- Visualizing America's Cruise Missile Diplomacy
President Donald Trump has threatened the use of missiles against targets in Syria. “Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’”, he tweeted, referring to Russia as an ally of the Syrian regime which stands accused of having once more used chemical weapons against targets in rebel-held areas, this time in Douma, a suburb of the capital Damascus.
Statista’s Dtfed Loesche notes that only a year ago, the United States Navy fired 59 “Tomahawk” cruise missiles from two destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean to hit a Syrian military airfield in Homs province. Trump ordered the assault in retaliation for a suspected chemical weapons attack on rebel-held areas in Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib province, five days before.
However, as our infographic shows, that wasn’t the first time the U.S. military fired such devices at targets in Syria. According to U.S. Central Command, Islamic State positions were targeted with up to 50 cruise missiles in September 2014, launched from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf at the onset of the continuing aerial bombardment of the Islamist militants.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Cruise missiles have been employed by the United States military (mostly the Navy) regularly, ever since their introduction during the Gulf War of 1991. Though they have been used as a tactical weapon in full scale wars, cruise missiles have mostly been used in limited strikes.
In his 1997 thesis, Timothy Sparks calls these strikes a “means of delivering a military punch to achieve political gain” and “an instrument in the execution of U.S. foreign policy”. In this sense, the cruise missile has been said to have replaced the gunboat. Hence, the phrase “gunboat diplomacy” has been modified to read “cruise missile diplomacy”.
Cruise missiles have often been favored by U.S. civilian and military leadership, as they allow for limited strikes, a show of force or punitive raid, while not placing service personnel in danger of death. The missiles are fired from a safe distance to the target and can travel up to 1,500 miles, depending on make and explosives payload.
- Taking The World To The Brink Of Annihilation
Authored by Rick Sterling via Oriental Review,
Western neoconservatives and hawks are driving the international situation to increasing tension and danger. Not content with the destruction of Iraq and Libya based on false claims, they are now pressing for a direct US attack on Syria.
As a dangerous prelude, Israeli jets flying over Lebanese airspace fired missiles against the T4/Tiyas Airbase west of Palmyra.
This was Predicted
As reported at Tass, the Chief of Russia’s General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, predicted the current events almost a month ago. The report from March 13 says, “Russia has hard facts about preparations for staging the use of chemical weapons against civilians by the government forces. After the provocation, the US plans to accuse Syria’s government forces of using chemical weapons … furnish the so-called ‘evidence’ … and Washington plans to deliver a missile and bomb strike against Damascus’ government districts.”
Gerasimov noted that Russian military advisors are staying in the Syrian Defense Ministry’s facilities in Damascus and “in the event of a threat to our military servicemen’s lives, Russia’s Armed Forces will take retaliatory measures to target both the missiles and their delivery vehicles.”
The situation is clearly dangerous with risk of sliding into international conflict and even WW3. If that happens, it would mean the demise of civilization. All of this so that the West can continue supporting the sectarian armed groups seeking to overthrow the Assad government … in violation of international law and the UN Charter.
US President Donald Trump, joined by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, left, Vice President Mike Pence, second from left, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, right, speaks to the media as he arrives at the Pentagon in January 2018
The most powerful country in the world is now led by a real estate, hotel and entertainment mogul without political experience. Behind the scenes, there is a powerful foreign policy establishment determined to maintain and reclaim US unilateral “leadership” of the world. They don’t like the fact that the US is losing influence, prestige and power around the world. Israel and Saudi Arabia are especially upset that their plans for regional domination are failing.
East Ghouta, Damascus
East Ghouta is a district of farms and towns on the north-east outskirts of Damascus. For the past six years, various armed factions controlled the area. On a nearly daily basis, they launched mortar and hell cannon missile attacks into Damascus, killing many thousands. This author personally witnessed two such mortar attacks in April 2014.
By the end of March most of East Ghouta had been retaken by the government. With the peaceful evacuation of armed militants, civilians flooded into the humanitarian corridors and then government camps for the displaced. The campaign was proceeding quickly with minimal loss of life as the Russian Reconciliation officers negotiated agreements which allowed the militants to keep small weapons and be transported to Idlib in the north. Vanessa Beeley documented the situation including the happiness and relief of many civilians as they finally made it to safety. One described the feeling as “like being reborn”. Robert Fisk was on site and reported what he saw first hand in stories titled Watching on as Islamist fighters are evacuated from war-torn Eastern Ghouta and Western howls of outrage over the Ghouta siege ring hollow.
As reported at the Russian Reconciliation Centre, by the end of March, 105,857 civilians had moved into government controlled areas while 13,793 militants plus 23,433 family members had been transported north. Those who wanted to stay, including former fighters, were welcomed. They could rejoin Syrian society with the same rights and obligations as other Syrians.
Jaish al-Islam terrorist fighters in East Gouta
The last remaining opposition stronghold was the town of Douma, controlled by the Saudi funded Jaish al Islam. Negotiations were prolonged because Jaish al Islam did not want to go to Idlib which is dominated by another militant opposition group, Jabhat al Nusra also known as Hayat Tahrir al Sham.
The Chemical Incident
On Saturday April 7 video and stories claiming a chemical weapons attack in Douma were broadcast. The video showed dozens of dead children. On Sunday the story grabbed western mainstream media headlines. US President Trump quickly come to a conclusion: “President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay”.
There has been no objective investigation. The media claims are based on statements and videos from members of the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) and White Helmets. Both organizations receive significant funding from the US government and call for Western intervention in Syria.
Chemical weapons have emerged as the quick and easy justification for aggression. One year ago, in April 2017, it was the incident at Khan Shaykoun. That resulted in a US attack on a Syrian air base just days later. The subsequent investigation discovered that dozens of victims had shown up in hospitals in diverse locations and up to 100 km away from the scene of crime BEFORE the event happened. Strangely, and indicating the investigation team bias, this red flag pointing to fraud was not investigated further. If it was just a few victims or just one location, it might be a mistake in time record-keeping. However in this case there were dozens of discrepancies in multiple locations, clearly raising the possibility of fraud.
Now we have the incident in Douma, at town on the outskirts of Damascus. The armed opposition is in retreat. They have tried to pressure the US and NATO to intervene directly since 2012. They have access to chemical weapons in East Ghouta and motive. They also have thousands of prisoners. This is the group which put hundreds of prisoners, primarily women and children, in cages on the streets of Douma.
Who Benefits?
The timing of the chemical weapons incidents is also noteworthy. As documented here, one year ago on 30 March 2017 Ambassador Haley said the US policy was no longer focused on getting Assad out. Five days later the chemical incident at Khan Sheikhoun happened, quickly followed by blaming the Syrian government, a US attack and a restoration of the demand that “Assad must go”. On March 29 Trump said that US forces will withdraw from Syria “very soon”. This was followed by outcries from the media and political establishment. Now, following the Saturday chemical weapons incident, the US is again threatening to intervene directly. The chemical weapons incidents have consistently resulted in the reversal of a proposed change in hostility toward Syria.
US Ambassador to UN Security Council Nikki Haley
Neoconservatives and the supporters of ‘regime change’ foreign policy have various theories why the Assad government would perpetrate a chemical weapons attack. Senator John McCain says the Syrian President was “emboldened” by the previous Trump statement.
Juan Cole, an academic who promoted the assaults on Libya in 2011, has a different theory. He says“Chemical weapons are used by desperate regimes that are either outnumbered by the enemy or are reluctant to take casualties in their militaries. Barrel-bombing Douma with chem seems to have appealed to the regime as a tactic for this reason. It had potential of frightening the Douma population into deserting the Army of Islam.” In contrast with his theory, chemical weapons were used extensively by the US in Vietnam and Iraq when they were far from desperate. As evidenced in the flow of civilians into government held areas, most of the civilian population are happy to get away from the sectarian and violent Army of Islam (“Jaish al Islam”). Cole seems to be basing his theories on inaccurate western media coverage just as he did regarding Libya where sensational claims about a looming massacre in Benghazi were later shown to be fraudulent.
It’s clear who benefits from sensational media coverage about a chemical weapons incident: those who seek to demonize the Syrian government and President and want the US government to intervene militarily. Every time there is an incident, it is quickly accepted and used by the governments and organizations who have been seeking ‘regime change’ in Syria for many years.
Manipulating Public Opinion
The manipulation of western opinion about the Syrian conflict using fake events is not theory; it has been proven. A good example is the fake kidnapping of NBC reporter Richard Engel in December 2012. Engel and his media team were reportedly kidnapped and threatened with death by “shabiha” supporters of the Syrian president. After days in captivity the American team was supposedly rescued by Free Syrian Army “rebels” after a shootout. In 2015 it was confirmed this was a hoax perpetrated by the FSA and their American supporters. The entire charade was carried out by the “rebels”. The goal was to demonize the Assad government and its supporters, and to romanticize and increase support for the armed opposition. Neither Engel nor NBC confessed to the reality until it was about to be exposed years later, pointing to duplicity and collusion in the deception.
Four and half years ago, on 21 August 2013, the most famous chemical weapons incident occurred. The Syrian government was immediately accused of launching a sarin attack which killed hundreds of children and civilians. Over the next six months investigations were carried out. The conclusions of Seymour Hersh, Robert Parry and the research site whoghouta.com concluded that the attack was almost certainly NOT from the government but actually from one of the ‘rebel’ factions with support from Turkish intelligence services. Two Turkish parliamentary deputies held a press conference and publicly revealed some of the evidence. The intent then, as now, was to provide justification and provocation for the US and NATO to intervene directly.
Conclusion
Today there is the imminent possibility of a major attack based on the allegations of a clearly biased source. What ever happened to international law and legal due process? Why is violence being threatened before there is a serious objective investigation of the chemical incident? If the accusations against Syria are true, why not have a serious investigation, especially now that the area has been liberated today (9 April) and safe access can be provided?
The drums of war are pounding. After over one year of incessant Russia bashing and disinformation, is the public ready to go to war with Russia over Syria? Neoconservative hawks and their Israeli and Saudi allies seem to want this. Their plans and predictions for Iraq, Libya and Yemen were delusional fantasies with the price paid in blood by the people of those countries and in treasure by Americans as well. Sadly, there has not been any accountability for the media and political establishment that promoted and launched these wars. Now they want to escalate the aggression by attacking Syria, causing vastly more blood to flow and risking confrontation with a country which can fight back.
- Amazon Pulls Child Sex Dolls Following Complaints
Amazon UK has pulled child sex dolls from their online storefront after widespread complaints from a watchdog group and others in Britain over concerns that pedophiles may use them as a “gateway doll” which would lead to the sexual abuse of children.
Over a dozen child sex dolls were removed in all, having been listed by third-party sellers.
“All Marketplace sellers must follow our selling guidelines and those who don’t will be subject to action including potential removal of their account,” said an Amazon spokesman in a statement. “The products in question are no longer available.”
Amazon does not sell the products itself but instead receives money from the sellers.
Dolls found on the website were typically three or four feet tall with waist sizes around 16 inches (41cm).
In the accompanying pictures they were placed in sexual poses with descriptions such as “Mannequin Sexy” and “100% mimics girl’s body”.
Several dolls were described as coming with “sexy lingerie”.
A couple from Durham were horrified to find that a child sex doll came up in the results for their online search for sex toys.
“We felt disgusted and we straight away reported it to Amazon,” they told the BBC.
Twenty four hours later the couple had received no response from the retailer. –BBC
UK authorities want to know how the dolls were allowed on Amazon’s platform in the first place.
England’s Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, said that Amazon needs to explain what happened (Too bad the Children’s Commissioner wasn’t around during Jimmy Savile’s reign of pedophilic terror, or while former PM Sir Edward Heath was abusing children for decades, – which we’re isn’t going on today of course).
Last year, a judge at Canterbury Crown Court dismissed ex-primary school governor David Turner’s argument that a child sex doll he imported was not obscene. Turner, a former churchwarden, pleaded guilty last July to importing the child sex doll.
Responding to a BBC investigation, Anne Longfield, England Children’s Commissioner, said: “These dolls are disgusting and are clearly meant to look like children.
“Not only do I, as Children’s Commissioner, but the wider public also, have a right to expect a huge company like Amazon, to not only remove these products from their platform, but to explain why they are on there in the first place and ensure they can’t just be reloaded having been taken down.”
“Such dolls are clearly built for one purpose and that purpose is a clear danger to the safety of real children,” she added.
Ms Stewart said the dolls were unlike those people might associate with stag dos and were the precursor to more sophisticated child sex robots, which she warned were “just around the corner”.
“They are the weight of a seven-year-old child, they are not something that is the traditional blow-up doll,” she said.
“(They are) very, very different – very, very more accurate anatomically.”
The dolls, with their unnerving glass-eye stare, false eyelashes and crooked fingers and toes, often come packaged with accessories including a choice of wigs, a USB device to warm the spongy silicone skin, and a cleaning device. –independent.co.uk
The UK has seized 179 child-like sex dolls since March of 2016 as part of Operation Shiraz – an operation set up in conjunction with the National Crime Agency. Last July, a judge ruled that child sex dolls were obscene, and therefore covered under the 1979 Customs and Excise Management Act. That said, it is not a criminal offense to manufacture or own a child sex doll – just to import them.
The dolls are designed to be as lifelike as possible – made of silicone type material and weighing as much as a child, and made in such a way as to enable sexual acts to be performed on them.
NPSCC head Almudena Lara told the BBC “We already know that there is a risk that people using these dolls could become desensitised and their behaviour could become normalised to them, so that they go on to harm children, as is often the case with those who view indecent images of children online.
“There is absolutely no evidence that using the dolls stops potential abusers from abusing children.”
- The US Fading Into Irrelevance – A Good Thing For The World?
Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Chaos reigns in the United States, spreading to its closest allies. The war amongst Western elites is in full swing, manifesting itself from commercial wars to failed diplomacy, empty threats of war, corruption, and announced military withdrawals and attacks.
To sum up the last few weeks of international events, it is worth comparing the direction taken by the multipolar troika of Russia, China and Iran, and the one taken by the fading unipolar order led by the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
We can analyze the respective changes taking place within the unipolar and multipolar camps, especially in the economic, commercial, diplomatic and military fields.
The introduction by the US of duties on imports, applied to 1,300 products, including iron and aluminum, has triggered a chain of events, including the imposition of as many duties on various products exported by the US to China. The pressure on America’s European allies continues, against the protests of France and Germany. It seems that Europe is struggling to form a common front on many issues relating from foreign policy to trade. The Western elites continue its in-fighting, between the European Union (led by Berlin and Paris) and the UK and the US, clashing over agreements between London and Brussels and Washington and Brussels. The Trump tariff war aims to deliver a blow to America’s opponents, but it risks provoking strong responses, even from allies. Moreover, many analysts and economists have warned that this form of commercial warfare risks harming American workers the most.
A divided Europe finds itself dealing with an ever-increasing need to justify its defense and security package. The British, thanks to the artificial Russian threat – characterized by fake chemical attacks, hypothetical invasions of the Baltic countries, and the situation in Ukraine – continue to sustain an environment in which Europeans seek the protection of NATO, which includes Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Looking at this critically, the intent of Berlin, Paris, and especially London and Washington, is evidently to justify increased military spending to counter an alleged threat emanating from Moscow. All this comes down to increased sales of British, German, French and, above all, American weapons to NATO and EU countries. This only serves to continue the flow of money into the coffers of the elite, thanks to artificial tensions like the one generated between Russia and the UK over the poisoning of the former Russian spy in England.
If the unipolar world seems to have thrown to the wind the concept of diplomacy and adherence to international norms – with a flurry of expulsions of diplomats, false accusations, one-sided motions in the UN’s Security Council, and ignoring the basic rules of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – in Asia, on the other side of the globe, diplomacy continues to bear fruit. Xi Jinping just met with Kim Jong-un, in the first of a series of meetings that could bring the North Korean leader to an initial meeting with Moon Jae-in, and later with Putin. We have heard from Washington only bellicose rhetoric directed against Pyongyang, even within the confines of the United Nations. In line with the ideological attitude of American exceptionalism, the American establishment appreciates Trump’s threats, but is quite naturally less enamored with the announcement of a meeting between the American president and the North Korean leader. According to America’s traditional ideology, no negotiations are to be entered into with geopolitical opponents and peer competitors, for the simple reason that Washington is not willing to negotiate or make any concession on any matter; the only way it knows how to engage in international relations is to impose its will by any means possible. In Syria, the example is clear, where indirect or direct military force has failed to remove Assad, and now Washington finds itself isolated, mainly diplomatically, with the Geneva II Conference on Syria now replaced by the agreement reached in Sochi, from which the United States excluded itself on account of not enjoying a leading position, thereby conceding this role to Ankara, Tehran and Moscow. This is a good example of how the Western elite’s strategic attempt to overthrow Assad and partition Syria has ran into the military reality on the ground, which includes the strength of alliances (especially between Iran, Russia and China), and the willingness of Moscow and Tehran to resolve the Syrian crisis by military and diplomatic means.
In economic terms, the revolution the petro-yuan represents becomes more and more real, this new medium of exchange set to sooner or later involve Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter of crude oil, with China as its largest buyer. The Western elites will try to oppose by any means possible such an arrangement, given that the petrodollar is the basis American military power. But it is an inevitable process, which must necessarily be backed up with a military component in order to discourage the United States from behaving recklessly. Iraq and other countries have been on the receiving end of America’s imposition of its petrodollar hegemony militarily. For this and other reasons, mainly related to US ABM systems placed all around Russian borders, Putin has had to resort to a very public demonstration of the Russian Federation’s means of deterrence, advertising the existence of the country’s new hypersonic weapons.
As demonstrated by the recent meeting between the defense ministers of Russia and China, the multipolar strategy is now wide-ranging, relegating Washington, Tel Aviv and Riyadh to further digging themselves into the hole they have already dug themselves into (see recent events in Syria with Israel launching 8 missiles and Trump beating the drums of war). As General Wei Fenghe stated, “We came to Moscow to let the Americans know about the close military ties between the armed forces of China and Russia.” When these two military and economic powers unite their efforts, involving regional powers and mediating over various conflicts, it becomes clear that the challenge to Washington’s hegemony is progressively leading away from an international reality consisting of one superpower to one consisting of three to four powers that maintain an international balance via diplomatic, economic and military means.
The phase in which we currently live is turbulent and is essentially caused by a single factor that has two very strong thrusts.
The acceleration of the dwindling of the unipolar phase is directly connected with the strategic and tactical errors of the American deep state and its main sponsors, like Israel and Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, the opposing push comes from the multipolar environment, which tends to consolidate its sphere of influence via diplomatic and military means. The goal for Moscow and Beijing is to present to the American and European elites a viable alternative that is shared among several actors. For the time being, the Euro-Atlantic establishment continues to consider itself capable of changing the course of events and preventing the drift towards multipolarity.
Whether the Western oligarchy is a victim to its own propaganda or whether it simply wishes to avoid facing reality and is using every means available to postpone an epochal change, is difficult to determine; and this makes the future uncertain, and is therefore highly dangerous.
- Increase In US Exports Rendering Once Crucial Cushing Data Irrelevant
Houston is quickly becoming the new benchmark for oil, while Cushing is losing its relevance to the industry.
Cushing wasn’t just relevant to the industry for storage purposes, but also for sector wide data purposes. According to Reuters, it “got its distinction in the early 1920s when tanks sprung up to store oil en route from Oklahoma and Texas to major metropolitan areas and refineries in the Midwest. In 1983, it became the delivery point for the newly-launched WTI futures contract CLc1.”
For years, Cushing oil inventories were a staple for any business, trader or entity that dealt in the commodity, not to mention those who actively traded it on a daily basis. Cushing inventories were once the key indicator the the supply of crude oil held in the United States. These are the Cushing storage tanks in Cushing, OK:
(Photo: Reuters)
Decades ago, Cushing was seen as a fairly easy way to measure oil supply because the United States was not exporting any oil, but rather only importing it. This made it a novel and effective idea to have one major storage point to reference when trying to help gauge the amount of supply the United States had, which could quickly be used by traders and those in the industry to help with price discovery on oil futures contracts.
Just as the trading market for oil futures has evolved, replacing open outcry with computers, so has the efficiency and method with which we collect oil inventory data. Cushing seems to be “slowly going the way of the buffalo“ while focus turns further south. Reuters reported about Cushing’s storage this morning:
But those tanks could soon drain to levels near effectively empty, even as U.S. oil production soars past a new record of 10.4 million barrels per day.
Oil supplies have fallen before in Cushing for a variety of seasonal or market-driven reasons. But this time, there is no shortage of crude in the market. In fact, U.S. production is straining pipeline and storage capacity.
The declining volumes stored at Cushing reflects a more permanent shift, underscoring the hub’s waning influence as the primary measuring stick for the U.S. oil market and the leading barometer of future supply, demand and prices.
Things have changed in the industry over the years. Nowadays are oil exports play as big of a role as our imports and, with that, our infrastructure needs have vastly shifted.
The most obvious change in our infrastructure needs naturally and organically pushes focus toward port cities like Houston to be better indicators of oil activity coming both in and out of the United States. To arrive at spot prices, traders need to have a full grasp on what is now a much more dynamic oil inventory situation that it was decades ago. For this purpose, Houston is now the area most traders are focusing on and want to replace Cushing as a gauge for the oil market in the United States. The article continues:
Instead, producers are increasingly shipping directly to seaports such as Houston, where vessels carry the oil to dozens of countries worldwide. That reflects a major transformation in global crude flows since the United States lifted a four-decade ban on oil exports in late 2015. Some traders and buyers argue the benchmark needs to change to reflect this.
Joshua Wade, a crude oil marketer in Oklahoma, sees the benchmark delivery point moving south before long.
“That’s the direction it’s moving,” he said. “As opposed to importing, now you’re exporting through the same infrastructure … The oil capital of the nation is in Houston.”
Although it ends decades of focus on the Cushing area for the oil industry, this move toward establishing a new focus on Houston is commensurate with an oil market that has changed significantly over the last several decades. In addition, new pipelines are being built and are expected to come online over the next 2 years, as the country’s oil infrastructure continues to evolve to meet the needs of both importing and exporting.
Cushing’s future may not be completely bust, however – it could simply wind up as off-shore gulf storage, or a to act as a back up, rather than a primary storage site:
A spokesman for Magellan Midstream Partners, which owns about 12 million barrels of Cushing storage, said it will remain important because of its connections to the Gulf and Midwest.
Cushing is also connected via pipeline to the Gulf, 500 miles to the south, and can offer cheaper storage than what’s available on the coast, said SemGroup’s Conner.
“I believe Cushing’s next chapter,” he said, “is that it’s going to become an offsite Gulf Coast storage center.”
But Cushing’s relevance seems to be on the way out, as least as a crucial data point for the industry. Just as markets “evolve”, so do their data points and methods for collecting crucial sector wide data. Now, if we could only get the Fed to do the same with the way it measures CPI.
- Russia's Real Endgame
Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,
Russia’s Putin has never taken his eye off the ball. His ambition is not global hegemony or European conquest. Putin seeks what Russia has always sought: regional hegemony and a set of buffer states in eastern Europe and central Asia that can add to Russia’s strategic depth.
In Syria, Russia has the warm water port of Tartus – which is important when you consider that most Russian ports are ice-bound for months of the year.
It is strategic depth — the capacity to suffer massive invasions and still survive due to an ability to retreat to a core position and stretch enemy supply lines – that enabled Russia to defeat both Napoleon and Hitler. Putin also wants the modicum of respect that would normally accompany that geostrategic goal.
Understanding Putin is not much more complicated than that.
In the twenty-first century, a Russian sphere of influence is not achieved by conquest or subordination in the old Imperial or Communist style. It is achieved by close financial ties, direct foreign investment, free trade zones, treaties, security alliances, and a network of associations that resemble earlier versions of the EU
Russian military intervention in Crimea and eastern Ukraine is best understood not as a Russian initiative, but as a Russian reaction. It was a response to U.S. and U.K. efforts to attack Russia by pushing aggressively and prematurely for Ukraine membership in NATO. This was done by deposing a Putin ally in Kiev in early 2014.
This is not to justify Russia’s actions, merely to put them in a proper context. The time to peel off Ukraine for NATO was 1999, not 2014.
The Russian-Ukraine situation is a subset of the broader U.S.-Russian relationship. Here, the opposition comes not just from domestic opponents but from the globalist elite.
Globalization emerged in the 1990s as a consequences of the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany. For the first time since 1914, Russia, China and their respective empires could join the U.S., Western Europe and their former colonies in Latin America and Africa in a single global market.
Globalization relied on open borders, free trade, telecommunications, global finance, extended supply chains, cheap labor and freedom of the seas. Globalization as it existed from 1990 to 2007 made steady progress under the Bush-Clinton duopoly of power in the U.S. and like-minded leaders elsewhere. The enemy of globalization was nationalism, but nationalism was nowhere in sight.
The financial crisis of 2007–2008, caused by the elites’ own greed and inability to grasp the statistical properties of risk, put an end to the easy gains from globalization.
Ironically, globalization gained in the short-run despite financial calamity. The same elites who created disaster were empowered to “fix” the situation under the auspices of the G20 Leaders’ Summit. This global rescue began with the first G20 summit hastily organized by George W. Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy, then the President of France, in November 2008.
Despite the financial bailouts and central bank easy money of the decade following the crisis, robust self-sustaining growth in line with pre-crisis trends has never really returned. Instead the world has suffered through a ten-year depression (defined as depressed below-trend growth), which continues to this day.
What little growth emerged was captured mostly by the wealthy, which led to the greatest income inequality levels seen in over 80 years.
Discontent was palpable in middle-class and working class populations in the world’s major developed economies. This discontent morphed into political action. The result was the U.K. decision to leave the EU, called “Brexit,” the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of politicians such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, among others.
What unites these politicians and political movements is nationalism. This can be defined as a desire to put national interests ahead of globalization. Nationalism can mean closing borders, restricting free trade to help local employment, fighting back against cheap labor and dumping with tariffs and trade adjustment assistance, and rejecting multilateral trade deals in favor of bilateral negotiations.
This brings us to the crux of the U.S.-Russia relationship.
Simply put, Putin and Trump are the two most powerful nationalists in the world. Any rapprochement between Russia and the U.S. is an existential threat to the globalist agenda.
This explains the vitriolic, hysterical, and relentless attacks on Trump and Putin.
The globalists have to keep Trump and Putin separated in order to have any hope of reviving the globalist agenda.
Just as Trump and Putin are the champions of nationalism, President Xi Jinping of China and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have emerged as the champions of the globalist camp.
Understanding this dynamic requires consideration of the paradoxical roles of Xi and Merkel.
Xi positions himself as the leading advocate of globalization. The truth is more complex.
President Xi is the most nationalist of all major leaders. He continually puts China’s long-term interests first without particular regard for the well-being of the rest of the world.
But, China’s relative military and economic weakness, and potential social instability, require it to cooperate with the rest of the world on trade, climate change, and supply-chain logistics in order to grow. Xi is in a paradoxical position of being nationalist to the core, yet wearing a globalist veneer in order to pursue the nationalist long game.
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany is also in a paradoxical position — but the opposite of Xi’s role. Merkel knows Germany must embrace globalism both because of its unique historical burden of being the source of three major wars (Franco-Prussian, World War I, and World War II), and the necessity of German integration with the EU and Eurozone.
At the same time, Merkel has advanced her globalist agenda by promoting German interests through exports and cheap foreign labor.
For the globalists, the world breaks down into Manichean struggle between the nationalists, Trump and Putin, and the globalists, Xi and Merkel. Globalists may be playing a two-sided game of nationalists versus globalists, but they need to widen the lens to see that the world today is really a three-party game.
There are really only three superpowers in the world today — Russia, China and the U.S. All other nations are secondary or tertiary powers who may be aligned with a superpower, neutral or independent, but who otherwise lack the ability to impose their will on others.
Some analysts may be surprised to see Russia on the superpower list, but the facts are indisputable. Russia is the twelfth largest economy in the world, has the largest landmass, is one of the three largest energy producers in the world, has abundant natural resources other than oil, has advanced weapons and space technology, an educated workforce and, of course, has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons of any country.
Russia has enormous problems including adverse demographics, limited access to oceans, harsh weather, and limited fertile soil. Yet, none of these problems negate Russia’s native strengths.
Notwithstanding the prospect of improved relations, Putin remains the geopolitical chess master he has always been.
His long game involves the accumulation of gold, development of alternative payments systems, and ultimate demise of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.
- Burned-Out Shack In Silicon Valley Selling For $800k
Silicon Valley, the southern region of San Francisco Bay Area of California, is arguably the most expensive place in the United States to live. At the epicenter of all this, Palo Alto is a breeding ground for many unicorn start-ups and overvalued technology companies. The region has a median home price of roughly $2,598,200.
To gain a perspective of just how outrageous real estate in Silicon Valley is, the median sales price of existing homes in the United States averages around $241,000.
The meteoric rise in home prices has accelerated Silicon Valley’s real estate market into bubble territory. Even San Francisco’s median cost of a one-bedroom rental floats around $3,590 per month. As the housing bubble infects much of the San Francisco Bay area, we have stumbled across the latest installment of real estate insanity that could very well be an essential clue to what comes next.
Take, for instance, a burned-out shack in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood listed on Monday for $799,000. The realtor said the asking price is reasonable — given the housing market dynamics and its geographical location, said KTVU FOX 2.
The owners of an abandoned, fire-destroyed home in San Jose are asking $800,000 for the house and surrounding 5,800 square foot lot. Holly Barr
Realtor Holly Barr told KTVU the owners of an abandoned, fire-destroyed shack reflects the value of the property, not necessarily the burnt down structure. She noted in the interview, the home caught fire more than two years ago, and has been dormant ever since.
“They did leave it standing so you can remodel it versus tearing it down so you save a lot of money when you can leave a wall up and do a remodel versus a complete tear-down,” Barr told the station. The Bird Avenue address in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood sits close to a proposed transit-oriented Google “village” of offices, research sites and retail stores.
Barr’s realtor Facebook page describes the home and lot combination as a “Great opportunity to build your dream home!” Since the posting, Barr told KTVU she has received ten offers and expected a contract on the property by the end of the week.
Barr has yet to list the property on multiple listing services (MLS), a suite of services that real estate brokers use for completing transactions. However, she says, a home down the street recently sold for $1.6 million. Glancing at the current Glen San Jose real estate market (Zillow), the average price of a home is around $1,365,900 with total square footage around 2,500 sqft.
Some Facebook users found the price of the shack as absurd. Here is what they said:
“800k for that…What has this area come to when a family earning good money cannot even afford to buy even a burnt out wreak.Greed, pure greed from all concerned right here,” said Cally Jayne, a Facebook user.
“And here we see a perfect example of unchecked free market capitalism. A Chinese billionaire will pay $850k without blinking an eye because all they are interested in is the land as an investment. Thousands of properties bought up like this with zero interest in actually living in that lot or renting or anything. The actual housing market shrinks as a result to the point where even Silicon Valley engineers are priced out. Years later, we’ll all shrug our shoulders and go “WHAT HAPPENED!?!” like it’ll be some big mystery,” said another Facebook user.
Shocking, one Facebook user claims this million dollar neighborhood filled with shacks is located down the street from “homeless encampments every which way you turn!!!”
Another user warns the neighborhood where the million dollar shack resides is “full of crime” and homeless people.
About a hundred comments down, Facebook users started revolting against the realtor — showing pictures of their non-shack, McMansions for substantially less in other states…
“This only cost me 250k to build but I’m in Texas lol,” said Gomez.
“This is what you can get in Spicewood Texas for under $500,000,” said another.
While it is interesting to watch the dynamics of the market. What we see in San Francisco Bay Area of California is a classic bubble. Let us explain below:
The first graph shows house prices in the Bay Area have increased faster than the national average…Why has this been happening?
S&P/Case-Shiller CA-San Francisco Home Price Index/S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index
The second graph shows the working population in the region has, in fact, declined versus the national average. So, perhaps, an influx of residents is unlikely the cause behind the rising housing prices.
All Employees: Total Nonfarm in San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA
The third graph follows the progression of personal incomes in the Bay Area compared with the rest of the country.
Per Capita Personal Income in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA
..And alas, the problem has been solved, the Bay Area has fewer people with much more money chasing the same houses, a classic symptom of a bubble. As for the burned out shack worth 3.3x than the median sales price of existing homes in the United State, well, that is also a sign of peak stupidity for whoever buys it next.
- Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out Of Social Media
Submitted by Bill Blunden,
As the Facebook fracas unfolds, the agenda-setting members of the press have been inclined to frame Cambridge Analytica as an isolated incident. This belies the fact that mass surveillance is a fundamental aspect of social media’s business model, and that social media users cannot have their cake and eat it too, despite what tech CEOs might claim. In lieu of regulatory measures, protecting your privacy online entails swallowing a bitter pill: opting out of social media.
While the pool of Facebook accounts suspected of being harvested by Cambridge Analytica continues to grow it’s important to recognize that there’s more to this story than a cabal of shady republican operators. By focusing on Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL, the major news outlets are creating the perception that what’s happening is the work of a few bad apples. When the reality is that the underlying problem is systemic in nature.
It’s not just the GOP. Political influence operations are a bipartisan affair. According to a number cruncher who worked for the Democrats, the 2012 Obama campaign aggregated almost five times as much Facebook data as Cambridge Analytica. It’s just that in Obama’s case Facebook execs decided to turn a blind eye. As the source explained, “they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, Zuckerberg has hired public relations experts and launched an extensive damage control campaign. Note, for example, the tacit assumption baked into the title of Brian Chen’s piece in the New York Times: “How to Protect Yourself (and Your Friends) on Facebook.” Are editors at the Times alleging that users can have their cake and eat it too?
Reading down into the article, Chen acknowledges that truly protecting your data would entail deleting your Facebook account. This frank admission underscores the fact that it’s nearly impossible for social media users to escape data collection. After all that’s how social media companies make their money. Well over a hundred billion dollars per year. Your online activity inside their walled internet gardens as well as your dopamine addiction to “tweets” and “likes” are their income stream.
What? You thought these online services were free? A miracle of the new economy?
Social media’s big data collection directly informs Madison Avenue. All that aggregation begets carefully targeted attempts at manipulation (though marketing execs prefer harmless euphemisms like “educate” and “inform”). And if that wasn’t bad enough, when intelligence services ask to have a gander its dollars to donuts that social media will silently collaborate, chatting away with spy masters on a first name basis. Keep moving folks, nothing to see here.
So there you have it. Social media is a form of mass surveillance and a tool of elite control. Buy product X, vote for candidate Y, support regime change movement Z. Pay no attention to the CEO behind the curtain.
What to do, what to do?
In the spirit of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), journalists like Matt Taibbi have suggested that government regulation is the way forward. The idea is that lawmakers should enact laws that force social media companies to “dial back the use of the data-collection technologies.” Luminaries like Richard Stallman have echoed similar thoughts. And although there’s merit to the idea, it’s unlikely to be immediately feasible in the United States given the tech industry’s lobbying footprint. Companies like Facebook and Google have been more than generous with lawmakers. At best, serious legislative reform is a long term approach that’s linked to state capture. At worst it’s wishful thinking.
Thus we return to Brian Chen’s advice: cold turkey. Take personal responsibility for your own social life. Go back to engaging flesh and blood people without tech companies serving as an intermediary. Eschew the narcissistic impulse to broadcast the excruciating minutiae of your life to the world. Refuse to accept the mandate that you must participate in social media in order to participate in society. Reclaim your autonomy.
Having said that, the option of forgoing digital platforms in favor of genuine human interaction is related to another legitimate critique of social media; that it tends towards ideological echo chambers. Where people take refuge in the comfort of messaging that serves only to reinforce their existing beliefs. A novel incarnation of the divide and conquer strategy which the power elite have traditionally wielded to hobble the proles.
Readers should be wary of social media bubbles, safe spaces, and the like. In the absence of billionaire donors like Robert Mercer and Tom Steyer, instituting societal change means reaching out to other folks. Some of whom may have different ways of viewing the world. Resist the temptation to write them off and have the humility to accept the limits of your own understanding.
- Students Demand Penn State Defund Conservative "Hate Groups"
Authored by Adam Sabes via Campus Reform,
Student demonstrators at colleges across Pennsylvania are demanding that their schools cut funding to “hate groups” such as Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and the Bull Moose Party.
The Pennsylvania Student Power Network, as well as students from other clubs such as the United Socialists, protested Monday outside an administrative building at Pennsylvania State University, complaining that the school provides funding to groups such as TPUSA and the Bull Moose Party, according to The Daily Collegian.
The students also delivered a petition President Eric Barron’s office that urges him to defund the conservative “hate groups” that have “attracted avowed white nationalists to campus.”
Additionally, the petition demands that “school and student activities funds, which mostly draw from students’ tuition and fees, not be used to support student hate groups,” and that “our colleges and universities formally and publicly denounce hate groups on and around campus…”
PSU has pushed back on the accusation that it funds TPUSA and the Bull Moose Party, arguing that neither group receives direct financial support from the school.
“TPUSA and the Bull Moose Party have not requested nor received any funding from the University Park Allocation Committee, the entity that distributes portions of the student-initiated fee for student organizations,” Lisa Powers, a senior director for PSU’s Office of Communications, told Campus Reform.
To that extent, Powers said that the university is committed to upholding First Amendment rights, even when it comes to defending speech that people may disagree with.
“As an institution of higher education, Penn State not only has an obligation to support Constitutionally protected free speech, but also is committed to open and civil exchange of ideas,” Powers maintained.
One protester, Leslie Johnson, argued during the protest that “right-wing student organizations have a responsibility to shut down hate and violence stemming from their own members” while accusing TPUSA members of previously using offensive slurs against individuals with disabilities, the Daily Collegian reported.
Michael Csencsits, the treasurer of TPUSA at Penn State, told Campus Reform that the group’s members “never spoke with ill intent towards minorities of any kind,” adding that “we, TPUSA at Penn State, were shocked to hear [the demonstrators] calling us a hate group, as we don’t associate ourselves with any of those ideals.”
Vincent Cucchiara, the communications director for the Bull Moose Party at PSU, echoed Csencsits criticism of the protest, arguing that the activists’ claims are “unfounded.”
“The claims are completely unfounded, which is why they make no specific accusations, and they serve as excellent examples of how unreasonable and indecent college leftists really are,” Cucchiara told Campus Reform.
According to its Facebook page, activists from the Pennsylvania Student Power Network protested on 21 campuses across the state, making similar demands to “denounce campus hate groups” and “deny these groups school funding.”
Campus Reform reached out to the Pennsylvania Student Power Network, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Disclaimer: the Leadership Institute previously provided financial support for The State Patriot, which is affiliated with the Bull Moose Party at PSU.
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