Apr 16

Today’s News 16th April 2019

  • Turkish Economist Arrested After Insulting Erdogan On Twitter

    Following his party’s embarrassing defeat at the polls earlier this month, where the opposition wrested control of the municipal governments of Istanbul and Ankara, and last month’s destabilizing currency crisis, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is once again cracking down on dissenters, including the few remaining voices in Turkish media who dare criticize him directly.

    According to Bloomberg, Istanbul police briefly arrested and detained the economist Mustafa Sonmez, known for opposing the government’s policies, after he allegedly insulted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

    Sonmez’s lawyer told the state-run Anadolu press agency that police barged into the economist’s home on Sunday morning, arrested him, and took him to a police station in Istanbul. Sonmez, who has also been working as a columnist and a television commentator, was reportedly questioned about several tweets that were critical of the government’s response to the results of the local elections.

    Sonmez reportedly criticized Erdogan for not recognizing Ekrem Imamoglu as the winner of Istanbul’s mayoral race.  The AKP is demanding a recount and possibly a new vote.

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    His lawyer said that Sonmez was interrogated for a few hours and then released. But just because he was let go doesn’t mean he won’t face a legal case in Turkey.

    Erdogan has been cracking down on the press and freedom of expression in Turkey since the failed July 2016 coup, when Erdogan began a purge that has ensnared tens of thousands of Turks. Turkish police made headlines in late 2016 for shutting down one critical television outlet in the middle of a live broadcast.

    After the arrest, Sonmez tweeted that police burst into his home at three o’clock in the morning, and promised that he wouldn’t be silenced, saying “the water never stops.”

    He later claimed that it was ridiculous that he was detained for alegedly insulting Erdogan when there’s so much substantive criticism to levy at AKP and its policies.

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    We imagine that defiant tone will win him plenty of friends in Ankara.

  • As Notre Dame Burns, European Churches Are Vandalized, Defecated On, & Torched "Every Day"

    Authored by Raymong Ibrahim via The Gatestone Institute,

    Countless churches throughout Western Europe are being vandalized, defecated on, and torched.

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    In February, vandals desecrated and smashed crosses and statues at Saint-Alain Cathedral in Lavaur, France, and mangled the arms of a statue of a crucified Christ in a mocking manner. In addition, an altar cloth was burned. (Image source: Eutrope/Wikimedia Commons)

    In France, two churches are desecrated every day on average. According to PI-News, a German news site, 1,063 attacks on Christian churches or symbols (crucifixes, icons, statues) were registered in France in 2018. This represents a 17% increase compared to the previous year (2017), when 878 attacks were registered— meaning that such attacks are only going from bad to worse.

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    Among some of the recent desecrations in France, the following took place in just February and March:

    • Vandals plundered Notre-Dame des Enfants Church in Nîmes and used human excrement to draw a cross there; consecrated bread was found thrown outside among garbage.

    • The Saint-Nicolas Church in Houilles was vandalized on three separate occasions in February; a 19th century statue of the Virgin Mary, regarded as “irreparable,” was “completely pulverized,” said a clergyman; and a hanging cross was thrown to the floor.

    • Vandals desecrated and smashed crosses and statues at Saint-Alain Cathedral in Lavaur, and mangled the arms of a statue of a crucified Christ in a mocking manner. In addition, an altar cloth was burned.

    • Arsonists torched the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris soon after midday mass on Sunday, March 17.

    Similar reports are coming out of Germany. Four separate churches were vandalized and/or torched in March alone. “In this country,” PI-News explained, “there is a creeping war against everything that symbolizes Christianity: attacks on mountain-summit crosses, on sacred statues by the wayside, on churches… and recently also on cemeteries.”

    Who is primarily behind these ongoing and increasing attacks on churches in Europe? The same German report offers a hint:

    “Crosses are broken, altars smashed, Bibles set on fire, baptismal fonts overturned, and the church doors smeared with Islamic expressions like ‘Allahu Akbar.'”

    Another German report from November 11, 2017 noted that in the Alps and Bavaria alone, around 200 churches were attacked and many crosses broken:

    “Police are currently dealing with church desecrations again and again. The perpetrators are often youthful rioters with a migration background.” Elsewhere they are described as “young Islamists.”

    Sometimes, sadly, in European regions with large Muslim populations, there seems to be a concomitant rise in attacks on churches and Christian symbols. Before Christmas 2016, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany, where more than a million Muslims reside, some 50 public Christian statues (including those of Jesus) were beheaded and crucifixes broken.

    In 2016, following the arrival in Germany of another million mostly Muslim migrants, a local newspaper reported that in the town of Dülmen, “‘not a day goes by’ without attacks on religious statues in the town of less than 50,000 people, and the immediate surrounding area.”

    In France it also seems that where the number of Muslim migrants increases, so do attacks on churches. A January 2017 study revealed that, “Islamist extremist attacks on Christians” in France rose by 38 percent, going from 273 attacks in 2015 to 376 in 2016; the majority occurred during Christmas season and “many of the attacks took place in churches and other places of worship.”

    As a typical example, in 2014, a Muslim man committed “major acts of vandalism” inside a historic Catholic church in Thonon-les-Bains. According to a report (with pictures) he “overturned and broke two altars, the candelabras and lecterns, destroyed statues, tore down a tabernacle, twisted a massive bronze cross, smashed in a sacristy door and even broke some stained-glass windows.” He also “trampled on” the Eucharist.

    For similar examples in other European countries, please see here, here, here, here, and here.

    In virtually every instance of church attacks, authorities and media obfuscate the identity of the vandals. In those rare instances when the Muslim (or “migrant”) identity of the destroyers is leaked, the perpetrators are then presented as suffering from mental health issues. As the recent PI-News report says:

    “Hardly anyone writes and speaks about the increasing attacks on Christian symbols. There is an eloquent silence in both France and Germany about the scandal of the desecrations and the origin of the perpetrators…. Not a word, not even the slightest hint that could in anyway lead to the suspicion of migrants… It is not the perpetrators who are in danger of being ostracized, but those who dare to associate the desecration of Christian symbols with immigrant imports. They are accused of hatred, hate speech and racism.”

  • Forget Iran & Saudi Arabia, China Dominates The World Executions League Table

    Great news, world citizens, 2018 saw a 31 percent decrease in executions, according to Amnesty International’s annual review of countries using the death penalty. Excluding China, 690 people are known to have been executed around the world, a decline on 2017’s 993.

    But, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, China is the world’s top executioner by far and it’s believed that thousands of people are put to death every despite accurate figures remaining a state secret.

    Infographic: The World's Top Executioners | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Iran comes second after China with 253 people thought to have been executed last year. That is still a significant reduction on 2017 when more than 500 people had their death sentences carried out. The decline in Iran has been attributed to a change in the countries anti-narcotic laws. Other countries known for high numbers of executions also saw noticeable declines including Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia.

    Despite the reduction in executions by the worst perpetrators, a small number of states are still bucking the trend. They include developed nations like Japan and Singapore who both reported their highest execution totals for years. Thailand has also resumed executions after nearly a decade while the United States also saw a minor increase in 2018.

  • CJ Hopkins: Assange & Uncle Tom's Empire

    Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins via The Unz Review,

    I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but, given the arrest of Julian Assange last week, and the awkward and cowardly responses thereto, I felt it necessary to abandon my customary literary standards and spew out a spineless, hypocritical “hot take” professing my concern about the dangerous precedent the U.S. government may be setting by extraditing and prosecuting a publisher for exposing American war crimes and such, while at the same time making it abundantly clear how much I personally loathe Assange, and consider him an enemy of America, and freedom, and want the authorities to crush him like a cockroach.

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    Now I want to be absolutely clear. I totally defend Assange and Wikileaks, and the principle of freedom of the press, and whatever. And I am all for exposing American war crimes (as long as it doesn’t endanger the lives of the Americans who committed those war crimes, or inconvenience them in any way). At the same time, while I totally support all that, I feel compelled to express my support together with my personal loathing of Assange, who, if all those important principles weren’t involved, I would want to see taken out and shot, or at least locked up in Super-Max solitary … not for any crime in particular, but just because I personally loathe him so much.

    I’m not quite sure why I loathe Assange. I’ve never actually met the man. I just have this weird, amorphous feeling that he’s a horrible, disgusting, extremist person who is working for the Russians and is probably a Nazi. It feels kind of like that feeling I had, back in the Winter of 2003, that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, which he was going to give to those Al Qaeda terrorists who were bayonetting little babies in their incubators, or the feeling I still have, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Trump is a Russian intelligence asset who peed on Barack Obama’s bed, and who is going to set fire to the Capitol building, declare himself American Hitler, and start rounding up and murdering the Jews.

    I don’t know where these feelings come from. If you challenged me, I probably couldn’t really support them with any, like, actual facts or anything, at least not in any kind of rational way. Being an introspective sort of person, I do sometimes wonder if maybe my feelings are the result of all the propaganda and relentless psychological and emotional conditioning that the ruling classes and the corporate media have subjected me to since the day I was born, and that influential people in my social circle have repeated, over and over again, in such a manner as to make it clear that contradicting their views would be extremely unwelcome, and might negatively impact my social status, and my prospects for professional advancement.

    Take my loathing of Assange, for example. I feel like I can’t even write a column condemning his arrest and extradition without gratuitously mocking or insulting the man. When I try to, I feel this sudden fear of being denounced as a “Trump-loving Putin-Nazi,” and a “Kremlin-sponsored rape apologist,” and unfriended by all my Facebook friends. Worse, I get this sickening feeling that unless I qualify my unqualified support for freedom of press, and transparency, and so on, with some sort of vicious, vindictive remark about the state of Assange’s body odor, and how he’s probably got cooties, or has pooped his pants, or some other childish and sadistic taunt, I can kiss any chance I might have had of getting published in a respectable publication goodbye.

    But I’m probably just being paranoid, right? Distinguished, highbrow newspapers and magazines like The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vox, Vice, Daily Mail, and others of that caliber, are not just propaganda organs whose primary purpose is to reinforce the official narratives of the ruling classes. No, they publish a broad range of opposing views. The Guardian, for example, just got Owen Jones to write a full-throated defense of Assange on that grounds that he’s probably a Nazi rapist who should be locked up in a Swedish prison, not in an American prison! The Guardian, remember, is the same publication that printed a completely fabricated story accusing Assange of secretly meeting with Paul Manafort and some alleged “Russians,” among a deluge of other such Russiagate nonsense, and that has been demonizing Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite for several years.

    Plus, according to NPR’s Bob Garfield (who is lustfully “looking forward to Assange’s day in court”), and other liberal lexicologists, Julian Assange is not even a real journalist, so we have no choice but to mock and humiliate him, and accuse him of rape and espionage … oh, and speaking of which, did you hear the one about how his cat was spying on the Ecuadorean diplomats?

    But seriously now, all joking aside, it’s always instructive (if a bit sickening) to watch as the mandarins of the corporate media disseminate an official narrative and millions of people robotically repeat it as if it were their own opinions. This process is particularly nauseating to watch when the narrative involves the stigmatization, delegitimization, and humiliation of an official enemy of the ruling classes. Typically, this enemy is a foreign enemy, like Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Milošević, Osama bin Laden, Putin, or whoever. But sometimes the enemy is one of “us” … a traitor, a Judas, a quisling, a snitch, like Trump, Corbyn, or Julian Assange.

    In either case, the primary function of the corporate media remains the same: to relentlessly assassinate the character of the “enemy,” and to whip the masses up into a mindless frenzy of hatred of him, like the Two-Minutes Hate in 1984, the Kill-the-Pig scene in Lord of the Flies, the scapegoating of Jews in Nazi Germany, and other examples a bit closer to home.

    Logic, facts, and actual evidence have little to nothing to do with this process. The goal of the media and other propagandists is not to deceive or mislead the masses. Their goal is to evoke the pent-up rage and hatred simmering within the masses and channel it toward the official enemy. It is not necessary for the demonization of the official enemy to be remotely believable, or stand up to any kind of serious scrutiny. No one sincerely believes that Donald Trump is a Russian Intelligence asset, or that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite, or that Julian Assange has been arrested for jumping bail, or raping anyone, or for helping Chelsea Manning “hack” a password.

    The demonization of the empire’s enemies is not a deception … it is a loyalty test. It is a ritual in which the masses (who, let’s face it, are de facto slaves) are ordered to display their fealty to their masters, and their hatred of their masters’ enemies. Cooperative slaves have plenty of pent-up hatred to unleash upon their masters’ enemies. They have all the pent-up hatred of their masters (which they do not dare direct at their masters, except within the limits their masters allow), and they have all the hatred of themselves for being cooperative, and … well, basically, cowards.

    Julian Assange is being punished for defying the global capitalist empire. This was always going to happen, no matter who was in the White House. Anyone who defies the empire in such a flagrant manner is going to be punished. Cooperative slaves demand this of their masters. Defiant slaves are actually less of a threat to their masters than they are to the other slaves who have chosen to accept their slavery and cooperate with their own oppression. Their defiance shames these cooperative slaves, and shines an unflattering light on their cowardice.

    This is why we are witnessing so many liberals (and liberals in leftist’s clothing) rushing to express their loathing of Assange in the same breath as they pretend to support him, not because they honestly believe the content of the official Julian Assange narrative that the ruling classes are disseminating, but because (a) they fear the consequences of not robotically repeating this narrative, and (b) Assange has committed the cardinal sin of reminding them that actual “resistance” to the global capitalist empire is possible, but only if you’re willing to pay the price.

    Assange has been paying it for the last seven years, and is going to be paying it for the foreseeable future. Chelsea Manning is paying it again. The Gilets Jaunes protestors have been paying it in France. Malcolm X paid it. Sophie Scholl paid it. Many others throughout history have paid it. Cowards mocked them as they did, as they are mocking Julian Assange at the moment. That’s all right, though, after he’s been safely dead for ten or twenty years, they’ll name a few streets and high schools after him. Maybe they’ll even build him a monument.

  • Mapping 40 Years Of Nautical Piracy

    For millennia, voyaging on the open seas has been a dangerous and risky endeavor.

    Between the powerful forces of Mother Nature and self-made obstacles stemming from human error, there is no shortage of possible calamities for even the bravest of sailors.

    But, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, for most of human history, perhaps the biggest fear that sailors grappled with was that of piracy. A run in with such marauders could lead to the theft of valuable cargo or even possible death, and it’s a threat that carries on even through modern times.

    Hotbeds of Modern Piracy

    Today’s map comes from Adventures in Mapping and it aggregates instances of piracy over the last 40 years based on the database from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

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    View the full-size version of the infographic by clicking here

    It should be noted that all individual events can be seen on this interactive map, which is what we will use to look at current hotbeds of piracy in more depth below.

    1. The Strait of Malacca

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    The Strait of Malacca is one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, and also one of the most notorious.

    A key chokepoint that sits between Malaysia and Indonesia, the Strait of Malacca is as narrow as 25 miles wide while also seeing a quarter of the world’s traded goods shipped through it every year. As a result, the strait and surrounding area are a frequent target for modern piracy.

    Example account: (September 2002)
    “The 1,699-ton Malaysian-flag tanker (NAUTICA KLUANG) was hijacked 28 Sep at 0300 local time while underway off Indonesia in the vicinity of Pulau Iyu Kecil at the southern tip of the Strait of Malacca. The pirates, armed with guns and machetes, tied up the crew and locked them in cabins. When the crew freed themselves at 0900, 29 Sep, the thieves had transferred the ship’s cargo of 3,000 tons of diesel oil, damaged communications equipment, and renamed it (CAKLU). “

    2. The Horn of Africa

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    When many people think of modern piracy, they think of the coast of Somalia. While those waters are often avoided, the nearby areas can be just as problematic.

    In particular, the Bab el Mandeb strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, is a target for modern piracy. Similarly, the waters just off of Yemen are quite treacherous as well.

    Example account: (January 1991)
    “Somali pirates attached MV Naviluck off Somalia, killing three Filipino crewmen and setting fire to the vessel. Three boatloads of armed Somali pirates boarded the vessel on 12 Jan 91 took the crew ashore and killed three of them. The captain said the vessel was attacked off Xaafuun while on her way from Mombasa to Jeddah. He declined to specify the cargo. The surviving crew were made to jump overboard, and were later rescued by M Stern TRLR Dubai Dolphin.”

    3. The Gulf of Guinea

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    While we hear the most about Somalian pirates, the Gulf of Guinea that sits south of Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Ghana in West Africa is also a well-known hotbed.

    Tanker theft of petroleum products being shipped to and from Nigerian refineries is rampant, creating an ongoing concern for companies operating in the region.

    Example account: (June 2013)
    “On 13 June, the Singapore-flagged underway offshore supply vessel MDPL CONTINENTAL ONE was boarded and personnel kidnapped at 04-02N 008-02E, approximately 7 nm southwest of the OFON Oil Field. Two fiberglass speedboats, each with 2 outboards engines, each carrying 14 gunmen in wearing casual t-shirts and no masks, launched an attack. The pirates were armed with AK47’s. After stealing personal items and belongings, four expat crew were kidnapped (Polish Chief Engineer) and three Indians (Captain, Chief Officer, and Bosun).”

    4. The Caribbean

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    The Caribbean has a longstanding history with piracy – and while things have died down considerably since the peak, there are still isolated incidents that occur, especially with yachts.

    Most incidents happen off the coast of Venezuela, or in and around the islands on the eastern side of the sea, such as Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, and Grenada.

    Example account: (March 2016)
    “On 4 March, near position 13-16N 061-16W, several gunmen boarded a yacht anchored at Wallilabou in southwestern St. Vincent. During the course of the boarding, a German citizen aboard the yacht was killed and another person was injured. Authorities are investigating the incident.”

  • America's War Against Iran & Venezuela's "Deep States" Is Going Public

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

    The US’ desire to dismantle the network of Iranian influence in Latin America and specifically in Venezuela speaks to its commitment to counter the regional sway of its rivals’ “deep states”, though it’s hitherto unprecedented for any country to make such a crusade public since the end of the Old Cold War, let alone clothe it in “anti-terrorist” and “anti-criminal” rhetoric.

    US Secretary of State Pompeo recently reiterated his rhetoric that Iran is a “global threat”, this time basing it on his claims that the country’s network of influence in Latin America is supporting “transnational crime” and “terrorism”. This comes shortly after Washington designated the IRGC as a “terrorist” organization and approximately half a year since the Justice Department began investigating Iranian ally Hezbollah’s alleged links to drug cartels as a follow-up to the scandalous Obama-era “Operation Cassandra“.

    Taken together, it’s clear that the US desires to dismantle Iran and Venezuela’s supposedly interconnected influence networks in Latin America as the next step in fortifying “Fortress America“, and while “deep state” wars such as this one have been going on for decades, it’s hitherto unprecedented for any country to make such a crusade public since the end of the Old Cold War when the US used to make similar claims about the USSR and its communist proxies.

    Evidently, the US isn’t shy about ushering in a new era of “deep state” wars whereby Great Powers such as itself (which is presently the leading one in the world) openly work to thwart the networks of influence established by its regional rivals’ on the grounds that the military-intelligence wings of their “deep states” are engaged in “criminal” and “terrorist” activities that threaten the world at large. It’s no secret that the CIA has been involved in these exact same activities for years, but getting bogged down in “feel-good” “whatabouttism” isn’t the purpose of this analysis even though it’s still important to point that out since it shows that the Trump Administration’s “hyper-realist” foreign policy is centered on the notion that “might makes right” and that double standards don’t matter as long as a state is strong enough to implement them with minimal consequences to its interests.

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    If successful in what it’s setting out to do, then the US will undoubtedly expand its operations against Venezuela and Iran’s “deep states” to include Russia and China’s as well, with the first-mentioned being relevant because of the emerging role that it plays in strengthening “Democratic Security” across the “Global South” in counteracting America’s regime change influence whereas the latter is importantly leading the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) that will tie all of its partner states together in a “community of shared destiny” that revolutionizes 21st-century geopolitics.

    Russian influence is already on the decline in Latin America except for in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba, though China’s is on the ascent and poses the largest long-term threat to the “New Monroe Doctrine”, which is why it’ll probably be targeted next. Given the pattern being established through the public crusades against against Venezuela and Iran’s “deep states”, the US will likely attack China’s using similar “criminal”- or “corruption”-related rhetoric too, at the very least.

  • A Global Rally Killer Has Emerged In China

    Back in early October, the market catalyst that killed the US rally and sent stocks tumbling into a brief bear market after Powell warned that the neutral rate was a “long way away”, was the sudden spike in yields, which surged above 3.3%, breaking out above long-term resistance, and leading to renewed speculation that the 30 year long bull market in bonds is (again) officially over.

    But while US yields have remained stubbornly low, perhaps in anticipation of rate cuts and/or QE4, perhaps due to increased buying from foreigners due to sliding FX hedging costs, there is one place where yields have recently soared much higher: the same place whose massive credit expansion in the past three months has led to renewed hopes for global “green shoots”, and speculation that the economic slump is now over – China.

    After surging in the the first two weeks of April at the fastest pace in more than 2 years, on Monday Chinese ten-year yields rose to 3.38% Monday, extending their highest levels this year. And while for much of the recent advance Chinese equities were willing to ignore the spike in interest rates, in the past week Chinese stocks have been ominously toppy, and have continued to slide in Tuesday’s session.

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    As a result, and perhaps due to fears that Chinese liquidity is again getting too tight, on Tuesday the PBOC broke its streak of 18 consecutive days without open market interventions, and injected a net of 40 billion yuan via 7 day reverse repos. That plus concerns that the Chinese central bank will not cut rates as previously consensus had expected, stocks have topped out, even as 10Y yields have continued marching higher, and hit 3.40% in early Tuesday trading, the highest level since mid-December. In other words as Bloomberg’s Wes Goodman writes, while the PBOC says it will keep good control of the money supply, “yields may have more to rise even if the central bank is trying to temper the pace of the advance.”

    The risk is that if yields rise even higher, the rally in Chinese stocks – which has outperformed all major markets in 2019 – is now officially over.

    And, all else equal, it does appears that Chinese liquidity will shrink even more in the coming weeks, and local markets will face tighter credit conditions this quarter than in 1Q after the PBOC indicated the current pace had gone beyond its target. That, as Yinan Zhao cautions, is going to add to the pain for slumping sovereign bonds as investors face an uncertain economic outlook and reduced chances for stronger easing.

    1Q credit growth at 10.7% was way above the PBOC’s goal to keep it “in line with the pace of nominal GDP,” a range it specifically emphasized in yesterday’s policy statement. It usually doesn’t go into that much detail on credit growth goals.

    The PBOC emphasized a need for a balanced approach. Given 10-year yields are rising at the fastest pace in more than 2 years, that’s perhaps not the message fixed-income investors would have been hoping for.

    But wait, there’s more: while US traders are casting a fearful eye on just how bad the EPS contraction in Q1 earnings season will be (and whether it will recover in Q2 and onward) in China it will be far worse.  Indeed, the sharp Monday slump in Chinese small caps “underscores the dangers for mainland stock markets as what could be an ugly earnings season kicks off and steals the limelight from stimulus hopes”, as Bloomberg’s Kyoungwha Kim writes today.

    Here’s the punchline: while US stocks are expected to post a roughly 4% drop Y/Y, China small cap earnings will be a massacre, with Q1 EPS on the ChiNext board forecast to slump 29% y/y, following a 12% drop in the prior quarter. That’s in line with China’s dour Jan.-Feb. economic data. Paradoxically, as earnings tumbled, the ChiNext index soared by over 35% during the same period, so any disappointment in earnings will lead traders to rush for the exits… especially if rates keep rising as liquidity shrinks. This will keep markets volatile in April, especially as the ChiNext’s double top formation sets the gauge up for a correction.

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    The silver lining in China, just like in the US, is that any earnings recession is expected to be brief: in Q2 earnings are already predicted to rebound, largely thanks to the recent VAT cut, with overall 2019 EPS growth for the ChiNext seen at 52%.

    Whether or not that happens will ultimately depend on whether Chinese interest rates keep rising from here, and will also likely determine the fate of the global rally which, all else equals, is now entering extremely overbought territory.

  • US Government Won't Care About Your Definition Of Journalism After The Assange Precedent Is Set

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Since I published my last article about about the idiotic “Assange isn’t a journalist” smear, this talking point has become more and more commonplace in online discourse. It’s very important to defenders of the political status quo for us all to believe that Assange is not a journalist, because otherwise that would mean they’re cheering for a dangerous precedent which would allow for the prosecution of journalists who exposed the truth about US government malfeasance. And that would mean cognitive dissonance, which all defenders of the political status quo spend most of their day-to-day mental energy running away from.

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    So in the past few days, editorials like this one from free press avatar Peter Greste have popped up all over the place with their own definitions of what journalism is in order to argue why that label can’t possibly apply to Assange. All of these definitions ultimately boil down to the argument that because Assange doesn’t publish leaks in a way that they feel journalism ought to be practiced, it isn’t journalism and therefore sets no legal precedent for journalists around the world. As though the US government is going to be consulting their feelings about what specifically constitutes journalism the next time they decide to imprison a journalist for doing what Assange did.

    It doesn’t work that way, sugar tits. Assange is being prosecuted by the Trump administration for standard journalistic practices, he stands no chance of receiving a fair trial, and it is very likely that he will be hit with far more serious charges for his activities once on US soil. The next time the US government, under Trump or someone else, sees another journalist anywhere in the world doing something similar to what Assange did, there will be nothing stopping them from saying, “We need to lock that person up like we did Assange; they’re doing the same sort of thing.”

    It’s just so amazingly arrogant how people imagine that the way their feelings feel will factor into this in any way. Like the US Attorney General might show up on their doorstep one day with a clipboard saying “Yes, hello, we wanted to imprison this journalist based on the precedent we set with the prosecution of Julian Assange, but before doing so we wanted to find out how your feelings feel about whether or not they’re a real journalist.”

    You won’t get to define how the US government will interpret what constitutes journalism in the future. Only the US government will. It’s amazing that this isn’t more obvious to more people.

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    In reality, journalism has always been and will always be defined as an activity. It’s not like being a doctor. If you happen to witness a car crash and you give CPR on the scene, you are not a doctor in that moment, but if you take some photos and post them online with a summary of what you saw then you are engaging in the act of journalism and all the legalities and rules of journalism apply to you.

    The particular journalistic activities that the US is currently trying to extradite Assange for is encouraging a source to give him more documents and conspiracy to help Manning hide her identity so that she would not be persecuted for her heroic act of whistleblowing. In other words, Assange was attempting to make sure Manning’s leaks had enough impact to justify the risk, and also to try and make sure she wasn’t caught and tortured for it.

    As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out on Twitter, the indictment describes an activity that all investigative journalists partake in all the time. A source offers you some docs and you see a gap that needs to be filled, you will ask them to get them for you. A source fears they will be found out and you do what you can to hide their identity. That’s journalism at its most raw and dangerous and important. Check out the film Spotlight to see a fairly true version of what the journalists at the Boston Globe had to do in order to expose the pedophile ring of the Catholic Church. These high level crimes must be exposed for people’s safety, but the higher the level the crime, the more risk there is in its exposure.

    To be clear, you only have to engage in these kinds of activities when you are exposing the most powerful people with the most political clout for the most heinous of crimes. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning suspected she was risking years of torture if she was found out, and history has since proved them both correct.

    So of all the many enraging aspects of all of this extraordinary act of Nice Guy Fascism, one of them is the constant bloviation of the mainstream media elite with their endless personal definitions of what makes a one journalist. You’d think they were quaffing wine at an opening and wanking on about whether the paintings in the gallery were really art. “This journalist is not a journalist, my five year old son could paint that!” they grandstand to any poor bastard within earshot while inhaling olives and patting the waitress on the bum.

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    These people have obviously had their personal opinions taken far too seriously for far too long. It’s truly the hallmark of someone whose mother put too many of their crappy crayon drawings on the fridge when you think that your precious little homespun definition of what constitutes journalism will serve as a legal precedent in the years to come. No one will care about your feelings regarding who is a real journalist or not when the long arm of the US empire reaches out across the planet and nabs the next guy for exposing inconvenient truths about the US military-industrial complex or US corporate interests. No one is going to grant you a sit-down and consult you about your oh-so-fascinating ruminations about the next journalist they wish to use Assange’s precedent on.

    It’s obvious to any journalist who doesn’t have their head up their ass that this is the beginning of the end of the fourth estate. Want to expose the US corporate corruption fueling the degradation and desecration of your environment in your particular province in the world? Oh well, uh-oh, now you’ve found yourself on a plane to Gitmo.

    Journalism is an activity. It is bringing the detrimental activities of the powerful to the light, regardless of how you do it, whether it’s through the legacy media, publishing documents, or making a Facebook post. The powerful are not entitled to a private space where they can abuse humans or resources. They don’t get to commit crimes in secret just because they are rich or in government. Journalism is the only way the everyday person has any window into what the powerful are doing to them, doing to their planet, doing with their tax money, and doing in their name.

    So in every way it is probably even worse if you don’t consider Assange a journalist. This precedent puts every single person on earth in danger. That means you can be nabbed wherever you may be on the globe for helping a whistleblower, and I’m sorry to say to all you impassioned bloviators, you will not be consulted on how your feelings feel about whether they fit your dubious definition of what a journalist is, because journalism is an activity, not an elitist club of which you have been the self-proclaimed gatekeeper for so long.

    These narcissistic wankers are a severe danger to press freedom and they need to put their personal proclivities aside and start fighting a very dangerous legal precedent that is being set right before our eyes.

    *  *  *

    Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon orPaypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

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  • A History Of Revolution In U.S. Taxation

    As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.”

    While this quote was penned in 1789, Visual Capitalist’s Jenna Ross notes that his words still ring true today. U.S. taxation has changed over time, but it has always existed in some shape or form for over 250 years.

    U.S. Taxation: 1765 to Today

    In today’s infographic from New York Life Investments, we explore the history of U.S. taxation – from its colonial roots to its recent reform.

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    The modern American tax code has little resemblance to its early iterations.

    Over the last few centuries, Americans have battled against British taxation, faced sky-high tax rates to fund war efforts, and enjoyed tax cuts designed to boost economic growth.

    A Timeline of U.S. Taxation

    Today, total U.S. tax revenue exceeds $3.4 trillion. Below are some notable events that have shaped modern American taxation.

    Colonial Roots: 1765 to 1783

    1765 – Stamp Act
    In its first direct tax on the colonists, Britain places a tax on all paper – including ship’s papers, court documents, advertisements, and even playing cards.

    1767 – Townshend Revenue Act
    Importation duties are placed on British products such as glass, paint, and tea. The taxes are expected to raise £40,000 annually, (£6,500,000 in 2018 GBP). As hostilities continue to bubble up, colonists argue for “No taxation without representation”. Although taxes are imposed on the colonists, they aren’t able to elect representatives to British parliament.

    1770 – The Boston Massacre
    British troops occupy Boston to end the boycott on British goods. The March 5th Boston Massacre sees five colonists killed. By April, all Townshend duties are repealed except for the one on tea.

    1773 – The Tea Act (May 10)
    Britain grants the struggling British East India Company a monopoly on tea in America. While no new taxes are imposed, this angers colonists as it is seen as a thinly veiled plan to gain colonial support for the Townshend tax while threatening local business.

    1773 – The Boston Tea Party (December 16)
    Three ships arrive in Boston carrying British East India Company tea. Colonists refuse to allow the unloading of the tea, throwing all 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbour.

    1775-1783 – The American Revolutionary War
    Growing tensions between Britain and the colonists erupt in a full-scale war. After eight long years, Britain officially recognizes the independence of the United States.

    A Free Nation: 1787 to 1943

    1787 – The U.S. Constitution
    Congress gains the “power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.” The government primarily earns revenue from excise taxes and tariffs, including an “importation tax” on slaves.

    1791-1794 – Whiskey Rebellion
    Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Secretary of Treasury, leads the implementation of a whiskey excise tax. In 1794, whiskey rebels destroy a tax inspector’s home. President Washington sends in troops and quells the rebellion.

    1862 – The Nation’s First Income Tax
    To help pay for the Civil War, President Lincoln legislates the nation’s first income tax.

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    Over the coming years, income tax is repealed and reinstated twice.

    1913 – 16th Amendment
    As World War I looms the 16th amendment is ratified, allowing for taxation without allocation according to state populations. An income tax is permanently introduced for both individuals and corporations, and the first Form 1040 is created.

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    At this time, less than 1% of the population is paying income tax.

    1918 – The Revenue Act
    Tax rates skyrocket to pay for World War I efforts. The top tax rate is 77%.

    1935 – Social Security Act
    In light of the Great Depression, the Social Security Act introduces:

    • An old-age pension program

    • Unemployment insurance

    • Funding for health and welfare programs

    To fund the programs, a 2% tax is shared equally by an employee and their employer.

    1942 – The Revenue Act
    Described by President Roosevelt as “the greatest tax bill in American history”, the Act increases taxes and the numbers of citizens subject to income tax. Total personal and corporate income tax revenue more than doubles:

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    1943 – Current Tax Payment Act

    It becomes mandatory for employers to withhold taxes from employees’ wages and remit them four times per year.

    Modern Times: 1961 to 2018

    1961 – Beginning of The Computer Age
    The National Computer Center at Martinsburg, West Virginia is formally dedicated to assisting the IRS in its shift to computer data processing.

    1986 – Tax Reform Act
    The Tax Reform Act:

    • Lowers the top individual tax rate from 50% to 28%

    • Increases taxes on capital gains from 20% to 28%

    • Reduces corporate tax breaks

    The revisions are designed to make the tax code simpler and fairer.

    1992 – Electronic Filing
    Taxpayers who owe money are given the option to file electronically.

    2001 – Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act
    President George W. Bush implements large tax cuts:

    • Creates a new lowest individual tax rate of 10%
    • Reduces the top individual tax rate from 39.6% to 35%
    • Doubles child tax credit from $500 to $1,000* (*From $700 to $1,400 in 2019 dollars)

    2017 – Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
    President Trump signs off on reductions in tax rates, while some deductions are made more restrictive.

    For example, State and Local Taxes (SALT) deductions are capped at $10,000. Residents in high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey, California and Connecticut could see substantially higher tax bills.

    The Future

    U.S. taxation policy remains a contentious issue and shifts depending on who is in the White House.

    Investors need to stay informed on current legislation, so they can engage in proactive financial planning and minimize their tax obligations.

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Apr 15

Today’s News 15th April 2019

  • Turkey And Russia Create A $1 Billion Join Investment Fund

    Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily has confirmed Russia and Turkey have agreed to create a “Russia-Turkey Investment Fund” following President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s visit to Moscow early last week, where he met with President Putin to more broadly discuss technological cooperation, closer military ties and the future of action and local ceasefires in Syria. 

    The initiative was announced by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, and Turkey Wealth Fund (TWF) last week connected to the summit.

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    Via Russia Business Today

    “At the initial stage the investments in the funds’ projects will amount to 200 million euros. The total size of the Russia-Turkey Investment Fund is 900 million euros,” the RDIF said in a statement. 

    The agreement of the new cooperative venture was signed in the presence of Erdoğan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and will be central to assisting joint Russian-Turkish projects in the areas of technology, healthcare, and urban infrastructure. 

    “This is an important milestone for TWF and we believe initiating investments through RTIF in focused sectors will cement the relationship of both sovereign investment funds and further strengthen the relationship between Turkey and Russia,” the managing director of the Turkey Wealth Fund, Zafer Sönmez, said in a media release.

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    President Putin and Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) CEO Kirill Dmitriev, via the Russian Presidency

    The TWF is described as follows: 

    Turkey’s wealth fund, established in 2016, holds the total or part of shares of several Turkish companies such as flag carrier Turkish Airlines, telecommunications giant Türk Telekom, state-owned lenders Ziraat and Halk, Turkish Petroleum and Borsa Istanbul.

    Its portfolio also includes the petroleum pipeline company BOTAŞ, the postal services company PTT, and the national lottery Milli Piyango.

    According to the fund’s website, its mission is to develop and increase the value of the country’s strategic assets and consequently provide resource for our country’s primary investments.

    More broadly, the newly established Russia-Turkey Investment Fund further suggests that Turkey is fast moving into Moscow’s orbit. 

    For starters, Putin and Erdogan have already met multiple times this year, which doesn’t bode well for the White House’s ultimatum weeks ago saying that “Turkey must choose.” 

    It appears Turkey’s “choice” is becoming evident. Washington and Ankara have been in a diplomatic showdown and crisis surrounding blocked orders of Lockheed’s F-35 stealth fighter due to Turkey’s plan to receive Russian S-400 anti-air defense systems this summer. 

    Erdogan again affirmed last week amid US ultimatums, “those who ask or suggest we backtrack don’t know us,” and told reporters just after meeting with Putin, “If we sign a deal on an issue, that’s a done deal. This is our sovereign right, no one can ask us to back down.’’

  • Rogue State? – Britain Railing Against International Norms & Laws

    Via TruePublica.org.uk,

    Leaving aside Britain’s past, most particularly that of empire, the country is not just continually moving towards authoritarianism it is beginning to demonstrate all the early signs of a rogue state. These are strong words but the actual definition of a rogue state is –  “a nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.” Examples such as the illegal invasion of Iraq, Syria and latterly Libya are very clear. Irrespective of the technicalities, they all broke the rules of International laws or norms. But other examples demonstrate how lawless Britain as a state really is.

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    Chagos

    Here, an entire population were forcibly removed from their island homeland at British gunpoint to make way for a US Air Force nuclear base, the people were dumped destitute over a thousand miles away, their domestic animals gassed by the British army, their homes fired and then demolished. To achieve this, Britain maliciously threatened the Mauritian government into ceding the Chagos Islands as a condition of its Independence.

    Recently, the International Court of Justice found that the British occupation of the Chagos Islands was unlawful by a majority of 13 to 1. Britain rejected this ruling.

    Ex British ambassador Craig Murray wrote – “this represents a serious escalation in the UK’s rejection of multilateralism and international law and a move towards joining the US model of exceptionalism, standing outside the rule of international law. As such, it is arguably the most significant foreign policy development for generations. In the Iraq war, while Britain launched war without UN Security Council authority, it did so on a tenuous argument that it had Security Council authority from earlier resolutions. The UK was therefore not outright rejecting the international system. On Chagos it is now simply denying the authority of the International Court of Justice; this is utterly unprecedented.”

    Weapons and war crimes

    Britain’s arms and munitions sales are now regularly in the news. Even The Lords international relations committee said that British weapons were “highly likely to be the cause of significant civilian casualties” in various countries where illegal wars, acts of genocide and war crimes are being committed. A quick online search lists numerous examples.

    Israel

    Then there is Britain’s relationship with Israel, which is taking a battering due to internal politics and finger-pointing over claims of racism. Fundamentally though, the issue is about war crimes being committed against the Palestinian people. British arms sales to Israel is at best questionable, especially the news that British made sniper rifles were used to kill and injure thousands of Palestinians recently. But Britain’s support in this genocidal war again goes against all international norms where the conflict is described by Amnesty International as an “abhorrent violation of international laws.” It added that – “This is another horrific example of the Israeli military using excessive force and live ammunition in a totally deplorable way. This is a violation of international standards, in some instances committing what appear to be wilful killings constituting war crimes.”

    In addition, UK policy is allowing trade with ‘Israeli’ goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories. The British government has stated that it does not even keep a record of imports into the UK from these illegal Israeli settlements. Acquiescing in this illegal trade by an occupying power is a violation of international law. The December 2016 UN Security Council Resolution, to which the UK agreed:

    ‘reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law”

    Libya

    Mark Curtis, a British foreign policy expert and historian writes about Britain’s illegal attack of a soverign state – Libya: “British bombing in Libya, which began in March 2011, was a violation of UN Resolution 1973, which authorised member states to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya and to use ‘all necessary measures’ to prevent attacks on civilians but did not authorise the use of ground troops or regime change promoted by the Cameron government. That these policies were illegal is confirmed by Cameron himself, who told Parliament on 21 March 2011 that the UN resolution ‘explicitly does not provide legal authority for action to bring about Gaddafi’s removal from power by military means.” Today, Libya is a failed state and overrun by militant factions.

    Extrajudicial assassinations and even a kill list

    Reprieve’s report entitled Britain’s Kill List accused the Conservative government of extreme deception of parliament. Officially, Britain has never had a so-called ‘kill list’ but David Cameron had to admit to an extrajudicial assassinations programme in the Middle East, which we at TruePublica reported. All such killings break the most fundamental of international laws and norms as detailed HERE.

    The Reprieve introductory paragraph reads -“On September 7th, 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron came to Parliament and announced a “new departure” for Britain, a policy of killing individuals the Security Services and the military do not like, people placed on a list of individuals who the UK (acting along with the US and others) have identified and systematically plan to kill. The mere admission that there is a Kill List certainly should, indeed, have been a “departure” for a country that prides itself on decency. Unfortunately, it was not a “new departure” at all, as we had been doing it secretly for more than a decade.”

    Statelessness

    Britain has once again broken international norms. The goals of UNHCR’s stateless campaign, a Global Action Plan to End Statelessness 2014 – 2024 introduced a guiding framework comprised of 10 Actions to be undertaken by states. In the case of high-profile ‘ISIS Bride’ runaway from Bethnal Green to Baghuz, Shamima Begum, the UK disregarded Actions 4 and 9:

    Action 4: Prevent denial, loss or deprivation of nationality on discriminatory grounds.

    Action 9: Accede to the UN Statelessness Conventions.

    But Britain’s has its own laws. Section 40(2) of the 1981 British Nationality Act states the Home Secretary won’t make any individual rendered stateless as a result. Under this, the UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s decision to revoke Begum’s citizenship breaks UK law and international norms.

    Political prisoner

    Then, there is the persecution of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, which is now seven years old. Ecuador has protected Assange for the past half decade from being turned over to Washington until his arrest by British police yesterday. By definition, Assange is the only political prisoner in western Europe.  A United Nations legal panel ruled that Assange should be allowed to walk free and be compensated for his “deprivation of liberty” and that his detention was illegal.

    Assange has been nominated for a Nobel peace prize every year since 2010. His really big crime was releasing film of an American helicopter gunship killing civilians and journalists in Iraq. Britain is more than just complicit of it attack of fundamental and important press freedoms in arresting him.

    Assange’s lawyer criticised the British government for being poised to arrest and extradite Assange to the United States. “That a government would cooperate with another state to extradite a publisher for publishing truthful information outside its territory sets a dangerous precedent here in the UK and elsewhere,” she said. “No one can deny that risk. That is why he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.”

    Surveillance

    The UK government’s record on bulk data handling for intelligence purposes saw the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling that state surveillance practices such as those practised in Britain violated human rights law. United National Special Rapporteur on Privacy Joe Cannataci said Britain was setting a bad example to the world and that Britain’s surveillance techniques on its own citizens was – “worse than Orwell’s 1984.” The highest courts in Britain have ruled against the government on mass surveillance.

    In 2014, British spies were (illegally) granted the authority to secretly eavesdrop on legally privileged attorney-client communications, according to documents. The documents were made public as a result of a legal case brought against the British government by Libyan families who allege that they were subjected to extraordinary rendition and torture, where Britain was proven to be in violation of international laws, in a joint British-American operation that took place in 2004.

    A lawyer, in this case, said – “It could mean, amazingly, that the government uses the information they have got from snooping on you, against you, in a case you have brought. This clearly violates an age-old principle of English law set down in the 16th century – that the correspondence between a person and their lawyer is confidential.”

    In addition, just one of the many operations carried out by the British state was called Optic Nerve. It illegally went about capturing images from webcams of millions of completely innocent citizens accused of nothing. Between 3% and 11% of the images captured by the webcams were sexually explicit in nature and deemed “undesirable nudity.” The public has not been reassured that these files still exist or not that were taken to build an illegal facial recognition system the government had not declared.

    Surveillance operations such as – Muscular, Socialist, Gemalto, Three Smurfs, XKeyScore, Upstream and Tempora are all examples of extreme surveillance systems being used in Britain that would be completely unknown if it had not been for Edward Snowden – another political prisoner. All such operations would be deemed illegal in court and of breaking international laws or norms in normal democratic countries.

    Health and Safety

    In 2015, the Government pushed through a law that exempted a large number of self-employed people from the protection of the Health and Safety at Work Act. The Government managed to get away with reducing the level of protection because the self-employed are not covered by the European “Framework Directive”, which is the regulation that sets minimum standards that countries have to comply with.

    At the time the TUC pointed out to the Government that there were other international laws that the UK had signed up to in many other non European countries that did cover the self-employed including those of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Council of Europe.

    Disability

    The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities examined the British government’s progress in fulfilling its commitments to the UN convention on disabled people’s rights, to which the UK has been a signatory since 2007.

    Its report concludes that the UK has not done enough to ensure the convention, which enshrines the rights of disabled people to live independently, to work and to enjoy social protection without discrimination – is reflected in UK law and policy.

    Although it praises some initiatives by the Scottish and Welsh governments to promote inclusion, it is scathing of the UK government’s inconsistent and patchy approach to protecting disability rights and its failure to audit the impact of its austerity policies on disabled people.

    Trust

    Breaking international laws and norms has a long-term effect, mainly that of detriment to national security, long-term interests and trust. There is an assumption, of course, that international law cannot be enforced but in today’s world, international sanctions can be as damaging as using force. Those sanctions could be economic or diplomatic in nature. And if Britain wants to be an international player, it very strongly needs to appreciate and adhere to international laws and norms.

  • China Could Turn Taiwan Into The Next Lebanon: State Media Warns

    Via AlMasdarNews.com

    China has issued another firm warning to Taiwan amid the ongoing turmoil between the two east Asian nations.

    According to the Chinese publication The Global Times, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China has many options on the table, including the possibility of turning Taiwan into another Lebanon.

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    Chinese Air Force, via AMN

    “The PLA has many choices, including crossing the ‘middle line,’ flying over the Taiwan island and even turn Taiwan into a Lebanon-like situation,” the newspaper said. “These choices don’t necessarily lead to war. They are enough to force Taiwan authorities to readjust their radical policies.”

    The “Lebanon-like situation” is a reference to the fourteen-year-long (1975-1989) civil war in which the small Levantine country became a battleground for foreign entities like Israel, Syria, and the Palestine Liberation Organization(PLO).

    Israel ultimately used Lebanon to fight their proxy war against the Palestine Liberation Organization, while also curbing Syria’s influence from the southern part of the country.

    “Washington is choosing the wrong place, time and opponent to flex its muscle in Taiwan Straits,” warned Global Times. If the U.S. military stations forces in Taiwan, China will attack, the article said. If the U.S. sells advanced fighters like the F-16V to Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army will respond.

    Meanwhile, the National Interest reported that this warning came in response to U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton complaints about Chinese J-11 fighter jets crossing the middle line of the Taiwan Strait.

    “It marked the first time in almost twenty years that Chinese aircraft have done this, with Taiwanese fighters scrambling to intercept them,” the National Interest added.

  • Frankenstein Designer Kids: What You Don't Know About Gender-Transitioning Will Blow Your Mind

    Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Puberty-blocking drugs, mastectomies, vaginal surgery and fake penises – all with zero chance of reversal – these are just some of the radical experimental methods being used on children. The madness must stop.

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    Imagine that you are the parent of a five-year-old boy who innocently informs you one day that he is a girl. Of course, the natural reaction would be to laugh, not phone up the nearest gender transitioning clinic. You have no idea how your little boy came to believe such a thing; possibly it was through something he heard at the daycare center, or maybe a program he saw on television. In any case, he insists that he ‘identifies’ as a female.

    Eventually, possibly at the encouragement of your local school, you pay a visit to a physician. You hope this medical professional will be able to provide you and your child with some sound counseling to clear up his confusion. Prepare yourself to be disappointed. Your doctor will be forced, according to state and medical dictate, to follow the professional guidelines known as ‘affirmative care.’ It sounds nice and harmless, doesn’t it? In fact, the program could be best described as nothing short of diabolical.

    The Medical Harms of Hormonal and Surgical Interventions for Gender Dysphoric Children

    Following the ‘affirmative care’ approach, the doctor is required to follow the child’s lead, not vice-versa, as many people believe the doctor-patient relationship in this particular case would best work. In other words, if the child tells the doctor that he believes he is a girl, the doctor must comply with that ‘reality’ no matter what biology tells him or her to be the case. But this is just the beginning of the madness.

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    As the child’s parent, you will be encouraged to start referring to your son as your ‘daughter,’ and even permit him to choose a feminine name, as well as matching clothes. Teachers will be instructed to let your son use the girl’s bathroom while at school. The question of the social stigma attached to such a lifestyle change, complete with bullying, is rarely brought into the equation. Therapists will seldom discuss with the parents the social implications of such a mental and physical change; indeed, many will insist the changes are ‘reversible’ should the child one day have a change of heart. If only things were that easy.

    Let’s pause for a moment and ask what should be the most obvious question, especially among medical professionals: ‘Is it not terribly naive to support the fleeting belief of a child, who still believes in Santa Claus, that he/she is the opposite sex? Isn’t there a very high possibility that the child is just confused and the thought will pass? Moreover, why did we never hear about such episodes just 10 years ago, yet today we are led to believe it is some sort of epidemic?’ Instead of working with the child and his newfound identity from such an obvious approach, in the majority of cases the child will be placed on the fast-track to gender transitioning. This is where the horror story begins.

    One parent, ‘Elaine,’ a member of the advocacy group Kelsey Coalition whose daughter underwent “life-altering medical interventions,” came to understand that the transition is immensely harmful to the future health and well-being of her child.

    “Once the teenage years begin, affirmative care means giving young people cross-sex hormones,” Elaine said during a panel discussion organized by the Heritage Foundation.

    “Girls as young as twelve are prescribed testosterone for lifetime usage, while boys are given estrogen. These are serious hormonal treatments that impact brain development, cardiovascular health and may increase the risk of cancer.”

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    This leads us to the operating table, where adolescents, lacking the mental maturity necessary to make such a huge life-altering choice, are exposed to the knife of irreversible surgical manipulation. Double mastectomies on girls, for example, as well as the fashioning of false penises derived from flesh borrowed from other parts of the body, are just some of the unprecedented procedures now available.

    Elaine mentioned the high-profile story of one Jazz Jennings, who was diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’ and raised as a girl since the age of five. He was treated with hormones at the age of eleven, and at the age of 17, Jazz underwent surgery to remove his penis and create a simulated vagina out of his stomach lining.

    “After surgery, Jazz’s wounds began separating and a blood blister began to form. An emergency surgery was performed. According to Jazz’s doctor, ‘As I was getting her on the bed, I heard something go ‘pop.’ When I looked, the whole thing has split open.’”

    Elaine called the case of Jazz a “medical experiment on a child” that “has been playing out on television for the past 12 years.” It should be noted that a similar drama-packed scenario captivated the nation with the high-profile, made-for-television sexual transition of Caitlyn Jenner, born Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic gold medalist, who was quite possibly the greatest American athlete of all time.

    The obvious question is ‘how many impressionable children, many experiencing their own bodily changes in the form of puberty, were persuaded to decide in favor of gender transitioning (something that a child could have only heard about from some external media or source, unless the parents engage in such odd discussion topics at the dinner table) after watching these celebrity persona?’ By now, few people would doubt the powerful influence that TV celebrities have over people, and especially adolescents. In fact, that is the entire notion behind the idea of a ‘positive role model.’ I am not sure Caitlin Jenner would qualify for such a part.

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    According to Michael Laidlaw, M.D., these children, who are experiencing what the medical community has dubbed ‘gender dysphoria,’ will move beyond their condition either naturally or with the assistance of a therapist. Meanwhile, according to Laidlaw, citing studies, many of the girls and boys who display symptoms have neuro-psychiatric conditions and autism.

    “Social media and YouTube, things like that, binge-watching YouTube videos of transitioners seem to be playing a role…as well as contagion” in popularizing the idea among the masses.

    The movement is predicated upon the modern liberal idea of ‘gender identity,’ which has been defined as a “person’s core internal sense of their own gender,” regardless as to what the biological facts of their sex prove.

    Dr. Laidlaw presented perhaps the best case against parents and their children rushing to the conclusion that their children need puberty blockers, for example, or extreme doses of hormones, when he discussed what happens when a person is diagnosed with cancer.

    “If a child or somebody you knew had cancer, would you want pathology results, would you want imaging to prove [the condition] before you give harmful chemotherapeutics,” he asked. Yet we are allowing children and adolescents to undergo irreversible chemical and surgical procedures without being able to see any evidence that shows the presence of ‘the opposite sex’ in the patient.

    In other words, the medical community is monkey-wrenching with not only Mother Nature, but with the lives of children, with radical and irreversible experiments that have not been proven to promote the happiness and wellbeing of those on the receiving (or subtracting) end.

    “We are giving very harmful therapies on the basis of no objective diagnosis,” Dr. Laidlaw said.

    Laidlaw was forced to repeat what has been widely known for millennia.

    “There are only two sexes,” he said.

    “Sex is identified at birth, nobody assigns it. Doctors don’t arbitrarily assign this person to be a boy and this person to be a girl. We all know how to identify it.

    “I would say ‘ask your grandmother who doesn’t read the scientific journals, and they will tell you exactly how to identify boys from girls.’”

  • Why The Death Of 'King Dollar' Would Benefit American Workers

    Though the Saudis have denied it, reports last month that the Kingdom was privately threatening to ditch the dollar as the currency of choice for its oil trade have helped reignite speculation that the greenback could soon lose its reserve currency status, as a few financial luminaries have warned.

    Though many mainstream financial analysts categorically dismiss the idea that the dollar’s dominance is in any way under threat, reports about the threats to the petrodollar have prompted many to question how exactly, does the average American benefit from the dollar’s reserve currency status, and would the greenback’s fall from grace have a negative, or positive, impact on the livelihood of the averagee American worker?

    Well, economist Steve Keen has a few theories about what might happen if the dollar stops being the vessel via which a large plurality of global trade is conducted. And he shared his views with Erik Townsend during this week’s episode of MacroVoices.

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    When most people think about the risks associated with the dollar losing its reserve status, runaway inflation probably ranks high on the list. But Keen believes these risks are probably overblown,for several reasons. First, importers often hedge out foreign exchange risk between two and five years out. And even once the dollar’s weakness starts to bite, company’s will often simply absorb some of the margin pressure to maintain market share. While prices might move marginally higher, Keen doubts the outcome would destabilize large swaths of the US economy, as the reserve alarmists have warned.

    The real impact would be felt by Americans wanting to travel overseas, who would see their purchasing power collapse as the costs of traveling abroad skyrocket.

    Erik: Now, most of the products that you see at Walmart in the United States are imported from China. It seems to me that, if this were to occur and there was a marked devaluation of the US dollar versus other currencies, that would result in a massive inflation shock in the real economy in the US because we don’t have the manufacturing capacity to make widgets in the United States. That’s all gone offshore, to the detriment, perhaps, of the American worker.

    But we don’t have that capacity. So if, all of a sudden, we have to pay much higher prices in dollars in order to generate the same price in yuan or yen or whatever for the imported goods, doesn’t that result in a really big inflation shock inside the US?

    Steve: It can. Inflation shocks, you have to look at them in a proper empirical context.

    And most economists simply assume any currency devaluation will lead to an equivalent inflation spike in the country that is devaluing.

    What actually happens quite frequently is firms will try to – first of all, you have long-term contracts determining prices that are often set out two to five years in advance, particularly for industrial goods.

    But mainly we have importers putting a markup on their imports for their profit level. They are willing to cut their markup to hang onto market share to some extent. So you don’t see a 100% pass-through of that sort of thing. You might see 30% pass-through. So if you had a 10-15-20% devaluation in the economy in the American dollar, then you could see, yes, a 5 or 7 maybe – I wouldn’t say going beyond 10% – spike in the inflation rate.

    But, yes, you could see that spike occurring. And it would also – obviously cramp the style of any Americans wanting to go on overseas holidays. So there would definitely be a decrease in the American living standards. And it would bring home to people, too, the extent to which you have been deindustrialized and relied upon this exorbitant privilege to get over it. If the exorbitant privilege goes, then you wear the full consequences of being deindustrialized in the last 25 years.

    Similarly, worries that a weaker dollar would cause interest rates in the US to skyrocket are also overblown, Keen believes. Just look at Japan: Interest rates have been mired near zero for 15 years now, regardless of what’s been happening with the yen. Because it’s not the external market that sets interest rates in the US – that’s now the Federal Reserve’s job.

    Steve: So I can see it as giving America quite a severe jolt. But it won’t be something which causes interest rates to go sky-high. They will still be held in a band by the Federal Reserve. You might see rises in corporate rates and so on, but not large rises in the rates on American government debt.

    Circling back to the inspiration for this topic, Townsend asked Keen if he really believes the Saudis seriously considering ditching the dollar, or if these leaks are merely idle threats. Keen believes it’s the latter, given how dependent the Saudis are on American support in the form of both supplying arms and purchasing oil. The real risk for the dollar lies in Europe and China. Europe’s search for an alternative to SWIFT, which was inspired by Trump’s decision to ditch the Iran deal, was a major catalyst for this.

    As Trump’s belligerence toward America’s enemies and allies has made the dollar’s reserve status “intolerable” for many, Keen believes there’s a “one in three” chance that the dollar loses its reserve status within ten years.

    Erik: Steve, let’s come to the current risks that the US dollar faces in terms of maintaining its reserve currency status and talk about how real they are. Is this talk from Saudi Arabia just saber-rattling? Or are they really serious about ditching the dollar? Likewise, we had another comment last week from, I believe it was a former undersecretary of the UN, calling for a global currency to replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Are these things really at risk of actually happening?

    Or is this just talk?

    Steve: I think it’s at risk of happening. I don’t think the Saudis are going to go through with it though, because they’re incredibly intimately tied up with American military power and it would just be too dangerous for them to do that. But I know China and Russia and, to some extent, Europe are talking about it because they are sick of the extent to which this is being used as a bullying tool by America. Particularly – just one recent example – the decision not to let Iran use the SWIFT system for international payments.

    That could never have happened if the American dollar wasn’t the reserve currency. And you get American imposing its political will on the rest of the world using the fact that it’s the reserve currency. And of course that’s become intolerable under Trump. So I think the odds are, let’s say, one in three of a serious breakdown in that in the next 10 years.

    That’s not to say that this couldn’t be stopped, but the more the US tries to impose its will on the rest of the world, the more likely other world powers will rebel.

    But it could also be prevented. It’s one of these things – it doesn’t have the weight of financial numbers behind it like I could see with the credit crunch back in 2008 to say a crisis is inevitable.

    But, certainly, there will be strains on the system and the American dominance can’t be guaranteed. And the more America now tries to assert that dominance, the more likely it is to encourage one of those alternatives to be developed.

    As history has proven time and time again, no reserve currency reigns forever…

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    …So, With America’s allies and enemies looking for ways to mitigate their reliance on the dollar, what, ultimately, would be the impact if the world decides to ditch the greenback?

    While the decline in demand would probably cause the dollar to weaken, that could benefit the American working class. Given that President Trump’s confrontation approach to diplomacy has caused this process to accelerate, as Europe, Russia and China have repeatedly, this is one way in which what Keen describes as Trump’s leveraging America’s reserve-currency status as a “thug’s tool” (by threatening sanctions against its enemies), could circuitously benefit the working class Americans who make up a large portion of his base.

    Obviously, it’s going to mean a reduction in demand for American dollars on foreign exchange markets, which must mean a fall in the price over time. And it will be complicated by the usual spot and hedge markets and so on. But, yes, seeing a fall in the value of the dollar, unless America’s financial sector could no longer use the fact that it was American to have the power it has over financial institutions elsewhere in the world, so that the scale of the financial sector would be pulled back, your manufacturing sector would be more competitive. But, as you know, you don’t have the industrial pattern you used to have.

    You’ve still got some outstanding corporations and outstanding technological capability. But you don’t have that machine tool background. The skilled workers that used to exist there aren’t there anymore. So there would be a serious shock to America with more expensive goods to be imported from overseas and a slow shift towards having a local manufacturing capability, making up for the damage of the last 25 years.

    I can see a lot of social conflict out of that as well, but a positive for the American working class, who really have been done over in the last quarter century. And that’s partly the reason why Trump has come about. And, ironically, Trump is part of the reason why this might come to an end, given how much he’s used his bombast and the American reserve currency status as a thug’s tool in foreign relations rather than an intelligent person’s tool.

    In summary, although every reserve currency in history has lost its status as its economic dominance has faded, the US might be the first to lose that status because of an organized rebellion that it helped provoke via its willingness to use sanctions and other tools as a weapon for punishing its adversaries and rewarding its friends.

    Listen to the full interview below:

  • Caitlin Johnstone Warns Trump Supporters Are Hurting Assange With Their 4-D Chess Talk

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    At a time when everyone should be out in the streets shaking the earth and protesting the Trump administration’s prosecution of Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes, those who continue to support this president have one message and one message only when it comes to the WikiLeaks founder: Don’t do anything. Relax, wait and see, trust Trump, and don’t do anything. Trump is about to save Assange, and save us all. Do nothing.

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    Who do you guys think this strategy benefits, exactly?

    These are all people who say they support Assange and WikiLeaks, who say they support free speech and oppose the deep state, and yet what they are doing today hurts Assange and helps the unelected power establishment known as the deep state just as much as the hysterical Russiavape dupes who are overtly smearing Assange today.

    To be clear, not everyone who voted for Trump is doing this; many are aggressively opposing this administration’s prosecution of Assange and vocally withdrawing all support for him. But the ones who are engaged in the behavior I’m describing are all helping to kill the loud and aggressive opposition to Assange’s imprisonment which is so desperately needed right now, and they’re helping everyone they claim to oppose. The pussyhat-wearing Assange haters and the MAGA hat-wearing Assange lovers are on the same side on this issue, mindlessly working toward the exact same agenda: the permanent imprisonment of a truth-telling journalist.

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    Every time President Trump advances a longstanding evil agenda of America’s permanent government, I see my social media notifications swarmed with Trump supporters telling me that it is actually a good thing, because it’s secretly a brilliant strategic chess move that the 45th president is taking against the deep state.

    When I say that this happens every time, I’m not being hyperbolic to make a point. I mean it happens every single time, without a single, solitary exception, always. It happens with such clockwork reliability that I preemptively addressed it in the article I wrote when Julian Assange was arrested, saying, “I am going to have a zero tolerance policy for QAnon cultists who try to tell me that this is actually 5-D chess by Trump to overthrow the Deep State. Stay out of my comments, stay out of my social media notifications, stay the hell away from me, and please rethink your worldview.”

    I said this because I knew it was coming, and indeed it did. All sorts of theories have been concocted since Assange’s arrest which people cite as proof that Trump is actually protecting Assange with his administration’s indictment and extradition request, instead of working to imprison a journalist for exposing US war crimes, which is actually what’s happening.

    They tell me that Trump is bringing Assange to America for trial because he can only pardon him after he’s been convicted. This is false. A US president can pardon anyone at any time of any crime against the United States, without their having been convicted and without their even having been charged. After leaving office Richard Nixon was issued a full presidential pardon by Gerald Ford for “all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974.” Nixon had never been charged with anything. If Trump were going to pardon Assange he could have done it at any time since taking office, instead of issuing a warrant for his arrest in December 2017 and executing it on Thursday after a series of international legal manipulations. A pardon is not in the plans.

    Another common belief I keep encountering is that Trump is bringing Assange to America to get him to testify about his source for the 2016 Democratic Party emails in exchange for a pardon, thereby revealing the truth about Russiagate’s origins and bringing down Clinton and Obama. This is false. Everyone who knows anything about Assange (including the Trump administration) knows that he will never, ever reveal a source under any circumstances whatsoever. It would be a cardinal journalistic sin, a violation of every promise WikiLeaks has ever made, and a betrayal of his entire life’s work. More importantly, imprisoning a journalist and threatening him with a heavy sentence to coerce him into giving up information against his will is evil. If you believe your president is doing that, the last thing you should be doing is cheering for him.

    But that isn’t what Trump is doing. Trump is pursuing the imprisonment of a journalist for exposing US war crimes, so that he can scare off future leak publishers and set a legal precedent for their prosecution.

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    I’ve been engaging people in debates on this subject online so I can understand their arguments well enough to address them, and what I’ve learned is that they don’t really have any. Those who believe Trump is actually secretly helping Assange and helping the American people by prosecuting a journalist have no basis for their belief other than pure faith that Trump is good, therefore anything he does must be good. It’s the exact mirror image of Russiagate hysterics, and it benefits the exact same corrupt establishment.

    The mental contortions that people are doing to avoid the cognitive dissonance between their support for Assange and their support for Trump is truly something to behold. For the last 24 hours QAnon adherents have been telling me that Assange holding a Gore Vidal book when arrested is an undeniable signal that he’s in coordination with the Trump campaign to bring down the Deep State, and that I’m crazy for being unable to see that. Turns out it was actually a book that Assange wanted to read while he was waiting to be processed at the courthouse, which makes sense since Vidal’s “History of the National Security State” covers a subject that Assange has devoted his entire life to.

    QAnon is such a brilliant propaganda construct. With some cryptic posts on an anonymous message board, whoever is behind that psyop has succeeded in manipulating a vocal and impassioned sector of Trump’s base into applauding every single step he’s taken in advancing the dystopian agendas of his predecessors as a brilliant 4-D chess move against the establishment. I’ve been told that his bombing of Syria actually took out an Iranian nuclear base, that he’s helping to free the Venezuelan people without harming anyone, that he’s fighting the deep state in Iran, that his dangerous escalations against Russia are just a show because he and Putin are working together (a comical overlap with the Russiagate crowd), and last year they were telling me that Assange isn’t in the embassy at all because Trump had already covertly rescued and pardoned him. There are people who honestly believe that there is a revolution against the establishment underway which is being led by a plucky alliance between the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Israel, and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. It’s that bad.

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    QAnon followers make up a minority of Trump’s base, but the insanity of the QAnon psyop bleeds into the greater MAGA crowd and helps normalize the kind of thinking which leads people to conclude that a blatant prosecution of a journalist for telling the truth about the US political construct is actually a strategic maneuver against the establishment. The enthusiastic promotion of this narrative has an undeniable and pernicious chilling effect on opposition to Assange’s wrongful imprisonment, which should be an issue upon which the right and the true left agree.

    I’ve never pushed away Trump supporters because I believe isolating into ideological echo chambers makes the left impotent and stupid, and many of them have followed me since I started this gig because they agree with some of what I’ve got to say. I don’t know how many MAGA people I still have in my readership after all the stuff I’ve been writing about their president, but those of you who are still out there, please, for the love of God help get this idea out there. This is a time where everyone who supports WikiLeaks should be flooring the gas pedal, and all the “Don’t do anything, trust the plan, wait and see” rhetoric is keeping one foot on the brakes.

    Assange should have been pardoned already, long ago, if not by Obama then by Trump. There is no excuse whatsoever for this not to have happened already, let alone for Assange to be behind bars at the behest of this administration. Stop saying “wait and see”. We’ve already seen. The time to protest is now. Get your foot off the brakes, and aggressively demand that your president cease doing what he is doing. Make this an election issue. Trump can’t afford to lose his base, but if you keep saying “wait and see” the narrative manipulators will keep moving back the line you’d sworn you’ll never let him cross until before you know it you’ve got another four years of another Bushbama while Assange remains locked in a cage.

    Don’t let them do this to you. Use your power now.

    *  *  *

    Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

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  • The Truth About Brexit In 135 Words

    Confused about Brexit? Here is One River’s Eric Peters summarizing everything you need to know in exactly 135 words:

    * * *

    “They’re all liars mate,” said my London cabbie. “May was a Remainer. How were we going to get a good deal when our negotiators don’t want to leave?” he asked.

    I shrugged. “They’ll stall until they can say it’s not what people want no more — happened in every country that ever wanted a referendum or held one,” he said.

    “The EU paid to move a Land Rover factory from the Midlands to Slovakia where they earn 5 pound for every 25 we make – so our boys are out of work and the company makes more profit. How’s that right?,” he said.

    “For every two pound we put into the EU, we get one back.”

    So I asked if Brtiain held another referendum, which way it’d go? “We’re split in two mate, we’re absolutely shattered.”  

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  • Chinese Tycoon’s Son Buys $3.8 Million Bugatti In Vancouver With Dad’s Credit Card, Complains About Taxes

    Almost exactly two years ago, at the peak of the Vancouver housing bubble which was the result of an unprecedented money-laundering funds flow by Chinese oligarchs and tycoons into the Western Canadian real estate market, we brought you “The Rich Chinese Kids Of Vancouver“, which as the title suggests, profiled the spoiled offspring of some of China’s richest.

    You will know them by their Lamborghinis: hundreds of young Chinese immigrants, along with a handful of Canadian-born Chinese, have started supercar clubs whose members come together to drive, modify and photograph their flashy vehicles, providing alluring eye candy for their followers on social media.

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    Ms. Jiang at the Lamborghini dealership. Credit

    Because they are rich, they are confident they own the town: “occasionally, the need for speed hits a roadblock. In 2011, the police impounded a squadron of 13 Lamborghinis, Maseratis and other luxury cars, worth $2 million, for racing on a metropolitan Vancouver highway at 125 miles per hour. The drivers were members of a Chinese supercar club, and none were older than 21, according to news reports at the time.”

    Since those crazy days of 2016, the Chinese invasion of Vancouver has eased (certainly crushing the local real estate market as noted in ““Ghastly” Vancouver Home Sales Crash By 46%, Lowest Since 1985“), and following the imposition of some substantial, if hardly draconian, anti-money laundering measures by Canada as well as real estate purchasing curbs, the rich Chinese kids of Vancouver phenomenon – which just accidentally coincided with the second great cryptocurrency bubble – gradually faded into the background.

    But it certainly did not die and every now and then we get a stark reminder of just how much funds China’s “0.1%” transfers overseas (in fears that China’s own economic collapse is only a matter of time). A reminder such as this one from the South China Morning Post, which writes that the son of a Chinese tycoon is buying a C$5.1 million (US$3.8 million) custom Bugatti sports car in Vancouver, using his daddy’s Union Pay credit card, according to a picture of the invoice the young man posted on Instagram to complain about Canadian taxes.

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    Ding Chen, in a selfie posted to his Instagram account, and a March 12 photo of his new Bugatti Chiron, undergoing extensive customisation before delivery in Vancouver. Photos: Ding Chen

    In a move that could make even the Kardashians blush, Ding Chen published a copy of the bill bearing his father Chen Mailin’s name on his Instagram stories, with an exasperated message overlaid in Chinese: “These taxes … my heart feels tired”.

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    An image on Ding Chen’s Instagram stories on Thursday showed an invoice for a Bugatti Chiron, in his father Chen Mailin’s name, with taxes of more than C$900,000. The overlaid message reads: “These taxes … my heart feels tired”.

    The photo, which was posted around noon on Thursday and set to vanish 24 hours later, had been roughly edited to scrawl out most figures, except the taxes.

    But, as the SCMP calculates, the 5% federal goods and services tax of C$210,404.25 reveals a pre-tax price of C$4.2 million (US$3.1 million), the approximate list price of a Chiron. Additional provincial taxes of C$697,939 (US$522,100) bring the total purchase price to about C$5.1 million.

    The cherry on top: the bill includes a 1.7 per cent Union Pay fee, which, if imposed on the pre-tax price, would work out to C$71,400 alone – about the price of a BMW M3.

    Perhaps fearing retaliation from China’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign, just one hour after the SCMP article was published, Chen’s Instagram account was closed or locked down.

    To be sure, the image will spark some serious inquiries from the Chinese Communist Party which will want to inquire just how the junior tycoon managed to pay using his daddy’s “gas card”: the problem is that after an aggressive crackdown against money-laundering by Beijing in 2016 and 2017, China’s Union Pay credit cards have been the subject of increasing scrutiny as a conduit for money out of the mainland. China has an annual cash export limit of US$50,000, and Union Pay says it enforces an annual overseas cash withdrawal limit of 100,000 yuan (US$14,880).

    Yet while overseas purchases of more than 1,000 yuan (US$149) must be reported to Chinese regulators, there is no general limit on spending, and there is no suggestion that the purchase of the car is improper.

    The bill, from Vancouver Bugatti dealer Weissach Group according to a visible phone number, was issued to Chen Mailin, whose name was clearly displayed. The address of his home on Vancouver’s Drummond Drive was whited-out but still readable.

    The address is that of a palatial home purchased by Chen Mailin in 2015 for C$51.8 million (then US$40 million), in what was then believed to have been the biggest residential transaction ever conducted in Canada.

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    An aerial view of Chen Mailin’s Vancouver estate at 4787 Drummond Drive. Photo: SCMP Picture

    But who is Chen Mailin (i.e. “daddy”)?

    As often happens in China, his rags to riches story is yet another shocker: the 49-year-old Jiangsu province businessman is a former duck farmer who founded what is now a skyscraper-building property and investment conglomerate, Nanjing Dingye Investment Group, of which he is chairman. He is a former member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, China’s legislative advisory body. And, citing a corporate disclosure, the SCMP notes that Chen Mailin is also a permanent Canadian resident (just in case Beijing decided to issue a fatwa on the nouveau-riche billionaire).

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    Chinese businessman Chen Mailin, and photos of his 17,000 sq ft mansion in Vancouver’s exclusive Point Grey neighbourhood. Photo montage SCMP

    Ding Chen – who bears a striking resemblance to Chen Mailin – is the businessman’s son, according to the tycoon’s assistant at Chunghwa Investment company in Vancouver. The assistant told the South China Morning Post on Thursday to call Ding Chen on Friday at a nominated time, but the call went through to voicemail and has not yet been returned.

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    Ding Chen in a selfie taken on a mainland Chinese train on March 25. Photo: Instagram/Ding Chen

    Patrick Kam, a salesman for Weissach Group, Bugatti’s official dealer in Vancouver, said only one Bugatti Chiron had been sold and delivered in Vancouver. “It’s a very esoteric car,” he said.

    Curiously, Kam said that particular car had not been bought with a Union Pay card. But he said he was “not at liberty to discuss sales that may or may not be in the works”. Still, a Union Pay credit card would indeed be accepted at Weissach if someone wanted to use it to buy a C$4 million car, or any luxury vehicle. “Yeah, it’s a regular mode of payment that we take,” said Kam.

    Just as profiled in our post from April 2016, Ding Chen’s Instagram feed is filled with scenes of conspicuous consumption across the world, including a $30 million Bombardier Challenger jet with his name, “Ding”, emblazoned on the tail in Montreal; straphanging on the Hong Kong MTR with an Audemars Piguet watch on his wrist; and posing in Gucci leisure wear in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Shanghai.

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    A US$30 million Bombardier Challenger jet, with Ding emblazoned on the tail, pictured in Montreal on November 8 and posted on Instagram by Ding Chen. Photo: Instagram/Ding Chen

    Other photos apparently show his new Bugatti Chiron in various stages of completion as it undergoes extensive customisation. “It’s on its way. #bugatti #chiron #w16,” he posted on February 26, with a photo of a mostly dismantled Chiron in a laboratory-like workshop. “The next stage!” he posted on March 12, with a photo of a Chiron, still wheelless but with body work attached.

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    Ding Chen’s new Bugatti Chiron, undergoing extensive customisation, in a photo he uploaded on February 26. Photo: Instagram/Ding Chen

    Ding Chen’s big-spending father, meanwhile, has been the subject of media scrutiny in Vancouver ever since buying the Drummond Drive home. As we noted at the time, Chen Mailin was mentioned in a 2012 Canadian court ruling in which prominent Vancouver realtor Julia Lau claimed he was a friend who loaned her C$30,000 out of C$131,000 in undeclared cash. The money had been seized by Canadian border authorities in 2010 from a car broker named Jason Edward Lee as he tried to board a flight to Las Vegas.

    Lau said the money was intended to replace funds she had already given Lee, via wire transfer, to buy her a Porsche in the US. Lee claimed the wired funds never arrived in his account.

    The judge in the case found that Lee had instead “squandered” the wired funds at a casino.

    Lee, who told Canadian authorities the C$30,000 came from a “loan shark”, according to the ruling, was found dead of a heroin overdose in the boot of his car, with zip ties around his wrists and ankles, about a month after Canadian authorities seized the cash. There was no suggestion in the court case that Chen Mailin is a “loan shark”.

    Meanwhile, business as usual continues as China’s wealthiest can’t wait to transfer their savings offshore, even as Beijing, now facing its first current account deficit in modern history, is desperate to open up its own corrupt and crony capital markets to yield-starved foreign investors who in turn will make sure that Ding Chen ends up buying many more Bugattis before he too is mysteriously found deceased of a “heroin overdose” in the boot of some (super)car himself.

  • NY Dems Reject Tuition Aid For Gold Star Kids After Doling Out millions For Illegal Students

    Authored by Rob Shimshock via Campus Reform,

    New York State Assembly Democrats denied hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition money to relatives of Gold Star veterans on Tuesday but granted $27 million for illegal aliens’ college tuition in a state budget earlier in April.

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    In a 15-11 vote, New York’s Assembly Higher Education Committee decided not to allocate more money to a $2.7 million program that currently helps 145 students related to or dependent on disabled and deceased combat veterans to pay college tuition, the New York Post reported.

    “We will make every effort to ensure going forward, we have some additional resources allocated to the program so that as an entitlement, it is not falling short of the needs of our military families,” Democrat Assemblywoman Deborah Glick said, according to the Post.

    Not all Democrats opposed the veteran funding bill, however.

    “I voted for the bill because I think it’s important, especially after that FDNY firefighter was killed in Afghanistan, so heartbreaking,” Democrat Assemblywoman Judy Griffin said, reported the Post.

    “But I voted yes knowing the bill would be held because it was a tough budget year and as the chairwoman said, there just wasn’t the funding in the budget. But now we know for next year, [so] we will make it a priority and hopefully pass it.”

    New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo also signaled that he would support the bill, which provides merit-based awards with a $24,250 ceiling per student, if it made it past the Assembly, according to Stars and Stripes.

    “We have a moral obligation, a social obligation to help those families who lost their provider, their loved one, in service to this nation,” Cuomo said, according to Stars and Stripes.

    “Assemblywoman Glick should be ashamed of herself,” Republican state Sen. Robert Ortt, who sponsored the proposed funding, said.

    “We set aside $27 million dollars for college for people that are here illegally…apparently $2.7 million is all that the families of soldiers who are killed, get. If you’re a child of a fallen soldier, you do not rank as high and you know that by the money.”

    This comes after Campus Reform highlighted in a video earlier this week how a lesser-known federal statuteprohibits illegal immigrants from receiving “any postsecondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit.” 

    Currently, 18 states, including New York offer such benefits to illegal immigrant students. 

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Apr 14

Today’s News 14th April 2019

  • John Pilger: Assange Arrest A Warning From History 

    via John Pilger,

    The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.

    That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

    But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi-fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

    Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.

    The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization.” The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

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    Assange’s principal media tormentor, The Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years.” The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.

    With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.

    Revealing Homicidal Colonial Wars

    When Assange was still trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, Harding joined police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh.” The Guardian then published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.

    But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangled web,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published …. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden.”

    These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the exposé of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.

    The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.

    When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.

    If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what The Guardian calls truthful “things,” what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?

    What is to stop the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. The list is long.

    David McCraw, lead lawyer of The New York Times, wrote: “I think the prosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”

    Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalized by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.

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    In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.

    Journalism: a Major Threat

    Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defense in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.

    The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”

    What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake — if there are others — are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?

    In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.

    She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.

    “Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked her.

    “Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia …. When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.”

    And did. The rest, she might have added, is history.

    *  *  *

    John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, “Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia,” among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20thcentury. Some of his previous contributions to Consortium News can be found here. 

  • Google's Wing Launches Commerical Drone Delivery Service In Australia 

    The startup air delivery service Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has launched a drone-based commercial delivery service in Australia.

    “Our service allows customers to order a range of items such as fresh food, hot coffee or over-the-counter chemist items on our mobile app, and have them delivered directly to their homes by drone in minutes,” Wing wrote in a press release Monday.

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    The company launched the air delivery service earlier this week to residents in Crace, Palmerston and Franklin, which are suburbs in North Canberra. Next month, the service is expected to expand into Harrison and Gungahlin suburbs.

    Wing partnered with local business in the Gungahlin area, so that merchants can utilize the quick delivery service to reach more customers per day. Some of those partners include Kickstart Expresso, Capital Chemist, Pure Gelato, Jasper + Myrtle, Bakers Delight, Guzman Y Gomez, and Drummond Golf.

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    Last month, we reported that Wing was “on the verge of launching” its new service. The company tested drones over Bonython, a suburb of Tuggeranong, a township in southern Canberra for about a year. During the trial, the drones delivered food, small household items more than 3,000 times to Australian homes.

    The Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority granted Wing licenses to operate commercial drones after the agency reviewed all flight records and operational plans.

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    However, many Australians are not too enthusiastic about drones flying above. Some residents earlier this year told law enforcement that they would shoot the drones out of the sky.

    Despite dozens of complaints from residents, government officials have asked Wing to reduce the decibel level of the drones so that they don’t startle residents.

    “When they do a delivery drop they hover over the site and it sounds like an extremely loud, squealing vacuum cleaner,” Bonython Against Drones said on its website. The Australian aviation authority ordered Wing to modify its drone’s propellers and engines to reduce noise for quieter deliveries. New regulations have limited drone deliveries on weekdays between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m.

    “The feedback we have received during the trials has been valuable, helping us to refine our operations to better meet the needs and expectations of the communities in which we operate,” Wing stated.

    Wing has said drone deliveries could add $28.5 million to Australia’s annual revenue at its full capacity this year. 

    In the next 3 to 5 years, drone deliveries could revolutionize supply chain management and transportation planning for the last mile. Google and Amazon have been capturing the headlines with its drones, but other companies are developing their own drone delivery programs. This includes global corporations like Walmart, DHL, and UPS.

    Video: Google Drones Can Already Deliver You Coffee in Australia 

  • Coffee Robots Are Not Causing Homeless People To Starve

    Authored by Art Carden via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    A couple of months ago, this tweet made the social media rounds:

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

    The group of “Starving Jobless Homeless” people huddled outdoors next to a “Fully Robotic Coffeeshop” is jarring. The coffee shop, CafeX, features “Coffee from the best local roasters crafted with precision using recipes designed by top baristas.” It’s an image of the coming techno-dystopia in which robots take our jobs and leave everyone who isn’t a capital-owning plutocrat to starve in the streets, no?

    No. There are other things at play here. One reply to the tweet tagged John Stossel and diagnosed the problem immediately: the minimum wage in San Francisco is $15 per hour. That is a wage at which, apparently, the people in the picture cannot be profitably employed and which induces firms to look harder for ways to do with capital what was formerly profitable to do with labor.

    Labor and Capital

    “But firms will want to innovate and adopt new technology no matter what,” you say. Maybe: it depends on what the technological possibilities are. If labor is extremely abundant, then the low-cost, most efficient production method might be labor-intensive rather than capital-intensive.

    Think about why so many people don’t buy the absolute-best top-of-the-line computers or smartphones. You probably don’t. Consider the Cray XT5m supercomputer system, which “starts around $500,000, takes advantage of the hardware and software advances of the Cray XT5 supercomputer, the basis of the petascale system currently in use at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.”

    That’s a heck of a machine, and if you’re doing particle physics, it’s probably nice to have. If all you need to do is check your email and manage a few spreadsheets, then it’s overkill. Just as you wouldn’t expect a firm to buy a Cray XT5m for everyone in the office and just as you probably don’t keep one in the sewing room from which to check email and play Minecraft, firms aren’t going to go for hyper-tech when that tech is hyper-expensive.

    Again, firms will choose the lowest-cost way to produce a good in the interest of maximizing profits. When we use legislation like minimum wages and workplace safety rules and other things to increase the price of labor relative to what would obtain in the free market, we nudge firms toward replacing people with machines — as CafeX does, replacing human baristas with mechanical ones.

    That gives us the phenomenon in the picture: a mass of people who are either unemployed or who have given up on the labor market, huddled outside a robotic coffee bar.

    The same principles also explain why they are without housing. First, building new housing in San Francisco is notoriously difficult. Reason discusses an amusing-if-it-weren’t-so-tragic case in which the owner of a laundromat is being blocked from turning it into an eight-story apartment complex because the laundromat is “historic.”

    Making it difficult for people to build new housing reduces the supply of housing, which drives up prices. It also changes the composition of housing: high regulatory costs that make it hard to build any kind of housing will induce substitution away from modest housing and toward luxury housing.

    Changes in Relative Prices

    Economists call this the Alchian-Allen effect after the economists Armen Alchian and William Allen. Adding a fixed cost to two similar goods will induce substitution toward the higher-quality good because it changes the relative price of that good.

    The average quality of oranges in Florida, for example, is lower than the average quality of oranges in Vancouver for this reason. Suppose good oranges have a price of a dollar and bad oranges have a price of 50 cents. This means good oranges cost two bad oranges; a bad orange costs half a good orange. If it costs 50 cents to ship an orange — any orange — from Florida to Vancouver, it changes the relative price. Good oranges are relatively cheaper: with a total cost of $1.50 including shipping compared to $1 for bad oranges, good oranges only cost 1.5 bad oranges. The relative price of bad oranges rises, from half a good orange to 2/3 of a good orange. (The numbers in this example are from an example in Steven Landsburg’s textbook Price Theory and Applications.)

    People substitute toward higher-quality oranges and away from lower-quality ones. Before you say, “Wouldn’t people always buy the highest-quality oranges?,” note that there is a price difference. Then look in your own fridge or on your own kitchen counter. You probably don’t have the absolutely highest-quality produce imaginable on hand.

    Now, replace good and bad oranges with luxury and modest apartments and replace the fixed cost of shipping with a fixed cost of building. Costly regulations make all housing absolutely more expensive, but they make luxury housing relatively cheaper.

    If you’re still not convinced, think about hiring a babysitter for $40 and going on a date. Would you go to Taco Bell? Or would you go somewhere nicer? Adding the price of the babysitter means going to Taco Bell and spending $10 each would cost you $60. Or you could go to a very nice restaurant and spend $40 each for a total of $120.

    Without the cost of the babysitter, a trip to the very nice restaurant costs you four trips to Taco Bell. But the trip to the very nice restaurant is cheaper in terms of forgone trips to Taco Bell once you add the cost of the babysitter, which will cost $40 no matter what you do.

    As the San Francisco Tenants Union explains, “In San Francisco, most tenants are covered by rent control.” Rent control is a standard example in introductory economics classes of a policy that hurts the people we ostensibly want to help. The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck has said that “in many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.”

    By holding prices below what the market will bear, rent-control ordinances ensure housing shortages, where, at the controlled price, people want more housing than firms and landlords are willing to provide.

    Furthermore, they find themselves in a cat-and-mouse game with regulators because landlords and tenants move toward competition on non-price margins. Quality, to use just one example, falls because of rent control and necessitates, in the eyes of many activists, even more regulation.

    The additional regulation raises the cost of providing housing, which reduces the supply of housing, which puts pressure on prices and thus leads to more and more calls for rent control. The outcome is grotesque: all the new construction is high-end luxury housing while the rent-controlled housing deteriorates more quickly.

    Adam Smith famously wrote that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Does the picture of a huddled mass of homeless people outside a robotic coffee shop suggest the ruins of late-stage capitalism? I think not.

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    It represents instead the “great deal of ruin” policymakers create when they make policy as if the laws of supply and demand are optional.

  • An Interview With The Most Powerful Man On Wall Street

    Amid a rising legislative chorus demanding a halt to corporate buybacks (an activity which was illegal until 1982), with Congress realizing that most of the funds released by Trump’s tax cut and offshore tax repatriation were used not for capex or hiring but merely to levitate stock prices, last week Goldman’s chief equity strategist published the most “inspired” defense of buybacks, in which he said that from a portfolio strategy perspective, “the potential restriction on buybacks would likely have five implications for the US equity market: (1) slow EPS growth; (2) boost cash spending on dividends, M&A, and debt paydown; (3) widen trading ranges; (4) reduce demand for shares; and (5) lower company valuations.”

    Or, as we summarized it, if Congress were to ban buybacks, it would likely crash the market. Hence Goldman’s increasingly vocal defense of corporate buybacks, which incidentally are the biggest source of stock demand in the past decade.

    Then, just a few days later, Goldman – clearly worried that the anti-buyback push is gathering steam in Congress – published yet another research report discussing the “Buyback Realities”, in which it paradoxically tried to mitigate the role buybacks have on price formation and capital misallocation just one week after it explained how banning buybacks would have disastrous consequences for stocks.

    Of note, one of the charts in the defensive report had the following informative summary on the history of buybacks, in which Goldman explained that “in the past buybacks were not illegal [ZH: they were illegal prior to 1982] but were typically avoided because US companies feared government charges of market manipulation.” As a result, for decades US companies returned cash to shareholders almost exclusively via dividends, and from 1880 to 1980, the dividend payout ratio averaged 78% of earnings (companies also had the option to repurchase shares via tender offers, in which they would buy a certain amount of shares at a pre-determined price/time, however the price moving impact of such operations was virtually nil).

    Then, everything changed in 1982 with the passage of Rule 10b-18, which provided companies a safe harbor against charges of market manipulation when repurchasing their shares.

    In short, buybacks were illegal until 1982 for a reason – market manipulation – and then they gradually became mainstream, with  stock buybacks and dividends rising to 90% of the cumulative payout ratio of S&P 500 earnings in the 2002-2018 period. The cherry on top: in 2019, Goldman forecasts companies will spend a record $940 billion on buybacks (with $1.1 trillion in buyback announcements) up 16% from the prior record hit in 2018.

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    Some more staggering context: since the 2008 financial crisis, the S&P 500 companies have repurchased about $5 trillion of their own shares, which represents approximately 20% of the current market capitalization.

    So while it remains to be seen if Congress will ban buybacks, one thing is certain: as Goldman’s David Kostin cautioned last week, without company buybacks, demand for shares would fall dramatically, for one simple reason: repurchases have consistently been the largest source of US equity demand. Since 2010, corporate demand for shares has far exceeded demand from all other investor categories combined. Net buybacks for all US equities averaged $420 billion annually during the past nine years. In contrast, during this period, average annual equity demand from households, mutual funds, pension funds, and foreign investors was less than $10 billion for each category – despite the fact these categories collectively own 83% of corporate equities. Buybacks represented the largest source of equity demand in 2018. This is shown in the table below.

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    Then, overnight, Kostin reiterated this point, saying that “buybacks remain the largest source of net demand for US equities. Other ownership categories have been generally reducing equity exposure, including mutual funds.”

    What this means is the following: with buybacks having become the most important marginal buyer of stocks, the one trading desk that dominates the daily flow of buybacks – which amount to just under $3 billion in gross purchases each and every day – has more influence on the overall market than even the NY Fed. And the person who controls that trading desk will be the most powerful person on Wall Street.

    Meet Neil Kearns.

    Kearns, a name few have ever heard of – certainly not a name on par with Stevie Cohen, Israel Englander, Larry Fink, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, Bill Dudley or any other hedge fund billionaire that is part of the Wall Street folklore – is the head of Goldman Sachs’ corporate trading desk: the desk the executes hundreds of billions in corporate buyback orders for clients all around the world. And with Goldman sporting the largest buyback trading desk on Wall Street, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that – with the fate of the stock market in the hands of corporate buybacks – Neil is the most powerful man on Wall Street right now.

    In its latest “Top of Mind” publication, Goldman sat down with Kearns, this “master of the buyback universe”, to address the size, impact, and outlook for US share repurchases. Since Neil is the man that sees more buyback dollars executed in any year than anyone else, he is just the right man to answer all buyback related questions.

    Q: How large is the corporate bid in the stock market?

    A: US corporates have been the largest net buyers of US equity for the last decade, repurchasing $5tn+ since the financial crisis. Last year, roughly $1.1 trillion of repurchases were authorized, with about $900 billion actually repurchased. As a share of the overall trading footprint, that’s around 6-7% of average composite volume, which might be viewed as a slightly underwhelming number. But companies repurchase stock under rule 10b-18, a safe harbor enacted by the SEC in 1982 to provide companies an affirmative defense against accusations of stock price manipulation. This rule provides volume, timing and price limitations on how companies buy back stock. Pulling out the non-eligible volume, the trading footprint increases to about 10% on average, and into the teens during market weakness.

    Q: What is the major driver of volatility in share repurchases?

    A: The largest driver of share repurchase volatility is broader equity market performance. In particular, the corporate bid tends to  become more aggressive in a falling market as fundamental investors move to the sidelines. In periods of extreme dislocation, like we witnessed at the end of last year, repurchase activity can temporarily spike by multiples of average levels, as companies take advantage of attractive price points/valuations, and which may ultimately also have a secondary effect of tempering price volatility. That said, companies are cognizant of their trading footprints and generally aim to be less than 10% of trading volume.

    Q: How much seasonality is there in share repurchases?

    A: There is not a great deal of seasonality. Q1 tends to be the lightest quarter of activity—about 23% of total annual notional— given that companies have the least visibility on what earnings will look like that year. Q2 tends to be a little bit more active at  around 24%, while the last two quarters average around 26 to 27%, as companies feel more confident in repurchase levels given greater clarity on earnings strength/cash flow generation in the second half of the year.

    Q: We are in the midst of a blackout window for share repurchases, which occurs four times a year around quarterly earnings. Does that mean companies can’t buy stock?

    A: No. The other rule relevant to share repurchase programs is 10b5-1. The SEC enacted this rule in 2000 to provide senior executives, who have a desire to sell equity, an affirmative defense to any charge of insider trading, by adopting a written plan to sell at a time when they are not in possession of material non-public information (MNPI). The plan is a written contract between the individual and their broker, and contains very specific instructions on trade dates, sale parameters, etc. Though the plan may extend through a blackout window when the individual possesses MNPI, because it’s ultimately on auto-pilot, the executive is protected. Companies have applied this same safe harbor to buyback programs, enacting plans before the blackout window that will run on auto-pilot during the window. Very little public information is available on 10b5-1s, but an internal analysis of 350 companies suggests that approximately 85% of companies utilize them to continue to purchase stock during closed windows. Companies do tend to be more conservative than in the open window (when they have access to real time information); we observe a notional spend reduction of ~30% during the blackout window.

    Q: How do companies judge the success of their stock repurchase programs?

    A: From an execution standpoint, most companies judge the success of their program by comparing the average price at which they’ve purchased their shares on any given day, to the volume weighted average price (VWAP)—a daily benchmark that is readily available on Bloomberg. If their purchase price is below VWAP, they’ve “saved” money. Given the billions of dollars spent annually on share buybacks today, senior management and more frequently, corporate boards, have become increasingly focused on execution performance versus the daily benchmark, in some cases adjusting the structure of their program to specifically achieve this. In my view, this narrow focus on daily VWAP has the potential risk of missing more attractive valuation opportunities.

    Q: How would you judge investor focus on stock buybacks today?

    A: Focus from the buy side community is at an all-time high, with investors frequently questioning whether the very strong corporate bid we’ve observed over the past decade will persist, and looking at this as a potential harbinger of equity market performance. But if investors are looking to share repurchases for market direction, they are probably one or two quarters behind; corporate earnings drive share repurchases—not the other way around.

    Q: Do you see any evidence that the corporate bid is diminishing, especially given increased focus in Washington, DC?

    A: Not currently. Share repurchase authorizations are up approximately 13% yoy, which is remarkable given the surge in buybacks last year. And more broadly, the US economy continues to do reasonably well, the Fed appears to be on pause, and US-China trade negotiations are moving in the right direction. So we have little reason to believe that US corporates will not continue to generate strong free cash flow, which, as I mentioned, has historically been the primary driver of stock repurchases.

  • App Store Downloads Drop For The First Time In Years 

    The synchronized global slowdown has hit Apple’s iOS App Store downloads for the first time in years, according to a new report from Morgan Stanley, first reported by 9to5Mac.

    The research note reveals that the App Store saw a 5% drop in app and game downloads in 1Q19 versus the same period in 2018. This is the first time a deterioration in downloads has been observed since the 2015 Chinese stock market turbulence that slowed global growth.

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    In a series of Twitter posts, CNBC’s Kif Leswing published some of the investment bank’s findings:

     “For the first time since at least 1Q15 (as far back as we have the data), the number of quarterly [App Store] downloads declined, falling 5% Y/Y.”

    While the decline shows some signs of consumer weakness, the bank noted that App Store revenue is growing and is more closely tied to spend per download, and not just overall download numbers.

    “While the decline in downloads is something investors should monitor, it’s not necessarily indicative of consumer app usage trends, since App Store net revenue is correlated more so with spend per download (driven by in-app purchases).”

    The note also revealed how the App Store’s Entertainment category has started to slow in recent quarters.

    “In the December quarter, Entertainment net revenue growth decelerated … the deceleration could be a direct result of the actions taken by some large entertainment companies that no longer support Apple’s payment platform as a method of payment for new subscribers.”

    The majority of app revenue comes from entertainment apps with in-app purchases. Allegedly, the Chinese mobile gaming app market is one of the largest in the world. With a synchronized global slowdown in play for much of the developed and emerging countries, it makes sense why app downloads have recently come under pressure.

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    Historically, the App Store and the Google Play trend in similar directions, although the Play store has about half the revenues as Apple’s. Therefore, it’s likely that a much broader slowdown of all app marketplaces could be seen in the coming quarters.

    Apple’s Tim Cook issued a rare warning at the start of the year, which said, revenues would disappoint.

    To make matters worse, Samsung’s preliminary earnings report is showing a 60% collapse in 1Q19 profit compared to last year.

    Apple and Samsung are expected to report on April 30th – a day that will surely be disappointing to investors around the world.

    The smartphone bubble is deflating.

  • Rep. Omar Virtue Signals With "No Ban Act" – Except Obama's Travel Bans Were 16x That Of Trump's

    Via SaraCarter.com,

    As Democrats prepare to introduce ‘No Ban Act’ legislation to end what they say is President Donald Trump’s racist Muslim ban they should take a moment to read the new Government Accountability Office report issued Thursday. It shows that under President Obama the travel ban rate for security reasons in 2015 was 16 times higher than under Trump in 2017 based on the one year data that was available to GAO.

    It also indicates a very significant finding: that the Trump administration’s executive orders not only did not increase its refusal rate -for terrorism and security related reasons- but it was lower for the respective years studied.

    “GAO’s analysis indicates that, out of the nearly 2.8 million NIV applications refused in fiscal year 2017, 1,338 applications were refused specifically due to visa entry restrictions implemented per the executive actions,” stated the report.

    In fact, the nonimmigrant visa refusal rate rose under Obama’s tenure from about “14 percent in fiscal year 2012 to about 22 percent in fiscal year 2016, and remained about the same in fiscal year 2017; averaging about 18 percent over the time period,” according to the report. “The total number of NIVs issued peaked in fiscal year 2015 at about 10.89 million, before falling in fiscal years 2016 and 2017 to 10.38 million and 9.68 million, respectively.”

    For example, in 2015, “CBP data showed that it identified and interdicted over 22,000 high-risk air travelers through these programs” according to the most recent data available at the time of GAO’s report it stated.

    ONLY 1,338 VISA APPLICATIONS WERE REFUSED BECAUSE OF THE PRESIDENT TRUMP’S VISA ENTRY RESTRICTIONS FOR PEOPLE FROM CERTAIN COUNTRIES IN 2017 – THESE REFUSALS WERE TERRORISM OR SECURITY RELATED CONCERNS.

    Nonimmigrant visa’s are those issued to foreign nationals seeking admission into the United States. Some examples are visas issued to tourists, students and businessmen seeking temporary status.

    According to the GAO, “the number of adjudications peaked at about 13.4 million in fiscal year 2016, and decreased by about 880,000 adjudications in fiscal year 2017.”

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    State Department Stats

    From the time period above, the State Department denied roughly 18 percent of adjudicated applications “of which more than 90 percent were because the applicant did not qualify for the visa sought” and only “0.05 percent were due to terrorism and security-related concerns.”

    The report noted that previous successful and attempted terrorist attacks against the United States raised questions about the U.S. vetting system. One example listed in the report was the December 2015, terrorist attack in  San Bernardino, California, which led to the deaths of 14 people with dozens more injured. One of the attackers was admitted into the United States under a nonimmigrant visa, stated the report.

    Lack of Vetting 

    President Trump issued his executive travel ban in 2017 based on the apparent lack of vetting and what some security analysts described as an “open gateway” for applicants from nations affiliated with terrorist organizations.

    “Trump’s ban was not targeting Muslims it was using common sense to keep dangerous persons from entering the country through the visa system based on factual evidence of past attempted attacks and ones that we couldn’t stop,” said a DHS official, who was not authorized to speak to the media.

    “The failure was that system tied the hands of adjudicators in many cases – they just didn’t have all the information necessary to appropriately vet those entering the United States,” the DHS official added. “For nations like Syria, Libya and Yemen it’s almost impossible to know the intentions of those being vetted because those nations are not stable or have well functioning governments.”

    The report noted that an August 2018, analysis of State data “indicates that relatively few applicants— approximately 0.05 percent—were refused for terrorism and other security-related reasons from fiscal years 2012 through 2017.”

    It also shows that in 2017, under President Trump there was not a significant increase in refusals because State Department “data indicate that 1,256 refusals (or 0.05 percent) were based on terrorism and other security-related concerns, of which 357 refusals were specifically for terrorism-related reasons.”

    From 2012 To 2017 Most NIVS Were Denied For Reasons Other Than Security or Terrorism

    State data indicate that more than 90 percent of NIVs refused each year from fiscal years 2012 through 2017 were based on the consular officers’ determination that the applicants were ineligible nonimmigrants—in other words, the consular officers believed that the applicant was an intending immigrant seeking to stay permanently in the United States, which would generally violate NIV conditions, or that the applicant otherwise failed to demonstrate eligibility for the particular visa he or she was seeking. For example, an applicant applying for a student visa could be refused as an ineligible nonimmigrant for failure to demonstrate possession of sufficient funds to cover his or her educational expenses, as required.

    Under former President Obama the numbers were much higher. For example, “in fiscal year 2015 DHS’s predeparture programs stopped 22,000 high-risk travelers from entering the country.”

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    The Numbers and and Ilhan Omar’s “No Ban Act”

    The numbers are important. Why? Because some Democrats, led by Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, have introduced “The No Ban Act,”  which directly targets the Trump administration’s travel ban policy. The policy prevents persons from nations such as Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia from entering the country. The reason being, is that the majority of these nations do not have a functioning government capable of documenting or clearing those traveling to the United States and concern that some of these countries are safe-havens for terrorist organizations, as listed by the State Department. 

    Last year, Trump’s third executive travel ban order was upheld in a 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court.

    Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the majority opinion, noted that the president was within his authority to impose the ban. Trump based the ban on extensive national security concerns regarding travelers from these nations.

    Roberts opinion noted it was not the court’s place to pass judgment on Trump’s previous comments during the campaign regarding immigrants.

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote the dissenting opinion, and said Trump’s comments targeting Muslims should have been the reason to strike down his travel ban.

    Omar’s bill, however, will face a steep battle in Congress and the Senate. It would effectively end Trump’s policies to limit entry from these unstable and mostly ungoverned nations. It would also limit the government ability to conduct extreme vetting of immigrants who attempt to comet to the U.S. from countries designated as a threat because of ties to terrorism.

    Here’s what Omar had to say: 

    “The Muslim ban is a moral stain on our country’s history,” Omar said.

    “Proud to have joined my colleagues in introducing the #NoBanAct yesterday to put an end to this discriminatory ban,” Omar said on Twitter.

    Omar could not be immediately reached for comment.

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    GAO FOUND

    • About 2.8 million nonimmigrant visa applications were refused in fiscal year 2017—over 90% of which were because the applicant di 0.05% of applications were refused for security-related concerns

    • 1,338 visa applications were refused because of the President’s visa entry restrictions for people from certain countries.

    • In fiscal year 2015 DHS’s predeparture programs stopped 22,000 high-risk travelers from entering the country

    FROM THE GAO

    In August 2018, GAO reported that the total number of nonimmigrant visa (NIV) applications that Department of State (State) consular officers adjudicated annually increased from fiscal years 2012 through 2016, but decreased in fiscal year 2017 (the most recent data available at the time of GAO’s report).

    GAO’S ANALYSIS INDICATES THAT, OUT OF THE NEARLY 2.8 MILLION NIV APPLICATIONS REFUSED IN FISCAL YEAR 2017, 1,338 APPLICATIONS WERE REFUSED SPECIFICALLY DUE TO VISA ENTRY RESTRICTIONS IMPLEMENTED PER THE EXECUTIVE ACTIONS.

    NIVs are issued to foreign nationals, such as tourists, business visitors, and students, seeking temporary admission into the United States. The number of adjudications peaked at about 13.4 million in fiscal year 2016, and decreased by about 880,000 adjudications in fiscal year 2017. State refused about 18 percent of adjudicated applications during this time period, of which more than 90 percent were because the applicant did not qualify for the visa sought and 0.05 percent were due to terrorism and security-related concerns. In 2017, two executive orders and a proclamation issued by the President required, among other actions, visa entry restrictions for nationals of certain listed countries of concern. GAO’s analysis indicates that, out of the nearly 2.8 million NIV applications refused in fiscal year 2017, 1,338 applications were refused specifically due to visa entry restrictions implemented per the executive actions.

    Nonimmigrant Visa Adjudications, Fiscal Years 2012 through 2017

    In January 2017, GAO reported that the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) operates predeparture programs to help identify and interdict high-risk travelers before they board U.S.- bound flights. CBP officers inspect all U.S.-bound travelers on those flights that are precleared at the 15 Preclearance locations at foreign airports—which serve as U.S. ports of entry—and, if deemed inadmissible, a traveler will not be permitted to board the aircraft. CBP also operates nine Immigration Advisory Program and two Joint Security Program locations, as well as three Regional Carrier Liaison Groups, through which CBP may recommend that air carriers not permit identified high-risk travelers to board U.S.-bound flights.

    CBP Data High Risk

    CBP data showed that it identified and interdicted over 22,000 high-risk air travelers through these programs in fiscal year 2015 (the most recent data available at the time of GAO’s report). While CBP tracked some data, such as the number of travelers deemed inadmissible, it had not fully evaluated the overall effectiveness of these programs. GAO recommended that CBP develop a system of performance measures and baselines to better position CBP to assess program performance. As of December 2018, CBP set preliminary performance targets for fiscal year 2019, and plans to set targets for future fiscal years by October 31, 2019. GAO will continue to review CBP’s actions to address this recommendation.

    Why GAO Did This Study

    Previous attempted and successful terrorist attacks against the United States have raised questions about the security of the U.S. government’s screening and vetting processes for NIVs. State manages the visa adjudication process. DHS seeks to identify and interdict travelers who are potential security threats to the United States, such as foreign fighters and potential terrorists, human traffickers, drug smugglers and otherwise inadmissible persons, at the earliest possible point in time. DHS also has certain responsibilities for strengthening the security of the visa process. In 2017, the President issued executive actions directing agencies to improve visa screening and vetting, and establishing nationality-based visa entry restrictions, which the Supreme Court upheld in June 2018.

    This statement addresses (1) data and information on NIV adjudications and (2) CBP programs aimed at preventing high-risk travelers from boarding U.S.-bound flights. This statement is based on prior products GAO issued in January 2017 and August 2018, along with selected updates conducted in December 2018 to obtain information from DHS on actions it has taken to address a prior GAO recommendation.

    What GAO Recommends

    GAO previously recommended that CBP evaluate the effectiveness of its predeparture programs. DHS agreed with GAO’s recommendation and CBP has actions under way to address it.

    Click here for GAO Report…

  • Ecuador Hacked After Julian Assange Arrest

    Two days after the Thursday arrest of Julian Assange at Ecuador’s London embassy, several government websites were hacked; including Ecuador’s official website, the Central Bank of Ecuador, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ecuadorian Assembly in the UK, according to Gateway Pundit‘s Cassandra Fairbanks, who was in London last week and documented the run-up to Assange’s arrest. 

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    Concurrent with the breach, a hacking group operating under the name “AL1NE3737” released a database containing the full names and passwords for what appear to be 728 Ecuadorian government employees. 

    Furthermore, Ecuador’s sites were hit with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. According to DefCon Lab.

    Among those involved in these attacks stand out from the groups / hacker DeathLaw , 5UB5, Cyb3r C0nven Security and Al1ne ( Pryzraky ).

    DoS actions has consistently been against the Ecuadorian government targets, the country that gave Julian Assange to the UK police.” –DefCon Lab

    …

    The hacker Al1ne ( Pryzraky ) performed page defacements against and released a list of vulnerable targets related to the government of Ecuador

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    As noted by Fairbanks, “The cyber attack was reminiscent of 2010’s “Operation Avenge Assange” which was launched by the broader “Operation Payback” effort. The movement lead to hacktivists hitting companies such as PayPal, PostFinance, Mastercard, Visa, and others who had blocked services to WikiLeaks with a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. This is when a website is flooded with fake traffic until it crashes and goes offline.” 

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    Following Assange’s Thursday arrest, more than 70 MPs and peers signed a letter urging the UK home secretary to ensure that the WikiLeaks founder is extradited to Sweden if Swedish authorities request it. 

    Sweden is considering whether to open a previously-dropped investigation into allegations of rape and sexual assault against Assange. 

    The United States, meanwhile, wants to try Assange for the largest-ever leak of government secrets in 2010.  On Thursday, the Justice Department hit him with an indictment that claims the WikiLeaks founder helped former US Army intelligence analyst crack DoD password using Linux.  

    “The indictment alleges that in March 2010, Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications,” reads a DOJ press release. 

    Materials Manning released included videos of various US airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the “Iraq War Logs” and “Afghan War Diary.” 

    Assange faces five years in prison if convicted in the Manning case. 

  • China, Russia "Spread Disorder" And "Corruption" In Latin America: Pompeo

    Speaking Friday in Chile upon the start of his three-day South American tour, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out China and Russia for spreading “disorder” in Latin America through failing investment projects that only fuel corruption and undermine democracy, especially in places like Venezuela. 

    According to Bloomberg, Pompeo specifically listed a failing dam project in Ecuador, police advisory programs in Nicaragua, and Chinese loans to the Maduro government, which goes further back to Chavez. 

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    Pompeo with Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, via Reuters

    Pompeo asserted Chinese loans in Latin America “often injects corrosive capital into the economic bloodstream, giving life to corruption, and eroding good governance.” Both Beijing and Moscow have ultimately spread their economic tentacles into the region to “spread disorder,” he added.

    In what appears an effort to sustain momentum toward pressuring regime change in Caracas, America’s highest diplomat met Chilean President Sebastian Pinera earlier Friday, and will hit Paraguay, Peru next, and finally on Sunday will travel to a Colombian town on the border with Venezuela.

    Pompeo and Piñera also generally discussed the U.S.-China trade war and Beijing’s “Belt and Road” initiative, with Pompeo suggesting he was optimistic about solving the tariff war with China. But the focus remained finding a US-desired outcome to the Venezuela crisis. 

    According to Bloomberg: 

    As part of the broader pressure campaign on Maduro, Pompeo said the U.S. has revoked visas for 718 people and sanctioned over 150 individuals and entities. On Friday, the U.S. sanctioned four companies it says transport much of the 50,000 barrels of oil that Venezuela provides to Cuba each day.

    Late last month Pompeo had even more directly addressed Moscow, calling on Russia to “cease its unconstructive behavior” after it deployed a small troop contingency to Caracas to service existing military equipment contracts. Notably, Venezuela also has Russia’s S-300 air defense missile system, which over the past month have been reported deployed to a key airbase south of the capital of Caracas. 

    And in February Pompeo claimed in an interview with Fox News that “Hezbollah has active cells in Venezuela” — an assertion that has seemed to disappear from the spotlight of late. 

    China, for its part, has proactively offered to help Venezuela with its failing power grid, after a series of devastating mass outages over the past month has resulted in “medieval” conditions amidst an already collapsing infrastructure. Beijing also recently denied it has deployed troops to Venezuela after media reports a week ago cited online photos which appeared to show a Chinese military transport plane deployed to Caracas. 

  • A War Has Broken Out In The VIX Complex

    Back in January 2018, just weeks ahead of the infamous VIXtermination event on Feb. 5 2018 that wiped out virtually all inverse VIX ETPs in seconds, we predicted that such an event was imminent as a result of a sharp spike in the total outstanding Vega across the entire levered and inverse volatility derivative space, which had reached an all time high. Since then, while the VIX ETP market had been relatively quiet as a result of last year’s fireworks which wiped out countless retail investors and other vol sellers, another VIX “event” is coming, and it will be the result of a silent war being waged between retail and institutional investors.

    As we noted two weeks ago, JPMorgan’s Bram Kaplan recently pointed out that after a year of relative quiet, the net exposure among VIX ETPs recently spiked to their largest net long position in 1.5 years, tilted long by ~$150Mn vega, which is just shy of the record vega exposure hit in early 2018 and which precipitated the VIX ETP implosion. However, unlike 2018, this time the trade is in the other direction as investors piled into long and levered VIX ETPs beginning in February, as soon as the VIX index fell below 16, to as JPM suggests. “position for/speculate on the next volatility spike.”

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    However, when it comes to asset flows in 2019 – which has seen the S&P rise back to all time highs even as equity investors have been pulling money from equity funds week after week –  here too the situation is not nearly as simple.

    Commenting on the latest VIX flows, Deutsche Bank’s Parag Thatte reiterates JPMorgan’s point, observing that long VIX ETPs have seen significant inflows totaling $2bn YTD, as retail investors hedge equity gains. This record inflow into VIX ETPs, amounting to $2 billion in notional, is shown on the chart below.

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    Yet while retail investors, which traditionally prefer ETPs to hedge exposure, have been loading up on crash bets, institutional investors which traditionally prefer the greater liquidity of the futures market, are taking the other side of the volatility trade and as the latest CFTC commitment of traders report shows, the speculative net short position in VIX futures is approaching a record,

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    If one believes institutions, one look at the chart above confirms that not only is market complacency greater than its was either ahead of the Q4 mini bear market and February 2018 Volmageddon, but it is just shy of a record.

    And so the question emerges: who is right – retail investors, who are not only pulling billions from equity funds but have pushed their crash bets to all time highs via VIX ETPs, or institutions, who oddly are on the other end of the spectrum, and not are complacent to an almost record degree, but in their pursuit of yield and carry trades have pushed the net VIX futs short position to unprecedented levels. And while conventional wisdom would say that institutions, i.e., the smart money is always right, for the 9th year in a row, hedge funds and their peers are underperforming the market (with macro funds getting demolished once again).

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    So who will be right – retail or institutions. Since both positions are at or near record levels, the answer should emerge in the very near future.

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Apr 13

Today’s News 13th April 2019

  • Religion & The Simulation Hypothesis, Part 2: Is Karma A Questing Algorithm?

    Authored by Riz Virk via Hackernoon.com,

    “Know all things to be like this:

    A mirage, a cloud castle, a dream, an apparition, without essence, but with qualities that can be seen;

    As a magician makes illusions of horses, oxen, carts, and other things, nothing is at it appears.”

    – Buddha

    In Part I of this series, Religion and the Simulation Hypothesis: Is God an AI?, we looked at the implications of the Simulation Hypothesis, the theory that we are all living inside a sophisticated video game, as a model for how many things that are religious in nature might actually be implemented using science and technology. We looked briefly at the groundbreaking film, the Matrix, and how it brought this idea forward into popular consciousness with its release 20 years ago. We also looked at some of the central tenets of the Western (or more accurately, Middle Eastern or Abrahamic) religious traditions to show how they were not only consistent with this new theory, but this theory provided a way to bridge the ever-widening gap between religion and science.

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    In this second part of the series, we turn to the Eastern religious traditions, Hinduism and Buddhism in particular (and some of their offshoots), and look at some of its central tenets. While we had to search for ways that simulation hypothesis might be implied in some of the core beliefs of the Western religions, the simulation hypothesis (or more specifically, the video game version of the simulation hypothesis) seem almost tailor made to fit into these traditions.

    In the video game version of the simulation hypothesis (which is not agreed upon by all simulation theorists), there are PCs (player characters) inside the rendered world who are associated with and controlled by conscious beings (biological or otherwise) outside of the rendered world. In the other version of the simulation hypothesis, everyone in the simulation is an NPC, or non-player character, and are basically AI which are being simulated. While Bostrom’s simulation argument seemed to fit the latter, my interpretation leans towards the former, and this article exploring religion and the simulation hypothesis relies on the video game version with PCs (“player characters”) while the NPCs are there to do what good NPCs do in video games: assist the players in some way to achieve (or hinder) their goals!

    The Eastern mystical texts, as a general rule, are on the one hand, older than the Western religious texts. On the other hand, they might be considered newer because the teachings do not stop with Buddha or any particular sage, nor do they rely on any one “book”. There have been sages and swamis in the many years since the original Vedas were written (the originals were thought to be written in the Vedic period, from 1500 BC to 500 BC), while Buddha’s discourses took places around 500 BC. While many of the original Buddhist texts haven’t been preserved in India, they have been preserved in Tibetan and Chinese. One branch of the Tibetan teachings trace their lineage back to Naropa, an Indian scholar from Kashmir, and with commentaries that continued to the time the Dalai Lama and his monks were forced to flee Tibet.

    What have these mystics been telling us all these long years?

    While everyone has heard of the many gods of Hinduism, when we look further at Buddhism, which grew out of the Hinduism of its time (not unlike Christianity grew out of Judaism), scholars tell us that Buddha didn’t say much about God. It wasn’t so much that he said there was or wasn’t a God or gods– he was just silent on the subject. Instead, he seemed more concerned with the mechanics of how life, reincarnation, karma worked and what this meant for each of us. As we said in Part I, what happens after we die and how that relates to our behavior here, in this world is central the reason religions form in the first place and this is what we will delve into in this article.

    What both traditions agree on is that the world around us is a kind of illusion, like a dream, and that we “download” to bodies to play out different roles in each of our multiple lives. If this sounds familiar it’s because it sounds a lot like a super sophisticated video game a la the Matrix!

    Eastern Central Tenet #1: The World is an illusion or a Dream

    This branch of the Eastern religions explicitly tell us that the world around us is maya, or an illusion, and that all of our actions are recorded and have repercussions which must be played out (albeit in future lives).

    What is the nature of this illusion? According to the Hindu Vedas, it is the lila, the grand play that we become so involved with that we take it for reality. Of course, a stage play is a metaphor that would make sense at the time — each subsequent generation uses the technology of its time to describe God and religious metaphors — and video games may be the most powerful yet. This play is not just like a movie that we watch, but that we actively participate in and change events of.

    In Buddhism, the whole point is to recognize the illusory nature of the world around us — as if we were in a dream. In fact, in the Tibetan traditions there is a whole practice, Dream Yoga, whose goal it is to help you recognize that you are in a dream while asleep.

    Once you have recognized the illusory nature of the “dream-world”, which is like a little simulation that takes place while you are asleep, you are then prepared to the do the same while awake. It is one of the Six Yogas of Naropa, which has been preserved in the Tibetan traditions.

    In a multiplayer game like Second Life or Minecraft, we create objects which are made out of raw materials which are in fact, just pixels. Pixels consist of “information” that is then lit up using light when they are rendered. What seem like permanent things really are only visible and rendered while the game servers are up and running, which gives us new insight into the “impermanence of all things”.

    While this metaphor of a dream or mirage has been used for hundreds (even thousands of years), what this might actually mean from the perspective of science has never been fully explored. It means that what we think is real is actually a kind of projection — like a film, or more likely, an interactive synthetic experience, reminiscent of a dream. In today’s terminology, we would say it’s just like a video game!

    In Buddhism, the whole idea is to reach enlightenment, to get off of the wheel of reincarnation, by “waking up”. In fact, Buddha literally means “one who is awake”. Just like the “red pill” from the Matrix wakes up Neo from his illusory reality, the practices of Meditation and Yoga have been created by the sages over the years for a singular purpose: to wake us up from the illusory nature of reality around us!

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    Figure 1: Buddha’s Endless Wheel of samsara, driven by karma

    Eastern Central Tenet #2: Reincarnation, Karma and Buddha’s Endless Wheel

    Multiple lives are common in video games — anyone who was around in the early days of arcade games remember putting in a quarter for a certain number of lives and then putting in another quarter to “continue playing” the previous life, or to start over. The first widely available arcade game was Pong, built by Atari, founded by Nolan Bushnell in the heart of the counter-culture of Silicon Valley in the 1970’s.

    No one knows if he was seriously thinking about the idea of reincarnation of metaphor of multiple lives from Eastern traditions when the term started to be used in side video games, but the terminology caught on. Today, we take multiple lives inside video games for granted.

    In the Eastern traditions, the tenet of reincarnation is one of the fundamental precepts that underlies various religions. In fact, reincarnation may be a mis-translation — the literal translation is transmigration of the soul from one body to the next.

    The basic idea in these religions is that there is a soul that “downloads” to a physical body. In some traditions, there is the colorful metaphor of crossing the River of Forgetfulness so we don’t remember our past lives. We then “inhabit” this body and in so doing, we create new karma as we go through the actions in this “play” or dream. The Buddhist philosophy is expressed in Buddha’s endless wheel of wandering, or samsara, a depiction of which is shown in Figure 1.

    The reason we re-incarnate, the thing that keeps the wheel spinning, is karma. In the West, we are used to thinking of karma in gross physical terms (someone stabs you in this life, you get to stab them back in another life). It is more accurately the law of cause and effect.

    Assuming for a moment that these religions are describing a real phenomenon, how would it work? How could it be implemented?

    It is basically describing something so similar to playing an MMORPG that we barely have to draw an analogy. In video games, particularly MMORPG’s, we are players who live outside the rendered world. We play “characters” in the game world, and we can pause the character or keep playing it until it dies.

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    Figure 2: An information model for reincarnation and karma

    In the Eastern traditions, where is karma stored? It is information stored outside the rendered world (like a cloud server) in video games. Basically, it functions like a scorecard, but even more so like a set of quests. When we take actions in this life, we are creating a new set of quests for our player to complete in this or a future life. Cause and effect. Each time we play the game, we generate more quests.

    You can think of Buddha’s endless wheel as an endless stream of quests. As you play, you create more quests for you to fulfill. These quests range from “little karma”, which we can fulfill easily in our dream-state (mental impressions or what the Tibetans call “karmic traces”), or “big karma” which requires us to go through actual experiences in our “big dream”, what we call “waking reality”.

    Who decides what challenges or quests we have to take on next? Metaphorically, the Lords of Karma dip into our past karma, which is stored somewhere outside of the physical world, find other “characters/players” for us to interact with (kind of like a multi-life “friends list”).

    The more you looik into karma, the more it looks like an impersonal force and doesnt’ required the Lords of Karam, just as we saw with the recording angels in the Islamic or Christian traditions in Part 1. It is more like a “function that gets implemented” than a series of personified deities keeping watch and making decisions for us.

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    Figure 3: A Video Game Quest Engine for Karma (explored in detail in my book)

    As a video game designer, I spent some time thinking about how this might be implemented. Figure 3, which is explained in detial in my book, is the result.

    It turns out that “Individualized quests” which are accepted by multiple players is about as good of a description as you can have for this process. Far from needing the “Lords of Karma”, if we have billions of souls (on this planet alone!) and each has their own set of karma, what better to keep track of it then an AI or algorithm that adheres to these laws?

    Each piece of karma can be thought of as a quest in a tree-like structure, each of which unlocks additional quests. This is a common structure used in video games, though no video game to date has implemented such a sophisticated quest engine. Each person has their own set of quests, and the system would decide, based upon who else is in the physical scene or vicinity of a player, which of the pieces of karma (or quests) that should be fulfilled now.

    If both players (who we can think of as the souls of two characters in the game) accept the quest, then an interaction is set up. Free will and choice are of course, there, but there is an invisible force that is guiding you towards certain people and certain actions, which leads to the idea that we have souls with whom karma must be fulfilled.

    While there is some disagreement in these traditions about whether there is such a thing as an “immortal soul” — in general, Hinduism leans toward an indestructible soul, while Buddhism tends to lean towards a more functional description. In Buddhism, some scholars have told us that the “thing that reincarnates” is more appropriately a “bag of karma”, rather than a separate indestructible soul. When someone awakens to the reality of the illusory state, the “bag of karma” is emptied and the individual consciousness, like a drop is free to return to the ocean. The wheel of wandering stops turning and they are in their last incarnation here in the game.

    In using the model of the simulation hypothesis, it almost doesn’t matter which of these two is correct– since the soul is downloaded as information and the “bag of karma” is stored somewhere outside the rendered world — just like a cloud server in a game like Fortnite or Minecraft!

    Regardless of which particular interpretation of reincarnation, there is no doubt that what is basically being described is like a very sophisticated video game, with a rendered world that we “enter”, downloading consciousness into a body at birth and uploading it at death. We don’t need actual beings as the Lords of Karma, Buddha’s Endless Wheel may be much better characterized as an algorithm for the lila, the grand play, or the grand video game, of Life!

    Conclusion: The Simulation Hypothesis Explains the Unexplainable

    While it was once fashionable for scientists to invoke God and religion in their findings about how the world works, today this has receded and religion and science are thought of as two separate fields of study and endeavor. In fact, trying to explain religion scientifically, or using science as the basis for religion, is frowned on by both sides.

    But we see that the simulation hypothesis may be the one theory that provides a bridge between those who believe in “something else” and those who believe in the laws and rules of science and the promise of technology.

    With the simulation hypothesis those of us who are scientifically oriented can understand what the religions have been telling us all along: that we live in an illusory dream-like rendered world, that our actions are being recorded by beings (or processes) outside the rendered world, and that, like Neo in The Matrix, we can “wake up” from this simulated reality to the world beyond!

    Einstein once wrote that “science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”

    Thanks to video games and science fiction like The Matrix, we may have a framework, a model, which lets us bridge the ever-widening gap between these worlds.

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    NOTE: On the 20th anniversary of the release of the movie, the Matrix, MIT and Stanford grad Rizwan Virk is releasing his book, The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientists Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are In a Video Game, which explores the scientific, philosophic and religious implications of this important theory. Visit www.zenentrepreneur.comto learn more.

  • Pentagon Warns "Next Major Conflict Maybe Won Or Lost In Space" 

    “The next major conflict may be won or lost in space,” Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Tuesday. “We must confront reality. Weapons are currently deployed by our competitors that can attack our assets in space.”

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    Shanahan said that the U.S. Military “is not moving fast enough to stay ahead” of its rivals China and Russia in the space race. He warned that both countries have already acquired weapon technologies with the intent to strike American spy satellites in the event of conflict.

    “The PLA [Chinese People’s Liberation Army] is also deploying directed-energy weapons, and we expect them to field a ground-based laser system aimed at low-earth orbit space sensors by next year,” Shanahan told the audience. “They are also prepared to use cyber attacks against our space systems and have deployed an operational ground-based ASAT [anti-satellite] missile system.”

    He said that current U.S missile defense shields are “not capable of tracking” Chinese and Russian hypersonic missiles.

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    “Because of their actions, space is no longer a sanctuary — it is now a war-fighting domain. This is not a future or theoretical threat; this is today’s threat,” Shanahan said.

    The acting defense secretary endorsed President Trump’s Space Force, will allow the military to combat hypersonic attacks more effectively.

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    “By creating the new service inside the Air Force, the additional cost is less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the DoD budget. Or put another way, the Space Force will cost about $1.50 per American per year,” Shanahan said, claiming that cost of the new service is relatively small compared to America’s $19 trillion economy.

    The Pentagon currently spends more on defense than any other country.

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    “We are starting now because we refuse to fall behind. We can outpace our competitors and make it impossible for them to contest our dominance in space,” Shanahan concluded.

    * * *

    “Pity the nation whose people are sheep

    And whose shepherds mislead them

    Pity the nation whose leaders are liars

    Whose sages are silenced

    And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

    Pity the nation that raises not its voice

    Except to praise conquerors

    And acclaim the bully as hero

    And aims to rule the world

    By force and by torture…

    Pity the nation oh pity the people

    who allow their rights to erode

    and their freedoms to be washed away…”

    —Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet

    War spending is bankrupting America.

  • The Weakening Of Earth's Magnetic Field Has Greatly Accelerated

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    Earth’s magnetic field is getting significantly weaker, the magnetic north pole is shifting at an accelerating pace, and scientists readily admit that a sudden pole shift could potentially cause “trillions of dollars” in damage.  Today, most of us take the protection provided by Earth’s magnetic field completely for granted.  It is essentially a colossal force field which surrounds our planet and makes life possible.  And even with such protection, a giant solar storm could still potentially hit our planet and completely fry our power grid.  But as our magnetic field continues to get weaker and weaker, even much smaller solar storms will have the potential to be cataclysmic.  And once the magnetic field gets weak enough, we will be facing much bigger problems.  As you will see below, if enough solar radiation starts reaching our planet none of us will survive.

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    Previously, scientists had told us that the magnetic field was weakening by about 5 percent every 100 years.

    But now we are being told that data collected from the SWARM satellite indicate that the rate of decay is now 5 percent per decade…

    It’s well established that in modern times, the axial dipole component of Earth’s main magnetic field is decreasing by approximately 5% per century. Recently, scientists using the SWARM satellite announced that their data indicate a decay rate ten times faster, or 5% per decade.

    In case you didn’t quite get that, 5 percent per decade is 10 times faster than 5 percent per century.

    If the rate of decay continues at this pace, or if it speeds up even more, we could be looking at a mass extinction event that is beyond what most people would dare to imagine.

    As more solar radiation reaches Earth, we would expect to see a rise in cancer rates, and this is something that even National Geographic has acknowledged…

    However, if the magnetic field gets substantially weaker and stays that way for an appreciable amount of time Earth will be less protected from the oodles of high-energy particles that are constantly flying around in space. This means that everything on the planet will be exposed to higher levels of radiation, which over time could produce an increase in diseases like cancer, as well as harm delicate spacecraft and power grids on Earth.

    Of course we are already seeing this.  Cancer rates have been rising all over the world, and if you live in the United States there is a one in three chance that you will get cancer in your lifetime.

    But as the magnetic field continues to weaken, things will get worse.

    A lot worse.

    The weaker the magnetic field gets, the amount of solar radiation that will reach us will rise, and eventually it would get so bad that the entire human race would be in jeopardy.  The following comes from Futurism…

    Radiation and cosmic rays are a real concern for NASA, especially when it comes to long-term spaceflight.  Astronauts on a mission to Mars could undergo up to 1000 times the exposure to radiation and cosmic rays that they would get on Earth.  If Earth’s magnetic field disappeared, the entire human race – and all of life, in fact –  would be in serious danger.  Cosmic rays would bombard our bodies and could even damage our DNA, increasing worldwide risk of cancer and other illnesses.  The flashes of light visible when we close our eyes would be the least of our problems.

    And even if some of us found a way to survive underground for a while, we still wouldn’t be able to survive because solar winds would strip away our planet’s atmosphere and oceans…

    Without Earth’s magnetic field, solar winds — streams of electrically charged particles that flow from the sun — would strip away the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. As such, Earth’s magnetic field helped to make life on the planet possible, researchers have said.

    So could such a scenario actually happen?

    Well,  some scientists are saying that our magnetic field “could be gone in as little as 500 years”, but they are telling us not to worry because Earth’s magnetic poles will “flip” and things will eventually return to normal…

    The magnetic field surrounding Earth is weakening, and scientists say it could be gone in as little as 500 years.

    The result? Earth’s magnetic poles could, literally, flip upside down.

    Of course most scientists believe that a pole flip takes hundreds or thousands of years to happen, but they don’t actually know because they have never seen one take place.

    They also believe that we would potentially be facing “trillions of dollars in damage”to our power grid and electrical infrastructure because the magnetic field would be so weak during a flip…

    Storms far less powerful than these could cause much more damage if they happened to hit while Earth’s magnetic field was in the midst of a reversal, Roberts said. The result would likely be trillions of dollars in damage to our electrical infrastructure, and right now, there’s no plan for dealing with an event of that magnitude.

    “Hopefully, such an event is a long way in the future and we can develop future technologies to avoid huge damage,” Roberts concluded. Keep your fingers (but not your magnetic-field lines) crossed.

    Most of the experts also believe that a pole flip is still a long way off, but what everybody agrees on is that the magnetic north pole is moving toward Russia at an accelerating pace…

    But what’s really catching attention is the acceleration in movement. Around the mid-1990s, the pole suddenly sped up its movements from just over 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year to 34 miles (55 kilometers) annually. As of last year, the pole careened over the international date line toward the Eastern Hemisphere.

    And earlier this year, authorities had to issue an emergency update to global positioning systems because “the magnetic field is changing so rapidly”…

    The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 — but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now. “The error is increasing all the time,” says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Centers for Environmental Information.

    I know that I must sound like a broken record by now, but this is important.  Our planet is becoming increasingly unstable, and we are seeing things happen that we have never seen before.

    Everyone agrees that the Earth’s magnetic field is rapidly getting weaker, and that is making us more vulnerable with each passing day.

    Most of the experts are trying to put a happy face on things and are assuring us that everything is going to be okay.

    Hopefully they are right, but I wouldn’t count on it.

  • Lonely Millennials Are Becoming Friends With Houseplants

    Millennials are already the butt of many modern day jokes, being blamed for ruining things like beer, golf, restaurants and even cereal. And it now appears the laughter coefficient is about to ramp up a notch, with Bloomberg reporting that increasingly more lonely millennials are becoming friends… with houseplants.  

    In addition to providing comedic material to the masses, the newfound obsession has actually boosted the economy, resulting in a revenue bump for the houseplant market. U.S. sales have surged almost 50% to $1.7 billion over the last 3 years, according to the National Gardening Association. In fact, plants are gradually becoming the new “pets”, as many millennials choose to delay having kids and seek to fulfill their desire to connect with nature. 

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    Plants are mostly still being purchased from big, evil, capitalist corporations like Home Depot and Walmart, because they carry inexpensive varieties that are tailored to novice buyers. But there are some startup companies that are targeting this newfound demand. Upstart company The Sill sells most of its plants online and offers care advice, free returns and a slogan for plant-care novices: “Can’t Kill It. Just Try.” 

    Hipsters in places like Brooklyn also have shops like Tend, Tula and Soft Opening to graze for new “friends”. Eliza Blank, The Sill’s founder, said: “We are talking about an antiquated industry that hasn’t changed and a consumer that has. Millennials don’t want to go to Walmart to buy their plants.”

    The houseplant industry last saw a boom back in the 1970’s when hippies accounted for purchases of spider plants that they crafted custom hangers for. Today, millennials are buying plants like the monstera deliciosa and fiddle-leaf fig that have become so popular that many owners consider them children and give them names. 

    “If we don’t have a fiddle-leaf fig, it’s a missed sale,” said Joe Ferrari, owner of Tend. Darryl Cheng, whose runs House Plant Journal on Instagram said: “I know what people who buy plants feel like.” He has answered thousands of questions on plant care  on Instagram, many times under the hashtag #plantsofinstagram, which aggregates 2.7 million posts on plants.   

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    Social media has been the catalyst for the ongoing plant craze, spraying buyers to sits like Etsy and eBay. Even Amazon has benefited from the craze, opening its own dedicated site for plants. Instagram, which recently added a shopping feature to its app, could be next to try and cash in. 

    Bloomberg says “the industry is ripe for disruption” because its supply chain hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years. Growing is mostly done in Florida and operations are widespread throughout Latin America. Many growers, who work with a network of wholesalers, brokers and retailers, don’t even have cell phones and often have zero contact with consumers. As a result it’s tough for them to shift what they are growing based on industry trends. 

    The variegated monstera, a mutation whose leaves are a blend of green and ghostly white, is among one of the sought after plants that’s difficult to grow commercially. Costa Farms, a major grower whose plants are found in places like Amazon and Walmart, employs “plant hunters” who look at distant places like Tanzania to find new varieties to grow. 

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    Often times, it’s difficult to get growers to switch varieties. Kay Kim, co-founder of Rooted, a plant company based in Brooklyn said: “It’s hard to convince a grower to do something new. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.” This can lead to volatility in pricing and availability of some plants. Variegated monsteras sell for $200 on Etsy and monstera deliciosa seeds have more than doubled in price over the last 12 months. 

    Florida grower Matt Metzler said he had “never seen anything like this.” Grower Maxwell Sherer said simply: “It’s a good time to be in plants.”

    The Sill has closed $7.5 million in venture funding and its sales quadrupled last year. 

  • Is There A "Porn Tax" In Your Future?

    Authored by Mark Nestmann via InternationalMan.com,

    The pornography (porn) industry is worth almost $100 billion. Laws that banned porn were struck down more than 50 years ago, so in all 50 states, you can download adult content all you want. Or consume porn the old-fashioned way by reading dirty magazines.

    Companies that distribute pornography, of course, already pay taxes on their profits. But legislators in at least 18 states are anxious to ensure they’re getting their “fair share” of the financial bonanza.

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    One recent effort is in my home state of Arizona. Republican state senator Gail Griffin has introduced HB 2444, the “Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Prevention Act.” The bill would require any manufacturer or supplier of any product that provides access to the Internet to block residents of Arizona from accessing adult content. The filters would need to block all forms of porn and “any hub that facilitates prostitution.”

    The only way that those living in our fair state could have uncensored Internet access would be to prove they are at least 18 years old and pay a $20 unblocking fee to the state. Revenues from fees would go into a fund called the John McCain Human Trafficking Fund. The fund would make grants for projects that “uphold community standards of decency.” The highest-priority grant would be to help pay for construction costs in Arizona of President Trump’s proposed wall along the US-Mexico border. This seems odd, since McCain criticized the border wall.

    Approximately 5.2 million of the residents of Arizona are over 18 and could legally watch porn under Griffin’s bill. If every one of us were to buy a “porn license,” the state would raise around $104 million. This won’t go far to fund the border wall, which is estimated to cost more than $25 billion. It’s unlikely, though, that all 5.2 million residents would pay the fee.

    Of course, if Griffin amended her proposal to require a $20 annual license fee, the state could create a significant continuing revenue stream.

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation has tracked similar proposals in several states. They appear to all be the brainchild of disbarred attorney Mark Christopher Sevier, who has filed numerous lawsuits against technology companies (blaming them for his porn addiction) and several states (seeking permission to marry his laptop to protest same-sex marriage).

    Proponents of porn licensing compare it to excise taxes on cigarettes or alcohol – so-called sin taxes. If the government wants to both raise revenues and reduce the frequency of a certain behavior, it can impose an excise tax on it. And in fact, excise taxes on cigarettes have raised immense revenues for states and reduced demand for tobacco products.

    To date, none of the states in which legislation requiring porn viewers to obtain a license has been proposed have enacted it. And that’s a good thing, because imposing porn filters on consumers is a terrible idea.

    One reason it’s a terrible idea is that it forces consumers to purchase technology they don’t necessarily want. And manufacturers and suppliers are likely to over-censor content for fear of accidentally failing to identify adult content. Even then, these companies would need to employ an army of human censors to troll through borderline websites.

    What’s more, the filters would need to block virtual private networks (VPNs), since they can be used to evade Internet censorship. Anyone concerned about hackers or online identity theft would need to pay the porn tax merely to maintain Internet security.

    But the biggest problem with these proposals is they put us on a slippery slope for further Internet censorship. If our Internet connections are censored by default for porn, what’s next? For a preview of what could develop, look no further than the sophisticated Internet filtering system in China.

    China’s government now employs an estimated two million people to monitor and censor the Internet. They’re called “Internet public opinion analysts.” Their job is to identify and remove objectionable web postings, such as any critique of the government, and to insert hundreds of millions of favorable comments about the Communist Party. The Chinese government has also banned most VPNs.

    Is that the future we want to emulate in the US? I think not. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one or two states enact a porn tax along the lines suggested by Sevier. But I hope they don’t. States shouldn’t use porn as an excuse to quash free choice, free speech, and impose an impossible burden on manufacturers and suppliers of products that connect people to the Internet.

    *  *  *

    Clearly, there are many strange things afoot in the world. Distortions of markets, distortions of culture. It’s wise to wonder what’s going to happen, and to take advantage of growth while also being prepared for crisis. How will you protect yourself in the next crisis? See our PDF guide that will show you exactly how. Click here to download it now.

  • "That's Something China Can't Tolerate": Tensions Erupt As China Slams Australia's "Irresponsible Comments"

    It all started in late February when we reported that a political row had erupted between China and Australia, with Beijing cracking down on imports of coal from Australia, cutting off the country’s miners from their biggest export market and threatening the island nation’s economy at a time when it and its fellow “Five Eyes” members who have sided with the US by blocking or banning Huawei’s 5G network technology.

    In the weeks that followed, while Beijing disputed such a draconian export crackdown, China was overtly targeting Australian coal imports with increased restrictions – what Beijing claims were quality checks – that delayed their passage through northern ports. Given Australia has the highest level of income dependency on China of any developed nation as 30.6% of all Australian export income came from China last year, equivalent to US$87 billion (twice the trade volume with Japan, Australia’s next biggest trading partner), and Australia’s coal industry is deeply dependent on its exports to China, which account for 3.7% of Australia’s GDP, this prompted much speculation that Beijing is punishing coal companies as retribution for political acts by Canberra, one of Washington’s closest allies. “The last time Australia was so dependent on one country for its income was in the 1950s when it was a client state of Britain,” Sydney Morning Herald’s international editor, Peter Hartcher Hartcher said in March, according to the SCMP.

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    To be sure, Beijing had numerous issues that it was smarting over: Australia’s blocking of the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei from building its national 5G network; accusations that China has been involved in spying on its parliament; and the denial of Australian citizenship to billionaire political donor Huang Xiangmo.

    And while tensions simmered largely in private for the subsequent two months, they finally boil over in public when a Chinese coal industry official criticized Australia for biting the hand that feeds it at a coal conference in Beijing, in what the Sydney Morgning Herald declared  was “a rare public acknowledgement that diplomatic tensions could be the cause of slowing trade.”

    “You can’t earn Chinese money and then politically make irresponsible comments about China and become unfriendly,” said Cui Pijiang, director of the China Coking Industry Association. “I’m afraid … this is something the Chinese government can’t tolerate.”

    As noted above, since the Huawei scandal erupted in January the Chinese government has denied any ban on Australian coal, and instead blamed the slowdown in unloading of Australian coal at Chinese ports on tougher environmental inspections. But Cui’s comments in a speech at the Global Coking Coal Summit in Beijing, to an audience that included Australian embassy officials, and representatives from BHP, was a rare public articulation that political factors are at least partly behind Australian coal facing extended inspections.

    “Although businesses can conduct effective, friendly and reasonable cooperation between the two countries, the political factors have to be considered,” he said adding that politics and the economy are always indispensable to each other.

    Immediately before his comments, the SMH reported that Cui pointed out the Australian embassy was in the audience, saying Australia was the largest coking coal exporter to China.

    What was most stunning to analysts and observers is that what until now was a diplomatic conflict that was only acknowledged in private, spilled out in the public and the audience were stunned by the political attack in a business forum.

    One audience member, clearly one who can’t put 2 and 2 together and needs everything presented on a silver platter, said: “We’ve all been chasing this phantom of what’s driving this behaviour and this was a much clearer articulation – in an inappropriate forum.” While “one audience member” may have been amazed by China confirmation that its behaviour was purely a political retaliation, we can only hope that it was clear to everyone else.

    What is ironic is that Chinese steel mills had actually preferred Australia’s higher quality imported coal amid a government crackdown on emissions and implementation of tougher environmental policies. Cui said China consumes 600 million tonnes of coking coal each year and imports 69 million tonnes, but argued China should meet its domestic needs.

    Meanwhile, what we said above about how this situation should have been obvious to everyone, well strike that because as the SMH adds, Australian diplomats “have attended a spate of coal industry conferences across Beijing and Shanghai in the past fortnight to try to understand why Australian coal was facing a slowdown and try to determine how long it will last.”

    And while Australia may now “know” what is behind the boycott of Australian coal, that doesn’t mean the situation will get any better; in fact, it is only set to get even worse, as the conference heard that a restriction policy on overall imported coking coal levels would become tougher in 2019.

    Fenwei Energy Information vice-general manager Sarah Liu said China’s coal imports were 280 million tonnes last year, but the policy would restrict annual imports to 200 million tonnes by 2020. This target was “quite challenging”, she said. And as imports of coal fell in 2019, domestic coking coal production would increase, she forecast.

    Australia was the top coking coal importer in 2018 at 28 million tonnes, but Mongolia was catching up at 27 million. Russia saw coal imports fall 4.2 per cent last year, but would increase this year, she predicted.

    But one place that is sure to benefit from the escalation in trade tensions between Beijing and Canberra, is yet another Latin American nation that is slated to become China’s next vassal colony. As S&P Global reports, Clombian thermal coal is proving attractive to Chinese buyers, who are picking up “super cheap” offers from producers and traders with around 1 million to 1.35 million mt of coal on its way to China from the South American exporter, plus additional cargoes to northeast Asian countries including South Korea.

    In addition to not being politically charged, one other benefit of Colombia coal is that it is much cheaper: June-arrival Capesize cargoes of Colombian thermal coal are trading at $65/mt CFR China on a 5,500 kcal/kg NAR basis, which is cheaper than equivalent grade Australian cargoes priced at $68/mt.

    And with Australian purchase set to collapse – should the nation continue to antagonize Beijing with its pro-US bias – Chinese traders are wasting no time, and one of them is understood to have booked three Colombian cargoes for June arrival, adding up to nearly 500,000 mt, S&P sources.

    “There is 1 million mt of Colombian coal on its way to China,” said one market source.

    Meanwhile, there is a lot of Australian coal also on its way to China, the only problem is that due to the escalating diplomatic scandal, it just can’t depart: one market source estimated that about 4 million mt of Australian thermal coal was waiting to enter Chinese ports in May and June.

    And while some have have expressed hope that China will lift its restrictions on Australian coal shipments at the end of May, this looks increasingly unlikely, especially after China’s foreign ministry on Thursday criticized Australia’s telecommunications legislation that allows “backdoors” to be installed.

    Australia had barred Huawei from participating in the 5G network because of fears China installed backdoors on Huawei.

    “It is baffling how the country concerned could whip up ‘security threats’ posed by other countries or companies … while engaging in acts that endanger cyber security themselves,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang, sending a clear message to Australia: if you continue to side with the US on the Huawei – or any other issue – you can keep your coal.

  • Tverberg: The True Feasibility Of Moving Away From Fossil Fuels

    Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

    One of the great misconceptions of our time is the belief that we can move away from fossil fuels if we make suitable choices on fuels. In one view, we can make the transition to a low-energy economy powered by wind, water, and solar. In other versions, we might include some other energy sources, such as biofuels or nuclear, but the story is not very different.

    The problem is the same regardless of what lower bound a person chooses: our economy is way too dependent on consuming an amount of energy that grows with each added human participant in the economy. This added energy is necessary because each person needs food, transportation, housing, and clothing, all of which are dependent upon energy consumption. The economy operates under the laws of physics, and history shows disturbing outcomes if energy consumption per capita declines.

    There are a number of issues:

    • The impact of alternative energy sources is smaller than commonly believed.

    • When countries have reduced their energy consumption per capita by significant amounts, the results have been very unsatisfactory.

    • Energy consumption plays a bigger role in our lives than most of us imagine.

    • It seems likely that fossil fuels will leave us before we can leave them.

    • The timing of when fossil fuels will leave us seems to depend on when central banks lose their ability to stimulate the economy through lower interest rates.

    • If fossil fuels leave us, the result could be the collapse of financial systems and governments.

    [1] Wind, water and solar provide only a small share of energy consumption today; any transition to the use of renewables alone would have huge repercussions.

    According to BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy data, wind, water and solar only accounted for 9.4% 0f total energy consumption in 2017.

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    Figure 1. Wind, Water and Solar as a percentage of total energy consumption, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.

    Even if we make the assumption that these types of energy consumption will continue to achieve the same percentage increases as they have achieved in the last 10 years, it will still take 20 more years for wind, water, and solar to reach 20% of total energy consumption.

    Thus, even in 20 years, the world would need to reduce energy consumption by 80% in order to operate the economy on wind, water and solar alone. To get down to today’s level of energy production provided by wind, water and solar, we would need to reduce energy consumption by 90%.

    [2] Venezuela’s example (Figure 1, above) illustrates that even if a country has an above average contribution of renewables, plus significant oil reserves, it can still have major problems.

    One point people miss is that having a large share of renewables doesn’t necessarily mean that the lights will stay on. A major issue is the need for long distance transmission lines to transport the renewable electricity from where it is generated to where it is to be used. These lines must constantly be maintained. Maintenance of electrical transmission lines has been an issue in both Venezuela’s electrical outages and in California’s recent fires attributed to the utility PG&E.

    There is also the issue of variability of wind, water and solar energy. (Note the year-to-year variability indicated in the Venezuela line in Figure 1.) A country cannot really depend on its full amount of wind, water, and solar unless it has a truly huge amount of electrical storage: enough to last from season-to-season and year-to-year. Alternatively, an extraordinarily large quantity of long-distance transmission lines, plus the ability to maintain these lines for the long term, would seem to be required.

    [3] When individual countries have experienced cutbacks in their energy consumption per capita, the effects have generally been extremely disruptive, even with cutbacks far more modest than the target level of 80% to 90% that we would need to get off fossil fuels. 

    Notice that in these analyses, we are looking at “energy consumption per capita.” This calculation takes the total consumption of all kinds of energy (including oil, coal, natural gas, biofuels, nuclear, hydroelectric, and renewables) and divides it by the population.

    Energy consumption per capita depends to a significant extent on what citizens within a given economy can afford. It also depends on the extent of industrialization of an economy. If a major portion of industrial jobs are sent to China and India and only service jobs are retained, energy consumption per capita can be expected to fall. This happens partly because local companies no longer need to use as many energy products. Additionally, workers find mostly service jobs available; these jobs pay enough less that workers must cut back on buying goods such as homes and cars, reducing their energy consumption.

    Example 1. Spain and Greece Between 2007-2014

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    Figure 2. Greece and Spain energy consumption per capita. Energy data is from BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy; population estimates are UN 2017 population estimates.

    The period between 2007 and 2014 was a period when oil prices tended to be very high. Both Greece and Spain are very dependent on oil because of their sizable tourist industries. Higher oil prices made the tourism services these countries sold more expensive for their consumers. In both countries, energy consumption per capita started falling in 2008 and continued to fall until 2014, when oil prices began falling. Spain’s energy consumption per capita fell by 18% between 2007 and 2014; Greece’s fell by 24% over the same period.

    Both Greece and Spain experienced high unemployment rates, and both have needed debt bailouts to keep their financial systems operating. Austerity measures were forced on Greece. The effects on the economies of these countries were severe. Regarding Spain, Wikipedia has a section called, “2008 to 2014 Spanish financial crisis,” suggesting that the loss of energy consumption per capita was highly correlated with the country’s financial crisis.

    Example 2: France and the UK, 2004 – 2017

    Both France and the UK have experienced falling energy consumption per capita since 2004, as oil production dropped (UK) and as industrialization was shifted to countries with a cheaper total cost of labor and fuel. Immigrant labor was added, as well, to better compete with the cost structures of the countries that France and the UK were competing against. With the new mix of workers and jobs, the quantity of goods and services that these workers could afford (per capita) has been falling.

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    Figure 3. France and UK energy consumption per capita. Energy data is from BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy; population estimates are UN 2017 population estimates.

    Comparing 2017 to 2004, energy consumption per capita is down 16% for France and 25% in the UK. Many UK citizens have been very unhappy, wanting to leave the European Union.

    France recently has been experiencing “Yellow Vest” protests, at least partly related to an increase in carbon taxes. Higher carbon taxes would make energy-based goods and services less affordable. This would likely reduce France’s energy consumption per capita even further. French citizens with their protests are clearly not happy about how they are being affected by these changes.

    Example 3: Syria (2006-2016) and Yemen (2009-2016)

    Both Syria and Yemen are examples of formerly oil-exporting countries that are far past their peak production. Declining energy consumption per capita has been forced on both countries because, with their oil exports falling, the countries can no longer afford to use as much energy as they did in the past for previous uses, such as irrigation. If less irrigation is used, food production and jobs are lost. (Syria and Yemen)

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    Figure 4. Syria and Yemen energy consumption per capita. Energy consumption data from US Energy Information Administration; population estimates are UN 2017 estimates.

    Between Yemen’s peak year in energy consumption per capita (2009) and the last year shown (2016), its energy consumption per capita dropped by 66%. Yemen has been named by the United Nations as the country with the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Yemen cannot provide adequate food and water for its citizens. Yemen is involved in a civil war that others have entered into as well. I would describe the war as being at least partly a resource war.

    The situation with Syria similar. Syria’s energy consumption per capita declined 55% between its peak year (2006) and the last year available (2016). Syria is also involved in a civil war that has been entered into by others. Here again, the issue seems to be inadequate resources per capita; war participants are to some extent fighting over the limited resources that are available.

    Example 4: Venezuela (2008-2017)

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    Figure 5. Energy consumption per capita for Venezuela, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy data and UN 2017 population estimates.

    Between 2008 and 2017, energy consumption per capita in Venezuela declined by 23%. This is a little less than the decreases experienced by the UK and Greece during their periods of decline.

    Even with this level of decline, Venezuela has been having difficulty providing adequate services to its citizens. There have been reports of empty supermarket shelves. Venezuela has not been able to maintain its electrical system properly, leading to many outages.

    [4] Most people are surprised to learn that energy is required for every part of the economy. When adequate energy is not available, an economy is likely to first shrink back in recession; eventually, it may collapse entirely.

    Physics tells us that energy consumption in a thermodynamically open system enables all kinds of “complexity.” Energy consumption enables specialization and hierarchical organizations. For example, growing energy consumption enables the organizations and supply lines needed to manufacture computers and other high-tech goods. Of course, energy consumption also enables what we think of as typical energy uses: the transportation of goods, the smelting of metals, the heating and air-conditioning of buildings, and the construction of roads. Energy is even required to allow pixels to appear on a computer screen.

    Pre-humans learned to control fire over one million years ago. The burning of biomass was a tool that could be used for many purposes, including keeping warm in colder climates, frightening away predators, and creating better tools. Perhaps its most important use was to permit food to be cooked, because cooking increases food’s nutritional availability. Cooked food seems to have been important in allowing the brains of humans to grow bigger at the same time that teeth, jaws and guts could shrink compared to those of ancestors. Humans today need to be able to continue to cook part of their food to have a reasonable chance of survival.

    Any kind of governmental organization requires energy. Having a single leader takes the least energy, especially if the leader can continue to perform his non-leadership duties. Any kind of added governmental service (such as roads or schools) requires energy. Having elected leaders who vote on decisions takes more energy than having a king with a few high-level aides. Having multiple layers of government takes energy. Each new intergovernmental organization requires energy to fly its officials around and implement its programs.

    International trade clearly requires energy consumption. In fact, pretty much every activity of businesses requires energy consumption.

    Needless to say, the study of science or of medicine requires energy consumption, because without significant energy consumption to leverage human energy, nearly every person must be a subsistence level farmer, with little time to study or to take time off from farming to write (or even read) books. Of course, manufacturing medicines and test tubes requires energy, as does creating sterile environments.

    We think of the many parts of the economy as requiring money, but it is really the physical goods and services that money can buy, and the energy that makes these goods and services possible, that are important. These goods and services depend to a very large extent on the supply of energy being consumed at a given point in time–for example, the amount of electricity being delivered to customers and the amount of gasoline and diesel being sold. Supply chains are very dependent on each part of the system being available when needed. If one part is missing, long delays and eventually collapse can occur.

    [5] If the supply of energy to an economy is reduced for any reason, the result tends to be very disruptive, as shown in the examples given in Section [3], above.

    When an economy doesn’t have enough energy, its self-organizing feature starts eliminating pieces of the economic system that it cannot support. The financial system tends to be very vulnerable because without adequate economic growth, it becomes very difficult for borrowers to repay debt with interest. This was part of the problem that Greece and Spain had in the period when their energy consumption per capita declined. A person wonders what would have happened to these countries without bailouts from the European Union and others.

    Another part that is very vulnerable is governmental organizations, especially the higher layers of government that were added last. In 1991, the Soviet Union’s central government was lost, leaving the governments of the 15 republics that were part of the Soviet Union. As energy consumption per capita declines, the European Union would seem to be very vulnerable. Other international organizations, such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, would seem to be vulnerable, as well.

    The electrical system is very complex. It seems to be easily disrupted if there is a material decrease in energy consumption per capita because maintenance of the system becomes difficult.

    If energy consumption per capita falls dramatically, many changes that don’t seem directly energy-related can be expected. For example, the roles of men and women are likely to change. Without modern medical care, women will likely need to become of the mothers of several children in order that an average of two can survive long enough to raise their own children. Men will be valued for the heavy manual labor that they can perform. Today’s view of the equality of the sexes is likely to disappear because sex differences will become much more important in a low-energy world.

    Needless to say, other aspects of a low-energy economy might be very different as well. For example, one very low-energy type of economic system is a “gift economy.” In such an economy, the status of each individual is determined by the amount that that person can give away. Anything a person obtains must automatically be shared with the local group or the individual will be expelled from the group. In an economy with very low complexity, this kind of economy seems to work. A gift economy doesn’t require money or debt!

    [6] Most people assume that moving away from fossil fuels is something we can choose to do with whatever timing we would like. I would argue that we are not in charge of the process. Instead, fossil fuels will leave us when we lose the ability to reduce interest rates sufficiently to keep oil and other fossil fuel prices high enough for energy producers.

    Something that may seem strange to those who do not follow the issue is the fact that oil (and other energy prices) seem to be very much influenced by interest rates and the level of debt. In general, the lower the interest rate, the more affordable high-priced goods such as factories, homes, and automobiles become, and the higher commodity prices of all kinds can be. “Demand” increases with falling interest rates, causing energy prices of all types to rise.

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    Figure 6.

    The cost of extracting oil is less important in determining oil prices than a person might expect. Instead, prices seem to be determined by what end products consumers (in the aggregate) can afford. In general, the more debt that individual citizens, businesses and governments can obtain, the higher that oil and other energy prices can rise. Of course, if interest rates start rising (instead of falling), there is a significant chance of a debt bubble popping, as defaults rise and asset prices decline.

    Interest rates have been generally falling since 1981 (Figure 7). This is the direction needed to support ever-higher energy prices.

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    Figure 7. Chart of 3-month and 10-year interest rates, prepared by the FRED, using data through March 27, 2019.

    The danger now is that interest rates are approaching the lowest level that they can possibly reach. We need lower interest rates to support the higher prices that oil producers require, as their costs rise because of depletion. In fact, if we compare Figures 7 and 8, the Federal Reserve has been supporting higher oil and other energy prices with falling interest rates practically the whole time since oil prices rose above the inflation adjusted level of $20 per barrel!

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    Figure 8. Historical inflation adjusted prices oil, based on data from 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, with the low price period for oil highlighted.

    Once the Federal Reserve and other central banks lose their ability to cut interest rates further to support the need for ever-rising oil prices, the danger is that oil and other commodity prices will fall too low for producers. The situation is likely to look like the second half of 2008 in Figure 6. The difference, as we reach limits on how low interest rates can fall, is that it will no longer be possible to stimulate the economy to get energy and other commodity prices back up to an acceptable level for producers.

    [7] Once we hit the “no more stimulus impasse,” fossil fuels will begin leaving us because prices will fall too low for companies extracting these fuels. They will be forced to leave because they cannot make an adequate profit.

    One example of an oil producer whose production was affected by an extended period of low prices is the Soviet Union (or USSR).

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    Figure 9. Oil production of the former Soviet Union together with oil prices in 2017 US$. All amounts from 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

    The US substantially raised interest rates in 1980-1981 (Figure 7). This led to sharp reduction in oil prices, as the higher interest rates cut back investment of many kinds, around the world. Given the low price of oil, the Soviet Union reduced new investment in new fields. This slowdown in investment first reduced the rate of growth in oil production, and eventually led to a decline in production in 1988 (Figure 9). When oil prices rose again, production did also.

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    Figure 10. Energy consumption per capita for the former Soviet Union, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy data and UN 2017 population estimates.

    The Soviet Union’s energy consumption per capita reached its highest level in 1988 and began declining in 1989. The central government of the Soviet Union did not collapse until late 1991, as the economy was increasingly affected by falling oil export revenue.

    Some of the changes that occurred as the economy simplified itself were the loss of the central government, the loss of a large share of industry, and a great deal of job loss. Energy consumption per capita dropped by 36% between 1988 and 1998. It has never regained its former level.

    Venezuela is another example of an oil exporter that, in theory, could export more oil, if oil prices were higher. It is interesting to note that Venezuela’s highest energy consumption per capita occurred in 2008, when oil prices were high.

    We are now getting a chance to observe what the collapse in Venezuela looks like on a day- by-day basis. Figure 5, above, shows Venezuela’s energy consumption per capita pattern through 2017. Low oil prices since 2014 have particularly adversely affected the country.

    [8] Conclusion: We can’t know exactly what is ahead, but it is clear that moving away from fossil fuels will be far more destructive of our current economy than nearly everyone expects. 

    It is very easy to make optimistic forecasts about the future if a person doesn’t carefully examine what the data and the science seem to be telling us. Most researchers come from narrow academic backgrounds that do not seek out insights from other fields, so they tend not to understand the background story.

    A second issue is the desire for a “happy ever after” ending to our current energy predicament. If a researcher is creating an economic model without understanding the underlying principles, why not offer an outcome that citizens will like? Such a solution can help politicians get re-elected and can help researchers get grants for more research.

    We should be examining the situation more closely than most people have considered. The fact that interest rates cannot drop much further is particularly concerning.

  • Stephen Moore Set To Challenge Fed Status Quo

    Trump’s proposed nominee to the seven-member Federal Reserve board, Stephen Moore, is planning to challenge the status quo at the US central bank, at a time when it needs continuity and stability the most. Moore said on Bloomberg that he is seeking to debunk the idea that growth causes inflation and that he is also going to “try to demystify monetary policy so it’s not conducted within a temple of secrecy.”

    Moore said yesterday: “I’ll say that again: Growth does not cause inflation. We know that. When you have more output of goods and services, prices fall. And I think the Fed has been afraid of growth — there’s “growth-phobiacs” over there and I think they’re wrong.” Whether or not the FOMC committee will agree with that remains to be seen, it would be perhaps more interesting to hear his position on whether debt causes growth, which is far more topical in a world where to “buy” one dollar of GDP, nations have to increase debt by $3, $4 or more.

    Last month, President Trump said that he’s planning to nominate Moore for a seat on the Fed’s board of governors. Trump’s intentions drew ire and criticism from some circles as a move motivated by politics instead of “sound” economics.

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    Another of Moore’s missions that’s sure to be a hit with current Fed governors is his intentions to make the Fed more transparent. 

    “I’m going to run on an agenda of transparency, openness. Why shouldn’t Bloomberg and C-Span and others be able to cover everything they do? Why does there have to be this temple of secrecy? So, I want openness and sunlight on the Fed,” Moore said, assuring that his future colleagues (assuming he succeeds in the nomination process) isolate him from any off the record, decision-making huddles. He certainly will never be invited to conference room E at the BIS tower in Basel where all the really important decisions are made every few weeks.

    Moore further raised eyebrows for pushing the Fed to set monetary policy in response to falling commodity prices and criticizing its rate hikes for undermining Trump’s economy, after slamming it when Barack Obama was in the White House for keeping rates too low. He also called for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to be fired, though he later said he regretted that remark.

    Of course, Moore still has to undergo FBI clearance and financial disclosures before being nominated, a process that usually lasts about a month. 

    That said, if he’s interested in transparency, perhaps he can start by explaining his recent comments, when he referred to himself as a “growth hawk”, a term that nobody seems to understand. 

    “We want wage increases, I want workers to be better off but I’ve said repeatedly when I get at the Fed I’m going to be the growth hawk there. I’m one of these people, I don’t believe in secular stagnation, it’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” Moore told FOX Business yesterday.

    Even if he is nominated, he is certain to get the cold shoulder from his Fed colleagues: as Bloomberg reported today, Fed officials, “in their polite and coded way”, have already issued a veiled warning for the political loyalists that President Donald Trump is trying to insert into their ranks: We don’t do flimsy economics, which of course is hilarious for a central bank which last October said the neutral rate was “far away”, and just two months later had to make a humiliating U-turn after the market slumped into a very brief bear market.

    “There’s a lot of analysis that goes into these decisions and a lot of dispassionate judgment about a variety of matters about the macro economy,’’ St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said Thursday in Tupelo, Mississippi, apparently without a shred of self-referential sarcasm. “Even if somebody comes in with strong political views, they get converted into technocrats pretty quickly.”

    And by technocrats, he means people who check the S&P several times every hour, ready to launch QE or issue a dovish soundbite should the “wealth effect” ever be threatened and jeopardize the social order with even a modest correction.

    * * *

    Providing some perspective on Moore’s thought process is Cornell professor, libertarian and self-described gold bug Dave Collum who saw Moore speak earlier this week, and had the chance for a 20 minute one-on-one conversation with the potential nominee. Collum described Moore as a “remarkably genuine person displaying serious humility.” He continued, “I didn’t detect even a twinge of arrogance”:

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    Collum note that Moore told students to question authority. “Experts can be dead wrong,” Moore said.

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    Moore also apparently stressed a goal of zero inflation and holding prices fixed. 

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    Moore also didn’t seem to loathe or laugh at the gold standard, like almost every other Fed governor and academic over the past few decades.

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    He also noted that he “detests corporate welfare” and ended his conversation with a great one liner: “Monetary policy cannot correct for bad economic policy.” Moore also called MMT the “most insane concept imaginable”. 

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    You can read Collum’s entire interaction with Moore in this thread.

  • It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time…

    Submitted by Eric Peters of Rabobank

    Let’s face it, there are some pretty dumb ideas out there in markets right now. The economic assumptions that underpin the macro view of how the world works, and hence where value is likely to sit in the long run, is a great place to start.

    For example, aggregate demand curves don’t exist, as was shown by Sonnenshein-Mantle-Debreu decades ago: yet almost all economics still relies on aggregate demand curves regardless. For another, economic theory says firms stop producing goods when diminishing productivity means marginal cost of production equals marginal cost: except that is demonstrably untrue, as has been known since Sraffa (1926), and underlined every time actual firms are asked what their actual marginal cost of production is (fixed after a certain point) and when they actually stop production (when there is no demand). Or how about efficient markets hypothesis – that asset prices fully reflect all available information and it is impossible to “beat the market” consistently on a risk-adjusted basis? Forget the debunking work of psychologists like Kahneman and Tversky: has anyone who agrees with that theory ever worked in a market? (I vividly recall one former salesman in another bank in the early 2000s asking me for my views on the Hungarian Florin.) The simple point, dear readers, is that markets can be built on intellectual foundations of sand. It might be a while before everyone realizes that and prices adjust violently, but we get there in the end. (And then the same silly economic theories keep being taught in universities regardless.)

    But then we get examples rammed in our faces. For example, bond issuance by an energy-producing company so incredibly profitable it somehow needs to tap international capital markets for billions, the pricing for which then trades inside the sovereign which owns it. Or a major transportation company that loses money with every journey it makes whose IPO is massively over-subscribed and then slumps…to be followed by the IPO of a rival firm with exactly the same money-losing business model. Or how about sovereign bond yields that are negative and yet highly sought-after? Or Chinese bank perpetual bonds at 4.5% that never give you your principle back? Or a cash-strapped Chinese firm that had to repay bond holders in ham, not cash, then ran low on pigs, and whose shares are up 78% YTD? Or USD/CNH flat as a pancake at 6.70 and volatility collapsing when the political backdrop, economic fundamentals, and CFETS currency basket all say CNH should be closer to 7? One could make an argument that all of the above also belong in the ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time…’ file.  

    However, the latest news simply takes the breath away: Chinese scientists have put human brain genes in monkeys—and yes, they may be smarter. Yes, the story is exactly as printed. Chinese scientists –and not the same ones who have permanently altered the DNA of babies with unforeseen future impacts on the human gene pool in what is either dangerous ‘mutant’ or, even worse, eugenics territory– have deliberately altered monkey brains to try to increase simian intelligence.

    Can I politely suggest that it is the Chinese scientists whose intelligence needs to be raised? Technologyreview.com quotes James Sikela, a geneticist who carries out comparative studies among primates at the University of Colorado: “The use of transgenic monkeys to study human genes linked to brain evolution is a very risky road to take. It is a classic slippery slope issue and one that we can expect to recur as this type of research is pursued.” He is concerned the experiment will soon lead to even more extreme modifications. And how could that end badly?!!! Haven’t we just had a series of Hollywood movies pointing out in detail what kind of horrible scenarios could play out there – and, yes, they were even released in China. (Though the classic episode of The Simpsons with super-intelligent space chimps probably wasn’t.) And, of course, the idiot-savant human-genome-editing/monkey-genome-editing crowd is joined by scientists trying to bring back dinosaurs. Again, it’s not as if we haven’t been saturated with movies telling us what an appalling-stupid idea that would be. As Jeff Goldblum’s character Dr Ian Malcolm says in the first Jurassic Park adventure: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Folks, that applies not only to X-Men, Superman, and Planet of the Apes scenarios in China, but to so, so much that one sees around you in the markets daily. Frankly, as I’ve said before and will say again:

    Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off. From Chimpan A to Chimpan Z, you’ll never make a monkey out of me.

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Apr 12

Today’s News 12th April 2019

  • "The UK Has Gone Mad" – Brits' Disenchantment With Politics Is Soaring

    The rest of the world is watching in disbelief…

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    In the New York Times Thomas L. Friedman wrote “If you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t come to London right now because there is political farce everywhere. In truth though it’s not very funny, it’s actually tragic… What we’re seeing is a country that’s determined to commit economic suicide but can’t even agree on how to kill itself.”

     He went on to say we were led by “a ship of fools” unwilling to “compromise with one another and with reality… an epic failure of political leadership,” scary stuff “but you can’t fix stupid.”

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    In the Washington Post Fareed Zakaria wrote  “Brexit will mark the end of Britain’s role as a great power. Britain famous for its prudence, propriety and punctuality is suddenly looking like a banana republic.”

    He goes on to warn that the consequences of a no-deal Brexit could mean the beginning of the end of “the West as a political and strategic entity.”

    Underlining the damage that the Brexit process is doing to faith in politics in the UK, Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes that the Hansard Society’s annual Audit of Political Engagement has revealed a rate of disenchantment with the system unprecedented in recent years, surpassing even the fallout from the MP expenses scandal.

    Infographic: Growing disenchantment with the UK political system | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    When asked their opinion on the present system of governing Britain, 37 percent of respondents said they think it needs ‘a great deal of improvement’ – up from 29 percent last year and a whole 19 points higher than the first survey published in 2004.

  • EU And China Sign A Mandate For Trade Heaven

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    Beijing promises an investment deal by next year, to curb industrial subsidies and the need for tech transfers, while the EU promises its own transport network…

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    Sparks did fly in Brussels, but in the end the European Union and China managed to come up with an important joint statement at their summit this week, signed by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and head of the European Council, Donald Tusk.

    In theory, there’s agreement on three quite sensitive fronts: a complex, wide-ranging EU-China investment deal to be signed “by the end of next year, or earlier”, according to Li; Beijing to increasingly commit to erasing industrial subsidies and the obligation of technological transfers; and a substantial opening-up of the Chinese market to EU companies.

    The EU is the largest combined market in the world and China’s top partner in trade, while China is the EU’s second largest trading partner. So, the EU-China summit on Tuesday was the real deal, unlike the endless Brexit soap opera.

    Departing from concentric circles of posturing, the EU did not even blast China as a “systemic rival” – following the recent report EU-China: A Strategic Outlook. And there were no accusations of “unfair” trade hurled at Beijing.

    Crucially, Brussels and Beijing seem to be finally engaging in building some sort of synergy between the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and something only Eurocrats know actually exists – the EU Connecting Europe and Asia project, which in theory should advance in conjunction with the Trans-European Transport Network – a rail, road and air connectivity drive.

    Diplomats in Brussels said off-the-record that the run-up towards this entente cordiale was as bumpy as a trail in the Tibetan plateau. EU negotiators did try to walk away from the table without even talking to their Chinese counterparts, over Beijing’s much promised, and always delayed “market reforms”.

    It’s as if the EU – in practice, the leading Franco-German duo – was trying to pull a Trump, employing hardcore pressure to extract concessions. It worked.

    Before the summit, while the war of the sherpas was raging, with revision piling upon revision, Zhang Ming, China’s ambassador to the EU and its leading negotiator, did his best to dismiss the notion of China as a “systemic rival”. “In Chinese culture, rivals are bound to seek superiority over the other side,” he was quoted as saying.

    Brussels demanded from the start that all rewrites to their agreement should be tacitly approved by the leadership in Beijing – which took no time to understand the powerful geoeconomic ramifications of a positive outlook, in contrast with the trade war still unresolved with the US. And that led to the breakthrough that finally made the EU swoon, a real-life timetable for those elusive Chinese “reforms”.

    The joint statement reads in fact like a rose garden: “The high level of ambition will be reflected in substantially improved market access [and] the elimination of discriminatory requirements and practices affecting foreign investors.” The devil, of course, is in the details.

    All the way to the 16+1

    From Beijing’s perspective, this spectacular trade and diplomatic victory smoothes the path towards the China and Central and Eastern Europe 16+1 summit in Dubrovnik on Friday. Of the European 16, no less than 11 are EU member states, while five are Western Balkans members.

    Even as Li emphasizes at every turn Beijing’s firm interest in EU unity, one has to marvel at the Sun Tzu maneuver at the heart of the Chinese approach. No wonder some EU players incessantly carp at China’s divide-and-rule tactics.

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    Take for instance the Croatian angle. Croatia will sign a memorandum of understanding with Huawei, while the Croatian Railway Infrastructure and China Railway Eryuan Engineering Group will agree to set up a transportation corridor. Translation: smoother trade between Central Europe and ports in the Mediterranean, with China fast interlinking Greece, Italy and Croatia.

    Slowly but surely, EU decisions are fast becoming integrated with the 16+1. Brussels Eurocrats actually examined the draft of deals that will be signed at the 16+1 summit in Dubrovnik. Unlike France, for instance, most of the 16+1 are enthusiastic participants in BRI – which, not by accident, is the star of the show, especially after Italy signed a memorandum of understanding to join New Silk Road projects last month.

    Even as the EU lingers at designing what it still does not have – a comprehensive industrial policy – Beijing hits all the necessary buttons: free trade, multilateralism, globalization 2.0 – or even 3.0 or 4.0. Beijing essentially does not fear competing with EU firms.

    After all, Beijing’s drive is to configure national champions in virtually every industrial and post-industrial sector, including preeminence in 5G and AI. The crux of the Chinese strategy is not the US but a close relationship with Europe, where opportunities to acquire first-class technology and first-class education are immense. Not to mention that Europe is BRI’s privileged terminal.

    Perception is reality. There’s no doubt the Beijing leadership has understood that this EU-China agreement goes a long way to show, especially to its leaders, that they are dealing with a responsible emerging superpower. The contrast with the acrimony and intimidation tactics displayed throughout the US trade war could not be sharper. 

    Remember the deluge

    At this stage, a flashback may be enlightening to put all that’s going on in perspective.

    All the major religions of the book – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – share the same fable, according to which Noah, after the Deluge, divided the earth between his three sons. Shem got “Asia”, the lands considered the oldest, Ham got Africa, and Japheth got Europe.

    It was only in the 18th century Europe that a noxious Christian equation went into full effect, articulating the curse of Ham, the color of a man’s skin, ethnic descent and slavery. That’s how the West justified racial slavery and the pillage of Africa – reduced to the status of a non-civilized space.

    At the same time, under European (the land of Japheth) guidance, America was promoted as a land of colonization, and Asia (the land of Shem), as a land of economic exploitation. Judeo-Christian European elites had to admit the ancient brilliance of those Asian civilizations – Mesopotamia, India, China – but in the end they no more than integrated Asia in a new Orientalist narrative.

    In parallel, based on the allegedly non-shameful character of Shem’s descendants, these elites forged a relatively common Semitic origin. And attributing Ham’s curse to a Muslim source, which for its part evoked Jewish sources, Christianity exonerated itself. The colonial, imperialist European project was on a roll.

    But now China is back, for real, and for good, after a short historical interval. And the Chinese know all there is to know about European colonialism. Don’t expect Eurocrats fingering color-coded folders to have such long memories. But they certainly don’t need to study Admiral Zheng He’s travels to see which way the wind is blowing.

  • Dutch F-16 Damaged After Own Bullet Strikes Fuselage

    A Royal Netherlands Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon was severely damaged during a live-fire training mission at Vliehors Shooting Range in the Netherlands, earlier this year, reported The Military Times.

    Dutch State media released a photo of the damaged aircraft, showing at least one round ripping through the plane’s exterior skin. The fighter jet reportedly had engine damage from the debris. Although details behind the incident have been kept secret, Dutch media outlets have described the mishap as a case of the “plane shooting itself.”

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    The F-16’s armament includes a General Electric M61A1 Vulcan, a 6-barrel 20mm cannon. It fires standard M50 ammunition at 6,000 rounds per minute.

    The reported muzzle velocity of the M61A1 Vulcan is approximately 3,450 feet per second, while the maximum speed of the F-16 is 1,500 mph or 2,200 feet per second. The Aviationist said, “that makes the likelihood of an F-16 actually catching its own bullets in flight largely impossible.” Rather it was a case of ricocheting bullets.

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    Nevertheless, “this is a serious incident,” Wim Bagerbos, inspector general at the Netherlands Department of Defense, told Dutch media, adding that “we, therefore, want to fully investigate what happened and how we would be able to avoid this in future.”

    Some aviation blogs are comparing the Dutch incident to a 1965 incident when a Grumman F-11 Tiger was damaged when it started a 20 degrees nose-down dive firing 20mm cannons, then collided with the rounds in midflight, and shortly after crashed.

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    The American aerospace industry has entered into a crisis as of late. Boeing, for instance, was slammed with a new lawsuit Wednseday, as investors accused the company of defrauding shareholders by covering up safety deficiencies in its 737 MAX planes before the two deadly crashes.

    On Tuesday, a Japanese Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II vanished off the radar. Japan’s defense ministry announced Wednesday that a U.S. guided-missile destroyer recovered parts of the aircraft in the Pacific Ocean near Misawa airbase. 

    Dutch media said the investigation into the incident “is now in full swing.” It’s hard to tell exactly what happened, due to limited information released by authorities, but it could be likely that a rare event occurred where the plane shot itself – not seen in over 5 decades.

  • The Day America Died

    Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

    47 years ago in American Pie, Don McLean talked about The Day The Music Died. Or of course the music didn’t really die, but at the same time it did. “The three mean I admired most, the father, son and the holy ghost, they caught the last train for the coast, the day the music died.”

    Back then you could still have claimed the country merely lost its innocence. And you could have said the same in 1861 or 1914 or 1941. Today, not to take anything away from music, or the song, something much bigger died. America itself died, not just its music or innocence. America didn’t just lose its innocence, it pled guilty.

    No doubt most of you would proclaim that’s a gross exaggeration, and an insane hyperbole, but you would all be wrong, sorry. There’s no way back this time.

    America, the United States, with all its initial prejudice and lethal screw-ups, was founded as a place where people could direct their own lives without having to fear any other party, let alone a government, that would stand in their way while they did it. And a big part of not having to fear one’s government is not having to fear that government purposely lying to its citizens. The Founding Fathers, for all their faults, got that right. And today erases all of that in one fell swoop.

    That is what died today.

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    Or, you know, it may have died much earlier, and a thousand times before as well, but with the arrest in London of Julian Assange, an Australian citizen wanted by the US Deep State, a myriad of strands connecting, and connected to a bloated dying corpse came together. And now we know there is no salvation possible. Today made it all terminal. America is no more. Or it is no longer what they tell you it stands for, whichever comes first.

    Infographic: The Lead Up to Julian Assange's Arrest | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    And it’s not just America, mind you. ‘The UK is a serious country’, PM Theresa May said today when addressing Brexit. No it’s not, Theresa, it’s a banana republic hopelessly stuck in a spaghetti western and it no longer knows the rule of law. It sells people to the highest bidder in a meat market, be they Windrush, refugees from her Majesty’s wars in Libya, or just white and poor English, or Julian Assange.

    The UK is a parody on a country, it’s a sordid piece of third rate slapstick. It kills people while trying to maintain the image of being a serious country. You know, whatever that is?! The British judge Assange faced today was bleeding mocking him, the arguably greatest journalist of this century and millennium. A serious country?

    Julian Assange Branded ‘Narcissist’ By Judge As He Faces US Extradition

    Julian Assange has been branded a “narcissist” by a judge as he faces both a UK prison sentence and being extradited to the US. The Metropolitan Police said the Australian hacker was initially detained at the Ecuadorian embassy for failing to surrender to court. He had been summoned in 2012 over an alleged rape in Sweden, where authorities are now considering reopening their investigation into those allegations.After arriving at a London police station on Thursday morning, the 47-year-old was additionally arrested on behalf of the US under an extradition warrant.

    Mr Assange was taken to Westminster Magistrates’ Court and found guilty of breaching bail hours later. He faces a jail sentence of up to a year. He denied the offence, with lawyers arguing that he had a “reasonable excuse” could not expect a fair trial in the UK as its purpose was to “secure his delivery” to the US. District Judge Michael Snow described the defence as “laughable”, adding: “Mr Assange’s behaviour is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests. He hasn’t come close to establishing ‘reasonable excuse’.” He remanded Mr Assange in custody ahead of a future sentencing hearing at Southwark Crown Court.

    And where was opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn when this all went on? Haven’t seen him, other then in the afternoon when he was ‘discussing’ Brexit details with May in Parliament on day 1021 since the Brexit referendum, while he should have been out in the street denouncing May and protecting Assange at the loudest voice there is.

    Screw you, Jeremy, you’re a pathetic loser. No matter what else you do, there are times when you have to stand up and be counted. You were nowhere to be seen, you coward. Screw you again. And all of your family. A curse on y’all. You had a chance to be counted, and you whimped out so enormously only an elephant could whimp out more. Today was your day, and you were a no-show, again.

    But don‘t you mind me, I’m not British and I’m not one of those ass-hat followers of you. I’m just someone calling you a coward. So, you know, your campaign team can keep polling and intervene as soon as they see too many ass-hats become concerned about Assange. Until then, who cares, it’s all in the numbers. It’s not as if you have any principles anyway. If you can screw up Brexit there’s no reason why you couldn’t screw up Assange’s situation as well.

    As for the Donald, man, it’s just 6 days ago that I issued a well-meant warning to you, to tell you that those who are after Assange are the same people who are after you.

    And now you’ve given those very people a huge stage to execute their anti-Assange and thereby their anti-Trump messages from. Mr. Trump, you’re helping Brennan and Clapper and Comey and their ilk persecute the only person who could ever stand up to them. And who did that better than you ever did. Because he’s so much smarter.

    And where are all the media? Where are all the other governments? Where is the European Union? Where is Australia? Yes, Ecuador took away Assange’s citizenship too today, like that’s a piece of candy or something. Asylum, citizenship, they can be bought and sold whenever a bell tolls.

    Why do we have international law anyway if nobody abides by any of it? You can’t just grant someone asylum, and then a citizenship, and then rescind it when you like on a rainy morning when your medication runs out or they’re on to you for blatant fraud, Lenin Moreno. Do that and all international law becomes null and void. Hereby.

    Pardon me, I’ve just been, like hopefully many people are, so sad and angry and despondent today, all day. The entire world watched the music die today, and never realized it, and a man much smarter and braver and real than any of us is out there paying for our sins, and we have no media left to tell us an honest story about it, and George Orwell is laughing somewhere out there.

    And I am still stupid enough to think that we can do better.

  • Monkeys Injected With Human Brain Genes – And It Made Them Smarter

    Scientists in southern China report that after creating several “transgenic macaque monkeys” which contained extra copies of a human gene linked to brain development, the monkeys did better on a memory test, exhibited better short term memory, and had faster reaction times vs. their non-altered simian counterparts. What’s more, the monkeys’ brains took longer to develop, similar to that of a human child. 

    The gene, MCPH1, was successfully introduced to five out of 11 monkey embryos using “lentivirus transfection” – in which genetic material effectively hitches a ride on an injected virus. A derivation of the gene called haplogroup D appeared around 37,000 years ago across the globe except for Sub-Saharan Africa. 

    Anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals shared a long period of coexistence, from as early as 130,000 years ago in the Middle East to as late as 35,000 years ago in Europe, consistent with the estimated introgression time of the microcephalin D allele at or sometime before ≈37,000 years ago. Furthermore, the worldwide frequency distribution of the D allele, exceptionally high outside of Africa but low in sub-Saharan Africa, suggests, but does not necessitate, admixture with an archaic Eurasian population. -via ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

    “This was the first attempt to understand the evolution of human cognition using a transgenic monkey model,” said lead geneticist Bing Su of the Kunming Institute of Zoology. 

    The experiments, described on March 27 in a Beijing journal, National Science Review, and first reported by Chinese media, remain far from pinpointing the secrets of the human mind or leading to an uprising of brainy primates.

    Instead, several Western scientists, including one who collaborated on the effort, called the experiments reckless and said they questioned the ethics of genetically modifying primates, an area where China has seized a technological edge. –MIT Technology Review

    “The use of transgenic monkeys to study human genes linked to brain evolution is a very risky road to take,” said University of Colorado geneticist James Sikela, who conducts comparative studies on primates. He is concerned that the research will open the door to more extreme modifications. 

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    “It is a classic slippery slope issue and one that we can expect to recur as this type of research is pursued,” added Sikela. 

    Research using primates is increasingly difficult in Europe and the US, but China has rushed to apply the latest high-tech DNA tools to the animals. The country was first to create monkeys altered with the gene-editing tool CRISPR, and this January a Chinese institute announced it had produced a half-dozen clones of a monkey with a severe mental disturbance. –MIT Technology Review

    “It is troubling that the field is steamrolling along in this manner,” says Sikela. 

    Scientists have long sought the genes which, according to evolutionary theory, caused human brains to become intelligent while those of chimpanzees and other simians were left behind despite our genes sharing similarities of around 98%. According to Sikela, the objective behind the experiment is to locate “the jewels of our genome,” or the DNA which makes humans unique. 

    One popular candidate gene known as FOXP2 – the “language gene” – has been potentially linked to human speech. The MIT Review notes that a British family whose members inherited an abnormal version had difficulty speaking. 

    Meanwhile, Bing Su focused on a different gene – MCPH1 – as babies borh with damaged versions of the gene typically have tiny heads. 

    Judging by their experiments, the Chinese team did expect that their transgenic monkeys could end up with increased intelligence and brain size. That is why they put the creatures inside MRI machines to measure their white matter and gave them computerized memory tests. According to their report, the transgenic monkeys didn’t have larger brains, but they did better on a short-term memory quiz, a finding the team considers remarkable. –MIT Technology Review

    Some aren’t so convinced

    Su’s research has its detractors within the scientific community. One – computer scientist Martin Styner of the University of North Carolina, who actually participated in the study by training Chinese students to extract brain volume data from MRI images (and considered removing his name from the paper), said “There are a bunch of aspects of this study that you could not do in the US,” adding “It raised issues about the type of research and whether the animals were properly cared for.”

    The next genetic target of Su’s research? SRGAP2C – a DNA variant which arose over two million years ago dubbed the “humanity switch” and “missing genetic link” for its potential ties to human intelligence. 

  • Oregon's SB-978 Gun Control Bill Is So Hysterically Restrictive That Pepper Spray Is A Felony

    Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

    A new gun control bill introduced in the Oregon State Legislature added 45 pages of draconian amendments the night before the vote. SB978 passed the Judiciary Committee yesterday and now heads to the Oregon Senate.

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    It’s a good thing that some parts of this state have vowed to be 2A sanctuaries because Oregonians are going to need them. If the gun owners – and even pepper spray owners – in other parts of the state hope to defend themselves, they could be facing a vast new array of felony charges.

    The battle for the right to bear arms is rapidly spreading across the country. In February, the House of Representatives passed two sweeping national bills.  New Mexico has passed 6 outrageous new laws that sheriffs are refusing to enforce, and sheriffs in Washington state are also rebelling. On the other stand, two states have introduced invasive laws requiring would-be gun owners to hand over access to years of personal social media.

    What’s in the unconstitutional bill, you ask?

    Well, let’s get started.

    Raising the minimum age

    They want to raise the minimum age to buy a gun to 21 in certain cases.

    The following may establish a minimum age of 18,19, 20 or 21 years for the purchase of firearms, firearm accessories, firearm components, ammunition or ammunition components, or for the repair or service of a firearm:

    “(a) A person transferring a firearm, a firearm accessory, a firearm component, ammunition or an ammunition component at a gun show;

    “(b) A gun dealer; or

    “(c) A business engaged in repairing or servicing a firearm

    Keeping your gun locked up

    Residents will be required to keep their guns locked up at all times that they are not being carried. These rules will render guns all but useless in the event a person needs to access them to protect themselves and their family.

    A person who owns or possesses a firearm shall, at all times that the firearm is not carried by or under the control of the person or an authorized person, secure the firearm:

    “(A) With an engaged trigger lock or cable lock that meets or exceeds the minimum specifications established by the Oregon Health Authority under section 10 of this 2019 Act;

    “(B) In a locked container, equipped with a tamper-resistant lock, that meets or exceeds the minimum specifications established by the Oregon Health Authority under section 10 of this 2019 Act; or

    “(C) In a gun room.

    “(b) For purposes of paragraph (a) of this subsection, a firearm is not secured if a key, combination or other means of opening a lock or container is readily available to a person the owner or possessor has not authorized to carry or control the firearm.

    Failure to follow these rules is a Class C Felony. Also, don’t get excited about the phrase “gun room” because your bedroom doesn’t count.

    ‘Gun room’ means an area within a building enclosed by walls, a floor and a ceiling, including a closet, that has all entrances secured by a tamper-resistant lock, that is kept locked at all times when unoccupied and that is used for:

    “(a) The storage of firearms, ammunition, components of firearms or ammunition, or equipment for firearm-related activities including but not limited to reloading ammunition, gunsmithing and firearm cleaning and maintenance; or

    “(b) Conducting firearm-related activities, including but not limited to reloading ammunition, gunsmithing and firearm cleaning and maintenance.

    I know that the time I had to protect my daughter with a gun, if my firearm locked up, had on a trigger lock, and had to be loaded, it would have delayed my potential to do so to a horrific degree.

    Gun owners are liable for the acts of gun thieves

    If your gun/guns are stolen, you must report it. Failure to do so is a Class B felony per weapon. And if the thief hurts or kills someone with the stolen firearm, the owner is liable for two years.

    If you have kids, look out.

    Any adult who transfers a firearm to a minor is responsible for any actions taken by that minor with the firearm. And if you want to take your kids shooting or hunting, they must be “directly supervised.”  And if a young person gets ahold of a parent’s gun, the parent is liable for the young person’s action. If the gun isn’t secured as per the rules above, then the adult is charged with even more crimes.

    “(b) Unlawful storage of a firearm is a Class A violation if the minor who obtains possession of the firearm intentionally, by word or conduct, attempts to place another person in fear of imminent serious physical injury.

    “(c) Unlawful storage of a firearm is a Class A misdemeanor if the minor who obtains possession of the firearm injures or kills a person by means of the firearm.

    Oregon wants to crack down on unregistered guns.

    The next section deals with “ghost guns.” Pages 11-19 offer a lengthy list of rules, restrictions, requirements, and record-keeping for the transfer of antique guns, gun parts, and much more. If you have them, you’ll be a felon upon the passage of this bill.

    And as everyone knows, registration is only one step away from confiscation. Here’s an article by Selco, explaining how gun confiscation could go down.

    The next section makes it more complicated to transport a gun.

    If this passes, gun owners who are not concealed-carry permit holders will have to jump through all sorts of hoops to transport a firearm in a vehicle, including locking it in a box in a “secure” are of the vehicle.

    Concealed carry permit fees will go up.

    The next section deals with CC permits and the related fees, increasing them in another effort to put an undue burden on law-abiding citizens.

    And then there’s the stuff about “public buildings.”

    In this bill can find a massive list of restrictions regarding having a gun on the premises of or “near” public buildings. To me, this is the scariest part because it’s so incredibly arbitrary.

    In section 25, Local Authority to Regulate Firearms in Public Buildings,” airports, ports, hospitals, schools, colleges, universities probate courts, city halls, homes of officials, and other “public buildings” – and even their grounds – can restrict not only guns but also the following:

    “(10) ‘Weapon’ means:

    “(a) A firearm;

    “(b) Any dirk, dagger, ice pick, slingshot, metal knuckles or any similar instrument or a knife, other than an ordinary pocketknife with a blade less than four inches in length, the use of which could inflict injury upon a person or property;

    “(c) Mace, tear gas, pepper mace or any similar deleterious agent as defined in ORS 163.211;

    “(d) An electrical stun gun or any similar instrument;

    “(e) A tear gas weapon as defined in ORS 163.211;

    “(f) A club, bat, baton, billy club, bludgeon, knobkerrie, nunchaku, nightstick, truncheon or any similar instrument, the use of which could inflict injury upon a person or property; or

    “(g) A dangerous or deadly weapon as those terms are defined in ORS
    161.015.

    Public places as defined in the bill need only to “post a sign, visible to the public, identifying all locations where
    the affirmative defense described in ORS 166.370 (3)(g) is limited or precluded.”

    And if you ignore the sign and get caught?

    You’re guilty of a Class C felony. Even if your gun is unloaded.

    Any person who intentionally possesses a loaded or unloaded firearm or any other instrument used as a dangerous weapon, while in or on a public building, shall upon conviction be guilty of a Class C felony.

    Go here to read the insanity in detail.

    Gun grabbers are overjoyed

    Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford’s anti-gun foundation was delighted with the bill even before the super-secret amendments were added. In a statement, spokeswoman Robin Lloyd said:

    “Gun violence hurts hundreds of Oregon families each year. The proposed provisions in the bills heard today are the critical next steps that Oregon should take to save lives. For example, homemade, untraceable ghost guns pose serious threats to law enforcement and communities impacted by gun violence. A commitment from lawmakers to stem the flow of these firearms will ensure criminals aren’t able to easily get their hands on an undetectable weapon. Today’s hearings highlight a serious commitment by the legislature to reduce the epidemic of gun violence in Oregon. I applaud Attorney General Rosemblum [sic] and the Oregon legislature for prioritizing these lifesaving measures.”

    SB 978-1 includes commonsense efforts to reduce gun violence like requiring safe storage of firearms, holding gun owners accountable to make sure kids don’t get their hands on a gun, requiring gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms, and providing increased regulation of 3D-printed guns and unfinished frames or receivers, parts used to produce ghost guns. (source)

    If it passes, it will spread.

    Gun control laws are like a virus – if they pass in one place they’ll spread to other places. And there’s little reason to believe that in this era of anti-gun hysteria, the legislature will strike down this unconstitutional bill. Thankfully, 13 of 36 Oregon sheriffs have already vowed to make their counties Second Amendment sanctuaries.

    But heaven forbid an Oregonian gets caught driving out of their 2A sanctuary county with a usable firearm.

    Hat tip: Kris

  • New Class Of Hypersonic Engines Passes Critical Test, Could Power Commercial Flight In Decade 

    Reaction Engines says it successfully tested an integral component of its Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) that could clear the path for commercial hypersonic flight in the next decade, read the press release.

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    SABRE’s pre-cooler heat exchanger met all objectives in the first phase of high-temperature testing designed to replicate hypersonic flight. At very high speeds, Mach 5 or greater, hypersonic vehicles transition into dense atmospheric layers which causes a significant temperature increase. The biggest dilemma for any aerospace company testing hypersonic engines has been how to reduce heat above Mach 5.

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    The release said additional tests would be planned throughout 2019, will test the heat exchanger with even hotter temperatures replicating Mach 5 or higher. The pre-cooler is an essential part of the engine and has the potential for reducing heat at high speeds.

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    In the latest tests, the pre-cooler performed exceptionally well, achieved a 1.5 MW of heat transfer, the equivalent to the energy demand of 1,000 American homes; successfully cooling incoming air that was in excess of the 1,000°C (~1800°F).

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    To replicate intense heat, engineers used a General Electric J79 turbojet engine to provide high-temperature airflow.

    The test was completed at Test Facility 2 located at the Colorado Air and Space Port. Reaction Engines constructed a facility that has conducted ground-based ‘hot’ testing of its pre-cooler technology. The release said the engine component has already passed a series of tests in the U.K.

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    Commenting on the success, Mark Thomas, Chief Executive, Reaction Engines, said:

    “This is a hugely significant milestone which has seen Reaction Engines’ proprietary precooler technology achieve unparalleled heat transfer performance. The HTX test article met all test objectives and the successful initial tests highlight how our precooler delivers world-leading heat transfer capabilities at low weight and compact size. This provides an important validation of our heat exchanger and thermal management technology portfolio which has application across emerging areas such as very high-speed flight, hybrid electric aviation and integrated vehicle thermal management.”

    The release ends by saying additional testing of the SABRE engine core will be conducted this year. The company has received over $131 million in public financing from BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Boeing HorizonX. If all goes well, the SABRE could be the next hypersonic engine that powers commercial flights in the next decade.

    Video: Reaction Engines explains the ‘breakthrough’ technology 

  • "I'm Going Back To Selling Drugs": Backpage Seizure Forces Sex Traffickers Back To "Legitimate" Work

    In the year after US authorities shut down sex ad website Backpage.com, the online prostitution market has scattered across the internet with several players still trying to  -ahem, literally – fill the void.

    The breakdown of this quasi monopoly, and the resulting scattering of websites, means that the landmark package of sex trafficking laws passed by Congress, known collectively as SESTA-FOSTA, has made it difficult for these types of websites to operate according to a Reuters report. Sex trafficking and prostitution has now, instead, drifted towards so-called hobby boards and “sugar daddy” pages. Rob Spectre, CEO of Childsafe.AI said that ad demand levels remain low as sex trafficking has become more difficult and less profitable on the Internet.

    “Basically the ads are back but the buyers aren’t,” he said.

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    Recent looks at sex web ad sites showed men complaining about the difficulty in finding “legitimate” providers, with some openly lamenting the absence of Backpage.com. That website was seized almost a year ago to the day on April 6, 2018 in a United States Justice Department sex trafficking and child prostitution investigation. Seven people, including the founders of the website, were charged in a 93 count indictment with facilitating prostitution, money laundering and fraud.

    Days after the seizure, President Trump signed the SESTA-FOSTA laws, which amended the “safe harbors” provisions of the Communications Decency Act that had protected websites from criminal liability over third-party or user generated content.

    Naturally, advocates for sex workers have criticized the set of laws, arguing that taking down Backpage would drive prostitution even further underground or into the streets. Free-speech activists also said that the laws burden website owners with policing content. The study showed that the website’s closure resulted in demand for prostitutes dropping 67% and search volume plunging 90% immediately after the site went off-line. While many states have tried to “fill the void” left by Backpage, they each only draw about 5% to 8% of the unique visitors Backpage was earning at its height in 2016.

    Senator Claire McCaskill had previously described Backpage as “a $600 million company built on selling sex and, importantly, on selling sex with children.”

    Spectre said: “I don’t think we had any understanding of how dominant Backpage was at the time. They were a full monopoly on (internet-based) commercial sex in the United States. The competition is so fierce, and it’s really dirty, to the degree that I’m not sure there’s ever going to be a single dominant player ever again.”

    A sampling of current ads shows that nearly 3/4 of them are duplicates, spam or scams. Meanwhile, website operators struggle to process credit card transactions or obtain outside financing. The costs associated with running these illicit businesses are on the rise, causing more and more owners to abandon them. 

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    Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer

    Spectre continued: “We’re seeing a greater number of victims saying they have been abandoned by their trafficker and traffickers saying, ‘I’m getting out of the game, I’m going back to selling drugs.'”

    Others have turned to Twitter or Instagram using the #backpage hashtag to signal their intentions. There has also been a shift towards hobby boards, where clients of prostitutes share graphic reviews of women and sugar daddy pages, that attempt to emulate dating sites.

    Anaheim Police Sergeant Juan Reveles of the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force in Southern California said the closure of Backpage represented a double edged sword for law-enforcement. He stated: “If we spend the time and effort to shut down one website, another one will pop up, and our resources are finite.”

  • A Dummies' Guide To What Dems Will Say When Mueller Report Is Released

    Authored by Tom Donner via Liberty Nation,

    Now that Attorney General William Barr has promised to release the Mueller report in all its glory within the next few days, we thought it considerate to save you time you’ll never get back watching the establishment media’s reaction by informing you in advance of just how the Democrats are going to respond.

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    But, you say, the report has not even been released, so how could you know what the Democrats will say? Well, they have been at this collusion delusion for more than two years now, we have witnessed the lengths to which they are willing to go in an effort to take down President Trump, and they have only a few bullets left in their chamber. We can state with overwhelming confidence that they will fire all of them.

    But let’s start by reaffirming something as certain as the sun rising in the east: The Democrats will not accept the validity of the report in whatever form they receive it. That would, after all, require them to stop spinning their conspiracy theories, and we can’t have that.

    From there, we move seamlessly to a preview of the four prefabricated talking points that will launch the Democrats’ spin cycle. We call them the Mueller final four, because this is the last chance to demagogue the issue of Trump-Russia collusion. You need only to fill in the blanks using yet-to-be-determined passages from the report.

    So without further ado, we present the talking points Democrats will provide for the elite media to dutifully repeat and amplify:

    Talking Point 1 (mildest of the four): While we thank and commend Mr. Mueller for his work, the scope of his investigation was necessarily limited by his specific mandate and the special counsel law itself. There are just so many areas Mueller was not able to probe, thus at least six, and perhaps as many as nine, of our congressional committees must take the baton and continue running down the track. It is undoubtedly the highest and best use of our time, because as legislators we are elected to investigate (LINOs – legislators in name only?). After all, even though the financial disclosure forms Trump filed during the presidential campaign are far more revealing than any tax return, we must do everything possible to force the release of Trump’s tax returns anyway. He is the first presidential candidate in 40 years not to release his tax returns, so he must be hiding something. And, of course, we need to dig into the entire history of the Trump organization, because we have deep suspicions all manner of crookedness is hidden in there.

    Talking Point 2: While the conduct outlined does not quite rise to the level of criminality, the report details events and conversations that are deeply disturbing, primarily (fill in most easy-to-spin passages of report). Remember that not all improper, shameful, and traitorous conduct is felonious. Though the special counsel falls just short of uncovering collusion, he also refused to issue a recommendation on obstruction of justice. We all know that the attorney general is little more than a bootlicking hack taking orders from Trump, ipso facto his finding of no obstruction is likely some sort of coverup. And even though we lauded Rod Rosenstein for his stewardship of the special counsel investigation, even Rosenstein, in concurring with Barr’s judgment on obstruction, has evidently fallen under the spell of the president and, like Barr, cannot be trusted.

    Talking Point 3: Yes, the report contains no direct evidence of anything other than process and financial crimes that occurred either during the special counsel investigation itself or before Trump ran for president, and those have already been litigated. But there is ample circumstantial evidence of conspiracy between Trump operatives and the Russians to interfere in the election. For example, (fill in name of alleged conspirator) and (fill in name of another alleged conspirator) spoke to (fill in name of alleged Russian conspirator) less than two weeks apart. Mueller is by nature conservative in his judgments, no matter that an overwhelming majority of the lawyers he hired are politically active, anti-Trump Democrats who contributed to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or both. And regardless of whether he felt it appropriate to launch military-style raids on Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. So we must investigate this circumstantial evidence and connect the dots ourselves.

    Talking Point 4: The redactions in this report are clear evidence that someone is trying to hide the parts that likely reveal actual collusion. The crooked attorney general and deplorable president used the cover of (choose one: grand jury testimony/classified information/interviews with completely innocent subjects) to redact the truth. Yes, all of that testimony and information must be redacted by law or by long-standing department regulations and precedent, but we nevertheless repeat our demand that the entire report, unredacted, be released, or we will launch yet more investigations on the cover-up by Barr and, of course, Trump. What are you hiding with these redactions, Mr. Barr?

    The Dems, of course, will cherry-pick passages from the report that can most effectively be spun together into a fantastic web of collusion. And like most conspiracy theorists, they will allege things that can never be proven or disproven. That basic fact alone will allow them to keep expressing outrage and carry on with their accusations about collusion and obstruction for as long as they choose.

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    Different Democrats will parrot one or more of these, depending on whether they are in a safe or vulnerable district. For example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), in the heart of an overwhelmingly Democratic region, will likely employ all four points, while a newly elected Democrat in a district won by Trump might focus only on the first.

    Oh, one last thing. Here is what the Democrats will not say: We appreciate all the work that went into this report. This counterintelligence investigation was very thorough, there is no evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice, so we look forward to going back to the job we were elected to do: legislating for the benefit of the American people.

    So there you go. Everything you need to know about the Democrats’ response to the Mueller report before it is even released.

    You’re welcome.

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Apr 11

Today’s News 11th April 2019

  • Russia Releases Never Before Seen Video Of Advanced Arctic Base 

    The Russian military has released the first video detailing the complete modernization of a top secret military base in the Arctic. The video shows the technologically-advanced Northern Clover facility in Yakutia, reported RT News.

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    The base opened in 2015 and is home to more than 250 troops, supporting military operations on Kotelny Island, one of the New Siberian archipelagos off the northern coast of Russia. The base has a landing strip, high-power radar station, missile defense shields, and an array of high-tech weapons to defend the region from approaching threats.

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    Northern Clover can operate autonomously for 365 days without any additional supplies.

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    The base is part of Russia’s northern shield, protecting the nation from external threats and economic interest in the Arctic.

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    Last year, President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow had “re-established itself firmly” in the Arctic, adding that the region is “extremely important” to Russia’s economy.

    Russia is not the only superpower trying to position itself in the region, as shrinking polar ice opens up new resource exploration capacities and shipping lanes across the Arctic Ocean.

    The U.S., China, Canada, Denmark, and Norway have all shown interest in the Arctic.

    Last year, China released a white paper outlining its plans for a “Polar Silk Road.”

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    The Trump administration made its first attempt to tap the Arctic and Atlantic oceans for natural resources, but a federal judge in Alaska last month blocked the sale of drilling rights.

    Pentagon spokesman Johnny Michael said the Department of Defense (DOD) “can best defend the U.S. national interests and support security and stability in the Arctic,” in a  “great-power competition” with Russia and China.

    “The Arctic is changing faster than anywhere else in the world, losing older, long-term sea ice at a rapid rate. These changing environmental conditions are creating new access routes and new geostrategic opportunities,” Sherri Goodman, a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, told Fox News. “Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine and the Baltics are now occurring in the High North, against our Nordic allies. Russia is upgrading its military infrastructure in the Arctic. China is building a spider web of Polar Silk Road across the Arctic, strategically deploying its scientists across the region.”

    Russia has made reaffirming its presence in the Arctic a top goal, where it controls 25% of the Earth’s undiscovered oil and gas.

    Putin has made several claims that the value of Arctic minerals could be north of $30 trillion.

    The race for natural resources in the Arctic has started. With trillions of dollars of untapped resources in the Arctic, it makes sense why Russia has constructed a secret base to guard the region against American imperialist.

    Video: Russian MoD reveals Arctic military base ‘Northern Clover’

  • The Betrayal Of Brexit Is A Mix Of Social Engineering And Mock Elections

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

    The UK’s so-called “powers that be” are betraying Brexit through a mix of social engineering and mock elections in order craft the false narrative that it’s actually the “people’s will” to remain in the EU.

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    By now it’s obvious enough that PM May represents the vested interests of the UK’s so-called “powers that be” by betraying Brexit and doing all that she can to prevent her country’s exit from the EU. Her failed attempts to seal a deal with the bloc for a so-called “soft Brexit” were never anything more than a ruse because her people vote for a clean split from the EU that was later deceptively described as a so-called “hard Brexit” in order to invent the idea of its foil that she was then tasked with implementing as a “publicly plausible” time-buying measure. In reaction to the expected opposition that she’s encountered in parliament after humiliating her country on the world stage and over-complicating what would otherwise have been a manageable divorce, she’s now dangerously flirting with the idea of second referendum on whether to honor the spirit of Brexit or not.

    While the public at large is being led to believe that this is just the latest chaotic outcome of her bungled Brexit, it’s very likely that this was planned long ago for official introduction into the discourse at large at this pivotal moment after the UK has already passed the original deadline for leaving the EU. The only reason why the masses aren’t actively revolting is because they’ve been slowly preconditioned to accept this scenario through the extensive social engineering techniques that the state has been experimenting on them with over over nearly the past three years. Not only was Brexit “delegitimized” before the vote as the “fringe fantasy” of “racists, fascists, and white supremacists”, but this narrative was repeated ad infinitum after the referendum in order to instill doubts about the “morality” of this outcome. When that didn’t succeed, active efforts were undertaken to sabotage it from the very top levels of the state, ergo the antics of PM May.

    The state has engaged in so much incessant fearmongering about the socio-economic consequences of Brexit that some polls suggest that the majority of voters would nowadays prefer to “Bremain” if another election were to be held, a scenario that had originally been presented as a “fringe fantasy” but is actually becoming a reality given the latest developments. The electorate wouldn’t have reached this “conclusion” on their own unless they were guided to it through the social engineering that they were subject to since the referendum, though opinion polls don’t hold political weight in a self-professed “democracy” unless they tangibly translate into votes during an official election, which is why a second referendum might be held to “legitimize” the efforts to betray Brexit once and for all. It doesn’t matter to the “masterminds” behind this plot what the domestic consequences of going against the people’s original will might be since all that they care about is the immediate objective of stopping Brexit.

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    Prime Minister Theresa May leaves Downing Street on March 23, 2017 in London, England

    That said, the only foreseeable way to offset this scenario is if responsible members of the UK’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) intensively work behind the scenes to ensure that Brexit does indeed happen like the majority of voters originally wanted. It can only be speculated how this might occur in practice, but there’s evidently a possibility that it could succeed seeing as how visibly divided the British government is over this issue. The globalist forces aligned with the financial interests of the City of London clearly don’t want Brexit to happen, but the nationalist ones representing much of England understand the need to let democracy run its course regardless of socially engineered “voters’ regret”, though the country is now so divided along geopolitical lines (especially with respect to Scotland’s “Bremainers”) over this issue that its very unity is now in question no matter what ultimately happens, which might have been the globalists’ goal all along.

  • Turkey Threatens To Buy Even More Russian S-400s If US Doesn't Cooperate

    The US-Turkey showdown over Ankara’s deal with Russia for the S-400 anti-air defense system continues and could even escalate further considering Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu this week issued a return ultimatum after continued Washington pledges to halt sale of Lockheed’s F-35 stealth fighters. 

    Not only did FM Cavusoglu say on Wednesday that Turkey will not bow to mounting US pressure, but said if Washington blacklists Turkey on either sales of the US-made Patriot systems, or blocks F-35s already purchased, then Ankara may pursue even more S-400 systems and would further look for alternatives to the F-35 jets. 

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    Russian S-400 air defense missile systems at Red Square in Moscow, via the AP.

    This comes after Turkey’s leaders voiced deep frustration over NATO leadership giving the cold shoulder to a Turkish proposal last week to overcome the standoff by forming a technical group in order to address the alliance’s concerns over the S-400 purchase. 

    “If the United States is willing to sell, then we’ll buy Patriots. However, if the United States doesn’t want to sell, we may buy more S-400s or other systems,” Cavusoglu told Turkish broadcaster NTV, as cited by Reuters. 

    “If the F-35s don’t work out, I will again have to procure the jets I need from elsewhere …There are (Russian) SU-34, SU-57 and others.” And continuing the threat, he said, “I will absolutely meet my needs from somewhere until I can produce it myself.” 

    The US has tried a carrot-and-stick approach by dangling its US Army Patriot systems in front of Turkey, hoping it would be a desirable alternative to the S-400 altogether. 

    The advanced Russian-made S-400 air defense system purchased by Turkey has been seen as a threat by the United States, given the potential for compromising the F-35 advanced radar evading and electronics capabilities. The fear is that Turkey possessing the S-400s and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter stealth aircraft together would potentially enabling Moscow to detect and exploit its vulnerabilities, meaning Russia could ultimately learn how the S-400 could take out an F-35.

    Interestingly, during his comments Wednesday, the Turkish foreign minister invoked Syria, in an observation that probably won’t sit well with Pentagon planners. “The U.S. F-35s fly over Syria every day and there are S-400 systems there.”

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    He followed this provocative reference by concluding, “They pose no threats despite being systems that are completely under Russian control, so will they pose a risk when the are in Turkey’s control?” he said.

    Meanwhile Kremlin officials responded to Cavusoglu’s comments by noting Russia and Turkey were seeking closer military and technical ties — this after Presidents Putin and Erdogan met in Moscow earlier this week. 

  • Unaccountable Media Faced With Dilemma In Next Phase Of Deep-State-Gate

    Authored by Ray McGovern via ConsortiumNews.com,

    Now that the media has been exposed for wrongly siding with the intelligence agencies, how will it handle Devin Nunes’s criminal referrals in Deep State-gate?

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    Readers of The Washington Post on Monday were treated to more of the same from editorial page chief Fred Hiatt. Hiatt, who won his spurs by promoting misleading “intelligence” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and suffered no consequences, is at it again.

    This time he is trying to adjust to the fading prospect of a Deus ex Mueller to lessen Hiatt’s disgrace for being among the most shameless in promoting the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

    He is not giving up. When you are confident you will not lose your job so long as you adhere to the agenda of the growing Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT if you will), you need not worry about being a vanguard for the corporate media. It is almost as though Hiatt is a tenured professor in an endowed chair honoring Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who perhaps did most to bring us Iraqi WMD.

    In his Monday column Hiatt warned: “Trump was elected with the assistance of Russian spies and trolls, which he openly sought and celebrated. But he did not (or so we are told) secretly conspire with them.” In effect, Hiatt is saying, soto voce: “Fie on former (now-de-canonized) Saint Robert of Mueller; we at the Post and our colleagues at The New York Times, CNN et al. know better, just because we’ve been saying so for more than two years.”

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    Hiatt: Never held to account. (Wikipedia)

    Times executive editor Dean Baquet said, about the backlash to the Times‘ “collusion” coverage: “I have no regrets. It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality.” CNN President Jeff Zucker said: “We are not investigators. We are journalists.” (One wonders what investigative journalist Bob Parry, who uncovered much of Iran-Contra and founded this site, would have thought of that last one.)

    Going in Circles

    Hiatt’s circular reasoning is all too familiar. It is the kind a former director of national intelligence excels at when he’s not lying, sometimes under oath. For instance, James Clapper was hawking his memoir at the Carnegie Endowment last year when he was confronted by unexpectedly direct questions from the audience.

    Asked about the misleadingly labeled, rump “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017, which he orchestrated, and which blamed Russia for interfering in the 2016 election, Clapper gavean ipse dixit response: The ICA simply had to be correct because that’s what he had told President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump.

    In fact, that “Intelligence Community Assessment” stands out as the most irresponsible, evidence-free and at the same time consequential crock of intelligence analysis since the National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 2001 claimed there was WMD in Iraq. Recall that that one was shaped by out-and-out fraudulent intelligence to “justify” an attack on Iraq six months later.

    Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described the main thrust of the committee’s five-year bipartisan report, stating, “In making the case for war, the [Bush] Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

    Hiatt was one of the media’s major offenders, feeding on what the Cheney/Bush folks told him. When no “weapons of mass destruction” were found in Iraq, Hiatt conceded during an interview withThe Columbia Journalism Review that, “If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction … If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.” [CJR, March/April 2004] As Parry wryly observed at the time in a piece calling for Hiatt’s dismissal, “Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn’t real, we’re not supposed to confidently declare that it is.”

    The Morning After

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    Clapper: After WMD failure, promoted by Obama.  (White House Photo/ Pete Souza)

    The media set the prevailing tone the day after the ICA was published. The banner headline atop page one of theTimes read: “Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says.” That put in motion more than two years of Dick Cheney-like chicanery in the media.

    Buried inside the Times that same day was a cautionary paragraph written by staff reporter Scott Shane who noted, “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the [three] agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission.” Indeed it was; and remains so.

    (Sadly, Shane was then given his marching orders and fell in line with many other formerly reputable journalists in what has been the most miserable performance by the mainstream media since they helped pave the way for war on Iraq.)

    Clapper and Hiatt are kindred souls when it comes to the “profound effect” of Russian election interference. In his column, Hiatt asserted as flat fact that: “Trump was elected with the assistance of Russian spies and trolls …” At the Carnegie event in November, Clapper opined:

    “As a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn’t have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election.”

    Hiatt: Captain of Cheerleaders

    Hiatt emulated peppy, preppy cheerleader George W. Bush in leading Americans to believe that war on Iraq was necessary. Appointed Washington Post editorial page editor in 2000, he still runs the page — having not been held accountable for gross misfeasance, if not malfeasance, on Iraq. Shades of Clapper, whom President Obama allowed to stay on as director of national intelligence for three and a half years after Clapper lied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee about NSA surveillance of U.S. persons.

    That Obama appointed Clapper to lead the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election speaks volumes. Clapper claims to have expertise on Russia and has made no effort to disguise his views on “the Russians.” Two years ago, he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press:

    “… in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election, and just the historical practices of the Russians, who are typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique … we were concerned.”

    It beggars belief that Obama could have been unaware of Clapper’s bizarre views on “the Russians.” Clearly, Obama was bowing yet again to pressure from powerful Deep State actors arguing that Clapper was the ideal man for the job.

    And there is now documentary evidence that, from the Deep State point of view, indeed he was. In the text exchanges between discredited FBI sleuth Peter Strzok and his girlfriend, Lisa Page, a lawyer working for the FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, it seems clear that Obama wanted to be kept apprised of the FBI’s behind-the-scenes machinations. In a Sept. 2, 2016 text to Strzok, Page writes that she was preparing talking points because the president “wants to know everything we’re doing.”

    A Sweaty Pate?

    Clapper is aware now that he is going to have to sweat it out. He may believe he can ignore White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who has said that he and other former intelligence officials should be investigated after special counsel Mueller did not establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

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    Strzok: Will he be on Nunes’s list? (Wikipedia)

    But recent statements by members of the House and Senate intelligence committees cannot be dismissed so easily. In his media appearances, the supremely confident, hero-of-many-liberals Clapper has been replaced by a squirming (but-Obama-made-me-do-it) massager of facts. He may find it harder this time to avoid being held accountable.

    Devin Nunes (R-CA), the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, has gone on the offensive, writing Friday that committee Republicans “will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved … in the abuse of intelligence for political purposes. These people must be held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future.”

    On Sunday, Nunes told Fox News he’s preparing to send eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice this week concerning alleged misconduct during the Trump-Russia investigation. This will include leaks of “highly classified material” and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. It’s no-holds-barred for Nunes, who has begun to talk publicly about prison for those whom DOJ might indict and bring to trial.

    Nunes’s full-speed-ahead offensive is being widely ignored in “mainstream” media (with the exception of Fox), giving the media the quality of “The Dog That Did Not Bark in the Night.” The media has put its ducks in a row, such as they are, to try to rip Attorney General William Barr apart this coming week when he releases the redacted text of the Mueller report that so disappointed the Democratic Party/media coalition.

    But how will they cover criminal referrals of the “heroes” who have leaked so much to them, providing grist for their Russia-gate mill? They will likely find a way, eventually, but the media silence about Nunes is depriving oxygen to the story.

    On Sunday, Nunes said,

    “They [the Democrats] have lied multiple times to the American people. All you have to do is look at their phony memos. They have had the full support of the media, 90 percent of the media in this country. They all have egg on their face. And so the fact of the matter remains, is there going to be — is justice going to be served or is justice going to be denied? And that’s why we’re sending over these criminal referrals.”

    Nunes is, of course, trying to project an image of confidence, but he knows he is fighting uphill. There is no more formidable foe than the MICIMATT, with the media playing the crucial role in these circumstances. How will the American people be able to see egg on anyone’s face if the “mainstream media” find ways to wipe it off and turn the tables on Nunes, as they have successfully done in the past?

    Though the Democrats now control the House, they have lost some key inside-the-Deep-State allies.

    By all appearances, House Democrats still seem to be banking on help from the usual suspects still on duty in the FBI, CIA, and the Justice Department. Lacking that they seem ready to go down with the Schiff—Rep. Adam Schiff of California, perhaps the most virulent Russia-gater that there’s been.

    Clapper is no long in position to help from the inside, and there’s no knowing how his sleepy replacement, Dan Coates, will react, if and when he wakes up long enough to learn chapter and verse about the machinations and dramatic personae of 2016.

    Of course, there is a new sheriff in town running the Department of Justice. Attorney General William Barr, for better or ill, is a far cry from Jeff Sessions, who let himself be diddled into recusing himself. He’s not Rod Rosenstein either, whose involvement in this affair may have already earned him a prominent place on Nunes’s list of referrals.

    What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?

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    On top of this, Sen. Rand Paul (R, KY) has called for an investigation into the origins of Mueller’s probe, including on the dicey question of how witting President Obama was of the Deep State chicanery during the last months of his administration. Page did tell Strzok in that Sept. 2, 2016 text that the president “wants to know everything we’re doing.”

    Sen. Paul has also tweeted information from “a high-level source” that it was former CIA Director John Brennan who “insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report… Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP.”

    Vying for Media Attention

    If, as expected, Nunes discloses the names of those being criminally referred to DOJ, and Barr releases a redacted text of the Mueller report, the “mainstream” media will have a fresh challenge on their hands. The odds would seem to favor the media covering the Democrats’ predictable criticism of Barr — and perhaps even of Mueller, now that he has been defrocked.

    The Post’s Hiatt should be counted on, as always, to play a leading role.

    At the same time, there are signs the America people are tired of this. It would be difficult though for the media to avoid reporting on criminal referrals of very senior law enforcement and intelligence officials. Given the media’s obvious preference for siding with the intelligence agencies and reporting on Russia-gate rather than Deep-State-gate, it would be even harder for the media to explain why these officials would be in trouble.

    Things appear to be unraveling but, as always, much will depend on whether the media opts to remain the “dog that didn’t bark,” and succeeds again in hoodwinking too many people.

  • Don't Worry, It's Different This Time: Home Flipping Frenzy Matches Pre-Crisis Highs

    For our latest installment of “it’s different this time”, where we examine the revival of financial products or market trends that contributed to the crises of yesteryear, we bring you a report from the Wall Street Journal about how house flipping – the practice of buying a home for speculative purposes, with the hope of turning a short-term profit – is officially back in vogue, thanks to mortgage rates that have been mired near cycle lows (and, thanks to Trump’s lobbying for a rate cut, could move lower in the not-too-distant future).

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    Those who were around during the run-up to the great financial crisis (or have at least seen the movie/read the book “The Big Short”) should recall that a flipping frenzy helped fuel the destabilizing speculative bubble in the American housing market, as cocktail waitresses, strippers and gardeners all rushed to take out ‘liar loan’ mortgages to buy homes in Nevada, Florida and other particularly hard-hit markets, with the hope of turning around and selling them at a profit because housing prices could only rise.

    That turned out to be a terrible miscalculation with serious consequences not just for the borrowers who succumbed to their adjustable-rate mortgages, but for the global economy that suffered the consequences of the gold rush to securitize them.

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    Google searches for ‘how to flip a house’ have soared in recent years.

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    But according to CoreLogic, the analytics firm that provided the data for the WSJ story, the odds of another crash are slim, even as speculative transactions presently comprise the largest share of the market since 2006, just as US home sales have become mired in a serious slump.

    But a new analysis from CoreLogic Inc. suggests most of the current flips are less risky than the ones more than a decade ago, making today’s flippers less likely to cause market volatility if prices decline in the next few years.

    Some 10.6% of homes sold in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2018 were flips, defined as having been owned for less than two years, according to CoreLogic. That is near the level of the first quarter of 2006, when 11.3% of homes sold were flips, and the highest fourth-quarter level in the two decades since CoreLogic started tracking the data.

    One reason why CoreLogic is confident about the risks is that home-flipping today is more profitable than it was during the Bush era (though, as other data providers have recently noted, home-flipping profits have been sliding over the past few months).

    The study, however, shows that flippers today have much larger profit margins than flippers at the peak of the previous housing cycle. By one measure, the trades are more than twice as profitable as the flips made in 2006. That offers current flippers more of a cushion if home prices begin to flatten or fall.

    And it’s also dominated by professionals who have a better understanding of the market, are mostly looking to buy older homes in need of renovation. Also, companies like Redfin have started business lines where they buy homes from people who don’t want to wait for a private buyer to come along, hoping to flip them later.

    This time, the market is dominated by professionals who are purchasing older homes that likely need work, appealing to buyers’ desire for a move-in ready home rather than one needing months of renovations. At 39 years old, the median age of a home flipped is the oldest it has been since CoreLogic has been tracking. Flipped homes today are about a decade older than they were in 2006.

    “Flippers are very different today than they were in the past,” said CoreLogic Deputy Chief Economist Ralph McLaughlin. “Even though we see hype and hysteria in popular culture, this isn’t necessarily something to worry about.”

    But the caveat is that a serious drop in home prices would likely leave flippers in a difficult position, possibly even at risk of default, since most need the recoup their capital in the short term to pay off bridge loans.

    Plus, buying older homes often comes with unforseeable risks.

    Rachel Street, a real-estate agent with a home-flipping company, said there are significant financial risks to buying older properties.

    “Every house I’m just going to do a cosmetic rehab. Then you open the wall and you find that every joist is rotted. That is never fun,” she said.

    And the business is getting more difficult, as deals in urban markets like New York City and Philadelphia (one of the hottest markets for the latest wave of flippers) become harder to find. “A year or two ago I could have walked out and found deals all over the place,” said a former opera singer who has a home-flipping business. Today “there are six other people waiting.”

    But we’re sure WSJ is right and there’s nothing to worry about. After all, there’s a whole new crop of millennials who are getting ready to settle down and start families. They’ll all want homes, right?

  • Same People Behind Iraq War Lies Pushed Russian Collusion

    Authored by Julie Kelly via American Greatness,

    For more than two years they misled us.

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    Exploiting fear and confusion after a shocking event, they warned that our country was in imminent danger at the hands of a mad man. They insisted that legitimate intelligence, including a CIA report issued a month before a national election and a dossier produced by reliable sources in the United Kingdom, proved the threat was real. The subject monopolized discussions on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and in the press.

    They argued that the situation was so dire that it was straining our relationship with strategic allies. Any evidence to the contrary was readily dismissed. And anyone who questioned their agenda was ridiculed as a coward, a dupe, or a conspiracy theorist. The news media dedicated endless air time and column inches to anyone who wanted to repeat the falsehood.

    But an investigative report released two years after the propaganda campaign began found no evidence to support their central claim. The CIA report was highly flawed. The official dossier, some concluded, was deceptive and “sexed-up.”

    No, I’m not referring here to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, although the similarities are nearly identical. I’m talking about the period between 2002 and 2004 when many of the very same people who recently peddled collusion fiction also insisted that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—including material to produce nuclear bombs. On the heels of the horrors of 9/11, the United States and our allies waged war against Iraq in 2003 based primarily on that assurance.\

    But in 2004, a special advisor to the CIA concluded Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. There were no stockpiles of biological or chemical agents; no plans to develop a nuclear bomb. The main argument for the war had been wholly discredited. But it was too late: The conflict officially raged on for another seven years, including a “surge” of 20,000 more U.S. troops in 2007 at the behest of the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). We still have a troop presence in Iraq to this day.

    In between the two scandals was more than a decade of recriminations against once-trusted experts on the Right who led our nation into battle. The Iraq war cost the lives of more than 4,400 U.S. troops, maimed tens of thousands more and resulted in an unquantifiable amount of emotional, mental, and physical pain for untold numbers of American military families. Suicide rates for servicemen and veterans have exploded leaving thousands more dead and their families devastated. And it has costtaxpayers more than $2 trillion and counting.

    So, these discredited outcasts thought they found in the Trump-Russia collusion farce a way to redeem themselves in the news media and recover their lost prestige, power, and paychecks. After all, it cannot be a mere coincidence that a group of influencers on the Right who convinced Americans 16 years ago that we must invade Iraq based on false pretenses are nearly the identical group of people who tried to convince Americans that Donald Trump conspired with the Russians to rig the 2016 election, an allegation also based on hearsay and specious evidence.

    It cannot be an innocent mistake. It cannot be explained away as an example of ignorance in the defense of national security or democracy or human decency. It cannot be justified as a mere miscalculation based on the “best available information at the time” nor should we buy any of the numerous excuses that they offered up to rationalize the war.

    In fact, one can draw a straight line between the approach of neoconservative propagandists from the Iraq War travesty and the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The certainty with which they pronounced their dubious claims, their hyperbolic warnings about pending doom—all eerily similar:

    Bill Kristol in 2003: “We look forward to the liberation of our own country and others from the threat of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and to the liberation of the Iraqi people from a brutal and sadistic tyrant.”

    Bill Kristol in 2018: “It seems to me likely Mueller will find there was collusion between Trump associates and Putin operatives; that Trump knew about it; and that Trump sought to cover it up and obstruct its investigation. What then? Good question.”

    John McCain in 2003: “I believe that, obviously, we will remove a threat to America’s national security because we will find there are still massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

    John McCain in 2017: “There’s a lot of aspects with this whole relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin that requires further scrutiny. In fact, I think there’s a lot of shoes to drop from this centipede. This whole issue of the relationship with the Russians and who communicated with them and under what circumstances clearly cries out for an investigation.”

    David Frum in 2002 (writing for President George W. Bush): “States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.“

    David Frum in 2016: “I never envisioned an Axis of Evil of which one of the members was the US National Security Adviser.”

    Max Boot in 2003: “I hate to disappoint all the conspiracy-mongers out there, but I think we are going into Iraq for precisely the reasons stated by President Bush: to destroy weapons of mass destruction, to bring down an evil dictator with links to terrorism, and to enforce international law.”

    Max Boot in 2019: “If this is what it appears to be, it is the biggest scandal in American history—an assault on the very foundations of our democracy in which the president’s own campaign is deeply complicit. There is no longer any question whether collusion occurred. The only questions that remain are: What did the president know? And when did he know it?”

    Those are just a handful of examples from a deep trove of comparisons. Other accomplices on the Right involved in both scandals include former NSA Director Michael Hayden; former Weekly Standardeditor Stephen Hayes; MSNBC host and former U.S. Representative Joe Scarborough; neoconservative think tankers Robert Kagan and Eliot Cohen; and former Bush aides Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner.

    Even George W. Bush questioned aloud last year whether alleged Russian meddling “affected the outcome of the election.”

    And let’s not forget who was in charge of the FBI before, during, and after the Iraq War: Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel hired in May 2017 to find evidence of Russian collusion. In his February 2003 Senate testimony, Mueller confirmed reports that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and expressed concern that Hussein “may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological material.” James Comey, Mueller’s close friend and successor at the FBI, served as George W. Bush’s deputy attorney general from 2003 to 2005. Comey, of course, is the man who opened an investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016 and signed the FISA application in October 2016 to spy on Trump campaign aide, Carter Page. Both, we’ve been assured repeatedly, were Republicans.

    A Deficit of Humility and Introspection

    So why did they do it? Why did Kristol, McCain, Frum, Boot, et. al., dive headlong and without shame into a domestic political war with just as much thoughtless braggadocio as they brought to the disastrous Iraq war? Clearly, this war did not have the same deadly results as the war in Iraq but, nonetheless, it fueled an unprecedented degree of anger and division among our countrymen and toward our new president. It ensnared innocent people who suffered real-life consequences, their fate grotesquely cheered by these mendacious fraudsters.

    Why?

    If you had the blood of so many young Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis on your hands because you peddled a lie, wouldn’t you be a tad more cautious before repeating that kind of mistake? If you assured Americans that the Iraq war would last just a few months, as Bill Kristol said in 2002, but instead it ended up lasting eight years, wouldn’t you be chastened about making more predictions? If your actions led directly to the election of a Democratic president who launched his winning campaign based on your egregious failures, wouldn’t you hesitate before inserting yourself in another scandal that gave fodder to your political opponents at your expense?

    The answer, apparently, is “no.”

    It’s unlikely any of these collusion propagandists on the Right truly believed the contents of the Steele dossier. One reason they played along was to exact revenge against the man who won the White House over their objections and called their bluff on the Iraq War: Donald Trump.

    When Trump stood on a debate stage in February 2016 and said the Iraq war was a “big, fat mistake,” he didn’t just say it to a random Republican opponent. He said it directly to Jeb Bush, the brother of the president who launched the war. “George Bush made a mistake, we should never have been in Iraq,” Trump seethed. “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

    The crowd mostly booed. But Trump didn’t back down. In a post-debate interview on Fox News, Trump reiterated his criticism. “The Iraq war was a disaster. We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. What do we have?” he asked Tucker Carlson. “We have nothing, absolutely nothing.” Nothing except a massive bill in blood and treasure borne mostly by the middle and working class.

    At the time, Trump’s view was well outside the mainstream of conservative orthodoxy. Republicans were not inclined to admit failure on the battlefield, let alone to doubt the motives of intelligence, military, and political leadership we had trusted and were taught not to question. “Challenging the assumption that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction would draw scorn and mockery,” Adam Mill reminded us in an excellent piece for American Greatness. Further, with near-unanimous consent, House and Senate Republicans voted in 2002 to authorize military force against Iraq.

    But Trump laid bare the culpability of the failed war’s Republican architects. He exposed the lingering guilt many rank-and-file Republicans felt about their unflinching support for a war that ultimately was based on a docket of falsehoods and empty promises. A war its promoters were eager to get into but had no plan to win.

    Crossing a Red Line

    Further, Trump intended to halt the Republican Party’s fealty to the Bush Doctrine. The post-9/11 foreign policy of the neoconservatives running the Bush Administration centered around preemptive war, regime change, and the spread of democracy in the Middle East.

    But 15 years later, Trump called out the doctrine’s failures and faulted those who authored it:

    “That’s why I have to look for talented experts with approaches and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect résumés but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war,” Trump said in a foreign policy speech in April 2016. “We have to look to new people because many of the old people frankly don’t know what they’re doing.”

    At a campaign rally in May 2016, Trump specifically mocked Kristol. “All the guy [Kristol] wants to do is kill people even though he knows it’s not working although he doesn’t know because he’s not smart enough.”

    A red line, so to speak, had been crossed. The candidate likely to win the Republican presidential nomination was taking direct aim at the elite Republican establishment so they responded in kind. Dozens of Republican national security and intelligence experts denounced Trump in an August 2016 public letter, insisting he would be a “dangerous president and put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.” Kristol enlisted an independent candidate to run against Trump.

    At the very same time, the Obama White House and top Democratic officials in his administration were circulating the Steele dossier and investigating the Trump campaign for possible collusion with the Russians. (After the election, McCain and one of his advisors distributed the phony Steele dossier to the FBI, lawmakers, and reporters.)

    The symmetry is impossible to ignore or dismiss as coincidence. The Trump-Russia collusion hoax was a chance for these jilted influencers to get revenge against a president and a party that no longer had any use for them. Trump threatened their long-held grasp of centralized power, so they did everything they could to hold on to it, including siding with the Left to sabotage him. It was a craven act of self-restoration. Excommunicated by the Right, they sought to redeem themselves by sucking up to the Left, which not so long ago accused Iraq war promoters of being criminals.

    Utterly Shameless and Undeterred

    The question now is, will the Left shun these useful idiots once and for all? Now that their role in pushing the collusion narrative from the anti-Trump Right is over, will they stop booking Kristol on CNN? Will the Washington Post stop publishing Boot and Wehner and Hayden? Will Jake Tapper ask them any hard question, such as, “how can you be so wrong twice in 15 years?” Will the anti-war Left remember the human destruction for which they are responsible?

    Further, they viewed Robert Mueller as the man who could destroy Trump. Much like their objective in the aftermath of the Iraq war, their end goal was to be proven right that Donald Trump was unfit to lead, not actually to do what was right for the country. It was pure ego.

    Unfortunately, that probably isn’t where the similarities between Russian collusion and the Iraq War will end. The collusion propagandists on the Right will never apologize for supporting the hoax—just like most have not yet apologized for leading the country into a deadly, destructive, and arguably unnecessary war. Even now, after both the Mueller investigation and the House Intelligence committee have found no evidence of collusion, they won’t let up. Kristol is still tweeting Trump-Russian conspiracy theories and both Kristol and Frum are creating new conspiracies about the Mueller report. They know no shame.

    In another ironic twist, authors David Corn and Michael Isikoff wrote a book, Hubris, that lamented the lack of accountability for the neoconservative pushers of the Iraq war. “If you look at the media cheerleaders from that time . . . David Brooks, Bill Kristol . . . did they lose one speaking engagement? Did they lose the fee for one column?” Corn asked during a 2013 MSNBC interview. “There was no price to be paid.”

    Corn and Isikoff were the two reporters who published Steele dossier-sourced articles prior to the 2016 presidential election. Isikoff’s article was cited extensively in the October 2016 FISA application on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Of course, they won’t pay a price, either.

    So, there may not be a short-term price for the Iraq War/Trump-Russia propagandists on the Right to pay. The only consolation, if there is one, is that these con men are unlikely to ever to have a home again in the Republican Party. They will not have any influence; they’ll be political poison for any candidate dumb enough to seek their endorsement.

    They can never again initiate a foreign war that costs thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars. Yes, they’ll be played for fools at CNN, MSNBC and in the Washington Post—trotted out as “conservatives” to condemn Republicans who are actually advancing policies that help the country. But they will never be taken seriously by anyone on the Right; to the contrary, they’ll be a collective cautionary tale for future generations of Republican leaders and influencers.

    While they are not directly responsible for enormous bloodshed in this instance, like they are for the Iraq War, their deception about Trump-Russia collusion did result in actual harm to hundreds of people victimized by the farce. Every Trump family member and associate has been under a shadow of manufactured suspicion since the election; ditto for every White House aide, cabinet member, and former campaign worker. The amount of money and time wasted on this travesty will never fully be known.

    Carter Page, a former U.S. Navy officer, was stalked relentlessly by the media and congressional investigators—and was a recipient of numerous death threats—not to mention spied on by his own government for a year in a fruitless attempt to find collusion between the campaign and the Kremlin. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, still not sentenced more than 18 months after his plea deal for one count of lying to federal officials, is bankrupt. The home of Roger Stone was raided by the FBI at dawn; he, too, is going bankrupt. The civil libertarians and so-called freedom-loving conservatives all have been silent on these political persecutions.

    Will the Fraudsters Get Away With It Again?

    The country has been divided by hate and rage and unjustified distrust. Legitimate problems—such as illegal immigration, sustained job growth for the middle class, faulty trade agreements, the opioid crisis—have been completely ignored by our ruling class with the exception of President Trump. Calls to retaliate against Russia have been far and wide, while real international threats, such as China, North Korea, and ISIS have been overlooked by the collusion propagandists. This has been their intention all along; with no solutions to offer for any of these issues, the vanquished neoconservatives cling to relevance by spinning fabulist tales all in service of destroying a Republican president.

    The goal of the intersectional Iraq War and Trump-Russia collusion fraudsters was clear: Regime change. The playbook is nearly identical—produce flawed intelligence, rally support from the media, portray any opponent as a bad actor, keep creating new crimes. However this time, instead of seeking to depose an Iraqi tyrant, the collusion propagandists within the conservative establishment sought to remove a duly elected U.S. president.

    This is unconscionable and likely illegal. It’s the reason why Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) this week is expected to make at least eight criminal referrals to the Justice Department related to the real scandal: The weaponization of the world’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to sabotage a rival presidential campaign and derail an incoming administration.

    That’s a necessary start. But those who did not engage in specifically illegal activity but nonetheless bolstered those venal efforts also must be held responsible. They escaped justice and accountability once—they can’t get away with it again. They must be shamed into political oblivion.

  • Boeing Is Building A New Jet To Cater To Beijing's 'One Belt, One Road'

    Even after China led the global grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 following the March 10 crash of ET302 – the second deadly crash under similar circumstances within five months – and even with Boeing’s planes becoming a top target for Beijing in the ongoing trade spat with the US, it’s possible that the aerospace company might lead the ranks of American firms seeking to cater to President Xi’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative – much to Washington’s consternation, we imagine.

    According to the South China Morning Post, Boeing sees potential for an aircraft that would make more routes viable between nations involved in the BRI – something that could fly on medium range routes where the 737 is too small to accommodate airlines’ needs and the larger 787 are too big and costly to fly.

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    But with Boeing still grappling with the fallout from the 737’s grounding, a decision on the new model – which has been dubbed the 797 within Boeing – likely won’t come until next year.

    Last month, Italy became the first G-7 nation to officially join what has been derided as Xi’s “neocolonial project”. The sweeping plan to create new economic and infrastructure links between Europe, Asia and Africa is one of the signature projects of Xi’s rule.

    “China is a little bit unique in that it has misused a lot of wide-body planes,” Tinseth said on the sidelines of an aviation conference on the trade initiative. “A middle-of-the-market airplane would better allow them to optimise that process, so it’s an opportunity in China, no question.”

    In Boeng’s battle with Airbus over supremacy in the global aviation market, China is a key prize. Expected to become the world’s largest aviation market by the mid-2020s, the world’s second-largest economy is expected to buy some 7,690 planes.

    According to Boeing marketing chief Randy Tinseth, the new plane would be a boon for China, which he says has “misused” wide-body planes on these types of medium-length routes.

    “China is a little bit unique in that it has misused a lot of wide-body planes,” Tinseth said on the sidelines of an aviation conference on the trade initiative. “A middle-of-the-market airplane would better allow them to optimise that process, so it’s an opportunity in China, no question.”

    “For a middle-of-the-market airplane, 40 per cent of the market in general is in Asia, and 40 per cent of the demand for a new mid-sized aircraft would be here as well. There is no mystery there,” Tinseth said.

    Tinseth added that Boeing’s timeline would involve getting the new plane in the air some time during the middle of the next decade. Then again, it’s also possible that China’s home-grown rival Comac could dominate this market as it seeks to become a “third option” challenging both Boeing and Airbus. Though involving Comac in the production of such a plane could give Boeing an edge.

    Another challenge for Boeing is the trade war. Despite opening a delivery center at Zhoushan in Zhejiang province to focus on assembling the 737, Boeing hasn’t secured an order from China since late 2017, before trade tensions between the US and China flared. Meanwhile, Airbus last month secured a $33 billion order for 300 planes.

    Cathay Pacific Airways, one of Asia’s biggest carriers and Hong Kong’s flagship airline, said a medium-haul plane might not be necessary due to limited appetite for new flights along belt and road routes, but this was in part because many governments in Central Asia have been stingy about handing out flying rights to foreign airlines. And as economic growth increases, that demand would likely rise.

    But if Boeing can’t convince the world that its planes are safe, or if the Trump administration fails to secure a trade deal with China, the 797 could be dead before it ever begins.

  • On Ray Dalio's Hollow Lament

    Authored by Jeff Deist via The Mises Institute,

    Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio is just the latest billionaire to call for government to save us from guys like him.  

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    It’s not pretty. Dalio’s recent article titled “Why and How Capitalism Needs to be Reformed” is a mess, though to be clear it’s a thoroughly well-intentioned and heartfelt mess. It’s a mix of self-effacement (I’m just a lucky guy with good parents who went to good public schools!), dubious statistics concerning the non-problems of wealth and income inequality, and utterly unoriginal, counterproductive proposals for government action. But approving journalists can’t get enough of it, or him, because nothing beats a billionaire’s mea culpa for capitalism. So Dalio, fantastically rich and successful at age 69, finds himself a media darling on financial talk shows after a recent kickoff appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

    The article, in two parts, is fairly long. It spends several pages discussing the author’s own background, wage and income inequality, bad schools, lack of child care, lack of health care, and a host of other standard left-liberal complaints. But we can summarize Dalio’s bottom line, as he does in a section called “What I Think Should be Done.” It’s an exercise in bland, meaningless jargon and lack of specifics:

    • Leadership from the top. People with their “hands on the levers of power” (yikes!) need to make inequality a priority. Obviously he means politicians and corporate leaders, and does not intend to lessen the “power” of either. But if bad politicians and greedy corporate types got us into this mess, how will they get us out? More importantly, and left unaddressed, is any suggestion of their incentives to do so. After all, the present system made them rich, powerful, and unaccountable.

    • Bipartisan policy makers working together to “divide and increase the economic pie better.” More politics, which doesn’t work and can’t work. Whose policy? What makes a policy good? Why hasn’t this supposed policy consensus already emerged on its own?

    • Clear metrics and accountability for the “people in charge.” This doesn’t work, and can’t work, in politics. We have centuries of “data” to show how the worst rise to the top of the political world. Government by definition acts outsider the market, and is unaccountable by its very nature as a monopoly. Politicians don’t have a P& L; private businesses do. Again, why does Dalio seem so oblivious to incentives?

    • Redistribution of resources. This doesn’t work and can’t work, except by market processes. Taxes. regulations, economic intervention, and state ownership of industry always reduce total wealth in society. A total nonstarter of a tired and thoroughly debunked idea, especially considering we already have a heavily interventionist economy. We also have the entire history of 20th century collectivism to demonstrate why “third way” interventionism can lead to outright socialism.

    Many billionaires—Mr. Dalio, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates among them— like to call for higher taxes on people such as themselves. But this raises a compelling question: would they have become rich in the first place under the kind of  tax system they now advocate? Would they have accumulated a critical mass of investment capital if taxes had consumed more of their profits along the the way? Would they have been able to maintain sufficient capital expenditures in their respective businesses to stay dynamic? Or would revenue, capital, and personal wealth lost to the IRS have relegated these super achievers to the status of merely successful? 

    Well-heeled tax hikers never mention the diminishing marginal utility of money. A billionaire could lose 90% of his/her wealth to the state and remain an elite centimillionaire. Higher taxes for billionaires are simply a cost of doing business, like paying 20% more for an acquisition. But for a “rich” American family making $200,000, or even $40,000 by global standards, a 20% higher tax bill might prevent them from ever reaching their own critical mass of savings and wealth. Just as dominant corporations welcome new regulations, financial elites welcome new taxes as a form of protecting their status from upstarts.

    Furthermore, there is no indication Mr. Dalio or other wealthy advocates for wealth redistribution ever practiced this idea in their own businesses. Dalio voluntarily could have paid higher taxes, much higher taxes, both to the federal government and his home state of Connecticut. He could have argued for higher capital gains tax rates, and refused to accept “carried interest” treatment of his firm’s income for management services. After all, to paraphrase Warren Buffett, why should Dalio’s secretary pay a higher tax rate than him?  

    He also could have equalized pay and ownership among his employees, and hired low-income and low skilled victims of the bad public schools he identifies. He could have run his hedge fund as an employee-owned cooperative. He could have opened his funds to ordinary people with $500 or $1000 to invest.

    Perhaps most of all, he could have called for the Federal Reserve to end its practice of keeping interest rates artificially low. Cheap money and credit are the lifeblood of hedge funds, making it possible to buy companies with less equity and more debt—less skin in the game. Leveraged acquisitions allow for fewer shareholders receiving (nondeductible) dividends, along with the tax benefits of deductible interest payments. Cheap leverage made Mr. Dalio billionaire he is today. 

    But low interest rates cause tremendous harm to average people who simply want to save money in simple, low-risk vehicles, and they distort the entire economy by producing malinvestment, encouraging consumption over saving, and rewarding high time preference. While Dalio admits the Fed favors rich guys by crafting policy that inflates asset prices instead of wages, he remains blind to the central bank’s role as the primary driver of the wealth inequality he laments.

    Mr. Dalio is by all accounts a brilliant and hard-nosed businessman. Hedge funds, at least successful hedge funds, make money by ruthlessly identifying untapped value in organizations, replacing board members and management with fund executives, and selling when the selling is good. So why on earth would he pledge to donate $100 million to Connecticut public schools, a system he admits is failing?  Would he invest in a company with a similar track record of spending more and more each year for worse results? A company where he would have no say in management, board governance, operations, or how it spends his investment? Will he maximize, or even measure, the “return” on his investment in Connecticut public schools? Will he seek to minimize risk, in the form of his $100 million being irretrievably wasted?

    The answer to these question is “No”, because he’s not buying a company or making a financial investment. He’s buying goodwill, a form of insurance for billionaires against the growing tide of populist resentment. The infamous Reverend Bacon from Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities comes to mind: Dalio is buying “steam control,” and he’s getting “value for money” as Bacon puts it. He’s buying relief, an indulgence for his sin of getting too rich.

    Dalio played the game, by the rules of the game. Now he appears to say, “I’ve got mine, let’s change the rules.”

  • Americans' Expectations For Home Prices Appreciation Drops To Lowest On Record

    Today, the NY Fed released its March 2019 Survey of Consumer Expectations, which showed no change in the short-term inflation expectations and a slight increase in medium-term inflation expectations. And  while expected earnings and household income expectations improved slightly, in keeping with various consumer confidence surveys, a red flashing alert was noted in regard to home price change expectations which remain at their lowest level on record, suggesting that most Americans do not anticipate any increase in the price of their homes – an asset which has traditionally been an equity piggy bank for America’s middle class – for a long time.

    Here are the main findings from the March 2019 survey:

    Inflation

    • Median inflation expectations at the one-year horizon remained stable at 2.8% in March, while increasing by 0.1 percentage point to 2.9% at the three-year horizon.
    • The median expected change in the cost of gas increased from 4.3% to 4.7% in March, the highest reading since June 2018. The median one-year ahead expected changes in the cost of food, medical care, college education, and rent changed little in March, all staying within 0.1 percentage points of the previous month’s expectations.  

    And while the median home price change expectations remained steady at 3.0% for the fourth consecutive month, this was the lowest reading of the series, driven mostly by a continued drop in appreciation expectations by those earning over $100,000.

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    There were notable improvement in the labor market where median one-year ahead earnings growth expectations increased from 2.5% in February to 2.6% in March, the highest reading since September 2018. These expectations, however, varied substantially across demographic groups. In particular, median earnings growth expectations reported by respondents over the age of 60 and respondents with a high school diploma or less actually decreased in March.

    Separately, the mean perceived probability of losing one’s job in the next 12 months decreased 0.3 percentage points to 14.3% in March, equal to its 12-month trailing average. This decrease was driven mostly by respondents under the age of 40. Adding to the labor market optimism, the probability of leaving one’s job voluntarily in the next 12 months increased from 21.2% to 21.8%.

    A modest cloud on the otherwise blemishless labor market horizon, was the perceived probability of finding a job (if one’s current job was lost) which decreased 0.7 percentage points to 58.6%. And although this is the lowest level since August 2018, it remains close to the series’ high of 60.1% reached in November 2017.

    * * *

    Finally, the survey found a somewhat mixed picture when it comes to the state of household finance. After declining for three consecutive months, the median expected household income growth rebounded to 2.8%. In contrast, median household spending growth expectations stayed unchanged at 3.1%. At the same time, perceptions of credit access compared to a year ago improved slightly despite the recent contraction in credit availability according to the most recent SLOOS survey.

    The proportion of respondents who reported experiencing more difficulties accessing credit declined from 29.8% to 28.9%, while the proportion of those reporting easier access increased from 22.6% to 23.7%. Expectations for year-ahead credit availability also improved slightly in March. The proportion expecting improving conditions in credit access increased from 19.0% to 19.2%, while the proportion expecting worsening conditions in credit access declined from 32.5% to 32.3%.

    The next question revealed a concerning development in the economy, as slightly over one in ten Americans believe they will be unable to make their minimum debt payment in the immediate future. Specifically, the percentage of consumers who expect to not be able to make minimum debt payment over the next three months increased 0.7 percentage points to 11.6% in March (however, it remains below its 12-month trailing average of 12.0%).

    More concerning is that the fiscal tailwind from the tax cut stimulus is now a distant memory, and the median expected year-ahead change in taxes (at current income level) increased from 2.5% in February to 2.8%, the highest reading since October 2016. The series has been trending upwards since reaching a low of 1.5% in February 2018.

    And so, with the average consumer seeing little room for improvement in their personal finances, or any home price appreciation, with many challenged by rising rates, it was no surprise that one-year ahead expectations as well as perceptions about households’ current financial situations deteriorated in March, with slightly lower proportions of respondents expecting to be and feeling better off financially.

    Finally, looking at Donald Trump’s favorite indicator, the survey-implied probability that U.S. stock prices will be higher 12 months from now than they are today decreased slightly from 42.0% in February to 41.4% in March, perhaps as a result of stocks approaching their Sept 2018 all time highs.

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Apr 10

Today’s News 10th April 2019

  • China's Multi-Billion Dollar Greece Investment Plunged In "Unprecedented Limbo" By Local Bureaucrats

    “The challenges for Chinese enterprises to succeed in managing BRI projects is not showering the dollars and yuans, but winning hearts and minds,” a China research fellow at London-based think tank Chatham House told the South China Morning Post in a bombshell full report detailing how Beijing has entered an “unprecedented limbo” on a stalled expansion project on the famous and ancient Port of Piraeus in Greece. It illustrates an emerging trend in other Belt and Road Initiative countries: all the money in the world can’t overcome local and cultural realities, and if Beijing plans to ride roughshod over these in hunger of its broader ambitions, President Xi’s grand initiative is sure to die on the vine.

    Cosco Shipping — the China state-owned Shanghai based shipping and logistics services conglomerate — has been operating Piraeus port for the past decade, but local authorities have now banned the company from pursuing a planned expansion of port facilities due to archaeological concerns, halting a €1.5 billion (US$1.7 billion) long term expansion deal with the Greek government which included construction of a sprawling mall next to a new cruise ship terminal, as well as a five-star hotel in port’s southern section. The broader makeover was a planned first step in creating a so-called Athens Riviera — but which now faces endless bureaucratic obstacles amid local fears China is playing an outsized role in Greece.  

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    The Port of Piraeus, which could soon become the biggest container terminal in the Mediterranean. Image source: Xinhua

    Last week the Greek Central Archaeological Council unanimously turned down major key aspects to the project, citing potential damage to local heritage and archaeological preservation projects, as well as environmental concerns and “aesthetic” reasons. Crucially, the council effectively declared half the town as an archaeological site, bringing to a halt Cosco’s further plans to construct a new cruise passenger station, a logistics center in nearby Keratsini, four new cruise berths at Pireaus, along with a new berth allocation system, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) report. 

    Ironically, the SCMP observes, “while Greece’s heritage was once an attraction for the Chinese leadership, it may now prove to be a stumbling block for their ambitions.” Though Cosco’s management of Pireaus predates Xi’s BRI plans (Cosco has a 51% stake in the port), China’s success in Greece could convince skeptics concerning Beijing’s role on the European continent. 

    But it now appears the skeptics are winning, given Cosco will now face much stricter regulations for any expansion due to the extension of the archaeological zone, even as Greece’s leaders lobby for more foreign investors aimed at recovery from a nearly nine-year economic and austerity crisis. It’s further believed that opposition elements within PM Tsipras’ own Syriza party are working against him to block major foreign companies from gaining too much of a stake in Greece. 

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    Illustration via SCMP

    Citing Cosco company insiders, the SCMP report lends credence to these fears in the following: 

    Insiders at the company, however, say they are now playing a greater role in Greece than initially expected.

    The Chinese brand is seen as a representative of modernity, a provider of jobs in an economically struggling country, a redeveloper of cities – and a constant target for sceptics in the Greek parliament.

    Cosco is responsible for the long-term sustainability of the port, given its outsize role in the Piraeus Port Authority, which it took over from the Greek government in 2016 following Tsipras’s privatisation deal.

    But now, after last week’s Central Archaeological Council decision, which made Cosco executives “furious” according to some reports, obstacles and red tape are mounting given that “Even projects that had already been approved had to be referred to the Ministry of Culture, the Central Archaeological Council and the Central Council of Modern Monuments for reauthorization,” according to the SCMP.

    Moreover, the whole episode underscores Beijing’s overly optimistic approach to BRI-related expansion generally, given the tendency to operate on the assumption that a population’s deep cultural roots combined with local politics can ultimately be overcome with the lure of multi-billion dollar investment. 

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    On the intricacies of the internal long running Greek fight over privatization and the sale of state assets to speed economic recovery, the SCMP reports further:

    Speaking to the South China Morning Post, Greece’s Deputy Prime Minister Yanis Dragasakis rejected Greek media reports that the Tsipras administration was employing delaying tactics because it was falling in the polls ahead of elections this year.

    “I don’t know there’s a delay here. This is not related to the election. It is related to the complexity of the decision to be made,” Dragasakis said.

    “This area is full of antiquities, [a] fact that requires all procedures to be followed properly. In any event, the investment for the port of Piraeus is a very, very important investment.”

    The Greek government, he added, “will do our utmost to facilitate [Cosco’s] presence in Greece.”

    Sources say the stymied expansion plan will result in at least an eight month delay for implementation of already approved investments, on top of the ongoing two-and-a-half years of delays since the Piraeus Port Authority’s privatization under Cosco.

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    Port of Piraeus via Seatrade Maritime News

    Initially, Cosco faced very few permits, according to Greece’s Ekathimerini newspaper, and was on its way to surpass Valencia in Spain for becoming the Mediterranean’s busiest container terminal. 

    Cosco considers the expansion projects and interventions as necessary for Piraeus’ continued operation at such levels, as well as a crucial future link in the so-called new Silk Road linking Europe and Eurasia. 

  • Gold & Basel 3: A Revolution That Once Again No One Noticed

    Via The Saker blog,

    By Aleksandr Khaldey
    Translated by Ollie Richardson and Angelina Siard
    cross posted with https://www.stalkerzone.org/basel-3-a-revolution-that-once-again-no-one-noticed/
    source: http://www.iarex.ru/articles/65626.html

    Real revolutions are taking place not on squares, but in the quiet of offices, and that’s why nobody noticed the world revolution that took place on March 29th 2019. Only a small wave passed across the periphery of the information field, and the momentum faded away because the situation was described in terms unclear to the masses.

    No “Freedom, equality, brotherhood”, “Motherland or death”, or “Power to Councils, peace to the people, bread to the hungry, factories to the worker, and land to the farmers” – none of these masterpieces of world populism were used. And that’s why what happened was understood in Russia by only a few people. And they made such comments that the masses either did not fully listen to them or did not read up to the end. Or they did listen to the end, but didn’t understand anything.

    But they should’ve, because the world changed so cardinally that it is indeed time for Nathan Rothschild, having crumpled a hat in his hand, to climb onto an armoured Rolls-Royce [a joke referencing what Lenin did – ed], and to shout from on top of it to all the Universe: “Comrades! The world revolution, the need for which revolutionaries spoke about for a long time, came true!” [paraphrasing what Lenin said – ed] And he would be completely right. It’s just that the results of the revolution will be implemented slowly, and that’s why they are imperceptible for the population. But the effects, nevertheless, will be soon seen by absolutely everyone, up to the last cook who even doesn’t seek to learn to govern the state soon.

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    This revolution is called “Basel III”, and it was made by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Its essence is in the following: BIS runs the IMF, and this, in turn, runs the central banks of all countries. The body of such control is called BCBS – the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. It isn’t just some worthless US State Department or Congress of American senators. It’s not a stupid Pentagon, a little Department of the Treasury, which runs around like the CIA’s servant on standby, or a house of collective farmers with the name “White House”.

    This isn’t even the banks of the US Federal Reserve, which govern all of this “wealth”. This is a Government of all of them combined. That real world Government that people in the world try not to speak about aloud.

    BCBS is the Politburo of the world, whose Secretary General, according to rumours, is comrade Baruch, and the underground structure of the Central Committee is even more secret. It has many euphemisms, the most adequate of which is “Zurich gnomes”. This is what Swiss bankers are called. Not even owners of commercial banks, but namely those ordinary-looking men sitting in the Swiss city of Basel who Hitler – who tried to attach the whole world to the Third Reich, and who preserved neutrality with Switzerland during all the war – didn’t dare to attack. And, as is known, in Switzerland, besides Swiss rifleman, in reality there isn’t even an army. So who was the frenzied Fuhrer afraid of?

    Nevertheless, the “recommendations” that were made by BCBS on March 29th 2019 were immediately, at the snap of the fingers, accepted for execution by all the central banks of the world. And our Russian Central Bank is not an exception. There is even the statement of the press service of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation posted on the official website of the Central Bank. It is called “Concerning the terms of implementation of Basel III”. The planned world revolution was in 2017 (magic of dates and digits or just a coincidence [a reference to 1917 – ed]?), but it has started only now.

    Its essence is simple.

    In the world the system of exclusive dollar domination established in 1944 in Bretton Woods and reformed in 1976 in Jamaica, where gold’s equivalency to money was cancelled. The dollar became world money and gold became an ordinary exchange good, like metal or sugar traded in London on commodity exchanges. However, this was determined there by only three firms of the “Pool of London” that belong to an even smaller number of owners, but, nevertheless, it’s not gold, but oil that became the dollar filler.

    We have lived in such a world ever since. Gold was considered as a reserve of the third category for all banks, from central to commercial ones, where the reserves were, first of all, in dollars and bonds of the US. The norms of Basel III demand an increase, first of all, in monetary reserves. This impeded the volumes of monetary resources of banks that could be used to carry out expansion, but it was a compulsory measure for saving the stability of a world banking system that showed to be insufficient in a crisis.

    In Russia pseudo-patriots were very much indignant at this, demanding to reject Basel III, which they called a sign of “a lack of sovereignty”. In reality, this is a quite normal demand to observe international standards of bank security, which were becoming more rigid, but since we [Russians – ed] were not printing dollars, so of course it had an impact on us. And since the alternative is an exit from world financial communications into full isolation, so our authorities, of course, did not want to accept such nonsense that was even designated by pseudo-patriots as a “lack of sovereignty”. To call sovereignty – freedom, to put your head in the noose is, let’s agree, a strange interpretation of the term.

    The Basel III decision meant that gold as a reserve of the third category was earlier estimated at 50% of its value on the balance sheets of world banks. At the same time, all owners of world money traded in gold not physically, but on paper, without the movement of real metal, the volume of which in the world wasn’t enough for real transactions. This was done in order to push down the price of gold, to keep it as low as possible. First of all, for the benefit of the dollar. After all, the dollar is tied to oil, which had to cost no less than the price of one gram of gold per barrel.

    And now it was decided to place gold not in the third, but “just” in the first category. And it means that now it is possible to evaluate it not at 50, but at 100% of its value. This leads to the revaluation of the balance sheet total. And concerning Russia, it means that now we can quietly, on all legal grounds, pour nearly 3 trillion rubles into the economy. If to be precise, it is 2.95 trillion rubles or $45 billion at the exchange rate in addition to the current balance sheet total. The Central Bank of the Russian Federation can pour this money into our economy on all legal grounds. How it will happen in reality isn’t yet known. Haste here without calculating all the consequences is very dangerous. Although this emission is considered as noninflationary, actually everything is much more complicated.

    During the next few months nothing will change in the world. The U-turn will be very slow. In the US the gold reserves officially total 8133.5 tons, but there is such a thing as a financial multiplier: for every gold dollar, the banks print 20-30 digital paper ones. I.e., the US can only officially receive $170 billion in addition, but taking into account the multiplier – $4.5 trillion. This explains why the Federal Reserve System holds back on increasing interests rates and so far maintains the course towards lowering the balance sheet total – they are cautious of a surge in hyperinflation.

    But all the largest states and holders of gold will now revalue their gold and foreign exchange reserves: Germany, Italy, France, Russia, China, and Switzerland – countries where the gold reserves exceed 1,000 tons. Notice that there is no mumpish Britain in this list. Its reserves are less than 1000 tons. Experts suspect that it is perhaps not a coincidence that the dates of Brexit and the date of Basel III coincide. The increased financial power of the leaders of Europe – Germany and France – is capable of completely concluding the dismantlement of Britain on the European continent. It was necessary to get out as soon as possible.

    Thus, it seems that it is possible to congratulate us – the dollar era lasting from 1944 to 2019 has ended. Now gold is restored in its rights and is not an exchange metal, but world money on an equal basis with the dollar, euro, and British pound. Now gold will start to rise in price, and its price will rise from $1200-1400 per troy ounce up to $1800-2000 by this autumn. Now it is clear why Russia and China during all these years so persistently decanted its export income into the growth of gold reserves. There is now such a situation where nobody in the world will sell gold.

    Injections of extra money will suffice for the world economy for 5-6 months. In the US this money can be used to pay off the astronomical debt. Perhaps this wasn’t Zurich’s last motive for making such a decision. But after all, the most important thing is an attempt to slip out from under the Tower of Pisa that is the falling dollar.

    Since the dollar and oil are connected, the growth of the price of gold will directly affect the growth of the price of oil. Now a barrel costs as much as 1.627 grams of gold. A price growth will cause the world economy – where 85% of the money dollar supply turns into stock surrogates like shares, bonds, and treasuries – to cave in. The stock exchange will not be able to bundle together such an additional mass of money any more.

    It will be good for oil industry workers – even, perhaps, best of all, but not for long. The economical crash because of expensive oil will become a crash for all oil industry workers too. It is precisely this that is the main reason why our rights for additional emissions can remain unused in full volume, although a gift in such a form will not be completely ignored. The May ‘Decrees of Putin’ in the current context are being understood completely differently. Russia runs away from the oil-based economic model in all ways. Including by political reforms and changing the elites.

    However, why is the decision of Basel a revolution?

    Because from the autumn the financial flood in the world economy will begin. It will entail the acceleration of Russia and China’s isolation from the dollar system and the crash of the economies that completely depend on the dollar – the vassal countries of the US. It will be worst of all for them. And this means that the reasons for increased distancing between the EU and the US will increase in number manyfold.

    A redrawing of the map of global unions awaits the world.

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    And the redrawing of these unions will be carried out not least by military methods. Or with their partial use, but in one way or another, reasoning involving force in the world will increase almost to the level of guaranteed war. “Almost” is our hope for rescue, because the US loses all main instruments of influence on this world. Except force.

    But it’s not for this purpose that the “Zurich gnomes” created this world, so that the US is so simply turned into radioactive ashes. The US will be drenched with cold water like a broken down nuclear reactor, while the world has entered the zone of the most global transformations over the past few centuries. The revolution that so many waited for, were afraid of, and spoke so much about has started. Buckle up and don’t smoke, the captain and crew wish you a pleasant flight.

  • Putin Hopes For Fresh Start With Trump After "Notorious" Mueller Commission Found Nothing

    Russian president Vladimir Putin said he’s ready to turn the leaf on the first two years of diplomatic scandals between the US and Russia, and is seeking areas of cooperation with his US counterprart (and according to various now debunked lunatics, spy) Donald Trump, calling the furor over election-meddling allegations part of the deep political crisis in Washington.

    In his first public comments on the outcome of Robert Mueller’s investigation which found no collusion or conspiracy between Trump and Russia, Putin welcomed the controversial findings.

    “We said from the very start that this notorious commission of Mr. Mueller wouldn’t find anything because we know this better than anyone,” Putin told the International Arctic Forum in St. Petersburg on Tuesday, adding that it was “utter nonsense aimed solely at a domestic audience and used for internal political struggle in the U.S.”

    In retrospect, he was right.

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    Vladimir Putin delivers a speech at the International Arctic Forum in St. Petersburg on April 9, Photo: TASS

    As a reminder, Trump scored the biggest political victory of his presidency – even as the credibility of the US liberal medial plumbed new lows – last month after AG William Barr published a summary of Mueller’s finding that there was no collusion during the campaign. Trump, who repeatedly – and correctly – condemned the 22-month inquiry as a “witch hunt” said he’d been completely exonerated.

    Agreeing with his US colleague, Putin said that witch hunts are “a black page” in U.S. history and “I would not like it ever to happen again” (here the conspiracy nuts should be ready to chime in with a witty rejoinder). The outcome of the Mueller investigation showed that “a mountain gave birth to a mouse,” the Russian president said.

    While Putin said when the two leaders met in Helsinki last year that he’d wanted Trump to win the 2016 election because of his pledge to improve relations – and because Hillary Clinton’s State Department did everything in its power to set the stage for a war between Russia and Ukraine – he avoided generating more controversy, and said he supports Trump’s re-election in 2020.

    “We respect the wishes of the American people,” he said. “Whoever is president, we’re ready to work with them.”

    To be sure, much bad blood remains between the US “deep state” and Moscow: recall that US intelligence agencies “concluded” that Russia was behind hacking aimed at damaging Democratic Party contender Hillary Clinton (which unveiled that the DNC had rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders, and that Hillary Clinton was a professional in saying one thing to the public and something else to Wall Street). Russia, naturally, rejects the allegations. Trump pledged during his campaign to improve ties with Russia and has repeatedly said he wants good relations with Putin.

    As for how the former KGB spy and Trump are getting along currently, Putin said he has “plenty of disagreements” with Trump, whose administration has imposed a series of new sanctions on his country, but is ready to work with the U.S. on issues of joint interest including terrorism and arms control.

    “We hope that when this situation normalizes, opportunities will emerge for bilateral cooperation on all issues,” Putin said.

    * * *

    Separately, Putin also said that Russia will dramatically increase its presence in the Arctic region by building new ports and other facilities and expanding its fleet of icebreaker vessels, as the competition for the area’s natural resources intensifies.

    Putin told the leaders of Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden at the Forum that Russia’s efforts will help quadruple the level of cargo shipments across the Arctic sea route.

    “This is a realistic, well-calculated, and concrete task. We need to make the Northern sea route safe and commercially feasible,” he said.

    And here is another irony: climate change is directly benefiting Russia – the shrinking polar ice in the Arctic region is expected to offer new opportunities for resource exploration and the development of new shipping lanes, leading Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, and Norway into a competition for jurisdiction in the region.

    Putin set a goal for the amount of cargo carried across the shipping lane to rise to 80 million metric tons by 2025 from the 20 million tons transported in 2018, the majority under Russian-flagged vessels. Russia, the only country with a fleet of nuclear icebreakers, is moving to expand its current inventory of four nuclear-powered vessels to a total of nine by 2035, he said. It also has four nonnuclear icebreakers in its fleet, according to RFE.

    In 2017, Jim Mattis, the former U.S. defense secretary noted the Russian buildup and said that “America has got to up its game in the Arctic.”

    “The Arctic is key strategic terrain. Russia is taking aggressive steps to increase its presence there. I will prioritize the development of an integrated strategy for the Arctic,” said Mattis, who left his position at the end of 2018.

    At the Arctic forum, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov defended the military buildup, saying, “We don’t threaten anyone.”

    “We ensure sufficient defense capabilities given the political and military situation around our borders,” He added.

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  • Financial Tyranny: America Has Become A Pay-to-Play Exercise In Fascism

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
    If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
    If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,
    If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.

    Don’t ask me what I want it for
    If you don’t want to pay some more
    ‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman…
    And you’re working for no one but me.
    — George Harrison, “Taxman”

    We’re not living the American Dream. We’re in the grip of a financial nightmare.

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    “We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

    We get taxed on how much we earn, taxed on what we eat, taxed on what we buy, taxed on where we go, taxed on what we drive, and taxed on how much is left of our assets when we die, and yet we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used.

    Case in point: Lawmakers across the country have been acting as fronts for corporations, sponsoring more than 10,000 model laws written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks such as the American Legislative Exchange Council.

    Make no mistake: this is fascism disguised as legislative expediency.

    As a recent investigative report by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity points out, these copycat bills have been used to “override the will of local voters” and advance the agendas of the corporate state. “Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called ‘model’ bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.”

    In this way, laws that promise to protect the public “actually bolster the corporate bottom line.”

    For example, “The Asbestos Transparency Act didn’t help people exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations who wanted to make it harder for victims to recoup money. The ‘HOPE Act,’ introduced in nine states, was written by a conservative advocacy group to make it more difficult for people to get food stamps.”

    Talk about Orwellian.

    So we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn.

    This is true whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities. Even monetary awards in lawsuits against government officials who are found guilty of wrongdoing are paid by the taxpayer.

    We’re being forced to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, for misguided pork barrel projects that do little to enhance our lives, and for the trappings of a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

    All the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

    We’re being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.

    Truly, if there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the taxpayers—who fuel the nation’s economy and fund the government’s programs—always get ripped off.

    Examples abound of wasteful government spending.

    $28 million for a camouflage pattern for the Afghan National Army’s uniforms that had to be discarded because it clashes with the desert; $80 million to corral wild horses that would fare better unpenned; $5 million for a study to conclude that fraternity and sorority members drink more than their peers; and more than $1 billion worth of small arms, mortars, Humvees, and other equipment that has gone “missing” in Iraq.

    If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

    Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its money grabs.

    Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.

    With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

    Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

    The overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the NSA; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; roving TSA sweeps; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies such as the IRS, Dept. of Education, the Smithsonian and others with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

    Meanwhile, the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and the agencies under their command—Defense, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, etc.—have switched their allegiance to the Corporate State with its unassailable pursuit of profit at all costs and by any means possible.

    We are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

    While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the police state is spending our hard-earned tax dollars to further entrench its powers and entrap its citizens.

    If you want to know the real motives behind the government’s agenda, follow the money trail.

    When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.

    It gets worse.

    Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

    Those football stadiums that charge exorbitant sums for nosebleed seats? Our taxpayer dollars subsidize them.

    Those blockbuster war films? Yep, we were the silent investors on those, too.

    This isn’t freedom.

    You’re not free if the government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes.

    You’re not free if government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing.

    And you’re certainly not free if the IRS gets the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

    If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

    As former Congressman Ron Paul observed, “The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.”

    Unfortunately, somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), and representative government has been rejected in favor of a kakistocracy (a government run by the most unprincipled citizens that panders to the worst vices in our nature: greed, violence, hatred, prejudice and war) ruled by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.

    The American kleptocracy continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

    This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight.

    It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president.

    It has been a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

    By playing on our prejudices about those who differ from us, capitalizing on our fears for our safety, and deepening our distrust of those fellow citizens whose opinions run counter to our own, the powers-that-be have effectively divided us into polarized, warring camps incapable of finding consensus on the one true menace that is an immediate threat to all of our freedoms: the U.S. government.

    We are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few.

    Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us.

    All of those nefarious government deeds that you read about in the paper every day: those are your tax dollars at work.

    So what are you going to do about it?

    There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

    Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

    Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

    Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

    And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

    But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?

    What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

    What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if we don’t have the right to decide what happens to our hard-earned cash, then we don’t have any rights at all.

    After all, the government isn’t taking our money to make our lives better.

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    We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

    This is nothing less than financial tyranny.

  • Unsuspecting Masturbators Blackmailed For Millions; Porn-Site Hacker Bought Hookers And Rolex With Proceeds

    A UK computer hacker working for a Russian crime group has been jailed for six years and five months for his role in blackmailing unsuspecting would-be masterbators who visited pornography websites, according to the UK’s National Crime Agency. 

    An undisclosed number of victims from over 20 countries were pumped for millions of dollars in the scheme, in which 24-year-old computer scientist Zain Qaiser of Barking in Essex used fraudulent identities and fake companies to buy advertising space on legal porn sites, which were “laced with malicious software.” Once a victim’s computer was infected, a pop-up message purporting to be law enforcement would accuse people of crimes – which they could rectify by paying a fine.

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    Zain Qaiser lived at home with his family

    When users clicked on the ads they were redirected to another website, hosting highly-sophisticated malware strains including the infamous Angler Exploit Kit (AEK) – believed to have been created, managed and marketed by one of Qaiser’s Russian-speaking associates. Users with any vulnerabilities would subsequently be infected with a malicious payload.

    One of those malicious payloads was a piece of software called Reveton – a type of malware that would lock a user’s browser. Once locked, the infected device would display a message purporting to be from a law enforcement or a government agency, which claimed an offence had been committed and the victim had to pay a fine of anything between $300-$1,000 in order to unlock their device. –National Crime Agency

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    According to UK authorities, Qaiser spent his more than £700,000 ($912,000 US) share of the ill-gotten-booty on stays in high-end hotes, hookers, gambling, drugs and luxury items – including a £5,000 ($6,500 US) Rolex watch. During one 10-month stretch, Qaiser spent £68,000 ($88,000 US) on gambling in one London casino. 

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    Zain Qaiser

    Qaiser was brought down in the “extremely long-running, complex cyber-crime investigation” in which UK investigators worked with agencies in the US, Canada and Europe – while the FBI and US Secret Service arrested others in connection to the global malware campaign. 

    “Zain Qaiser was an integral part of this organised crime group generating millions of pounds in ransom payments by blackmailing countless victims and threatening them with bogus police investigations,” reads the report. 

    Qaiser admitted to 11 offenses – including blackmail, fraud, money laundering and computer misuse. He was jailed at Kingston Crown Court. Zain better hope that nobody in prison uses a backdoor exploit to access his mainframe. 

  • Mike Whitney Asks "Will Junta-Mastermind, John Brennan, Ever Face The Music?"

    Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,

    The Great Russia Deception all began with John Brennan.

    It was Brennan who reported “contacts… between Russian officials and persons in the Trump campaign”, just as it was Brennan who first referred the case to former FBI Director James Comey. It was also Brennan who “hand-picked” the analysts who stitched together the dodgy Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which said that “Putin and the Russian government aspired to help…Trump’s election chances.”) And it was Brennan who persuaded Harry Reid to petition Comey to open an investigation. At every turn, Brennan was there. He got the ball rolling, he pulled all the right strings, he whipped up a mood of public hysteria, and he excoriated the president at every opportunity. For those who want to know where Russiagate began, look no further than John Brennan.

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    Here’s a bit of what Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee during his testimony in 2017:

    “We were uncovering information and intelligence about interactions and contacts between U.S. persons and the Russians. And as we came upon that, we would share it with the bureau.”

    Brennan’s statement clarifies his role in the operation, he was providing the raw intelligence to Comey and Comey was reluctantly following up with surveillance, wiretaps, leaks to the media, and the placing of confidential informants in the Trump campaign. It was a tag-team combo, but Brennan was the primary instigator, there’s no doubt about that.

    And let’s not forget that Comey didn’t really want to participate in Brennan’s hairbrain scheme to smear candidate Trump. At first he balked, which is why Brennan leaned on Senate Majority leader Harry Reid to twist Comey’s arm. Here’s a little background from Tom Fitton at artvoice.com:

    “Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid reportedly believed then-Obama CIA Director Brennan was feeding him information about alleged links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in order to make public accusations:

    According to ‘Russian Roulette,’ by Yahoo! News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff and David Corn… Brennan contacted Reid on Aug. 25, 2016, to brief him on the state of Russia’s interference in the presidential campaign. Brennan briefed other members of the so-called Gang of Eight, but Reid is the only who took direct action.

    Two days after the briefing, Reid wrote a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey asserting that ‘evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount.’ Reid called on Comey to investigate the links ‘thoroughly and in a timely fashion.’

    Reid saw Brennan’s outreach as ‘a sign of urgency,’ Isikoff and Corn wrote in the book. ‘Reid also had the impression that Brennan had an ulterior motive. He concluded the CIA chief believed the public needed to know about the Russian operation, including the information about the possible links to the Trump campaign.’

    According to the book, Brennan told Reid that the intelligence community had determined that the Russian government was behind the hack and leak of Democratic emails and that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind it. Brennan also told Reid that there was evidence that Russian operatives were attempting to tamper with election results. Indeed, on August 27, 2016, Reid wrote a letter to Comey accusing President Trump’s campaign of colluding with the Russian government.” (“The John Brennan-Harry Reid Collusion to ‘Get Trump’”, artvoice.com)

    So Brennan fed Reid a load of malarkey and the credulous senator swallowed it hook, line and sinker. It may sound incredible now, given the results of the Mueller report, but that’s what happened. Here’s more of Brennan’s testimony to Congress:

    “I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals and it raised questions in my mind, again, whether or not the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”

    Okay, so Brennan says he gathered “information and intelligence that revealed contacts between Russian officials and persons in the Trump campaign.”

    What information? What intelligence? What officials? Brennan has never identified anyone and never produced a lick of evidence to back up any of his claims, and yet, his testimony was taken as gospel truth. Why? Why would anyone in their right mind trust anything Brennan has to say? Hasn’t Brennan lied to Congress in the past? Didn’t the CIA’s inspector general find that Brennan’s agents “improperly” spied on US Senate staffers”? Hasn’t Brennan defended the use of torture and promoted Obama’s homicidal drone program? Hasn’t Brennan revealed his personal animus and vitriolic hatred for Donald Trump many, many times before. So why would anyone trust what he has to say? It makes no sense. The man has a major credibility problem which is a polite way of saying he’s a serial liar. Here’s more from Brennan:

    “I don’t know whether or not such collusion — and that’s your term, such collusion existed. I don’t know. But I know that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.”

    Got that? So Brennan had zero hard evidence of anything, but he thought that a few scratchy phone intercepts were sufficient for the FBI to hector, harass and spy on the GOP nominee for president of the United States. Can you see how ridiculous this is? No one elected John Brennan to anything, and yet, he arbitrarily decided that he had the right to sex up the intelligence so Comey and Clapper would do his bidding and try to bring down Trump. This is the type of thing you’d expect to see in a police state not America.

    We are told by the Guardian that:

    “GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters) played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016. One source called the British eavesdropping agency the “principal whistleblower”. (Guardian)

    This might be true, but I seriously doubt it. I suspect the Guardian is just covering for Brennan because they know that his ridiculous claims of “contacts between Russian officials and persons in the Trump campaign” are complete, utter nonsense. There were no contacts between Russian officials and the Trump campaign because–as the Mueller report states– there was no coordination, no cooperation, and no collusion. In other words, Brennan just made it up to pursue his own personal vendetta against Trump which is what you’d expect from the most partisan CIA chief in history. Here’s more from the same article:

    “The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow ahead of the US election. This was in part due to US law that prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of American citizens without warrants. “They are trained not to do this,” the source stressed.” (Guardian)

    “The extensive nature of contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow”???

    There were no extensive contacts nor were there any illegal, unethical or improper contacts. If there were, AG Barr would have highlighted them in the 4-page Mueller report summary released last weekend. But he didn’t, because they don’t exist. The Democrats are now clinging to the feint hope that their flimsy obstruction case can be pulled from the ash-heap, but that’s not going to happen. It’s impossible to obstruct a case when you already know the case is is a fraud. Trump did not break the law. It’s that simple.

    As for Brennan, well, he was providing classified briefings to ranking members of Congress (expressing his belief that Moscow was helping Trump win the election) as early as August 2016. The date seems particularly relevant given that Trump did not become the GOP’s official presidential nominee until July 21, 2016. Was that just a coincidence or did it suddenly dawn on Brennan that Trump must be a Kremlin mole shortly after he clinched the top spot on the ticket? Funny how that works, isn’t it? Trump nabs the nomination and all of a sudden Brennan shifts into high gear digging up all kinds of fictional intercepts from Estonia and god-knows where else. Is this the looniest story you’ve ever heard or what?

    There’s really no part of Brennan’s implausible storyline that holds water. Even his flagship Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which was supposed to provide iron-clad proof of Trump’s culpability, fizzled out like a Roman candle in a summer downpour.

    Brennan of course hit all the cable news stations shortly after the ICA was released touting its wishy-washy findings as rock-solid proof of wrongdoing but, strangely enough, the report undermined its own credibility by providing a sweeping disclaimer that cautions readers against drawing any rash conclusions from the analysts observations. Here’s the money-quote from the report:

    “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”

    Nice, eh? So, while Brennan continues to insist that the Kremlin meddled in our elections, his own analysts suggest that any such judgements should be taken with a very large grain of salt. Nothing is certain, information is “incomplete or fragmentary”, and the entire report is based on what-amounts-to ‘educated guesswork.’ It’s a wonder why anyone took the report seriously to begin with.

    There’s no way to get around the fact that Brennan was glitzing up the intelligence to persuade Comey into hounding Trump. That’s the bottom line here. The unelected agents in the bureaucracy decided to use their considerable power to try to sabotage the election, prevent the normalisation of relations with Russia, and pave the way for impeachment proceedings. Only they got caught with their pants down, so someone’s going to have to take the fall.

    Who is responsible for placing spies in the Trump campaign? That’s what we want to know.

    Who is Stefan Halper and who did he work for?

    Why did he cozy up to Trump campaign advisers Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos?

    Was it all part of an ‘entrapment’ scheme?

    How many other spies were assigned to the Trump campaign?

    What was their purpose and who did they work for?

    Who signed off on the FISA applications that were improperly obtained?

    How was the Steele dossier used to build the case against Trump?

    Who authorized or participated in the leaks to the media? Who approved the wiretapping of Trump advisors?

    Was Trump wiretapped too?

    What was Obama’s role in all of this? How much did he know and how much did he authorize?

    How has Brennan escaped blame for the political firestorm he started?

    (According to Mother Jones, it was not the FBI that initiated the “Trump-Russia connection”.. but ..”Former CIA Director John Brennan … was the one who got the ball rolling.”)

    The only way the American people are going to find out what really happened is by interrogating the people who know. Putting John Brennan in the docket would be a good place to start.

  • Warm Weather Sparks Out Of Control Chicago Shooting Spree

    The warm weather is back, and with it Chicago’s iconic weekend mass shootings (which somehow never make it to the front pages).

    Twenty four people were shot in 24 hours in Chicago between April 6-7, including three adults and three children, who died from gunshot-related injuries, according to the Chicago Police Department. The mayhem started early Saturday morning and continued into the afternoon hours on Sunday.

    Police, and common sense, both allege that warmer weather was responsible for the surge in violent crime.

    During the weekend horror, Chicago police investigated multiple homicides and a mass shooting of six people in West Englewood. Three people were shot in East Garfield Park at 3:30 am Sunday. A 34-year-old was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital with a gunshot wound to the leg, a 26-year-old was taken to Norwegian American Hospital with a gunshot wound to his foot, and a 33-year-old was taken to Rush University Medical Center after he was shot in the arm.

    There is some good news: so far in 2018, Chicago shooting are trending about 20% below 2018, and well below the recent record hit in 2016, when nearly double the number of people had been shot through April 8.

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    A teenager was shot to death Saturday afternoon, in the 1700 block of West Steuben Street in Morgan Park.

    About 6:10 a.m on Sunday, officers found a 32-year-old man, shot in the back multiple times, was transported to University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

    Two of the three homicide investigations were conducted on Sunday. About 8:30 a.m. officers found a man, 52, with a single gunshot wound to the head at the 700 block of South Normal Boulevard in Englewood. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

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    Chicago Tribune listed the other shootings: “A 13-year-old boy wounded in the 1200 of West 73rd Street in Englewood, a 45-year-old man wounded in the 2000 block of West 68th Place, a 28-year-old man was wounded in the 5100 block of West Madison Street in South Austin, a 28-year-old man wounded in the 4900 block of West Hubbard Street in South Austin, a 29-year-old man wounded in the 4100 of West Belmont Avenue in Kilbourn Park, a 30-year-old man wounded in the 400 block of East 103rd Street in Roosemoor, a 29-year-old man wounded in the 7900 block of South Halsted Street in Gresham, a 27-year-old man wounded in the first block of East 102nd Street in Roosemoor, a 20-year-old man and a 43-year-old man wounded in the 10300 of South Corliss Avenue in Roseland, a 39-year-old man wounded in the 200 block of North Long Avenue in South Austin.”

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    As temperatures soar, so does violent crime in concentrated urban areas. Besides Chicago, Baltimore, Detriot, and New Orleans also suffer from out of control gun violence, despite strict weapons restrictions: it is almost as if criminals choose not to obey gun control laws.

    Shootings in the Windy City tends to rise in spring, peak in late summer months, then trough in late fall and winter. 

    Temperatures over the weekend were above average, so far, the hottest day of the year.

    “Temperatures certainly rebounded in the Chicago area this weekend versus temperatures in March and even the first few days of April. During March, the temperature averaged 3.6°F below normal at Chicago-O’Hare, with two days reaching the low to middle 60s during the month. This past weekend, the high was 66°F on Saturday and 67°F on Sunday, the warmest days of 2019, respectively (before Monday’s high temperature of 73°F). With some sunshine, the weather was very favorable for outdoor activities during this time, reported Meteorologist and owner of Empire Weather LLC., Ed Vallee.

    Warm weather encourages people to go outside, where more social interactions occur. Probabilities of violence tend to soar on hot days, especially in neighborhoods where 15–24-year-old unemployment rates are elevated.

  • "Man-Up" – Statistics Tell Us That American Boys Are Falling Behind In Just About Every Area

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

    As a society we appear to be really dropping the ball, because the numbers indicate that American boys are deeply struggling in just about every area. 

    Many professionals are pointing to a “crisis of fatherhood” as one of the key factors, and as I pointed out the other day, approximately a third of all U.S. children are now being raised in a home without a father.  Of course this negatively affects our girls as well, but there is something about that lack of a masculine role model that seems to particularly hurt boys.  However, the lack of a traditional family structure cannot explain all of the numbers that I am about to share with you.  As you will see, we are facing a crisis that will not easily be solved.

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    Warren Farrell, the co-author of a new book entitled “The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It”, has identified three key areas that he is most concerned about.

    The first is education…

    It is a crisis of education. Worldwide, 60% of the students who achieve less than the baseline level of proficiency in any of the three core subjects of the Program for the International Assessment are boys. Even boys’ IQs are dropping.

    Today, girls are educationally outperforming boys in elementary school, middle school and high school.

    And by the time college rolls around, the performance gap is absolutely enormous.  In fact, females have earned at least 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the United States for 18 years in a row.

    The second area Farrell is deeply concerned about is mental health…

    It is a crisis of mental health. Boys’ suicide rate goes from only slightly more than girls before age 14 to three times that of girls’ between 15 and 19, to 4 1/2 times that of girls between 20 and 24. Mass shooters, prisoners and Islamic State terrorism recruits are at least 90% male.

    In addition to all of that, males commit 90 percent of all homicides in the United States, and men lead women by a very wide margin in just about every other violent crime category as well.

    This is one area where the lack of a father in the home really seems to make a difference.  According to one very alarming study, when there is a 1 percent increase in fatherlessness in a neighborhood, on average it leads to a 3 percent rise in adolescent violence.

    Sadly, it appears that our young people are steadily becoming unhappier over time.  The following numbers come from the Free Beacon…

    Recent years have seen a rise in Americans 12 to 25 saying they are unhappy. Since 2012, the proportion of 8th and 10th graders who tell the Monitoring the Future survey that they felt unhappy has crept up from 13 percent to 18 percent. In roughly the same time, the proportion of 18- to 25-year-olds who say they are unhappy has risen from 11 to 17 percent, according to the General Social Survey.

    And as I pointed out in one recent article, other studies have found a clear link between unhappiness and social media use.

    The Internet can be used for great good, but it can also be heavily toxic, and today many of our young people are “plugged in” almost constantly…

    Essentially 100 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds are on social media. Fifty-four percent think they spend too much time on their cellphone; 72 percent of teens say their phone is sometimes the first thing they look at upon waking up.

    This, Twenge argues in her book iGen, explains a lot about why they are unhappy. Using several national surveys, Twenge argues that screen-using activities are linked to indicators of depression and unhappiness. For example, she finds that kids using devices more than three hours a day are 30 percent more likely to have an indicator of suicidality.

    The third major area that Farrell is deeply concerned about is physical health…

    It is a crisis of physical health. American men’s life expectancy has decreased two-tenths of a year even as American women’s has remained the same. Boys and men are dying earlier in 14 out of 15 of the leading causes of death.

    Overall, men are living 4.9 years less than women in the United States.

    One thing that would help would be to encourage our young men to avoid engaging in extremely risky behavior.  Young males tend to get hooked on drugs and alcohol at much higher rates than young females, and one recent study found that an alarming percentage of our boys are having sex before they reach the age of 13.  The following comes from CBS News…

    Talking to your children about sex can be awkward, but new research suggests that parents need to have those conversations much earlier than they do.

    In two national surveys, investigators found that between 4% and 8% of boys reported having sex before they were 13. That number varied greatly depending on where the boys lived. In San Francisco, just 5% of boys said they had sex before 13, but in Memphis that number jumped to 25%.

    Can that number for Memphis possibly be accurate?

    I certainly hope not.

    Unfortunately, it is not just in the United States where boys are falling behind.  If you can believe it, boys are educationally behind girls in each of the 63 largest developed nations.

    The world has changed, and it appears to be leaving boys behind.

    But what is going to happen when all of those boys grow up?

    The young people of today are the future, and right now that future is not looking very promising at all.

  • Intel Officials Fear China Will Target Globe's Underwater Internet Cables

    A new op-ed in Bloomberg Quint has noted what the United States should really be worried about regarding Beijing’s intentions after a year of tense China-US Navy encounters in the South China Sea. This potential threat, which is “far harder to discern,” involves the world’s some 380 underwater cables carrying more than 95% of all data and voice traffic between the continents. Could China be stealthily hacking them? It is certainly now in a better position to do so. 

    The piece details how the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies — already at the center of a broader US-China dispute over theft of trade secrets and unlawful dealings with sanctioned regimes like Iran — now has contracts to construct or improve nearly 100 submarine cables globally. 

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    Image via Extreme Tech

    In what sounds like a quick pivot away from now deflated ‘Russiagate’ (which seemed to also involve bi-monthly articles suggesting Putin was ever ready to cut the world’s submerged internet cables), western intelligence officials are now sounding the alarm over Beijing’s increased access and influence over such key global communications infrastructure. 

    The report summarizes the view of “Western intelligence professionals” in the following: 

    Just as the experts are justifiably concerned about the inclusion of espionage “back doors” in Huawei’s 5G technology, Western intelligence professionals oppose the company’s engagement in the undersea version, which provides a much bigger bang for the buck because so much data rides on so few cables.

    The report notes further that last year Huawei Marine Networks in a joint project with China Unicorn, a state-controlled telecom operator, successfully laid a cable running nearly 4,000 miles from Brazil to Cameroon, and there’s plans for greater involvement in global internet traffic cables which would necessitate cooperating and in some case competing with US internet giants such as Google and Facebook, who lease or buy vast cable networks from companies that constructed them, whether private or state-owned.

    The WSJ observed last month, “Chinese company Huawei is embedding itself into cable systems that ferry nearly all of the world’s internet data.” 

    Map Of Underwater Cables That Supply The Worlds Internet, via MapPorn

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    Amidst the debate and resulting US official restriction on federal agencies using Huawai’s 5G equipment for fear of vulnerability to Chinese hacking, underwater internet infrastructure constructed by Huawai could prove the most sensitive global backdoor.

    The report continues:  

    Naturally, Huawei denies any manipulation of the cable sets it is constructing, even though the US and other nations say it is obligated by Chinese law to hand over network data to the government…

    A similar dynamic is playing out underwater. How can the US address the security of undersea cables? There is no way to stop Huawei from building them, or to keep private owners from contracting with Chinese firms on modernizing them, based purely on suspicions. Rather, the US must use its cyber- and intelligence-gathering capability to gather hard evidence of back doors and other security risks. This will be challenging — the Chinese firms are technologically sophisticated and entwined with a virtual police state.

    One of the more bizarre scenarios that the report floats is the possibility of submarines to “tap” the cables externally. This has long been discussed among military and intelligence analysts regarding Russia, but increasingly Beijing will come under scrutiny. 

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    Underwater internet cable, via Wikimedia Commons

    One of those analysts, US Admiral Jamie Foggo, identified as a career submariner, told Bloomberg Quint: “Underwater cables are part of our critical infrastructure and essential to the global economy. The US must protect the integrity and security of them as surely as we provide international freedom of the high seas.” 

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Apr 09

Today’s News 9th April 2019

  • Helen Mirren Rages: "F*ck Netflix", There's "Nothing Like Sitting In A Cinema"

    Actress Helen Mirren has had enough of Netflis, and she’s letting the world know.

    The actress, who is most famous for roles in in “The Queen” and “Gosford Park,” recently said on stage in Las Vegas: “I love Netflix, but fuck Netflix. There’s nothing like sitting in a cinema.” She recently spoke at an event to promote her new film “The Good Liar” at the CinemaCon conference. She was looking to rile up a relatively friendly crowd of theater owners who attend the conference.  

    After Netflix’s “Roma” nearly won an Academy Award for best picture, the company has been in the crosshairs of industry traditionalists, who believe it undermines the industry’s longstanding practices. “Roma” was the first nominee that was a digital release. If it had won, Netflix would have been the first tech company to win the award.

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      The controversy stems from movies being put out on Netflix being considered for awards without traditional theater runs.

      Mirren isn’t the first to speak out on the issue, either. Steven Spielberg has claimed that streaming movies shouldn’t be considered for Oscars unless they are shown in theaters. 

      “Steven feels strongly about the difference between the streaming and theatrical situation,” a spokesperson from Amblin, Spielberg’s production company, told IndieWire earlier this month. Spielberg helps set policy for the organization as one of the three Academy governors of the directors branch. 

      And what would any stupid and meaningless controversy be without the government’s involvement?

      The DOJ weighed in to warn the Academy that if rule changes hurt Netflix, they may violate anti-competition laws. According to Bloomberg, Makan Delrahim, head of the agency’s antitrust division, sent a letter to Academy Chief Executive Officer Dawn Hudson on March 21, expressing concern about the way new award rules might be written.

    1. Why NATO's Official Purpose Makes No Sense, but It Is Likely To Outlive Us All

      Authored by Tim Kirby via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

      This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of NATO, but the question is, is this a happy birthday for a lively meaningful organization or time for us to pull the plug on a Cold War dreg that has lived well past its purpose?

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      After WWII it was inevitable that there would be a conflict between the Liberal Capitalist world and the growing Red Communist one. Perhaps if the Soviet Union would have resigned itself to being the only Communist nation rejecting any form of proselytization and rebranding itself as some kind of Democracy B as a mild alternative to the West’s Democracy A then the Cold War could have been avoided.

      But this did not happen and was very unlikely to do so. The motto of the Soviet Union on its seal was “Workers of the World Unite!”. That was workers of the “world” not “only Russia”. So it is not surprising that the West took a preemptive move and formed NATO to gang up on the USSR.

      However now the Soviet Union is dead and gone. NATO fulfilled its mission a little after turning 40. Sadly rather than phasing out and riding off into the sunset it had a midlife crisis, bought a Camaro and continued to not only exist but expand and bomb. But should it exist? Why is this organization still around at 70 years old posing as if we are still living in some sort of Cold War dynamic where if we don’t bomb Libya back to the stone age somehow Belgium and Greece will fall to evil ideologically different invaders.

      NATO relies heavily on the idea that the weakest members benefit from being treated as “equals” in the security organization. Many tiny nations would be militarily helpless otherwise. At first this logic makes sense. Little nations need a boost to help them maintain a stable defense.

      For example, the smaller nations who allied with Nazi Germany in/before WWII avoided their Deutsch wrath via submission. By NATO logic they were made vastly “stronger” by being part of the Axis/Tripartite Pact. The Nazis did have arguably the best military in the world at that time which would bump up weaker allies for sure. But in turn could weak Bulgaria and Romania really make any demands from Germany? Could Germany get their allies to do what the Reich wanted?

      Weak members of an alliance are never equal members with a voice, they are merely submissive states who fear the whip of their masters who are more benevolent than some other potential master, and this is what we see in many NATO members today who have absolutely neither an economy nor military of any worth to offer allies.

      Interestingly, NATO seems to acknowledge that some people might be baffled as to why it continues to exist and by making a video about the very topic they somewhat subconsciously confirm the doubters’ beliefs.

      So NATO in its own PR declares that its current missions, which are too big for any one nation to handle, are the following…

      • Protect against an “assertive” Russia.

      • Deal with the “deteriorated” security situation in Africa and the Middle-East which cause migration and terror attacks.

      • Promoting “international efforts” (whatever that means) to project stability and strengthen security outside of NATO territory.

      • Dealing with WMD’s, Cyber Attacks, and threats to Energy Supplies and deal with Environmental Challenges with “security implications”.

      So let’s evaluate these points to see if NATO should shoot for for an 80th birthday and beyond.

      Protecting Against an Assertive Russia

      During the 90’s Russia would have been willing to join NATO. Russia is very powerful but still a distant third on the world stage. Furthermore, in a world of mutually assured destruction, Russia is only capable of maybe retaking lost friendly territory that those in power in America cannot find on a map or helping foreign nations help themselves win wars like they did in Syria.

      Russia as it is today is not very assertive and always plays a reactive role to the West. An assertive Russia would have taken the majority of the Ukraine which it considers to be an inherent and ancient part of Russia itself. Only being able to take the Crimea reveals that Russia still has far to go before becoming a “threat” to Europe again. In terms of the grand chessboard of the former USSR, Russia is usually spending its turns escaping from being in check.

      The Deteriorated Security Situation in Africa and the Middle-East

      This has been caused by NATO itself committing regime changes in stable nations. If NATO had disbanded in 1991 the security situation in these regions would be exponentially better.

      Promoting International Efforts” to Project Stability and Strengthen Security Outside of NATO Territory.

      Projecting Stability is just coded language for terrifying others into submission. This is a normal part of human history and NATO like all militaries should do this, however they should be more honest about it. If one is to act like the Romans or Mongols and put the fear of God into their enemies with the threat of war then they could at least do so boldly.

      The key words here that raise eyebrows are “outside of NATO territory”. Meaning that an organization founded for the “defense” of its members must by its own officially stated objectives work outside of its own territory proving that their mission is not defense but a form of preemptive offense.

      Dealing with WMD’s, Cyber Attacks, Threats to Energy Supplies and Environmental Challenges with “Security Implications”.

      Every powerful military has WMD’s. If they mean getting them out of the hands of Non-State actors then NATO should try to not allow any of its members to sell weapons to non-member entities. Why does defense against cyber attacks require NATO? Threats to energy supplies is coded language for wars for oil. Dealing with the environment militarily is just stupid but it sounds trendy and caring, so why not?

      As you can see none of the official arguments for the continued existence of NATO is particularly convincing. By their own logic NATO exists to deal with the problems it causes by itself, fight against an assertive enemy that backs down from fighting it, terrify foreigners outside its borders into submission as a form of collective defense and deal with vague issues and security threats to the environment vaguely.

      These arguments are not convincing to anyone, and probably not even to the member states of NATO themselves. As we blow out the 70 candles on the NATO cake everyone knows that this organization is a farce living on via historical inertia alone. The only real purpose it has is to keep much of Europe under the Washington yoke which means that in all likelihood it will outlive us all. Happy Birthday!

    2. China’s Special Forces To Station In Zimbabwe, Build Secret Underground Base To Protect Natural Resource Claims

      Spotlight Zimbabwe has reported that China is preparing to station elite special forces in Zimbabwe, as Beijing increases military cooperation with Harare, amid concerns that the Asian powerhouse is set to construct a secret underground military base in the country.

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      The new report comes one year after Spotlight Zimbabwe revealed that China installed next-generation surface-to-air missiles (SAM) in the country, the same ones that are deployed to the South China Sea on Woody Island.

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      China’s new military base is set to protect its large diamond claims and gold mines across the country, where some of its SAM launchers are already located.

      According to a former minister of ex-leader President Robert Mugabe’s administration, China has been planning on sending their special forces to the country since 2014 “to offer technical assistance and support” to the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA). However, Mugabe called off the plan several years ago, after accusing the Chinese of corruption, and the plunder of natural resources in Marange.

      “They (China) have been itching to set a permanent military presence in this country, to protect their vast economic interests here but Mugabe was resisting the overtures,” said the former cabinet minister. “Although the cover argument was around offering technical assistance and support to our armed forces, it later became clear that Mnangagwa had his own agreement and arrangements with China. This infuriated Mugabe, and it was also during the same period Mnangagwa had first traveled to China as vice president, holding high-level meetings which his boss had not fully been briefed on. The incident increased Mugabe’s political mistrust for Mnangagwa, whom he suspected was presenting himself to President Xi Jinping, as the best political actor to secure China’s investments in Zimbabwe after he steps down. The rest is history. Mnangagwa has since invited China back to mine diamonds in Marange, and their special force has received the greenlight from vice president Rtd General, Constatino Chiwenga, to find a station in the country. Now there is every reason to believe that Mugabe’s November 2017 ouster, could have been a result of China viewing his stay in power as a threat to their economic investments, especially after having stripped them of diamond mining rights.”

      Zimbabwe has seen billions of dollars of Chinese investments over the last few years, mainly in critical economic sectors of mining, agriculture, and telecommunications. The investments are part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an ambitious effort to improve regional economies on a trans-continental scale. It aims to strengthen infrastructure, trade, and investment between China and 65 other countries that collectively account for 30% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 62% of world population and 75% of known global energy reserves.

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      President Emmerson Mnangagwa said last month that BRI is a significant improvement of the old Silk Road.

      “In the past, there was the Silk Road, and that to a greater extent did not embrace the entire continent. Zimbabwe was only lucky to the extent that 800 to 1000 years ago there was trade between the Munhumutapa Kingdom and China when we imported porcelain and silk from here and in turn you got our ivory.

      “But today the Road and Belt Initiative has taken everybody on board so that our economies can talk to each other, so that our economies can help each other modernize and mechanize. We are getting connected and benefiting from each other.

      “If you look at the current FOCAC meeting, there are 10 issues that we are going to deal with and these issues are really primary issues that show developing countries like Zimbabwe.

      “The issue of transportation, the issue of infrastructure development in our countries . . . we believe that with this relationship under FOCAC where the rest of Africa is making conversations with China, and China helping Zimbabwe and Africa to go up. And when that happens it creates the integration of marketing in China and Africa so we are happy that we are part of this global vision,” he said.

      China has indicated that it will invest in Africa with the Agenda 2063 of the African Union, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations, as well as the development strategies of individual African countries.

      However, in Zimbabwe’s case, Chinese BRI investments have been followed by a permanent military presence. Now, allegedly, a secret underground military base for special forces is set to be constructed, a move that will certainly anger Washington.

    3. Designating Iran's Revolutionary Guards As Terrorists Will Have Consequences For America

      Authored by James Durso, op-ed via The Hill,

      America’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group is an example of taking a good idea — sanctioning Iranian entities for malign behavior — one step too far.

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      A former State Department counterterrorism official said of the designation, “The future ramifications of this decision will be profound.” He’s right about that, but “profound” may cut both ways.

      In 2007, the U.S. designated the Guard’s overseas operations arm, the Quds Force, for support of terrorist organizations, so the new sanctions will hit the parent organization which is already under sanctions for ballistic missile development and supporting the Bashar Assad regime in Syria.

      An Iranian lawmaker responded to the news by saying Iran would regard the U.S. military as no different than the Islamic State, echoing the 2017 statement by the commander of the Guards, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, that the Guards would “consider the American army to be like Islamic State all around the world.”

      The Department of Defense (DOD) and the CIA reportedly opposed the move, and no wonder: Officials at the National Security Council and the Treasury Department are safe in Washington, D.C., State Department officers in Baghdad labor under restrictive security rules which limit their movements, which leaves the U.S. military and CIA officers exposed.

      DOD has opposed this idea for a long time. When it was considered in 2007, the representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told his civilian counterparts, “The United States has always carefully avoided declaring military officers engaged in activities sanctioned by their governments as terrorists to avoid the same being done to us.” It could be applied to American special forces officers, who frequently operate clandestinely and have provided military assistance and training to insurgents.

      Encounters between the American and Iranian military and security services can go one of three ways:

      • Proxy war: Iraqi militias supported by Iran killed at least 608 American servicemen.

      • Let’s-get-this-over-with: Iran quickly released the U.S. Navy crews who were captured by the IRGC Navy when they wandered into Iranian waters in early 2016.

      • The Beirut option: In the 1980s, the CIA’s Beirut station chief William Buckley and U.S. Marine colonel William Higgins were kidnapped by Iran’s Lebanese Hezbollah allies and died under interrogation. Former FBI agent – and CIA contractor – Robert Levinson disappeared in Iran in 2007, and the FBI, then led by Robert Mueller, was reduced to asking Vladimir Putin’s most loyal oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, to fund his (unsuccessful) rescue.

      And the designation won’t just discomfit Americans; Iraqi officials regularly encounter Guards officers whether they want to or not. Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani regularly visits Iraq, and the last three Iranian ambassadors to Baghdad have been Quds Force officers, so Iraqi officials can expect to be put on notice by the Americans to avoid “terrorists.” Iran is active economically in Iraq, so the designation may be bad for Iraq’s economy. One near-term effect may be to scuttle an effort to import electricity from Iran, badly needed as the country still suffers from power shortages.

      America’s timing is bad, as Iran’s “resistance economy” is dragging, and the government has been criticized for its lackluster response to the recent widespread, deadly flooding. These sanctions will just give the mullahs an excuse for their economic mismanagement.

      Given the Guard’s penetration of Iran’s economy, new sanctions might enrich it even more. If the economy becomes radioactive to outside investors because the due diligence is too hard, the IRGC could buy the remaining assets at cut-rate prices. If, in the future, the Guard is neutered and sanctions are relaxed, unwinding the sanctioned businesses will take years and will require the approval of the U.S., which will move at the speed of government. This will hobble the post-mullah regime which will be under pressure to improve the lives of newly-free Iranians.

      The current U.S. practice of targeting specific people and economic entities for sanctions allows the U.S. to fine-tune its actions and tells the Iranians the U.S. knows who is doing what. Given the Guards economic ubiquity, the terrorist designation is a blanket sanction with unknown consequences, though one might be increased power for the Guards.

      The last time a military formation of a sovereign state was declared a criminal organization was when Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS was condemned for its involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Designating the IRGC a terrorist entity may sound great after that third beer, but is IRGC commander Major General Jafari as bad as Himmler? No.

      Terrorism sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards promise something for everyone, all of it bad: More American hostages, and more money for the Guards. The Americans should ignore the bright, shiny object of terrorism sanctions and remember firm, consistent pressure is the way to win the contest with Iran.

    4. Baltimore Dubbed 'Most Robbed' City In America 

      About a 60-minute drive northeast of Washington D.C., the city of Baltimore is on the verge of collapse.

      Thousands of people are fleeing the city each year as total population plummets to 100-year lows. There are about 46,000 vacant rowhomes scattered throughout the area, or roughly 15% of the housing stock is dormant. On a per capita basis, the city has the highest rate of homicides per 100,000 in the country. Opioids from Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland Medical Center continue to flood the poorest of neighborhoods, leaving the African American communities in a perpetual state of addiction, along with the need for constant government assistance programs. With the local economy basically a black market, gangs roam the streets like a third world country.

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      The outlook for Baltimore is rather bleak. We have covered the great implosion of Baltimore over the years. The accelerated deterioration restarted after 2015 Baltimore riots. Ever since, the slope of decline has been far steeper than ever seen before.

      There is new evidence that verifies our coverage on Baltimore, and we must say – the report doesn’t give hope that a turn around in the city is happening anytime soon.

      New evidence from ADT security study that examined FBI statistics shows the town is now the “most robbed” city in America.

      Baltimore had the most significant number of robberies per capita – 95.87 for every 10,000 people.

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      ADT’s analytic analysts “looked at the FBI’s annual crime data [for 2017] for robbery rates to discover which city in each state experienced the most robberies.”

      While robberies worsened in Baltimore, they declined nationwide, dropping by 28% between 2008 and 2017.

      Some of the safest streets in America are in Boise, Idaho where 2.26 people are robbed per 10,000 people.

      Here’s the rest of the most dangerous cities:

      1. Cleveland, Ohio

      2. Oakland, California

      3. St. Louis, Missouri

      4. East Point, Georgia

      Wilmington, Delaware ranks no. 8, Chester, Pa. is no. 10.

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    5. A New Battle For Tripoli: Preconditions & Prospects

      Via SouthFront.org,

      Libya has been in a state of the constant chaos since the NATO intervention in 2011. After the fall of the government of Muammar Gaddafi, the country fell into the hands of warrying armed factions, many of which were linked to radical Islamist groups. Al-Qaeda and then ISIS strengthened and expanded their presence in the country. The erupted humanitarian crisis has never been fully overcome. A high level of violence, crime and unsolved humanitarian issues turned Libya in one of the key hubs of arms, drugs and even trafficking. A large number of the refugees moving to Europe uses Libya as a transfer point.

      NATO contributed very little efforts to change this situation, defeat terrorism and restore the order. One of the reasons is that the Western-backed Government of National Accord (GNA), based in Tripoli, is itself largely linked to radicals. Groups that declared their support to the GNA control a part of northwestern Libya. The only real anti-terror effort undertaken by pro-GNA forces and their foreign backers took place in 2016, when they moved to chuck ISIS out of the coastal city of Sirte. Despite this, ISIS cells kept a notable presence in the county. The GNA receives support from the US, various EU states, Qatar and Turkey.

      The southwestern part of the country is controlled by local Tuareg and Tabu militias. Central, northeastern and southeastern Libya is in the hands of the Libyan National Army (LNA) and the allied to it House of Representatives based in the city of Torbuk.

      Over the past few years, the LNA under the leadership of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar has consolidated control over a major part of the country, sometimes by forming pacts and alliances with local communities like in the south and sometimes by defeating radical militant groups by force. The LNA has also carried out a successful operation against militant and criminal groups in southern Libya. This effort was officially coordinated with the governments of Niger and Chad. Egypt, the UAE and France are often mentioned as the LNA backers. An interesting fact is that wilde media speculations about Russian mercenaries, Special Forces and, if we take into account the British mainstream media, even military bases allegedly deployed and created to support the LNA are barely linked with the reality on the ground. The real Kremlin involvement in the conflict has so far been mostly limited to diplomatic contacts with representatives of at least formally constructive local forces.

      On April 4, Field Marshal Haftar officially announced a start of counter-terrorism operation in the area of Tripoli. In the following days, the LNA has made a series of advances capturing large areas south of the city, including Tripoli International Airport, and reached the vicinity of the city. According to local sources, over 40 people were killed or injured in clashes between the LNA and pro-GNA forces. The sides even employed their existing air forces in order to deliver strikes each against other.

      However, a coalition of pro-GNA forces, which includes the al-Nuasi Brigade, the Tripoli Revolutionaries Brigade, the Special Deterrence Force, the al-Mahjub Brigade, the 33rd Infantry Brigade, the Abu Obeida al-Zawia Forces, the al-Halbus Brigade and the Usama al-Juwayli Forces, appeared to be able showing some resistance to the LNA only when Haftar-led forces reached the city’s vicinity.

      On April 7, the U.S. Army Africa Command (AFRICOM) announced that it had evacuated its troops from the Libyan capital “in response to the evolving security situation” there. This means that Washington expects clashes in the city itself.

      The LNA claims that its move to capture Tripoli is not a part of political struggle, but an operation against terrorists who are hiding there. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the LNA advance is another move made in the framework of the previous LNA attempts to put an end to the division of the country into feods controlled by local warlords and to consolidate the governmental power, including the right of use of force, in one hands. In the event of success, it will allow to restore a kind of order in the major part of he country and to crack down on local militant and criminal armed groups that operate freely in the existing power vacuum.

      On the other hand, the LNA advance faced a wide criticism on the international level. Foreign powers use the collapse of Libya to exploit its territory and energy resources in own favor are opposing the LNA actions under the banner of the need to defend democracy and prevent humanitarian crisis.

      In the event of their success the humanitarian and security situation in Libya will likely continue to deteriorate creating a room for the further expansion of radical groups, first of all ISIS and al-Qaeda, in and contributing to the continuing flow of migrants to Europe.

    6. We're All Being Judged By A Secret 'Trustworthiness' Score

      Nearly everything we buy, how we buy, and where we’re buying from is secretly fed into AI-powered verification services that help companies guard against credit-card and other forms of fraud, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

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      More than 16,000 signals are analyzed by a service called Sift, which generates a “Sift score” ranging from 1 – 100. The score is used to flag devices, credit cards and accounts that a vendor may want to block based on a person or entity’s overall “trustworthiness” score, according to a company spokeswoman.

      From the Sift website: “Each time we get an event — be it a page view or an API event — we extract features related to those events and compute the Sift Score. These features are then weighed based on fraud we’ve seen both on your site and within our global network, and determine a user’s Score. There are features that can negatively impact a Score as well as ones which have a positive impact.” 

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      The system is similar to a credit score – except there’s no way to find out your own Sift score. 

      Factors which contribute to one’s Sift score (per the WSJ): 

      • Is the account new?

      • Are there are a lot of digits at the end of an email address?

      • Is the transaction coming from an IP address that’s unusual for your account?

      • Is the transaction coming from a region where there are a lot of hackers, such as China, Russia or Eastern Europe?

      • Is the transaction coming from an anonymization network?

      • Is the transaction happening at an odd time of day?

      • Has the credit card being used had chargebacks associated with it?

      • Is the browser different from what you typically use?

      • Is the device different from what you typically use?

      • Is the cadence of the way you typed out your password typical for you? (tracked by some advanced systems)

      Sources: Sift, SecureAuth, Patreon

      The system is used by companies such as Airbnb, OpenTable, Instacart and LinkedIn. 

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      Companies that use services like this often mention it in their privacy policies—see Airbnb’s here—but how many of us realize our account behaviors are being shared with companies we’ve never heard of, in the name of security? How much of the information one company shares with these fraud-detection services is used by other clients of that service? And why can’t we access any of this data ourselves, to update, correct or delete it?

      According to Sift and competitors such as SecureAuth, which has a similar scoring system, this practice complies with regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which mandates that companies don’t store data that can be used to identify real human beings unless they give permission.

      Unfortunately GDPR, which went into effect a year ago, has rules that are often vaguely worded, says Lisa Hawke, vice president of security and compliance at the legal tech startup Everlaw. All of this will have to get sorted out in court, she adds. –Wall Street Journal

      In order to optimize scoring “Sift regularly evaluates the performance of our models and tries to minimize bias and variance in order to maximize accuracy,” according to a spokeswoman. 

      “While we don’t perform audits of our customers’ systems for bias, we enable the organizations that use our platform to have as much visibility as possible into the decision trees, models or data that were used to reach a decision,” according to SecureAuth Vice President and chief security architect Stephen Cox. “In some cases, we may not be fully aware of the means by which our services and products are being used within a customer’s environment.” 

      Not always right

      While Sift and SecureAuth strive for accuracy, sometimes it’s difficult to decipher authentic purchasing behavior from fraud. 

      “Sometimes your best customers and your worst customers look the same,” said Jacqueline Hart, head of trust and safety at Patreon – a site used by artists and creators to allow benefactors to support them. “You can have someone come in and say I want to pledge $10,000 and they’re either a fraudster or an amazing patron of the arts,” Hart added. 

      If an account is rejected due to its Sift score, Patreon directs the benefactor to the company’s trust and safety team. “It’s an important way for us to find out if there are any false positives from the Sift score and reinstate the account if it shouldn’t have been flagged as high risk,” said Hart. 

      There are many potential tells that a transaction is fishy. “The amazing thing to me is when someone fails to log in effectively, you know it’s a real person,” says Ms. Hart. The bots log in perfectly every time. Email addresses with a lot of numbers at the end and brand new accounts are also more likely to be fraudulent, as are logins coming from anonymity networks such as Tor.

      These services also learn from every transaction across their entire system, and compare data from multiple clients. For instance, if an account or mobile device has been associated with fraud at, say, Instacart, that could mark it as risky for another company, say Wayfair—even if the credit card being used seems legitimate, says a Sift spokeswoman. –Wall Street Journal

      A person’s Sift score is constantly changing based on that user’s behavior, and any new information the system gathers about them, according to the spokeswoman. From Sift: 

      We learn in real-time, which means Scores are constantly being recalculated based on new knowledge of fraudulent users and patterns. For example, when someone logs in, we’ve found out a lot of information in the meantime about suspicious devices, IP addresses, shipping addresses, etc., based on the activity of other users. Add this to the fact that there may have been some new labeled users since their last login, and the scores can sometimes have a significant change. This is also more likely if the user hasn’t had much activity on your site. –Sift.com

      While Sift judges whether or not one can be trusted, there’s no file with your name on it that it can produce for review – because it doesn’t need your name to analyze your behavior, according to the report – which seems like total BS. 

      “Our customers will send us events like ‘account created,’ ‘profile photo uploaded,’ ‘someone sent a message,’ ‘review written,’ ‘an item was added to shopping cart,” says Sift CEO Jason Tan. 

      It’s technically possible to make user data difficult or impossible to link to a real person. Apple and others say they take steps to prevent such “de-anonymizing.” Sift doesn’t use those techniques. And an individual’s name can be among the characteristics its customers share with it in order to determine the riskiness of a transaction.

      In the gap between who is taking responsibility for user data—Sift or its clients—there appears to be ample room for the kind of slip-ups that could run afoul of privacy laws. Without an audit of such a system it’s impossible to know. Companies live under increasing threat of prosecution, but as just-released research on biases in Facebook ’s advertising algorithm suggest, even the most sophisticated operators don’t seem to be fully aware of how their systems are behaving. –Wall Street Journal

      “I would argue that in our desire to protect privacy, we have to be careful, because are we going to make it impossible for the good guys to perform the necessary function of security?” asks Anshu Sharma – co-founder of Clearedin, a startup which helps companies avoid falling victim to email phishing attacks. 

      His solution? Transparency. When a company rejects a potential customer based on their Sift score, for example, it should explain why – even if that exposes how the scoring system works. 

    7. GMU Students & Faculty Demand New Kavanaugh Probe, Claim "Threat To Mental Health"

      Authored by Zachary Petrizzo via The College Fix,

      Some students at George Mason University continue to put pressure on campus leaders to fire U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh from his new post as a visiting law professor.

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      Kavanaugh was hired in January by GMU’s Antonin Scalia Law School and is set to co-teach a class this summer called “Creation of the Constitution” in Runnymede, England, where the Magna Carta was sealed.

      Despite the fact that Kavanaugh is teaching over 3,500 miles away from the Virginia campus, several students took to the podium at the Board of Visitors meeting last Wednesday to say they feel unsafe having Kavanaugh teach the class.

      Exclusive video recorded by The College Fix shows several students, a few who say they are sexual assault survivors, address the campus leaders to tell them students’ mental health is threatened by the Kavanaugh hire.

      “As a survivor of sexual assault this decision has really impacted me negatively,” one female student said.

      “It is affecting my mental health knowing that an abuser will be part of our faculty.”

      Another female student gave similar comments to the board:

      “As someone who has survived sexual assault three times I do not feel comfortable with someone who has sexual assault allegations like walking on campus.”

      A third female student told the board “we are fighting to eradicate sexual violence on this campus. But the hiring of Kavanaugh threatens the mental well being of all survivors on this campus.”

      A fourth female student echoed similar sentiments, noting her sister is a sexual assault victim.

      “I’ve seen what it does to a person,” she said. “I’ve seen what these cases can do to people.”

      The comments were made during the meeting’s public comment section. The students represent a relatively new group on campus called “Mason 4 Survivors,” launched in recent months.

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      A student petition created by “Mason 4 Survivors” demands that the university “terminate AND void ALL contracts and affiliation with Brett Kavanaugh at George Mason University.” So far nearly 3,300 have signed it.

      After the students spoke, Rector Tom Davis and GMU President Angel Cabrera said they were proud of the students and appreciated that they spoke up and acted as engaged citizens.

      Later in the meeting, Cabrera suggested steps to continue to eradicate sexual assault on the campus, stating “one case of sexual assault is one too many.” The board agreed to learn more about sexual assault on campus and steps underway to combat the problem.

      The next day, students continued their protest by marching around campus chanting “cancel Kavanaugh” and “take Kavanaugh off campus.” Some had blue tape over their mouths. The group delivered their petition to fire the Supreme Court justice to Merten Hall, an administration building.

      The demonstrators also defaced a statue of George Mason, putting blue tape on his mouth and attaching anti-Kavanaugh signs to it, using it as a prop in their protest.

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      University spokesman Michael Sandler told The College Fix “we allow students to dress up the statue, so this doesn’t violate any policies that I’m aware of.” He said the university “strongly supports freedom of expression and this would seem to fall into that category.”

      As to Kavanaugh’s fate at George Mason University, some members of the Faculty Senate may believe they have the right to investigate Kavanaugh independently despite the U.S. Senate’s determination. They called for as much at their meeting last Wednesday.

      But President Cabrera has stated that Justice Kavanaugh’s appointment was approved by the law school faculty in January and he stands behind that decision.

    8. US Sanctions Impede Rescue Efforts In Iran During Historic Flooding

      In yet more confirmation that US sanctions don’t fundamentally punish or weaken regimes they seek to bring down, but hurt the common population America feigns to be helping, a new report finds that relief efforts in the wake historic floods which have created a disaster zone in Iran are being hindered due to Washington’s sanctions. 

      The Middle East’s main regional emergency response and humanitarian aid arm, the Red Crescent, says that US sanctions have prevented the bulk of badly needed external emergency relief from getting through after record rains have caused the worst floods in nearly a century in multiple provinces across Iran, killing at least 70 and displacing many tens of thousands. 

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      The worst flooding in 70 years has hit Iran over the past 3 weeks, via the AP.

      “No foreign cash help has been given to the Iranian Red Crescent society. With attention to the inhuman American sanctions, there is no way to send this cash assistance,” the Red Crescent said in a statement, cited by Reuters.

      In all, international humanitarian groups say up to 90,000 have sought emergency shelter amid response efforts which are faltering due to lack of external help. 

      The floods began on March 19, and produced surreal scenes coming out of the country involving flash floods sweeping away cars and whole towns over the past three weeks. 

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      Poldokhtar is among the cities hit hard, via Sky News

      The US has acknowledged the crisis, with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pledging the US government was prepared to help through the Red Cross and Red Crescent.

      However, in rhetoric that sounded similar to his tough talk on Venezuela amid ongoing economic and infrastructural collapse there, he blamed Iran’s woes on “mismanagement in urban planning and in emergency preparedness” due to the inept and corrupt leadership of Iran’s Ayatollah and other leading clergy. 

      Surreal scenes of entire towns being swept away by flash floods have come out of Iran over the past weeks.

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      But Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in statements last week pointed the finger at Washington for imposing an economic blockade by seeking to prevent European and other international companies from doing business with Iran: “Blocked equipment includes relief choppers: This isn’t just economic warfare; it’s economic TERRORISM,” he said on Twitter.

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      Over the weekend sustained rains continued to unleash floods in the southwest of the country, and new evacuation efforts are underway for towns along the Iraq border, near rivers and dams already bulging under the strain. 

      Meanwhile the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Ali Asghar Peyvandi, in fresh statements slammed the US for blocking the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

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      Peyvandi said: “We used a number of bank accounts connected to SWIFT, which we used for receiving international aid. But at the moment these accounts are subject to sanctions.”

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      Six cities along the Karkheh River in southwestern Khuzestan province were ordered evacuated over the weekend. Image source: Tasnim News/AFP

      “It’s impossible to transfer cash from other countries as well as the International Federation of [Red Cross and] Red Crescent Societies,” he added.

      Thus far it’s unclear just how the US State Department plans to help, other than send funds through the Red Cross and Red Crescent organizations; however, that would ironically run the risk of violating Washington’s own sanctions against Tehran. 

    Digest powered by RSS Digest

    Apr 08

    Today’s News 8th April 2019

    • Hundreds Of Migrants Battle With Greek Riot Police After 'Fake News' About Open Border

      False rumors that the Balkan states were preparing to open their borders to allow the tens of thousands of migrants who have been stuck in Greece for years to travel on to Europe have led to days of skirmishes between Greek police and migrants near the country’s northern border.

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      According to Reuters and Al Jazeera, anti-riot police used tear gas and flares to try and force hundreds of migrants hoping to cross into North Macedonia to leave the area and return to their camps. Greek authorities even sent buses to bring some of the migrants back to their refugee camps, but the migrants refused to board and demanded to be let through.

      The skirmishes have been going on for days, as thousands of migrants have pitched tents in an area near an official migrant camp and steadfastly refused to leave.

      The first bouts of unrest flared up on Friday. At around midday on Saturday, riot police fired teargas at dozens of people, some of whom were carrying children. Meanwhile, migrants hurled stones and bottles at the police as they tried to break through the cordon. Some lit fires. On Sunday, hundreds of migrants remained in the area, though some had taken the Greek government’s offer to travel back via the buses. Hundreds have been camped out in a field outside the official migrant camp in Diavata, Greece.

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      The migrants insisted they didn’t want to fight with police – they just wanted to make it to Macedonia.

      “We don’t want to fight with the Greek police,” said 36-year old Yaser, a Syrian refugee, sitting on a blanket with his baby son in his arms.

      “We want to go to Europe, we don’t want to stay in Greece,” he told Reuters through an interpreter.

      His 26-year old wife Fatemeh, who was carrying their six-month old baby, said the family was determined to stay at the makeshift camp.

      “We will stay here until the borders open, we don’t have any other choice,” she said, standing close to where the clashes took place.

      Workers with an international service tending to the needs of refugees blamed smugglers for the spreading the false rumors on Facebook:

      Jana Frey, country director for the International Rescue Committee Greece, said the unrest highlighted “the amount of false information being presented to asylum seekers and refugees.”

      “IRC staff have received reports of refugees who are being lured to the border by smugglers, who are feeding them lies about the border to Europe opening up,” she said.

      Tens of thousands of refugees and migrants from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have been stuck in Greece since the Balkan countries closed their borders in 2016.

      Watch footage from the skirmishes below:

    • Brexit: Parliament Is Revolting

      Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,

      Back on 29th June 2016, just after the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, I indulged in a little speculation about what would happen next:

      “I don’t usually like to indulge in prophetic utterances, and I’m not sure I would describe this as such an attempt – more an informed hunch – but I believe that the 17,410,742 people who just expressed their opinion in a democratic vote to leave the European Union are about to find themselves involved in what can only be described as the mother of all stitch ups. Brexit just isn’t going to happen!!!”

      However, although I believed that we were going to see the mother of all stitch ups, I was wrong about how this would happen. At the time, I fully expected that ways would be found to avoid ever triggering Article 50, and so I was somewhat surprised when it was. Still, it didn’t alter my view that a Remain Prime Minister in a Remain Parliament was highly unlikely to carry out the mandate given by the majority of voters in that referendum, and nothing I’ve seen or heard since has changed that view.

      But we now come to what could well be the crunch week in the whole charade, with the number of possible outcomes being narrowed down to just a few. These are, I believe, the main possibilities:

      1. Another extension, either until 30th June, or a “flextension”, as has been mooted in the last few days

      2. A no deal Brexit

      3. A Parliamentary majority for Revoking Article 50

      Of these possibilities, unfortunately I believe that the third is now by far the most likely, even though it was one of the options rejected by MPs in the series of indicative votes held in Parliament, and even though it still wouldn’t command a majority were a vote held on it early in the week. So I guess this needs some explaining.

      What I expect to happen next week is as follows. Talks between the leaderships of the two main parties will break down, with both sides blaming one another. This will mean that the default position will remain a no deal Brexit (or to put it more accurately, a World Trade Organisation Brexit) on 12th April.

      On 10th April, the EU Council will once again meet to discuss Brexit, and in particular Theresa May’s request to the EU Council President, Donald Tusk, for an extension until 30th June. It should be noted that she made the exact same request in previous letter to Mr Tusk, and it should be further noted that that request was turned down, with two alternative dates proposed — 12th April and 22nd May –, which were tied to her failure or success in getting the Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament. And so it seems that having seen that deal rejected by MPs on three occasions, she is now going for a second shot at having her extension date request rejected by the EU, and who knows, perhaps she’s hoping to make that three as well! I am not convinced that she is in complete possession of an entire collection of marbles, as it were.

      I believe that the EU Council is extremely likely to turn her request down. But unlike the previous occasion, I also think it extremely unlikely that they will grant her any extension at all. And the reason for this is simply this: Emmanuel Macron.

      M. Macron is an extreme EU integrationist. He really does want to see a United States of Europe, replete with its own army and a number of new institutions including:

      • A European agency for “the protection of democracies”

      • A revamping of the EU’s passport-free Schengen zone

      • A common border police

      • A European asylum office

      • A European council of internal security.

      • A defence and security treaty to increase defence spending and put in place an operational mutual defence clause

      • A European Security Council

      And despite the fact that the German leadership is nowhere near as keen on these things, this does not seem to dampen Macron’s enthusiasm and he wants to go full speed ahead on this now. However, he is already extremely frustrated that Brexit has been taking up so much of everyone’s time. It was Macron who was the sticking point in the granting of the previous deadlines, and it is he who supposedly kicked back against Mrs May’s request for an extension until 30th June. In the end, as I understand it, Macron grudgingly accepted an extension, but insisted on two shorter dates, tied to the success or failure of Mrs May to get her Withdrawal Agreement through.

      I simply don’t think that Macron is going to give way again. And so I expect that he, possibly along with a number of other countries, will reject Mrs May’s request. And so the EU Council will, I believe, conclude their meeting by saying that because the British Government has failed to get the Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament, and because the British Prime Minister has failed to set out a fresh and credible reason as to why an extension should be granted, they will not be offering one.

      Should this occur, late on Wednesday 10th April, regardless of what has happened in the passage of the Cooper-Letwin Bill, Britain will be just 48 hours from exiting the European Union with a no deal Brexit.

      MPs will then be faced with a very stark choice with just hours to go. The Withdrawal Agreement will have passed away. The possibility of an extension will be dead. The choice will be startlingly simple: Accept No Deal or Vote to Revoke. And despite the fact that most MPs voted against Revoke in the indicative vote, and despite the fact that they fear the reaction of their constituents should they vote for this, faced with this choice with literally hours to go, I believe them quite capable of, and indeed highly likely to vote to Revoke Article 50. And indeed they are equally capable of justifying it by claiming that they couldn’t in all conscience see the country plunged into chaos (which could well prove to be a case of irony on steroids).

      And thus the Mother of all Stitch ups, the Revolt of Parliament against the people will be complete.

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      No doubt events shall prove me wrong. However, as the clock ticks down, and as this convoluted process boils down to an increasingly narrow range of possibilities, unfortunately it seems to me that a last minute Revoking of Article 50, along with all that that would entail, is now looking increasingly likely.

    • Secret Document Reveals Plans For Civil War In Lebanon, Israeli False Flags, & Invasion

      Authored by Randi Nord via GeopoliticsAlert.com,

      During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.

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      Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article.

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      Israel and the United States Foment Civil War in Lebanon

      The document details American plans to splinter the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, a domestic institution separate from the Lebanese Army. The plans involve Washington investing 200 million dollars into the Internal Security Forces (ISF) under the guise of keeping the peace but with the covert goal of creating sectarian conflict against Hezbollah with 2.5 million specifically dedicated to this purpose.

      The document states the ultimate goal is to destabilize the country by creating a civil war in Lebanon which will “help Israel on the international scene.” The United States and Israel plan to accomplish this by supporting “democratic forces,” sounding remarkably similar to the same strategy used in Syria, Libya, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

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      According to the document, although “full load of our firepower will be unleashed,” they somehow do not anticipate any casualties.

      They do, however, expect the civil war to “trigger requests” for intervention from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) which Israel must only agree to after extreme reluctance.

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      The document says Israel will also play an important role by creating “covert false flag operations” as the conflict progresses. Perhaps these operations would include chemical attacks similar to the chemical attacks on civilians in Syria or even direct attacks on Lebanese or Israeli civilians to blame on Hezbollah and justify international intervention.

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      The document admits that the United States and Israel will need an unprecedented amount of credibility to pull this off and also admits that the Lebanese Army may be an obstacle, likely due to the Army’s diverse makeup. As a legitimate political party with members throughout all aspects of Lebanese society, Hezbollah already has members and allies throughout the ISF as well as the Army.

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      Click images to enlarge. Screenshots from Al-Jadeed. Article continues below…

      Mike Pompeo Holds Meeting with Lebanese Officials

      During his meeting with Lebanese President, Michael Aoun, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo presented an ultimatum: contain Hezbollah or expect unprecedented consequences.

      According to Foreign Policy, Pompeo told Aoun that if he fails to complete the impossible task of removing Hezbollah from government institutions and cracking down on its military activities, Lebanon should expect an end to US aid and even potential sanctions.

      “It will take courage for the nation of Lebanon to stand up to Hezbollah’s criminality, terror, and threats,” Pompeo said.

      At a dinner, Pompeo reportedly warned Lebanese officials that they themselves were potential targets for sanctions such as members of the Free Patriotic Movement, President Aoun’s party with the majority of its support coming from Lebanese Christians.

      Potential sanctions will likely first target the Lebanese Health Ministry which is currently managed by an elected member of Hezbollah’s political party. Civilians across Lebanon rely on a functioning Health Ministry for subsidized medications and general medical care so these sanctions would create immense suffering for the entire Lebanese population.

      The civil war plan detailed in the document is not likely to succeed according to US plans. The Lebanese Security forces are not a homogeneous group. Members of Hezbollah and their Christian allies hold many positions not only in the ISF but throughout the Lebanese Army and several branches of government. The Lebanese constitution and political system require all sects have adequate representation in government. As such, a potential manufactured civil war would likely focus on re-writing the Lebanese constitution as a top priority.

      It is unclear if Pompeo’s staff presented Aoun with this document as a threat prior to their meeting. It is clear, however, that the US and Israel are plotting behind closed doors to create sectarian conflict in Lebanese society and its democratic political process, similar to actions in Syria, Lybia, Yemen, Venezuela, Iran, and so on.

    • Russiagate: A Moral Reckoning Is Due

      Authored by Renee Parsons via Off-Guardian.org,

      With Russiagate, the Democrats created some powerful karma to answer for; especially for the likes of Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, (D-Calif.), both of whom persist in the mindless search for the Holy Grail.

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      After cheating Bernie out of the nomination in 2016, the Dems had not yet learned their karmic lesson when they lost the Presidential election. The Mueller Report is but the latest of that karmic reckoning.

      There is no pride in being one of those who “got it right” that there was no evidence, not a scintilla of material fact to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the dastardly Russians. As the country has been torn asunder by a two year politically tainted investigation begun with no evidentiary standard and no probable cause, there is little satisfaction to be gained.

      That being said, I am royally pissed off at all the players who supported this unprecedented farce as an attack on the country’s rule of law. How could the autocratic digital giants, the intel community (which missed 911), the already discredited MSM and the pathetically trivial Democratic party think they could get away with lie after lie? Because they counted on the Democratic rank n file and other hypnotized Americans to believe anything they are told – repeat a lie often enough and the masses will own it.

      The determination of no new indictments and no collusion is little cause for celebration in that the country should not have had to endure the extended anguish of an insistent, irrational, near-hysterical drumbeat generated by the MSM and Democrats as co-conspirators. It is fair to say that all participants were consciously aware that they were repeatedly lying to the American public just as it is highly probable that Special Counsel Robert Mueller who was appointed in May, 2017 knew well before the 2018 mid-term elections that allegations of collusion and obstruction were unsubstantiated.

      Now that the Report into the Investigation on Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election has been delivered, all can rest assured that the American system of government works, that the checks and balances did their job and that American democracy survived another close call.

      As a result of the hyperventilating hubris, the word ‘collusion’ has now become an empowered part of the lexicon. There is now an implicit warning for any candidate, or indeed any citizen, to be wary with whom they speak, be wary of their associations, to not fraternize with just anyone and to be ultra sensitized to meeting with any potential adversary, even in the legitimate interests of diplomacy.

      In addition, without the political will to do so, there will be little initiative for PTB (powers that be) to undo the new generation of intense political repression and censorship initiated by Russiagate that can be traced directly to HRC’s loss in 2016.

      Two weeks after that election, the Washington Post, long believed to be a CIA asset, combined allegations that Russia exploited American online platforms “critical of the US government” with the now discredited creation of ‘fake news’ that 200 American websites were “peddlers of Russian propaganda.”

      As Attorney General William Barr quotes from the Mueller Report:

      The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors had successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations and publicly dessiminated those materials throughout various intermediaries including Wikileaks.”

      This statement is in direct contradiction with Bill Binney, former NSA Technical Director for Analysis and co-founder of NSA’s Signal Intel Center who conducted independent forensic research. Binney concluded that the data was ‘leaked by a person with physical access to the DNC computer” and that the “DNC data was downloaded to a storage device and transported to Wikileaks, like on a thumb drive or cd rom.”

      While neither Mueller, any Congressional committee nor the FBI ever contacted Binney regarding his findings, the DNC refused to turn over their computer to the FBI for forensic testing. After the full Mueller report is publicly available, Binney’s feedback promises to be enlightening.

      As some Democrats and MSM continue to spin the illusion of a pending obstruction of justice charge, Barr’s letter relying on the Mueller Report is clear – the “Report identifies no actions that constitute obstructive conduct” and that ‘evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime,” therefore, there is no proof ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that obstruction occurred. Legalese 101 says that obstruction cannot be alleged if no crime was committed but when did proof or evidence ever make a difference to the co-conspirators. Review of the Mueller Report itself will provide further details.

      It was the unverified Steele dossier that provided the FBI with the basis for its submission to the FISA Court that Russian collusion had occurred and in order to obtain the necessary warrants (four of them) to spy on the Trump campaign; specifically US Naval Academy graduate, the hapless Carter Page. Prior to its FISA Court submission, the FBI knew that the Dossier was a bogus document. We know that the HRC campaign and the DNC funded Fusion GPS firm to get the dirt on Trump. Fusion then brought in Christopher Steele who put together a salacious piece of garbage that the FBI took and ran with.

      The dossier was then circulated by Obama CIA Director John Brennan and publicly released by BuzzFeed and CNN in January, 2017. Former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper provided ‘inconsistent information’ to the House Intelligence Committee that he “flatly denied” any media discussions regarding the dossier and then “subsequently acknowledged discussing the dossier with CNN’s Jake Tapper” and perhaps others.

      CNN (Tapper, Carl Bernstein, Evan Perez and Jim Sciutto) went on to win White House Correspondents Association’s 2018 Merriman Smith Award for outstanding reporting with the Judges noting that the “depth of reporting demonstrated in these remarkable and important pieces, and the constant updates as new information continued to be uncovered showed breaking news reporting at its best.” The WHCA gathers annually to “celebrate the First Amendment and the crucial role of journalism in informing and protecting the public.”BuzzFeed, which broke the original story, did not share in the $2500 award.

      In reality, the award apparently struck other WHCA members as unusual, considering the entire story took little actual reporting and instead relied on leaks from Brennan and Clapper.

      There should be enough shame to go around but there appears to be no evidence of a conscience or the need to pay a karmic debt among any of the perpetrators.

      In the aftermath of Mueller, Judicial Watch has filed an FOIA suit to obtain the records of communication between Brennen, Clapper and CNN including all documents related to the dossier.

      In a September, 2016 text message from FBI attorney Lisa Page to Peter Strock, she relates the preparation of talking points to brief FBI Director Jim Comey on the efforts to bring down Trump. In that same message, Page adds that “POTUS wants to know everything we are doing.”

      The question arises whether the usual mealy-mouth Republican establishment and a previously compromised FISA Court will step up and better protect the Constitution than they have in the past?

    • Visualizing The Most Hyped Technology Of Every Year From 2000-2018

      Nothing captures our collective imagination quite like emerging technology.

      In a short amount of time, technological innovations such as wireless internet and social networking have become a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives, quietly transforming the way we live, work, and communicate. Other promising technologies have their moment in the sun, only to fade into obscurity.

      As Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley notes, Gartner’s Hype Cycle charts the roller coaster ride of emerging tech, from the first stirrings of public awareness to the point of wider adoption and economic viability. Today’s graphic is a retrospective look at which trends scaled the summit of the Hype Cycle each year since 2000.

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      Reaching the Peak

      As the media searches for the next big thing, certain technologies tend to dominate the headlines. Meanwhile, venture capital flows into the companies racing to bring the tech to market, valuations swell, marketing departments generate excitement, and the expectations of the general public begin to grow as well.

      One example of this phenomenon at work is the adoption of microblogging. Today, we don’t think twice about posting a tweet or updating our status on Facebook, but a decade ago, the act of posting a short public message was major shift in the way people used technology to communicate with one another. The intense buzz that sent microblogging towards the top of the Hype Cycle is corroborated by Google Search data.

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      Living Up to the Hype

      A few technologies transcend the hype to transform entire industries. Here are some examples that lived up to their time in the spotlight.

      Cloud Computing
      Right from the beginning, the analogy of data breaking the shackles of folders and clunky external drives – instead zipping efficiently into the invisible cloud – generated a lot of excitement. It felt like the future of computing, and enterprises and individuals eagerly adopted the technology.

      Today, Microsoft and Amazon’s cloud computing divisions each make $6-7 billion in revenue per quarter, and that number is still growing at a brisk pace.

      NFC Payments
      Near Field Communication – the technology that enables contactless payments – is transforming the way people pay for purchases around the world.

      The global contactless payments market is expected to reach $138.4 billion by 2023. Here’s a look at where NFC payments are making the greatest in-roads:

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      The Ones That Underwhelmed

      During the Christmas season of 2009, Kindle became the most gifted item in Amazon’s history. This watershed moment looked like the end of physical books as the public embraced the e-reader as the new way of consuming text.

      Fast-forward to today, and only 19% of adults in the U.S. own an e-reader.

      Of course, not every technology that grabs the headlines is going to become the next iPhone. Here are some others that didn’t immediately meet expectations after topping the Hype Cycle.

      m-Commerce
      Some concepts fail primarily because they’re ahead of their time. Such is the case with mobile commerce.

      By 2001, more than half of Americans owned mobile phones, and this represented a huge opportunity. Unfortunately, early m-commerce was restricted by the limitations of mobile phones of that time period. It wasn’t until the introduction of smartphones that the concept really took off. Today, nearly half of all online transactions are made via mobile devices.

      3D Printing
      Few technologies reach the fever pitch that 3D printing did in 2012. From the $1.4 billion merger of the largest players in the sector to the reports of firearm blueprints circulating the web, you could forgive people for believing that the 3D printer was destined to become the next microwave. In the end, interest in 3D printing leveled off.

      While it is getting used for prototyping in many different industries, it remains to be seen whether the technology will ever achieve the wide consumer-level adoption that was promised.

      What’s Next?

      When 2019’s Hype Cycle is released later this year, it remains to be seen which technology will rise to the top. Based on the trajectory from last year, search volume, and current news reports, 5G is a strong competitor.

    • Prepare For The Political Pendulum's Payback…

      Authored by Tim Knight via SlopeOfHope.com,

      Allow me to start off what is intended as an economic musing by referring to a favorite comic of mine, Patton Oswalt. He has a fairly new bit in which he explains the Trump phenomenon as a totally understandable response to the Obama presidency.

      The political pendulum in America, deep in the throes of the financial crisis, had swung so far that the United States elected its first black President, and a rather progressive one.

      After eight years of that, the “mirrored” response was to elect a political novice known principally as the billionaire star of a reality television show.

      Continue reading “Today’s News 8th April 2019” »

    Apr 07

    Today’s News 7th April 2019

    • Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between The Vatican, The CIA, & The Mafia

      Authored by via Off-Guardian.org,

      On the hot summer morning of Aug. 2, 1980 a massive explosion ripped apart the main waiting room of the Bologna railway station. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more injured. Though at first blamed on Italy’s legendary urban guerrillas, The Red Brigades, it soon emerged that the attack had, in fact, originated from within the ‘deep state’ of the Italian government itself.

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      The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry, revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of an organization which later came to be identified as ‘Gladio’.

      The members of this group turned out to include not only hundreds of far-right figures in the intelligence, military, government, media, Church and corporate sectors, but a motley assortment of unreconstructed WW2 fascists, psychopaths and criminal underworld types to boot. And despite Andreotti’s attempts to airbrush the group as ‘patriots’ it appeared evident to much of the rest of the Italian polity that these seemed rather more like pretty bad folk indeed. Little did they know. Follow-up research by the likes of Daniele Ganser, Claudio Celani, Jurgen Roth and Henrik Kruger traced connections to similar groups spread throughout Europe of which all were found to be deep state terrorist organizations, and all of which were found, ultimately, to be subservient unto the highest levels of the CIA and NATO command structures.

      The moniker ‘Gladio’ (after the two-edged sword used in classical Rome) was eventually broadened to include a bewildering host of related deep state terrorist structures including: ‘P2’ In Italy, ‘P26’ in Switzerland, ‘Sveaborg’ in Sweden, ‘Counter-Guerrilla’ in Turkey and ‘Sheepskin’ in Greece. This (hardly definitive) European list was then found to have connections not only to virtually every US sponsored secret state terrorist organization the world over (including the likes of Operation Condor in Latin America), but also to many of the global drug cartels that provided the secretive wealth needed to fund and otherwise lubricate the whole rotting, corrupt shebang.

      If all this sounds sinister enough, it pales in light of the detailed structure of the dazzlingly diabolical Gladio edifice. And it is to those details we now repair vis a vis an overview of the remarkable, if otherwise unheralded, 2015 work by journalist Paul L. Williams entitled, ‘Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia’. Though there are other books on the subject worthy of honourable mention (including Daniele Ganser’s seminal tome, ‘NATO’s Secret Armies’, and Richard Cottrell’s recent and stylishly written, ‘Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe’), it is to Williams that I believe we owe a particular debt of gratitude in having provided a more or less fully integrated portrait of the global machinations of Operation Gladio.

      Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst ‘Gladio’ was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament (in Nov., 1990; Washington and NATO having ever after refused ‘comment’ on the matter), and its multifarious organs and factions ordered dismantled, it is hardly likely that the latter was ever fully enacted. The historical context of ‘Gladio’, then, is really the quintessential backdrop to understanding the trademark false flag events of the modern era.

      OF SPOOKS AND MADE MEN

      The general origins of this labyrinthine network of deep state actors lay in the so-called ‘stay-behind-armies’ set up at the end of WW2 by the Allied powers (principally the US) ostensibly to act as resistance forces should the Soviets ever decide to invade Europe. Quickly, however, the raison d’etre of the ‘armies’ transmogrified into a mission to counteract, not external invasion, but ‘internal subversion’. Such would eventually result in the undermining not just of post-war European socialism, but of Italian, Greek – and later global – democracy itself.

      But we get ahead of ourselves.

      The primal author of the ‘stay-behind-armies’, Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had “concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics” ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as ‘werewolves’.

      Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources.

      The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the American fold, the ‘werewolves’ were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded as ‘gladiators’. Operation Gladio was born.

      In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task, i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well. Fortunately, ‘Gladio’ was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.

      In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand with the communist ‘problem’. The arrival of the ‘made men’ was the result of Donovan’s efforts from 1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new (drug) funding for the OSS’s off-books’ operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power.

      Still, the threat remained. Fully half the Italian electorate were communist sympathizers and, moreover, leftist politics pervaded much of the rest of the diseased European body. More would have to be done. The problem, however, was money. There simply wasn’t enough of it. Thus, the initial $200 million in funding for Gladio (which had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations) was quickly exhausted. And though the National Security Act of 1947 had provided the loophole that allowed for the CIA’s covert operations, it had not allowed for their overt Congressional funding. There lay the rub. Thankfully, Paul Helliwell knew how to salve the itch.

      Paul Helliwell was an inner member of the original OSS (along with key scions of the Morgan, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, DuPont and Ryan families) and, according to Williams, likely the greatest unsung hero of the nicknamed ‘Oh-So-Social’ club. It was he, who having cut his teeth in the drugs-for-arms trade by shepherding opium deals with the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese National Army fighting against Mao Zedung), conjured the brilliant inspiration to do the very same thing – in the United States itself.

      Thus, it was at his suggestion that Donovan elected to forge the deep bond (and that exists to this day) between the nation’s intelligence services and organized crime. Enter stage left such notables as ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and the Trafficante and Gambino crime clans. Quickly the streets of, first, New York, and later many an American metropolis, were flooded with heroin. These early, halcyon days would soon lead to the infamous ‘French Connection’, thence to the ‘Golden Triangle’ (where the CIA’s very own ‘Air America’ transported drugs out of South East Asia during the Vietnam War) and, later, to the Balkan, Mexican, and Colombian drug cartels.

      All very well and good. But, to begin with, there was yet a fly in the whole drugs-for-arms-for-terror ointment. To wit: how to pay off the mafioso without anyone noticing; indeed, how to stash, launder and hide all of this financial derring-do from the prying eyes of the authorities; you know, the real-enough authorities, the Treasury cops and so forth. How do you do that?

      THE VATICAN CONNECTION

      Article 2 of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 was clear and unequivocal. The Article, which served to regulate matters between the Holy See and the Italian state, expressly forbade any interference of the latter in the affairs of the former. It is hardly conceivable, of course, that the framers of the Treaty ever foresaw what such immunity could actually mean in practice. But then they probably hadn’t reckoned on the fiendish formation of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), or more colloquially, the Vatican Bank.

      Established by Pope Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara in 1942, the Bank would quickly come to serve as the principal repository post-war both for the Sicilian Mafia and for the OSS/CIA wherein all of the monies and documents relating to drug trafficking and to Gladio would be stored and laundered. Already in 1945 the pope had held private audiences with Donovan to discuss the implementation of Gladio and where, as Williams reports, Donovan was knighted as an anti-Communist crusader with the Grand Cross of the Order of Sylvester. Prior to this time Pius XII had proven himself a loyal ally in working with Dulles and the OSS to establish the ratlines used to help prominent Nazis escape Europe. Now, new horizons beckoned. The first duty at hand, of course, was to destroy the communist menace in respect of the 1948 elections. To this end the pope authorized his own terror squads (under Monsignor Bicchierai) to assist the gladiators and the ‘made men’ in intimidating the Italian electorate. Task accomplished.

      The second duty at hand, however, was longer term. Communism, socialism and, indeed, any Godless form of progressive government, anywhere, had to be stamped out at source. For this money would be needed. Lots of money. Untraceable money. Drug money. Now in the months before the 1948 election the CIA deposited some $65 million into the Vatican Bank. The source of these monies came from heroin produced by the Italian pharmaceutical giant, Schiaparelli, and which was then transported by the Sicilian mob into Cuba where it was cut and then distributed to New Orleans, Miami and New York by the Santo Trafficante family. Lucrative though this trade was, it was not nearly enough to suit the needs of the CIA and ‘Gladio’. More would be required. More drug networks and more banks. Gladio was about to global.

      To start with a new alliance was forged with the Corsican mafia. Unlike the Sicilian mob, the Corsicans had extensive experience in processing heroin, a skill they had picked up through years of working with Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese technicians in French Indochina. A supply route then emerged running from Burma through Turkey to Beirut and thence to Marseille. Alas, there was a slight hitch when the leftist dockworkers in Marseille, being sympathetic to the rebel army under Ho Chi Minh, refused to load and unload the boats from Indochina. No worries. A deft bit of terror administered by the Corsican boys (and funded by the CIA), and problem solved. By 1951, then, Marseille had become the center of the Western heroin industry. Voila, the ‘French Connection’.

      Meanwhile, Wild Bill Donovan had ‘resigned’ from the CIA to form the World Commerce Corporation (WCC) whose primary function was to facilitate the arms-for-drugs deals with the KMT. Paul Helliwell lent a needed hand at the helm by heading up Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA front company gainfully employed in shipping heroin from Bangkok. By 1958 the whole operation was so successful that a second supply route was established running through Saigon. Here, the help of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US installed despot of South Vietnam, proved invaluable.

      Still, there was a potential cloud on the horizon, i.e. word of all these shenanigans was bound to leak out. What to do? The first reflex, naturally, was to pin the blame for the West’s growing heroin problem on the Communist Chinese under Mao Zedung. Check. The second, more considered response, was to organize an ongoing campaign to deflect attention away from, and burnish the image of, the CIA. And to this end, in 1953, did the CIA establish ‘Operation Mockingbird’. Under ‘Mockingbird’ the Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists to spread false stories and propaganda about the Company’s ‘benign’ activities. Eventually, this depraved fabric of anti-journalism enlisted entire news networks including ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now the guys and gals at Langley could relax. Henceforth, American (and global) eyes were dutifully prismed through the rose-coloured lens of ‘Mockingbird’.

      But back to the Vatican. The IOR, solid banking pillar of the Gladio community that it was, could hardly be expected to do all the heavy lifting itself. After all, the global heroin industry would, by 1980, be pulling in a cool $400 billion annually. En route an extensive and orchestrated financial network would be required to supplement God’s Bank. As with any fine orchestra it helps to have a maestro of exquisite genius to run the show. A nice round of applause, then, for one Michele Sindona. The biography of Sindona begins, humbly enough, with his degree in tax law from the University of Messina in 1942 after which, in quick succession, he rockets to stardom as a leading financial adviser to the Sicilian mafia, an agent for the CIA, and, thereafter, a financial intimate of the Holy See. By the late 1950s Sindona had become the lynchpin in a nexus between the mob, the CIA and the Vatican that would eventually, as Williams chillingly puts it, “result in the toppling of governments, wholesale slaughter and financial devastation.”

      Though a full elaboration of this bewilderingly complex financial system is best left to the author, it is worth briefly savouring a few highlights. To begin with Sindona purchased Fasco AG, a Liechtenstein holding company and through which he purchased his first bank – the Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF). The BPF then became, by way of a Chicago-based intermediary bank, Continental Illinois, a principal conduit for transferring drug money from the IOR for the purposes of Gladio. In fact, it was this banking pipeline in particular which provided the filthy lucre that fueled the 1967 coup d’etat in Greece. But more on this heady stuff in a bit.

      It was through his Chicago contacts that Sindona first met Monsignor Paul Marcinkus, popularly known as ‘the Gorilla’. The Gorilla was six foot four, “a gifted street fighter…and a lover of bourbon, fine cigars and young women”. Under Sindona’s patronage Marcinkus would soon rise to become both Pope Paul VI’s personal body guard and the head of the IOR. A third musketeer in the person of Roberto Calvi (the assistant – and later full – director of the famous, Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano) came to complete the three Vatican amigos. Together they would cut a dramatic, collective figure in the global banking underworld all through the ‘anni di Piombo’ (the Gladio ‘years of lead’ in Italy from 1969 to 1987). Exactly how dramatic is illustrated, par excellence, by Calvi’s eventual dark demise. Who among us, old enough to remember, can forget the macabre spectacle (June, 1982) of Calvi’s body hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, his feet dangling in the Thames and pockets stuffed with five masonry bricks. Sindona would also later be murdered (1986) by means of a cyanide-laced cup of coffee whilst in jail and under ‘maximum protective custody’.

      Calvi was a key figure in establishing a series of eight shell companies (six in Panama, two in Europe) through which drug lords like Pablo Escobar in South America were encouraged to deposit their ill-gotten loot. (The CIA put shoulder to wheel by helping ferry the Escobar cocaine in a fleet of planes operating out of Scranton airport in Pennsylvania). The monies were then transferred via Banco Ambrosiano to the IOR which took a 15 to 20 percent processing fee. From there funds were distributed to a host of European banks set up by Sindona for use by Gladio units spread throughout the continent. In addition to the flow of cash from the cartels, funds were bled from Banco Ambrosiano into the eight shell companies – again for use by the CIA in funding its covert operations.

      This points up a general operating procedure of the entire Gladio ‘banking’ system, i.e. the system, far from being designed to turn a profit, was expressly designed to ‘lose’ money; that is, to have it siphoned off into covert ops. Such explains the regular and spectacular failure of a host of CIA-related banks including: Franklin National Bank (purchased by Sindona), Castle Bank & Trust, Mercantile Bank & Trust (both set up by the ubiquitous Paul Helliwell), Nugan Hand Bank (in Australia, and from which funds were diverted to undermine Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during the Vietnam War), and the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (based in Karachi in aid, primarily, of the Southeast Asian heroin trade). Indeed, it was precisely the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano itself that brought both Calvi and Sindona to their untimely ends.

      Finally, it is worth noting here that these august institutions were linked in a tight criminal embrace with many of the most prestigious financial firms in America including Citibank, the Bank of New York, and the Bank of Boston. The base of the iceberg, in short, extended far and wide. But then, what was all this money really doing?

      THE TERROR

      Following the thwarting of Italian democracy in 1948 the Gladio ‘secret armies’ entered into a period of what one might characterize as pregnant incubation. Thus, it was during the 1950s that the various drug supply routes and financial networks were being created, as were some of the principal political organizations. Probably the most important of the latter was ‘Propaganda Due’ otherwise known as ‘P2’.

      Created in 1877 as a Freemasonry lodge for the Piedmont nobility, it was banned by Mussolini in 1924 only to be resurrected post-war with the approval of Allen Dulles, himself a thirty-third degree Mason. The lodge, though at first dominated mainly by spooks, spies, military and mafia figures, would soon encompass a who’s who of Italian political, corporate, banking and media supremos to boot. Indeed, the organization would eventually spread shoots throughout Europe as well as North and South America, and its members would come to include such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig.

      A ‘P2’ denizen of especial significance was Licio Gelli. The latter’s pedigree was impressive: a former volunteer in the 735th Black Shirts Battalion, a former member of the elite SS Division under Field Marshall Goering and, thereafter, a chummy employee of the US Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army. Working with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, Gelli soon gained entry to the Vatican where he helped set up the Nazi escape routes to Argentina. His ties with Argentina would later prove critical in facilitating Operation Condor (the US-backed mass assassination program in 1970s and ‘80s South America). Moreover, in 1972, Gelli would emerge as P2’s supreme ‘Worshipful Master’ under whose leadership the lodge would reach its full, horrific flowering. Finally, it is worth mentioning at this juncture that it was as a result of a police raid on Gelli’s villa in 1981 that the full, tentacled structure of Gladio would come to light. But we digress.

      One of the first substantive actions of Gladio was the Turkish coup of 1960. Here the incumbent Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, made the fatal mistake of believing he was really in charge and thereafter initiating a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid. The ‘stay-behind-army’ in Turkey known as Counter-Guerilla, in alliance with the Turkish military, quickly disabused him of any such delusions by arresting and executing him. Throughout the 1970s both Counter-Guerilla and its youth wing, the Grey Wolves, would stage “ongoing terror attacks…that resulted in the deaths of over five thousand students, teachers, trade union leaders, booksellers and politicians”.

      Counter-Guerilla would also figure in the Turkish coup of 1980 when its commander, General Kenan Evren, toppled the moderate government of Bulent Ecevit. According to Williams, US President Jimmy Carter phoned in his approval to the CIA station-chief in Ankara, Paul Henze, with a jubilant, ‘Your boys have done it!’ What they had done, of course, was set up a tyranny in which thousands more would be tortured while incarcerated. The Turkish Gladio boys would also be unleashed in the 1980s upon the PKK – the Kurdistan Workers Party. All of this was in keeping with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s (Carter’s national security advisor) core vision of the importance of controlling Central Asia to which Turkey was both a vital portal and, thus, a key NATO ally.

      Alas, Gladio would prove something of a disappointment in France, where, after having backed a series of assassination attempts against the regrettably too independent President Charles de Gaulle, it found itself on the receiving end of de Gaulle’s boot. Actually, it was NATO itself – at the time, headquartered in Paris – that was unceremoniously kicked out of France (in 1966, whence it took up its present cozy and famously corrupt abode in Brussels). But, of course, de Gaulle was ahead of the curve and understood all too well who was really behind the mayhem and murder.

      Greece, unfortunately, did not fare as well. In 1967 the ‘Hellenic Raiding Force’, a franchise of Gladio and playing to a NATO authored script entitled Operation Prometheus, overthrew the left-leaning government of George Papandreou. The ensuing military dictatorship would last until 1974 though this would hardly signal the end of Greece’s tribulations. From 1980 until near the turn of the millennium, the nation would suffer under a reign of terror and political assassinations nominally attributed to ‘November 17’, an alleged Marxist revolutionary group, but which in fact (and here I briefly tag-team with authors Cottrell and Ganser) was yet another faction of Greek-Gladio known as ‘Sheepskin’.

      This illustrates a point originally brought home by Ganser’s research to the effect that virtually every alleged ‘leftist revolutionary’ group said to have been operating in Europe throughout the post-war years was, in truth, either a Gladio ‘secret army’ unit or else had been completely infiltrated by state intelligence services, and was subsequently being steered by them for Gladio-style state-terrorist ends.

      Such is well documented for the ‘Red Brigades’ in Italy and the ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang’ in Germany (the ‘gang’ being conveniently and cold-bloodedly exterminated on the ‘night of the long knives’, Oct.18, 1977, whilst under custody in Stammheim prison). It also, just by the by, speaks to the universally attested prior association of many a modern-day ‘terrorist’ and their police and intelligence handlers.

      In Spain, during the early ‘70s, Stefano delle Chiaie and fellow Gladio agents from Italy provided their consulting expertise to General Francisco Franco’s secret police who conducted over a thousand violent acts and some fifty murders. Following Franco’s death in 1975, delle Chiaie moved to Chile to lend a fatherly hand in helping the CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet set up his death squads. In later years the Spanish Gladio unit would find gainful employment hunting down and assassinating the leaders of the Basque separatist movement.

      Of Italy we have already mentioned the ‘years of lead’, but just to capture a few highlights. The ‘strategy of tension’ unleashed in 1969 in Italy – the same year ‘Condor’ was unleashed in Latin America – was in response to the renewed popularity of Communism throughout the country and which, itself, was partly in response to the uptick in revolutionary sentiment globally as a result of antipathy towards the US war on Vietnam. The antidote, naturally, to this woeful state of progressive affairs was a healthy dose of terror. According to Williams, “Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Advisor, issued orders to Licio Gelli through his deputy, General Alexander Haig, for the implementation of terror attacks and coup attempts.” The terror attacks began on December 12, 1969 when a bomb exploded in the crowded lobby of a bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in which seventeen people were killed and eighty-eight injured. Over the ensuing years (from 1969 to 1987) there followed more than ‘14,000 acts of violence with a political motivation’. The most infamous of these was, of course, the Bologna bombing in August of 1980 and which led to the initial exposure of Gladio in Italy.

      Of the many attempted coups and related high-level political machinations engineered by Gladio forces in Italy (1963, 1970, 1976) and Sicily (more or less continually on tap throughout the decade), the kidnapping on March 16, 1978 – and murder a month or so later – of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was likely the most sensational. Moro had dared to include communists in his new coalition government. At first blamed on the usual suspects, i.e. the Red Brigades, further investigation (to begin with by journalist Carmine ‘Mino’ Pecorelli who paid with his life) led to the real usual suspects including CIA operative Mario Moretti (eventually convicted of the killing) and thence up the line to Gelli, then to Italy’s interior minister Francesco Cossiga and onwards to Zbigniew Brzezinski.

      The high-level intrigue did not stop at the murder of a prime minister however. At least two Popes felt the sharp end of the Gladio sword as well. In August of 1978, Pope Paul VI died. His successor, the preternaturally timid John Paul I, soon gave his handlers a very real shock when, after looking at the IOR accounts, he issued a ‘call for reform’. The very next day the otherwise fastidiously health-conscious pontiff – in office barely a month – was dead. Not just dead but expired with the telltale bulging eyes and horrific grimace of acute poisoning. His autopsy was definitively thwarted by an illegal and hastily contrived embalming, and his personal papers disappeared without a trace. Archbishop Marcinkus, having been temporarily removed prior, was returned to office whilst Calvi and Sindona, also under scrutiny at the time, breathed a (temporary) sigh of relief.

      Having been (almost) burned once the overseers of Gladio made sure to engineer the follow-up Papal succession. Thus did Cardinal Karol Wojtyla shuffle onto the historical proscenium as Pope John Paul II. Now, at first, John Paul worked seamlessly with the CIA and Gladio. Together they oversaw the destruction of Liberation Theology in Latin America, the continued undermining of Italian democracy, and the dispensing of black funds for Solidarity in Poland. Ah, but how the best laid plans do oft go astray. By the spring of 1981 not only were events spinning out of control for Gladio itself, but so too were they for Banco Ambrosiano, and by extension, the IOR. The Pope, inexplicably, refused to act. Compounding this lapse was an unaccountable trifecta of moral turpitude that witnessed the Holy Father suddenly breaking into treasonous song singing the benefits of rapprochement with the Soviets; recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization; and, egads, nuclear disarmament. The order from on high was given: ‘Kill the Pope’.

      But best blame it on the Soviets. So issued the ‘Bulgarian Thesis’ wherein a lowly Bulgarian airline employee (Sergei Antonov) was set up as the patsy. In truth, the key actors in the Papal plot came straight from Gladio central casting. The starring role in the drama fell to General Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italy’s military intelligence (SISMI) and the commander of the Italian Gladio units. His co-star, Theodore Shackley, was the infamous CIA mastermind who had already served as executive producer on such epics as Operation Phoenix (involving the murder of some 40,000 non-combatants in Vietnam), Operation Condor, the setting up of Nugan Hand Bank, and, along with delle Chiaie, the murder of Salvador Allende. West Germany’s BND (the national security services) garnered a significant credit by harbouring and financing the two actual assassins, Mehmet Agca and Abdullah Cath (both from Turkish Gladio). And, of course, the Mighty Wurlitzer, i.e. Operation Mockingbird, figured prominently in the aftermath grinding out endless tunes on the ‘Bulgarian Thesis’ – despite the fact of Agca’s eventual (lone) conviction in the shooting.

      The production ended all somewhat anticlimactically when the Pope (on May 13, 1981) was only seriously wounded. In a fascinating denouement, however, on Christmas Day 1983, the Pope opted to publicly forgive Agca. Italian state television was allowed to record the moment when John Paul asked his assassin from whom he had received his orders. Leaning forward to hear Agca’s response the Pope appeared momentarily frozen, then clasped his hands to his face. Though the Pontiff kept it secret, there was little need to guess at the answer.

      The adventures of both Agca and Cath are the stuff of legend. Indeed, Cath figures in events well beyond the time line of Gladio proper, enough to suggest that Gladio never really shut down at all. But that, as they say, is a whole other story – and one I leave to the author to take up.

      *  *  *

      Paul Williams has made a fine contribution here. Certainly, if the day ever comes when, seated across from some smug establishment interlocutor, you are taken to task for being a ‘conspiracy monger’ – well, you need only lean back, smile gently, and utter but two words….’Operation Gladio’.

    • Textron Delivers Next Generation Squad Weapon To Army 

      Textron Systems’ AAI Corporation, an aerospace and defense development and manufacturing firm, located in Hunt Valley, Maryland, announced last week the delivery of its initial Next Generation Squad Weapon-Technology (NGSW-T) prototype demonstrator to the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) Armaments Center and Joint Services Small Arms Program (JSSAP), the company said in a statement. 

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      “Moving from contract award to delivery of a revolutionary, next-generation weapon in just 15 months not only demonstrates the maturity of our Cased-Telescoped technology, but also the project execution excellence our team possesses to rapidly fill critical warfighter needs on schedule,” said Textron Systems Senior Vice President of Applied Technologies & Advanced Programs Wayne Prender.

      “Our Cased-Telescoped weapons and ammunition offer the growth path to a true next-generation small arms weapon for U.S. warfighters, including increased lethality at longer ranges, while also delivering significant weight reductions to the warfighter.”

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      In development since 2004, AAI’s NGSW-T offers increased lethality and weighs 40% less than current standard issue light machine guns. The weapon chambers a telescoped round between 6.5mm and 6.8mm and is expected to be the future replacement for the M16 rifle, M4 carbine, and M249 light machine gun.

      In October, the Army selected the 6.8mm, next-generation round as the official requirements for the NGSW-T. The new bullet is designed to penetrate the world’s most advanced body armor at a range of up to 600 meters. 

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      The Pentagon’s current shift from urban warfare in Iraq and Syria to the mountains and open terrain of Afghanistan have been the driving force behind modernizing standard issue weapons for infantry units. While standard rifles are well-suited for close combat in cities like Mosul and Raqqa, it lacks the range to kill adversaries in open stretches.

      The Army is expected to test AAI’s NGSW-T weapon at firing ranges this summer. If the weapon meet’s the Army’s requirements for NGSW-T, then AAI could get a large contract to send the gun into series production to produce more than 250,000 units and 150 million rounds. The expected field date could be as early as 2020. 

       

    • Taiwan, The BRI, & The Geopolitical Chessboard

      Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

      What remains of Western unity does not represent a vision of the future any more…

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      It’s all about the cross-strait median. No, that’s not a drink in a Hong Kong bar. It’s the de facto maritime border between continental China and Taiwan.

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      Last Sunday morning, two Chinese J-11 fighters crossed the median and stayed on Taiwanese air space for about 10 minutes – even after Taiwanese interceptors were dispatched. Tsai Ing-wen, the President of Taiwan, defined the incursion by the PLA Air Force as “reckless and provocative.”

      And, ominously, demanded the “forceful expulsion” of Chinese fighter jets if it ever happened again. Well, that used to happen, quite frequently, but only up to 1999, when Beijing and Taipei clinched a deal to make them stop.

      US mainstream media predictably spun this latest incursion as yet another Chinese provocation, omitting the essential background to what is only one more move in an extremely complex – and dangerous – geopolitical chessboard.

      Taiwan has made an official request to buy more than 60 F-16 fighter jets from the US. And the Trump administration tacitly approved it. It works like this. Trump’s advisers “encouraged” Taipei to make a formal request. They acted in tandem with Lockheed Martin, which builds the F-16s.

      The request then became an actual proposal by the Pentagon and State Department. Finally, Congress has 30 days to consider whether the sale may go ahead. Considering this particular case suits not only the industrial-military complex, but also the overall US government agenda of containment of China, it might as well be considered a done deal.

      Call in your CHIPS

      Without this crucial context, it’s impossible to understand the logic behind the Chinese “provocation.” And that is also directly linked to John Bolton torpedoing negotiations with North Korea (the DPRK) and the non-stop demonization of both Russia and Iran.

      China, Russia and Iran are the essential nodes in the laborious, ongoing, long-term Eurasia integration process. Russia and China were also essential advisers to the DPRK in its nuclear negotiations with the Trump administration.

      The demonization of Russia and Iran proceeds in parallel with what is in effect a Washington-orchestrated SWIFT-CHIPS war.

      CHIPS is the US dollar clearing system used by 88% of the transactions in global trade. This means that the US dollar is on one side of every international transaction 88% of the time.

      If you are cut out of this system, it’s extremely difficult to conduct world trade – you need barter, trading in local currencies or an untested system like INSTEX, set up by the EU for non-dollar transactions with Iran after the Trump administration crashed out of the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal.

      China is way more dependent on world trade than Russia as it needs to import massive amounts of natural resources that must be paid for by exports.

      Russia, for its part, could very easily become self-sufficient, as it holds about 96% of the natural resources it needs. The US, by comparison, needs to import many vital natural resources for its advanced industries.

      Recent history is filled with examples – for instance, Japan and South Korea – showing that national self-sufficiency works. China is fine-tuning the model as applied to the Made in China 2025 strategy.

      The problem with Russia is that the Central Bank under Elvira Nabiullina arguably does not operate in the Russian national interest.

      As I have extensively discussed with Russian analysts, a solution would be for the Russian Central Bank to create currency controls to prevent oligarchs from siphoning their wealth overseas, a move that only serves to further collapse the ruble. And also create credit to build the industries that would replace imports – a de facto massive import substitution. No credit should be issued for any other purpose.

      Entering the next decade, what would constitute a sort of nuclear option would be for Russia to divert to China most of the natural resources sold to the West, whose retribution is packages of sanctions, while importing from China the advanced technologies required for Russia.

      China is de facto an equal or even ahead of the US in plenty of technology areas – as documented, for instance, by Kai-Fu Lee on AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order. Much is not visible yet because advances have not been commercialized.

      All of the above is being debated in Moscow, in detail, on myriad levels. It’s not by accident that Russia is fully on board the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in connection with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

      The latest graphic example of the Russia-China economic partnership is the railroad bridge across the Amur river linking the Russian Far East with China’s Heilongjiang province.

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      The future rises in the East

      Throughout the next decade it will be clear how the entire Eurasian land mass is linked with, or by, the BRI. In comparison, Chas Freeman, a former US ambassador to China, is one of the few informed observers who have sounded the alarm; Washington treats the BRI as a military strategic challenge.

      Alastair Crooke has shown how a mini-BRI is already shaping up, linking Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. In fact, this is the emerging Southwest Asia BRI node.

      At the same time, Beijing had made it very clear that – harsh methods included – Xinjiang, the key BRI hub in Western China, would not be allowed to become another Syria, Libya or Iraq. Xinjiang directly links with the essential BRI connectivity corridors to the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

      The West, or what remains of its unity, does not represent a vision of the future any more. China is striving for the BRI to fulfill this role. That’s something a few extra F-16s patrolling the cross-strait median won’t be able to change.

    • Banning Buybacks Would Crash The Market, Goldman Warns

      Few topics prompt as powerful (and violent) a response from financial professionals as what the role of financial buybacks is in determining stock prices. One group, largely those bulls who after a decade of central bank manipulation still believe that markets are efficient and unrigged, and in hope of increasing their AUMs claim that they are financial geniuses for riding the world’s biggest financial bubble in history, argue that stock buybacks have no impact on stock prices. Others, those who actually understand that if there is a trillion dollars in price indiscrimiante stock bids (as was the case in 2018 and will again happen in 2019) is the single most effective way to boost stock prices (and management’s incentive-linked comp, linked to higher stock prices), know – correctly – that corporate buybacks, which until not too long ago were banned, and which over the past decade emerged as the single biggest source of stock purchases, are one of the two most important factors behind the all time highs in the stock market (the other being the Fed, whose policies have allowed companies to issue debt with record low yields, allowing them to fund these trillions in buybacks).

      And with the debate raging, either side happy to “convince” others in its echo chamber while hurling insults at the other, few have been as vocal in their defense of stock buybacks as Goldman Sachs.

      One month ago, the firm’s chief equity strategy David Kostin wrote a report – let’s call it the carrot – seeking to debunk “misconceptions” about stock buyabcks, which he claimed had gotten an unfair rap in the US. Specifically, Kostin said that “one of the greatest misconceptions in the public discourse surrounding corporate buybacks is the belief that managements repurchase stock in an attempt to inflate earnings per share and meet incentive compensation targets,” Goldman wrote. And while Goldman tried, to demonstrate that “executives whose compensation depends on EPS, did not allocate a higher proportion of 2018 total cash spending to buybacks than companies where management pay is not linked to EPS”, the bank was forced to admit that last year buybacks did surpass capex as the biggest use of capital allocation.

      Goldman’s valiant effort to halt regulatory and legislative focus on buybacks – which also included Goldman’s ex-CEO Lloyd Blankfein issuing a rebuttal defending the practice on Twitter, saying the money “gets reinvested in higher growth businesses that boost the economy and jobs” did little however to stem the tide and as a result buybacks have been getting increasing scrutiny in the wake of the tax reforms in late 2017, when companies used money saved from the lower taxes as well as repatriated cash to return money to shareholders in record amounts, with total announced buybacks surpassing $1 trillion for the first time in 2018.

      As a result, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida released a plan last month that would curb buyback incentives. Democratic Senator Chris van Hollen of Maryland may propose legislation curbing executive share sales after repurchase announcements. The culmination – so far – was the US Senate convening hearings and introducing legislation to prohibit public companies from repurchasing their shares on the open market.

      This was too much for Goldman, which realized that the carrot approach is not working, and late on Friday went all “stick”, when one month after his first report exposing buyback “misconception”, Goldman’s David Kostin doubled down, effectively warning that a ban on buybacks would likely result in a market crash, as “eliminating buybacks would immediately force firms to shift corporate cash spending priorities, impact stock market fundamentals, and alter the supply/demand balance for shares.”

      And just to underscore his dire warning, Kostin said that from a portfolio strategy perspective, “the potential restriction on buybacks would likely have five implications for the US equity market: (1) slow EPS growth; (2) boost cash spending on dividends, M&A, and debt paydown; (3) widen trading ranges; (4) reduce demand for shares; and (5) lower company valuations.”

      Kostin then breaks down these core points into the detail components, all of which have dire consequences for the market if the single biggest buyer of stocks is forced to step aside:

      1. Slow EPS growth.

      From a fundamental perspective, removing buybacks would have a negative effect on EPS growth. Aggregate earnings growth trails EPS growth because buybacks boost earnings per share by reducing the number of shares outstanding. During the past 15 years, the gap between EPS growth and earnings growth for the median S&P 500 company averaged 260 bp (11% vs. 8%). In 2018, the spread equaled 200 bp (20% vs. 18%). Another approach to estimating the boost to EPS growth in excess of earnings growth is the net buyback yield [(share repurchases – share issuance) / starting market capitalization]. This yield reflects the percent of market cap repurchased during the trailing 12 months. The S&P 500 net buyback yield averaged 2.6% during the past five years, close to the actual 290 bp gap between median EPS and earnings growth (10% vs. 8%).

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      2. Shift cash spending priorities.

      S&P 500 firms allocated an average of 25% of their annual cash spending to buybacks since 2009. Eliminating repurchases would compel firms to find new uses for that cash. Some firms might choose to make formal tender offers for their shares, which firms employed to retire stock prior to 1982. But most managements would probably redirect cash that was previously spent on buybacks towards dividends (both regular and special) and funding more M&A. Spending on capex and R&D would probably not change if buybacks ceased, according to Goldman. During the past decade, capex and R&D have accounted for an average of 45% of S&P 500 annual cash spending which has consistently equaled about 8% of sales. Investment spending has always been the first priority for corporations, at least until 2018 when spending on buybacks surpassed CapEx for the first time. Simply put, to Goldman this means that without new investment opportunities firms are unlikely to suddenly spend more than 8% of sales on capex and R&D, and firms would be forced to hoard the case. This means that in a world without buybacks, companies would almost certainly increase dividend growth and raise cash M&A spending. Dividends have accounted for 18% of annual cash use during the past decade and growth has averaged 6%. The S&P 500 dividend payout ratio currently equals 34%, below the 30-year average of 38%. Cash M&A spending would also jump. During the past decade, cash M&A spending accounted for 13% of corporate cash use and growth averaged 16% annually (Ex. 2). More than 75% of mergers involve some cash consideration. Firms might also choose to redirect cash spent on buybacks to reduce debt outstanding.

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      3. Widen trading ranges.

      Removing or limiting buybacks would lead to a greater amplitude of index moves, a wider distribution of individual stock returns, and higher volatility: in short many more market crashes, both flash and otherwise. Worse, Goldman notes that prohibiting buybacks would reduce downside support for equity prices since companies could no longer step in to repurchase shares if their stock prices tumble. A case study of the potential impact of eliminating buybacks can be seen each quarter around the time the buyback blackout rolls in, about five weeks prior through two days after a company releases earnings. During these periods, firms are restricted from executing discretionary buybacks.

      And here is the clearest indication just how much of an impact buybacks have no stock prices: during the past 25 years, the 20th percentile return for stocks within the S&P 500 has averaged -27% (annualized) in buyback blackout periods compared with -16% when companies can freely repurchase their shares. The average (11% vs. 5%) and 80th percentile (61% vs. 40%) stock returns are also higher during buyback blackouts likely due to the boost from quarterly earnings releases. Return dispersion (16 pp vs. 14 pp) and volatility (16.4 vs. 15.8) during blackout windows have also been higher compared with non-blackout periods (Exhibit 3).

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      4. Reduce demand for shares

      This is where Goldman’s warnings start to get especially dire, because as Kostin cautions, without company buybacks, demand for shares would fall dramatically. Repurchases have consistently been the largest source of US equity demand. Since 2010, corporate demand for shares has far exceeded demand from all other investor categories combined. Net buybacks for all US equities averaged $420 billion annually during the past nine years. In contrast, during this period, average annual equity demand from households, mutual funds, pension funds, and foreign investors was less than $10 billion for each category – despite the fact these categories collectively own 83% of corporate equities. Buybacks represented the largest source of equity demand in 2018.

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      According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent Financial Accounts quarterly report, corporate demand for stocks, measured as gross repurchases minus share issuance plus M&A, totaled $509 billion last year. Households were the only other net buyer of stocks (+$191 billion). Pensions, mutual funds, and foreign investors sold $243 billion, $124 billion, and $94 billion of equities in 2018, respectively. High equity exposure among major investor categories increases the importance of buybacks as a source of equity demand. Equity allocations for each of the major investor categories are elevated vs. history. Aggregate equity allocation totals 44% across households, mutual funds, pension funds, and foreign investors (86th percentile relative to the past 30 years). In contrast, we estimate that allocation to debt and cash are only at the 39th and 3rd percentiles, respectively.

      5. Lower valuations

      A decline in expected earnings growth could also lead to P/E multiple contraction. In a world without buybacks, forward EPS growth could be trimmed by 250 bp, close to the impact of net buybacks on company-level EPS growth. During the past 30 years, a 250 bp lower expected FY2 EPS growth has corresponded with a one multiple point lower forward P/E multiple for the median S&P 500 stock. And since Goldman already warned liquidity would be even more dire, one can expect that 1x PE multiple shrinkage to have dire consequences on stock prices.

      Finally, prohibiting buybacks could also apply downward pressure to equity prices if it increases the supply of equities relative to demand at current prices, as eliminating the largest source of equity demand could lower the demand curve if other investor categories do not replace the corporate bid from buybacks. And since buybacks have been the go-to backstop for the market – along with the Fed – the probability of another “investor category” stepping up to buy stocks when the buyer of last reserve is gone, is virtually nil.

      * * *

      So as Goldman turns from a carrot to a stick approach, one can summarize the latest Goldman report by observing that very bad things will happen if Congress proceeds with its intentions to ban buybacks. There is a silver lining: while Goldman previously sided with the generally clueless segment of “financial experts”, claiming that the impact of buybacks on stocks is at best muted, now that buyback legislation is becoming an increasingly greater threat by the day, Goldman can finally admit the truth: without buybacks the market will crash.

      And with Goldman’s abrupt and honest reversal, we are confident that the debate whether buybacks influence stocks or not, can finally be laid to rest.

    • Reality TV Star Prostitute Gets Prison For Racking Up $20,000 On Dead "Client's" Debit Card

      A former reality TV “bad girl”, Shannade Clermont, is now actually heading to jail for a year on wire fraud charges. The sentence comes as a result of “making and attempting more than $20,000 in fraudulent charges using debit card information she stole from a man who died during the course of a prostitution date with her,” according to the Justice Department. 

      Clermont admitted to stealing the debit card information from a man she visited in his Manhattan apartment. The DOJ said:

      “When the man died of an overdose, instead of notifying the authorities or calling for help, Clermont callously chose to use the man’s debit card information to make tens of thousands of dollars in illegal purchases.” 

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      After stealing his debit card information she attempted to purchase “thousands of dollars of luxury clothing and other merchandise, including, among other items, Valentino shoes, a Phillip Plein jacket, Beats headphones, as well as a gift certificate at a beauty salon”.

      As far as Reality TV “talent”, Clermont was low on the totem pole to begin with. She had appeared on the Oxygen network series “Bad Girls Club” in 2015 which helped her grow a large social media following. Her and her sister have appeared in music videos and have also modeled for Kanye West’s Yeezy brand, appearing in the Yeezy Season 6 campaign. She was ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.

      The Southern District of New York issued the following fantastic Tweet after her sentence

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      U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman released a longer statement along the same lines:

      “Former reality TV ‘Bad Girl’ Shannade Clermont lived up to her on-screen persona, as she admitted to stealing the debit card information from a man she visited for a prostitution date in his Manhattan apartment. When the man died of an overdose, instead of notifying the authorities or calling for help, Clermont callously chose to use the man’s debit card information to make tens of thousands of dollars in illegal purchases. As Shannade Clermont has now learned, her real-life bad behavior has real-life consequences, and has now landed her in federal prison.”

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      “On Jan. 31, 2017, my brother died and she went shopping,” the victim’s sister said at the sentencing, declining to give her name.

      The overdose was reported to be from cocaine laced with fentanyl.

    • The Number Of Americans With "No Religion" Has Soared 266% Over The Last 3 Decades

      Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

      Over the last 30 years, there has been a mass exodus out of organized religion in the United States.  Each year the needle has only moved a little bit, but over the long-term what we have witnessed has been nothing short of a seismic shift.  Never before in American history have we seen such dramatic movement away from the Christian faith, and this has enormous implications for the future of our nation.  According to a survey that was just released, the percentage of Americans that claim to have “no religion” has increased by 266 percent since 1991…

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      The number of Americans who identify as having no religion has risen 266 percent since 1991, to now tie statistically with the number of Catholics and Evangelicals, according to a new survey.

      People with no religion – known as ‘nones’ among statisticians – account for 23.1 percent of the U.S. population, while Catholics make up 23 percent and Evangelicals account for 22.5 percent, according to the General Social Survey.

      In other words, the “nones” are now officially the largest religious group in the United States.

      At one time it would have been extremely difficult to imagine that one day the “nones” would someday surpass evangelical Christians, but it has actually happened.

      And the biggest movement that we have seen has been among our young people.  According to a different survey, two-thirds of Christian young adults say that they stopped going to church at some point between the ages of 18 and 22…

      Large numbers of young adults who frequently attended Protestant worship services in high school are dropping out of church.

      Two-thirds of young people say they stopped regularly going to church for at least a year between the ages of 18 and 22, a new LifeWay Research surveyshows.

      These are the exact same patterns that we saw happen in Europe, and now most of those countries are considered to be “post-Christian societies”.

      The young adults of today are going to be the leaders of tomorrow, and they have a much higher percentage of “nones” than the population as a whole.  According to a study that was conducted a while back by PRRI, 39 percent of our young adults are “religiously unaffiliated” at this point…

      Today, nearly four in ten (39%) young adults (ages 18-29) are religiously unaffiliated—three times the unaffiliated rate (13%) among seniors (ages 65 and older). While previous generations were also more likely to be religiously unaffiliated in their twenties, young adults today are nearly four times as likely as young adults a generation ago to identify as religiously unaffiliated. In 1986, for example, only 10% of young adults claimed no religious affiliation.

      To go from 10 percent during Ronald Reagan’s second term to 39 percent today is an absolutely colossal shift.

      Right now, only about 27 percent of U.S. Millennials attend church on a regular basis.  Most of them simply have no interest in being heavily involved in organized religion.

      And even the young people that are involved in church do not seem very keen on sharing their faith with others.  According to one of the most shocking surveys that I have seen in a long time, 47 percent of Millennials that consider themselves to be “practicing Christians” believe that it is “wrong” to share the gospel with others…

      A new study from the California-based firm Barna Group, which compiles data on Christian trends in American culture, has revealed a staggering number of American millennials think evangelism is wrong.

      The report, commissioned by the discipleship group Alpha USA, showed a whopping 47 percent of millennials — born between 1984 and 1998 — “agree at least somewhat that it is wrong to share one’s personal beliefs with someone of a different faith in hopes that they will one day share the same faith.”

      These numbers are hard to believe, but they are from some of the most respected pollsters in the entire country.

      Politically, these trends indicate that America is likely to continue to move to the left.  Those that have no religious affiliation are much, much more likely to be Democrats, and so this exodus away from organized religion is tremendous news for the Democratic Party.

      In a previous article, I documented the fact that somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 churches in the United States are dying each year.

      That means that more than 100 will die this week.

      And thousands more are teetering on the brink.  In fact, most churches in America have less than 100 people attending each Sunday…

      A majority of churches have fewer than 100 people attending services each Sunday and have declined or nearly flatlined in membership growth, according to a new study from Exponential by LifeWay Research.

      The study, which was conducted to help churches better understand growth in the pews, showed that most Protestant churches are not doing well attracting new Christian converts, reporting an average of less than one each month.

      But even among all the bad news, there are some promising signs for the Christian faith.  The home church movement if flourishing all over the country, and many of those home fellowships are focused on getting back to the roots of the Christian faith.  All throughout history there have been relentless attempts to destroy the Christian faith, and yet it is still the largest faith in the entire world.

      However, there is no doubt that Christianity is in decline throughout the western world, and churches are dying one after another.

      This is what one pastor had to say about the slow death of his church…

      ‘My church is on the decline,’ he said. ‘We had 50 (congregants) in 2005 and now we have 15. We’re probably going to have to close (in a few years).’

      ‘Mainline Christianity is dying,’ he added. ‘It’s at least going away. It makes me feel more comfortable that it’s not my fault or my church’s fault. It’s part of a bigger trend that’s happening.’

      John Adams, the second president of the United States, once said the following about our form of government…

      Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

      As America has turned away from the Christian faith, we have become steadily less moral and steadily less religious.

      If we continue down this path, many believe that the future of our nation is going to be quite bleak indeed.

    • The Most & Least 'Stressed-Out' States

      Across the US, suicide rates, drug overdoses and other “deaths of despair” are soaring – and recently contributed to the third-straight year of life-expectancy decline. Meanwhile, millennials, saddled with debt and suffering with a paucity of marketable skills, are putting off parenthood and homeownership as they toil away in expensive urban centers, surrendering more than half of their monthly income to rent and debt service.

      With the outlook on the future of American society as grim as it has ever been (thanks to widening economic inequality, the dire warnings of climate alarmists, and the erosion of confidence in American institutions, among other reasons), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Americans – particularly young Americans – are extremely stressed out.

      Though stress can be an amorphous concept, researchers at WalletHub have tried to quantify stress-level trends across the US, incorporating data from average hours worked per week to personal bankruptcy rate to share of adults getting adequate sleep and using these data to assign a score to individual states.

      Their study turned up an interesting result: It showed that states in the Deep South tended to be the most stressed, followed by expensive coastal states like New York and California, with the sleepy Midwest and plain states bringing up the rear.

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      Here’s a breakdown of the highest and lowest scoring states in each category analyzed:

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      Read more about how more Americans are dying young here…

    • A New Call For Expanding "Racist" Labelling By Reporters

      Authored by Mark Glennon via Wirepoints.com,

      If everything is racist, nothing is racist.

      You’d think that principle might be now be obvious, given how the terms racist and racism are used as often as they are. Maybe you’ve been hoping that racism’s most genuine enemies are concerned that overusing the term is causing real examples to be overlooked.

      Forget it.

      Instead, reporters now have the green light to use those labels far more often, as many of them will see things. In fact, some will feel obligated to do so, as they are interpreting new guidelines  from the Associated Press. Those new guidelines are in the A.P.’s revised Stylebook, which is about more than style. It’s about politically correct language, and it’s the definitive source. We know it’s the definitive source not just because many reporters obey it but because, well, the A.P. says so.

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      It’s is a particularly bad development for places like Chicago that sit on perpetual racial powder kegs.

      This is about separating factual reporting from opinion. Separately labeling commentary and opinion supposedly is a core ethical obligation in journalism, but the A.P.’s new guidelines undoubtedly will be accepted by many as permission to throw away any pretense about that.

      Under the new guidelines, reporters should forget what it calls euphemisms like racially charged, racially divisive and racially tinged.

      Instead, just call those things racist or racism, say the guidelines. At least that’s how many reporters will interpret them.

      Some news sources already seem elated, welcoming the guidelines as authorization to report racism as fact in news stories:

      • Previous years of soft-pedaling around the word ‘racist’ in news reporting are reflective of how we as a country have soft-pedaled around having an honest dialogue about the impact of racism not only in America but in American newsrooms,” said Sarah Glover, an editor at NBC-owned television stations.

      • Minnesota Pubic Radio referred to racially-charged as “a weak-kneed euphemism used by news organizations who know what racism and racists look like, but don’t want to be pinned down on it.”

      • “People have criticized news outlets,” as the Huffington Post sees things in its world, for using those sugarcoated words “particularly in reporting on President Donald Trump.”

      Trump is undoubtedly who they’re most giddy about since they can now just report he’s a racist whenever he trolls on racial topics or goes over the top, as he often does

      But this will go far beyond Trump. Think about the countless stories where those so-called euphemisms – or something still weaker — were appropriate but should have been replaced, according to the A.P., by racism reported as fact.

      Some examples:

      Hillary Clinton made what Fox News called a racially tinged joke. Fox should have called it racist?

      John McCain’s comparison of Barack Obama to young, white celebrities was racially tinged, according to the New York Times. No, that was racism, they apparently should have written.

      The list goes on endlessly.

      Calling rioters thugs is racially charged, according to an NPR story. Burly has a racially charged history, according to the New York Times.

      Leslie Jones of Saturday Night Live made racially charged jokes, as news reports had it. (Jones is black.) Should it all have been called racism in news stories?

      Illinois offers a good example of the inflammatory impact the new A.P. standards could have.

      A black legislator has a bill pending to mandate minority representation on boards of directors of public companies in Illinois. Last week, an opponent in the legislature criticized the bill with language that undoubtedly could be described by those euphemisms the A.P. now dislikes. The black sponsor said he was offended and the critic has now apologized.

      Should the criticisms of the bill have been labeled racist in the news stories about it? Opinions may vary, but the A.P.’s guidelines clearly would encourage a news source to report the opposition as racist.

      A hotter example of how the guidelines may be abused came up in a Twitter skirmish I had recently with Dan Mihalopoulos, a reporter at Chicago’s NPR station.

      He wrote it’s “Already time to implement the new AP policy on calling a racist a racist,” referring to a news story about Pat Buchanan saying “we haven’t fully assimilated African-American citizens.”

      The underlying story did it right, as I see things. it simply reported what Buchanan said. The story was by a source that’s left-leaning – Mediaite.

      Instead of just reporting what Buchanan said, Mihalopoulos apparently thinks the story should have said racist or racism, per the A.P. policy.

      I tweeted back: “Ridiculous. Instead of reporting what somebody said, you’re saying to report a subjective, highly charged characterization of what they said using a term defined very differently by different people.”

      Mihalopoulos entirely missed that point, resorting instead to trying to link Buchanan’s views to mine. That’s hardly relevant, nor accurate, since I don’t share Buchanan’s views. He answered, “You think anybody needs you or Pat Buchanan to tell them how to assimilate? Including those whose ancestors were brought here forcibly as slaves? Assimilate to what? And you will reform media with such bias!” He proceeded to block me.

      If Mihalopoulos wants to write an opinion piece saying Buchanan or his words were racist, great. But labeling things that way in a news story about what was said would violate the basic, ethical duty to separate reporting from opinion.

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      What’s fact is that racism now has vastly different meanings to different people. The new left’s version is about systemic, ubiquitous, implicit bias, and conformity to what many of us see as politically correct rules of language police like the A.P. To me and many others, it’s about judging on color instead of character and violating what Chief Justice Roberts wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

      Other people — good, reasonable people — may have other definitions, so it would be fine to see opinion columns branding Buchanan or his comments as racist or not racist.

      But this is about reporting news.

      That’s one obvious problem with the A.P.’s new guideline. Despite being fighting words to many, racist and racism are exceptionally controversial in meaning. The country is already torn apart over this. Why use those terms except where there’s some consensus on what they mean?

      There’s certainly no shortage of examples where there should be consensus. To take just one, consider the conduct reported at Chicago’s Water Management Department. A white worker urinating in the cup of a black co-worker, crosses in front of the lockers of complaining African American employees, copies of Mein Compf placed on the desks of black co-workers and more.

      I doubt many Chicagoans know that story, except black Chicagoans who are probably all too familiar with it. Why? Isn’t it partly because stories like that are lost in the fog? That’s the biggest problem with the A.P.’s new guidelines. The fog of stories about racism will thicken as reporters report it as fact where they, subjectively, see it. The public will become further desensitized.

      If you carefully parse through the A.P.’s new guidelines, you can make a case that it actually calls for use of racism and racist only in limited circumstances. Racism, it says, “is a doctrine asserting racial differences in character, intelligence, etc., and the superiority of one race over another, or racial discrimination or feelings of hatred or bigotry toward people of another race.”  [Emphasis added.] And the guidelines say not to use the word unless it really fits. That would be a fine interpretation.

      But look through the whole thing and you’ll see it’s filled with weaselly contradictions that reporters so inclined will cite as their go-ahead for labeling more conduct as racist. Euphemism has insulting connotations. Users of the terms the A.P. calls euphemisms are cowards, the standards imply. And there’s this silliness, which is impractical for reporters with deadlines: “[D]ecisions should include discussion with colleagues and/or others from diverse backgrounds and perspectives.”

      In short, many reporters will interpret the guidelines as this simple headline put it: “Reporters Urged to Use 2 Words They Often Avoid.”

      Count on seeing racism reported as fact more often. It certainly will include the A.P. itself, which already is no exemplar of objective reporting. It will include other reporters who obey its rules, which apparently will include Mihalopoulos, whose NPR station is already among the most biased news sources in Illinois.

      Their stories probably will be infused with the usual pretense of racial togetherness and understanding.

      The opposite will result.

    • Amazon Is Challenging Google And Facebook For Dominance In Digital Advertising

      If Jeff Bezos has proven anything during the quarter century since he founded Amazon as a humble online bookseller, it’s that no industry is immune to his company’s expansionary blood lust. Not even its fellow tech behemoths.

      While the public’s focus over the past year has been on Amazon’s expansion into industries as diverse as groceries, pharmacies and delivery and logistics, one of the company’s biggest success stories has largely flown under the media radar – until yesterday, that is, when the Wall Street Journal published a deeply reported story about the e-commerce behemoth’s hostile conquest of the digital advertising business. According to WSJ, Amazon is the first firm to seriously challenge the Facebook-Google digital advertising duopoly that has for years controlled more than 60% of the market, largely thanks to the growth of Amazon’s search-ad business.

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      To be sure, Amazon has a long way to go to catch up with Google: It still controls 78% of the $44.2 billion US market for search ads. But market-research firm eMarketer is projecting that Amazon will generate more than $5 billion in search-ad revenue by the end of 2020, which would put it in the No. 2 spot ahead of Microsoft. This would cause Google’s market share to slip to just 71% by then, even as

      And thanks to its giant online marketplace, Amazon is benefiting from synergies that simply don’t exist for Google.

      But the shift in spending follows a major change in shopper behavior: While Google has long been the dominant player in online searches of all sorts, some 54% of people looking for a product now begin their search directly on Amazon, a jump from 46% in 2015, according to Jumpshot, a research firm that collects data from 100 million devices.

      “Consumers are no longer double hopping between Google and Amazon, they just go straight to Amazon,” said Scott Hagedorn, chief executive officer of Omnicom Media Group North America, the ad-buying division of Omnicom.

      The search-ad dollars shifting to Amazon are from companies that sell products on its platform, such as consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers, Mr. Hagedorn said.

      Though eMarketer doesn’t have an estimate for Amazon’s search-ad revenues from 2018, it expects it will account for at least half of Amazon’s $11.3 billion in overall ad revenue this year.

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      Courtesy of WSJ

      The way Amazon’s search-ad business is structured makes it particularly lucrative: companies bid in an auction-based system to have their product ads show up when a user searches for a term like “shampoo.” Of course, Amazon only sells ads to companies that sell on its platform. But companies that use the service report a remarkable ROI on dwarfs Google’s. Because of this, many have shifted more of their ad spend to Amazon.

      Men’s grooming product maker Oars + Alps LLC was using Google search ads last year but has shifted most of its search-ad spending to Amazon. Its monthly ad outlays with Amazon now top $20,000.

      “I was amazed at the return on ad spending on Amazon, so I lowered our spending in Google search,” said Laura Cox, co-founder of Oars + Alps, which sells its products at Target, Amazon.com and on its own website.

      Ad executives said money for increased spending on Amazon search ads is also coming from other ad and marketing budgets, including in-store promotions and ads, and display ads.

      Dentsu Aegis Network, another major ad buyer, said its Amazon search-ad spending in the U.S. increased upward of 60% last year but only a small portion of the money likely came from budgets previously earmarked for Google.

      Moving beyond search ads, Amazon has build a brisk ad business that has moved the company into third place behind Google and Facebook.

      Amazon’s advertising ambitions have steadily grown. Beyond search, it offers other opportunities for marketers including display ads, TV-like ads in live sports telecasts and targeted ads it serves to people as they travel around the web. Overall, it is now the third-largest digital ad player behind Google and Facebook Inc.—the “duopoly” that combined controls about 60% of U.S. online spending.

      And Amazon is rapidly developing new advertising options, including video ads.

      If there’s one risk to Amazon’s aggressive expansion into the search ad market, it might be the company’s own success. Because of its bidding system for placing search ads, brands’ rush to buy with Amazon has sparked a bout of dramatic price inflation, that is swiftly forcing brands to reevaluate whether the ROI is still worth the price. Some brands are also wary of Amazon’s ad business because they view the company as a competitor.

      The rush of ad dollars to Amazon does have a downside: a big jump in ad prices in competitive categories such as consumer products, ad buyers said. The cost per click on the search term “laundry detergent liquid,” for example, was $17.51 last month, a 127% increase from September, according to Pacvue, which provides tools for brands to optimize Amazon ads.

      “Amazon was extremely inexpensive” a few years ago but the influx of brands has caused a “significant increase in pricing,” said Melissa Burdick, co-founder of Pacvue.

      Some brands remain leery of the company, viewing it as a competitor. Even as it helps other brands market their own products, Amazon is increasingly hawking its own private labels as well.

      But in the not-too-distant future, the expansion of Amazon’s advertising business could transform the digital advertising duopoly into a triumvirate.

      Though that’s probably the last thing digital media organizations and newspapers wanted to hear. But as the Trump administration ramps up its anti-trust scrutiny of big tech, this could be the rare issue where the Silicon Valley giants join forces with the Trump Administration against one of their own.

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