- Russian Warship Packing 'Vomit Weapon' Sparks Fear After Sailing Down English Channel
A Russian warship carrying a “hallucination” weapon that “makes enemies vomit” successfully navigated the English channel over the weekend after conducting “air defense and countersabotage exercises” near Scotland’s only air force base, according to the UK’s Sunday Times.
Royal Navy warship HMS Defender was deployed to shadow the Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov and three auxiliary vessels, which performed “provocative drills” in territorial waters, according to SNP defense spokesman Stewart McDonald.
The Gorshkov – the first of a new class of Russian frigates – embarked from the Barents Sea port town of Murmansk, home to Russia’s northern fleet.
Hallucinating device
According to the Times, the Gorshkov is equipped with a “5P-42 Filin” or “Owl” optical device which can “provoke hallucinations and sickness in enemies using fast pulses of high-intensity light beams.”
The non-lethal Filin can be used at night or during twilight and is said to be effective from up to two kilometres away. In tests, volunteers who had the weapon turned on them found it was impossible to aim a firearm at a target protected by it. A fifth experienced something like a hallucination and about half noticed “signs of spatial disorientation, as well as nausea and dizziness”. The device is said to agitate the optic nerves of the enemy by modulating the brightness of the light. –The Times
A Royal Navy spokesman said that the Defender was “monitoring the Russian task group and keeping track of their activity in areas of national interest.”
Scottish politicians, meanwhile, weren’t reassured by the Royal Navy’s response to the Russian ships.
“The UK’s Ministry of Defence is failing Scotland, allowing Russian navy vessels sailing through our territorial waters at will to conduct provocative drills like this,” said SNP Defense spokesman Stewart McDonald.
That said, a Royal Navy insider tells the Times that the Russian group was forced to take shelter in the Scottish islands due to bad weather, and continued their journey when conditions improved.
“They were waiting out the weather. Anyone who says they were trying to agitate is pushing fake news,” said the insider.
For anyone who wants to make their own barf gun, watch below:
- The Orientalism Of Western Russophobia
Authored by Max Parry via Off-Guardian.org,
Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of Edward W. Said’s pioneering book, Orientalism, as well as fifteen years since the Palestinian-American intellectual’s passing. To bid farewell to such an important scholar shortly after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which Said fiercely criticized until his dying breath before succumbing to leukemia, made an already tremendous loss that much more impactful.
An illustration from a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Russia’s Turn to its Asian Past” depicting Vladimir Putin as Genghis Khan.
His seminal text forever reoriented political discourse by painstakingly examining the overlooked cultural imperialism of colonial history in the West’s construction of the so-called Orient. Said meticulously interrogated the Other-ing of the non-Western world in the humanities, arts, and anthropology down to its minutiae. As a result, the West was forced to confront not just its economic and political plunder but the long-established cultural biases filtering the lens through which it viewed the East which shaped its dominion over it.
His writings proved to be so influential that they laid the foundations for what is now known as post-colonial theory. This became an ironic category as the author himself would strongly reject any implication that the subjugation of developing countries is a thing of the past. How apropos that the Mandatory Palestine-born writer’s death came in the midst of the early stages of the ‘War on Terror’ that made clear Western imperialism is very much alive.
Despite its history of ethnic cleansing, slavery, and war, the United States had distinguished itself from Britain and France in that it had never established its own major colonies within the Middle East, Asia or North Africa in the heart of the Orient. According to Said, it was now undergoing this venture as the world’s sole remaining superpower following the end of the Cold War with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Today’s political atmosphere makes the Bush era seem like eons ago. Thanks to the shameful rehabilitation of neoconservatism by centrist extremists, Americans fail to understand how Trumpism emerged from the pandora’s box of destructiveness of Bush policies that destabilized the Middle East and only increased international terrorism. Since then, another American enemy has been manufactured in the form of the Russian Federation and its President, Vladimir Putin, who drew the ire of the West after a resurgent Moscow under his leadership began to contain U.S. hegemony. This reached a crescendo during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election with the dubious accusations of election interference made by the same intelligence agencies that sold the pack of lies that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. The establishment has even likened the alleged intrusion by Moscow to 9/11.
If a comparison between the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and the still unproven allegations of Russian meddling seems outrageous, it is precisely such an analogy that has been made by Russiagate’s own biggest proponents, from neoconservative columnist Max Boot to Hillary Clinton herself.
Truthfully, it is the climate of hysteria and dumbing down of discourse to such rigid dichotomies following both events where a real similarity can be drawn. The ‘with us or against us’ chasm that followed 9/11 has reemerged in the ‘either/or’ post-election polarity of the Trump era whereby all debate within the Overton window is pigeonholed into a ‘pro vs. anti-Trump’ or ‘pro vs. anti-Russia’ false dilemma. It is even perpetrated by some on the far left, e.g. if one critiques corporate media or Russiagate, they are grouped as ‘pro-Trump’ or ‘pro-Putin’ no matter their political orientation. This dangerous atmosphere is feeding an unprecedented wave of censorship of dissenting voices across the spectrum.
In his final years, not only did Edward Said condemn the Bush administration but highlighted how corporate media was using bigoted tropes in its representations of Arabs and Muslims to justify U.S. foreign policy. Even though it has gone mostly undetected, the neo-McCarthyist frenzy following the election has produced a similar travesty of caricatures depicting Russia and Vladimir Putin. One such egregious example was a July 2018 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Russia’s Turn to Its Asian Past” featuring an illustration portraying Vladimir Putin as Genghis Khan.
The racist image and headline suggested that Russia is somehow inherently autocratic because of its past occupation under the Mongol Empire during its conquest of Eastern Europe and the Kievan Rus state in the 13th century. In a conceptual revival of the Eurocentric trope of Asiatic or Oriental despotism, the hint is that past race-mixing is where Russia inherited this tyrannical trait. When the cover story appeared, there was virtually no outcry due to the post-election delirium and everyday fear-mongering about Russia that is now commonplace in the media.
The overlooked casual racism used to demonize Russia in the new Cold War’s propaganda doesn’t stop there. One of the main architects of Russiagate, former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, in an interviewwith NBC‘s Meet the Press on the reported meddling stated:
And just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned.”
Clapper, whose Office of the DNI published the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”, has been widely praised and cited by corporate media as a trustworthy source despite his previous history of making intentionally false statements at a public hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee denying that the National Security Agency (NSA) was unconstitutionally spying on U.S. citizens.
The disclosures of NSA activities by whistleblower Edward Snowden that shocked the world should have discredited Clapper’s status as a reliable figure, but not for mainstream media which has continuously colluded with the deep state during the entire Russia investigation. In fact, the scandal has been an opportunity to rehabilitate figures like the ex-spymaster complicit in past U.S. crimes from surveillance to torture. Shortly after the interview with NBC, Clapper repeated his prejudiced sentiments against Russians in a speech at the National Press Club in Australia:
But as far as our being intimate allies, trusting buds with the Russians that is just not going to happen. It is in their genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed, to the United States and to Western democracies.”
The post-election mass Trump derangement has not only enabled wild accusations of treason to be made without sufficient evidence to support them, but such uninhibited xenophobic remarks to go without notice or disapproval.
In fact, liberals have seemingly abandoned their supposed progressive credence across the board while suffering from their anti-Russia neurological disorder. In an exemplar of yellow journalism, outlets like NBC News published sensational articles alleging that because of the perceived ingratiation between Trump and Putin, there was an increase in Russian ‘birth tourism’ in the United States.
More commonly known by the pejorative ‘anchor babies’, birth tourism is the false claim that many immigrants travel to countries for the purpose of having children in order to obtain citizenship. While there may be individual cases, the idea that it is an epidemic is a complete myth — the vast majority of immigration is motivated by labor demands and changes in political or socio-economic factors in their native countries, whether it is from the global south or Eastern Europe. Trump has been rightfully criticized for promoting this falsehood regarding undocumented immigrants and his executive orders targeting birthright citizenship, but it appears liberals are willing to unfairly apply this same fallacy toward Russians for political reasons.
In order to make sense of the current groupthink hysteria towards Moscow, it must be understood in its context as an extension of the ongoing doctoring of history regarding U.S.-Russia relations since the Cold War. Americans living within the empire are proselytized into a glorified and nationalist version of their entire background, beginning with merchants and explorers ‘discovering’ the continent and the whitewashing of indigenous genocide. This imaginary narrative includes the version of WWII taught in U.S. schools and the arms race with the Soviet Union that followed. The West presents an entirely Anglospheric perspective of the war starting with its very chronology.
For example, it is said that the conflict ‘officially’ began with the September 1st, 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. This mythology immediately frames the war from an Eurocentric viewpoint by separating the Sino-Japanese war that was already underway as the Pacific Ocean theater began long before the ‘surprise’ Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and U.S. entry into the conflict.
The truth is that nearly everything Americans are taught about U.S. participation in the war is either a mischaracterization or a lie, with its role in the Allied victory inflated exponentially. The widely held misconception that the 1944 Normandy landings in the Allied invasion of France was the decisive turning point in Europe is a fairy tale. The ‘D’ in D-Day does not stand for ‘decision’ as many Westerners assume, and when the Allied forces converged on Germany from East and West it was the Soviets who captured Berlin.
Although Operation Overlord may have been the largest invasion transported by sea in history, the real watershed in the Great Patriotic War was the Soviet victory in the Battle of Stalingrad the previous year, the biggest defeat ever suffered by the German army. The U.S. only took on the Wehrmacht once it was exhausted by the Red Army which bore the real burden of overcoming Germany.
Just three years earlier, the British army had been completely vanquished by the Nazi armed forces. Omitted from Hollywood folklore like Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk is that the Germans were entirely capable of pressing on with an invasion of the British isles but abruptly halted their advance — what stopped them? Quite simply, Hitler’s fanatical desire to conquer the Soviet Union and eradicate communism which he regarded as a greater threat to the Third Reich than Western capitalism. It is not surprising that the Eastern Front became a higher priority considering that the ruling classes in Britain, France and the U.S. had previously financed the German rearmament in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
The Germans did not hold the same hatred for the West that it reserved for the Russians. In fact, the Führer personally admired the U.S. so much for the extermination of its natives that he named his armored private train ‘Amerika’, a mobile version of the Wolf’s Lair. The Nuremberg race statutes were partly inspired by Jim Crow segregation laws in the U.S. and many of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials tried to excuse their atrocities by arguing the similarity between Nazi race theories and the eugenicist movement which actually originated in the United States.
Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele was even previously employed as an assistant to the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics institute that was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Hitler also preferred an attack on the Soviets over an invasion of Britain because of the eugenics of Lebensraum. Nazi Germany, like Britain and France, was really an imperial settler colonialist state and Hitler viewed the Slav inhabitants of the USSR as ethnically inferior to the ‘master race.’ The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had been a strategic move to buy time for the Soviets in preparation for a German onslaught, at the time the most powerful military power in the world.
Britain and France had rebuffed Stalin’s efforts to form an alliance in 1938, leaving the USSR no choice but to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany, knowing full well it was only a matter of time until Hitler would eventually embark on his Masterplan for the East.
Operation Barbarossa, in June 1941, broke the agreement and the German dictator ultimately sealed his own fate. Although the Soviets were victorious, the slaughter that proceeded it had no parallel in human history as 27 million citizens would lose their lives in the fight compared to less than half a million Americans. Even worse, the West has made a mockery of this sacrifice with their refusal to fully acknowledge the USSR’s contribution despite the fact that they did the vast majority of the fighting and dying while 80% of all German casualties were on the Eastern Front.
Meanwhile, the Cold War had already begun before the Second World War even ended. Whether or not Stalin was fully aware of either the U.S. capability or plans to use the atomic bomb against Japan is still a matter of debate, as U.S. President Harry S. Truman changed his story numerous times over the years.
Nevertheless, their use is incorrectly attributed by the West to have brought the war’s end and very few Americans realize this tale was told entirely for political reasons. The purported rationale was to allegedly save the lives of American soldiers that would be lost in a future Allied invasion of Japan planned for the Autumn of 1945. Controlling the narrative became crucial in ‘justifying’ the use of such deadly weapons which held the secret motivation to begin an arms race with the Soviets.
Stalin and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had agreed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 that the USSR would eventually break its neutrality treaty with Japan and enter the Pacific theater later in the year. That was until Roosevelt died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage just a few months later while American nuclear physicists were busy at work enriching uranium in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Then, just a day prior to newly inaugurated President Truman’s meeting with Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in July, the U.S. army and Project Y successfully detonated a nuclear weapon for the first time with the Trinity test as part of the expensive Manhattan Project. After his face-to-face with Truman at Potsdam, whom everyone agrees at least hinted to Stalin of the new U.S. weaponry, the Soviet premier suspected the new U.S. leader would go back on the previous agreement at Yalta with Roosevelt that included compromises with the USSR in the Pacific.
The ugly truth is that the U.S. was well aware that the Japanese were willing to conditionally surrender on the basis of immunity for Emperor Hirohito. However, the U.S. secretly wanted to achieve an Allied victory ideally without Soviet participation so it could demonstrate its exclusive nuclear capability in order to dominate the post-war order. Japan didn’t relinquish following the first bombing of Hiroshima but the second, Nagasaki, three days later — both of which mostly impacted civilians, not its military.
What else happened on August 9th, 1945? The Soviet Union declared war on Japan upon realizing that the U.S. was backtracking on its pledge with the underhanded use of ‘Fat Man and Little Boy’ that instantly killed more than 200,000 civilians. The timing gave the appearance that the bomb resulted in the surrender when it was the Soviet invasion of occupied Manchuria in the north against Japan’s military stronghold that was the real tipping point which led to an unconditional acceptance of defeat.
According to the Western narrative, the Cold War only began following Winston Churchill’s invitation to the U.S. by Truman after being surprisingly voted out of office in 1946. At Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, he gave a speech entitled “Sinews of Peace”, widely known as the Iron Curtain speech, where he condemned Soviet policies in Europe and popularized the moniker for the boundary dividing the continent after the war:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an “iron curtain” has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.”
Although the term ‘iron curtain’ predates Cold War usage to describe various barriers political or otherwise, what is not commonly known is that Churchill likely appropriated the term from its originator, none other than the German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels himself, who used it in reference to the Soviet Union. In February 1945, he wrote in Das Reich newspaper:
If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, would occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the Reich. An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered.”
The ‘Nazi megaphone’ himself may have gotten the term from the Wehrmacht propaganda publication Signal which in 1943 published an article entitled “Behind the Iron Curtain” that described:
He who has listened in on the interrogation of a Soviet prisoner of war knows that once the dam is broken, a flood of words begins as he tries to make clear what he experienced behind the mysterious iron curtain, which more than ever separates the world from the Soviet Union.
Is it any wonder that British newspaper The Guardian is now illustrating cartoons in its anti-Russia propaganda today that imitate Goebbels’ anti-Soviet posters during WWII?
Although Stalin was unaware of Churchill’s lifting of Nazi phraseology, he still detected the resemblance between Western and Third Reich policies toward the Soviet Union in the Fulton speech during an interview with Pravda:
A point to be noted is that in this respect Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation.
Mr. Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world. The German race theory led Hitler and his friends to the conclusion that the Germans, as the only superior nation, should rule over other nations. The English race theory leads Mr. Churchill and his friends to the conclusion that the English-speaking nations, as the only superior nations, should rule over the rest of the nations of the world.
Actually, Mr. Churchill, and his friends in Britain and the United States, present to the non-English speaking nations something in the nature of an ultimatum: “Accept our rule voluntarily, and then all will be well; otherwise war is inevitable.”
But the nations shed their blood in the course of five years’ fierce war for the sake of the liberty and independence of their countries, and not in order to exchange the domination of the Hitlers for the domination of the Churchills. It is quite probable, accordingly, that the non-English-speaking nations, which constitute the vast majority of the population of the world, will not agree to submit to a new slavery.”
It is easy to see the parallels between Stalin’s explanation for the geopolitical tensions underlying the Cold War and Edward Said’s postcolonial theory. From a Marxist perspective, one of Said’s shortcomings was a reductionism in understanding empire to cultural supremacy, one of the reasons he unfortunately conflated Marxism with Orientalism as well. When it came to the Cold War, Said also demonstrated a lack of understanding of internationalism. He wrote:
By the time of the Bandung Conference in 1955, the entire Orient had gained its independence from the Western empires and gained a new configuration of imperial powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Unable to recognize “its” Orient in the new Third World, Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient.”
Yet who foremost ‘armed’ the movements of national liberation? The USSR, including support for the Palestinians during most of its history. Nevertheless, Stalin’s description of the West’s prerogative for post-war hegemony based on the belief in its primacy has many overlaps with the idea that the Occident exercised patronizing dominance over the East.
Today, even though the Berlin Wall has long since fallen and Eastern Europe is under free enterprise, the political establishment in the West is still clinging to this attitude and misunderstanding of Moscow to fulfill its need for a permanent global nemesis with a desire to eventually colonize Russia with foreign capital as it did under Boris Yeltsin.
Russia has historically possessed a unique and ambivalent identity located between the East and West, having been invaded by both European and Asian empires in previous centuries. Said included Russia in Orientalism in his analysis of European countries and their attitude toward the East, but did not note that Russia is in many respects the Orient within the Occident, as more than 75% of its territory as the largest nation in the world is actually located in Asia while three quarters of its population live on the European side.
Russia may be partly European, but it is certainly not Western. Then again, Europe is not a continent unto itself but geographically connected to Asia with the arbitrary division between them based on cultural differences, not landmass, where Russia is an intermediate. Expansionism under Peter the Great may have brought Western European ‘cultural values’ and modernization to Russia, but the majority of its territory itself remains in Asia.
Even after the presumed end of the Cold War, Russia has been excluded from the European Union and instead joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), while developing strong ties with China. As recently disclosed documents from the National Security Archive prove, NATO has broken its promise to Mikhail Gorbachev during the George H.W. Bush administration that it not expand eastward following Germany’s enrollment. It has since added 13 countries since 1999, 10 of which were former Warsaw Pact states.
Russia’s alliance with China has been solidified precisely because it is still not treated in the same regard as other European nations even after the adoption of a private sector economy. In order to justify its continued armament and avoid obsolescence, NATO has manufactured an adversarial relationship with Moscow.
Contrary to the widespread perception of his rhetoric, in terms of policy-making President Trump has been equally as hostile to Moscow as his predecessors, if not more so in light of the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). What the usual suspects behind the attempted soft-coup against him fail to understand is that Trump’s tact toward Putin is more likely an inverted version of the ‘only Nixon could go to China’ strategy, an unexpected style of diplomacy based on the pragmatic objective of containing Beijing by dividing America’s two primary foes.
The liberals still in denial about their election defeat continue to underestimate Trump, but the Chinese are not fooled. The architect behind Nixon’s détente with Mao, Henry Kissinger, is even believed to have encouraged Trump to ease tensions with Moscow in order to quarantine China and don’t think they haven’t noticed. Ultimately, the divide between Trump and his enemies in the establishment is really a disagreement over strategy in how to surround China and prevent the inevitable downfall of the U.S. empire.
The ongoing demonization of Moscow is ultimately about China as well. It was only a matter of time until the uncertain allegations of election interference were also leveled against Beijing without proof as a Joint Statement from the U.S. intelligence agencies recently showed.
Make no mistake – underneath the West’s Russophobia lies Sinophobia and as Washington’s real geopolitical challenger, China will in due course emerge as the preferred bogeyman. The bipartisan hawkishness has created an environment where rapprochement and diplomacy of any kind is seen as weakness and even a sign of treason, making the prospect of peace seemingly impossible. As China continues to grow, it will find itself more squarely in the crosshairs of imperialism, regardless of whether Trump’s strategy to renew relations with Moscow against Beijing is successful. Until then cooler heads at the highest levels of government must prevail as they thankfully did at the height of the first Cold War for the sake of peace between Russia, the U.S. and the entire world.
- Air Force Releases Video Of XQ-58A Valkyrie Supersonic Stealth Combat Drone
The Air Force Research Laboratory (ARL) has just published a never before seen video of the Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie, an unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV), which completed its first flight on March 5, 2019, at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.
According to a statement published by the US Air Force, the inaugural test flight of the XQ-58A was a joint effort within ARL’s Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology portfolio, which has been instructed by the Air Force to provide the service with supersonic stealth drones at an affordable cost. These objectives are met by designing and manufacturing drones faster by developing innovative tools, and maturing and leveraging commercial manufacturing processes to reduce build time and cost.
Tuesday’s first test flight is an important step forward for the experimental “loyal wingman” concept that can escort fifth-generation fighters, like the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II, into combat, conduct surveillance missions, and even absorb enemy fire.
Developed for runway independence, the XQ-58A “behaved as expected and completed 76 minutes of flight time,” said the Air Force statement.
ARL and Kratos spent 2.5 years from contract award to develop the XQ-58A. The statement said the stealth drone would have five planned test flights in two phases that evaluate the functionality, aerodynamic performance, and launch and recovery systems.
Doug Szczublewski, AFRL’s XQ-58A Program Manager said, “XQ-58A is the first example of a class of UAV that is defined by low procurement and operating costs while providing game-changing combat capability.”
XQ-58A will have an impressive range of about 3,000 miles. It can carry a payload of 600 lb., including small-diameter bombs and missiles.
- Calling Dr. Strangelove: The Threat Of Nuclear War Cannot Prevent World War III Forever
Today, humanity is confronted with an ugly paradox in that the world’s foremost peacekeepers are nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. One bad move on the geopolitical chessboard, however, could trigger a global catastrophe.
On July 25, 1945, in the waning moments of World War II, then US President Harry S. Truman jotted the following words in his diary, “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world.” But not terrible enough to employ them, it seems.
Just weeks later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese industrial cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, indiscriminately killing some 200,000 civilians in, literally, a flash. Many others died in the years that followed from radiation poisoning and other associated illnesses. If there is a special place in hell for those who would expose the planet to such horrific weapons, Truman must certainly be there.
The historic tragedy is not without some dark irony. Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity spearheaded the development of atomic weapons, was worried that Adolf Hitler would acquire the deadly know-how before the West. This prompted him in 1939 to write a letter to Truman’s predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, advising him to expedite research into nuclear fission. American scientists, working in the secret Manhattan Project, succeeded beyond Einstein’s wildest dreams.
The famous physicist, appalled by the devastation visited upon the two Japanese cities, expressed regret over his fateful decision to warn the Americans.
“Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I would have never lifted a finger.”
Since then, the world has been forced to live with the knowledge that all life on earth could be quickly extinguished in the event of some mishap or conflict. Yet this knowledge has not stopped most governments from coveting nuclear weapons because they understand this technology is their best life insurance policy, so to speak.
Indeed, only the simple-minded could have failed to take away lessons with regards to the West’s top hits list. A brief glance at the candidates designated for US-led regime change – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Yugoslavia and Syria as the most obvious – demonstrated an obvious fact: only unarmed countries need to worry about foreign actors determining their ‘democratic’ future.
In marked contrast to those weaker countries that ‘suffer what they must’, members of the nuclear club (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea, while it is generally recognized that Israel possesses nuclear weapons although it does not officially acknowledge them) can rest easy in the belief that they are safe from outside attack.
Lately, however, that self-confidence has been greatly shaken by a spate of dramatic events that have given the entire world pause. The most recent wake-up call came this month with a series of aerial dogfights between Pakistan and India – two countries that possess over 100 nuclear warheads apiece. The incident demonstrated exactly how fast things can spiral out of control, especially when third-party actors i.e. terrorists are involved in the equation.
On February 14, the Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed carried out a suicide attack on an Indian military convoy in the Pulwama District that killed over 40 soldiers. Less than two weeks later, New Delhi – accusing Islamabad of going soft on terrorism (sound familiar?) – retaliated by hitting a “terrorist camp” in a Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. Tensions mounted the following day as the Pakistani military carried out airstrikes along the Line of Control (LoC), shooting down two Indian aircraft that crossed into its territory and capturing one pilot, who has since been released.
It is impossible to read such reports without recalling that both Pakistan and India possess nuclear weapons. This places the enemy combatants in a curious position in that they must practice extreme restraint so as to avoid a ‘worse-case scenario’, and we all know what that is. Whether or not the two regional rivals can continue to keep cool heads remains to be seen.
Another recent incident involving nuclear powers came as a tragic accident, although no less disconcerting. In September, four Israeli F-16 fighter jets launched a reckless attack on Latakia, Syria that resulted in the downing of a Russian military aircraft, which was accidentally hit by Syrian ground fire. The incident resulted in the death of 15 Russian crew members, as well as heightened global tensions.
The Russian Ministry of Defense accused Israel of deliberately using the Russian aircraft to attract fire in that the Israeli aircraft failed to either change their approach to the intended targets or give Moscow enough time to move the Il-20 to safety.
Russian MoD: 3D video of Il-20 downing off Syrian coast https://t.co/TYnUB0j20K pic.twitter.com/5cynnLIxyE
— RT (@RT_com) September 24, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Although tensions eventually calmed down between Moscow and Tel Aviv, the incident provided a grim reminder that the world is becoming chaotic to the point where accidents between nuclear powers are increasingly likely.
By far, the most disturbing development on the global stage, however, is the spectacle of Washington unilaterally withdrawing from arms control treaties – specifically the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Needless to say, these moves will rekindle the global arms race – a positive development for defense contractors, no doubt, but an unmitigated disaster for everyone else.
Most worrisome is that the US is trashing these landmark treaties at the very same time it has built a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, while actively building up its military footprint smack on Russia’s border. Moscow, naturally, has responded in kind, with Vladimir Putin having recently unveiled an array of weapon systems that will make US-led NATO think twice about making any aggressive moves against Russia.
Judging by such American antics, one almost gets the impression that it believes a nuclear war is somehow a winnable venture. And there are grounds to believe that is the case. According to a 2017 report, for example, a panel of Pentagon officials have called on the president to consider a “tailored nuclear option for limited use.”
As described in the National Interest, using low-yield nuclear weapons against an adversary’s conventional forces will “demonstrate that you mean serious business and might be crazy enough to launch an all out nuclear attack.”
Judging by what transpired in 1945 against the Japanese, is there any reason to doubt that many people could believe that America is “crazy enough” to do the unthinkable for a second time?
With such deranged ideas floating around, it’s no wonder that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit group of academics devoted to the study of security issues, said the world is now perched at “two minutes before midnight” with regards to a nuclear cataclysm due to ongoing events that place the world in “extraordinary danger.”
To paraphrase the 1964 black political comedy, Dr. Strangelove, maybe we should all just stop worrying and love the bomb?
- China's Gold-Buying Spree Extends To Third Month
After China’s official gold reserves rose for the first time in around two years (since Oct 2016) in December, Beijing appears to have joined the global gold rush, increasing its gold reserves for the third month in a row in February to 60.26 million ounces.
As we previously noted, China has long been silent on its holdings of gold as many countries are turning away from the greenback.
The value the country’s holdings of the precious metal reached US$79.5 billion, increasing by more than $3 billion compared to the end of last year.
Goldman Sachs has flagged central-bank buying as a plank supporting its bullish outlook for gold, which it expects to rally to $1,400 an ounce over six months.
China is also trying “to diversify its reserves” away from the greenback, according to Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at currency broker OANDA. The analyst told the South China Morning Post that the state of affairs in global politics, including a trade war with the US, are driving China’s interest to buy gold as a “safe haven hedge.”
Just as we saw in 2015/2016, it appears China is reducing its US Treasury exposure as it increases its gold holdings…
In January, China dropped to sixth place among the world’s largest holders of the yellow metal behind Russia. With its 67.6 million ounces of gold, Russia now stands in fifth place behind the US, Germany, France, and Italy.
Last month’s inflow of 9.95 tons follows the addition of 11.8 tons in January and 9.95 tons in December. Should China continue to accumulate bullion at that pace over 2019, it may end the year as the top buyer after Russia, which added 274.3 tons in 2018.
Crucially, the size of the gold addition are far less important than the signaling effect – why did China decide now was the right time to publicly admit its gold reserves are rising?
After months of seeming stability in the yuan relative to gold, Q4 2018/Q1 2019 saw China seemingly allow gold to appreciate relative to the yuan (although the last week or so has seen Yuan strengthen against gold)
One wonders if Alasdair Macleod is on to something when he notes that if the yuan is to replace the dollar for China’s trade, officials will have to back it with gold…
It is hard to see how the US can match a sound-money plan from China. Furthermore, the US Government’s finances are already in very poor shape and a return to sound money would require a reduction in government spending that all observers can agree is politically impossible. This is not a problem the Chinese government faces, and the purpose of a gold-linked jumbo bond is not so much to raise funds; rather it is to seal a price relationship between the yuan and gold.
Whether China implements the plan suggested herein or not, one thing is for sure: the next credit crisis will happen, and it will have a major impact on all nations operating with fiat money systems. The interest rate question, because of the mountains of debt owed by governments and consumers, will have to be addressed, with nearly all Western economies irretrievably ensnared in a debt trap. The hurdles faced in moving to a sound monetary policy appear to be simply too daunting to be addressed.
Ultimately, a return to sound money is a solution that will do less damage than fiat currencies losing their purchasing power at an accelerating pace. Think Venezuela, and how sound money would solve her problems. But that path is blocked by a sink-hole that threatens to swallow up whole governments. Trying to buy time by throwing yet more money at an economy suffering a credit crisis will only destroy the currency. The tactic worked during the Lehman crisis, but it was a close-run thing. It is unlikely to work again.
Because China’s economy has had its debt expansion of the last ten years mostly aimed at production, if she fails to act soon she faces an old-fashioned slump with industries going bust and unemployment rocketing. China offers very limited welfare, and without Maoist-style suppression, faces the prospect of not only the state’s plans going awry, but discontent and rebellion developing among the masses.
For China, a gold-exchange yuan standard is now the only way out. She will also need to firmly deny what Western universities have been teaching her brightest students. But if she acts early and decisively, China will be the one left standing when the dust settles, and the rest of us in our fiat-financed welfare states will left chewing the dirt of our unsound currencies.
Is China’s “signal” an explicit warning of the end to the dollar era that has existed since August 1971, when gold as the ultimate money was driven out of the monetary system.
In fact, that appears to be exactly what is happening as for the first time since the end of the second world war, and catalyzed by the GFC 2008/9, central banks have begun to aggressively diversify into gold and away from the US dollar…
- Sunday Satire (Or Not?): "Eveything Is Bad, The World Is Ending, & You Shouldn't Have Kids"
The United States birth rate has continued to fall as millennials increasingly believe that everything is bad, the world is going to end, and to bring kids into this nightmarish hellscape would be tantamount to child abuse.
“The world is going to end in twelve years. If you have kids, it will end in probably like six years or something because they’ll just breathe more,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on a recent Instagram Live broadcast.
“I have the science right here.”
Ocasio-Cortez held up a copy of National Geographic.
She later realized she had been referencing an article from 1989 warning that the world would end in 2001 if deep and wide environmental policies were not enforced.
“If scientists from thirty years ago said the world was going to end in 12 years, who am I to doubt science?” she said upon realizing this.
”Science is science.”
“The most progressive thing we can do is abort as many of the next generation as possible so they don’t have to be brought into this apocalyptic nightmare,” said progressive blogger Martina Bridges on a live stream over her iPhone from the driver’s seat in her Lexus on a sunny day in Santa Monica while drinking a cucumber lime acai iced tea.
However, in conflict with the traditional progressive view of not having children, some evidence suggests that one of the world’s greatest resources is the bright young minds of tomorrow. Research shows that children born today could be tomorrow’s innovators, finding solutions to the world’s problems this generation never even thought of.
“That’s junk science,” said progressive researcher Darrell Lyons from the University of Henshaw. “Name one generation who was improved by the next generation. It’s a myth. People are born, they pollute the Earth, the world ends. That is how it has always worked out as long as the Earth has existed.”
“Name one person who isn’t born yet who could fix the world’s problems,” Lyons went on. “I’ll wait.”
Lyons sat with his arms crossed for close to thirty minutes before reporters began exiting the conference room.
“True progressivism knows the truth: this generation is the last possible hope for mankind,” Bridges continued on her live stream.
“We know that the most brilliant minds to ever exist, past or future, are ours. If we don’t have our way, that’s the real Armageddon.”
What is the truly progressive solution if it is not continuing to have kids? Bridges, Ocasio-Cortez, and many other progressives believe that the only hope for true progress is to bring about a system of government from the early 1900s that has led to the death of millions and to vote for the oldest presidential candidate in history.
* * *
Fact or Fiction?
- U.S. "Gets Its Ass Handed To It" In World War III Simulation: RAND
In simulated World War III scenarios, the U.S. continues to lose against Russia and China, two top war planners warned last week. “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it” RAND analyst David Ochmanek said Thursday.
RAND’s wargames show how US Armed Forces – colored blue on wargame maps – experience the most substantial losses in one scenario after another and still can’t thwart Russia or China – which predictably is red – from accomplishing their objectives: annihilating Western forces.
“We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary,” he warned.
In the next military conflict, which some believe may come as soon as the mid-2020s, all five battlefield domains: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace, will be heavily contested, suggesting the U.S. could have a difficult time in achieving superiority as it has in prior conflicts.
The simulated war games showed, the “red” aggressor force often destroys U.S. F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters on the runway, sends several Naval fleets to the depths, destroys US military bases, and through electronic warfare, takes control of critical military communication systems. In short, a gruesome, if simulated, annihilation of some of the most modern of US forces.
“In every case I know of,” said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense with years of wargaming experience, “the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”
So, as Russia and China develop fifth-generation fighters and hypersonic missiles, “things that rely on sophisticated base infrastructures like runways and fuel tanks are going to have a hard time,” Ochmanek said. “Things that sail on the surface of the sea are going to have a hard time.”
“That’s why the 2020 budget coming out next week retires the carrier USS Truman decades early and cuts two amphibious landing ships, as we’ve reported. It’s also why the Marine Corps is buying the jump-jet version of the F-35, which can take off and land from tiny, ad hoc airstrips, but how well they can maintain a high-tech aircraft in low-tech surroundings is an open question,” said Breaking Defense.
Meanwhile, speaking purely hypothetically of course, “if we went to war in Europe, there would be one Patriot battery moving, and it would go to Ramstein. And that’s it,” Work complained. The US has 58 Brigade Combat Teams across the continent but doesn’t have anti-air and missile-defense capabilities required to handle a barrage of missiles from Russia.
RAND also war-gamed cyber and electronic attacks in the simulations, Work said; Russia and China tend to cripple US communication networks.
“Whenever we have an exercise and the red force really destroys our command and control, we stop the exercise,” Work said without a trace of humor. Beijing calls this “system destruction warfare,” Work said. They aim to “attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they practice it all the time.”
The Air Force asked RAND to formulate a plan several years ago to improve the outcomes of the wargames in favor of the US, Ochmanek said. “We found it impossible to spend more than $8 billion a year” to fix the problems.
“That’s $8 billion for the Air Force. Triple that to cover for the Army and the Navy Department (which includes the US Marines),” Ochmanek said, “and you get $24 billion.”
Work was less concerned about the near-term risk of war, and he said, China and Russia aren’t ready to fight because their modernization efforts have not been completed. He said any major conflict is unlikely for another 10 to 20 years from now.
He said “$24 billion a year for the next five years would be a good expenditure” to prepare the military for World War III.
RAND offers a sobering assessment that America could lose a multi-front war in the future, which is quite shocking considering that the US spent nearly three times as much as the second biggest war power, China, did in 2017.
With the defense budget stuck around $700 billion per annum for the remainder of President Trump’s term, America’s Warhawks are inciting fear through simulated wargames with one purpose only: demand more taxpayers’ money for war spending.
- Greenwald: Coordinated Lie Over Maduro Burning Aid Trucks Reveals How Fake News Spreads
Authored by Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept
NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Humanitarian Trucks in Venezuela Shows How US Govt and Media Spread Fake News
EVERY MAJOR U.S. WAR of the last several decades has begun the same way: the U.S. Government fabricates an inflammatory, emotionally provocative lie which large U.S. media outlets uncritically treat as truth while refusing at air questioning or dissent, thus inflaming primal anger against the country the U.S. wants to attack. That’s how we got the Vietnam War (North Vietnam attacks U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin); the Gulf War (Saddam ripped babies from incubators); and, of course, the war in Iraq (Saddam had WMDs and formed an alliance with Al Qaeda).
This was exactly the tactic used on February 23, when the narrative shifted radically in favor of those U.S. officials who want regime change operations in Venezuela. That’s because images were broadcast all over the world of trucks carrying humanitarian aid burning in Colombia on the Venezuela border. U.S. officials who have been agitating for a regime change war in Venezuela – Marco Rubio, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, the head of USAid Mark Green – used Twitter to spread classic Fake News: they vehemently stated that the trucks were set on fire, on purpose, by President Nicolas Maduro’s forces.
Each of the trucks burned by Maduro carried 20 tons of food & medicine. This is a crime & if international law means anything he must pay a high price for this. #23FAyudaHumanitaria https://t.co/IrGzrOUX09
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 23, 2019
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Masked thugs, civilians killed by live rounds, and the burning of trucks carrying badly-needed food and medicine. This has been Maduro’s response to peaceful efforts to help Venezuelans. Countries that still recognize Maduro should take note of what they are endorsing. pic.twitter.com/KlSebd2M5a
— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) February 23, 2019
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.@SecPompeo: We denounce Maduro’s refusal to let humanitarian assistance reach #Venezuela. What kind of a sick tyrant stops food from getting to hungry people? The images of burning trucks filled with aid are sickening. https://t.co/zzFNYVly2c
— USConsulateFrankfurt (@usconsfrankfurt) February 24, 2019
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#Maduro ordering the firing on and burning of trucks filled with
humanitarian aid & attacking volunteers is unconscionable. I condemn the killings & human rights abuses committed by Maduro. Violent attacks against life-saving aid for #Venezuela is despicable. #EstamosUnidosVE https://t.co/BOSuVP1mTL— Mark Green (@USAIDMarkGreen) February 23, 2019
As it always does – as it always has done from its inception when Wolf Blitzer embedded with U.S. troops – CNN led the way in not just spreading these government lies but independently purporting to vouch for their truth. On February 24, CNN told the world what we all now know is an absolute lie: that “a CNN team saw incendiary devices from police on the Venezuelan side of the border ignite the trucks,” though it generously added that “the network’s journalists are unsure if the trucks were burned on purpose.”
Other media outlets endorsed the lie while at least avoiding what CNN did by personally vouching for it. “Humanitarian aid destined for Venezuela was set on fire, seemingly by troops loyal to Mr Maduro,” The Telegraph claimed. The BBC uncritically printed: “There have also been reports of several aid trucks being burned – something Mr Guaidó said was a violation of the Geneva Convention.”
That lie – supported by incredibly powerful video images – changed everything. Ever since, that Maduro burned trucks filled with humanitarian aid was repeated over and over as proven fact on U.S. news outlets. Immediately after it was claimed, politicians who had been silent on the issue of Venezuela or even reluctant to support regime change began issuing statements now supportive of it. U.S. news stars and think tank luminaries who lack even a single critical brain cell when it comes to war-provoking claims from U.S. officials took a leading role in beating the war drums without spending even a single second to ask whether what they were being told were true:
This is just evil https://t.co/kDOJBZ48td
— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) February 23, 2019
But on Saturday night, the New York Times published a detailed video and accompanying article proving that this entire story was a lie. The humanitarian trucks were not set on fire by Maduro’s forces. They were set on fire by anti-Maduro protesters who threw a molotov cocktail that hit one of the trucks. And the NYT’s video traces how the lie spread: from U.S. officials who baselessly announced that Maduro burned them to media outlets that mindlessly repeated the lie.
While the NYT’s article and video are perfectly good and necessary journalism, the credit they are implicitly claiming for themselves for exposing this lie is totally undeserved. That’s because independent journalists – the kind who question rather than mindlessly repeat government claims and are therefore mocked and marginalized and kept off mainstream television – used exactly this same evidence on the day of the incident to debunk the lies being told by Rubio, Pompeo, Bolton and CNN.On February 24, the day the lie spread, Max Blumenthal wrote from Venezuela, on the independent reporting Grazyzone site, that “the claim was absurd on its face,” noting that he “personally witnessed tear gas canisters hit every kind of vehicle imaginable in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, and I have never seen a fire like the one that erupted on the Santander bridge.” He compiled substantial evidence strongly suggesting that the trucks were set ablaze by anti-Maduro protesters, including Bloomberg video showing them using Molotov cocktails, to express serious doubts about the mainstream narrative. On Twitter, in response to Marco Rubio’s lie, he wrote:
I did not see any Venezuelan government forces set fire to US aid trucks on the Colombian side of the border. And neither did you. Actually, the evidence so far is pointing in the other direction. https://t.co/AVBPYtFMiR
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 24, 2019
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This video found by @graffitiborrao appears to show the moment when an opposition guarimbero throws a Molotov cocktail on a truck loaded with US aid: pic.twitter.com/Z4Bg6dL4BR
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 24, 2019
Meanwhile, others – who use their brains to critically evaluate what the U.S. Government says when it’s trying to start a new war, rather than mindlessly recite those claims as Truth, as U.S. media stars do – used the exact same evidence cited by the NYT last night to show that it was anti-Maduro protesters, not Maduro troops, who set the trucks on fire. But they were able to do it in the hours immediately following the incident, not three weeks later – but, needless to say, they were ignored by U.S. media outlets:
Here’s the moment when the trucks caught fire from a molotov coming from the Colombian side. https://t.co/vlZKzJpbRu
— Boots Riley (@BootsRiley) February 24, 2019
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The reports that say the Venezuelan Army (GNB) set humanitarian aid trucks on fire by shooting tear gas canisters at them from afar are a falsemedia stunt. Tear gas will not light anything on fire.
Also- look at where the trucks were vs where the GNB line was. pic.twitter.com/y7tyugOXXj
— Boots Riley (@BootsRiley) February 24, 2019
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You have no evidence of who set the aid truck on fire and these photos indicate your guarimberos had a hand in it. pic.twitter.com/VsvMDo2XaS
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) February 24, 2019
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.@marcorubio’s lie debunked: This video shows an opposition protester throwing a Molotov cocktail at the aid truck on the Francisco de Paula Santander bridge connecting Venezuela and Colombia. pic.twitter.com/4IgTt2u4pJ
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) February 24, 2019
Those last two tweets – using video footage to debunk the lies spread by Marco Rubio, CNN and the U.S. Government – happen to be from a correspondent with RT America. Please tell me: who was acting here as lying propagandists and agents of State TV, and who was acting like a journalist trying to understand and report the truth?
So everything the New York Times so proudly reported last night has been known for weeks, and was already reported in great detail, using extensive evidence, by a large number of people. But because those people are generally skeptical of the U.S. Government’s claims and critical of its foreign policy, they were ignored and mocked and are generally barred from appearing on television, while the liars from the U.S. Government and their allies in the corporate media were, as usual, given a platform to spread their lies without any challenge or dissent, just like the manual for how to maintain State TV intructs.
Indeed, none of the people questioning the original claim about the burning trucks, or citing this evidence to argue that the U.S. Government and its Venezuelan ally Guaidó were lying, ever made it onto national television to present their dissent. They weren’t allowed on. To the extent they were acknowledged at all, it was to defame them as Maduro apologists – for telling the truth – just as those who tried to combat the propaganda of 2002 and 2003 were smeared as being pro-Saddam. Only Rubio, Bolton, Pompeo, and various other U.S. officials were permitted to spread their lies without any challenge.
That’s particularly notable since the Russian Government, a long-time ally of the Maduro government, themselves published the evidence showing this was a lie. Claims from the Russian or Venezuelan governments deserves as much skepticism as the claims of any other government, but they at least deserve to be heard. But the corporate U.S. media – precisely because it is State TV even as it is loves to accuse others of being that – never airs the views of governments adverse to the U.S. Government except in the most cursory and mocking way:
#HandsOffVenezuela Footage from the Venezuela-Colombia border incident has emerged showing US-backed opposition throwing Molotov cocktails at the @USAID trucks + “opposition activists” openly preparing incendiary devices – https://t.co/UIMYNEjAnV. Do you believe:
— Russia in RSA 🇷🇺 (@EmbassyofRussia) February 25, 2019
It should be noted that this is not the first time outrights lies were spread by the U.S. Government and the U.S. media to inflame regime change against Venezuela. A photograph of a bridge between Colombia and Venezuela was broadcast all over the world as proof that Maduro was blocking humanitarian aid.
But the CBC – to their great credit – published a long apology noting that they, too, had fallen for this propaganda by publishing the photo of the bridge to support this narrative when, in fact, that bridge had been closed years earlier due to tensions between the two countries. Few, if any, of the U.S. media outlets that spread that lie offered a similar correction or apology.
Equally false is the widespread, popular media claim that Maduro has refused to allow any humanitarian aid to enter Venezuela. That, too, is an outright lie. The Venezuelan government has allowed substantial amountsof aid into their country from countries that have not threatened to overthrow the President with an external coup; Maduro has only blocked trucks and planes from entering that come from those countries (the U.S, Brazil, Colombia) that have been threatening Venezuela. something any country would do.
Indeed, both the Red Cross and the United Nations expressed concerns about “humanitarian aid” from the U.S. on the ground that it was a pretext for regime change and would politicize humanitarian aid). Even NPR recognized that “the U.S. effort to distribute tons of food and medicine to needy Venezuelans is more than just a humanitarian mission. The operation is also designed to foment regime change in Venezuela — which is why much of the international aid community wants nothing to do with it.”
That concern is obviously valid given the history of Elliott Abrams, the envoy leading U.S. policy in Venezuela, of exploiting “humanitarian aid” as a scam to smuggle weapons and other tools to overthrow Latin American governments he dislikes – another fact rarely if ever mentioned in U.S. media reports.
If you want to watch vintage “State TV,” watch this clip: a reporter embedded with US military, uncritically spouting every line from the US Government’s regime change effort, omitting key facts (like Elliott Abrams previously used humanitarian aid pretexts to smuggle weapons): https://t.co/T6NOiqMWRr
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 17, 2019
What we have here is classic Fake News – spread on Twitter, by U.S. officials and U.S. media stars – with the clear and malicious intent to start a war. But no western proponents of social media censorship will call for their accounts to be cancelled nor call for their posts to be deleted. That’s because “Fake News” and the war against it is strictly a means of combating propaganda by U.S. adversaries; the U.S. and its alliesmaintain extensive programs to spread Fake News online and none of those anti-Fake News crusaders call for those to be shut down.
And the next time claims are made about Venezuela designed to fuel regime change and wars, the independent journalists and analysts who were absolutely right in this instance – who recognized and documented the lies of the U.S. Government weeks before the New York Times did – will again be ignored or, at best, mocked. Meanwhile, those in the media and Foreign Policy Community who uncritically amplified and spread this dangerous lie will be treated as the Serious People whose pronouncements are the only ones worth hearing. With rare exception, dissent on Venezuela will continue to be barred.
That’s because the U.S. media, by design, does not permit dissent on U.S. foreign policy, particularly when it comes to false claims about U.S. adversaries. That’s why skeptics of U.S. regime change in Venezuela, or dissenters on the prevailing orthodoxies about Russia, have largely been disappeared from mainstream media outlets, just as they were in 2002 and 2003.
That’s not because U.S. media stars are ordered to do this. They don’t need to be ordered. They know propaganda is their job. More to the point, they are über-patriotic jingoists who revere U.S. officials and thus do not possess a single cell of critical thinking in their brain. That’s why they have TV programs in the first place. If they weren’t this way, they wouldn’t be on TV, as Noam Chomsky put it to the BBC’s Andrew Marr so perfectly in this short clip from many years ago (the whole three-minute context, well worth watching, is here). This tells the whole story of this sordid affair in Venezuela:
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- Brookings Says China Overstated Size Of Its Economy By 12%
Since China managed to weather the fallout from the financial crisis without registering much of a slowdown in its “official” GDP figures, playing “guess the real growth rate” has become one of the most popular parlor games among the professional economist set. Whereas the stakes are much higher for academics on the mainland (one of whom was censored and threatened by government thugs after speculating that GDP growth on the mainland might be closer to 2%), researchers at American think tanks have freely offered estimates ranging from 2% to 4% (which, admittedly, would still put China well ahead of the US).
But as investors and economists once again cast a wary eye toward China as signs of flagging growth are once again threatening to sink the whole world into a recession, a team of researchers from the Brookings Institute has published a carefully researched paper detailing the exact mechanism by which authorities in Beijing inflate the country’s GDP figures, while estimating that China’s economy is roughly 12% smaller than the official figures would suggest. Brookings published the paper on Thursday, just two days after Party leaders at the annual National Party Congress lowered their economic growth forecast to between 6% and 6.5% of GDP.
Though the paper focused on the period between 2008 and 2016, it’s the latest evidence that China’s economic slowdown has been more severe than believed, and that the growth rate from last year – China’s worst since the early 1990s – might, in reality, be just under 6% (compared with 6.6%).
According to Brookings, much of the manipulation in Chinese official government statistics takes place at the local level. In what the FT described as “a legacy of Maoist state planning”, authorities in Beijing hand down growth targets to local officials, who use it to goalseek the official statistics they hand back.
“China’s national accounts are based on data collected by local governments. However, since local governments are rewarded for meeting growth and investment targets, they have an incentive to skew local statistics. China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) adjusts the data provided by local governments to calculate GDP at the national level,” the study’s authors said.
Evidence of this is relatively obvious: Year after year, the sum total of China’s provincial growth figures is larger than the unadjusted national figures reported by Beijing. Though central authorities accused three provinces of doctoring their data back in 2017, authorities have done little else to discourage the practice.
Inflated data in hand, China’s National Bureau of Statistics struggles to adjust it, and though readings before 2008 were reportedly more accurate, more recently, the figures have been further off the mark, according to Brookings.
“NBS has done a lot of work to weed out the fake numbers added by local government, but it just doesn’t have enough power and capacity, nor the right incentives,” Michael Zheng Song, economics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a co-author of the paper, told the FT. “It would be unfair to blame NBS for fabricating GDP numbers.”
So, now that we’ve once again affirmed what many have widely suspected, what does this mean for US-China trade talks? Well, it would seem to confirm the argument made by an FT columnist earlier this week that President Xi has just as much to lose from a failed trade deal as President Trump.
Here are a few other conclusions from the paper:
- Official data overstated growth of nominal GDP by an average of 1.7% per year between 2008 and 2016
- This made the economy 12% smaller in 2016 than figured indicated
- GDP growth in real terms was overstated by 2% over the same period
- The paper’s authors are more confident about GDP data in nominal terms versus real terms
- Overstatement of industrial and investment output were the most severe
- Data on consumption was found to be the most reliable
But with authorities anxious to suppress any information that would contradict their economic narrative, we now wait to see whether Beijing will declare former Fed Chair and Brookings Institute economist Ben Bernanke (along with the study’s authors) ‘persona non grata’.
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