- $200 Million Ghost Town Of Castles, Created By Turkey's Recession
More than 500 hundred chateaux have been abandoned at the Burj Al Babas luxury housing development in Turkey after its developer filed for bankruptcy last November. The homes were crafted for wealthy Gulf investors in Turkey’s northern Bolu province, but as soon as the country slipped into an economic recession, the land development project collapsed.
About halfway between Istanbul and Ankara, the Burj Al Babas development will contain 732 chateaux when, or if, it ever finishes.
Started in 2014, hundreds of homes have been left unfinished since the downfall of the Turkish economy in 2018 led to developer Sarot Group to file for bankruptcy in November. The group has debts of $27 million, the AFP elaborates on the housing crisis unfolding in Turkey.
“Unfinished and empty housing projects are strewn across the country, testimony to the trouble the construction sector, and the wider economy, now finds itself in. The construction sector has been a driving force of the Turkish economy under the rule of [Turkish president Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, who has overseen growth consistently above the global average since he came to power in 2003. But the sector contracted 5.3% on-year in the third quarter of 2018.”
“Three out of four companies seeking bankruptcy protection or bankruptcy are construction companies,” said Alper Duman, associate professor at Izmir University of Economics.
Clients from Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates purchased 350 of the homes, according to Hurriyet, at $370,000 to $530,000 per unit.
Sarot Group Chairman Mehmet Emin Yerdelen blamed the company’s insolvency issues on deadbeat clients.
“We couldn’t get about 7.5 million dollars receivables for the villas we have sold to Gulf countries,” Hurriyet quoted Yerdelen as saying. “We applied for bankruptcy protection but the court ruled for bankruptcy. We will appeal the ruling.”
The group constructed 587 villas before it filed for bankruptcy protection. The court ordered the group to halt all construction for 2019, yet Yerdelen believes the project will restart in the near term.
“The project is valued at $200 million,” he said. “We only need to sell 100 villas to pay off our debt. I believe we can get over this crisis in four to five months and partially inaugurate the project in 2019.”
The villas, which here built in the style of miniature French chateaux, are all three stories and look like a medieval fortress.
Happy #BrutalMonday! Burj Al Babas (Turkey) pic.twitter.com/ydbFDaVgqG
— Mateo Arquitectura (@mateoarq) January 14, 2019
While Turkey has seen an economic boom over the last several decades, the country’s economy has been hit with a severe downturn in real estate, inflation skyrocketing, and political turmoil emerging around the slowdown. As for the hundreds of abandoned castles, well, maybe Turkish President Erdoğan could repurpose the site for a new refugee camp.
- The World’s Most Dangerous Nuclear Weapon Just Rolled Off the Assembly Line
Authored by James Carroll via TomDispatch.com,
With the creation of a new “mini-nuke” warhead, the US is making nuclear war all the more probable…
Last month, the National Nuclear Security Administration (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission) announced that the first of a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons had rolled off the assembly line at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant in the panhandle of Texas. That warhead, the W76-2, is designed to be fitted to a submarine-launched Trident missile, a weapon with a range of more than 7,500 miles. By September, an undisclosed number of warheads will be delivered to the Navy for deployment.
What makes this particular nuke new is the fact that it carries a far smaller destructive payload than the thermonuclear monsters the Trident has been hosting for decades – not the equivalent of about 100 kilotons of TNT as previously, but of five kilotons. According to Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the W76-2 will yield “only” about one-third of the devastating power of the weapon that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Yet that very shrinkage of the power to devastate is precisely what makes this nuclear weapon potentially the most dangerous ever manufactured. Fulfilling the Trump administration’s quest for nuclear-war-fighting “flexibility,” it isn’t designed as a deterrent against another country launching its nukes; it’s designed to be used. This is the weapon that could make the previously “unthinkable” thinkable.
There have long been “low-yield” nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nuclear powers, including ones on cruise missiles, “air-drop bombs” (carried by planes), and even nuclear artillery shells — weapons designated as “tactical” and intended to be used in the confines of a specific battlefield or in a regional theater of war. The vast majority of them were, however, eliminated in the nuclear arms reductions that followed the end of the Cold War, a scaling-down by both the United States and Russia that would be quietly greeted with relief by battlefield commanders, those actually responsible for the potential use of such ordnance who understood its self-destructive absurdity.
Ranking some weapons as “low-yield” based on their destructive energy always depended on a distinction that reality made meaningless (once damage from radioactivity and atmospheric fallout was taken into account along with the unlikelihood that only one such weapon would be used). In fact, the elimination of tactical nukes represented a hard-boiled confrontation with the iron law of escalation, another commander’s insight — that any use of such a weapon against a similarly armed adversary would likely ignite an inevitable chain of nuclear escalation whose end point was barely imaginable. One side was never going to take a hit without responding in kind, launching a process that could rapidly spiral toward an apocalyptic exchange. “Limited nuclear war,” in other words, was a fool’s fantasy and gradually came to be universally acknowledged as such. No longer, unfortunately.
Unlike tactical weapons, intercontinental strategic nukes were designed to directly target the far-off homeland of an enemy. Until now, their extreme destructive power (so many times greater than that inflicted on Hiroshima) made it impossible to imagine genuine scenarios for their use that would be practically, not to mention morally, acceptable. It was exactly to remove that practical inhibition — the moral one seemed not to count — that the Trump administration recently began the process of withdrawing from the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, while rolling a new “limited” weapon off the assembly line and so altering the Trident system. With these acts, there can be little question that humanity is entering a perilous second nuclear age.
That peril lies in the way a 70-year-old inhibition that undoubtedly saved the planet is potentially being shelved in a new world of supposedly “usable” nukes. Of course, a weapon with one-third the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, where as many as 150,000 died, might kill 50,000 people in a similar attack before escalation even began. Of such nukes, former Secretary of State George Shultz, who was at President Ronald Reagan’s elbow when Cold War-ending arms control negotiations climaxed, said, “A nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon. You use a small one, then you go to a bigger one. I think nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons and we need to draw the line there.”
HOW CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT?
Until now, it’s been an anomaly of the nuclear age that some of the fiercest critics of such weaponry were drawn from among the very people who created it. The emblem of that is the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a bimonthly journal founded after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by veteran scientists from the Manhattan Project, which created the first nuclear weapons. (Today, that magazine’s sponsors include 14 Nobel Laureates.) Beginning in 1947, the Bulletin’s cover has functioned annually as a kind of nuclear alarm, featuring a so-called Doomsday Clock, its minute hand always approaching “midnight” (defined as the moment of nuclear catastrophe).
In that first year, the hand was positioned at seven minutes to midnight. In 1949, after the Soviet Union acquired its first atomic bomb, it inched up to three minutes before midnight. Over the years, it has been reset every January to register waxing and waning levels of nuclear jeopardy. In 1991, after the end of the Cold War, it was set back to 17 minutes and then, for a few hope-filled years, the clock disappeared altogether.
It came back in 2005 at seven minutes to midnight. In 2007, the scientists began factoring climate degradation into the assessment and the hands moved inexorably forward. By 2018, after a year of Donald Trump, it clocked in at two minutes to midnight, a shrill alarm meant to signal a return to the greatest peril ever: the two-minute level reached only once before, 65 years earlier. Last month, within days of the announced manufacture of the first W76-2, theBulletin’scover for 2019 was unveiled, still at that desperate two-minute mark, aka the edge of doom.
To fully appreciate how precarious our situation is today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientistsimplicitly invites us to return to that other two-minutes-before-midnight moment. If the manufacture of a new low-yield nuclear weapon marks a decisive pivot back toward jeopardy, consider it an irony that the last such moment involved the manufacture of the extreme opposite sort of nuke: a “super” weapon, as it was then called, or a hydrogen bomb. That was in 1953 and what may have been the most fateful turn in the nuclear story until now had just occurred.
After the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, the United States embarked on a crash program to build a far more powerful nuclear weapon. Having been decommissioned after World War II, the Pantex plant was reactivated and has been the main source of American nukes ever since.
The atomic bomb is a fission weapon, meaning the nuclei of atoms are split into parts whose sum total weighs less than the original atoms, the difference having been transformed into energy. A hydrogen bomb uses the intense heat generated by that “fission” (hence thermonuclear) as a trigger for a vastly more powerful “fusion,” or combining, of elements, which results in an even larger loss of mass being transformed into explosive energy of a previously unimagined sort. One H-bomb generates explosive force 100 to 1,000 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb.
Given a kind of power that humans once only imagined in the hands of the gods, key former Manhattan Project scientists, including Enrico Fermi, James Conant, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, firmly opposed the development of such a new weapon as a potential threat to the human species. The Super Bomb would be, in Conant’s word, “genocidal.” Following the lead of those scientists, members of the Atomic Energy Commission recommended — by a vote of three to two — against developing such a fusion weapon, but President Truman ordered it done anyway.
In 1952, as the first H-bomb test approached, still-concerned atomic scientists proposed that the test be indefinitely postponed to avert a catastrophic “super” competition with the Soviets. They suggested that an approach be made to Moscow to mutually limit thermonuclear development only to research on, not actual testing of, such weaponry, especially since none of this could truly be done in secret. A fusion bomb’s test explosion would be readily detectable by the other side, which could then proceed with its own testing program. The scientists urged Moscow and Washington to draw just the sort of arms control line that the two nations would indeed agree to many years later.
At the time, the United States had the initiative. An out-of-control arms race with the potential accumulation of thousands of such weapons on both sides had not yet really begun. In 1952, the United States numbered its atomic arsenal in the low hundreds; the Soviet Union in the dozens. (Even those numbers, of course, already offered a vision of an Armageddon-like global war.) President Truman considered the proposal to indefinitely postpone the test. It was then backed by figures like Vannevar Bush, who headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which had overseen the wartime Manhattan Protect. Scientists like him already grasped the lesson that would only slowly dawn on policymakers — that every advance in the atomic capability of one of the superpowers would inexorably lead the other to match it, ad infinitum. The title of the bestselling James Jones novel of that moment caught the feeling perfectly: From Here to Eternity.
In the last days of his presidency, however, Truman decided against such an indefinite postponement of the test — against, that is, a break in the nuke-accumulation momentum that might well have changed history. On November 1, 1952, the first H-bomb — “Mike” — was detonated on an island in the Pacific. It had 500 times more lethal force than the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. With a fireball more than three miles wide, not only did it destroy the three-story structure built to house it but also the entire island of Elugelab, as well as parts of several nearby islands.
In this way, the thermonuclear age began and the assembly line at that same Pantex plant really started to purr. Less than 10 years later, the United States had 20,000 nukes, mostly H-bombs; Moscow, fewer than 2,000. And three months after that first test, theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved that hand on its still new clock to two minutes before midnight.
A MADMAN-THEORY VERSION OF THE WORLD
It may seem counterintuitive to compare the manufacture of what’s called a “mini-nuke” to the creation of the “super” almost six decades ago, but honestly, what meaning can “mini” really have when we’re talking about nuclear war? The point is that, as in 1952, so in 2019 another era-shaping threshold is being crossed at the very same weapons plant in the high plains country of the Texas Panhandle, where so many instruments of mayhem have been created. Ironically, because the H-bomb was eventually understood to be precisely what the dissenting scientists had claimed it was — a genocidal weapon — pressures against its use proved insurmountable during almost four decades of savage East-West hostility. Today, the Trident-mounted W76-2 could well have quite a different effect — its first act of destruction potentially being the obliteration of the long-standing, post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki taboo against nuclear use. In other words, so many years after the island of Elugelab was wiped from the face of the Earth, the “absolute weapon” is finally being normalized.
With President Trump expunging the theoretical from Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” — that former president’s conviction that an opponent should fear an American leader was so unstable he might actually push the nuclear button — what is to be done? Once again, nuke-skeptical scientists, who have grasped the essential problems in the nuclear conundrum with crystal clarity for three quarters of a century, are pointing the way. In 2017, the Union of Concerned Scientists, together with Physicians for Social Responsibility, launched Back from the Brink: The Call to Prevent Nuclear War, “a national grassroots initiative seeking to fundamentally change U.S. nuclear weapons policy and lead us away from the dangerous path we are on.”
Engaging a broad coalition of civic organizations, municipalities, religious groups, educators, and scientists, it aims to lobby government bodies at every level, to raise the nuclear issue in every forum, and to engage an ever-wider group of citizens in pressing for change in American nuclear policy. Back From the Brink makes five demands, much needed in a world in which the U.S. and Russia are withdrawing from a key Cold-War-era nuclear treaty with more potentially to come, including the New START pact that expires two years from now. The five demands are:
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No to first use of nukes. (Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Adam Smith only recently introduced a No First Use Act in both houses of Congress to stop Trump and future presidents from launching a nuclear war.)
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End the unchecked launch-authority of the president. (Last month, Senator Edward Markey and Representative Ted Lieu reintroduced a bill that would do just that.)
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No to nuclear hair-triggers.
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No to endlessly renewing and replacing the arsenal (as the U.S. is now doing to the tune of perhaps $1.6 trillion over three decades).
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Yes to an abolition agreement among nuclear-armed states.
These demands range from the near-term achievable to the long-term hoped for, but as a group they define what clear-eyed realism should be in Donald Trump’s new version of our never-ending nuclear age.
In the upcoming season of presidential politics, the nuclear question belongs at the top of every candidate’s agenda. It belongs at the center of every forum and at the heart of every voter’s decision. Action is needed before the W76-2 and its successors teach a post-Hiroshima planet what nuclear war is truly all about.
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- These Are America's Most Unaffordable Cities For Housing
Nearly 75% of American households believe the nation is experiencing a housing affordability crisis, according to a recent survey published on behalf of the National Association of Home Builders.
Affordability appears to be a significant issue for renters and prospecting homeowners.
So realtor.com wanted to find the locations where housing is the most unaffordable.
What they discovered was not necessarily the most expensive real estate markets. The focus of the report is on regions where residents are spending above 28% of their household income on a place to live.
As realtor.com warns: “that can be a perilous financial line to walk.”
“The more you spend on housing the less you have to spend on other things you value and to fund your financial goals,” says Roger Ma, a financial planner at Lifelaidout and New York City–based real estate agent.
The real estate listings website said some cities made the list because “foreign, out-of-state, and second- and third-home buyers” had inflated prices out of reach of the locals, many of whom are considered to be the poor working class. Other areas are popular with retirees, who have lower incomes or are living on savings. And less expensive places on the list are due to low, local wages and a lack of high-paying jobs.
To compute the findings, realtor.com examined median monthly housing costs in 500 metros to pinpoint the markets where residents are spending way too much on their homes. They did this by dividing the median monthly expenses for renters and homeowners by the median monthly household income.
realtor.com presents: America’s Most Unaffordable Cities For Housing
1. Santa Cruz, CA
Median list price: $895,800
Median monthly housing cost: $1,840
Median household income: $73,663
Share of income going toward housing*: 30%2. Miami, FL
Median list price: $385,100
Median monthly housing cost: $1,280
Median household income: $51,758
Share of income going toward housing: 29.7%3. Grants Pass, OR
Median list price: $334,600
Median monthly housing cost: $918
Median household income: $40,705
Share of income going toward housing: 27.1%4. Atlantic City, NJ
Median list price: $240,000
Median monthly housing cost: $1,290
Median household income: $57,514
Share of income going toward housing: 26.9%5. New York, NY
Median list price: $515,100
Median monthly housing cost: $1,588
Median household income: $72,205
Share of income going toward housing: 26.4%6. Kahului, HI
Median list price: $928,800
Median monthly housing cost: $1,594
Median household income: $72,743
Share of income going toward housing: 26.3%7. Jacksonville, NC
Median list price: $203,300
Median monthly housing cost: $1,028
Median household income: $48,162
Share of income going toward housing: 25.6%8. Bellingham, WA
Median list price: $415,000
Median monthly housing cost: $1,203
Median household income: $56,419
Share of income going toward housing: 25.6%9. Barnstable Town, MA
Median list price: $525,00
Median monthly housing cost: $1,411
Median household income: $68,048
Share of income going toward housing: 24.9%10. Carson City, NV
Median list price: $347,100
Median monthly housing cost: $1,012
Median household income: $49,341
Share of income going toward housing: 24.6%Housing is vital to the economic health of the country. This new report should serve as a wake-up call to lawmakers at all levels of government to ease regulatory burdens that drive up the cost of housing and enact sensible policies that will promote affordable living.
- History's 10 Most Culturally Significant Dick Pic Scandals
Authored by Matt Taibbi via RollingStone.com,
From Jeff Bezos to Anthony Weiner to Brett Favre, a look back at below-the-belt selfies that shook culture…
The AMI-Jeff Bezos scandal is set up to dominate headlines for a while. Who knows where it will lead? In the third world, an oligarch-president proxy war playing out in public like this usually presages a coup.
If this were Thailand or Uruguay, bookies would already have odds on a Bezos-Mark-Zuckerberg-Sundar-Pichai junta being in power by May.
This scandal will at least drag us through unprecedented legal and ethical conundrums. Can the president use the surveillance powers of the state to go after political enemies? Can a billionaire intelligence contractor and administrator of one of earth’s largest private data collections – including the so-called “Secret Region” cloud – fight back using his own surveillance trove through a newspaper he owns?
This story could blur the lines between public and private power to the point of meaninglessness. America could very well find its fate decided by a series of pre-dawn phone calls, after which we’d wake up to find Trump flying to Switzerland, Amazon lieutenants in the Joint Chiefs office and the presidency replaced by an executive board.
At the center of all of this: a dick pic.
Nothing could be more American than the fate of our democracy now hanging (!) on what Enquirer editor Dylan Howard euphemistically describes as a “below-the-belt selfie.”
Seemingly since the birth of the Internet, celebrity jackasses have felt the urge to take pics of their naughty bits and send them, often unsolicited, on the electronic superhighway. One study suggests as many as four in 10 young women have received an unsolicited nude photo from a man.
The dick-pic scandal really became a thing between 2010 and 2011, with the (listed below) Brett Favre and Anthony Weiner stories. Since then, it’s become so common for men to put their junk online that it really only makes headlines if it’s accidental, political or a slow news day. From Greg Oden to Tyrann Mathieu to Jude Law to countless others, there are so many famous penii online that the headlines have become more interesting than the stories (i.e. “Canada’s Dick Pic Scandal Gets Bigger All the Time”).
A few recent incidents, however, have become relevant major news stories. In declining order of cultural importance, here they are:
10. Brett Favre
What should a wealthy, married professional athlete do when he’s feeling the urge? Obviously send an unsolicited photo of what looks like half a stale donut to a married masseuse who works for your company. Poor Jenn Sterger probably thought she was the first person in history to receive a dong shot from a med school cadaver, but it got worse when she realized the infamous picture belonged to the Jets’ franchise quarterback. The masseuse was subjected to horrific media treatment after that — she actually had to go on TV to say she was not flattered by pictures of Brett Favre’s dick. The Favre incident ended up being a template in many ways for future scandals of this type. The Bezos story already fits on the “selfie-taking male must immediately act like he’s the victim” front, while the “gross-out picture always ends up getting released in NSFW form no matter how hard lawyers try” part of the story is yet to come.
9. Joe Barton
The Republican chair of the House Energy Committee has long had a reputation as one of the meanest people in Washington, like LBJ without national ambition. The Texan has also long been one of the most pious peddlers of aw-shucks, hand-over-heart “family values” claptrap in recent history — among other things he was one of the fiercest critics of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So there was a powerful cosmic justice angle when Barton was caught sending retch-inducing selfies showing him tugging sausage below his giant pink under-cauldron. He added a text message: “I want you so bad, deep and hard.” The selfie-taker-as-victim narrative kicked in quickly, as it’s been suggested Barton should be protected by a new Texas law against “revenge porn.” Of note: despite being a Republican and just as graphically compromised as his Democratic counterpart, Barton has not been dumped on as much either in Washington or in the national press as Anthony Weiner. This might be because Weiner’s preening and bottomless self-regard was extremely funny, while Barton is just a gross wanking old dude. It might also be a telling indicator of how loathed Weiner was during his time on the Hill.
8. Kimberly Guilfoyle
The former Fox anchor — and reputed willing Donald Trump, Jr. paramour — left work last summer amid rumors of bizarre in-office behavior. The Huffington Post, which did a major investigation interviewing 21 unnamed sources, noted: “Six sources said Guilfoyle’s behavior included showing personal photographs of male genitalia to colleagues (and identifying whose genitals they were).” The story also said Guilfoyle frequently complained Jeanine Pirro is too old. So it’s possible people at Fox were shown pictures of a Trump penis against their will. The alleged female dick-pic flasher was a new twist on the usual scandal format.
7. Tony Clement
The Canadian version of the Anthony Weiner scandal was, predictably, basically the same story as the American prototype, only less interesting. The Conservative MP exchanged explicit pictures with someone he thought “was a consenting female” but was, he claimed, in fact “an individual or party who targeted me for the purpose of financial extortion.” Vice reported that Clement was a serial Instagram lurker who went on “deep timeline liking sprees” late at night. Though nothing will ever top Weiner’s decision to try “equine therapy” for his sexting addiction, Clement also went into “treatment” for his behavior, holding to what’s become a pattern (my money is on yoga, dolphins, and Alexa lullabies when Bezos inevitably chooses a sexting cure).
6. Lars Ohly
In proof that junk-shot scandals are survivable, Sweden’s former Left Party leader Ohly emerged unscathed after he accidentally posted his packaging. Apparently he was trying to show off a tattoo.
“Ha, ha, I accidentally posted a picture on Instagram that showed more than intended. Now corrected,” he wrote, and that was it.
No scandal, no horse therapy, no freakout, no major-release documentary. Is everything in Europe easier?
5. Kanye West
It’s now officially more embarrassing to be photographed arm in arm with Donald Trump than it is to have your junk on the Internet. Obviously, it depends a little on the picture.
4. Hulk Hogan
It wasn’t really a dick pic, but the verbal penis-boasting of the famed wrestler — named Terry Bollea in real life — became a central issue in a landmark case that sank a media empire. Hogan’s attorney Shane Vogt scored crucial points in the lawsuit against Gawker for publishing a sex tape of Hogan sleeping with his best friend’s wife. Former Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio answered “no” to the question posed by Vogt, “Mr. Bollea’s penis had no real news value, right?” This case not only resulted in the devastation of Gawker Media (now a shell of itself under the name Gizmodo Media), but it forced Bollea, who had bragged to various radio personalities that Hulk Hogan was carrying a monster in his speedo, to say “I do not have a ten-inch penis,” on camera. It’s on YouTube forever. Note: Hogan’s son Nick is said to have been the first male victim of the hack-and-leak scandal called “the Fappening.”
3. Robert Mueller’s extremely rumored, extremely alleged possession of Individual 1’s selfie
In February 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller to great fanfare indicted 13 individuals and three companies connected to the Russian “Internet Research Agency.” It was widely assumed none of the defendants would appear to contest the charges, but one, Concord Management and Catering, did, showing up announcing a willingness to go to trial. Mueller asked permission to delay his own prosecution and was refused, a fact few outlets noticed. Mueller then commenced a long battle over discovery he seems to be winning, successfully arguing to a judge that the Russians are not entitled to what their lawyers call “millions of pages of non-classified discovery.”
As part of the motions in this case, Concord argued, “Could the manner in which [Mueller] collected a nude selfie really threaten the national security of the United States?”
This one sentence for the first time attracted real press attention to the case, as reporters ignored the anomaly of Mueller’s seeming reluctance to present evidence in his own case in favor of the remote possibility that he might have a Trump selfie in his possession. Although clearly, the public would have mixed feelings about the existence of such a picture.
As (again) The Root put it, “Please, for the love of god let this not be a photo of President Mushroom Cap. No one needs to see that. No. One.”
2. Anthony Weiner
It was bad enough that a sitting congressman named Weiner was sending unsolicited “nether region” pics to women around the country; it was worse when he did it again after leaving office, this time to a 15-year-old girl. What’s even worse is Donald Trump might now be president because of it. In late 2016, why is the FBI up on Weiner’s laptop if he’s not sexting with a teenager? Do new Hillary Clinton emails come out just before Election Day that year if Weiner wasn’t so proud of his photography? As an excuse for why the Democrats lost, emailgate has always seemed pathetic, but viewed purely through the lens of individual consequences, the butterfly effect of Weiner’s eroto-narcissistic addiction has been amazing. Not only did he help launch Breitbart into national-power status through his humiliating public prostration before the gloating form of Andrew Breitbart himself, but he threw a massive wrench in the 2016 presidential election by exposing his wife’s boss to political tormentors at just the wrong time. There’s not much to say beyond, what an asshole.
1. Jeff Bezos
The Bezos story is proof that there is no disincentive that could be invented to prevent men from taking pictures of their penises. Under Washington state law, Bezos’ wife MacKenzie in a divorce could collect half of his 79 million shares of Amazon stock, worth north of $130 billion. She could also massively dilute the worth of Amazon stock by forcing Bezos to sell off his shares to pay her in cash. This means Bezos at some point aimed a camera at his unit, snapped, and thought: I’m gonna risk $65 billion to hit send.
MacKenzie, a novelist, informed Bezos of her plans to divorce two days after being told an upcoming Enquirer story about his affair with Lauren Sanchez that included “raunchy messages and erotic selfies.”
Mercifully, we haven’t seen the actual photo yet, but we do seem to be mere minutes from a constitutional crisis.
So that’s awesome. What’s the over/under on dick-pic scandals in the 2020 race? I put it at two and I’m taking the over. You heard it here first.
- Inside The NYPD's Out-Of-Control DNA Collection Practices
The NYPD is going to great lengths to collect, and permanently store DNA from everyone they can – guilty or innocent, according to the NY Daily News.
Whether it be going door to door, bribing people with cigarettes, or simply demanding cheek swabs from random passers by, the NYPD has been aggressively compiling an Orwellian crime-fighting DNA database which had over 64,000 profiles as of 2017.
Take as an extreme example the police investigation of the Howard Beach jogger case. Before they identified a suspect, the NYPD collected well over 500 DNA profiles from men in the East New York area. Imagine police knocking on doors, in uniform, with a cheek swab in hand, asking residents to prove they didn’t kill the jogger in the nearby park.
They were willing to do it in East New York. Do you think this would happen on Park Ave.? In Park Slope? Not likely.
But things get worse from there. For those people excluded from the jogger case, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the city’s crime lab, permanently keeps those profiles in their databank and routinely compares profiles to all city crimes. –NY Daily News
The Chief Medical Examiner’s office, meanwhile, has justified the supercharged data collection on ambiguous city and state laws – instead preferring to invent their own rules governing how they use someone’s DNA.
In short – anyone who has given their DNA to the NYPD will be routinely compared to DNA samples from every rape, murder and any other violent crime run through the system.
But wait, you might say – why worry if you’ve done nothing wrong?
Because, as the Daily News notes, “DNA has unparalleled power to wrongly accuse. Genetic testing can now reveal a profile based on a few cells, and we shed hundreds of thousands of cells a day. Your DNA can show up in places you’ve never been.“
For example, the DNA of Lukis Anderson was discovered under the fingernails of a murdered billionaire – which was transferred to the dead man by paramedics that night who had treated both men. Anderson was facing the death penalty before his 2013 exoneration.
You might also take a cue from the police themselves. Under their labor contract with the city, rank-and-file officers don’t give the lab their DNA, which means the lab can’t easily rule out possible crime-scene contamination. This means that the officers knocking on doors ask people to volunteer to do what they won’t.
Basic privacy is another genuine worry. We see every day how our personal information, once set loose upon the internet, can never be recaptured. The past few years have heralded incredible expansions of the uses of DNA. Now imagine what will be possible in 30 years.
And just when you thought private DNA testing companies were safe (granted, ZH readers generally know better) – FamilyTreeDNA, one of the pioneers of the growing market for “at home”, consumer genetic testing, confirmed a report from BuzzFeed that it has quietly granted the Federal Bureau of Investigation access to its vast trove of nearly 2 million genetic profiles.
Having been caught abusing client privacy, the company decided to make the best of it and despite the (coming) outrage over privacy abuse, Family Tree officials touted their work with the FBI to BuzzFeed.
“Without realizing it [Family Tree DNA founder and CEO Bennett Greenspan] had inadvertently created a platform that, nearly two decades later, would help law enforcement agencies solve violent crimes faster than ever,” the company said in a statement.
What a brave new world!
- Mt. Gox Trustee May Have Crashed Bitcoin In 2018, But There Is Still Hope
Authored by Joseph Young via CoinTelegraph.com,
The now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox reportedly liquidated around $312 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) throughout February and June of 2018 through a Japanese exchange called BitPoint.
image courtesy of CoinTelegraph
GoxDox, an organization that was established to assist Mt. Gox creditors, released a photograph of a bank account statement on February 5 showing the alleged transactions sent from BitPoint to the Mt. Gox trustee led by Nobuaki Kobayashi.
If the report of GoxDox is accurate, the trustee went out of his way to disregard the suggestion of Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, who explicitly told the trustee to refrain from selling the company’s BTC holdings. If needed, Powell previously said that the trustee has to liquidate the remaining Bitcoin funds on an over-the-counter (OTC) trading platform to minimize its impact on the price of Bitcoin.
It is possible that the trustee and the rest of the individuals dealing with the Mt. Gox case were rattled by the circumstances, prematurely liquidating a significant portion of the organization’s assets to move forward with the bankruptcy.
Was the dump of Mt. Gox the primary cause of Bitcoin’s crash in 2018?
According to GoxDox, the Mt. Gox trustee began to sell the exchange’s Bitcoin holdings starting in early 2018, possibly even before February. From early February to June, the trustee is said to have sold tens of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin on a weekly basis.
The researchers said that the frequent wire transfers supposedly initiated from the bank account of BitPoint to that of the Mt. Gox trustee show the trustee’s intent to hide the transactions in an event of a security breach on the side of BitPoint.
The trustee likely expected a public backlash if it were revealed that the trustee had been selling large amounts of Bitcoin in the public cryptocurrency exchange market, putting the price of BTC at a significant risk of dropping.
“It seems fair to conclude that the reason for sending frequent wires was to prevent counterparty risk. A hack at BitPoint could expose the MtGox Estate to a loss and the trustee didn’t want to get Goxxed. It follows that the trustee would have instructed BitPoint to wire JPY [Japanese yen] over as soon as he had it. This way, MtGox Estate assets wouldn’t be exposed to any hacking incident at BitPoint.”
On May 2, based on the data provided by GoxDox, the trustee received 3,822,436,400 yen from BitPoint, worth around $34,845,330. From then on, at an interval of one to four days, the trustee continued to receive tens of millions of dollars from BitPoint.
Coincidentally, in the exact same time frame, the price of Bitcoin, which initiated a strong recovery from $7,000 to $10,000 from April to May, began to plunge. Since May 4, the price of Bitcoin began to drop substantially against the United States dollar. By the end of June, less than two months since the sell-off of Mt. Gox holdings began, the price of the dominant cryptocurrency dropped from nearly $10,000 to $5,912, by over 40 percent.
In February 2018, when the trustee started to sell BTC on a cryptocurrency exchange, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell reaffirmed that the company, which was hired to track the lost coins of the exchange, advised the trustee not to dump millions of dollars worth of BTC in the market.
“We were explicit about not dumping a large amount of coins on the market. Unfortunately, it looks like the trustee made their own decision or was taking advice from elsewhere — maybe whatever exchange they dumped those coins on. We had zero knowledge of these sales happening until it was announced at the recent creditors’ meeting.”
The initial correction of the cryptocurrency market in January of last year may have been completely unaffected by the Mt. Gox situation, which cannot be confirmed due to the lack of information presented in the leaked bank statement of the trustee. Some analysts have suggested that the opening of the CME Bitcoin futures market crashed the price of the asset.
The San Francisco Federal Reserve wrote that the time frame of the decline in the price of Bitcoin aligned with the launch of the CME Bitcoin futures market.
“The rapid run-up and subsequent fall in the price after the introduction of futures does not appear to be a coincidence. It is consistent with trading behavior that typically accompanies the introduction of futures markets for an asset.”
Others have said that the short-term bubble of BTC initiated by retail traders came to an end, and it was not caused by a specific set of factors.
But, from February onward, it is believed by traders that the unexpected liquidation of a large chunk of Bitcoin’s circulating supply had a drastic impact on the short-term trend of the asset.
The trustee was heavily criticized by industry experts including GoxDox researchers, who said that Mt. Gox creditors need to demand an explanation from the trustee to clarify the reasoning behind the dismissal of the advice of Kraken.
“Simple possession of a crypto license is not suitable criteria for selecting an expert. A non-expert judge’s approval does not equate to a sound plan. Reliance on an appeal to authority is never a substitute for good judgment.”
How does Mt. Gox move on from here?
On Jan. 22, Brock Pierce, a cryptocurrency investor and the co-founder of Blockchain Capital, who played a vital role in the development of EOS, revealed an ambitious plan to revive Mt. Gox and to repay all of the creditors of the exchange.
While the exchange is said to have around $1.2 billion worth of Bitcoin, with the supposed sale of more than $300 million worth of Bitcoin in 2018, it remains unclear precisely how much BTC the exchange currently possesses. It is not possible, given the circumstances of Mt. Gox, to repay all of the creditors through the sale of the company’s existing BTC.
Instead, Brock Pierce, who claims to acquire Mt. Gox for 2 BTC from Mark Karpeles and Jed McCaleb in 2014, decided to try to reopen the exchange and pay the creditors using the equity of the company.
As a first step, Pierce condemned the work of the Mt. Gox trustee and prevented the trustee from liquidating the company’s holdings with his authority over the company, according to the official statement of GoxRising, a British Virgin Islands-based company established to oversee Mt. Gox:
“Acknowledging that the Mt. Gox trustee had done a laudable job of managing an unwieldy estate, the group suggested that the inherent limitations on the trustee’s discretionary powers as a fiduciary, prevented him from maximizing creditor returns going forward.”
At the North American Bitcoin Conference (TNABC), Pierce further explained that the company intends to revive Mt. Gox through a unified Civil Rehabilitation Plan, a law in Japan that forces lenders of a company to change the terms of the loan. In the upcoming months, the company is expected to pay out $1.2 billion in BTC to creditors as fast as possible and move on with resuming operations.
One hurdle worth $16 billion
Mt. Gox could distribute its $1.2 billion Bitcoin holdings in the next two months and rush the process of obtaining a license from Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) to begin operating as a regulated cryptocurrency exchange.
But blockchain incubator CoinLab reportedly filed a $16 billion claim against Mt. Gox, alleging Mt. Gox of breaching a contract with the company. Previously, CoinLab filed a $75 million lawsuit. Last week, according to a leaked document, the firm bumped up its lawsuit to a 16 billion claim.
In an event in which the claim is approved by the court, even with a compromise, it could result in the loss of a significant portion of the exchange’s $1.2 billion holdings of BTC.
Following the filing of the complaint, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell expressed his disappointment.
Powell stated there are claims from insiders that the lawsuit is stopping the exchange from distributing the funds to creditors.
“I’m disappointed to hear that this lawsuit is responsible for holding up payouts, and that any judgement for CoinLab would be treated on par with the depositor victims. I think people are having a hard time getting their heads around the $75m+ claim given that common perception is that CoinLab never performed and owes $5m+ back to MtGox. If the deal had been carried out, it might be CoinLab on the hook for the shortfall of client deposits.”
The core issue with the lawsuit is that it is filed against the creditors of Mt. Gox, not the exchange itself. “This lawsuit today is not CoinLab vs. Mt. Gox, but CoinLab vs. the MtGox customers, now [current] creditors, who have done nothing to deserve being involved in this,” Karpeles said in 2017. As such, if the lawsuit continues on, it will be the creditors with the $1.2 billion holdings of Mt. Gox that will have to settle with the lawsuit for $16 billion.
Will creditors get their money back and could Mt. Gox continue to affect the price of Bitcoin?
If the $16 billion complaint filed by CoinLab remains as the only hurdle in settling creditor funds, it is likely that creditors will receive their share of the Mt. Gox Bitcoin holdings by the latter half of 2019.
The distribution of funds would primarily depend on the result of a court hearing or a settlement of the lawsuit and the outcome of the case could certainly affect the amount of BTC that is distributed to the creditors.
Once the $1.2 billion holding is distributed, then it will be in the hands of individual or retail traders. There still exists a possibility that the creditors could immediately sell the BTC in the exchange market, which may have a similar effect as the reported Mt.Gox’s trustee sell-off in February of last year.
But, it is highly improbable that the creditors would dump all of their newly obtained BTC in the exchange market in the short term, especially during a period in which BTC is demonstrating resilience in its low price range and is down by more than 80 percent since its all-time high.
- Is China Building Space Weapons To Attack US Satellites?
Here’s something that could really put a damper on US-China trade talks.
Two weeks after DNI Dan Coats warned about US adversaries expanding “their use of space-based reconnaissance, communications and navigations systems,” Bloomberg reported that China’s recent development of “sophisticated” capabilities for “satellite inspection and repair” and “space debris cleanup” might actually be a ruse for something far more nefarious.
At least some of these capabilities “could also function” as weapons against US satellites, the Defense Intelligence Agency has said. Because the technology used to clean up space debris could easily serve a “dual purpose.”
The increase in what’s essentially orbiting garbage that could damage or destroy a satellite “has implications for policymakers worldwide and is encouraging the development of space debris removal technology,” the agency said Monday in an unclassified publication on threats to U.S. satellites.
But “this technology is dual-use because it could be used to damage another satellite,” it said.
China’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that the allegations were “groundless,” though it acknowledged that, since the US has itself acknowledged the importance of developing space weapons, this could lead to their becoming a “reality.”
“Recently the U.S. has defined outer space as a battlefield and announced the establishment of an outer space force,” spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a briefing in Beijing. “So this may lead to the reality of the weaponization and endangerment of outer space.”
To be sure, as it multiplies, the issue of space debris is becoming an increasingly serious problem.
Of about 21,000 large objects in space that are least 10 centimeters (4 inches) in size that are tracked and cataloged in Earth’s orbit, only about 1,800 are active satellites, according to the defense agency. The rest is debris, including parts of spacecraft.
More than a third of all recorded debris is from two events: China’s use of a missile in 2007 to destroy a defunct satellite and the accidental collision between a U.S. communications satellite and a defunct Russian one in 2009.
From 1998 through 2017, the International Space Station, which is in low Earth orbit, maneuvered at least 25 times to avoid potential orbital collisions, the intelligence agency said.
Of course, China and the US aren’t alone in purportedly developing space weapons. Russia has been pursuing them, too. Luckily, the Pentagon budget has set aside money to start building that first “Space Force” base.
It certainly might make one wonder: How far away are we from “Death Star” levels of destruction?
- Insect Apocalypse: The Global Food Chain Faces Major Extinction Event And Scientists Don't Know Why
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Scientists are telling us that we have entered “the sixth major extinction” in the history of our planet. A brand new survey of 73 scientific reports that was just released has come to the conclusion that the total number of insects on the globe is falling by 2.5 percent per year. If we stay on this current pace, the survey warns that there might not be “any insects at all” by the year 2119. And since insects are absolutely critical to the worldwide food chain, that has extremely ominous implications for all of us.
I write a lot about the inevitable collapse of our economic systems, but it could definitely be argued that our environment is already in a very advanced stage of “collapse”. According to this new research, insects are going extinct at a rate that is “eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles”…
The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
Perhaps the entire world will come together and will stop destroying the planet and we can reverse this trend before it is too late.
Unfortunately, you and I both know that this is extremely unlikely to happen.
And if it doesn’t happen, the researchers that conducted this scientific review insist that the consequences will be “catastrophic to say the least”…
The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: “The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet.
“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” they write. “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”
The clock is ticking, and time is running out for our planet.
Assuming that we could somehow keep the global insect decline from accelerating even more, we probably only have about 100 years before they are all gone…
Chillingly, the total mass of insects is falling by 2.5 percent annually, the review’s authors said. If the decline continues at this rate, insects could be wiped off the face of the Earth within a century.
“It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none,”study co-author Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, an environmental biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, told The Guardian.
So what would a planet without insects look like?
Well, according to Francisco Sánchez-Bayo of the University of Sydney, millions upon millions of birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish would “starve to death”…
One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. “If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death,” he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years.
And without bees and other pollinators, humans would be in a world of hurt. You may have heard that Albert Einstein once said the following…
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
With that statement in mind, I would like for you to consider what this new study discovered about the decline of bee colonies in the United States…
The study suggested that bee species in the UK, Denmark, and North America have taken major hits — bumblebees, honey bees, and wild bee species are all declining. In the US, the number of honey-bee colonies dropped from 6 million in 1947 to 2.5 million just six decades later.
We aren’t there yet, but a food chain cataclysm is literally right around the corner.
So why is all of this happening?
Modern methods of agriculture, urbanization and pesticides are some of the factors being blamed, but the truth is that scientists don’t actually know exactly why insects are dying off so quickly.
And none of those factors directly impact our oceans, and yet scientists have discovered that phytoplankton is declining at an exponential rate. As a result of that decline, seabird populations have been plummeting at a pace that is extremely alarming. The following comes from Chris Martenson…
Fewer phytoplankton means less thiamine being produced. That means less thiamine is available to pass up the food chain. Next thing you know, there’s a 70% decline in seabird populations.
This is something I’ve noticed directly and commented on during my annual pilgrimages to the northern Maine coast over the past 30 years, where seagulls used to be extremely common and are now practically gone. Seagulls!
Next thing you know, some other major food chain will be wiped out and we’ll get oceans full of jellyfish instead of actual fish.
A global collapse is not something that is coming in the distant future.
A global collapse is here, and it is happening right in front of our eyes.
Our environment is literally dying all around us, and without our environment we cannot survive.
If humanity cannot solve this crisis, and we all know that they cannot, then an extremely apocalyptic future awaits for all of us.
- Warmongers In Their Ivory Towers
While it seems the mainstream media paused last week’s avalanche of attacks on progressive Hawaiian Democratic rep. Tulsi Gabbard, which painted her as a Russian stooge for daring to oppose Washington’s addiction to regime change wars abroad, in favor of new controversy surrounding another progressive, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and charges of anti-Semitism leveled at her for criticism of pro-Israel money in US politics, Gabbard hasn’t let up a bit in terms of the intensity of her attacks on the warmongering establishment within both parties. In a new televised message Gabbard excoriated the pundit class for constantly dreaming up “new places for people to die”.
Gabbard released the half-minute video on Tuesday appropriately called “Warmongers in their ivory towers” wherein the US Army reserve officer and Iraq War veteran slammed the Washington culture of “powerful” decision-makers who “sit in ivory towers” and send other people’s children to war, while themselves never stepping close to a battlefield.
The message — which is all the more powerful given she has likely personally lost friends in the Iraq and Afghan “endless wars” — is reminiscent of Ron Paul’s fearless attacks on the neocons during the 2012 Republican primary debates as “chicken hawks”. Paul, also a veteran, brought the term into national consciousness.
It denotes those who advocate for US overseas military conflicts and foreign adventurism yet who avoided all military service in their careers. At that time Congressman Paul called out Newt Gingrich after Gingrich smeared Paul’s non-interventionism position as “dangerous”.
“When Newt Gingrich was called to service in the 1960s in the Vietnam era, guess what he thought about danger? He chickened out on that and got deferments and didn’t even go,” Paul said related to the primary debates in a 2012 CNN interview, and added, “Some people call that kind of program a chicken hawk, and I think he falls into that category.”
We remarked previously that Gabbard, as a rare Congressional voice who has personally experienced the ravages of one recent regime change war and its lasting consequences for both common Iraqis and the American people, has emerged as a “Ron Paul of the Left” of sorts (at least on foreign policy that is).
And like Paul before, she could emerge in 2020 as a rare voice spotlighting Washington’s addiction to regime change and “endless wars” abroad, and the military-industrial complex’s fueling America’s “global policeman” mentality, and its blindly obedient cheerleaders in the mainstream media. This will at the very least make the foreign policy debate during the next election — usually a mere single point of view establishment echo chamber — more interesting.
This is especially true given that she’ll likely unleash her “warmongers in their ivory towers” who think up “new places for people to die” attacks on her warmonger opponents during the Democratic debates. Seeing this is certainly something to look forward to.
* * *
Meanwhile the “chicken hawk” phenomenon is given deeper treatment in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin In The Game, a key passage of which is quoted below:
“Now some innocent people, Yazidis, Christian minorities, Syrians, Iraqis, and Libyans had to pay a price for the mistakes of these interventionistas currently sitting in their comfortable air-conditioned offices. This, we will see, violates the very notion of justice from its pre-biblical, Babylonian inception. As well as the ethical structure of humanity.
Not only the principle of healers is first do no harm (primum non nocere), but, we will argue: those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.
This idea is weaved into history: all warlords and warmongers were warriors themselves and, with few exceptions societies were run by risk takers not risk transferors. They took risks –more risks than ordinary citizens. Julian the Apostate, the hero of many, died on the battlefield fighting in the never-ending war on the Persian frontier. One of predecessors, Valerian, after he was captured was said to have been used as a human footstool by the Persian Shahpur when mounting his horse. Less than a third of Roman emperors died in their bed –and one can argue that, had they lived longer, they would have fallen prey to either a coup or a battlefield.”
And more…
“The interventionistas case is central to our story because it shows how absence of skin in the game has both ethical and epistemological effects (i.e., related to knowledge). Interventionistas don’t learn because they are not the victims of their mistakes.“
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