- Visualizing The West's Domination Of The Global Arms Market
Overall, arms sales increased in 2017, with total global sales nearing 400 billion dollars, marking a 2.5 percent increase from last year and the third year of continued growth for the industry.
But, as Statista’s Sarah Feldman points out, U.S. arms companies still produce the most weapons worldwide.
You will find more infographics at Statista
About 57 percent of weapons produced last year came from the United States, according to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute SIPRI.
Russia comes in second, with year-over-year growth in arms production. In 2017, Russia provided the world with 10 percent of arms sales, closely followed by The UK.
Only major arms companies were included in this study. China was excluded due to insufficient data.
- Signs Of Coming Collapse: Citizens Worldwide Revolt Against Taxation & Illegal Aliens
There are many serious issues to address, relevant to current events. Just to skim some of what has happened most recently, the Dow Jones (although a “lagging” indicator) has been extremely volatile within the past month, appearing to be headed toward a loss for the year overall. Spending is down, and the “bubble” of pseudo-consumer confidence prior to Thanksgiving seems to have dissipated.
The main focus: the unrest that is swiftly crossing national borders has a common denominator in France, and now in Belgium and the Netherlands. That common denominator is that of the populace being fed up with the amount of taxation, coupled with the politicos pushing illegal Muslim aliens into nations that have been predominantly Christian for almost a thousand years.
In countries such as Germany, Sweden, and Norway (whose ancestors were not known for playing “softball,” i.e. the Saxons and Vikings, respectively) we have been witness to rapes and beatings perpetrated by Muslim illegal aliens with the governments either looking the other way or encouraging it. Soros and those of his ilk in the EU have been pushing this “forced integration” of an invasion of illegals with a huge ethnic and religious gap between them and the host nations.
The controllers (oligarchs and politicos) are pushing these (numerically speaking) armies of aliens into previously stable nations…for several express purposes:
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The denigration of the nations’ borders, language, religion, family structure, and culture
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To reduce the nations’ original populace to a state of abandoning their nationalities and nationalism
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To place these aliens into a position where they will weaken the economies of the nations (by being forced onto the dole) and also utilizing their numbers for support when it comes time to “vote” in these nations.
We have been witnessing an internal conquest fomented upon each of these European nations more effective than any invasion with military resources. The controllers are “injecting” these aliens into the populations and allowing their destructive natures and habits (completely at odds with the host nation) to destroy those countries….from within.
On December 7, 2018, Zero Hedge published a piece entitled Viral Video Of French Students Lined Up Execution-Style Sparks Outrage; Protesters Want Macron’s “Scalp” that really bears looking at. The cops there are way out of hand. The most interesting part of the article, however, may be the interview that was conducted with a Parisian cab driver, and his stance in that interview summarizes the rage and betrayal felt by the French people. Here’s a piece of it for you, and the article highlighted some words in the excerpt…and I’m leaving them that way, as they are worth reading and keeping in mind:
One angry Paris taxi driver called for Macron’s “scalp” in a half-hour monologue, according to Bloomberg.
“We’re going out there to fight,” he said, adding: “I want Macron’s scalp, I’m not afraid of anything. I have nothing to lose. You have to risk your life or you don’t get anything from these people.”
And why does the cab driver feel this way about Macron? Read this other part, showing it is not “blind rage” for no reason:
For people like the taxi driver, there’s no limit when it comes to removing the youngest French leader since Napoleon who, as the country’s economy minister between 2014 and 2016, deregulated the taxi business and was a strong supporter of car-booking apps.
“He ruined us, he broke our business,” the taxi driver said. “He wants everything new, digital, the new world, and he did it all without thinking of the cost for us. Replace everyone, have everything young, new? Yeah, well that’s not how you do things. Now it’s payback time.”
Reminds me of Jesse Ventura’s words in the movie “Predator,” but you see the point: after they push you into a corner, you have to come out swinging. We are facing a similar situation in this country. The President has been holding his own, and it appears with the Mueller witch hunt and the Democrat Party gathering torches and pitchforks, the offensive is going to take a new direction. In January, the House (now Democrat-controlled) is back in control of defense expenditures, and that is going to place actions that the President is taking (troops on the border to halt the illegal alien “caravan of love,” and to build a wall) in danger of being halted and/or defunded.
Another article came out on December 3, 2018, entitled German biker gangs are standing up for their country’s women by beating the hell out of the Muslim ‘refugees’ in the[ir] midst who keep assaulting them, by ludinfo24.com.
Here is an excerpt:
Days after the sexual assaults on German women in Cologne city came to light, local gangs are uniting in a “manhunt” of foreigners. And just this weekend, two Pakistanis and a Syrian man were injured in attacks by gangs of people in Cologne, German police said. On New Year’s Eve, Cologne was the scene of dozens of assaults on women, a number that has grown into hundreds as more and women have come forward to register complaints. Local newspaper Express reported that the attackers were members of rocker and hooligan gangs who via Facebook arranged to meet in downtown Cologne to start a “manhunt” of foreigners.
You can plainly see the fawning media over there is no different than ours…as it labeled the bikers as “members of rocker and hooligan gangs.” Hooligans, eh? So, if they are “hooligans” for stepping up to the plate and defending their women, then what are the Polizei for permitting these crimes to occur against the women?
What they are: conspirators, who are complicit with the crimes committed by the controlling politico-oligarchy…the crimes of not protecting the German citizens from these Muslim invaders. Here’s the picture posted by ludinfo24.com with the article:
Look closely at the photograph. These guys are (even with the masks you can see it) pretty clean cut, dressed cleanly and normally…and they’re not “soy boys” by any stretch of the imagination. The prediction? German bikers 1, Arabs 0, plain and simple….and as it should be. It is a beautiful thing to see them stand up for their women…since their rights have been flushed into the toilet, or swept under a prayer rug or magic carpet.
When law enforcement fails to enforce the law and protect citizens from illegal aliens…then it is no longer law enforcement….it is an armed tyrannical enforcer of a dictatorship….voted into office legally, but pursuing actions that are not approved by the populace. Just as Marbury vs. Madison pointed out under our system, if something is onerous to the Constitution, then it is not to be considered lawful in any way, shape, or form. That also includes [mis]representatives who circumvent the will of the people by using the power of their position.
They were elected legally, but to represent the will of the people, not to accomplish the “fundamental transformations” of countries in stark contradiction to their constitutions, charters, and laws, and to the detriment and/or physical harm of their citizenry.
In previous articles I outlined 3 measures the globalists will take to collapse the systems and usher in a totalitarian global government (in order): A pandemic (fostered or artificially-created), an EMP event, or a Nuclear war.
You are seeing the final methods being used as a precursor to those three actions: the collapsing of the economies, the inculcation of the complete surveillance state, and the dissolution of the nations through internal subterfuge as has been outlined within this article.
One of the advantages that the European nations have in dealing with confronting their governments is ethnic homogeneity. This leads to a single-minded purpose, in which they will not settle for anything less than the capitulation of the government, and at a bare minimum, forcing the resignation of the leadership. Look at Merkel: not going to run for office again. Now look at Macron, one step from being shown the door by the angry mobs. They called out almost 90,000 police to deal with these riots in France, only to find that a great number of the police are siding with the populace!
Look at what is happening in the United States. Look at the crimes ranging from rape to murder that are being inflicted upon American citizens who live on our southern borders. Hungary has set up barbed wire and machine gun positions to keep out the illegals. We, on the other hand, send the National Guard…to do what? Play “Yahtzee” or “Scrabble” with the illegals? Best 3 out of 5 wins?
It is an invasion, plain and simple. The controllers originally intended for the U.S. to be where South Africa is now…with the reins of power taken away from white South Africans…and soon for them to be completely vilified and driven off of their land…and worse. It hasn’t happened that way here yet, but they have been pushing the destruction of the country through forced “immigration” for decades. Remember that President Reagan gave amnesty to a million illegals. Such actions are not monopolized by the Democrats and Obama. The former President they just buried was the one who created NAFTA….Clinton merely signed it into law.
In order for a nation to continue, it needs to maintain all of the elements that made it a nation. Those elements can be found within the borders, language, religions, and culture of its people. When the laws that are made within a nation to protect its citizens and maintain it are flagrantly disobeyed or circumvented by its politicians, courts, and legislators, it is time for that nation to return to the grass roots and exercise their rights. Just because a government is of and by the people doesn’t mean that it is “for” the people.
The instabilities we are seeing are a precursor of things to come, and the Parisian cab driver was correct… in order to change an evil, sometimes you have to be willing to risk everything you have. Let’s close with a quote from our recently-departed former President, George H.W. Bush that may stem the flow of the single tear coursing down the cheek in mourning:
“Sarah, if the American people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.” – President George H.W. Bush to Sarah McLendon, Journalist, in 1992 Press Corps Interview, when he was asked about Iraq-gate and Iran Contra
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- Ukraine's President Says "High" Threat Of Russian Invasion, Urges NATO Entry In Next 5 Years
Perhaps still seeking to justify imposing martial law over broad swathes of his country, and attempting to keep international pressure and media focus on a narrative of “Russian aggression,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko denounced what he called the high “threat of Russian invasion” during a press conference on Sunday, according to Bloomberg.
Though what some analysts expected would be a rapid flair up of tit-for-tat incidents following the late November Kerch Strait seizure of three Ukrainian vessels and their crew by the Russian Navy has gone somewhat quiet, with no further major incident to follow, Poroshenko has continued to signal to the West that Russia could invade at any moment.
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, via AFP/Getty “The lion’s share of Russian troops remain” along the Russian border with Ukraine, Poroshenko told journalists at a press conference in the capital, Kiev. “Unfortunately, less than 10 percent were withdrawn,” he said, and added: “As of now, the threat of Russian troops invading remains. We have to be ready for this, we won’t allow a repeat of 2014.”
Poroshenko, who declared martial law on Nov. 26, citing at the time possible imminent “full-scale war with Russia” and Russian tank and troop build-up, on Sunday noted that he will end martial law on Dec. 26 and the temporarily suspended presidential campaign will kick off should there be no Russian invasion. He also previously banned all Russian males ages 16-60 from entering Ukraine as part of implementation of 30 days of martial law over ten provinces, though it’s unclear if this policy will be rescinded.
During his remarks, the Ukrainian president said his country should push to join NATO and the EU within the next five years, per Bloomberg:
While declining to announce whether he will seek a second term in the office, Poroshenko said that Ukraine should achieve peace, overcome the consequences of its economic crisis and to meet criteria to join the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during next five years.
But concerning both his retaining power and his ongoing “threat exaggeration” — there’s even widespread domestic acknowledgement that the two are clearly linked.
According to The Globe and Mail:
While Mr. Poroshenko’s domestic rivals accuse him of exaggerating the threat in order to boost his own flagging political fortunes — polls suggest Mr. Poroshenko is on track to lose his job in a March election — military experts say there are reasons to take the Ukrainian president’s warning seriously.
As we observed previously, while European officials have urged both sides to exercise restraint, the incident shows just how easily Russia and the West could be drawn into a military conflict over Ukraine.
Certainly Poroshenko’s words appear designed to telegraph just such an outcome, which would keep him in power as a war-time president, hasten more and massive western military support and aid, and quicken his country’s entry into NATO — the latter which is already treating Ukraine as a de facto strategic outpost.
- Soviet Dissidents, America's Academia, & The Weaponization Of Psychiatry
Authored by Mark Hendrickson via The Mises Institute,
The New York Times obituary opened with a simple recitation of facts:
“Zhores A. Medvedev, the Soviet biologist, writer and dissident who was declared insane, confined to a mental institution and stripped of his citizenship in the 1970s after attacking a Stalinist pseudoscience, died … in London.”
Zhores Medvedev, his twin brother Roy (still alive at 93), the physicist Andrei Sakharov, and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were leading dissidents. They courageously put their lives on the line to smuggle manuscripts out of the Soviet Union. They wanted the wider world to learn the truth about the “the workers’ paradise” that so many Western intellectuals (some deluded, others having gone over to the dark side) praised.
A generation of Americans has been born since the Soviet Union, the USSR that President Ronald Reagan boldly labeled “the evil empire,” ceased to exist.
They have little to no concept of how ferociously the USSR’s communist tyranny suppressed dissent. As the Times obit of Dr. Medvedev illustrates, one Soviet technique of oppression was to declare that political dissidents were insane. They were then incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals where they were tormented and tortured. Some were used as human guinea pigs for dangerous experiments. (Shades of Hitler’s buddy, Dr. Mengele.) Some even succumbed to the not-so-tender ministrations of those “hospitals.”
I recall one particular example of the disgusting abuse of human beings in Soviet psychiatric hospitals. Vladimir Bukovsky, who will turn 76 later this month, spent a dozen years being shuffled between Soviet jails, labor camps, and psychiatric hospitals. One of the “therapies” administered in a psychiatric hospital was putting a cord into Bukovsky’s mouth, then threading it from his throat up through his nasal passages, and then drawing it out through one of his nostrils. (Maybe the cord went in the opposite direction; I’ve never been interested in memorizing torture techniques.) Alas, this communist “treatment” did not “cure” Bukovsky of his rational (NOT irrational) abhorrence of tyranny and brutality.
The warped thought process that led to the perversion and weaponization of psychiatry in the Soviet Union can be traced back to communist icon and thought leader Karl Marx. Marx propounded a spurious doctrine known as “polylogism” to justify stifling dissent. According to Marx, different classes of people had different structures in their minds. Thus, Marx declared the bourgeoisie to be mentally defective because they were inherently unable to comprehend Marx’s (allegedly) revelatory and progressive theories. Since they were, in a sense, insane, there was no valid reason for communists to “waste time” arguing with them. On the contrary, communists were justified in not only ignoring or suppressing bourgeois ideas, but in liquidating the entire bourgeois class.
The practice of categorizing one’s enemies as “insane” became a ready tool of suppression in the Soviet state founded by Lenin and developed under Stalin. The USSR’s infamous secret police energetically wielded quack psychiatry as a club with which to destroy political dissidents. If you want more information about how the Soviets kidnapped and misused psychiatry, here is a link to a document that describes what American agents of the USSR were taught about psycho-political techniques in the late 1930s. (The provenance of the booklet is murky, and Soviet apologists have long tried to discredit it, but in light of numerous psychiatric abuses known to have been committed with the approval of the USSR’s rulers, the content of the book is highly plausible.)
The incarceration of Zhores Medvedev in psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s was a monstrous injustice. His “crime” was having exposed the bizarre pseudoscience of Lysenkoism that Stalin had embraced in the 1950s. Lysenko’s quack theories led to deadly crop failures and widespread starvation. Nevertheless, Stalin backed him by executing scientists who dared to disagree with Lysenko. Millions of innocents lost their lives because “truth” in the Soviet Union wasn’t scientific, but political.
Another vivid example of the destructive consequences of politicizing truth is related in Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of Soviet labor camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Certain Soviet officials decided to increase the steel shipped to a certain area. When the planners issued orders for trains to carry double the steel to the designated destination, conscientious engineers informed them that it couldn’t be done. They pointed out that the existing train tracks could not support such great weights. The politicians had the engineers executed as “saboteurs” for opposing “the plan.” What followed was predictable: The loads were doubled, the tracks gave out, and the designated area ended up getting less steel, not more.
This episode shows where the true insanity was in the USSR. The central planners believed that constructing their ideal country was simply a matter of will.
Alas, reality doesn’t conform to the whims or will of any human being, but the arrogance of central planners remains stubbornly impervious to that inescapable fact of life. Instead, as the havoc wrought by Soviet central economic planners repeatedly demonstrated, the communist central planners refused to abandon their insufferable self-delusion and mystical belief in the power of their own will to alter reality. This was the true insanity, compounded by the error of persecuting competent scientists like Zhores Medvedev.
Sadly, the practice of branding political opponents as “insane” is not confined to the now-defunct Soviet state. In 1981, when I was completing my master’s thesis on Solzhenitsyn, I telephoned an American college professor of history to ask whether he recalled if Solzhenitsyn had been granted honorary U.S. citizenship. (He hadn’t. President Ford didn’t want to offend the Soviet leadership.) The reply to my question was this: “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn belongs in an insane asylum.” The virus of Marx’s polylogism is, unfortunately, alive and well in American academia.
As for Zhores Medvedev, may he now rest in peace and receive his reward for his integrity and courage.
- FBI, CIA Told WaPo They Doubted Key Allegation In Steele Dossier
FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn’t believe a key claim contained in the “Steele Dossier,” the document the Obama FBI relied on to obtain a surveillance warrant on a member of the Trump campaign.
The Post‘s Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats, reports the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross.
“We’ve talked to sources at the FBI and the CIA and elsewhere — they don’t believe that ever happened,” said Miller during the October event which aired Saturday on C-SPAN.
We literally spent weeks and months trying to run down… there’s an assertion in there that Michael Cohen went to Prague to settle payments that were needed at the end of the campaign. We sent reporters to every hotel in Prague, to all over the place trying to – just to try to figure out if he was ever there, and came away empty. -Greg Miller
Ross notes that WaPo somehow failed to report this information, nor did Miller include this tidbit of narrative-killing information in his recent book, “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy.”
Miller also admits that the dossier’s broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down once you focus on individual claims.
Steele, using Kremlin sources, claimed in his dossier that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin officials for the purpose of discussing “deniable cash payments” made in secret so as to cover up “Moscow’s secret liaison with the TRUMP team.”
Cohen’s alleged Prague visit captured attention largely because the former Trump fixer has vehemently denied it, and also because it would seem to be one of the easier claims in Steele’s 35-page report to validate or invalidate.
Debate over the salacious document was reignited when McClatchy reported April 15 that special counsel Robert Mueller had evidence Cohen visited Prague. No other news outlets have verified the reporting, and Cohen denied it at the time.
Cohen last denied the dossier’s allegations in late June, a period of time when he was gearing up to cooperate with prosecutors against President Donald Trump. Cohen served as a cooperating witness for prosecutors in both New York and the special counsel’s office. –Daily Caller
Cohen’s attorney and longtime Clinton pal Lanny Davis vehemently denied on August 22, one day after Cohen pleaded guilty in his New York case – that Cohen had never been to Prague, telling Bloomberg “Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier, but he has never been to Prague in his life.”
- How School Districts Weaponize Child Protection Services Against Uncooperative Parents
Authored by Kerry McDonald via The Foundation for Economic Education,
Parents are increasingly required to obey, to conform to a school’s demands even if they believe such orders may not be appropriate for their child…
Schooling is adept at rooting out individuality and enforcing compliance. In his book, Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky writes:
“In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on—because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.”
This filtering process begins very early in a child’s schooling as conformity is rewarded and divergence is punished.
Public Schooling Breeds Obedience
Most of us played this game as schoolchildren. We know the rules. The kids who raise their hands, color in the lines, and obey succeed; the kids who challenge the rules struggle. The problem now is that the rules are extending beyond the classroom. Parents are increasingly required to obey, to conform to a school’s demands even if they believe such orders may not be appropriate for their child.
In my advocacy work with homeschooling families across the country, I frequently hear stories from parents who decided to homeschool their kids because schools were pressuring them to comply with various special education plans, push medications onto their children, or submit to other restrictive procedures they felt were not in their child’s best interest. Even more heartbreaking is the growing trend of school officials to unleash child protective services (CPS) on parents, homeschooling or not, who refuse to give in to a district’s demands.
Weaponizing Child Protective Services
An investigative report by The Hechinger Report and HuffPost released last month revealed that schools are increasingly using child protective services as a “weapon” against parents. It said:
Fed up with what they see as obstinate parents who don’t agree to special education services for their child, or disruptive kids who make learning difficult, schools sometimes use the threat of a child-protection investigation to strong-arm parents into complying with the school’s wishes or transferring their children to a new school. That approach is not only improper, but it can be devastating for families, even if the allegations are ultimately determined to be unfounded.
More troubling, these threats disproportionately target low-income and minority parents. According to the report:
Such families also have fewer resources to fight back. When a family in a wealthy Brooklyn neighborhood learned roughly two years ago that their child’s school had initiated an ACS [New York’s Administration for Children’s Services] investigation against them, they sued the city education department. Parents from lower-income, majority-black and Latino neighborhoods, few of whom can afford that option, say such investigations can be a regular, even expected, part of parenting.
Bullying Proactive Parents
For parents who are unhappy with their child’s school and decide to withdraw their child for homeschooling, threats of child welfare investigations can sometimes turn to actions. In Massachusetts, a mother is reportedly suing the Worcester Public Schools after school officials called the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) on her for alleged “educational neglect,” even though the mother contends that she dutifully filed her homeschooling paperwork for her eight-year-old son mid-year.
Brian Huskie, a public high school teacher and homeschooling father in New York, noted a similar case last year with one of his students. Dissatisfied with the school, the parents decided to remove their daughter from the district, filed the necessary homeschooling paperwork, and were soon visited by child protective services investigating “educational neglect.” Huskie detailed the incident on his blog, writing that the school made a “decision to weaponize CPS against a district family.”
Parents who push back against a district’s recommendations or withdraw their child from school for homeschooling are often trying to ensure their child’s well-being. Questioning various educational interventions and examining alternatives is part of a parent’s job. They should be praised for looking out for their child’s best interest, while schools should be sure that they use social services agencies to investigate serious claims of abuse and neglect—not just district snubs or paperwork quarrels.
If, as Chomsky suggests, many of us have grown acquiescent to power due to our successful schooling, it can be hard to challenge authority. It can be even harder when that authority is strengthened by government force and when we may not have the resources to fight it.
Supporting parents, broadening their education choices, and respecting their decisions are crucial steps in liberating families and curbing government coercion.
- Amazon Denies Warehouse Workers' Request For Air Conditioning As "Robots Can't Work In Cold Weather"
Thanks to the notoriously brutal working conditions at its fulfillment centers, Amazon has become a lighting rod of criticism from the American labor movement and the Democratic Socialists of America, who claim to champion the rights of workers (despite the fact that most of the organization’s members are college students and creative-class workers relying on handouts from their parents to pay their expensive Brooklyn rents). The e-commerce giant even won the dubious distinction of being specifically called out in a bill proposed by Socialist champion Bernie Sanders (his “Stop BEZOS” act).
As investigative reporters on multiple continents have burnished Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ reputation as a ruthless capitalist by exposing some of the company’s more extreme labor abuses, like effectively forcing employees to pee in bottles to avoid taking unpaid bathroom breaks and hiring ambulances to wait outside some of its warehouses to cart away workers suffering from heat stroke.
As the debate about what, exactly, Amazon owes its workers and the municipalities that host its facilities has taken on renewed relevance following the backlash to the generous tax breaks offered by NYC for Amazon to build a new headquarters in Long Island City (the city’s subway is crumbling, but Amazon is getting taxpayer-funded handouts to build a helipad!), more Amazon workers are rising up to protest their brutal working conditions.
This month, workers at the Amazon’s MSP1 fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota gathered outside the facility on a cold Friday evening to protest several of these ‘abuses’, including the company’s refusal to accommodate Muslim workers by not providing adequate space and time for prayer as well as its refusal to accommodate workers observing the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which this year coincided with the company’s Prime Day sale.
A Gizmodo story about the protest in Minnesota included an interesting detail about another demonstration at a facility in Staten Island. Workers at the Amazon facility in Staten Island who recently announced their intention to unionize complained about the company’s refusal to install air-conditioning in its sweltering facility.
The reason given by Amazon for refusing to provide the air conditioning? The robots in its facility can’t function optimally in cold weather.
MSP1 is a fairly new and heavily-roboticized factory, much like the facility on Staten Island, New York, where workers recently announced their intention to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). One worker at the Staten Island facility, in a protest outside New York’s City Hall last week, expressed concern over long shifts, non-functioning smoke detectors and sprinkler systems, and inhumane temperatures. “We have asked the company to provide air conditioning,” she explained to the crowd, “but they told us that the robots inside can’t work in the cold weather.”
One worker who was leaving work during the demonstration in Minnesota, which involved some 250 workers and labor activists, told Gizmodo that he felt “utterly expendable” and offered a comment that sounded like a line of dialogue ripped straight from Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”
One worker getting off his shift at MSP1 (we were unable to get his name) told Gizmodo that the rate of the work continues to climb while the workers remain utterly expendable, toiling in poor conditions. “If you work with me,” he said, “you will be sick within a week.” Another MSP1 worker, Khadra Kassim, told the crowd through a translator that due to a workplace injury she nearly miscarried her unborn daughter.
Amazon pulled out all the stops in trying to suppress the action and play down coverage in the media – including requesting the presence of police officers, who mostly stood around in confusion unable to discern which workers were demonstrating, and which were just leaving work (sound familiar?).
Just before 5pm, the crowd of protesters moved from the sidewalk in front of MSP1 – where they had set up a massive prayer rug as well as an amplification system from the bed of a pickup truck – and marched on the building itself.
Police officers, who had not been present earlier in the day, lay in wait in the parking lot and were joined by additional units including Minnesota State Patrol officers and the Scott County sheriff, approximately 16 vehicles in total. The Shakopee Police Department confirmed in a phone call with Gizmodo, “no arrests, no property damage, no injuries.” In the moment, officers seemed confused as to which individuals were protesters and which were simply leaving work.
The crowd, meanwhile, dispersed peacefully, chanting, “Amazon – we’ll be back.”
Unfortunately for the striking workers, Amazon has every incentive to dig in its heels. Amazon’s economic heft is enough to cow municipal and state governments into cooperation, and as management seeks to assuage investors’ festering fears about ‘peak earnings’, we imagine the company’s much-maligned productivity targets will become increasingly stringent.
And while Amazon’s workers gripe about the company treating them like they’re expendable, the fact is that as Amazon robotics’ continues to innovate and upgrade, pretty soon, the company’s dependence on its human workers will decline, leading to lower head counts and – by extension – fewer jobs.
- Sundar Pichai And The Ethics Of Algorithms
Authored by Max Albert via HackerNoon.com,
The latest congressional technology hearing was as cringeworthy as you would expect.
There were politicians who thought Google was the same company as Apple.
There were politicians that wondered why Google was censoring hate-speech.
There were politicians that thought Sundar Pichai’s salary and some aggressive alpha-male shouting would enable him to reveal the answer to the age old mystery of “is Google tracking our every step?”
Confused? So am I.
Through all the hardships, Pichai remained calm and collected. He provided insight to a group of politicians who clearly lacked expertise. This is difficult to do and I give him credit. For 99% of the hearing, Sundar Pichai was on fire.
But there’s one crucial question that Pichai botched. It was about the ethics of algorithms.
Listen to this question by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA),
Right now, if you google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that,” she said. “How would that happen?”
This is Pichai’s response,
Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of [websites’] pages in our index. And we take the keyword and match it against their pages and rank them based on over 200 signals — things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query. And then we evaluate them with external raters, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines. And that’s how we make sure the process is working.
Representative Zoe Lofgren later concludes that she looks forward to working with Pichai on serious issues and,
It’s pretty obvious that bias against conservative voices is not one of them [google’s priorities].
Pichai’s response was not wrong or nefarious. Pichai did an excellent job at explaining the technical-side of how Google handles queries in Layman’s terms.
However this exchange as a whole may be misleading to the public eye. It lends itself to a common, dangerous misconception that sophisticated algorithms are always unbiased.
With this exchange, Rep. Lofgren and Pichai establish a defensive narrative that Google takes hundreds, thousands, even billions of data points into consideration before listing a website at the top. Furthermore, Google’s algorithm takes into account an unfathomable number of ‘objective guidelines’ and ‘external raters’ to evaluate. Lastly but most importantly, algorithms like this are too sophisticated to experience bias.
Of course Pachai knows this narrative is not true. But does Rep. Lofgren know? Do the other congressmen and congresswomen know? Does the public know?
Well the fact remains that algorithms were built by people. People have agendas. When people get to define what is a success and what is a failure, there will always be at least some inherent bias.
Just because a solution was discovered by an algorithm doesn’t necessarily make the solution unbiased. Sometimes, algorithms can make bias decisions and the amount of ‘data’ and ‘guidelines’ the algorithm has access to does not make the algorithm more credible.
For instance, there are criminal justice algorithms that are prone to label African Americans as ‘high risk’ (and thus ineligible for parole) more often than Caucasians. This algorithm has access to a wide array of ‘data’ and ‘objective guidelines’ yet it still makes biased decisions. Why? Because the court system is bias. All of the data the algorithm has access to is bias.
Additionally, there is an infamously bias flight algorithm that chose to remove Dr. Dao from a United Airlines flight and resulted in this traumatic video:
This is another extremely sophisticated algorithm that failed to provide biased-free judgement. So to suggest that Google’s search algorithm is unbiased because it’s a sophisticated algorithm is false. Algorithms can be incredibly prejudice if not careful.
The fact of the matter is, Google’s search algorithm is very close to being unbiased because of meticulous evaluation and consistent reevaluation by the team.
To my knowledge, the only way to validate an algorithm’s credibility is to consistently reevaluate the results by a third party. But even then, the term ‘bias’ is subjective. So this evaluation process is more like a short-answer question than a true or false question.
Pichai’s answer to the question of “how does searching ‘idiot’ reveal a picture of Donald Trump” was technically true but culturally disappointing.
Instead, consider what would’ve happened if Pachai answered Rep. Lofgren’s question with, “we have policies in place so that humans can not directly manipulate search results to make Donald Trump appear on the search of idiot. We’ve proven through independent parties that Google’s search does not show political bias and that this particular query-result could happen to a democratic president under the same conditions. Furthermore we are always reevaluating how the search engine could improve.”
This answer may not instill the same confidence of Pichai’s original answer, but it’s the most honest and complete answer in the context of bias.
Moving into an era where algorithms have more decision-making power, the general public is going to need to learn about what makes an algorithm credible and what makes an algorithm biased.
- The Bond Market Has Frozen: For The First Month Since 2008, Not A Single Junk Bond Prices
Late last week, we reported that in the aftermath of a dramatic drop in loan prices, a record outflow from loan funds, and a general collapse in investor sentiment that was euphoric as recently as the start of October, the wheels had come off the loan market which was on the verge of freezing after we got the first hung bridge loan in years, after Wells Fargo and Barclays took the rare step of keeping a $415 million leveraged loan on their books after failing to sell it to investors.
The two banks now “plan” to wait until January – i.e., hope that yield chasing desperation returns – to offload the loan they made to help finance Blackstone’s buyout of Ulterra Drilling Technologies, a company that makes bits for oil and gas drilling.
The reason the banks were stuck with hundreds of millions in unwanted paper is because they had agreed to finance the bridge loan whether or not there was enough demand from investors, as the acquisition needed to close by the end of the year. The delayed transaction means the banks will have to bear the risk of the price of the loans falling further, as well as costs associated with holding loans on their books.
The pulled Ulterra deal wasn’t alone.
As we reported previously, in Europe the market appears to have already locked up, as three loans were scrapped over the last two weeks. To wit, movie theater chain Vue International withdrew a 833 million pound-equivalent ($1.07 billion) loan sale. While the deal was meant to mostly refinance existing debt, around 100 million pounds was underwritten to finance the company’s acquisition of German group CineStar.
More deals were pulled the prior week when diversified manufacturer Jason Inc. became at least the fourth issuer to scrap a U.S. leveraged loan. Additionally, Perimeter Solutions also pulled its repricing attempt, Ta Chen International scrapped a $250MM term loan set to finance the company’s purchase of a rolling mill, and Algoma Steel withdrew its $300m exit financing. Global University System in November also dropped its dollar repricing.
Today, the FT picks up on the fact that the junk bond market – whether in loans or bonds – has frozen up, and reported that US credit markets have “ground to a halt” with fund managers refusing to fund buyouts and investors shunning high-yield bond sales as rising interest rates and market volatility weigh on sentiment (ironically it is the rising rates that assure lower rates as financial conditions tighten and the Fed is forced to resume easing in the coming year, that has been a major hurdle to floating-rate loan demand as the same higher rates that pushed demand for paper to all time highs are set to reverse).
Meanwhile, things are even worse in the bond market, where not a single company has borrowed money through the $1.2tn US high-yield corporate bond market this month according to the FT. If that freeze continues until the end of the month, it would be the first month since November 2008 that not a single high-yield bond priced in the market, according to data providers Informa and Dealogic.
Separately, as we already reported, the FT notes that in the loan market at least two deals – including the Barclays/Wells bridge loan – were postponed and could be the first of several transactions pulled from the market this year, bankers and investors said, as mutual funds and managers of collateralised loan obligations — the largest buyer by far in the leveraged loan sector — wait out the uncertainty.
“This is clearly more than year-end jitters,” said Guy LeBas, a strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott. “What we’re seeing now is pretty typical for end-of-credit-cycle behaviour.”
A prolonged period of low interest rates since the financial crisis a decade ago has seen companies binge on cheap debt. However, as financial conditions have tightened, the high level of corporate leverage has raised widespread concern among regulators, analysts and investors.
In the loan market, it’s not a total disaster just yet, because even as prices have slumped over the past two months, banks that committed to finance highly leveraged buyouts – including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs – have offered loans at substantial discounts to entice investors. As the chart below shows, the average new issue yield by month has exploded to the highest in years, with CCC-rated issuers forced to pay the most in 7 years to round up investor demand.
Still, as the following table from Bank of America shows, quite a few deals have priced, if only in the loan market:
Even so, other banks including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Wells Fargo, have had to pull deals altogether as they just couldn’t find enough buyers no matter how generous the concessions.
In addition to the Ulterra deal, technology services provider ConvergeOne postponed a $1.3bn leveraged loan offering that backed its takeover by private equity group CVC last week. As the FT notes, Deutsche Bank and UBS had marketed the deal to investors in a package that included senior and subordinated loans, with the junior debt expected to yield as much as 12 per cent in November when prices were first floated. While the banks attracted some bids for the debt, orders failed to surpass the overall size of the deal, which was postponed to the new year, according to people with knowledge of the transaction.
Why delaying deals into 2019? One word: hope.
One person familiar with the deal said the banks would market the loans again in January, when they hope market conditions will improve, and that other leveraged loans being marketed could be postponed to 2019.
The trouble lenders have faced in the leveraged loan market has mirrored the exasperation felt by investors in other asset classes. Higher-quality investment-grade bonds have also sold off, with a number of planned deals pulled from the market in recent weeks.
That said, for now the junk bond freeze and loan indigestion has remained confined to lower-rated issuers. However, that may change too, and should the “Ice-9” spread to the high-grade sector, where the bulk of issuance is to fund buybacks and M&A, that’s when the real pain begins.
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