- Is The Gaza Ceasefire The End For Netanyahu?
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
H. L. MenckenThe resignation of Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman over the terms of the ceasefire with Palestinians in Gaza has thrown Israeli politics into real turmoil.
Depending on whose analysis of this situation you read you may be tempted to see this as a good thing or a bad thing.
Bernard at Moon of Alabama sees a weakened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being forced to sue of peace after the upgraded response from Gaza. From MoA:
The short conflict demonstrated that:
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Israel is deterred. It does not want to launch another war on Gaza.
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The siege of Gaza, by Israel, Egypt and by the Palestinian authority under Mahmoud Abbas, failed. The reputational cost of the siege became too high after Israel killed some 160 Palestinians during weekly protests along the demarcation fence. It had to allow diesel fuel and money from Qatar to reach Gaza.
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The siege failed to prevent that Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other groups acquired a larger number of missiles and other new capabilities.
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The Palestinians in Gaza are united. The resistance against the occupation is alive and well.
This leaves Netanyahu scrambling to fend off snap elections and the rise of the even more hard-line Naftali Bennett who has threatened Bibi’s coalition outright unless he is made Defense Minister, replacing Lieberman.
MoA sees Netanyahu in a very precarious position, which he is, and will be forced to placate Bennett or risk a snap election that could see his government fall.
And it is on this point that Mintpressnews’s Whitney Webb takes another view, namely, that this is not the political victory for Gaza the Palestinians think it is. Since Bennett will step up the brutality to include all Gazans, including children.
With Lieberman’s party already withdrawing from Israel’s far-right coalition, Netanyahu will likely capitulate to Bennett’s demands in order to stabilize the current government and avoid dissolving the Knesset and subsequent snap elections. Thus, the current instability facing the Likud-led coalition now seems fated to result in a rightward surge, whether it’s through snap elections or through Netanyahu-led efforts to placate other right-wing parties and prevent them from defecting.
Other powerful politicians within Jewish Home, such as Uri Ariel, have also pushed for Bennett to be appointed. Ariel told Israeli media outlet Arutz Sheva:
Prime Minister Netanyahu should appoint Minister Bennett as defense minister and this government can continue to function. I think there is an advantage in stability, of course assuming that Bennett will bring security policy to a much better place.
Naturally, there is a desire of more than one person to be defense minister, but the most appropriate one is Minister Bennett, who was promised the portfolio by the prime minister in the past, and the promise was not honored.”
Over the past year, Bennett has repeatedly accused Lieberman of showing “restraint and weakness” as defense minister, especially in relation to his approach to Gaza’s Great Return March. Accusing Lieberman of “weakness” is particularly shocking given that the Israeli military under Lieberman repeatedly used lethal force to quell protests in Gaza, killing over 200 unarmed Palestinians – including children, medics and journalists – and wounding over 22,000.
As bad as Bibi and Lieberman are/were Bennett makes them look like Quakers.
So, the situation in Israel is similar to that in Russia for U.S. anti-Russian types. If you think Vladimir Putin is a dictator and a dangerous right-wing fanatic (which he isn’t) then you don’t understand what stands behind him.
In other words, be careful what you wish for — regime change — because you just might get it … good and hard, to quote Mencken.
In effect, weakening figures like them empowers the hyper-nationalists who are 1) eager to prove the other guy was a wimp and 2) untested in actual confrontation. So, they are unpredictable and likely to go off half-cocked.
For all of his faults, Netanyahu is at least battle-tested and can be reasoned with to some extent.
I think, however, Webb overstates the danger for the Palestinians here. Israel is in the precarious position. Too much of the world has turned against them and their handling of this situation.
And that reputational loss is putting Netanyahu in the bind he’s currently in. He knows what will happen if Bennett is in charge of Israel’s defense forces. It will be the best recruitment drive for anti-Israeli sentiment the world over, but most especially here in the U.S.
And that is something he can’t have.
Broadly speaking, the height of Israel’s influence over U.S. politics has already occurred with the peak of the Baby Boomers’ political power. As the generational shift happens more Gen-X’ers and Millennials who have had their fill of subordinating U.S. foreign policy to the whims of Israel will gain influence over U.S. policy.
This isn’t a judgment, it’s a sober observation.
So if Bennett takes over the IDF and takes things to eleven versus the Palestinians in Gaza, then it will cost Donald Trump politically at home and the best ally Israel has had in two decades in the White House will be lost.
They, along with the Saudis, are now having to truly deal with international criticism of their behavior and can no longer rely on a compliant (and paid for) western media to spin the narrative in their favor.
And Trump & Kushner’s Project Netanyahu, as Alistair Crooke recently described it, has been nothing but a disaster for all involved, especially the people it was supposed to help — The Saudis and the Israelis.
And all of Trump’s enemies, even the ones who are also pro-Israel, will turn up the heat on him over our relationship with these two countries if
They both overplayed their hands thinking that Trump would back whatever play they made.
It has played right into the hands of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah by continuing to think the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could be successful. What Obama thought would be a quagmire for the Russians turned out to be one for the U.S./Israel/Saudi coalition.
This is why Trump and his advisors have pushed all-in on regime change in Iran. Netanyahu is right that Iran can and will continue to supply the arms needed to grind out a win versus Israel in the long run.
If Russia’s S-300s and air defense systems are as good as advertised then Bennett will end the myth of Israeli air superiority after Israel loses a few F-16i’s when he inevitably needs to show strength.
Unfortunately for Israel, that myth is one of the few things keeping things relatively quiet.
Iran will find it’s way through the sanctions. Netanyahu didn’t have many other options and the neocons in D.C. really believe that this time it’ll be different. But it won’t be.
In fact, if you don’t think Iran and Russia haven’t game-planned this very scenario then you are as clueless as those that think getting rid of Putin would make Russia more pliable.
Oh right, those are the same people.
The silver lining to all of this is now that Bibi is on thinner ice in the Knesset the best path forward for Israel and Trump is to come to the bargaining table as honest brokers to end the conflict in Syria, something to this point hasn’t occurred.
That will get Iran to stand down, because otherwise Israel’s position in the region will continue to erode.
Putin was forced by his hard-liners to finally protect both Russian and Syrian interests directly from Israeli harassment. And that set us on the path we’re on today. The best deal Trump and Netanyahu are going to get from Putin and Assad is on the table today, not next year or 2020.
Provided, of course, that either one or the both of them survive.
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- Sentiment Scale Reveals Which Words Pack The Most Punch
For world leaders, journalists, CEOs, or anyone who has ever had to explain a dicey report card, word selection can have an enormous impact on how a message is perceived.
Does it make any difference whether a presentation went quite good versus pretty good, or if an earnings report is described as awful versus poor? As Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley explains, according to a new survey from YouGov, word sentiment isn’t as cut-and-dry as one would expect.
THE UNITED STATES OF SENTIMENT
Certain words more precisely communicate positive and negative feelings.
Interestingly, very bad edges out words like abysmal and dreadful as the most conclusively negative phrase for those survey respondents based in the United States.
Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
On the positive end of the spectrum, perfect was most conclusively positive term.
EFFECTIVE WORDS: U.K. EDITION
The version of the survey conducted in the United Kingdom reveals interesting differences in how words are perceived.
In the U.K. visualization, words have a more defined “hump”, meaning that people tended to agreed on where each word fell on the 10-point scale. As well, there appears to be more mutually agreed upon nuance. The U.S. results showed less agreement on words that weren’t on the extreme ends of the sentiment spectrum.
In both regions, the word average was nearly dead-center on the graph and had the highest percentage of people agreeing on its score.
QUANTIFYING LANGUAGE
It’s human nature to attempt to tame complexity and bring order to chaos. Language, with its fluidity and openness to interpretation, has always presented a tempting challenge.
To this end, researchers have developed lists that ascribe a sentiment score to specific words. Using data mining techniques, it’s possible to gauge the tone of a piece of writing.
One compelling example of this is a project by data analyst, Susan Li, who ran a sentiment analysis on Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letters, and found that the majority of the letters had a positive tone.
The one outlier? 2001, which was a challenging year for a number of reasons.
As these techniques continue to evolve, we are likely to better understand why one person’s abysmal is another person’s very bad.
- San Francisco's War On Airbnb Is A War On The Free Market
Authored by Fergus Hodgson, Antigua Report via The Epoch Times,
The city’s absurd fines, crackdowns show hostility for thrift …
The most ingenious arbiter of resource allocation is under attack around the globe: market pricing. In the cross hairs stands the peer-to-peer economy, which circumvents price controls, favoritism, and central planning.
The intermediary platforms – Airbnb, Uber, Kickstarter, Turo, etc. – have enabled a flowering of mutually beneficial exchange. The beauty of these decentralized networks is surpassed only by the economic value they bring to users.
The success of these intermediaries lies in their capacity to send out price signals and allow the invisible hand of the free market to work. Where there is pent-up supply or demand, these applications make that known. The harmonious response is for new participants to enter the market, either as providers or consumers, and for untapped resources to be utilized.
The enemies of peer-to-peer platforms, therefore, are the enemies of the free market and innovation. These Luddites either do not understand the economic benefits or profit artificially from the status quo. As Mariá Marty, the executive director of the Foundation for Intellectual Responsibility once quipped, “You can tell how corrupt a city is by how vehemently it cracks down on the sharing economy.”
The Crime of Serving Customers
Municipal and state officials correctly sense that these platforms challenge and limit their power. For those motivated by power, therefore, even platforms that bear fruit must be stamped out.
In the case of Airbnb—which offers flexible accommodation options to 150 million users—this contrast of peaceful exchange versus top-down dictates has led to bizarre and rising crackdowns. In May, New York fined a couple $1.2 million and Asheville, North Carolina, fined a man $850,000 for serving Airbnb guests.
San Francisco is ground zero for this standoff, and the municipal government this month imposed a $2.3 million fine on two Airbnb hosts.
“The city spent two years investigating the couple,” reports United Press International. While San Francisco is one of the most ardent sanctuary citiesin the nation, the City Attorney Dennis Herrera had the gall to tout the outcome and costly pursuit as a victory for the rule of law and an end to “unfair competition in the marketplace.”
The fact that this couple, Darren and Valerie Lee, were willing to go to great lengths to defy city mandates is a testament to the enormous demand for their accommodation. What the couple did was only a crime against protectionist regulations that patently are not in the interest of consumers.
San Francisco Needs More Airbnb
The irony lost on the officials leading the crackdown is that they are their own worst enemy, as they fret over rising rental rates and a shortage of available accommodation.
Their observations are spot on: San Francisco is one of the nation’s most expensive cities for accommodation, along with Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San José. This year’s International Housing Affordability Survey, published by Demographia and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Canada, showed San Francisco to be “severely unaffordable” and among the worst in the English-speaking world.
The metric the report authors use is the median multiple: How many times the median household income goes into the median house price. That is 9.1 times for San Francisco. Even if a normal San Francisco household were to devote an impossible 100 percent of pre-tax earnings to buying a home with no interest charges, they would need nearly a decade.
Not surprisingly, given the lack of affordable options, homelessness is a glaring problem in the city. Wendell Cox, a senior fellow at Canada’s Frontier Centre for Public Policy, points the finger at restrictive zoning and a constrained supply. Even the progressive Atlantic magazine has recognizedthe relationship between this beleaguered population, rising housing costs, and “zoning laws [that] have limited the construction of new housing units.”
Rather than deal with the pesky causes, though, San Francisco passed a new tax this month (Proposition C) “to fund housing and homelessness services.” In contrast, Airbnb has voluntarily committed $5 million of its own money to address homelessness in the city.
Airbnb’s Price Signal
When demand exceeds supply, the price will rise to clear the market. High prices for rentals and homes send a crucial message: San Francisco needs more houses and apartments!
Insofar as any space not being utilized, Airbnb has responsive, market-driven prices that incentivize offering what is available. In other words, every last inch of available space can more easily be offered and put to use—a win for owners, visitors, and renters who cannot commit to or afford long-term contracts. For those struggling and willing to accept less pristine options, Airbnb can be 40 percent cheaper than conventional hotels.
If you read San Francisco’s Airbnb law, however, you could be forgiven for believing that prices and Airbnb are the enemy. For example, city rent controls must be obeyed or providers will be subject to fines of $1,000 per day. Furthermore, no one can rent on Airbnb for more than 90 days per year if he does not live on-site, while out-of-towners are banned entirely. Naturally, owners need to move to San Francisco to alleviate the housing shortage.
Airbnb is simply allowing people to do the best they can to meet market needs within a painfully constrained housing market. It is an important tool to ease the strain on availability and make San Francisco more accessible, and the profits generated via the platform make the case for both loosened housing regulations and more construction.
Those who campaign for affordable housing with the same number and style of units want to have their cake and eat it too. Though blocked by municipal governments, Airbnb has shown the demand for more options, and the platform simply reflects the wishes of users.
- For The First Time Ever, Psychologists Warn Facebook Can Cause Depression
A new report conducted by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania have determined that an excessive amount of time on “social media” sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are making millennials depressed.
“It was striking,” said Melissa Hunt, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study. “What we found over the course of three weeks was that rates of depression and loneliness went down significantly for people who limited their (social media) use.”
The study, “No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression,” is being published in December’s Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
Researchers recruited 143 students for two different trials, one in the spring semester and one in the fall semester. Each subject was required to have a Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat account, plus an Apple iPhone. They collected data on the students for about a week to get a baseline reading of their social media usage, and also had them submit questionnaires that assessed their mental health according to seven different factors: social support, fear of missing out, loneliness, autonomy, and self-acceptance, anxiety, depression, and self-esteem.
“Here’s the bottom line,” Hunt explained to Science Daily. “Using less social media than you normally would leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness. These effects are particularly pronounced for folks who were more depressed when they came into the study.”
The link between increasing social media usage and mental health issues have already been established in past studies. But, depression and loneliness have not, until now.
Hunt said lonely and depressed people use platforms like Facebook because they are seeking social connections. Social media as a whole is making millennials more lonely, and increasingly depressed.
The study did not cover why social media makes people depressed. Hunt does provide an example:
The first is “downward social comparison.” A person reviews their feed and finds countless posts of their friends enjoying wonderful experiences. The result: “You’re more likely to think your life sucks in comparison,” said Hunt.
Social media sites are a vital tool for many millennials in the modern economy. This means they cannot cut it out altogether, Hunt Said.
That is why the study focused on cutting back usage. While ten minutes might not seem like much, the study showed it certainly helped with depression.
- Why Orwell Is Superior To Huxley
Authored by Colin Liddell via The Unz Review,
One of the frequent comparisons that comes up in the Dissident Right is who was more correct or prescient, Orwell or Huxley.
In fact, as the only truly oppressed intellectual group, the Dissident Right are the only ones in a position to offer a valid opinion on this, as no other group of intellectuals suffers deplatforming, doxxing, and dismissal from jobs as much as we do. In the present day, it is only the Dissident Right that exists in the ‘tyrannical space’ explored in those two dystopian classics.
But, despite this, this debate exists not only on the Dissident Right but further afield. Believe it or not, even Left-wingers and Liberals debate this question, as if they too are under the heel of the oppressor’s jackboot. In fact, they feel so oppressed that some of them are even driven to discuss it in the pages of the New York Times at the despotically high rate of pay which that no doubt involves.
In both the Left and the Dissident Right, the consensus is that Huxley is far superior to Orwell, although, according to the New York Times article just alluded to, Orwell has caught up a lot since the election of Donald Trump. Have a look at this laughable, “I’m literally shaking” prose from New York Times writer Charles McGrath:
And yet [Huxley’s] novel much more accurately evokes the country we live in now, especially in its depiction of a culture preoccupied with sex and mindless pop entertainment, than does Orwell’s more ominous book, which seems to be imagining someplace like North Korea. Or it did until Donald Trump was inaugurated.
All of a sudden, as many commentators have pointed out, there were almost daily echoes of Orwell in the news…The most obvious connection to Orwell was the new president’s repeated insistence that even his most pointless and transparent lies were in fact true, and then his adviser Kellyanne Conway’s explanation that these statements were not really falsehoods but, rather, “alternative facts.” As any reader of “1984” knows, this is exactly Big Brother’s standard of truth: The facts are whatever the leader says they are.
…those endless wars in “1984,” during which the enemy keeps changing — now Eurasia, now Eastasia — no longer seem as far-fetched as they once did, and neither do the book’s organized hate rallies, in which the citizenry works itself into a frenzy against nameless foreigners.
The counter to this is that Trump is the only non-establishment candidate to get elected President since Andrew Jackson and therefore almost the exact opposite of the idea of top-down tyranny.
But to return to the notion that Huxley is superior to Orwell, both on the Left and the Dissident Right, this is based on a common view that Huxley presents a much more subtle, nuanced, and sophisticated view of soft tyranny more in keeping with the appearance of our own age. Here’s McGrath summarizing this viewpoint, which could just as easily have come out of the mouth of an Alt-Righter, Alt-Liter, or Affirmative Righter:
Orwell didn’t really have much feel for the future, which to his mind was just another version of the present. His imagined London is merely a drabber, more joyless version of the city, still recovering from the Blitz, where he was living in the mid-1940s, just before beginning the novel. The main technological advancement there is the two-way telescreen, essentially an electronic peephole.
…Huxley, on the other hand, writing almost two decades earlier than Orwell (his former Eton pupil, as it happened), foresaw a world that included space travel; private helicopters; genetically engineered test tube babies; enhanced birth control; an immensely popular drug that appears to combine the best features of Valium and Ecstasy; hormone-laced chewing gum that seems to work the way Viagra does; a full sensory entertainment system that outdoes IMAX; and maybe even breast implants. (The book is a little unclear on this point, but in “Brave New World” the highest compliment you can pay a woman is to call her “pneumatic.”)
…Huxley was not entirely serious about this. He began “Brave New World” as a parody of H.G. Wells, whose writing he detested, and it remained a book that means to be as playful as it is prophetic. And yet his novel much more accurately evokes the country we live in now, especially in its depiction of a culture preoccupied with sex and mindless pop entertainment, than does Orwell’s more ominous book, which seems to be imagining someplace like North Korea.
It is easy to see why some might see Huxley as more relevant to the reality around us than Orwell, because basically “Big Brother,” in the guise of the Soviet Union, lost the Cold War, or so it seems.
But while initially convincing, the case for Huxley’s superiority can be dismantled.
Most importantly, Huxley’s main insight, namely that control can be maintained more effectively through “entertainment, distraction, and superficial pleasure rather than through overt modes of policing and strict control over food supplies” is not actually absent in 1984.
In fact, exactly these kind of methods are used to control the Proles, on whom pornography is pushed and prostitution allowed. In fact porn is such an important means of social control that the IngSoc authorities even have a pornography section called “PornSec,” which mass produces porn for the Proles. One of the LOL moments in Michael Radford’s film version is when Mr. Charrington, the agent of the thought police who poses as a kindly pawnbroker to rent a room to Winston and Julia for their sexual trysts, informs them on their arrest that their surveillance film will be ‘repurposed’ as porn.
In fact, Orwell’s view of sex as a means of control is much more dialectical and sophisticated than Huxley’s, as the latter was, as mentioned above, essentially writing a parody of the naive “free love” notions of H.G.Wells.
While sex is used as a means to weaken the Proles, ‘anti-Sex’ is used to strengthen the hive-mind of Party members. Indeed, we see today how the most hysterical elements of the Left — and to a certain degree the Dissident Right — are the most undersexed.
Also addictive substances are not absent from Orwell’s dystopian vision. While Brave New World only has soma, 1984 has Victory Gin, Victory Wine, Victory Beer, Victory Coffee, and Victory Tobacco — all highly addictive substances that affect people’s moods and reconcile them to unpleasant realities. Winston himself is something of a cigarette junkie and gin fiend, as we see in this quote from the final chapter:
The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens.
Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the cafe…
In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at a gulp.
But while 1984 includes almost everything that Brave New World contains in terms of controlling people through sex, drugs, and distractions, it also includes much, much more, especially regarding how censorship and language are used to control people and how tyranny is internalised. The chapter from which the above quote comes, shows how Winston, a formerly autonomous agent, has come to accept the power of the system so much that he no longer needs policing.
But most brilliant of all is Orwell’s prescient description of how language is changed through banning certain words and the expression of certain ideas or observations deemed “thought crime,” to say nothing of the constant rewriting of history. The activities of Big Tech and their deplatforming of all who use words, phrases, and ideas not in the latest edition of their “Newspeak” dictionary, have radically changed the way that people communicate and what they talk about in a comparatively short period of time.
Orwell’s insights into how language can be manipulated into a tool of control shows his much deeper understanding of human psychology than that evident in Huxley’s novel. The same can be said about Orwell’s treatment of emotions, which is another aspect of his novel that rings particularly true today.
In 1984 hate figures, like Emmanuel Goldstein, and fake enemies, like Eastasia and Eurasia, are used to unite, mobilise, and control certain groups. Orwell was well aware of the group-psychological dynamics of the tribe projected to the largest scale of a totalitarian empire. The concept of “three minutes hate” has so much resonance with our own age, where triggered Twitter-borne hordes of SJWs and others slosh around the news cycle like emotional zombies, railing against Trump or George Soros.
In Huxley’s book, there are different classes but this is not a source of conflict. Indeed they are so clearly defined – in fact biologically so – that there is no conflict between them, as each class carries out its predetermined role like harmonious orbit of Aristotlean spheres.
In short, Brave New World sees man as he likes to see himself — a rational actor, controlling his world and taking his pleasures. It is essentially the vision of a well-heeled member of the British upper classes.
Orwell’s book, by contrast, sees man as the tribal primitive, forced to live on a scale of social organisation far beyond his natural capacity, and thereby distorted into a mad and cruel creature. It is essentially the vision of a not-so-well-heeled member of the British middle classes in daily contact with the working class. But is all the richer and more profound for it.
- Russian Cruise Missile Destroyers Conduct Anti-Submarine Drills Near Syrian Coast
Since September when what was gearing up to be a major Syrian-Russian assault on Idlib was called off through a Russian-Turkish ceasefire agreement, possibly in avoidance of the stated threat that American forces would intervene in defense of the al-Qaeda insurgent held province, the war has largely taken a back-burner in the media and public consciousness.
But as sporadic fighting between jihadists and Syrian government forces is reignited this week along the outskirts of the contested territory, the war could once again be thrust back into the media spotlight as ground zero for a great power confrontation between Moscow and Washington.
Russia this week condemned “sporadic clashes”, as well as “provocations” by the jihadist group HTS (the main al-Qaeda presence) in northwestern Syria. At the same time Damascus has grown increasingly frustrated with implementation of the Idlib deal while criticizing Turkey for its failures. At a moment when we could be headed toward another major international showdown over Idlib, Russia is once again flexing its muscles by conducting military exercises off Syria’s coast in the Mediterranean.
Admiral Makarov during a prior exercises, armed with Kalibr-NK cruise missiles capable of hitting targets 2,600km away. “Drills were held to practice searching for and tracking a submarine, searching for, rescuing and providing medical assistance to persons in distress at sea,” a Russian naval press office statement reads.
Russian military and naval officials announced Friday that its warships held extensive anti-submarine warfare drills in the Mediterranean. Specifically the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s frigates Admiral Makarov and Admiral Essen conducted the exercise in tandem with deck-based helicopters near Syrian coastal waters.
According to TASS the Russian Navy deployed sub-killers armed with cruise missiles as part of the drill:
The frigates are armed with eight launchers of Kalibr-NK cruise missiles that are capable of striking surface, coastal and underwater targets at a distance of up to 2,600 km.
The warships of this Project are also armed with Shtil-1, Palash and AK-630M air defense missile and artillery systems, A-190 100mm universal artillery guns, torpedo tubes and RBU-6000 rocket launchers. The frigates also have a take-off and landing strip and a hangar for an anti-submarine warfare helicopter (Ka-27 or Ka-31).
The Russian Navy has over the past years of war in Syria maintained its permanent Mediterranean task force in high numbers of ships and deployable assets. The Kremlin announced earlier this month it would bolster its Mediterranean fleet by sending more long-range cruise missile capable ships.
Russia’s military began building up its forces last summer ahead of a planned massive assault on Idlib, and again after Israel attacked Syrian government facilities in mid-September, resulting in the downing of a Russian spy plane with 15 crew members on board. Russia’s response was to quickly transfer S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems to the Syrian government.
- Illinois School District Drops Controversial Eavesdropping Case Against Former Student
Authored by Austin Berg via IllinoisPolicy.org,
Prosecution lawyers for an Illinois school district have decided not to move forward with their case against Paul Boron, who was charged with felony eavesdropping at age 13 for recording audio of a meeting with his middle school principal.
Paul Boron no longer has a potential felony hanging over his head. But Illinois’ eavesdropping law means others like him might not be so lucky.
The young Illinoisan spent his summer at the center of an international media stormafter his school district pressed felony charges, alleging a then-13-year-old Boron violated the state’s eavesdropping law by recording audio of a meeting with his principal.
On Nov. 15, however, the lawyers prosecuting the Manteno Community Unit School District No. 5 complaint dismissed the indictment at a hearing at the Kankakee County Courthouse.
The Illinois Policy Institute funded Boron’s legal defense with assistance from online donations. Institute Senior Fellow David Camic coordinated the defense.
“I’m just relieved and elated to know my son won’t be mislabeled as a felon,” Boron’s mother Leah McNally said. “We are beyond grateful for all the help and support.”
Boron’s case is yet another chapter of controversy surrounding Illinois’ eavesdropping law, which is among the nation’s most severe.
The incident
As an eighth grader at Manteno Middle School, Paul Boron was called to the principal’s office Feb. 16, 2018, after failing to attend a number of detentions. During the meeting with Principal David Conrad and Assistant Principal Nathan Short, he announced he was recording audio on his cellphone.
Boron said he argued with Conrad and Short for approximately 10 minutes in the reception area of the school secretary’s office, with the door open to the hallway. When Boron told Conrad and Short he was recording, Conrad allegedly told Boron he was committing a felony and ended the conversation.
Two months later, Boron was charged with one count of eavesdropping – a class 4 felony in Illinois.
An assistant state’s attorney for Kankakee County wrote in the petition to bring the charge that Boron “used a cellphone to surreptitiously record a private conversation between the minor and school officials without consent of all parties.”
Terri Miller, president of the nonprofit Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation, thought the district was wrong to bring the charge due to the chilling effect on students seeking to expose wrongdoing.
“What child is going to come forward and try the same thing?” she said after being notified of Boron’s case. “It will have a deterrent effect on children to report, to speak up when something is wrong.”
Further, First Amendment advocates and other legal experts think the state’s eavesdropping law could be vulnerable to a constitutional challenge.
The law
Boron is far from the only one snagged in Illinois’ eavesdropping law for seemingly harmless behavior.
Christopher Drew, an artist arrested for selling artwork on a Chicago sidewalk in 2009, was charged with a felony for recording the incident. Bridgeport resident Michael Allison was charged with a felony in 2010 for recording his own court hearing after officials failed to provide a court reporter. Also in 2010, Chicagoan Tiawanda Moore was charged with a felony for recording conversations with Chicago Police Department investigators regarding her sexual misconduct complaint against an officer.
At the heart of each of these cases was Illinois’ status as an “all-party consent” state. Essentially, recording a variety of common interactions unless all parties consented could be deemed a felony offense. Meanwhile, federal law and a majority of states allow for one-party consent.
In March 2014, the Illinois Supreme Court struck down Illinois’ eavesdropping law, holding that it “criminalize[d] a wide range of innocent conduct” and violated residents’ First Amendment rights.
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling state lawmakers in December 2014 passed a new eavesdropping statute, including changes aimed at explicitly allowing residents to record police, for example. But the new law kept the “all-party consent” provisions intact and introduced a vague standard for when a person must get consent for recording.
Specifically, the new law made it a felony to surreptitiously record any “private conversation,” defined as “oral communication between [two] or more persons” where at least one person has a “reasonable expectation” of privacy.
Boron’s case raises a number of questions critics pointed out in the debate surrounding the 2014 law. Namely, when does someone have a “reasonable” expectation of privacy? And is it fair to expect Illinoisans to know where to draw that line in their everyday lives?
Illinois prosecutors have proven all too willing to bring charges for a variety of innocent-seeming conduct under the state’s eavesdropping law. And without action from Springfield, it’s unlikely Boron will be the last one caught in its crosshairs.
- Tepper: Facebook, Google And "The Myth Of Capitalism"
In this week’s MacroVoices podcast, host Erik Townsend interviews Jonathan Tepper, author and co-founder of research shop Variant Perception. During the course of a meandering hour-long conversation, the two men discuss everything from VPs outlook on China’s economy and oil’s role as a recession indicator, to the problems inherent in the US’s version of capitalism.
After some well-deserved humblebragging about VP’s call to avoid cyclicals and stick with defensive shares, a call that finally panned out during the “Shocktober” market selloff, the two men turned to the subject of China and the possible long-term repercussions of the US-China trade war.
Asked for his view on Chinese markets, Tepper admitted that he had no insight into how the trade war might be resolved – or if it will be resolved. Instead, he seized the opportunity to pitch Variant Perception’s Chinese leading indicator index, which he said has consistently put his clients “in front of some of the most cyclical profitable trades out there” in emerging-markets.
Though Tepper offered one meaningful comment about the recent economic weakness in China: That China’s economy and currency are weakening because of structural domestic factors, not trade-related anxieties.
So our index gives us an insight into Chinese growth. And I can tell you that I’m sure the trade war is bad and I’m sure it’s going to have some impact. But the slowdown that we’ve seen in China this year predates trade war problems and certainly is not driven by them. It’s driven by domestic monetary conditions.
Some analysts speculate that the record drop in oil over the past few weeks could signal that a global recession is ahead. But Tepper argued that his indicators offer a slightly different take. Looking at oil’s moves over the past two years, WTI is still trading at more than double its post-2014 lows.
This pattern more closely resembles the run-up to the recession in 2001, when oil more than doubled following the Asian and Russian crises in the late 1990s. And while oil has reversed some of its advance in dollar terms, when the exchange rate is factored in, the price of oil is far higher in some fragile emerging market economies. With all of this in mind, the rise in oil “is clearly negative” – though, as with any indicator, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a recession is imminent.
Oil collapsed from 2014 and then bottomed, essentially, early 2016 and then has doubled since. It’s very similar to the 1998–2001 period where oil collapsed after the Asian and Russian crisis and then doubled into 2000. And then you had a recession in 2001. So you could argue that we’ve had a similar dynamic at play.
Oil clearly has doubled and gone up. When you look at emerging markets, everyone looks at oil in dollars but if you look at oil in Turkish lira or you look at oil in Argentinian pesos or – a lot of these emerging currencies – oil is by far higher than it was in 2008. There clearly tends to be drag on economic growth when it takes a larger part of the global wallet.
And that’s fairly negative. But that’s just one input and not the only input that determines recessions. It’s clearly negative; it’s a drag. But you would never base your entire investing strategy on that.
But while oil offers forward looking signals, Tepper explained that this isn’t the case for inflation, which he said lags the economic cycle. In lieu of a wonky explanation, Tepper offered an intuitive example that clearly illustrated how this dynamic works.
If you think about it intuitively – let’s say you’re a boss at a factory. You don’t fire your workers just because you have a good month or two of sales. So employment lags the business cycle. Just like employment, if you run a supermarket, you don’t start hiking your prices just because you have a good or bad month of sales.
So unemployment and inflation are two of the most lagging indicators possible when it comes to the economy. So, if you know where the economy was 12 months ago, you can generally get a good read of where inflation is going to be in the future. All of the inputs that go into a leading indicator for inflation, essentially, are taking stock of where the economy was 6 to 12 months ago and then projecting that forward.
Given the flashpoints surrounding Brexit and the Italian populists’ running game of economic chicken with Brussels, it was inevitable that Tepper would be asked for his outlook on Europe. And asked he was. But after offering a fairly conventional overview of the euro’s flaws…
In the case of Europe, what’s quite interesting is that the euro itself is a completely flawed currency, badly designed. It took them quite some time to get the central bank buying peripheral bond markets. The countries themselves do not understand the implications of the euro.
So for the first seven or eight years, inflation basically proceeded as it did pre-euro, even though the central banks in Spain and Portugal and Greece and Ireland and Italy didn’t control monetary policy the way they used to. So, once the downturn happened, then suddenly not only did you have an epic collapse in Spanish and Irish bubbles, but then you basically had peripheral countries that had vastly overvalued currencies, like a Spanish euro was very overvalued relative to a German euro.
And they’ve had to try to adjust their unit labor costs. Then they couldn’t have the central bank buy their own government bonds. And, also, they couldn’t inflate away their debt in the government bonds. After that, basically once the ECB started buying, they were helped in the short run and it brought down borrowing costs and spending in Italy.
What we’re now seeing is that the market itself is repricing. Where the Spanish and the Italian yields have been very high, they then went absurdly low and priced near Germany. Now they’re starting to widen again. When there is the next downturn in Europe – and there will be, it’s a matter of when, not if.
Then people have to worry about the level of Italian debt. And Italy can’t devalue the euro the way that it did with the lira in the past. And they have to hope the ECB will buy the debt. This is clearly causing a conflict.
…He followed with an interesting contrarian take: That if the euro fails, it will be because Germany has finally become frustrated with the peripheral countries being given a “free ride” by the ECB once the central bank is pressed to buy up all of their bonds to avert another crisis.
So it would be more likely if the euro breaks up it’s because the Germans get fed up with the situation in the same way that the Russians got fed up with the ruble zone and ended it – it wasn’t the “stans” that exited. So I think Europe basically – we’re likely to see more trouble in the Italian bond markets and repricing, but I think it’s unlikely based on history that Italy would be the one leaving the euro area. I think it’s more likely that eventually the ECB buys all periphery debt and the Germans get tired of free riding – in the same way that the Czechoslovakia currency was broken up, it was because the Czech Republic got tired of the Slovaks. Normally that’s just the way it works when currency unions break up.
Following a brief overview of the Australian housing market, which Tepper described as the lynchpin of the country’s economic boom, where a rentrenchment could be catastrophic for consumption and availability of credit…
We were going around checking out the housing markets, speaking to bank managers, to mortgage brokers, to potential buyers, going to the auctions. It was truly crazy. And what we realized was that the standards for lending were quite poor. There was not a lot of verification of costs in terms of how much people were spending on children’s education or rent or anything housing related. And at the same time, there were almost no verifications on income.
Most of the mortgages at the time, over 40% of them were interest-only mortgages, so people were really not repaying principle. They were essentially speculating on the increase in the price of the houses. Howard Marks said that if you’re too early you’re, effectively, wrong.
So I would say that I was wrong in the sense that I was too early. But in Australia over the last year they’ve had what they call a Royal Commission, which is essentially an independent body, to look into the behavior of banks. And everything that they have uncovered has corroborated what John Hempton and I did, and pointing out the very poor and lax lending standards that were at play.
Due to this pressure, the banks in Australia are now having much tighter checks on income and costs. And the credit is really turned down and is drying up. So what you’re seeing is declines in prices at a national level. Within specific post codes, you’re seeing 10–20% declines, particularly at the high end in Australia.
So we are seeing a downturn in Australian housing. Building permits have rolled over. The entire economy is massively geared towards the real estate sector and that’s created an enormous wealth effect, which has fed consumption, car purchases, and retail purchases. So there is very much a slowdown and downturn at play in Australia.
…Tepper and Townsend switched to an entirely different subject: The contents of Tepper’s recent book, “the Myth of Capitalism.” As Tepper explained, he wanted to write the book as a defense of capitalism amid attacks levied by Thomas Piketty that the capitalist system conceals a fatal flaw: That workers receive persistently smaller share of the spoils from corporate earnings.
And what Tepper discovered during his research is that this phenomenon is related to why corporate profits, which Jeremy Grantham once described as the “most mean-reverting data set in finance”, haven’t undergone a genuine retrenchment in years. Meanwhile, the share of earnings going to workers has consistently shrunk.
But the fact that corporate profits have remained elevated while worker pay in real terms has continued to sink isn’t a flaw inherent to the capitalist system, Tepper explained. Rather, it’s a flaw inherent in our version of capitalism. And a lot of it is tied to the wave of consolidation that has swept most industries since the 1980s. This consolidation has hampered competition, and caused markets to start behaving in an unhealthy way, which has led to our current secular stagnation and all kinds of other ills. And tech giants like Facebook and Google are among the worst offenders.
It was really when I started digging that I realized the main reason for this is that, in industry after industry in the US, we’ve seen a merger wave every decade since the early ‘80s. The merger wave has basically – it’s like the US Sweet 16 in the NCAA basketball or the World Cup, where you start out with 16 teams and you go down to 8 and then 4 and then 2 and then 1. What’s happened is we moved from an open economy with lots of competitors essentially down to oligopolies and monopolies in many industries. And that has an impact. It affects the way everyone lives, whether it’s in the US or Canada or the UK. The Canadians know this particularly when they pay for their phone bills. The US people know this when they pay for their cable bills or they pay for medical bills. When there is no competition, the prices are very high. And this clearly means you get higher prices. It also means that wages are lower. And, overall, because barriers to interest tend to be very high – I have a chapter on regulation – you just get fewer competitors coming in. So it leads to a collapse in startups.
And while competition has disappeared in traditional industries from health care to cable, few realize how problematic the role of tech giants like Facebook and Google has been. These monopolies have been allowed to expand their market influence virtually unchallenged by regulators, buying competitors and strengthening their monopolies with impunity.
But if you look at the online ad market and talk to people who have been in it for decades – a very good friend of mine actually works at Google – he worked at DoubleClick beforehand. And Google was allowed to buy DoubleClick. So, Google does search ads. DoubleClick did display ads. What’s extraordinary is the FTC allowed for this merger to go through, even though Google was essentially taking out its main competitor in terms of online ads. And Facebook likewise bought Instagram and WhatsApp. They were able to merge WhatsApp with Facebook to the point where you can’t get a Facebook account without a phone number. So now Facebook on thousands of sites across the web functions essentially as your digital passport. You can’t get an account on various apps or websites without a Facebook login.
This has created a “highly centralized” system where the 70% of Web traffic runs through two companies – Google and Facebook – and as Tepper said, that’s not good for anyone.
But what should be done to restore competition? Tepper has an idea: Regulators should implement a hard rule that they won’t sign off on any mergers that would leave a given industry with fewer than six competitors. But will that undo the damage that has already been done? Well, it’s hard to say.
Listen to the full interview below:
- The Disturbing Thing Indonesian Kids Are Now Doing To Get High
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
Warning: Put down any food you are consuming before reading this!
There’s a disturbing new trend among Indonesian teenagers. The kids are boiling sanitary pads in water and then drinking the resulting liquid in an effort to get high.
Of course, please don’t try this at home – it should go without saying, but one never knows anymore. It appears that the kids trying to get high are boiling both used and unused female sanitary pads to make their liquid. But boiling used sanitary products is incredibly disgusting, not to mention potentially dangerous. According to the LAD Bible, the resulting broth that you get from boiling up used tampons and sanitary pads can offer the drinker a feeling of flying and has hallucinogenic properties.
A representative from the National Narcotics Agency, Senior Commander Suprinarto, said that the presence of chlorine in the mixture is what gives it the liquid the effects that it possesses.
“The used pads they took from the trash were put in boiling water. After it cooled down, they drank it together,” he is quoted in the Straits News as saying.
That completely gag-worthy statement says everything anyone should need to know about where humanity is headed. Our future does not look all that bright.
This insanely disturbing action surprisingly isn’t against Indonesian laws either. The reason this is so shocking is because Indonesia has notoriously harsh drug laws. That being said, several teenagers have still been arrested for boiling sanitary products and drinking the sickening liquid, although it isn’t known whether they were then charged with anything.
According to Jimy Ginting, as reported by the LAD Bible, this is not a new phenomenon. Ginting, who is an Indonesian advocate for safe drinking, claims that teenagers from a few places around Indonesia have been arrested for similar, if not identical, actions. And this goes as far back as 2016, according to Ginting.
“I don’t know who started it all, but I knew it started around two years ago. There is no law against it so far. There is no law against these kids using a mixture of mosquito repellent and cold syrup to get drunk,” he told the Jakarta Post.
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