- "Significant Slowdown" Spooks Maersk At Mediterranean's Third Largest Port
Malta Freeport, the third largest transshipment port in the Mediterranean region and located on the island of Malta, has seen a “significant slowdown in business activity” since 2H18.
One of its major clients, Maersk, the largest container ship and supply vessel operator in the world, has decided to move its operations from Malta to other ports in North Africa after Mediterranean shipping routes have been severely affected by the synchronized global slowdown.
The Times of Malta reported that Freeport’s management notified unions and other clients that Maersk and Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) will be shifting operations from Malta to other African ports, is expected to reduce business at Malta’s container terminal by 35% next month.
Last year’s figures show the port handled 3.3 million containers in its transshipment activities, but with Maersk and MSC halting operations, that number is expected to be dramatically less.
A spokesman for Freeport confirmed to the Times of Malta that Maersk and MSC have departed.
“Maersk recently informed us that it will be shifting some of the services that are being carried out through Malta Freeport to a new fully-automated facility in Tangier Med, Morocco, and to Port Said in Egypt.”
Maersk has been operating from Malta for at least a decade, handling import shipping routes to and from China.
Industry sources said shipping volumes have already decreased at Freeport, as a severe economic slowdown in Europe and Asia have sent container rates between both regions into a tailspin in the last several quarters.
“The slowdown can already be felt and there are already fewer people working, particularly on overtime,” the source said.
Last month, data from the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis revealed world trade volume fell 1.8% in the three months to January compared to the preceding three months as a global slowdown gained momentum.
The International Monetary Fund warned last month that this is a “delicate moment” for the global economy as many countries are in the midst of a severe slowdown.
The global economy has “lost further momentum” in the last six months, said IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde.
Lagarde pinned trade volume deterioration on decelerating global growth and “the impact of increased trade tensions on spending” on producer goods.
The threat of the U.S.-China trade war escalating into a full-blown trade war is starting to be realized. President Trump last Friday raised the tariff rate from 10% to 25% on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. China’s move came Monday, as it increased its tariff rate from 10% to 25% on $60 billion worth of American goods.
The tit-for-tat trade war has led to a massive re-pricing of global trade expectations for 2H19, expected to trigger a global trade recession if Trump initiates a 25% tariff on the remaining $300 billion of Chinese goods.
The global downturn in trade is widespread geographically. The disruption at Malta Freeport highlights that China and Europe are in a synchronized slowdown with no trough in sight.
- Europe Is Powerless In Growing Conflict Between The US And Iran
Authored by Patrick Cockburn via Counterpunch.org,
Brexiteers in Britain are denouncing the EU as an all-powerful behemoth from whose clutches Britain must escape, just as the organisation is demonstrating its failure to become more than a second-rate world power.
The EU’s real status – well behind the US, Russia and China – has just been demonstrated by its inability to protect Iran from US sanctions following President Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal of 2015. A year ago, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron made humiliating visits to Washington to plead vainly with Trump to stay with the agreement, but were rebuffed.
Since then the US has successfully ratcheted up economic pressure on Iran, reducing its oil exports from 2.8 to 1.3 million barrels a day. The UK, France and Germany had promised to create a financial vehicle to circumvent US sanctions, but their efforts have been symbolic. Commercial enterprises are, in any case, too frightened of the ire of the US treasury to take advantage of such measures.
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday that Iran would stop complying with parts of the nuclear deal unless the Europeans provided the promised protection for the oil trade and banks. Everybody admits that Iran is in compliance but this is not going to do it any good.
These are the latest moves in the complex political chess game between the US and Iran which has been going on since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. It is this conflict – and not the US-China confrontation over trade, which has just dramatically escalated – which will most likely define any new balance of power in the world established during the Trump era. It is so important because – unlike the US-China dispute – the options include the realistic possibility of regime change and war.
The Europeans have proved to be marginal players when it comes to the Iran deal and it was never likely that they would spend much more diplomatic capital defending it once the US had withdrawn. In the long term, they also want regime change in Tehran, though they oppose Trump’s methods of obtaining it as reckless. Nevertheless, the contemptuous ease with which Trump capsized the agreement shows how little he cares what EU leaders say or do.
The Europeans will be spectators in the escalating US-Iran conflict. The US potential is great when it comes to throttling the Iranian economy. Iranian oil exports are disappearing, inflation is at 40 per cent and the IMF predicts a 6 per cent contraction in the economy as a whole. The US can punish banks dealing with Iran everywhere, including countries where Iran is politically strong such as Iraq and Lebanon.
Tehran does not have many effective economic countermeasures against the US assault, other than to try to out-wait the Trump era. Caution has worked well for Iran in the past. After 2003, Iranians used to joke that God must be on their side because why else would the US have overthrown Iran’s two deeply hostile neighbours – the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Many Iranian leaders appear confident that they can survive anything Trump can throw at them other than a full-scale shooting war. Past precedent suggests they’re right: in the wars in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982, Iran came out on top and helped created Hezbollah as the single most powerful political and military force in the country. Likewise, after the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran undermined their occupation and saw a Shia-led government sympathetic to its interests hold power in Baghdad. In Syria after 2011, Iranian support was crucial in keeping its ally Bashar al-Assad in control.
Iran was on the winning side in these conflicts in part because of mistakes made by its opponents, but these will not inevitably happen again. Because the media and much of the political establishment in Washington and western capitals are so viscerally anti-Trump, they frequently underestimate the effectiveness of his reliance on American economic might while avoiding military conflict. At the end of the day, the US Treasury is a more powerful instrument of foreign policy than the Pentagon for all its aircraft carriers and drones.
Trump may not read briefing papers, but he often has a better instinct for the realities of power than the neo-conservative hawks in his administration who learned little from the Iraq war which they helped foment.
So long as Trump sticks with sanctions he is in a strong position, but if the crisis with Iran becomes militarised then the prospects for the US become less predictable. Neither Tehran nor Washington want war, but that does not mean they will not get one. Conflicts in this part of the Middle East are particularly uncontrollable because there are so many different players with contrary interests.
This divergence produces lots of wild cards: Trump is backed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but these oil states have had a dismal record of operational incapacity in Syria and Yemen.
The Iranians, for their part, have had their successes where their fellow Shia are the majority (Iraq), the largest community (Lebanon) or are in control of government (Syria). Given that they are a Shia clerical regime, it is always difficult for them to extend their influence beyond the Shia core areas.
Benjamin Netanyahu has led the charge in demonising Iran and encouraging the US to see it as the source of all evil in the Middle East. But Netanyahu’s belligerent rhetoric against Iran has hitherto been accompanied with caution in shifting to military action, except against defenceless Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
A danger is that a permanent cold or hot war between Washington and Tehran will become the vehicle for other conflicts that have little to do with it. These would include the escalating competition between Saudi Arabia and Turkey over the leadership of the Sunni world. Turkey’s independent role would be threatened by an enhancement of US power in the region. So too would Russia which has re-established its status as a global power since 2011 by its successful military support for Assad in Syria.
Trump hopes to force Tehran to negotiate a Carthaginian peace – particularly useful if this happens before the next US presidential election – under which Iran ceases to be a regional power. Regime change would be the optimum achievement for Trump, but is probably unattainable.
If Trump sticks to economic war it will be very difficult for Iran to counter him, but in any other scenario the US position becomes more vulnerable. There is an impressive casualty list of British and US leaders – three British prime ministers and three US presidents – over the last century who have suffered severe or fatal political damage in the Middle East. Trump will be lucky if he escapes the same fate.
- DARPA Is Training AI For Close-Range Air Combat Missions
The Pentagon wants to increase its use of artificial intelligence, or AI, for war. So it asked it research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to automate air-to-air combat, teaching AI how to manuever an aircraft and use weapons on the modern battlefield, reported DARPA Public Affairs.
The research agency says AI-controlled fighter aircraft could respond faster in combat situations, allowing the pilot to identify other threats. The software can also fly in a fully autonomous mode without a pilot.
The Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program was developed by DARPA to address the need for autonomous combat technology in the skies.
“Being able to trust autonomy is critical as we move toward a future of warfare involving manned platforms fighting alongside unmanned systems,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Dan Javorsek (Ph.D.), ACE program manager at DARPA.
“We envision a future in which AI handles the split-second maneuvering during within-visual-range dogfights, keeping pilots safer and more effective as they orchestrate large numbers of unmanned systems into a web of overwhelming combat effects,” Javorsek said.
ACE is designed to enable DARPA’s “mosaic warfare” vision. Mosaic warfare transfers warfighting away from human pilots to less-expensive drones that can be quickly manufactured, fielded, and upgraded with the latest technology to address changing threats on the modern battlefield.
The AI program is expected to be trained in aerial dogfighting rules in the near term. DARPA will train AI with basic fighter maneuvers first, then graduate onto more complex scenarios. Similar to a human pilot, AI performance will be closely watched by fighter instructors in the autonomous aircraft, which will help mature this technology.
“Only after human pilots are confident that the AI algorithms are trustworthy in handling bounded, transparent and predictable behaviors will the aerial engagement scenarios increase in difficulty and realism,” Javorsek said. “Following virtual testing, we plan to demonstrate the dogfighting algorithms on sub-scale aircraft leading ultimately to live, full-scale manned-unmanned team dogfighting with operationally representative aircraft.”
Several months ago, we reported that the Air Force Research Laboratory (ARL) published never before seen video of the Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie, an unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV), which completed its first flight on March 5, at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. The Valkyrie is programmed to fly alongside manned fourth and fifth-generation fighters, is another, but a separate example of how the Pentagon is rushing to deploy AI.
Zerohedge readers have already been briefed about the AI arms race between the US and China. Each superpower races to develop and commercialize AI technologies before the other, hoping to integrate these powerful technologies into weapons before the next major conflict breaks out.
- Russia-Gate's Monstrous Offspring – Mindless Bipartisan Bellicosity
Authored by Daniel Lazare via ConsortiumNews.com,
Russia-gate has shed any premise of being about Russian interference, but the idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable…
Americans used to think that Russia-gate was about a plot to hack the 2016 election. They were wrong. Russia-gate is really about an immense conspiracy to do four things:
No. 1: Ratchet up tensions with Russia to ever more dangerous levels;
No. 2: Show that Democrats are even more useless than people imagined;
No. 3: Persecute Julian Assange;
No. 4: Re-elect Donald Trump as president.
This was the takeaway from Mitch McConnell’s devastating “case closed” speech last week in which the Senate majority leader jeered at President Barack Obama for mocking Mitt Romney’s claim (seven years ago now) that Russia was America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” As Obama famously replied during that presidential debate: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
But that was so 2012. Now, says McConnell, it looks like Romney was right:
“We’d have been better off if the administration hadn’t swept [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s invasion and occupation of Georgia under the rug or looked away as Russia forced out western NGO’s and cracked down on civil society. If President Obama hadn’t let Assad trample his red line in Syria or embraced Putin’s fake deal on chemical weapons, if the Obama administration had responded firmly to Putin’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine in 2014, to the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, and to Russia intervention in Syria — maybe stronger leadership would have left the Kremlin less emboldened, maybe tampering with our democracy wouldn’t have seemed so very tempting.
“Instead,” McConnell went on, “the previous administration sent the Kremlin a signal they could get away with almost anything, almost anything. So is it surprising that we got the brazen interference detailed in special counsel Mueller’s report?”
Lies and Distortions
Like so much out of Congress these days, this was a farrago of lies and distortions. It wasn’t Moscow that started the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, but Tbilisi. While Russia has indeed cracked down on U.S.-backed NGO’s, Washington has done the same by forcing Russia’s highly successful news agency RT to register as a foreign agent and by sentencing Maria Butina, a Russian national studying at American University, to 18 months in prison for the crime of hobnobbing with members of the National Rifle Association. The charge that Syrian President Bashar al Assad “trampled” Obama’s red line by using chemical weapons is hardly as clear-cut as imperial propagandists like to believe – to say the least – while the agreement between Putin and former Secretary of State John Kerry to rid Syria of chemical weapons was not fake at all, but an example, increasingly rare unfortunately, of diplomacy being used to prevent an international crisis from getting out of hand.
Looking into Moscow’s Red Square at night. (U.S. Air Force/ Karen Abeyasekere)
And so on ad nauseum. But what could Democrats say in response given that they’ve spent the last three years trying to out-hawk the GOP? Answer: nothing. All they could do was try to turn tables on McConnell by charging him with not being anti-Russian enough. Thus, New York’s Sen. Chuck Schumer accused him of “aiding and abetting” Moscow while Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin accused him of running interference for Putin because he “feels the Russians were on the side of the Republicans in 2016 and just might be again in 2020.”
Democrats Feed the Super Hawks
The result: a Democratic consensus that Russia can’t be trusted and that America must put itself on a war footing to prevent Putin from “toppl[ing] the mighty oak that has been our republic for two hundred years,” as Schumer put it. It’s an across-the-board agreement that the long-awaited Mueller report has only strengthened by regurgitating the intelligence-community line that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” and then cherry-picking the facts to fit its preconceived thesis. (See “Top Ten Questions About the Mueller Report,” May 6.)
Democrats claim to oppose National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, but the anti-Russian hysteria they promote strengthens the hand of such super-hawks. It makes military conflict more likely, if not with Russia then with perceived Russian surrogates such as Venezuela or Iran.
Schiff increasingly unhinged. (Caricature/DonkeyHotey via Flickr)
Simultaneously, it backfires on Democrats by making them look weak and foolish as they argue that even though the Mueller report says “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government,” somehow “significant evidence of collusion” still exists, as an increasingly unhinged Rep. Adam Schiff maintains. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of congressional Democrats, no evidence does not mean no evidence. In fact, it means the opposite.
Voters are unmoved. Ten times more Americans – 80 versus 8 percent – care about healthcare than about Russia according to a recent survey. When CNN pollsters asked a thousand people in mid-March to name the issues that matter most, not one mentioned Russia or the Mueller probe. If they didn’t care when collusion was still an open question, they care even less now that the only issue is obstruction plus a phony constitutional crisis that desperate Democrats have conjured up out of thin air.
Trump the Chief Beneficiary
Besides Fox News – whose ratings have soared while Russia-obsessed CNN’s have plummeted – the chief beneficiary is Trump. Post-Mueller, the man has the wind in his sails. Come 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders could cut through his phony populism with ease. But if Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post succeeds in tarring him with Russia the same way it tried to tar Trump, then the Democratic nominee will be a bland centrist whom the incumbent will happily bludgeon. Former Vice President Joe Biden – the John McCain-loving, speech-slurring, child-fondler who was for a wall along the Mexican border before he was against it – will end up as a bug splat on the Orange One’s windshield.
Trump ready to take on challengers. (Caricature/DonkeyHotey via Flickr)
Beto O’Rourke, the rich-kid airhead who declared shortly before the Mueller report was released that Trump, “beyond the shadow of a doubt, sought to … collude with the Russian government,” will not fare much better. Sen. Elizabeth Warren meanwhile seems to be tripping over her own two feet as she predicts one moment that Trump is heading to jail, declares the next that voters don’t care about the Mueller report because they’re too concerned with bread-and-butter issues, and then calls for dragging Congress into the impeachment morass regardless.
Such “logic” is lost on voters, so it seems to be a safe bet that enough will stay home next Election Day to allow the rough beast to slouch towards Bethlehem yet again.
Assange Convicted in Eyes of Press
Then there’s Julian Assange, currently serving a 50-week sentence in a supermax prison outside of London after being ejected from the Ecuadorian Embassy. By claiming that the WikiLeaks founder was “dissembling” by denying that Russia was the source of the mammoth Democratic National Committee leak in July 2016, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has effectively convicted him in the eyes of Congress and the press.
The New York Times thus reports that Mueller has “revealed” that Russian intelligence was the source while, in a venomous piece by Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger, The Washington Post declared that Assange “is neither whistleblower nor journalist,” but someone who helped Russian intelligence interfere in “the American electoral process.”
Schumer thus greeted Assange’s April 11 arrest by tweeting his “hope [that] he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government,” while, in a truly chilling statement, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia declared that “[i]t will be really good to get him back on United States soil [so] we can get the facts and the truth from him.”
Now that Julian Assange has been arrested, I hope he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government.
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 11, 2019
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Assange is guiltier than ever. If Washington gets its hands on him, he’ll no doubt be hauled before some sort of Star Chamber and then clapped in a dungeon somewhere until he confesses that Russian intelligence made him do it, even though a careful reading of the Mueller report strongly suggests the opposite. (See “The ‘Guccifer 2.0’ Gaps in Mueller’s Full Report,” April 18.)
Assange languishing behind bars, war breaking out in Latin America or the Persian Gulf, Trump in the Oval Office for four years more – it’s the worst of all possible worlds, and the Democratic Party’s bizarre fixation with Vladimir Putin is what’s pushing it.
Ultimately, Russia-gate is yet a variation on the tired old theme of American innocence. If something goes wrong, it can’t be the fault of decent Americans who, as we all know, are too good for our deeply flawed world. Rather, it must be the fault of dastardly foreigners trying to hack our democracy. It’s a deep-rooted form of xenophobia that has fueled everything from the criminalization of marijuana (smuggled in by evil Mexicans) to the 1950s Red Scare (a reaction to Communism smuggled in by evil Russians), and the war on terrorism (the work of evil Muslims). The idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable.
But Russia-gate may be the greatest delusion of all. After decades of celebrating Donald Trump as the essence of American flash and hustle, the corporate media have decided that the only way he could have gotten into the White House is if Putin put him there. The upshot is a giant conspiracy to force Americans to turn their back on reality, an effort that can only end in disaster for all concerned, Democrats first and foremost.
- "No One Wants To Be In That Building": Trump Tower Shunned By NYC Luxury Buyers
Trump Tower has now become one of the least desirable luxury properties in Manhattan, according to Bloomberg. Since Donald Trump won the presidency, the building has been turned into a “fortress” and has been blocked off with barriers at two of its main entrances.
And the building that once attracted stars and celebrities is now famous only for the infamous Trump campaign meeting with the Russian lawyer documented in Robert Mueller’s report. The 36-year-old building that bears Trump’s name has simply become a “turn off” for tenants in the liberal city.
The pain has been felt by those who own units in the tower. Most condo sales in the building have resulted in a loss after adjusting for inflation and several condos have been sold at a more than 20% loss. For comparison, according to PropertyShark, just 0.23% of homes across Manhattan have been sold at a loss over the last two years.
There’s also 42,000 square feet of office space that the tower is having trouble filling out, despite advertising rents below the area average. And it’s not just Trump Tower that’s feeling the pain: business is down at Trump’s public golf course in New York and plans to launch a new middle tier hotel chain across the country have been shelved.
Trump will be providing an updated snapshot of his net worth this week, as his annual financial disclosures are due Wednesday. They won’t go into detail about the Trump Organization‘s revenue, but it’s clear that Trump Tower is suffering based on securities filings, property records and real estate listings.
And on any given day, the number of Trump Organization and government security people in the building can easily outnumber everybody else in the building’s atrium. The building’s occupancy rate has fallen to 83% from 99% over the last seven years. This vacancy rate is about twice Manhattan’s average.
Edward Son, until recently a market analyst for CoStar Group Inc said: “If I were looking for office space, that would be a building I’d want to avoid.”
Net income for the tower was up slightly last year, as a result of the tenancy of Trump’s 2020 campaign committee, which has spent more than $890,000 over the last two years to rent space in the tower. But the building’s net income is still about 26% lower than what bankers expected when they evaluated Trump’s finances for a $100 million loan in 2012.
But even after taking into account the $4.3 million in interest owed on the loan, the building generated about $10 million in free cash last year. The few that have rented condos in hopes of bumping into the president have likely been disappointed, as Trump has only visited the building 13 times since his inauguration.
Michael Sklar sold his parent’s 57th floor unit for $1.83 million in October after they spent $400,000 to remodel it. It was originally purchased for $1.4 million in 2004, which comes out to $1.84 million after adjusting for inflation.
“No one wants in that building,” Sklar said.
Living in the tower became a hassle after Trump won the presidency, Sklar said. His mother, who was battling cancer at the time, took cabs from the airport to the building and used to be dropped off at the front entrance. But after Trump’s election, she was forced to be dropped off “hundreds of feet” from the front door and was made to walk home.
“The name on the building became a problem,” Sklar continued.
At least 13 condos have sold in the tower since Trump’s election. Eight out of nine transactions available from New York City records show that the seller sold at an inflation adjusted loss. For comparison, just 57 homes elsewhere in Manhattan sold at a loss over the past two years, out of 24,871 third-party sales.
Matthew D. Hughes, a Manhattan-based broker at Brown Harris Stevens said: “The luxury market is softening. But it’s rare that someone owns an apartment here for 10 years and takes a loss.”
One real estate agent said that clients have repeatedly told him not to show them units in Trump buildings, where gawkers often outnumber the customers of the building’s retail stores. Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive said: “It’s totally a tourist trap.”
She remembers the building “fondly” and said that when it was built, Trump often recruited celebrities to purchase condos there in order to fill it out and add to its appeal.
The tower is just two blocks from Central Park and is home to a 60 foot waterfall and tons of pink Italian marble. It’s advertised as having 68 stories, despite having only 58, and the building was ahead of its time when it was built. Trump’s lawyer, George Ross, wrote in 2005: “He single-handedly created the market for high-end luxury residences in New York City.”
The building was given a new prominence when Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice, launched in 2004 and filmed there, helping Trump revive his personal brand. In 2013, Trump put the value of his brand at $4 billion.
And the tower’s location should have it doing well: it’s in the Plaza District, right off of Central Park, an area that many real estate experts consider to be the nation’s premier office area. Offices that have views of Central Park easily bring in more than $100 per square foot often, one New York Research director said. Trump Tower, however, is now advertising open space for $72-$85 per square foot annually. Late last year the Trump Organization said in a promotional video that the tower was “one of New York’s most iconic trophy buildings.”
Prices are now listed as negotiable.
Louis D’Avanzo, managing principal of Cushman & Wakefield Plc’s Midtown Manhattan office, said: “Any of the buildings that have been really successful in Midtown are either newer class or the landlords have spent considerable capital to make them more modern and have more amenities.”
Trump has spent little on updating the tower in recent years.
Res concluded: “I don’t think I would want an office in Trump Tower. Why would you go there? It’s a wonder he doesn’t have 50% vacancy.”
- The Disinformationists
Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins via The Unz Review,
So, the election-meddling Putin-Nazi disinformationists are at it again! Oh yes, while Americans have been distracted by Russiagate, Obstructiongate, Redactiongate, or whatever it’s being called at this point, here in Europe, we are purportedly being bombarded with Russian “disinformation” aimed at fomenting confusion and chaos in advance of the upcoming EU elections, which are due to take place in less than two weeks.
The New York Times reports that an entire “constellation” of social media accounts “linked to Russia and far-right groups” is disseminating extremist “disinformation,” “encouraging discord,” and “amplifying distrust in the centrist parties that have governed for decades.” These accounts share some of the same “digital fingerprints,” and are engaging in “tactics” similar to the “tactics used in previous Russian attacks,” notably the Kremlin’s notorious mass-brainwashing of millions of defenseless African Americans with those deceptive anti-masturbation memes during the 2016 elections.
Now, this is not just a bunch of nonsense dressed up with authoritative-sounding lingo. No, The Times spoke to “analysts” and “advocacy groups,” which informed them that certain websites in Italy “share the same signatures” as certain other websites sharing certain “pro-Kremlin views.” Moreover, two “political groups” in Germany used the same Internet service providers as those “Russian hackers” who attacked our democracy by stealing those Democratic Party emails that transformed Americans overnight into a nation of Trump-loving white supremacists!
That hasn’t happened here in Europe yet, but I’m not sure how much longer we can hold out against this relentless onslaught. According to an “analysis” concocted by some cloud-based cybersecurity firm and authoritatively cited by Politico, at this point, “more than half of Europeans might have seen some form of disinformation” spread by “Russians” on social media. They might have been exposed to “extremist views” and “amplified content” possibly produced by the far-right Alternative for Germany party, and even (God help them!) supporters of Brexit.
SafeGuard Cyber (the cybersecurity firm in question, which offers “digital risk protection and empowers businesses to embrace new technologies,” or whatever mumbo jumbo it says on their website) identified, and is now presumably surveilling on a more or less around the clock basis, “a vast network of automated social media accounts allegedly controlled by Russian actors” which is spreading this “amplified extremist content.”
Although Politico “was unable to independently verify” whether the social media accounts the SafeGuard Cyber analysis “identified” (and used to generate a meaningless graph) were in any way actually linked to Russia, and although SafeGuard Cyber would not provide Politico with a list of the users it assured Politico were “linked to Russia,” SafeGuard Cyber’s CTO informed Politico that his team of experts had used “more than 50 identifiers,” among them, the location from which the messages were sent and “activity linked to Russian interests,” to identify these “Russian actors” who are exposing innocent Europeans and expatriate Americans like myself to Lord knows what kind of jargon-laden, dangerously amplified, extremist content in order to disinform and confuse us.
And it’s not just the upcoming EU elections that the Putin-Nazi disinformationists are targeting. An outfit called Global Security Review, which “publishes objective, solutions-oriented insight into geopolitical issues” which can be authoritatively referenced by the corporate media to lend whatever story they are pushing an air of credibility, warn that Russia is conducting a campaign to “overwhelm democracies” with disinformation! According to the experts at GSR, Putin-Nazi disinformationists working for Russia Today and Sputnik brainwashed the citizens of Catalonia into voting for their independence from Spain with a network of bots (or “zombie accounts”). In France, they brainwashed the Gilets Jaunes protesters into attacking the windows of upscale stores and setting fire to luxury vehicles by “magnifying the brutality of the French police,” who have been doing their utmost to show restraint as they shoot people’s eyes out with rubber bullets and indiscriminately tear-gas the hell out of everyone.
And then there’s the evil Russian spywhale, which the disinformationists want us to believe is just a harmless “therapy Beluga” for kids, but which has clearly been strapped with some sort of monstrous, mind-controlling apparatus that enables the Kremlin to remotely implant a host of dangerous “populist” ideas in the brains of defenseless Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist Viking berserkers who will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in Brussels smelling of akvavit and fermented shark.
These Putin-Nazi disinformationists are not to be confused with the corporate media, or other sources of real information, like SafeGuard Cyber, Global Security Review, Bellingcat, Integrity Initiative, The Atlantic Council, E.U. East StratCom Task Force, Foreign Policy Research Institute, and countless other companies, foundations, think tanks, and intelligence agency fronts. These are legitimate information providers, who would never try to disinform the public to serve any sort of corporatist agenda, or to generate any kind of mass hysteria over “terrorists,” “Russians,” “fascists,” or “populists.”
OK, granted, these sources are not perfect, but it’s not like they intentionally lied about those non-existent WMDs in Iraq, or those babies that weren’t yanked out of their incubators, or those nerve gas canisters that Assad didn’t drop, or when Russia didn’t hack the Vermont power grid, or attack us with crickets, or hack into CSPAN, or “collude” with Trump via a secret server, or when Manafort didn’t meet with Assange, or when Corbyn didn’t lay a wreath for terrorists, and all the other things that didn’t happen … no, they just got their stories “wrong,” over and over, and over again.
Plus, what motive would they possibly have, these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and think tanks, and research institutes, to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative that allows them to systematically stigmatize, marginalize, criminalize, deplatform, demonetize, and otherwise eliminate any type of speech they deem to be “Russian disinformation,” or “extremist content,” or a “conspiracy theory,” or simply too “dangerous,” “divisive,” or “confusing” to circulate among the general public?
No … see? That makes no sense. That’s just an example of the type of fascist disinformation these Putin-Nazi disinformationists are trying to spread to confuse us to the point where we can’t even concentrate long enough to think anymore, or parse the meaningless jargon-laden nonsense they’re trying to deceive us with, and just devolve into these Pavlovian imbeciles conditioned to respond to specific trigger words, like “extremist,” “terrorist,” “fascist,” “populist,” “anti-Semitic,” “Russians,” “hackers,” and whatever other emotional stimuli we are being trained to instantly recognize and robotically react to like circus animals.
Or … I don’t know, maybe it isn’t. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say. Probably they’ve already got to me. I’d better get back down into my anti-disinformation bunker, pull up The Guardian, or The Washington Post, or Der Spiegel on my child-proof computer, and immerse myself in some objective journalism, before the Putin-Nazi spywhale makes its way up the Landwehrkanal, takes control of what’s left of my mind, and forces me into going out and trying to vote for Hitler or something.
I recommend you do the same, and I’ll see you when this nightmare over.
* * *
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.
- Ohio High School Protects Sensitive Children By Ditching Valedictorian And Salutatorian Honors
Top of your class? Who cares!
A High School in Mason, Ohio has eliminated their valedictorian salutatorian honors in order to help the “mental wellness” of other students,” according to Fox19.
Instead of the two honors bestowed on the two highest achievers, Mason High School located in a Cincinnati suburb will stick with the Latin honors system – awarding students with a 4.0 GPA summa cum laude, those with a 3.75 – 3.99 GPA magna cum laude, and those with a GPA between 3.51 and 3.74 as cum laude.
The school is also going to begin classes 30 minutes later next year, and are also considering reducing the amount of homework after school and during summer vacation.
If only the real world were so accommodating!
“This will help reduce the overall competitive culture at MHS to allow students to focus on exploring learning opportunities that are of interest to them,” said Principal Bobby Dodd.
“Currently, we’ve recognized one valedictorian and one salutatorian based upon the ranking of students according to their weighted GPA. Although Mason High School utilizes class rank to determine these graduation honors for each senior class, the ranking of students is not reported to colleges. The paradoxical nature of class rank within the culture of MHS does nothing to decrease the competition among students.”
Whatever that means.
The new recognition system sans valedictorian and salutatorian awards will begin with students graduating in the class of 2020, so all those straight-A freshmen and sophomores who were dead set on being the best will have to settle for a group participation award.
- House Overreach – Are Dems Weaponizing The Oversight Authority?
Submitted by J. Theodore Schatt,
The dispute between the White House and House Democrats ended up in the Courts this week for a determination of “appropriate oversight”.
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A review of the United States Constitution will be of no assistance in resolution of the matter. Oversight is not an enumerated power of Congress. Instead, it is understood that in order for Congress to carry out its own responsibilities under the Constitution, Congress must have the authority to gain necessary information from the Executive branch.
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The Judicial branch has previously determined that so long as the request has a legitimate legislative purpose the request is proper.
It appears without question that the House demands from the Executive Branch will have a legitimate legislative purpose. For example, Mr. Nadler has demanded all back-up documentation for the Mueller Report, including the information that by law may not be disclosed. Clearly, a review of this information could permit Congress to determine that FISA laws must be amended to protect a constitutional right to privacy from overzealous, or biased, government agents. That isn’t what Mr. Nadler has in mind, but it would be a “legitimate legislative purpose”.
However, the more interesting issue the Courts may be called upon to determine is whether the current oversight efforts by the House, despite having a “legitimate legislative purpose” are so obviously aimed at weaponizing the oversight authority of the House for political gain that acquiescence to such use would be destructive to the balance of power between the three branches of government. President Nixon faced articles of Impeachment for endeavoring “to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns…” Should Mr. Nadler and his committee be given authority to act in a manner, through “oversight”, that cannot be exercised by the Executive?
Recent history evidences a Democrat party that is perfectly willing to test the boundaries of their constitutional power for political benefit. After demanding that Senator McConnell protect the filibuster of judges nominated by President Bush for fear of destroying the Senate, Senator Reid reversed course and eliminated the filibuster to permit judges nominated by President Obama to be confirmed with a simple majority. Democrats feigned outrage when the filibuster was eliminated to permit Justice Gorsuch to avoid a purely politically motivated filibuster and ascend to the Supreme Court. Prior to the election of 2016, the intelligence operations of the United States were weaponized based upon an opposition research operation paid for by the Clinton Campaign.
Subsequent to the election in 2016, the Department of Justice was weaponized based upon the same opposition research resulting in a nearly three year investigation that failed to substantiate the core allegations of that Clinton opposition research. In September 2018, the entire country was witness to the shamelessly attempted character assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh masquerading as the “advise and consent” role of the Senate.
That spectacle was too much even for the mild mannered Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Senator Graham utilized a portion of his time to chastise Democrats for their actions,
“Boy, you [Democrats] all want power. God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham. … To my Republican colleagues, if you vote no, you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.”
Mr. Nadler’s attempted use of House oversight for nakedly political means should be no less odorous. Even cloaked in a “legitimate legislative purpose”, the abuse of legitimate government authority for political gain should be decried by all.
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- Huawei Responds To Tech Ban: In Concession To Trump Says "Willing To Engage To Ensure Product Safety"
It appears that Trump’s aggressive trade war escalation is proving the doubters wrong and already bearing fruit.
Earlier on Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order declaring a “national emergency” in permitting the US federal government to legally block American companies from purchasing foreign-made telecom equipment deemed a national security risk. The move is expected to restrict Huawei and fellow Chinese telecommunications company ZTE from selling their equipment in the U.S. Shortly afterward, the Department of Commerce said it had put Huawei on a blacklist that could forbid it from doing business with American companies.
In the executive order, while Trump did not name any company specifically, it was the latest action in the ongoing security saga with Huawei. The order reads that “openness must be balanced by the need to protect our country against critical national security threats.”
Separately, the Commerce Department’s move to put Huawei on its “Entity List” means U.S. companies will need a special license to sell products to the Chinese company. A similar move against ZTE last year nearly forced the company to shut down before Trump intervened and a deal was reached.
As a result of allegations it works covertly with the Chinese government to facilitate industrial and other espionage, Huawei has been banned from building the 5G networks in the US, in Australia, and numerous other countries – if not in Europe, where the local liberal elite would rather be spied on by Beijing than appear to fold to the demands of the White House – after concerns were raised that the company’s products may be used by the Chinese government for surveillance.
And just a few hours after Trump signed the executive order, the Chinese telco released a statement in response to the US ban, in which while it warned that the country will lag behind in 5G networks made by “inferior” or “more expensive alternatives.”
Yet while Huawei leaders have long insisted their company operates independently of the Chinese government and that its products aren’t used for spying, it appeared to confirm just that when the company said that it is “ready and willing to engage with the U.S. government and come up with effective measures to ensure product security.”
Why Huawei needs to ensure product safety if, as it claims, its products are safe is certainly worth a scratch on the head, and if anything it validates Trump’s suspicions about Huawei’s less then noble motives, which resulted in the US leveling 23 charges against Huawei and its CFO, and daughter of the CEO, Meng Wanzhou including charges of violating trade sanctions with Iran and attempted theft of trade secrets. Huawei has, of course, maintained that it is all a “political” game with no credence.
Huawei’s full statement is below.
“Huawei is the unparalleled leader in 5G. We are ready and willing to engage with the US government and come up with effective measures to ensure product security. Restricting Huawei from doing business in the US will not make the US more secure or stronger; instead, this will only serve to limit the US to inferior yet more expensive alternatives, leaving the US lagging behind in 5G deployment, and eventually harming the interests of US companies and consumers. In addition, unreasonable restrictions will infringe upon Huawei’s rights and raise other serious legal issues.”
Trump’s order is clearly meant to ratchet up pressure on Beijing to concede in the trade war; and just to make sure Xi Jinping has a few days to contemplate the latest US retaliation, the Commerce Department’s blacklisting of Huawei isn’t effective until it’s listed in the Federal Register. The department didn’t say when that would occur. The administration official said Wednesday that the Commerce Department was expected to take as long as six months to fashion an approach to the order, so there might not be an immediate effect. The government may eventually prohibit products from specific companies or countries as Commerce carries out Trump’s order.
Last week, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission barred China Mobile Ltd. from the U.S. market over national security concerns and said it was opening a review of other Chinese companies.
Finally, in addition to getting Tom Friedman and Steve Bannon to agree on something, Trump’s hard line stance against China appears to be earning him some very unexpected friends: democrats. “This is a needed step, and reflects the reality that Huawei and ZTE represent a threat to the security of U.S. and allied communications networks,” said Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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