Sep 17

Today’s News 17th September 2020

  • Russia's Foreign Spy Chief Says US Is "Stage Managing" Belarus Unrest
    Russia’s Foreign Spy Chief Says US Is “Stage Managing” Belarus Unrest

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/17/2020 – 02:35

    Just after Moscow announced Tuesday that Russian force reserve units would be withdrawn from the Lithuanian border, top Russian officials have slammed NATO “flexing its muscle” during the ongoing ‘Tobruq Legacy 2020’ drills in Lithuania. 

    A top official, Alexander Kanshin, who heads the Association of Unions of Reserve Officers said that while “alarming,” it’s not expected that NATO will take “any real military action against Belarus,” according to his comments in TASS.

    But it was the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service SVR, Sergey Naryshkin, who issued the most directly provocative comments Thursday. The powerful intelligence chief charged that the United States is “stage managing” the unrest in Belarus, which has since the Aug.9 reelection of President Alexander Lukashenko sought to topple him.

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    Belarus protest file image

    He described that US intelligence, NGOs, and Western state linked media had funded ground protests to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Over prior weekends protests in the streets of Minsk alone have swelled to 100,000 people according to most estimates. 

    “Though publicly Washington tries to keep a low profile, once the massive street demonstrations began, the Americans stepped up funding to the Belarusian anti-government forces bountifully to the tune of tens of millions of dollars,” Naryshkin said, also calling US and Western involvement “obvious” – however, not presenting any specific evidence or intelligence, only outlining the scenario he said is already long in action.

    Tweet from a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and self-described “media trainer”:

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    “The demonstrations have been well organized from the very outset and coordinated from abroad,” he said. “It is noteworthy that the West had launched the groundwork for the protests long before the elections. The United States in 2019 and early 2020 used various NGOs to provide about $20 million for staging anti-government demonstrations,” Naryshkin alleged.

    He said “ostensibly independent bloggers” were organizing social media campaigns at the behest of more powerful interests.

    Describing a classic ‘color revolution’ scenario, the SVR director highlighted the involvement of US and EU NGOs which were providing training in eastern European countries and border states with Russia.

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    Sergei Naryshkin, via Moscow Times/Kremlin Press Service

    “Some of them underwent training in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, where experienced US instructors coached them to stage ‘non-violent’ protests,” Naryshkin said.

    He also noted that the US is “closely mentoring former presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and other opposition activists, whom they try to present in the guise of ‘popular leaders’ and future top officials of a ‘democratic Belarus’.”

    On Tuesday in a meeting between Putin and the embattled Lukashenko, Putin emphasized in statements to the press that Belarus must resolve its own issues internally, but without any foreign interference. 

    However, it’s unclear the degree to which Putin would get more involved on an overt level, so long as any alleged Western meddling remains under the surface. 

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    This month’s pre-planned NATO drills in Lithuania, via AP.

    Of course, Western intelligence and media no doubt see Russia’s own covert meddling at work in propping up Lukashenko, but at this point it doesn’t appear either side wants to take things toward a costly, full-blown Ukraine scenario. 

  • China Poses "The Greatest Threat To World Order": UK Military Intel Chief
    China Poses “The Greatest Threat To World Order”: UK Military Intel Chief

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/17/2020 – 02:00

    Authored by Alexander Zhang via The Epoch Times,

    The Chinese regime “poses the greatest threat to world order,” Britain’s Chief of Defence Intelligence told British media this week.

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    Lt. Gen. Jim Hockenhull, speaking at the first media briefing at the UK’s Defence Intelligence hub based at the Royal Air Force base in Wyton, Cambridgeshire, discussed how “global players such as Russia and China continually challenge the existing order without prompting direct conflict, operating in the expanding grey-zone between war and peacetime,” the Ministry of Defence said in a statement.

    While Hockenhull saw Russia as posing “the greatest military and geopolitical threat to European security,” he reserved the starkest warning for China’s communist regime, The Telegraph reported.

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    People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers take part in a performance during an open day at Stonecutters Island naval base in Hong Kong, on June 30, 2019. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

    China is “increasingly authoritarian and assertive,” he said. “It poses the greatest threat to world order, seeking to impose Chinese standards and norms and using its economic power to influence and subvert, backed up by massive investment in modernizing its armed forces.”

    According to The Sun, Hockenhull said that Beijing had accelerated its modernization of the military since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.

    The Chinese military now boasts “an array of leading-edge weapons systems that are fast eroding Western military advantages,” he said, according to The Sun, adding, “Its growing fleet of Renhai-class destroyers are the most capable of any navy.”

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    A Chinese navy formation, including the aircraft carrier Liaoning (C), during military drills in the South China Sea, on Jan. 2, 2017. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

    The shifting global picture has changed the character of warfare in ways that will challenge the West to keep pace with adversaries who do not play by the rules, Hockenhull said, according to the Ministry of Defence.

    He warned that conflict is bleeding into new domains such as cyber and space, threatening Britain’s cohesion, resilience, and global interests.

    “Whilst conventional threats remain, we have seen our adversaries invest in Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and other ground-breaking technologies, whilst also supercharging more traditional techniques of influence and leverage,” he said.

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    A Long March 3B rocket carrying the Beidou-3GEO3 satellite lifts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Xichang in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province on June 23, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

    The UK government is conducting a comprehensive review of its foreign, security, and defense policy.

    As part of the review, Britain’s Ministry of Defence is planning to pivot away from traditional defense and “operate much more in the newest domains of space, cyber, and sub-sea,” UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said in July.

    Both Russia and China have been developing offensive space weapons and upgrading their capabilities, Wallace wrote in The Telegraph.

    Cyber-attacks by hostile state actors are also seen as posing a heightened risk to the UK, especially during the pandemic caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

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    Medical workers take swab samples from residents to be tested for the COVID-19 coronavirus, in a street in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on May 15, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

    On July 22, UK’s Foreign Minister Dominic Raab said he was “deeply concerned” over evidence that “China is engaged in malicious cyber attacks against commercial, medical and academic institutions, including those working to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.”

    A day earlier, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that two Chinese hackers had been indicted for targeting businesses and government agencies in several countries, including the UK, Belgium, Germany, the United States, Australia, and Japan, for stealing millions of dollars worth of trade secrets and other sensitive information, and attempting to steal research on COVID-19.

    On May 5, the UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency (CISA) issued a joint advisory, exposing malicious cyber campaigns targeting international health-care and medical research organizations involved in the coronavirus response.

    To counter cyber threats, the UK government announced that health-care businesses will be able to get government-funded training in order to boost their cyber-security and protect sensitive data.

  • Nashville Officials Concealed Low COVID-19 Numbers Coming From Bars And Restaurants: Emails
    Nashville Officials Concealed Low COVID-19 Numbers Coming From Bars And Restaurants: Emails

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/17/2020 – 01:07

    Leaked emails between the senior adviser to Nashville’s Mayor and a health department official reveal a disturbing effort to conceal extremely low coronavirus cases emanating from bars and restaurants, while the lion’s share of infections occurred in nursing homes and construction workers, according to WZTV Nashville.

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    On June 30th, contact tracing was giving a small view of coronavirus clusters. Construction and nursing homes causing problems more than a thousand cases traced to each category, but bars and restaurants reported just 22 cases.

    Leslie Waller from the health department asks “This isn’t going to be publicly released, right? Just info for Mayor’s Office?“

    “Correct, not for public consumption.” Writes senior advisor Benjamin Eagles. –WZTV

    Four weeks later, Tennessean reporter Nate Rau asked the health department: “the figure you gave of “more than 80” does lead to a natural question: If there have been over 20,000 positive cases of COVID-19 in Davidson and only 80 or so are traced to restaurants and bars, doesn’t that mean restaurants and bars aren’t a very big problem?“

    To which health department official Brian Todd scrambled for an answer – asking five health department officials: “Please advise how you respond. BT.”

    The response – from an official whose name was omitted from the leaked email: “My two cents. We have certainly refused to give counts per bar because those numbers are low per site,” adding “We could still release the total though, and then a response to the over 80 could be “because that number is increasing all the time and we don’t want to say a specific number.””

    According to a metro staff attorney asked by city councilmember Steve Glover to verify the authenticity of the emails, “I was able to get verification from the Mayor’s Office and the Department of Health that these emails are real.”

    Glover told WZTV: “They are fabricating information. They’ve blown there entire credibility Dennis. Its gone i don’t trust a thing they say going forward …nothing.”

    Glover says he has been contacted by an endless stream of downtown bartenders, waitresses, and restaurant owners. Why would they not release these numbers?

    “We raised taxes 34 percent and put hundreds literally thousands of people out of work that are now worried about losing their homes their apartments etcetera and we did it on bogus data. That should be illegal!” he says.

    Again, we weren’t told by the mayor’s office this wasn’t true. We were told to file a freedom of information act request. –WZTV

  • Trump Says He Would Sell Other Gulf Countries Same Advanced Weapons Given To Israel
    Trump Says He Would Sell Other Gulf Countries Same Advanced Weapons Given To Israel

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/17/2020 – 00:45

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    In an interview ahead of the signing ceremony for the normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Trump said he would be willing to sell other countries in the Middle East “the same advanced weapons” the US sells to Israel.

    “They’re very wealthy countries for the most part,” Trump told Fox News. Trump also mentioned the UAE’s desire for US-made F-35s and said he would “personally not have a problem” with the UAE acquiring the warplanes.

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    Image via AP

    Since the normalization agreement was announced, there have been reports that the UAE F-35 sale was part of the deal. The treaties that were signed on Tuesday made no mention of F-35s, but the sale is clearly still on the table.

    He noted that the UAE wanted to buy some fighter jets, adding: “I personally would have not problem with it. Some people do, they say… maybe they go to war.” — Reuters

    President Trump is a big fan of selling weapons to Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia. The president has boasted about the billions of dollars in weapons the Kingdom has purchased and has vetoed efforts by Congress to end such sales.

    Congress tried to prohibit arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in an effort to end US support for the war in Yemen, where the US-backed Saudi-led coalition regularly kills civilians.

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    The atrocities in Yemen are so bad that US officials in the State Department fear being arrested overseas for war crimes for their role in facilitating the weapons sales.

  • Dr. Strangelove's Spoon-Benders: How The US Military Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
    Dr. Strangelove’s Spoon-Benders: How The US Military Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 23:30

    Authored by Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    It is the belief held by top officials within the U.S. military industrial complex that their ideology of appropriate morality is to prevail and that one must use these mind-over-matter techniques to achieve the ultimate goal, “the power to manipulate reality”, that global dominance can be achieved without wiping out the world.

    “MindWar must be strategic in emphasis, with tactical applications playing a reinforcing, supplementary role. In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe…through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth…State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword of Excalibur, we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and integrity to enhance civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they can then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.”

    – “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory” by Col. Paul Vallely and Maj. Michael Aquino, a document written to increase the influence of the “spoon-benders” in the U.S. military.

    On Sept 4th, an unprecedented show of force aimed at Russia occurred, with U.S. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress bombers flying from the UK to Ukraine airspace. After arriving in Ukraine airspace they orbited for an extended period right at the edge of the Ukraine-Russian border.

    These B-52H bombers are capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

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    In addition, a number of U.S. and UK aerial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets were operating in the area at the time, including a RC-135V/W spy plane, a RAF Airseeker and a RAF Sentinel R1 radar jet. No doubt to gather information on Russia’s integrated air defense networks and other command nodes.

    Last month, Russia announced in their official military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda that any ballistic missile launched at its territory will be perceived as a nuclear attack that will warrant a nuclear response. In the article, senior officers of the Russian military, General Staff, Maj. Gen. Andrei Sterlin and Col. Alexander Khryapin, stated that in the case of an incoming ballistic missile towards Russia, there would be no way to determine whether it were fitted with a nuclear or conventional warhead and thus Russia is giving forewarning that any missile attack will be perceived as a nuclear attack.

    The Krasnaya Zvezda article emphasized that the announcement in June of the new nuclear deterrent policy is intended to unambiguously explain what Russia sees as aggression: “Russia has designated the ‘red lines’ that we don’t advise anyone to cross…If a potential adversary dares to do that, the answer will undoubtedly be devastating.”

    Some may consider this an over-reaction on the part of Russia, however, just six months ago the U.S. military conducted a simulation of a “limited” nuclear exchange with…Russia. This was strange news on several accounts. For one, this sort of thing is not typically announced in the candid detail U.S. defense secretary Mark Esper described to journalists, giddy that he got to “play himself” in this war game scenario as if he were preparing for a Hollywood movie doing his best John Wayne impression: “If you got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.”

    However, the most concerning revelation of this simulated exercise was the announcement to the American people that “it might be possible to fight, and win, a battle with nuclear weapons, without the exchange leading to an all-out-world-ending conflict.”

    In other words, throw your cares to the wind, that is, the “spirit wind” known as kamikaze, because we are going for it.

    In the transcript of a background briefing on the war game exercise, senior Pentagon officials described their tactic further, explaining that their confident calculation on being “victorious” in this exercise completely relied on the supposition that such a confrontation would remain “limited” in its nuclear exchange.

    “It’s a very reasonable response to what we saw was a Russian nuclear doctrine and nuclear capability that suggested to us that they might use nuclear weapons in a limited way,” a senior official stated.

    It seems what senior Pentagon officials are really saying here about the predictability of the Russians, is that there seems to be a line the Russians won’t cross in the case of a nuclear conflict…but the Americans sure will.

    Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists tried to play down the “rodeo circus” and reduce the high profile announcement of the U.S. military exercise as simply a marketing gimmick to “justify” the new nuclear weapons since we are entering the new budget phase. “So all of this has been played up to serve that process.” stated Kristensen.

    I don’t know about you but I am getting some serious déjà vu. Didn’t we already go through all of this with the disastrous JIC-502 spookery?

    JIC-502 intelligence report titled “Implications of Soviet Possession of Atomic Weapons” drafted in Jan 20th 1950, turned out not to be an intelligence report at all but rather a sales pitch, claiming that a nuclear-armed Soviet Union had introduced the notion that “a tremendous military advantage would be gained by the power that struck first and succeeded in carrying through an effective surprise attack.” For more on this refer to my paper.

    It was JIC-502 which would be the first to put forward a justification for the preventive first strike concept, supported by a massive military buildup under the pretence of pre-emptive war.

    NSC-68 would be drafted the same year and called for a massive military buildup to be completed by 1954 dubbed the “year of maximum danger,” the year JIC-502 claimed the Soviets would achieve military superiority and be able to launch war against the U.S.

    But the Soviets never did launch such a war, and all claims of their capabilities let alone their intentions turned out to be entirely fraudulent… so what was it all for?

    Did the U.S. have to put everything into expanding their military, turning away from the concept of a nation at peace made up of citizen soldiers and instead towards a nation in perpetual war made up of the Nietzschean fantasy of Übermensch (Beyond-Man) super soldiers, the very thing that Eisenhower warned against?

    Did this all have to happen in defense of “peace and security” of the free world?

    Why were the predictions of the JIC-502 completely unfounded? Were the predictions based off of corrupted data? Did the Soviets simply change their mind? Or was it never about a pre-emptive war but rather was always about global dominance.

    What would the American people think if they knew the truth, that their entire military industrial complex was never built for the protection of the “free world” in opposition to dictators and despots but rather the very opposite? That it simply thought its ideology the superior one, the only lawful dictatorship that had the right to rule, even if it meant by force.

    In the words of Vallely/Aquino: “If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they can then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.”

    This may look like just a “rodeo circus” but it is far far worst. As Edgar Poe elaborated in his “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether”, the asylum is quite literally being run by the lunatics.

    What do Jedi Warriors, Spoon-benders, the First Earth Battalion and Men Who Stare at Goats Have in Common?

    For those who need a refresher of the film Dr. Strangelove’s synopsis, it is about what could happen if a lunatic had the authority to bypass the U.S. president and cause a nuclear escalation between the U.S. and USSR. In the movie, it is U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripper who initiates a nuclear attack to destroy the USSR under the premise that once the U.S. government is briefed on the situation, they would have no choice but to commit 100% towards a hostile attack against the USSR, in order to prevent nuclear retaliation.

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    The reason why General Jack Ripper is fully convinced that it is absolutely necessary to destroy the USSR is because he believes that the communists are conspiring to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people. Gen. Jack Ripper goes on to describe how he first discovered this Soviet ploy, after sexual relations with a woman and how he felt empty inside but that luckily he was astute enough to be able to accurately deduce the cause of this feeling of emptiness as due to being drained of his “life essence”, all part of the communist conspiracy for sure. In other words, Gen. Jack Ripper is unequivocally insane.

    Unfortunately, this type of thinking in the U.S. military is not reserved to pure fiction.

    Sometime in the late 1980s then Col. Paul Vallely, Commander of the 7th Psychological Operations Group and then Maj. Michael Aquino, PSYOP Research & Analysis Team Leader authored a paper titled “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory”, which discusses the necessity to wage perpetual psychological warfare against friend and enemy populations alike, and even against the American people. As stated in the paper:

    “MindWar must target all participants to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war…There are some purely natural conditions under which minds may become more or less receptive to ideas, and MindWar should take full advantage of such phenomena as atmospheric electromagnetic activity, air ionization, and extremely low frequency waves.”

    Of course the terms “enemy” and “national interest” are not elaborated on, nor is the matter of free will even considered but rather that mind control is not only “natural”, it is essential. Besides the overtly fascist and occultist content in the paper, the proposal had a disturbing similarity to the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program launched by the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon. TIA was a global propaganda and mega-data-mining plan that was supposedly scraped after a series of negative news stories.

    On Aug 17th, 2005 The New York Times published an article that discussed how “a military intelligence team repeatedly tried to contact the FBI in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ring leader of the Sept. 11 attacks” as reported by veteran Army intelligence officer Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer.

    The information came from the highly classified intelligence program “Able Danger”, which had successfully identified the terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers of the 9/11 terrorist attack in mid-2000, well over a year before the actual 9/11 attack.

    According to New York Times article, Shaffer learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations Command of the Defense Department had canceled the FBI meetings “because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.” (Able Danger was linked in its function to the TIA program)

    However, this is only part of the truth, the by far uglier truth is that they were already fully aware of the 9/11 terrorist ring and didn’t want a wrench thrown into the gears so to speak.

    Gen. Vallely, Lt. Col. Aquino and Col. Alexander (author of “The New Mental Battlefield: Beam Me Up, Spock”) are leading figures within the Special Operations community. In addition, Gen. Stubblebine III, Gen. Schoomaker, Gen. Downing and Gen. Boykin are the four names most often cited as promoters of programs like the “Goat Lab,” “Jedi Warriors,” “Grill Flame,” “Task Force Delta,” (aka the spoon-benders) and the “First Earth Battalion,” and have held top posts within the military intelligence and Special Operations commands.

    These were the programs that promoted the idea that one could learn to bend a metal spoon, walk through walls, and burst the hearts of goats with the use of “mind over matter” techniques.

    In 1979, Lt. Col. Channon presented a 125 page document called “The First Earth Battalion,” which outlined “non-lethal” techniques that would soon be adopted by the military including the use of atonal noises as a form of combat psychological warfare and widespread experimentation with psychoelectronics and other means of debilitation.

    On March 10th, 1991, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz while serving as chief policy advisor to then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, wrote the memo “Do We Need a Non-Lethal Defense Initiative?” in which he wrote, “A U.S. lead in non-lethal technologies will increase our options and reinforce our position in the post-Cold War world.” Though no mention was made of Col. Alexander, who spear-headed the non-lethal weaponry campaign, Alexander at the time of the memo had retired from active duty and was heading the Non-Lethal Weapons Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

    In 1990, Col. Alexander published “The Warrior’s Edge” and states its goal as to:

    “unlock the door to the extraordinary human potentials inherent in each of us. To do this, we, like governments around the world, must take a fresh look at non-traditional methods of affecting reality. We must raise human consciousness of the potential power of the individual body/mind system – the power to manipulate reality. We must be willing to retake control of our past, present, and ultimately, our future.” (emphasis added)

    Investigative journalist Jon Ronson, in his book “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, goes through how ‘psychic warriors’ such as Uri Geller and Jim Channon were called back into government service after 9/11, and that a series of meetings in 2004 were held between Gen. Schoomaker and Jim Channon to start a think tank which would utilise “First Earth Battalion” techniques in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    The Non-Lethal Techniques of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and al-Qa’im

    According to a 1998 International Committee of the Red Cross presentation before the European parliament intended on evaluating how “non-lethal” the non-lethal technologies promoted by Alexander, Channon et al. actually are in reality, it was found that non-lethal weapons are simply defined as weapons with a less-than 25% fatality rate.

    Perhaps this is what the senior Pentagon officials were referring to in their “limited” nuclear exchange scenarios.

    Included in the list of non-lethal weapons now widely used in the U.S. military are lasers, extremely low frequency (ELF) weapons, and various chemical, biological and audio stun weapons that can cause permanent damage such as blindness, deafness and destruction of the gastrointestinal system.

    According to Ronson and The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, many of the torture techniques employed at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the less-well-known al-Qa’im near the Syrian border in Iraq, are based on Channon and Alexander’s non-lethal conceptions. Jim Channon actually confirmed this in an email correspondence with Ronson.

    At one point in his investigation, Ronson asks Stuart Heller, friend of Jim Channon, if he could name one soldier who was “the living embodiment” of the First Earth Battalion, to which Heller responds unhesitatingly “Bert Rodriguez.” Ronson continues in his book, “In April 2001, Bert Rodriguez took on a new student. His name was Ziad Jarrah.” Rodriguez taught Jarrah “the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit. You need a code you’d die for, a do-or-die desire.” Rodriguez added, “Ziad was like Luke Skywalker. You know when Luke walks the invisible path? You have to believe it’s there…Yeah, Ziad believed it. He was like Luke Skywalker.” Rodriguez trained Ziad Jarrah for six months.

    On Sept 11, 2001, Ziad Jarrah took control of the United Airlines flight 93 as part of the orchestrated 9/11 terrorist attack.

    Meet Dr. Strangelove

    At the end of the film Dr. Strangelove we are finally confronted with the “top lunatic” so to speak who was really in charge this whole time. For all the “top brass” in the war room, nobody was really in control of the situation this entire time since the entire “war scenario” was set-up as a positive feedback loop within the doomsday plan of a lunatic.

    You see, the belief that one can bend spoons, walk through walls, and burst the hearts of goats is not the problem, it is the belief held by top officials within the U.S. military industrial complex that their ideology of appropriate morality is to prevail and that one must use these mind-over-matter techniques to achieve the ultimate goal, “the power to manipulate reality”, that global dominance can be achieved without wiping out the world.

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    That somehow “it might be possible to fight, and win, a battle with nuclear weapons, without the exchange leading to an all-out-world-ending conflict,” and if not…we may all die for a lunatic’s dream in the process.

  • Trump Agrees With Powell: "Much Higher" Fiscal Stimulus Is Needed… And Why That Could Crash Stocks
    Trump Agrees With Powell: “Much Higher” Fiscal Stimulus Is Needed… And Why That Could Crash Stocks

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 23:18

    One can clearly see the moment the market’s mood reversed today during Powell’s FOMC press conference: it took place just as Powell warned that “more fiscal stimulus is likely to be needed”, noting that while the recovery has been faster than expected in the past 60 days, “there’s certainly a risk” the economy could slow without more stimulus. After all there are about 11 million people still out of work, small businesses are struggling and state and local governments have seen revenues drop (this is the same Fed that claimed that it is doing $120 billion in monthly QE for the benefit of US households).

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    Yet this is hardly the first time Powell has made that claim, in fact he has said on countless previous occasions that monetary policy alone would be insufficient (even though for the past 10 years until covid, monetary policy was in fact sufficient if nothing else than at least to push stocks higher), and that the Fed desperately needs Congress to unlock trillions in fiscal stimulus.

    Why was this time different? Because in a curious schism within the republican party earlier in the day, none other than president Trump split ranks with the “conservative” republican senators when the White House gave a clear indication on Wednesday that it is willing to increase its pandemic-relief offer in talks with Democrats and that Senate Republicans should go along in order to seal a stimulus deal in the next week to 10 days. After all elections are coming, and Trump desperately needs to talk up the economy – what better way than to flood the middle-class with another trillion. Or $1.5 trillion to be exact.

    Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said the President is open to the compromise $1.5 trillion stimulus proposal from a bipartisan group of House lawmakers that was an effort to break a months-long deadlock over bolstering the U.S. economy amid the coronavirus pandemic.

    Trump himself took to his favorite medium on Wednesday morning, and when he had a clear message for Senate republicans: “Go for the much higher numbers, Republicans, it all comes back to the USA anyway.”

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    Then on Wednesday evening, during a White House press conference on Wednesday Trump repeated that he liked “the larger numbers” in a compromise $1.5 trillion stimulus proposal from a bipartisan group of House lawmakers that tried (and so far failed) to break a months-long deadlock over bolstering the U.S. economy.

    “I agree with a lot of it,” Trump said of the plan. “I heard Nancy Pelosi say she doesn’t want to leave until we have an agreement” and “she’s come a long way.” It’s remarkable how quickly Trump ended up siding with “Crazy Nancy.”

    However, even that compromise number – which was about $1 trillion more than the latest official republican proposal – was not be high enough for Nancy Pelosi who called it insufficient, while Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the chamber’s second-ranking Republican, said that large a stimulus would cause “a lot of heartburn” among GOP lawmakers.

    After initially proposing a $1 trillion stimulus at the end of July, Senate Republicans attempted to advance a bill providing $650 billion in economic aid, without the direct payments to individuals that the president – and Democrats – want. Naturally, getting thrown under the bus by the president, has left quite a few of the Republicans startled and confused, as Bloomberg reports:

    Trump’s new push for a deal highlights continuing divisions among Republicans, some of whom are reluctant to spend more money on stimulus with the national deficit reaching $3.3 trillion this year.

    Missouri Republican Senator Roy Blunt said a number higher than $1 trillion could be the basis for an agreement, if it can be done quickly.

    “I think there is a deal to be had here,” he told reporters at the Capitol. “My concern is that the window probably closes around the end of this month. And we need to get busy finding out what we can all agree on.”

    But other senators resisted the idea.

    Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said the Senate GOP bill, which costs about $300 billion when its cuts to Federal Reserve loan authority are counted, is the right amount.

    “The president has his opinion. We have ours,” he told reporters.

    At the same time, Democrats are understandably playing hardball. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said on Tuesday that Democrats shouldn’t agree to less than $2 trillion. A group of House Democratic chairmen issued a statement criticizing the Problem Solvers proposal as inadequate. Pelosi earlier on MSNBC Wednesday reinforced her demand for $2.2 trillion.

    And at this rate, Trump may demand a $2+ trillion stimulus as well.

    Yet even as the Democrats continued the charade – knowing well they won’t concede to a major Trump poll-boosting stimulus just 48 days before the election – Pelosi and Chuck Schumer took a victory lap and released a statement saying they were “encouraged” by Trump’s endorsement of higher spending. “We look forward to hearing from the president’s negotiators that they will finally meet us halfway,” they said.

    And so did Powell, who by now has realized that the Fed is hopeless in sparking the much needed inflation (that the Fed needs to inflate away the debt), and instead is punting to Congress, whose direct stimulus funds have a far higher chance to spark the much desired reflationary wave.

    The problem, as the market made it very clear, is that whereas continued deadlock in Congress – with Trump backing Republicans – would mean more monetary stimulus, another $1.5 or $2 trillion in fiscal stimulus actually stands a good chance of generating a sharp (albeit fleeting) reflationary episode. And since the Fed will be there to monetize all the newly issued debt to pay for all this stimulus it’s win-win (for everyone but the US debt which is now exploding at a record pace that has surpassed World War II). In fact, as Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett said last week, a $1.5-$2 trillion fiscal stimulus deal, coupled with an October vaccine represents the “most dangerous combo for Treasury and equity bulls” and represents “a messy inflection handoff to higher rates, inflation & inflation assets.” In the process, such deflationary assets as tech stocks and Treasurys would get clobbered, something we are already seeing this evening as the Nasdaq slides amid fears that fiscal stimulus-driven inflation may indeed be coming.

    As a further reminder, BofA is merely the latest voice to caution that a transition from a Nasdaq-led market to a “value” driven one will not come without major market turbulence, with Morgan Stanley and Goldman both warning previously that a deflation to reflation rotation would lead to turmoil.

    But what we find especially paradoxical is that Trump – who has repeatedly touted the repeated records in the stock market as the most objective scorecard of his presidency – is now pushing for precisely the two events, along with an accelerated vaccine, that could catalyze a sharp market correction, if not far worse. In effect, Trump is willing to sacrifice a major market drop in exchange for direct stimulus handouts and the hope that a covid vaccine is here (which is also paradoxical, since most Trump supporters will refuse to be vaccinated).

    We doubt that Trump has realized just what the tradeoffs are in his latest position flip-flop, although if the president indeed sided with the Democrats in seeking a far greater stimulus over that proposed by Senate republicans, the November election outcome will almost certainly be the one that Democrats desire as well.

  • "Sci-Fi Awesome" – Hypersonic "Smart Bullet" Fired From Tank Downs Cruise Missile 
    “Sci-Fi Awesome” – Hypersonic “Smart Bullet” Fired From Tank Downs Cruise Missile 

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 23:10

    The U.S. Air Force used a hyper velocity projectile (HVP), capable of traveling Mach 7.3, or about 5,600 mph, fired from an Army M109 howitzer tank, to shoot down a fast-moving cruise missile over a missile range in New Mexico. 

    “Tanks shooting down cruise missiles is awesome,” Dr. Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, told reporters, who was quoted by Asia Times. “Video game, sci-fi awesome.

    “You’re not supposed to be able to shoot down a cruise missile with a tank. But, yes, you can, if the bullet is smart enough, and the bullet we use for that system is exceptionally smart,” Roper said. 

    Main battle tanks, nevertheless a self-propelled 155 mm howitzer, are not designed to destroy fast-moving cruise missiles, suggests the HVP “smart bullet” is ground-breaking technology that could revolutionize the modern battlefield. 

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    M-109 fires HVP at a cruise missile on Sept. 2. h/t U.S. Army 

    The successful firing of the HVP was conducted at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, destroyed a “surrogate” Russian cruise missile target using the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System that’s designed to detect incoming missiles. 

    HVP was initially developed in 2013 to fire out of the electromagnetic railgun. However, the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office has shifted to firing the HVP out of more conventional guns, such as common artillery pieces found on the battlefield. 

    The advantage of the HVP over conventional missile defenses is a dramatic decline in cost-per-kill. Each HVP costs around $85,000, opposed to $1.5 million Tomahawk missiles, $155,000 Hellfire rockets, and or $147,000 Javelin shoulder-rocket. 

    So what does this mean? Well, the Pentagon can shoot a lot more of these smart bullets and not feel bad they’re robbing taxpayers. There’s also a strategic component to HVP, that is, precision-guided short-range defense at hypersonic speeds to take out enemy missiles. 

  • Self-Censorship Soars In The US
    Self-Censorship Soars In The US

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 22:50

    Authored by Judith Bergman via The Gatestone Institute,

    A recent survey of 2,000 Americans by Cato Institute/YouGov found that 62% of Americans say “the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive”.

    This is up from 2017, when 58% agreed with this statement.

    “Majorities of Democrats (52%), independents (59%) and Republicans (77%) all agree they have political opinions they are afraid to share”.

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    People who defined themselves as staunch liberals self-censored considerably less:

    “Strong liberals stand out, however, as the only political group who feel they can express themselves. Nearly 6 in 10 (58%) of staunch liberals feel they can say what they believe”.

    If truly representative, the numbers are chilling: The US nominally enshrines the most far-reaching freedom of speech, thanks to the First Amendment of the Constitution. Yet the average number of Americans who self-censor is slowly beginning to approximate that of Germany, where a survey on self-censorship a year ago concluded:

    “Nearly two-thirds of citizens are convinced that ‘today one has to be very careful on which topics one expresses oneself’, because there are many unwritten laws about what opinions are acceptable and admissible”.

    The difference, however, is that Germany has some of the most draconian hate speech laws in Europe. The US does not have any hate speech laws.

    “Nearly a third (32%) of employed Americans say they are worried about missing out on career opportunities or losing their job if their political opinions became known”, according to the Cato survey.

    “Americans across the political spectrum share these concerns: 31% of liberals, 30% of moderates, and 34% of conservatives are worried their political views could get them fired or harm their career trajectory… Those with the highest levels of education are most concerned. Almost half (44%) of Americans with post‐​graduate degrees say they are worried their careers could be harmed if others discovered their political opinions, compared to 34% of college graduates, 28% of those with some college experience, and 25% of high school graduates”.

    There is a noticeable difference between highly educated Democrats and highly educated Republicans:

    “About a quarter of Republicans with high school degrees (27%) or some college (26%) worry their political opinions could harm them at work—but this number increases to 40% among Republican college graduates and 60% of those with post‐​graduate degrees”.

    The survey also found that younger Americans under 30 were more concerned than older Americans that their political opinions could harm their careers.

    That young people especially are afraid to speak their minds — the survey suggests this is because they “have spent more time in America’s universities” — is particularly worrying for the future robustness of American democracy. It is, however, not surprising. American campuses have steered a “leftist” course for decades. The tilt has had familiar consequences: the proliferation on campus of “safe spaces”, trigger warnings, de-platforming of conservative voices and a “cancel culture” aimed at professors and students who do not conform to an on-campus political orthodoxy that has become increasingly totalitarian. Most recently, the dean of University of Massachusetts Lowell’s School of Nursing, Leslie Neal-Boylan, was fired by the school after writing “Black lives matter, but also everyone’s life matters” in an email to students and faculty.

    Cancel culture has moved from campus into American society. The topics no longer acceptable as legitimate subjects of unconditionally free and open public debate keep growing: Race, gender, the merits of Western history and civilization, and climate change currently top the list of taboo subjects. In addition, there are uncountable words and concepts that are no longer considered legitimate, even names of food products. Those who publicly offer dissenting views on any of these issues risk immediate “cancellation”, especially since the killing of George Floyd and the beginning of the Black Lives Matter protests across the US, as reported by Gatestone. Cato’s poll is more evidence that the chilling effects that these “cancellations” have on people are severe and should not be underestimated.

    When citizens stop voicing their concerns in public about current events, policies and ideas out of fear that they will lose their livelihoods and social standing, it is — or should be — a huge problem in a democracy. The free exchange of opinions and ideas is the bedrock of free and healthy democracies worthy of their name. How much speech can you shut down — and how many people can you “cancel”– before public discourse is destroyed altogether?

    A democratic society of fearful citizens who dare not speak about what is on their minds – often important issues of their time — is doomed to succumb to the will of those who bully the hardest and shout the loudest.

  • China & India In Major Himalayan Border Troop Build-Up Expected To "Extend To Winter"
    China & India In Major Himalayan Border Troop Build-Up Expected To “Extend To Winter”

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 22:30

    After a summer of high level military to military talks appear to have unraveled — though they’ve prevented another major border breach like the June 15 brutal hand-to-hand combat clash which saw 20 Indian troops killed — multiple reports confirm a new build-up of thousands of Indian and Chinese troops on either side of the Ladakh region.

    “Thousands of Indian and Chinese troops are still locked in an impasse across the mountain passes of the Himalayan region of Ladakh and the banks of the glacial lake Pangong Tso, with neither side backing down despite their foreign ministers having agreed five days ago to improve mutual trust and de-escalate tensions,” South China Morning Post reported Tuesday.

    And amid the blame game for the renewed mobilization of forces and the potential for more high altitude fighting, China’s state-run Global Times says to expect Sino-Indian border tensions to likely “extend to winter”. 

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    And citing Indian sources, Russia’s Sputnik reports China’s PLA military recently moved 10,000 more troops to the region, despite multiple rounds of talks with the Indian side briefly resulted in a pull-back from the immediate Line of Actual of Control.

    “As tensions continue to soar between the two nuclear-powered rivals, China has moved an additional 10,000 troops forward since the past week along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh, government sources in New Delhi revealed,” Sputnik wrote.

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    “The additional hauling of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to the border has taken the Chinese deployment to approximately 52,000 with 150 fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles (SAM),” the report added. 

    There does appear to be heightened build-up in the area based on both local reports and social media videos circulating. 

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    Image via The Federal

    Meanwhile Reuters has cited India’s defense minister to say the conflict “remains unresolved” with “fears of a broader conflict” remaining high as ever, given that “the scale of deployment of troops and the number of disputed areas was much more than in previous years,” according to the report.

    Reuters cited Indian defense minister Rajnath Singh in an interview as saying Tuesday:

    As of now, the Chinese site has mobilized a huge number of army battalions and armaments along the LAC and inner areas. Our armed forces have made appropriate counter deployments in response to the actions by China, in eastern Ladakh and [INAUDIBLE] and Kongka La and Pangong Lake’s north and south banks, and many areas where there is friction, so that India’s security interests are fully protected.

    Below is rare video showing Indian troops and supplies being transported into the difficult to reach region:

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    The Indian side is busy conducting a large-scale logistical operation observed resupplying Indian troops in the high, remote region.

    The fact that on both sides troops and supplies have been seen pouring into the region strongly suggests we’re in for a long haul. When winter hits, all roads leading to the area are blocked. It appears the rival militaries are digging in for the long harsh winter. 

  • Paul Craig Roberts: The Democrat Ticket Is Puzzling
    Paul Craig Roberts: The Democrat Ticket Is Puzzling

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 22:10

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    I am puzzled, as I assume my readers are, why the powers-that-be chose the two least electable candidates for the Democrat nominations for president and vice president.  

    It makes no sense to choose people who have little chance of winning – unless the globalists intend to rig the election and elect them, or install them after a color revolution, in order to make the US a laughing stock throughout the world as a way of removing the US, a hegemonic power, as an obstacle to the global elite.

    Really, once you see Biden in action, it is difficult to believe that even white liberals can vote for the Democrat ticket:

    Imagine the ridicule that would be heaped upon Biden by the presstitute media if he were the Republican candidate.  

    Those of you old enough to remember President Reagan will remember all the presstitute insinuations about Reagan being senile and falling asleep at cabinet meetings.  Of course, the presstitutes were never at cabinet meetings.  

    Reagan successfully confronted the two major problems of his time—stagflation and the nuclear armageddon that could result from misunderstood intentions or a warning system error.  Reagan’s supply-side policy deep-sixed stagflation—the simultaneous rise of inflation and unemployment—and his negotiations with Soviet President Gorbachev ended the Cold War.

    The Establishment has buried both achievements, and today Reagan is understood as the president who made Americans feel good while he cut taxes for the rich and poured money into the Pentagon and defense contractors. Reagan’s “star wars” was more illusion than real. It’s purpose was to convince the Soviets to end the Cold War.  This was also the purpose of his military interventions against leftish takeovers in the US “sphere of influence.”  The reason for these interventions was to give the message to Moscow that there would be no further territorial gains for communism.  

    Americans today, especially the youth, know nothing about how the Reagan administration gave us two decades of economic growth without having to pay for it with rising inflation, and they do not know that Reagan ended the Cold War.  

    Today the rightwing and Russians themselves believe that Reagan won the Cold War. That was not Reagan’s goal.  President Reagan told those of us involved that the purpose was “to end, not win, the Cold War,” and that we must never act or speak in any way that implied that we had prevailed over the Soviets.  Wikipedia, a disinformation website, opens its account of Reagan’s foreign policy with a blatant lie:  “The foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration was the foreign policy of the United States from 1981 to 1989. The main goal was winning the Cold War.”  The ignorance of whoever wrote this is extraordinary. The Soviets never would have agreed to losing the Cold War.  President Reagan understood this, which is why he emphasized that our purpose was to end, not win, the Cold War.

    Everything President Reagan accomplished by creating trust between Washington and Moscow has been destroyed by successor US administrations.  As Stephen Cohn, myself, and a few others emphasize, the danger of both accidential and intentional nuclear war at the present time is substantially greater than during the Cold War.

    It is difficult to reconcile Washington’s pursuit of hegemony with the divisiveness that has been created in American society.  The Democrats and the presstitutes have made it clear that the November election will be used to deepen the divisiveness.  For the rest of the world, the silver lining in America’s internal conflict is the end of US hegemony.

  • Yelp Reveals 60% Of Business Closures Are Now Permanent 
    Yelp Reveals 60% Of Business Closures Are Now Permanent 

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 21:50

    The virus pandemic shock is generating deep economic scarring, the likes of which many have never seen before. The virus-induced downturn has led the economy into a “liquidity trap,” in which interest rates will likely reside on the zero lower bound until 2023, and monetary policy could have trouble stimulating the real economy besides artificially inflating asset prices. As Washington pumps fiscal injection after fiscal injection into the real economy, creating unstable artificial growth, the latest lapse of fiscal support, now 46 days, has sent the economy into another slump.

    For more color on the deep economic scarring, not just a deterioration in the labor market, we turn our attention to a Yelp report published Wednesday that revealed as of Aug. 31, 163,735 businesses have closed on the platform, a 23% increase since mid-July.

    Yelp pointed out an increase of permanent business closures over the past six months, now reaching 97,966, or about 60% of closed businesses will never reopen their doors again.  

    “As of August 31, 163,735 total U.S. businesses on Yelp have closed since the beginning of the pandemic (observed as March 1), a 23% increase since July 10. In the wake of COVID-19 cases increasing and local restrictions continuing to change in many states we’re seeing both permanent and temporary closures rise across the nation, with 60% of those closed businesses not reopening (97,966 permanently closed).” 

    “Overall, Yelp’s data shows that business closures have continued to rise with a 34% increase in permanent closures since our last report in mid-July,” Justin Norman, Yelp’s vice president of data science, told CNBC. 

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    Yelp notes restaurants, shopping and retail, and beauty and spas have been damaged the most with temporary and permanent closures since March 1. About 32,109 restaurants closed on Yelp, with 19,590 of those permanent, or about 61%. Shopping and retail saw 30,374 business closures, with 58% of those permanent. Beauty and spas saw 16,585 closures, with 42% of which are permanent. 

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    Professional services, like roofing, landscaping, accountants, and lawyers, experienced some of the smallest declines. Meanwhile, restaurants and retail businesses have been struggling the most. Readers may recall, dying restaurants have been panic selling assets on Facebook Marketplace as the industry remains in a bust cycle. 

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    Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco were three metro areas that saw the most closures and permanent closures.

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    And what does this all mean? Well, policy tools, if that is monetary of fiscal, are producing diminishing returns that will likely result in a recovery that does not resemble a “V.” The road to recovery could take years as the latest analysis from Opportunity Insights of US business activity reveals the number of small businesses open is plunging. 

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    And by the way, the fiscal cliff, which we’ve warned about since late July (see: here) – is finally showing up in economic data as online spending growth hit a wall. Lower spending by consumers will pressure businesses and lead to more closures.  

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    What this all means is that America’s coming double-dip recession could be dead ahead.  

  • Tyranny Down Under: From Blue Shirts To Brown
    Tyranny Down Under: From Blue Shirts To Brown

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 21:30

    Authored by Alan Hamilton via Off-Guardian.org,

    “On at least 3 or 4 occasions in the past week we’ve had to smash the windows of people in cars and pull them out of there so they could provide their details – because they weren’t telling us where they were going; they weren’t adhering to the chief health officer’s guidelines, they weren’t providing their name and their address.”

    – Shane Patton, Victorian Chief Police Officer 04/08/2020

    On Saturday 5th of September a national day of protest occurred in cities around Australia against the unnecessary and draconian lockdowns that have been occurring across the country and which are still occurring in Victoria. Similar protests have occurred in cities around the world, most especially in Europe.

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    These protests are a legitimate and rational response to despotic and often unconstitutional laws that unscientifically characterize every member of society as a bio-security risk to everyone else. They are also a protest against law enforcement bureaucracies that identify responsible, civic-minded citizens as criminals if they dare to question such laws or even worse, step out of their homes in defiance of the lockdown to register their dissent.

    The Australian protests occurred peacefully and without incident in most places, including Brisbane where I participated. But it was not the case in Victoria where a State of Disaster has been declared due to the ‘extraordinarily high’ number of active Covid cases there.

    On the eve of the nationwide protests, mainstream news reported on the harrowing state of affairs in Victoria which was suffering from hundreds of active cases but, as it turns out, had only 20 people in intensive care suffering from covid-related illnesses. This is in a state of 6.35 million people that has 58 metropolitan hospitals and 69 rural hospitals and District Health services.

    Despite the ‘extraordinarily low’ incidence of people who were actually sick from Covid 19, the Victorian Premier decided that new case numbers (>100 per day) were just too high to tolerate anyone leaving their homes for any reason other than the four exemptions provided by the government.

    What he neglected to mention when insisting on preserving his lockdown was that most new cases are occurring in the under-30 age bracket: a demographic that is almost always asymptomatic to SARS CoV-2 and which has more chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident than of Covid19.

    Undeterred by inconvenient truths like this, the Premier announced he had to protect the public from the potentially catastrophic medical emergency that would doubtless result from masked people walking down St Kilda Road to the Cenotaph in a socially distanced manner, so he banned all participation in the national day of protest.

    Just days earlier the Assistant Police Commissioner for the North West Metro Region, Luke Cornelius, warned everyone in Victoria against participating in the Saturday protests. He referred to people who planned to protest against lockdowns as “boof heads”, calling them an “anti-vax, anti-mask, tinfoil hat-wearing brigade who were batshit crazy”.

    This oddly extreme language from one of the State’s most senior police officers is not accidental. It serves a specific purpose.

    In order to get ordinary well-adjusted police officers – who may have joined the force out of a desire to be of public service – to brutalize a population whose only crime is that they object to being locked in their homes for 23 hrs a day for months on end, you need to demonize dissent. If your officers on the ground can identify in any way with the people they are being told to terrorize, they might not follow orders.

    This is a perennial problem for martial leaders everywhere. It’s particularly problematic when the rules being enforced are arbitrary or unjust. Hence the need to malign.

    As Saturday rolled around, the police were out in force across Victoria on horseback with cuffs, batons, tasers and guns ready to intimidate, arrest and fine anyone unfortunate enough to attract their attention within the vicinity of a protest in any town in the State – even those towns where not a single case of Covid-19 has been recorded.

    And here we get to the crux of the SARS-CoV-2 scam. Sure, there’s a virus out there. It’s real and it certainly kills people but we know enough about it now to know that the draconian response taken by Premier Danial Andrews is scientifically indefensible. So why is he persisting with the lockdowns?

    My personal opinion is that the global program of lockdowns is a mechanism for reorganizing societies around the world along the lines of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset” agenda and all that this entails. It seems Daniel Andrews is fully on board with this agenda. But make no mistake, its coming to your state and country next.

    I believe that sustained lockdowns are a “Stanley Milgram-style” experiment designed to see just how far bureaucrats in authority will exceed the moral limits of their power and how much abuse the Australian public will tolerate before they push back.

    As part of this experiment, the algorithms that once monitored every nuance of our social media interactions to make frighteningly accurate predictions about us have been extended to track and predict our off-line experience as well. It should come as no surprise that both the Azure and AWS cloud eco-systems have expanded by 50% since the beginning of the pandemic.

    The purpose of all this surveillance is not to better understand us as potential marketing targets (the standard explanation) but rather to better control us as victims in a system of profound inequality. Such a system is already in place across much of the world and under the guise of a health pandemic, it is rapidly being expanded to developed countries as well.

    So far as I can see the whole experiment is going spectacularly well for the globalists, billionaires, and authoritarians, and very poorly for free citizens everywhere: mostly due to the effectiveness of media propaganda in driving public passivity.

    A SCIENTIFIC DICTATORSHIP

    Many medical practitioners are aware that Victoria’s management of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic is based on highly selective medical advice which doesn’t stand up to serious scientific scrutiny.

    Recently a group of doctors wrote an excellent letter to the Premier advocating an alternative response to disease management, noting that more than 41,000 people die every year in Victoria, roughly 10,000 each from cardiovascular disease and cancer, yet in 7 months of a supposed pandemic less than 600 Victorians have died of Covid-19: 90% of them over 65 years of age and most with multiple co-morbidities.

    The problem with the doctor’s alternative advice is that it assumes the government is merely mistaken or misinformed in its policymaking and implementation. The idea that the exercise of political power in Victoria has become pathological never seems to occur to them – despite a wealth of evidence supporting such a notion.

    When governments pass laws that are extreme or unjust or which by-pass constitutional constraints, it is rarely by accident. As doctors they ought to be the first to appreciate what a pathological exercise of power means to the cultural and institutional bonds that hold a society together:

    • As bio-security increasingly substitutes for health care, doctors will find that the personal confidences of their patients are no longer inviolate and that the Hippocratic obligations they once held so dear can be easily compromised by legal mandates to force-medicate people regardless of need or consequence.

    • When politicians rule by executive decree the police force morphs from a public service comprised of citizens in uniform to the enforcement arm of a political clique. When this happens, public trust in the police is lost and this loss of legitimacy results in a loss of respect. Eventually this loss of respect becomes mutual and the police start to despise the people they victimize and abuse the power they have. The opening quote being a perfect example.

    • Similarly with the military: when the exercise of our democratic rights is pathologized by those in power, our servicemen and women eventually find they’re being asked to apply, at home, the counter-insurgency training and urban warfare tactics they learned for battlefields abroad. This is something that has occurred since the time of Thucydides and it’s happening again.

    • Even the tools we use to make sense of the world, such as the scientific method, cease to function properly when our governments become toxic. Once everyone in a society has been force-vaccinated by government decree, it will become legally impossible to prove a link between mandated vaccines and any potential vaccine-related injury. Not because the manufacturers will have immunity from liability (they will), but because there will no longer be a non-vaccinated control group left against which randomized double-blind control studies can be conducted.

    Not one of these developments is accidental. All of them are known, predictable outcomes of policy decisions being taken today. And these policy decisions rob everyone of their integrity; health workers, academics, the police and the military.

    When those in power have a pathological relationship to the people they rule, you know you are on a road to perdition. We can see such a pathology evolving among our politicians most clearly in Victoria with its home invasions, curfews and lock downs but it is also evident in the overreach of governments around the country.

    Western Australia’s recent dispute with mining magnate, Clive Palmer, over the State’s Covid border closure is a case in point. According to the WA Law Society the Government’s anti-Palmer legislation violates several of the fundamental legal principles that underpin the rule of law in a civilized society. Such overreach is also apparent in the ASIO Amendment Act 2020, introduced into Federal Parliament by Peter Dutton in May this year – right at the height of the Covid panic while most members were not even in Canberra.

    This legislation is the latest in a succession of Bills that have been passed by our Federal government since 9/11 (85 and counting) which have vastly expanded the powers of law enforcement and security agencies in Australia while limiting public oversight. The legislation effectively criminalizes the free exercise of our basic democratic freedoms.

    The Dutton amendment extends powers normally applied to terrorists, to any group or person engaged in any kind of civil disobedience or protest that could possibly result in ‘politically motivated violence’. That would include the anti-lock down protests that I participated in last week.

    Among a raft of frightening provisions this bill allows police and intelligence agencies to track, apprehend and question children as young as 14 yrs of age as though they were terrorists. It suspends the rules of habeas corpus and allows the State to arbitrarily restrict a defendant’s access to legal representation.

    This is the sort of legislation you’d expect to find in China or Saudi Arabia, not Australia.

    The permanent changes to our society that are now in place in Australia following the SARS CoV-2 pandemic mean we qualify as proto-fascist State by any measure of political freedom. This thought is anathema to most Australians and would be vociferously denied by paid-off mainstream media pundits – but probably not constitutional lawyers – because the legislative reality is that we are now much closer to full-blooded fascism than we are to the liberal democracy that existed when I was born in 1963. And we are a very far cry from the nation our diggers returned to in 1945.

    The only way we will arrest and/or reverse this trend is if we all take direct, non-violent, physical (not digital) action to exercise our civic and democratic rights at every opportunity we can. The time to speak up and stand up is now. It will be too late tomorrow.

  • US Pushes Unprecedented 7 Major Weapons Systems Sales To Taiwan At Once
    US Pushes Unprecedented 7 Major Weapons Systems Sales To Taiwan At Once

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 21:10

    Despite Beijing’s threats centered on the ‘red line’ of the Taiwan issue, Washington only looks to ramp up its arms sales, which will no doubt earn more condemnations alleging violation of the ‘One China’ policy. 

    Reuters points out the US is content to further build up ‘Fortress Taiwan’ while “needling China” – as it “plans to sell as many as seven major weapons systems, including mines, cruise missiles and drones to Taiwan, four people familiar with the discussions said, as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on China.”

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    Via Asia Times: “Taiwan’s military will soon receive 18 MK-48 Mod 6 Advanced Technology Heavy Weight Torpedoes from the US to counter China’s rising threat.” Photo: US Navy

    The Trump administration is throwing caution to the wind, given the reality is that this many sales at once is “a rare departure from years of precedent in which U.S. military sales to the island were spaced out and carefully calibrated to minimize tensions with Beijing.”

    Here’s Taiwan’s shopping list, in various phases of passing US legal hurdles and discussions, according to the new Reuters report:

    • Drones that can see over the horizon for surveillance and targeting, coupled with advanced missiles and coastal defenses that include smart mines and anti-submarine capabilities to impede a sea invasion…
    • A Lockheed Martin-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), essentially a truck-based rocket launcher, is among the weapons Taiwan wants, people familiar with the negotiations said.
    • at least four large sophisticated aerial drones to Taiwan for what could be about $600 million.
    • under discussion are land-based Boeing-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles to serve as a coastal defense against cruise missiles.
    • Other systems include “underwater sea mines and other capabilities to deter amphibious landing, or immediate attack,” Taiwan’s de facto ambassador here to United States said in July.

    Anti-tank missile systems are also said to be under consideration, at a moment Chinese PLA naval and aerial drills near the island have been on the uptick.

    Beijing has repeatedly signaled that it considers reunification as a landmark mission and won’t stand idly by as external forces intervene in what it sees as inter-China affairs.

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    PLA fighters jets, via Xinhua

    And as South China Morning Post recently warned, “Unlike other areas of territorial contention, such as in the South China Sea, analysts say Beijing will show no flexibility on this issue and has not ruled out force to reunify Taiwan with the mainland.”

  • Dalio Sheds Light On Chinese Thinking On Trade Deal
    Dalio Sheds Light On Chinese Thinking On Trade Deal

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 20:50

    Authored by Ye Xie, Bloomberg macro commentator and analyst

    There were few surprises at the FOMC meeting as the Fed signaled it plans to leave rates near zero for at least three years, even as it upgraded growth forecasts. The fact that bond yields and the dollar erased earlier declines perhaps reflected the positioning of a minority of investors who were looking for more. In the bigger picture, though, the macro backdrop remains the same – accommodative monetary policy with continued economic recovery, coupled with both upside risks (a vaccine) and downside risks (fiscal, virus and the presidential election).

    In China, Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen said Beijing is “seriously” implementing the phase-one trade deal with the U.S. even as it faces difficulties caused by the pandemic and complexities in the relations between the two nations.

    So why does Beijing bother to stick to the deal when the conflicts extend everywhere from technology to human rights and capital markets?

    In a long article published this week to promote his upcoming book, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio shed some light on the thinking of Chinese policy makers: It’s really about avoiding a real war.

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    Dalio, who has connections with senior policy makers since the 1980s, recounted a meeting between him and China’s top negotiator Liu He during the first round of trade talks:

    “He explained that going into his meeting with Trump, he was concerned about how it would go, not because of the trade negotiations, which he was confident didn’t have any issues that couldn’t be worked out, but because he was concerned about the worst-case scenario where tit-for-tat escalations could get out of control and lead to more serious consequences.”

    China has long said that trade is the anchor for the Sino-U.S. relationship. Without it, relations could slip into a military confrontation. To Dalio, the U.S. conflicts with China rose in a way that was “analogous to the rise of Japan and Germany to challenge the then-existing powers in the 1930s,” which eventually led to World War II.

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    To some extent, the tension is inevitable, given the two sides’ different understandings of the role of the state in the economy. In fact, Dalio said he “would have done almost the exact same things as they did if I were in their shoes,” given the constraints China faces. He urges the U.S. to abandon the stereotype of “communist China” to really understand what Beijing is actually doing.

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    So where do we go from here? Dalio left his conclusion for the next chapter of his book. From what we’ve learned, though, he seems to believe that gold is something that one must have in the current chaotic global environment. After all, 12 of the past 16 global transitions of rival powers in the last 500 years ended in war, the ominous curse of the “Thucydides Trap.”

  • Hamas Rockets Rained Down On Southern Israel At Moment UAE Peace Deal Signed
    Hamas Rockets Rained Down On Southern Israel At Moment UAE Peace Deal Signed

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 20:30

    During the signing of the Abraham Accords Peace Agreement at the White House Tuesday, which is the first ever historic Treaty of Peace, Diplomatic Relations and Full Normalization Between the United Arab Emirates and the State of Israel, Hamas rockets rained down on communities in southern Israel. 

    “Thirteen people were injured after two rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip towards Ashkelon and Ashdod in southern Israel on Tuesday,” The Jerusalem Post reports. “Rocket sirens sounded as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed normalization deals with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. One of the rockets was intercepted by the IDF.”

    Israel was quick to respond in airstrikes overnight and into the early hours of Wednesday morning.

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    Israeli retaliatory airstrikes overnight, via Retuers.

    Considering that during past volleys of rocket fire out of the Gaza Strip, most projectiles fail to hit any target and instead fall into the desert, the high injury rate from Tuesday night’s attack points to most of these rockets striking residential areas in Israel. 

    Gaza’s Islamist armed factions confirmed the rocket fire was in response to the Israeli-UAE deal, which includes Bahrain as well, and had declared Tuesday a Palestinian “day of rage”:

    Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem responded to the normalization deals shortly after the rockets were fired from Gaza, saying that “the normalization agreements between the UAE and Bahrain with the Zionist entity are not worth the ink with which they were written – and our people, with their insistence on the struggle until the full recovery of their rights, will deal with these agreements as if they were non-existent,” according to Palestinian media.

    “A question to the United States of America, Israel, Bahrain and the UAE: Will the signing of the normalization agreement at the White House now prevent these missiles from leaving Gaza tonight to Israel?” asked senior Fatah official Monir al-Jaghoub in response to the deals and rocket fire. “Peace begins in Palestine and war begins in Palestine.”

    In the early hours of Wednesday morning the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed it responded by conducting at least ten air strikes on Hamas targets throughout the strip.

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    Hamas rockets continued just before dawn on Wednesday, and given the escalating tit-for-tat are likely to continue. 

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed retaliation and charged Hamas with attempting to “turn back the peace”. 

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    “I’m not surprised that the Palestinian terrorists fired at Israel precisely during this historic ceremony,” Netanyahu told reporters before leaving Washington where he had been personally presented a “key to the White House” by President Trump and the first lady after signing the Abraham Accords.

    “They want to turn back the peace. In that, they will not succeed,” he added. “We will strike at all those who raise a hand to harm us, and we will reach out to all those who extend the hand of peace to us.”

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    However, Palestinian leadership considers that it’s being sold out by the Arab gulf states which in past decades have resisted Israeli expansion.

  • "The Virus Isn't Going Away… Campuses Need To Reopen", Northeastern Uni President Warns
    “The Virus Isn’t Going Away… Campuses Need To Reopen”, Northeastern Uni President Warns

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 20:10

    Authored by Leana Dippie via Campus Reform,

    With many colleges and universities across the country shifting to remote learning for the fall semester, and even the spring semester, one college president is arguing that campuses need to reopen.

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    Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University in Boston wrote in a Washington Post op-ed titled, “The virus isn’t going away. That’s why campuses need to reopen,” that he believes schools need to reopen, and explained why he himself worked tirelessly to ensure Northeastern students could return to their classrooms this fall.

    He argues that the coronavirus is going to be a constant threat, and states that the world cannot hit the pause button.

    “The pandemic, we realized, is going to be endemic: an ongoing threat to manage, not a brief blip in history, cleanly wiped out by a miracle vaccine. The science will take time. But the world cannot,” Aoun explains after consulting with various epidemiologists, biologists, and scientists from the Northeastern faculty.

    “Manufacturing enough doses to vaccinate the entire country, let alone the world, will take many months. And we don’t yet know the strength and duration of the immunity that will be conferred, making it likely that the world will experience covid-19 outbreaks, albeit at lower levels, for years,” Aoun continued.

    Auon states that the coronavirus will likely be a “four-to-five-year problem” and explains that putting a pause on in-person learning would “be devastating to colleges and their students.”

    “This will likely make COVID-19 at least a four-to-five-year problem, epidemiologists say. Pausing in-person education that long would be devastating to colleges and their students. And even a one-year delay would be a substantial challenge.

    It would disproportionately hurt low-income students who spent the spring continuing their studies online, without adequate technology, sometimes in overcrowded and even traumatic living conditions. And it would impair universities’ ability to discover solutions that would make the world safer — from this pandemic, and from ones that are yet to come.”

    Campus Reform reached out to Northeastern students to get their takes on Aoun’s stance.

    One student, Tess Dufour, a sophomore at Northeastern told Campus reform that she “absolutely” agrees with her university president.

    “I absolutely agree with his push to reopen,” Dufour said.

    “I agree with the principle that this is an ‘endemic’ virus that will not be erased within one year. I acknowledge how serious and high risk the coronavirus is, however, I also acknowledge the importance of college students being able to thrive within a new normal. We have the benefit of seeing other colleges go back before us. We have learned from their mistakes and plan to handle this pandemic way better.”

    Bernardo Costa is an international student about to embark on his second year at Northeastern.

    When asked whether he agrees with Aoun’s push to reopen schools this fall, he said that international students are disadvantaged by remote learning, stating that if they stay home, they risk losing their visas.

    “Many international students have worked their whole lives towards studying in the U.S. Taking classes at home could be a very big time difference for them. Many times they cannot watch the classes live and it hurts their academic performance. We also risk losing visas, scholarships, and things like that.”

    “These are things we can’t afford to lose,” Bernardo continued.

    “By reopening campuses, they’re giving people a choice on whether they’d prefer to come back and continue their educational journey where they intended to be from the beginning – in the United States.”

  • "Where Are The Police?" After Voting To Defund Cops, Minneapolis City Council Baffled Over Recent Crime Wave
    “Where Are The Police?” After Voting To Defund Cops, Minneapolis City Council Baffled Over Recent Crime Wave

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 19:50

    In the wake of George Floyd’s death while in the custody of the Minneapolis police, the city council – nearly all Democrats, made the brilliant decision to defund the city’s police department and embark on a “police-free future.“

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    Minneapolis City Council

    “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” tweeted Council Member Jeremiah Ellison on June 4, pledging to “dramatically rethink” the city’s approach to emergency response.

    Now, via The Blaze, a development that we promise isn’t from the Babylon Bee: Minneapolis lawmakers are baffled over the recent crime wave sweeping the city.

    “During a two-hour meeting with Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo this week, the Democratic city council, in brazen fashion, demanded to know why city police are not responding to the violence with enhanced law enforcement measures,” Writes Chris Enloe.

    From Minnesota Public Radio:

    The number of reported violent crimes, like assaults, robberies and homicides are up compared to 2019, according to MPD crime data. More people have been killed in the city in the first nine months of 2020 than were slain in all of last year. Property crimes, like burglaries and auto thefts, are also up. Incidents of arson have increased 55 percent over the total at this point in 2019.

    “Residents are asking, ‘Where are the police?‘” Councilman Jamal Osman said, MPR reported. “That is the only public safety option they have at the moment. MPD. They rely on MPD. And they are saying they are nowhere to be seen.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAnti-police Council President Lisa Bender claims the cops are being “defiant,” adding “This is not new.”

    Democratic council member Phillipe Cunningham called out his colleagues for their hypocrisy.

    “What I am sort of flabbergasted by right now is colleagues, who a very short time ago were calling for abolition, are now suggesting we should be putting more resources and funding into MPD,” he said.

    Police Chief Arradondo insisted that Minneapolis PD has taken measures to combat the crime wave, such as adding more officers to patrols, devoting additional resources to investigative duties, and discussing the spike in crime with department leadership.

    That said, over 100 officers have left the department this year, over double the typical number.

    What did they expect?

  • The Portland Riots Just Stopped… Why?
    The Portland Riots Just Stopped… Why?

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 19:30

    Authored by Victoria Taft via PJMedia.com,

    Have Portland’s Professional Protesters™ been smoked out?

    Since May 29th, Portland has been the back drop of more than 100 nights of antifa, anarchist and Black Lives Matter, Inc™ terroristic riots. They set fires, looted, and intimidated people by threatening to burn them alive in their homes.

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    But after the millions of dollars of destruction, criminality and thuggery it stopped last week. Poof!

    Why?

    I certainly don’t want to tempt these thugs, but it can’t go without saying that Portland’s 100 plus days of riots appeared to end after Wednesday, September 9th.

    That was the last time the Portland Police Bureau warned about protests.

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    The usual live-streamers decamped to other riots and fires.

    By September 10th, the overworked cops from Portland Police Bureau were offered out to assist other agencies. Suddenly, instead of being required to work the riots lines, they were free.

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    Why?

    On September 7th to the morning of the 8th, the Pacific Northwest experienced a major “wind event.” Winds gusted through Oregon and Washington at more than 60 miles per hour. Fires that had been allowed to crackle along, such as the Beachie fire, flared up. Power lines were downed. The fires kicked up.

    And then came the reports.

    Clackamas County Sheriff’s officials reported that people had seen antifa protester types reportedly stashing gas cans, looting, and looking ridiculously out of place. They were taking pictures and giving locals grief for trying to keep them out of closed neighborhoods. Locals wondered if there was a connection between the fires and the sightings of these folks.

    BLM was seen there. The original BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, not the group that borrowed the acronym.

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    And just as suddenly, such sightings and reports were dismissed as rumors and lies. Myriad law enforcement agencies begged people to stop sharing such stories, as I reported on PJMedia.

    I reached out to the Portland Police Bureau for a comment on the lag in riots, but didn’t receive a reply before publication.

    Riot-weary Oregonians aren’t necessarily mollified by the concerted effort to shut down these reports. Until last Wednesday night, they’d seen the antifa rioters and arsonists in action on the news every night in Portland. And now some of them swore they saw those people in Estacada, Sandy, Molalla and other parts of the burning Clackamas County.

    Indeed, documents from the Department of Homeland Security show that whatever antifa rioters are doing, they’re doing in concert, organizing with other like-minded people.

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    The internal document leaked yesterday from the Department of Homeland Security reads:

    According to this @DHSgov internal email, obtained @CBSNews, former Acting Under Secretary for Intelligence & Analysis Brian Murphy wrote colleagues on July 25th that the Portland violence was not “opportunistic” but “organized” citing “Anarchists or Antifa”

    “We can’t say any longer that this violent situation is opportunistic. Additionally, we have overwhelmingly(sic) intelligence regarding the ideologies driving individuals toward violence + why the violence has continued.

    A core set of Threat actors are organized and show up night after night, and share common TTPs (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures).. Threat actors who are motivated by Anarchists or ANTIFA (or a combination of both) ideologies to carry out acts of violence against State, Local and Federal authorities..”

    They’re organized, share the same tactics and talk to each other. Why are they so quiet right now?

    Oregonians might well wonder that these “threat actors” are doing their arsons in the tinder dry woodlands of the state instead of nearby downtown Portland.

    The riots have stopped. Did they go to San Francisco or Lancaster, Pennsylvania to raise hell? Did they stop because of the smokey skies and air quality numbers that are off the charts?

    It seems unlikely that a group that spawned a murderer, multiple arsonists and police assaulters would be dissuaded by smoky quality air.

    Is it because the media are busy covering the wildfires and there’s nothing in rioting for the terrorists? Or is it because of something else?

    The riots are over for now. Why?

  • Trump Opposes TikTok-Oracle Deal, Demands Majority US Ownership
    Trump Opposes TikTok-Oracle Deal, Demands Majority US Ownership

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/16/2020 – 19:10

    Update (1900ET): Trump said during Wednesday’s meandering, impromptu press briefing that he won’t make a decision on the TikTok-Oracle deal until Thursday, following a briefing on the subject. CFIUS has reportedly finished its review, but it’s waiting on the president to make a decision.

    WSJ followed up the Bloomberg reported noted earlier with a more comprehensive report of where things stand. The central conflict is that a group of China hawks are demanding that Oracle and the other US investors in the deal walk away with at least a majority combined stake, to ensure that ByteDance (and, by extension, Beijing) can’t install any “backdoors” or otherwise make the company’s data accessible to Beijing.

    Reports claim that the two sides are working to hash out a deal whereby the new entity would include all of TikTok’s assets, including its “golden goose” algorithm. This would in theory make it easier for Oracle to monitor all of TikTok’s network while also handling most of its IT infrastructure. This would ideally act as a safeguard against Beijing getting its hands on the data.

    Of course, one can never completely eliminate that risk.

    After days earlier expressing his appreciation for Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Trump told reporters Wednesday evening that he’s not comfortable with the deal as it stands.

    “Conceptually, I can tell you, I don’t like that,”\” he said, adding that he had not been briefed on that element of the deal.

    While the Trump Administration officials quoted anonymously in the WSJ’s report projected optimism about the deal, they ultimately offered no plan for winning the approval of Chinese regulators, which have said they would rather see TikTok shuttered than be coerced into selling.

    The deadline is Sept. 20, so we have until the end of the weekend for the two sides to work out another stop-gap “deal”, only for everything to fall apart again once it’s blocked by Beijing.

    * * *

    Update (1730ET): New details about the new ByteDance and Oracle-backed, US-headquartered newly independent TikTok have emerged in the latest Bloomberg report, as the administration scrambles to try and convince or mollify a group of GOP senators who remain suspect of ByteDance’s majority control of the new venture.

    Over the past few hours, Sen. Ted Cruz has joined Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley and others in opposing the deal, penning his own letter claiming that any deal that doesn’t 100% address national security concerns should be rejected.

    2020.09.15 — TikTok Letter Final – FSV PDF by Zerohedge on Scribd

    Complaints about Oracle not having access to TikTok’s core algorithm have metastasized into concerns that ByteDance will leave Oracle in the dark. However, Bloomberg is reporting that Oracle will have complete access to TikTok’s source code as part of the deal. Specifically, the report adds more context on the meaning of the phrase “trusted security partner,” one of the initial complaints from Hawley & Co. Trump added that he “doesn’t like” that Oracle won’t be outright buying the US business, something that Beijing would prohibit.

    Oracle Corp. will get full access to TikTok’s source code and updates to make sure there are no back doors used by the company’s Chinese parent to access data on the video-sharing app’s 100 million American users, according to terms of a proposed deal submitted to the U.S. government over the weekend and reviewed by Bloomberg.

    The new details of the deal with TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. shed light on what the companies and security officials mean when they call Oracle a “trusted technology partner,” which goes beyond just housing data inside Oracle’s U.S. cloud servers, according to people with knowledge of the terms, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

    Oracle will be able to check all source code from the algorithms that decide which videos get shown to which users to ensure there are no back doors and will be able to continue to review the technology as updates come in to make sure there are no new points of access, the people said.

    Commenting on the administration’s internal talks, CNBC’s Kayla Tausche said it’s believed that Trump and Mnuchin support the deal, while Pompeo, Barr and the GOP senators – among others, like Peter Navarro – have continued to harp on the national security issue.

    President Trump said during a press briefing Wednesday evening that the deal needs to be “100%” and that there will be more information Thursday morning. Though that doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that CFIUS’s decision could leak tonight. Trump also said there’s no way to “guarantee” that money from TikTok will pay off the Treasury.

    * * *

    Hours after former presidential candidate Marco Rubio came out against the new TikTok-Oracle deal, which would spin off TikTok into a US-headquartered independent company majority owned by ByteDance, with Oracle holding a major stake and a contract to supervise the hosting and back-end technology while ByteDance continues to manage TikTok “at arm’s length.”

    Earlier, a senior reporter from Fox Business said the deal was on track to be approved by CFIUS, the Commerce Department board that reviews deals for national-security concerns. After their initial proposal faced pushback, Oracle and ByteDance worked with the administration to devise the new deal, which was unveiled on Monday. Despite some complaints about ByteDance retaining majority control, the deal appeared set to sail through.

    However, Marco Rubio came out against the deal a few hours ago. Now, Bloomberg is reporting that the deal is now facing opposition from a group of GOP senators led by Rubio , a group who have presumably been lobbying CFIUS and Trump.

    Per Bloomberg, several high-ranking officials, including Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, are now concerned that after a potential transaction, TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance could still access user data from its 100 million or so users in the US, its sources claimed. 

    Oracle Corp.’s bid for TikTok falls short of resolving concerns of Trump administration officials that the Chinese-owned video-sharing app poses a risk to U.S. national security, according to people familiar with the matter. President Donald Trump has the authority to sign off on a deal, but continuing concerns from national security officials could sway his decision. The agreement remains on the table, with discussions continuing between administration officials and the companies, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks are confidential. Addressing those remaining issues could pave the way for U.S. approval, the people said.

    Many remain wary of the new ownership structure, which Rubio and Sen Josh Hawley have criticized for ceding too much control to ByteDance, Of course, anything less would likely be unpalatable for Beijing.

    Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and AG Barr are also examining the deal. Both have some say in the final decision, since both of their departments are part of CFIUS. While Mnuchin has reportedly reviewed the deal, Barr hasn’t yet had the time. Officials first expressed their doubts to CFIUS Tuesday night, and the committee is expected to meet again on Wednesday.

    We’re still waiting on the final word from CFIUS, but if the past is any guide, a rejection would no longer come as a surprise.

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