Nov 21

Today’s News 21st November 2017

  • Zimbabwe Military Says Mugabe Impeachment Process Has Begun

    Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe baffled his country and the world last night when, instead of publicly announcing his resignation, he reaffirmed his intention to stay on as the head of state in Zimbabwe, and admonished members of his ruling ZANU PF party for their “arbitrary decision making” and “victimization.”

    Mugabe’s defiance immediately spurred conspiracy theories, including one where military commanders who flanked Mugabe during his speech smuggled him an alternate version following the review of his initial draft.

     

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    Rumors circulated that some ZANU PF lawmakers had fled the country to avoid participating in an impeachment vote, though they were later debunked, according to local media reports. Still, the military’s deadline for Mugabe’s resignation – initially set at noon local time on Monday – has come and gone, and Mugabe remains the nominal leader of Zimbabwe, even if he’s still under house arrest, according to BBC.

    However, ZANU PF appears to be reaching the end of its patience with its long-time leader. In a media briefing, party member Paul Mangawana said Zimbabwe’s lawmakers will move to formally impeach Mugabe tomorrow, and that he could be formally removed from office as soon as Wednesday.

    Discussions about the impeachment proceedings began Monday, Reuters added.

    Reuters added that impeachment would represent an ignominious end to the career of the “Grand Old Man” of African politics, who was once lauded across the continent as an anti-colonial hero. Chief whip Lovemore Matuke told Reuters ZANU-PF members of parliament would meet at 1230 GMT to start mapping out Mugabe’s impeachment.

    In the draft motion, the party accused Mugabe of being a “source of instability”, flouting the rule of law and presiding over an “unprecedented economic tailspin” in the last 15 years.

    It also said he had abrogated his constitutional mandate by trying to position his unpopular wife, Grace, as his successor.

    While the process of impeaching Mugabe looks complex on paper and involves a joint sitting of the Senate and National Assembly, then a nine-member committee of senators, then another joint sitting to confirm his dismissal with a two-thirds majority. However, constitutional experts said ZANU-PF had the numbers and could push it through in as little as 24 hours.

    “They can fast-track it. It can be done in a matter of a day,” said John Makamure, executive director of the Southern African Parliamentary Support Trust, an NGO that works with the parliament in Harare.

    A statement released Monday evening (local time) by Gen Chiwanga reaffirmed the military’s commitment to ensuring a peaceful transition of power.

     

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    One Zimbabwe lawmaker said there will be another caucus meeting for ZANU PF members beginning at 10 am local time Tuesday. It also noted that the President has called for a cabinet meeting. The MDCT, another party, will also be in caucus, while the president meets with his cabinet.

     

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    However, ZANU PF's chief whip said that if Mugabe calls a cabinet meeting, no ministers will attend.

     

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    Despite the political upheaval – and the marches that occurred over the weekend – local media reported that people were going on with their lives, on their way to work, children were in class, vendors were on the streets and taxis were meandering through the streets of Harare.

    However, while the demonstrations were peaceful, tanks were strategically positioned at Mugabe's office and other key government institutions, a clear indication that the standoff is far from over.
     

  • Is A Saudi-Israeli Friendship Driving The Rest Of The Middle East Together?

    Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Through its top official, Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), Saudi Arabia continues a wave of internal arrests, having seized nearly $800 billion in assets and bank accounts. A few days later, MBS attempted to demonstrate his authority by summoning Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to Saudi Arabia, where he was forced to resign on Saudi state TV. Trump tweeted support for Bin Salman's accusations against Iran and Hezbollah, and the future Saudi king even obtained Israel's secret support. Iran, meanwhile, denies any involvement in Lebanon's domestic affairs or involvement with the ballistic missile launched by Houthi rebels towards Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport a few days ago. Meanwhile, Trump, Putin and Xi met recently and seem to have decided the fate of the region in an exercise of realism and pragmatism.

    News that upends the course of events has now become commonplace over the last few months. However, even by Middle East standards, this story is something new. The affair surrounding Lebanon’s Prime Minister Hariri generated quite a bit of commotion. Hariri had apparently been obliged to announce his resignation on Saudi Arabia's Al Arabiya news channel while being detained in Riyadh. His most recent interview seemed to betray some nervousness and fatigue, as one would expect from a person under enormous stress from forced imprisonment. In his televised resignation statement, Hariri specified that he was unable to return to Lebanon due to some sort of a threat to his person and his family by operatives in Lebanon of Iran and Hezbollah. The Lebanese security authorities, however, have stated that they are not aware of any danger faced by Hariri.

    In an endless attempt to regain influence in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has once again brought about results directly opposite to those intended. Immediately after receiving confirmation that the resignation had taken place in Saudi Arabia, the entire Lebanese political class demanded that Hariri return home to clarify his position, meet with the president and submit his resignation in person. Saudi actions have served to consolidate a united front of opposition factions and paved the way for the collapse of Saudi influence in the country, leaving a vacuum to be conveniently filled by Iran. Once again, as with Yemen and in Syria, the intentions of the Saudis have dramatically backfired.

    This Saudi interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign country has stirred up unpredictable scenarios in the Middle East, just at the time that tensions were cooling in Syria.

    Hariri's detention comes from far away and is inextricably linked to what has been happening over the past few months in Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman, son of King Salman, began his internal purge of the Kingdom’s elite by removing from the line of succession Bin Nayef, a great friend of the US intelligence establishment (Brennan and Clapper). Bin Nayef was a firm partner of the US deep state. Saudi Arabia has for years worked for the CIA, advancing US strategic goals in the region and beyond. Thanks to the cooperation between Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, Bin Nayef, and US intelligence agencies, Washington has for years given the impression of fighting against Islamist terrorist while actually weaponizing jihadism since the 1980s by deploying it against rival countries like the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Iraqi government in 2014, the Syrian state in 2012, and Libya’s Gaddafi in 2011.

    MBS has even detained numerous family-related princes, continuing to consolidate power around himself. Even Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the richest men in the world, ended up caught in MBS’s net, rightly accused of being one of the most corrupt people in the Kingdom. It is speculated that family members and billionaires are detained at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh, with guests and tourists promptly ejected days before the arrests began. Mohammed bin Salman’s actions are not slowing down, even after seizing $800 billion in accounts, properties and assets.

    MBS is intensifying his efforts to end the conflict in Yemen, which is a drain on Saudi finances, lifting the naval blockade of the Port of Aden. Not only that, the two main Syrian opposition leaders, Ahmad Jarba and Riyadh Hijab, have been arrested by Riyadh in an effort to demonstrate to Putin the good will of MBS in seeking to resolve the Syrian conflict. Not surprisingly, King Salman, in a frantic search for a solution to the two conflicts that have lashed his reputation as well as the wealth and alliances of the Saudi kingdom, flew to Moscow to seek mediation with Putin, the new master of the Middle East.

    MBS has undertaken an anti-corruption campaign for international as well as domestic purposes. At the national level, the collapse of oil prices, coupled with huge military spending, forced the royal family to seek alternatives for the future of the Kingdom in terms of sustainability, earnings and profits. MBS’s Vision 2030 aims to diversify revenue in order to free Saudi Arabia from its dependence on oil. This is a huge ask for a nation that has been thriving for seventy years from an abundance of resources simply found under its ground. This delicate balance of power between the royal family and its subjects is maintained by the subsidies granted to the local population that has allowed the Kingdom to flourish in relative peace, even during the most delicate periods of the Arab Spring in 2011. There is an underlying understanding in Saudi Arabia that so long as the welfare of the population is guaranteed, there should be no threat to the stability of the royal family. It is no wonder that after losing two wars, and with oil prices at their lowest, MBS has started to worry about his future, seeking to purge the elites opposed to him.

    The Kingdom’s reality is quickly changing under MBS, the next Saudi king, who is trying to anticipate harder times by consolidating power around himself and correcting his errors brought on by incompetence and his excessive confidence in the Saudi military as well as in American backing. The ballistic missile that hit Riyadh was launched by the Houthis in Yemen after 30 months of indiscriminate bombing by the Saudi air force. This act has shown how vulnerable the Kingdom is to external attack, even at the hand of the poorest Arab country in the world.

    In this context, Donald Trump seems to be capitalizing on Saudi weakness, fear, and the need to tighten the anti-Iranian alliance. What the American president wants in return for support of MBS is as simple as it comes: huge investments in the US economy together with the purchase of US arms. MBS obliged a few months ago, investing into the US economy to the tune of more than $380 billion over ten years. Trump's goal is to create new jobs at home, increase GDP, and boost the economy, crucial elements for his re-election in 2020. Rich allies like Saudi Arabia, finding themselves in a tight fix, are a perfect means of achieving this end.

    Another important aspect of MBS’s strategy involves the listing of Aramco on the NYSE together with the switch to selling oil for yuan payments. Both decisions are fundamental to the United States and China, and both bring with them a lot of friction. MBS is at this moment weak and needs all the allies and support he can get. For this reason, a decision on Aramco or the petroyuan would probably create big problems with Beijing and Washington respectively. The reason why MBS is willing to sell a small stock of Aramco relates to his efforts to gin up some money. For this reason, thanks to the raids on the accounts and assets of the people arrested by MBS, Saudi Arabia has raised over $800 billion, certainly a higher figure than any sale of Aramco shares would have brought.

    This move allows MBS to postpone a decision on listing Aramco on the NYSE as well as on whether to start accepting yuan for payment of oil. Holding back on the petroyuan and Aramco’s initial public offering is a way of holding off both Beijing and Washington but without at the same time favouring one over the other. Economically, Riyadh cannot choose between selling oil for dollars on the one hand and accepting payment in another currency on the other. It is a nightmare scenario; but some day down the road, the Saudi royals will have to make a choice.

    The third party to this situation is Israel in the figure of Netanyahu, Donald Trump's great friend and supporter right from the beginning of his electoral campaign. Trump's victory brought positive returns to the investment the Israeli leader had made in him. Ever since Trump won the election, the US has employed harsh words against Iran, turning away from the positive approach adopted by Obama that managed to achieve the Iran nuclear deal framework. Nevertheless, the Israeli prime minister has had to deal with numerous problems at home, with a narrow parliamentary majority and several members of his government under investigation for corruption.

    Donald Trump pursued a very aggressive policy against Tehran during the election campaign, then went on to annul the Iran nuclear deal a few weeks ago. The decision is now for Congress to certify, with a difficult mediation between European allies (other than China and Russia), who are opposed to ending the deal, and the Israelis, who can count on the support of many senators thanks to their lobbying efforts. Israel, for its part, sees in Saudi Arabia and MBS the missing link between Saudi Wahhabism and Israeli Zionism. Various private cablegrams leaked to the press have shown how Israeli diplomats around the world were instructed to support Saudi  accusations of Iran interfering in Lebanon's internal affairs.

    The interests of MBS and Netanyahu seem to dovetail quite nicely in Syria and Yemen as well as with regard to Iran and Hezbollah. The two countries have a common destiny by virtue of the fact that neither alone can deal decisively with Hezbollah in Syria or Lebanon, let alone Iran. Rouhani himself has said that Iran fears American strength and power alone, knowing that Saudi Arabia and Israel are incapable of defeating Tehran.

    Trump's approval of the arrests carried out by MBS is based on a number of factors. The first involves the investments in the economy that will be coming America’s way. The other, certainly less known, concerns the subterranean battle that has been occurring between the Western elites for months. Many of Clinton’s top money sources are billionaires arrested by MBS, with stock options in various major banks, insurance companies, publishing groups, and American television groups, all openly anti-Trump. In this sense, the continuation of Trump's fight with a portion of the elite can be seen with the halting of the merger of AT&T and Time Warner involving CNN.

    Trump seems to be accompanying Saudi and Israeli urgings for war with multiple intentions, potentially having a plan for a broader, regional and global agreement between the parties.

    At a regional level, Trump first supported the Saudi crusade against Qatar, resolved with Riyadh not getting Qatar to accede to any of its advanced demands. During the crisis, Doha approached Tehran and Moscow, who immediately took advantage of the situation to establish trade relations and commence negotiations with Qatar to tame its terrorist influence in the region, especially in the Syrian conflict. Turkey and Qatar have practically announced a military alliance, cementing a new front that includes China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Qatar, now potentially all on the same side of the barricades, opposed to Saudi dictates and Israel’s efforts to foment war with Iran.

    With the US withdrawal from the region, as is increasingly evident from Trump's reluctance to embark on a Middle East conflict, Israel and Saudi Arabia are increasing their desperate cries against Iran, observing how the gains of the resistance axis have led Tehran to dominate the region with its allies. The visit of King Salman to Russia, and the four meetings between Putin and Netanyahu, give the idea of which capital is in charge in the region. This all represents an epochal change that further isolates Riyadh and Tel Aviv, two countries that represent the heart of chaos and terror.

    The Saudi attempt to isolate Qatar has failed miserably, and the continuous effort to paint Iran as the main cause of tension in the region seems to have reached a point of no return, with the latest stunt involving Hariri. Sunnis, Christians and Shiites agree on one point only: that the premier must return home. Riyadh hopes to light the fuse of a new civil war in the region, with Israel hoping to take advantage of the chaos brought about by an attack on Hezbollah. This is not going to happen, and the disappointment of the House of Saud and the Israeli prime minister will not change anything. Without a green light from Washington and a promise from Uncle Sam to intervene alongside his Middle East allies, the Israelis and Saudis are aware that they have neither the means nor strength to attack Iran or Hezbollah.

    Trump is playing a dangerous game; but there seems to be some degree of coordination with the other giants on the international scene. The main point is it is impossible for Washington to be an active part in any conflict in the region, or to change the course of events in a meaningful way. The "End of history" ended years ago. US influence is on the decline, and Xi Jinping and Putin have shown great interest in the future of the region. In recent months, the Russian and Iranian militaries, together with the Chinese economic grip on the region, have shown a collective intention to replace years of war, death and chaos with peace, prosperity and wealth.

    MBS and Netanyahu are having a hard time dealing with this new environment that will inevitably proclaim Iran the hegemon in the region. Time is running out for Israel and Saudi Arabia, and both countries are faced with enormous internal problems while being unable to change the course of events in the region without the full intervention of their American ally, something practically impossible nowadays.

    The new course of the multipolar world, together with Trump’s America First policy, seems to have hit hardest those countries that placed all their bets on the continuing economic and military dominance of the United States in the region. Other countries like Qatar, Lebanon and Turkey have started to understand the historical change that is going on, and have slowly been making the switch, realizing in the process the benefits of a multipolar world order, which is more conducive to mutually beneficial cooperation between countries. The more Saudi Arabia and Israel push for war against Iran, the more they will isolate themselves. This will serve to push their own existence to the brink of extinction.

  • Doomsday Preppers Are Switching Allegiance From Gold To Bitcoin

    The gold versus Bitcoin debate is complex, nuanced and still in its embryonic stages when put into the perspective of gold’s known 2,700-year use as money versus Bitcoin’s very modest eight-year track record.

    From a pure investment perspective, as the following Bloomberg chart shows, Bitcoin has obviously “wiped the floor” with its esteemed rival and, no doubt, has absorbed a considerable volume of funds that otherwise might have found their way into gold investments.

    One subset of gold investors, which is both over-stated and over-ridiculed in the mainstream media, is the “preppers”, or those preparing for a catastrophic disaster to occur in the future by stockpiling food, ammunition and “durable” methods of storing their wealth, etc. We clarify the term "preppers" because it is not common parlance in many European countries. While some allocation in gold was basically “de rigeur” some years ago, the prepping community is increasingly turning to Bitcoin, as Bloomberg reports.

    Wendy McElroy is ready for most doomsday scenarios: a one-year supply of nonperishable food is stacked in a cellar at her farm in rural Ontario. Her blueprint for survival also depends upon working internet: part of her money, assuming she needs some after civilization collapses, is in bitcoin. Across the North American countryside, preppers like McElroy are storing more and more of their wealth in invisible wallets in cyberspace instead of stockpiling gold bars and coins in their bunkers and basement safes. They won’t be able to access their virtual cash the moment a catastrophe knocks out the power grid or the web, but that hasn’t dissuaded them. Even staunch survivalists are convinced bitcoin will endure economic collapse, global pandemic, climate change catastrophes and nuclear war.

     

    “I consider bitcoin to be a currency on the same level as gold,” McElroy, who lives on the farm with her husband, said by email. “It allows individuals to become self-bankers. When I fully understood the concepts and their significance, bitcoin became a fascination.”

    Wendy McElroy's profile, for what it’s worth, is not exactly that of a “whacko” prepper. A former journalist with FOX News, McElroy might be described as an “anarcho-capitalist”. She has authored a dozen books and numerous articles on subjects such as voluntarism (all forms of human association should be voluntary), feminism, how pornography can benefit women, capitalism and defending Wikileaks. In an article “Would Bitcoin ‘Function’ in a Societal Collapse?” on bitcoin.com, McElroy cited the growth in Bitcoin adoption in the midst of the collapse of Venezuela’s economy and its currency.

    Bloomberg continues by noting the seeming contradiction for preppers, like McElroy, since a collapse in the grid would take the internet down. However, it’s the ability of Bitcoin to operate beyond the control of central bankers (so far) which is a key attraction.

    At first glance, it seems counter-intuitive that some of bitcoin’s most ardent proponents are people motivated by the belief that public infrastructure will collapse in times of social and political distress. Bitcoin isn’t yet widely accepted as a method of payment and steep transaction costs make it inconvenient to use at vendors that do take it. Preppers, as it happens, have a different perspective on what they see as the money of the future, which has surged 10-fold in the past 12 months as supporters lauded it as a digital alternative to rival the dollar, euro or yen. Used to send and receive payments online, bitcoin is similar to payment networks like PayPal or Mastercard, the difference being that it runs on a decentralized network—blockchain—that’s beyond the control of central banks and regulators. It was born out of an anti-establishment vision of a government-free society, a key attraction for those seeking unhindered access to their capital in case a massive shock shuts down the banking system.

    Even if the grid went down temporarily, preppers are attracted by the blockchain’s record of Bitcoin holdings and transaction.

    "Not too long ago, people in the prepper community were actively warning against crypto, and now they’re all investing in it,” said Tom Martin, a truck driver from Washington who runs a social-media website for people interested in learning skills to survive disaster.

     

    “As long as the grid stays up, people will keep using bitcoin.”

     

    In addition to gold, silver and stocks, Martin invests in bitcoin and peers litecoin and steem because they’re easier to travel with, harder to steal and offer better protection in the event of the kind of societal breakdown that would unfold if a fiat currency like the dollar collapsed. He’s among those confident that bitcoin can withstand even a complete blackout through the strength of the underlying blockchain, the anonymous public bookkeeping technology that records every single bitcoin transaction.

    In the bitcoin.com article, Wendy McElroy noted the increasing dependence on blockchain and the internet, the revival of which would be a priority after a disaster.

    Yes. Electricity and the internet may be less reliable or more expensive but they would be available. An increasing dependence on the blockchain would make it a top economic priority. It would also be a top military priority. In October 2016, the Pentagon revealed it was actively exploring blockchain technology “to create tamper-proof military computer systems, including those used to control America’s nuclear weapons.” Other nations are undoubtedly doing the same.

    Bloomberg acknowledges this view.

    Preppers, though, stock enough food and supplies to sustain them for months, if not years, and they expect whatever governing structure emerges post-calamity will prioritize getting the web back up and running.

     

    “It may be difficult, if not impossible to access for a while, but once things start returning to some level of normality, then the blockchain will return as it was before the disaster,” said Rob Harvey, a bitcoin investor who prepares for natural and nuclear catastrophes by learning and teaching survival skills, like making a fire. “The blockchain does not need a specific place or a specific person to survive—that’s a strong survival tactic”.

    Bloomberg notes how Bitcoin has increasingly become a topic of debate on prepper forums, where participants were previously gold devotees.

    Discussions on the pros and cons of investing in crypto have popped up on survivalist forums like mysurvivalforum.com and survivalistboards.com this year as bitcoin rallied above $7,000. “Buy bitcoin” is now a more popular search phrase than “buy gold” on Google.

     

    The buzz is starting to impinge on gold’s role as a store of value especially since, like the precious metal, there’s a finite supply of bitcoin, which proponents say gives it anti-inflationary qualities. Sales of gold coins from the U.S. Mint slid to a decade low in the first three quarters months of 2017.

     

    “It’s definitely had some impact on the market,” Philip Newman, who does research on precious-metal coin sales and is one of the founders of research firm Metals Focus, said by phone from Washington. “People see bitcoin prices going to the moon. No one thinks gold is going to the moon.”

    While gold’s lack of “portability” is considered a negative.

    Along the fringe, the 20,000 libertarians expected to converge on New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project are also switching from precious metals. They like bitcoin because it isn’t created by a government, unlike conventional currency.

     

    “You can use bitcoin for economic transactions in a way that gold was never designed to do because it’s a physical thing—it’s heavy,” Matt Philips, the project’s president, said by phone. “A lot of people don’t know what the heck to do with gold if you give it to them in exchange for a cup of coffee.”

    Wendy McElroy’s support for Bitcoin is drawn straight from the philosophy of Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged.

    Whatever doom-and-gloom scenario unfolds, McElroy, from Canada, has faith in bitcoin. She’s writing a book called Satoshi Revolution, inspired by the pseudonym of the person or people who created bitcoin in 2009 as an answer to the financial turmoil wrought by the global financial crisis. She says the digital currency breaks society’s dependence on a state that uses its monopoly over the issuance of money to dominate the economy, making it a natural hedge against disaster. “It is a people’s currency,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “Bitcoins move seamlessly through a world without states or borders, obeying only the command of individuals who choose to deal with each other. Immune to currency manipulation and inflation, they do not serve the powerful elites at the expense of average people.”

    When it boils down to it, the rationale and investment cases for gold and Bitcoin are similar enough that common sense suggests that the prepper community would, to some extent, adopt both.

    With Bitcoin’s performance smashing gold to bits (intended), it’s hardly surprising that preppers are shifting their allegiance towards the digital currency. They are just “following the money”. As with all these things, however, we suspect that a point will come when too many people will be standing on the same side of the boat and there will be a sharp reversal in relative performance. The all-important question is whether that’s when Bitcoin is 10,000, 13,000 or 50,000?

  • The Economist Went There – Shockingly Un-PC Study Shows Whites Work Hardest, Longest

    A trio of labor economists suggest that effort at work is correlated with race…

    As The Economist writes, given the long history of making racial slurs about the efforts of some workers, any study casting black and Hispanic men as lazier than whites and Asians is sure to court controversy.

    But, a provocative working paper by economists Daniel Hamermesh, Katie Genadek and Michael Burda sticks a tentative toe into these murky waters.

    They suggest that America’s well-documented racial wage gap is overstated by 10% because minorities, especially men, spend larger portions of their workdays not actually working.

    Uncomfortable though the topic may be, the authors have attempted a rigorous analysis.

    The study’s method is straightforward. The data come from nearly 36,000 “daily diaries”, self-reporting on how Americans spent their working hours, collected from 2003 to 2012.

     

    Relying on the assumption that workers are equally honest in admitting sloth, the authors calculate the fraction of time spent not working while on the job – spent relaxing or eating, say – and find that it varies by race to a small but statistically significant degree.

     

    The gap remains, albeit in weaker form, even with the addition of extensive controls for geography, industry and union status, among others. Non-white male workers spend an additional 1.1% of the day not working while on the job, or an extra five minutes per day.

     

    Assuming their controls are adequate, that would still leave 90% of the wage difference between white workers and ethnic minorities, which was recently estimated to be 14%, unexplained.

    After rejecting a number of plausible explanations for why this might be, the authors finally attribute the discrepancy to unexplained “cultural differences”.

    Acutely aware of the sensitivity of these findings, the professors delayed publication until after the presidential election, releasing their report in January.

    “I knew full well that Trump and his minions would use it as a propaganda piece,” says Mr Hamermesh, a colourful and respected labour economist. The paper may yet be seized on by those who are keen to root out “political correctness” and are perennially unhappy with current anti-discrimination laws.

    When asked what motivated the study of such a sensitive topic, QZ's Allison Schrager notes that Hamermesh, typical of economists driven by pure intellectual curiosity, said it hadn’t occurred to him that it might be so controversial.

    But, denunciations came quickly, however. Within hours of publication, Mr Hamermesh received vitriolic messages and was labelled a racist in an online forum popular among economists. Mr Hamermesh, an avowed progressive, who refers to Donald Trump only by amusing nicknames and resigned from a post at the University of Texas over a state law permitting the open carrying of firearms, finds this unfair.

    He notes that Americans work too much. His preferred solution would not be for some groups to work more, but for others to work less.

  • Walmart Nation: Mapping The Largest Employers In America

    In an era where Amazon steals most of the headlines, it’s easy to forget about brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart.

    But, even though the market values the Bezos e-commerce juggernaut at about twice the sum of Walmart, Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes that the blue big-box store is very formidable in other ways. For example, revenue and earnings are two areas where Walmart still reigns supreme, and the stock just hit all-time highs yesterday on an earnings beat.

    That’s not all, though. As today’s map shows, Walmart is dominant in one other notable way: the company is the biggest private employer in America in a whopping 22 states.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    WALLY WORLD

    Using data from 24/7 Wall Street, we mapped out the largest employer (excluding public administrative bodies, such as state governments) in each state.

    Here are the top ten states where Walmart took the title:

    The company has 1.5 million employees in the U.S. – and about 950,000 of them are in the states above.

    A SOUTHERN INSTITUTION

    In Walmart’s home state of Arkansas, the company employees 53,310 people, or about 4% of the non-farm work force. That includes about 18,600 jobs at the HQ in Bentonville, AR.

    Despite the company’s obvious influence in the state where it was founded, Walmart is also the largest employer across the South in general. Whether it is Texas (171,531 employees) or Virginia (44,621), there are Walmarts aplenty in the states surrounding Arkansas.

    One notable exception to this rule? North Carolina, where the University of North Carolina University system employs 74,079 people. However, that doesn’t mean that Walmart has zero presence in the Tar Heel State – it actually has 218 retail stores and 58,525 employees in North Carolina, according to its website.

    YOUR TURN, AMAZON

    In case you may be wondering, Amazon is not the largest employer in any state – even in the company’s home state of Washington, where it still lags behind Boeing.

    However, Amazon’s epic ramp-up is quickly taking over Seattle, and the company now has as much office space there as the city’s next 40 biggest employers combined.

    And who knows, with over 238 bids for Amazon’s new HQ2, it’s possible that the company could be adding up to 50,000 new jobs in another state very soon.

  • Now the Sexual Harassment Noose Falls Upon Rep. John Conyers

    Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

    The sexual harassment allegations continue, with today’s showcase revelations being Charlie Rose and Rep. John Conyers. Over at the Weinstein scandal, upwards of 90 women have come forward, some of whom claimed they were outright raped by the big fat ape.

    So you know, Harvey Weinstein is still at large.

    This from Buzzfeed tonight — tipped off by Mike Cernovich

    Here’s Mike discussing the latest scandal via Periscope.

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    Michigan Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, settled a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2015 with a former employee who alleged she was fired because she would not “succumb to [his] sexual advances.”

    Documents from the complaint obtained by BuzzFeed News include four signed affidavits, three of which are notarized, from former staff members who allege that Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the powerful House Judiciary Committee, repeatedly made sexual advances to female staff that included requests for sexual favors, contacting and transporting other women with whom they believed Conyers was having affairs, caressing their hands sexually, and rubbing their legs and backs in public. Four people involved with the case verified the documents are authentic.

    And the documents also reveal the secret mechanism by which Congress has kept an unknown number of sexual harassment allegations secret: A grinding, closely held process that left the alleged victim feeling, she told BuzzFeed News, that she had no option other than to stay quiet and accept a settlement offered to her.

    “I was basically blackballed. There was nowhere I could go,” she said in a phone interview. BuzzFeed News is withholding the woman’s name at her request, because she said she fears retribution.

    Last week the Washington Post reported that the office paid out $17 million for 264 settlements with federal employees over 20 years for various violations, including sexual harassment. The Conyers documents, however, give a glimpse into the inner workings of the Office of Compliance, which has for decades concealed episodes of sexual abuse by powerful political figures

    The woman who settled with Conyers launched the complaint in 2014 with Congress’s Office of Compliance alleging that she was fired for refusing his sexual advances and ended up facing a daunting process that ended with a confidentiality agreement in exchange for a $27,111.75 settlement. Her settlement, however, came from Conyers’ office budget rather than the designated fund for settlements.

    Congress has no human resources department. Instead, congressional employees have 180 days to report a sexual harassment incident to the Office of Compliance, which then leads to a lengthy process involves counseling, mediation, and requires the signing of a confidentiality agreement before a complaint can go forward.

    After this, an employee can choose to take the matter to federal district court, but another avenue is available: an administrative hearing, after which a negotiation and settlement may follow.

    In her complaint, the former employee said Conyers repeatedly asked her for sexual favors and often asked her to join him in a hotel room. On one occasion, she alleges that Conyers asked her to work out of his room for the evening, but when she arrived the congressman started talking about his sexual desires. She alleged he then told her she needed to “touch it,” in reference to his penis, or find him a woman who would meet his sexual demands.

    She alleged Conyers made her work nights, evenings, and holidays to keep him company.

    In another incident, the former employee alleged the congressman insisted she stay in his room while they traveled together for a fundraising event. When she told him that she would not stay with him, she alleged he told her to “just cuddle up with me and caress me before you go.”

    “Rep. Conyers strongly postulated that the performing of personal service or favors would be looked upon favorably and lead to salary increases or promotions,” the former employee said in the documents.

    Three other staff members provided affidavits submitted to the Office Of Compliance that outlined a pattern of behavior from Conyers that included touching the woman in a sexual manner and growing angry when she brought her husband around.

    One affidavit from a former female employee states that she was tasked with flying in women for the congressman. “One of my duties while working for Rep. Conyers was to keep a list of women that I assumed he was having affairs with and call them at his request and, if necessary, have them flown in using Congressional resources,” said her affidavit. (A second staffer alleged in an interview that Conyers used taxpayer resources to fly women to him.)

    The employee said in her affidavit that Conyers also made sexual advances toward her: “I was driving the Congressman in my personal car and was resting my hand on the stick shift. Rep. Conyers reached over and began to caress my hand in a sexual manner.”

    The woman said she told Conyers she was married and not interested in pursuing a sexual relationship, according to the affidavit. She said she was told many times by constituents that it was well-known that Conyers had sexual relationships with his staff, and said she and other female staffers felt this undermined their credibility.

    “I am personally aware of several women who have experienced the same or similar sexual advances made towards them by Rep[.] John Conyers,” she said in her affidavit.

    A male employee wrote that he witnessed Rep. Conyers rub the legs and other body parts of the complainant “in what appeared to be a sexual manner” and saw the congressman rub and touch other women “in an inappropriate manner.” The employee said he confronted Conyers about this behavior.

    “Rep. Conyers said he needed to be ‘more careful’ because bad publicity would not be helpful as he runs for re-election. He ended the conversation with me by saying he would ‘work on’ his behavior,” the male staffer said in his affidavit.

    “I don’t think any allegations should be buried…and that’s for anyone, not just for this particular office”
    The male employee said that in 2011 Conyers complained a female staffer was “too old” and said he wanted to let her go. The employee said he set up a meeting in December 2011 to discuss “mistreatment of staff and his misuse of federal resources.” The affidavit says that Conyers “agreed that he would work on making improvements as long as I worked directly with him and stopped writing memos and emails about concerns.”

    Another female employee also attested that she witnessed Conyer’s advances, and said she was asked to transport women to him. “I was asked on multiple occasions to pick up women and bring them to Mr. Conyers[‘] apartment, hotel rooms, etc.”

    BuzzFeed News reached out to several former Conyers staffers, all of whom did not want to speak on the record. One former staffer, who did not want to be named, said she was frustrated by the secretive complaint process.

    “I don’t think any allegations should be buried…and that’s for anyone, not just for this particular office, because it doesn’t really allow other people to see who these individuals are,” said the former staffer. “When you make private settlements, it doesn’t warn the next woman or the next person going into that situation.”

    Another staffer said that Conyers’ reputation made people fearful to speak out against him. Aside from being the longest-serving House member and the ranking member of a powerful committee, Conyers is a civil rights icon. He was lauded by Martin Luther King Jr. and is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

    “Your story won’t do shit to him,” said the staffer. “He’s untouchable.”

    In a statement to BuzzFeed News, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said she was not aware of the settlement.

    “The current process includes the signing of non-disclosure agreements by the parties involved. Congresswoman Jackie Speier has introduced legislation that will provide much-needed transparency on these agreements and make other critical reforms,” Pelosi said in the statement. “I strongly support her efforts.”

    What’s interesting about the revelations of sexual harassment is they’re mainly being reported by left wing media, concerning left wing men. Perhaps there’s a disruption in the matrix, or they’re quite literally eating their own.
    This didn’t age well.

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

    Good times.

     

  • Where Does It End?

    Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

    It’s nothing new.

    Whenever a major country is in decline and approaching collapse, a contingent arises that does everything it can to speed up the process toward collapse.

    This is always done in the same way:

    • Vilify the established rulers as being the culprits for the nation’s woes.
    • Establish simplistic arguments to support that view. (The arguments need not be entirely logical or supportable, but they must have emotional public appeal.)
    • Create simplistic rhetoric that supports the destruction of the establishment and its icons.
    • Make the arguments and rhetoric as ubiquitous as possible (particularly through the media).

    Then, like any recipe, turn up the heat and bake until done.

    Generally, the destruction of the first icon (most often a statue) requires some sort of explanation, regardless of how flimsy the argument may be. After that has succeeded, praise is to be showered on those who took part, egging them, and others, on to do more. As each new icon falls, less justification is necessary and, in the end, only blind anger is required to keep the destruction going.

    In the present era, we’re witnessing this age-old process taking place in quite a few countries, but notably in the US.

    But, why the US—the one country in the world that began as possibly the most advanced, freest nation the world had ever seen? How did this come to pass in “the land of the free”?

    Well, truth be told, no matter how inspired or sincere the founding fathers of any nation may be, those who would usurp them are always many in number and, in most cases, are prepared to do whatever it takes to slowly take power and return to tyrannical rule.

    As Thomas Jefferson said,

    Even under the best forms of Government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

    And, even in George Washington’s Cabinet, the rot set in early, with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton continually seeking to subvert the objectives of Secretary of State Jefferson. Therefore, the degradation in the US system began quite early.

    But why does it seem as though it’s speeding up dramatically now? Why is it suddenly pulling apart at the seams?

    Well, for that answer, we can once again rely on Mister Jefferson:

    Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.

    And the US has passed that significant tipping point. The majority now depend upon handouts from the government. Once that occurs, it becomes easy to sell them the idea that, since they’re “entitled” to the handouts, they have a perfect right to be outraged that they’re not receiving more. (Again, logic is not necessary; what’s required is an emotionally-charged sense of victimisation.)

    Historically, once a nation has reached this point, it never goes back. It’s ripe for a collectivist revolution. Ironically, in every collectivist revolution, the leaders have no intention of “freeing the people.” Their goal is to dominate them far more greatly than they presently had been.

    Essentially, what we’re observing in the US is a standard collectivist revolution, but in slo-mo. At the same time as relatively pampered Americans are purchasing the latest pricey smartphones and buying a Toasted Graham Latte at Starbucks for $5.25, the sense of victimisation is well under way and the destruction of icons has begun.

    The tearing-down of Confederate flags occurred. Statues of Robert E. Lee were destroyed and, recently, a plaque in a Virginia church honouring the seat where George Washington regularly sat has been under attack for removal.

    In each of the above cases, the arguments have been increasingly flimsy, but no matter. As stated above, the reasoning need not bear scrutiny. All that matters is that it has an emotional attraction. As the destruction continues, the emotion will morph from indignation to blind rage as necessary.

    And, as any revolutionary leader could attest, if he can succeed in inducing blind rage, no King, no Czar, no President can stand up to that rage for long.

    It’s important to note that, in every country where collectivist revolution has taken place, only a small minority of the population has been necessary to bring about the unseating of conventional leaders. In some cases, the leaders have been killed. In others, they’ve been forced to flee the country quickly. In still others, the leaders have agreed to step down in disgrace.

    What’s significant is not the manner in which the leaders were supplanted, but the direction that the country takes following the leaders’ downfall.

    In the US, this may be as mild a change as the resignation of the president, followed by the election of an avowed collectivist that will transform the country.

    It will matter little whether the new leader describes himself as a collectivist, socialist, democrat, or other term. The outcome will be the same.

    In the beginning, there will be euphoria on the part of the 51%, who will see themselves as the heroes of change. What they will be, in reality, will be the pawns of the new order.

    Recently, an American associate of mine sent me the link for the article describing the intended removal of the Washington plaque and asked, “Where does it end?”

    Well, unfortunately, it doesn’t “end.” It continues for decades. (Collectivism can sometimes be maintained for generations before it finally flames out, due to lack of productivity and the weight of a costly top-heavy government.)

    The folly is in hoping, as my colleague sometimes does, that the stampede toward collectivism will somehow magically screech to a halt and reverse its direction. The sad truth is that, historically, this has never happened. At best, we observe a revolution in slow motion, as is taking place in the US.

    The question for the individual who’s likely to be impacted by this is whether he should rely on “hope,” or whether he should recognize that hope is not a plan.

    Plans often prove to be challenging, costly, and difficult, but, for those who may soon be losing a large measure of their freedom, they are essential, if the outcome is to be a positive one.

    *  *  *

    Fortunately, you don’t have to draft your plan from scratch. We know practical steps you can take today to prepare for the fallout from America’s collectivist revolution. Get the details in our Guide to Surviving and Thriving During an Economic Collapse.

  • Roy Moore Refutes Sexual Assault Claim With Statements By Former Restaurant Employees And Customers

    Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

    Over the last several weeks, accusations of sexual improprieties by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore have led to calls for the judge to exit the race to fill the vacant seat left by Attorney Jeff Sessions. Others, meanwhile, have rushed to Moore’s defense – calling into question everything from the original Washington Post article, to accuser Beverly Young Nelson’s claim that Moore showered her in unwanted attention when she was 15, and sexually assaulted her when she was 16.

    A now infamous yearbook entry, from December 1977, which Nelson claims is Moore’s has also come under scrutiny, with many pointing out that Moore’s last name, title, date, and location appear to have been added later – constituting a forgery if true.

    Nelson’s attorney Gloria Allred refused to confirm the authenticity of the yearbook, and she won’t hand it over to handwriting experts unless a US Senate Committee agrees to conduct a hearing first. Considering that the Alabama special election is just over three weeks away.

    Meanwhile Nelson’s stepson, Darrel Nelson, claims that his stepmother’s accusations are “one hundred percent a lie,” stating “I know for a fact that there is a lot that that woman does not tell the truth on,” Nelson claimed in an in-person interview with Breitbart News.  “Do I think that Beverly is trustworthy? No, I really don’t. Could I see her making it up? …The odds are in that favor.”

    And now the latest – the Moore campaign has released a lengthy statement poking holes in Nelson’s claims 

    Everything from Nelson’s age when she began working at the Olde Hickory House, to the restaurant’s hours, to the physical layout of the location Nelson says Moore assaulted her have been called into question – aided by the testimony of former Old Hickory House employee Rhonda Ledbetter, a waitress at Olde Hickory House for almost three years from 1977-1979, along with another former employee.

    In addition, two former waitresses and two former customers say they never say Moore come into the restaurant, despite Nelson’s claim that he was there “almost every night.”

    • According to Ledbetter, Olde Hickory House required employees to be 16 years old. Nelson claims she was 15 when she started.
    • According to two former employees, the dumpsters were on the side of the building. Nelson claimed that they were in the back.
    • Olde Hickory House sat right off of the four-lane highway and had a wrap-around porch with lights all around it. Nelson claimed that the surroundings were “dark and isolated.”
    • Rhonda Ledbetter, who worked at Olde Hickory House for almost 3 years, states that the earliest it closed was at 11 p.m. but she believes it was open until midnight. She is certain it did not close at 10:00 because Goodyear was next door, and employees came to eat when their shift ended at 10 p.m. Nelson claims her story occurred after the restaurant closed at 10 p.m.
    • It is unlikely that there was an entrance from the back of the parking lot, which Nelson claimed existed. Multiple sources have claimed that everyone parked on the sides of the building because there wasn’t much room behind the restaurant, according to Rhonda not enough room to turn around. Renee Schivera stated that a neighborhood backed up to the parking lot and it was adjacent to the backyards of people’s houses, so she did not see how there would have been a back entrance as it would have gone through someone’s yard.
    • Nelson claimed that Judge Roy Moore came in almost every night and sat at the counter, but former employees state that customers at the counter were served by the bartender or short order cook – not served by the waitresses and had no reason to interact with the wait staff. Additionally, two former waitresses and two former patrons state they never saw Judge Moore come into the restaurant. 

    Read the full statement below: 

    GADSDEN, Ala. – On Monday evening, the Moore Campaign unveiled statements from key witnesses that completely bust the story of Beverly Nelson and Gloria Allred and further reveal an unconscionable bias on the part of state and national press to hide the truth from Alabama voters who will undoubtedly see through the “fake news” and elect Judge Moore for the man that they have always known him to be.

    • According to a former waitress, Olde Hickory House required employees to be 16 years old. Nelson claims she was 15 when she started.
    • According to two former employees, the dumpsters were on the side of the building. Nelson claimed that they were in the back.
    • Olde Hickory House sat right off of the four-lane highway and had a wrap-around porch with lights all around it. Nelson claimed that the surroundings were “dark and isolated.”
    • Rhonda Ledbetter, who worked at Olde Hickory House for almost 3 years, states that the earliest it closed was at 11 p.m. but she believes it was open until midnight. She is certain it did not close at 10:00 because Goodyear was next door, and employees came to eat when their shift ended at 10 p.m. Nelson claims her story occurred after the restaurant closed at 10 p.m.
    • It is unlikely that there was an entrance from the back of the parking lot, which Nelson claimed existed. Multiple sources have claimed that everyone parked on the sides of the building because there wasn’t much room behind the restaurant, according to Rhonda not enough room to turn around. Renee Schivera stated that a neighborhood backed up to the parking lot and it was adjacent to the backyards of people’s houses, so she did not see how there would have been a back entrance as it would have gone through someone’s yard.
    • Nelson claimed that Judge Roy Moore came in almost every night and sat at the counter, but former employees state that customers at the counter were served by the bartender or short order cook – not served by the waitresses and had no reason to interact with the wait staff. Additionally, two former waitresses and two former patrons state they never saw Judge Moore come into the restaurant.
    • These witnesses have shared their testimony with multiple news outlets. The outlets have failed to report.

    Rhonda Ledbetter, a retired public school teacher who is currently the senior choir director at a Baptist church and teaches children at a local, church-sponsored day care center, was a waitress at Olde Hickory House for almost three years from 1977-1979. She was a college student at Jacksonville State University at the time and worked varying shifts at different times of day, multiple days a week during the time of her employment. She said in a statement: “When I heard Beverly Nelson’s story, there were several details that were different from what I remember. I was nervous at coming forward because of all the attention this story has gotten, but as a moral and ethical person I had to speak up about what I know to be true. I was a waitress at Olde Hickory for almost three years from 1977-1979, and I never saw Roy Moore come in to the restaurant. Not one time. And I would have noticed because most of our customers weren’t wearing suits, especially not at night. Many customers worked at Goodyear next door and would stop in on their way to and from work, and I don’t remember anyone from the courthouse coming in at all. That just wasn’t our crowd.

    “A few things stuck out to me. First, Nelson said she was 15 years old when she started working there but you had to be 16. I don’t remember her from my time there, and I don’t remember any 15 year olds working there at all.

    “Second, Nelson said the restaurant closed at 10 p.m. but I know the earliest it closed was 11, though I believe it was midnight. I’m certain of that because Goodyear employees came in to eat after their shift ended at 10:00 p.m., so there’s no way we would have closed at that time.

    “Third, the area wasn’t dark and isolated as she described. Rather, the building was right off the busy four-lane highway and people and cars were always around. The restaurant had a wrap-around porch, like the ones at Cracker Barrel restaurants, and there were lights all around the sides of the building. So it wasn’t dark and anyone in the parking lot was visible from the road.

    “Fourth, the dumpsters were to the side of the building, not around back and there sure wasn’t room to park in between the building and the dumpsters. People from the kitchen would take trash out of the side door and throw it right into the dumpsters. We were always told to park on the side of the building, because there just wasn’t much room behind it. I don’t remember there being an exit from the back of the parking lot, there would barely have been enough room to turn a car around.

    “I came forward because from what I’ve seen, the media is only interested in reporting one side of this story. In fact, Dixon Hayes from WRBC in Birmingham asked for former employees to contact him but never responded when I told him I never saw Roy Moore come into Olde Hickory House during the three years I worked for. Two other news outlets in the state asked to interview me and I agreed, but neither one has aired my interview and I have to wonder why they don’t think the people of Alabama deserve to hear anything that counteracts the accusations against Judge Moore. It’s not for me to say whether or not something happened, I can only tell the truth about factual details that I know for sure. I think all Alabamians deserve to have all of the facts so they can decide for themselves what the truth is. Despite what the national media and people in DC might say, Alabama voters are intelligent and have common sense. We don’t need anyone to tell us how to vote or to explain to us what really happened. We will make that decision and I just wanted to do my part in sharing the truth on some of these important facts. I, like all Alabama voters, want any and all information that can shed light on the truth.”

    Johnny Belyeu, Sr. is a former police officer with over two decades of experience with the Etowah County Sheriff’s Department and the Gadsden Police Department. He said in a statement, “I was an officer with the Etowah County Sheriff’s Department in the 1970s which means I worked in the courthouse and knew who Roy Moore was since he was the Deputy District Attorney at the time. I was a regular customer at Olde Hickory House, and I never once saw Judge Moore come in there. If he had I would have immediately recognized him. I also never met Beverly Nelson during any of the many times I frequented the restaurant, and I can’t say that she even worked there.”

    Renee Schivera of Huntsville, Alabama stated, “I was a waitress at the Olde Hickory House during the summer of 1977, before my senior year of high school. When I heard Beverly Nelson’s story the first thing that stuck out to me was that I don’t remember Roy Moore ever coming into the restaurant. I also don’t remember her working there. The other thing that struck me as odd is that from my best recollection, the dumpsters were to the side of the building. I just know they were visible from the road, and not back behind the building. But the main thing is that if someone came in almost every night we knew who there were, and I never saw Roy Moore there. As a Christian woman, I wouldn’t lie for anyone and I am only sharing what I know because it’s the truth.”

    “The days of unbiased reporting are over,” Moore Campaign strategist, Brett Doster said. “The liberal media will dodge any source and refuse to air any interview that doesn’t square with their effort to land a liberal Democrat in the senate seat. The Moore Campaign is committed to presenting factual truth to the people of Alabama and looks forward to victory on December 12.”

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  • Realtors In Miami And Manhattan Are Embracing Bitcoin

    Back in September, we reported on a major milestone in bitcoin’s evolution into a respectable medium of exchange for large purchases: A Dallas real estate agent had negotiated the first all-bitcoin purchase of a US home on record. Few details about the home or the identity of the buyers were released. However, given bitcoin’s blistering rise since then – the value of a single coin has more than doubled – it’s reasonable to assume that, whoever they are, they probably regret pulling the trigger on their dream home, seeing as, if they had just waited two more months, they could’ve bought two. Indeed, the unknown seller of the home reportedly earned $1.3 million from the bitcoin they accepted as payment in the transaction.

    At the time, we predicted that it wouldn’t be long before settling real-estate transactions in bitcoin would be commonplace, something we imagine could help further inflate real-estate prices in trendy markets like San Francisco, while also potentially attracting real-estate speculators to also dabble in bitcoin.

    As if according to some preordained plan, Cryptocoins News reported this weekend that real-estate agents in both Miami and New York City are warming to bitcoin, and some have even convinced their clients to accept payment in the digital currency.

    Eric Fernandez, owner of Sol/Mar Real Estate, recently listed a $3.5 million penthouse condo at the Blue Diamond in Miami Beach, Fla. saying the owners would accept payment in bitcoin or Ethereum, according to the Miami New Times.

    Fernandez believes it is only a matter of time before bitcoin acceptance for real estate purchases gains popularity.

    Fernandez is not the only real estate agent who expects more homes to be bought with digital currency. Bitcoin is achieving cult status for international buyers. Some believe Miami will lead this trend.

    Another Miami realtor, Stephan Burke, who listed a Coral Gables mansion for sale in August, said the seller would accept bitcoin. Burke pointed out that Miami is an ideal market for bitcoin since it offers investors from South America, Canada, Asia and Russia a way to quickly purchase property.

    * * *

    Manhattan realtors are also jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon, according to Ben Shaoul, of Magnum Real Estate Group.

    We were approached by a buyer who has been collecting bitcoin for many years and was interested in using it to buy property.

    Since then there have been a further two to three customers who have approached the developer to see if they can purchase luxury condos with the cryptocurrency. Prices for these properties range in price from $700,000 to $1.5 million.

    The United Kingdom has also recorded a few examples of sellers accepting payment in bitcoin for their homes, with at least one case of a seller accepting payment only in bitcoin.

    Last month, a Notting Hill mansion in London was put up for sale with the asking price of $17 million, believed to be a first for the metropolitan city. In this case, though, the seller is only accepting bitcoin. In the last week it has been reported that a 49-year-old man has put his £80,000 house up for sale, with the option of accepting the digital currency.

    Meawhile, a UK co-living company has announced that it will begin accepting down payments made in bitcoin, making it that much easier for traders hooked on effortless, outstanding returns to speculate in another bubble-prone market: UK housing.

    Of course, bitcoin’s somestimes-extreme volatility presents risks. But the NYC realtors say they’re not worried.

    "Would you stop investing in stock markets? No, you wouldn’t. Each person is going to have a risk assessed judgement on whether or not they want to invest in bitcoin," one realtor said.

    And now that traders can easily purchase futures contracts allowing them to profit off of declines in the bitcoin price, sellers can purchase protection to offset some of the risk.
     

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Nov 20

Today’s News 20th November 2017

  • Who Gets To Push The Nuclear Button?

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    William Binney is the former National Security Agency (NSA) official who created NSA’s mass surveillance program for digital information. He says that if the Russian government had conspired with Trump, hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computer, or in any way influenced the outcome of the last US presidential election, the National Security Agency would have the digital evidence. The fact that we have been listening to the unsubstantiated charges that comprise “Russiagate” for more than one year without being presented with a scrap of evidence is complete proof that Russiagate is entirely fake news.

    The fake news originated with CIA director John Brennan and FBI director Comey conspiring with the DNC in an effort to discredit and unseat President Trump and at a minimum prevent him from damaging the vast power and profit of the military/security complex by normalizing relations with Russia.

    Consider what this means.

    The directors of the CIA and FBI made up a totally false story about a newly elected President and fed the lies to the presstitutes and Congress. The presstitutes never asked for a drop of evidence and enlarged the Brennan/Comey lie with a claim that all 17 US intelligence agencies had concluded that Russia had interfered. In actual fact, a handful of carefully selected people in three of the agencies had prepared, perhaps under duress, a conditional report that had no evidence behind it.

    That it was fake news created to control President Trump was completely obvious, but corrupt security officials, corrupt senators and representatives, a corrupt DNC, and corrupt media used constant repetition to turn a lie into truth.

    Having shoved Trump into the militarist camp, his enemies have turned on Trump as an unstable, volatile person who might push the button. Senator Bob Corker (R, TN) and Senator Chris Murphy (D,CT) are using the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to portray President Trump as a quixotic person who shouldn’t have his finger on the nuclear button. We have gone full circle, from Trump who wants to defuse nuclear tensions to Trump who might push the button.

    If Senators Corker and Murphy were really concerned and not just orchestrating a new way to attack Trump, they would bring out the fact that Russiagate is a hoax that has made nuclear war more likely. As I have pointed out, Washington has convinced Moscow that Washington is planning a surprise nuclear attack on Russia and also collecting Russian DNA for a tailored Russian-specific bio-weapon. I cannot think of anything more likely to trigger nuclear war than the escalated tensions that Russiagate is preventing Trump from reducing.

    For the record, contrary to the erroneous assertions of “nuclear experts,” the president cannot simply order a nuclear attack.

    The president either has to accept a Joint Chiefs war plan and order a launch when the military is ready, or

     

    …he has to accept the advice of his national security adviser to launch in retaliation for incoming enemy ICBMs.

     

    If a president simply ordered a nuclear strike, he would be ignored.

    If it is not the president who must make the nuclear decision, who is it to be? The military? We should be thankful that that was not the case when the Joint Chiefs pressured President John F. Kennedy to approve a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

    The question who should have launch authority is an easy one to answer. No one.

    If nuclear missiles are incoming, launching does not protect you. You are already going to be destroyed. Why destroy the other side of the world in an act of revenge. It is pointless.

    There is no such thing as a preemptive strike that prevents retaliation.

    Nuclear war is an act of insanity. Nothing can justify it.

    The purpose of diplomacy is to prevent war. However, ever since the Clinton regime attacked Serbia, US diplomacy has been used to cause wars. During the 16-years of George W. Bush and Obama the US destroyed in whole or part seven countries, killing and maiming millions of peoples and producing millions of refugees. Not a single one of these wars was justified. Everyone of these wars was based in lies. The last US government that showed any respect at all for truth was the George H. W. Bush administration.

    Before launching each of these acts of unprovoked aggression, Washington demonized the leader of the country. To get rid of one person, Washington did not flinch at murdering large numbers of people and destroying the infrastructure of the country. This tells you that Washington has no morality. None. Zilch. Therefore, Washington is capable of launching a preemptive nuclear strike. Back when nuclear weapons were puny by today’s standards, Washington nuked two Japanese cities while Japan was trying to surrender. That was in 1945, a lifetime ago. Whatever bits of morality that still existed then are long gone.

    Today a CNN editor-at-large named Chris Cillizza, published online an article titled, “There’s a massive moral vacuum in the country right now.” At last, I thought, a presstitute has realized that Washington’s constant nuclear threats against other countries shows a complete disrespect for the life of the planet and indicates a moral vacuum. But no, the presstitute is talking about sexual harassment, especially that of Roy Moore in the 1970s. And it is all Trump’s fault. How can he lead when he harasses women himself?

    President Trump intended to normalize relations with the other major nuclear power. He has been prevented from doing so by the military/security complex, the DNC, and the presstitutes.

    Cillizza says sexual harassment is a “very big” consequence of Trump’s election. I am left wondering if CNN’s editor-at-large considers nuclear war to be as serious as sexual harassment.

  • "Worst Case Scenario" Looms As Merkel's "Jamaica Coalition" Collapses; EUR Sinks

    We warned on Friday that German Chancellor Angela Merkel faced a 'night of the long knives' in her efforts to bring together the co-called 'Jamaica' coalition of four parties and after a desperate weekend of talks, Bloomberg reports Merkel's efforts at forming a coalition have failed meaning a second election looms and sending the euro sliding.

    As Bloomberg reports, talks on forming German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s next government collapsed, throwing the future of Europe’s longest-serving leader into doubt and potentially pointing the world’s fourth-biggest economy toward new elections.

    After a 12-hour negotiating session that ended shortly before midnight Sunday, the Free Democratic Party walked out of the exploratory talks, saying the differences with the Green party were too great to bridge.

    Merkel has sought for four weeks to enlist the two smaller parties for her fourth-term coalition.

    “It’s better not to govern than to govern badly,” FDP head Christian Lindner told reporters in Berlin.

    No further coalition talks were scheduled, he said. There was no immediate comment from Merkel.

    EURUSD is down aroound 80 pips on the news…

    As MINT Partners' Bill Blain noted previously, Germans are not used to multiple elections – and a second vote early next year would be massive negative for Merkel herself – she may even have to stand down if coalition looks like falling. That could be massive shock.

    As a result, the prospects for more volatile European peripheral markets, particularly Greece and Italy, are likely to be exacerbated, and we might well see some of the currency and European stock market froth blow away in coming days as the scale of the “German Problem” becomes clearer.

    • My worst case Germany scenario is a second election early next year, political uncertainty as Mutti Merkel finds herself squeezed out, and a scramble to build a new coalition government in her aftermath.
    • The best case scenario isn’t much better: that Merkel manages to forge a new coalition, but it will be a long drawn out affair and the resulting administration will be vulnerable, weak and fraxious.

    These sound like German problems, but they mean the “leader of Europe” is likely to be entirely inward focused in coming months/years.. at a time when the European union will be facing a host of new issues regarding closer union, banking union and reform of the ESM, bailout and QE policies. There will also be new potential crisis points – Italian elections next year, Greece bailout, renewed immigration crisis or a blow-up with Trump. And these are just the known unknowns.

    This has profound implications for the so-called French/German axis as it slides towards Paris. We are not going to see a new German government “waste time” on issues like closer EU union, European Banking Union, or critical finance issues like reforming ESM or new approaches on QE and Bailout funds. Forget Wiedemann for ECB president, it’s more likely to another Frenchman (Trichet II) – I’m sure its already underway. In short.. Germany negotiations could get very fraxious while Europe is dragged down in its wake. I doubt the markets have discounted it yet.

  • Victoria's Secret Staff Think The Chinese Are Spying On Them

    Stories about the shambolic Victoria’s Secret fashion show – which is slated to take place Tuesday Nov. 28 in Shanghai – just keep getting weirder.

    Chinese bureaucrats have so far refused to cooperate with the show’s producers and planners, denying visas to Gigi Hadid, one of the show’s highest-profile models, and Katy Perry, the US pop superstar who was slated to be the musical guest.

    The Communist Party has also inexplicably refused to issue press passes and visas to members of the western media who were supposed to travel to China to cover the event.

    Already, we imagine the marketing brass at L Brands have learned their lesson, and that this will be both the first, and the last, VS fashion show held in China.

    But as if all this weren’t enough, the New York Post is now reporting that the show’s organizers believe the Chinese government is spying on them. Which, of course, is probably true, given Chinese authorities’ well-known penchant for monitoring foreigners.

    The Post says e-mails of VS show staffers and production crew are apparently being monitored by Chinese authorities.

    TV and media-industry insiders who are desperately trying to figure out what’s going on amid the production chaos are getting frustrated by messages from colleagues in China simply saying that they can’t speak frankly about the issues with the government because their communications are being watched.

    Perry had her visa application declined because she once showed support for Taiwan (which is in an independence struggle with China) during a Beijing concert. Hadid’s was denied because of a picture her sister, Bella Hadid, published on Instagram that the Chinese public deemed offensive. Plus, fellow Angel Adriana Lima’s visa application has been imperiled by an unknown “diplomatic issue.” Meanwhile, a host of other models have also had their visas denied.

    Many fashion bloggers have also been denied visas, and TV producers have discovered that they need permits to shoot outside of the Mercedes-Benz Arena, where the show, which is slated to air on CBS later this month, is set to take place.

    As one source put it, “If you’re going to China you want to show that you’re in China!”

    The surveillance is apparently making it difficult for the show’s organizers to find replacements for the models who have been denied entry. Harry Styles has already been booked to fill in for Perry.

    “They want to discuss what’s going on as far as replacements for those denied visas and alternative arrangements, but they have to be tight-lipped because it seems that the government is watching their e-mails,” said a source.

    With more than a week to go before the show, we can only imagine what fresh entanglements will crop up as the date draws nearer.
     

  • Top NSA Whistleblower Claims "Russiagate" A Fake To Increase War-Spending

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    William Binney is the mathematician and Russia-specialist, who quit the NSA in 2001 as its global Technical Director for geopolitical analysis, because of the lying about, and manipulations of, intelligence, that he saw — distortions of intelligence by the George W. Bush Administration — in order to ‘justify’ systematic, massive, and all-encompassing, Government snooping into all Americans’ private electronic communications. His, and some colleagues’, efforts to get the Inspector General of the US Department of Defense to investigate the matter, produced FBI raids into their homes, and seizures of their computers, so as to remove incriminating evidence they might have against higher-ups. According to Binney, NSA's Director, Michael Hayden, had vetoed in August 2001 a far less intrusive and more effective system of signals-intelligence collection and analysis, which might have enabled the 9/11 attacks to be blocked — a more effective system that would have been less expensive, less intrusive, and not violated Americans’ Constitutional rights. Hayden went on to head the CIA, until the end of George W. Bush’s Presidency. Afterward, Hayden joined the Chertoff Group and other military-industrial-complex contractors of the US federal Government. There were no such rewards for any of the whistleblowers.

    Binney viewed Hillary Clinton as continuing George W. Bush’s neoconservatism, and so, though reluctantly, voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

    On November 15th, an interview of Binney was published at the Washingtonsblog news-site, titled “How to Instantly Prove (Or Disprove) Russian Hacking of US Election”, in which Binney provides technical details to explain why he strongly believes that the Democratic Party’s allegations, which say that Russia was the source of the leaks of information from the computers of the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, are nothing more than intentional concoctions and distortions, which are backed and promoted by America’s military-industrial complex, whose stock-values rise accordingly with the lies. 

    He believes,

    there’s a huge part of the story that the entire mainstream media is missing …

    Specifically, Binney says that the NSA has long had in its computers information which can prove exactly who hacked the DNC … or instead prove that the DNC emails were leaked by a Democratic insider. …

    And he stressed:

    If the idiots in the intelligence community expect us to believe them after all the crap they have told us (like WMD’s in Iraq and “no we don’t collect data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”) then they need to give clear proof of what they say. So far, they have failed to prove anything.

    Which suggests they don’t have proof and just want to war-monger the US public into a second cold war with the Russians.

    After all, there’s lots and lots of money in that for the military-industrial-intelligence-governmental complex of incestuous relationships.

    His technical explanation of how he came to this conclusion, is provided in that Washingtonsblog article. He doesn't think that the elements within the intelligence community which are promoting the Russiagate allegations can possibly be so stupid as to actually believe what they are saying. He claims that they know that what they are saying is false, because if it weren’t false, then they could provide, to the public, evidence that it is true, and do it without violating anyone’s rights, nor revealing any legitimate US national-security information.

    Basically, he is saying that the keepers of the keys are blocking the public from the truth, because they know that the truth will expose the fact that they’ve been lying to the public, all along.

    His technical explanation of the details employs a number of undefined terms, which aren’t understandable to persons who are not themselves technically knowledgeable about the field, such as his saying:

    First, from deep packet inspection, they would have the originator and ultimate recipient (IP) of the packets plus packet series 32 bit number identifier and all the housekeeping data showing the network segments/path and time to go though the network. And, of course, the number of packet bits. With this they would know to where and when the data passed.

     

    From the data collection, they would have all the data as it existed in the server taken from. That’s why I originally said if the FBI wanted Hillary’s email, all they have to do is ask NSA for them.

     

    All this is done by the Narus collection equipment in real time at line rates (620 mbps [mega bits per second,] for the STA-6400 and 10 gbps [giga bits per second] for the Insight equipment).

    Binney explained what these numbers mean: Each Narus Insight device can monitor and record around 1,250,000 emails each second … or more than 39 trillion emails per year.

    However, no one who is promoting the Russiagate allegations is taking him on, to debate Binney’s allegations. Instead, all of the newsmedia are plastered with allegations of ‘Russia’s meddling in American democracy’.

    There are people who know what the terms that Binney is using refer to. But, thus far, none of these people is saying that Binney is a liar. Instead, they’ve all just been ignoring him – and none of the major newsmedia have been inviting Binney and the promoters of the military-industrial-complex’s position onto their forums in order to debate these issues in public.

    It’s just like the situation was about ‘Saddam’s WMD,’ in 2002 and 2003 prior to our invasion and destruction of Iraq as a supposed ‘response’ to the 9/11 attacks.

  • Big Brother Is Here: Twitter Will Monitor Users Behavior 'Off Platform'

    In perhaps the most intrusive move of social media platforms' efforts signal as much virtue as possible and appease their potentially-regulating government overlords, Twitter has announced that it is cracking down on what it defines at hate-speech and not just by looking at its own site.

    In what amounts to a major shift in Twitter policy, Mashable's Kerry Flynn reports that the company announced on Friday that it will be monitoring user's behavior "on and off the platform" and will suspend a user's account if they affiliate with violent organizations, according to an update to Twitter's Help Center on Friday.

    Abusive Behavior

    We believe in freedom of expression and open dialogue, but that means little as an underlying philosophy if voices are silenced because people are afraid to speak up. In order to ensure that people feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs, we prohibit behavior that crosses the line into abuse, including behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user’s voice.

     

    Context matters when evaluating for abusive behavior and determining appropriate enforcement actions. Factors we may take into consideration include, but are not limited to whether:

    • the behavior is targeted at an individual or group of people;
    • the report has been filed by the target of the abuse or a bystander;
    • the behavior is newsworthy and in the legitimate public interest.

     

    Violence: You may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people. This includes, but is not limited to, threatening or promoting terrorism.

     

    You also may not affiliate with organizations that – whether by their own statements or activity both on and off the platform – use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes.

     

    Abuse: You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.

     

    Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

     

    Hateful imagery and display names: You may not use hateful images or symbols in your profile image or profile header. You also may not use your username, display name, or profile bio to engage in abusive behavior, such as targeted harassment or expressing hate towards a person, group, or protected category.

    Furthermore, Twitter says it will control the stream of information more broadly…

    At times, we may prevent certain content from trending.

    As Kerry Flynn notes, these changes comes amid aggressive moves by Twitter to curb abuse and harassment on the site after more than a decade of essentially letting the abusers operate freely.

    Over the last week, Twitter has taken action against the accounts of white supremacists. Twitter permanently banned Tim "Treadstone" Gionet, a prominent alt-right troll more widely known as Baked Alaska, earlier this week. It also removed the verification badges of Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the racist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and of alt-right activist Richard Spencer.

    Twitter's decision to monitor users off site sparked concern from free speech advocates such as Andrew Torba, founder of social network Gab.

    "This is a scary precedent to set," he wrote in an email to Mashable.

     

    "Rules like this will only force dissidents and those who are speaking truth to power to silence themselves or risk being silenced by Twitter."

    Twitter's new rules will not be enforced until December 18th…

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

    And of course, "if you're doing nothing wrong, then why would this be an issue for you" will be instant reposte of those defending yet more intrusion within America's surveillance state.

  • How A Half-Educated Tech Elite Delivered Us Into This Chaos

    Authored by John Naughton, op-ed via The Guardian,

    If our supersmart tech leaders knew a bit more about history or philosophy we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now…

    One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. We have a burgeoning genre of “OMG, what have we done?” angst coming from former Facebook and Google employees who have begun to realise that the cool stuff they worked on might have had, well, antisocial consequences.

    Put simply, what Google and Facebook have built is a pair of amazingly sophisticated, computer-driven engines for extracting users’ personal information and data trails, refining them for sale to advertisers in high-speed data-trading auctions that are entirely unregulated and opaque to everyone except the companies themselves.

    The purpose of this infrastructure was to enable companies to target people with carefully customised commercial messages and, as far as we know, they are pretty good at that. (Though some advertisers are beginning to wonder if these systems are quite as good as Google and Facebook claim.) And in doing this, Zuckerberg, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and co wrote themselves licences to print money and build insanely profitable companies.

    It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters.

    Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid? The cynical answer is they knew about the potential dark side all along and didn’t care, because to acknowledge it might have undermined the aforementioned licences to print money. Which is another way of saying that most tech leaders are sociopaths. Personally I think that’s unlikely, although among their number are some very peculiar characters: one thinks, for example, of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel – Trump’s favourite techie; and Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber.

    So what else could explain the astonishing naivety of the tech crowd? My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. Take the Google co-founders. Sergey Brin studied mathematics and computer science. His partner, Larry Page, studied engineering and computer science. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, where he was studying psychology and computer science, but seems to have been more interested in the latter.

    Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature. As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture.

    We are now beginning to see the consequences of the dominance of this half-educated elite. As one perceptive observer Bob O’Donnell puts it:

    “a liberal arts major familiar with works like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, or even the work of ancient Greek historians, might have been able to recognise much sooner the potential for the ‘tyranny of the majority’ or other disconcerting sociological phenomena that are embedded into the very nature of today’s social media platforms. While seemingly democratic at a superficial level, a system in which the lack of structure means that all voices carry equal weight, and yet popularity, not experience or intelligence, actually drives influence, is clearly in need of more refinement and thought than it was first given.”

    All of which brings to mind CP Snow’s famous Two Cultures lecture, delivered in Cambridge in 1959, in which he lamented the fact that the intellectual life of the whole of western society was scarred by the gap between the opposing cultures of science and engineering on the one hand, and the humanities on the other – with the latter holding the upper hand among contemporary ruling elites.

    Snow thought that this perverse dominance would deprive Britain of the intellectual capacity to thrive in the postwar world and he clearly longed to reverse it.

    Snow passed away in 1980, but one wonders what he would have made of the new masters of our universe. One hopes that he might see it as a reminder of the old adage: be careful what you wish for – you might just get it.

  • Hezbollah On "High Alert", Says It Will Be Blamed For 'False Flag' Assassination Attempt

    Submitted by Elijah Magnier, Middle East based chief international war correspondent for Al Rai Media

    Hezbollah has raised its military readiness on the whole Lebanese territory in the last few days and put its forces on high alert in the light of the threats it has received from a number of countries, and especially from Israel and Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah forces have been mobilized in the event of any hostile activity on the borders or in the country, notwithstanding the ongoing conviction of its leadership that Israel will not wage a direct war in the near or distant future.

    According to well informed sources, Hezbollah fears the possible assassination of a well-known Lebanese figure, Sunni or Christian, similar to the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. The aim would be to re-mix the cards on the Lebanese scene, accuse Hezbollah and to embarrass President Michel Aoun.


    Image source: Reuters via The Jerusalem Post.

    Aoun has raised the challenge against Riyadh during the recent events related to the televised resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, and he has accused Saudi Arabia of holding Hariri as a hostage (for more than two weeks), defining the Prime Minister’s submission to this act as “unconstitutional and illegitimate.”

    Moreover, Hezbollah, in coordination with Iran, has issued orders not to transfer weapons sent to it from Iran via Syria to Lebanon for the following clearly defined reasons:

    • There is no longer a reason to store weapons in Lebanon because the Lebanese-Syrian front has become united.
    • Hezbollah needs to maintain accurate and long-range missiles in Syria (not Lebanon), confirming what Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Syrian President Bashar Assad have said, that “Syria is one front against Israel in the next war.”
    • Hezbollah’s weapons stores in Lebanon are full, and its warehouses are overflowing. Hezbollah therefore could maintain a long war if Israel did decide to attack Lebanon, and has the capability of launching hundreds of rockets and missiles daily.

    It is clear that President Bashar al-Assad has emerged stronger from the war that has been going on for more than six years. His thinking is now orientated towards the Israeli threat, to tune in with Hezbollah and to assure Saudi Arabia and Israel that Hezbollah will not be left alone in any future battle because the front from Naqoura (in southern Lebanon) to the Golan is now united. Assad is determined and able to respond to any Israeli violation following the total defeat of the “Islamic State” in all the Syrian cities.

    Thus, Assad has lived with and survived the war and has learned to accept losses: during the hard days of the war, the number of soldiers killed reached hundreds in some battles. The Syrian leadership is in a better position to accept the consequences of any future war with Israel as long as the goals are reached despite the sacrifices required.

    But Assad will not be alone facing any future attack on Hezbollah. There are thousands of fighters in Syria from neighboring countries, available at the request of the Syrian government. These shall certainly not be neutral in the next war with Israel if it should happen.

    Damascus will be careful not to provoke the United States directly in the next war with Israel, but it will give a free hand to the Syrian resistance if the US decides to occupy north-east Syria.

    The presence of Russian troops in the Levant may not allow all belligerents to be dragged into a large war with multiple frontiers and certainly not a third world war. Israel is so far giving signs that its forces are aware of the future danger and won’t be dragged into a war in the region despite Saudi Arabia’s financial offers and support. The Saudis were responsible for kidnapping the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri (who was "released" this weekend), aiming to present Lebanon as more vulnerable, inviting Israel, in vain, to attack what the Kingdom defines as the “arms of Iran” in the Middle East.

    Russia has no agreement with Israel on anything related to the presence of the Iranian forces and its loyalists in Syria and particularly on the borders with Israel. The Kremlin is not negotiating and disposing of Syrian soil because these matters concern the Syrian government, which intends to recover the occupied Golan after the end of the ISIS threat and al-Qaeda, the Takfiri extremists, in Syria.

    Saudi Arabia's renewed power ploy in the Middle East is likely to more than meet its match because it seriously underestimates Hezbollah as an effective military arm of Iran

  • Is Financial Argmageddon Bullish For Stocks? One Bank's Surprising Answer

    Everyone knows that after nearly a decade of capital markets central planning by the world’s central banks, “good news is bad news.” But did you also know that financial armageddon has become the most bullish catalyst to buy stocks? That’s the understated take-home message from the year ahead preview by Macquarie’s Viktor Shvets published last week. It is also the conclusion that One River Asset Management’s Eric Peters reached in his latest weekend notes.

    While we will have much more to comment on Macquarie’s rather macabre 2018 preview, which is arguably one of the most honest, comprehensive, and objective predictions of what to expected from the “central bank/market confidence boosting nexus”, we will highlight the one argument that has served to promote countless BTFD algo-driven stock rips, summarized in the following blurb, which is a sublime explanation by Viktor Shvets the worst things are, the more you should buy:

    If volatilities jump, CBs would need to reset the ‘background picture’. The challenge is that even with the best of intentions, the process is far from automatic, and hence there could be months of extended volatility (a la Dec’15-Feb’16). If one ignores shorter-term aberrations, we maintain that there is no alternative to policies that have been pursued since 1980s of deliberately suppressing and managing business and capital market cycles. [T]his implies that a relatively pleasant ‘Kondratieff autumn’ (characterized by inability to raise cost of capital against a background of constrained but positive growth and inflation rates) is likely to endure. Indeed, two generations of investors grew up knowing nothing else. They have never experienced either scorching summers or freezing winters, as public sector refused to allow debt repudiation, deleveraging or clearance of excesses. Although this cannot last forever, there is no reason to believe that the end of the road would necessarily occur in 2018 or 2019. It is true that policy risks are more heightened but so is policy recognition of dangers.

     

    We therefore remain constructive on financial assets (as we have been for quite some time), not because we believe in a sustainable and private sector-led recovery but rather because we do not believe in one, and thus we do not see any viable alternatives to an ongoing financialization, which needs to be facilitated through excess liquidity, and avoiding proper price and risk discovery, and thus avoiding asset price volatilities.

    Translation: central banks remain trapped by the mountain-sized bubble they have blown with years of QE and ZIRP/NIRP, and once volatility returns, and risk assets plunge, CBs will have no choice but to scramble right back and prevent the pyramid from keeling over and undoing a decade of fake “wealth creation” which was pulled from the future to the tune of $15 trillion in central bank asset purchases, which while still rising is about to go into reverse in just over a year’s time.

     

    If that’s not enough, here is One River’s Eric Peters, with the exact same conclusion:

    Anecdote

     

    “The market has an accident, the Fed returns to QE, slashes interest rates, bonds surge, stocks recover,” said the CIO, high atop his prodigious pile, alone. Staring into the distance. Squinting, straining.

     

    “The correlation between bonds and equities remains negative, the risk parity equity/bond portfolios are dented but not destroyed. And we descend to the next lower level in real interest rates. US bond yields turn negative. In essence, we prolong the paradigm that has driven markets for a few decades.”

     

    Far below, economies hummed in harmony, capitalists collecting their expanding share. “A continuation of this paradigm is what everyone believes. And I just doubt that outcome so sincerely.” Hidden within the distant economic whir, labor strived, struggled. Their wage growth anemic, their children indebted, career prospects uncertain.

     

    “It has taken time, but the political context for a regime shift is now established; populism is evident in recent elections. And the academic context for a seismic economic policy shift is in place too.”

     

    The extraordinary response to the global financial crisis prevented depression. But the price of salvation is proving to be as profound as it is impossible to precisely measure — unexpected election outcomes, political paralysis, an isolationist America, de-globalization, fake news, opioid epidemics.

     

    And connecting it all, a corrosive, woven thread; injustice, unfairness, inequality, hypocrisy, distrust, endemic, growing. “We are on the cusp of great change, the old paradigm is set to shift,” he said, at altitude, the air crisp, clear.

     

    “The market has an accident, monetary policy is seen to be bust, the models have been wrong, we have to change what we do, we can’t go down the same route, we need to move to a different policy mix. Fiscal expansion, infrastructure, labor over capital. We’re moving to something that may be great for the economy, but no good for asset markets. New Regime — end of story.”

  • "You're So Dumb, You're Beyond Hope" – ESPN Host Hits Out At Conservative Critics

    Authored by Alex Thomas via SHTFplan.com,

    Over the last few years the once dominant sports news outlet ESPN has come under fire for their perceived political bias after the network fired multiple employees for conservative viewpoints while propping up those that pushed the companies anti-Trump agenda.

    From firing baseball icon Curt Schilling to allowing prime-time SportsCenter news anchor Jemele Hill to smear the president on Twitter, the network has an obvious liberal leaning and many conservatives have rightly called out this transparent bias.

    Now, in a fiery interview with Sports Illustrated, one of the networks poster boys, Scott Van Pelt, has responded to his conservative critics by attacking them for even having the gall to question ESPN’s political bias in the first place.

    Van Pelt attempted to act like a tough guy, calling out said critics for being cowards who he believes only speak out against ESPN on the internet but would never do so in real life.

    “This make believe world where everyone talks shit, this shit talking, poke you in the chest virtual whatever it’s just there’s nothing more chicken shit than that, because it’s the easiest thing in the world to do,” Van Pelt laughably said before targeting those who have boycotted his network in the past.

    In what one can only assume was a network approved attack on their critics, Van Pelt then described those that have boycotted ESPN as so dumb that they don’t even deserve to be prayed for.

    If you truly wanna boycott the NFL and you wanna boycott ESPN, the notion that some guy sitting out there, or gal, and they decide, ‘you know what, I’m gonna cut my entire cable package because ESPN gave an award on a made-up show in July because there’s no sports, to a woman who used to be a man.

     

    So I’m now not gonna have any cable TV at all and I’m gonna sit around at night and read books by candlelight like olden times because of that,’ that’s not happening.

     

    And if you did that, than you’re so dumb that I can’t even pray for you because you’re beyond hope.

    Yep, that is apparently what the networks most visible personality (and thus presumably the network as a whole) thinks about conservatives.

    From Hollywood to the media, and now apparently the sports world, anyone with conservative viewpoints are being openly attacked and labeled racist as a means to silence all dissenting thought against the liberal world establishment.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Nov 19

Today’s News 19th November 2017

  • Russia-Gate Spreads To Europe

    Authored by Robert Parry via ConsortiumNews.com,

    Ever since the U.S. government dangled $160 million last December to combat Russian propaganda and disinformation, obscure academics and eager think tanks have been lining up for a shot at the loot, an unseemly rush to profit that is spreading the Russia-gate hysteria beyond the United States to Europe…

    British Prime Minister Theresa May

    Now, it seems that every development, which is unwelcomed by the Establishment – from Brexit to the Catalonia independence referendum – gets blamed on Russia! Russia! Russia!

    The methodology of these “studies” is to find some Twitter accounts or Facebook pages somehow “linked” to Russia (although it’s never exactly clear how that is determined) and complain about the “Russian-linked” comments on political developments in the West. The assumption is that the gullible people of the United States, United Kingdom and Catalonia were either waiting for some secret Kremlin guidance to decide how to vote or were easily duped.

    Oddly, however, most of this alleged “interference” seems to have come after the event in question. For instance, more than half (56 percent) of the famous $100,000 in Facebook ads in 2015-2017 supposedly to help elect Donald Trump came after last year’s U.S. election (and the total sum compares to Facebook’s annual revenue of $27 billion).

    Similarly, a new British study at the University of Edinburgh blaming the Brexit vote on Russia discovered that more than 70 percent of the Brexit-related tweets from allegedly Russian-linked sites came after the referendum on whether the U.K. should leave the European Union. But, hey, don’t let facts and logic get in the way of a useful narrative to suggest that anyone who voted for Trump or favored Brexit or wants independence for Catalonia is Moscow’s “useful idiot”!

    This week, British Prime Minister Theresa May accused Russia of seeking to “undermine free societies” and to “sow discord in the West.”

    What About Israel?

    Yet, another core problem with these “studies” is that they don’t come with any “controls,” i.e., what is used in science to test a hypothesis against some base line to determine if you are finding something unusual or just some normal occurrence.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on March 3, 2015, in opposition to President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. (Screen shot from CNN broadcast)

    In this case, for instance, it would be useful to find some other country that, like Russia, has a significant number of English speakers but where English is not the native language – and that has a significant interest in foreign affairs – and then see whether people from that country weigh in on social media with their opinions and perspectives about political events in the U.S., U.K., etc.

    Perhaps, the U.S. government could devote some of that $160 million to, say, a study of the Twitter/Facebook behavior of Israelis and whether they jump in on U.S./U.K. controversies that might directly or indirectly affect Israel. We could see how many Twitter/Facebook accounts are “linked” to Israel; we could study whether any Israeli “trolls” harass journalists and news sites that oppose neoconservative policies and politicians in the West; we could check on whether Israel does anything to undermine candidates who are viewed as hostile to Israeli interests; if so, we could calculate how much money these “Israeli-linked” activists and bloggers invest in Facebook ads; and we could track any Twitter bots that might be reinforcing the Israeli-favored message.

    No Chance

    If we had this Israeli baseline, then perhaps we could judge how unusual it is for Russians to voice their opinions about controversies in the West. It’s true that Israel is a much smaller country with 8.5 million people compared to Russia’s 144 million, but you could adjust for those per capita numbers — and even if you didn’t, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that Israel’s interference in U.S. policymaking still exceeds Russian influence.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on May 10, 2015, at the Kremlin. (Photo from Russian government)

    It’s also true that Israeli leaders have often advocated policies that have proved disastrous for the United States, such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s encouragement of  the Iraq War, which Russia opposed. Indeed, although Russia is now regularly called an American enemy, it’s hard to think of any policy that President Vladimir Putin has pushed on the U.S. that is even a fraction as harmful to U.S. interests as the Iraq War has been.

    And, while we’re at it, maybe we could have an accounting of how much “U.S.-linked” entities have spent to influence politics and policies in Russia, Ukraine, Syria and other international hot spots.

    But, of course, neither of those things will happen. If you even tried to gauge the role of “Israeli-linked” operations in influencing Western decision-making, you’d be accused of anti-Semitism. And if that didn’t stop you, there would be furious editorials in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the rest of the U.S. mainstream media denouncing you as a “conspiracy theorist.” Who could possibly think that Israel would do anything underhanded to shape Western attitudes?

    And, if you sought the comparative figures for the West interfering in the affairs of other nations, you’d be faulted for engaging in “false moral equivalence.” After all, whatever the U.S. government and its allies do is good for the world; whereas Russia is the fount of evil.

    So, let’s just get back to developing those algorithms to sniff out, isolate and eradicate “Russian propaganda” or other deviant points of view, all the better to make sure that Americans, Britons and Catalonians vote the right way.

  • Back-To-Back Hindenburg Omens

    About a week ago, we warned about the infamous bearish stock market pattern developing in US equities coined by some as the ‘Hindenburg Omen’. The pattern is known for its bearish tendencies developed after the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. The key understanding is breadth deterioration, when more stocks hit 52-week lows than 52-highs. Since the warning, a liquidity gap has developed in stocks thwarting any attempt at new all time highs.

    Fast forward to this morning and a very ironic situation has unfolded in the skies 50-miles north of London. And no – it’s not a giant penis drawn by US-Navy pilots in F-18s – it’s a true ‘Hindenburg Omen’ as the world’s longest airship crashed early this morning. The £25m airship called ‘Airlander 10’ appeared to “break in two,” a witness told the BBC. Reports suggest the airship broke free from mooring less than 24-hours after a successful test. At the time, no-one was on board of the aircraft, but Bedfordshire police, paramedics and fire crews were alerted and treated a women who suffered minor injuries.

    According to the Guardian,

    The roads around the airfield were closed amid concerns that aviation fuel and helium could escape from the airship. However, police said they believed the helium would soon dissipate.

     

    Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), the company that developed the airship confirmed there had been an incident. It said the craft was not on a flight at the time and had since been deflated.

     

    An investigation has been launched to find out what happened.

    Local residents took to social media and snapped shocking pictures of the crashed airship appearing to be more deflated than Tom Brady’s footballs.

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

    Another concerned resident indicated ground crews rushed to slice open the aircraft to release helium after the crash.

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

    Airship community is in tears this morning…

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

    The Airlander 10 is/was the world’s largest aircraft produced by Hybrid Air Vehicles. The airship is classified as a helium airship powered by four diesel engines driving large propellers on each side of the craft. Hybrid Air Vehicles originally built this aircraft for the United States Army’s Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) program in 2012, but was cancelled one-year later.

    To give perspective of the Airlander’s size, a Boeing 747 can pretty much fit inside the craft.

    Perhaps the United States Army made the right decision in 2013, as it appears the Airlander 10 has many kinks that still need to be worked out. In late 2016, the Airlander 10 had a slow motion crash during a landing approach where damage to the cockpit was heavily sustained, but the crew of two was untouched.

    Bottomline: Back to back ‘Hidenburg Omens’ for US-stocks and now the largest aircraft in the world crashing this morning is an ominous sign and we hope it’s not a redux of 1937 where markets crashed in excessive around 50%.

  • "Gasping For Air" – Atlanta Nursing Home Staff Laugh As WWII Veteran Dies After Calling For Help

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    Staff at the Northeast Atlanta Health and Rehabilitation Center laughed as a decorated World War II veteran took his last gasps of air after frantically calling for help six different times, according to a shocking new investigation from 11Alive.com.

    The investigation included the release of a never before seen hidden camera video that not only completely contradicted statements given by the nursing home staff but also proved, without a shadow of doubt, that the nursing home essentially let the decorated veteran die as if it were a joke.

    The video is so disgusting that attorneys for the nursing home repeatedly tried to stop its release, going through a series of court battles with the local news station in which they hoped that the media would be ordered to censor the footage.

    Thankfully, the judge in the case ruled in favor of actual journalism and the nursing home, after seeing no other possible outcome, eventually dropped their appeal to the Georgia State Supreme Court.

    In the 11Alive investigation, the news outlet details the fact that a nurse who was on duty at the time directly lied about what actually happened before being confronted with the hidden camera video.

    In the video deposition, former nursing supervisor Wanda Nuckles tells the family’s attorney, Mike Prieto, how she rushed to Dempsey’s room when a nurse alerted her he had stopped breathing.

     

    Prieto: “From the time you came in, you took over doing chest compressions…correct?”

     

    Nuckles : “Yes.”

     

    Prieto: “Until the time paramedics arrive, you were giving CPR continuously?”

     

    Nuckles : “Yes.”

     

    The video, however, shows no one doing CPR when Nuckles entered the room. She also did not immediately start doing CPR.

     

    “Sir, that was an honest mistake,” said Nuckles in the deposition. “I was just basing everything on what I normally do.”

     

    […]

     

    When nurses had difficulty getting Dempsey’s oxygen machine operational during, you can hear Nuckles and others laughing.

     

    Prieto: “Ma’am, was there something funny that was happening?”

     

    Nuckles : “I can’t even remember all that as you can see.”

    “The video shows the veteran calling for help six times before he goes unconscious while gasping for air. State records show nursing home staff found Dempsey unresponsive at 5:28 am. It took almost an hour for the staff to call 911 at 6:25a.m,” the 11Alive report read.

    Amazingly, the Georgia Board of Nursing told 11Alive that the nurse seen in the above video, as well as another nurse on duty at the time, were only forced to surrender their licenses in September of this year, almost three years after the disgusting incident!

    “Nursing board president Janice Izlar says she cannot confirm when the state knew about the video, but the board’s action came shortly after 11Alive sent her and other board staff a link to view the video,” 11Alive continued.

    The deceased veteran, 89-year-old James Dempsey was a decorated World War II veteran who was from Woodstock, Georgia. Dempsey’s family received a settlement from the nursing home in 2014 so were unable to comment on the investigation.

  • The U.S. Is Crushing Its Clean Energy Forecasts

    Paris, schmarish…

    In a February 2007 report, the United States Department of Energy made thirty-year predictions for the country's energy usage and production. As Statista's infographic below shows, using data from the non-profit international environmental pressure group Natural Resources Defense Council, these forecasts have so far been smashed.

    Infographic: The U.S. Is Smashing Its Clean Energy Forecasts | Statista

    You will find more statistics at Statista

    Martin Armstrong details that actual CO2 emissions in 2016 have undercut the 2006 predictions by 24 percent.

    In terms of the energy mix, power generated from coal was 45 percent beneath the forecast while clean(er) alternatives natural gas and wind/solar power saw overshoots of 79 and 383 percent, respectively.

    Renewable energy infrastructure is also expanding at a much faster rate than was thought ten years ago. 2006's prediction for installed solar was a massive 4,813 percent shy of the 2016 reality. The U.S now also has installed wind capacity of 82 gigawatts, 361 percent more than had been hoped for.

    In fact, energy consumption in total was also 17 percent lower than expected… which is odd and perhaps a better indication of the recovery-less recovery's reality?

  • We're Living In The Age Of Capital Consumption

    Authored by Ronald-Peter Stöferle via The Mises Institute,

    When capital is mentioned in the present-day political debate, the term is usually subject to a rather one-dimensional interpretation: Whether capital saved by citizens, the question of capital reserves held by pension funds, the start-up capital of young entrepreneurs or capital gains taxes on investments are discussed – in all these cases capital is equivalent to “money.” Yet capital is distinct from money, it is a largely irreversible, definite structure, composed of heterogeneous elements which can be (loosely) described as goods, knowledge, context, human beings, talents and experience. Money is “only” the simplifying aid that enables us to record the incredibly complex heterogeneous capital structure in a uniform manner. It serves as a basis for assessing the value of these diverse forms of capital.

    Modern economics textbooks usually refer to capital with the letter “C”. This conceptual approach blurs the important fact that capital is not merely a single magnitude, an economic variable representing a magically self-replicating homogenous blob but a heterogeneous structure. Among the various economic schools of thought it is first and foremost the Austrian School of Economics, which stresses the heterogeneity of capital. Furthermore, Austrians have correctly recognized, that capital does not automatically grow or perpetuate itself. Capital must be actively created and maintained, through production, saving, and sensible investment.

    Moreover, Austrians emphasize that one has to differentiate between two types of goods in the production process: consumer goods and capital goods. Consumer goods are used in immediate consumption – such as food. Consumer goods are a means to achieve an end directly. Thus, food helps to directly achieve the end of satisfying the basic need for nutrition. Capital goods differ from consumer goods in that they are way-stations toward the production of consumer goods which can be used to achieve ultimate ends. Capital goods therefore are means to achieve ends indirectly. A commercial oven (used for commercial purposes) is a capital good, which enables the baker to produce bread for consumers. 

    Through capital formation, one creates the potential means to boost productivity. The logical precondition for this is that the production of consumer goods must be temporarily decreased or even stopped, as scarce resources are redeployed toward the production of capital goods. If current production processes generate only fewer or no consumer goods, it follows that consumption will have to be reduced by the quantity of consumer goods no longer produced. Every deepening of the production structure therefore involves taking detours.

    Capital formation is therefore always an attempt to generate larger returns in the long term by adopting more roundabout methods of production. Such higher returns are by no means guaranteed though, as the roundabout methods chosen may turn out to be misguided. In the best case only those roundabout methods will ultimately be continued, which do result in greater productivity. It is therefore fair to assume that a more capital-intensive production structure will generate more output than a less capital-intensive one. The more prosperous an economic region, the more capital-intensive its production structure is. The fact that the generations currently living in our society are able to enjoy such a high standard of living is the result of decades or even centuries of both cultural and economic capital accumulation by our forebears.

    Once a stock of capital has been accumulated, it is not destined to be eternal. Capital is thoroughly transitory, it wears out, it is used up in the production process, or becomes entirely obsolete. Existing capital requires regularly recurring reinvestment, which can usually be funded directly out of the return capital generates. If reinvestment is neglected because the entire output or more is consumed, the result is capital consumption.

    It is not only the dwindling understanding of the nature of capital that leads us to consume it without being aware of it. It is also the framework of the real economy which unwittingly drives us to do so. In 1971 money was finally cut loose entirely from the gold anchor and we entered the “paper money era.” In retrospect, it has to be stated that cutting the last tie to gold was a fatal mistake. Among other things, it has triggered unprecedented instability in interest rates. While interest rates displayed relatively little volatility as long as money was still tied to gold, they surged dramatically after 1971, reaching a peak of approximately 16 percent in 1981 (10-year treasury yield), before beginning a nosedive that continues until today. This massive decline in interest rates over the past 35 years has gradually eroded the capital stock.

    An immediately obvious effect is the decline in so-called “yield purchasing power”. The concept describes what the income from savings, or more precisely the interest return on savings, will purchase in terms of goods. The opportunity to generate interest income from savings has of course decreased quite drastically. Once zero or even negative interest rate territory is reached, the return on saved capital is obviously no longer large enough to enable one to live from it, let alone finance a reasonable standard of living. Consequently, saved capital has to be consumed in order to secure one's survival. Capital consumption is glaringly obvious in this case.

    It is beyond question that massive capital consumption is taking place nowadays, yet not all people are affected by it to the same extent. On the one hand, the policy of artificially reducing the interest as orchestrated by the central banks does negatively influence the entrepreneurs’ tasks. Investments, especially capital-intensive investments seem to be more profitable as compared to a realistic, i. e. non-interventionist level, profits are thus higher and reserves lower. These and other inflation-induced errors promote capital consumption.

    On the other hand, counteracting capital consumption are technological progress and the rapid expansion of our areas of economic activity into Eastern Europe and Asia in recent decades, due to the collapse of communism and the fact that many countries belatedly caught up with the monetary and industrial revolution in its wake. Without this catching-up process it would have been necessary to restrict consumption in Western countries a long time ago already.

    At the same time, the all-encompassing redistributive welfare state, which either directly through taxes or indirectly through the monetary system continually shifts and reallocates large amounts of capital, manages to paper over the effects of capital consumption to some extent. It remains to be seen how much longer this can continue. Once the stock of capital is depleted, the awakening will be rude. We are certain, that gold is an essential part of any portfolio in this stage of the economic cycle.

     

  • Who's Next? Venezuela's Collapse Puts These Nations At Risk

    "It's a wake-up call for a lot of people who will say ‘Look, the stuff I own is actually very risky'…" warns Ray Jian, who oversees about $6 billion at Pioneer Investment Management Ltd. in London. "People have been ignoring risks in places like Lebanon for a long time," and the official default of Venezuela this week has emerging-market money managers are looking to identify countries that might run into trouble down the road.

    While Bloomberg reports that while none are nearly as badly off as Venezuela – where a combination of low oil prices, economic mismanagement and U.S. sanctions did the country in –  traders are scouting for credit risk, from Lebanon, where Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s sudden resignation has once again thrust the nation into a Saudi-Iran proxy war, to Ecuador, where recently elected President Lenin Moreno continues to expand the debt load in a country with a history as a serial defaulter.

    1. Lebanon:

    One of the world’s most indebted countries, Lebanon may hit a debt-to-gross domestic product ratio of 152 percent this year, according to International Monetary Fund forecasts. That’s coming at a time when political tension is rising. Hariri’s abrupt resignation, announced from Riyadh on Nov. 4, triggered about $800 million of withdrawals from the country as investors speculated that the nation would be in the crosshairs of a regional feud between the Saudis and Iranians. While the central bank says the worst may be over, credit-default swaps have hit a nine-year high.

    2. Ecuador:

    After a borrowing spree, the Andean nation’s external debt obligations over the next 12 months ballooned to a nine-year high relative to the size of its GDP. Ecuador probably has the highest default risk after Venezuela, according to Robert Koenigsberger, the chief investment officer of Gramercy Funds Management. The country will be vulnerable “when the liquidity environment changes and they can no longer go to the market to get $2.5 billion to plug the hole," he said. Finance Minister Carlos de la Torre told Bloomberg in an email on Thursday that there is "no default risk" for any of Ecuador’s debt commitments and the nation’s indebtedness is nowhere near "critical" levels.

    3. Ukraine:

    While the Eastern European nation’s credit-default swaps have declined from their 2015 highs, persistent economic struggles are giving traders reason for caution. GDP expansion has slowed for three consecutive quarters and the World Bank warns that the economy is at risk of falling into a low-growth trap. Ukraine’s parliament approved next year’s budget on Tuesday as it eyes a $17.5 billion international bailout.

    4. Egypt:

    Egypt’s credit-default swaps are hovering near the highest since September. The cost for protection surged in June as regional tensions heated up amid a push by the Saudis to isolate Qatar. While Egypt has been able to boost foreign-currency reserves and is on course to repay $14 billion in principal and interest in 2018, its foreign debt has climbed to $79 billion from $55.8 billion a year earlier.

    5. Pakistan:

    Pakistan’s credit-default swaps surged in late October and linger near their highest level since June. South Asia’s second-largest economy faces challenges as it struggles with dwindling foreign reserves, rising debt payments and a ballooning current account deficit. Pakistan is mulling a potential $2 billion debt sale later this year. Speaking at the Bloomberg Pakistan Economic Forum last week, central bank Deputy Governor Jameel Ahmad played down concerns over the country’s widening twin deficits.

    6. Bahrain:

    Bahrain’s spread rose dramatically in late October to the highest since January after it was said to ask Gulf allies for aid. The nation is seeking to replenish international reserves and avert a currency devaluation as oil prices batter the six Gulf Cooperation Council oil producers. Although its neighbors are likely to help, Bahrain could still be left with the highest budget deficit in the region, according to the IMF.

    7. Turkey:

    Despite high yields, investors are still reluctant to buy Turkish bonds. The nation has been caught up in a blur of political crises, driving spreads on credit-default swaps to their highest level since May. Turkey was the only holdover on S&P Global Ratings’s latest “Fragile Five” list of countries most vulnerable to normalization in global monetary conditions.

  • The Coming Economic Downturn In Canada

    Authored by Deb Shaw via MarketsNow.com,

    • Canadian GDP growth has outperformed this year, helping the Canadian dollar
    • As GDP growth slows and the Bank of Canada turns neutral, catalysts turning negative
    • Crude oil and real estate look set for a downturn, with negative implications for the currency

    Given its natural resource-based economy, Canada is a boom and bust kind of place. This year, the country has enjoyed a significant boom. Thanks to a government stimulus program, rising corporate capital expenditures and consumer spending, Canada’s GDP growth has been nothing short of spectacular in 2017. According to Statistics Canada, the latest reading for year-over-year GDP growth is a healthy 3.5% (as of August 2017). While this is stronger than all major developed countries, growth is decelerating from its most recent peak in May 2017 (when GDP growth was an astounding 4.7%). A visual overview of historical GDP growth is shown below for reference:

    Turning a corner: Canadian growth comes back down to earth

    11-17-2017 CAD GDP growth

    Source: Statistics Canada

    Following the crude oil bust in the second quarter of 2014, Canadian growth rates cratered. While the country avoided a technical recession, the economic outlook was poor until early 2016. After crude oil returned to a bull market in the first quarter of 2016, the fortunes of the country turned. Given limited growth in 2015, the economy had no problem delivering 2%+ year-over-year growth rates in 2016. As a substantial stimulus program ramped up government spending in 2017, growth rates have continued to accelerate this year.

    Storm clouds on the horizon: crude oil and real estate

    While Canada has delivered exceptional growth in the last two years, the future outlook is much more challenging. Beyond the issue of base effects (mathematically, year-over-year GDP growth will be much tougher next year), key sectors including the oil & gas industry and Canadian real estate look ripe for a downturn.

    Crude bull market intact today, but at risk in 2018

    As WTI crude strengthens beyond $55, crude oil is clearly in a bull market today. Looking at figures from the International Energy Agency, global demand growth continues to run ahead of supply growth. Thus the ongoing bull market is supported by fundamentals. Thanks to the impact of hurricanes and infrastructure bottlenecks in 2017, US shale hasn’t entirely fulfilled its role as the global ‘swing producer’ this year. The dynamics of supply growth versus demand growth are shown below:

    Who invited American shale? US supply ruins the crude oil party

    10-13-2017 crude oil supply demand

    Source: International Energy Agency, forward OPEC supply estimates via US EIA

    Unfortunately, the status quo looks set to change as US supply returns with a vengeance. According to estimates from the IEA, supply growth will outstrip demand growth in the first quarter of 2018. Digging deeper into supply estimates, US shale is once again to blame. Our view is that this changing dynamic will lead to a new bear market in crude oil. Looking back at recent history, crude prices formed a long-term top in the second quarter of 2014 once supply growth overtook demand. Similarly, crude prices bottomed in the first quarter of 2016 once supply growth fell below demand in early 2016. Given Canada's dependence on crude oil exports, a bear market for the commodity is likely to result in a weaker currency.

    As China enters its latest real estate downturn, Canada not far behind

    While Canadian real estate has enjoyed a great year, the future outlook is much tougher. Similar to its peers in Australia and New Zealand, Canadian real estate prices tend to lag real estate prices in China. This is both because Canada’s economy is deeply intertwined with China, and because the country is a big destination for overseas investment from China. While overseas investors make up a relatively small portion of buyers (around 5% according to government estimates), they serve an important role by acting as the marginal buyer for prime property. A comparison of new house prices in China versus Canada is shown below for reference:

    Canadian real estate boom set to run out of steam

    11-17-2017 China Canada real estate

    Source: Statistics Canada, China National Bureau of Statistics

    As Chinese new house prices accelerated significantly in early 2015, Canadian real estate prices followed in 2016. As the Chinese market is now decelerating, negative growth appears to be on the horizon. In March 2015, Chinese house price growth bottomed at -6.1%. While the Canadian bull market continues for now (September new house prices registered at 3.8%), a downturn is likely over the next 6-12 months. As real estate makes up 13% of Canadian GDP, a significant decline in the fortunes of the industry are likely to spill over to the broader economy.

    Implications for the Canadian dollar

    At the beginning of the year, the Canadian dollar enjoyed a wide number of bullish catalysts including accelerating GDP growth, rising rate hike expectations, a relatively strong crude oil market and speculator sentiment that was at a bearish extreme. These catalysts, and the Bank of Canada’s actions in particular, helped the currency strengthen until late September.

    Today, almost every factor that drives the Canadian dollar is working against it. Future GDP growth rates are set to keep decelerating. Looking at the Bank of Canada, its outlook for future rate hikes is now “cautious”. This is a big change from its hawkish tilt earlier this year. While speculator sentiment is no longer at bullish extremes, waning interest in the Canadian dollar is weighing on the currency. The ongoing NAFTA negotiations are another source of potential political risk. Finally, an impending downturn for both crude oil and Canadian real estate further worsen the picture. Thus, our longer term outlook on the Canadian dollar is bearish.

     

  • Apple Diversity Chief Forced Out After Saying White Men Can Also Be 'Diverse'

    Silicon Valley's disdain for its mostly white, mostly male tech workforce has reached absurd new heights.

    The New York Post is reporting that, after just six months on the job, Apple Diversity Chief Denise Young Smith, who was named vice president of diversity and inclusion in May, has resigned her post after making a “controversial” comment last month during a summit in Bogota, Colombia.

    What was Young’s crime? She insinuated that “diversity” can still exist among a group of white men because of their different life experiences.

    “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.

    “Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT."

    That’s right: Young, who is – for the record – a black woman, has been forced out of Apple because her views on diversity were too inclusive.

    As the Post pointed out, Young’s comments appeared to defend Apple’s overwhelmingly white and male leadership at a time when the company’s makeup is markedly uneven. This begs the question: What, exactly, was she defending them from?

    Young, a 20-year Apple veteran who previously served as the company’s head of worldwide human resources (a senior level position), was later forced to apologize for her remarks, telling Apple staff that her comments “were not representative of how I think about diversity or how Apple sees it."

    “For that, I’m sorry,” she said in an email. “More importantly, I want to assure you Apple’s view and our dedication to diversity has not changed."

    “We deeply believe that diversity drives innovation,” an Apple spokesman told TechCrunch in a statement. “We’re thrilled to welcome an accomplished leader like Christie Smith to help us continue the progress we’ve made toward a more diverse workplace."

    In 2017, only 3 percent of Apple’s leaders were black, and women held just 23 percent of tech jobs, according to Fortune. Female leadership stood at 29 percent, Apple said.

    “Meaningful change takes time,” the company said in its diversity report. “We’re proud of our accomplishments, but we have much more work to do."

    Smith will leave the company at the end of the year. Taking over as VP of inclusion and diversity will be Christie Smith, who spent 17 years as a principal at Deloitte.

    She is also a white woman.
     

  • Golden Catalysts

    Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

    The physical fundamentals are stronger than ever for gold.

    Russia and China continue to be huge buyers. China bans export of its 450 tons per year of physical production.

    Gold refiners are working around the clock and cannot meet demand.

    Gold refiners are also having difficulty finding gold to refine as mining output, official bullion sales and scrap inflows all remain weak.

    Private bullion continues to migrate from bank vaults at UBS and Credit Suisse into nonbank vaults at Brinks and Loomis, thus reducing the floating supply available for bank unallocated gold sales.

    In other words, the physical supply situation has been tight as a drum.

    The problem, of course, is unlimited selling in “paper” gold markets such as the Comex gold futures and similar instruments.

    One of the flash crashes this year was precipitated by the instantaneous sale of gold futures contracts equal in underlying amount to 60 tons of physical gold. The largest bullion banks in the world could not source 60 tons of physical gold if they had months to do it.

    There’s just not that much gold available. But in the paper gold market, there’s no limit on size, so anything goes.

    There’s no sense complaining about this situation. It is what it is, and it won’t be broken up anytime soon. The main source of comfort is knowing that fundamentals always win in the long run even if there are temporary reversals. What you need to do is be patient, stay the course and buy strategically when the drawdowns emerge.

    Where do we go from here?

    There are many compelling reasons why gold should outperform over the coming months.

    Deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia will only accelerate Russia’s efforts to diversify its reserves away from dollar assets (which can be frozen by the U.S. on a moment’s notice) to gold assets, which are immune to asset freezes and seizures.

    The countdown to war with North Korea is underway, as I’ve explained repeatedly in these pages. A U.S. attack on the North Korean nuclear and missile weapons programs is likely by mid-2018.

    Finally, we have to deal with our friends at the Fed. Good jobs numbers have given life to the view that the Fed will raise interest rates next month. The standard answer is that rate hikes make the dollar stronger and are a head wind for the dollar price of gold.

    But I remain skeptical about a December hike. As I explained above, the market is looking in the wrong places for clues to Fed policy. Jobs reports are irrelevant; that was “mission accomplished” for the Fed years ago.

    The key data are disinflation numbers. That’s what has the Fed concerned, and that’s why the Fed might pause again in December as it did last September.

    We’ll have a better idea when PCE core inflation comes out Nov. 30.

    Of course, the Fed’s main inflation metric has been moving in the wrong direction since January. The readings on the core PCE deflator year over year (the Fed’s preferred metric) were:

    January 1.9%

    February 1.9%

    March 1.6%

    April 1.6%

    May 1.5%

    June 1.5%

    July 2017: 1.4%

    August 2017: 1.3%

    September 2017: 1.3%

    Again, the October data will not be available until Nov. 30.

    The Fed’s target rate for this metric is 2%. It will take a sustained increase over several months for the Fed to conclude that inflation is back on track to meet the Fed’s goal.

    There’s obviously no chance of this happening before the Fed’s December meeting.

    A weak dollar is the Fed’s only chance for more inflation. The way to get a weak dollar is to delay rate hikes indefinitely, and that’s what I believe the Fed will do.

    And a weak dollar means a higher dollar price for gold.

    Current levels look like the last stop before $1,300 per ounce. After that, a price surge is likely as buyers jump on the bandwagon, and then it’s up, up and away.

    Why do I say that?

    There’s an old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This chart is a good example of why that’s true:

    Gold Breakout Chart

    Gold analyst Eddie Van Der Walt produced this 10-year chart for the dollar price of gold showing that gold prices have been converging into a narrow tunnel between two price trends – one trending higher and one lower – for the past six years.

    This pattern has been especially pronounced since 2015. You can see gold has traded up and down in a range between $1,050 and $1,380 per ounce. The upper trend line and the lower trend line converge into a funnel.

    Since gold will not remain in that funnel much longer (because it converges to a fixed price) gold will likely “break out” to the upside or downside, typically with a huge move that disrupts the pattern.

    At the extreme, this could imply a gold price on its way to $1,800 or $800 per ounce. Which will it be?

    The evidence overwhelmingly supports the thesis that gold will break out to the upside. Central banks are determined to get more inflation and will flip to easing policies if that’s what it takes.

    Geopolitical risks are piling up from North Korea, to Saudi Arabia, to the South China Sea and beyond.

    The failure of the Trump agenda has put the stock market on edge and a substantial market correction may be in the cards. Acute shortages of physical gold have also set the stage for a delivery failure or a short squeeze.

    Any one of these developments is enough to send gold soaring in response to a panic or as part of a flight to quality. The only force that could take gold lower is deflation, and that is the one thing central banks will never allow. The above chart is one of the most powerful bullish indicators I’ve ever seen.

    Get ready for an explosion to the ups ide in the dollar price of gold. Make sure you have your physical gold and gold mining shares before the breakout begins.

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Nov 18

Today’s News 18th November 2017

  • America's Righteous Russia-gate Censorship

    Authored by Robert Parry via ConsortiumNews.com,

    Arriving behind the anti-Trump “resistance” and the Russia-gate “scandal” is a troubling readiness to silence dissent in the U.S., shutting down information that challenges Official Narratives…

    A stark difference between today’s Washington and when I was here as a young Associated Press correspondent in the late 1970s and the early 1980s is that then – even as the old Cold War was heating up around the election of Ronald Reagan – there were prominent mainstream journalists who looked askance at the excessive demonization of the Soviet Union and doubted wild claims about the dire threats to U.S. national security from Nicaragua and Grenada.

    Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin wall, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)

    Perhaps the Vietnam War was still fresh enough in people’s minds that senior editors and national reporters understood the dangers of mindless groupthink inside Official Washington, as well as the importance of healthy skepticism toward official pronouncements from the U.S. intelligence community.

    Today, however, I cannot think of a single prominent figure in the mainstream news media who questions any claim – no matter how unlikely or absurd – that vilifies Russian President Vladimir Putin and his country. It is all Russia-bashing all the time.

    And, behind this disturbing anti-Russian uniformity are increasing assaults against independent and dissident journalists and news outlets outside the mainstream. We’re not just entering a New Cold War and a New McCarthyism; we’re also getting a heavy dose of old-style Orwellianism.

    Sometimes you see this in individual acts like HuffingtonPost taking down a well-reported story by journalist Joe Lauria because he dared to point out that Democratic money financed the two initial elements of what’s now known as Russia-gate: the forensic examination of computers at the Democratic National Committee and the opposition research on Donald Trump conducted by ex-British spy Christopher Steele.

    HuffingtonPost never contacted Lauria before or after its decision to retract the story, despite a request from him for the reasons why. HuffPost editors told a BuzzFeed reporter that they were responding to reader complaints that the article was filled with factual errors but none have ever been spelled out, leaving little doubt that Lauria’s real “error” was in defying the Russia-gate groupthink of the anti-Trump Resistance. [A version of Lauria’s story appeared at Consortiumnews.com before Lauria posted it at HuffPost. If you want to sign a petition calling on HuffPost to restore Lauria’s article, click here.]

    Muzzling RT

    Other times, the expanding American censorship is driven by U.S. government agencies, such as the Justice Department’s demand that the Russian news outlet, RT, register under the restrictive Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires such prompt, frequent and detailed disclosures of supposed “propaganda” that it could make it impossible for RT to continue to function in the United States.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin, following his address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 28, 2015. (UN Photo)

    This attack on RT was rationalized by the Jan. 6 “Intelligence Community Assessment” that was, in reality, prepared by a handful of “hand-picked” analysts from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. Their report included a seven-page addendum from 2012 accusing RT of spreading Russian propaganda – and apparently this Jan. 6 report must now be accepted as gospel truth, no questions permitted.

    However, if any real journalist actually read the Jan. 6 report, he or she would have discovered that RT’s sinister assault on American democracy included such offenses as holding a debate among third-party candidates who were excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates in 2012. Yes, allowing Libertarians and Greens to express their points of view is a grave danger to American democracy.

    Other RT “propaganda” included reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests and examining the environmental dangers from “fracking,” issues that also have been widely covered by the domestic American media. Apparently, whenever RT covers a newsworthy event – even if others have too – that constitutes “propaganda,” which must be throttled to protect the American people from the danger of seeing it.

    If you bother to study the Jan. 6 report’s addendum, it is hard not to conclude that these “hand-picked” analysts were either stark-raving mad or madly anti-Russian. Yet, this “Intelligence Community Assessment” is now beyond questioning unless you want to be labeled a “Kremlin stooge” or “Putin’s useful idiot.” [An earlier State Department attack on RT was equally ridiculous or demonstrably false.]

    And, by the way, it was President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who testified under oath that the analysts from the three agencies were “hand-picked.” That means that they were analysts personally selected by Obama’s intelligence chiefs from three agencies – not “all 17” as the American public was told over and over again – and thus were not even a full representation of analysts from those three agencies. Yet, this subset of a subset is routinely described as “the U.S. intelligence community,” even after major news outlets finally had to retract their “all 17” canard.

    So, the myth of the intelligence community’s consensus lives on. For instance, in an upbeat article on Tuesday about the U.S. government’s coercing RT into registering as a foreign agent, Washington Post reporters Devlin Barrett and David Filipov wrote, “U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the network and website push relentlessly anti-American propaganda at the behest of the Russian government.”

    In the old days, even during the old Cold War and President Reagan’s ranting about “the Evil Empire,” some of us would have actually examined the Jan. 6 report’s case against RT and noted the absurdity of these claims about “relentlessly anti-American propaganda.” Whether you want to hear the views of the Greens and Libertarians or not – or whether you like “fracking” and hate Occupy Wall Street – the opportunity to hear this information doesn’t constitute “relentlessly anti-American propaganda.”

    The U.S. government’s real beef with RT seems to be that it allows on air some Americans who have been blacklisted from the mainstream media – including highly credentialed former U.S. intelligence analysts and well-informed American journalists – because they have challenged various Official Narratives.

    In other words, Americans are not supposed to hear the other side of the story on important international conflicts, such as the proxy war in Syria or the civil war in Ukraine or Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. Only the State Department’s versions of those events are permitted even when those versions are themselves propagandistic if not outright false.

    For example, you’re not supposed to hear about the huge holes in the Syria-sarin cases, nor about Ukraine’s post-coup regime arming neo-Nazis to kill ethnic-Russian Ukrainians, nor about Israel’s evolution into an apartheid state. All right-thinking Americans are to get only a steady diet of how righteous the U.S. government and its allies always are. Anything else is “propaganda.”

    Also off limits is any thoughtful critique of that Jan. 6 report – or apparently even Clapper’s characterization of it as a product of “hand-picked” analysts from only three agencies. You’re not supposed to ask why other U.S. intelligence agencies with deep knowledge about Russia were excluded and why even other analysts from the three involved agencies were shut out.

    No, you must always think of the Jan. 6 report as the “consensus” assessment from the entire “U.S. intelligence community.” And you must accept it as flat fact – as it now is treated by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other mainstream news outlets. You shouldn’t even notice that the Jan. 6 report itself doesn’t claim that Russian election meddling was a fact. The report explains, that “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

    But even quoting from the Jan. 6 report might make an American reporter some kind of traitorous “Russian mole” whose journalism must be purged from “responsible” media and who should be forced to wear the journalistic equivalent of a yellow star.

    The Anti-Trump/Russia Hysteria

    Of course, much of this anti-Russian hysteria comes from the year-long fury about the shocking election of Donald Trump. From the first moments of stunned disbelief over Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the narrative was put in motion to blame Trump’s victory not on Clinton and her wretched campaign but on Russia. That also was viewed as a possible way of reversing the election’s outcome and removing Trump from office.

    Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

    The major U.S. news media quite openly moved to the forefront of the Resistance. The Washington Post adopted the melodramatic and hypocritical slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” as it unleashed its journalists to trumpet the narrative of some disloyal Americans spreading Russian propaganda. Darkness presumably was a fine place to stick people who questioned the Resistance’s Russia-gate narrative.

    An early shot in this war against dissenting information was fired last Thanksgiving Day when the Post published a front-page article citing an anonymous group called PropOrNot smearing 200 Internet news sites for allegedly disseminating Russian propaganda. The list included some of the most important sources of independent journalism, including Consortiumnews.com, apparently for the crime of questioning some of the State Department’s narratives on international conflicts, particularly Syria and Ukraine.

    Then, with the anti-Russia hysteria building and the censorship ball rolling, Congress last December approved $160 million for think tanks and other non-governmental organizations to combat Russian propaganda. Soon, reports and studies were flying off the shelves detecting a Russian behind every article, tweet and posting that didn’t toe the State Department’s line.

    The New York Times and other leading news organizations have even cheered plans for Google, Facebook and other technology companies to deploy algorithms that can hunt down, marginalize or eliminate information that establishment media deems “fake” or “propaganda.” Already Google has put together a First Draft coalition, consisting of mainstream media and establishment-approved Web sites to decide what information makes the cut and what doesn’t.

    Among these arbiters of truth is the fact-check organization PolitiFact, which judged the falsehood about “all 17 intelligence agencies” signing off on the Russian “hacking” claim to be “true.” Even though the claim was never true and is now clearly established as false, PolitiFact continues to assert that this lie is the truth, apparently filled with the hubris that comes with its power over determining what is true and what is false.

    But what is perhaps most troubling to me about these developments is the silence of many civil liberties advocates, liberal politicians and defenders of press freedom who might have been counted on in earlier days to object to this censorship and blackballing.

    It appears that the ends of taking down Donald Trump and demonizing Vladimir Putin justify whatever means, no matter the existential danger of nuclear war with Russia or the McCarthyistic (even Orwellian) threats to freedom of speech, press and thought.

  • WTF Chart Of The Day: America's Youngest Child Brides & Grooms

    Between 2000 and 2015, at least 207,468 minors were married in the United States.

    As Statista's Martin Armstrong notes, despite an overall fall in child marriage since 2000 (25,583 to 9,247), there are still a shocking number of young children legally married in the country. Only 14 percent married other minors, meaning 86 percent wedded an adult.

    As the infographic below shows, the youngest to marry since 2000 were three ten year olds.

    Infographic: America's Youngest Child Brides & Grooms | Statista

    You will find more statistics at Statista

    According to Frontline, the three girls married men aged 24, 25 and 31 in Tennessee in 2001.

    While certain conditions have to be met before a minor can marry, and consent from a parent or judge is usually required, every state in the U.S. allows children to marry to some extent.

    In Oregon and Nebraska, for example, the lower limit is set at 17.

    In 26 states, there is no minimum age for marriage.

  • Ben Garrison On Mending A Fractured America

    Authored by Ben Garrison via GrrrGraphics.com,

    Earlier this week I was on the Jesse Lee Peterson show out of LA.

    It was a short segment early in the morning and we briefly discussed the NFL kneelers. I spoke about how they offended the fans, the veterans, and US history in general. I pointed out that black Americans have just as much stake and heritage in this country as anyone else. The first person to die in the Revolutionary War was Crispus Attucks, a black man. There were black Minute Men. I mentioned Andrew Jackson and the black battalion that was vital in defeating the the British in the Battle of New Orleans.

    Peterson had one call for me – a woman who angrily denounced Andrew Jackson and how those slaves were forced to fight. I was taken aback by this, because those men were heroes and veterans to be honored regardless of slavery. Shamefully, some of those men did not get their freedom, but it does not take away from the fact that they put their lives on the line for their country. I might have added that nearly 600,000 ‘privileged’ white men died in the Civil War to end slavery.

    The kneelers seem to have forgotten that.

    Increasingly our country is divided.

     

    Civility is being replaced by name calling–and even violence.

     

    People want others with whom they disagree to lose their jobs.

     

    Accusations of sexual impropriety are widespread.

     

    Censorship is being implemented by the tech left.

     

    Rational debate is replaced by name calling and fear.

     

    Racial hatred is very real and always has been, but it seems worse nowadays—and our first ‘black’ president, Obama, actually set back race relations.

     

    Too many people now hate our country, our history and our culture.

    What is that culture? For most of our history it has been predominately European and Christian. For years we’ve had a huge influx of immigrants ‘of color’ who have a lot of children. White people will soon be a minority in the USA. There are some on the alt right calling for the protection of whites by means identity politics and segregation. Many black nationalists also want the return of segregation, after they fought so hard against it. Muslims naturally segregate themselves and demand special food, special treatment, and Sharia Law, which is completely at odds with our Constitution. The rich are getting stupendously richer and segregate themselves in gated communities. Three men in America now control more wealth than the bottom half of the US population.

    Immigrants, illegal and otherwise, are now encouraged to keep their own cultures and languages. Some consider the traditional melting pot to be offensive – they say it’s ‘racist’ and ‘nativist.’

    The end game of that kind of thinking will be the proliferation of ‘no go’ Balkanized zones in the United States. Trump’s brand of nationalism may be the glue needed to keep our country together. At least for a while longer.

  • President Trump Accelerates Drone Strikes In Somalia

    President Trump’s expansion of war is most evident in the skies of Somalia where an acceleration in drone strikes have been reported.

    U.S. Africa Command has conducted fourteen airstrikes since August bringing the year’s total to eighteen. The increased tempo of airstrikes started in September between the Kismayo and Mogadisu region.

    Earlier this month, we reported on Trump’s administration hitting a new milestone – when U.S. Africa Command launched its first airstrike against the Islamic State-linked fighters – further accelerating the US presence..

    Defense One highlights this momentous achievement…

    U.S. Africa Command has released data on 18 strikes this year, more than four times the average over the previous seven years. 

    The escalation of U.S. Africa Command presence in Somalia was made possible by president Trump’s order in March that ”allows the U.S. Department of Defense to conduct lethal action against al-Shabaab within a geographically-defined area of active hostilities in support of partner forces in Somalia.”

    Defense One outlines a majority of the airstrikes have been situated around Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia where a mixture of Al-Shabab attack zones and support zones reside.

    Back in October, Al-Shabab blew up a truck bomb in the capital killing 300 making it one of the nation’s worst terrorist attack ever. The devastating bombing was in response to President Trump and Somalia’s newly elected president forming new military efforts to combat the rise in Islamic State-linked fighters in the country.

    Drones have been responsible for most of the airstrikes and what the report states it’s impossible to verify how many ‘extremist’ have been killed.

    Defense One notes,

    The Bureau for Investigative Journalism estimates that the strikes have killed as few as 88 people and as many as 124. The group also says it has tracked nearly 30 strikes for 2017, about a dozen more than the Pentagon claims.  

    Micah Zenko, a writer at foreignpolicy.com, outlines (dated Nov 09) that in 5+ months Trump has bombed Somalia 17 times verse Obama bombed Somalia 29 times in 7+years. The explanation for Trump’s rapid bombardment is the geographical spread of  strikes in the country is much larger, plus he authorized a new enemy back in March – ISIS.

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

    Earlier this year, the US military reported about 50 US troops were stationed in Somalia providing training and advice for the Somali military, but as of lately the figure now stands at 500.

    Before President Trump, the US military has always maintained a small presence in the region. Now it seems with the geographical spread larger and a new enemy in the region defined; the endless wars will most certainly continue further enriching the US-military industrial complex.

     

  • Stockman Slams "The Awesome Recovery" Narrative

    Authored by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

    One of the great philosophers of recent times was surely Sgt. Easterhaus of "Hill Street Blues". As he assigned his men to their daily rounds in the crime infested streets of the Big Apple he always ended the precinct's morning call with his signature admonition:

    "Let's be carful out there."

    That wisdom has been long lost on both ends of the Acela Corridor. In the face of blatant dangers and even existential threats, their denizens whistle past the graveyard with alacrity. So doing, they turn a blind eye on virtually all that contradicts the awesome recovery narrative, the indispensable nation conceit and the Washington can Make America Great Again (MAGA) delusion, among countless other fantasies.

    For example, the GOP should be literally petrified by an horrid fiscal scenario for the coming decade that entails Social Security going bust, another $12 trillion of current policy deficits and a prospective $33 trillion public debt by 2027. And even that presupposes a macro-economic miracle in the interim: Namely, a 207 month stretch from 2009 to 2027 without a recession—–a feat which is twice the longest expansion in recorded history

    Image result for images of three monkeys of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

    Instead, they have passed a FY 2018 budget resolution which implicitly embraces all of the above fiscal mayhem, and then adds upwards of $2 trillion (so far and counting interest) of incremental deficits to fund an ill-designed tax cut that is inherently an economic dud and political time bomb.

    As to the former, the GOP is lost in ritual incantation and foggy Reagan-era nostalgia. Unlike the giant Reagan tax cut of 1981, the pending bills do not cut marginal tax rates measurably—or even the individual income tax burden in any meaningful sense.

    In fact, if you set aside the so-called pass-thru rate for unincorporated businesses (see below), the entire 10-year tax cut on the individual side amounts to just $480 billion. In the scheme of things, that's a tiny number; it represents only 2.2% of the $22 trillion CBO baseline for individual income tax collections over the next decade; and it also is equal to just 0.2% of the projected nominal GDP over the period.

    By way of comparison, the Reagan tax cut amounted to 6.2% of GDP when fully effective; and the net cut for individuals taxpayers alone averaged 2.7% of GDP over a decade. In today's economy, that would amount to a tax cut of $6.5 trillion during 2018-2027 or 14X more than the $450 billion net figure estimated by the Joint Committee on Taxation.

    To be sure, the abused citizens of America are more than entitled to even this tiny tax cut and much more. That is, if their elected representatives were willing to cut spending by an equal amount or even raise alternative, more benign sources of revenue (i.e. a VAT on consumers vs. the current levy on producer and worker incomes). But unless a rapidly aging society wishes to bury itself in unsupportable public debt, it simply can't afford deficit-financed tax cuts for either the principle or the politics of the thing.

    Moreover, to pretend that the tax concoction fashioned by Congressman Brady—- with a pack of Gucci Gulch jackals nipping at his heels— will actually generate enough growth and jobs to largely pay for itself is to make a mockery of Sgt. Easterhaus' admonition. Rather than an exercise in fiscal carefulness, it is the height of recklessness to assume that much enhanced domestic growth, employment and Treasury receipts will result from any part of the $2.8 trillion cut for the rich and corporations that is at the heart of the GOP tax bill.

    Actually, it's the heart and then some. With recent modifications (including dropping of the $150 billion corporate excise tax intended to prevent companies from hiding domestic profits via over-invoicing of imports from their own affiliates), the net revenue loss of the Brady bill is calculated at about $1.7 trillion.

    That means, of course, that fully 165% of the net tax cut goes to: (1) 5,500 dead rich people's heirs per year ($172 billion for estate tax repeal); (2) 4.3 million very wealthy loophole users ($700 billion for the minimum tax repeal); and (3) the top 1% and 10% of households who own 60% and 85% of business equities, respectively, who will get most of the $1.95 trillion of business rate cuts.

    In this context, we cannot stress more insistently that Art Laffer's famous napkin does not apply to business tax cuts in today's world of globalized trade and labor rates and artificially cheap central bank enabled debt and capital.

    That's because the business income taxes are born by owners, not workers. The wage rates and incomes of the latter are determined in a saturated global labor market where the China Price for Goods and the India Price for internet based services sets wages on the margin.

    At the same time, owners are not deterred from making investments by the proverbial "high after-tax cost of capital". That's because it isn't.

    Even at the current statutory 35% tax rate (which few pay), the absolute cost of equity and debt capital is cheaper than ever before in modern history.

    In fact, the after-tax cost of equity to scorched earth investment juggernauts like Amazon is virtually zero, while the cheap debt-fueled boom in conventional plant, equipment, mining, shipping and distribution assets over the last two decades has stocked the planet with sufficient capacity for decades to come.

    In short, if you lower the business tax rates to 20% and 25% for corporations and pass-thrus, respectively, you will get more dividends, more stock buybacks and other returns to shareholders. Those distributions, in turn, will go to the very wealthy and to pension funds/non-profits. The latter will pay no taxes on these distributions while the former will pay 15%-20% at current law rates of o%, 15% and 20% on capital gains and dividends, which the Brady bill does not change.

    In short, maybe the $2.8 trillion of tax cuts for business and the wealthy will generate a few hundred billion of reflows over the decade. And even that will not be attributable to the "incentive effect" of the Laffer Curve at all; it's just tax collection mechanics at work as between the personal and business taxing systems.

    By the same token, the Sgt. Easterhaus principle is also being ash-canned by the GOP on the politics side of the tax bill, as well. In fact, Republicans have been chanting the "tax cut" incantation for so many decades that they apparently can't see the obvious. Namely, that among the middle quintile of households (about 30 million filers between $55,000 and $93,000 of AGI) the ballyhooed "tax cut" will actually be a crap shoot.

    When fully effective, roughly two-thirds of filers (20 million units) would realize a $1,070 per year tax cut, while another 31% (roughly 9.5 million filers) would experience a $1,150 tax increase!

    That's a whole lot of rolling dice—-depending upon family size, sources of income and previous use of itemized deductions. Yet for the heart of the middle class as a whole—-30 million filers in the aforementioned income brackets—the statistical average tax cut would amount to $6.15 per week.

    That's right. Two Starbucks cappuccinos and a banana!

    So we'd call the GOP's noisy advertising of a big tax cut for the middle class reckless, not careful. Indeed, the Dems will spend hundreds of millions during the 2018 election season on testimonials and tax tables which prove the GOP's claim is a pure con job.

    They will also prove the opposite— that the overwhelming share of this unaffordable tax cut is going to the top of the economic ladder. After all, the income tax has morphed into a Rich Man's Levy over the last three decades. So if you cut income taxes—-the benefits inherently and mechanically go to the few who actually pay.

    Thus, in the most recent year (2015), 150.5 million Americans filed for income taxes, but just 6.8 million filers (4.5% of the total) accounted for 35% of all AGI ($3.6 trillion) and 59% of taxes paid ($858 billion).

    By contrast, the bottom 64 million filers reported only $928 billion of AGI, and paid just 2.2%  ($20 billion) in taxes. That is, owing to the standard deduction, personal exemptions and various credits the bottom 44% of taxpayers accounted for only 1.4% of personal income tax collections.

    Even when you widen the bracket to the bottom 123 million tax filers (82%), you get $4.3 trillion of AGI and just $284 billion of taxes paid. In other words, the bottom four-fifths of filers pay only 6.6% of their AGI in tribute to Uncle Sam. They may not be getting their money's worth from the Washington puzzle palaces, but you can't get blood from a turnip, either.

    In short, Flyover America desperately needs tax relief for the 160 million workers who actually do pay up to 15.5% of their wages in employer/employee payroll tax deductions. Yet by ignoring the $1.1 trillion per year payroll tax entirely and recklessly and risibly claiming that its income and corporate tax cut bill materially aids the middle class, the GOP is only setting itself up for a thundering political backlash.

    Nothing makes this clearer than some recent (accurate) calculations by a left-wing outfit called the Institute for Policy Studies that boil down to the proposition that "It Takes A Baseball Team".

    That is, the top 25 US persons (like the full MLB roster) on the Forbes 400 list now report about $1 trillion in collective net worth. That happens to match the net worth of the bottom 180 million (56%) Americans.

    Needless to say, that egregious disproportion does not represent free market capitalism at work; it's the deformed fruit of Bubble Finance and the vast inflation of financial assets that the Fed and other central banks have enabled over the past three decades.

    In terms of the Sgt. Easterhaus metaphor, monetary central planning has planted some exceedingly dangerous political time bombs in the precincts, neighborhoods, towns and cities of Flyover America. Accordingly, if the GOP succeeds in passing some version of its current tax bill, it may be what finally brings the Dems back into power on an out-and-out platform of socialist healthcare (single payor) and tax redistributionism with malice aforethought.

    Even as the GOP recklessly plunges forward with gag rules and its sight unseen legislative steamroller (echoes of ObamaCare in 2010), it will never be able to hide what is buried in the bill's tax tables. Namely, an average tax cut for the top 1%—even after accounting for elimination of upwards of $1.3 trillion of itemized deductions—-that would amount to $1,000 per week.

    Moreover, for the top o.1% (150,000 filers), the Dem campaign ads will show a cut of $5,300 per week; and for a subset of 100,000 of the top 0.1% filers, the GOP's tax cut would amount to $11,300 per week .

    That's right. Each and every one of the very ultra rich would get a tax break equivalent to that which would accrue to every 2,000 middle bracket filers under the Brady bill.

    As Sgt. Easterhaus might have said: They have been warned!

    Meanwhile, at the other end of the Acela Corridor, the good precinct sergeant gets no respect, either. Indeed, gambling in today's hideously over-valued and unstable casino is exactly the opposite of being careful; it's certain to lead to severe—even fatal—financial injuries on the beat.

    In this context, we have been saying right along that the essential evil of monetary central planning is that it systematically falsifies asset prices and corrupts all financial information. That includes what passes for analysis by the Cool Aid drinkers in the casino.

    But when we ran across this gem from one Steve Chiavarone yesterday we had to double check because we thought perhaps we were inadvertently reading The Onion.

    But, no, he's actually a paid in full (and then some) portfolio manager at the $360 billion Federated Investors group who appeared on CNBC, and then got reported by Dow-Jones' MarketWatch just in case you had the sound turned off during his appearance on bubblevision.

    So here's how the bull market will remain "alive for another decade." According to Chiavarone, millenials who don't have two nickels to rub together will make it happen. No sweat.

    “Millennials are entering the workforce, but their wages are going to be under pressure their whole career,” he explained to CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Friday. “They won’t make enough money to pay down their debt, fund their life and fund retirement where there is no pension. So, they’re going to need equities.”

    Then again, aspiration and capability are not exactly the same thing. In fact, the frequent yawning difference between the two puts us in mind of the Donald's characterization of his primary opponent as Little Marco Rubio. The latter never stops talking about himself as the very embodiment of the American Dream come true—-so for all we know perhaps Marco did aspire to be an NBA star.

    But when he famously couldn't reach his water bottle from atop a stool during his nationwide TV rebuttal of an Obama SOTU speech a few years back, it was evident that NBA stardom wasn't ever meant to be.

    Nor during the coming decade of stagnant wages and rising interest rates is it any more obvious how millennials will beg, borrow or steal their way to massive purchases of equities. That is, how they will finance what will actually be an avalanche of stock sales by 80 million fading baby boomers who will need the proceeds to pay their nursing home bills.

    But never mind. MarketWatch caught the full measure of  what shines on the inside of Mr. Chiavarone's financial beer goggles:

     The risk is not being in this market,” says Chiavarone, who helps run the Federated Global Allocation Fund. The firm’s current price target is for 2,750 on the S&P by the end of next year and 3,000 for 2019.

     

    “We are probably frankly low on both of them,” he said. “Tax reform could push up the markets.” That’s not to say there won’t be some pain along the way, specifically the potential for a recession in 2020 and 2021, according to Chiavarone.

     

    What’s an investor to do in that case? “Buy the recession,” he said.

    Indeed, it doesn't come any stupider than the market blather that is constantly published on MarketWatch. Today it also informs us that not only have US earnings been galloping forward in recent quarters, but its actually a global trend:

    However, this is hardly a U.S.-only story. Corporate earnings have been improving globally, and some of the fastest growth has come from international companies, as seen in the following chart from BlackRock, which looks at U.S. growth against the globe, excluding the U.S.

    The chart below is supposed to be the evidence, but we are still scratching our heads looking for the point. It seems that global corporate earnings ex-US based companies have surged…..all the way back to where they were in 2011!

    You can't make this stuff up. Did these geniuses notice that China just went full retard in credit expansion to insure that the coronation of Mr. Xi was the greatest since, apparently, the Ming Dynasty invited the civilized world (not Europe) to the coronation of its fourth emperor in 1424?

    In fact, the 19th Party Congress is now over, and the Red Suzerains of Beijing are back to the impossible task of reining in the massive malinvestment, housing, debt and construction bubbles which have turned China's economy into a $40 trillion powder keg. So right on cue it reported a sharp cooling of its red hot pre-coronation economy last night.

    Thus, value-added industrial output, a rough proxy for GDP, expanded by just 6.2% in October compared to double digit increases a few months back.

    Likewise, fixed-asset investment climbed 7.3% in the January-October period from a year earlier. Notably, that's way down from high double digit rates during most of the century, and, in fact, is the slowest pace since December 1999.

    Needless to say, the latter data point amounts to a clanging clarion. At the end of the day, the ballyhooed Chinese growth miracle is really a story of construction and debt-fueled asset investment gone wild. And that party is now over.

    So whatever Sgt. Easterhaus actually meant during the seven seasons of "Hill Street Blues" which always started with his famous admonition, we are quite sure that today it would not have meant buying the dips in a casino that is rife with unprecedented danger.

    Finally, when it comes to real danger we think the most precarious spot along the Acela Corridor is about one mile from Union Station. We are speaking, of course, of the Oval Office and the Donald's questionable tenure therein.

    Even as he meandered around Asia double-talking about trade and basking in the royal reception put on by his duplicitous hosts in Tokyo, Seoul and most especially Beijing, the Donald did manage to hit a fantastic bull-eye stateside.

    Indeed, his takedown of the three stooges—Brennan, Clapper and Comey—–of the Deep State's spy apparatus will be one for the ages. Not since Jimmy Carter has a president even vaguely admonished the intelligence agencies, but as it his wont, the Donald held nothing back—naming names and drop-kicking backsides good and hard:

    “And then you hear it’s 17 agencies. Well, it’s three. And one is Brennan and one is whatever. I mean, give me a break. They’re political hacks. So you look at it — I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper, and you have Comey. Comey is proven now to be a liar and he’s proven to be a leaker,” Trump told the reporters on Air Force One…..   

    Yes, the next day he backed away in what appeared to be a pro forma nod to be his own courage-challenged appointees.

    We don't think so, however.

    Image result for picture of brennan, comey and clapper in prison uniforms

    The truth is, the Deep State is already in the precinct house. And Sgt. Easterhaus is talking to the wall.

     

  • Can You Do A Backflip? Because This Robot Can

    Since being founded in 1992 with funding from DARPA, robotics company Boston Dynamics has unveiled one nightmarish robotic creation after another. But the company outdid itself this week when it introduced the latest iteration of its ‘Atlas’ robot.

    The company caused a stir after publishing a video on YouTube showing the hulking humanoid robot jumping across platforms of varying heights and even perform backflips on command – some of the most advanced capabilities demonstrated by any bipedal robot.

    If you’re wondering how this seemingly trivial ability portends imminent warfare between mankind and the machines, then you need to ask yourself: When was the last time you did a standing backflip?

    Unless you’re a gymnast, the answer is probably never.

    Unsurprisingly, the video inspired a cascade of commentary about humanity’s impending obsolescence:

     

     

     

     

    Though apparently there are still some mundane tasks that Atlas has not yet mastered…

     

     

    Boston Dynamics also made headlines earlier this week by introducing a polished dog-like robot that sits somewhere along the slope of Freud’s 'Valley of the Uncanny'…

    The robot is called the SpotMini. The company has released few details about it other than a promotional video showing it trotting across a grassy field and the teaser text “Coming Soon”.

    Meanwhile, an international group of scientists have seemingly taken a cue from Elon Musk and are demanding that governments take steps to regulate automated lethal weapons systems before the technology comes into its own, purportedly to prevent the plot of the Terminator series from unfolding in real life.

    It’s been a big week for the robots, sure. However, while humanoid robots like Atlas are becoming more adept at completing tasks in the physical world, their cousins on Wall Street still can’t quite figure out how to buy the fucking dip.


     

  • "It's A Nightmare" – Chinese Bureaucrats Are Killing The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

    The marketing brass at L Brands are probably starting to regret their decision to hold this year’s Victoria’s Secret fashion show – expected to have the largest audience in the show's history – in Shanghai.

    As the New York Post reports, the fashion show, which takes place in two weeks and will feature  Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio and Karlie Kloss, among other internationally recognized supermodels, is transforming into an international diplomatic crisis.

    Chinese government officials are refusing to work with the show’s producers and grant the necessary expedited visas so fashion bloggers and other media types who’re supposed to cover the show, according to the New York Post.

    Bureaucrats have also stubbornly resisted other seemingly routine requests, like approving shooting locations for the TV crew.

    We’re told fashion bloggers booked to cover the glitzy event are canceling their trips because the Chinese government won’t give them visas; TV producers are grappling with bureaucrats over permission to shoot outside the Mercedes-Benz Arena, where it’s being held (“If you’re going to China, you want to show that you are in China!” fumed an insider); and Victoria’s Secret staffers in China can’t send out press releases because they have to be approved by government officials.

     

    “It’s just a nightmare for all the media trying to cover [the show],” said a jet-setting insider. “These TV companies are spending a fortune on it, and they don’t even know what they can shoot when they get there."

     

    We’re told that producers charged with coordinating the coverage for various outlets are “on the verge of nervous breakdowns."

    The show, which will be broadcast on CBS, has mostly been held in the US since 2001, but the popular purveyor of ladies’ undergarments has had a run of bad luck in the past few years since trying to host the show overseas, the Post reports. Last year’s show (which was held in Paris) was also plagued with production issues caused by a terror attack and Kim Kardashian’s high-profile robbery.

    For that event, every journalist covering the event had to submit to background checks and provide government ID, and security was so tight that cars dropping off VIP guests were only allowed to stop momentarily outside the venue, so celebrities had to circle the block before being dropped off.

    This year, they’d be lucky to get a visa.

  • Why People Will Happily Line Up To Be Microchipped Like Dogs

    Authord by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

    So…some people actually want to be microchipped like a dog. They’re lining up for it. They’re having parties to get it done. It if isn’t available to them, they’re totally bummed out.

    I’m not even going to venture into the religious aspect of having a microchip inserted into a human being. Let’s just talk about the secular ramifications.

    Certain folks won’t be happy until everyone has a computer chip implanted in them. Here’s how this could go.

    • Initially, it would be the sheep who blindly desire to be chipped for their own “convenience” leading the way.
    • Then, it would become remarkably inconvenient not to be chipped – sort of like it’s nearly impossible to not have a bank account these days.
    • Then, the last holdouts could be forcibly chipped by law.

    Read on, because I could not make this stuff up.

    Some employers are chipping workers.

    Last summer, the internet was abuzz about a company in Wisconsin that wanted to microchip their employees. Workers at the technology company, Three Market Square, were given the option of having a chip implanted in their hands and 50 out of 80 eagerly lined up for the privilege.

    Why? So they could buy food or swipe their way through building security with a wave of their hand. Software engineer Sam Bengtson explained why he was on board.

    “It was pretty much 100 percent yes right from the get-go for me. In the next five to 10 years, this is going to be something that isn’t scoffed at so much, or is more normal. So I like to jump on the bandwagon with these kind of things early, just to say that I have it.” (source)

    He wasn’t alone. In fact, they had a microchipping party and some people got chipped live on TV so the rest of us reluctant humans could all see how cool it was to get microchipped. Watch what fun they had!

    It isn’t just this American company chipping workers. Here’s an example in Sweden.

    What could pass for a dystopian vision of the workplace is almost routine at the Swedish start-up hub Epicenter. The company offers to implant its workers and start-up members with microchips the size of grains of rice that function as swipe cards: to open doors, operate printers or buy smoothies with a wave of the hand.

     

    “The biggest benefit, I think, is convenience,” said Patrick Mesterton, co-founder and chief executive of Epicenter. As a demonstration, he unlocks a door merely by waving near it. “It basically replaces a lot of things you have, other communication devices, whether it be credit cards or keys.” (source)

    Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, warns that this might not be a good idea. (Although it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to realize this.)

    “Companies often claim that these chips are secure and encrypted…But “encrypted” is “a pretty vague term,” he said, “which could include anything from a truly secure product to something that is easily hackable.”

     

    Another potential problem, Dr. Acquisti said, is that technology designed for one purpose may later be used for another. A microchip implanted today to allow for easy building access and payments could, in theory, be used later in more invasive ways: to track the length of employees’ bathroom or lunch breaks, for instance, without their consent or even their knowledge.

     

    “Once they are implanted, it’s very hard to predict or stop a future widening of their usage,” Dr. Acquisti said. (source)

    Pretty soon, experts say everyone will want to be microchipped.

    Many sources say that it’s inevitable that we’re all going to get chipped. Noelle Chesley, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says it’s inevitable.

    “It will happen to everybody. But not this year, and not in 2018. Maybe not my generation, but certainly that of my kids.” (source)

    Another pro-chipping advocate, Gene Munster, an investor and analyst at Loup Ventures, says that we just have to get past that silly social stigma and then everyone will be doing it within 50 years. Why? Oh, the benefits.

    The company, which sells corporate cafeteria kiosks designed to replace vending machines, would like the kiosks to handle cashless transactions.

     

    This would go beyond paying with your smartphone. Instead, chipped customers would simply wave their hands in lieu of Apple Pay and other mobile-payment systems.

     

    The benefits don’t stop there. In the future, consumers could zip through airport scanners sans passport or drivers license; open doors; start cars; and operate home automation systems. All of it, if the technology pans out, with the simple wave of a hand. (source)

    There are other companies who are on board with chipping everyone.

    At a recent tech conference, Hannes Sjöblad explained how a microchip implanted in his hand makes his life easier. It replaces all the keys and cards that used to clutter his pockets.

     

    “I use this many times a day, for example, I use it to unlock my smart phone, to open the door to my office,” Sjöblad said.

     

    Sjöblad calls himself a biohacker. He explained, “We biohackers, we think the human body is a good start but there is certainly room for improvement.”

     

    The first step in that improvement is getting a microchip about size of a grain of rice slipped under the skin. Suddenly, the touch of a hand is enough to tell the office printer this is an authorized user.

     

    The microchips are radio frequency identification tags. The same technology widely used in things like key cards. The chips have been implanted in animals for years to help identify lost pets and now the technology is moving to humans.

     

    Tech start-up Dangerous Things has sold tens of thousands of implant kits for humans and some to tech companies in Europe.

    Sjöblad said he even organizes implant parties where people bond over getting chipped together.  (source)

    Will microchipping parties be the next generation of those outrageously expensive candle parties? Will folks be pimping microchips like they do those scented wax melts? Will it become some kind of MLM thing to make it even more socially acceptable?

    A UK newspaper, the Sun, explains how awesome it is to be microchipped.

    The woman sat next to you could be hiding an implant under the skin which slowly releases hormones to stop her from getting pregnant.

     

    Nans and granddads across the nation come installed with cutting-edge technology installed just to boost their hearing and vision seeing or help them walk with comfort.

     

    We’re preparing ourselves for the next form of evolution in which humans will merge with artificial intelligence, becoming one with computers.

     

    At least that’s the belief of Dr. Patrick Kramer, chief cyborg officer at Digiwell, a company that claims to be dedicated to “upgrading humans”. (source)

    Seriously, who wouldn’t want all that awesomeness in their lives?

    There are some serious pitfalls

    While the current chips being “installed” in humans are said not to have GPS tracking, don’t you figure it’s just a matter of time? And also, how do you KNOW that there is no GPS tracking technology in that teeny little chip? Just because they tell you so?
    Then there is the issue of the chip in your body being hacked.

    “This is serious stuff. We’re talking about a nonstop potential connection to my body and I can’t turn it off, I can’t put it away, it’s in me. That’s a big problem,” said Ian Sherr, an executive editor at CNET.

     

    “It’s very easy to hack a chip implant, so my advice is don’t put your life secrets on an implant, Sjöblad said…

     

    “It’s about educating the people and giving every person the tools…not only how to use the technology but, more importantly, when it’s being used against you,” Sjöblad warned.  (source)

    And microchipping won’t stop with a payment chip in your hand.

    The endgame is microchipping people’s brains. And folks are chomping at the bit to get them. Scientists are saying that they can fix mental health issues with brain chips, they can make people smarter, and help them “merge” with AI. A chipped person could, theoretically, think his thoughts right onto his computer.

    Watch this video…

    So, with these chips in our brains, we’ll actually be merging with computers to some degree. The robot overlords will have a pretty easy takeover if our brains can be accessed like this.

    Microchips may not be optional one day.

    This horror movie gets even scarier. There is already a law on the books that potentially allows human beings to be forcibly chipped.

    Oh, it’s couched in warm, fuzzy language and they say it’s just to help keep track of folks with Alzheimer’s or other developmental disabilities, but remember that the most unpatriotic law ever passed was also called the Patriot Act.

    H.R.4919 was passed in 2016.

    It directs the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) to award competitive grants to health care, law enforcement, or public safety agencies, and nonprofit organizations, to develop or operate locally based proactive programs to prevent wandering and locate missing individuals with dementia or children with developmental disabilities. The BJA must give preference to law enforcement or public safety agencies partnering with nonprofit organizations that use person-centered plans and are directly linked to individuals, and families of individuals, with dementia or developmental disabilities. (source)

    Despite the fact that the bill requires everyone to use privacy “best practices,” it’s not that much of a stretch to see what a slippery slope this is. Who gets to decide whether a person “needs” to be chipped for their own good? Law enforcement. Scary.

    Could this lead to a cashless society?

    If “everyone” is getting microchipped like these experts predict, that could be the next step in the push toward a cashless society. Think about the lack of privacy then. If everything is purchased via a chip unique to you, then no purchases could be under the radar. Whether a person was stocking up on food, watching X-rated movies, reading books on revolution, or buying ammo, it would all be recorded in a database. Our purchases could be used in some kind of pre-crime technology, ala Minority Report, or they could be used to profile us in other ways.

    If there is no way to make purchases but with a chip, many people will have to reluctantly comply. The same chips could be a requirement for medical care, driver’s licenses, jobs – you name it. No matter where you tried to hide, your GPS locator would mean that you would be found. It would be like everyone being forced to have one of those ankle bracelets that criminals wear, except it would be inside your body.

    If you think the atmosphere of control is unnerving now, just wait. When everyone is microchipped, the net will be even tighter.

    Between the pending robot apocalypse that I wrote about earlier this week and forcible microchipping, it seems like we won’t have to wait for “climate change” or a war of Mutually Assured Destruction to get us. Technology just might be the end of humanity.

     

  • Moody's Boosts Modi: India Gets First Sovereign Credit Upgrade Since 2004

    Moody’s upgrade to India’s credit rating comes as a much-needed boost for India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who has been criticised for the fallout from the goods and services tax (GST) and demonetisation reforms. Indeed, Moody’s argued that Modi’s reforms will help to stabilize India’s rising debt levels. According to Reuters.

    Moody's Investors Service upgraded its ratings on India's sovereign bonds for the first time in nearly 14 years on Friday, saying continued progress on economic and institutional reform will boost the country's growth potential. The agency said it was lifting India's rating to Baa2 from Baa3 and changed its rating outlook to stable from positive as risks to India's credit profile were broadly balanced. Moody's upgrade, its first since January 2004, moves India's rating to the second lowest level of investment grade. The upgrade is a shot in the arm for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government and the reforms it has pushed through, and it comes just weeks after the World Bank moved India up 30 places in its annual ease of doing business rankings.

    Moody's believes that Modi’s reforms have reduced the risk of a sharp increase in India’s debt, even in potential negative scenarios. On the GST reform, which converted India's 29 states into a single customs union, the rating agency expects it to boost productivity by removing barriers to inter-state trade. In addition, the recent $32 billion recapitalisation of state banks and the reform of the bankruptcy code are beginning to address India’s sovereign credit profile.

    "While the capital injection will modestly increase the government's debt burden in the near term, it should enable banks to move forward with the resolution of NPLs."

    Following the upgrade, India’s S&P BSE Sensex Index rose 1.1%, with metals, property and banks the strongest performers. The Sensex has risen 25% so far in 2017, while the banks sector is 42% higher. Retail investors have piled into financial assets and the banking system has been awash with funds since Modi unexpectedly banned high denomination bank notes last November.

    As Reuters notes, the Indian government had been unsuccessful at persuading Moody’s to upgrade the rating in 2016.

    Last year, India lobbied hard with Moody's for an upgrade, but failed. The agency raised doubts about the country's debt levels and fragile banks, and declined to budge despite the government's criticism of their rating methodology. The government cheered the upgrade on Friday with Economic Affairs Secretary S. Garg telling reporters the rating upgrade was a recognition of economic reforms undertaken over three years.

    The Rupee and Indian bonds also rallied on the Moody’s announcement – although some debt traders expressed scepticism that the rally was sustainable.

    "It seems like Santa Claus has already opened his bag of goodies," said Lakshmi Iyer, head of fixed income at Kotak Mutual Fund said. "The move is overall positive for bonds which were caught in a negative spiral. This is a structural positive which would lead to easing in yields across tenors," she said. 

     

    The benchmark 10-year bond yield was down 10 basis points at 6.96 percent, the rupee was trading stronger at 64.76 per dollar versus the previous close of 65.3250. "We have been expecting it for a long time and this was long overdue and is very positive for the market. Looks like sentiments are going to become positive," said Sunil Sharma, chief investment officer with Sanctum Wealth Management. However, debt traders said the rally was unlikely to last beyond a few days as the coming heavy bond supply and hawkish inflation outlook were unlikely to change soon.

     

    "Who has the guts to continue buying in this market?" said a bond trader at a private bank.

    India has basked in its status as the world’s fastest growing major economy and Moody’s forecasts suggests that it will continue to outpace China’s roughly 6.5% growth, but only marginally. In the fiscal year to March 2018, Moody’s expects the Indian economy to grow at 6.7% versus last year’s 7.1%. From Reuters.

    Moody's noted that while a number of key reforms remain at the design phase, it believes those already implemented will advance the government's objective of improving the business climate, enhancing productivity and stimulating investment. “Longer term, India's growth potential is significantly higher than most other Baa-rated sovereigns," said Moody's.

    Bloomberg published some initial reactions from portfolio managers and analysts.

    Luke Spajic (head of portfolio management for emerging Asia at Pacific Asset Management Co. in Singapore)

    • “The upgrade came sooner than expected. India has undertaken some tough but necessary reforms like demonetization and the GST, the benefits of which are yet to be fully calculated”
    • “India is on the right long-term path with capital markets — in both debt and equity — pricing in potential improvements in investment quality”

    Lin Jing Leong (investment manager, Asia fixed income, at Aberdeen Standard Investments in Singapore)

    • “The upgrade has been long time coming” given Modi’s reform ambitions. “This is not a surprise — we do believe all the rating agencies have been behind the curve somewhat”
    • Initial Indian market reaction is likely to be knee-jerk, but we still expect dollar-India credit spreads, onshore India bonds and the rupee to continue outperforming the broader Asia and emerging-market bloc.

    Navneet Munot (chief investment officer at SBI Funds Management Pvt. in Mumbai)

    • This will boost global investors’ confidence in India, but factors like world monetary policy shifts and company earnings will also be key to foreign inflows.
    • Investors like us who have long positions on India always expected an upgrade.
    • The firm has been boosting equity holdings in Indian corporate lenders, industrial and telecommunications companies.

    Nischal Maheshwari (head of institutional equities at Edelweiss Securities Ltd. in Mumbai)

    • Equity markets have already given a thumbs up to the news”.
    • It will lead to a reduction in borrowing costs, which is a major improvement.
    • “For foreign investors in equity, it doesn’t change much as their concerns around high stock valuations remain. However, their commitment to the country is in place and the upgrade will only help reiterate their position”.

    Shameek Ray (head of debt capital markets at ICICI Securities Primary Dealership in Mumbai)

    • Foreign investors won’t be able to take full advantage of the positive sentiment from the upgrade as quotas for them to buy into rupee-denominated government and corporate debt are full, Ray says.
    • “Whenever these quotas open up there will be keen interest to take India exposure,” but in the meantime Indian companies will get more access to offshore markets.
    • “We could see them pricing dollar or Masala bonds at tighter levels”.

    Ken Hu (chief investment officer for Asia-Pacific fixed income at Invesco Hong Kong Ltd.)

    • The upgrade confirms Invesco’s positive view on India’s structural economic reforms.
    • “With more political capital, Modi and his party are able to launch more difficult but more impactful structural reforms. The positive feedback loop will continue to lead to more credit rating upgrades of India in future”.

    Chakri Lokapriya (managing director at TCG Asset Management in Mumbai)

    • The upgrade is “very positive for banks, infrastructure and cyclical sectors”.
    • “Banks will benefit strongly as their credit costs come down leading to a reduction in interest costs for infrastructure and manufacturing companies”.

    Ashley Perrott (head of pan-Asian fixed income at UBS Asset Management in Singapore)

    • The upgrade is a bit of a surprise, so the market is likely to see some initial bond-spread tightening.
    • “But raising one notch does not make much difference from a fundamental perspective”.

    Avinash Thakur (managing director of debt capital markets at Barclays Plc in Hong Kong)

    • “The upgrade should help issuers from India as they are no longer on the cusp of investment grade”.
    • “It makes a big difference to investors and we will see more dollar bond supply from India”.

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Nov 17

Today’s News 17th November 2017

  • Despite Massive Liquidity Injection, Chinese Stocks, Commodities Head For Worst Week Of Year

    The PBOC stepped up cash injections this week, suggesting authorities are trying to shore up financial markets as a selloff in bonds spreads to equities… but it is not working!

    As Bloomberg reports, the central bank has already added a net 510 billion yuan ($77 billion) via open-market operations into the financial system this week, matching the third biggest weekly injection this year.

    But, it is not enough…

    While bonds did stabilize – managing to avoid closing beyind the crucial 4.00% level…

    Stocks did not…

    As they head of the worst week in 7 months…

    And commodities are getting clobbered…

    “The increase in cash additions will help soothe market sentiment,” said Qin Han, chief fixed-income analyst at Guotai Junan Securities Co. “But the decline will not be reversed, as the market’s biggest concern is not tight liquidity but tougher financial regulation.”

  • Pepe Escobar Live From Baghdad: The Secret Of Iraq's Renaissance

    Authored by Pepe Escobar of The Asia Times, via RT.com,

    BAGHDAD – On a sandstorm-swept morning in Baghdad earlier last week, Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, the legendary deputy leader of Hashd al-Shaabi, a.k.a. People Mobilization Units (PMUs) and the actual mastermind of numerous ground battles against ISIS/Daesh, met a small number of independent foreign journalists and analysts.

    This was a game-changing moment in more ways than one. It was the first detailed interview granted by Mohandes since the fatwa issued by Grand Ayatollah Sistani – the immensely respected marja (source of emulation) and top clerical authority in Iraq – in June 2014, when Daesh stormed across the border from Syria. The fatwa, loosely translated, reads, “It is upon every Iraqi capable of carrying guns to volunteer with the Iraqi Armed Forces to defend the sanctities of the nation.”

    Mohandes took time out of the battlefield especially for the meeting, and then left straight for al-Qaim. He was sure “al-Qaim will be taken in a matter of days” – a reference to the crucial Daesh-held Iraqi border town connecting to Daesh stronghold Abu Kamal in Syria.

    That’s exactly what happened only four days later; Iraqi forces immediately started a mop up operation and prepared to meet advancing Syrian forces at the border – yet more evidence that the recomposition of the territorial integrity of both Iraq and Syria is a (fast) work in progress.

    The meeting with Mohandes was held in a compound inside the massively fortified Green Zone – an American-concocted bubble kept totally insulated from ultra-volatile red zone Baghdad with multiple checkpoints and sniffer dogs manned by US contractors.

    Adding to the drama, the US State Department describes Mohandes as a “terrorist”. That amounts in practice to criminalizing the Iraqi government in Baghdad – which duly released an official statement furiously refuting the characterization.

    The PMUs are an official body with tens of thousands of volunteers linked to the office of the Commander in Chief of the Iraqi Armed Forces. The Iraqi Parliament fully legalized the PMUs in November 2016 via resolution 91 (item number 4, for instance, states that “the PMU and its affiliates are subject to military regulations that are enforced from all angles.”)

    Its 25 combat brigades – comprising Shi’ites, Sunnis, Christians, Yazidis, Turkmen, Shabak and Kurds – have been absolutely crucial in the fight against Daesh in Samarra, Amerli, Jalawla, Balad, Salahuddin, Fallujah (35 different battles), Shirqat and Mosul (especially over the western axis from Qayarah base to the Iraq-Syrian border, cutting off supply chains and sealing Mosul from an attempted Daesh escape to Syria).

    Retaking Kirkuk “in a matter of hours”

    Mohandes describes the PMUs as “an official military force” which plays a “complementary role” to the Iraqi Army. The initial plan was for the PMUs to become a national guard – which in fact they are now; “We have recon drones and engineering units that the Army does not have. We don’t mind if we are called gendarmes.” He’s proud the PMUs are fighting an “unconventional war”, holding the high ground “militarily and morally” with “victories achieved in record time”. And “contrary to Syria”, with no direct Russian support.

    Mohandes is clear that Iran was the only nation supporting Iraq’s fight against Daesh. Iraq reciprocated by helping Syria, “facilitating over flights by Iranian planes.” With no Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between Washington and Baghdad, “the Americans withdrew companies that maintain Abrams tanks.” In 2014 “we didn’t even have AK-47s. Iran gave them to us. The US embassy had 12 Apache helicopters ready to transport diplomats if Baghdad fell to Daesh”.

    One year later, “Baghdad would have been occupied” were not for the PMUs; “It’s like you’re in a hospital and you need blood. The Americans would show up with the transfusion when it was too late.”

    He is adamant “the US did not provide a single bullet” in the overall fight against Daesh. And yet, Mohandes clarifies that the “US may stay in Iraq should the Iraqi government decide it. My personal opinion is well known.”

    Mohandes considers the [Western] “media war waged against Hashd al-Shaabi” as “normal from the beginning”; “Countries that supported terrorism would not perceive that a popular force would emerge, and did not recognize the new political system in Iraq.” On that note, he added ruefully, “you can smell petrol”.

    Mohandes was personally wounded in Halabja and also in Anfal – Saddam Hussein’s anti-Kurdish operations. He was “pleased to see Kurdistan saved after 1991”; stresses “we had martyrs who fell in Kurdistan defending them”; and considers himself a friend of the Kurds, keeping good relations with their leaders. Iranian advisors, alongside the Iraqi Army and the PMUs, also “prevented Daesh from conquering Erbil.”

    Yet after a “unilateral referendum, Iraq had to assert the authority of the state”. Retaking Kirkuk – largely a PMU operation – was “a matter of hours”; the PMUs “avoided fighting and stayed only in the outskirts of Kirkuk”. Mohandes previously discussed operational details with the Peshmerga, and there was full coordination with both Iran and Turkey; “It’s a misconception that Kurdish leaders could rely on Turkey.”

    Fallujah, finally secured

    The PMUs absolutely insist on their protection of ethnic minorities, referring to thousands of Sabak, Yazidi and Turkmen – among at least 120,000 families – forced by Daesh rule into becoming IDPs. After liberation battles were won, the PMUs provided these families with food, clothing, toys, generators and fuel. I confirmed that many of these donations came from families of PMU fighters all across the country. PMU priorities include combat engineering teams bringing families back to their areas after clearing mines and explosives, and then reopening hospitals and schools. For instance, 67,000 families were resettled into their homes in Salahuddin and 35,000 families in Diyala.

    Mohandes stresses that, “in the fight against Daesh in Salahuddin and Hawija, the brigade commanders were Sunnis”. The PMUs feature a Christian Babylon brigade, a Yazidi brigade, and a Turkmen brigade; “When Yazidis were under siege in Sinjar we freed at least 300,000 people.”

    Overall, the PMUs include over 20,000 Sunni fighters. Compare it with the fact that 50 per cent of Daesh’s suicide bombers in Iraq have been Saudi nationals. I confirmed with Sheikh Muhammad al-Nouri, leader of the Sunni scholars in Fallujah, “this is an ideological battle against Wahhabi ideology. We need to get away from the Wahhabi school and redirect our knowledge to other Sunni schools.” He explained how that worked on the ground in Haditha (“we were able to control mosques”) and motivated people in Fallujah, 30 minutes away; “Fallujah is an Iraqi city. We believe in coexistence.”

    After 14 years in which Fallujah was not secure, and with the Haditha experience fast expanding, Sheikh Muhammad is convinced “Iraq will declare a different war on terror.”

    The inclusive approach was also confirmed by Yezen Meshaan al-Jebouri, the head of the Salahuddin PMU brigade. This is crucial because he’s a member of the very prominent Sunni Jebouri family, which was historically inimical to Saddam Hussein; his father is the current governor of Tikrit. Al-Jebouri decries “the state corruption in Sunni regions”, an “impression of injustice” and the fact that for Daesh, “Sunnis who did not follow them should also be killed.” He’s worried about “the Saudi accumulation of developed weapons. Who guarantees these won’t be used against the region?” And he refuses the notion that “we are looked upon by the West as part of the Iranian project.”

    Military victory meets political victory

    Far from the stereotyped “terrorist”, Mohandes is disarmingly smart, witty and candid. And a full-blooded Iraqi patriot; “Iraq now reinstates its position because of the blood of its sons. We needed to have a military force capable of fighting an internal threat. We are accomplishing a religious national and humanitarian duty.”

    Soldiers apart, thousands of extra PMU volunteers do not receive salaries. Members of Parliament and even Ministers were active in the battlefield. Mohandes is proud that “we have a chain of command just like the army”; that the PMUs harbor “thousands of people with college degrees”; that they run “dozens of field hospitals, intensive care units” and have “the strongest intel body in Iraq.”

    In Baghdad, I personally confirmed the narrative accusing the PMUs of being Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s private army is nonsense. If that was the case, Grand Ayatollah Sistani should take the blame, as he conceptually is the father of the PMUs. Hadi al-Amiri, the secretary-general of the powerful Badr organization, also extremely active in the fight against Daesh, stressed to me the PMUs are “part of the security system, integrated with the Ministry of Defense”. But now “we need universities and emphasis on education.”

    Pakistani Prof. Hassan Abbas, from the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University in Washington, went even further, as we extensively discussed not only Iraq and Syria but also Afghanistan and Pakistan; “Iraq is now in a unique position heading towards a democratic, pluralistic society”, proving that “the best answer to sectarianism is religious harmony.” This “inclusiveness against Takfirism” must now connect in the streets “with the rule of law and a fair justice system”. Abbas points out that the base for Iraq to build up is law enforcement via scientific investigation; “Policing is the first line of defense”.

    Baghdad has been able, almost simultaneously, to pull off two major game-changers; a military victory in Mosul and a political victory in Kirkuk. If Iraq stabilizes, erasing the Daesh death cult, so will Syria. As al-Jebouri notes, “now every community must have a cut of the cake.” At least 7 million jobs and pensions are paid by Baghdad. People want the return of regularly paid salaries. That starts with decent security all over the country. Mohandes was the engineer – his actual profession – of key battles against Daesh. There’s a wide consensus in Baghdad that without him Daesh would be firmly installed in the Green Zone.

    Hashd al-Shaabi is already an Iraqi pop phenomenon, reflected in this huge hit by superstar Ali al-Delfi. From pop to politics is another matter entirely. Mohandes is adamant the PMUs won’t get involved in politics, “and directly won’t contest elections. If someone does, and many individuals are now very popular, they have to leave Hashd.”

    From hybrid warfare to national renewal

    After days talking to Hashd al-Shaabi personnel and observing how they operate a complex hybrid warfare battlefield coupled with an active recruitment process and heavy presence in social media, it’s clear the PMUs are now firmly established as a backbone underpinning Iraqi state security, an array of stabilization programs – including much needed medical services – and most of all, introducing a measure of efficiency Iraq was totally unfamiliar for almost three decades.

    It’s a sort of state-building mechanism springing out of a resistance ethic. As if the ominous Daesh threat, which may have led to as many as 3.1 million IDPs, shook up the collective Iraqi subconscious, awakened the Iraqi Shi’ite proletariat/disenfranchised masses, and accelerated cultural decolonization. And this complex development couldn’t be further from religious bigotry.

    Amid Wilsonian eulogies and references to the Marshall Plan, Foreign Minister Ebrahim al-Jaafari is also a staunch defender of the PMUs, stressing it as “an experiment to be studied”, a “new phenomenon with a humane basis operating on a legal framework”, and “able to break the siege of solitude Iraq has suffered for years.”

    Referring to the Daesh offensive, Jaafari insisted “Iraq did not commit a crime” in the first place, but hopefully there’s “a new generation of youth capable of reinforcing the experiment”.

    The emphasis now, following reconciliation, is on “an era of national participation”. He’s adamant that “families of Daesh members should not pay for their mistakes.” Daesh informers will be duly put on trial.

    I asked the Foreign Minister if Baghdad did not fear being caught in a lethal crossfire between Washington and Tehran. His response was carefully measured. He said he had enough experience of dealing with “radical” neocons in D.C. And at the same time he was fully aware of the role of the PMUs as well as Iran in Iraq’s reassertion of sovereignty. His warm smile highlighted the conviction that out of the ashes of a cultish black death, the Iraqi renaissance was fully in effect.

  • Abu Dhabi Businessman Pays $2.9 Million For 19-Year-Old Model's Virginity

    Another young millennial has reportedly sold her virginity for millions on the famed site Cinderella Escorts.

    Back in April, a Hong Kong businessman paid $2.5 million for an 18-year-old Romanian model’s virginity. Just yesterday, we outlined that millions of millennials in the United States could be trading sex for their next debt servicing payment on a website called SeekingArrangement.com. As what we believe, the trend is clear and millennials are resorting to sex for a real simple get-out-of debt option or the chance for a better life, as their future economic prospects are quite dim.

    The latest demand for virgins is coming from a businessman in Abu Dhabi who has agreed to pay $2.9 million (€ 2.5million) for the virginity of a 19-year-old part time student and model living in California. The model named Giselle,19, is astounded by the overall outcome of the auction and says a Hollywood Actor and Russian Politician were also in the running. She says this is “a dream told true” and plans to use the money for — you guessed it— tuition fees and travel. Perhaps, she’ll be one of the few millennials enjoying avocado and toast for breakfast for the rest of her life.

    Giselle’s 30 second elevator-pitch of why she wants to sell her virginity…

    According to the Daily Mail,

    The model said: ‘I am happy to have decided to sell my virginity through Cinderella Escorts.

     

    ‘I would never have dreamt that the bid would rise so high and we would have reached 2.5million Euros. This is a dream come true.’

     

    Giselle said she was ‘shocked’ by the outrage against women selling her virginity, describing it as a ‘form of emancipation.’

     

    ‘If I want to spend my first time with someone who is not my first love, that’s my decision,’ she said.

     

    ‘The fact that women can do what they want with their bodies and have the courage to live their sexuality free against the critics sets a sign for emancipation’.

     

    She added: ‘In retrospect, how many would probably give up their first time if they could have 2.5million Euros instead?’ 

    The man behind Cinderella Escorts, Jan Zakobielski, 27, who runs the business from Dortmund, Germany, and as the Daily Mail put it, “likens a woman’s virginity to a very old wine or a luxury car”.

    Cinderella Escort’s fees are twenty percent of each transaction, which is a sizable payout for Zakobielski. 

    A spokesman for Cinderella Escorts said: ‘On our website you will find a video where girls from all over the world talk about the reasons to sell their virginity.

    *  *  *

    As the geopolitical tensions in the Middle East spiral out of control and a military conflict looms, it seems as one lucky Abu Dhabi businessman has found a novel way of funneling hot money out of the region before a conflict with Saudi Arabia and Lebanon breaks-out.

    For Giselle, if the transaction goes through her avocado and toast days are just ahead while blowing all her money on tuition, but for the greater scope of the millennial generation, it’s a bleak future with many hardships of debt servicing encompassed in a stagnate wage growth environment unless you sell your virginity.

    We imagine this trend is only getting started…

  • Satellite Images Reveal North Korea "Aggressively" Working On Ballistic Missile Submarine

    According to the latest analysis of satellite imagery taken at North Korea’s Sinpo South Shipyard on November 5 conducted by the 38 North website, Pyongyang is pursuing an “aggressive schedule” to build its first operational ballistic missile submarine.

    Continued movement of parts and components into and out of the parts yards adjacent to the construction halls indicates an ongoing shipbuilding program, the analysts concluded. “The presence of what appear to be sections of a submarine’s pressure hull in the yards suggests construction of a new submarine, possibly the SINPO-C ballistic missile submarine (SSB)- the follow-on to the current SINPO-class experimental ballistic missile submarine,” 38 North said in the report published today.

    Additionally, Imagery from November 5 shows two larger circular objects that may be sections of a submarine’s pressure hull: “The diameter of the first object was approximately 7.1 meters, while the diameter of the second starts at approximately 7.1 meters and reduces to approximately 6.1 meters. The larger object has what appears to be two internal cross members that could be used to support decks or internal equipment.”

    If correct, that would imply that the shipbuilding program is for a submarine with a beam broader (in width) than the ROMEO-class attack submarine (6.7 meters)—meaning it is potentially a SINPO-C SSB, the reported follow-on to the SINPO-class SSBA.


    Separately, at the test stand, imagery from November 5 shows an object visible at the top of the service tower that appears to be either a launch canister support or launch canister.

    This object does not appear in previous satellite or ground images of the test stand. While there is no additional activity of note in the immediate area, the service tower remains in place. During the earlier development of the Pukguksong-1/KN-11, it was removed after testing campaigns. Therefore, the continued presence of this object suggests ongoing SLBM ejection tests. If correct, this is likely a continuation of the ejection test campaign reported during July of this year.[4] Regardless, additional ejection tests should be expected in the future for further development of the Pukguksong-1, a potential Pukguksong-3, or other future SLBMs.

    Such a test would also be valuable for validating missile launch systems for a new class of SSBs.

    And while images of a test stand indicated continued experimenting with a mechanism for ejection launch of missiles from a submarine, so far, the report said, no activity could be seen suggesting preparations for a new test of a submarine-launched missile.

    Last month, The Diplomat magazine quoted a U.S. government source as saying U.S. military intelligence had detected a new diesel-electric submarine under construction at Sinpo and dubbed it the Sinpo-C. It said the submarine was likely a larger successor to North Korea’s single experimental ballistic missile submarine.

    Another article in The Diplomat last month quoted a U.S. government source as saying that North Korea had tested a new solid fuel engine sometime between Oct. 15 and Oct. 21. U.S. intelligence officials have declined to comment on this.

  • Tesla Unveils Its "Mind-Blowing" Semi And New Roadster, The "Fastest Production Car Ever Made"

    Update 2: there were some rumors of a surprise during tonight's presentation, and Musk did not disappoint when just as the semi-introduction was ending, Tesla also unveiled a new Roadster, the new version of its original sports car. According to Musk, It’s the fastest production car ever made, with speeds of just 1.9 seconds for 0 to 60 and 4.2 seconds for 0 to 100. It can handle a quarter mile in 8.9 seconds.

    “This is the base model,” Musk said, then went on to mention that its top speed is above 250 mph. and it has a 200 kWh battery pack that offers 630 miles of highway driving range.

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    * * *

    Update 1: this is what the new Semi truck, which Tesla will give a 1 million mile guarantee for, looks like:

    * * *

    Tonight's the night!! In what has been promised to "blow your mind," Elon Musk will unveil an all-electric Class 8 semi truck.

    In the works for two years, it’s a project that’s aimed squarely at cleaning up the freight industry, which accounts for one-fifth of global oil demand… and which Goldman Sachs has warned will cost 300,000 jobs per year.

    As Bloomberg notes, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has promised a truck that will “out-torque any diesel semi” and drive “like a sports car.” Seeing what an all-electric semi is capable of may be the most entertaining part of the night, even if it’s not a key metric for Tesla’s trucking customers.

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    “If you had a tug-of-war competition,” Musk bragged at a Ted Talk in April, “the Tesla Semi will tug the diesel semi uphill.”

    The show is due to start at 8pmPT, 11pmET.

    If the transmission is interrupted, readers can go to Tesla’s website by clicking the image below…

    Here's what to watch for – including some potential wild cards (via Bloomberg)

    1. How Long Is Long Range?

    The range of any electric vehicle is the critical metric—it defines how the vehicle can be used and the size of its potential market. Five years ago, few would have thought that a long-range heavy duty-truck was even possible. That’s changing fast. Daimler, the leader in Class 8 diesel trucks, recently unveiled a 220-mile range electric big rig, establishing a new bar for the industry. Long-range hauling across vast stretches of the U.S. would likely require more than 500 miles of range.

    2. At What Cost?

    Batteries are the single most expensive component of any electric truck, and the battery of a cross-country hauler could cost $100,000 even before you build the truck around it. The sticker price, regardless of size, is going to be higher than its diesel equivalent because of those pricey batteries.

    Can Tesla keep the upfront price low enough to be offset by cheaper operating costs from fuel savings and simpler maintenance? Tesla may provide such figures, though many fleet operators will want to put them to the test with hundreds of thousands of road miles before they’ll be convinced.

    Source: Bloomberg analysis

    3. Platooning on Autopilot

    Will the truck, expected to roll out by 2020, come with some level of autonomous driving? Tesla has been in talks with California and Nevada regulators about testing semis that can automatically follow a lead vehicle, a technique known as “platooning.” Platooning cuts fuel costs by reducing wind drag. And if the autonomous driving system is good enough to run without a driver, it could also dramatically cut labor expenses.

    A teaser animation released by Tesla on Wednesday suggests the realization of one of Musk’s design aspirations: cameras instead of side door mirrors.

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    4. Who Are the First Customers?

    The biggest players in freight are good at keeping their trucks in top driving condition and averse to messing with the supply chain. Convincing companies like Swift, Ryder, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to bring an electric drivetrain into their fleets will be a tough sell. Musk says Tesla has been gathering feedback from trucking companies throughout the development process (at least one, Ryder, confirmed it), so it would be a good sign if Tesla comes out of the gate with some early partnerships.

    It could be that Musk’s own empire will be the first demonstration customer of the big rig. Tesla’s automotive reach is growing, and its SolarCity arm is the biggest rooftop solar installer in the U.S. Musk's SpaceX could potentially use the vehicles to transport rockets, satellites, capsules, and equipment.

    During earlier unveilings of Tesla’s passenger cars—the Models S, X and 3—the company started taking paid reservations immediately, at least 18 months before the first deliveries. Is that a strategy that can work with commercial trucks? How long until the first rigs hit the road?

    A new 40-stall Supercharger station and customer lounge opens in Kettleman, California.

    Source: Tesla

    5. Infrastructure Solutions

    A lot of infrastructure goes into servicing big rigs. Truck stops line the world’s highways, and fleet operators stand by with mountains of replacement parts ready to fix anything that might go wrong. How does Tesla plan to deal with these hurdles? Will they introduce a whole new type of charging system, with ultrafast chargers or a robot that swaps out used batteries for fresh ones? Who will build out and operate the charging network? Who handles maintenance and roadside assistance?

    6. Location, Location, Location

    Tesla’s car factory in Fremont, California, is running out of room. Musk wants to build 500,000 electric passenger cars there next year, and even if he misses that goal by half, it’s very unlikely Tesla would be able to squeeze in a big rig assembly line. Tesla’s massive battery factory near Reno, Nevada, which is still under construction, seems like a more natural fit. That factory is also where Tesla makes electric motors and drivetrains—primary components for an electric semi.

    7. “Driver Comfort Features”

    In a profile in this week’s Rolling Stone, Musk hinted at an unspecified “driver comfort feature” that he’s fond of. “Probably no one will buy it because of this,” he said, “but if you’re going to make a product, make it beautiful.” One possibility? A sweet coffee maker. In a Twitter post on Wednesday, Musk joked that the truck “can transform into a robot, fight aliens and make one hell of a latte.”

    The Model 3 motor sits in line with the wheel axle. The semi will use multiple Model 3 engines in tandem to power the big rig semi trucks.

    Source: Tesla

    8. Shared Parts

    Perhaps Tesla’s biggest advantage over other truck makers is that its Semi will share some core parts with its first mass-market car, the Model 3. Musk disclosed during an earnings call in May that the Semi uses “a bunch” of Model 3 motors, which sit in line with the truck’s axles. These relatively cheap electric motors will give the Semi unparalleled electric torque for getting quickly up to speed with a heavy load.

    Tesla’s foray into commercial trucking is coming at an impossibly tough time for the company. The Model 3 is already months behind schedule, and Tesla is spending $1 billion a quarter to get things cranking.

    But if Musk can get Model 3 production lines up to their promised rates, and the motors and battery cells are truly interchangeable between the Semi and the new passenger car, the scale of those operations would be profound. While traditional diesel truck makers are testing truck-suitable electric motors by the hundreds, Tesla could be making them by the hundreds of thousands—even before its first big rig hits the road.

    *  *  *

    Tesla shares have been on the downtrend since mid-September…

    So this event could be just what Musk needs to turn things around and distract investors from the massive cash burn the company is suffering while hand-making Model 3s…

  • After Slamming Bitcoin As A Money Laundering Tool, JPMorgan Busted For Money Laundering

    Score one for the poetic irony pages.

    Two months after JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon lashed out at bitcoin, calling it a “fraud” which is “worse than tulip bulbs, warning it won’t end well”, will “blow up” and “someone is going to get killed” and threatened that “any trader trading bitcoin” will be “fired for being stupid” as it was merely a tool for money-laundering, today Swiss daily Handelszeitung reported that the Swiss subsidiary of JPMorgan was sanctioned by the Swiss regulator, FINMA, over money laundering and “seriously violating supervision laws.”

    As the newspaper adds, the Swiss sanctions relate to breaches of due diligence in connection with money laundering standards. In other words, JPMorgan was actively aiding and abeting criminal money laundering.

    The report further notes, the Finma decision was issued on June 30 and should have been published the following week but JPMorganm tried to prevent the publication of the judgment. More recently, the Federal Administrative Court dismissed the appeal.

    In response to money-laundering violation, JPM said that in support of safety and soundness of global monetary system, “we have made and continue to make significant enhancements to the firm’s AML program to ensure we are meeting regulatory expectations,” according to an emailed statement sent to Bloomberg.

    Unfortunately, JPMorgan also said that it can’t, or rather won’t, provide further details since the Finma resolution from June 2017 isn’t public.

    This means that anyone wondering if Jamie Dimon’s bank was using (and thus trading) bitcoin to circumvent Swiss anti-money laundering regulations, will just have to ask Jamie Dimon in person during his next public appearance.  

  • Saudi Arabia Offers Arrested Royals A Deal: Your Freedom For Lots Of Cash

    Saudi Arabia just introduced a 70% wealth tax. It did so in a most original way…

    As we noted shortly after the Crown Prince’s purge of potential rivals within Saudi Arabia’s sprawling ruling family, while the dozens of arrests were made under the pretext of an "anti-corruption crackdown", Mohammed bin Salman’s ulterior motive was something else entirely: Replenishing the Kingdom’s depleted foreign reserves, which have been hammered for the past three years by low oil prices, with some estimating that the current purge could potentially bring in up to $800 billion in proceeds.

    Furthermore, the geopolitical turmoil unleashed by the unprecedented crackdown helped push oil prices higher, creating an ancillary benefit for both the kingdom’s rulers and the upcoming IPO of Aramco.

    Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman

    And, in the latest confirmation that the crackdown was all about cash, the Financial Times reports today that the Saudi government has offered the new occupants of the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton a way out…. and it’s going to cost them: In some cases, as much as 70% of their net worth.

    Saudi authorities are negotiating settlements with princes and businessmen held over allegations of corruption, offering deals for the detainees to pay for their freedom, people briefed on the discussions say.

     

    In some cases the government is seeking to appropriate as much as 70 per cent of suspects’ wealth, two of the people said, in a bid to channel hundreds of billions of dollars into depleted state coffers.

     

    The arrangements, which have already seen some assets and funds handed over to the state, provide an insight into the strategy behind Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s dramatic corruption purge.

    The crackdown has led to the detention of hundreds of royals, ministers, officals and the country’s richest oligarchs including Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire, Waleed al-Ibrahim, the founder of Middle East Broadcasting Center, which owns Al Arabiya, the Saudi satellite television channel, and Bakr bin Laden, chairman of the Saudi Binladin construction group and brother of Osama bin Laden.

    Additionally, as we reported, the crackdown sent members of the country’s wealthy upper crust scrambling to liquidate their holdings and move their cash offshore, where they might have a better chance of keeping it away from the Saudi government.

    Unsurprisingly, the Saudi "offer" is working.

    Some of the suspects, most of whom have been rounded up at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh since last week, are keen to secure their release by signing over cash and corporate assets, the FT's sources say.

    “They are making settlements with most of those in the Ritz,” said one adviser. “Cough up the cash and you will go home." 

     

    One multi-billionaire businessman held at the Ritz-Carlton has been told to hand over 70% of his wealth to the state as a punishment for decades of involvement in allegedly corrupt business transactions. He wants to pay, but has yet to work out the details of transferring those assets to the Saudi state.

    Settlements for royals will also include pledges of loyalty as MbS prepares himself to take the Saudi throne, though his father, King Salman, has vigorously denied these rumors.

    One detainee told his staff that the authorities may be looking to take ownership of his main business. Families of detained suspects have started to hire consultants to assist efforts to secure their relatives’ release and to ring fence the damage to their business interests.

    “They are looking for ways to isolate the tainted shareholder and keep the business going,” said the adviser.

    The settlements aim to recover billions of dollars allegedly earned through “corruption” at a time when the government is grappling with a recession triggered by prolonged low oil prices and a budget deficit that widened to $79 billion last year.

    The country’s attorney-general has said he is investigating allegations of corruption amounting to at least $100 billion –    though the total value of assets seized could be as high as $800 billion. Though the Financial Times puts the high-end figure at a relatively modest $300 billion; to make up for the delta, more arrests are still expected.

    Regular Saudis, who’ve seen their benefits cut and some of their jobs taken away, support MbS’s decision.  “Why should the poor take all the pain of austerity,” said one Saudi academic. “The rich need to pay their way too.”

    In Saudi Arabia, they are about to do just that.

  • An Unexplained Light Flash Over Phoenix Was Captured On Security Cameras

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    A bright flash ripped across Phoenix, Arizona’s night sky last night, terrifying residents.

    The mysterious flash was caught on security cameras as concerned onlookers watched.

    The remarkable bright object was spotted by numerous people in the area, with reports streaming in from Arizona and the surrounding states, including California, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico. 

    “Subtle” would be far from the correct way to describe that bright flash of light streaking downward. But, based on the fact that it is “falling” from the sky, scientists say that it was more than likely nothing more than a big hunk of space junk burning up in the atmosphere.

    But that didn’t stop people from taking to social media to share their experiences with the world. “Something BRILLIANT just flew across the Phoenix sky around 8:30 this evening!” the City of Phoenix, AZ tweeted last night.” Check out what our Phoenix City Cam Captured! Look to the right of this screen.”

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    According to the American Meteor Society, this week alone has several sources of meteoric activity, leading to fireball sightings all around the world. In the span of just ten hours between November 14 and 15, there were four major sightings, with events in France and Germany, and two parts of the US. Some have suggested that the Taurid meteor shower, which peaked last weekend, may be to blame. But, as for the Arizona flash, the experts say this is not the case.

    “Both branches of the Taurids are most notable for colorful fireballs and are often responsible for an increased number of fireball reports from September through November,” according to AMS. 

     

    “The first analysis conducted by former IMO president Dr. Juergen Rendtel of the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam from the raw data shows that the events that occurred over Arizona and France cannot be linked to the Taurids: the Arizona event was moving from North-West to South-East while the French event was moving from North-East to South-West.”

    Instead, the Arizona fireball may have come from one of the other many meteor sources. The Leonid meteor shower, for example, is set to peak this weekend and has been active since the beginning of the month.

    November is going to be an interesting month for those interested in celestial events. Go here for a rundown of what to expect in the second half of the month.

  • Rickards On Gold, Interest Rates, & Super-Cycles

    Authord by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

    When the Fed raised interest rates last December, many believed gold would plunge. But it didn’t happen.

    Gold bottomed the day after the rate hike, but then started moving higher again. 

    Incidentally, the same thing happened after the Fed tightened in December 2015. Gold had one of its best quarters in 20 years in the first quarter of 2016. So it was very interesting to see gold going up despite headwinds from the Fed.

    Meanwhile, gold has more than held its own this year. 

    Normally when rates go up, the dollar strengthens and gold weakens. They usually move in opposite directions. So how could gold have gone up when the Fed was tightening and the dollar was strong?

    That tells me that there’s more to the story, that there’s more going on behind the scenes that’s been driving the gold price higher.

    It means you can’t just look at the dollar. The dollar’s an important driver of the gold price, no doubt. But so are basic fundamentals like supply and demand in the physical gold market.

    I travel constantly, and I was in Shanghai meeting with the largest gold dealers in China. I was also in Switzerland not too long ago, meeting with gold refiners and gold dealers.

    I’ve heard the same stories from Switzerland to Shanghai and everywhere in between, that there are physical gold shortages popping up, and that refiners are having trouble sourcing gold. Refiners have waiting lists of buyers, and they can’t find the gold they need to maintain their refining operations.

    And new gold discoveries are few and far between, so demand is outstripping supply. That’s why some of the opportunities we’ve uncovered in gold miners are so attractive right now. One good find can make investors fortunes.

    My point is that physical shortages have become an issue. That is an important driver of gold prices.

    There’s another reason to believe that gold could be in a long-term trend right now.

    To understand why, let’s first look at the long decline in gold prices from 2011 to 2015. The best explanation I’ve heard came from legendary commodities investor Jim Rogers.

    He personally believes that gold will end up in the $10,000 per ounce range, which I have also predicted.

    But Rogers makes the point that no commodity ever goes from a secular bottom to top without a 50% retracement along the way.

    This means the 50% retracement is behind us and gold is set for new all-time highs in the years ahead.

    Gold bottomed at $255 per ounce in August 1999. From there, it turned decisively higher and rose 650% until it peaked near $1,900 in September 2011.

    So gold rose $1,643 per ounce from August 1999 to September 2011.

    A 50% retracement of that rally would take $821 per ounce off the price, putting gold at $1,077 when the retracement finished. That’s almost exactly where gold ended up on Nov. 27, 2015 ($1,058 per ounce).

    This means the 50% retracement is behind us and gold is set for new all-time highs in the years ahead.

    Why should investors believe gold won’t just get slammed again?

    The answer is that there’s an important distinction between the 2011–15 price action and what’s going on now.

    The four-year decline exhibited a pattern called “lower highs and lower lows.” While gold rallied and fell back, each peak was lower than the one before and each valley was lower than the one before also.

    Since December 2016, it appears that this bear market pattern has reversed. We now see “higher highs and higher lows” as part of an overall uptrend.

    The Feb. 24, 2017, high of $1,256 per ounce was higher than the prior Jan. 23, 2017, high of $1,217 per ounce.

    The May 10 low of $1,218 per ounce was higher than the prior March 14 low of $1,198 per ounce.

    The Sept. 7 high of $1,353 was higher than the June 6 high of $1,296. And the Oct. 5 low of $1,271 was higher than the July 7 low of $1,212.

    Of course, this new trend is less than a year old and is not deterministic. Still, it is an encouraging sign when considered alongside other bullish factors for gold.

    But more importantly, gold has held its own despite higher interest rates and threats of more.

    That tells me we’re seeing a flight to quality, meaning people are losing confidence in central banks all over the world. They realize the banks are out of bullets. They’ve been printing money for eight years and keeping rates close to zero or negative. But it still hasn’t worked to stimulate the economy the way they want.

    So gold has been moving up in what I would consider a challenging environment of higher rates. 

    The question is, where does gold go from here?

    The market is currently giving close to 100% odds that the Fed will raise rates next month.

    I disagree. I’m skeptical of that because of the weak inflation data. There will be one more PCE core data release before the Dec. 13 meeting. That release is due out on Nov. 30.

    If the number is hot, say, 1.6% or higher, that will validate Yellen’s view that the inflation weakness was “transitory” and will justify the Fed in raising rates in December.

    On the other hand, if that number is weak, say, 1.3% or less, there’s a good chance the Fed will not raise rates in December. In that case, investors should expect a swift and violent reversal of recent trends.

    Markets have priced a strong dollar and weaker gold and bond prices based on the expectation of a rate hike in December. If that rate hike doesn’t happen because of weak inflation data, look for sharp rallies in bonds and gold.

    Now, the last time gold sold off dramatically was on election night, when Stan Druckenmiller, a famous gold investor, sold all his gold. It’s only natural that when someone dumps the amount of gold he deals in, the price will go down.

    That move reflected a change in sentiment.

    What Stan said at the time was very interesting. He said, “All the reasons that I own gold in the first place have gone away because Trump was elected president.”

    In other words, he was buying into the story that Hillary Clinton would be bad for the economy but Donald Trump’s policies would be beneficial. If we were going to have strong economic growth with a Trump presidency, maybe you didn’t need gold for protection. So he sold his gold and bought stocks on the assumption that the economy would grow under Trump.

    But earlier this year, Stan has said he’s buying gold again. What that means is that people are finally reconsidering the reflation trade. Tax reform is still a big question mark. And when’s the last time you heard a word about infrastructure spending?

    Investors will once again flock into gold once reality sets in. Mix in rising geopolitical tensions in Asia and the Middle East, and gold’s future looks bright.

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Nov 16

Today’s News 16th November 2017

  • Brandon Smith Warns: The Saudi Coup Signals War And The New World Order Reset

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    For years now, I have been warning about the relationship of interdependency between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and how this relationship, if ended, would mean disaster for the petrodollar system and by extension the dollar's world reserve status.

    In my recent articles 'Lies And Distractions Surrounding The Diminishing Petrodollar' and 'The Economic End Game Continues,' I point out that the death of the dollar as the premier petrocurrency is actually a primary goal for establishment globalists.

    Why?

    Because in an effort to achieve what they sometimes call the "global economic reset," or the "new world order," a more publicly accepted centralized global economy and monetary framework is paramount. And, this means the eventual implementation of a single world currency and a single global economic and political authority above and beyond the dollar system.

    But, it is not enough to simply initiate such socially and fiscally painful changes in a vacuum. The banking powers are not interested in taking any blame for the suffering that would be dealt to the masses during the inevitable upheaval (or blame for the suffering that has already been caused). Therefore, a believable narrative must be crafted. A narrative in which political intrigue and geopolitical crisis make the "new world order" a NECESSITY; one that the general public would accept or even demand as a solution to existing instability and disaster.

    That is to say, the globalists must fashion a propaganda story to be used in the future, in which "selfish" nation-states abused their sovereignty and created conditions for calamity, and the only solution was to end that sovereignty and place all power into the hands of a select few "wise and benevolent men" for the greater good of the world.

    I believe the next phase of the global economic reset will begin in part with the breaking of petrodollar dominance. An important element of my analysis on the strategic shift away from the petrodollar has been the symbiosis between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been the single most important key to the dollar remaining as the petrocurrency from the very beginning.

    The very first oil exploration and extraction deal in Saudi Arabia was sought by the vast international oil cartels of Royal Dutch Shell, Near East Development Company, Anglo-Persian, etc., but eventually fell into the hands of none other than the Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. The dark history of Standard Oil aside, this meant that Saudi business would be handled primarily by American interests. And the Western thirst for oil, especially after World War I, would etch our relationship with the reigning monarchy in stone.

    A founding member of OPEC, Saudi Arabia was one of the few primary oil-producing nations that maintained an oil pipeline that expedited processing and bypassed the Suez Canal. (The pipeline was shut down, however, in 1983). This allowed Standard Oil and the United States to tiptoe around the internal instability of Egypt, which had experienced ongoing conflict which finally culminated in the civil war of 1952.

    Considered puppets of the British Empire at the time, the ruling elites of Egypt were toppled by the Muslim Brotherhood, leading to the eventual demise of the British pound sterling as the top petro-currency and the world reserve. The British economy faltered and has never since returned to its former glory.

    Perhaps we are seeing some parallels here?

    Civil war may not be in the cards for Saudi Arabia; so far a quiet coup has been rather effective in completely changing the power base of the nation over the past few years. The primary beneficiary of that change in power has been crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who only answers to King Salman, an 81-year-old ruler barely involved in leadership.

    To understand how drastic this coup has been, consider this – for decades Saudi Kings maintained political balance by doling out vital power positions to separate, carefully chosen successors. Positions such as Defense Minister, the Interior Ministry and the head of the National Guard. Today, Mohammed Bin Salman controls all three positions. Foreign policy, defense matters, oil and economic decisions and social changes are now all in the hands of one man.

    But the real question is, who is behind that man?

    Well, the recent political purge of various "neo-conservative" tied Saudis might lead some to believe that Prince Mohammed is seeking an end to globalist control of Saudi oil and politics.

    These people would be wrong for a number of reasons.

    Prince Mohammed's revolutionary "Vision for 2030" developed as he entered power was touted as a means to end Saudi reliance on oil revenues to support economic stability. However, I believe this plan is NOT about ending reliance on oil, but ending reliance on the U.S. dollar. In fact, the plan indicates a move away from the dollar as the world's petrocurrency and a de-pegging of the Riyal from the dollar.

    Prince Mohammed has also established much deeper ties to Russia and China, creating bilateral agreements which may end up removing the dollar as the mechanism for oil trade between the nations.

    You would think that this kind of strategy would be highly damaging to the West and to American interests in particular and that the corporate establishment would be doing everything in their power to stop it. However, this is not at all the case. In reality, the globalist establishment is fully behind Mohammed Bin Sulman's "Vision for 2030."

    Corporate behemoths such as the Carlyle Group (Bush family, etc), Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Blackrock have ALL been backing the Vision for 2030 and Prince Mohammed through his Public Investment Fund (PIF), of which he is the chairman.

    Trillions in capital are flowing through PIF, most of it from the coffers of globalist establishment companies. Once again I point out that the so-called "East versus West division" and the Eastern "opposition" to the globalists is complete nonsense; banking elites and globalists are the true influence behind the move away from the dollar, as the Saudi example and the Vision for 2030 shows. The end of the dollar as world reserve works in their favor — it is planned.

    This does not end with the death of the dollar's petro-status, though. These kinds of upsets in the power dynamic invariably lead to war. War acts as a kind of cleansing of the historical record; it tends to distract the public, for generations, from those that truly benefit from geopolitical and economic strife.

    Prince Mohammed has already triggered conflicts with Yemen and Qatar, but this seems to have only been a precursor to greater kinetic displays of force. The next target appears to be Lebanon, and eventually Iran and Syria.

    The first signal came with the resignation of Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad Hariri on November 4, a resignation Hezbollah claims was forced by the Saudi government. Interestingly, Saad Hariri recorded the televised announcement in Saudi Arabia.

    This shocking disruption to Lebanon's political apparatus has been followed by an escalation in saber rattling by Saudi Arabia against Hezbollah (which is considered by many to be merely a puppet organization of the Iranian government). If official polls are to be believed, the Lebanese population is in extreme disagreement over Iran and Hezbollah, which could add to internal divisions and civil war if tensions continue to grow. Add to this the suspected (but officially denied) "secret visit" by Prince Mohammed to Israel in September, and the newfound "friendship" between the two nations in the months since, and we have quite a bit of momentum for a war in Lebanon.

    The question is, will a war between Saudi Arabia and perhaps Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon remain a proxy war, or will it gestate into a wider conflict drawing in Iran, Syria and perhaps even the U.S.?

    First, keep in mind that Prince Mohammed has already frozen and/or confiscated approximately $800 billion in assets from his imprisoned political enemies. More than enough to fund a war campaign for several years, maybe even an expanded war against Iran.

    Trump's rhetoric against Iran and his re-institution of sanctions seems to coincide nicely with the increasing tension between the Saudis and Hezbollah. Israel attempted an invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and was soundly and embarrassingly defeated. But, the Israeli government does still showcase a willingness to enter into a ground war in the region, and with the combined forces of the Saudis and the Israelis, we might see a different outcome. Iran would be forced to intervene.

    Syria under the Assad regime would also most likely be drawn in through its mutual defense pact with Iran.

    I believe that major powers like the U.S. and Russia will probably not become involved in a wider sense, but continue to insert covert forces into the region and support opposing nations through funding and armaments. As with North Korea, I would not expect "world war" on the scale of a nuclear conflagration to develop in the Middle East.

    What I do expect is something far more devastating – namely an accelerated disintegration of our already collapsing economic structure as war plays out abroad and the loss of the dollar's world reserve and petro-status hits us hard at home. So far, in my view it appears that the insanity in Saudi Arabia, (along with the continued war drums against North Korea), is a perfect trigger point that provides a catalyst for mass distraction.

    World economic war is the real name of the game here, as the globalists play puppeteers to East and West. It is a geopolitical crisis they will have created to engineer public support for a solution they predetermined.

  • Australia Votes Overwhelmingly For Gay Marriage After Heated Campaign

    It was only twenty years ago that the last Australian state, Tasmania, decriminalised male homosexuality. Whether one is in favour or not, Australia had a lot of catching up to do with other western nations.

    In an Australian general election, there is no such thing as a “low turnout” since voting is compulsory for citizens. In contrast, the vote on gay marriage was voluntary and conducted by post, following two failed attempts by the government to hold a compulsory national vote that was denied twice in the Australian Senate. Senators opposing a compulsory vote had expressed concern that it would be more costly and exacerbate hate campaigns. Nevertheless, it was costly (A$100million or $76 million) and, at times, the campaign became violent. For example, a man was charge last month after former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, an opponent of same-sex marriage, was headbutted. Abbott called the incident “politically motivated violence.” Police were called to intervene in a confrontation between rival groups at the University of Sydney, while some workers complained that they were harassed if they did not show support for the “Yes” vote.

    Despite its voluntary nature, 12.7 million people, 79.5% of those eligible to vote, participated in the poll during an eight-week period. It asked one question.

    "Should the marriage law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?"

    With the votes counted, the “Yes” vote gained more than 60%, as the BBC reports.

    Australians have overwhelmingly voted in favour of legalising same-sex marriage in a historic poll. The non-binding postal vote showed 61.6% of people favour allowing same-sex couples to wed, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said. Jubilant supporters have been celebrating in public spaces, waving rainbow flags and singing and dancing. A bill to change the law was introduced into the Senate late on Wednesday. It will now be debated for amendments. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said his government would aim to pass legislation in parliament by Christmas.

     

    "[Australians] have spoken in their millions and they have voted overwhelmingly yes for marriage equality," Mr Turnbull said after the result was announced. "They voted yes for fairness, yes for commitment, yes for love."

    The Yes campaign argued that it was a debate about equality. The No campaign put the focus on the definition of family, raising concerns about how issues like gender will be taught in schools. Australia's chief statistician David Kalisch said about 7.8 million people voted in support of same-sex marriage, with approximately 4.9 million against it. He said participation was higher than 70% in 146 of Australia's 150 electorates. All but 17 electorates supported changing the law.

     

    "This is outstanding for a voluntary survey and well above other voluntary surveys conducted around the world," Mr Kalisch said. "It shows how important this issue is to many Australians."

    As the FT reports, “Yes” supporters celebrated after the result was announced, with high-profile business and celebrity figures getting involved.

    The resounding victory for the Yes campaign sparked celebrations across the country, with supporters wearing rainbow colours and glitzy costumes at events to reflect on the eight-week campaign for marriage equality. Alan Joyce, the Irish-born Qantas chief executive who donated A$1m to the Yes campaign, performed a jig on stage at an event in Sydney, declaring it was an “amazing result, on an amazing day”. Tiernan Brady, director of Australians for equality, a lobby group that co-ordinated the Yes campaign, said voters had reaffirmed that most deeply-held Australian value — a “fair go for all”.

     

    “Their message today is one of confidence in their values and their country. Their message to LGBTI people is one of generosity and inclusion. Their message to politicians is clear — it is time for them to do their jobs and pass marriage equality,” he said.

     

    The vote in favour of marriage equality marks a watershed moment for gay rights in Australia, which remains one of the last English speaking developed nations that has not yet implemented the reform.

    While the draft bill to legalise same-sex marriage is expected to pass the Australian parliament by Christmas, it has ignited division within the ruling political party, according to the FT.

    However, Mr Turnbull is likely to face a tricky internal battle within his own party from a group of conservative lawmakers, who have used the issue as a proxy war for control of the ruling Liberal party. They are pushing for exemptions to individuals or companies who did not want to provide services to gay weddings due to religious or “conscientious” objections. The exemptions would allow parents to withdraw their children from school classes that do not accord with their own understanding of marriage. They would also enable people to discuss their traditional views about marriage without fear of legal penalties. Tony Abbott, a prominent No campaigner and former prime minister, said this week more protections were needed to guarantee freedom of conscience and freedom of religion.

     

    “I look forward to a parliamentary process that improves on (the draft bill) to implement same-sex marriage with freedom of conscience for all, not just the churches,” he said. Critics say approving such exemptions would roll back years of anti-discrimination laws and encroach on protections for gay and lesbian people.

    The following infographic from the FT shows the 26 nations which had legalised same-sex marriage before Australia’s landmark “Yes” vote.


     

  • Doug Casey On Why Race Will Break The US Apart, Part I

    Via CaseyResearch.com,

    “America is a marvelous idea, a unique idea, fantastic idea. I’m extremely pro-American. But America has ceased to exist.”

    Longtime readers will recognize this. It’s one of Doug Casey’s more memorable quotes.

    I’m sharing it with you today because Doug said something last week that touched on this radical idea. He said the United States could break apart due to racial tensions.

    Most people haven’t considered this possibility. After all, the U.S. is supposedly a “melting pot” where different races can coexist peacefully.

    So, a few days ago, I called Doug to learn why he thinks this. Below is the first part of our discussion.

    *  *  *

    Justin: Doug, the last time we spoke, you said the United States could break apart because of racial tensions. Why do you think that?

    Doug: Well, I used to know a guy by the name of Michael Hart. He would come to our Eris Society meetings in Aspen. Eris was a private annual event I ran for 30 years, for authors, scientists, and people who were well-known for something. It enabled people who might not otherwise meet to get to know each other and exchange ideas. Michael was a university prof, best known for his book The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential People in History.

    One year, he gave a speech about how the U.S. was going to break up into smaller countries, and part of it would be on racial lines.

    I thought that unlikely at the time; it was about 1990. Now, I think Michael may have been right.

    I’ll explain why in a minute. But we should first discuss the origins of democracy.

    Democracy originated in 6th-century BC Greece. It was a unique and workable method of governance for city-states of a few thousand people. And in the case of Athens, as many as 40,000 people.

    But these people all shared a common language. They worshipped the same gods. They were the same ethnicity. They had the same customs and beliefs.

    They were like an extended clan with many similarities. Differences were among individuals, not groups.

    When the U.S. democracy was started, it was much like that. It was very much like a Greek city-state, an extended one. Everybody shared culture, ethnicity, language, habits, and so forth, with just minor regional differences. People saw themselves first as New Yorkers, Virginians, or whatever, just as the Greeks saw themselves first as Athenians, Thebans, Corinthians, or many scores of other polities.

    As you know I don’t believe in democracy, I believe in personal freedom. Democracy is workable enough in something like a cohesive city-state. But absolutely not once voters get involved in economic issues—the poor will always vote themselves a free lunch, and the rich will buy votes to give themselves more. Democracy always devolves into class warfare.

    In ancient Greece, if you weren’t a landowner you weren’t respected. In the U.S., voting rules were determined by the States, and originally, everywhere, you had to be a landowner. That meant you had something to lose. But that’s not the case anymore.

    Justin: What’s changed?

    Doug: For one thing, anybody can vote. People who are penniless. Eighteen-year-olds who have no knowledge or experience and are fresh out of the indoctrination of high school. Lots of non-citizens, probably millions, manage to vote. Voting has become, as H.L. Mencken said, just an advance auction on stolen goods.

    For another thing, today, the United States is multicultural. America used to have its own distinct culture; the U.S. no longer stands for anything.

    Race is just the most obvious thing that divides people. You can see that somebody’s of a different race just by looking at them. The old saying about birds of a feather flocking together is basically true. It’s very politically incorrect to make that observation, of course. Certainly if you’re white. But it’s factually accurate. Most things that are PC fly in the face of reality.

    If people are of a different race, it increases the chances that they’re not going to share other things. The key, for a rational person, is to judge people as individuals. Race, sex, religion, and cultural background are quick indicators of who a person might be. As are dress, accent, attitude, and what they say among many other indicators. You need as much data as you can get to help you judge what the other person will do, and who he is. It’s actually quite stupid to not discriminate among people you encounter. But then the whole PC movement is quite stupid by its very nature.

    But, back to the subject, you can’t have a multicultural democracy. And you especially can’t have one where the government is making laws that have to do with economics…where it allocates wealth from one group to another group.

    So, sure. The U.S. is going to break apart, and you can certainly see it happening along racial lines. The active racism among many blacks isn’t an anomaly.

    Justin: I agree that racial tensions are rising in this country. But that’s clearly not the only source of tension. What else might cause the U.S. to break apart?

    Doug: Cultural differences.

    The Pacific Northwest draws people who like the idea of ecotopia. Southern California draws a very different type of person than Northern California does. People that live in Las Vegas are quite different from the people that live in Omaha, and very different again from people that live in New York.

    The U.S. has turned into a domestic empire. It’s no longer the country that it was when it was founded.

    And the constitution itself has changed at least as much. It’s a dead letter. Mainly window dressing. It’s been interpreted out of existence.

    Sure, the U.S. is going to break up; throughout history the colors of the map on the wall have always been running. I don’t think the racial situation in the near term is going to get better. And the breakdown of the culture is definitely getting worse.

    On the other hand, there’s more racial intermingling and marriage now than there’s ever been in the past. If we look down the road 1,000 years or so, racial distinctions will probably disappear. The average person will probably look like most Brazilians. Brazil, incidentally, is theoretically an integrated country—but there’s still a huge amount of racism. Go farther into the future, when homo sapiens has conquered the planets and hopefully the stars, and we’ll likely transform not only into new races, but new species. But I don’t think any of us are looking that far ahead.

    *  *  *

    Stay tuned for Part II of our discussion tomorrow. In it, Doug explains why the U.S. is “no longer a country”… And gets into all the problems that are bubbling to the surface…

  • Corruption In China Risks A Soviet-Style Collapse – Party's Graft Buster

    Yang Xiadou is the Party’s number two man in Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption in the Chinese Communist Party – although some have seen this, in part, as a convenient way for Xi to bolster his power base.

    During the 19th Party Congress last month, Yang was asked about the anti-corruption drive and how to achieve a balance between human rights and party discipline. Yang replied that, having worked in the Tibet Autonomous Region for many years, human rights was an “interesting question”. He recounted a conversation he had with a US assistant secretary of state where he likened Abraham Lincoln freeing slaves in America to China’s actions in Tibet.

    “I said in the hearts of Chinese people, Lincoln is a hero, because he freed the slaves.

     

    On this point the Chinese people and the American people have the same understanding – this is a human rights issue.

     

    In turn, we freed the serfs in Tibet, how come American friends cannot understand this? From Lincoln’s perspective, he should have supported China’s overturning of the serfdom in Tibet.”

    No matter that the Central Tibetan Administration, usually called the “Tibetan Government in Exile” has a starkly different view.

    Yang’s ability to “paint broad canvases” was in evidence again when he stated that corruption in China could lead to a collapse similar to the Soviet Union. According to the Times of India.

    China must step up its battle against corruption in order to safeguard against a Soviet-style collapse, the country's second most senior graft buster said in an editorial on Wednesday. Yang Xiaodu, the deputy secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, who was promoted to the ruling Communist Party's 25-strong Politburo last month, said failure would risk the "red country changing colour".

    In unusually direct and strongly worded criticism of previous administrations, Yang said "in a previous period", corruption had been allowed to fester to such an extent that the party's leadership had weakened, with supervision soft, and ideology apathetic.

     

    "It had developed to the point where if not rectified, the country could change colour," Yang wrote in the official People's Daily.

     

    "The future fate of the party and the country's people could follow the same old road to ruin as the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc."

    It's well known that senior Party officials warn their underlings of the need to study the collapse of the Soviet Union and the importance of maintaining discipline and tight control. China analysts are viewing these comments by Yang and others as evidence that Xi’s crackdown is not letting up despite the former Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, Wang Qishan, stepping down at the Party Congress.

    Writing in the People’s Daily last Saturday, Wang’s replacement and Politburo Standing Committee member, Zhao Leji, warned that if the Party lost the battle against corruption it risked “being erased by history”. Yang emphasised the need to press forward in the eliminating corruption, as the Times of India notes.

    Yang said Xi's anti-corruption achievements had been revolutionary in "turning the blade of the knife inward".

     

    But he said unhealthy pollutants within the party's political ecosystem had yet to be completely cleansed, and the anti-corruption fight remained "grave and complex”.

     

    "There is no road for retreat, only forward in attack, and definitely no pause or relax," Yang wrote. China has plans for a national supervision law and a new commission next year to oversee the expansion of Xi's graft fight. Yang, who is also minister of supervision, had been Wang's deputy since 2014 and his promotion to the Politburo is seen as another display of the importance the central leadership attaches to fighting corruption.

    In the wake of the Party Congress, we can deduce that Xi means business on deleveraging and cooling the property bubble, stepping up efforts to reduce pollution, in addition to attacking corruption. We continue to believe that China is entering a more risky phase than financial markets are discounting at this point.

  • There's A New Nation In Space… And You Can Apply For Citizenship Right Now

    Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

    The world’s very first space nation launched this week, but despite the fact that 300,000 members applied for citizenship over the last year, no people were on board.

    The “nation” launched early Sunday from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, CNET reported this week, as “an Orbital ATK Antares rocket carrying a CubeSat named Asgardia-1.”

    The satellite is the size of a milk carton and called the “Space Kingdom of Asgardia.”

    The creators lauded the launch as establishing the first nation to have all of its territory in space, though no countries have acknowledged its statehood.

    For now, the primary benefit of “citizenship” is being able to store data on Asgardia-1 while it’s in orbit.

    Even so, the satellite nation has terms and conditions and is subject to Austrian copyright law, so it is not free of earthly constraints.

    In fact, the creators intend to bring human forms of governance to the new space nation, noting on their website the virtues of democracy and promoting parliamentary elections.

    They also have a proposed constitution and laws and intend to elect 12 cabinet ministers and a head of state.

    Only those who support the constitution will have the right to upload data to the satellite. Asgardia will have taxes, though only businesses will be forced to contribute. Individual taxes will apparently be voluntary. The website explains that “people can decide what amount of tax they would like to pay.”

    The country will also have passports, IDs, a national bank, business regulations, and a cryptocurrency called SOLAR.

    According to Asgardia’s website, the nation “was created with three top goals in mind: to ensure the peaceful use of space, to protect the Earth from space hazards, and to create a demilitarized and free scientific base of knowledge in space.”

    It also seeks to “create a mirror of humanity in space, but without Earthly division into states, religions, and nations,” though it’s unclear how it will be free of states by establishing a state.

    The founder, Dr. Igor Ashurbeyli, “is a thinker and visionary who has been contemplating Asgardia as a first space nation as long as he’s been alive,” the website notes.

    He is a scientist and businessman of Russian-Azerbaijani descent and is currently serving a five-year term as “Head of the Nation.”

    Asgardia’s long-term plans include establishing actual human settlements in space, on the moon, and “perhaps even more distance colonies,” CNET reports.

    For now, the satellite housed in a Cygnus spacecraft is slated to dock at the international space station on Tuesday. In a month, it will climb to a higher altitude and enter an orbit.

    People from all countries can apply for citizenship by simply creating a login and accepting the constitution and terms and conditions.

  • Trump's Border Wall Is No Match For Mexican Drug-Shooting Bazooka

    While everyone salivates over the board game, ‘Cards Against Humanity’s’ latest political stunt in buying a small piece of border land in attempt prevent President Trump from erecting his proposed Mexican wall, there is a greater crisis lurking that no wall will stop: a Mexican drug-shooting Bazooka.

    New evidence from Mexican daily El Universal suggests a wall would do very little to stem the flow of drugs across the border, as drug cartels have resorted to mobile vans using a tubular mechanism powdered by compressed-air to launch drugs and other illegal objects  into the United States.

    Last week, the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) and the Mexican Army seized a mobile bazooka housed inside a van on the border town of Agua Prieta, Sonora, boarding Douglas, Arizona.

    According to authorities, the contents with-in the van included not just the drug bazooka, but 825 kilos (1818.81 pounds) of marijuana, cartridges, and an array of firearms of different caliber.

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

    The Mexican daily El Universal provides additional detail of the military operation seizing the bazooka van:

    It transpired that in a search diligence, authorized by a judge as part of a preliminary investigation of the Ministerial Agency for Criminal Investigations (AMIC), on November 09, agents discovered several packages of marijuana and the van designed with a sliding roof where a bazooka comes out to launch the drug packages to the United States.   

    The article ends to say, this is not the first time a drug bazooka has been found. Back in 2016, the same boarder municipality “secured” a vehicle with a “projectile type attachment for the launching of drug packages”.

    Mexican drug cartels have been smuggling all types of illegal items into the United States for years. This is nothing new, but bazooka vans are a new phenomenon that no matter the height of the wall – drugs will be shot in. On the map below, bazooka vans have been seized on the Mexican border parallel to Douglas Arizona, which happens to be a major port of entry for drugs.

    Mexican authorities have had a busy year with more than 24,000 homicides on pace for the most violent year in history, as you guested it –  the drug war is fueling the crisis. Perhaps, that is why Mexican drug cartels are resorting to bold techniques such as bazooka vans and even drones – anything to stay ahead of the competition.

    As we noted in October,

    2017 might be the most violent year in Mexican history, one NGO claims. Semáforo Delictivo said that, due to the 24,000 homicides between January and September, the year is proving even worse than 2011, when President Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs led to 22,000 homicides.

     

    President of the organization, Santiago Roel, said that 73 percent of murders committed in the first eight months of the year were related to organized crime. He said that in 2007, there were 2,828 executions. Now, a decade later, 18,017 have been reported.

     

    All high-impact crimes have increased during the current year, including abductions, homicides and grand theft auto at gunpoint. According to Roel, the main cause of violence and corruption is the “Mérida Plan,” which focuses on eradicating drug cartels. 

    Evidence above suggests Mexican drug cartels will continue to innovate through technology as the drug war spirals out of control.

    For Trump’s current and possible future wall, it’s already obsolete, as cartels are now shooting in drug with a trajectory of over 500ft. 

    The evolutionary phase is quite clear– drones are next. So why even build a wall?

  • AI Researcher Warns Skynet Killer-Robots "Easier To Achieve That Self-Driving Cars"

    A group of the world’s leading AI researchers and humanitarian organizations are warning about lethal autonomous weapons systems, or killer robots, that select and kill targets without human control.

    The group alleges killer robots now exist and the bulk of these technological developments are military funded in UK, China, Israel, Russia, and the United States. Although, fully autonomous weapons systems have not yet been deployed on the battlefield, the action by the group to ban lethal autonomous weapons is a preemptive ban before the technology falls into the wrong hands. The group calls on the citizens of the world to contact their representatives and for countries to work together to form international treaties, before it’s too late.

    Member List of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots:

    • Human Rights Watch
    • Article 36
    • International Committee for Robot Arms Control
    • PAX
    • Association for Aid and Relief Japan:
    • Mines Action Canada
    • Nobel Women’s Initiative
    • Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs
    • Seguridad Humana en América Latina y el Caribe (SEHLAC)
    • Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

    Future of Life Institute released a video yesterday titled: Slaughterbots.

    The video portrays not to far in the distant future of a military firm unveiling a drone with shaped explosives that can target and kill humans on its own. Further in, the video abruptly changes pace, when bad guys get ahold of the technology and unleash swarms of killer robots onto the streets of Washington, D.C. and various academic institutions.

    The video is aggressive and graphic but outlines if the technology was misused it could have severe consequences – such as civilian mass causality events.

    Stuart Russell, a world leading AI researcher at the University of California in Berkeley, showed the video above to the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons on Monday. He said, “the technology illustrated in the film is simply an integration of existing capabilities. It is not science fiction. In fact, it is easier to achieve than self-driving cars, which require far higher standards of performance.”

    Russell wants a preemptive ban on the technology before it’s too late. He claims the window to halt such technologies is closing and warns that autonomous weapons, such as drones, tanks and automated machine guns are imminent.

    The Guardian adds,

    The military has been one of the largest funders and adopters of artificial intelligence technology.

     

    The computing techniques help robots fly, navigate terrain, and patrol territories under the seas. Hooked up to a camera feed, image recognition algorithms can scan video footage for targets better than a human can.

     

    An automated sentry that guards South Korea’s border with the North draws on the technology to spot and track targets up to 4km away.  

    The International Committee for Robot Arms Control is calling upon the international community for a treaty against autonomous weapon systems.

    Given the rapid pace of development of military robotics and the pressing dangers that these pose to peace and international security and to civilians in conflict, we call upon the international community for a legally binding treaty to prohibit the development, testing, production and use of autonomous weapon systems in all circumstances.  

    Human Rights Watch is another organization calling for the preventive measures to stop the machines…

     The development of fully autonomous weapons—“killer robots”—that could select and engage targets without human intervention need to be stopped to prevent a future of warfare and policing outside of human control and responsibility.

     

    Human Rights Watch investigates these and other problematic weapons systems and works to develop and monitor international standards to protect civilians from armed violence.  

    Conclusion: The evolution of targeted killing practices have certainly evolved to something on the lines of the Terminator, a fantasy/science movie where Skynet an artificial intelligence system gained self- awareness, and decided to wage a war on humans. Will Stuart Russell and his team of AI researches be able to stop the trend in autonomous weapon systems before it’s too late?

  • Leonardo Painting Sells For A Record $450 Million (Or 62,500 Bitcoin)

    How do you know we are living through the biggest bubble in history? Simple: when a painting, doesn’t matter who the artist is, doesn’t matter who rare and prized, sells for half a billion dollars.

    A rediscovered painting by Leonardo da Vinci broke the record price for art at an auction on Wednesday night, selling for just over $450 million (or a bargain basement 62,500 bitcoin to the Chinese money launderer who bought it) at Christie’s in New York. The last da Vinci in private hands sold nearly 4 times above its estimated price after a fevered, 90-minute long round of bidding. It is widely believed to be the most expensive piece of art ever sold.

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    The 500-year-old “Christ as Salvator Mundi,” which was originally estimated at $100 million, was the star of Christie’s evening sale of postwar and contemporary art, what Bloomberg described an unconventional move by the auction house because of its vintage. The previous auction record for an Old Master painting was held by Peter Paul Rubens, whose “The Massacre of the Innocents” fetched $76.5 million in 2002.

    “Salvator Mundi,” Latin for Saviour of the World, was one of only 15 surviving works by Leonardo da Vinci and depicts Jesus Christ in a flowing robe, holding a crystal orb and raising his right hand in benediction.

    The 67.5cm tall portrait, which once belonged to England’s King Charles I in the 17th century, disappeared around 1900. In 2005, it was bought at an estate sale and, after six years of research and restoration, attributed to da Vinci, the first such rediscovery in more than 100 years. Before the auction, Christie’s secured an irrevocable $100 million bid by an anonymous investor meaning it was sure to sell.

    The painting, called “Salvator Mundi,” Italian for “Savior of the World,” is one of fewer than 20 paintings by Leonardo known to exist and the only one in private hands. It was being sold by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev’s family trust. The fertilizer king purchased it for $127.5 million in 2013 and it’s been at the heart of an international legal battle. Rybolovlev assembled a $2 billion trove with the help of art entrepreneur Yves Bouvier, but in recent years has been selling off works from the collection, often at steep discounts.

    Well, even he will be happy with the 250% return in just 4 years. Also happy will be Christies: the $450 price also includes $50.3 million in premiums paid to Christie’s for its services by the buyer.

    Jussi Pylkkanen, auctioneer for the evening, opened bidding on the piece at $70m and offers rapidly vaulted higher, according to the FT. Gasps broke out throughout the salesroom in Rockefeller Centre when an offer hit $200m. Bidders interested in the Da Vinci — lot 9 of the evening’s sale — were given special red paddles in the salesroom, a move the auction house attributed to the work’s high worth, although much of the action was fuelled by phone bidders.

    Some more details on the painting’s troubled recent history:

    Following its rediscovery and sale in 2013, the painting was at the centre of a legal feud between current owner Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian billionaire and owner of AS Monaco football club, and Yves Bouvier, the owner of Natural Le Coultre, one of the largest fine art storage and shipping specialists.

     

    The protracted legal battle centred around claims that Mr Bouvier allegedly bought the painting for $80m and sold it to Mr Rybolovlev for $127.5m, a near $50m difference. A small group of critics have even questioned the painting’s authenticity.

    After its original disappearance, the painting was acquired in 2005, badly damaged and partly painted-over, by a consortium of art dealers who paid less than $10,000 (8,445 euros). The art dealers restored the painting and documented its authenticity as a work by Leonardo.

    Christie’s says most scholars agree that the painting is by Leonardo, though some critics have questioned the attribution and some say the extensive restoration muddies the work’s authorship. Christie’s capitalized on the public’s interest in Leonardo, considered one of the greatest artists of all time, with a media campaign that labeled the painting “The Last Da Vinci.” The work was exhibited in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London and New York before the sale.

    * * *

    Other paintings on offer on Wednesday evening included works by Mark Rothko, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol. Christie’s said it was in part the inclusion of the 32ft Warhol painting Sixty Last Suppers, which riffed on Da Vinci’s famed The Last Supper, that the house attempted to secure ‘Salvator Mundi’ for auction. ‘Sixty Last Suppers’ features a black-and-white silkscreen grid of 60 prints of ‘The Last Supper’ and was among the last works created by Mr Warhol before his death in 1987.

    And just to confirm that everything around you is indeed one giant bubble, the exquisite piece of modernist “art” you see below, sold for more than $46 million.

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  • The Moment Gary Cohn Realized His Entire Economic Policy Is A Disaster

    Ever since 2012 (see “How The Fed’s Visible Hand Is Forcing Corporate Cash Mismanagement“)  we have warned that as a result of the Fed’s flawed monetary policy and record low rates, corporations have been incentivized not to invest in growth and allocate funds to capital spending (the result has been an unprecedented decline in capex), but to engage in the quickest, and most effective – if only in the short run – shareholder friendly actions possible, namely stock buybacks.

    We got a vivid confirmation of that recently when Credit Suisse showed that the only buyer of stock since the financial crisis has been the corporate sector’, i.e. companies repurchasing their own shares…

    … with SocGen showing previously that virtually all the net debt issued this century has been used to fund stock buybacks.

    While one can debate the implications, the above two charts show one thing clearly: corporate incentives have been perverted in the past decade, and instead of allocating capital to ensure long-term business growth, companies have rushed to cash out, with shareholders benefiting the most, while management teams got record bonuses as a result of their stock price-linked compensation bogeys.

    The eagerness to shift incentives away from buybacks to capex is also the basis for much of Trump’s economic policy as designed over the past year by his top economic advisor, former Goldman COO Gary Cohn who is the White House Economic Council director. In fact, the motive behind the administration’s entire push for tax reform (cutting corporate tax rates) and offshore cash repatriation, is to the funds domestically, though not on buybacks and M&A (which also leads to “synergies” and other headcount reductions), but on reinvesting the funds in growing one’s business and hiring.

    Which is why we were amused to observe the following brief interchange yesterday between Gary Cohn and an audience made up of executives, where in the span of a few seconds Gary Cohn realized that his entire economic policy had been a disaster.

    During an event for the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, an editor at The Wall Street Journal asked the room: “If the tax reform bill goes through, do you plan to increase investment — your company’s investment, capital investment?” He asked for a show of hands.

    Alas, as the camera revealed, virtually nobody raised their hand.

    Responding to this “unexpected” lack of enthusiasm to invest in growth, Cohn had one question: “Why aren’t the other hands up?”

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    His confusion was understandable: this one simple experiment revealed that Cohn’s entire economic policy was a disaster. And while the former Goldman president tried to cover up his disappointment with laughter, the cognitive dissonance between the stated intention behind tax reform, and what it would ultimately achieve, or rather not achieve, was painfully obvious to everyone.

    Adding insult to injury, last month the White House released a paper arguing slashing the corporate tax rate would increase average household income.  Kevin Hassett, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) chairman, said on a call last month the main reason why cutting the corporate tax rate would boost wages is because doing so would make it less expensive for companies to invest in capital assets such as machines.

    “More assets like machines let workers produce more, and when workers can produce more, businesses can afford to pay their workers more,” he said last month. Unfortunately, virtually no CEOs have any intention of using freed up funds to reinvest in themselves.

    Ironically, Cohn’s epiphany took place just as tax reform is approaching the final stretch in Congress and it increasingly appears that at least some form of corporate tax cut will be enacted. We say ironically, because the only thing Trump’s reform will achieve is to dramatically accelerate recently slowing buybacks, which in turn will push stocks to new all time highs as price-indescriminate CFOs and Tresurers tells their favorite VWAP trading desk to just “wave it in.” Which means that the White House paper suggesting corporate tax cuts will boost household income is correct… if it focuses only on the incomes of the richest 1% of households.

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Nov 15

Today’s News 15th November 2017

  • How to Instantly Prove (Or Disprove) Russian Hacking of U.S. Election

    It’s newsworthy that CIA head Mike Pompeo recently met with Bill Binney – who designed the NSA’s electronic surveillance system – about potential proof that the DNC emails were leaked rather than hacked.

    It’s also noteworthy that the usual suspects – Neocon warmongers such as Max Boot – have tried to discredit both Binney and Pompeo.

    But there’s a huge part of the story that the entire mainstream media is missing …

    Specifically, Binney says that the NSA has long had in its computers information which can prove exactly who hacked the DNC … or instead prove that the DNC emails were leaked by a Democratic insider.

    Remember – by way of background – that the NSA basically spies on everyone in America … and stores the data long-term.

    After the story of Pompeo’s meeting with Binney broke, Binney told Washington’s Blog:

    Here’s what they would have from the programs you list [i.e. NSA’s Fairview, Stormbrew and Blarney spying programs, which Edward Snowden revealed] plus hundreds if not thousands of trace route programs embedded in switches in the US and around the world.

     

    First, from deep packet inspection, they would have the originator and ultimate recipient (IP) of the packets plus packet series 32 bit number identifier and all the housekeeping data showing the network segments/path and time to go though the network.  And, of course, the number of packet bits. With this they would know to where and when the data passed.

     

    From the data collection, they would have all the data as it existed in the server taken from.  That’s why I originally said if the FBI wanted Hillary’s email, all they have to do is ask NSA for them.

     

    All this is done by the Narus collection equipment in real time at line rates (620 mbps [mega bits per second,] for the STA-6400 and 10 gbps [giga bits per second] for the Insight equipment).

    Binney explained what these numbers mean:  Each Narus Insight device can monitor and record around 1,250,000 emails each second … or more than 39 trillion emails per year.

    Wired reported in 2006:

    Whistle-blower Klein allegedly learned that AT&T was installing Narus boxes in secure, NSA-controlled rooms in switching centers around the country.

    Binney told us there are probably 18 or so Narus recording systems throughout the U.S. deployed by the NSA at AT&T facilities, drawing our attention to the following NSA document leaked by Edward Snowden:

    Fairview At a Glance - Snowden

    And this AT&T graphic:

    AT&T Global Internet Centers

    (Binney has figured out their locations from publicly-available sources. He has also mapped out similar monitoring systems at Verizon facilities.)

    Binney also sent me hard-to-find company literature for Narus.  Here are some interesting excerpts:

    NarusInsight …

    • Provides full visibility into network traffic …
    • Analyzes at macro or micro level targeting specific or aggregate full-packet data for forensic analysis

    And:

    Universal data collection from links, routers, soft switches, IDS/IPS, databases, etc. provides total network view across the world’s largest IP networks.

    Binney also pointed me towards a couple of network engineering principles that show that figuring out who hacked the emails (or proving they were leaked) is well within NSA’s capabilities.

    Initially, when data is transmitted online, it is sent using the TCP/IP Packet format.  Put simply, data is not sent in a vacuum, but rather as part of a bundle containing a lot of other information.

    Here’s the TCP part of the bundle:

    And here’s the IP part of the bundle:

    So any data analyst can learn a tremendous amount about the source address of the sender, the destination address of the receiver and a boatload of other information by using a “packet sniffer” to  inspect the “packets” of information being sent over the web.

    Additionally, it’s simple to conduct “traceroute” searches. “Traceroute” is a computer network diagnostic tool for displaying the route and measuring transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol network.

    Wired reported in 2006:

    “Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”

    So NSA can easily basic packet sniffers and traceroutes, And see this.

    Remember, Edward Snowden says the NSA could easily determine who hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails:

    Binney told us:

    Snowden is right and the MSM is clueless.

     

    ***

     

    Do they have evidence that the Russians downloaded and later forwarded those emails to wikileaks? Seems to me that they need to answer those questions to be sure that their assertion is correct.

     

    ***

    You can tell from the network log who is going into a site.  I used that on networks that I had.  I looked to see who came into my LAN, where they went, how long they stayed and what they did while in my network.

     

    Further, if you needed to, you could trace back approaches through other servers etc. Trace Route and Trace Watch are good examples of monitoring software that help do these things.  Others of course exist … probably the best are in NSA/GCHQ and the other Five Eyes countries.  But, these countries have no monopoly on smart people that could do similar detection software.

    He explained:

    If it were the Russians, NSA would have a trace route to them and not equivocate on who did it.  It’s like using “Trace Route” to map the path of all the packets on the network.  In the program Treasuremap NSA has hundreds of trace route programs embedded in switches in Europe and hundreds more around the world.  So, this set-up should have detected where the packets went and when they went there.

    He added:

    As Edward Snowden said, once they have the IP’s and/or other signatures of 28/29 [the supposed Russian hacking groups] and DNC/HRC/etc. [i.e. the DNC and Hillary Rodham Clinton], NSA would use Xkeyscore to help trace data passing across the network and show where it went. [Background.]

     

    In addition, since Wikileaks is (and has been) a cast iron target for NSA/GCHQ/etc for a number of years there should be no excuse for them missing data going to any one associated with Wikileaks.

     

    ***

     

    Too many words means they don’t have clear evidence of how the data got to Wikileaks.

    And he stressed:

    If the idiots in the intelligence community expect us to believe them after all the crap they have told us (like WMD’s in Iraq and “no we don’t collect data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”) then they need to give clear proof of what they say. So far, they have failed to prove anything.

     

    Which suggests they don’t have proof and just want to war monger the US public into a second cold war with the Russians.

    After all, there’s lots and lots of money in that for the military-industrial-intelligence-governmental complex of incestuous relationships.

     

    ***

     

    If you recall, a few years ago they pointed to a specific building in China that was where hacks on the US were originating. So, let’s see the same from the Russians. They don’t have it. That’s why they don’t show it. They want to swindle us again and again and again. You can not trust these intelligence agencies period.

    And he told Newsweek:

    U.S. officials “know how many people [beyond the Russians] could have done this but they aren’t telling us anything. All they’re doing is promoting another cold war.”

     

    Binney … compared allegations about Russian hacks to previous U.S. fabrications of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the bombing of North Vietnam in 1964.

     

    “This is a big mistake, another WMD or Tonkin Gulf affair that’s being created until they have absolute proof” of Russian complicity in the DNC hacks, he charged during a Newsweek interview. He noted that after the Kremlin denied complicity in the downing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1983, the U.S. “exposed the conversations where [Russian pilots] were ordered to shoot it down.” Obama officials “have the evidence now” of who hacked the DNC, he charged. “So let’s see it, guys.“

    NSA either doesn’t have solid evidence of Russian hacking of DNC emails – which means the Russians didn’t do it – or those with the power to demand NSA produce the evidence simply haven’t asked the right questions.

  • ‘The Atlantic’ Commits Malpractice, Selectively Edits To Smear WikiLeaks

    Originally published on Medium by Caitlin Johnston (@Caitoz). This must-read rebuke of ‘The Atlantic’ republished with permission.

    —–

    ‘The Atlantic’ Commits Malpractice, Selectively Edits To Smear WikiLeaks

    Everyone was buzzing about the shocking, bombshell new report by The Atlantic yesterday, which revealed that Donald Trump Jr. and the WikiLeaks Twitter account had engaged in a “largely one-sided” conversation in private messages over the course of several months.

    Don Jr. actually comes off looking fairly normal in the report, while WikiLeaks comes off looking weird and sleazy in a way that will likely damage its reputation even further than the mainstream media campaign to smear the outlet already has. WikiLeaks is seen asking for favors Trump never fulfilled, making recommendations Trump Jr. didn’t act upon, and asking for leaks Trump Jr. never gave them, which when you step back and think about it are actually fairly normal things for a leak outlet to do, all things considered. But the following passage from the Atlantic report makes the whole thing look far darker:

    It is the third reason, though, Wikileaks wrote, that “is the real kicker.” “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” Wikileaks explained. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.”

    See that full stop at the end of the last sentence there? That’s journalistic malpractice. We learned this when Donald Trump Jr. published the entirety of his private messages with WikiLeaks in response to the Atlantic article:

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    The author of the Atlantic article, Julia Ioffe, put a period rather than a comma at the end of the text about not wanting to appear pro-Trump or pro-Russia, and completely omitted WikiLeaks’ statement following the comma that it considers those allegations slanderous. This completely changes the way the interaction is perceived.

    This is malpractice. Putting an ellipsis (…) and then omitting the rest of the sentence would have been sleazy and disingenuous enough, because you’re leaving out crucial information but at least communicating to the reader that there is more to the sentence you’ve left out, but replacing the comma with a period obviously communicates to the reader that there is no more to the sentence. If you exclude important information while communicating that you have not, you are blatantly lying to your readers.

    There is a big difference between “because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source” and “because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.” Those are not the same sentence. At all. Different meanings, different implications. One makes WikiLeaks look like it’s trying to hide a pro-Trump, pro-Russian agenda from the public, and the other conveys the exact opposite impression as WikiLeaks actively works to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns. This is a big deal.

    And it made a difference in the way WikiLeaks was perceived, as evidenced by the things people who read the article are saying about Ioffe’s version:

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    At first I wasn’t sure who was responsible for this highly egregious omission. It could have been Ioffe, an editor, the source of the leaked DMs or an intermediary deliverer who cut out the rest of the sentence. But then I read in The Guardian’s version of this story that Ioffe had actually tweeted to Don Jr. erroneously accusing him of excluding “a couple of missing pages” from his three-part release of his DMs with WikiLeaks. Ioffe eventually deleted the tweet, after it had been seen and reported on by many people, and clarified her error.

    From The Guardian, http://archive.is/TWaqv#selection-2753.0-2761.62

     

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    “My bad,” she says. Cute.

    What Ioffe’s tweets tell us is that she had full copies of the DMs, since she knew that there were more pages missing from the single tweet by Don Jr. that she had read. The deceitful omission that is the subject of this article was clarified in the first Don Jr. tweet she replied to. She read it, she analyzed it enough to figure out what was missing, but she said nothing about the fact that there were a lot more words in the sentence that she selectively edited out to convey the exact opposite of its meaning.

    I’m no detective, but it sure looks like this was a willful omission on Ioffe’s part made deliberately with the intention of damaging WikiLeaks’ reputation. I have been attempting to contact Ioffe, whose other work for the Atlantic includes such titles as “The History of Russian Involvement in America’s Race Wars” and “The Russians Are Glad Trump Detests the New Sanctions”; I will update this article if she has anything she’d like to say.

    Also worth noting is Ioffe’s omission of the fact that we’ve known since Julythat WikiLeaks had contacted Donald Trump Jr., as well as the fact that Julian Assange’s internet was cut at the time some of the Don Jr. messages were sent, meaning they may have been sent by someone else with access to the WikiLeaks account.

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    As happens every single time these pro-establishment manipulations take place, the rest of the mainstream media is picking up the Atlantic’s deceitful omission and running with it as fact. GQ ran with it quoting the selectively edited text. ABC and CBS both ran with the same fake quote even after including Don Jr.’s tweets which make it clear that text was omitted. The Guardian went so far as to use the Atlantic’s selectively edited quote, and then publish an update saying that Julian Assange had “suggested that the Atlantic had selectively edited the messages” without updating the original selectively edited quote or publishing the omitted text.

    What percentage of Guardian readers do you think went and read the private messages published by Don Jr. for themselves and learned that they’d been manipulated? One percent? Half of one percent? Why would they go read the published DMs if their trusted Guardian was presenting itself as conveying the full truth?

    The Atlantic’s senior editor is neocon David Frum, who is credited with coining the phrase “axis of evil” used in George W Bush’s jingoistic schtick, and its editor-in-chief is the neocon Jeffrey Goldberg. Its corporate owner, Atlantic Media Company, is chaired by New America’s David G. Bradley. New America is a DC think tank whose team includes representatives from Northrop Grumman and Raytheon along with big name media and corporate giants like CNN and Walmart, and whose top donors include Bill Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and the US State Department.

    So this immoral manipulation is not exactly surprising. These are virulently pro-establishment people.

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    Every time. This happens literally every single time there’s a new “bombshell” report on the Russiagate phenomenon, without exception. Twitter explodes, I’m bombarded with social media notifications telling me “HAHAHA I BET YOU FEEL LIKE AN IDIOT NOW”, then it turns out to be a basically innocuous revelation dishonestly blown up into something explosive by liars and manipulators in the establishment media. It’s fueled entirely by Trump derangement syndrome, not by facts.

    And people ask why I’m skeptical of the establishment Russia narrative. I’m skeptical because we’re being lied to every single step of the way by the news media who claim to be helping the public discover the truth. Trump lies because he’s a corrupt billionaire who knows he can get away with it, but that doesn’t make him a Russian agent. The media lies because they’re bolstering the stranglehold of America’s unelected power establishment, and that makes them traitors to our species.

    I stand with WikiLeaks. They’re doing more than anyone else to shake loose the nuts and bolts of the omnicidal death machine that is driving our species toward extinction, and that’s why that same death machine pours so much energy into tarnishing their reputation so their leaks will be dismissed. Even my fellow leftists have been largely won over by the ongoing psyop to paint Assange as an evil Nazi, and I simply have no respect for that perspective. When there’s such a massive, concerted effort by America’s unelected government to sabotage someone’s reputation, your belief that they’re bad is probably a deliberate and artificial construct.

    The mainstream media is not your friend, America. It’s time to send them the way of the dinosaur before they do the same to us.

    UPDATE 5 PM EST 11/14/17: Surprise, surprise, here’s Chris Hayes on MSNBC regurgitating Ioffe’s selectively edited quote on MSNBC. There will be others. There is no way to undo the damage that was done by this lie. At the end of the clip Ioffe actually asserts that her story confirms Russia-WikiLeaks collusion, without at any time acknowledging that the only thing in the story that makes it look that way is her selectively-edited quote.

     

    If Russiagate was valid, the people selling it to us wouldn’t have to lie about it every single step of the way.

    _________

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  • Sweden: The World's Biggest Housing Bubble Cracks

    Sweden’s property bubble is probably the world’s biggest, despite which it gets relatively little coverage in the mainstream financial media – although that might be about to change. Warnings about this bubble are not new. In March 2016, Moody’s issued a very explicit warning that Sweden’s negative interest rates were propagating an unsustainable housing bubble.

    The central banks of Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden (all rated Aaa stable) have been among the first to push policy rates into negative territory. A year into this novel experience, Moody's Investors Service concludes that, from among the three countries, Sweden is most at risk of an – ultimately unsustainable – asset bubble…

     

    "The Riksbank has not been successful in engineering higher inflation, while Sweden's GDP growth continues to be among the strongest in the advanced economies," says Kathrin Muehlbronner, a Senior Vice President at Moody's.

     

    "At the same time, the unintended consequences of the ultra-loose monetary policy are becoming increasingly apparent – in the form of rapidly rising house prices and persistently strong growth in mortgage credit", adds Ms Muehlbronner. In Moody's view, these trends will likely continue as interest rates will remain low, raising the risk of a house price bubble, with potentially adverse effects on financial stability as and when house prices reverse trends.

    In October 2016, the Riksbank’s Governor, Stefan Ingves, spoke in grave terms to the FT about the impact of negative rates on house prices.

    But despite a lack of drama so far, Mr Ingves remains worried about a bad ending due to risks over financial stability.

     

    He said: “It remains an issue because we are mismanaging our housing market. Our housing market isn’t under control, in my view.” The ratio of household debt to disposable income in Sweden is one of the highest in the world at more than 180 per cent and the Riksbank estimates it will continue to rise in the coming years.

    Last month, we revisited Sweden’s housing bubble (see here) pointing out.

    …nowhere would the bursting of Sweden's unprecedented asset bubble be more concerning than in the country's home prices.

     

    And to get a sense of just how bad it could get, here is a chart from Nordea's Andreas Wallstrom, showing nearly 140 years of real house prices in Sweden's capital, Stockholm, with an emphasis on the exponential surge in the past 2 decades. As Wallstromg sarcastically points out, the big irony in this is that "the current monetary policy regime, which aims for "price stability", started in 1995." Ah yes, presenting "price stability", aka the world's biggest housing bubble.

    On Monday, Reuters reported that SEB’s Housing Price Indicator suffered its second biggest ever drop this month.

    Swedes turned less optimistic on the housing market in November, a report showed, after figures suggesting a long run of price rises may be coming to an end amid signals that authorities will squeeze mortgage borrowers to reduce the risk of a crash.

     

    Monday’s Housing Price Indicator from banking group SEB posted its second biggest drop ever, declining by 39 points and lagging only a steeper fall 10 years ago. According to SEB, 43 percent of households expect prices to rise over the coming year, down from 66 percent the previous month. The number expecting prices to decline doubled to 32 percent.

    The Reuters piece quoted SEB saying that the indicator signaled a slowdown but “does not yet signal outright declines”. A day later and we have clear evidence of outright declines. Here is a summary of the key prices changes for October 2017 versus the previous month in the NASDAQ OMX Valueguard-KTH Housing Index – known as the HOX.

    • Prices for housing prices in Sweden as a whole declined by 3.0% versus September;
    • House prices in Sweden fell by 3.2% and apartment prices by 2.8%;
    • Stockholm house prices fell 4.0% in October and apartment prices by 3.4%; and
    • Gothenburg house prices fell by 1.6% and apartment prices by 1.2%.

    With the market starting to crack, we can rely on the regulators, as usual, to take action after the fact. From a Reuters report yesterday.

    Sweden’s financial watchdog has proposed a further tightening of mortgage repayment rules to keep a lid on spiralling debt that could spell danger for the cooling property market and the wider economy. A surge in building and tougher mortgage rules have put the brakes on a 20-year bull run in the Swedish property market, but authorities remain concerned that debt levels among the highest in Europe are still rising. The country’s Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA) on Monday proposed new rules to force the biggest borrowers to make larger mortgage repayments in an effort to reduce risks.

     

    “Prices have risen more than 30 percent in the past three years and the risk level is elevated,” FSA chief economist Henrik Braconier told reporters.

    Reuters reported this comment from Braconier.

    “It is not a catastrophe if prices fall a little.”

    And we agree…but what if they fall a lot.
     

  • The White House Is Being Warned: North Korea Is Planning A "Devatstaing EMP Attack" On America

    Marine Corps veteran Tommy Waller, director of special projects at the Center for Security Policy, has warned President Trump about the EMP threat facing the United States.

    "Winston Churchill once said, 'History will be kind to me for I intend to write it'…

     

    The surest way for history to be kind to President Trump is for him to write it, by being the first leader to truly address the existential threat of EMP.

     

    The first and foremost thing he must write is an Executive Order establishing his own EMP Commission in the White House – a task force that draws from the experience of the previous EMP Commission."

    The grim warning is directed at North Korea and their ambitions to unleash a devastating atmospheric nuclear explosion above the United States that would collapse the nation’s power grid.

    Most are aware by now that North Korea has successfully tested ICBM missiles and detonated nuclear devices throughout 2017. Put two and two together, and this is a dangerous cocktail fueling the regime in North Korea. It’s also a perfect recipe for Waller to further his agenda and urge President Trump to create a special commission to prepare for an EMP attack, such as the Manhattan Project in the 1940s in developing the nuclear bomb.

    Here is what he had to say:

    For those able to execute an unconstrained analysis of today’s threat environment, the single most urgent concern for America is what threatens her electric grid. Without electricity, the America we know today ceases to exist – and our enemies know this.

     

    Elites in the U.S. government know this too, but most have chosen to ignore these threats and to ridicule, silence, and stymie anyone willing to speak the truth about them.

    Waller also warns the whole system of 16 critical infrastructure components are dependent upon electricity and the idea an EMP could wipe out critical systems would be devastating for the survival of the empire.

    America’s 16 Critical Infrastructures range from Water & Wastewater Systems to Food & Agriculture to Nuclear Reactors, Materials & Waste – and all of them depend upon electricity.

     

    America’s need for electricity creates the ideal conditions by which an adversary can take advantage of Sun Tzu’s “Supreme art of war,” which is “to subdue your enemy without fighting.”

     

    In 1999, with full recognition of this reality and enraged with American policy in the Balkans, Vladimir Lukin (the head of the Russian State Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee) threatened a U.S. Congressional delegation by stating: “If we really wanted to hurt you with no fear of retaliation, we would launch a Submarine-launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM), [and] we would detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country and shut down your power grid.”  

    With fear in place, Waller is pushing for the first Executive order, establishing his own EMP Commission in the White House.

    What’s very interesting is that the Obama administration already did this by passing an Executive Order on October 2016 preparing the nation for ‘Space Weather Events’, which would contribute to a total power grid collapse.

    Here is snippet of section 1 of the executive order:   

    Space weather events, in the form of solar flares, solar energetic particles, and geomagnetic disturbances, occur regularly, some with measurable effects on critical infrastructure systems and technologies, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), satellite operations and communication, aviation, and the electrical power grid. Extreme space weather events — those that could significantly degrade critical infrastructure — could disable large portions of the electrical power grid, resulting in cascading failures that would affect key services such as water supply, healthcare, and transportation. Space weather has the potential to simultaneously affect and disrupt health and safety across entire continents. Successfully preparing for space weather events is an all-of-nation endeavor that requires partnerships across governments, emergency managers, academia, the media, the insurance industry, non-profits, and the private sector.

    What’s even more peculiar are that high ranking officials are speculating a total power grid collapse across the United States is nearing,  but as mentioned above the Obama administration’s Executive Order is emphasizing ‘Space Weather Events’. On the other-hand, Waller is stressing that a total grid collapse will be due to a ‘North Korean EMP’.

    The question: Who will be right? 

    At this moment, the source of the total power grid collapse is unclear and conflicting —all depending on who you talk to, but there is one clear message. A total grid collapse in the United States is coming and it’s evident in the information above. 

    In a blog post on Ripon Forum, the magazine of the moderate GOP Ripon Society, Waller wrote:

    After massive intelligence failures grossly underestimating North Korea’s long-range missile capabilities, number of nuclear weapons, warhead miniaturization, and proximity to an H-Bomb, the biggest North Korean threat to the U.S. remains unacknowledged — nuclear EMP attack.

     

    North Korea confirmed the EMP Commission’s assessment by testing an H-Bomb that could make a devastating EMP attack, and in its official public statement: “The H-Bomb, the explosive power of which is adjustable from tens of kilotons to hundreds of kilotons, is a multi-functional thermonuclear weapon with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP attack according to strategic goals.”

     

    The Pentagon and some states have started to take action to protect the electric grid from an EMP attack, but the administration and Congress have largely shrugged off the concerns, according to EMP advocates.

     

    Previous congressional testimony has suggested that 90 percent of humans within the area of an EMP attack would die in a year, either from hunger, lack of water and health care, and violence.

    What would the aftermath of an EMP attack look like?

  • Financial Tyranny: "We The People" Are The New Permanent Underclass In America

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    Americans can no longer afford to get sick and there’s a reason why.

    That’s because a growing number of Americans are struggling to stretch their dollars far enough to pay their bills, get out of debt and ensure that if and when an illness arises, it doesn’t bankrupt them.

    This is a reality that no amount of partisan political bickering can deny.

    Many Americans can no longer afford health insurance, drug costs or hospital bills. They can’t afford to pay rising healthcare premiums, out-of-pocket deductibles and prescription drug bills.

    They can’t afford to live, and now they can’t afford to get sick or die, either.

    It’s a gamble any way you look at it, and the medical community is not helping.

    Healthcare costs are rising, driven by a medical, insurance and pharmaceutical industry that are getting rich off the sick and dying.

    Appallingly, Americans spend more than any developed country on healthcare and have less to show for it. While Obamacare (a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act) may have made health insurance more accessible to greater numbers of individuals, it has failed to make healthcare any more affordable.

    Indeed, health care in America has become just another way of making corporations rich at consumer expense.

    This is how the middle classes, who fuel the nation’s economy and fund the government’s programs, get screwed repeatedly.

    We’re living a financial nightmare.

    We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay 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.

    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.

    Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

    Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers under the 16th Amendment to the Constitution to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

    All the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

    If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

    Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its money grabs.

    While we’re struggling to get by, the police state is spending our hard-earned tax dollars to further entrench its powers and entrap its citizens.

    For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” The 16-year war in Afghanistan, which now stands as the longest and one of the most expensive wars in U.S. history, is about to get even longer and more costly, thanks to President Trump’s promise to send more troops over.

    In this way, the military industrial complex will get even richer, and the American taxpayer will be forced to shell out even more funds for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

    This is no way of life.

    Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

    We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

    Are you getting the picture yet?

    The government isn’t taking our money to make our lives better. Just take a look at the nation’s failing infrastructure, and you’ll see how little is being spent on programs that advance the common good.

    We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

    This is nothing less than financial tyranny.

    “We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

    It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.

    There are a few things we can do (demand transparency, reject cronyism and graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over people), but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in fascism.

    We’ve become so invested in identity politics that label us based on our political leanings that we’ve lost sight of the one label that unites us: we’re all Americans.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want to pit us against one another. They want us to adopt an “us versus them” mindset that keeps us powerless and divided. Trust me, the only “us versus them” that matters anymore is “we the people” against the police state.

    We’re all in the same boat, folks, and there’s only one real life preserver: that’s the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

    The Constitution starts with those three powerful words: “We the people.”

    The message is this: there is power in our numbers.

    That remains our greatest strength in the face of a governmental elite that continues to ride roughshod over the populace. It remains our greatest defense against a government that has claimed for itself unlimited power over the purse (taxpayer funds) and the sword (military might). As Patrick Henry declared in the last speech before his death, “United we stand, divided we fall.”

    This holds true whether you’re talking about health care, war spending, or the American police state.

  • SocGen On China's Slowdown In The Making

    As we highlighted (see here), China’s macro data for October 2017 was disappointing with retail sales and industrial production missing consensus estimates, fixed asset investment was in line and inflation surprised on the upside. There was some impact from state-driven efforts to reduce pollution, but this issue will be an ongoing headache for decades. In big picture terms, the challenge for the Chinese leadership is to deflate a credit bubble in an orderly fashion, something which we’re not aware has ever been done on this scale. Notwithstanding the reach of China’s famed central planners, we doubt that they will be successful, a view which seems to be shared by the outgoing PBoC Governor who recently warned of a “Minsky moment”.

    In the following charts of GDP, industrial production, retail sales and fixed asset investment, we showed that growth rates in key macro indicators are currently around the lowest they’ve been since the crisis or, in the case of the fixed asset investment, as low as they’ve been for nearly two decades.

    Commenting after the October data releases, SocGen is getting equally bearish. To wit.

    China’s activity growth decelerated more than expected in October for the most part, while inflation surprised on the upside. Supply constraints imposed by the air pollution reduction programme clearly played a role, while demand slowdown emerged only a little. However, the seeds have been sown for a full-fledged growth slowdown in 2018. Housing tightening has bitten deeper into housing sales; persistent cost-push inflation may dampen the private sector’s appetite for capex; and, most importantly, credit growth – which did not really slow much in October – is poised to trend further lower amid the resumption of financial deleveraging policies.

    SocGen notes that while the slowdown in industrial production growth in October 2017 was concentrated in higher value-added sectors, traditional areas of upstream strength are locked in a deeper contraction.

    IP growth dropped to 6.2% in October from 6.6% in the previous month. The high value added sectors – automobiles, electrical machinery and computers, telecommunication & other electronics (CTE) – accounted for most of the slowdown in the headline figures, although growth rates in these three sectors were still in the high double-digits. The anti-pollution campaign also left its mark on upstream material sectors, where part of the production was suspended during winter. Production growth of coking coals, cement, steel and aluminium were all in a deeper contraction.

    The property sector has obviously been white hot in the latest phase of the Chinese credit bubble, although Xi Jinping’s warning at the recent Party congress that “Housing is for living rather than speculation” is beginning to look prescient. SocGen notes that housing acts as a leading indicator and, while it weakened in October 2017, the decline remains fairly most so far.

    Housing sales – one of the best leading indicators – indisputably weakened further. Floor space sold dropped 6% in October, after a 1.1% increase in 3Q. Sales revenue growth turned negative for the first time in 31 months, dropping to -1.7% in October from 3.9% in 3Q. While the sales slowdown at the moment is unequivocally bad news for housing construction in 2018, housing supply indicators did not really deteriorate as much as they appeared to in October. Yoy growth of new starts fell to -4.3% in October from 0.4% in 3Q, but the mom rate was largely in line with the historical average for this month. Similarly, property investments slowed to 5.4% from 7.4% in 3Q, albeit against a negative base effect.

    The bull case for China rests on rebalancing the economy from investment-led growth to consumption-led growth. While the slowdown in retail sales is a concern, it’s too early to gauge whether October’s weakness will be sustained in the coming months due to this month’s Singles Day distortion.

    Domestic demand softened somewhat. Nominal retail sales growth eased to 10% in October from 10.3%, despite stronger inflation. Adjusted for price effects, retail sales grew 8.6% yoy in October, down from 9.2% in 3Q. Automobile sales – the biggest category – saw its volume growth down to 2% from 5.7%, which seemed to be behind the softer production number in the IP data. However, given the strong increase in online sales at the 11 November sales events (the “Double 11” or the Singles’ Day), part of the weakness in October might be due to delayed shopping.

    While SocGen notes the October 2017 credit data undershot estimates, it remains fairly sanguine on the immediate implications.

    Although the credit and monetary data came in below market expectations, there was little deceleration in credit stock growth, which means that the much smaller monthly increases in bank loans and total social financing (TSF) were mostly seasonal. While new yuan loans dropped by almost half to CNY663bn in October from CNY1,270bn in September, growth in the bank loan stock softened by only 0.1pp to 13%, which a faster rate than in 1H17. Growth in total credit to non-financial sectors (= TSF – net equity financing + net increases in government bonds) ticked up a little to 14.4% from 14.3% in the previous month.

    However, the bank sees three driving a looming deceleration in credit growth.

    1. Housing-related credit tightening seems to be succeeding. Short-term borrowing by households cooled substantially to CNY79bn in October from over CNY200bn in the previous four months, indicating that regulators’ efforts to weed out the taking out of consumption loans for property purchases has started to work;
    2. Formal bank lending is likely to be constrained by loan quotas. Reportedly, big banks have either completely or nearly used up their loan quotas for 2017, and there is widely shared expectations among banks that the 2018 quotas1 are unlikely to be much bigger; and
    3. As financial deleveraging continues, banks’ options to extend shadow lending will be increasingly limited. “Equity and other investments” – the asset item of banks that is most closely related to shadow lending – has dropped by about CNY1trn from its peak in February 2017 (after increasing by CNY19trn since 2014).

    Most importantly, financial deleveraging is poised to pick up soon. In addition to talks by senior policymakers of more regulation, the Financial Stability and Development Committee, the high profile body in charge of this project and headed by a vice premier, has concluded its first gathering and reconfirmed the policy direction only two weeks after the Party Congress. The expectation of tighter regulations has already driven up bond yields onshore.

    After the Chinese leadership permitted the credit engine to be revved up again from early 2016 through to the early part of 2017, most commentators have put fears about China to the back of their minds, preferring to focus on the synchronised global growth narrative. The reality is that massive credit bubbles are not only dangerous, but we suspect, inherently fragile, when central planners try to fine tune them.

  • The Deeper Purpose Of Trump's Asia Trip

    Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

    President Trump is wrapping up his historic visit to Asia today. Trump’s journey is the longest overseas trip of his presidency and the longest Asian visit of any president in 25 years.

    After a stopover in Hawaii, Trump proceeded to Japan, where he met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinz? Abe, and then to South Korea where he met with President Moon Jae-in.

    The capstone of the trip was Trump’s arrival on Nov. 8 in Beijing for meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trump then headed for Vietnam late in the week and is concluding meetings in the Philippines today.

    Much of the reporting on this trip has involved international trade, but it’s a mistake to focus on that. This trip was a prewar gathering of allies (Japan and South Korea) and potential allies (China) in a last-ditch struggle to head off a hot war with North Korea, led by the reckless Kim Jong Un.

    At this point, there are only four possible outcomes of the U.S.-North Korea confrontation over nuclear weapons:

    1.Kim Jung Un stands down and gives up his nuclear weapons program.

     

    2. The U.S. and China combine forces to decapitate the Kim dynasty and force regime change in North Korea.

     

    3. Preventive attack on North Korea by the U.S. before March 20, 2018.

     

    4. The U.S. accepts a nuclear-armed North Korea and relies on containment and deterrence to constrain its actions.

    Based on public statements of U.S. officials, my recent meetings in Washington with the director of the CIA and the national security adviser and other sources, I estimate the degree distribution of those possible outcomes as follows:

    • Kim stands down: 10%
    • Regime change: 20%
    • War: 70%
    • U.S. lives with nuclear North Korea: 0%.

    Trump’s visits to Japan and South Korea were about leaving the door open to negotiations in the hope that Kim would stand down while also preparing for war.

    Trump’s visit to China was about asking for assistance in regime change. Xi is unlikely to agree to help the U.S. in this regard.

    This means war. Instead, Trump and Xi no doubt discussed China’s “red lines” in North Korea so that a war between the U.S. and North Korea does not escalate into a war with China.

    Almost none of this is fully priced in public markets, although markets seemed to be getting the message last week.

    A war between the U.S. and North Korea will cause a global flight to quality assets and currencies at the expense of other asset classes.

    Here are the likely market moves as the prospect of war becomes clear: Dollars, euros and Swiss francs will rally at the expense of emerging-market currencies. U.S. Treasury bonds will rally in price, pushing yields lower.

    Gold will rally strongly, well past the $1,325 level, and then push higher.

    Curiously, U.S. stocks may rally after an initial pullback when the shooting starts. Defense contractors, tech companies, commodities producers, utilities and energy companies should all rally. War is generally good for some sectors of the economy and may finally give the Fed the inflation it’s been looking for in vain the past eight years.

    The war is likely coming in a matter of months.

  • Millions Of Millennials Could Be Trading Sex For Their Next Debt Payment – Here's How

    As the storm clouds of peak stupidity gather over the heads of the millennial generation who were conned by banks, government, and universities to take out excessive amounts of leverage in auto loans, credit cards, and student debt; millions have flocked to a new website seeking ‘Sugar Daddies’ and or even ‘Sugar Mommies’ to pay off their debt amid an economic environment where wage growth remains non-existent.

    Today’s real simple get-out-of-debt option for the broke college/post college millennial is through an unconventional dating website called SeekingArrangement.com.

    In 2016, the website identified some 2.5 million college students who turned to the site in an act of desperation to find a ‘Sugar Daddy’ or even a ‘Sugar Mommy’ in exchange of personal time for straight cash.

    The website’s mission is to “delivers a new way for relationships to form and grow. Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddies or Mommas both get what they want, when they want it”.

    We find it hard to believe the intention of the website, when created by MIT graduate Brandon Wade in 2006, was to have 25% of the 10 million users—broke college millennials.

    According to Business Insider,

    A couple years ago, the site noticed an uptick in the number of members signing up with a university email address, Alexis Germany, a spokesperson for SeekingArrangement.com, told Business Insider.

     

    It decided to launch a marketing campaign – dubbed Sugar Baby University – targeting indebted college students and young people who are interested in college but afraid of taking on massive loans.

    In total, Americans owe more than $1.3 trillion in student loan debt to federal government agencies and or private lenders.

    As explained by UBS strategist Matthew Mish, millennials have never been more in debt and this shocking development could hint why millennials are resorting to an online dating site, in the millions to trade sex for their next debt servicing payment.

    Exploring the data from UBS, the divergence between consumer delinquencies and the unemployment rate at record lows signals wage growth is non-existent at a time when millennials’ leverage is high.

    We further summarized: “Per the charts below, when you break out rising consumer delinquencies into their individual buckets the catalyst for the trend above suddenly becomes more clear. While delinquency rates on mortgages, HELOCs and credit cards are improving, or at least not deteriorating rapidly, delinquency rates on student loans and auto loans are a completely different story."

    And lastly, who took on all those $40,000, 0%, 80-month loans all so they could drive around in a brand new BMW they couldn’t afford? Well, if you guessed millennials in the lowest quintile of wages earners in the country then you’re absolutely right!

    As Mish points out in Figure 7 below, the median debt-to-asset ratio for Americans under the age of 35 has surged over the past couple of decades from ~40% to a staggering 100%”.

    With the financial security of the millennial in grave danger, as per UBS strategist Matthew Mish’s charts, we start to get the sense of why millennials are flocking to SeekingArrangement.com.

    First, Sugar Daddies and or Mommies have an average annual income of $250,000 and the average net worth of $1.5 million. The simple term in life: ‘follow the money’ seems to be at play here. Sugar Daddies and or Mommies have a monthly membership of $80.00 per month, meanwhile the website allows a broke college student free of charge.

    Here are the benefits of a ‘Sugar Daddy’:

     

    Browsing the ‘Sugar Baby Female’ mill of broke millennials. We find this:

    Here are the disturbing ‘Sugar Daddies’ preying on broke desperate college millennials:

    Business Insider, , interviewed a broke college millennial by the name of  Christina, 29-year old, and user of SeekingArrangement.com.

    Christina said she isn’t willing to have sex for money, but has received over $90,000 for education-related costs from her ‘Sugar Daddies’.

    The MBA student at Michigan State University living in Las Vegas said,

    That was when it finally set in and I was looking at the prices and I was looking at how much debt I was getting in and I had already started my MBA. I was like, I can’t afford this, I’m going to be paying this off for years and years and years.

    In addition, she made it clear that she isn’t interested in “one-night stands”.. We find that hard to believe.. Here’s what she said:

    I’m not a person that is interested in one-night stands with people who are visiting Vegas for a couple days – that’s not interesting to me. If that’s what you’re going to come at me with, my response is going to be, thank you for the offer, but I’m going to pass. On my profile it specifically says, I’m going to school for this, this is what I’m looking for, I would like help paying for my school and my books.

    Bottomline: The millennial generation has turned desperate with debt up to their eyes balls and it shows how this avocado and toast generation will do anything for a debt service payment.

  • Japan's Plea To Millennials: Please Buy Stocks

    Ever since the Federal Reserve first got into the business of blowing massive equity bubbles back in the 1980’s, Americans have shown a willingness to happily, if ignorantly, embrace each successive iteration to the rigged market.  Of course, as E-Trade recently confirmed via the following ad, making money in equities is a very simple two-step process: (1) get invested, (2) buy a yacht made of Cuban mahogany and party with models…why would anyone in their right mind pass that up?

    Unfortunately, at least for the central planners at the Bank of Japan who would love to be as efficient at creating asset bubbles as their U.S. counterparts, Japanese investors have a slightly longer memory than U.S. investors and have shunned stocks ever since an entire generation of wealth was wiped out in the 90’s.  After 20 years of stocks pretty much only trading in one direction, one can understand their concern.

    Moreover, given the chart above, perhaps it’s not surprising that millennials in Japan use the words “Risky”, “Gambling”, “Scary” and “Loss” most frequently to describe the idea of “investing” (chart per the Wall Street Journal).

    Japan

    All that said, as the Wall Street Journal points out today, with an aging population and trillions of dollars worth of pension promises about to come due, Japan’s central planners have no option to double down on efforts to convince millennial investors to once again throw all of their money into the Nikkei slot machine.

    If anything can persuade Japanese to invest, it may be fear rather than greed. The government’s debt, more than twice the nation’s annual output, has fanned doubts about whether promised pensions will be forthcoming decades from now.

     

    More than half of Japan’s household wealth sits in bank deposits or cash under the mattress, according to the Bank of Japan, compared with 14% in the U.S.

     

    “We have to increase our assets. Otherwise we cannot survive in a super-aged society,” said Satoshi Nojiri, director of the Fidelity Retirement Institute in Japan.

    Luckily, there is even a new Robot, Theo, who will take your monthly deposit and gamble invest it for you.  Theo was created by a company called Money Design whose ‘business strategy’ is centered around targeting “smartphone users accustomed to playing games on their phones”…you know, because if you can play Angry Birds on your iPhone then you can definitely be a rock star investor.

    Money Design has a smartphone app, Theo, that aims to appeal to a cautious generation of investors accustomed to deflation. If it can unlock Japanese savers’ appetite for stocks with a click or a swipe, it would succeed at what many in Tokyo have found a nearly impossible task.

     

    Nao Kitazawa, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who helps run the startup, called Money Design, does his best to distance himself from the past, with his New Balance sneakers and black T-shirt. His target is smartphone users accustomed to playing games on their phones.

     

    “We’ve tried to make our service cool, sharp, new,” said the 42-year-old entrepreneur. “We’re getting rid of some of the stiff formality of meeting with brokers for an hour during lunch time.”

     

    The Theo app pitches a small starting investment of around $100 a month, with a robo adviser selecting model portfolios based on the investor’s inflation expectations and risk appetite. Fees come to 1% of assets annually.

     

    “We want to provide an alternative to a bank deposit,” said Money Design’s Mr. Kitazawa.

     

    The business is still small: Since starting in February last year, Theo has drawn in 18,386 accounts and $106 million in assets under management as of the end of September 2017, with about half of clients in their 20s or 30s.

    Japan

    Of course, efforts to get millennials in Japan to invest are nothing new and the latest such efforts even include tax exempt brokerage accounts for people willing to gamble just $3,500 per year…

    Efforts to attract new blood have fallen short before. The government a few years back created a tax exemption for small brokerage accounts in hopes of getting people to dip their toes in the market. Not many did, and government figures show half the accounts are inactive.

     

    This month, the government started taking applications for a new program that will start next year and be available at major brokerages. Officials said they have streamlined the process and lowered the minimum investment a year to ¥400,000 (about $3,500) from ¥1.2 million, while allowing tax benefits to last longer.

     

    To Japanese policy makers, stock investing isn’t just a personal choice. Bringing a new crop of risk-taking investors into the market, they say, could in turn encourage more risk-taking entrepreneurs to create the kind of companies that are driving the U.S. economy.

     

    Getting money to flow into stocks could “contribute to economic growth eventually,” a Financial Services Agency spokesman said. “Then we hope that through long-term, regular diversified investments, people can share the success of the securities market.”

    …The desparation almost feels like a comp from a casino way off the strip in Vegas…”free” meat loaf dinner for anyone willing to gamble away their mortgage payment this month!

    Of course, up until this morning it looked as if Japanese investors were once again getting excited about investing…and then this happened:

    So what say you?  Is this just a temporary blip or is a fragile Japanese investor base once again preparing to “sell the rip.”

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Nov 14

Today’s News 14th November 2017

  • World Largest Reseller Of Virtual 'Skins' Raises $40M With An ICO

    ICO Investors are about to experience something that’s almost never happened in the brief history of the $3 billion market: An offering by a company with an actual product.

    Bloomberg Businessweek has managed to find the one ICO being launched to solve the rare problem that could actually benefit from decentralized, monetized tokens. The company is called OPSkins, and it’s the largest skins site in the $50 billion market. The company has raised $41 million in an ICO it launched last month, and hopes to raise another $7 million before the sale ends on Nov. 28. For those readers who aren’t avid gamers, Bloomberg explains that a “skin” is a decoration for the virtual guns and knives found in video games like CounterStrike: Global Offensive. While the concept of building a company around these products might seem silly, some buyers will pay thousands of dollars for the rarest skins.

    The two-year-old company has raised about $41 million by selling what it calls WAX tokens, a virtual currency that will become the default way to buy and sell skins on its intercompany skins exchange, the Worldwide Asset eXchange, which will allow buyers to connect to dozens of disparate marketplaces. The idea is to simplify purchases for gamers from different countries and give everyone a clearer sense of what a particular item is worth, using the same kind of digital-ledger system as the cryptocurrency bitcoin.

    Previously, the market for these virtual items was highly fragmented, and wealthy buyers would often play intermediaries a premium to root out the best deals on their behalf.

    The company bets that making its exchange accessible to rivals, who can then make a broader catalog available to customers, will expand its audience beyond the limitations of an individual website, says Chief Information Officer Malcolm CasSelle, who’s helping lead the WAX effort. In theory, there’s lots of room for new skins buyers, says Chris Grove, managing director at researcher Eilers & Krejcik Gaming LLC. About 200,000 new people buy virtual items through OPSkins each month, but the site sells gear for online games with more than 125 million regular players.

     

    “This could be the perfect on-ramp,” says investor Scott Walker, who helped fund the “initial coin offering,” or ICO. Early investors are getting more WAX tokens for their money, but their value will become another variable once the exchange goes live in December.

     

    OPSkins doesn’t disclose its financials, but its revenue is growing at double digits annually, says CasSelle, previously chief technology officer at Tronc Inc., the former Tribune Co. Partly, he says, the WAX token strategy is a way to stave off competitors. Over the past few months, rivals including DMarket, KyberNetwork, and SkinCoin have held ICOs to launch or expand their services. So far, though, no other trader has the muscle to create the kind of intercompany exchange OPSkins is building. Starting next year, websites that install the WAX widget will get as-yet-undetermined fees for resulting sales.

    However, before you rush out and buy WAX tokens purely for the sake of speculating, It’s worth considering the fact that OPSkins entire business is essentially at the mercy of the giant video game studio that produces many of the games whose wares Skins sells on the secondary market.

    The volatility of the WAX token price may make it a poor place to hold money not being used for short-term item buying and selling. But OPSkins’ biggest potential roadblock is the maker of the games. Industry leader Valve Corp., which publishes Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and the other big hits OPSkins exploits, has the power to ban sites from trading skins. Last year, Valve sent cease-and-desist letters to 23 online gambling sites to prevent them from using skins as collateral, a move aimed at reducing teenage gambling on professional video game matches. “Valve has certainly left the door open to an action in the future,” says Grove, the Eilers researcher.

    However, the company’s technology chief says it doesn’t need Valve Corp.’s cooperation to build a successful business.

    CasSelle says that the new exchange can work without Valve’s help, including as a way to acquire other virtual goods, and that OPSkins is looking to raise an additional $7 million in WAX tokens before it finishes its ICO on Nov. 28. (The company initially sought a total of $63 million but lowered that goal because the flurry of interest around bitcoin and its spiking value has diverted attention from ICOs.) Alexander, the personal shopper for virtual goods, says he thinks the exchange will be good for people like him in the short term, swelling the overall market for skins. “It makes the entire process effortless,” he says. “It is a massive pain dealing with the payment methods available at the moment.” But he’s hedging his bets, having returned to college to finish his degree in economics. He says he eventually wants to get a job in finance or start his own business.

    OPSkins doesn’t disclose its financials, but its chief technology officer – who was previously the CTO at Tronc Inc. – explained that the WAX token strategy is a way to stave off competitors. Over the past few months, some of OPSkins rivals, including DMarket, KyberNetwork, and SkinCoin have held ICOs to launch or expand their services. So far, though, no other company has the muscle to create the kind of intercompany exchange OPSkins is building.

    If it succeeds in being the first platform to capture a dedicated customer base, maybe – just maybe – the WAX token might have a future.

    Unfortunately for investors, most of the other 799 tokens trading on one of hundreds of exchanges scattered across the Earth, probably won’t.
     

  • Chinese Singles' Day Eats Cyber Monday For Breakfast

    As online retailers in the United States prepare for Cyber Monday, i.e. the biggest online shopping day of the year, China’s largest e-commerce company just recorded the biggest day in its history.

    As Statista's Felix Richter notes, on November 11, Chinese Singles’ Day, online shoppers bought merchandise worth more than $25 billion across Alibaba’s platforms (mainly Tmall and Taobao), shattering last year’s sales record in the process.

    Alibaba processed 812 million orders within 24 hours and its payment service Alipay handled 1.5 billion transactions during the day, peaking at an incredible 256,000 transactions per second.

    Compared to these numbers, Cyber Monday and Black Friday look like celebrations of frugality.

    Infographic: Chinese Singles' Day Eats Cyber Monday for Breakfast | Statista

    You will find more statistics at Statista

    In 2016, total Cyber Monday e-commerce sales in the United States amounted to $3.06 billion with Thanksgiving and Black Friday adding another $3.79 billion to a weekend total of $6.85 billion.

    This year’s Thanksgiving weekend will likely bring about another record in U.S. e-commerce history, but it won’t come close to matching China’s largest shopping extravaganza.

  • Stockman: US Entry Into World War I Was A Disaster

    Authored by David Stockman via The Daily Reckoning,

    103 years ago, in 1914, the Federal Reserve opened-up for business as the carnage in northern France was getting under way.

    And it brought to a close the prior magnificent half-century era of liberal internationalism and honest gold-backed money.

    The Great War was nothing short of a calamity, especially for the 20 million combatants and civilians who perished for no reason discernible in any fair reading of history, or even unfair one.

    Yet the far greater calamity is that Europe’s senseless fratricide of 1914-1918 gave birth to all the great evils of the 20th century – the Great Depression, totalitarian genocides, Keynesian economics, permanent warfare states, rampaging central banks and the follies of America’s global imperialism.

    Indeed, in Old Testament fashion, one begat the next and the next and still the next.

    The old liberal international economic order – honest money, relatively free trade, rising international capital flows and rapidly growing global economic integration – resulted in a 40-year span between 1870 and 1914 of rising living standards, stable prices, massive capital investment and prolific technological progress that was never equaled either before or since.

    The Great War undid it all.

    In the case of Great Britain, for example, its national debt increased 14-fold, its price level doubled, its capital stock was depleted, most off-shore investments were liquidated and universal wartime conscription left it with a massive overhang of human and financial liabilities.

    Yet England was the least devastated.

    In France, the price level inflated by 300% its extensive Russian investments were confiscated by the Bolsheviks and its debts in New York and London catapulted to more than 100% of GDP.

    Among the defeated powers, currencies emerged nearly worthless with the German mark at five cents on the pre-war dollar, while wartime debts – especially after the harsh peace of Versailles – soared to crushing, unrepayable heights.

    And the Great Depression’s tardy, thoroughly misunderstood and deeply traumatic arrival happened compliments of the United States.

    In the first place, America’s wholly unwarranted intervention in April 1917 prolonged the slaughter, doubled the financial due bill and generated a cockamamie peace, giving rise to totalitarianism among the defeated powers and Keynesianism among the victors.

    Even conventional historians admit as much.

    Had Woodrow Wilson not misled America on a messianic crusade, the Great War would have ended in mutual exhaustion in 1917 and both sides would have gone home battered and bankrupt but no danger to the rest of mankind.

    Indeed, absent Wilson’s crusade there would have been no allied victory, no punitive peace, and no war reparations; nor would there have been a Leninist coup in Petrograd or Stalin’s barbaric regime.

    Likewise, there would have been no Hitler, no Nazis, no holocaust, no global war against Germany and Japan and no incineration of 200,000 civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    Nor would there have followed a Cold War with the Soviets or CIA sponsored coups and assassinations in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil and Chile to name a few. Surely there would have been no CIA plot to assassinate Castro, or Russian missiles in Cuba or a crisis that took the world to the brink of annihilation.

    There would have been no domino theory and no Vietnam slaughter, either.

    Nor would we have had to come to the aid of the mujahedeen and train the future al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Likewise, there would have been no Khomeini-led Islamic counter-revolution, and no U.S. aid to enable Saddam’s gas attacks on Iranian boy soldiers in the 1980s.

    Nor would there have been an American invasion of Arabia in 1991 to stop our former ally Saddam Hussein from looting the equally contemptible Emir of Kuwait’s ill-gotten oil plunder – or, alas, the horrific 9/11 blowback a decade later.

    Nor would we have been stuck with a $1 trillion Warfare State budget today. But I digress.

    Economically, the Great War enabled the already rising American economy to boom and bloat in an entirely artificial and unsustainable manner for the better part of 15 years.

    The realities of war finance also transformed the new Federal Reserve into an incipient central banking monster in a manner wholly opposite to the intentions of its great legislative architect – the incomparable Carter Glass of Virginia.

    During the Great War America became the granary and arsenal to the European Allies – triggering an eruption of domestic investment and production that transformed the nation into a massive global creditor and powerhouse exporter virtually overnight.

    Altogether, in six short years $40 billion of money GDP became $92 billion in 1920 – a sizzling 15% annual rate of gain.

    Needless to say, these fantastic figures reflected an inflationary, war-swollen economy – a phenomena that prudent finance men of the age knew was wholly artificial and destined for a thumping post-war depression.

    World War I simply gave birth to the modern Fed as we know it.

    When Congress created the Federal Reserve on Christmas Eve 1913, just six months before Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination, it had provided no legal authority whatsoever for the Fed to buy government bonds or undertake so-called “open market operations” to finance the public debt.

    In part this was due to the fact that there were precious few Federal bonds to buy. The public debt then stood at just $1.5 billion, which is the same figure that had pertained 51 years earlier at the battle of Gettysburg, and amounted to just 4% of GDP.

    Thus, in an age of balanced budgets and bipartisan fiscal rectitude, the Fed’s legislative architects had not even considered the possibility of central bank monetization of the public debt, and, in any event, had a totally different mission in mind.

    The big point here is that Carter Glass’ “banker’s bank” was an instrument of the market, not an agency of state policy. The so-called economic aggregates of the later Keynesian models — GDP, employment, consumption and investment — were to remain an unmanaged outcome on the free market, reflecting the interaction of millions of producers, consumers, savers, investors, entrepreneurs and even speculators.

    But WWI crossed the Rubicon of modern Warfare State finance. During World War I the U.S. public debt rose from $1.5 billion to $27 billion – an eruption that would have been virtually impossible without wartime amendments which allowed the Fed to own or finance U.S. Treasury debt.

    These “emergency” amendments – it’s always an emergency in wartime – enabled a fiscal scheme that was ingenious, but turned the Fed’s modus operandi upside down and paved the way for today’s monetary central planning.

    Washington learned that it could unplug the free market interest rate in favor of state administered prices for money, and that credit could be massively expanded without the inconvenience of higher savings out of deferred consumption.

    Effectively, Washington financed Woodrow Wilson’s crusade with its newly discovered printing press – turning the innocent “banker’s bank” legislated in 1913 into a dangerously potent new arm of the state.

    It was this wartime transformation of the Fed into an activist central bank that postponed the normal post-war liquidation – moving the world’s scheduled depression down the road to the 1930s.

    The Fed’s role in this startling feat is in plain sight in the history books, but its significance has been obfuscated by Keynesians presuming that the state must continuously manage the business cycle and macro-economy.

    The Great Depression thus did not represent the failure of capitalism or some inherent suicidal tendency of the free market to plunge into cyclical depression — absent the constant ministrations of the state through monetary, fiscal, tax and regulatory interventions.

    Instead, the Great Depression was a unique historical occurrence — the delayed consequence of the monumental folly of the Great War, abetted by the financial deformations spawned by modern central banking.

    The “failure of capitalism” explanation of the Great Depression is exactly what enabled the Warfare State to thrive and dominate the rest of the 20th century because it gave birth to what have become its twin handmaidens — Keynesian economics and monetary central planning.

    Together, these two doctrines eroded and eventually destroyed the great policy barrier – that is, the old-time religion of balanced budgets – that had kept America a relatively peaceful Republic until 1914.

    If only we could rewind the clock to 1917 and keep Wilson out of WWI, history – and economics – likely would have been a lot different.

  • The IRS Is Puzzled: Why Out Of 500,000 Coinbase Users, Only 900 Reported Gains Or Losses

    Almost exactly one year ago, the IRS realized that it could be leaving billions of dollars on the table in the form of uncollected taxes, and launched a tax-evasion probe on the largest US Bitcoin exchange, Coinbase, seeking to identify all Coinbase users in the U.S. who “conducted transactions in a convertible virtual currency” from 2013 to 2015.

    In a vexing paradox for cryptocurrency traders who had hoped they could avoid the IRS indefinitely as someone, somewhere once may have mentioned, the higher the price of bitcoin rose, the more motivated the IRS was to obtain access to user transaction records. Or, as Bloomberg put it, “the exploding value of the cryptocurrency since its first real-world transaction in 2010 is one reason the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is pushing to see records on thousands of users of Coinbase Inc., one of the biggest U.S. online exchanges. The company’s digital currency platform allows gains to be converted into old-fashioned dollars in transactions that the IRS alleges are going unreported.”

    To be sure, as we have reported over the past year, Coinbase and industry trade groups are fighting back in court, claiming the government’s concerns about tax fraud are unfounded and that its sweeping demand for information is a threat to privacy. That however, did not stop the IRS which claimed in a court filing that “U.S. taxpayers, including Coinbase users, have made use of virtual currencies to avoid the reporting and payment of taxes.” The agency said it needs access to customer records to “gain some degree of visibility into a space where it is already necessarily moving about somewhat in the dark.”

    Meanwhile, both Coinbase and bitcoin have exploded. Whereas Coinbase had under 5 million users last November when the IRS filed its lawuist, as of last week it had 12.2 million users, deploying 41 million virtual currency wallets in 32 countries that have so far exchanged $40 billion in digital currency. The price of bitcoin hit a record high just under $8,000 at the start of November, more than 10x higher than in November 2016.

    The biggest problem, however, and the reason why the IRS is unlikely to relent is that as the IRS said, it detected a “reporting gap” between the 500,000 virtual currency users Coinbase reported between 2013 and 2015 and the less than 900 bitcoin users reporting gains or losses for each of those years.

    That would imply that less than 0.2% of coinbase users bothered to report anything on their tax forms. One can see why the IRS is angry.

    And, worse for those who believe they will be able to get away with their cryptoprofits unscathed by Federal Taxes, following last week’s hearing, a federal judge is poised to allow a limited investigation into those gains to proceed over the company’s objection that the agency is on “a massive fishing expedition” meant to make itself look tough in the eyes of its critics in Congress, according to Bloomberg.

    “It’s legitimate for them to investigate whether people are making money on their bitcoin purchases” and paying taxes on any gains, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in San Francisco told lawyers for Coinbase at a hearing last Thursday. “I have to give tremendous discretion to the agency as to how they investigate,” she added later.

    Coinbase was not impressed. Mike Lempres, the company’s chief legal and risk officer said after the hearing that the company can’t negotiate with the IRS about a “forward-looking, rational reporting system” so long as the agency is suing it. Such discussions aren’t possible “because we’re in this tussle with them where they are improperly searching for private information of our customers with no evidence of wrongdoing,” Lempres said. He declined to comment on Corley’s pending ruling before the company has seen a final order in writing.

    Last year, the IRS persuaded Corley last year to order Coinbase to approve its summons for customer records from 2013 to 2015 for an investigation into whether taxpayers failed to report income. Coinbase resisted, and negotiations between the company and the agency resulted in a narrowed request for information about 8.9 million transactions and 14,355 account holders. Coinbase argued Thursday the inquiry remains unreasonably broad.

    On Thursday, Bloomberg reports, Corley said she would allow the IRS to investigate Coinbase customers who made money on the currency and bar the agency from probing accounts of those who hadn’t. The judge also said she’ll probably give Coinbase time to appeal her decision before it turns over any customer information.

    While lots was said of bitcoin’s drop over the past 4 days, much of attributed to suspension of the controversial Segwit 2x fork which was originally due in mid-November, some are wondering if a key catalyst for the price drop wasn’t the latest court ruling, although it in itself should have little impact on trading decisions: after all, at this point it’s a binary outcome: either the IRS will have access to all those who made money trading the crypto… or it won’t.

    In retrospect, it will be interesting to find out, if only based on the number of IRS submissions, how many of the over 12 million bitcoin accounts have actually made money trading cryptos. We will soon find out.

  • Scientists Shocked As Fisheries Collapse On West Coast: "It's The Worst We've Seen"

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    The Gulf of Alaska cod populations appears to have taken a nose-dive. Scientists are shocked at the collapse and starving fish, making this  the “worst they’ve ever seen.”

    “They [Alaskan cod] get weak and die or get eaten by something else,” said NOAA’s Steve Barbeaux.

    The 2017 trawl net survey found the lowest numbers of cod on record forcing scientists to try to unravel what happened. A lot of the cod hatched in 2012 appeared to survive, but by 2017, those fish were largely gone for the surveys, which also found scant evidence of fish born in subsequent years. Many of the cod that have come on board trawlers are “long skinny fish” according to Brent Paine, executive director of United Catcher Boats.

    “This is a big deal,” Paine said. “We just don’t see these (cod) year classes disappear from one year to the next.”

    The decline is expected to substantially reduce the gulf cod harvests that in recent years have been worth — before processing — more than $50 million to Northwest and Alaska fishermen who catch them with nets, pot traps, and baited hooks set along the sea bottom.

    Barbeaux says the warm water, which has spread to depths of more than 1,000 feet, hit the cod like a kind of a double-whammy. Higher temperatures sped up the rate at which young cod burned calories while reducing the food available for the cod to consume. And many are blaming “climate change” for the effects on the fish, although scientists aren’t directly correlating the two events. “They get weak and die or get eaten by something else,” said Barbeaux, who in October presented preliminary survey findings to scientists and industry officials at an Anchorage meeting of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.

    The 2017 trawl net survey found the lowest numbers of cod on record, more than 70 percent lower than the survey found two years earlier.

     

    Barbeaux said the cod decline likely resulted from the blob, a huge influx of warm Pacific Ocean water that stretched — during its 2015 peak — from the Gulf of Alaska to California’s offshore waters.

     

    Biologists tracked increases in bird die-offs, whale strandings, and other events such as toxic algae blooms.

     

    Even today, its effects appear to linger, such as in the dismal survey results for salmon last summer off Washington and Oregon.

    – The Olympian

    The blob began to take hold in 2014, and within a year had raised temperatures as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit in some surface waters of the Gulf of Alaska. In deeper waters, where cod feed, the temperature rose by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit. The surface temperatures recorded during the blob’s peak could be close to the average at century’s end, according to a recent report on climate change by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Thus, future blobs could push temperatures much higher than the most recent event.

    “They may not necessarily be more frequent, but they will be more intense,” said Nicholas Bond, a University of Washington climate scientist who assisted in the Gulf of Alaska cod research. “This is really going to be uncharted territory.”

  • Emerging Market Junk Debt Issuance Surges To New Record As The "Search For Yield" Intensifies

    It seems that the never-ending “thirst for yield” from the world’s massive pension funds, combined with the ever-present “cash on the sidelines” problem, is driving the creation of yet another global financial bubble in emerging market junk bonds.  Alas, as the FT points out today, the world’s largest fixed income investors can’t seem to get enough of the risky paper as bond issuance by the most financially vulnerable countries has suddenly spiked to a all-time high of $75 billion just as spreads are tightening to all-time lows.

    Junk-rated emerging market sovereigns have raised $75bn in syndicated bonds so far this year, up 50 per cent year on year to the highest total on record, according to figures from Dealogic, a data provider.

     

    The increase has buoyed the total volume of debt-raising by developing economies; non-investment grade issuance has made up 40 per cent of the new debt syndicated in EM so far in 2017.

     

    These rare and new issuers have been lured into the market by attractive pricing — strong investor demand for EM debt has pushed pricing up and yields down, making it one of the best-performing assets globally in 2017.

     

    According to Bloomberg Barclays indices, EM’s local currency-denominated sovereign debt has returned 10.4 per cent since the start of this year, while dollar-denominated debt has returned 7.6 per cent. By contrast, US Treasuries have returned 2.5 per cent while European nations’ debt has returned 0.9 per cent.

    Of course, for all the “doom and gloom” predictions of an imminent crash in Emerging Markets (here and here, among many others), not only have these not materialized, but the average yield on corporate junk bonds issued by emerging markets has dropped to record-low levels of around 5.5%, compared to nearly 10% just 2 years ago.

    For a case study of the yield-chasing insanity unleashed by central bankers, one has to look no further than Tajikistan.

    The central Asian country last month raised $500 million in its first-ever international bond sale, paying just 7.125% in annual interest on the debt after the U.S.-dollar offering drew a swarm of American and European buyers. Bankers had earlier shopped the 10-year bonds from the former Soviet satellite with an 8% yield, which was pulled down by strong investor demand.

    The reason for the scramble into any piece of yielding debt, even Tajik junk bonds is simple: as the IMF shows today in its latest financial stability report, there are virtually no IG bonds left with yields above 4%, and in the junk bonds space, whether in the US or offshore, it isn’t much better.

    Meanwhile, as the head of EM asset allocation at UBS Wealth Management, Michael Bollinger, pointed out to the FT, holding the 7.125% Tajik bonds until maturity can be a great yield for a pension fund with a 7% return target…that is, until the bonds can’t be refinanced at maturity.

    Michael Bollinger, head of EM asset allocation at UBS Wealth Management, said that relatively high-risk, high-yield sovereigns were attractive to institutional investors and private clients to hold to maturity.

     

    “The problem with liquidity is that when you need it most, it is least available, and that problem can be particularly pronounced in these rare issuer names,” he said.

     

    Will the flurry of issuance continue? Mr Bollinger expects it to ease off. “Some of these guys will start to find it more difficult — at this point in the cycle it is time to become more selective in EM bonds,” he said.

     

    Meanwhile, Mr Rediker warns that sovereigns with poor credit ratings could struggle to refinance their debt when it matures.

     

    “What if the rollover risk is greater than investors and issuers think it is?” he said. “That is a premise that not everybody seems to be taking as seriously as they might.”

    Of course, with garbage bonds (it’s a technical term) in Illinois yielding 3.74% (see: Muni Investors Celebrate “Juicy” 3.74% Yield On New Illinois Bonds As State Hurdles Toward Bankruptcy), it’s not all that difficult to understand why bond investors see relative value in Tajikistan.

  • Sessions Considers Appointing Special Council To Investigate Clintons

    With Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly preparing to make another round of arrests in his probe into the Trump campaign’s efforts to “collude” with Russia, House and Senate Republicans – not to mention President Donald Trump – will be thrilled to learn that Attorney General Jeff Sessions might soon appoint a second special counsel to investigate allegations of corruption and self-dealing involving several prominent Democrats and Obama-era officials, including Bill and Hillary Clinton.

    According to the Washington Post, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is entertaining the idea of appointing a second special counsel to investigate alleged wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation and the controversial sale of a uranium company to Russia. A letter obtained by WaPo shows Sessions directed senior federal prosecutors to explore at least some of these matters and report back to him and his top deputy, Rod Rosenstein, as to whether the DOJ should follow up with a full-blown investigation.

    For months now, President Trump has encouraged Sessions to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Clintons. Those calls grew louder – and were joined by several senior Republicans in Congress – after it was revealed that the DNC and the Clinton campaign jointly financed the infamous “Trump dossier” – which contained several salacious claims that the FBI reportedly used to justify launching the original investigation into collusion between the Trump camp and Russia back in July 2016.

    Those calls only intensified further after the Hill reported that the FBI had launched an investigation into corruption surrounding Russia’s efforts to gain control over a stockpile of Uranium based in the US – uranium that was owned by the Canadian company Uranium One and represented 20% of total uranium assets in the US. That investigation led to the arrest of the most senior official of the US subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian state-backed nuclear agency. Yet, for some unknown reason, the FBI neglected to inform Congress of the investigation. Several months after the arrest of the Russian, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voted to approve the sale of the Uranium One assets to Rosatom. Around the time she voted ‘yes’ on the deal, her husband Bill Clinton received a $500,000 speaking fee from Kremlin-aligned Alfa Bank, while the Clinton Foundation received more than $100 million in donations from Russia-affiliated entities.

    Session’s letter was a response from the Justice Department to an inquiry from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte, who in July and again in September called for Sessions to appoint a second special counsel to investigate concerns he had related to the 2016 election and its aftermath.

    The list of matters he wanted probed was wide ranging, but included the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, various dealings of the Clinton Foundation and several matters connected to the purchase of the Canadian mining company Uranium One by Russia’s nuclear energy agency. Goodlatte took particular aim at former FBI director James Comey, asking for a second special counsel to evaluate the leaks he directed about his conversations with President Trump, among other things.

    Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote that Sessions had “directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues raised in your letters,” and those prosecutors would “report directly to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel."

    It appears that, after a year of being dogged by allegations that Russia was partly responsible for Trump’s upset victory over Clinton in the 2016 election, Trump’s claim that the DOJ “should be looking at the Democrats” is finally being heeded by his own attorney general.

    As we’ve long maintained, the Clintons have just as many – if not more – connections to the Russian government than Trump and his affiliates. And given the recent revelations about Don Jr’s contact with Wikileaks and Carter Page’s freelance trips to Moscow, it’s about time that these connections were brought into full public view.

    We can only hope that Sessions follows through.
     

  • Ominous Russophobia In America

    Authored by Stephen Lendman,

    It infests America like a malignant tumor, exceeding the worst of the post-WW I “Red Scare” and its repeat following WW II.

    Beginning in 1938, House Un-American Activities Committee witch-hunt hearings into alleged disloyalty and subversive activities became headline news.

    Starting in the late 1960s, more of the same followed by the renamed House Committee on Internal Security.

    Notorious McCarthyism in the 1950s was a demagogic smear campaign against prominent figures, slandering them, ruining careers, even accusing General George Marshall of being “soft on communism.”

    Notable Hollywood figures were blacklisted. McCarthyism was baseless slander, unscrupulous fear-mongering, and political lynchings.

    Harvard Law School dean Ervin Griswold once called McCarthy “judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one.”

    Modern-day Russophobia includes a second Cold War, Russia under Vladimir Putin again considered the “evil empire,” relentless Washington and media Russian bashing, along with endless congressional and special counsel witch-hunt investigations suggesting the worst, revealing nothing.

    Russia expert Stephen Cohen said “(w)e’re in the most dangerous confrontation with Russia since the Cuban missile crisis.”

    He underestimated the threat. It’s much worse now than then. Jack Kennedy explained he “never had the slightest intention of” attacking or invading Cuba.”

    Obama was no Jack Kennedy. Nor is Trump, his administration and Congress infested with neocons, Democrats as ruthlessly dangerous as Republicans.

    The late political theorist Sheldon Wolin once called undemocratic Dems the “inauthentic opposition,” as infested with neoliberal Russophobic neocons as the Republican party.

    Virtually everyone in Washington is part of the anti-Russia crowd, Bernie Sanders among them, a progressive in name only.

    During his presidential campaign, he sounded like a modern-day Joe McCarthy, shamefully claiming “the evidence is overwhelming” that Russia “help(ed) elect the candidate of their choice, Mr. Trump, to undermine in a significant way American democracy.”

    In a YouTube video, he repeated the Big Lie, saying “the US intelligence community has concluded that Russia played an active role in the 2016 election with the goals of electing Donald Trump as president.”

    “The Trump campaign had repeated contacts with the senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”

    The phony “dossier” showed Russian agents able to “blackmail” the White House. Like most others in Congress, Sanders is a cold and hot warrior, a self-serving con man, supporting wealth, power and privilege like the rest of Washington’s political establishment, pretending otherwise.

    Feelthebern.org states:

    “Bernie supports enforcing economic sanctions and international pressure as an alternative to any direct military confrontation when dealing with Russia.”

     

    “To temper Russian aggression, we must freeze Russian government assets all over the world, and encourage international corporations with huge investments in Russia to divest from that nation’s increasingly hostile political aims.”

     

    “The United States must collaborate to create a unified stance with our international allies in order to effectively address Russian aggression.”

     

    “(T)he United States should isolate Putin politically and economically…The entire world has got to stand up to Putin.”

    Shocking stuff, exposing the real Bernie Sanders, not the persona he publicly displays!

    Former CIA counterintelligence official/whistleblower John Kiriakou was invited to participate in a European Parliament panel – then removed at the last moment because panelist Winnie Wong, co-founder of People for Bernie, refused to appear with him, Kiriakou saying:

    “(S)he didn’t want the appearance of Bernie Sanders appearing to endorse the Russian media.”

    Kiriakou hosts a Sputnik News radio show called Loud & Clear, why she objected, supporting Sanders’ Russophobia.

    Kiriakou remarked saying “American politics rear(ed) its ugly head in Brussels.” No problems arose when he appeared on another panel with Cuba’s EU ambassador.

    It’s the “red scare all over again,” Kiriakou explained.

    Anything remotely connected to Russia is toxic. Failing to be Russophobic in Washington is a likely career-ender, much like what happens to Israeli critics.

    Intense anti-Russian sentiment in America risks the unthinkable – possible catastrophic nuclear war, humanity’s survival at stake.

  • Conservatives Smash Keurig Machines In Social Media Uproar

    Over the weekend, CNBC reported on five companies that halted all advertisements of their products on Fox News’ Sean Hannity show. These companies included:

    • 23 and Me
    • Eloquii
    • Keurig
    • Nature’s Bounty
    • Realtor.com

    The story began last Thursday, with the sexual allegations against Roy Moore, the Alabama senate candidate who, The WaPo reported that day, made sexual advances towards four teenagers when he was in his early 30s. As of today, there is even a fifth women accusing Moore of sexual misconduct.

    After the story broke on Thursday, Fox host Sean Hannity came out and asked his audience to give Moore the benefit of the doubt. According to NYTimes,

    Mr. Hannity, describing those actions on his radio show while speaking with a co-host, Lynda McLaughlin, seemed to justify Mr. Moore’s reported conduct by calling one of the encounters “consensual.”

    Hours later “On his television show, Mr. Hannity said that the statement “was absolutely wrong” and that he “misspoke.” He then brought up the possibility of accusers lying for money, or for political purposes.”

    The following day, Angelo Carusone, President of Media Matters, a ‘politically progressive media watchdog’ that monitors “conservative misinformation in the U.S. media” said this to Keurig:

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

    On Saturday, Keurig responded by saying “we worked with our media partner and FOX news to stop our ad from airing during the Sean Hannity Show”.

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

    What happened next was a firestorm on social media that swept across the United States late Saturday into Sunday. The bulk of the trend #BoycottKeurig exploded on Sunday, as many conservatives who have boycotted the NFL because of kneeling problems, decided they had to urgently get involved in the latest bitter debate splitting America. We start with ‘Snoop Baily’ who smashed the living hell out of Keurig with a driver.

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

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

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

    To keep it short, this is what it looks like when a sizable chunk of the US decides to go “Office Space”:

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

    For a while, Hannity played along with the trend empowering it to grow through his enormous social media network as conservatives were called to action to smash Keurig machines. As the day closed, he then told his audience that he was buying 500 coffee makers to give away on Monday.

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

    On Monday, however, the Krush The Keurig fun ended when Hannity told his audience to stop smashing the Coffee machines, after Keurig CEO apologizes for ‘taking sides’…

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

    Moore’s sexual allegations aside, which have yet to be rejected or confirmed, what is more concerning is the blind willingness of substantial portions of the population to succumb to instant mobilization through social media and or a media figure(s), to collectively work as a unit in completing tasks, in this case the destruction of one’s own property. Ironically, something tells us that for Keurig the news that its machines were being “Office Spaced” across the nation, was music to the CEO’s ears (think replacement value), not to mention the unprecedented media exposure as virtually everyone spent the day talking about the incident (think unlimited advertising).

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

    There’s more: as The Atlantic writes, “in destroying Keurig machines also clearly aligns these people with a global environmentalist movement. In 2015, the “Kill the K-Cup” campaign took hold among those concerned about the net waste of so many pods. A Canadian advocate encouraged people to publicly abandon the machines.”

    Now America finds itself in the midst of hordes of angry people with clubs who will soon be going through caffeine withdrawal. They could go to Starbucks, though the chain has also been condemned and boycotted by some isolationist conservatives, since earlier this year it promised to hire 10,000 refugees in response to President Trump’s executive order barring them from the country.

    Meanwhile, always eager to ride on the latest social media trend, corporate America has promptly noticed the events over the past 72 hours, and it is guaranteed that many more companies will follow in Keurig’s activist footsteps. Who knows: the resultant breaking and smashing of various “resistance” products may just end up being the CapEx spark that the US economy so desperately needs…

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Nov 13

Today’s News 13th November 2017

  • US, Russia Agree On "Iran-Free Zone" In Syria

    Multiple Israeli news outlets reported Saturday that the US, Russia, and Jordan have reached a ceasefire agreement over southern Syria which proposes to expel Iran-backed militias from the border with Israel in the Golan Heights. The reports came on the same day presidents Trump and Putin issued a joint statement on Syria after meeting on the sidelines of the APEC conference in Danang, Vietnam, which reaffirmed de-confliction efforts as both countries fight ISIS and underscored willingness to keep Syria's territorial integrity intact while pursuing the Geneva process.

    Though the joint statement references the "Memorandum of Principles concluded in Amman, Jordan", it doesn't make explicit reference to Iran or Hezbollah, but more broadly to efforts for "the reduction, and ultimate elimination of foreign forces and foreign fighters from the area to ensure a more sustainable peace."


    Image source: Getty images

    But according to The Times of Israel, the Amman agreement is geared toward preventing a continuing Iranian presence in Syria:

    Under the agreement apparently inked Saturday, all non-Syrian fighters, including Iranian proxies fighting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, would be required to leave the border area and eventually Syria, Hebrew media reports said Sunday, citing an American official.

    Currently, there's been no confirmation of whether or not the deal actually singles out "Iranian proxies" or if Israel had any influence within the negotiations. The deal is based on a previous ceasefire agreement reached in July in Astana, Kazakhstan – a deal which Israel blasted at the time as being too tolerant of Iran's presence in Syria. 

    As part of the Astana talks, Trump agreed to a southwest Syria 'de-escalation zone' with Russia, which would necessarily involve Iranian cooperation. The agreement implicitly acknowledged Iran's troop presence in Syria as legitimate, and as reported at the time further "ignored Israel’s positions almost completely." But analysts have been in general agreement that the US-Russia brokered deal has been relatively successful and a step in the right direction. 

    A subsequent Reuters report covering a contentious Netanyahu-Putin meeting in August bluntly acknowledged Israel's willingness to see the Iranian and Shia allies of Assad expelled from the region, even if that should mean the ascendancy of ISIS. According to the Reuters report: 

    In parallel to lobbying Moscow, Israel has been trying to persuade Washington that Iran and its guerrilla partners, not Islamic State, pose the greater common threat in the region.

    For this reason, Israel has blamed – seemingly without any pretense of an investigation – each and every border incident on Syria and its allies, to the point that even when anti-Assad groups fire mortars in the direction of Israeli territory, the Israeli military response targets Syrian government forces.  

    This phenomenon has been long recorded by United Nations investigative reports. For example, in October 2014 the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), which at that time still had a significant presence in the Golan area, reported to the UN Security Council:

    On 23 June [2014], Israel targeted nine Syrian army positions with tank fire and air strikes after mortar fire from the Syrian side the previous day killed an Israeli civilian. Israel’s assessment is that most of these incidents are due to errant fire resulting from fighting in Syria. Israel said that armed opposition groups were probably responsible but that its forces fired on Syrian military positions to stress that Syria was responsible for security on its side of the ceasefire line.

    Since then Israel has repeatedly struck targets inside Syria deemed to be Hezbollah weapons storage locations – and over the past year such airstrikes have occurred almost weekly – with Israeli jets often firing from over Lebanese airspace. 

    And again over the weekend Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reportedly shot down a drone above the Golan Heights, which the IDF claimed was a "Syrian Spy drone" which originated with either Iran or Hezbollah. The incident prompted Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman to once again threaten Syria. “The Syrian regime is responsible for every attack and violation of our sovereignty, and we will not allow the Shiite axis to be established in Syria as a base for action,” Liberman said.

    On Friday Israel continued to escalate its rhetoric after a dubious report published by the BBC claimed that Iran has established a military base at a site used by the Syrian army outside El-Kiswah, 14 km (8 miles) south of Damascus. For Israel this would constitute the crossing of a "red line" by Iran: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu recently warned that Iran wanted to establish itself militarily in Syria. "Israel will not let that happen," he said.

    Though Israeli media appears to be reporting the latest 'deescalation agreement' in southern Syria which would force the exit of Iranian proxies as an Israeli diplomatic victory, it is unlikely that Israel's heightening war rhetoric will cease.

  • The Crimes Americans Worry About Most

    Even though 2017 is already the worst year for mass shootings in modern U.S. history, Americans are more worried about cybercrime than violent crime.

    That's according to a new Gallup poll which found that 67 percent of U.S. adults frequently or occasionally fret about having personal, credit card or financial information stolen by hackers. 66 percent also worry about the threat presented by identity theft.

    In comparison with cybercrime, Statista's Niall McCarthy notes that anxiety about conventional crime forms is less prevalent with a large gap to the third-biggest worry – having a car stolen or broken into. That's a frequent concern for 38 percent of people while 36 percent tend to worry about burglary when they are away from home.

    Infographic: The Crimes Americans Worry About Most | Statista

    You will find more statistics at Statista

    More serious crimes such as muggings, murders and sexual assault are much further down the list, but why?

    The reason cybercrime comes first is more than likely due to far higher levels of victimization, along with substantial coverage in the media. Gallup also found that a quarter of households have experienced hackers stealing their personal information while a mere three percent have experienced a burglary.

  • Why Robert Mueller Was Selected To Be The Special Prosecutor

    Authored by Eric Zuesse,

    It all began with the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex in the Saudi city of Khobar, which killed 19 U.S. military, who worked at the Dharan air base three miles away.

    That incident became the lynchpin of the accusation by the Saudi royal family, the U.S. State Department, and the CIA, that Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism.

    Both Robert Mueller and his longtime ally James Comey (the latter of whose firing as the FBI chief, by U.S. President Trump, had sparked the appointment of Mueller to become the Special Counsel investigating the U.S. President) performed crucial roles in establishing that the Khobar Towers bombing had been a Hezbollah operation run by the Iranian Government – and, starting upon this basis, in helping to develop the case that Iran “is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism.”

    However, as has been made clear by several great independent investigative journalists, on the basis of far more-solid documentation than the official account, the Khobar Towers bombing was instead entirely a fundamentalist-Sunni operation, specifically perpetrated by Al Qaeda, which hates Shia and which also hates America’s military presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden’s claim of the bombing's having been done by Al Qaeda, was, in fact, entirely honest and accurate.

    America’s “Deep State,” which extends to Saudi Arabia and to a number of other Governments – it’s an international network – is deeply committed to supporting the fundamentalist-Sunni war to conquer and destroy Shia Islam, and not merely to conquer the leading Shia nation, which is Iran. The U.S. Government has intensely taken a side in the Sunni-Shia religious war. That war is comparable in some respects to the 30 Years’ War (1618-1648) between Catholics and Protestants, which killed an estimated eight million Europeans; and, both the United States and Israel have clearly joined with the fundamentalist-Sunni leaders, against Iran, and against Shia generally.

    The reasons behind the prevailing lies about this matter will also be documented here. Discrepancies between the official story and the solidly documented facts, need to be explained, in order for a reader to be able to understand truthfully why Mueller (who cooperated with Comey in order to rig the official account of the bombing, so as to condemn Iran and Hezbollah instead of Al Qaeda) received his appointment. This is also important in order to understand why Trump, though rabidly anti-Iranian himself, is nonetheless insufficiently anti-Iranian to satisfy the Sauds, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or the rest of the U.S.-and-allied Deep State.

    Before proceeding further here, however, the statistical falseness of the allegation that Iran is the foremost state-sponsor of terrorism has to be clearly recognized as being the ultimate fact; because, if this entire question – to which Mueller and Comey contributed so importantly to answering by their identifying Iran (and Shia generally) as being precisely that (‘the foremost state sponsor of terrorism’) — can be assessed at all objectively, then the statistical answer to it would certainly be the objective one.

    Wikipedia’s article on “Iran and state-sponsored terrorism” says: “According to the Global Terrorism Database, the majority of deaths, more than 94% attributed to Islamic terrorism since 2001, were perpetrated by Sunni jihadists of the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and others.[3][4].” Only 6% were Shiites, at all — from any country. Similarly, my own independent study of 54 especially prominent global instances of Islamic terrorism was headlined (and reported that) "All Islamic Terrorism Is Perpetrated by Fundamentalist Sunnis, Except Terrorism Against Israel.” (The anti-Israel terrorist instances might constitute the “6%” which was referred to in the Wikipedia article, but that article provided no good link to its source for the “6%” figure.)

    So: the basic allegation is false, that Iran is the foremost state-sponsor of terrorism; the general allegation isn’t anywhere near to being true. It’s a lie.

    More specifically, now, regarding the Khobar Towers incident, which triggered the start of this fraudulent generalization:

    The Saudi royal family asserted, immediately after the bombing, that the attack had been perpetrated by jihadists who had returned from Afghanistan and who were now fighting to overthrow Saudi Arabia’s Government (the royal Saud family).

    For example, on 15 August 1996, the New York Times headlined "Saudi Rebels Are Main Suspects In June Bombing of a U.S. Base”, and reported that, “The Government of Saudi Arabia now believes that native Saudi Islamic militants, including many veterans of the Afghan war, carried out the June 25 bombing that killed 19 American servicemen at a base in Dhahran, Saudi officials said today.” However, the “mujahideen” who had fought in Afghanistan were paid and backed both by the Sauds and by the U.S. Government, For example, as early as 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski flew into Pakistan and exhorted the Taliban there to become mujahideen in Afghanistan because “That land over there is yours; you’ll go back to it one day, because your fight will prevail, and you will have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right and God is on your side.”

    Then, starting in 1980, “From the Pakistani border, bin Laden raises funds and provides the mujahedeen with logistical and humanitarian aid.” So, the Sauds’ allegation that the Khobar bombers had been “veterans of the Afghan war” would have meant that they had been foot-soldiers for the U.S.-Saudi operation in Afghanistan. Both the U.S. Government and the Saud family (who own the Saudi Government) hate Shia and especially hate Iran. Hezbollah are Shia, and they are extremely pro-Iran. How likely is it that Hezbollah, anywhere, would have been fighting under the command of Al Qaeda, or of any other fundamentalist-Sunni jihadist organization that calls all Shia “infidels”? So, the Sauds’ account of the Khobar Towers bombing is fishy, at best.

    Furthermore, a Google-search for the phrase “Hezbollah in Afghanistan” turns up only “6 results,” and all of them say nothing about any “Hezbollah in Afghanistan.” No report comes up about such a thing, for any year, or any period. The only countries where Hezbollah was reported to exist were Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. One of the links in that Google search was globally comprehensive for the year 2007, the Center on International Cooperation’s “Annual Review of Global Peace Operations — 2007”. It included reports on wars during that year, in 26 countries, and the chapter for Afghanistan (pages 52-58) doesn’t mention Hezbollah even once. However, a search for the phrase ”Hezbollah Afghanistan” does bring up “Syria's Other Foreign Fighters: Iran's Afghan and Pakistani Mercenaries”, at the neoconservative (and thus favoring not only the American aristocracy but its allied aristocracies — especially in Saudi Arabia and Israel) The National Interest, dated 20 November 2015. That article says, “The liwa’ fatimiyun (Fatimiyun Brigade) is composed exclusively of Afghans and fights under the auspices of Hezbollah Afghanistan,” based in Syria. Other supposed foreign Shiites trying to overthrow Syria’s Government are mentioned, as being supposedly “Pakistanis fighting in Syria under the Hezbollah flag.” However, if these allegations are true, then those men would be opponents of Syria’s secular government, which is headed by the secular Shiite Bashar al-Assad, who is being attacked by fundamentalist Sunnis — including both ISIS and Al Qaeda there — who are trying to kill Hezbollah in Syria, who are, in fact, defending Assad. (Such illogical ‘historical’ accounts as that, are normal in neoconservative publications — counterfactuality is entirely acceptable to them.) Either that, or else the alleged Shiite Pakistanis who are fighting in Syria to overthrow the Shiite Assad and replace him with a fundamentalist Sunni regime, would be — not actually members of Hezbollah, but instead — Shiites from Pakistan who came to Syria in order to help actually not to overthrow the Government but to defend it against its rabidly anti-Shia attackers. That’s the opposite of the assumption that The National Interest made, but it conceivably could be the case. A Pew survey scientifically randomly sampled 1,512 Pakistanis, and found that 1,450 of them declared themselves to be “Muslim,” which is 96%. It also found that 94% of Pakistanis (of any or no faith) say that religion is “very important” in their lives, and found that 81% of the Muslims said they were “Sunni,” 6% said they were “Shiite,” and 12% said they were “Just a Muslim.” So, only 6% of Pakistanis identify themselves specifically as “Shia.” That is such a small percentage of Shiites in Pakistan, as to make unlikely any significant contribution that Pakistanis would be providing to the defense of Syria, which is at least 1,800 miles or 2,900 kilometers, away — not even in the same general region. But, in any case, that neoconservative magazine’s assumptions regarding the entire matter are clearly false.

    Clearly, then, the logical feasibility of the U.S. Government’s case against Iran is so tiny as to constitute almost an absolute impossibility of that case being true.

    Now, then, let’s consider the specifics of the case:

    The great investigative journalist Greg Palast, in his 2003 The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (pages 101-102), wrote:

    True-blue Democrats may want to skip the next paragraphs. If President Bush put the kibosh on investigations of Saudi funding of terror and nuclear bomb programs, this was merely taking a policy of Bill Clinton one step further.

     

    Following the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, Clinton hunted Osama with a passion — but a passion circumscribed by the desire to protect the sheikdom sitting atop our oil lifeline. In 1994, a Saudi diplomat defected to the United States with 14,000 pages of documents from the kingdom’s sealed file cabinets. This mother lode of intelligence included evidence of plans for the assassination of Saudi opponents living in the West and, tantalizingly, details of the $7 billion the Saudis gave to Saddam Hussein for his nuclear program — the first attempt to build an Islamic bomb. The Saudi government, according to the defector, Mohammed Al Khilewi, slipped Saddam the nuclear loot during the Reagan and Bush Sr. years when our government still thought Saddam too marvelous for words [because he was trying to slaughter Shiite Iran]. The thought was that he would only use the bomb to vaporize Iranians [which the rulers of both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia — and of Israel — would love].

     

    Clinton granted the Saudi defector asylum, but barred the FBI from looking at the documents. Al Khilewi’s New York lawyer, Michael Wildes, told me he was stunned. Wildes handles some of America’s most security-sensitive asylum cases. “We said (to the FBI), ‘Here, take the documents! Go get some bad guys with them! We’ll even pay for the photocopying!” But the agents who came to his office had been ordered not to accept evidence of Saudi criminal activity, even on U.S. soil.

     

    In 1997, the Canadians caught and extradited to America one of the [Saudi-Government-alleged] Khobar Towers attackers. In 1999, Vernon Jordan’s law firm stepped in and — poof! — the [Saudi-alleged] killer was shipped back to Saudi Arabia before he could reveal all he knew about Al Qaeda (valuable) and the Saudis (embarrassing). I reviewed but was not permitted to take notes on, the alleged [finally, Palast is getting that right] terrorist’s debriefing by the FBI. To my admittedly inexpert eyes, there was enough on Al Qaeda to make him a source on terrorists worth holding on to. Not that he was set free — he’s in one of the kingdom’s dungeons [likelier dead soon after arriving back in Saudi Arabia] — but his info is sealed up with him. The terrorist’s extradition was “Clinton’s.” “Clinton’s parting kiss to the Saudis,” as one insider put it.

    Another great investigative journalist is Seymour Hersh, who in the 22 October 2001 issue of the New Yorker, headlined “King’s Ransom” and he opened:

    Since 1994 or earlier, the National Security Agency has been collecting electronic intercepts of conversations between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family, which is headed by King Fahd. The intercepts depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from the country's religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channelling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it.

     

    The intercepts have demonstrated to analysts that by 1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Central Asia, and throughout the Persian Gulf region. "Ninety-six is the key year," one American intelligence official told me. "Bin Laden hooked up to all the bad guys — it's like the Grand Alliance — and had a capability for conducting large-scale operations." The Saudi regime, he said, had "gone to the dark side.”

    Subsequently, he noted:

    In 1994, Mohammed al-Khilewi, the first secretary at the Saudi Mission to the United Nations, defected and sought political asylum in the United States. He brought with him, according to his New York lawyer, Michael J. Wildes, some fourteen thousand internal government documents depicting the Saudi royal family's corruption, human-rights abuses, and financial support for terrorists.

     

    He claimed to have evidence that the Saudis had given financial and technical support to Hamas, the extremist Islamic group whose target is Israel. There was a meeting at the lawyer's office with two F.B.I. agents and an Assistant United States Attorney. "We gave them a sampling of the documents and put them on the table," Wildes told me last week. "But the agents refused to accept them." He and his client heard nothing further from federal authorities. Al-Khilewi, who was granted asylum, is now living under cover.

     

    The Saudis were also shielded from Washington's foreign-policy bureaucracy. A government expert on Saudi affairs told me that Prince Bandar dealt exclusively with the men at the top, and never met with desk officers and the like. "Only a tiny handful of people inside the government are familiar with U.S.-Saudi relations," he explained. "And that is purposeful."

    Both Mueller and Comey were high enough “at the top” so as to know what the people below them needed to hide in order to succeed in their careers.

    The New York Times’s report, on 15 August 1996, quoted a leading Saudi dissident in London as asserting that, “As far as I know, Prince Nayef is keeping the Americans away from all the details at this point.” This report went on: “In a statement responding to the earlier reports of confessions, Prince Nayef said Saudi Arabia would make an announcement as soon as the investigation is completed. His comments were also viewed as refuting earlier suggestions by Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, who had said that Saudi investigations might point to an Iranian connection.” In other words, at that time (as of August 15th), the U.S. official was suggesting “an Iranian connection” but the Saudi official wasn’t — at least, not yet — and the expectation was that “confessions” would be providing the decisive ‘evidence’. However, these ‘confessions’, in Saudi cases are typically ‘information’ extracted under torture, and, where that fails to obtain the ‘information’ that’s desired by the Government, then threats to destroy the person’s immediate family are applied; so, the Sauds famously usually do get exactly the ‘information’ that they want (regardless of whether it’s true). 

    The Wikipedia article “Khobar Towers bombing” summarizes the ‘findings’ by the U.S. FBI and courts, and ignores the Sauds’ ‘investigation(s)’, because nothing was ever made public from the Sauds’ Government or officials or anyone there, about what they ‘found’ (other than ‘found’ by torture). Wikipedia’s article, which is based entirely upon the U.S. Government (the first party to broach publicly the possibility of “an Iranian connection”) states flatly, right up front, “Perpetrators: Hezbollah Al-Hejaz (English: Party of God in the Hijaz).” In common parlance, that’s Hezbollah, an “Iranian connection” — exactly what the U.S. Government wanted.

    Here’s what that article asserts regarding the operations of the alleged mastermind:

    In June 2001, an indictment was issued in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, Virginia charging the following people with murder, conspiracy, and other charges related to the bombing:[18]

    Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Mughassil

    Al-Mughassil disappeared from the ‘news’ after the Sauds announced his capture in 2015, but Wikipedia on 6 November 2017 closed its bizarre article about him by saying, without comment, “Al-Mughassil was believed to be living in Iran.[1][2]” That footnote [1] linked to Front Page mag. in 2005, which actually said nothing of the sort; footnote [2] linked to FDD in 2006, which actually said nothing of the sort. The obvious likeliest explanation for Wikipedia’s blatant falsehoods there is Wikipedia’s being edited by the CIA, which serves the Sauds, just like the rest of America’s federal Government does.

    The Wikipedia article then continued by listing the other alleged defendants:

    • Abdelkarim Hussein Mohamed Al-Nasser
    • Ali Saed Bin Ali El-Hoorie
    • Ibrahim Salih Mohammed Al-Yacoub
    • Hani al-Sayegh who had been previously in U.S. custody but deported to Saudi Arabia, when charges against him were dropped due to a lack of evidence.
    • Eight other Saudis
    • One Lebanese man listed as "John Doe".

    In July 2001, Saudi Arabia said that eleven of the people indicted in the US were in custody in Saudi prisons, and were to be tried in Saudi court, as the country refused to extradite any of them to the United States to stand trial.[19] The government has not since made public the outcome of the trial or the whereabouts of the prisoners.

    All six of the named persons there were Shiites in Saudi Arabia. The respective Wikipedia articles on each provide no evidence that any of them was at all involved in the bombing. However, the article on Hani al-Sayegh, who was living in Canada, is extraordinarily honest: it indicates that he said he had had nothing whatsoever to do with any bombings, nor any terrorism at all, and that the U.S. Government tried to get him to confess to something on the basis of which he could be tried and convicted in the U.S., but that he continued to resist all plea-offers, and to maintain that they were seeking to get him to lie, which he would not do. So, since the U.S. would not torture him on U.S. soil, the U.S. deported him “to Saudi Arabia on October 10, 1999 where it was assumed he would be executed upon arrival.[3][12].” But the Saudi regime never announced anything about any of the men they were charging in the Khobar Towers bombing.

    The FBI issued charges against al-Sayegh and 12 others (all allegedly Hezbollah) on 21 June 2001, for the bombing; and, since that time, the only publication of their names has been in regards to the mere presumption that they were guilty. Their indictments in the U.S.(without evidence), and (since the Saudi Government wouldn’t say anything about them — not even whether they were in prison or free there) the charge in U.S. courts that Iran had helped them to do it, were 100% based upon that ‘evidence’. Therefore, Iran was declared guilty in U.S. courts, and fined, again, and again, over $500 million in all, without any reliable evidence, at all, that Iran had anything to do with the Khobar Towers bombing. And, not a cent of those fines was paid; but the U.S. Government’s purpose was served nonetheless: getting Iran’s ‘guilt’ onto the official record, such that Wikipedia, for example could say “Perpetrators: Hezbollah Al-Hejaz (English: Party of God in the Hijaz).”

    The Wikipedia article on the Khobar Towers bombing closed, however, by saying:

    William Perry, who was the United States Secretary of Defense at the time that this bombing happened, said in an interview in June 2007 that "he now believes al-Qaida rather than Iran was behind a 1996 truck bombing at an American military base.”[25]

     

    On December 22, 2006, federal judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that Iran and Hezbollah were responsible for the attack, stating that the leading experts on Hezbollah presented "overwhelming" evidence of the group's involvement and that six captured Hezbollah members detailed the role of Iranian officials in providing money, plans, and maps.[4] This decision was reached as a default judgment, however, in which the Iranian government was not represented in court, and had no opportunity to challenge the allegations.

    People who trust the U.S. Government’s honesty will interpret the outcome as displaying legal and judicial incompetency, not as displaying political and propagandistic competency.

    William Perry announced his opinion only after the 2006 court ‘finding’ of Iran’s ‘guilt’ in the case. The UPI article on this opened and closed as follows:

    Perry: U.S. eyed Iran attack after bombing

    Published: June 6, 2007 at 4:25 PM

     

    WASHINGTON, June 6 (UPI) — A former U.S. defense secretary says he now believes al-Qaida rather than Iran was behind a 1996 truck bombing at an American military base.

     

    Former Defense Secretary William Perry said he had a contingency plan to attack Iran if the link had been proven, but evidence was not to either his nor President Bill Clinton's satisfaction.

     

    The attack would have struck "at a number of their military facilities that would have weakened — substantially weakened … the Iranian navy and air force," he said in New York Tuesday during a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. …

     

    "I believe that the Khobar Tower bombing was probably masterminded by Osama bin Laden," Perry said. "I can't be sure of that, but in retrospect, that's what I believe. At the time, he was not a suspect. At the time … all of the evidence was pointing to Iran."

     

    He said al-Qaida did not emerge as a major threat until Clinton's second term.

     

    "We probably should have been more concerned about it at the time than we were but in the first term we did not see Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida as a major factor, or one that we were concerned with," he said.

     

    In 2001, the U.S. Justice Department announced a 46-count indictment against 13 Saudis and one Lebanese man in the bombing. All were allegedly connected to Hezbollah, a terrorist group the United States believes is linked to Iran.

     

    Perry said the FBI strongly believed at the time the bombing was ordered by Iran, but Saudi officials tried to discourage that theory.

     

    "They feared what action we would take. They rightly feared it. In fact, I had a contingency plan for a strike on Iran, if it had been if it had been clearly established. But it was never clearly established, and so we never did that," Perry said.

    So, although Wikipedia started by alleging “Perpetrators: Hezbollah Al-Hejaz (English: Party of God in the Hijaz)” — and in plain language, that’s Hezbollah — it ended by kaboshing that very theory of the case, which the Wikipedia article had been ‘documenting’ (with bad logic and some false ‘facts’).

    Subsequently, the fine investigative journalist Gareth Porter explained how Perry had come to think that Iran and Hezbollah had been the culprit. Perry had trusted the head of the FBI, Louis Freeh. Perry didn’t know that, behind the scenes, Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud (who was his family’s U.S. Ambassador) had told Freeh that Iran and Hezbollah did it. Furthermore, the Sauds had actually blocked the FBI’s own investigators from having access to the site or to any of the evidence (other than by providing Freeh himself access to the torture-extracted ‘confessions’). Initially, in fact, the Sauds even started bulldozing the site.

    The first part of Porter’s five-part report was titled “EXCLUSIVE — PART 1: Al Qaeda Excluded from the Suspects List”. It said: “The Saudi bulldozing stopped only after Scott Erskine, the supervisory FBI special agent for international terrorism investigations, threatened that Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who happened to be in Saudi Arabia when the bomb exploded, would intervene personally on the matter.” It said there was: “a systematic effort by the Saudis to obstruct any U.S. investigation of the bombing and to deceive the United States about who was responsible for the bombing. The Saudi regime steered the FBI investigation toward Iran and its Saudi Shi’a allies with the apparent intention of keeping U.S. officials away from a trail of evidence that would have led to Osama bin Laden and a complex set of ties between the regime and the Saudi terrorist organiser.”

    The second part was titled “EXCLUSIVE — PART 2: Saudi Account of Khobar Bore Telltale Signs of Fraud”.

    The third part was titled “EXCLUSIVE — PART 3: U.S. Officials Leaked a False Story Blaming Iran”.

    The fourth part was titled “EXCLUSIVE — PART 4: FBI Ignored Compelling Evidence of bin Laden Role”. It noted that, “In October 1996, after having issued yet another fatwa calling on Muslims to drive U.S. soldiers out of the Kingdom, bin Laden was quoted in al Quds al Arabi, the Palestinian daily published in London, as saying, ‘The crusader army was shattered when we bombed Khobar.’"

    The fifth part was titled “EXCLUSIVE — PART 5: Freeh Became "Defence Lawyer" for Saudis on Khobar”. This part had the most hair-raising details:

    The key to the success of the Saudi deception was FBI director Louis Freeh, who took personal charge of the FBI investigation, letting it be known within the Bureau that he was the "case officer" for the probe, according to former FBI officials.

     

    Freeh allowed Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan to convince him that Iran was involved in the bombing, and that President Bill Clinton, for whom he had formed a visceral dislike, "had no interest in confronting the fact that Iran had blown up the towers," as Freeh wrote in his memoirs.

     

    The Khobar Towers investigation soon became Freeh’s vendetta against Clinton. "Freeh was pursuing this for his own personal agenda," says former FBI agent Jack Cloonan.

     

    A former high-ranking FBI official recalls that Freeh "was always meeting with Bandar". And many of the meetings were not in Freeh’s office but at Bandar’s 38-room home in McLean, Virginia.

     

    Meanwhile, the Saudis were refusing the most basic FBI requests for cooperation.

     

    Freeh quickly made Iranian and Saudi Shi’a responsibility for the bombing the official premise of the investigation, excluding from the inquiry the hypothesis that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organisation had carried out the Khobar Towers bombing.

     

    The CIA’s bin Laden unit, which had only been established in early 1996, was also excluded by CIA leadership from that Agency’s work on the bombing.

    Finally, in order to bring his exhaustive investigation up-to-date, Porter headlined on 1 September 2015, “Who Bombed Khobar Towers? Anatomy of a Crooked Terrorism Investigation”. Here’s one particularly forceful portion of it:

    In order to build a legal case against Iran and Shi'a Saudis, Freeh had to get access to the Shi'a detainees who had confessed. But the Saudis never agreed to allow FBI officials to interview them. In early November 1998, Freeh sent an FBI team to observe Saudi secret police officials asking eight Shi'a detainees the FBI's questions from behind a one-way mirror at the Riyadh detention center.

     

    By then Saudi secret police had already had two and half years to coach the detainees on what to say, under the threat of more torture. But Freeh didn't care. "For Louis, if they would let us in the room, that was the important thing," a senior FBI official involved in the Khobar investigation told me. "We would have gone over there and gotten the answers even if they had been propped up."

     

    But the Justice Department refused to go ahead with an indictment based on the information the FBI team brought back. Department lawyers knew the Shi'a detainees had been subject to torture, so they have ruled that the confessions were not valid.

    In other words: the head of the FBI believed torture-extracted ‘confessions’ as if such would meet U.S. rules of evidence — which they don’t. And coaching of witnesses is likewise prohibited — under U.S. laws.

    On 30 May 2013, The Washingtonian headlined “Forged Under Fire — Bob Mueller and Jim Comey’s Unusual Friendship” and Garrett M. Graff reported:

    Although they’d been aware of each other for years, sharing their similar orbits, Comey and Mueller were first brought together professionally by then-FBI director Louis Freeh in the opening days of the Bush administration. … As the Bush administration took office in 2001, Freeh asked Bob Mueller, who was acting as John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, to transfer the [Khobar] case to Comey.

     

    When he finally did so, Mueller called Comey with a warning: “Wilma Lewis is going to be so pissed.” Indeed, Lewis blasted the decision, as well as both Freeh and Mueller personally, in a press release, saying the move was “ill-conceived and ill-considered.” But Freeh’s gambit paid off.

     

    Within weeks, Comey had pulled together the indictment. During a National Security Council briefing at the White House, under the watchful gaze of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Comey presented overwhelming evidence of Iran’s involvement.

     

    On the eve of the expiration of the statute of limitations, fourteen individuals were indicted for the attack. Freeh, who stepped down the next day, said the indictment was “a major step.”

    So, Comey and Mueller were brought in by Freeh because Freeh was about to retire and he wanted successors who would be committed to the theory of the case, that Freeh had gotten from Prince Bandar. If Comey and Mueller wouldn’t go along with that torture-extracted ‘testimony’ as ‘evidence’, then their ability to become appointed head the FBI would have been zero. Freeh, Comey, and Mueller are a team – a team that serves the Bushes and the Sauds. But not the American public.

    Our continuing war against Iran is due entirely to their crucial assistance. The Deep State appoints such individuals.

    *  *  *

    CLOSING NOTE: This article had been submitted to, and rejected by, the 39 publications listed here at the bottom, sent to each as an exclusive, but since they all rejected it without comment, I now am sending it not just to them but to the entire U.S. newsmedia, on a non-exclusive and free-of-charge basis to publish. Since none of them will pay me for publishing it, I shall be happy if any publish it without charge, even small ‘alternative news’ sites online, because – and especially if a mainstream newsmedium relents and decides to publish it – then perhaps the embargo against the truth of such important matters being published in the United States and its vassal nations, will come to be broken, and the ‘news’media in America and in those other countries, might then terminate being actually the U.S-regime’s propaganda-media, and might finally begin to pay penance for their all having helped the U.S. Government to deceive the American (and allied-nations’) public into supporting the regime’s entirely lie-based invasions of Afghanistan in 2001, of Iraq in 2003, of Libya in 2012, of Syria since 2012, of U.S. coups elsewhere (such as in Ukraine), and, now, potentially repeating it yet again with invasions or coups against Iran or other countries that the U.S. elite want to grab and add to their growing U.S. empire.

    If Iran becomes invaded, or another U.S. coup becomes perpetrated there (such as in 1953), then perhaps Russia’s only realistic response — as being the ultimate U.S. target — will be a blitz nuclear attack to destroy the United States, in recognition of the U.S. Government’s fanatical reach to control a total global empire — total global strangulation of freedom and of peace, everywhere. After all, if Russia waits till after a U.S. lie-based invasion of Iran, then it will be simply waiting for a blitz nuclear attack by the U.S. and its NATO alliance against Russia itself, which would be even worse for the world than Russia’s striking first — though the world would end, either way. The U.S. Government now seems to be an out-of-control spreading cancer, a terminal threat to the world in every regard. It’s already recognized throughout the world as being “the greatest threat to peace in the world today”. And its ‘news’media have helped to keep it that way.

    Here is the list of 39 publications that this article had been submitted to as an exclusive (and, of course, it’s now being submitted to them, too, yet again, but this time on a non-exclusive, non-fee, basis, along with being submitted to all the rest of the regime’s press, including broadcast media):

    McClatchy newspapers, New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper’s, TIME, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, The Nation, Progressive, National Review, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Business Week, Forbes, Politico, thedailybeast, huffingtonpost, slate, bloomberg, businessinsider, newsweek, theintercept, breitbart, alternet, newsbud, spiked-online, vice, mintpressnews, truthdig, truth-out, Independent, Guardian, Daily Mail, Spectator, London Review of Books, New Statesman, Spiegel.

    *  *  *

    Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

     

  • Outrage Follows "Jaw-Droppingly Shocking" 1986 Prince Charles Letter Blaming Mid-East Problems On "Foreign Jews"

    Prince Charles has sparked media outrage following a report he wrote a letter blaming “the influx of foreign, European Jews” for aggravating the Arab-Israeli conflict and leading to general unrest in the Middle East, while also asking whether an American president would “have the courage” to take on “the Jewish lobby” to put an end to terrorism in the region.

    The note, written on November 24, 1986, was found in a public archive and published Saturday by the Daily Mail. The Prince penned the letter after official visits to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar with Princess Diana.

    “I now appreciate that Arabs and Jews were all a Semitic people originally,” the then 38-year-old Prince of Wales wrote in his letter, adding, that “it is the influx of foreign, European Jews (especially from Poland, they say) which has helped to cause great problems” in the Middle East. “I know there are so many complex issues, but how can there ever be an end to terrorism unless the causes are eliminated?” he questioned.

    “Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in the US? I must be naive, I suppose!” he concludes.

    The Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, described Charles’ comments “both shocking and entirely predictable.”

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

    “To me this is the most astonishing element of the Prince’s letter. The “Jewish lobby” is one of the anti-Semitic themes that have endured for centuries. It is this myth there are these very powerful Jews who control foreign policy or the media or banks or whatever.”  Pollard then told the daily mail that the letter was “jaw-droppingly shocking” and added that “[the Prince’s comments] come from the heir to the throne is unsettling, to put it mildly.”

    While the letter is inflammatory, there is no suggestion Charles holds anti-Semitic views according to The Mail: “He has many prominent Jewish friends and in 2013 became the first Royal to attend a chief rabbi’s inauguration ceremony. In a speech that year, he expressed concern at the apparent rise of anti-Semitism in Britain.”

    At the same time, he is seen as a defender of Islam, with one historian noting that no other major Western figure has as high a standing in the Muslim world. 

     

    It has also been suggested he has pro-Palestinian leanings, a perception the letter appears to support.

    Prince Charles is not the first one to fall in the “lobby” spotlight: among those to come under fire for using the term ‘Jewish lobby’ are General George Brown, the highest-ranking military officer in the US as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was publicly rebuked and disowned by President Gerald Ford in 1974 after claiming that a ‘Jewish lobby’ controlled Congress, according to The Daily Mail. Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage was criticised earlier this month when he referred to ‘a powerful Jewish lobby’ in the US.  In 2006, Chris Davies, former leader of the Lib Dem MEPs, was forced to resign after he used the term. Archbishop Desmond Tutu also came under fire when he used the phrase in a newspaper article in 2002.

    The Prince’s reference in the letter to the influx of European Jews also caused dismay.

    It is not clear if he is referring to immigration before or after the Second World War, or both. Mr Pollard said: ‘It is the absolute classic Arab explanation of the problems in the Middle East.

     

    ‘And it is what everyone has always said the British aristocracy actually thinks – the idea that Jews were some kind of foreigners who had no real place in Israel until we decided to make it their homeland. Historically it is nonsense and it’s quite stunning when it comes from the heir to the throne.’

     

    A senior Israeli diplomatic source said last night: ‘He [Charles] was travelling around the Gulf states [just before he wrote the controversial letter], which in those years were very anti-Israel. It seems he was presented with a narrative in a very convincing way.’

    Earlier this month, Britain marked the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, the document that paved the way for the state of Israel, with a gala dinner in London attended by Theresa May and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    It is also not the first time Prince Charles has gotten in hot water for controversial remarks: In 2007, leaked emails between senior Clarence House staff put Charles at the centre of a row about the Royals’ attitude towards the Jewish state.

    * * *

    Attempting some damage control, a spokesman for Clarence House said the thoughts revealed in the 1986 letter, were actually “not The Prince’s own views.”

    “The letter clearly states these were not the Prince’s own thinking on Arab-Israeli affairs, but represented the opinions of some of those he met during his visit which he was keen to interrogate,” the statement said. It added that Prince Charles “was sharing the arguments in private correspondence with a long standing friend in an attempt to improve his understanding of what he has always recognized is a deeply complex issue to which he was coming early on in his own analysis in 1986,” the representative said.

    “Over the years, the prince has continued his study of the complex and difficult themes he referenced here. He has built a proven track record of support for both Jewish and Arab communities around the world and has a long history of promoting interfaith dialogue and cultural understanding,”
    she added.

  • Mainstream Media Now Promoting "Gun Confiscation Orders" As Solution To Mass Shootings

    Authored by Alex Thomas via SHTFplan.com,

    In what many saw coming a mile away in the aftermath of both the Las Vegas Massacre and the Texas Church mass shooting, liberals in the government, with the help of their mainstream media allies, are now pushing what amounts to plans for gun confiscation, outside of normal law, for Americans across the country.

    The new push for gun control from the left comes courtesy of ABC News which recently published a piece promoting the use of an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) that many believe is nothing more than a thinly veiled confiscation plan that would allow a judge to “issue an ex parte order” for the direct confiscation of an American citizens firearms.

    Unbelievably, the order can actually be issued without the firearm owner even being present, which would in turn end with police at the citizens door demanding he hand over his weapons or face violence from the state.

    ABC’s Andy Fies, on the other hand, apparently wants Americans to see the orders differently, painting a more friendly picture of the ERPO’s while quoting two different left-wing gun control groups as seemingly unbiased experts on gun violence.

    As of now, only Washington, California, Connecticut and most recently Oregon have ERPO laws (while Indiana and Texas have modified risk warrant statutes). Over the past year, however, spurred by a string of mass shootings beginning with the Pulse Nightclub attack that killed 49 in June 2016, legislatures in 19 states and Washington, D.C., have taken up 32 separate ERPO bills for consideration, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit organization that advocates for gun control.

     

    Everytown’s deputy legal director, William Rosen, told ABC News that list will grow. “We expect to see at least as much interest in 2018,” he said.

     

    “There is a growing consensus,” added Lauren Alfred of the gun violence prevention group Sandy Hook Promise, “that this is the first step we should be taking when we are talking about people who are at risk of hurting themselves or others.”

     

    Current laws barring gun ownership are limited. Generally, a person with a long history of mental health issues can still legally buy or possess firearms if they don’t fall into specific statutory categories such as having been adjudicated mentally ill or under a domestic violence restraining order. But, as was the case with Texas church gunman Devin Kelley, even these restrictions may not work if the person’s troubled past is not recorded on a background registry.

     

    With an ERPO, however, if family members or police can show a gun owner to be an imminent danger to themselves or others, they can force the person to surrender their weapon(s).

    Keep in mind that Everytown for Gun Safety is a Michael Bloomberg funded, left-wing gun control group that was created as part of a rebranding effort by the billionaire gun grabber after his previous group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, was outed by multiple former members as actually pushing an agenda of full-scale gun confiscation.

    The Extreme Risk Protection Orders scheme seems to be nothing more than another attempt at slowly eroding the right of lawful Americans to own firearms.

    As AWR Hawkins reported in an April 2017 article about a similar law being pushed in Oregon, “Oregon state Sen. Brian Boquist is pushing a confiscation bill that would broaden the number of prohibited gun purchasers as well as require certain individuals to hand over any guns in their possession.”

    At the time, gun rights activist and NRA member Keely Hopkins rightfully described the law as an attempt to remove your Second Amendment rights by using a third-party who would need little evidence to declare you unfit to own a firearm. (Imagine a vengeful ex-wife/husband)

    “This bill allows for a protective order to remove your Second Amendment rights, not because of a criminal conviction, but based on third-party allegations using an evidentiary standard that falls far below what’s normally required for the removing of fundamental rights.”

    It is also important to note that gun control advocates and the mainstream media are using The Las Vegas Massacre, which the authorities are openly lying about (there were at least 7 different shooters) as a pretext to further take away Americans right to bear arms. This is, and has always been, the modus operandi of the power elite.

  • Wal-Mart Is Raising Prices Of Food, Household Products On Its US Website

    Somebody should tell Wal-Mart they’re doing it wrong.

    In what the Wall Street Journal described as an attempt to lure customers back to its brick-and-mortar locations, Wal-Mart has been quietly raising prices for some food and household products sold on its US website, including Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Colgate toothbrushes and bags of Purina dog food.

    Of course, we weren’t in the room when this plan was being vetted by whoever is in charge of corporate strategy at the retailing behemoth. But we find it hard to believe that nobody pointed out the simple fact that, if customers notice that prices have been raised on Wal-Mart’s website, customers can simply buy the same product, or a similar one, from Amazon or another competing retailer.

    Before this latest shift in strategy, Wal-Mart previously planned to keep online and in-store prices equal for many of its most popular products, WSJ says, unless competition organically drove them lower.

    But now the company is experimenting with a new pricing system that is raising prices on certain goods that would otherwise be unprofitable to ship.

    To be sure, the pressure on Wal-Mart to drive foot traffic to its stores has never been greater, especially since the now-Amazon owned Whole Foods Market has been slashing prices left and right in a push to wrest market share away from its rivals. Meanwhile, the strategy of charging more online has been used by other big-box retailers like Costco Wholesale Corp. but the move is unusual for Wal-Mart, which has long embraced the strategy of outcompeting on price in accordance with its “everyday low price” message, and has worked to keep online prices at least as low as shoppers find in its 4,700 U.S. stores.

    In some cases, product listings on walmart.com show an “online” and “in the store” price. Often the online price matches Amazon. But this system is changing now that the store is focusing on preserving its in-store dominance while also trying to expand its online presence.

    “We always work to offer the best price online relative to other sites,” a Wal-Mart spokeswoman said. “It simply costs less to sell some items in stores. Customers can access those store prices online when they choose to pick up the item in store."

    According to WSJ, a box of Kraft Thick n’ Creamy Macaroni & Cheese Dinner was $1.48 on walmart.com as of Friday, the same as Amazon’s price but more than Wal-Mart’s $1.28 store price (listed online). A similar comparison for a twin-pack of Betty Crocker Hamburger Helper showed the price as $3.30 online. but $2.50 if purchased at a Wal-Mart store in Illinois.

    Wal-Mart is investing billions to boost e-commerce sales, which rose 60% in the US in the most recent quarter, but some shareholders worry the effort could drag on profits.

    Marc Lore, head of Wal-Mart’s U.S. e-commerce unit, told investors in October that “this year should be the largest loss in e-commerce, and we’ll see slight improvement next year.” The company overall expects profit margins to be slightly down this year. It is scheduled to report third-quarter earnings on Thursday.

    Wal-Mart e-commerce workers responsible for product sales have been instructed to boost profits along with sales, according to the people familiar with the situation, and are “no longer obligated to follow store pricing,” one of them said.

    The company is also asking suppliers to sell more of their merchandise in bulk versions instead of single boxes, an effort to increase order sizes and make them more profitable, the people said.

    For inexpensive items, “there’s no cheaper way to get these products to consumers than have them come in the store and pick it off the shelf themselves,”  Lore said at last month’s investor conference. He said he hopes shoppers will come to stores for the best price and place larger orders online to offset the cost of shipment.

    In an effort to try and compete with Amazon’s “Amazon Prime” service, Wal-Mart offers free two-day shipping on millions of items on any order above $35.

    Lore, who founded online retailer Jet.com Inc., which Wal-Mart bought last year for $3.3 billion, said that since he became head of Wal-Mart’s U.S. e-commerce division, the company has become more experimental with online marketing and pricing, including offering more discount codes and working with companies that publicize discounts through mobile applications.

    Amazon is also trying new pricing models. It started lowering prices on products sold by outside vendors by as much as 9% in recent weeks, ratcheting up a price war with other retailers ahead of the holidays.

    The company is also asking suppliers to sell more of their merchandise in bulk versions instead of single boxes, an effort to increase order sizes and make them more profitable, the people said.

    For inexpensive items, “there’s no cheaper way to get these products to consumers than have them come in the store and pick it off the shelf themselves,” Mr. Lore said at last month’s investor conference. He said he hopes shoppers will come to stores for the best price and place larger orders online to offset the cost of shipment.

    The change in Wal-Mart’s strategy comes at a particularly risky time – the holiday shopping season when retailers typically book their highest revenues and profits. If the strategy works, investors should have some idea of exactly how successful it has been by the time the company publishes its fourth-quarter earnings report.

    However, raising prices in an era of unprecedented online competition could be particularly damaging. Considering the rapid growth Wal-Mart has seen in its online sales this year, raising prices could cause that trend to come to a complete stop.
     

  • High Prices And Zombie Housing

    Authored by Doug French via The Mises Institute,

    “The inventory is coming, but people are buying faster than it can get here,” GLVR President David Tina told Channel 8. “We have 5,000 available houses, but we sell 3,000 a month.”

     

    The Business Press backs this up, “By the end of September, GLVAR reported 4,969 single-family homes listed for sale without any sort of offer. That’s down 33.1 percent from one year ago. For condos and townhomes, the 680 properties listed without offers in September represented a 41.4 percent drop from one year ago.”

     

    Dennis Smith of Home Builders Research points out, “There are still boatloads of homes underwater, or almost underwater, essentially keeping those owners from selling their home and buying another. However, there have been a lot of out of town buyers that have propped up the market and have kept the recovery moving forward.”

    What Tina and Smith don’t mention Eli Segall does in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, ”Some 2.17 percent of homes in the Las Vegas area, or a total of 14,334 properties, are vacant. That’s up from 2.15 percent, or 13,896 properties, in 2016, according to Attom [Data Solutions].”

    That’s three months of inventory off the market.

    The nationwide vacancy rate is 1.58% according to Attom, with most of these vacancies (75%) being non-owner occupied. Attom’s website post is entitled, “Vacant Property Rate Increases From a Year Ago in 54 Percent of U.S. Local Housing Markets in Q3 2017.”

    According to the Attom report,

    vacant “zombie” pre-foreclosure properties – which have started the foreclosure process but have not yet been repossessed by the foreclosing lender – decreased 22 percent from a year ago to 14,312 as of the end of Q3 2017, 67 percent below the peak of 44,030 in Q3 2013.

     

    The number of vacant bank-owned properties decreased 48 percent from a year ago to 24,026 as of the end of Q3 2017.

    Most Zombie foreclosures are located in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. Most vacant REOs are in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Cleveland.

    Nevada is among the leaders in numbers of seriously underwater homes.

    The New York Times, The Guardian and CNN’s Lisa Ling have all reported on the Las Vegas squatter problem. Ion Lovett wrote for the NYT last year,

    Squatters have descended on every corner of the Las Vegas Valley, taking over empty houses in struggling working-class neighborhoods, in upscale planned communities like Summerlin, and everywhere in between. And they often bring a trail of crime with them.

    “Things get out of hand pretty quickly when these people move in,” Jacquelyn Romero, 59, told the NYT. 

    She has lived in the neighborhood for about 15 years. “We’re trying to do almost like a neighborhood watch, just to keep ourselves safe.”

    Echoing that point, a vacant animal clinic in North Las Vegas was torched by squatters in the early hours of November 1st, reports the LVRJ.

    This strange brew of limited sale inventory, rising prices and yet three months of vacant inventory being ransacked by squatters is not how markets work, unless manipulated by government.

     

  • Meanwhile, In The Philippines

    It’s clearly time for a caption contest.

    President Trump joins other world leaders in a handshake with President Rodrigo Roa Duterte,
    right, during the opening ceremony of the 31st ASEAN Summit. Photo @dougmillsnyt

    Also, how did Medvedev get an exemption?

  • Army Lowers Recruiting Standards To Allow Soldiers With History Of Self-Mutilation, Bipolar Disorder

    Since the beginning of the year, much ink has been spilled about the Army’s increasingly desperate attempts to fill its lofty recruiting quota for fiscal year 2017-2018: That is, 80,000 new soldiers. To hit that number, the Army has repeatedly loosened its recruiting requirements. Last month, the military introduced a new policy that would forgive recruits with a history of marijuana use or certain marijuana related criminal violations…

    …and now, the military is taking those efforts one step further, with USA Today reporting today that the Army has expanded its criteria for granting “waivers” to certain recruits who violate criteria related to mental-health violations like having a history of bipolar disorder, or self-mutilation. The military said this expansion is justified by the increasing availability of medical records allowing recruiters to analyze a potential recruit’s history in greater detail to make a more accurate assessment as to whether they’re fit to serve.

    Here’s USA Today:

    WASHINGTON – People with a history of “self-mutilation,” bipolar disorder, depression and drug and alcohol abuse can now seek waivers to join the Army under an unannounced policy enacted in August, according to documents obtained by USA TODAY.

     

    The decision to open Army recruiting to those with mental health conditions comes as the service faces the challenging goal of recruiting 80,000 new soldiers through September 2018. To meet last year's goal of 69,000, the Army accepted more recruits who fared poorly on aptitude tests, increased the number of waivers granted for marijuana use and offered hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses.

     

    Expanding the waivers for mental health is possible in part because the Army now has access to more medical information about each potential recruit, Lt. Col. Randy Taylor, an Army spokesman, said in a statement. The Army issued the ban on waivers in 2009 amid an epidemic of suicides among troops.

    While it's unclear how long this decision was under consideration, last year, Jeff Snow, the army major-general who is in charge of the branch’s recruiting program, revealed to AZCentral that only 3 in 10 individuals applying to join the Army actually meet the branch’s “rigorous” recruiting requirements. "The biggest challenge right now is the fact that only three in 10 can actually meet the requirements to actually join the military," said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Snow, commanding general of United States Army Recruiting Command. "We talk about it in terms of the cognitive, the physical and the moral requirements to join the military, and it's tough. We have a very good Army; there's a desire to recruit quality into the Army."

    The decision to open Army recruiting to those with mental health conditions comes as the service faces the challenging goal of recruiting 80,000 new soldiers through September 2018. To meet last year's goal of 69,000, the Army accepted more recruits who fared poorly on aptitude tests, increased the number of waivers granted for marijuana use and offered hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses.

    However, despite the Army's claims that it now possesses the tool's to conduct more advanced screenings of individual candidates, one expert on military waivers pointed out, no amount of precise data about recruits’ health history can definitively prevent those issue from resurfacing later. Self-mutilation is a particularly disruptive issue because it could set off alarms about potential suicide attempts or other similarly disruptive phenomenon.

    But accepting recruits with those mental health conditions in their past carries risks, according to Elspeth Ritchie, a psychiatrist who retired from the Army as a colonel in 2010 and is an expert on waivers for military service. People with a history of mental health problems are more likely to have those issues resurface than those who do not, she said.

     

    “It is a red flag,” she said. “The question is, how much of a red flag is it?

     

    While bipolar disorder can be kept under control with medication, self-mutilation — where people slashing their skin with sharp instruments — may signal deeper mental health issues, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association.

     

    If self-mutilation occurs in a military setting, Ritchie said, it could be disruptive for a unit. A soldier slashing his or her own skin could result in blood on the floor, the assumption of a suicide attempt and the potential need for medical evacuation from a war zone or other austere place.

    In the past, recruits who received waivers have been responsible for some of the most embarrassing (and extremely heinous) incidents in recent army history. As USA Today pointed out, in 2006, an Iraqi girl was raped and her family killed by US soldiers, one of whom required waivers for minor criminal activity and poor educational background.

    Still, new guidelines for screening potential recruits with histories that include self-mutilation make clear that the applicant must provide “appropriate documentation” to obtain the waiver, according to a September memo sent to Army commanders. Those requirements include a detailed statement from the applicant, medical records, evidence from an employer if the injury was job-related, photos submitted by the recruiter and a psychiatric evaluation and “clearance."

    Slides for military officials who screen recruits show examples of people whose arms, legs and torsos have been scarred by self-mutilation.

    "For all waivers," one memo states, "the burden of proof is on the applicant to provide a clear and meritorious case for why a waiver should be considered."

    A spokeswoman for the military rigorously defended the new waiver protocol, arguing that, under the right circumstances, a waiver for self-mutilation could be justified.

    “I can see a rationale that that shouldn’t be an absolute but could be a waiver,” she said.

    Of course, given the escalating tension between the US and North Korea – and more recently the escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and its chief geopolitical rival, Iran – the possibility that the US could engage in yet another armed conflict before the end of Trump's first term is looming over the Pentagon, not to mention the general public. Furthermore, Trump's decision to send another 4,000 military personnel to Afghanistan, not to mention the US's decision to send a contingent of military "advisers" to help combat terror networks in Northern and East Africa, means that the US's military entanglements have only continued to expand under Trump, despite his repeated promises during the campaign to adhere to an "America first" policy of nonintervention.

    As these conflicts worsen, we doubt this will be the last time the military lowers its recruiting standards before Trump's first term is up.

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Nov 12

Today’s News 12th November 2017

  • The Surveillance State: An Inexorable March Toward Totalitarianism

    Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

    The Surveillance State has slowed down its rate of growth since the President took office, however, it has not halted that growth. Instead, it lies festering below the veneer of daily events, inexorably growing its tentacles and extending their reach.

    Akin to an infestation of weeds, the roots are deep within the fabric of our communications networks: telephones, CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) cameras, the Internet…all are thoroughly permeated.

    Gizmodo released an article entitled “US Homeland Security Wants Facial Recognition to Identify People in Moving Cars,” on 11/2/17 by Matt Novak. Here is an excerpt from that article:

    The proposed program would allow Homeland Security to maintain a database of everyone who leaves and enters the US that would now include photos taken by spying robot-cameras at every border crossing.

     

    Not only does DHS want this new facial recognition program to work without anyone having to exit their vehicle, the agency wants it to work even if the travelers are wearing things like sunglasses and hats. DHS also wants it to work without cars having to stop.

    Seems they really want our information for their database. There is something more. One of the readers on the article’s website who uses the handle “Artiofab” posted this comment that is important, as he lives on the Texas border with Mexico:

     “11/02/17 12:31pm  Hi everybody I live near the US-MX border so I’m happy to give informed opinions on this topic, since I know that a lot of the audience at Gizmodo dot com apparently lives closer to the US-CA border.

     

    Near the US-MX border along major US highways there are these interior checkpoints. If you’re traveling “into” the US (e.g., if you’re in New Mexico and you’re driving north) you stop your car, a USBP agent asks if you’re all US citizens, you say yes, they let you keep going.

     

    (I have no personal anecdote about what happens if you don’t say yes. I have some secondhand anecdote about what happens if you are transporting a small amount of substances that the US considers illegal. But that’s tangential…)  If you’re traveling “towards” Mexico, you don’t have to stop. Instead you drive past one of these.

     

     

    Yes, those are cameras and lights that take images of your car as you drive past them. What does the USBP do with the images? Great question! I don’t know the answer. But I imagine that they might really like some facial recognition software to do some biometric data-gathering on anyone passing past those cameras.”

    This is interesting. Illegal aliens (yes, the Mexicans and foreigners who cross the border illegally are aliens: foreigners entering the United States illegally) are crossing our borders every day. These measures are not to keep the illegal aliens out.

    These measures are to keep the subjects (taxpaying American citizen-slaves) in.

    Why else would they be requiring the use of a passport starting next year on domestic flights? This is the internal passport system of the former Soviet Union, materializing before our eyes. They will not need the “Mark of the Beast” implanted or bar-coded…they have the cellular telephones.

    The taxpayer slave-serfs carry these around…willingly, of their own free will…to transmit their every activity and location every four seconds…events that are all recorded for future use in whatever capacity the rulers see fit.

    China has been the “testing ground” ever since free trade with them was initiated along with NAFTA (George H.W. Bush created this: Clinton just signed it into law). There is another revelatory article about the increase in surveillance technology in China. Entitled “This is What a 21st Century Police State Really Looks Like,” by Megha Rajagopalan for Buzz Feed News, released 10/17/17. 

    Here is an excerpt from that important article:

    For millions of people in China’s remote far west, this dystopian future is already here. China, which has already deployed the world’s most sophisticated internet censorship system, is building a surveillance state in Xinjiang, a four-hour flight from Beijing, that uses both the newest technology and human policing to keep tabs on every aspect of citizens’ daily lives.

     

    The region is home to a Muslim ethnic minority called the Uighurs, who China has blamed for forming separatist groups and fueling terrorism. Since this spring, thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities have disappeared into so-called political education centers, apparently for offenses from using Western social media apps to studying abroad in Muslim countries, according to relatives of those detained.

    The reason the article is important is that Miss Rajagopalan was in the area for two months, accumulating firsthand interviews, reports, and photos. Here’s the big news. The Chinese have devices that allow them to scan cell phones and laptops from a distance at any time. They have biometric facial scanners they employ when stopping individuals on the street. The photos are a must-see: it shows an almost cowed populace infringed upon in every area of life.

    That is the type of life coming to the United States, and soon.

    In an article by the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Who Wants to Supply China’s Surveillance State?  The West,” by Dan Strumpf on 11/1/17.  This excerpt reveals the meaning of the article’s title:

    Companies from across the globe packed one of the world’s biggest surveillance trade shows to demonstrate the latest gizmos and algorithms powering the high-tech revolution in the industry, of which China is on the vanguard. Tools being hawked included facial-recognition cameras, iris scanners, software that can read a subject’s mood and cameras that can scan license plates in the dark.  The surveillance-equipment market in China was valued at $6.4 billion last year, according to IHS Markit .

     

    China is a big buyer of surveillance technology as Beijing steps up its efforts to better monitor its 1.4 billion people. That is providing a boon for equipment makers, who are looking to export their gear abroad. But it has also sparked concern from rights activists about how the authoritarian government is using the souped-up “Big Brother” technology.

    China is the testing ground for the eventual use of this surveillance technology in the United States. An article posted on 11/6/17 shows us just how far the police state has come along toward completion. “Texas National Guard Using Cellphone Spy Tech on Surveillance Planes,” is the article’s title, by Michael Thalen of Info Wars.  The Texas National Guard is using technology to mimic cell phone towers and capture locations of thousands at a time. Here is part of the article:

    The devices, purchased with drug-asset forfeiture money from Maryland-based Digital Receiver Technology Inc. (DRT), are designed to locate cellphones within a certain range by emulating a cell tower.  The specific model obtained by the Texas National Guard, known as the DRT 1301C, is even capable of intercepting and recording phone calls in real-time. A leaked U.S. government catalogue of cellphone surveillance devices obtained by The Intercept in 2015 also notes the ability of the DRT 1301C, nicknamed the “dirt box,” to “locate up to 10,000 targets and can process multiple analog and digital wireless devices all at the same time.”

    There is a large question as to whether a National Guard Unit is allowed to take on the role of a police force. That question has already been covered under legislation and executive orders passed under the Color of Law that basically has thrown the rulebook out the window. Posse Comitatus has been supplanted by the Warner Defense Act of 2006, and the NDAA’s and accompanying Executive Orders under Obama have all but federalized both Active Duty military forces and National Guard troops in the never-ending “War on Terror.”

    As can be seen with these articles, the U.S. government has a new President and a new “pitch,” but many things are not changing, or if so…it is for the worse. The increasing surveillance is tightening of the noose around the necks of the American citizens.

    The surveillance state is growing more powerful and thanks to legislation, is becoming more invulnerable to challenges to its supremacy. Soon its inexorable march will be irreversible. Totalitarian control will be in place, and most of the citizens are either unaware of such, or they do not care that it is so.

  • Visualizing The Rapidly Aging Western World

    From issues such as declining fertility rates to the ongoing complications resulting from China’s famous “One Child Policy”, there are many demographic challenges that the world must grapple with in the coming years.

    However, Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes one problem of particular importance – at least in places like Europe and the Americas – is a rapidly aging population. As the population shifts grayer, potential consequences include higher dependency ratios, rising healthcare costs, and shifting economies and cities.

    EUROPE: A PRIME EXAMPLE

    We’ve discussed Germany’s demographic cliff before, but it’s not only Germany that will be impacted by a rapidly aging population.

    The above animation from data visualization expert Aron Strandberg shows the median age of European countries between 1960 and 2060.

    Starting about a decade from now, you can see that the U.N. projects some European countries to start hitting a median age of 50 or higher. This includes countries like Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece, and then later Germany, Poland, Bosnia, and Croatia.

    The UK, France, Ireland, Scandinavia, and former Soviet countries will be younger – but only slightly so. Median ages in these places by 2060 will be in the early to mid-forties.

    THE AMERICAS

    Populations in North and South America are also graying fast, though not quite at Europe’s pace.

    Here’s a similar map of the Americas that highlights median age between 1960 and 2060, based on U.N. projections.

    Chile and Brazil, in particular, are trending older. Meanwhile, Canada is not far behind with an expected median age of 45 in 2060. Interestingly, the United States is anticipated to only hit a median age of 42 by 2060, which is lower than almost all Western countries.

    While this makes the U.S. look younger in comparison, the country will still experience the same type of economic burden from an aging population. In fact, it’s expected that the population of Americans older than 65 years will nearly double from 48 million to 88 million over the coming three decades.

  • Ethereum's Creator Mulls Limiting Supply In Novel Ways

    While the ICO craze has got out of control in 2017, the two leading cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin and Ethereum – have gone from strength to strength. We’ve seen frequent gut-wrenching (for bulls) drawdowns, wallet freezings (Ethereum several days ago – see here), exchange closures (China) and high-profile criticism from speakers engaging forked-tongues (Jamie Dimon's famous fraud comments, etc).  Nonetheless, like fledglings learning to leave the nest, a broad swathe of opinion senses that there is progress. Like the early days of the internet, investors will suffer losses on those ICOs which were poorly planned and/or poorly executed – which might be most of them. As this process unfolds, however, the better cryptocurrencies will be tweaked, refined and sometimes “forked” to make them better suited to a range of decentralised applications which are, themselves in state of flux.

    Talking of tweaks, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is mulling one for Ethereum which might happen before the end of 2017. Watching the firehose of ICOs, Buterin has been asking himself whether, with Ethereum (ether), he’s creating too much of a good thing. According to Bloomberg.

    The 23-year-old helped sell one of the first digital currencies in 2014 when he introduced ether to the public. Three years later he’s witnessed scads of other digital currencies raise more than $3 billion in 2017 via so-called initial coin offerings. The sheer number of coins now being created has made him ponder the previously imponderable: limiting the supply of ether.

     

    “I’m concerned a lot of these token models aren’t going to be sustainable,” Buterin said in a rare interview last week at the Ethereum Developers Conference in Cancun, Mexico. So what’s the problem? There’s a hard limit — 21 million coins — on the supply of bitcoin, the first successful cryptocurrency, that helps underpin its value. Buterin isn’t mulling a cap like that, but he’s intrigued by the idea of imposing fees on applications built atop ethereum. Those fees would destroy — or burn, in Buterin’s parlance — ether tokens over time.

    Finite supply is hardly a new concept, but it’s certainly entered the consciousness of Bitcoin investors. There’s been much debate on Ethereum supply and while there isn’t a hard limit, the inflation in Ethereum supply is set to decline exponentially, with the maximum amount somewhere in the region of 100 million. There is a quote on Reddit that is attributed to Buterin on this subject.

    During the interview at the Ethereum conference, Buterin pondered – at times in slightly less than coherent fashion – the need to limit Ethereum supply in order to differentiate it from fiat currencies.

    “If the token is being burned, then you have an economic model that says the value of the token is the net present value of basically all future burnings,” he said.

     

    Otherwise, “it’s just a currency that goes up and down. It feels kind of like voodoo economics and the price of the token isn’t really backed by anything,” Buterin added.

     

    “That’s a very spooky thing.” Reminded that he created such a coin himself, he said going forward that could change. “It’s a fact that’s definitely informing a lot of design choices,” Buterin said. “Introducing some kind of sinks into ethereum is definitely something we’re looking at,” he said. “By sinks, I mean fees that lead to the token actually being destroyed.”

    If he decides against “burning”, another possibility is essentially warehousing some of the supply, eliminating it from circulation.

    Another way to limit supply, at least temporarily, is through locking up some of the ether currently in circulation. That’s the plan as ethereum moves to a new way of verifying transactions on its network. Known as proof-of-stake, it requires users who want to be rewarded for validating transactions to deposit ether for a set amount of time. The more ether they set aside, the bigger the reward for verifying the network. Buterin said the ethereum community may transition to proof-of-stake as early as the end of the year.

    While Bloomberg notes that Ethereum’s abundance has obviously not adversely affected its price this year, our question is what impact would limiting supply have on Ethereum? Especially when  cryptocurrency prices are so sensitive to newsflow, even when it’s ill-informed, in Dimon’s case, for example. Talking of limiting supply, Buterin had some cautionary words on the ICO boom although, given the nature of financial market regulation, nothing will be done until something really bad happens, which is sadly inevitable.

    Buterin said ICOs had both good and bad attributes. The way they’re currently structured skews the incentives of the startups that have raised over $3 billion this year. In nearly all ICOs, groups have pitched tokens to fund projects still in development, leaving open the question of what happens if they fail to deliver on promises. “The token models we have right now are lopsided and give skewed incentives,” Buterin said. “The worst part is the front-loading. Basically getting $140 million before you have a product. The right way to do that is to come up with a mechanism that either splits the ICO up across rounds or has a mechanism where if it doesn’t go well people can get refunds or anything similar.” ICOs have solved a key problem, making it easier for developers to raise money to fund their work, he said. But that doesn’t mean that every project should start with an offering, Buterin said. “It’s definitely a complicated balance,” he said.

    The ICO boom is definitely not balanced.
     

  • Libya: The Forgotten Reason North Korea Desperately Wants Nuclear Weapons

    Authored by Ted Galen Carpenter via The National Interest,

    The United States and its allies continue to cajole and threaten North Korea to negotiate an agreement that would relinquish its growing nuclear and ballistic-missile programs.

    The latest verbal prodding came from President Trump during his joint press conference with South Korean president Moon Jae-in. Trump urged Pyongyang to “come to the negotiating table,” and asserted that it “makes sense for North Korea to do the right thing.” The “right thing” Trump and his predecessors have always maintained, is for North Korea to become nonnuclear.

    It is unlikely that the DPRK will ever return to nuclear virginity. Pyongyang has multiple reasons for retaining its nukes. For a country with an economy roughly the size of Paraguay’s, a bizarre political system that has no external appeal, and an increasingly antiquated conventional military force, a nuclear-weapons capability is the sole factor that provides prestige and a seat at the table of international affairs. There is one other crucial reason for the DPRK’s truculence, though. North Korean leaders simply do not trust the United States to honor any agreement that might be reached.

    Unfortunately, there are ample reasons for such distrust.

    North Korean leaders have witnessed how the United States treats nonnuclear adversaries such as Serbia and Iraq. But it was the U.S.-led intervention in Libya in 2011 that underscored to Pyongyang why achieving and retaining a nuclear-weapons capability might be the only reliable way to prevent a regime-change war directed against the DPRK.

    Partially in response to Washington’s war that ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003, ostensibly because of a threat posed by Baghdad’s “weapons of mass destruction,” Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi seemed to capitulate regarding such matters. He signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in December of that year and agreed to abandon his country’s embryonic nuclear program. In exchange, the United States and its allies lifted economic sanctions and pledged that they no longer sought to isolate Libya.

    Qaddafi was welcomed back into the international community once he relinquished his nuclear ambitions.

    That reconciliation lasted less than a decade. When one of the periodic domestic revolts against Qaddafi’s rule erupted again in 2011, Washington and its NATO partners argued that a humanitarian catastrophe was imminent (despite meager evidence of that scenario), and initiated a military intervention. It soon became apparent that the official justification to protect innocent civilians was a cynical pretext, and that another regime-change war was underway. The Western powers launched devastating air strikes and cruise-missile attacks against Libyan government forces. NATO also armed rebel units and assisted the insurgency in other ways.

    Although all previous revolts had fizzled, extensive Western military involvement produced a very different result this time. The insurgents not only overthrew Qaddafi, they captured, tortured and executed him in an especially grisly fashion. Washington’s response was astonishingly flippant. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quipped: “We came, we saw, he died.”

    The behavior of Washington and its allies in Libya certainly did not give any incentive to North Korea or other would-be nuclear powers to abandon such ambitions in exchange for U.S. paper promises for normal relations. Indeed, North Korea promptly cited the Libya episode as a reason why it needed a deterrent capability—a point that Pyongyang has reiterated several times in the years since Muammar el-Qaddafi ouster. There is little doubt that the West’s betrayal of Qaddafi has made an agreement with the DPRK to denuclearize even less attainable than it might have been otherwise. Even some U.S. officials concede that the Libya episode convinced North Korean leaders that nuclear weapons were necessary for regime survival.

    The foundation for successful diplomacy is a country’s reputation for credibility and reliability. U.S. leaders fret that autocratic regimes—such as those in Iran and North Korea—might well violate agreements they sign. There are legitimate reasons for wariness, although in Iran’s case, the government appears to be complying with its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Tehran signed with the United States and other major powers in 2015—despite allegations from U.S. hawks about violations.

    When it comes to problems with credibility, though, U.S. leaders also need to look in the mirror. Washington’s conduct in Libya was a case of brazen duplicity. It is hardly a surprise if North Korea (or other countries) now regard the United States as an untrustworthy negotiating partner. Because of Pyongyang’s other reasons for wanting a nuclear capability, a denuclearization accord was always a long shot. But U.S. actions in Libya reduced prospects to the vanishing point. American leaders have only themselves to blame for that situation.

  • She's Back! La Niña Is Here For The Second Consecutive Year

    For the second consecutive time in two years, La Niña (translated from Spanish as “little girl”) is back and she means business. New data from Climate.gov indicates La Niña conditions have formed just in time for winter weather in the Northern Hemisphere.

    On Thursday, the Climate Prediction Center confirmed La Niña after analyzing October ocean temperatures cooling along the equatorial eastern and central Pacific Ocean. La Niña is often declared when sea surface temperatures in the region (just stated) decline by 0.5 degrees Celsius.

    John Morales‏, Chief Meteorologist WTVJ NBC-6 Miami, shows the progression of cool water over the equatorial Pacific Ocean responsible for La Niña formation.

    The cooler waters have an influence on atmospheric conditions by decreasing evaporation in the tropics, which is a major driver of global weather.

    According to the Weather Channel,

    A typical La Niña winter in the U.S. brings cold and snow to the Northwest and unusually dry conditions to most of the southern tier of the U.S., according to the prediction center.

     

    The Southeast and Mid-Atlantic also tend to see warmer-than-average temperatures during a La Niña winter. New England and the Upper Midwest into New York tend to see colder-than-average temperatures.

    Climate Prediction Center /NCEP/NWS Full Report: La Niña conditions are predicted to continue (~65-75% chance) at least through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2017-18.

    During October, weak La Niña conditions emerged as reflected by below-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) across most of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean [Fig. 1]. The weekly Niño indices were variable during the month, with values near -0.5° C during the past week in the Niño-3.4 and Niño-3 regions [Fig. 2]. Sub-surface temperatures remained below average during October [Fig. 3], reflecting the anomalously shallow depth of the thermocline across the central and eastern Pacific [Fig. 4]. Also, convection was suppressed near the International Date Line and slightly enhanced over parts of the Maritime Continent and the Philippines [Fig. 5]. Over the equatorial Pacific Ocean, low-level trade winds were mainly near average, but the upper-level winds were strongly anomalously westerly and the Southern Oscillation Index was positive. Overall, the ocean and atmosphere system reflects the onset of La Niña conditions.

     

    For the remainder of the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter 2017-18, a weak La Niña is favored in the model averages of the IRI/CPC plume [Fig. 6] and also in the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) [Fig. 7]. The consensus of forecasters is for the event to continue through approximately February-April 2018. In summary, La Niña conditions are predicted to continue (~65-75% chance) at least through the Northern Hemisphere winter (click CPC/IRI consensus forecast for the chance of each outcome for each 3-month period).

     

    La Niña is likely to affect temperature and precipitation across the United States during the upcoming months (the 3-month seasonal temperature and precipitation outlooks will be updated on Thursday November 16th). The outlooks generally favor above-average temperatures and below-median precipitation across the southern tier of the United States, and below-average temperatures and above-median precipitation across the northern tier of the United States.

    La Niña weather phenomenon easily explained:

    Ben Noll, Meteorologist, National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research of New Zealand, compares the equatorial sea-surface temperatures in 2016 and 2017. His findings indicate 2017 waters “not as large farther west” when compared with 2016. Basically he validates NOAA’s “weaker La Niña” claim…

    NOAA’s winter weather outlook indicates normal participation for the mid-tier of the United States. The southern-tier is forecasted to see much drier conditions. Meanwhile, the Great Lakes region and Northwest of the United States appear to have much wetter conditions.

    Temperature outlooks for this winter include at-least 2/3 of the United States well above average. Below average to normal in regions, such as the Great Lakes region and Northwest.

    Bottomline: What do weather forecasters and Dennis Gartman both have in common?… Well you guessed it– terrible forecasting…

  • Who Killed President Kennedy And Why?

    Via Oriental Review,

    In late October President Trump ordered that “the veil be lifted” from the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. More than 3,000 new, previously classified FBI, CIA, and Congressional documents were released to the public. A quick overview of the material shows that the bulk of it pertains either to the CIA’s covert operations against Cuba (one of the most popular theories about JFK’s assassination focuses on the ties between Lee Harvey Oswald and anti-Castro paramilitary groups that were upset about Kennedy’s “soft” policy toward the island) or the CIA’s search for a “Soviet fingerprint” in the crime – as can be seen in Langley’s fruitless but determined attempts to turn the defector Yuri Nosenko into a key source of information (although, truth be told, he adamantly refused to give the required “testimony” and was for this reason long suspected of being a KGB double agent). We cannot avoid the impression that these huge document dumps – along with the scores of “investigations” conducted over the last 54 years, in addition to the books and movies about this cryptic murder – have one goal: to keep whoever really ordered the JFK assassination from being brought to justice.

    All of these materials focus in one way or another on the figure of the unhappy “psychopath,” known as Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone gunman who shot the 35th US president on Nov. 22, 1963, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, using a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano Italian rifle with telescopic sight. Each new batch of released documents (and there have been three just this year: on July 24, Oct. 26, and Nov. 3) triggers another round of furious debate, all over the world, about his motives, connections, and the facts of the crime.

    Oswald being led from the Texas Theatre following his arrest

    Oswald being led from the Texas Theatre following his arrest, Nov 22 1963

    The narrative of the murder would seem quite straightforward. Just a few minutes after the fatal shots were fired, the security services were already combing through the depository building. On the 6th floor, they discovered an open window, three shell casings, and a rifle bearing Oswald’s fingerprints. Forty minutes after Kennedy’s death, the cops already had a name, physical description, and address for his alleged killer. The crime of the century was easily solved. The police surrounded the Texas Theatre building where Mr. Oswald was hiding, and he was arrested barely an hour after the president was assassinated.

    But not everything was quite so simple. A 26-second movie, made that day by Abraham Zapruder, shows the exact moment of the murder, which has made it possible to dissect the instant of Kennedy’s death, frame by frame.

    According to the official story, three shots were fired (the first missed, the second passed through the president’s neck and ricocheted into the chest, wrist, and thigh of Texas Governor John Connally, and the third bullet struck Kennedy in the head). But the film clearly shows that the second bullet (frame 225) and third bullet (frame 313) are of completely different types: the second passed through the president’s neck without serious tissue damage, while the third was obviously an expanding bullet, the impact of which shattered the American leader’s skull! A mix of different types of bullets within a single clip of a semi-automatic gun would be a game-changer for shooters. But the most likely explanation is that there were at least two snipers involved.

    A number of recognized probe inconsistencies (missing bullets, improper autopsy procedure, faked autopsy photos & notes, to point out a few) that led to repeated official and inofficial attempts to reconsider the case for the past decades, eventually resulted in the fact that today only 24% of Americans believe that LHO had acted alone.

    An analysis of the Zapruder film prompts even more awkward questions. It turns out that the killer took about five seconds to fire all the shots. That seems quite unlikely for this model of rifle with a telescopic sight, because the bolt has to be cycled with each firing. If you look at the video below, a professional is taking a few shots using the same type of rifle, but without the telescopic sight.

    If you time the video carefully, you can see that this expert rifleman takes just about five seconds to get off three shots, but you’ll notice that he’s making no attempt to aim! Is it possible to believe that a second-rate marksman like Lee Harvey Oswald could have performed with robot-like precision in such an extreme situation?

    And so Oswald was arrested. “I did not kill President Kennedy … I didn’t kill anybody … I don’t know anything about what you are accusing me,” he said. Nor for that matter was he allowed to call a lawyer. He never admitted to murdering Kennedy. And two days after the president’s death, while Oswald was being transferred between jails, he was shot at close range by a Texas underworld figure named Jack Ruby (Jacob Rubenstein), who was also, according to the Warren Commission, “a lone gunman.” You don’t have to dig too deeply into the man’s background to realize that he had very deep ties to the police and American security agencies.

    And then within the next two years, an astonishing number of people (more than 50!) who possessed some kind of information about the Kennedy assassination died under mysterious circumstances. The Navy officer Lt. William Pitzer, who managed the closed-circuit camera in the autopsy room at the at Bethesda Naval Hospital and filmed the proceeding, was later discovered to have “shot himself”, and the tape of the film had vanished. A week later, the taxi driver who drove Oswald home from the book depository on the day of the president’s assassination, William Whaley, was killed in a car crash. The same fate befell one of the witnesses to the Kennedy assassination, Lee Bowers, who saw “two men shooting from behind the fence.” Three of the five people who were present in Jack Ruby’s house on the evening of Nov. 24, 1963 were shot to death (the lawyer Tom Howard and reporters Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe) … And on Nov. 8, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen, who was the only journalist granted a private interview with Jack Ruby after Oswald’s assassination, died of a “drug overdose,” although she had never taken drugs. There are dozens of such examples, and the names involved have never been a secret, but is it even worth pointing out once again that these people are never mentioned in the declassified files from the US National Archives?

    On Nov. 29, 1963, Lyndon Johnson, the former vice president who had automatically risen to head of state upon JFK’s death, ordered a special commission to be established to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy. The chief justice of the US Supreme Court, Earl Warren, was asked to head the seven-man panel, which also included two senators, two members of the House of Representatives, the former director of the CIA Allen Dulles, and the banker John McCloy. The commission listened to testimony from 552 witnesses and obtained more than 3,000 reports from courts and law-enforcement agencies, which, in turn, had conducted approximately 26,000 interviews, collected in 26 volumes of documentation.

    However, the final report, which was intended to shed light on the mysterious details of the “crime of the century,” merely offered withering criticism of the CIA, the FBI, and the Dallas police for not being able to prevent the death of the president, who had been shot by a deranged lone gunman…

    Hale Boggs, a Democratic Representative from Louisiana, was the only member of the Warren Commission who did not buckle to Earl Warren and his disciples and disagreed with the conclusion. In October 1972 he was killed in a plane crash over frozen Alaska…

    Rep. Hale Boggs

    One of the last photos of Rep. Hale Boggs

    The findings of the investigation, which ignored a whole slew of facts and the death of almost all the witnesses, were so obviously bizarre that in 1976 the US Congress created a new special commission on the Kennedy case. In 1979 it issued its verdict: “Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” The HSCA determined, based on available evidence, that the probable conspiracy did not involve the governments of the Soviet Union or Cuba. The committee also added that no organized crime group, anti-Castro group, or the FBI, CIA, or Secret Service was mixed up in that conspiracy. Is it any wonder that following this report, the FBI and the US Department of Justice “raised numerous concerns regarding perceived inadequacies in the Committee’s experts’ methodology, which led to the conclusion of a conspiracy”?

    So, who ordered the murder of President Kennedy and then covered up the tracks? Obviously the masterminds were not merely some group of conspirators or Mafiosi, but rather individuals who wield immense and very real power in the American government. So immense that they could force the entire US law-enforcement system to do everything necessary to keep this crime from being solved and to compel the Kennedy family to obediently close their eyes to it!

    Who would have been capable of doing this? The Mafia? Cuban emigrants? Anyone could pull the trigger, but not just anyone could force the investigation to overlook obvious facts and turn a blind eye to what any of us can see in the films and photos. Nor did the CIA or FBI command such power. If it were simply a matter of liquidating an undesirable foreign political figure or an out-of-control drug baron, then either of these agencies could contain the scandal on its own. But even they would be in over their heads in any attempt to assassinate a US president in his own country.

    In order to get closer to unraveling one of the most mysterious political murders of the 20th century, we should turn our attention to an obscure document signed by that resident of the Oval Office less than six months before his death.

    On June 4, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 11110, authorizing the US Treasury to issue paper currency that could be redeemed for silver held by the treasury.

    As a result, this US currency was printed in denominations of $2 and $5 and inscribed with the words “United States Note” instead of “Federal Reserve Note.”

    United States Note 1963

    United States Note 1963 5 dollars

    Kennedy’s order was intended to wean the Federal Reserve System away from printing money, beginning a smooth transition toward returning the printing press to the hands of the American government.

    He was correcting a clear violation of the US Constitution and an absurd situation in which the US government could not print its own money. It was a quiet and inconspicuous coup d’état. For the bankers who had founded the Federal Reserve, their greatest fear was about to come true. Now with one stroke of the pen, their plans to establish complete control over the US government and American society were faced with a clear and present danger. Because the fact was that the issuance of these small banknotes was to be followed by the complete suspension of the Fed’s right to print money. So what was that agency to do then? Regulate the financial market, monitoring it so as to forestall any crises? Fine, regulating and monitoring is all well and good. Just stop printing money …

    The Federal Reserve’s monopoly on the issuance of its own dollar, which is for some reason considered to be the “US dollar,” hinges on a single act of legislation that was signed by President Woodrow Wilson in December of 1913. Consequently, a single, different act of legislation would be enough to destroy this monopoly. But John F. Kennedy failed to realize his agenda. Executive Order 11110 was not revoked but was never actually implemented. For the owners of the Fed, however, the threat remained that the order could be revived by a new US president, potentially JFK’s brother Robert, who in his position as US Attorney General fully grasped the implications of what was happening. And the equally enigmatic murder of Robert Kennedy, who was a leading candidate headed into the Democratic primary for the 1968 presidential election, occurred exactly five years after the signing of the very executive order that killed his brother. It looks like the very influential bankers from the Federal Reserve sent a clear signal: the clan whose representatives tried to betray the System will no longer be allowed to play a significant role in US politics. And they haven’t.

    We still can’t reliably assess President Trump’s motivation in releasing the JFK files. The plenitude, relevance and authencity of this archive are highly questionable. Nevertheless, he might have intuitively felt that the draining of Washington’s swamp should eventually be completed at the Constitution Avenue…

  • DHS Warns That "Weaponized Drones" Are A Serious Terror Risk

    In what appears to be an expertly timed exercise in fearmongering less than two weeks after the horrifying Halloween terror attack in lower Manhattan – the deadliest attack in America’s financial center since 9/11 – the Department of Homeland Security has issued a bulletin warning the public about the risk of drones being used to facilitate acts of terrorism.

    Drones, which are now easy to obtain and modify in potentially deadly ways (one Connecticut man was investigating after he published a video of a drone equipped to fire a nine-millimeter) DHS is warning about the threat of weaponized drones being used to carry out chemical attacks and the targeting of commercial aircraft, according to ABC.

    "We continue to face one of the most challenging threat environments since 9/11, as foreign terrorist organizations exploit the internet to inspire, enable or direct individuals already here in the homeland to commit terrorist acts," reads the bulletin.

    The National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin, which replaced the old color-coded system, is used to give the public and local law enforcement a summary about ongoing and potentially new terror threats.

    A senior DHS official told ABC that there's been an "uptick in terrorist interest" in using unmanned aerial systems as weapons in the United States and other western countries.

    These tactics have been used by terrorists on the battlefield, and the department wants to "guard against those tactics being exported to the west," said the official.

    The official said that DHS wants to be "forward leaning" about seeing what terrorists are doing overseas and tactics they might adopt in the future.

    DHS has been implementing wide-ranging security measures for all airports and airlines that fly directly to the U.S. In June, the administration announced "enhanced screening" of passengers and their electronic devices, as well as "seen and unseen" security around the aircraft and inside the airport.

    White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said terrorists still see "aviation as the crown jewel target,” when the security measures were announced.

    At the time, he was the head of DHS, a cabinet-level department that was created by George W Bush after 9/11.

    The measures, which are being rolled out in phases, are aimed at detecting concealed explosives, insider threats and identifying suspicious passengers.

    The US has been urging other countries to adopt similar measures, according to current acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke.

    The new bulletin also warns of the use of "poisons or toxins," which the DHS official says there has been increased chatter about in the terror realm.

    The "big picture" is that the homeland security fight is shifting, the senior DHS official told ABC.

    The department's response to the terror threat is adapting as ISIS is close to defeat in safe havens, but continues to have branches and affiliates around the world, according to DHS.

    For the record, here’s the video of the handgun-firing drone…

    ;

    Read the full bulletin below:

     

    17 1109 NTAS Bulletin by zerohedge on Scribd

     

  • Plague Fears Grow As New Virus With No Cure Appears: "This Is Worse Than The 'Black Death'"

    Malawi is bracing itself for an outbreak of the plague after the Daily Mail reports that deadly disease continues to spread across the island nation of Madagascar. At least 143 people have died and more than 2,000 others have been infected in Madagascar since an outbreak in early August this year which has now spread to its 10th African nation.

    Malawi's health secretary confirmed the country is ready for any reported cases of the disease amid mounting concerns of Africa's 'porous borders'.

    He said: 'We have infection prevention materials ready and groups and teams ready to be activated if there is a trigger.'

    South Africa, Mauritius, Seychelles, Tanzania, La Réunion, Mozambique, Kenya, Ethiopia and Comoros have all been warned they could be at risk from a possible outbreak as well…

    The strain can be cured with antibiotics and the WHO money will go towards paying for extra medical personnel, the disinfection of buildings and fuel for ambulances.

    Cases have risen by eight per cent in just the space of one week and scientists are now working hard to ensure the disease does not spread from Madagascar to mainland Africa.

    Health expert Professor Jimmy Whitworth described the current outbreak as the 'worst in 50 years or more'.

    But as SHTFplan.com's Mac Slavo notes, a new virus for which medical officials have no remedy is spreading. The infectious disease also has a fatality rate of almost 90% making it much more deadly than the black death plaguing Madagascar.

    A deadly outbreak of a rare and highly fatal virus has broken out in eastern Uganda and five cases have already been identified, the World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed. The disease is known as the Marburg virus. It is similar to the Ebola virus and can be fatal in up to 88% of cases.

    The outbreak of the contagious and deadly Marburg virus disease in the Kween district of eastern Uganda was declared by the nation’s Ministry of Health back on October 19. Since then, five cases have been identified as international aid agencies, stretched thin by Madagascar’s black death outbreak, have rushed to deploy teams on the ground to control the recent outbreak. This news comes amid a surge in cases of plague in Madagascar, which is considered to be the “worst outbreak in 50 years” and now at “crisis” point.

    Marburg virus disease (MVD), which causes severe viral hemorrhagic fever, ranks among the most virulent pathogens known to infect humans, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO website reads: “Marburg virus disease is a rare disease with a high mortality rate for which there is no specific treatment. The virus is transmitted by direct contact with the blood, body fluids, and tissues of infected persons or wild animals (e.g. monkeys and fruit bats).” MVD also falls within the same family as the Ebola virus – the hemorrhagic fever that decimated West Africa and killed around 11,000 in 2014 and 2015.

    The outbreak is thought to have begun in September when a man in his 30s, who worked as a game hunter and lived near a cave with a heavy presence of bats, was admitted to a local health center with a high fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. The man’s condition deteriorated quickly and he failed to respond to antimalarial treatments. He died after being taken to another hospital, and a short time later, his sister in her 50’s also died of the same ailment.

    Emergency screening has begun at the Kenya-Uganda border in Turkana after all three members of the same family died of the disease in Uganda. Health workers have been asked to work with communities to stop the deadly Marburg outbreak from devastating communities in the rural region.

    Dr. Zabulon Yoti, a Technical Coordinator for Emergencies at the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Africa, said: “Community engagement is the cornerstone of emergency response.” He urged health officials to “work with the communities to build their capacity for success and sustainability” and develop a better understanding of the local customs and traditions.

    Early symptoms include fever, chills, headache, and myalgia (muscle pain). Several hundred people have been exposed to the virus as officials worry this outbreak could spread rapidly into regions already devastated by the ongoing black death outbreak.

  • Geopolitical Tsunami: Pax Americana, Petrodollar, & The Coming Crisis In The Gulf

    It’s easy to get lost in all things Middle East, especially concerning the chaotic events that unfolded over the weekend in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

    Three days after the most stunning purge in recent Saudi history – which was really a countercoup, that led to the arrest of dozen of Saudi Arabian royals, ministers and businessmen to further the control of the Kingdom – Saudi Arabia called Yemen’s missile launch on Riyadh an ‘act of war’ by Iran, and also played victim by saying Lebanon has declared war against the Kingdom.

    How to make sense of this all? 

    An author on twitter by the handle Black Pigeon Speaks beautifully outlines today’s events in an easy to understand video titled: PAX AMERICANA, PetroDollar & the Coming CRISIS in the GULF… 

    The author of the video focuses on the Middle East and says a perfect storm is gathering upon the horizon, as the whole world is changing and the only way to change it for the better is to understand the world around you.

    The video opens up with a brief understanding of the stunning purge in Saudi Arabia and how it has cleared any potential obstacles for King Salman’s son ascension to the throne.

    This was done by a widespread arrest of royals, ministers and businessmen who have large sums of money and control key parts of the economy and parts of the military. Such an unorthodox move is bound to force internal conflict with-in the country that could very well spillover.

    In the next section, the author says “this comes all at a time of seeming change for the Kingdom”. Allowing women to drive was merely a window dressing event and the real issue is the country’s economic transition away from oil. The problem resides around the world’s most generous social welfare systems of which most citizens do not work. The money transfer from state to citizens is similar to the United States social programs, but the objective in Saudi Arabia has been to sedate the populace from expressing any collective opposition to the kingdom. It is easy to understand how fragile the house of Saud really is….

    Moreover as what was highlighted by the recent arm sales via the Trump administration. The country is armed with the most technological weapons in the world, as it has completely abandoned the line of succession through a stunning weekend purge.

    The idea that Saudi Arabia is trying to cement a new era for the kingdom at the expense of those who have been purged could pose serious problems. And how the author puts it, “you have a recipe for civil war– for two reasons:

    • Those who have been purged will claim they’ve a legitimate claim to power. These individuals are very wealthy and have the means to buy mercenary armies to fight for their claim
    • Breakdown of the social welfare program

    The outlook for Saudi Arabia is bleak and in our view, the conditions are perfect for a civil war. The probability of an expansionist war also increases as the kingdom has Iran and Lebanon in its crosshairs.

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