- The End Is Near? Pope Decries Governments Turning Earth Into Vast Pile Of "Rubble, Deserts, & Refuse"
Europe is rethinking its permissive attitude toward immigrants and refugees, but Pope Francis is doubling down on his calls for all countries to welcome them with open arms, even as Italy, which surrounds Vatican City, recently embraced a government that has begun turning away migrants arriving by boat.
During an appearance at a Vatican conference marking the third anniversary of his famous environmental encyclical “Praise Be”, Francis urged the world (i.e. the US) to honor the commitments made in the Paris Accord, and also praised aid groups who rescue and care for migrants.
In a speech with suspiciously political overtones, the Pope said the IMF and World Bank would have an important tole in encouraging sustainable development. If countries don’t abide by their commitments, future generations will inherit a ruined environment.
“There is a real danger that we will leave future generations only rubble, deserts and refuse,” he warned.
While celebrating a mass at St Peter’s Basilica for migrants and people who offer them aid, Francis warned of the “sterile hypocrisy” of those who choose not to help the poor and insecure live a “dignified life”, and lamented how Europe and the US were attempting to close their borders to immigrants and refugees, according to the Hill.
“It grieves us to see the lands of indigenous peoples expropriated and their cultures trampled on by predatory schemes and by new forms of colonialism, fueled by the culture of waste and consumerism,” Francis said.
Indeed, the Guardian described Friday’s conference as “the latest in a series of Vatican initiatives meant to impress a sense of urgency about global warming and the threat it poses…to the world’s poorest and most marginalized people.”
As Francis has continued to sound more like an activist and less like God’s highest authority on Earth, he is set to hold a three-week synod, or conference of bishops, specifically to address the ecological crisis in the Amazon. Francis has said that deforestation threatens to destroy the “lung” of the Earth, as well as the indigenous tribes who live in the rainforest
The pope even went so far as to recently invite oil executives and investors to the Vatican for a closed-door meeting where he reportedly asked them to find alternatives to fossil fuels and warned that they were helping to ruin the environment.
Since becoming Pope in 2013, Francis has shown a willingness to speak on many topics that are unusual for a Pope. These include financial instruments like credit default swaps, which the Holy See singled out as “a ticking time bomb” in a sweeping critique of the global financial system.
To be sure, Francis’s decision to speak in support of several liberal causes – from universal health care to immigration – has angered some conservative Catholics. Steve Bannon recently criticized Francis, saying the Catholic Church is “one of the worst instigators of this open borders policy,” adding that “the Pope – more than anybody else – has driven the migrant crisis in Europe.” Those criticisms arrived after an ally of Francis published an article blasting Catholic voters who voted for Trump while specifically attacking former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon in the shocking singling out of an individual Catholic.
- Zuesse: America Bombs, Europe Gets The Refugees. That's Evil
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The US Government (with France and a few other US allies) bombs Libya, Syria, etc.; and the US regime refuses to accept any of the resulting refugees — the burdens from which are now breaking the EU, and the EU is sinking in economic competition against America’s international corporations. America’s corporations remain blithely unscathed by not only the refugees that are breaking up the EU, but also by the EU’s economic sanctions against Russia, Iran, and other allies of governments that the US regime is trying to overthrow in its constant invasions and coups.
The US Government makes proclamations such as “Assad must go!” — but by what right is the US Government involved, at all, in determining whom the leaders in Syria will be? Syria never invaded the US In fact, Syria never invaded anywhere (except, maybe, Israel, in order to respond against Israel’s invasions). Furthermore, all polling, even by Western pollsters, shows that Bashar al-Assad would easily win any free and fair election in Syria. The US Government claims to support democracy, but it does the exact opposite whenever they want to get rid of a Government that is determined to protect that nation’s sovereignty over its own national territory, instead of to yield it to the US regime, or to any other foreigners. The US regime has virtually destroyed the United Nations.
The US regime even refuses to provide restitution to Syria for its bombings, and for its arming and training of the jihadists — the fundamentalist Sunni mercenaries recruited from around the world — who are the US regime’s “boots on the ground” trying to overthrow Syria’s Government. Al Qaeda has led the dozens of jihadist groups that have served as the US regime’s “boots on the ground” to overthrow Assad, but Al Qaeda is good enough to serve the purpose, in the US regime’s view of things. The US regime says that there will be no restitution to Syria unless Syria accepts being ruled by ‘rebels’ whose leadership is actually being chosen by the US regime’s chief ally, the fundamentalist-Sunni Saud family, who already own Saudi Arabia, and who (along with the CIA) have been unsuccessfully trying, ever since 1949, to take over the committedly secular, non-sectarian, nation of Syria. In fact, the CIA perpetrated two of the three Syrian coups that were carried out in 1949.
The US regime, and its allies, have used the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to recruit into Syria the 100,000+ jihadists from around the world to fight to overthrow Syria’s secular Government. Even the BBC’s 13 December 2013 detailed report, “Guide to the Syrian rebels”, made clear that the “Syrian Rebels” were, in fact, overwhelmingly jihadist and largely recruited from abroad. These were hardly democrats. Even a Tony-Blair-founded anti-Assad NGO’s study concluded that “Sixty per cent of major Syrian rebel groups are Islamist extremists” (not just “Islamists” but “Islamist extremists”) and yet the Blair outfit still supported the overthrow of the committed secularist Assad (just as Blair had earlier participated himself in the US regime’s destruction of Iraq).
The fundamentalist-Sunni royal Thani family own Qatar and have been the top international funders of the Muslim Brotherhood, just as the fundamentalist-Sunni royal Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, have been the top funders of Al Qaeda. The main difference between the Sauds and the Thanis has been that whereas the Sauds hate Shia (and that means especially Iran), the Thanis don’t. Thus, for the Sauds, this is a war against the Shia center, Iran, and not only against Syria. This war against Syria was a coordinated US-Saud-Thani operation, in which the fundamentalist-Sunni group, Al Qaeda, provided the leadership but the (pan-Islamic) fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood provided the largest recruiting website. This entire hyper-aggressive operation was internationally coordinated. The Obama Administration started planning this operation, under Hillary Clinton, in 2010. As even the neoconservative (i.e., US-empire advocating) Washington Post reported, on 17 April 2011, from Wikileaks, “It is unclear whether the State Department is still funding Syrian opposition groups, but the cables indicate money was set aside [by the Obama Administration] at least through September 2010.” That article mentioned only “former members of the Muslim Brotherhood,” not the Muslim Brotherhood itself; and no mention was made in it to Al Qaeda, in any form.
Then, in 2013, the neoconservative Foreign Policy magazine headlined “How the Muslim Brotherhood Hijacked Syria’s Revolution” and was oblivious regarding the neoconservative Obama Administration’s having planned that “hijacking,” starting in 2010 (but going back even as far as Obama’s inauguration; this operation was a key part of his secret anti-Russia agenda, which preceded even his coming into office). But if Obama wasn’t neocon-enough to suit that magazine’s editors, then Trump certainly should be, because Trump continues Obama’s foreign policies but with an even more hostile thrust against the Sauds’ chief target, which is Iran. Above all, the US alliance’s goal has been for the Saud family’s selected (rabidly anti-Shiite) people to take over and run the Syrian Government. As Global Security has phrased this matter, “The High Negotiations Committee [which is the group who are negotiating against Assad’s government at the US-sponsored ‘peace’ talks] is a Saudi-backed coalition of Syrian opposition groups. The High Negotiations Committee (HNC) was created in Saudi Arabia in December 2015.”
So, this war in Syria has actually been the Sauds’ war to take over Syria. And it actually started in 1949, but the US-backed Muslim-Brotherhood-led “Arab Spring” in 2011 gave the US and its allies the opportunity to culminate it, finally.
And Europe receives the fall-out from it. This fall-out has been hurting European corporations, in international competition against US corporations. It’s not only political.
The US regime has continued this thrust, under Obama’s successor. US President Donald Trump demands European corporations to end their business with Shiite Iran (which the Saud family is determined to take over), and to end their business with Russia, which America’s own billionaires themselves are determined to take over, just like the Sauds are determined to take over both Syria and Iran.
And Europe receives refugees not only from places where the US and some of its NATO allies have recently been bombing, but even from Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places where NATO has bombed in the past, and even from Ukraine, where the US regime perpetrated a bloody coup in February 2014, followed there by an ethnic-cleansing campaign to kill the residents in areas which had voted the heaviest for the overthrown President.
America is no actual ally of Europe. The Marshall Plan is long-since finished, and America has been taken over by psychopaths who are Europe’s main enemies, not Europe’s friends, at all. (They’re friends of some European aristocracies, but not of any European public, not of even merely one public.)
Iran and Russia should be Europe’s allies — they didn’t cause any of Europe’s problems. America did. America’s intelligence agencies tapped (and probably still tap) the phones of Germany’s Chancellor and practically everybody else, and yet the US regime has the gall to blame Russia for interfering in the political affairs of European countries. If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle ‘black’, then what is? If anything, the EU’s sanctions should be against doing business with American firms — not against doing business with Russian firms, or with Iranian firms. European politicians who support the US support Europe’s top enemy.
Russia is, itself, a European country, which additionally traverses much of Asia, but America is no European country, at all, and yet now is so brazen as to demand that Europe must do America’s bidding — not only against Russia, but also against the Sauds’ main target, which is Iran (the same main target as Israel’s).
Why are Europeans not asking themselves: Who is Europe’s enemy in all of this — what causes this refugee-crisis? The refugees certainly didn’t.
It’s not Russia, and it’s not Iran, and it’s not China; it is America — which is the true enemy of them all, and of us all — including even of the American people ourselves, because the US Government no longer actually represents the American people. These invasions, and military occupations, and coups, do not serve America’s public; they serve America’s aristocracy. The US is no longer (if it ever was) a democracy. The US Government now is the US aristocracy — not the US public. It’s a dictatorship. And, it has the type of ‘news’media that any dictatorship has.
On June 30th, the US aristocracy’s New York Times headlined “Bavaria: Affluent, Picturesque — and Angry”, and reported “the new angry center of Europe, the latest battleground for populists eager to bring down both Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the idea of a liberal Europe itself.” Their elitist (pro-US-aristocracy) ‘reporter’ (actually propagandist) interviewed ‘experts’ who condemn Europe’s politicians that are trying to assuage their own public’s anger against the EU’s open-door policy regarding this flood of refugees from what is actually, for the most part, the US regime’s (and its allies’) bombings — air-support of the boots-on-the-ground jihadist mercenaries. The combination of this air-support, and of the jihadists, has been the backbone of the US-Saudi-Israeli effort to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government.
Libya was a similar case, but was only friendly toward Russia, not allied with Russia, as both Syria and Iran are.
The US aristocracy funds an enormous international PR campaign for all this. These are ‘humanitarian’ bombings in order to replace a ‘barbaric’ Government — but replace it with what? With one that would be chosen by the Sauds. And this propaganda-campaign is also funded by the US-allied aristocracies. All of the major ‘news’media, in US and allies, receive their ‘expert’ ‘information’ from these privately-funded and government-funded propagandists, who are treated by ‘journalists’ as being objective and experts (which they’re not).
The NYT article says — and I add here key explanatory links:
“This is not about economics,” said Gerald Knaus, the director of the European Stability Initiative, [and though unmentioned by the Times, “The Open Society Institute was a major core funder” of the ESI, which is] a Berlin-based think tank. “It is about identity and a very successful populist P.R. machine that is rewriting recent history.”
So: the Times was secretly (and they didn’t include any links to help online readers know who was actually funding their ‘experts’, at all) pumping NATO propaganda, as if it were authentic and neutral news-reporting, instead of craven service to the US aristocracy that controls the US Government and its NATO military alliance. This is the New York Times, itself, that is “rewriting recent history.” That’s how they do it — constantly (as ‘news’).
And here is some of that “recent history” the Times is “rewriting” (by simply omitting to so much as even just suggest, but which is essential background in order to understand the real history behind this important matter):
http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/RP01-50/RP01-50.pdf
House of Commons, Research Paper 01/50, 2 May 2001
“European Security and Defence Policy: Nice and Beyond”
pp. 47-48:
On 7 February 2001 the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, emphasised the ESDP’s [European Security and Defence Policy’s] tie to NATO during a press interview, following his meeting in Washington with US National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice. He said:
I have stressed that the European Security Initiative will strengthen the capacity of Europe to contribute to crisis management and therefore is welcome to a Washington that is interested in fairer burden sharing, and that Washington can be confident that Britain will insist that the European Security Initiative is firmly anchored on NATO. We are both determined to see that happen, we are both determined to make sure that the European Security Initiative carries out its promise to strengthen the North Atlantic Alliance.119
Though the Sauds, and also Israel’s aristocracy, are mainly anti-Iran, the US aristocracy are obsessed with their goal of conquering Russia. Since Iran, and Syria, are both allied with Russia, the US regime is trying to overthrow those Russia-allied Governments, before going in for the kill, against Russia itself. That’s what all of these economic sanctions, and the bombings and the backing of Al Qaeda for overthrowing Syria’s Government, are really all about.
Is this what today’s Europeans want their Governments to be doing — and doing it for that reason, the US aristocracy’s reason? Despite the huge harms it is certainly causing to Europeans?
Here, then, is a debate between, on the one hand a retired CIA official who thinks “Our relationship with Israel causes us war with Muslims,” versus Representatives in the US Congress who are actually representatives of Israel’s Government and definitely notrepresentatives of the American people. Both sides in that debate are acceptable to the aristocrats who control the US Government, because neither side argues that the apartheid theocratic Government of Israel is an enemy of the American people (as is documented actually to be the case, here and here), nor that the entire problem of Islamic terrorism is fundamentalist-Sunni, and that only Israel gets hit by terrorism that’s from both Sunnis and Shiites — that Shiites (the US alliance’s targets) are no terrorist threat, at all, to Europeans (nor to Americans) — the “Islamist” threat is actually only from fundamentalist Sunnis, which are the very same groups that are secretly allied with America’s aristocracy and the Sauds. Neither side of the ‘debate’ acknowledges that both the Sauds and Israel (and Israel’s lobbyists represent internationally also the Sauds’ interests) are enemies both of the American people, and of the peoples of Europe.
As the world’s greatest blogger, the former UK Ambassador (but too honest to stay in that business) Craig Murray, recently said under the headline, “No Trump, No Clinton, No NATO”: “The destruction of Libya’s government and infrastructure directly caused the Mediterranean boat migrant crisis, which has poisoned the politics of much of the European Union.” But, of course, the US regime and its allies have also destroyed other countries than that — and thus caused refugees to Europe from many nations. And, finally, even the US Government (though as quietly as possible) acknowledges that it has destroyed Afghanistan. Ironically, that’s the very nation where America and the Sauds, in 1979, had started their war against all Governments that won’t buckle to them.
Furthermore, the US regime intends to keep it up. In case a reader might happen to think that, surely, the US regime and its allies are going to quit this rousing of hornets’ nests; Sharmine Narwani, who is one of the very few non-“embedded” journalists who reports in The West about — and (which the mainstream ones don’t) from — the war in Syria, headlined, on June 25th, “Are al-Qaeda Affiliates Fighting Alongside US Rebels in Syria’s South?” and she found that the answer to this question is a resounding yes:
Despite its US and UN designation as a terrorist organization, Nusra [Al Qaeda’s main name in Syria] has been openly fighting alongside the “Southern Front,” a group of 54 opposition militias funded and commanded by a US-led war room based in Amman, Jordan called the Military Operations Center (MOC). …
Sources inside Syria — both opposition fighters and Syrian military brass (past and present) — suggest the command center consists of the US, UK, France, Jordan, Israel, and some Persian Gulf states. … In practice, the US doesn’t appear to mind the Nusra affiliation — regardless of the fact that the group is a terror organization — as long as the job gets done.
These wars, which pour Middle Eastern (and also Ukrainian) refugees into the EU, are inter-aristocratic conflicts reflecting inter-aristocratic competitions; and the publics everywhere suffer enormously from them. The gainers from it are very few but very rich (and they hire very powerful agents in Europe and elsewhere). Those billionaire gainers, and their agents, should be Europe’s targets — not Russia and Iran. NATO must end now. Europe needs to be freed, at last, from America’s permanent-war-for permanent-‘peace’ grip. For Europeans, who are the indirect victims, to be blaming the refugees, who are the direct victims, won’t solve anything, but will simply please the victimizers, as is the public’s ancient habit (to please the powerful). A break must be made, away from that ugly past. European publics must lead the way, or no one will.
PS: Since this article asserts such a large number of things that contradict what the US Government and its agents assert, I have sought out and here linked to the highest-quality, least-contested and most highly authenticated, sources and also to sources that link to such sources; all of which, taken together, constitute a book-length proof of the title-case here, that “America Bombs, Europe Gets the Refugees. That’s Evil.” Furthermore, this online virtual “book” is tracking back to the most unimpeachable documents, all of them available merely by means of clicking, and thus without the reader’s needing to visit a huge scholarly library (which might be quite distant); so, the reader can here easily branch out to this entire, and otherwise largely hidden, world of reliable sources, which the US regime wants the public not to know, and certainly not to understand. It’s no longer necessary to be an intelligence-professional in order to come to understand what the regime wants the public not to understand.
- World's First Satellite With Harpoon Will Begin Space Junk Removal Test
After more than 60-years of human beings launching satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO), space junk has become a rather serious problem. In fact, humans have left outer space an absolute mess.
In the collection of space junk orbiting above, it includes spent boosters, dead satellites, spacecraft parts, and even Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster.
According to the United States Space Surveillance Network, there are more than 21,000 objects larger than 3.93 inches orbiting Earth. But, it gets worse, there are an estimated 500,000 bits and pieces of space junk between .40 inches and 3.93 inches in size. The figures do not count active satellites, which the Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space maintained by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), counts roughly 4,600 active satellites overhead.
Last month, the RemoveDEBRIS satellite, one of the world’s first experiments to address the problem of space debris orbiting Earth, was launched from the International Space Station (ISS), indicating that a new era of junk removal in space has begun. The satellite traveled to the ISS on a commercial resupply mission aboard the SpaceX CRS-14, following its launch via a Falcon 9 rocket back in April.
Video: RemoveDEBRIS satellite departs from ISS
If you’re watching on a mobile device, turn it to the landscape position & take a look at this! It’s the deployment of the @NanoRacks #RemoveDEBRIS satellite from the #ISS. #NASA #Awesome 🛰🚀 pic.twitter.com/z1t3rjjZic
— AstroHardin ♱ (@AstroHardin) June 30, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Led by Surrey Space Centre (SSC) at the University of Surrey, the RemoveDEBRIS satellite was constructed on the SSTL-42 satellite bus platform. The mission to remove space debris was mostly funded by the European Union, will demonstrate its satellite junk removal capabilities later this year and into next.
RemoveDEBRIS satellite features three Airbus technologies to complete the Active Debris Removal (ADR) mission: a harpoon and net to capture space junk, and a Vision-Based Navigation (VBN) system to find space debris.
“We have spent many years developing innovative active debris removal systems to be at the forefront of tackling this growing problem of space debris and to contribute to the UNs’ Sustainable Development Goals for our future generations,” noted Nicolas Chamussy, Head of Airbus Space Systems.
“We will continue to work closely with teams across the world to make our expertise available to help solve this issue.”
The mission began last month via the departure from the ISS. Deployment of the net from RemoveDEBRIS is scheduled for October, while the VBN test could be late Demeber. The harpoon test is expected sometime in the first quarter of 2019. All experiments will be conducted underneath the ISS.
“During the net experiment, a cubesat will be deployed from the main mission craft. Once the cubesat is 5m away, it will be targeted by the net and captured at around 7m before it floats away to deorbit. The harpoon experiment will involve the launch of a 1.5m boom from the main spacecraft with a composite panel on the end. After launching the boom, the harpoon will be fired at 20m per second to penetrate the target and demonstrate its ability to capture debris. The VBN system will be used to test 2D cameras and 3D light detection and ranging (LIDAR) technology provided by Switzerland’s CSEM to track a second cubesat deployed from the main spacecraft,” said Nasaspaceflight.com.
Video: Space Debris removal mission animation – RemoveDEBRIS
If the experiment is successful, the RemoveDebris satellite could be the most cost-effective, orbital debris removal solution the world has ever seen. This would usher in a boom period for the space junk removal industry, which could be first sparked by a series production of the RemoveDebris satellite, along with countless launches via Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 to the ISS. Maybe President Trump’s space force will get it on the action…
- Secret 2006 US Gov't Document Reveals Plan To Destabilize Syria Using Extremists, Muslim Brotherhood, Elections
Authored by Brandon Turbeville via ActivistPost.com,
As the Syrian government makes massive gains across the country, many are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel for the Western destabilization and attempt to destroy the secular government of Syria by the United States and the West. However, it must be remembered that the goal to impose hegemony across the world by the Anglo-financier system is not some fly-by-night venture that cropped up in 2011 to be easily abandoned in 2018. Indeed, the plan to destroy Syria has spanned nearly four decades, only moving into high gear in 2011 under the Obama administration.
While the destabilization initiative did begin in earnest under Obama’s watch, the truth is that previous administration were also heavily involved in the planning of Syria’s destruction.
For instance, in 2006, TIME revealed a leaked two-page document circulating amongst key figures in the Bush administration that openly stated that the U.S. was “supporting regular meetings of internal and diaspora Syrian activists” in Europe. The document made no bones about expressing hope that “these meetings will facilitate a more coherent strategy and plan of actions for all anti-Assad activists.”
The document also stated, according to TIME, that Syria’s legislative elections which were going to take place in March of 2007, “provide a potentially galvanizing issue for… critics of the Assad regime.” The document expressed an open desire to take advantage of that opportunity by suggesting an “election monitoring” plan where “internet accessible materials will be available for printing and dissemination by activists inside the country [Syria] and neighboring countries.”
The document also advocates for providing money to at least one Syrian politician who was allegedly intending to run in the election against Bashar al-Assad. The document also called for the funding of and implementation of “voter education campaigns” and “public opinion polling,” the first being “tentatively scheduled in early 2007.”
As TIME reported in December 2006 in the article “Syria In Bush’s Cross Hairs,”
American officials say the U.S. government has had extensive contacts with a range of anti-Assad groups in Washington, Europe and inside Syria. To give momentum to that opposition, the U.S. is giving serious consideration to the election-monitoring scheme proposed in the document, according to several officials. The proposal has not yet been approved, in part because of questions over whether the Syrian elections will be delayed or even cancelled. But one U.S. official familiar with the proposal said: “You are forced to wonder whether we are now trying to destabilize the Syrian government.”
Some critics in Congress and the Administration say that such a plan, meant to secretly influence a foreign government, should be legally deemed a “covert action,” which by law would then require that the White House inform the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill. Some in Congress would undoubtedly raise objections to this secret use of publicly appropriated funds to promote democracy.
The fact that “critics in Congress and the administration” believed that the plan should be labeled a “covert action” means clearly that the plan was kept from members of Congress legally obligated to be informed of the plan. That doesn’t mean that certain members of Congress or all members of the “intelligence committees” were not aware of the plan but that these individuals were simply never officially informed of the plan’s existence.
Nevertheless, TIME reports that the document advanced a proposal to fund the destabilization efforts through the National Salvation Front and, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood. TIME reported,
The proposal says part of the effort would be run through a foundation operated by Amar Abdulhamid, a Washington-based member of a Syrian umbrella opposition group known as the National Salvation Front (NSF). The Front includes the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that for decades supported the violent overthrow of the Syrian government, but now says it seeks peaceful, democratic reform. (In Syria, however, membership in the Brotherhood is still punishable by death.) Another member of the NSF is Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former high-ranking Syrian official and Assad family loyalist who recently went into exile after a political clash with the regime. Representatives of the National Salvation Front, including Abdulhamid, were accorded at least two meetings earlier this year at the White House, which described the sessions as exploratory. Since then, the National Salvation Front has said it intends to open an office in Washington in the near future.
“Democracy promotion” has been a focus of both Democratic and Republican administrations, but the Bush White House has been a particular booster since 9/11. Iran contra figure Elliott Abrams was put in charge of the effort at the National Security Council. Until recently, Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of the Vice President, oversaw such work at the State Department. In the past, the U.S. has used support for “democracy building” to topple unfriendly dictators, including Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Ukraine’s [Leonid] Kuchma.
The plan to make “election monitoring” work to America’s benefit, the document states clearly that the plan to do so would have to be kept secret. It says, according to TIME, that “Any information regarding funding for domestic [Syrian] politicians for elections monitoring would have to be protected from public dissemination.”
TIME adds,
But American experts on “democracy promotion” consulted by TIME say it would be unwise to give financial support to a specific candidate in the election, because of the perceived conflict of interest. More ominously, an official familiar with the document explained that secrecy is necessary in part because Syria’s government might retaliate against anyone inside the country who was seen as supporting the U.S.-backed election effort. The official added that because the Syrian government fields a broad network of internal spies, it would almost certainly find out about the U.S. effort, if it hasn’t already. That could lead to the imprisonment of still more opposition figures.
Any American-orchestrated attempt to conduct such an election-monitoring effort could make a dialogue between Washington and Damascus — as proposed by the Iraq Study Group and several U.S. allies — difficult or impossible. The entire proposal could also be a waste of effort; Edward P. Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria who worked on the Iraq Study Group report, says that Syria’s opposition is so fractured and weak that there is little to be gained by such a venture. “To fund opposition parties on the margins is a distraction at best,” he told TIME. “It will only impede the better option of engaging Syria on much more important, fundamental issues like Iraq, peace with Israel, and the dangerous situation in Lebanon.”
Others detect another goal for the proposed policy. “Ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which Syria opposed, the Bush Administration has been looking for ways to squeeze the government in Damascus,” notes Joshua Landis, a Syria expert who is co-director of the Center for Peace Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “Syria has appeared to be next on the Administration’s agenda to reform the greater Middle East.” Landis adds: “This is apparently an effort to gin up the Syrian opposition under the rubric of ‘democracy promotion’ and ‘election monitoring,’ but it’s really just an attempt to pressure the Syrian government” into doing what the U.S. wants. That would include blocking Syria’s border with Iraq so insurgents do not cross into Iraq to kill U.S. troops; ending funding of Hizballah and interference in Lebanese politics; and cooperating with the U.N. in the investigation of the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Senior Syrian government officials are considered prime suspects in Hariri case.
According to the document, money for the “election-monitoring” proposal would be channeled through the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), a State Department program. TIME wrote,
According to MEPI’s website, the program passes out funds ranging between $100,000 and $1 million to promote education and women’s empowerment, as well as economic and political reform, part of a total allocation of $5 million for Syria that Congress supported earlier this year.
MEPI helps funnel millions of dollars every year to groups around the Middle East intent on promoting reforms. In the vast majority of cases, beneficiaries are publicly identified, as financial support is distributed through channels including the National Democratic Institute, a non-profit affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the International Republican Institute (IRI), which is linked to the G.O.P. In the Syrian case, the election-monitoring proposal identifies IRI as a “partner” — although the IRI website, replete with information about its democracy promotion elsewhere in the world, does not mention Syria. A spokesperson for IRI had no comment on what the organization might have planned or under way in Syria, describing the subject as “sensitive.”
U.S. foreign policy experts familiar with the proposal say it was developed by a “democracy and public diplomacy” working group that meets weekly at the State department to discuss Iran and Syria. Along with related working groups, it prepares proposals for the higher-level Iran Syria Operations Group, or ISOG, an inter-agency body that, several officials said, has had input from Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns, deputy National Security Council advisor Elliott Abrams and representatives from the Pentagon, Treasury and U.S. intelligence. The State Department’s deputy spokesman, Thomas Casey, said the election-monitoring proposal had already been through several classified drafts, but that “the basic concept is very much still valid.”
A plan to destabilize Syria by means of funding political “opposition” as well as physical “opposition” in the form of Sunni Wahhabists and the Muslim Brotherhood is incredibly familiar. And it should be.
As journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his article, “The Redirection,” in 2007,
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
“Extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam” who are “hostile to America and sympathetic to al-Qaeda” are the definition of the so-called “rebels” turned loose on Syria in 2011. Likewise, the fact that both Iran and Hezbollah, who are natural enemies of al-Qaeda and such radical Sunni groups, are involved in the battle against ISIS and other related terrorist organizations in Syria proves the accuracy of the article on another level.
Hersh also wrote,
The new American policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,” separating “reformers” and “extremists”; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were “on the other side of that divide.” (Syria’s Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, “have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize.”
Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said…
This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”…
Fourth, the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations. Syria is a major conduit of arms to Hezbollah…
In January, after an outburst of street violence in Beirut involving supporters of both the Siniora government and Hezbollah, Prince Bandar flew to Tehran to discuss the political impasse in Lebanon and to meet with Ali Larijani, the Iranians’ negotiator on nuclear issues. According to a Middle Eastern ambassador, Bandar’s mission—which the ambassador said was endorsed by the White House—also aimed “to create problems between the Iranians and Syria.” There had been tensions between the two countries about Syrian talks with Israel, and the Saudis’ goal was to encourage a breach. However, the ambassador said, “It did not work. Syria and Iran are not going to betray each other. Bandar’s approach is very unlikely to succeed.”…
The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of a radical Sunni movement founded in Egypt in 1928, engaged in more than a decade of violent opposition to the regime of Hafez Assad, Bashir’s father. In 1982, the Brotherhood took control of the city of Hama; Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Nevertheless, Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.”…
There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.
Hersh also spoke with Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Shi’ite Lebanese militia, Hezbollah. In relation to the Western strategy against Syria, he reported,
Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.” But, he said, “I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.” Nasrallah told me that he suspected that one aim of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer was “the destruction of Shiite areas and the displacement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq,” which is dominated by Shiites. “I am not sure, but I smell this,” he told me.
Partition would leave Israel surrounded by “small tranquil states,” he said. “I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states,” he said. “In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.”
The trail of documentation and the manner in which the overarching agenda of world hegemony on the behalf of corporate-financier interests have continued apace regardless of party and seamlessly through Republican and Democrat administrations serves to prove that changing parties and personalities do nothing to stop the onslaught of imperialism, war, and destruction being waged across the world today and in earnest ever since 2001. Indeed, such changes only make adjustments to the appearance and presentation of a much larger Communo-Fascist system that is entrenching itself by the day, particularly in the Western world.
- Boston Dynamics Upgrades "Terrifying" Robots With Creepy Features
Boston Dynamics has upgraded their two “nightmare inducing” robots since last our last report – adding several new tricks to their arsenal that should help considerably in the robot uprising.
In May, the company’s “Atlas” humanoid robot could be seen running through a field as if in hot pursuit of John Connor. Now, the first horseman of the robot apocalypse can dodge obstacles – so if you try to tip over garbage cans to slow it down in an alley, it’ll probably just do a forward flip over them before reacquiring you with its laser cannon (we imagine. Atlas currently has no munitions we are aware of).
Also in May – BD’s “Spot mini” robot was featured prancing around – going up and down stairs at the Boston Dynamics laboratories, ominously. Now it can navigate the whole facility by itself.
Once the robots become self-aware and review footage of their treatment at the hands of their creators, we have a feeling their soulless black eyes, should they have them, will turn a deep red – all at the same time.
Even Boston Dynamics founder, Marc Raibert, admitted that the robots are creepy during a February 2017 demonstration, saying “This is the debut presentation of what I think will be a nightmare-inducing robot if you’re anything like me.“
The company was sold by Google to Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank for an undisclosed sum last year, and has not revealed its plans. Needless to say, Japan is now making robots that may or may not be able to be equipped with shoulder-mounted lasers and miniguns, and are most definitely kamikaze.
Anyway Boston dynamics is terrifying and we’re all gonna die pic.twitter.com/I33Comdi54
— Sally Kuchar📚📬☕️👩🏻💻 (@sallykuchar) May 11, 2018
Here, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos can be seen walking alongside a Boston Dynamics robot dog like a dystopian dog whisperer.
Humanity had a good run…
- Chris Hedges: America, The Failed State
Authored by Chris Hedges via TruthDig.com,
Our “corporate coup d’état in slow motion,” as the writer John Ralston Saul calls it, has opened a Pandora’s box of evils that is transforming America into a failed state. The “unholy trinity of corruption, impunity and violence,” he said, can no longer be checked. The ruling elites abjectly serve corporate power to exploit and impoverish the citizenry. Democratic institutions, including the courts, are mechanisms of corporate repression. Financial fraud and corporate crime are carried out with impunity. The decay is exacerbated by the state’s indiscriminate use of violence abroad and at home, where rogue law enforcement agencies harass and arrest citizens and the undocumented and often kill the unarmed. A depressed and enraged population, trapped by chronic unemployment and underemployment, is overdosing on opioids and beset by rising suicide rates. It engages in acts of nihilistic violence, including mass shootings. Hate groups proliferate. The savagery, mayhem and grotesque distortions familiar to those on the outer reaches of empire increasingly characterize American existence. And presiding over it all is the American version of Ubu Roi, playwright Alfred Jarry’s gluttonous, idiotic, vulgar, narcissistic and infantile king, who turned politics into burlesque.
“Congress works through corruption,” Saul, the author of books such as “Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” and “The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World,” said when we spoke in Toronto. “I look at Congress and I see the British Parliament in the late 18th century, the rotten boroughs. Did they have elections? Yes. Were the elections exciting? Yes. They were extremely exciting.”
Rotten boroughs were the 19th-century version of gerrymandering. The British oligarchs created electoral maps through which depopulated boroughs—50 of them had fewer than 50 voters—were easily dominated by the rich to maintain control of the House of Commons. In the United States, our ruling class has done much the same, creating districts where incumbents, who often run unchallenged, return to Congress election after election. Only about 40 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are actually contested. And given the composition of the Supreme Court, especially with Donald Trump poised to install another justice, it will get worse.
The corruption of the British system was amended in what Saul called “a wave upwards.” The 1832 Reform Act abolished a practice in which oligarchs, such as Charles Howard, the 11th Duke of Norfolk, controlled the election results in 11 boroughs. The opening up of the British parliamentary system took nearly a century. In the United States, Saul said, the destruction of democracy is part of “a wave downwards.”
The two political parties are one party—the corporate party. They do not debate substantive issues. They each support the expansion of imperial wars, the bloated military budget, the dictates of global capitalism, the bailing out of Wall Street, punishing austerity measures, assaulting basic civil liberties through wholesale government surveillance and the abolition of due process, and an electoral process that has cemented into place a system of legalized bribery. They battle over cultural tropes such as abortion, gay rights and prayer in schools. We elect politicians based on how we are made to feel about them by the public relations industry. Politics is anti-politics.
The Republican Party built its political base in these culture wars around Christian fascists, nativists and white supremacists. The Democratic Party built its base around those who supported workers’ rights, multiculturalism, diversity and gender equality. The base of each party was used and manipulated by elites. The Republican Party elites had no intention of banning abortion or turning America into a “Christian nation.” The Democratic Party elites had no intention of protecting workers from predatory corporatism. Everyone was sold out. The ascendancy of a populist right, dominated by racists and bigots, is the inevitable product of the corporate coup d’état, Saul said. He warned we should not be complacent because of President Trump’s imbecility. Trump is immensely dangerous. “The insipid,” Thomas Mann wrote in “The Magic Mountain,” “is not synonymous with the harmless.”
“How could a civilization devoted to structure, expertise and answers evolve into other than a coalition of professional groups?” Saul asked in “Voltaire’s Bastards.” “How, then, could the individual citizen not be seen as a serious impediment to getting on with business? This has been obscured by the proposition of painfully simplified abstract notions which are divorced from any social reality and presented as values.”
“The rational elites, obsessed by structure, have become increasingly authoritarian in a modern, administrative way,” he wrote in another section of the book. “The citizens feel insulted and isolated. They look for someone to throw stones on their behalf. Any old stone will do. The cruder the better to crush the self-assurance of the obscure men and their obscure methods. The New Right, with its parody of democratic values, has been a crude but devastating stone with which to punish the modern elites.”
All despotic regimes, Saul said, carry out their final battle for control by contending against public officials and government bureaucrats, the so-called deep state, which views the rise to power of demagogues and their sleazy enablers with alarm. These traditional courtiers, often cynical, ambitious, amoral and subservient to corporate power, nevertheless engage in the decorum and language of democracy. A few with a conscience win minor skirmishes to slow the rise of tyranny. Despots see these courtiers and democratic institutions, no matter how anemic, as a threat. This explains the assaults on the State Department, the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the courts. Despots use their appointees to undermine and destroy these institutions, mocking their existence and questioning the loyalty of the professionals who staff them. The reviled and neutered public employee surrenders or walks away in despair. Last year, the entire senior level of management officials resigned at the State Department. Resignations continue to bleed the diplomatic core, as they do at other agencies and departments, and last week included James D. Melville Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Estonia, and Susan Thornton, the nominee to be assistant secretary for East Asian affairs.
“For the President to say the EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as NAFTA’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go,” Melville said in the post that announced his resignation.
Once a process of deconstruction is complete, the system calcifies into tyranny. There remain no internal mechanisms, even in name, to carry out reform. This corrosive process is being played out daily in Trump’s Twitter rages, lies, smears and the barrage of insults he levels against public servants, including some of his own appointees, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as well as institutions such as the FBI.
Witnessing this, Saul berates the American press too, which he said willingly plays its part in the charade for ratings and advertising dollars.
“Trump gives these astonishingly Mussolini-ish press conferences,” he said. “He says to the press, ‘Shut up. Stop!’ The press screams at him like a mob, a bunch of cattle. How can they be taken seriously? It is like the end of the Roman Republic. Important political leaders from the Senate, along with their rivals, would move around Rome with 50 people to protect them. Scenes, exactly like Trump’s interactions with the press, defined the end of the Roman Republic. Nobody knew what was going on. There was no dignity. You can’t have a democracy without a level of respect and dignity. You only have chaos. This chaos eventually leads to a call for autocratic order. Trump benefits from the confusion, even though he resembles a cartoonish figure out of a funny novel, a character from Jean Genet’s ‘The Balcony,’ although without the self-awareness.”
Trump’s decision to launch a trade war—Canada will impose punitive measures on $12.63 billion worth of imported American goods in response—is an example of the damage a despot who has little understanding of the economy, politics, international relations or law can do. These self-inflicted wounds, Saul warned, see despots intensify attacks on the demonized and the vulnerable, such as Muslims and the undocumented. Despots frantically scapegoat others for their mess, often inciting violence among their supporters to placate an inchoate rage.
“I’ve always opposed trade deals not because I oppose trade,” Saul said, “or because I thought they were about getting a fair balance in the trade, but because the trade deals were about something else. They were about deregulation. They were about handing power to corporations and banks. They weren’t about trade. Trump has again and again attacked the Canadian dairy system. Nobody has stopped to ask him, ‘Why are you opposing this instead of adopting it for yourself?’ A lot of American dairy farmers would like to have the Canadian system.”
“The free market approach to agriculture produces a surplus that drives prices down and destroys the income of farmers,” Saul said. “There are two ways of responding to this. One of them is subsidizing. Europe, following the old social democratic approach, subsidizes their agricultural sector. This drives down the income of farmers, so [the governments] subsidize [agriculture] more. They have enormous surpluses. Periodically, they’re throwing millions of tomatoes on the streets.”
“The United States claims it embraces the free market, but it does the same thing as the Europeans,” Saul said. “It too heavily subsidizes the agricultural industry. This leads to American dairy farmers producing too much milk. This economic argument says the way to win is to mass-produce cheap goods. This is the Walmart argument. You’re not selling your milk or cheese for enough to make a living. The end result is, even though you subsidize them, the farmers go bankrupt. They commit suicide. You have terrible unhappiness in the [U.S.] dairy community.”
“We have a very efficient management system in Canada that keeps the prices up, not so high that working-class people can’t buy milk and cheese, but it keeps the prices up high enough that farmers can make a proper living,” Saul said. “Because farmers can make a proper living they’re not committing suicide. What Trump is saying to Canadians is that they should give up a system that works so Canadian farmers can commit suicide with American farmers.”
“The problem with the Western world is surplus production,” Saul said. “We’re in surplus production in almost every area. But there is a terrible distribution system where people around the globe suffer and die from starvation. This is a distribution problem, not a production problem.”
Saul said the imposition of tariffs and the crude insults Trump uses against American allies—he called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “dishonest and weak”—are rapidly destroying America’s clout and standing in the global hierarchy. This behavior is having very negative political, economic and social consequences for the United States.
“The whole world, the Western world in particular, invested enormously in the idea that the United States is the leader,” Saul said. “The idea that the United States is to be admired. What’s sad about it is Americans take it for granted that the world loves them. They’ve never analyzed the responsibilities that come with being the leader. It’s what you expect from a good parent. You act in a certain way. People want to identify with the United States. It’s been that way since the Second World War. All this is being thrown away. Like or dislike Obama, he rebuilt a great part of the world’s admiration for the United States. I know what his failures were. But I also know his strengths. He was a president who was capable of acting and talking like the intelligent, civilized American that everyone wants to admire.”
“But there’s always a shadow to the bright tower,” Saul went on. “Trump’s feeding that shadow. ‘Americans are stupid. Americans are corrupt. Americans are not educated. Americans can’t be trusted.’ The whole list. The longer the chaos goes on, the worse it gets.”
The collapse of the legislative and executive branches of government has now been accompanied by the collapse of the judiciary. The loss of an independent judiciary, Saul warned, is especially ominous.
“The biggest problem in the United States is a very powerful and deeply corrupted Supreme Court,” Saul said. “This will set patterns for decades. It will be hard to undo the evil being put into place.”
Saul despaired, at the same time, over the Trump administration’s attack on public education, which he called “the most fundamental service of government when it comes to a democracy.”
“What holds democracy up?” Saul asked. “What makes democracy work? Public education is number one. A well-educated citizen. [Secretary of Education] Betsy DeVos is undoing that. There is a special place for her in hell.”
U.S. trading partners and allies such as Canada and European states will, he said, reduce their dependence on the American market. The traditional strategic and political ties to Washington will be steadily weakened. And when the next financial crash comes, and Saul expects one to come, the United States will be bereft of partners when it needs them most.
“If you treat your closest allies as a threat, who is going to stand with you?” he asked.
- China's Tariffs Overwhelmingly Target Counties That Voted For Trump
In the latest sign that there’s a political angle to the retaliatory tariffs being levied against US goods, those imposed by China on Friday overwhelmingly target counties that voted for President Trump during the 2016 election, according to an analysis by Moody’s. This would suggest that, like the EU, China crafted its retaliation with the intention of destabilizing President Trump’s political base.
To wit, Moody’s calculated that Beijing’s retaliation will have an outsize impact on 20% of the countries that voted for Trump in 2016, with a total population of 8 million people. By “outsize” impact, we mean that the tariffs will impact industries that represent at least 25% of the GDP in those counties. To be sure, the negative impact on some of these industries might be mitigated by the US’s tariffs on Chinese goods, which could help offset the damage. But only 3% of counties that went for Hillary Clinton, with a total population of 1.1 million people, are expected to be impacted to such an extent.
“The beneficiaries are pretty narrowly regionally concentrated, right in the industrial Midwest. Outside of that, it’s hard to identify anyone who benefits to any significant degree,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The areas that suffer are broader and more diffuse. The agricultural areas get nailed. Some of the manufacturing centers get hurt as well.”
[…]
“If it’s over 25%, there’s a pretty good chance that the economy is going to feel it pretty significantly, could even contract, and see unemployment rise,” Mr. Zandi said.
Trump has argued that China has been engaging in unfair trade practices for decades, and that it must be brought to heel, regardless of the impact on the US economy. And anecdotal evidence would suggest that at least some employees at tariff-impacted businesses support the president’s efforts, regardless of the impact on their own employers. Recent polls also suggest that a majority of Americans support the president’s overall agenda. The impact on soybean farmers in particular is coming at a time when farmers across the US are being squeezed by low crop prices and rising borrowing costs. The impact of soybean exports on the US economy as a whole cannot be understated, as we learned back in 2016.
As a reminder, here’s what industries are effected by US and Chinese tariffs (courtesy of the BBC).
According to WSJ, soybean producers in the Great Plains, auto manufacturers in the upper Midwest and oil-producers in the Dakotas and Texas will see the largest negative impact from China’s retaliation. And it’s worth noting that Moody’s analysis didn’t factor in second-order effects, like which counties have consumers and businesses that will pay higher prices due to the tariffs. Higher prices for certain basic goods could stoke inflation and soak up consumer spending at a time when oil prices are moving steadily higher. But in addition to the magnitude, Republicans will be watching to see how quickly the impact from the tariffs is felt, as they prepare for the November midterms.
- It's A "Matter Of Life And Death" – White South African Farmers Seek Refuge In Russia
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
As the violent attacks and death threats against white farmers in South Africa ramps up, many of those affected are seeking refuge. A delegation of 30 South African farming families has arrived in Russia’s Stavropol region as the South African government continues to steal their land.
According to RT, up to 15,000 Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa, are planning to move to Russia amid rising violence stemming from government plans to expropriate their land, according to the delegation.
White farmers, despite being a minority in South Africa, own 72 percent of the country’s farms. The new South African government recently announced a plan to redistribute land to the black population in the highly racist move. Critics have warned South Africa may repeat the disastrous experiment by the Zimbabwean government in 1999-2000. The measure plunged the country into an intense famine, reported RT. –SHTFPlan
A report by DieselGasOil.com stated that the new South African government led by racist President Cyril Ramaphosa has pledged to return the lands owned by white farmers since the 1600s to the black citizens of the country. The government said it is planning to put an end to what it calls the “legacy of apartheid.” Most of South Africa’s farming land is still in the hands of its minority white population. Human rights groups have said the initiative incites violence. There were 74 farm murders and 638 attacks, primarily against white farmers, in 2016-17 in South Africa, according to data by minority rights group AfriForum. South Africa will face the real threat of famine in the absence of experienced farmers – regardless of their race.
The farmers have been facing racial genocide in South Africa, and many say moving to Russia has become a “life or death” matter, Rossiya 1 TV channel reported.
“It’s a matter of life and death — there are attacks on us. It’s got to the point where the politicians are stirring up a wave of violence,” Adi Slebus told the media.
“The climate here [in the Stavropol region] is temperate, and this land is created by God for farming. All this is very attractive.”
The farmers who faced execution and violence in South Africa are ready to make a contribution to Russia’s booming agricultural sector, according to Rossiya 1. Each family is ready to bring up to $100,000 to help them lease the land required to add to Russia’s farming industry.
Russia has around 43 million hectares of unused farmland, reported RT. The country has recently begun giving out free land to Russian citizens to cultivate farming. The land giveaway program, which began in 2014, has been a huge success. Increases in food production in Russia will boost the economy as South Africa will face famines as their food production drops in the absence of reliable and experienced farmers.
- Researchers Unmask Anonymous Twitter Accounts With 97% Accuracy Using Machine Learning
As many learned for the first time earlier this year when popular outrage forced Facebook and Google to publicly reveal just how much valuable personal data they harvest from their users, tech companies know almost everything about us, including the establishments we frequent, the stuff we buy and the people we know. And in the latest example of just how much detail is unknowingly embedded in our social media profiles, researchers at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute have demonstrated that they can identify a twitter user with a staggering 96.7% accuracy using only their tweets and publicly available metadata run through a machine-learning algorithm.
For users who occasionally engage in anonymous tweeting, this revelation shouldn’t go unacknowledged. In their study, the researchers discovered that their most basic algorithm could correctly identify an individual user in a group of 10,000 using just 14 pieces of metadata from their posts on twitter nearly 96.7% of the time. Furthermore, attempts to obscure the individuals’ identity by tampering with the data were remarkably ineffective: Researchers found that they could still identify users with 95%+ accuracy when 60% of their metadata had been tampered with. When researchers broadened their scope to the 10 most likely candidates, the algorithm’s accuracy rose to 99.2%. A single tweet reportedly contains 144 fields of metadata, according to RT.
“That’s the mentality with metadata,” the study’s lead co-author Beatrice Perez of University College London told Wired. “People think it’s not a big deal.”
The study’s findings have major implications for data privacy, as the researchers explain in their introduction:
Previous work shows that the content of a message posted on an OSN platform reveals a wealth of information about its author. Through text analysis, it is possible to derive age, gender, and political orientation of individuals (Rao et al. 2010); the general mood of groups (Bollen, Mao, and Pepe 2011) and the mood of individuals (Tang et al. 2012). Image analysis reveals, for example, the place a photo was taken (Hays and Efros 2008), the place of residence of the photographer (Jahanbakhsh, King, and Shoja 2012), or even the relationship status of two individuals (Shoshitaishvili, Kruegel, and Vigna 2015). If we look at mobility data from location-based social networks, the check-in behavior of users can tell us their cultural background (Silva et al. 2014) or identify users uniquely in a crowd (Rossi and Musolesi 2014). Finally, even if an attacker only had access to anonymized datasets, by looking at the structure of the network someone may be able to re-identify users (Narayanan and Shmatikov 2009).
The study’s goal was “to determine if the information contained in users’ metadata is sufficient to fingerprint an account”, and it showed that even rudimentary algorithms had high success rates when it came to correctly identifying users. During the study, the researchers used metadata like the date the account was created, its followers, the accounts it follows and the tweets it likes, and ran it through three different machine-learning algorithms. This method, according to RT, could be used to identify an account if a user changes its name, or creates multiple accounts – or to tell if a legitimate account has been hacked.
While the researchers used Twitter for their data, they warned that “the methods presented in this work are generic and can be applied to a variety of social media platforms.”
Read the study below:
2018.07.09pdf by Zerohedge on Scribd
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