- New Satellite Images Reveal Russia Is Preparing For War In Kaliningrad
The July 16 summit in Helsinki, Finland, between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin offers a unique opportunity to de-escalate Cold War 2.0 between the United States and Russia.
Ahead of the summit, several reports have detailed a new alarming trend of Moscow’s rapid modernization efforts to improve its westernmost military facilities in Kaliningrad, a strategic enclave of Russian territory situated between Poland and the Baltics.
Last month, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) published satellite images revealing significant upgrades to a nuclear weapons storage bunker situated at a secret facility in Kaliningrad.
“It has all the fingerprints of typical Russian nuclear weapons storage sites,” Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at Federation of American Scientists (FAS), said in a report.
“There is a heavy-duty external perimeter of multilayered fencing. The bunkers themselves have triple fencing around them as well. These are typical features from all the other nuclear weapons storage sites that we know about in Russia,” Kristensen explained.
A buried nuclear weapons storage bunker in the Kaliningrad district has been under major renovation since mid-2016. (Source: Federation of American Scientists (FAS))
This comes at a time when Moscow expressed its concern over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) military infrastructure expansion near the Poland–Kaliningrad border. On May 28, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared that Russia is prepared to take appropriate measures in response. That statement was a reaction to the Pentagon debuting plans to build a permanent military base in Poland.
NATO forces have surrounded Kaliningrad, as it seems Moscow is in the final stages of installing and upgrading military structures and other bunker improvements in this strategic slice of territory in the heart of NATO-allied eastern Europe. Moscow knows its fate with NATO, and that is why it is preparing for war.
Now, there is more evidence that Russia has been constructing even more structures and bunkers 8 miles away from the nuclear bunker facility that FAS reported last month.
The new report, by an American private Earth-imaging company Planet Labs and Defense One, shows significant changes around a bunker facility in Baltiysk, near the Polish border. Matt Hall, a senior geospatial analyst at 3GIMBALS, a firm that provides human-machine integrated location-based analytics, told Defense One that the facilities in the satellite images (below) are used to store artillery.
“The visible change between the two images provided appears to be the fortification of buildings, characteristic of explosive storage bunkers, utilizing earthen berms to further insulate these structures. There also appears to be clearings, new structures visible within the the forested portion of the installation, as well as a berm and exterior fence surrounding the installation,” said Hall.
The unforested regions include explosive ordinance bunkers, he said. “Every structure in the northern non-forested sector have been reinforced during the three month period of the imagery,” he said. “The berms appear to be continually fortified to make them more obscured from aerial detection.”
“In the forested sector, a different type of storage facility exists, some of which are bermed and appear to be leveled off. There appears to be additional uncovered storage, some with berms but not heavily fortified. In this area some of the structures have changed, potentially showing roofing structures or tarps that have since been removed to reveal caches of items. Some of the berms appear to be more extensive, but the foliage in the second imagery may obscure this analysis. Additionally, there appear to be new or redistributed items — potentially identifiable as shipping containers,” said Hall.
Hall also identified a railroad line in the satellite images. It connects to the broader national system, which runs to and through Lithuania. Defense One said Russia constructed a similar line in the Georgian province of Abkhazia before invading that country in 2008.
Defense One asked National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency officials about the recent activity in Kaliningrad. They replied with no comment because such information is deemed classified.
Russia has been adding troops since 2015 to the region, which is the home base of Russia’s 11 Army Corps and the headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet.
There is only one reason why Russia would be quickly fortifying various military facilities and upgrading nuclear storage bunkers in Kaliningrad: Moscow sees war on the horizon.
- A New World Order: Brought To You By The Global-Industrial Deep State
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“There are no nations. There are no peoples … There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.”—Network (1976)
There are those who will tell you that any mention of a New World Order government – a power elite conspiring to rule the world – is the stuff of conspiracy theories.
I am not one of those skeptics.
What’s more, I wholeheartedly believe that one should always mistrust those in power, take alarm at the first encroachment on one’s liberties, and establish powerful constitutional checks against government mischief and abuse.
I can also attest to the fact that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I have studied enough of this country’s history—and world history—to know that governments (the U.S. government being no exception) are at times indistinguishable from the evil they claim to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
And I have lived long enough to see many so-called conspiracy theories turn into cold, hard fact.
Remember, people used to scoff at the notion of a Deep State (a.k.a. Shadow Government), doubt that fascism could ever take hold in America, and sneer at any suggestion that the United States was starting to resemble Nazi Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.
We’re beginning to know better, aren’t we?
The Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) is real.
We are already experiencing fascism, American-style.
Not with jackboots and salutes, as Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution notes, “but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac ‘tapping into’ popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.”
And the United States is increasingly following in Nazi Germany’s footsteps, at least in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.
Given all that we know about the U.S. government—that it treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; that it repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; and that it wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad—it is not a stretch to suggest that the government has been overtaken by global industrialists, a new world order, that do not have our best interests at heart.
Indeed, to anyone who’s been paying attention to the goings-on in the world, it is increasingly obvious that we’re already under a new world order, and it is being brought to you by the Global-Industrial Deep State, a powerful cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations.
It is as yet unclear whether the American Police State answers to the Global-Industrial Deep State, or whether the Global-Industrial Deep State merely empowers the American Police State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.
This marriage of governmental and corporate interests is the very definition of fascism.
Where we go wrong is in underestimating the threat of fascism: it is no longer a national threat but has instead become a global menace.
Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and the pharmaceutical industry.
All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins: Walmart, Alphabet (formerly Google), AT&T, Toyota, Apple, Exxon Mobil, Facebook, Lockheed Martin, Berkshire Hathaway, UnitedHealth Group, Samsung, Amazon, Verizon, Nissan, Boeing, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Citigroup… these are just a few of the global corporate giants whose profit-driven policies influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.
The U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations are redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.
Global Surveillance
Spearheaded by the National Security Agency (NSA), which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.
Yet the government does not operate alone.
It cannot.
It requires an accomplice.
Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.
Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept, “The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”
Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).
Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.
Global War Profiteering
War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its best buyers and sellers. In fact, as Reuters reports, “[President] Trump has gone further than any of his predecessors to act as a salesman for the U.S. defense industry.”
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).
Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.
Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.
It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.
Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. Trump, no different from his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically, calling on Congress to approve billions more to hire cops, build more prisons and wage more profit-driven war-on-drugs/war-on-terrorism/war-on-crime programs that pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.
Global Policing
Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.
There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force.
For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”
Then you have the Strong Cities Network program. Funded by the State Department, the U.S. government has partnered with the United Nations to fight violent extremism “in all of its forms and manifestations” in cities and communities across the world. Working with the UN, the federal government rolled out programs to train local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.
What this program is really all about, however, is community policing on a global scale.
Community policing, which relies on a “broken windows” theory of policing, calls for police to engage with the community in order to prevent local crime by interrupting or preventing minor offenses before they could snowball into bigger, more serious and perhaps violent crime.
It sounds like a good idea on paper, but the problem with the broken windows approach is that it has led to zero tolerance policing and stop-and-frisk practices among other harsh police tactics.
When applied to the Strong Cities Network program, the objective is ostensibly to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting ostensibly as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.
Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist. Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert withfusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
Are you starting to get the picture now?
We’re the sitting ducks in the government’s crosshairs.
On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, you can bet that the government and its global partners have already struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.
Unless we can put the brakes on this dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.
It’s taken less than a generation for our freedoms to be eroded and the police state structure to be erected, expanded and entrenched.
Rest assured that the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the global police state.
The current or future occupant of the White House will not save us.
For that matter, anarchy, violence and incivility will not save us.
Unfortunately, the government’s divide and conquer tactics are working like a charm.
Despite the laundry list of grievances that should unite “we the people” in common cause against the government, the nation is more divided than ever by politics, by socio-economics, by race, by religion, and by every other distinction that serves to highlight our differences.
The real and manufactured events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have all conjoined to create an environment in which “we the people” are more divided, more distrustful, and fearful of each other.
What we have failed to realize is that in the eyes of the government, we’re all the same.
In other words, when it’s time for the government to crack down—and that time is coming—it won’t matter whether we voted Republican or Democrat, whether we marched on Washington or stayed home, or whether we spoke out against government misconduct and injustice or remained silent.
When the government and its Global-Industrial Deep State partners in the New World Order crack down, we’ll all suffer.
If there is to be any hope of freeing ourselves, it rests—as it always has—at the local level, with you and your fellow citizens taking part in grassroots activism, which takes a trickle-up approach to governmental reform by implementing change at the local level.
One of the most important contributions an individual citizen can make is to become actively involved in local community affairs, politics and legal battles. As the adage goes, “Think globally, act locally.”
America was meant to be primarily a system of local governments, which is a far cry from the colossal federal bureaucracy we have today. Yet if our freedoms are to be restored, understanding what is transpiring practically in your own backyard—in one’s home, neighborhood, school district, town council—and taking action at that local level must be the starting point.
Responding to unmet local needs and reacting to injustices is what grassroots activism is all about. Attend local city council meetings, speak up at town hall meetings, organize protests and letter-writing campaigns, employ “militant nonviolent resistance” and civil disobedience, which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches.
And then, as I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of communities and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.
Nullification works.
Nullify the court cases. Nullify the laws. Nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the principles on which this nation was founded.
We could transform this nation if only Americans would work together to harness the power of their discontent.
- A Timeline Of Media-Inflamed Fears (2000-2017)
Modern media does not always have the best reputation for providing complex and nuanced commentary.
The news cycle is sensational enough when we’re dealing with the regular issues of the day. But, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, add in some uncertainty and urgency – such as when the world is dealing with an outbreak like SARS, Mad Cow Disease, Ebola, or even Y2K – and each headline seems to get more provocative or speculative than the last.
Today’s graphics come to us from Information is Beautiful, and they show the intensity of news mentions for different topics that stoked frenzies in the media from 2000-2017.
VISUALIZING EBOLA SENSATIONALISM
We all make mistakes, but headlines for Ebola brought a new level of hyperbole to the table.
“Ebola in the air? A nightmare that could happen” – CNN (link)
“New Ebola Cases May Soon Reach 10,000 a Week, Officials Predict” – NYT (link)
“Ebola as ISIS Bio-Weapon?” – Forbes (link)
In fact, the outbreak in 2014 goes down as the most sensationalized events in the last 17 years.
Here’s all other topics scaled to match Ebola mentions (which go “off the page” in the first graph):
Nothing is even close.
By the way, it turned out that Ebola didn’t mutate into a scary airborne virus. The CNN article with the crazy headline even admits in the body of the article itself: “Speculation that Ebola virus disease might mutate into a form that could easily spread among humans through the air is just that: speculation, unsubstantiated by any evidence.”
Meanwhile, Ebola cases hit a maximum rate of 6,987 in a month, mainly because of delayed reporting of older cases in Liberia. Regardless, that is just 17% of the predicted “10,000 cases per week” rate reported in a New York Times headline.
Finally, as you’re probably aware: ISIS did not weaponize Ebola, either. Made for good clickbait, though.
SCALED TO DEATH
When we scale the data to match total deaths, the sensationalism of many of the outbreaks is even clearer:
The death count for Ebola did eventually hit 11,310 globally, and Swine Flu resulted in 18,500 lab-confirmed deaths (and potentially many more). However, most of these outbreaks were relatively harmless in relative terms. The Zika Virus, for example, resulted in only a handful of deaths.
While having zero deaths is certainly the ideal, and many of the issues above should be taken very seriously especially as stories develop, we should be careful not to blow things out of proportion. Making mountains out of molehills does not help anyone, and it adds to growing distrust of media in general.
- Two Sides To Every Coin: When "Security Measures" Become Imprisonment
The most recent article I covered was a piece last week on the illegal alien situation and the president’s handling of it. This is a problem that has plagued the U.S. for decades, and as I wrote before, I agree completely with the way the president has been handling it. Let’s put the president “aside” in this article, however, because no matter how well-intentioned he is, there are forces at work in the U.S. that hold more power than he does.
Subtleties are present that are usually either overlooked or intentionally downplayed so as not to “jar” the consciousness of those who see them. Yes, we need increased border security on the Mexican border, and we need to stem the tide (the “tsunami” is more appropriate) flooding this country with illegal aliens.
Just as with cattle, however, the fence around their pasture keeps things out…and simultaneously keeps the cattle in: the fence works in both directions.
A piece just surfaced from The Hill entitled “Thousands of Americans Stand to be Denied Passports Due to Unpaid Taxes,” written by John Bowden on 7/6/18. While this may come as no surprise to most, it parallels other restrictions such as not permitting those with child support in arrears or bankruptcy proceedings to not be able to depart the country. The law the article refers to was made in 2015 requiring the IRS and State Department to deny U.S. citizens a passport if they owe more than $51,000 in tax debt. The article pointed out that approximately 362,000 Americans fall into that category.
It does not stop there. Our rights as enumerated under the U.S. Constitution are being eroded on a daily basis. The Jennings v. Rodriguez is a Supreme Court decision that affects illegal aliens as well as U.S. citizens. The decision upholds the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) provisions for indefinite detention both for American citizens and/or illegal aliens. The decision also leaves the president with the right to order such a detention… of anyone, for whatever reason… at his discretion.
Major metropolitan airports such as in Atlanta and Chicago are taking biometric information… requiring it of all airline passengers… to pass “under the yoke” of facial recognition software and stored for (yes, you guessed it) “security reasons.”
The government and their “partners” in the form of multinational corporations are not undertaking these actions for no reason.
The bad (and sadly ironic) part is that we the taxpayers are the source of funding for these unconstitutional measures: our taxes pay for the cages being constructed around us and before our very eyes. The masses are unaware and/or they do not care. A shift is being fostered: a “need” for more security [translation: more surveillance] and more accountability [translation: more control] are forced upon us.
The public is being shaped and manipulated: having lost conscience, its consciousness is now being molded and made to feel as if there is a need for security, safety, and being led. By appealing to the hierarchy of needs, the powers that be are fostering a climate of fear and creating a need for increased government intervention and control in the interests of security.
With 9-11, the opponents were “created” out of the Arab world and a policy of “we’re all in it together and under the gun…besieged America” was pursued with the following objectives:
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Re-prime the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) with fresh wars, new “threats” (Iraq, and bin Laden) and taxpayer-funded government contracts to build up the war machine,
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“Justification” for military expansion to further force projection and encroach in other spheres of influence,
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The “crafting” of a war-footing…continuous, with the “battlefield” redefined under the NDAA and the Patriot Act as being not only worldwide, but also within the United States, and
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The beginning of the creation of a complete surveillance state via TIA (Total Information Awareness) as revealed to the American public by Edward Snowden a few years ago.
Now the threat has not been “abandoned,” just changed in form and expanded.
The “foreign threats” of attack have not abated, but their focal points are changed from the Arab enemy to the Russians and Chinese. The largest changes have taken place domestically, that is to say within the continental United States.
The shootings at schools and public places, and the bombings (such as in Austin, TX) have been used to structure more police presence, more surveillance, and an increased “feeling” by citizens of being unsafe. The CCTV cameras keep sprouting up, the technology increases to monitor, record, photograph, eavesdrop, and control the lives and movements of the average citizen.
The branches of government craft laws (Congress) and selectively interpret the laws (Supreme Court) that abrogate our rights while exempting themselves from the provisions they inflict upon us. A president can go either direction, and whichever way is chosen, the tide of movement is not halted. The paradigm shift toward totalitarianism continues either incrementally, in leaps and bounds, or at full force/unrelenting (as in the Obama years).
The walled fortress in the name of security becomes the fully enclosed prison. Only the direction of the top tier of barbed wire…inward or outwardly pointing…reveals the nature. We the taxpayers pay for the cage, a prison that expands by the day. There will no longer be a need to keep everything outside of the pasture. The cattle will be kept in, and the wolves are already inside as well.
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- Could "Super Suits" For Baby Boomers Defuse The Demographic Time Bomb?
A Silicon Valley startup is gambling on the demographic time bomb that is set to explode in the Western world over the next several decades. The company hopes baby boomers will abandon their canes, wheelchairs, and walkers for futuristic robotic-powered “super suits” that works with the user’s muscles to help boost strength. Just imagine if grandma was turned into a cyborg with one of these contraptions…
The ‘super suit’ helps boost the power of the wearer’s muscles. (Source: Seismic/BBC)
The company called Seismic, an apparel and robotics company spin-off from SRI International, has debuted a new kind of technology that millennials hope could be the solution to defuse the demographic time bomb.
The wearable powered suits aim to improve the wearer’s core strength and turn baby boomers into productive beings once more. The suit’s ‘electric muscles,’ powered by miniature motors are embedded into the futuristic, Under Armour-like clothing around the joints of the body via grips in the suit that function like human tendons.
Motor-powered ‘muscles’ are attached to the clothing near the wearer’s joints. (Source: Seismic/BBC)
A computer and sensors monitor the user’s body movements are also integrated into the suit; complex software with machine learning characteristics decide when the smart clothing should provide extra energy to the user. The hardware in the suit is of low-profile hexagon-shaped pods for a sleek design.
“Right now the only kinds of products that can help people are walkers and canes,” Rich Mahoney, founder and CEO of Seismic told BBC. “The other option is to stay home or to limit your activity. And most people choose that because they don’t really want to associate themselves with those other kinds of products.”
For saleability purposes, Seismic partnered with designer Yves Béhar. “The goal is to make a product that you actually want to wear, not one that you have to wear,” Béhar told BBC. “Comfort is extremely important, as well as aesthetics.”
Seismic plans to debut the powered suit at the Future Starts Here, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London later this year. The company plans to target demographically challenged markets including the US, Japan, and the UK.
Wearable smart apparel for baby boomers and the ‘senior market’ is set to explode in the next decade. The percentage of the global population that is 65 or older will double from 10 percent to 20 percent by 2050, according to Visual Capitalist.
The company is also exploring clothing lines to help those who have experienced strokes and children with muscular dystrophy. There are even plans that the product could be used for occupational safety and industrial applications, for example, auto manufacturing, construction activities, and warehousing.
“As a designer, my focus is in ensuring that this technology is used in a way that makes sense for us as humans – that it improves our daily lives,” said Béhar.
He believes that wearable smart technology is in its infancy. “Ten years from now, technology will only be more invisible,” he added.
So, Seismic is an example of Silicon Valley millennials racing against time with technology to defuse the demographic time bomb that is poised to become one of the most significant social transformations this country has ever seen. The goal, well, it is to turn the baby boomer generation into productive cyborgs and avoid a collapse. Something tells us the collision at play is irreversible.
- Which Companies Generate the Highest Revenue Per Employee?
Submitted by Priceonomics
The Standard & Poor‘s 500 Index includes the 500 largest American companies listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ. In 2017, the S&P 500 index increased by 22% from 2016-2017. S&P 500 companies generated $11 trillion in combined revenue and employed more than 25 million people worldwide.
In this report, we rank the companies by Revenue Per Employee (RPE) to explore how efficiently the companies utilize human capital. We will examine how the ranking of these companies changed from last year (S&P – Revenue Per Employee Perspective 2016). Energy and Healthcare companies remained high on the list, while Industrials and Consumer Discretionaries continue to perform the worst.
The table below shows the top 50 companies by Revenue Per Employee in 2017 in S&P 500, along with how they have moved in the rankings relative to last year’s analysis.
Data source: Craft
Twenty-four Energy companies and ten Healthcare companies made the list. Energy company Valero Energy Corporation passed AmerisourceBergen and topped the list. Newcomers to the S&P 500 (compared to 2016), Everst Re Group, and Andeavor made the made the list, replacing Murphy Oil Corporation, whose RPE fell by 15% in 2017 and has been removed from the S&P 500.
We specifically omitted the Real Estate sector, particularly real estate investment trusts (REIT). REIT make revenue from pooling investor money to purchase, rent, or sell real estate. At least 90% of taxable income must be distributed to shareholders. The companies that we excluded from the list include Host Hotels & Resorts, which owns and operates mainly luxury hotels, and Welltower and HCP, which invest primarily in real estate serving the healthcare industry, including senior housing, assisted living, and medical office.
By grouping the companies into different sectors, we computed the average RPE for each sector to examine the relative labor-intensity of different industries.
Data source: Craft
For Energy companies, the business is dependent more on natural resource and physical capital rather than human capital. As a result, they are able to generate revenue with less reliance on employees than other more labor-intensive sectors.
The table below shows the lowest 10 companies in the index ranked by PRE:
Data source: Craft
Hanesbrands, Accenture, Starbucks, Chipotle, Cognizant, and Darden Restaurants remained on the list of 10 lowest companies by RPE from last year.
We took a deeper look at why consulting companies such as Cognizant and Accenture have among the lowest revenue per employee. Accenture and Cognizant are IT consulting with 425,000 employees and 260,000 employees respectively. As both companies are IT providers and provide consulting services, they depend on large teams to deliver services. The two firms performance are strongly linked to how many consultants they have and how many engagements they book. At Accenture, the employee headcount grew by 12% from 2014-2017, while revenue increased 5%. A larger increase in hiring than revenue led to a decrease in RPE.
For Tech companies’, we looked at RPE and Compound Annual Growth Rate of Revenue and Employees between 2014-2017:
Data source: Craft
There is generally a growth in Revenue per Employee for Tech companies. Most companies on this list grew their revenue faster than employee headcount.
Key takeaways:
- The Energy sector continues to be the highest performer on RPE, representing almost 50% of the Top 50 list. Since 2016, the average RPE in the Energy sector has increased from $1.79M to $2.27M.
- The Industrials sector remains the lowest performer on RPE, even with an increase from $321,000 in average RPE to $332,000 in average RPE from 2016-2017.
- Tech companies are becoming increasingly more productive by growing their RPE.
- Japanese Yield Curve Collapses, Investors Give Up Hopes Of BoJ Normalization
While a day doesn’t go by when the US Treasury yield curve’s plunge is not discussed (and its flattening again today)…
As its recessionary-signaling prowess from the past is questioned by those that know better than it’s different this time – there is another yield curve in the world that has collapsed with far less media attention…
Japan.
The decline in Japan’s yield curve is a sign investors have given up on the Bank of Japan readying for a normalization of its unprecedented monetary policy, according to Mitsubishi UFJ Kokusai Asset Management.
This curve collapse is happening even as The BoJ is ‘stealth tapering’ its bond-purchases…
Expectations that the Bank of Japan wants a steeper yield curve to pave the way for tighter policy are all but gone, given the paltry rise in inflation, said general manager of trading Akio Kato in an interview in Tokyo.
Despite the fact that Japan has suffered (officially) five recessions in the last 30 years, the JGB 2s10s yield curve has not been inverted since 1991…
And perhaps more concerning, now that investors are losing faith in The BoJ’s normalization, Kokusai’s Kato warns that, there’s “nothing to put a brake” on further flattening.
- "They Go Low, We Go High": China Quotes Michelle Obama, Sees "Darkest Hour" For The World
China is now officially part of the anti-Trump resistance.
Readers will recall that on Saturday, among the various responses by Chinese officials to the launch of trade war by the US (and instant retaliation by China), we quoted Frank Ning, chairman of state-owned Sinochem Group, who said that “what Trump is doing is more than crazy” in reference to Trump’s tariffs. “The biggest victim from a trade war will be the one who initiates trade protectionism,” Ning said at the APEC China CEO Forum in Beijing.
But the punchline was Ning’s closing remarks, in which he cited Michelle Obama’s 2016 line from the last U.S. presidential election campaign that “When they go low, we go high“, a phrase which was subsequently adopted by Hillary Clinton (We also wondered if Ning was aware that the extensive use of that line as part of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 elections ended badly for the Democrats).
Well, fast forward just a few days to today, when China has decided to double down on what ended up being a losing campaign slogan, and when assistant minister for China’s Ministry of Commerce, Li Chenggang, commenting on the latest trade escalation at a forum in Beijing today, said that in trade “they go low, we go high.” Which of course makes absolutely no sense, because just minutes later an official from China’s Commerce Ministry reiterated that China will take countermeasures, which – for anyone confused – means that when “they go low, we will go just as low if not lower.“
Chnggang wasn’t done with the bizarrely nonsensical verbal diarrhea, and said that the latest round of proposed US tariffs on $200bn in Chinese goods “harms the WTO trade order” that the US is “escalating” the trade tension, that “tariffs disrupt globalization” and concluded that the global investment environment is seeing its “darkest hour.”
And while nobody has expressly stated what they will be, both a Chinese Commerce Ministry Official and a PBOC adviser, i.e. the guys in charge of yuan devaluation and dumping Treasuries, said China is consider countermeasures.
And while we await the official MofCom response, due later today (as previewed earlier), according to Suan Teck Kin, head of research at United Oferseas Bank, China may retaliate by imposing higher tariffs on U.S. products – i.e., more than 10%, instead of targeting a greater amount of US exports as those simply don’t exist – so it can match the proposed 10% tariffs on $200b of Chinese imports. Suan also said that China may also limit U.S. service exports, worth more than $50b per year, in terms of tourism, education and banking services.
Ultimately, as we just said minutes ago, the uncertainty for the market is how China will retaliate: “Whichever way, the markets will take it negatively after the calm over the past few days.” Suan concluded.
- Riots: 3 Places All Hell Has Broken Loose In The Last Few Days
Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
A lot of people like to think that the SHTF is some distant thing that probably won’t ever happen. But, in reality, it happens every single day, someplace in the world. Riots have occurred all over the world recently, stranding travelers, destroying property, and causing serious injuries and death.
Here are 3 different places where all hell has broken loose in just the past few days.
Haiti
It’s a bad time to be in Haiti right now. Apparently, an increase in gasoline prices has caused people to take to the street. A number of American missionaries are currently hunkering down in fear for their lives. They’re unable to get out of the country because many airlines have canceled all flights in and out of the country.
Savannah Peek, a missionary with a team from Richmond County, North Carolina, told WSOC said they are terrified for their lives…
…“We heard gunshots start and they were very close,” said Peek. “At this point, we all dropped immediately to the ground. We’re all on our hands and knees. Everyone’s screaming, everyone’s crying.”
Peek said guns were handed out to civilians for protection.
“People started passing out guns to civilians because we thought the (men) were about to break in and rob us, kill us, start a fire. We had no idea,” she said. (source)
The US Embassy in Haiti issued the following alert:
Due to continuing demonstrations, roadblocks, and violence across Port-au-Prince and throughout Haiti, U.S. citizens should continue to shelter in place. Do not travel to the airport unless you confirmed your flight is departing. Flights are canceled today and the airport has limited food and water available.
Telecommunications services, including Internet and phone lines, have been affected throughout Haiti. It may be difficult to reach people through normal communication methods.
U.S. Embassy personnel are still under a shelter-in-place order. The embassy will continue to monitor the situation.
The U.S. Embassy will be closed for routine services Monday July 9. Non-emergency appointments will be rescheduled for a later date. The Embassy remains open for emergency U.S. citizen services.
Actions to take:
- Shelter in place. Do not attempt to travel at this time.
- Avoid protests and any large gathering of people.
- Do not attempt to drive through roadblocks.
- If you encounter a roadblock, turn around and get to a safe area.
- Let family and friends know if you are safe. (source)
Here’s some shocking video footage of the riots.
France
In Nantes, a city in France, a battle has been going on between African migrants and the French police for days now, after the police shot a 22-year-old migrant named Aboubakar Fofana. The riots went on for 4 days but eased when relatives of the Aboubakar Fofana said they were filing a lawsuit.
Initially, police said that the victim was shot because he tried to run over a police officer with a car. Later, they admitted the shooting was in fact NOT self-defense, but an accident.
The worst of riots looked like a war between police and migrants.
The police forces were deployed massively in the neighborhoods of the rioters. They fired Molotov cocktails at Breil and Bellevue and responded with tear gas grenades.
In total, 35 vehicles were burned. To prevent a resurgence of fires, since last night, Friday, July 6, the Region has banned the retail sale of fuel and fireworks.
In the Breil district, the beginning of a fire hit a building of the Nantes Habitat social landlord. The damage, however, seems small: except for some traces of fire near the building, only a window is barred by a sign; the building is intact.
“Put your weapons, gang of assassins” or “you are going to be afraid in your houses” are the slogans that were launched to the CRS came to reinforcement in the districts. (source)
According to Zero Hedge, things are only going to get worse in France.
The GEFIRA team expect riots in France to become more and more violent and eventually lethal. Like most Western European societies and the US, the demographic change and the gradual replacement will come with a hefty price.
There are signs that white French bourgeoisie youth will join the violent protests, like Black bloc and Antifa. (source)
Here’s some video footage of the chaos in Nantes.
Portland
And right here in the United States, violent riots have erupted over the Trump administration, political differences, and immigration policies. Portland has been the heart of many political movements since the election of President Trump, starting the day after the election in which Hillary Clinton suffered a surprise loss.
The riots in the city have been going on for the past couple of months, with some particularly heated moments occurring in early July. A Patriot Prayer rally turned violent when members of Antifa showed up and began pelting them with firecrackers, eggs, and water bottles.
The counterprotesters were identified as the Eugene Antifa, who named their demonstration“Defend PDX: Patriot Prayer’s Violence Must End.”
“It is very important that antifascists keep up the pressure so that we can stop them once and for all,” a Facebook event page for the counterprotest read.
“While many acolytes have broken away from Gibson at this point, the core that remains, largely Proud Boys, have grown increasingly violent,” the page said. “For this reason we must sustain our campaign, and keep up our efforts on as many fronts as possible until they completely cease their despicable activity.” (source)
The demonstrators didn’t hesitate to fight back and police used firecrackers, smoke bombs, flash bangs and “aerial distraction in an attempt to disperse the crowd.
This isn’t the first time the groups have gone head to head. They also became violent toward one another in early June and previously, in 2017. Below is a video of what some people are calling “The Battle of Portland.”
What can we learn from all this?
I’m all for protesting and demonstrating against things that are unjust. The right to peaceful protest is written right into the American constitution.
But what we can all learn from this is how quickly something that starts out as a peaceful protest can be disrupted and turned into a violent riot. It can happen anywhere, at any time, and if you are unfortunate enough to be nearby, it can be a life-threatening emergency in some cases.
Here are the things to remember:
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Learn to watch the signs and foresee when violence is about to erupt so you can get yourself and your family safely away.
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Make a plan to keep your family safe during times of civil unrest if it should occur near your home. (This article can help.)
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Avoid situations that are likely to become violent.
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Remember that fire is one of the most common weapons used in a riot.
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If you are traveling when violence erupts, plan to hunker down. Contact the American Embassy for help. DO NOT go to the airport unless you know for sure your flight is definitely taking off.
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Remember that the police and military may be every bit as violent as the crowd and will not have time to differentiate between you and a protester.
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If you’re caught in a crowd, move diagonally to get yourself out of the masses. Hold on to children so that you do not get separated.
The best thing you can do is avoid trouble. The second best thing you can do is know how to handle it if trouble comes to you.
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