- The Price Of Empire
Authored by Umair Haque via Eudaimonia & Co,
Why America and Britain Are Self-Destructing (And What the World Can Learn From it)
It’s a striking fact of today’s world that the two rich societies in shocking, swift, sharp decline are America and Britain. Nowhere else in the world, for example, are real income, life expectancy, happiness, and trust all plummeting, apart from maybe Venezuela (No, “but at least we’re not Venezuela!” is not the bar to aim for, my friends.)
Their downfall is, of course, a self-inflicted catastrophe. But the interesting question is: why? And what does it tell us about what it takes to prosper and thrive in the 21st century, which is something that America and Britain clearly aren’t doing, and maybe aren’t capable of doing?
Here’s an equally curious observation. America and Britain aren’t just any countries. They are the former hegemons of the world’s most powerful empires. Britain, until the first half of the 20th century, and America, picking up where Britain left off. Is this just a strange cosmic coincidence — that it is the two greatest empires of the most recent past who are the ones seemingly most incapable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century? There aren’t coincidences that great, my friends. Such tides of history always whisper lessons to be learned. What is this one trying to urgently teach us?
That there is a price to empire. A grave and ruinous one. And that price has grown over the centuries – so high that now, it is not worth paying anymore.
Let me explain what I mean — because it is not just about spending too much money and grasping too high. Not at all. It is about the kind of a place and people such a country ends up limited to being — and perhaps can then never really easily outgrow.
To be a great empire, you must also be a certain kind of culture, society, place— a people with a certain set of values, a certain kind of attitudes. You must cherish control and prize possession over humanity and empathy and wisdom. You must value brutal competition above all else — and train your children to be little warriors, basically, whether tossing them into seas, like Spartans, or making them do “active shooter drills.” You must be domineering and controlling and vengeful, feared, not loved — you must come to prize anger and rage as the only true or worthy emotions in life, not, say, intelligence gentleness, kindness, or happiness. The primary objective of your institutions, the aspiration of your best and brightest, must be subjugating others, instead of lifting them up — after all, empires are made of subjects, not equals. You must instill in people an admiration for violence — since empires are run with bullets, whether fired from drones or armies. Your science and art and so forth must be dedicated, fundamentally, to the proposition that somehow, you are the natural masters of the world which is your dominion — no matter how they claim to admire freedom and equality and truth. You cannot plan for any kind of long term good — your primary motive is simply to acquire, colonize, plunder, take the next possession.
In other words, to be an empire, you must cultivate the qualities of cruelty, of selfishness, of greed, of tribalism, socially. Of materialism and acquisitiveness and conformity to greed and selfishness, mentally. You must encourage the rise of supremacy and triumphalism and bigotry and misogyny, culturally. You must attach to all human life just one purpose: not happiness, or belonging, or the growth of meaning and purpose, but material gain, whether it’s measured in colonies, protectorates, slaves, bodies, or GDP. Thus, the overarching organizing principle of your entire empire must be just this: the strong survive, and the weak perish. Everyone — even the weak — must come to buy into this principle, treasure it, cheer it, applaud it — even when they themselves are the ones being destroyed. Just think of how Donald Trump embodies all those values to a comical, disgusting degree.
How else are you to run an empire? How else are you to convince people to go out there and conquer the world for you — instead of happily tilling their fields and loving their children, taking fields and children from others? You can’t do it without accomplishing most or all of the above. Every empire from Rome to Egypt to America to Britain has needed to build these ramparts and beams of the human mind and spirit to be an empire. Empires are Darwinian things, little pecking orders of humanity — what they are not is democracies, really, though they might be so in name, they cannot be in spirit, in intellect, in sentiment, in truth.
Now. Let’s observe the state of America and Britain today — and then connect the dots. What’s really curious about them? Just think of Trumpism and Brexit as you read the next paragraph.
These are societies which cannot brook the idea of being equals with any other. Isn’t that Trumpism and Brexit are really about — we must be number one? They are societies which cannot cooperate with any other — or even cooperate amongst themselves. They are societies which cannot plan for the long term. Societies which seem to revel in both their cruelty and their ignorance, while the world looks on, aghast. They prefer being Darwinian places to being humane ones. They would rather build walls than build schools and hospitals, minds and bodies. They are societies which cannot tolerate the idea that they do not still reign supreme — and the moment their supremacy is threatened, bang! They lash out even at their closest neighbours, allies, friends, and partners.
Don’t these two lists seem weirdly, eerily, strikingly similar to you — the list of the qualities it takes to be an empire, and the list of savage, intractable problems afflicting Britain and America, which have caused them to crater into extreme ruin? That’s not a coincidence either. It is cause and effect. Let me put that more clearly.
America and Britain built the world’s two biggest, most powerful empires — ever, period. Sure, America didn’t call countries it’s colonies — it said (LOL) that it “liberated” them. What that means is that they effectively became colonies of American style predatory capitalism (take a look at Puerto Rico — or Iraq.) Just a century ago, half the world was a British colony — I don’t need to tell you that story.
Now, the problem with a colonial mentality, attitude, society, way of life is this. What happens when you run out of stuff to colonize? After all, sooner or later, you’re going to run out of tempting frontiers, helpless savages, Manhattans to trade for beads, fish in the ocean, and so on, right? That day might seem a long way away — but it has to come, after all. Well, then, my friends, you are screwed — if you can’t give up the colonial mindset, then you will have to colonize yourself. What do I mean by this curious phrase, “colonize yourself”? I mean that you will have to exploit your own people the very same way that you exploited others before. You will have to teach them to exploit each other, just the same way that they once exploited poorer people of different “colors” and creeds, when there are no more of those strangers in new frontiers left to conquer, no more fresh mountains left to plunder.
And that is exactly what happened in America and Britain. It’s most obvious in America. When there was no one else left to exploit — first it was slaves, then it was subhuman blacks kept segregated, then it was various countries who were “liberated” by war for their oil and cheap labour — bang! Americans were told to turn on themselves. They obeyed. What else did they know? That is what they’d been told all their lives — that this mindset of exploitation and violence is good. So off the American went to work as a manager at an HMO, where his job was to deny people healthcare, or as a minor-league corporate droid, where his job was to find cleverer ways to jack up profits he never even saw a larger share of.
(It happened in Britain, too — only in a roundabout way. Though Britain tried to overcome empire’s hangover, by building great public institutions, like the NHS, in the end, the values of greed and selfishness and hate, the need to be supreme, won out. But all that meant was that Brits began to exploit each other. That is not just what Brexit clearly shows — but its root causes, Brits getting poorer for a decade or two, as they turned on each other.)
The lesson is as simple as it is crystal clear. Empires require colonial mindsets. Attitudes of materialism, selfishness, greed, cruelty, domination. But what happens an empire runs out of things to colonize? Do you see any countries in the world left to colonize easily? I don’t. What happens when a country that used to be an empire runs out of things to colonize is this: it colonizes itself. Bang! That is the story of American collapse and Britain’s stunning decline in one sentence.
You see, giving up something like a colonial mindset is not easy. It is addictive, just like any easy pleasure. It’s much easier to suppose that my prosperity comes from taking yours, at the point of a gun — whether or not I call it “liberation” — than it does from recognizing you as a human being, doing the hard work of lifting you up.
But the truth is that is precisely where prosperity comes from: me lifting you up. Not me colonizing you. That is the greatest lesson of the 20th century. How do we know? From the nations which truly turned their backs on empire. Many other nations had empires, too — just not ones as great and strong. So perhaps they were easier to let go of. Or perhaps it was the great war and its horrors which taught them the lesson better. Still, nations like France, Germany, and Spain did a better job of letting the colonialist mindset go. After the war, Europe tried hard to build a new continent on a new attitude — wealth would not come from seizing it from others anymore, but from cooperating to lift one another up. What had the road of seizing wealth, life, prosperity from others ended in after all — but horror and ruin?
But English speaking societies, it seems, never learned this lesson. There are days I wonder if they can. They are too wedded to their colonial mindset — attitudes of supremacy, of being-number-one, of not being able to treat anyone else as an equal, of an inability to cooperate, of anger as the primary emotion in life — to make any progress now, it seems to me. The English speaking countries probably won’t lead the world in the 21st century. That shouldn’t be controversial. They can barely manage themselves at this point. But the lesson, I think, cuts deep and true.
The price of empire is that maturity, psychologically, socially, economically, culturally, becomes harder and harder, every day. Maturity beyond what, exactly? Beyond violence. Beyond stupidity. Beyond greed and selfishness and cruelty. You see, the Anglos of the world have never given up their strange love of and lust for all these things — whether it comes in the form of suddenly insulting their neighbours, building walls, starting needless wars, whether wars of trade or wars fought with missiles, drone-bombing children to death, or the subtler violence and greed of people taking their neighbours’ healthcare and jobs and savings away.
But violence and greed and cruelty cannot lead anyone anymore to prosperity in the 21st century. There is nobody left to colonize and exploit left but yourself, your very own society, in a world which is out of easy frontiers and helpless peoples. Nobody’s trading Manhattans for beads anymore, are they? And so violence and greed is only left in one form: self-destruction. Funnily, ironically, foolishly, tragically, the only choice that English speaking world seem able to make anymore is self-destruction — because the problem is that empire’s price is an addiction to ruin in the first place, but in the end, there is no one to ruin but yourself.
- Army Struggles To Reach Generation Z, Tries Recruiting At Video Game Tournaments
Army recruiters are having a challenging time convincing Americans born between 1995 and 2005 to sign up and serve. The situation is so dire that Army Recruiting Command has turned to e-Sports video game tournaments.
“It is incredible, the amount of coverage that you get and the amount of the Z Gens that are watching these games,” Gen. Frank Muth, the head of Army Recruiting Command, told NPR.
Sponsoring video game tournaments is an effort to boost recruitment after the Army fell short of its 76,500 recruitment goal by 6,500 people last year.
“Calling the Z generation on the phone doesn’t work anymore,” Gen. Muth told NPR. “We’re really giving the power back to our recruiters to go on Twitter, to go on Twitch, to go on Instagram, and use that as a venue to start a dialogue with the Z generation.”
NPR noted that a recent e-Sports tournament featured an Army recruiter as an announcer and went viral with more than 2 million views, adding that “Half [the views] were from people aged 17 to 24.”
To further implement the strategy, the Army is now screening more than 4,000 applications from soldiers who want to play video games.
Army Recruiting Command will select 30 of the service’s top gamers to be on the new Army e-Sports Team to compete in national gaming tournaments.
Generation Z soldiers are part of this subculture, according to Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Jones, a noncommissioned officer overseeing the Army e-sports Team.
“Soldiers are showing a want and desire to not only play gaming … but also be in competitive gaming, and we understand that is a really good connection to our target market,” he said.
“These soldiers will actually be hand-selected, so what we are doing is grouping them together and — based upon the title and platform that they wish to compete in — having them scrimmage within those groups to find out who are the best we have.”
Part of the screening process will include ensuring that candidates also meet Army physical fitness, height, and weight standards.
“Those soldiers will be screened from there to make sure that not only can they compete, but [they] are the top-quality soldier that we are looking for in order to move here to Knox to compete,” Sgt. Jones said.
“We want those soldiers, when they go to these events, to be able to articulate to the public.”
The team of Army gamers will serve on 36-month rotations at Fort Knox and travel to tournaments around the country, supporting the Army’s recruitment efforts at gaming events.
Gen. Muth is not sure that the Army can hit its recruitment goals for 2019. He told NPR, the e-Sports strategy could be the key to unlocking a new wave of future soldiers.
However, there is a problem: “Health-Risk Correlates of Video-Game Playing Among Adults” study shows that video gamers in America are overweight and depressed. It seems that the Army’s strategy in recruiting the younger generation at gaming events could backfire.
- Crypto Credibility (& Why Gold Makes Sense For Russia)
Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,
Last Monday, there was a striking headline in the Daily Telegraph: “Russia looks to bitcoin to soften effects of US Sanctions”. The immediate impact on bitcoin’s price was minimal, though it did rise 4.2% later in the day, after Zerohedge picked up the story.
The Telegraph’s source seemed credible. Vladislav Ginko is an economist at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, which is the training ground for Russia’s political and administrative elite, a Russian equivalent of France’s École Nationale d’Adminstration.Professor Ginko appears to be a firm believer in bitcoin and its technology, and he seems well-connected. But it is not a brand-new story. Earlier this month he tweeted the following:
However, Professor Ginko perhaps should not be taken too seriously, being either a conspiracy theorist or perhaps a joker, as the following more recent tweet reveals:
Putting this bizarre allegation to one side, he has reminded us that President Putin has expressed an interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. The point missed in Professor Ginko’s tweets is that one way to destabilise the dollar would be to encourage a new bull market in cryptocurrencies, which could be the strategic logic behind a Russian move. It is not, as implied by Professor Ginko, that bitcoin is about to take its place alongside Western currencies in Russia’s currency reserves. Furthermore, the idea that Russia is seriously considering adding $10bn of bitcoin to reserves does not ring true, given it would be more likely to quietly accumulate them first instead of boasting about an intention and paying higher prices.
It may be just coincidence, but bitcoin’s vicious bear market broadly coincided with the US dollar’s recovery, which commenced only a month after bitcoin’s peak in December 2017. Recently, the dollar has shown signs of entering a new bear phase, in which case a negative correlation suggests bitcoin might begin to recover, and with other credible cryptocurrencies become to be seen as an alternative to the king of fiat.
Cryptocurrencies have disappeared from most people’s radar screens. While public attention has drifted elsewhere, it is clear that professionals are still working on solutions to identify and control risks at a time of market quietness. These are the generic market conditions usually identified with the prospect of a renewed bull phase.
Crypto criminal cleansing continues
For the moment, it might too early to expect cryptocurrencies to be ready for a lasting revival. The 2017 bull market blow-off exposed excessive greed, signalling the start of a probable multi-year bear market, or even the end of the entire phenomenon. Over a thousand cryptocurrencies were in existence by early 2018, issued mostly by wannabe Satoshis. Today it is estimated there are over 1,600.
In recent years exchanges and other service providers have been closed amid accusations of fraud and money-laundering. Freedom from national boundaries and the laws that go with them have undoubtedly contributed to criminal activity both real and imagined. On Monday this week, SlowMist, a Chinese-based blockchain security firm, reported suspected money-laundering in ethereum classic (ETC), in its newsfeed reproduced below:
ETC Network Is Abnormal, Large Transactions Suspected of Money Laundering 0735
Monitored by China-based blockchain security firm SlowMist, there was a large amount of abnormal miners’ rewards on the ETC public chain in the early morning of Jan 14 (UTC+8). Further analysis revealed that the abnormal rewards resulted from the address starting with 0xb71ee622 that holds approximately 72,383 ETC. The address paid a huge transaction fee for a large number of transactions, and the large amount of high fees were taken by the miner’s address starting with 0x00473. The miner transferred out the mining revenue in real time, which is suspected of money laundering.
The previous week, SlowMist got to the bottom of a rollback attack on ETC. Hackers deploy a rollback attack by resetting protocols to an earlier point in time, so they can alter a blockchain’s transaction history to clone cryptocurrency. SlowMist identified the exchanges involved and all of them have now returned the extra ETC, as declared in the following tweet on Wednesday, 16 January:
It is worth noting that the detectives in this story are China-based, which illustrates how markets left to their own devices lead to responsible cooperative behaviour, irrespective of nationality and national boundaries. You won’t hear this from governments, for whom this invisible hand of market forces is inexplicable and not to be trusted.
As well as rollbacks, there are other attack categories against which service providers have to be vigilant. And even though they continue, developers and service providers are getting better at recognising and preventing them. Clearly, it is a process that still has some way to go, but it appears that the cryptocurrency community is beginning to regulate itself effectively.
Consequently, there is likely to be growing institutional confidence in both cryptocurrency technology and in the leading cryptocurrencies themselves. We can therefore expect renewed attempts to package cryptocurrencies into regulated investment vehicles, pressure regulators will find increasingly difficult to resist, so that investing institutions can invest.
Defining cryptocurrencies and their role as currency
There is a continuing debate about whether cryptocurrencies are a form of money, so it is important to put them in their financial context and establish their function.
Money and the currency which represents it are mediums of payment that allow a business and people to turn their production output into the goods and services they need and desire. A common money or form of currency has to be accepted by everyone with whom the individual is likely to transact directly and indirectly. It must be stable in value, so that decisions on prices paid and received are confined to changes from the goods and services side of a transaction. In other words, money must have a common objective value which goes unquestioned between transacting parties, so that all else in a price is subjective.
The choice of currency is down to transacting individuals, whether it be crypto or fiat. Fiat currencies are accepted by us in our relevant jurisdictions because we are commanded to use it by our governments. We comply because of the convenience a state currency offers, but ultimately the decision to use it and the exchange value we put on it is a collective choice. Cryptocurrencies share this theoretical standing as fiat currencies, except that they do not have government backing and are not normally used to settle transactions in goods and services. It is on these two points that many dismiss the status of cryptocurrencies as a representation of money, as well as being too volatile to have that important objective value. But before dismissing it on these grounds we should note that there can be as much volatility in fiat, as users of Turkish rials, Indonesian rupiahs and others will attest; it just happens the volatility in fiat tends to be in a negative direction.
These considerations apply only to settling transactions in goods and services. A different case is the use of fiat currency as a counterpart to financial investment, where the objective is not to use it to facilitate consumption, but to convert the investment back to the original currency at a later date. This has led some investors to argue that cash should be regarded as a portfolio asset, having strategic value just like any investment allocation. In this respect, we can see both crypto and fiat can be regarded as ranking assets for investment purposes. All that is required for this to materialise is a loss of confidence in fiat relative to crypto for investors to accept crypto as a money-substitute for fiat.
We can take the comparison of cryptocurrencies with the status of fiat currency even further. As investors, we look at foreign-issued fiat money as a potential investment. Selling dollars for Swiss francs is with a profit in mind, a transaction to be valued in dollars and reversed at a later date, unless you intend to go to Switzerland to spend your francs. For the purpose of currency speculation, in this context a cryptocurrency is obviously an alternative that ranks with fiat.
The limitations on the future issue of a cryptocurrency that requires to be mined contrasts with the open-ended expansion of fiat currencies, and so purely on the difference in their individual rates of expansion they have the potential to drive cryptocurrencies priced in fiat relatively higher over time. The caveat which must not be neglected is that it assumes there is no change in relative confidence, because both state-issued currencies and cryptocurrencies are backed by nothing else.
Lastly, the rapid increase in the number of cryptocurrencies might at first sight constitute supply. This has not turned out to be the case, because confidence in future values has been restricted to those with an established history. There can be ten thousand different cryptocurrencies, but public acceptability will remain confined to very few.
Fundamentally, there is much in common between fiat and crypto, and to the extent that the central bankers issuing fiat currency understand it, they should be alarmed at the potential consequences. So far, most central banks have ducked this issue. The only governments that are interested in crypto are either ones that have destroyed their own monetary credibility, such as Venezuela, or those who might consider strategic benefits, such as Russia. And this is why Professor Ginko’s tweets are thought-provoking.
Could it be that President Putin thinks he has found a way to destroy the dollar? If so, he must be taking an iconoclastic view, because it will also need a systemic crisis to undermine faith in the dollar in order to trigger a widespread flight out it into cryptocurrencies.
Gold makes more sense for Russia
President Putin seems unlikely to indulge in cryptocurrency fairy tales. Instead, through Russia’s central bank he is building gold reserves in partnership with a number of important Asian governments. The geopolitical sense in this strategy is that Russia wants to replace the dollar and the currencies tied to it and instead accept hard, incorruptible money for its energy exports. Gold has been suppressed by the US Government’s long-standing denials that it is money, preferring to promote their fiat dollar instead. Gold priced in dollars is therefore cheap and an opportunity for Russia.
Gold’s durability as a medium of exchange establishes it as true money, whereas crypto and fiat are mere currency, that is to say they only pretend to be true money. Early cryptocurrency enthusiasts claimed that bitcoin and others were a modern replacement for gold, based on similar supply characteristics and the requirement to be “mined”. What they omitted to tell us was that without demand for cryptocurrencies, they are valueless, whereas if gold for the first time in the history of money became universally rejected as money, it still retains value for other uses.
It is those other uses, coupled with its incorruptible characteristics that marks out gold from all forms of ethereal currency. But in this confusing world of what constitutes money and currencies, few Westerners seem to understand that gold is the money. Instead, they regard it as an investment, offering protection in uncertain times.
This is a mistake. The purpose of an investment is profit. Investment is undertaken in anticipation of final values and their realisation in the underlying units of account. That is what a buyer of shares in gold mines and gold derivatives does. A buyer of physical gold buys it because he or she is disposing of inferior currency as a store of value.
This is why gold has remained the true money for millennia. Fiat currencies are probably on the path that ends in their final oblivion, a journey that has lasted only a century. Cryptocurrencies in the context of time are ephemera which will enjoy only a brief existence before oblivion.
For those of us that have taken the trouble to understand money, we can see that cryptocurrencies have the potential to evolve into the biggest bubble of all time and on a global scale, fuelled by the excesses of fiat issuance, past and future. Only time will tell if it happens, but if a cryptocurrency bubble really gets going, it could accelerate a move out of fiat currencies, undermining the public’s relative preferences that give fiat its credibility. Logically, cryptocurrencies have the alarming potential to kill fiat currencies stone dead.
Does President Putin understand this, and does he have a plan to demolish the dollar by triggering a cryptocurrency bubble? Clever though he is, probably not.
- Trucking Companies At War Over This New Niche Of E-Commerce Delivery
The battle for new delivery business spurred by the significant rise in large products ordered online is officially on.
And as consumers get more comfortable buying larger items like appliances, grills, treadmills and even furniture online, trucking companies like JB Hunt Transport Services Inc. are knee-deep in the fray to secure the ensuing delivery business that comes with it.
JB Hunt, for instance, announced Wednesday that it has agreed to pay $100 million for a company in New Jersey that specializes in delivering large items to consumers. This is the second such purchase made by JB Hunt in the delivery space in less than two years.
Similarly, XPO logistics has made four acquisitions of this nature to try and implement what it is calling a “white glove service”. Ryder System Inc. also spent $120 million last year to purchase a company that would bring in an additional 109 e-commerce fulfillment facilities and 72 third-party centers.
And the M&A should continue. Nick Hobbs, of J.B. Hunt told Bloomberg:
“You’ll see more consolidation come along because there’s a lot of interest out there.”
The market for these types of deliveries is up about 10% from last year, according to SJ Consulting Group. The total market is valued at about $8.9 billion. This is a significantly faster rate of growth than regular freight and it is anticipated that it will continue to grow rapidly, as younger people start to age and take on bigger purchases.
John Hill, president and chief commercial officer Pilot Freight Services said:
“Millennials buy everything online. They’re very comfortable making those purchases sight unseen.”
The need for the delivery niche also arises from online merchants who want pricing and tracking options similar to FedEx and UPS, who are not efficient in delivering the larger items.
One merchant recently profiled in a Bloomberg writeup, BBQGuys.com, ships its items from Louisiana all over the country and gets more than 70% of its $115 million in annual sales from larger items. The company has tried to offer delivery with installation but inconsistencies among the industry have made it difficult for them.
Corey Tisdale, the VP of the company, stated:
“We know there’s a demand for it. We’ve been limited by the networks that we found, being able to have the same consistency in terms of delivery experience across the U.S.”
This need for consistent delivery is what has created the opportunity for these trucking companies.
Hobbs of JB Hunt continued:
“Each consumer wants something different and each retailer wants something different. So we have to be very agile in how we put together a good solution.”
At Ryder, the company tries to provide consistent nationwide coverage with their partners, while using volume to offset high delivery costs. The technology it has recently bought allows customers to pick their own delivery times, one of several capabilities that aren’t available with traditional shippers or small independent truckers.
- A 'Convenient Killing' Of US Troops In Syria
Authored by Finian Cunningha, via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
With unseemly haste, US news media leapt on the killing of four American military personnel in Syria as a way to undermine President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from that country.
The deadly attack in the northern city of Manbij, on the west bank of the Euphrates River, was reported to have been carried out by a suicide bomber. The Islamic State (ISIS) terror group reportedly claimed responsibility, but the group routinely makes such claims which often turn out to be false.
The American military personnel were said to be on a routine patrol of Manbij where US forces have been backing Kurdish militants in a purported campaign against ISIS and other terror groups.
An explosion at a restaurant resulted in two US troops and two Pentagon civilian officials being killed, along with more than a dozen other victims. Three other US military persons were among those injured.
US media highlighted the bombing as the biggest single death toll of American forces in Syria since they began operations in the country nearly four years ago.
The US and Kurdish militia have been in control of Manbij for over two years. It is one of the main sites from where American troops are to withdraw under Trump’s exit plan, which he announced on December 19.
Following the bombing, the New York Times headlined: “ISIS Attack in Syria Kills 4 Americans, Raising Worries about Troop Withdrawal”. The report goes on, “the news prompted calls from Republicans and Democrats for President Trump to reconsider his plans to withdraw troops from the country.”
A more pointed headline in The Washington was: “Killing of 4 Americans in Syria Throws Spotlight on Trump’s Policy”.
The Post editorialized, “the bombing showed that [ISIS] is likely to be a force to be reckoned with in Syria for the foreseeable future.” It quoted politicians in Washington claiming the “bombing deaths… were a direct result of a foolish and abrupt departure announcement [by Trump], and made the case for staying.”
Democrat Senator Jack Reed, who sits on the Senate Armed Forces Committee, said: “From the beginning, I thought the president was wrong [in ordering the withdrawal]. It was a strategic mistake for the whole region.”
With macabre smugness, anti-Trump politicians and news media appeared to exploit the death of US troops in Manbij to score points against Trump.
The president’s claims made just before Christmas of having defeated ISIS were widely replayed following the Manbij attack this week by way of ridiculing Trump’s order to pullout US troops from Syria.
Nevertheless, despite the deaths, Trump and his Vice President Mike Pence stated they were still committed to bring the 2,000 or so US troops home. Some military figures also went on US media to defend Trump’s pullout plan in spite of the terror attack in Manbij.
There clearly is a serious division in Washington over Trump’s policy on Syria. For Democrats and supportive media outlets, anything Trump does is to be opposed. But there are also elements within the military and intelligence nexus which are implacably against, what they see as, his “capitulation to Russia and Iran” in Syria. That was partly why his Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned days after Trump made his announced withdrawal at the end of last month.
Having invested years and money in regime-change machinations in Syria, there is bound to be US military and intelligence cabals which are resistant to Trump’s move to pack up. Not that Trump’s move portends a peace dividend for the region. It is more a “tactical change” for how US imperialism operates in the Middle East, as his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in Cairo last week.
That is why Trump’s order to take troops out of Syria may not be a clear-cut withdrawal. His National Security adviser John Bolton on a tour of the Middle East last week has already tried to undermine Trump by attaching all sorts of vague conditions to the troop pullout. Bolton and Pompeo have talked about the need to ensure the total defeat of ISIS and of the countering of Iranian presence in Syria.
This brings up the question of who may have carried out the bombing in Manbij? Was it really a suicide bomber? Was it really ISIS? Several observers have pointed out that ISIS have not had any presence in Manbij for the past two years since the Americans and Kurds took control of the city.
As always, the key question arises: who stands to benefit from the killing of the American troops? The scale of the attack suggests it was carried out with a sharp political message intended for Trump.
One potential beneficiary are the Kurdish militants who are being abandoned by the putative US withdrawal. Without their American sponsor on the ground, the Kurds are in danger of Turkish forces launching cross-border operations to wipe them out, as Ankara has vowed to do. A Machiavellian Kurdish calculation could be to “disprove” Trump about “ISIS being defeated”, and that US forces are needed to prevent any resurgence of the terror group in Manbij and northeast Syria.
Another sinister player is the CIA or some other element of US military intelligence. It is certainly not beyond the realm of plausibility that the CIA could facilitate such an atrocity against American personnel in order to discredit Trump’s withdrawal plan.
Certainly, the way the anti-Trump media in the US reacted with such alacrity and concerted talking points suggests there was something a bit too convenient about the massacre.
It would in fact be naive to not suspect that the CIA could have pulled off such a false flag in Manbij. As in 1950s Vietnam, as told by Graham Greene in ‘The Quiet American’, the CIA have been doing such dirty tricks with bombing atrocities and assassinations for decades in order to precipitate wars in foreign countries that the agency calculates are in America’s geopolitical interests.
- Automating Retail: Googly-Eyed Robots Are Coming to Nearly 500 Grocery Stores
Robots may soon be scooting around the aisles of your local grocery store.
Approximately 500 robots will be coming to supermarkets in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, thanks to a strategic partnership between Retail Business Services and Badger Technologies.
Retail Business Services, a subsidiary of Ahold Delhaize USA, currently provides services to six of Ahold Delhaize USA’s East Coast supermarket brands, including Food Lion, Giant Food, GIANT/MARTIN’S, Hannaford and Stop & Shop, as well as the online grocery retailer, Peapod.
Within the next six months, Ahold Delhaize USA brands will have at least one robot in nearly 500 of their stores following successful in-store pilot programs at Harrisburg and Carlisle locations.
“As part of our continued focus on technology transformation, we’re pleased to support one of the most significant deployments of robotics innovation in the grocery retail industry.
Several companies in the grocery retail space have recently begun testing or using in-store robots – something Retail Business Services and the local brands we serve have been doing for some time. We’re pleased to support the GIANT/MARTIN’S and Stop & Shop brands as they now lead the industry from test to large-scale usage of robots and to see the benefits the technology continues to drive for their businesses,” ” said Paul Scorza, EVP and Chief Information Officer for Retail Business Services.
Dubbed “Marty,” the in-store fully autonomous robot has been designed for the grocery retail environment to address out-of-stock, planogram compliance, price integrity, and audit and compliance issues.
The robot operates safely alongside patrons and employees while scanning aisles. Advanced technologies include:
- Rotating lidar to map and navigate the store
- High resolution and 3D depth cameras for navigation and data acquisition
- Navigation sensors • Firmware in robotics operating system (ROS)
- Modular application software architecture for custom system integration
- Autonomous base with rechargeable 12-hour battery
“We are excited to be part of this industry-leading rollout of fully autonomous robots that collect safety data while traversing retail stores,” said Frederic McCoy, SVP, Jabil Retail. “Real-time hazard alerts empower stores to resolve incidents like spills, as well as improve operations.”
Nationwide, other retailers, including Walmart and Target, have been testing or rapidly deploying robots. This is part of the great transformation, and a defined theme by Karen Harris, Managing Director of Bain & Company’s Macro Trends Group, who recently penned the piece Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality.
For more color on how automation will disrupt the business environment in the next decade, Harris discusses the collision at play.
- Is Putin Stealing Santa's Grotto? The Magnetic North Pole Has Moved Closer To Russia
Authored by Kevin Anderton via Forbes.com,
I have been seeing some headlines pointing out that Earth’s magnetic field is acting up and that scientists don’t understand why, so I thought I would take the time to clear up the issue.
What is happening?
Earth’s magnetic pole is moving in the direction of Siberia and away from Canada. This is something that scientists have been tracking for a long time. It’s fairly easy to look up the location of the magnetic pole dating back to the early 1900s. The recent changes of the drifting pole are raising some concerns but the direction is not the problem. In fact, the direction of the drifting pole has been roughly the same for as long as scientists have been tracking it. The speed is the issue.
Every five years scientists recalculate the location of the magnetic pole. This is important information for global navigation, which includes GPS satellites and other technology. These changes can make a big difference in our everyday lives.
Scientists at NOAA and the British Geological Survey check how accurate the World Magnetic Model is every year and when they did their check this year they noticed some large differences. Primarily that the pole’s movement had sped up. The location data for the pole was supposed to last until 2020 before it needed to be updated but according to experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it needs to be updated now.
The movement of Earth’s magnetic field since its discovery
Why is this happening?
The movement of the pole is caused by flows of molten liquid iron in the Earth’s core. This liquid and how it moves creates the Earth’s magnetic field. Variations in the liquid flow cause the magnetic field to change over time and cause the location of magnetic north to move.
The global model was off because of a geomagnetic pulse the occurred beneath South America in 2016. This pulse just came at a bad time. The 2015 World Magnetic Model was brand new and not scheduled to be renewed until 2020. It seems that in the future we may not be able to wait as long between updates. The poles movement has sped up in recent memory from 9 miles a year in the 1990s to about 34 miles a year at present day. A new model needs to be implemented as soon as possible and even then they will have to rework the model again in 2020. Until then navigation might be affected.
What caused the geomagnetic pulse beneath South America is unknown. If you have been seeing headlines that imply the scientists are clueless or don’t understand what is happening this is what they are talking about. Anomalies like this happen from time to time and honestly, it’s nothing to be worried about.
Why is the pole moving?
In the northern hemisphere, deep within the Earth, there are two large areas of magnetic strength being generated by the liquid metal surrounding Earth’s core. One is under Canada and the other is under Siberia. What we are seeing now is the result of those two areas pulling against each other.
It’s also worth noting that the release of the new model is being delayed due to the US government shutdown. If you would like to know more about this issue please write your Senator and ask them to reopen the government.
- Watch Robot Dog Deliver A Package From Autonomous Shuttle
At CES 2019, the transport firm Continental pushed the boundaries of autonomous vehicle technology, showed how a driverless utility van could be used to stage and deploy delivery robot dogs, taking packages from the vehicle to a customer’s doorstep.
In the demonstrations, the battery-powered ANYmal robot, manufactured by Swiss robotics manufacturer ANYbotics, walked out of Continental’s CUbE (Continental Urban mobility Experience) demo vehicle, stepped over an object in its path and marched up the front steps of a model front porch. After reaching the door, the robot rings the doorbell with its paw and leans over to slide the package of its back.
ANYbotics partners with @ContiPress to show autonomous robot parcel delivery with #ANYmal at @CES! See the live demo at booth #7519. #CES2019 #robotics #robot #leggedrobotics pic.twitter.com/uCrIw6lrcb
— ANYbotics (@anybotics) January 8, 2019
“With the help of robot delivery, Continental’s vision for seamless mobility can extend right to your doorstep. Our vision of cascaded robot delivery leverages a driverless vehicle to carry delivery robots, creating an efficient transport team,” said Ralph Lauxmann, Head of Systems & Technology, Chassis & Safety division, Continental, in a statement.
“Both are electrified, both are autonomous and, in principle, both can be based on the same scalable technology portfolio. These synergies create an exciting potential for holistic delivery concepts using similar solutions for different platforms. Beyond this technology foundation, it’s reasonable to expect a whole value chain to develop in this area.”
The robot weighs 66 pounds and can carry boxes up to 22 pounds. AI navigates the Black Mirror-like dog through wide-angle cameras, sensor-studded feet, and a high-tech radar system.
Continental has focused research on the last mile, a term used in supply chain management/transportation planning to describe how goods move to their final destination.
The company wants to use robot dogs and autonomous vehicles for goods and parcel delivery to residential areas, a rapidly developing market thanks to e-commerce sales.
Continental believes that the last mile of goods delivery should be automated, it will be an integral part of future urban mobility. Driverless vehicles like the CUbE can transport multiple robot dogs that could handle the last yards of the goods and parcel delivery logistics chain.
“Industrializing the automation of goods delivery requires reliable, robust, high-performing and best-cost technology – a mix perfectly reflected in the automotive equivalent of automation. It is this very profile of expertise that has made Continental one of the industry-leading suppliers of advanced driver assistance systems and vehicle automation,” said Ralph Lauxmann, Head of Systems & Technology, Chassis & Safety division, Continental.
Automating the last mile with robot dogs and driverless vehicles represents the next big thing for smart cities in the future, and it also serves as a warning that thousands of gig-economy last mile jobs are about to be eliminated.
- Solar Investment Plunges Amid Panel Glut
Authored by Irina Slav via Oilprice.com,
Global spending on solar energy declined by almost a quarter last year to US$130.8 billion, mainly on the back of a regulatory policy overhaul in China that led to an oversupply of solar panels, driving prices down. This, in turn, resulted in an 8-percent slide in overall renewable energy investments to US$332 billion, data from a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance has shown.
China took markets by surprise in June last year by announcing that it would not issue approvals for any new solar power installations in 2018 and would also cut the feed-in tariff subsidy that has been a major driver of the solar business in the country that accounts for as much as 50 percent of capacity.
Following the June decision of the Chinese planning commission, global PV panel prices dropped by 12 percent, which benefited buyers of PV panels but served a blow to producers, and not just those in China. Yet, the investment cut was the largest in China: investments in renewable energy there fell by about 50 percent or US$40 billion last year.
This had a beneficial effect on capital costs, the BNEF analysts said. In 2018, the cost of installing a megawatt of solar generation capacity shed 12 percent. Now, this was not because of major cost reductions as much as a global PV module oversupply that was already emerging before China overhauled its solar industry regulations, but it was still substantial as far as cost cuts go.
While the news about falling panel costs is certainly good as it is making solar energy more competitive, the BNEF report was generally of the “cold shower” variety as a whole. The Bloomberg researchers warned that despite a surge in renewable energy investment since 2004, when the world spent less than US$62 billion on cleaner energy, as global energy demand grew, so did the consumption of fossil fuels. This effectively offset the gains in carbon emissions reductions achieved through the growing use of alternative energy sources.
Commenting on the report’s findings, BNEF analyst Jenny Chase, head of solar analysts, said “2018 was certainly a difficult year for many solar manufacturers, and for developers in China. However, we estimate that global PV installations increased from 99GW in 2017 to approximately 109GW in 2018, as other countries took advantage of the technology’s fiercely improved competitiveness.”
This year promises to be tough as well, at least in China. Earlier this month, the government said it will only approve new solar and wind power capacity if it matches the country’s coal benchmark on price.
One of the reasons for this move is the weight of subsidies that prompted last year’s regulatory change. Another, according to Forbes’ John Parnell, was the fact that Chinese companies are building solar projects abroad that produce electricity much more cheaply than the installations at home.
China is still the biggest spender on renewables, the BNEF report established, so it will remain key to the world’s total carbon emission reduction success, regardless of where capital costs of solar installations go.
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