- The Child That Christmas Forgot: How Would Jesus Fare In The American Police State?
The Child That Christmas Forgot: How Would Jesus Fare In The American Police State?
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rurtherford Institute,
“Once upon a midnight clear, there was a child’s cry, a blazing star hung over a stable, and wise men came with birthday gifts. We haven’t forgotten that night down the centuries. We celebrate it with stars on Christmas trees, with the sound of bells, and with gifts… We forget nobody, adult or child. All the stockings are filled, all that is, except one. And we have even forgotten to hang it up. The stocking for the child born in a manger. It’s his birthday we’re celebrating. Don’t let us ever forget that. Let us ask ourselves what He would wish for most. And then, let each put in his share, loving kindness, warm hearts, and a stretched out hand of tolerance. All the shining gifts that make peace on earth.”—The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.
The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.
Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?
What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?
A singular number of churches across the country are asking those very questions, and their conclusions are being depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.
These nativity scenes are a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war.
The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do?
What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer risked his life to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.
Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.
Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.”
As the parable states:
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”
This is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.
After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.
When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.
Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?
Consider the following if you will.
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Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.
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Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.
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Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.
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Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.
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From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.
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Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.
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Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.
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From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.
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Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”
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While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.
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Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.
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Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.
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Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.
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Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.
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Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.
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Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. Currently, 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.
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Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.
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Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.
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Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.
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Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.
Indeed, as I show in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.
Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebrations and gift-giving, we would do well to remember that what happened on that starry night in Bethlehem is only part of the story. That baby in the manger grew up to be a man who did not turn away from evil but instead spoke out against it, and we must do no less.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 23:55 -
- Japan Proposes Dumping Radioactive Waste Into Pacific As Storage Space Dwindles
Japan Proposes Dumping Radioactive Waste Into Pacific As Storage Space Dwindles
As the decade comes to an end, the future of nuclear power in the west remains in doubt. Almost nine years ago, a powerful underwater earthquake triggered a 15-meter tsunami that disabled the power supply and cooling at three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The accident caused the nuclear cores of all three damaged reactors to melt down, prompting the government to issue evacuation orders for all people living within a 30 kilometer radius of the damaged reactors, a group that included roughly 100,000 people.
And the evacuation zone:
Now, the Epoch Times reports that Japan’s Economy and Industry Ministry has proposed that TEPCO gradually release, or allow to evaporate, massive amounts of treated but still radioactive water being stored at the power plant. TEPCO, or the Tokyo Electric Power Co, is the owner of the Fukushima plant, and is also responsible for leading the clean-up of the damaged reactors.
But as regulators have stepped in to try and guide TEPCO as it struggles to dispose of all the contaminated water, one ministry has offered a proposal that is almost guaranteed to anger the fishermen who have resisted all of TEPCO’s other plans for dumping the contaminated water.
In its Dec. 23 proposal, the ministry suggested a “controlled release” of the contaminated water into the Pacific. Offering another option, the ministry also suggested allowing the water to evaporate, or a combination of the two methods.
The government is stepping up the pressure on TEPCO to do something as Fukushima’s ‘radioactive water crisis’ worsens. The problem is that TEPCO is running out of room to store the contaminated water.
But the ministry insisted that the controlled release of the contaminated water into the sea would be the best option because it would “stably dilute and disperse” the water from the plant, while also allowing the government and TEPCO to more easily monitor the operation.
And as we have reported, the Japanese fishing industry isn’t the only party that objects to the government’s plan. South Korea has also complained to the IAEA about TEPCO’s plans to dump the radioactive water.
The project is expected to take years to fully dispose of the water.
Still, the fishermen are bound to be skeptical because of one radioactive element that TEPCO has been unable to remove from the contaminated water: It’s called tritium.
Fukushima fishermen and the National Federation of Fisheries Co-operative Associations have strongly opposed past suggestions by government officials that the water be released to the sea, warning of an “immeasurable impact on the future of the Japanese fishing industry,” with local fishermen still unable to resume full operations after the nuclear plant accident.
The water has been treated, and the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., states that all 62 radioactive elements it contains can be removed to levels not harmful to humans except for tritium. There is no established method to fully separate tritium from water, but scientists say it isn’t a problem in small amounts. Most of the water stored at the plant still contains other radioactive elements including cancer-causing cesium and strontium and needs further treatment.
Tritium is routinely found in nuclear explosions and other nuclear accidents, including the meltdown at Three-Mile Island back in 1979. But experts at the IAEA recommend that the controlled release of the tritium-laced water at Fukushima into the sea is probably the best option for handling the situation – even if the Japanese decide to wait until after the Summer Olympics in 2022.
The ministry noted that tritium has been routinely released from nuclear plants around the world, including Fukushima before the accident. Evaporation has been a tested and proven method following the 1979 core meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the United States, where it took two years to get rid of 8,700 tons of tritium-contaminated water.
TEPCO says it is currently storing more than 1 million tons of radioactive water and only has space to hold up to 1.37 million tons, or until the summer of 2022, raising speculation that the water may be released after next summer’s Tokyo Olympics. TEPCO and experts say the tanks get in the way of ongoing decommissioning work and that space needs to be freed up to store removed debris and other radioactive materials. The tanks also could spill in a major earthquake, tsunami, or flood.
Experts, including those at the International Atomic Energy Agency who have inspected the Fukushima plant, have repeatedly supported the controlled release of the water into the sea as the only realistic option.
On Dec. 22, some experts on the panel called for more attention to be given to the impact on the local community, which already has seen its image harmed by accidental leaks and the potential release of water.
“A release to the sea is technologically a realistic option, but its social impact would be huge,” said Naoya Sekiya, a University of Tokyo sociologist and an expert on disasters and social impact.
Other possible strategies for disposing of the contaminated water have included injecting the water deep into the Earth’s crust. Another strategy, which called for storing the nuclear waste in large industrial tanks outside the plant, was ruled out because of fears that leaks in the tanks could contaminate some of Japan’s most important fishing waters.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 23:30 - Escobar: You Say You Want A (Russian) Revolution?
Escobar: You Say You Want A (Russian) Revolution?
Authored by Pepe Escobar via ConsortiumNews.com,
Once in a blue moon an indispensable book comes out making a clear case for sanity in what is now a post-MAD world. That’s the responsibility carried by “The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs,” by Andrei Martyanov (Clarity Press), arguably the most important book of 2019.
Martyanov is the total package — and he comes with extra special attributes as a top-flight Russian military analyst, born in Baku in those Back in the U.S.S.R. days, living and working in the U.S., and writing and blogging in English.
Right from the start, Martyanov wastes no time destroying not only Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s ravings but especially Graham Allison’s childish and meaningless Thucydides Trap argument — as if the power equation between the U.S. and China in the 21stcentury could be easily interpreted in parallel to Athens and Sparta slouching towards the Peloponnesian War over 2,400 years ago. What next? Xi Jinping as the new Genghis Khan?
(By the way, the best current essay on Thucydides is in Italian, by Luciano Canfora (“Tucidide: La Menzogna, La Colpa, L’Esilio”). No Trap. Martyanov visibly relishes defining the Trap as a “figment of the imagination” of people who “have a very vague understanding of real warfare in the 21st century.” No wonder Xi explicitly said the Trap does not exist.)
Martyanov had already detailed in his splendid, previous book, “Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning,” how “American lack of historic experience with continental warfare” ended up “planting the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the American military mythology of the 20thand 21stcenturies which is foundational to the American decline, due to hubris and detachment of reality.” Throughout the book, he unceasingly provides solid evidence about the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a possible, future war against real armies (not the Taliban or Saddam Hussein’s), air forces, air defenses and naval power.
Do the Math
One of the key takeaways is the failure of U.S. mathematical models: and readers of the book do need to digest quite a few mathematical equations. The key point is that this failure led the U.S. “on a continuous downward spiral of diminishing military capabilities against the nation [Russia] she thought she defeated in the Cold War.”
In the U.S., Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) was introduced by the late Andrew Marshall, a.k.a. Yoda, the former head of Net Assessment at the Pentagon and the de facto inventor of the “pivot to Asia” concept. Yet Martyanov tells us that RMA actually started as MTR (Military-Technological Revolution), introduced by Soviet military theoreticians back in the 1970s.
One of the staples of RMA concerns nations capable of producing land-attack cruise missiles, a.k.a. TLAMs. As it stands, only the U.S., Russia, China and France can do it. And there are only two global systems providing satellite guidance to cruise missiles: the American GPS and the Russian GLONASS. Neither China’s BeiDou nor the European Galileo qualify – yet – as global GPS systems.
Then there’s Net-Centric Warfare (NCW). The term itself was coined by the late Admiral Arthur Cebrowski in 1998 in an article he co-wrote with John Garstka’s titled, “Network-Centric Warfare – Its Origin and Future.”
Deploying his mathematical equations, Martyanov soon tells us that “the era of subsonic anti-shipping missiles is over.” NATO, that brain-dead organism (copyright Emmanuel Macron) now has to face the supersonic Russian P-800 Onyx and the Kalibr-class M54 in a “highly hostile Electronic Warfare environment.” Every developed modern military today applies Net-Centric Warfare (NCW), developed by the Pentagon in the 1990s.
Rendering of a future combat systems network. (soldiersmediacenter/Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Martyanov mentions in his new book something that I learned on my visit to Donbass in March 2015: how NCW principles, “based on Russia’s C4ISR capabilities made available by the Russian military to numerically inferior armed forces of the Donbass Republics (LDNR), were used to devastating effect both at the battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo, when attacking the cumbersome Soviet-era Ukrainian Armed Forces military.”
No Escape From the Kinzhal
Martyanov provides ample information on Russia’s latest missile – the hypersonic Mach-10 aero-ballistic Kinzhal, recently tested in the Arctic.
Crucially, as he explains, “no existing anti-missile defense in the U.S. Navy is capable of shooting [it] down even in the case of the detection of this missile.” Kinzhal has a range of 2,000 km, which leaves its carriers, MiG-31K and TU-22M3M, “invulnerable to the only defense a U.S. Carrier Battle Group, a main pillar of U.S. naval power, can mount – carrier fighter aircraft.” These fighters simply don’t have the range.
The Kinzhal was one of the weapons announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s game-changing March 1, 2018 speech at the Federal Assembly. That’s the day, Martyanov stresses, when the real RMA arrived, and “changed completely the face of peer-peer warfare, competition and global power balance dramatically.”
Top Pentagon officials such as General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have admitted on the record there are “no existing countermeasures” against, for instance, the hypersonic, Mach 27 glide vehicle Avangard (which renders anti-ballistic missile systems useless), telling the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee the only way out would be “a nuclear deterrent.” There are also no existing counter-measures against anti-shipping missiles such as the Zircon and Kinzhal.
Any military analyst knows very well how the Kinzhal destroyed a land target the size of a Toyota Corolla in Syria after being launched 1,000 km away in adverse weather conditions. The corollary is the stuff of NATO nightmares: NATO’s command and control installations in Europe are de facto indefensible.
Martyanov gets straight to the point: “The introduction of hypersonic weapons surely pours some serious cold water on the American obsession with securing the North American continent from retaliatory strikes.”
Kh-47M2 Kinzhal; 2018 Moscow Victory Day Parade. (Kremilin via Wikimedia Commons)
Martyanov is thus unforgiving on U.S. policymakers who “lack the necessary tool-kit for grasping the unfolding geostrategic reality in which the real revolution in military affairs … had dramatically downgraded the always inflated American military capabilities and continues to redefine U.S. geopolitical status away from its self-declared hegemony.”
And it gets worse: “Such weapons ensure a guaranteed retaliation [Martyanov’s italics] on the U.S. proper.” Even the existing Russian nuclear deterrents – and to a lesser degree Chinese, as paraded recently — “are capable of overcoming the existing U.S. anti-ballistic systems and destroying the United States,” no matter what crude propaganda the Pentagon is peddling.
In February 2019, Moscow announced the completion of tests of a nuclear-powered engine for the Petrel cruise missile. This is a subsonic cruise missile with nuclear propulsion that can remain in air for quite a long time, covering intercontinental distances, and able to attack from the most unexpected directions. Martyanov mischievously characterizes the Petrel as “a vengeance weapon in case some among American decision-makers who may help precipitate a new world war might try to hide from the effects of what they have unleashed in the relative safety of the Southern Hemisphere.”
Hybrid War Gone Berserk
A section of the book expands on China’s military progress, and the fruits of the Russia-China strategic partnership, such as Beijing buying $3 billion-worth of S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft missiles — “ideally suited to deal with the exact type of strike assets the United States would use in case of a conventional conflict with China.”
Beijing parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic, October 2019. (YouTube screenshot)
Because of the timing, the analysis does not even take into consideration the arsenal presented in early October at the Beijing parade celebrating the 70thanniversary of the People’s Republic.
That includes, among other things, the “carrier-killer” DF-21D, designed to hit warships at sea at a range of up to 1,500 km; the intermediate range “Guam Killer” DF-26; the DF-17 hypersonic missile; and the long-range submarine-launched and ship-launched YJ-18A anti-ship cruise missiles. Not to mention the DF-41 ICBM – the backbone of China’s nuclear deterrent, capable of reaching the U.S. mainland carrying multiple warheads.
Martyanov could not escape addressing the RAND Corporation, whose reason to exist is to relentlessly push for more money for the Pentagon – blaming Russia for “hybrid war” (an American invention) even as it moans about the U.S.’s incapacity of defeating Russia in each and every war game. RAND’s war games pitting the U.S. and allies against Russia and China invariably ended in a “catastrophe” for the “finest fighting force in the world.”
Martyanov also addresses the S-500s, capable of reaching AWACS planes and possibly even capable of intercepting hypersonic non-ballistic targets. The S-500 and its latest middle-range state of the art air-defense system S-350 Vityaz will be operational in 2020.
His key takeway: “There is no parity between Russia and the United States in such fields as air-defense, hypersonic weapons and, in general, missile development, to name just a few fields – the United States lags behind in these fields, not just in years but in generations [italics mine].”
All across the Global South, scores of nations are very much aware that the U.S. economic “order” – rather disorder – is on the brink of collapse. In contrast, a cooperative, connected, rule-based, foreign relations between sovereign nations model is being advanced in Eurasia – symbolized by the merging of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the NDB (the BRICS bank).
The key guarantors of the new model are Russia and China. And Beijing and Moscow harbor no illusion whatsoever about the toxic dynamics in Washington. My recent conversations with top analysts in Kazakhstan last month and in Moscow last week once again stressed the futility of negotiating with people described – with overlapping shades of sarcasm – as exceptionalist fanatics. Russia, China and many corners of Eurasia have figured out there are no possible, meaningful deals with a nation bent on breaking every deal.
Indispensable? No: Vulnerable
Martyanov cannot but evoke Putin’s speech to the Federal Assembly in February 2019, after the unilateral Washington abandonment of the INF treaty, clearing the way for U.S. deployment of intermediate and close range missiles stationed in Europe and pointed at Russia:
“Russia will be forced to create and deploy those types of weapons…against those regions from where we will face a direct threat, but also against those regions hosting the centers where decisions are taken on using those missile systems threatening us.”
Translation: American Invulnerability is over – for good.
In the short term, things can always get worse. At his traditional, year-end presser in Moscow, lasting almost four and a half hours, Putin stated that Russia is more than ready to “simply renew the existing New START agreement”, which is bound to expire in early 2021: “They [the U.S.] can send us the agreement tomorrow, or we can sign and send it to Washington.” And yet, “so far our proposals have been left unanswered. If the New START ceases to exist, nothing in the world will hold back an arms race. I believe this is bad.”
“Bad” is quite the euphemism. Martyanov prefers to stress how “most of the American elites, at least for now, still reside in a state of Orwellian cognitive dissonance” even as the real RMA “blew the myth of American conventional invincibility out of the water.”
Martyanov is one of the very few analysts – always from different parts of Eurasia — who have warned about the danger of the U.S. “accidentally stumbling” into a war against Russia, China, or both which is impossible to be won conventionally, “let alone through the nightmare of a global nuclear catastrophe.”
Is that enough to instill at least a modicum of sense into those who lord over that massive cash cow, the industrial-military-security complex? Don’t count on it.
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Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow him on Facebook.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 23:05 - Christmas Trees: The Battle Between Pine & Plastic
Christmas Trees: The Battle Between Pine & Plastic
Starting in early December, many U.S. families carry out an annual and important ritual: an outing to find the perfect Christmas tree. Once the most desirable tree is found, it’s then lugged home and lavishly decorated while its piney smell wafts through the house.
As nice as that smell is, a real tree has numerous disadvantages such as prickly pines that shed and it eventually needs to be disposed of.
For some families, its just too much hassle and assembling a plastic three that spends most of the year in the basement is the preferred option. It also represents a once-off purchase, another advantage over its real counterpart.
So, with America firmly experiencing prime Christmas tree shopping season, how do sales of real and plastic trees compare?
Interestingly, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, while sales of plastic trees have increased noticeably over the past decade, sales of real trees have remained fairly stable according to historic data from the National Christmas Tree Association of America.
You will find more infographics at Statista
32.8 million real trees were sold in the U.S. last year, the highest total since 2013. That’s despite the huge increase in people buying fake trees with their sales numbers climbing from 10.9 million in 2012 to 23.6 million in 2018.
There is bad news for fans of real trees this year and that’s a supply shortage. During the recession, farmers planted fewer trees and that’s now impacting the industry a decade later. Industry workers say that everyone intent on buying a real tree will find one but that prices are going up, something that has the potential to drive more families towards plastic. In 2017, the average price of a real tree was $75 and that went up to $78 in 2018. Meanwhile, the average price of a plastic tree fell from $107 to $104 during the same period.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 22:40 - Could Invisible Ink Tattoos Be Used By The Elites To Identify Unvaccinated Kids?
Could Invisible Ink Tattoos Be Used By The Elites To Identify Unvaccinated Kids?
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
Because it’s becoming difficult for the ruling class and Big Pharma to keep track of people who have been vaccinated and those who have not, a suggestion to use “tattoos” has surfaced. A new technology created by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can now help authoritarians track the unvaccinated.
According to Futurism, this means that they have found a covert way to embed the record of a vaccination directly in a patient’s skin rather than documenting it electronically or on paper. This tracking seems to be a lower-risk tracking system than vaccines themselves at least, and it could greatly simplify the process of maintaining accurate vaccine records, especially on a larger scale.
“In areas where paper vaccination cards are often lost or do not exist at all, and electronic databases are unheard of, this technology could enable the rapid and anonymous detection of patient vaccination history to ensure that every child is vaccinated,” researcher Kevin McHugh said in a statement.
If that’s what it’s used for, it will eventually also be used to force vaccines on those who wish to not receive them. There’s an obvious agenda here too when you follow the money: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the team’s research.
This new research, which was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday, came about after following a direct demand from Microsoft founder Bill Gates himself, who has been personally involved in efforts to eradicate polio and measles through vaccinations, according to Scientific American.
The invisible “tattoo” accompanying the vaccine is a pattern made up of minuscule quantum dots — tiny semiconducting crystals that reflect light — that glows under infrared light. The pattern — and vaccine — gets delivered into the skin using hi-tech dissolvable microneedles made of a mixture of polymers and sugar. –Futurism
Researchers have already tested this new tattoo on rats and human cadavers.
“It’s possible someday that this ‘invisible’ approach could create new possibilities for data storage, biosensing, and vaccine applications that could improve how medical care is provided, particularly in the developing world,” MIT professor and senior author Robert Langer said in the statement.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 22:15 - Breaking The Ice: Mapping A Changing Arctic
Breaking The Ice: Mapping A Changing Arctic
The Arctic is changing. As retreating ice cover makes this region more accessible, Visual Capitalist’s Nicholas LePan notes that nations with Arctic real estate are thinking of developing these subzero landscapes and the resources below.
As the Arctic evolves, a vast amount of resources will become more accessible and longer shipping seasons will improve Arctic logistics. But with a changing climate and increased public pressure to limit resource development in environmentally sensitive regions, the future of northern economic activity is far from certain.
This week’s Chart of the Week shows the location of major oil and gas fields in the Arctic and the possible new trade routes through this frontier.
A Final Frontier for Undiscovered Resources?
Underneath the Arctic Circle lies massive oil and natural gas formations. The United States Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic contains approximately 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil resources and about 30% of its undiscovered natural gas resources.
So far, most exploration in the Arctic has occurred on land. This work produced the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field in Alaska, the Tazovskoye Field in Russia, and hundreds of smaller fields, many of which are on Alaska’s North Slope, an area now under environmental protection.
Land accounts for about 1/3 of the Arctic’s area and is thought to hold about 16% of the Arctic’s remaining undiscovered oil and gas resources. A further 1/3 of the Arctic area is comprised of offshore continental shelves, which are thought to contain enormous amounts of resources but remain largely unexplored by geologists.
The remaining 1/3 of the Arctic is deep ocean waters measuring thousands of feet in depth.
The Arctic circle is about the same geographic size as the African continent─about 6% of Earth’s surface area─yet it holds an estimated 22% of Earth’s oil and natural gas resources. This paints a target on the Arctic for exploration and development, especially with shorter seasons of ice coverage improving ocean access.
Thawing Ice Cover: Improved Ocean Access, New Trading Routes
As Arctic ice melts, sea routes will stay navigable for longer periods, which could drastically change international trade and shipping. September ice coverage has decreased by more than 25% since 1979, although the area within the Arctic Circle is still almost entirely covered with ice from November to July.
Typically shipping to Japan from Rotterdam would use the Suez Canal and take about 30 days, whereas a route from New York would use the Panama Canal and take about 25 days.
But if the Europe-Asia trip used the Northern Sea Route along the northern coast of Russia, the trip would last 18 days and the distance would shrink from ~11,500 nautical miles to ~6,900 nautical miles. For the U.S.-Asia trip through the Northwest Passage, it would take 21 days, rather than 25.
Control of these routes could bring significant advantages to countries and corporations looking for a competitive edge.
Competing Interests: Arctic Neighbors
Eight countries lay claim to land that lies within the Arctic Circle: Canada, Denmark (through its administration of Greenland), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States.
There is no consistent agreement among these nations regarding the claims to oil and gas beneath the Arctic Ocean seafloor. However, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea provides each country an exclusive economic zone extending 200 miles out from its shoreline and up to 350 miles, under certain geological conditions.
Uncertain geology and politics has led to overlapping territorial disputes over how each nation defines and maps its claims based on the edge of continental margins. For example, Russia claims that their continental margin follows the Lomonosov Ridge all the way to the North Pole. In another, both the U.S. and Canada claim a portion of the Beaufort Sea, which is thought to contain significant oil and natural gas resources.
To Develop or Not to Develop
Just because the resources are there does not mean humans have to exploit them, especially given oil’s environmental impacts. Canada’s federal government has already returned security deposits that oil majors had paid to drill in Canadian Arctic waters, which are currently off limits until at least 2021.
In total, the Government of Canada returned US$327 million worth of security deposits, or 25% of the money oil companies pledged to spend on exploration in the Beaufort Sea. In addition, Goldman Sachs announced that it would not finance any projects in the U.S.’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The retreat of Western economic interests in the Arctic may leave the region to Russia and China, countries with less strict environmental regulations.
Russia has launched an ambitious plan to remilitarize the Arctic. Specifically, Russia is searching for evidence to prove its territorial claims to additional portions of the Arctic, so that it can move its Arctic borderline — which currently measures over 14,000 miles in length — further north.
In a changing Arctic, this potentially resource-rich region could become another venue for geopolitical tensions, again testing whether humans can be proper stewards of the natural world.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 21:50 - What Percentage Of Americans Celebrate Christmas?
What Percentage Of Americans Celebrate Christmas?
Authored by Lydia Saad via Gallup.com,
Ninety-three percent of Americans in December 2019 report celebrating Christmas, in line with the level Gallup has recorded over the past quarter century.
Near universal observance of Christmas is seen across all gender, age, education and income subgroups of Americans with more than 9 in 10 in each saying they celebrate, and the holiday is also a unifying event for Republicans and Democrats.
The only Americans less likely to observe Christmas are those who say that religion is not very important to them, and among them the figure is 85%. Participation stretches to 96% among those who are “very” and “fairly” religious.
While the overall percentage of Americans celebrating Christmas remains high, fewer today (71%) than a decade ago (82%) say it is a strongly or somewhat religious holiday for them.
For more on this trend, read More Americans Celebrating a Secular Christmas.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 21:25 - Russia's New Floating Nuclear Power Plant Begins Delivering Electricity To The Arctic
Russia’s New Floating Nuclear Power Plant Begins Delivering Electricity To The Arctic
On September 14, we reported that the world’s first ever floating nuclear power plant, the Akademik Lomonosov, reached the port city of Pevek in Russia’s Chukotka after covering a distance of more than 4,700km from Murmansk.
Russia’s first floating nuclear power plant has two KLT-40S reactor units that collectively generate 70 MW of energy.
A year ago we noted video of the beginning of the ships’ voyage (from St.Petersburg to Murmansk)
A floating nuclear power plant made by Russia headed out for its first sea voyage on Saturday. The floating plant, the academic lomonosov will provide power for a port town and for oil rigs. pic.twitter.com/Eo0uBjVfht
— ANews (@anewscomtr) April 28, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
And now, as The Barents Observer reports that at 11 am Moscow Times on December 19th, the “Akademik Lomonosov” delivered its first electricity to the grid in Pevek, Arctic Russia.
As Thomas Nilsen reports, symbolically, given the season, the town’s Christmas tree was first to be lighted with electricity produced by the two reactors on board the plant that is moored in the port.
Additional to the town of Pevek, the grid includes the Chaun-Bilibino junction in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, Rosatom informs.
“Today a historic event occurred, the first connection of the “generators of “Akademik Lomonosov” floating nuclear heat- and electricity nuclear power plant were connected to the grid,” Rosenergoatom Director General Andrey Petrov said.
He said Pevek is now the new energy capital of the region, “a stronghold for the development of western Chukotka and a key link for the Northern Sea Route.”
As we concluded previously, the launch of the first ever floating nuclear power plant has become an important engineering breakthrough that will impact the energy sphere on a global scale. This technology, which could potentially provide safe and clean energy to a large part of the planet, could also be provided at an attractive price.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 21:00 - This Christmas, Over Half A Million Americans Will Struggle With Homelessness
This Christmas, Over Half A Million Americans Will Struggle With Homelessness
Authored by Alan Macleod via MintPressNews.com,
The government estimates ending homelessness would cost around $20 billion, less than Americans spend on Christmas decorations, yet there appears to be little appetite to address the growing problem…
While millions of Americans celebrate Christmas this year with loved ones, carving turkey and sharing gifts, others are not so fortunate. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, over half a million of us will spend Christmas on the streets. The government agency estimates that on any given day, around 553,000 Americans are homeless. A third of those are families with young children. African Americans and those with disabilities are particularly likely to become homeless.
Yet these distressing numbers are sure to be underestimates of the true problem as they do not include the many more sleeping in vehicles or other makeshift accommodation, sofa surfing or relying on friends. Around 1.5 million people sleep at a shelter annually, according to figures from the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Furthermore, the 500,000 number itself is likely an underestimate. A 2017 experiment done by The Guardian, where it placed actors posing as homeless people on the streets, found that authorities missed around one in three of them. And they were wishing to be seen, not individuals keen to go undetected.
Tens of millions of Americans are barely managing to stave off the same fate. Almost half of America is broke, and 58 percent of the country is living paycheck to paycheck, with savings of less than $1,000. 37 million Americans go to bed hungry and around 130 million admit an inability to pay for basic needs like food, housing or healthcare. After a decade of decline, the homeless population is again creeping up.
The Trump administration is believed to be readying a “get tough” approach to the problem. Singling out California, earlier this year, Trump claimed that its cities were “going to hell” thanks to illegal encampments that increase environmental pollution. The number of unsheltered homeless people in Los Angeles Country alone increased by over 10 percent this year, to 44,214.
Yet the United Nations has decried the already inhumane treatment of homeless Americans, claiming that the state “effectively criminalizes” them “for the situation in which they find themselves.” In many cities, activities like sleeping rough, panhandling or public urination (in locations with zero pubic bathrooms) have been turned into arrestable offenses, ensuring a carceral “solution” to the problem. Homeless people can be given tickets for infractions as innocuous as loitering, leading to warrants and unpayable fines, trapping them in a cycle of criminality which they cannot escape as their record prohibits them from subsequent employment and access to most housing. Thus, the UN report concludes that it is “effectively a system for keeping the poor in poverty while generating revenue” for the state to employ more police to speed the system up.
Despite being a very visible representation of the economic and social dislocation in society, there currently appears to be little political appetite in Washington to solve the problem. The government estimates ending homelessness would cost around $20 billion– less than Americans spend on Christmas decorations alone. Yet there may be an even easier and cheaper way to fix the problem. Amnesty International reported that there are five times as many vacant properties in the U.S. as there are homeless people. Legislation enacted to make use of those as emergency accommodation could be enacted.
If Democrats manage to unseat Trump in 2020 there is hope that this could be the last year of mass homelessness at Christmas. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, has made housing for all a key pillar of his campaign message.
“In the richest country in the history of the world, every American must have a safe, decent, accessible, and affordable home as a fundamental right” his website declares, pledging to end homelessness, fight gentrification and protect tenants’ rights.
Sanders also promises to invest $2.5 trillion into building nearly 10 million “permanently affordable housing units.”
Other major candidates, like former Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have discussed measures to address the epidemic, but nothing as substantial as Sanders’. On the other hand, as Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg conducted a relentless campaign against homeless people under his jurisdiction.
Media often treat the problem of homelessness not as a condemnation of the callous disregard for human life of modern society, but as merely a natural function of the market. For example, in one supposedly heartwarming story about a good samaritan helping the homeless during the Chicago polar vortex last winter, CBS News casually noted that 22 homeless people had already died of exposure during the cold weather.
Society does its best to hide or normalize homelessness. Or, worse still, blame them for their own predicament. But, like slavery and apartheid, it is not natural and is a consequence of a man-made system that can be changed. Americans in 2020 will have an opportunity to decide what solution they wish to see enacted. For now, though, it won’t be a very merry Christmas for those at the bottom of the economic scale.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 20:35 - The Biggest Empires In Human History
The Biggest Empires In Human History
In 1913, 412 million people lived under the control of the British Empire, 23 percent of the world’s population at that time. As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, it remains the largest empire in human history and at the peak of its power in 1920, it covered an astonishing 13.71 million square miles – that’s close to a quarter of the world’s land area.
At its height, it was described as “the empire on which the sun never sets” but of course the sun finally did set on it.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Today, Britannia no longer rules the waves and its remnants consist of 17 small dependent and unincorporated territories scattered across the world such as the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar.
The Mongol Empire existed during the 13th and 14th centuries and it is recognized as being the largest contiguous land empire in history. It of course originated in Mongolia and once stretched from Eastern Europe to the Sea of Japan, extending into the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, covering 9.27 million square miles.
The Russian Empire comes third on the list with a peak land area of 8.8 million square miles.
The data for this infographic was published by website World Atlas.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 20:10 - Profs Urge NYTimes To Correct The Many Errors In Its '1619 Project'
Profs Urge NYTimes To Correct The Many Errors In Its ‘1619 Project’
Authored by Jennifer Kabbany via The College Fix,
Five historians have written a letter to the editor to The New York Times telling the “newspaper of record” to correct the major and serious errors that riddle its 1619 Project.
The 1619 Project sought to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding,” due to the arrival in that year of 20 African slaves to a Virginia colony.
The correction request was signed by Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York and Gordon Wood of Brown University, reports The Washington Post.
Their letter was published shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported on several of those professors’ concerns about the project that had been circulating on social media.
The letter states in part:
These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or “framing.” They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only “white historians” — has affirmed that displacement.
On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false. Some of the other material in the project is distorted, including the claim that “for the most part,” black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone.”
Still other material is misleading. The project criticizes Abraham Lincoln’s views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality, for blacks as well as whites, a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white supremacists who opposed him. The project also ignores Lincoln’s agreement with Frederick Douglass that the Constitution was, in Douglass’s words, “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”
Instead, the project asserts that the United States was founded on racial slavery, an argument rejected by a majority of abolitionists and proclaimed by champions of slavery like John C. Calhoun.
Given that the 1619 Project is being developed into a book and student curriculum, the scholars state it is very important that these errors be amended to reflect an accurate history of America.
But The New York Times said no.
“New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein addressed each concern from the professors but stood firmly behind the reporting and declined to correct it,” the Post reports.
Read the letter to the editor in the Times and the Post’s coverage of it.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 19:45 - SEC Investigating BMW For Using "Sales Punching" To Potentially Inflate Sales Numbers
SEC Investigating BMW For Using “Sales Punching” To Potentially Inflate Sales Numbers
While Tesla continues to waltz around regulators, breaking any and all securities laws it wants to, underreserving its warranty liabilities and allowing its self-driving cars with human beta testers to slam into inanimate objects before bursting into flames, regulators have decided to instead pay attention to BMW.
It was reported yesterday that the SEC has now opened an investigation into whether BMW’s sales figures have been manipulated, according to the Wall Street Journal. On a side note, there’s been no word on whether or not BMW counts its “factory gated” vehicles in its press releases.
Instead, the SEC is looking at whether or not the automaker has engaged in “sales punching”, a practice that encourages dealers to register cars despite them not being sold.
BMW acknowledged they were being investigated, stating: “We have been contacted by the SEC and will cooperate fully with their investigation.”
BMW also faces litigation by European authorities on allegations of colluding with rivals to manipulate prices and control emissions. BMW has vowed to fight the case and took a $1.1 billion charge as a result in April.
The company has also faced headwinds due the U.S./China trade war’s effect on its Spartanburg, S.C. factory exports.
The SEC investigation comes as U.S. officials are reportedly pursuing other car companies suspected of engaging in the same practice.
Fiat paid a $40 million fine in September to settle claims by the SEC that the company had paid dealers to report exaggerated sales numbers. But don’t worry, the company has said it “reviewed and refined its sales reporting procedures and was committed to maintaining strong controls.”
We feel better.
Fiat was also forced to revise several years of sales results, nullifying a streak of 75 months of sales increases. Using the revised numbers, the streak ended in September 2013.
Regulators also found that VW had defrauded U.S. consumers and the U.S. government in 2015 by rigging their cars to cheat emissions tests.
As a reminder, the investigation into BMW comes at arguably the peak of the auto bubble – as well as the peak of auto regulator apathy. We recently reported that only 7% of incomes had been verified on new auto loans since 2017 and, despite these ongoing investigations into other companies, the name we see as the industry’s main offender, Tesla, has been mostly left alone by regulators.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 19:20 - How The Soviets Replaced Christmas With A Socialist Winter Holiday
How The Soviets Replaced Christmas With A Socialist Winter Holiday
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Leftist revolutionaries have long been in the habit of reworking the calendar so as it make it easier to force the population into new habits and new ways of life better suited to the revolutionaries themselves.
The French revolutionaries famously abolished the usual calendar, replacing it with a ten-day week system with three weeks in each month. The months were all renamed. Christian feast days and holidays were replaced with commemorations of plants like turnips and cauliflower.
The Soviet communists attempted major reforms to the calendar themselves. Among these was the abolition of the traditional week with its Sundays off and predictable seven-day cycles.
That experiment ultimately failed, but the Soviets did succeed in eradicating many Christian traditional holidays in a country that had been for centuries influenced by popular adherence to the Eastern Orthodox Christian religion.
Once the communists took control of the Russian state, the usual calendar of religious holidays was naturally abolished. Easter was outlawed, and during the years when weekends were removed, Easter was especially difficult to celebrate, even privately.
But perhaps the most difficult religious holiday to suppress was Christmas, and much of this is evidenced in the fact that Christmas wasn’t so much abolished as replaced by a secular version with similar rituals.
Emily Tamkin writes at Foreign Policy:
Initially, the Soviets tried to replace Christmas with a more appropriate komsomol (youth communist league) related holiday, but, shockingly, this did not take. And by 1928 they had banned Christmas entirely, and Dec. 25 was a normal working day.
Then, in 1935, Josef Stalin decided, between the great famine and the Great Terror, to return a celebratory tree to Soviet children. But Soviet leaders linked the tree not to religious Christmas celebrations, but to a secular new year, which, future-oriented as it was, matched up nicely with Soviet ideology.
Ded Moroz [a Santa Claus-like figure] was brought back. He found a snow maid from folktales to provide his lovely assistant, Snegurochka. The blue, seven-pointed star that sat atop the imperial trees was replaced with a red, five-pointed star, like the one on Soviet insignia. It became a civic, celebratory holiday, one that was ritually emphasized by the ticking of the clock, champagne, the hymn of the Soviet Union, the exchange of gifts, and big parties.
In the context of these celebrations, the word “Christmas” was replaced by “winter.” According to a Congressional report from 1965,
The fight against the Christian religion, which is regarded as a remnant of the bourgeois past, is one of the main aspects of the struggle to mold the new “Communist man.” … the Christmas Tree has been officially abolished, Father Christmas has become Father Frost, the Christmas Tree has become the Winter Tree, the Christmas Holiday the Winter Holiday. Civil-naming ceremonies are substituted for christening and confirmation, so far without much success.
It is perhaps significant that Stalin found the Santa Claus aspect of Christmas worth preserving, and Stalin apparently calculated that a father figure bearing gifts might be useful after all.
According to a 1949 article in The Virginia Advocate,
at children’s gatherings in the holiday season … grandfather frost lectures on good Communist behavior. He customarily ends his talk with the question “to whom do we owe all the good things in our socialist society?” To which, it is said, the children chorus the reply, ‘Stalin.’
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 18:55 - Movie Theater Stocks Slump Amid Underwhelming Year, Not Even Star Wars Can Save Dying Industry
Movie Theater Stocks Slump Amid Underwhelming Year, Not Even Star Wars Can Save Dying Industry
Movie theater stocks plunged on Monday following a disappointing opening weekend for Disney’s Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, reported Bloomberg.
AMC Entertainment Holdings, Cinemark Holdings Inc., and Cineworld Group Plc all plunged after reports over the weekend indicated weak ticket sales from Dec. 20 to Dec. 22 for Star Wars.
Theater stocks have exhibited declines throughout most of the year.
The movie generated a whopping $176 million over the weekend, making it the third-largest December debut ever but tracked below $183 million estimates.
“Hollywood was banking on a strong showing to boost receipts,” Geetha Ranganathan, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote.
“The reception, far below predecessors, may have been partly due to mixed critical reviews.”
According to Comscore estimates, North American movie ticket sales slumped in 2019 by 3.6% to $11.5 billion, despite several blockbuster debuts this year, including Avengers: Endgame, The Lion King, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
North America’s movie theater industry has been in limbo since the emergence of streaming services. A consolidation wave among movie theaters continues despite Hollywood’s softer domestic performance in 2019. Operators have been hunting for additional growth channels, including expansion in Asia.
U.K.-based Cineworld is expected to become North America’s largest movie theater operator as it acquires Canada’s Cineplex in a $1.86 billion deal.
The movie theater consolidation wave began in 2012 when China’s Dalian Wanda Group purchased AMC Entertainment.
Netflix has undoubtedly disrupted the industry by releasing its content on television screens and mobile devices instead of at the box office. Netflix released 371 new movies and TV shows in 2019, over 50 percent more than they did last year, according to data compiled by Variety Insight.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The movie theater industry is always changing, there are ups and downs, but these days — it’s in a secular decline as streaming services have undoubtedly changed consumer preferences of how they watch movies. So in the next decade, or let’s say by 2030 — will movie theaters even exist?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 18:30 - Christmas Is Canceled
Christmas Is Canceled
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
No matter how good old St Nick Chris Cringle is, in his red and white suit, he’s not as good as Orange man is bad. And that’s why Christmas is canceled for leftists.
Whingy Amanda Marcotte of Salon complains that everything about Christmas is ruined, because all of her family are fans of President Trump, so she can no longer have any relationship with them.
In an op-ed titled “How Donald Trump ruined Christmas,” Marcotte complains that Trump “ruins everything he touches” and that “Christmas isn’t fun for me anymore.”
“My family is mostly a bunch of Trump voters, sucked up into a vortex of propaganda and lies, unable even to admit basic facts about the world that run contrary to what their tribal politics dictate,” she whines.
“That sort of thing is stressful on a normal day but makes a mockery of the idea of familial love and harmony.” Marcotte further sobs.
The unhinged whinging just gets more and more pathetic as the piece progresses. Marcotte explains that because she is a liberal, feminist, atheist, her “enthusiasm for the Christmas season was always weak”, but now because of Trump it’s gone altogether.
“This isn’t a matter of political differences that can be set aside for the sake of the holiday,” she blathers.
“This is about not being able to make merry with people who think nothing of voting for a man who is on tape bragging about sexual assault, a man who cheats in elections and runs concentration camps on the border. A man whose racism has inspired a wave of terrorist violence, including in my hometown of El Paso, Texas.”
“It’s a sad reminder that we are not the country we pretend to be when we sing songs about love and joy at this supposedly wonderful time of the year.” Marcotte snivels.
Maybe the actual reality is that the entirety of her family just don’t like to wallow around in misery for a fortnight complaining about how shit everything is?
But wait… Christmas is actually for white supremacists now, Marcotte argues, saying that because “Trump and his minions” have gotten hold of it, it has “morphed into something even uglier, a way to imply that the point of Christmas is to declare white supremacist America as the only ‘real’ America and to tell everyone else they can go hang.”
What?
Marcotte argues that Thanksgiving is still ok, because she can avoid her family and just hang out in a safe space bubble with her friends, who all presumably agree with her about everything and never challenge anything she says. If only the entire world was like that!!
“It seems a little silly to make a big thing out of a holiday that just reminds me how my own family and so many other people in America have been sucked up into the Trump cult.” Marcotte adds, saying “I’d rather just read a book or binge-watch some TV.”
Miserable and deranged.
She then ends with a diatribe about how evil capitalism is, and claims “I can sense the shaming, criticism and condescension coming my way, let me be clear: I am not a joyless person.”
Could’ve fooled me.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 18:05 - Russia's Su-57 Stealth Fighter Crashes During Factory Test Flight
Russia’s Su-57 Stealth Fighter Crashes During Factory Test Flight
Tass News is reporting that Russia’s most advanced stealth fighter crashed Tuesday during a test flight in the Khabarovsk Region in the Far East of the country.
The fifth-generation Su-57 fighter jet experienced technical failure of the aircraft’s control system, a defense source told Tass.
“According to the preliminary information, the crash is due to a failure of the Su-57’s control system,” one of the sources said.
Another source said, “the tail control failed.”
At the time of the incident, a civilian pilot was operating the Su-57, ejected from the aircraft 69 miles from the airfield.
Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) also confirmed the crash on Tuesday.
The company said the Su-57’s emergency system performed well and ejected the pilot to safety.
TASS noted that this is the first crash of the Su-57, a fifth-generation multirole fighter that is designed to rival the US’ Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters.
The Su-57 was first tested in early 2010 and has since flown combat missions in Syria.
Su-57 over Syria. Video from Russian MoD pic.twitter.com/iCEnKfvV74
— Yuri Lyamin (@imp_navigator) November 19, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Last month, UAC started series production of the Su-57, rolled off the first production jet, and delivered it to Russia’s Aerospace Force.
Russia’s Aerospace Force is expecting to receive 76 Su-57s by 2028.
Back in August, Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivoruchko told the press that Su-57 is “the most advanced fifth-generation multirole fighter jet, which will boost the domestic Aerospace Force’s combat capabilities” across the country.
Russia is planning on arming the stealth jets with hypersonic missiles to become the deadliest planes in the world.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 17:40 - The Great Cover Up Of The Biggest Scandal In American History
The Great Cover Up Of The Biggest Scandal In American History
Joe diGenova has been talking about the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election for at least a year, maybe longer. Unlike a lot of the people commenting on this in the mass media, he is not using it to sell books or boost his cable career. He also knows how the FBI and DOJ works from a practical matter. Being knowledgeable makes him a rare guy in the commentariat. Most of the people brought on as experts for the cable chat shows know very little about their alleged areas of expertise.
Regardless, he has been one of the most hawkish people on the Barr investigation, claiming that it is a real investigation with real criminal targets. In this recent radio interview he goes into the details of both the Barr investigation and the ongoing impeachment fiasco. He is a Trump partisan, so his opinions on impeachment are predictable, but his thoughts on the conspiracy are interesting. He probably has access to information from the Trump White House.
The interesting thing about all of this is just how widespread the conspiracy was during the 2015-2016 period. In that interview he talks about former NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, who is allegedly cooperating with Barr and Durham. What makes the Rogers issue interesting is that he was the original whistle-blower. He is not treated as such, because the media hates Trump and anyone associated with him, but Rogers was the guy who blew the whistle on the spying to the Trump people.
What’s also interesting about Rogers is he seems to have been a good guy, who decided to put an end to the shenanigans with regards to access to top-secret data by FBI contractors. He closed off their access at some point in 2016, which put him in bad odor with the Obama administration. He was eventually pushed out, which suggests the conspiracy has roots into the Obama inner-circle. That may explain why the easy cases to be made against the FBI conspirators are on hold.
That’s the other thing about the Rogers case. As CTH explains in that post, his addition to the story reveals that the use of the NSA database by political contractors working for the Democrats goes back to at least 2012. It is an axiom of white-collar crime that the practice always goes back much further than the evidence initially reveals. Anyone who has done forensic accounting knows this. You find the first evidence of a crime, but it turns out that the pattern goes back much further.
That may be what lies beneath all of this. The great puzzle thus far has been the lack of prosecutions, despite ample evidence. The FBI agents are all guilty of crimes that have been detailed in public documents and the IG reports. There is now proof that Comey perjured himself many times. Just from a public relations perspective alone, rounding up these guys and charging them with corruption seems like a no-brainer. Almost a year into his tenure and Barr has charged no one with a crime.
One obvious explanation is that Barr is running a long con on Trump and the rest of the country, on behalf of the inner party. Robert Mueller was supposed to use his investigation to hoover up all the data so it could not be made public, in addition to harassing the Trump White House. His incompetence meant Barr took over the job and is now hoovering up all the information on the various parties. That way, everyone has an excuse for not doing anything about plot.
One bit of evidence in support of this is the handling of the James Wolfe issue. He was the Senate staffer caught leaking classified information to one of the prostitutes hired by the Washington Post. Big media hires good looking young women to sleep with flunkies like Wolf in order to get access to information. Wolf was caught and charged, but instead of getting a couple years in jail, he got two months. He will come out and land into a six-figure job as a reward for being a good soldier.
An alternative explanation is that what started as a straight forward political corruption case bumped into a long pattern of behavior. In the course of investigating that pattern, the trail went much further back than the 2016 election. If there is evidence of abuse going back to 2012, maybe it goes back further. It was the Bush people, after all, who pushed for the creation of secret courts and secret warrants. Maybe Dick Cheney was listening to your phone calls after all.
It is not just the linear aspect of this. The sheer number of people involved in just the FBI scandal is phenomenal. There are at least 20 FBI people named and dozens of bit players in the media and DOJ. So far, the “contractors” with access to the NSA database have not been revealed, but that could be hundreds of people, given that it seems to have been a free-for-all. The corruption may not only go back a long time, but cover a wide swath of official Washington.
That may be the answer to the great cover up. That’s what we are seeing. This is a great cover up of the biggest scandal in American history. To date, no one has been charged with a crime, despite hundreds of crimes being documented. Many of the principals are now enjoying high six figure lives, based on the fact they were part of the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. Instead of the scandal of the century, it is the celebration of the century for the inner party.
One of the signs of ruling class collapse is when they can no longer enforce the rules that maintain them as a ruling class. When the Romans started making exceptions to republican governance, it was a matter of time before someone simply decided the rules no longer applied to them. Perhaps the robot historians will consider Obama our Marius or Sulla. Maybe that person is in the near future. Either way, the rule of law is over and what comes next is the rule of men.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 17:15 - US Must "Pursue Targeted Decoupling" From China's Economy, Says Former US Ambassador
US Must “Pursue Targeted Decoupling” From China’s Economy, Says Former US Ambassador
Despite the latest Sino-American phase one deal to ease tensions over trade, one former top US official is now calling for a decoupling between both economies, reported the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Former US ambassador to India Ashley Tellis explains in a new book titled Strategic Asia 2020: US-China Competition for Global Influence — that the world’s two largest economies have entered a new period of sustained competition.
Tellis said Washington had developed a view that “China is today and will be for the foreseeable future the principal challenger to the US.”
“The US quest for a partnership with China was fated to fail once China’s growth in economic capabilities was gradually matched by its rising military power,” he said.
Tellis said Washington must resume its ability to support the liberal international order established by the US more than a half-century ago, and “provide the global public goods that bestow legitimacy upon its primacy and strengthen its power-projection capabilities to protect its allies and friends.”
He said this approach would require more strategic cooperation with allies such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea.
“The US should use coordinated action with allies to confront China’s trade malpractices … should pursue targeted decoupling of the US and Chinese economies, mainly in order to protect its defense capabilities rather than seeking a comprehensive rupture.”
The latest phase one deal between both countries is a temporary trade truce — likely to be broken as a strategic rivalry encompasses trade, technology, investment, currency, and geopolitical concerns will continue to strain relations in the early 2020s.
A much greater decoupling could be dead ahead and likely to intensify over time, as it’s already occurring in the technology sector.
Tellis said President Trump labeling China as a strategic competitor was one of “the most important changes in US-China relations.”
The decoupling has already started as Washington races to safeguard the country’s cutting-edge technologies, including 5G, automation, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicle, hypersonics, and robotics, from getting into the hands of Chinese firms.
A perfect example of this is blacklisting Huawei and other Chinese technology firms from buying US semiconductor components.
Liu Weidong, a US affairs specialist from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told SCMP that increased protectionism among Washington lawmakers suggests the decoupling trend between both countries is far from over.
The broader shift at play is that decoupling will result in de-globalization, economic and financial fragmentation, and disruption of complex supply chains.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 16:50 - The TSA and Security Theater: Understanding American Airport Security Following 9/11
The TSA and Security Theater: Understanding American Airport Security Following 9/11
Authored by Brian Miller via Ammo.com,
Following the attacks of September 11th, Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA), creating the Transportation Security Agency (TSA). The TSA replaced private security screening companies with one government agency. Since then, air travelers have bowed to pat downs, bans on water bottles and other inconvenient, intrusive procedures as the “new normal” at our nation’s airports. But does any of this make us safer?
The short answer is no, it doesn’t. What’s more, laid out below is the quantifiable evidence that the TSA is a massive boondoggle that has done little to keep Americans safe while they travel. Indeed, it might make us less safe by providing a false sense of security, as American politicians shy away from ever questioning the efficacy of the TSA (or other elements deemed necessary for “homeland security”).
Perhaps more disturbing is the established record of TSA agents stealing from passengers. You’re far more likely to get robbed by a TSA agent than you are to get protected by one, a shorthand for the bureaucratic state if there ever was one.
We did an in-depth study about the history, practices and statistics of the Transportation Security Agency. Whether you’re skeptical of the TSA efficacy, convinced of their incompetence, or just irritated about having to get groped to go on a plane, this article is a must read.
SECURITY THEATER AND THE TSA
Security expert Bruce Schneier coined the term “security theater” to describe some of the TSA’s procedures and screening practices. Security theater provides the appearance of enhanced security without actually making anyone more secure.
Since 9/11, the TSA has implemented new screening procedures on an almost constant basis. The structural problem with these new screening procedures is two-fold. First, these procedures are almost always in response to past threats, not in anticipation of future threats. Second, average Americans suffer the consequences for years to come in the form of ever-increasing screening procedures and lost time.
Sadly, the TSA’s accumulated procedures and screening practices are actually causing more American deaths. Cornell University researchers found decreased air travel after 9/11 led to an extra 242 road fatalities per month. In all, the researchers estimate that 1,200 people died as a result of decreased air travel. In 2007, the Cornell researchers studied TSA screening procedures implemented in 2002, and found that they decreased air travel by 6% – leading to an additional 129 road fatalities in the last three months of 2002. In terms of casualties, that’s the same as blowing up a fully loaded Boeing 737.
THE TSA’S SECURITY THEATER TIMELINE
There have been significant and numerous changes in the TSA’s security theater since 9/11. Here are some of the highlights and lowlights:
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September 12, 2001: During the months after 9/11, National Guard troops are posted at the nation’s airports. Their guns are empty.
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November 19, 2001: President Bush signs the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA), replacing private security screening with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
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November 22, 2001: British national Richard Reid tries to blow up a Paris-Miami flight using explosives hidden in his shoes. The TSA institutes a random shoe-screening policy.
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April 2002: The TSA deploys 6,000 explosive trace detection machines, or “puffers,” at all American airports. Fewer than 100 machines are deployed and the plan is scrapped. The total cost of the project is more than $30 million.
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September 2004: The TSA orders all jackets and belts removed and X-rayed. Visitors banned from gate area.
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March 31, 2005: TSA adds all lighters to its list of prohibited items.
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December 2005: In response to the Madrid train bombings the year before, the TSA starts the Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) program to secure America’s transportation infrastructure beyond airports.
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August 10, 2006: All passengers now required to remove shoes during security screening.
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August 10, 2006: In response to a foiled plot using liquid explosives in Britain, the TSA adds all liquids, gels and aerosols to its list of prohibited items.
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September 2006: The TSA implements its 3-1-1 Rule, allowing liquids in 3-ounce containers that fit in a single 1-quart plastic bag.
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2007: The TSA repeals the lighter ban and the agency’s chief Kip Hawley says that taking lighters away is “security theater.”
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October 2007: In response to intelligence about remote-detonated explosives, the TSA starts training screeners to carry out additional screening of remote control toys.
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Christmas Day, 2009: Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tries to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit using explosives concealed in his underwear. The TSA orders mandatory full-body scans for all passengers. Passengers who refuse to be scanned will receive a physical pat-down search instead.
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Early 2010: The TSA starts introducing full-body scanners that use backscatter radiation to produce effectively nude images of passengers. By the end of the year, more than 500 scanners are operational.
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August 2010: The TSA achieves its goal of screening 100% of all checked baggage and cargo on board domestic flights.
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October 2010: Saudi intelligence discovers a plot to blow up aircraft with explosives hidden in printer cartridges. The TSA bans all printer cartridges from carry-on luggage.
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November 16, 2010: Hundreds of body scan images are leaked to the press. The leak causes a wave of demands to ban the fully-body scanners. In response to public outcry, Congress orders the TSA to purchase machines that generate a more generic picture of passengers’ bodies.
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November 17, 2010: The TSA institutes new “enhanced” pat-down procedures that allow screeners to touch passengers’ inner thighs, groins, buttocks and breasts – areas previously off limits.
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End of 2011: Every U.S. airport has at least one full-body scanner.
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March 2012: Shoe removal rules are relaxed to allow passengers younger than 12 and older than 75 to keep their shoes on during screening.
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July 6, 2014: The TSA bans powerless devices on direct flights to the United States from certain overseas airports. Smartphones, laptops and any device with dead batteries “will not be permitted onboard aircraft.”
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October 2018: The TSA lays out plans to use facial recognition software for domestic flights. And they order travelers to pay $1.4 million in civil penalties for bringing guns to airports.
Nowadays, the TSA runs background checks on all travelers before they even arrive at the airport. Using the Department of Homeland Security’s Automated Targeting System, a massive database that employs algorithms to identify potential terrorists, the TSA automatically places thousands of travelers on the so-called selectee list, which earns them an “SSSS” stamp on their boarding pass and extra screening every time they fly. For travelers who want to avoid extra screening, there’s the TSA’s PreCheck program, which lets passengers keep their shoes, belts and jackets on and skip lengthy lines in exchange for a background check, fingerprinting and a fee.
THE TSA’S 95% FAILURE RATE IN REHEARSALS
Although security procedures have gotten more aggressive under the TSA, detection rates seem no better than they were before September 11, 2001. An undercover investigation by the DHS in 2018, found that the TSA had equipment or procedure failure more than half the time.
Numbers don’t lie. The TSA’s failure rate at weapon detection remains strong, which is likely 80% at some major airports. And during undercover tests, that failure rate increases. During covert tests conducted by the DHS in 2015, TSA agents failed to detect guns and fake explosives 95 percent of the time. In one test, an undercover DHS agent was stopped and received an “enhanced” pat-down search after setting off a metal detector, but the TSA screener failed to detect the fake bomb taped to the agent’s back.
The U.S. hasn’t suffered any major attacks since 9/11. However, incidents like shoe bomber Richard Reid weren’t thwarted by the TSA – they were stopped by watchful passengers.
HOW TO SPOT A TERRORIST
Since 2006, the TSA has spent more than $1 billion on training so-called Behavior Detection Officers (BDOs) who watch passengers for suspicious behavior so they can be singled out for extra screening at airports. The program is called Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT).
The specific behaviors that BDOs are trained to look for are supposed to be secret, but a leaked copy of the behavior checklist includes fidgeting, sweating, yawning and “suspicious” eye movements. SPOT operates on a point system. Sweaty palms and whistling earns travelers one point. Arrogance, a cold stare and good posture earn travelers two points. Other indicators include a recently shaved face, looking at the floor, clearing your throat, and complaining about the screening process. Travelers who get enough points can be flagged for extra screening.
Since its inception in 2006, and after spending more than $1 billion, the SPOT program has only identified one man who could be called a terrorist. Kevin Brown, a Jamaican citizen, was waiting for his flight back home at Orlando International Airport in 2008. He checked his two bags, but not before a BDO flagged him as suspicious and ordered extra screening of his checked luggage – which contained pipes, caps, fuses, fuel and a handy printout explaining how to put them all together to make a bomb.
Fewer than one out of the 30,000 passengers who are flagged every year as “suspicious” and are searched, end up getting arrested (usually for carrying drugs, undeclared currency or having outstanding warrants or being in the country illegally). A report by the Government Accountability Office in 2013 surveyed more than 400 scientific studies and found no evidence that terrorists can be identified by the behaviors on the SPOT checklist, and recommended that the TSA cut funding for SPOT and stop training new BDOs.
THE ISRAELI ART OF CONVERSATION
Israel faces more terrorist threats than any other country in the world, yet their airport security is a model of sensible, measured response to a very real danger.
The screening process at Ben Gurion International Airport starts with a vehicle and bag inspection before passengers even enter the airport. Once inside the airport, passengers must pass through increasing layers of security, facing heavier and heavier scrutiny until they board. The level of technology at Ben Gurion hasn’t changed much since the 1980s. Metal detectors, X-ray scanners and bomb-sniffing dogs are still considered state-of-the-art.
Israeli security screeners approach passengers to ask about their travel plans as standard practice. If passengers’ answers seem practiced or implausible, security personnel can order extra screening. Instead of a checklist, Israeli security screeners rely on intuition and the art of conversation to judge passengers’ intentions. Science bears this out as a more effective technique than a behavior checklist.
Under the rules of the SPOT program, a BDO may see a passenger they feel is suspicious. However, the BDO cannot order extra screening unless the passenger displays approved “suspicious” behaviors like clearing their throat or looking at the floor. Since BDOs are supposed to remain undercover, they cannot approach passengers to gauge their intentions through conversation. That forces American airport security to rely on body language alone, which is actually worse than chance at identifying liars and others with concealed intent.
There are three problems with the Israeli screening procedures, however: First, Israelis in general are used to higher levels of security scrutiny as part of their overall culture. This means both a greater acceptance of the idea of profiling and police interaction, but also a greater deal of confidence and trust in security and police forces.
Perhaps more importantly, there are potential Constitutional issues. Profiling – racial or otherwise – does not currently violate Fourth Amendment protections, but no one is eager to test this in a court of law. Still, as proponents of the Israeli system are quick to point out, their profiling is behavioral, relying less upon unsuccessful pseudoscience and more upon a general “feel” officers trained in behavioral sciences get from interacting directly with travelers.
Finally, there are concerns that the Israeli system simply won’t scale. Still, it’s worth asking how the Israeli system applied to the United States could get any worse.
BEYOND SECURITY THEATER
The TSA’s poor performance record has led some airports back to the private screening companies that handled security before 9/11. Under the TSA’s Screening Partnership Program, an approval process that typically takes years, airports can hire private security screeners. The only requirement is that the private outfits maintain the same level of security as the TSA. More than 20 local and international airports have joined the program – with San Francisco and Kansas City already onboard and more set to join as the TSA promises waiting times will reach three hours at busy airports during the spring and summer travel seasons.
Private screeners at SPP airports have proven themselves to be more efficient and more effective than the TSA. A report by a House oversight committee in 2013 found that private screeners at San Francisco International Airport were much better at detecting prohibited items than TSA screeners at LAX, and wait times were shorter. As a result of the report, calls are growing in Congress to abolish the TSA and return to private screening companies.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/24/2019 – 16:25 -
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