- 20 Amazing Things That Happen Every Single Minute Of Every Single Day In Our Rapidly Changing World
Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
Our world is changing at a blinding pace that is accelerating with each passing day.
Thanks to the Internet, information travels at a speed that would have been unimaginable at other times in human history, and our technological capabilities are advancing at a rate that is exponentially increasing. What all of this means is that seismic cultural shifts that used to take decades can now be accomplished in a matter of months or even weeks.
The following are 20 amazing facts about what happens every single minute of every single day in our rapidly changing world…
#1 250 babies will be born, and 113 of them will be born into poverty.
#2 500 hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube.
#3 The Earth will travel 1,118 miles around the sun.
#4 McDonald’s will sell 4,500 hamburgers.
#5 Lightning will strike our planet about 6,000 times .
#6 28,500 trees will be cut down.
#7 51,000 applications will be downloaded from Apple’s App Store.
#8 65,000 barrels of oil will be used used.
#9 People will watch 64,444 hours of content on Netflix.
#10 120,673 pounds of edible food will be thrown away in the United States.
#11 $203,596 worth of products will be sold on Amazon.com.
#12 448,800 tweets will be posted on Twitter.
#13 527,760 photos will be shared on Snapchat.
#14 3.3 million posts will be made to Facebook.
#15 3.8 million Google searches will be conducted.
#16 5 million pounds of garbage will be generated.
#17 6 million chemical reactions will happen in each one of our cells.
#18 20.8 million messages will be sent using WhatsApp.
#19 25 million Coca-Cola products will be consumed.
#20 204 million emails will be sent.
So will all of this change lead to a wonderfully positive future for humanity, or will it result in a dystopian nightmare? Only time will tell, but what everyone can agree on is that our world is rapidly becoming a much different place than the world that our parents and grandparents grew up in.
- Doug Casey On Why Gold Is Money
Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,
It’s an unfortunate historical anomaly that people think about the paper in their wallets as money. The dollar is, technically, a currency. A currency is a government substitute for money. But gold is money.
Now, why do I say that?
Historically, many things have been used as money. Cattle have been used as money in many societies, including Roman society. That’s where we get the word “pecuniary” from: the Latin word for a single head of cattle is pecus. Salt has been used as money, also in ancient Rome, and that’s where the word “salary” comes from; the Latin for salt is sal (or salis). The North American Indians used seashells. Cigarettes were used during WWII. So, money is simply a medium of exchange and a store of value.
By that definition, almost anything could be used as money, but obviously, some things work better than others; it’s hard to exchange things people don’t want, and some things don’t store value well. Over thousands of years, the precious metals have emerged as the best form of money. Gold and silver both, though primarily gold.
There’s nothing magical about gold. It’s just uniquely well suited among the 98 naturally occurring elements for use as money…in the same way aluminum is good for airplanes or uranium is good for nuclear power.
There are very good reasons for this, and they are not new reasons. Aristotle defined five reasons why gold is money in the 4th century BCE (which may only have been the first time it was put down on paper). Those five reasons are as valid today as they were then.
When I give a speech, I often offer a prize to the audience member who can tell me the five classical reasons gold is the best money. Quickly now—what are they? Can’t recall them? Read on, and this time, burn them into your memory.
Money
If you can’t define a word precisely, clearly, and quickly, that’s proof you don’t understand what you’re talking about as well as you might. The proper definition of money is as something that functions as a store of value and a medium of exchange.
Government fiat currencies can, and currently do, function as money. But they are far from ideal. What, then, are the characteristics of a good money? Aristotle listed them in the 4th century BCE. A good money must be all of the following:
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Durable: A good money shouldn’t fall apart in your pocket nor evaporate when you aren’t looking. It should be indestructible. This is why we don’t use fruit for money. It can rot, be eaten by insects, and so on. It doesn’t last.
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Divisible: A good money needs to be convertible into larger and smaller pieces without losing its value, to fit a transaction of any size. This is why we don’t use things like porcelain for money—half a Ming vase isn’t worth much.
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Consistent: A good money is something that always looks the same, so that it’s easy to recognize, each piece identical to the next. This is why we don’t use things like oil paintings for money; each painting, even by the same artist, of the same size and composed of the same materials is unique. It’s also why we don’t use real estate as money. One piece is always different from another piece.
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Convenient: A good money packs a lot of value into a small package and is highly portable. This is why we don’t use water for money, as essential as it is—just imagine how much you’d have to deliver to pay for a new house, not to mention all the problems you’d have with the escrow. It’s also why we don’t use other metals like lead, or even copper. The coins would have to be too huge to handle easily to be of sufficient value.
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Intrinsically valuable: A good money is something many people want or can use. This is critical to money functioning as a means of exchange; even if I’m not a jeweler, I know that someone, somewhere wants gold and will take it in exchange for something else of value to me. This is why we don’t—or shouldn’t—use things like scraps of paper for money, no matter how impressive the inscriptions upon them might be.
Actually, there’s a sixth reason Aristotle should have mentioned, but it wasn’t relevant in his age, because nobody would have thought of it…it can’t be created out of thin air.
Not even the kings and emperors who clipped and diluted coins would have dared imagine that they could get away with trying to use something essentially worthless as money.
These are the reasons why gold is the best money. It’s not a gold bug religion, nor a barbaric superstition. It’s simply common sense. Gold is particularly good for use as money, just as aluminum is particularly good for making aircraft, steel is good for the structures of buildings, uranium is good for fueling nuclear power plants, and paper is good for making books. Not money. If you try to make airplanes out of lead, or money out of paper, you’re in for a crash.
That gold is money is simply the result of the market process, seeking optimum means of storing value and making exchanges.
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- No, the NSA Has NOT Stopped Spying On Americans’ Emails
The NSA announced Friday that they would stop the controversial program which sweeps up all emails and text messages which an American exchanges with someone overseas that makes reference to a real target of NSA surveillance.
By way of background, if Russia’s Putin was an NSA target, and an American received an email from a Russian saying “I hate Putin”, then that American could be surveilled by the NSA.
Washington’s Blog asked Bill Binney what he thought of the NSA’s announcement.
Binney is the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”). Binney is the real McCoy. Binney has been interviewed by virtually all of the mainstream media, including CBS, ABC, CNN, New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, PBS and many others.
Specifically, we asked Binney:
Do you buy it? https://www.yahoo.com/tech/us-nsa-spy-agency-halts-controversial-email-sweep-215107654.html
Or do you think they’re just collecting under a different authorization/program?
Binney responded:
Short answer, NO.
This is a farce given the bulk continuous domestic data collection and storage from the Upstream programs: Fairview, Stormbrew and Blarney. [Here’s background on Fairview/Stormbrew/Blarney.]
This FAA 702 [Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] has been a charade from the beginning. [Specifically, the NSA is spying on all Americans under Executive Order 12333, and only talking about Section 702 to confuse people as to what they’re doing.]
It was a way to make people/congress/judiciary think that they were trying to conform to the law.
And, by spreading false information, which our useless MSM fail to challenge, it’s a way of subverting our republic – all done in secret with only a few people in the know of what really is going on.
Meanwhile in the background, NSA through program “Muscular” was unilaterally tapping the fiber lines between Google and Yahoo and others data centers; so that when they backed up their data between centers, NSA got it all and the companies did not even know that was happening.
Absolutely nothing has changed.
- Silver Takes the Elevator Down, Report 30 April, 2017
Last week, we talked about the effect of the French election on the gold and silver markets, and noted:
Of course, traders want to know how this will affect gold and silver. As we write this, we see that silver went down 30 cents before rallying back up to where it closed on Friday. Gold went down about $20, and then half way back up.
At this point, we are not sure if the metals are supposed to go up because more printing. Or go down because the euro constrains France from printing. Or silver at least should go up because the economy is going to be better with France remaining in the Eurozone. Or go down because the ongoing malaise will only progress as it has been. Or some other logic… and the price gyrations this evening show that traders don’t agree either.
It didn’t take too long. Here is what happened to silver this week. The graph below shows the price of silver in real money (i.e. gold).
The Price of Silver in Real Money
Silver has been falling for going on one year, but clearly since March 1. After one last hurrah at the end of March, it has been taking the elevator down. And by its fundamentals it should be quite a bit lower—0.0125.
In any case, we are interested in watching what the fundamentals of the metals are doing. We will take a look at the graphs below, but first, the price and ratio charts.
The Prices of Gold and Silver
Next, this is a graph of the gold price measured in silver, otherwise known as the gold to silver ratio. It had another major move up this week, after a major move up last week.
Last week, we said:
If prior peaks are an indication, there may be a spot of resistance at 72.5 (+0.8 above Friday’s close) and another at 73.25. If the ratio should go over these levels, then it may go all the way to its fundamental level (discussed below).
Well, it broke those levels and ended the week just under 74.
The Ratio of the Gold Price to the Silver Price
For each metal, we will look at a graph of the basis and cobasis overlaid with the price of the dollar in terms of the respective metal. It will make it easier to provide brief commentary. The dollar will be represented in green, the basis in blue and cobasis in red.
Here is the gold graph.
The Gold Basis and Cobasis and the Dollar Price
The scarcity (i.e. the cobasis, the red line) was on the rise this week. It makes sense, that as the price of gold drops (which is the mirror of what this graph shows, the price of the dollar in gold milligrams) the metal becomes scarcer. This means speculators are selling their paper. If owners of metal were selling, then the metal would not become scarcer and might even become more abundant.
However, it only became a little scarcer while the price dropped almost twenty bucks. So our calculated fundamental price fell $15 to $1,274, a few bucks above the market price.
Now let’s look at silver.
The Silver Basis and Cobasis and the Dollar Price
In silver, the price fell a lot. 72 cents. The cobasis rose (i.e. abundance dropped and scarcity increased).
Last week, we asked:
Some speculators definitely got flushed. However, the question is how many and how much?
Clearly it happened to more of them this week. And, unless the fundamentals get stronger, it is likely to flush even more leveraged futures positions. Our calculated fundamental price fell three cents this week, now a buck thirty under the market.
© 2017 Monetary Metals
- Congress Reaches Deal To Keep Government Open Through September
Update: Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer seems very positive on the bipartisan agreement too (but can’t resist a few jabs at President Trump)…
“This agreement is a good agreement for the American people, and takes the threat of a government shutdown off the table.
The Bill “ensures taxpayer dollars aren’t used to fund an ineffective border wall, excludes poison pill riders, and increases investments in programs that the middle-class relies on, like medical research, education, and infrastructure”
“Early on in this debate, Democrats clearly laid out our principles..” and the deal “reflects those principles.”
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As we detailed eariler, one of the biggest political overhangs facing the market may have just been removed, when moments ago AP and other newswires reported that House Democrats and Republicans are said to have reached a $1 trillion spending deal to keep the government – which is currently operating thanks to a last minute one-week stopgap measure enacted on Friday – open until October 1.
BREAKING: Congressional Republicans, Democrats reach agreement on $1T measure to fund government until Oct. 1.
— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) May 1, 2017
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According to Washington Post, negotiators from both parties reached an agreement on a spending package to fund the government through the end of September, alleviating fears of a government shutdown later this week. Congress is expected to vote early this week on the package, with the bipartisan agreement expected to include increases for military spending and border security, a major priority for GOP leaders in Congress.
The agreement follows weeks of tense negotiations between Democrats and GOP leaders after President Trump insisted that the deal include funds to begin construction of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Trump eventually dropped that demand, leaving Congress to resolve lingering issues over several unrelated policy measures.
There is a non-trivial chance the Sunday night announcement is merely a trial balloon, because as the WaPo adds “the details of the agreement were not yet clear on Sunday night” which would suggest that there is a high likelihood that whatever tentative deal was reached, ultimately falls through.
For now, however, this is good news, and it has sent both the pound and yen sliding, and the dollar rising on hopes that politics will not be a major risk factor for at least 5 months.
House Republicans have struggled in recent weeks to keep their members focused on spending as White House officials and conservatives pressed leaders to revive plans for a vote on health-care legislation. The health-care fight became tangled last week with the spending talks as leaders worried that forcing a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act risked angering Democrats whose votes are necessary to avoid a government shutdown.
Another possible threat is that the GOP pushes on with Obamacare repeal, a gambit which may prompt Democrats to withdraw any support they voiced for Sunday’s “deal.”
GOP leaders worked last week to determine if there are enough votes in the House to pass a revised health-care bill brokered by the White House, the head of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and a top member of the moderate Tuesday Group. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and his top lieutenants announced Thursday that they did not have sufficient votes to be sure the health-care bill would pass but vowed to press on.
“We’re still educating members,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters after a late-night health care meeting last week. “We’ve been making great progress. As soon as we have the votes, we’ll vote on it.”
And now, in the spirit of trial balloons everywhere, we await the denial from yet other “unnamed sources.”
- North Korea Threatens To Sink "Doomed" US Nuclear Submarine
North Korea threatened to sink a US nuclear sub currently deployed in South Korean waters if the US take provocative action, responding to a statement from Donald Trump that the president won’t be “happy” if Pyongyang conducts another nuclear test.
After the US deployed a nuclear-powered submarine and an aircraft carrier to South Korean waters amid high Korean tensions, Yonhap reported that North Korea on Sunday threatened to sink the submarine, accusing America of stepping up military intimidation.
“The moment the USS Michigan tries to budge even a little, it will be doomed to face the miserable fate of becoming a underwater ghost without being able to come to the surface,” the North’s propaganda website Uriminzokkiri wrote in a vivid article. North Korea’s nuclear deterrent will assure that American aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and other military hardware will be “shattered into pieces of molten metal” if they threaten Pyongyang, the article read.
The North warned – once again using its dramatically vivid jingoist language – that “whether it’s a nuclear aircraft carrier or a nuclear submarine, they will be turned into a mass of scrap metal in front of our invincible military power centered on the self-defense nuclear deterrence.”
“The urgent fielding of the nuclear submarine in the waters off the Korean Peninsula, timed to coincide with the deployment of the super aircraft carrier strike group, is intended to further intensify military threats toward our republic,” the website further claimed. According to the article, recent statements from the Trump administration indicate that Washington is close to implementing a strategic scenario in which an actual military confrontation is a real possibility.
Earlier on Sunday, Donald Trump told CBS that he “will not be happy” if North Korea conducts another nuclear test. When asked to clarify, the US president said: “I would not be happy. If he (North Korean supreme leader, Kim Jong-un) does a nuclear test, I will not be happy.”
“And I can tell you also, I don’t believe that the president of China, who is a very respected man, will be happy either,” Trump said, adding that he believes Xi Jinping was also “putting pressure” on North Korea to bring a halt to its nuclear tests.
CBS host John Dickerson then directly asked Trump whether US military action was possible, the US president replied: “I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.”
The guided-missile submarine USS Michigan sailed into the South Korean port of Busan on April 25 before heading out to sea four days later. The Ohio-class submarine is reportedly conducting various drills. At the same time, the U.S. has also directed the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson to the waters near South Korea. The supercarrier is currently engaged in a joint exercise with South Korean naval forces of the Korean peninsula.
The threat followed North Korea’s failed missile launch. On early Saturday, North Korea fired off a ballistic missile which the South Korean military said exploded after flying only 71 kilometers. The launch marks the third missile test in April.
Trump told CBS that the failed test wasn’t significant enough to warrant action against North Korea. “This was a small missile. This was not a big missile. This was not a nuclear test, which he was expected to do three days ago. We’ll see what happens,” the president said.
Joint US-South Korean naval wargames, Foal Eagle, involving 20,000 Korean and nearly 10,000 American troops kicked off in the region on Sunday.
Washington has said that the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier and USS Michigan nuclear sub will remain in the area due to the spike in tensions between Washington and Pyongyang.
- The Real WMD In Syria – The West's Weapon Of Mass Disorientation
Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
A senior Rand analyst, inadvertently, gave the game away in a recent article inculpating Syrian President Bashar al Assad over the alleged toxic massacre of civilians on April 4. The Rand Corporation, a longtime conduit for CIA propaganda, wrote: «The use of chemical weapons today provokes international condemnation… Those who order their deployment risk being charged with war crimes».
The Western objective, as tacitly admitted above, is therefore to brand the Syrian leader and his government as depraved war criminals, deserving pariah status and excommunication by the «international community».
The alleged use of chemical weapons, a particularly odious weapon of mass destruction (WMD), serves as an effective prop to channel Western public outrage against Assad. Allegedly killing civilians with bullets and bombs just doesn’t have the same psychological power to incite public disgust. Poisoning little children with lethal chemicals is a more effective label with which to demonize the alleged perpetrator.
But the more pertinent WMD issue here is Weapon of Mass Disorientation. And in particular how Western governments, their servile corporate-controlled media, like the Rand Corp, New York Times, CNN, BBC, Guardian and France 24, and so on, and local proxy mercenaries inside Syria are covertly deploying deadly chemicals in a series of propaganda stunts. Not only deploying deadly chemicals against civilians in a most cynical and callous way, but getting away with their crimes of murder through an audacious distortion of reality. All made possible because of the West’s media weapon of mass disorientation.
By massive manipulation of facts and images, the Western public are disorientated to condone the wider criminal agenda that their governments are pushing – that of regime change. Part of that disorientation involves the Western public suspending critical thinking over what are otherwise highly dubious circumstances and claims; it also involves an abject manipulation of perception and emotions, whereby some victims of violence are the focus for Western public trauma, while many other victims in Syria and elsewhere are unseen or overlooked with callous indifference. Those anomalies surely speak of a phenomenal disorientation of Western public intelligence, emotion and morals.
Immediately following the incident in the militant-held Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun, in northern Idlib Province, on April 4, Western governments and the corporate news media began accusing the Syrian leader of responsibility for a «chemical weapon attack». The US ambassador the UN Nikki Haley made a dramatic presentation at the Security Council on April 5, holding aloft enlarged photos purportedly of children dying from toxic exposure. Two days later, on April 7, US President Donald Trump ordered a full-scale barrage of cruise missile strikes on a Syrian airbase out of «revenge» for the murder of «beautiful babies».
Trump’s decision to attack Syria was reportedly prompted by his disgust at watching videos of the alleged victims, and by the emotional angst that his daughter and special advisor Ivanka Trump felt on also watching the same footage. The video and images were, by the way, released to the Western news media solely by militant-aligned sources, the so-called White Helmets, operating at the location of the alleged chemical weapon attack.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer later said that any one «who gases a baby» can expect more US military retribution. Spicer also made the crass claim that Syrian President Assad was «worse than Hitler» because of his alleged uniquely barbaric use of chemical weapons on civilians.
Meanwhile, US and British warplanes operating in Syria, Iraq and Yemen are slaughtering at the very same time hundreds of civilians. In Yemen, thousands of children are dying from starvation due to a US-backed blockade on that country by Saudi Arabia in its war for regime change there. Why aren’t Donald Trump, his daughter Ivanka, and his spokesman Sean Spicer traumatized by these deaths? Why is the Western public also not outraged, traumatized?
In Syria, on Easter Saturday, April 15, busloads of civilians were murdered by terrorist suicide bombers, whom the Western governments and media refer to as «rebels». Over 120 civilians were massacred including 68 children. Where was the Western outrage at the images of charred children’s bodies hanging out of mangled buses? Indeed, the Western media coverage of that carnage was minimal and was downplayed with insidious words that the victims were «pro-regime supporters».
But the victims of the bus attacks were more numerous than those allegedly killed during the chemical weapons incident two weeks before at Khan Sheikhoun.
President Trump has condemned Syria’s Assad as an «animal» due to the alleged use of chemical weapons. Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has also called Assad a «monster». Clearly, the image-projection here is aimed at demonizing and dehumanizing the Syrian leader. Once that image-making is «successful» – and the saturation pejorative Western media coverage is crucial to that success – then a moral, legalistic mandate is created which allows Washington and its allies to escalate their aggression against Syria. Either through diplomatic sanctions at the United Nations or by military means with direct military force, as seen with Trump’s cruise missile barrage on April 7, or with increased support to proxy militant groups inside Syria.
All the while that Western governments and media have been demonizing Syria over alleged chemical weapons, the political-media campaign has also been directed at smearing Russia for alleged complicity because of its alliance with Syria.
Britain’s Johnson said earlier this month that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had «toxified» Russia’s international reputation by its alliance with Syria. The British diplomat’s choice of words betrayed an overly contrived attempt to push the propaganda theme.
In what should be seen as a transparently crude effort, the Western governments tried to splice Russia’s support for Syria by hyping up the «horror» of chemical weapons. The Western political momentum has since dissipated somewhat, but there was an obvious bid by the West in the days following the incident at Khan Sheikhoun to force an ultimatum on Moscow to abandon the Assad government, and to in effect cede to Western demands for regime change in Damascus.
Russia seems to have succeeded in rebuffing this tawdry tactic by holding firm to principles of international law and objective facts.
Last week, the UN-affiliated Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued a statement claiming that there was «incontrovertible evidence» that the lethal chemical weapon sarin was used in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4.
The OPCW did not say who used the alleged sarin. But the inference pushed by Western media was that it was the Syrian government.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov deprecated the OPCW as «discrediting» itself. The supposedly neutral, scientific organization was basing its conclusions on samples supplied by illegally armed groups, in a dubious chain of «evidence» that is neither impartial nor verifiable.
The «sarin conclusion» announced by the OPCW is in accordance with the assertions made by the US, Britain, France and Turkey. They are not disinterested parties. They are protagonists for regime change and sponsors of a covert war against the Syrian government since March 2011. Yet, audaciously, their partisan claims are afforded credibility by Western media.
Russia’s call last week for an impartial, on-site investigation into what actually happened at Sheikhoun was rejected by the Western governments. Russia’s demand for an independent probe was also supported by Iran and the Syrian government.
As Sergey Lavrov noted: «The spreading of false information on the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government is being used to move away from implementing UN resolutions on finding a peaceful settlement and instead to switch to the long-cherished objective of regime change».
There is abundant evidence that sarin was not the toxic agent used at Khan Sheikhoun on April 4. American MIT professor Theodore Postol, a highly accredited weapons expert, as well as neuroscientist Dr Denis O’Brien, are just two of many sources who have concluded from the observing the symptoms and circumstances that sarin could not have possibly been used.
There is abundant evidence too that the Western-backed regime-change militants in Syria have been involved in fabricating supposed «chemical weapons» incidents, creating media-ready videos which the Western news outlets have avidly disseminated and which Western governments have cited as «evidence» against Assad. That was the conclusion of the Swedish Doctors for Human Rights, among other reputable sources.
Considering that the only «evidence» for the latest chemical weapon incident on April 4 comes in the form of unverifiable videos supplied by terrorist-affiliated groups, it is highly plausible that the narrative put out by these groups, the Western governments and media is false. That narrative is that Syrian warplanes dropped chemical weapons on Khan Sheikhoun, killing over 80 civilians.
By contrast, it is plausible that the entire incident is an orchestrated fabrication. That is, that there was no chemical «weapon of mass destruction» used at Khan Sheikhoun. If a weapon of that sort were used, as alleged, then one would expect the death toll to be in the hundreds, if not thousands, as happened at Halabja in 1988 when up to 5,000 Kurdish civilians were massacred by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Instead, what likely happened in Syria was simply the murder by intoxication of civilians by militants using lethal chemicals, such as cyanide or chlorine. Why were the supposed aid responders of the White Helmets not also poisoned if highly toxic sarin had been used? Why do the «responders» seem too preoccupied with making videos instead of actually treating victims with due medical care? Why have no sarin antidotes or decontaminants been requested or sent to Khan Sheikhoun in the days and weeks following the alleged attack?
Thus the militants and their media-savvy agents in the White Helmets (who are funded by Western military intelligence) could very well have staged the poisoning of unwitting civilians. The despicable, cynical act of homicide may not have even happened on the alleged date of April 4, or even in the alleged location of Khan Sheikhoun.
Bear in mind that it has been reported in the past that US and other Western military forces have «trained» the so-called Syrian «rebels» (terrorists) on the handling of lethal chemicals. Those Western media reports mendaciously spun the notion that the «rebels» were being trained in the event of Assad’s «chemical weapons arsenal being unleashed».
The Syrian government has repeatedly and categorically denied that its forces used chemical weapons at Khan Sheikhoun earlier this month or in any other incident. It says that all its chemical weapons were destroyed back in 2014 under a Russian-brokered deal, a result that was confirmed at the time by the OPCW.
Tenuously, the US Secretary of Defense James Mattis claimed last week that the Syrian government cheated the OPCW and secretly kept a portion of chemical weapons in reserve.
The Western narrative of chemical weapons (sarin) used by the Syrian government is riven with anomalies if interrogated with critical thinking. Indeed, when looked at with due skepticism, it is apparent that the Western narrative is not merely a misinformed, erroneous perspective. The whole affair is a deliberate, carefully constructed and delivered Western psychological operation, a false-flag propaganda stunt, to demonize and dehumanize the Syrian government in order to propel the Western agenda of regime change. The American CIA and British MI6 have been trying to implement regime change in Syria since 1949 in on-off clandestine projects. The chemical weapon of mass destruction allegation is but the latest ploy in a long-running project.
Western governments, their military intelligence agencies and the propaganda service of the corporate media have been working on this particular psychological operation for several years in Syria, going back to the first major «chemical weapon» incident in East Ghouta, near Damascus, in August 2013. That stunt failed to effectively demonize the Assad government then. But the Western operation has continued and evolved over time until its latest episode at Khan Sheikhoun on April 4. The «chemical weapon» nomenclature is spurious from the nature of the injuries inflicted. It is more likely an incident of mass poisoning by militants carried out on hapless victims, which is conveniently broadcast around the world by Western governments and media as a «chemical weapon of mass destruction» used by the «Assad regime».
What is overlooked, however, is the WMD weapon of mass disorientation being used against Western public. The disorientation of critical thinking, emotions and moral standards is deployed in order to more easily manipulate public consent for the Western governments’ criminal enterprise of regime change in Syria.
There is an abominable charade taking place before our very eyes. A charade in which supposedly «moral», «law-abiding», «democratic» Western governments are colluding with the most vile terror groups using the most vile means of deception and murder. Why this simple glaring truth is not recognized more widely by the Western public is because their own governments have deployed weapons of mass disorientation through dutiful mass media purporting to act as «news services».
- Contagion Fears Rise In Aftermath Of Home Capital Group Collapse
With the bank run at Home Capital Group hitting a crescendo on Friday, when in one day 36% of the liquidity at Canada’s largest non-bank lender escaped through the front door, and only an emergency rescue loan yielding over 20% has prevent a liquidation at HCG so far, suddenly some are wondering if the dreaded “C” word is applicable to what Bloomberg has dubbed “one of the world’s strongest financial systems.”
The word in question is contagion, and the party casually bringing it up is Mawer Investment Management, one of HCG’s largest former investors. Jim Hall recalculating the odds of a contagion widening across one of the world’s strongest financial systems.
According to Bloomberg, Mawer CIO Jim Hall is recalculating the odds of a contagion widening across the Canadian financial system.
“The probability has gone from infinitesimal to possible — unlikely, but possible,” said Hall, chief investment officer of the Calgary-based money manager, in an interview Saturday. “If depositors or bondholders start to lose faith in their banks, well then that becomes systemic.”
Mawer is not waiting to find out either way: the company which oversees more than C$40 billion in assets, sold about 2.8 million shares, or a 4.3 percent stake, in Home Capital in the past week, joining another Calgary-based money manager, QV Investors Inc., in exiting its investment amid the imbroglio consuming the Toronto-based lender.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Hall said that in his view, the odds that woes at Home Capital – which had C$20.5 billion in assets at the end of 2016, and whose C$15 billion home-loan book represents about 1% of Canada’s C$1.45 trillion mortgage market – spread through Canada’s financial system are low, “despite a growing chorus of voices speculating such fears in a nation gripped by an overheated housing market and runaway home prices in two of its three biggest real-estate markets: Vancouver and Toronto.“
“It’s a pretty hot fire in one little corner of the forest, and it doesn’t look like it’s spreading,” Hall said. “There are firefighters standing around it right now, so if it starts to move, they’ll put it out.”
Unless, of course, the firefighters are just as capable as the rating agencies or the company’s investors, the vast majority of whom never saw this coming.
As reported last week, after admitting it was the subject of a furious bank run, Home Capital secured a loan to stem dwindling deposits and said it’s weighing a sale, hiring RBC Capital Markets and BMO Capital Markets to advise on financing and “strategic options.” Canada’s banking regulator says it’s closely monitoring the situation and surveying other financial firms to assess their condition.
“The assets look, at this point, still reasonably good,” Hall said, adding that Home Capital’s problem is a matter of confidence. “Confidence was lost in this company and the business model breaks apart. That’s the problem with banks.”
So what would a worst case scenario look like?
Canada’s financial system has lots of fire breaks, as Hall describes it, to prevent problems from spreading.
“Even if a bank gets itself into a confidence issue, it can be effectively bailed out by another bank or by another financial institution or by ultimately the regulator,” Hall said.
Bank failures in Canada’s financial system, deemed the world’s soundest by the World Economic Forum for eight straight years until 2016, are rare. Canadian banks sidestepped the worst of the 2008 financial crisis, having only a fraction of the $1.95 trillion of writedowns and losses suffered by financial firms worldwide.
Ultimately, it is the “safest” financial systems, those that have taken virtually no reserves against a downside case, that end up being most exposed to unexpected shock factors.
“In a system that’s well capitalized, there are lots of firefighters around and they’ve got lots of equipment and they’ve got lots of water – that’s kind of where we’re at right now,” Hall said. “But it doesn’t mean it can’t get out of control.” As a reminder, in the US stocks surged for months after the US had its own “New Century” moment, hitting all time highs nearly half a year later, when it took months for the market to digest just what the collapse of subprime meant for the US and global economy.
- HaPPY MaY DaY 2017…
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