Apr 16

Today’s News 16th April 2018

  • US Tanks In Europe Get Invisible Futuristic Missile Shield To Counter Russian Threat

    Back in March, we detailed how the United States Army M1 Abrams tank, an American third-generation main battle tank, was in the process of being upgraded with an invisible missile shield that will destroy all chemical energy anti-tank threats and other threats before reaching the vehicle. We even said, “that Washington is preparing their main battle tank for the next evolution of hybrid wars.”

    Known as Trophy, this is the world’s first and only fully operational Active Protection System and Hostile Fire Detection System for armored vehicles. This cutting-edge technology will provide M1 Abrams tanks with 360-degree security from all threats, as advanced algorithms are continually detecting, locating, and neutralizing anti-tank threats on the battlefield.

    We even noted that the Trophy system was tested thoroughly on select M1A2 tanks in Europe and the Middle East. With much of the testing classified, there were still several unanswered questions surrounding what region(s) of the world the upgrades would go.

    However, in a new report on Thursday, the United States Army has decided to deploy the missile shields for M1 Abrams tanks to Europe “as part of a sweeping effort to better arm its Armored Brigade Combat Teams and counter Russian threats in the region,” said Warrior Maven, as quoted by Fox News. 

    “Not only will we be fielding one set of Trophy on Abrams tanks to Europe, but also three other brigades,” Maj. Gen. John Ferrari, Director, Program Analysis and Evaluation, G-8, told Warrior Maven in an interview.

    “The weapons plus-up for Europe-bound Active Protection System is woven into the 2019 budget request,” he added.

    The Trophy system employs advanced algorithms that use radar to provide continuous 360-degree protection. The bolt on kit includes four antennas and two rotating launchers mounted on the turret of each tank (see below).

    Once the threat is discovered, the algorithm classifies the threat, and if a direct hit is calculated, the countermeasure systems are automatically activated, and a tight pattern of explosively shaped penetrators launches at the warhead to neutralize the threat (as shown below).

    Rafael Advanced Defense Systems says the Trophy system has been thoroughly tested, qualified, and is already in production for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The system debuted in 2009 and had proven to work exceptionally well in the Gaza Strip and other hot spots around Israel.

    Warrior Maven points out that the immediate deployment of Trophy systems for American tanks in Europe is to counter new high-tech Russian technology, which has been deployed to the European Russia border.

    “Trophy is the kind of armored vehicle ground-war weapon of particular value in the event of a major land combat engagement against a fortified, well-armed adversary such as Russia. Systems of this kind have been in development for many years, however the rapid technological progress of enemy tank rounds, missiles and RPGs is leading the Army to more rapidly deploy Active Protection System for its fleet of Abrams tanks deploying to Europe.”

    Warrior Maven also describes the Pentagon’s biggest fear:

    “APS on Abrams tanks, quite naturally, is the kind of protective technology which could help US Army tanks in tank-on-tank mechanized warfare against near-peer adversary tanks, such as a high-tech Russian T-14 Armata tank.

    The 48-ton modern T-14 tank is widely reported to be able to reach speeds of 90-kilometers per hour; it is built with an unmanned turret, without a “fume extractor” and is designed for a 3-man crew surrounded by an armored capsule

    While much has been made of the T-14 Armata’s cutting-edge technology, including its active protection, 12-round per minute firing range and 125mm smoothbore cannon in numerous public reports and assessments, it is not at all clear that the T-14 in any way fully outmatches current and future variants of the Abrams tank.

    Army Abrams modernization efforts are without question being designed to meet and exceed any dangers posed by rival nation tanks, including the T-14. Concerns about the threat posed by the T-14 Armata are, without question, informing US tank and weapons developers.”

    Essentially, Washington’s much-needed modernization efforts of invisible force fields, are to protect M1 Abrams from Russian anti-tank weapons and its new high-tech T-14 Armata, all evidence suggests — a major conflict could soon be on the horizon.  

  • Draining The Data Swamp: Who Owns The "Virtual You"?

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    In our digital age, ownership, utilization, and monetization of data raises profound questions about personal rights, state rights and the limits of freedom…

    For all the raft of unanswered questions or dismissal as a nothingburger, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s two-day grilling at Capitol Hill hopefully may unleash a serious global debate about our virtual selves.

    US politicians, it seems, have discovered the merits of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation  (GDPR). The EU is actually at war with the GAFA galaxy (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) and environs. The question for the US revolves around the immense legal twists and turns on how and what to regulate.

    As much as Zuckerberg may have conceded that the industry needs to be regulated, scores of congressmen pressed him on whether Facebook would enforce GDPR for US customers. He dodged the question multiple times, promising GDPR “controls,” but never “protection.”

    An army of savvy lawyers at the Facebook HQ certainly envisaged that regulation might “stifle competition,” as some congressmen did not fail to point out. And some, naively, even gave the whole game away, asking Zuckerberg directly what kind of regulation he would prefer.

    Capitol Hill may not have noticed that Facebook and GAFA as a whole work pretty much like political parties disguised as companies. The founders/CEOs are major shareholders. Decisions have the imprimatur of a board working as a sort of political bureau. Congress is the shareholder general assembly. And the militants are the salaried mass addicted to a visionary movement.

    The whole process runs in parallel with the decline of traditional political parties. Even top counseling comes from the political arena, like former Obama operative David Plouffe, who moved to Facebook from Uber, and Joel Benenson, Bill Clinton’s top polls specialist.

    And it’s certainly very much a political issue how cyberspace trumps actual physical space. GAFA is always looking for nations that offer comparative advantages and privileges to dodge regulation and annoying redistributive fiscal obligations.

    That betrays a clear ideological choice. GAFA is all about Ayn Rand-inspired Libertarianism; minimum government and maximum freedom. Surf away from the crashing waves of the state. Regulation is for losers.

    Ayn Rand happens to be the supreme idol of PayPal’s Peter Thiel, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Wikipedia co-creator Jimmy Wales.

    And then there’s philosophy great Martin Heidegger.

    Peter Thiel, Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman, Instagram inventor Mike Krieger – they all followed the Symbolic Systems program established in Stanford in 1986 combining neurosciences, logic, psychology, AI, cybernetics and, yes, philosophy, with an emphasis on Heidegger.

    Add to it the role of Pluralistic Networks, founded by Chilean Fernando Flores, a former minister of Salvador Allende and co-author, with Terry Winograd (Google’s Larry Page’s mentor) of a book about Heidegger’s influence on information science, redefining intelligence, language and the limits of biology. Here we have Heidegger as the precursor of AI.

    Liberal democracy vs freedom?

    One of the big shows in Brussels for years has been the debate on why GAFA refuses to pay taxes. Libertarianism is incompatible with direct tax deductions or regulations. What matters most of all is the philanthropic value of those entrepreneurs and their social importance in creating jobs.

    European egalitarian cynics, on the other hand, would describe them as a bunch of moguls bloated by un-measurable hubris praying to a doctrine of sovereign egotism.

    GAFA + Microsoft’s market capitalization reached a whopping $2.9 trillion last year – bigger than India’s GDP; their collected revenues are larger than Sweden’s GDP.

    According to the OECD, globally, states are not collecting as much as  $240 billion a year in taxes. According to a 2015 report from the European Parliament, the EU loses as much as 70 billion euros a year because of “fiscal optimization,” due uniquely to the transfer of GAFA profits towards fiscal paradises.

    So what we have is GAFA working as political parties, actively changing the world without ever submitting themselves to a vote. It’s a case of “freedom” being incompatible with Western liberal democracy. That’s exactly what PayPal founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009; “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

    In The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press), Frank Pasquale stresses how the industry, facing no accountability, will end up risking the very own legitimacy of sovereign states.

    Which brings us to the monopoly question. Zuckerberg was asked if he considered Facebook a monopoly. Brussels certainly does, in its drive to regulate an economic model based on systematic smashing of competition and limitless privatization of personal data (which the EU has been unable to stop). Once again Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s earliest investors: “Competition is for losers.”

    The main complaint in Brussels, as officials stressed to Asia Times, is that the EU’s “fair competition” model is being corroded. Yet the paradox is the EU – because of ferocious fiscal competition – is actually the largest tax paradise on the planet.

    The EU condemns international tax evasion while the enemy inside is represented by Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ireland – a sort of Bermuda Triangle of corporate tax. The savory combination of a single free market and a sophisticated service economy in which almost no physical goods cross borders offers unlimited opportunities for tax evasion. No wonder the digital giants have accumulated over $600 billion in tax-free profits.

    The limits of ‘self-ownership’

    While GAFA in the US essentially controls the politics limiting the capacity for regulation, Brussels will continue to insist the only path towards healthy regulation comes from the EU.

    The other model is of course China. Beijing has domesticated its sprawling digital industry – which is a de facto extension of the state apparatus as well as a growing instrument of global influence.

    When Zuckerberg was asked whether Facebook should be broken up – the monopoly issue once again – he said that would weaken the US’s competitive advantage against China, which by the way is fast disappearing.

    Facebook’s customer base though is not American; it’s global. Inside the Facebook HQ, the consensus is that it is a global company. So all these issues at stake – from monopoly to regulation to privacy – are indeed global issues.

    Zuckerberg dodged extremely serious questions. Who owns “the virtual you?” Zuckerberg’s response was that you own all the “content” you upload, and can delete that content any time you want. Yet the heart of the matter is the advertising profile Facebook builds on each user. That simply cannot be deleted. And the user cannot alter it in any way.

    The GAFA galaxy, in fact, owns you when you click accepting those massive terms and conditions of use. As argued by philosopher Gaspard Koenig, director of the GenerationLibre think tank in France, data property should logically follow the evolution of property rights, land property, financial property and property of ideas, thus replacing the current figure of the “proletarian 2.0” at the heart of the value chain of the digital economy.

    The whole debate may revolve in fact about algorithmic determinism. Every algorithmic model is influenced by economic and financial interests. “Our” data is de facto monetized by all those massive, user-friendly platforms. The four billion profiles generated every three months by Facebook are derived from content that real people produce and let Facebook use. Even Zuckerberg himself admitted he cannot lock down his own privacy settings.

    Thus the key question that Libertarianism refuses to answer: If “self-ownership” is being configured as the future of our social contract in a secular world, how do we mere consumers profit from our rampant, digital marketization?

  • US Syria Strategy "A Succession Of Failures Divorced From Reality"

    American involvement in Syria – “from Obama through Trump” – was described to Axios by a Republican foreign policy expert as “a succession of failures divorced from reality.” 

    The expert, which Axios says wishes to remain anonymous but “has decades of experience analyzing the region,” emailed his devastating indictment of the U.S. Syria “strategy” over several administrations – noting “The inevitable result was failure.” 

    Presented below are said expert’s thoughts: 

    • “Syria is a microcosm of U.S. foreign policy in general. We never had a coherent strategy beyond simplistic generalities, childishly selecting our goals based on what we wanted, not what was necessary, or even possible. The inevitable result was failure. Wobbly Assad won, powerful us lost. Rust-bucket Russia accomplished its goals, triumphant us achieved none.”

    • “The Obama Administration bears the principal responsibility for Syria and Libya but not for Iraq and Afghanistan or the succession of failures elsewhere. Timid intervention did not work for the former; full-scale intervention did not work for the latter. “

    • “But the military are not miracle-workers. These failures sprang from cobbled-together strategies based on comforting illusions that have repeatedly proven not to be true, with objectives shaped not by the constraints of reality but the indulgent selection from an a la carte menu. There is little evidence that repeated failure has had a significant impact on policymakers or specialists.”

    • “There is a price to be paid for incompetence. Few now fear us; fewer respect us. As our opponents increase in number and strength, the prospect of defeat at their hands will grow. But the more immediate result will be irrelevance.”

    Ouch! No wonder this mystery foreign policy expert wishes to remain anonymous. This is a sobering take.

  • How Much Longer Can The American Empire Run On Fake Money?

    Excerpted from Jay Taylor’s Gold & Energy Stocks Newsletter:

    Gold rocketed to nearly $1,365 on Wednesday in New York, which is well above the $1,350 that Michael Oliver suggests is when technical price watchers will finally start to head into the yellow metal and related investments like gold stocks. But alas the banking cartel had other ideas and exercised a 100-tonne “pretend gold” smackdown in the gold paper futures markets starting at about noon that day, just to make sure the greatest competition in the world to the dollar didn’t start to lead to a loss of confidence.

    This of course is nothing new. The Gold Anti Trust Action Committee (GATA) has been documenting paper market manipulation of the gold markets now for decades. Isn’t it interesting that more virtual gold trades in one day on the LBMA than is mined in an entire year.

    Whatever it takes, including endless wars to try to keep the petrodollar alive and trillions of dollars spent on blood and treasury. I truly believe Eisenhower’s fears of the endless power of the Military Industrial Complex are now playing out.

    It should be eminently clear now that “the President is not really the President of the United States.”

    That was established by the “Deep State” under Kennedy. If you have doubts about that, you might do well to read “Unlike Trump, Kennedy never bent a knee,” by Jacob G. Hornberger, the founder of The Future of Freedom Foundation and a former trial attorney in Texas.

    While another war or two might buy a bit more time for the Anglo-American Empire, it should also be very clear that the U.S. military, like the U.S. budget, is out of control with no one specifically in charge. What it is instead is an amorphous powerful monster that needs more lands to conquer to justify more military spending that in turn will continue to keep massive parasitic bureaucracies ever expanding so that hundreds of thousands of Americans can continue living a splendid lifestyle while Americans who produce things of value find their living standards ever in decline.

    If you are not questioning the legitimacy of the war just started this evening by the Neocons who run America you should be. Stop to ask yourself why for a second year in a row the Syrian leader would implement a gas attack on his own people a mere week after Trump said he would pull troops out of Syria, if the result of that would be to have bombs rain down on his country. Also ask yourself why the U.S. refused to let an impartial country like Norway do an independent investigation into who actually was responsible for the recent gas attack. In fact, like the weapons of mass destruction that dragged us into Iraq, there never has been any proof of last year’s gas attack or this most recent one.

    This may very well lead us into a hot war with Russia, a nuclear power. That is unthinkable but then who said the Military Industrial Complex, like a cornered animal being threatened by death, is doing much thinking? As I say, America is an empire that is out of control. Nothing but the hand of God will stop the enormous evil we are inflicting on country after country, rendering nations into death and poverty wherever we go.

    Trump couldn’t keep his campaign promises because the President is not the President. Kennedy tried to be. He never had time to realize he wasn’t the President, but the rest of us should have begun to understand that long ago, rather than quietly accepting the Warren Report, which I think had no more credibility than all other manner of CIA reporting that serves the out-of-control Imperial State monster whose heart resides in Washington.

    What does this have to do with the gold markets and gold shares? I would submit to you it has a great deal to do with it. The one currency that would put all nations on an even playing field would be gold. A gold standard would mean the U.S. would have to earn its way to wealth rather than print money to pay for endless wars, death, and destruction. Nixon took us off the international gold standard in 1971 for that very reason, which enabled banks and financial institutions to get rich by impoverishing Americans with debt and job losses funded by bankers who have access to printing-press money. It also made it possible for America to fund endless wars with debt. But to keep the dollar viable, its leading competitor had to be held at bay. Hence smackdowns like the one this past Wednesday.

    But the Russians and Chinese and a host of other countries are sick and tired of being told they have to use dollars for trade when doing so helps fund the U.S. that is outright hostile to those nations and seeks their overthrow. Led by the massive wealth gained by China over the years, financial institutions and a currency backed by gold appear to be well underway so that they can compete with the immoral monetary system the U.S. set up on August 15, 1971.

    Now this gets directly to the issue of gold. Watch very carefully when in a week or so the first petro yuan contract comes due on the Shanghai Exchange. You know that countries that sell their oil to China will have to get paid in yuan. If they are a bit shaky on accepting yuan, they can hedge against yuan by taking delivery of gold (not paper delivery but real gold) on the Shanghai Gold Exchange, which, unlike the LBMA in London, is an honest, physical gold market.

    So while American economists with PhD’s in economics thumb their noses at gold as money and worship Keynesian lies that suggest nations can get rich by printing endless amounts of money no matter how far into debt and insolvency that takes them, the Russians (who are largely debt free) and the Chinese (not to mention the Iranians and other nations of Asia) are building up their gold reserves for the day when the U.S. self destructs, financially or otherwise.

    As an American I don’t wish for that because when that happens there will be untold pain in our country. But clearly, the stage has been set. The bombing of Damascus by Trump today may be the start of an unfathomable war that he had little chance of avoiding given the obvious control of our government by the Deep State.

    *  *  *

    I believe we are on the cusp of a major breakout in the price of gold. It is taking more and more paper gold to hold it down and if/when those who buy paper gold, thinking that will protect them as well as the real thing, find out that isn’t true we may see a run on physical gold that could send the yellow metal to prices undreamed of by the most bullish of gold bulls. [Technician Michael Oliver]’s initial target once we get through $1,350 at the end of this month or a month in the near future is $1,700. By that time, it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be quite a number of people trading in their marijuana and cryptocurrencies for gold and gold mining shares.

  • Trump Job Approval Highest Since First 100 Days; Majority Of Men Support The President

    Update: Trump has apparently taken notice, correctly pointing out that his approval rating, according to Rasmussen, is higher than Obama’s was at this point in his presidency.

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    * * *

    Even Bloomberg and the Washington Post are being forced to admit that President Donald Trump’s approval rating is on the rise.

    Both media organizations, which had seized on every opportunity to tout the president’s approval rating when it was mired in the mid-to-low 30s, are now being forced to tout a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showing Trump with an approval rating above 40% – his highest since his first 100 days in office.

    Poll

    Furthermore, among men, Trump’s approval rating has risen to 49%, while 47% of men disapprove. Meanwhile, 32% of women approve of the president’s job performance. Meaning that, for the first time, half of US men support the president.

     

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    Nearly every credible poll is now showing the president’s job approval at his highest since taking office. On Friday, Rasmussen Reports published a poll showing 50% of likely US voters approve of Trump’s job performance – while 49% disapprove. Of those 34% strongly approve of the president’s jon performance, while 40% strongly disapprove.

    Last week, CNN was also forced to report that Trump’s approval rating has rebounded to its highest level since the 100-day mark, with 42% of likely voters approving of the way Trump is handling the presidency.

    The president’s strongest approval rating was for his handling of the economy, of which 48% approve and 45% disapprove. This is clearly a sign that the Republican’s tax cut plan has been welcomed by most Americans, who are beginning to see more money left in their paychecks.

    Finally, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released last week shows Trump’s approval rating just four points below a peak reached last month – down from 43% to 39%.

    However, the president’s decision to attack Syria will likely dent his support among some of his most fervent backers, who had applauded Trump’s “America First” stance, and his promises to bring US troops home from abroad.

  • Take The Red Pill – The History Of Syrian False Flags Exposed

    “You take the red pill… and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

    The infamous line from the movie ‘The Matrix’  – where Morpheus offers Neo a glimpse of the ‘real’ reality that is occurring, not the ‘manufactured’ reality that those whose rule want him to see – could not be a better analogy for what one brave (and clearly a treasonous Russian troll who should be banned from any and all social media forever) Twitter user exposes below.

    “Jad” – @Jadinho123 – shows how the world has been lied to many times to create the current Syrian theater of war…

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    Remember this photo of a kid laying next to her ‘dead’ parents who were ‘killed’ by Assad and this photo went viral and got thousands of retweets and had people crying all over Twitter?

    Well…

    Oh and remember this photo of this child who was in the back of an ambulance after supposedly being attacked by Assad and his regime???

    Well…

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    It gets worse…

    And worser…

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    And worsest…

    And a little make-up for good measure…

    And a rehearsal for a false flag chemical attack…

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    Remember the girl “running to survive and All her family have been killed…”

    Well, it was a clip from a music video!!…

    Oh, and remember that video of the Syrian boy ‘saving’ his sister from Assad forces?

    Well, it was a lie too…

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    And here is the cast…

    And one has to wonder if this is a ‘coincidence’ or is this girl just shit out of luck?

    And CNN didn’t care…

    Remember this harrowing scene from Syria?

    Well it was Gaza…

    Remember Bana? The young Syrian girl living in Syria who would post videos blaming Assad and the regime for her friends and families deaths.

    Well, this is her dad…

    Here’s Bana meeting Turkish president Erdogan. Because a man who funds ISIS is so innocent right???

    h/t @Jadinho123

    Finally here are two truth-bombs that actually made it to the mainstream media…

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    Before being cut off...

    Now, go back to your dinner and your ignorantly uninformed, cognitively dissonant, unquestioning ‘patriotism’ to support whatever you’re told… no matter how much evidence of previous lies and manipulation you are confronted with.

  • This Is How The US Postal Service Loses So Much Money

    Authored by Justin Murray via The Mises Institute,

    Lately, when he isn’t trying to blame China on America’s competitiveness woes, President Donald Trump has become obsessed with the online retailer Amazon. While there’s speculationthat Trump is using the reins of government to carry out a personal grudge because Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, also owns The Washington Post, the more recent obsession is based on his belief that the United States Postal Service is subsidizing Amazon’s activity.

    The claim is that, based on a cost-plus method of pricing, Amazon is being subsidized $1.47 per package delivered by the USPS as a last-mile carrier. With an estimated608 million boxes shipped by the online retailer in 2017, Trump is implying that Amazon has shorted the postal service by $893 million.

    Considering the USPS lost $2.7 billion, this further implies that Amazon is a key reason why the USPS is struggling financially. Trump goes on to state that Amazon should fork over the entire $2.7 billion to cover the difference.

    A key problem here is the assumption that businesses operate on a cost-plus basis. This kind of thinking is a result of how warped government operations are, which frequently engage in cost-plus kinds of contracts. Cost-plus contracts are where the government agrees to cover all the applicable costs of performing the work plus a guaranteed profit. These forms of contracts are relatively unusual in the private business sector, where bidding on price are the primary form of activity. Because of the nature of cost-plus, and how they will frequently go over-budget because there is little incentive to control costs of performance, companies generally don’t engage in them. This means, in the world outside of tax-funded activity, the USPS has to compete with other package carriers like UPS and FedEx and doesn’t have the luxury of guaranteeing itself a profit on every activity.

    When it comes to the USPS, the organization has significant fixed costs. In business planning, prices are usually lower-bound by the variable cost of activity. Any revenues that are collected above and beyond the variable costs are able to contribute toward fixed expenses. This is referred to as the contribution margin. Because the fixed component exists whether the product or service is sold or not, companies will be pressured to lower prices until they reach this contribution margin is exhausted. Companies then hope to generate sufficient volume at this margin to cover the fixed expenses. If the choice is between no sale and a sale below an optimal price with some contribution margin, the organization will usually go with the lower than optimal price to at least slow the resource deterioration.

    The reason the USPS is in trouble and is struggling to cover its estimated $29 billion in fixed costs is because of its status as a partial legal monopoly. From the own words of the USPS, Congress has granted, with criminal penalty, the USPS total monopoly over the delivery of letters, with some carve-out exceptions (such as urgent or free of charge). Like most monopolies, the USPS had little incentive to keep costs controlled. In 1999, the USPS even went so far as to shrug off the burgeoning Internet, e-mail in particular, as some fad and engaged in sorting facility expansions with the expectation that letter volume would continue to grow. Since peaking in 2001, the number of letters delivered by the USPS has since collapsed to nearly half as much in 2017. The USPS costs, however, continued to increase, from $62 billion in 2000 to $72.3 billion in 2017, despite the collapse of business volume. The USPS was only able to remain solvent by leveraging its monopoly status by driving up the price of stamps from $0.34 for a first class stamp in 1999 to $0.50 later this year. But even this is running into limitations as the decline in mail volume accelerates.

    This monopoly, however, doesn’t cover package delivery, putting the USPS in a strange position of having a legal monopoly on only part of its business. This creates the impression that the package business is subsidized by the letter business since the prices on the letter side aren’t limited by a competitive force. This then creates the further impression that the expenses, which were never controlled because of the historical reliance on letter delivery, should be evenly applied to package delivery as well. Thus the assumption there is a subsidy at all when in reality the costs are grossly overinflated due to a lack of market discipline.

    When a private business is threatened by decreased volume, they usually have to trim operations to adjust their size to meet the new market demands. The USPS, on the other hand, does not do this. The organization continues to operate on the assumption it must make daily deliveries, six days a week, to every address in the nation. Even the old rural excuse has become weakened as the nation becomes more urban (assuming it was ever justified to tax city residents to provide city amenities to those who elected to live in remote places). Not that rural residents need a monopoly organization to deliver junk mail.

    Repeal the Postal Service’s Monopoly

    So what’s the answer to the failings of the USPS? Repeal the Private Express Statutes and let the USPS loose to manage its own affairs without Congressional interference in its operations. As Lysander Spooner famously proved back in 1844 with the American Letter Mail Company, the private sector can not only deliver the mail, it can deliver the mail profitably for a fraction of the cost of the postal service. This solves two problems:

    1. The appearance that Amazon is subsidized through the USPS is eliminated

    2. Profitable, stable delivery organizations can come into play

    Repealing the private express statutes and getting government out of the mail delivery business may also very well save the USPS as not only can the USPS get out from under populist mandates, such as the overly generous retirement program and maintaining an absurd number of postal service locations; the USPS maintains over twice as many postal stops as McDonald’s has restaurants. It will also open up the market to more competition and competition breeds superior operations for competing members as creative methods of operation are more likely to be identified and can be mimicked, leading to superior operations for all players.

    In the end, the “problem” with Amazon is self-inflicted by the government insisting it operates a monopoly letter carrier. Trump can fix the problem with one fell swoop by pressuring Congress not to pass laws imposing higher rates on Amazon delivered packages, which will only accelerate the failure of the USPS since Amazon would just pick an alternate carrier, but to open up unrestricted competition in mail delivery and cut the USPS loose from the government tether. It certainly worked out well in New Zealand.

  • Nearly One-Third Of Americans Believe Facebook Has A "Negative Impact On Society"

    Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook vice president for user growth, isn’t the only one who believes his former employer is ripping apart the fabric of society.

    Palihapitiya triggered an unexpectedly intense backlash after revealing that he feels “tremendous guilt” for his role in building the social media giant, warning that, if you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you…”

    “I feel tremendous guilt.”

    “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are.”

    “I would encourage all of you, as the future leaders of the world, to really internalize how important this is.  If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you.  If you push back on it you have a chance to control it and reign it in.”

    “There is a point in time when people need a hard break from some of these tools.”

    “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.  No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

    “So, we’re in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion.  It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.”

    “And, I don’t have a good solution.  You know, my solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore.  I ahven’t for years.  It’s created huge tension with my friends.  Huge tensions in my social circles.”

    …He later walked his comments back after twitter users suggested that he maybe donate some of the money he made off the enterprise to a worthy cause.

    And now, shortly after it published reports about a survey showing 10% of US Facebook users deleted their accounts in the wake of the company’s latest data-privacy scandal, Recode is back with another scathing story about Facebook’s public identity crisis.

    Tavis McGinn, Mark Zuckerberg’s former personal pollster, conducted a survey that exposes just how reviled Facebook is in many parts of the world. Indeed, up to 33% of responds in Australia, Canada and the UK say Facebook is having a “negative impact on society.”

    Americans have a similarly negative perception of FB, with just 32% (about 54 million people) of the population also believing that Facebook has a negative impact. For context, that makes Facebook more popular than Marlboro cigarettes, but worse than McDonald’s.

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    In fact, the only countries where distrust in Facebook was relatively low were countries like Japan, where few people use Facebook.

    McGinn, who recently opened his own polling firm after leaving Facebook after six months, said he didn’t ask what, specifically, these negative impacts might be – but he says he has an idea.

    “In the U.S. obviously we’re very focused on election interference, and in the U.K. they’ve been focused on that as well with Brexit,” McGinn told Recode. “But there are also things like, ‘how does it affect children, how does the platform create addiction, how does the platform encourage extremism, how does the platform push American values onto other countries?’”

    There’s also the issue of Facebook’s data policies, which McGinn, who spent three years at Google, says are a result of Facebook’s DNA.

    “The culture has always been focused on driving usage, on getting more people to use and how to get them to spend longer on the platform,” he said. “It influences every decision, large and small.”

    And here’s the kicker: McGinn conducted his poll in January and February. Which means that, judging by the decline in user engagement – which had already been on the decline before the Cambridge Analytica scandal – negative perceptions of the company have probably worsened.

  • The Systemic Racism Of American Gun Control

    Authored by Steve C. via Free Market Shooter blog,

    Imagine if you will, centuries of racially-targeted denial of a well established, and popular civil right in the United States. Within this context, imagine that going back to colonial times, that it was at times legal to physically attack or even kill a free black person who was practicing this right, or that later state constitutions would outright prohibit the exercise of this right if you happened to have the wrong skin color.

    Imagine too, the US Supreme Court determining that citizenship rights could not be extended to free persons of color, lest they exercise this fundamental liberty. I am of course, talking about the right to keep and bear arms, which in a nutshell has laid out the horrors of systemic racism applied to that right from the colonial era to the Civil War.

    In 1857,  Chief Justice Taney wrote in the infamous Dred Scott case, that to extend citizenship to the “negro race” would allow black people to “keep and carry arms wherever they went.” This, along with voting and free speech, was problematic to white America at the time. Fear of slave revolts was so powerful, that even free blacks were to be denied basic civil rights, lest they perhaps attempt to overthrow slaveholders.

    After the Civil War, when thousands of freed slaves had served in the Union Army, and learned the use of arms, the situation was no better. As former Confederate states rejoined the Union, they quickly imposed onerous restrictions on the bearing of arms, with the understanding that they would not be enforced against white citizens. In 1870, the state of Tennessee banned ownership of all but the most expensive handguns. By 1907 five southern states had outlawed handguns altogether  (South Carolina, 1902) required their registration (Mississippi, 1906) or had instituted full or partial bans on inexpensive handguns (Tennessee in 1870 and 79, Arkansas in 1882, and Alabama in 1893).

    In each case, these laws were explicitly race based. Other southern states would over time admit that their gun laws were specifically designed to limit or prevent black citizens from acquiring or bearing arms, or would enforce such laws only along racial lines. In 1911, New York City passed the infamous Sullivan Act which was an open effort to disarm Eastern European immigrants, and other persons not wealthy or politically connected enough to acquire a permit to carry a pistol. As late as 1968, many believed the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed less to control guns, and more “to control blacks”.

    Thomas Nasts 1878 political cartoon vilified white supremacy and reveals how helpless recently freed blacks were in some parts of the South

    Into the 1980’s and 90’s further attacks against poor (and usually black) persons and their right to keep and bear arms continued. Many state housing projectsattempted to ban the possession of guns in public housing, while in 1988 Maryland imposed a ban on inexpensive handguns, perhaps the most modern and recent ban on guns based on price.

    Florida at one time, went so far as to require a license to own “Winchester rifles” or other repeating rifles. This law, first enacted in 1893, and revised in 1901 was an insidious way to prevent minorities from gaining access to modern rifle cartridges like the .30-30 Winchester or modern bolt action rifles chambered for the same cartridge as the US Army Springfield. By attempting to bar blacks and other minorities from accessing modern repeating rifles, Florida was seeking to ensure they would remain helpless against a tyrannical state, and white supremacists. Needless to say, white people never had trouble gaining permission to own modern repeating rifles during this time.

    The National Firearms Act of 1934, or NFA was the first attempt at a national set of gun control laws that applied in all states. While not overtly racist, it targeted “gangster weapons”, and also would have originally placed handguns under the same strict regulation as machine guns and other NFA items. However, then, as now, “gangster” is often a polite way of describing an ethnic minority or minorities who are seen as undesirable. In the early 20th century, this was often Eastern European immigrants, which New York City’s Sullivan act targeted, in what may have been the first case of racist gun control laws targeted at Europeans.

    Today, the NFA continues to burden law abiding Americans by vilifying safety equipment such as suppressors, and making it difficult to acquire rifles and shotguns with short barrels. All this, due to racially driven moral panics over Prohibition era “gangsters” who often ran the gamut of socially unacceptable ethnic origins.

    Today, there is a great deal of heated debate on the way police treat ethnic minorities lawfully bearing arms as opposed to how they treat white people. In the 1960’s and 70’s, active and openly armed resistance played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Panthers most famously took it to to extremes by openly bearing arms at several state capitol buildings. It should be noted, that in California and Washington State, that action resulted in new laws about the open display of guns, but modern day (and mostly white) open displays of arms under similar circumstances have not been met with new legislation.

    Members of the Black Panthers protest for gun rights in Olympia, Washington – 1969

    We might speculate that modern day attempts at gun control are race neutral, but if you consider that most, if not all gun control is driven from major population centers, and that “tough on crime” is just another racist dogwhistle, then we can start seeing the more implicit gun control. Rarely do these sorts of laws openly target rural areas, but “inner city gun crime” is regularly trotted out as some sort of crisis to stamp out – and if it happens to disarm law abiding minorities, who cares?

    One might ask why in the enlightened 21st century, there is still fear over armed minorities. The answer remains the same. An armed person is free, but a disarmed person is a subject. The War on Drugs succeeded in destroying the inner cities by breaking up families, and disenfranchising millions of minorities, and on the heels of this, modern day gun control has succeeded in leaving only criminals and violent gangs armed. Today, as in the harsh years of the 19th century, racism requires minorities to be unarmed, and unable to fully stand up for themselves, or their rights, lest they too gain their place in the sun and walk as equals in American society.

    The question then, is how to combat this pervasive, systemic racism? The very political party that claims to support the best interests of American minorities, also is the one that openly, and actively seeks to disarm them. The Democratic Party’s open assault on gun rights even has a paternalistic ring to it, that is straight out of the 19th century. We must ban guns “for the children” or “to protect our communities.” From their lofty (and mostly white) seats of power, they demand the inner cities and urban areas of America surrender their arms, their liberties and their rights in order to “fight crime”, and in return, they are met with hostile police forces, an ongoing war on civil rights disguised as a war on drugs, and the assurance that the government will protect them. This of course, being the same government that has spent hundreds of years actively suppressing these populations. How it is different today is beyond me.

    Today, it is expected ethnic minorities will be left wing leaning, and it is expected if you are left wing, you are anti gun. It is a perfect formula that took centuries to perfect. How better to disarm a people, than to convince them to support that idea themselves? It is insidious, twisted and a violation of all basic moral and legal ideals which this country was founded upon.  Landmark Supreme Court decisions like Heller and McDonald have established once and for all that the 2nd Amendment applies to ALL states and ALL Americans. Places like Chicago and Washington DC have grossly abused these rulings by imposing strict limits on carrying guns, and imposed excessive financial and regulatory burdens on acquiring permits to carry a gun. Other states like California and many East Coast states already do the same. It is the same, age old tactic. Pay lip service to civil rights, but make sure that only the well to do, and well connected can actually exercise them.

    What then can be done to combat the deeply rooted racism that is at the heart of gun control in modern America? This is a very complicated question, as the very idea of minorities organizing for their interests has been seen as threatening by many people over the years. However, there are now a rock solid set of Supreme Court cases which make it patently clear that the right to keep and bear arms is a right for all  Americans to enjoy. There are many pro-gun groups which actively promote the right to keep and bear arms, and increasing minority membership in them is a net positive for all parties involved.

    The divisive nature of American politics today often pits people with shared common interests against each other, if they happen to espouse different beliefs in other areas. While many rational Americans agree about some things, they do not agree on all, but in the arena of gun rights, all gun owners should welcome each other, and put aside other political differences to promote gun rights for all people. This may be the biggest stumbling block to overcoming the deep seated racism that is modern day gun control. Far too often I have seen so-called conservativesreject gun owning allies, because they voted the wrong way. Divisive and emotion driven political beliefs on non gun related issues keep gun owners apart from each other, and this wedge is almost assuredly a deliberate action to keep people from coming together in common purpose.

    Racism is a vicious, ugly and horrible blight on American society, and now more than ever it must be stamped out, and gun rights taken back from laws rooted in keeping slaves and free blacks under control, or in suppressing the rights of the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Civil rights are for everybody, and everybody must come together to defend them.

    For more reading about the roots of racism in American gun control, I recommend Clayton Cramer’s The Racist Roots of Gun Control, and Robert F. Williams’ Negroes With Guns as well as Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement.

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