- How A Renewed Korean Conflict Is Going To Be Felt Around The Globe
Authored by James Durso via TheHill.com,
The United States and the Republic of South Korea have, until now, had identical interests in the Korean peninsula: defending against a North Korean attack on the South, and keeping the North’s regime at bay until it collapsed from internal contradictions.
The inevitable ability of North Korea to hit North America with a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) means the U.S. has to consider striking North Korea preventively, regardless of the casualties in South Korea because no U.S. President will trade San Francisco for Seoul.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) recently said President Trump told him,
"If there’s going to be a war to stop [Kim Jong Un], it will be over there. If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here.”
And National security adviser H.R. McMaster has stated the U.S. is planning a “preventive war” against North Korea.
What will the president have to consider before he launches a preventative attack on North Korea?
Casualties in an attack of the North on the South are estimated at 100,000 in Seoul in the first 24 hours. The U.S. military estimates 200,000-300,000 South Korean and U.S. military casualties within 90 days, and even more civilian deaths, many of which may be caused not by North Korean weapons but the collapse of the electric power grid, and the water, transport and sewer systems in a city with one of the highest population densities in the world. Half of the South’s population of over 50 million lives in the Seoul Capital Area, which produces almost half of the country’s gross domestic product.
The effects would be felt worldwide and immediately as South Korea is a vital part of the global supply chain for high technology equipment, both as end products and parts used by other manufactures. Nor is it likely companies in other countries can quickly pick up the slack: it is estimated that the replacement cost of the display manufacturing capability of Samsung and rival LG will top $50 billion. In the words of one analyst, “If Korea is hit by a missile, all electronics production will stop.”
Shipping in the nearby Sea of Japan, East China Sea, and Yellow Sea will halt as there may no longer be a destination for the cargo, and spiking maritime insurance rates, if insurance can be had, will make most voyages unprofitable. Shipping to and from major Chinese ports such as Dalian, Qingdao, Shanghai, and Tianjin will halt and disrupt worldwide supply chains. Ships returning to China will have to anchor until the crisis abates, at a cost to the shipping lines (and customers). Most of Japan’s major ports are on the east coast of the main island, Honshu, and will be open for business, though with the threat of North Korean missiles early in the conflict.
South Korea imports 98 percent of its fossil fuels and relies exclusively on tankers for liquefied natural gas (LNG) and crude oil. China will also be affected as it is the world’s largest net importer of crude oil and has LNG regasification terminals at Dalian, Qingdao, Shanghai, and Tianjin. Crude and LNG tankers enroute will have to be rerouted, but the product can probably be sold on the spot market.
The airspace surrounding the Korea Peninsula and northeast China will be closed and will affect passenger and cargo traffic, including at Beijing, the world’s second busiest airport, and Shanghai, the ninth busiest. Eastward traffic to the region will slow and will hit the hub airport, Dubai, which is also a major tourist destination for Asia. Japan will lose eastbound air traffic, but westward traffic from the U.S. less so.
South Korea imports most of its food as it has little arable land. The U.S. is its largest supplier, providing mostly corn, meat, hides, soybeans, milling wheat, and cotton, so the U.S. farm sector will sag if the crisis happens when produce is on the way to market.
Of the local allies, Japan may be more disposed to action as it isn’t – literally – on the front line and it has already deployed the PATRIOT surface-to-air interceptor and the AEGIS ship-based anti-ballistic missile system, and it may install the AEGIS Ashore system or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. South Korea will be more reticent as it will absorb the initial blows and the only air defense missiles on its territory, the THAAD system, were deployed by the U.S. in the spring of 2017.
President Trump will have to weigh Asia’s regional stability and homeland security when making the toughest call since President Truman OK’d the use of nuclear weapons in Japan in 1945.
- Police Seize Enough Fentanyl "To Kill Half Of NYC" In Recent Bust
The opioid crisis is killing tens of thousands of Americans a year as powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl are increasingly mixed in with the heroin supply, killing unsuspecting addicts in greater numbers. These lab-manufactured opioids and their pharmacological cousins are so powerful, a 20-pound mixture of fentanyl and heroin that was recently seized by law enforcement was said to contain enough of the narcotic to kill half of New York City’s 9 million residents, according to one Drug Enforcement Administration agent who spoke with Consumerist.
The drugs were taken when DEA agents busted a heroin mill operating out of an apartment across the street from Central Park. Police arrested four men, including one who was posing as an Uber driver, for their alleged involvement in the drug-distributing ring.
According to NYC’s department of Health and Mental Hygiene, fentanyl – which is 50 times more potent than heroin – is driving a spike in fatal overdoses, which reached an all-time high of 1,374 deaths in 2016, a 46% increase over 2015. Nationwide, the rate of drug-related deaths per 100,000 people peaked at 19.7 during the third quarter, up from 16.7 during the same period a year earlier, according to government data released Tuesday. The increase was driven largely by opioids, specifically fentanyl, carfentanil and other synthetics. Deaths from drug overdoses in the US are believed to have surpassed the 60,000 mark last year.
“Fentanyl is the deadliest street drug to ever hit this country,” said DEA Special Agent-in-Charge James J. Hunt. “This seizure alone contains enough potency to kill half of the population of New York City, if laboratory analysis proves it is all fentanyl. Fentanyl is manufactured death that drug dealers are mixing with heroin.”
Here’s an account of the bust, courtesy of Consumerist:
“DEA agents were conducting surveillance near the building on Central Park West on Aug. 4 when they saw one defendant leaving with two boxes inside a large shopping bag. He got into a vehicle driven by another defendant, an Uber driver, with agents following behind.
Investigators stopped the vehicle, and observed the suspect sitting in the backseat with two boxes: One box was open and they could see a clear plastic bag containing a tan powdery substance inside.
After looking more closely at that box — the larger of the two — investigators say they also saw six large cylindrical packages wrapped in tape and plastic wrap.
And in the smaller box, officials spotted a large cylindrical package wrapped in tape and plastic wrap, and a clear plastic bag containing a tan powdery substance.
Agents seized the packages, and arrested both the Uber driver and the passenger. Meanwhile, investigators kept watching the building, and eventually observed a man previously identified as a member of a drug trafficking organization exiting with another man. When questioned by agents, he said he lived in the building, and admitted to having a gun and drugs in the apartment."
The bust also generated some laughable headlines. According to the Verge, the dealers had branded the some of the packaged heroin with the Uber logo. The drug crew used other corporate logos, like McDonald’s, as well as generic names like “Black Friday.”
President Donald Trump’s Commission on Drug Addiction and Combating the Opioid Crisis urged the president to declare a state of emergency to help combat the crisis. On Tuesday, Trump said the US has “no alternative” but to triumph over the crisis.
The US already has the highest rate of drug-related deaths in the world.
- Krieger Asks: Is Google A Search Engine Or 'Deep State' Organ?
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Today’s post should be read as Part 3 of my ongoing series about the now infamous Google memo, and what it tells us about where our society is headed if a minority of extremely wealthy and powerful technocratic billionaires are permitted to fully socially engineer our culture to fit their ideological vision using coercion, force and manipulation. For some context, read Part 1 and Part 2.
I struggled with the title of this piece, because ever since the 2016 election, usage of the term “deep state” has become overly associated with Trump cheerleaders. I’m not referring to people who voted for Trump, whom I can both understand and respect, I’m talking about the Trump cultists. Like most people who mindlessly and enthusiastically attach themselves to political figures, they tend to be either morons or opportunists.
Nevertheless, just because the term has been somewhat tainted doesn’t mean I deny the existence of a “deep state” or “shadow government.” The existence of networks of unelected powerful people who formulate and push policy behind the scenes and then get captured members of Congress to vote on it is pretty much undeniable. I don’t believe that the “deep state” is a monolithic entity by any means, but what seems to unite these various people and institutions is an almost religious belief in U.S. imperial dominance, as well as the idea that this empire should be largely governed by an unaccountable oligarchy of billionaires and assorted technocrats. We see the results of this worldview all around us with endless wars, an unconstitutional domestic surveillance state and the destruction of the middle class. These are the fruits of deep state ideology, and a clear reason why it should be dismantled and replaced by genuine governance by the people before they lead the U.S. to total disaster.
From my own personal research and observations, Google has become very much a willing part of this deep state, with Eric Schmidt being the primary driving force that has propelled the company into its contemporary role not just as a search engine monopoly, but also as a powerful and undemocratic tech arm of the shadow government.
One of the best things about all the recent attention on the Google memo, is that it has placed this corporate behemoth and its very clear ideological leanings squarely in the public eye. This gives us the space to shine light on some other aspects of Google, which I believe most people would find quite concerning if made aware of.
To that end, in 2014, Wikileaks published an extremely powerful excerpt from Julian Assange’s book, When Google Met Wikileaks. The post was titled, Google Is Not What It Seems, and it is an incredible repository of information and insight. If you never read it, I suggest you take the time. Below I share some choice excerpts to get you up to speed with what Google is really up to.
Let’s start with the intro to the piece, which sets the stage…
Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, about three hours’ drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention. But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.
In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior US officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth. Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an empire.
I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.
The stated reason for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as Google’s in-house “think/do tank.” I knew little else about Cohen at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the US State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking “Generation Y” ideas man at State under two US administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties. He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened “Condi’s party-starter,” channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into US policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as “Public Diplomacy 2.0.”2 On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as “terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran.”3.
Now I’m going to skip ahead in the piece to the moment where Assange describes his attempt to make contact with the U.S. State Department in 2011 regarding cables Wikileaks was releasing.
It was at this point that I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, DC, including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton’s people known that Eric Schmidt’s partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel. While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the US State Department, the US State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch. Two years later, in the wake of his early 2013 visits to China, North Korea, and Burma, it would come to be appreciated that the chairman of Google might be conducting, in one way or another, “back-channel diplomacy” for Washington. But at the time it was a novel thought.
I put it aside until February 2012, when WikiLeaks—along with over thirty of our international media partners—began publishing the Global Intelligence Files: the internal email spool from the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor. One of our stronger investigative partners—the Beirut-based newspaper Al Akhbar—scoured the emails for intelligence on Jared Cohen.The people at Stratfor, who liked to think of themselves as a sort of corporate CIA, were acutely conscious of other ventures that they perceived as making inroads into their sector. Google had turned up on their radar. In a series of colorful emails they discussed a pattern of activity conducted by Cohen under the Google Ideas aegis, suggesting what the “do” in “think/do tank” actually means.
Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and “corporate responsibility” work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s “director of regime change.” According to the emails, he was trying to plant his fingerprints on some of the major historical events in the contemporary Middle East. He could be placed in Egypt during the revolution, meeting with Wael Ghonim, the Google employee whose arrest and imprisonment hours later would make him a PR-friendly symbol of the uprising in the Western press. Meetings had been planned in Palestine and Turkey, both of which—claimed Stratfor emails—were killed by the senior Google leadership as too risky. Only a few months before he met with me, Cohen was planning a trip to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan to “engage the Iranian communities closer to the border,” as part of Google Ideas’ project on “repressive societies.” In internal emails Stratfor’s vice president for intelligence, Fred Burton (himself a former State Department security official), wrote:
Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do . . . [Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag.
In further internal communication, Burton said his sources on Cohen’s activities were Marty Lev—Google’s director of security and safety—and Eric Schmidt himself. Looking for something more concrete, I began to search in WikiLeaks’ archive for information on Cohen. State Department cables released as part of Cablegate reveal that Cohen had been in Afghanistan in 2009, trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto US military bases. In Lebanon he quietly worked to establish an intellectual and clerical rival to Hezbollah, the “Higher Shia League.” And in London he offered Bollywood movie executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into their films, and promised to connect them to related networks in Hollywood.
Three days after he visited me at Ellingham Hall, Jared Cohen flew to Ireland to direct the “Save Summit,” an event cosponsored by Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations. Gathering former inner-city gang members, right-wing militants, violent nationalists, and “religious extremists” from all over the world together in one place, the event aimed to workshop technological solutions to the problem of “violent extremism.” What could go wrong?
Cohen’s world seems to be one event like this after another: endless soirees for the cross-fertilization of influence between elites and their vassals, under the pious rubric of “civil society.” The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government.
This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years has seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.
It is not just obvious neocon front groups like Foreign Policy Initiative. It also includes fatuous Western NGOs like Freedom House, where naïve but well-meaning career nonprofit workers are twisted in knots by political funding streams, denouncing non-Western human rights violations while keeping local abuses firmly in their blind spots. The civil society conference circuit—which flies developing-world activists across the globe hundreds of times a year to bless the unholy union between “government and private stakeholders” at geopoliticized events like the “Stockholm Internet Forum”—simply could not exist if it were not blasted with millions of dollars in political funding annually.
In 2011, the Alliance of Youth Movements rebranded as “Movements.org.” In 2012 Movements.org became a division of “Advancing Human Rights,” a new NGO set up by Robert L. Bernstein after he resigned from Human Rights Watch (which he had originally founded) because he felt it should not cover Israeli and US human rights abuses. Advancing Human Rights aims to right Human Rights Watch’s wrong by focusing exclusively on “dictatorships.” Cohen stated that the merger of his Movements.org outfit with Advancing Human Rights was “irresistible,” pointing to the latter’s “phenomenal network of cyberactivists in the Middle East and North Africa.” He then joined the Advancing Human Rights board, which also includes Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in occupied Afghanistan. In its present guise, Movements.org continues to receive funding from Gen Next, as well as from Google, MSNBC, and PR giant Edelman, which represents General Electric, Boeing, and Shell, among others.
Google Ideas is bigger, but it follows the same game plan. Glance down the speaker lists of its annual invite-only get-togethers, such as “Crisis in a Connected World” in October 2013. Social network theorists and activists give the event a veneer of authenticity, but in truth it boasts a toxic piñata of attendees: US officials, telecom magnates, security consultants, finance capitalists, and foreign-policy tech vultures like Alec Ross (Cohen’s twin at the State Department). At the hard core are the arms contractors and career military: active US Cyber Command chieftains, and even the admiral responsible for all US military operations in Latin America from 2006 to 2009. Tying up the package are Jared Cohen and the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt.
Now here’s a little background on Schmidt.
Eric Schmidt was born in Washington, DC, where his father had worked as a professor and economist for the Nixon Treasury. He attended high school in Arlington, Virginia, before graduating with a degree in engineering from Princeton. In 1979 Schmidt headed out West to Berkeley, where he received his PhD before joining Stanford/Berkley spin-off Sun Microsystems in 1983. By the time he left Sun, sixteen years later, he had become part of its executive leadership.
Sun had significant contracts with the US government, but it was not until he was in Utah as CEO of Novell that records show Schmidt strategically engaging Washington’s overt political class. Federal campaign finance records show that on January 6, 1999, Schmidt donated two lots of $1,000 to the Republican senator for Utah, Orrin Hatch. On the same day Schmidt’s wife, Wendy, is also listed giving two lots of $1,000 to Senator Hatch. By the start of 2001 over a dozen other politicians and PACs, including Al Gore, George W. Bush, Dianne Feinstein, and Hillary Clinton, were on the Schmidts’ payroll, in one case for $100,000. By 2013, Eric Schmidt—who had become publicly over-associated with the Obama White House—was more politic. Eight Republicans and eight Democrats were directly funded, as were two PACs. That April, $32,300 went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. A month later the same amount, $32,300, headed off to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Why Schmidt was donating exactly the same amount of money to both parties is a $64,600 question.
It was also in 1999 that Schmidt joined the board of a Washington, DC–based group: the New America Foundation, a merger of well-connected centrist forces (in DC terms). The foundation and its 100 staff serves as an influence mill, using its network of approved national security, foreign policy, and technology pundits to place hundreds of articles and op-eds per year. By 2008 Schmidt had become chairman of its board of directors. As of 2013 the New America Foundation’s principal funders (each contributing over $1 million) are listed as Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the US State Department, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Secondary funders include Google, USAID, and Radio Free Asia.
Schmidt’s involvement in the New America Foundation places him firmly in the Washington establishment nexus. The foundation’s other board members, seven of whom also list themselves as members of the Council on Foreign Relations, include Francis Fukuyama, one of the intellectual fathers of the neoconservative movement; Rita Hauser, who served on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under both Bush and Obama; Jonathan Soros, the son of George Soros; Walter Russell Mead, a US security strategist and editor of the American Interest; Helene Gayle, who sits on the boards of Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, the Rockefeller Foundation, the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Unit, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the White House Fellows program, and Bono’s ONE Campaign; and Daniel Yergin, oil geostrategist, former chair of the US Department of Energy’s Task Force on Strategic Energy Research, and author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power.
The chief executive of the foundation, appointed in 2013, is Jared Cohen’s former boss at the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton law and international relations wonk with an eye for revolving doors. She is everywhere at the time of writing, issuing calls for Obama to respond to the Ukraine crisis not only by deploying covert US forces into the country but also by dropping bombs on Syria—on the basis that this will send a message to Russia and China.41 Along with Schmidt, she is a 2013 attendee of the Bilderberg conference and sits on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
There was nothing politically hapless about Eric Schmidt. I had been too eager to see a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast. But that is not the sort of person who attends the Bilderberg conference four years running, who pays regular visits to the White House, or who delivers “fireside chats” at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister”—making pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines—had not come out of nowhere; it had been presaged by years of assimilation within US establishment networks of reputation and influence.
On a personal level, Schmidt and Cohen are perfectly likable people. But Google’s chairman is a classic “head of industry” player, with all of the ideological baggage that comes with that role. Schmidt fits exactly where he is: the point where the centrist, liberal, and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life. By all appearances, Google’s bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the “benevolent superpower.” They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil.” They believe that they are doing good. And that is a problem.
Even when Google airs its corporate ambivalence publicly, it does little to dislodge these items of faith. The company’s reputation is seemingly unassailable. Google’s colorful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year—an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history. Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the US intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its “don’t be evil” doublespeak. A few symbolic open letters to the White House later and it seems all is forgiven. Even anti-surveillance campaigners cannot help themselves, at once condemning government spying but trying to alter Google’s invasive surveillance practices using appeasement strategies.
Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity. Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community.
In 2003 the US National Security Agency (NSA) had already started systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) under its director General Michael Hayden. These were the days of the “Total Information Awareness” program. Before PRISM was ever dreamed of, under orders from the Bush White House the NSA was already aiming to “collect it all, sniff it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it all.” During the same period, Google—whose publicly declared corporate mission is to collect and “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—was accepting NSA money to the tune of $2 million to provide the agency with search tools for its rapidly accreting hoard of stolen knowledge.
In 2004, after taking over Keyhole, a mapping tech startup cofunded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the CIA, Google developed the technology into Google Maps, an enterprise version of which it has since shopped to the Pentagon and associated federal and state agencies on multimillion-dollar contracts.54 In 2008, Google helped launch an NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into space. Google shares the photographs from the satellite with the US military and intelligence communities. In 2010, NGA awarded Google a $27 million contract for “geospatial visualization services.”
Around the same time, Google was becoming involved in a program known as the “Enduring Security Framework” (ESF), which entailed the sharing of information between Silicon Valley tech companies and Pentagon-affiliated agencies “at network speed.” Emails obtained in 2014 under Freedom of Information requests show Schmidt and his fellow Googler Sergey Brin corresponding on first-name terms with NSA chief General Keith Alexander about ESF. Reportage on the emails focused on the familiarity in the correspondence: “General Keith . . . so great to see you . . . !” Schmidt wrote. But most reports overlooked a crucial detail. “Your insights as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base,” Alexander wrote to Brin, “are valuable to ensure ESF’s efforts have measurable impact.”
In 2012, Google arrived on the list of top-spending Washington, DC, lobbyists—a list typically stalked exclusively by the US Chamber of Commerce, military contractors, and the petrocarbon leviathans. Google entered the rankings above military aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, with a total of $18.2 million spent in 2012 to Lockheed’s $15.3 million. Boeing, the military contractor that absorbed McDonnell Douglas in 1997, also came below Google, at $15.6 million spent, as did Northrop Grumman at $17.5 million.
If anything has changed since those words were written, it is that Silicon Valley has grown restless with that passive role, aspiring instead to adorn the “hidden fist” like a velvet glove. Writing in 2013, Schmidt and Cohen stated,
What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.
This was one of many bold assertions made by Schmidt and Cohen in their book, which was eventually published in April 2013. Gone was the working title, “The Empire of the Mind”, replaced with “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business”. By the time it came out, I had formally sought and received political asylum from the government of Ecuador, and taken refuge in its embassy in London. At that point I had already spent nearly a year in the embassy under police surveillance, blocked from safe passage out of the UK. Online I noticed the press hum excitedly about Schmidt and Cohen’s book, giddily ignoring the explicit digital imperialism of the title and the conspicuous string of pre-publication endorsements from famous warmongers like Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger, Bill Hayden and Madeleine Albright on the back.
Billed as a visionary forecast of global technological change, the book failed to deliver—failed even to imagine a future, good or bad, substantially different to the present. The book was a simplistic fusion of Fukuyama “end of history” ideology—out of vogue since the 1990s—and faster mobile phones. It was padded out with DC shibboleths, State Department orthodoxies, and fawning grabs from Henry Kissinger. The scholarship was poor—even degenerate. It did not seem to fit the profile of Schmidt, that sharp, quiet man in my living room. But reading on I began to see that the book was not a serious attempt at future history. It was a love song from Google to official Washington. Google, a burgeoning digital superstate, was offering to be Washington’s geopolitical visionary.
One way of looking at it is that it’s just business. For an American internet services monopoly to ensure global market dominance it cannot simply keep doing what it is doing, and let politics take care of itself. American strategic and economic hegemony becomes a vital pillar of its market dominance. What’s a megacorp to do? If it wants to straddle the world, it must become part of the original “don’t be evil” empire.
Whether it is being just a company or “more than just a company,” Google’s geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower. As Google’s search and internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world’s population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone market and racing to extend internet access in the global south, Google is steadily becoming the internet for many people. Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history.
If the future of the internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even in Europe—for whom the internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.
I first became really interested in this side of Google back in 2013, when I read the entire transcript of the Schmidt interview of Assange. For more on the topic, see the post I published at the time: Highlights from the Incredible 2011 Interview of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange by Google’s Eric Schmidt.
Finally, I think the perfect way to end this piece is with the following tweet:
Google motto 2004: Don't be evil
Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define
Google motto 2013: We make military robots— Brent Butt (@BrentButt) December 16, 2013
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
- Visualizing Guam's Strategic Importance To The US
In apparent response to Trump's promise of "fire and fury" in the event of any threat to the United States from North Korea, Pyongyang has said it is "carefully examining" a plan to attack the U.S. Territory of Guam, saying they will engulf the island with an "enveloping fire".
As well as being home to over 162 thousand people, Statista's Martin Armstrong notes that Guam is of key strategic importance to the U.S. military.
You will find more statistics at Statista
With a large proportion of the 544km² occupied by the Andersen Air Force Base in the north, home to rotating deployments of B-1, B-2 and B-52 strategic bombers, and a naval base in the west, it is understandable why the island is sometimes referred to as America's 'permanent aircraft carrier'.
In terms of personnel, as of March 31, Guam was home to 4,290 active duty Army, Navy and Air Force personnel, 1,739 National Guard/Reserves, as well as 2,133 APF civilians.
- Whitehead Rages "Anything Goes When You're A Cop In America"
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“There is one criminal justice system for citizens – especially black and brown ones – and another for police in the United States.”
President Trump needs to be reminded that no one is above the law, especially the police.
Unfortunately, Trump and Jeff Sessions, head of the Justice Department (much like their predecessors) appear to have few qualms about giving police the green light to kill, shoot, taser, abuse and steal from American citizens in the so-called name of law and order.
Between Trump’s pandering to the police unions and Sessions’ pandering to Trump, this constitutionally illiterate duo has opened the door to a new era of police abuses.
As senior editor Adam Serwer warns in The Atlantic, “When local governments violate the basic constitutional rights of citizens, Americans are supposed to be able to look to the federal government to protect those rights. Sessions has made clear that when it comes to police abuses, they’re now on their own. This is the principle at the heart of ‘law and order’ rhetoric: The authorities themselves are bound by neither.”
Brace yourselves: things are about to get downright ugly.
By shielding police from charges of grave misconduct while prosecuting otherwise law-abiding Americans for the most trivial “offenses,” the government has created a world in which there are two sets of laws: one set for the government and its gun-toting agents, and another set for you and me.
No matter which way you spin it, “we the people” are always on the losing end of the deal.
If you’re a cop in the American police state, you can now break the law in a myriad of ways without suffering any major, long-term consequences.
Indeed, not only are cops protected from most charges of wrongdoing—whether it’s shooting unarmed citizens (including children and old people), raping and abusing young women, falsifying police reports, trafficking drugs, or soliciting sex with minors—but even on the rare occasions when they are fired for misconduct, it’s only a matter of time before they get re-hired again.
For example, Oregon police officer Sean Sullivan was forced to resign after being accused of “grooming” a 10-year-old girl for a sexual relationship. A year later, Sullivan was hired on as a police chief in Kansas.
St. Louis police officer Eddie Boyd III was forced to resign after a series of incidents in which he “pistol-whipped a 12-year-old girl in the face in 2006, and in 2007 struck a child in the face with his gun or handcuffs before falsifying a police report,” he was quickly re-hired by another Missouri police department.
As The Washington Post reports: “In the District, police were told to rehire an officer who allegedly forged prosecutors’ signatures on court documents. In Texas, police had to reinstate an officer who was investigated for shooting up the truck driven by his ex-girlfriend’s new man. In Philadelphia, police were compelled to reinstate an officer despite viral video of him striking a woman in the face. In Florida, police were ordered to reinstate an officer fired for fatally shooting an unarmed man.”
Much of the “credit” for shielding these rogue cops goes to influential police unions and laws providing for qualified immunity, police contracts that “provide a shield of protection to officers accused of misdeeds and erect barriers to residents complaining of abuse,” state and federal laws that allow police to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing, and rampant cronyism among government bureaucrats.
Whether it’s at the federal level with President Trump, Congress and the Judiciary, or at the state and local level, those deciding whether a police officer should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.
It’s a pretty sweet deal if you can get it, I suppose: protection from the courts, immunity from wrongdoing, paid leave while you’re under investigation, the assurance that you won’t have to spend a dime of your own money in your defense, the removal of disciplinary charges from your work file, and then the high probability that you will be rehired and returned to the streets.
It’s a chilling prospect, isn’t it?
According to the New York Times, “Some experts say thousands of law enforcement officers may have drifted from police department to police department even after having been fired, forced to resign or convicted of a crime.”
It’s happening all across the country.
This is how perverse justice in America has become.
Incredibly, while our own protections against government abuses continue to be dismantled, a growing number of states are adopting Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBoR)—written by police unions—which provides police officers accused of a crime with special due process rights and privileges not afforded to the average citizen.
In other words, the LEOBoR protects police officers from being treated as we are treated during criminal investigations.
Not only are officers given a 10-day “cooling-off period” during which they cannot be forced to make any statements about the incident, but when they are questioned, it must be “for a reasonable length of time, at a reasonable hour, by only one or two investigators (who must be fellow policemen), and with plenty of breaks for food and water.”
These LEOBoRs epitomize everything that is wrong with America today.
Now once in a while, police officers engaged in wrongdoing are actually charged for abusing their authority and using excessive force against American citizens.
Occasionally, those officers are even sentenced for their crimes against the citizenry.
Yet in just about every case, it’s still the American taxpayer who foots the bill.
Human Rights Watch notes that taxpayers actually pay three times for officers who repeatedly commit abuses: “once to cover their salaries while they commit abuses; next to pay settlements or civil jury awards against officers; and a third time through payments into police ‘defense’ funds provided by the cities.”
This is a recipe for disaster.
“In a democratic society,” observed Oakland police chief Sean Whent, “people have a say in how they are policed.”
Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy, which means that “we the people” not only have a say in how we are policed—we are the chiefs of police.
- From Coke To Coors: Philly Soda Tax Leading To Alcoholism As Beer Now Cheaper Than Soda
Perhaps The Burning Platform summarized the idiocy of Philadelphia’s soda tax better than anyone to date:
In a shocking development, the Philadelphia soda tax is a big fucking fail. Who could have predicted that. Democrat government drones and their brain dead minions are so desperate for money to fund their gold plated union pensions and bloated salaries, they lie, cheat and tax the poor into oblivion. Result: lost jobs, further impoverished poor people, no help for children, more closed businesses, and a further hole in the city budget. But at least the city union workers can keep their gold plated pensions – for now. Maff is hard for liberals, but it always wins in the end.
But, as The Washington Free Beacon points out, the unfortunate side effects of Philly’s disastrous soda tax may not be limited just to the economic consequences enumerated above. As a study by the Tax Foundation recently found, there are social consequences as well with people now choosing to substitute beer for soda in light of the fact that, well, beer is just cheaper.
Philadelphia’s tax on sugary drinks has made soda more expensive than beer in the city.
The Tax Foundation released a new study on the excise tax last week, finding that the 1.5-cent per ounce tax has fallen short of revenue projections, cost jobs, and has forced some Philadelphians to drive outside the city to buy groceries.
The study finds that the tax is 24 times higher than the Pennsylvania tax rate on beer.
“Purchases of beer are also now less expensive than nonalcoholic beverages subject to the tax in the city,” according to the study, written by Courtney Shupert and Scott Drenkard. “Empirical evidence from a 2012 journal article suggests that soda taxes can push consumers to alcohol, meaning it is likely the case that consumers are switching to alcoholic beverages as a result of the tax. The paper, aptly titled From Coke to Coors, further shows that switching from soda to beer increases total caloric intake, even as soda taxes are generally aimed at caloric reduction.”
While not terribly surprising, the study found that while Philly’s soda tax was sold to taxpayers as a way to raise money for local schools, less than half of the proceeds are actually being used for that purpose.
The Tax Foundation points out that unlike most cities, Philadelphia passed the tax specifically to raise revenue, not to fight obesity. The city even includes diet sodas in its tax, as a way to raise money for pre-kindergarten programs.
However, less than half of the $39.4 million collected since the tax went into effect on Jan. 1 has gone to education funding.
“[T]he tax was originally promoted as a vehicle to raise funds for prekindergarten education, but in practice it awards just 49 percent of the soda tax revenues to local pre-K programs,” Shupert and Drenkard write. “Another 20 percent of the soda tax revenues fund government employee benefits or city programs, while the rest of the money will go towards parks, libraries, and community schools.”
Meanwhile, lower soda sales have already started to claim the jobs of grocery and soda distribution workers.
Collections from the soda tax are also well below original projections of $92 million per year, due to tax avoidance.
“Soda sales in Philadelphia have also declined since the tax went into effect at the beginning of 2017, threatening the long-run sustainability of the tax,” Shupert and Drenkard write. “According to some local distributors and retailers, sales have declined by nearly 50 percent. This is likely primarily due to higher prices, which discourage purchasing beverages in the city.”
Earlier this year PepsiCo announced it was laying off up to 100 workers because of the tax, which the company blames for costing a 43 percent drop in business.
Philadelphians are also no longer able to buy 12-packs or 2-liters of Pepsi products in grocery stores due to the tax, the Tax Foundation said.
Way to think it through…
- This Is The Closest That The U.S. Has Been To Nuclear War Since The Cuban Missile Crisis
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Are we on the verge of a nuclear war with North Korea? It has now been confirmed that North Korea has successfully created a miniaturized nuclear warhead, and last month they tested a missile that can reach at least half of the continental United States. Since 1994 the U.S. has been trying to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, and every effort to do so has completely failed. Last September, the North Koreans detonated a nuclear device that was estimated to be in the 20 to 30 kiloton range, and back in January President Trump pledged to stop the North Koreans before they would ever have the capability to deliver such a weapon to U.S. cities. But now the North Koreans have already achieved that goal, and they plan to ultimately create an entire fleet of ICBMs capable of hitting every city in America.
Right now, North Korea and the Trump administration are locked in a game of nuclear chicken. Kim Jong Un’s regime is never, ever, ever going to give up their nuclear weapons program, and so that means that either Donald Trump is going to have to back down, find another way to deal with North Korea, or use military force to eliminate their nuclear threat.
And time is quickly running out for Trump to make a decision, because now that North Korea has the ability to produce miniaturized nuclear warheads, the game has completely changed. The following comes from the Washington Post…
North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.
The new analysis completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The U.S. calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts believe the number of bombs is much smaller.
The truth is that nobody actually knows how many nukes North Korea has at this point, and they are pumping out more all the time.
Yes, the Trump administration could order an absolutely devastating military strike on North Korea. But if the North Koreans even get off one nuke in response, it will be the greatest disaster for humanity since at least World War II.
But at this point Trump doesn’t sound like someone that intends to back down. In fact, on Tuesday he threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” if they keep threatening us…
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Trump said from the clubhouse at his golf course in Bedminster, N.J.
“He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said they will be met with the fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
In response to Trump’s comments, the North Koreans threatened to hit Guam with a pre-emptive strike…
If Trump thought that his bluff would be sufficient to finally shut up North Korea, and put an end to Kim’s provocative behavior, well… bluff called because North Korea’s state-run KCNA news agency reported moments ago that not only did N.Korea escalate the tensions up another notch, but explicitly warned that it could carry out a “pre-emptive operation once the US shows signs of provocation”, and that it is “seriously considering a strategy to strike Guam with mid-to-long range missiles.”
Most Americans appear to be completely oblivious to the seriousness of this crisis. Once we hit North Korea, they will respond. A single nuke could potentially kill millions in Tokyo, Japan or Seoul, South Korea. And the North Koreans also have some of the largest chemical and biological weapons stockpiles on the entire planet. If things take a bad turn, we could see death and destruction on a scale that is absolutely unprecedented.
And if the North Koreans launch an invasion of South Korea, we will instantly be committed to a new Korean War and thousands upon thousands of our young men and women will be sent over there to fight and die.
There is no possible way that a military conflict with North Korea is going to end well. If things go badly, millions could die, and if things go really badly tens of millions of people could end up dead.
But members of the Trump administration continue to insist that “a military option” is on the table…
In an interview broadcast Saturday on MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt Show, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said the prospect of a North Korea armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be “intolerable, from the president’s perspective.”
“We have to provide all options . . . and that includes a military option,” he said.
Of course letting North Korea construct an entire fleet of ICBMs that could endanger the entire planet is not exactly a palatable option either. The Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all kicked the can down the road year after year, and now we facing a nightmare problem that does not appear to have a good solution.
Unfortunately for Trump, time has now run out and a decision has to be made…
“Today is the day that we can definitely say North Korea is a nuclear power,” Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, told USA TODAY.
“There is no more time to stick our heads in the sand and think we have months or years to confront this challenge.”
And then there is today's statement from The Pentagon:
"The United States and our allies have the demonstrated capabilities and unquestionable commitment to defend ourselves from an attack.
Kim Jong Un should take heed of the United Nations Security Council's unified voice, and statements from governments the world over, who agree the DPRK poses a threat to global security and stability.
The DPRK must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.
President Trump was informed of the growing threat last December and on taking office his first orders to me emphasized the readiness of our ballistic missile defense and nuclear deterrent forces.
While our State Department is making every effort to resolve this global threat through diplomatic means, it must be noted that the combined allied militaries now possess the most precise, rehearsed and robust defensive and offensive capabilities on Earth.
The DPRK regime's actions will continue to be grossly overmatched by ours and would lose any arms race or conflict it initiates."
Roughly translated – stop… or you'll lose (bigly).
Let us pray that a way can be found to derail North Korea’s nuclear program that does not involve us going to war.
Because the moment that U.S. forces start striking North Korea, the North Koreans could literally unleash hell if they are inclined to do so.
It appears that we are now closer to nuclear war than we have been at any point since the Cuban missile crisis.
A nuclear holocaust was avoided back then, and hopefully a way will be found to avoid one now.
- Syrian Army Poised To Retake Last Al-Qaeda Held District In Damascus
This week the Syrian Army has been pounding the last al-Qaeda held district of Damascus, and as Alarabiya TV reports, an all out ground assault by the army is looking "imminent". Jobar lies within the Syrian capital's eastern side and extends close to the center of the city. The district has been held by armed opposition groups since 2013, and quickly became ground zero for al-Qaeda presence in Damascus over the past years. While the neighboring Old City and downtown districts have largely returned to normalcy after years of nation wide fighting – even including a thriving nightlife of bars, nightclubs, and restaurants – mortar shells have routinely been lobbed from Jobar. Christian and Shia neighborhoods of the Old City near "Straight Street" have been especially impacted.
But now as external supply lines to various armed opposition pockets throughout Syria have been more or less reduced and restricted, especially with Trump's recent closure of the CIA's Syrian arms program and with Saudi-Qatari GCC infighting, and as the Syrian Army has mostly confined al-Qaeda fighters operating in the country's North to Iblib, the army is promising a full and final liberation of Jobar.
Explosions light up the Damascus sky with Mt. Qasioun in the background.
Photo provided by a local Damascus photographer, via Leith Fadel.Middle East based Al-Masdar News spoke to a military officer of Syria's elite 42nd Brigade of the 4th Mechanized Division, now advancing in Jobar, and summarized the situation as follows:
His unit captured more than ten building blocks around the Al-Manasher Roundabout, killing and wounding several militants from Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham and Faylaq Al-Rahman.
The officer added that the Syrian Army will continue to advance on the ground during the day and pound the Islamist rebels with surface-to-surface missiles at night; they will stop their assault once Jobar is cleared or the militants surrender.
The specific groups operating in Jobar primarily include the Islamist group Faylaq Al-Rahman and al-Qaeda linked Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS/al-Nusra). HTS also recently made headlines after emerging victorious against other Islamist factions in consolidating control over Idlib Province, where it currently seeks to establish a caliphate. It forced out main rival, Ahrar al-Sham, which was favored by Turkey and other external powers seeking to topple the Syrian government. Western media outlets and prominent think tank 'experts' had long defended al-Qaeda linked Ahrar al-Sham as 'moderate' – yet in reality HTS dominance over Idlib was strengthened only after, according to multiple reports, "thousands of hardline Ahrar al Sham fighters, who are sympathetic to al-Qaida, defected from the movement to join JFS in forming the HTS alliance." Currently, Russia in conjunction with other international powers are weighing military operations to dislodge the northwestern province from HTS control.Residents throughout Damascus are currently experiencing frequent rattling and shaking of buildings as fighting is now at the most intense it's been in months or perhaps years – mortars, rockets, and tank fire is lighting up the night sky. This week dozens of Syrian soldiers have been reported killed during fighting in and near the capital.
A number of areas in Damascus that once had heavy barricades and frequent checkpoints are reducing the restricted movement zones as life begins to return to normal. The impending liberation of Jobar district from al-Qaeda would take the pressure off of the millions of Syrians living in urban Damascus who have long been under constant threat of mortar fire and terror attack. But liberation of all of East Ghouta, which stretches far outside the city environs, is likely going to be a long extended campaign against what is already morphing into an endless 'underground' insurgency which will keep the fires burning in Syria.
- Fired Coder Speaks Out On Google's "Potentially Illegal Practices", "Recorded Meetings" And "Science Denial"
For those who have managed to avoid this storyline, James Damore, now a former Google employee, caused outrage when he circulated a manifesto on Friday, complaining about Google’s “ideological echo chamber,” alleging women have lower tolerance for stress and that conservatives are more conscientious. By Monday, the chess master, who studied at Harvard, Princeton and MIT and worked at Google’s Mountain View HQ, was fired after the search giant’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said portions of Damore’s 10-page memo “violate our code of conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes” despite saying in the same memo that Google employees shouldn’t be afraid of speaking their minds.
Now, for the first time, the former Googler sat down for a YouTube interview with University of Toronto professor of psychology, Jordan Peterson, to discuss the circumstances leading up to the release of his controversial memo and the fallout that has resulted since.
In this first exchange, Damore explains that he decided to write his now-infamous memo after attending a ‘secretive’ Google “diversity summit” in which he says presenters talked about “potentially illegal practices” intended to “try to increase diversity…basically treating people differently based on what their race or gender are.”
Peterson: “Why did you do this?”
Damore: “About a month and a half ago, I went to one of our diversity summits, all of it unrecorded and super-secret and they told me a lot of things that I thought just were not right.”
Peterson: “Ok, what do you mean ‘unrecorded and super-secret?'”
Damore: “Most meetings at Google are recorded. Anyone at Google can watch it. We’re trying to be really open about everything…except for this. They don’t want any paper trail for any of these things.”
“They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they’ve been doing to try to increase diversity. Basically treating people differently based on what their race or gender are.”
Peterson: “Ok, why?”
Damore: “Because I think it’s illegal. As some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percentage of people who agreed with me on the document. So, if everyone got to see this stuff, then they would really bring up some criticism.”
Damore also talks about how he originally published his memo over a month ago but upper-management largely ignored it until it started to garner media attention. Then, once it went viral, upper management organized a coordinated attack and misrepresented facts in order to silence him.
Damore: “I actually published this document about a month ago; it’s only after it had gone viral and leaked to the news, that Google started caring.”
“There was a lot of upper management that started to call it out and started saying how harmful it is. This sort of viewpoint is not allowed at Google.”
Peterson: “Yeah, what sort of viewpoint exactly? The idea that there are differences between men and women that might actually play a role in the corporate world? That’s an opinion that’s not acceptable?”
Damore: “Yeah, it seems so. And there’s a lot of misrepresentation by upper-management just to silence me, I think.”
On why he was fired:
Peterson: “What was there rationale for firing you exactly? What was the excuse that was given?”
Damore: “So, the official excuse was that I was perpetuating gender stereotypes.”
And finally, an interesting tidbit in which Damore once again points out that Google’s progressives are all too eager to put on their science hats when discussing climate change but are less eager to entertain scientific facts when they’re deemed ‘inconvenient.’
Damore: “I’m not sure how they can expect to silence so many engineers and intelligent people and just deny science like this”
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