- Why A Typical Keynesian Stimulus Package Won't Help Germany
Today, we show you another ugly chart about the German economy. Last week, Destatis confirmed that the economy shrank by 0.1% QoQ in the second quarter and, as Saxobank’s Christopher Cembik points out, based on the very weak start to Q3, especially the latest ZEW, the risk of falling into recession is quite elevated this year.
On the export front, since Q3 2018, Germany has faced the combination of three negative waves:
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credit crunch in Turkey,
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risks related to Brexit and,
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more importantly, slowdown in China that affects directly the key local car market.
After a short-lived rebound in June, China’s imports from Germany has again entered in negative territory in July.
Source: Saxobank
We use the 3-month moving average to track imports in order to avoid too much short-term volatility. China’s imports from Germany are down 0.4% YoY last month.
Given the most up-to-date data about the car sector, China’s economy and global trade, there is no reason at that point to expect a rebound that could help the German economy. What is even more worrying is that Germany’s domestic demand, which has been quite resilient over the past quarters, starts to be negatively impacted by the industrial slump.
We expect in coming weeks a very heated debate over fiscal stimulus in Germany.
Financial conditions are very accommodative – Germany’s yield curve is at the flattest level since the financial crisis – but solutions to restart growth engine will be trickier to find than in 2008 as the country’s slowdown is also deeply linked to structural challenges.
Thus, a typical Keynesian stimulus package, based on temporary VAT reduction along with other tax exemptions, will only be able to bring short-term relief. It won’t be enough to tackle lack of digitization, infrastructure and increase in the long-run growth potential. A long-term strategy that may include green investments is needed for the German economic model to revive.
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- Eric Margolis Warns Hong Kong: Don't Provoke The Dragon
Time was when flying to Hong Kong was a really big thrill – or maybe scare would be a better term. Its old airport, Kai Tak, was right in the middle of bustling downtown Hong Kong. Flying into Kai Tak used up 11 of one’s 12 lives.
The wide-bodied jumbo aircraft would drop down into a long fjord that was usually shrouded in fog or mist. The nervous passenger would see nothing but cloud. Suddenly, the aircraft would break out of the thick cloud cover right over the airport.
To the left and right were apartment buildings festooned with drying laundry at the same height as one’s plane. The big 747 airliner landed with a huge thud and screaming tires right in front of another bunch of apartment buildings.
Even for veteran air travelers like myself, this was a heart-stopping experience. Amazingly, I recall only one crash at Kai Tak, which we used to call ‘Suicide Airport.’ Still, it was like landing a jumbo-jet on New York’s Park Avenue. Not for the faint of heart.
In 1998, Kai Tak was closed and replaced by the modern, spacious Chek Lap Kok, better known as Hong Kong International. It quickly became one of Asia’s principal aviation hubs.
This week, Hong Kong airport was besieged and shut down by thousands of young local demonstrators protesting China’s attempt to impose a new extradition law on Hong Kong that would allow Beijing to arrest Hong Kong residents for ‘anti-state’ activities. The deal that Hong Kong’s former colonial Britain signed with China calls for ‘two-states, one nation,’ with considerable independence for the former island colony.
But anyone who thinks China’s iron-fisted rulers will allow a scrap of paper to limit their influence over Hong Kong is dead wrong. For them, Hong Kong is as much a part of China as Shanghai. So, too, is Taiwan.
The massive rioting in Hong Kong earlier this week set off alarm bells in Beijing, which runs an Orwellian police state on the mainland. China’s hardline leaders rightly fear that the fracas in Hong Kong could incite other uprisings across China. Everyone remembers the long, bloody Cultural Revolution of the 1970’s with its rampaging Red Guards.
Perhaps more important, Chinese leaders study their nation’s history and draw lessons from it, unlike America’s history-free politicians. For the Americans, history is what was on Fox TV the week before.
What Beijing really fears is another Taiping Rebellion. A nobody named Hong Xiuqan proclaimed himself the brother of Jesus and raised a vast peasant army to overthrow the ruling Manchu dynasty in Beijing. Brutal civil war raged from 1850-1864 in which up to 100 million are believed to have been killed or died of famine.
If this sounds completely crazy, think of all the Republican sycophants that call President Trump the reincarnation of the ancient Hebrew Queen Esther or a ‘Christian warrior.’ Bizarre behavior and beliefs are universal.
China has warned the rioting Hong Kong students to cease their protests or face intervention by Beijing’s tough paramilitary police, which backs up the regular People’s Army. Chinese armed police and soldiers are massing just across the border in Shenzhen, a mere taxi ride from downtown Hong Kong.
If the Hong Kong students are not wise, they risk winding up in China’s penal camps, the ‘laogai.’ Large numbers of Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang have been locked away in China’s western laogai.
The airport riots now appear over but continue in Hong Kong’s streets. If the People’s Police or Liberation Army do intervene in Hong Kong to impose China’s iron hand, they could spark another Tiananmen Square bloodbath. But once Beijing’s forces impose martial law on Hong Kong its days of autonomy will be over.
The type of repression China imposed on Tibet and Muslim regions could be repeated in Hong Kong. There is absolutely nothing any of the world’s powers can do about it. China will then turn its attention to ‘renegade province’ Taiwan. Western politicians can huff and puff all they like but they are powerless to change the tide of events in Hong Kong.
- How Many Websites Are There?
On 6 August 1991, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland published the first ever website, the WorldWideWeb (W3).
By the end of 1992 there were ten websites online and, after CERN made the W3 technology publicly available on a royalty-free basis in 1993, the internet gradually started to grow into the all-encompassing giant that it is today.
By 1994, there were close to 3 thousand sites, one of which was a fledgling Yahoo! which, originally called ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web’, started its online life as a web directory.
By the time Google came onto the scene there were over two million websites.
You will find more infographics at Statista
As Statista’s infographic shows, today there are 1.71 billion, and looking at Internet Live Stats’ counter, despite being lower than 2017’s 1.76 billion, this figure is currently increasing at a fast rate.
- America Can Stop China From Dominating Artificial Intelligence… And Should
Authored by Gordon Chang via The Gatestone Institute,
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The People’s Republic of China, nonetheless, is already an AI powerhouse, and for America to maintain its edge – and to prevent U.S. tech from being used for exceedingly disturbing purposes – Washington should force U.S. companies to end cooperative AI projects in China.
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The West should be seriously concerned: whoever wins at AI will both dominate the global economy and field the most destructive conventional military force.
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Unfortunately, American companies are helping China’s leaders in what many call – correctly – crimes against humanity. For instance, AI researchers from Microsoft, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Michigan State University gave keynote speeches at the Chinese Conference on Biometric Recognition in Xinjiang in August of last year on facial recognition, a social-control technology.
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Some of Google’s research is in China. The company has three AI operations there: the Google AI China Center in Beijing, established in 2017, and partnerships with China’s two premier educational institutions, Peking University and Tsinghua University… If the labs remain open, the net flow of AI learning will be out of the U.S. into China.
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Moreover, Chinese researchers, if they could not work for American companies in China, would not, as Vox suggests, necessarily find employment in their homeland. Some of those seeking research slots would follow other Chinese to the United States, and that would exacerbate one of Beijing’s big AI vulnerabilities. “China’s Path to AI Domination Has a Problem: Brain Drain,” is the title of an August 7 article posted by the MIT Technology Review. The U.S. can make that crucial problem even more severe.
China, writes Amy Webb in Inc., has been “building a global artificial intelligence empire, and seeding the tech ecosystem of the future.” It has been particularly successful, Webb, the founder of the Future Today Institute, believes. “China is poised to become its undisputed global leader, and that will affect every business,” she notes.
Not everyone shares Webb’s assessment that Chinese researchers are in the lead. America, after all, is home to most leading AI tech. The People’s Republic of China, nonetheless, is already an AI powerhouse, and for America to maintain its edge—and to prevent U.S. tech from being used for exceedingly disturbing purposes, Washington should force U.S. companies to end cooperative AI projects in China.
Chinese artificial intelligence. We need to ask what would happen if the world’s most dangerous regime were to dominate the world’s most powerful technology. Photo: Getty Images.
Artificial intelligence permits machines to mimic human functions such as driving vehicles, recognizing spoken words, and playing games of skill like chess and Go.
Especially Go, the Chinese game of strategy. If China had an “AI Sputnik moment,” it occurred in March 2016 when AlphaGo, developed by Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind, took four out of five games from an 18-time champion in a challenge match in Seoul.
By the following year, Beijing was pouring even more money into AI research. Beijing in 2017 supplemented the AI component of its Made in China 2025 initiative with its “Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, a three-part effort to lead global AI by 2030. Furthermore, Beijing made sure its determination to dominate the field was shared across society. Business chieftains and policy analysts in China are much more focused on AI than those in the West, surveys show.
The nationwide effort, Webb tells us, paid off. China, for instance, now publishes more AI machine learning papers than the United States.
The West should be seriously concerned: whoever wins at AI will both dominate the global economy and field the most destructive conventional military force. To borrow a phrase, we are witnessing the “Rise of the Machines.”
What if those “machines” are Chinese? We need to ask what would happen if the world’s most dangerous regime were to dominate the world’s most powerful technology.
We are getting a hint what will occur in what Beijing calls the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. There, facial recognition systems, powered by AI, are helping China’s leaders to continually track inhabitants.
In Xinjiang, Beijing is relentlessly eliminating cultural and religious identity and implementing race-based policies reminiscent of those of the Third Reich. For example, more than a million inhabitants are being held in concentration-camp-like facilities for no reason other than their Uighur or Kazak ethnicity or their adherence to Islam.
Unfortunately, American companies are helping China’s leaders in what many call—correctly—crimes against humanity. For instance, AI researchers from Microsoft, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Michigan State University gave keynote speeches at the Chinese Conference on Biometric Recognition in Xinjiang in August of last year on facial recognition, a social-control technology.
China is on the AI map in part because Beijing has been given a boost by U.S. companies sharing technology. Leaders in the field are both Alphabet and its Google unit. Alphabet is a major player in part due to its acquisition of DeepMind. Google also conducts extensive AI research.
Some of Google’s research is in China. The company has three AI operations there: the Google AI China Center in Beijing, established in 2017, and partnerships with China’s two premier educational institutions, Peking University and Tsinghua University.
Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor, has in recent weeks severely criticized the search giant. “I think it is unprecedented in the last 100 years, or ever, that a major U.S. company refused to work with the U.S. military and has worked with our geopolitical rival,” he said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” on August 11th.
Google has in various statements denied charges like the ones Thiel has been making, but its contentions, although technically true, appear disingenuous.
First, the company has said it works with the Pentagon, but it is nonetheless not renewing its Project Maven contract, an AI project analyzing drone footage.
Second, Google denies working with the Chinese military, but as Thiel, a PayPal cofounder, points out, its “civilian” projects are actually military in disguise. “It’s not like the U.S., where you have different companies and different people and you have a government sector and a private sector and these things don’t always coordinate or work together,” Thiel said on Fox. “In China, these things are still tightly coordinated across the board.”
In the China of Xi Jinping, the aggressive ruler, “civil-military fusion” means nominally civilian research is pipelined into the Chinese military.
Thiel is right about the essential nature of China’s one-party state. The Communist Party, to which the People’s Liberation Army reports, has, in reality, near-absolute power over society, especially over something as important as scientific and technical research. Companies such as Google have to know about the military’s access to its AI research in China.
Not everyone is concerned about China’s militarization of research. “You’re not going to be able to stop or slow down Chinese AI progress by stopping these labs,” Jeffrey Ding of Oxford’s Center for the Governance of AI, told Vox, the popular American-based news site, while referring to foreign AI research facilities. “Either we try to get the best and brightest, or they have other options,” he said.
“If we rather someone work for Microsoft than the Chinese military,” Vox, asked, “why take away the option of working for Microsoft?”
Ding and Vox highlight an important aspect of the AI race. The competition, as a practical matter, is one for brainpower: people. As futurist George Gilder has noted, “The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius.” Axios reports that most of America’s best AI researchers have come from other countries.
“What has given the US its AI advantage has been, in significant part, the fact that the US attracts AI talent from all over the world,” Vox writes.
“While America is a much smaller country than China, it’s drawing on what is effectively a much larger talent pool, including attracting many top Chinese researchers.”
Chinese researchers, if they could not work for American companies in China, would not, as Vox suggests, necessarily find employment in their homeland. Some of those seeking research slots would follow other Chinese to the United States, and that would exacerbate one of Beijing’s big AI vulnerabilities. “China’s Path to AI Domination Has a Problem: Brain Drain,” is the title of an August 7 article posted by the MIT Technology Review. The U.S. can make that crucial problem even more severe.
Despite benefits of conducting AI research in China, the weight of evidence argues for closing American AI operations in that country. These labs leak
outU.S. learning, and despite what Webb writes, it appears the United States is still ahead in cutting-edge AI. If the labs remain open, the net flow of AI learning will be out of the U.S. into China.Although much AI research today is open-source—meaning it does not matter where researchers are based—it is becoming clear that in coming years AI work will not be published in open forums. That should put a premium on attracting the best talent to one’s own country.
Of course, there is no question that closing American facilities in China will inhibit, in some fashion, American AI work, but that loss is not nearly as great as the benefits of walling off China. Moreover, we cannot ignore the moral considerations of helping a militant, racist state.
It is the race of the century, and the U.S. urgently needs to improve the odds. It is time, therefore, for President Trump, by emergency order, to close the AI projects of American companies in the People’s Republic of China.
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- It Begins: Pentagon Tests First Land-Based Cruise Missile Post-INF Treaty
Here we go with the unleashing of the new Cold War arms race 2.0: the United States has just tested a ground-launched cruise missile with a range of over 500km — previously banned under the now defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty — just after Putin recently said Russia will be forced to deploy banned missiles if the US does.
The Pentagon on Monday confirmed a flight test of a “conventionally configured ground-launched cruise missile” which happened on Sunday, and released video of the launch.
“Data collected and lessons learned from this test will inform the Department of Defense’s development of future intermediate-range capabilities,” the DoD press release said.
The test occurred at a range on San Nicolas Island, California, the Pentagon said Monday. The missile was reported as successfully hitting a target of more 500km (310 miles) away.
Crucially this comes on the heels of both the United States and Russia formally withdrawing from the landmark 1987 treaty which banned missiles with a range of between 500km and 5,000km.
At the start of August US Defense Secretary Mark Esper had indicated plans to deploy previously banned missiles in Asia or the Pacific region:, “It’s fair to say, though, that we would like to deploy a capability sooner rather than later,” Esper said during a prior trip to Australia. “I would prefer months. I just don’t have the latest state of play on timelines.”
WATCH: U.S. flight-tests ground launched Tomahawk variant off of California in a test that went “more than 500km”, a first since the end of the INF treaty earlier this month. Notable that they chose the Tomahawk as the original ground-launched version of it was killed by INF pic.twitter.com/aIPKRFHdvC
— Jeff Martin (@JeffMartinDC) August 19, 2019
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Putin had told a gathering of his defense chiefs days following news of the US deployment plans for Asia: “In our opinion, the United States’ actions, which have led to the termination of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, will inevitably entail devaluation, undermine the entire global security architecture, including the strategic offensive arms treaty and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” he told the council, according to a Kremlin press service statement.
“This scenario means the resumption of an unrestrained arms race,” Putin emphasized.
Russia’s defense ministry recently reiterated that it would refrain from deploying mid- and long-range missiles unless Washington did first.
The Pentagon’s new missile test could mark the beginning of precisely such an “unrestrained arms race” which characterized the worst fears of the Cold War era.
- Krieger: Believing Jeffrey Epstein Committed Suicide Is The Real Conspiracy Theory
Authored by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Is a murder committed more heinous than a suicide allowed? In its act, sure. In this context? NO.
An “unlucky accident” like this is the ONE THING that a non-corrupt State must prevent. It’s the non-corrupt State’s ONE JOB to keep Epstein alive for trial, and everyone knows that everyone knows this is their ONE JOB.
It is impossible to violate this common knowledge without premeditation and malice, without conspiracy and criminality aforethought. It is impossible to have an “unlucky accident” like this in a non-corrupt State.
– Ben Hunt, I’m a Superstitious Man
It’s entirely fitting that the death of Jeffrey Epstein is as disturbing, shady, bizarre and seemingly inexplicable as the rest of his life. It seems as if one could research this wretched man’s time on earth for years and still come up with more questions than answers. An unfortunate reality complicated by the fact we don’t have a mass media particularly interested in asking any of the big questions, such as:
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Where is Ghislaine Maxwell? Why isn’t she in custody and was she a Mossad spy like her late father Robert Maxwell?
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Explain the details of the relationship between Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein? Why does it seem as if Wexner helped set Epstein up with the appearance of extraordinary wealth, yet no one seems to know how Epstein actually came into all his money?
It appears sexually abusing children and accumulating associated blackmail on the rich and powerful was a full-time job for Epstein, so who was actually bankrolling/overseeing this operation? Was it Wexner, somebody else, or was it an intelligence agency as Alex Acosta claims he was told? Seems kind of important to get to the bottom of this.
I could go on and on, but then this would become a book. Rather, the purpose of this post is to highlight the outlandishness surrounding many of the details (or lack thereof) surrounding Epstein’s death a week ago in a Department of Justice operated New York City prison.
Indeed, what you’d have to believe in order to think this was a simple suicide is the actual conspiracy theory.
Let’s begin with the initial attack, which happened three weeks before his death.
The Initial Attack
As everybody knows, on July 23, Jeffrey Epstein was found in a fetal position, semi-conscious, on the floor of his cell with neck injuries. His cellmate at the time was Nicholas Tartaglione, a former New York police officer who was arrested in December 2016 on charges of killing four men in a drug distribution conspiracy.
There was a giant haze surrounding this incident up until the moment of Epstein’s death, with everyone unsure whether he was attacked or if it was a suicide attempt. According to a report by NBC News, Tartaglione was subsequently cleared the day before Epstein was found dead. I suppose that means the initial attack was belatedly ruled a suicide attempt, but why did it take so long to figure that out? It took far less time to rule Epstein’s suspicious death a suicide.
Circumstances at the Prison Surrounding the Death
Either the stars all aligned perfectly for the most important prisoner in America to kill himself on that day, or he was somehow murdered to shield an extensive list of some of the most wealthy and powerful people on earth. Decide for yourself.
– One of Epstein’s Guards Was Not a Corrections Officer
The AP reported:
A person familiar with operations at the federal jail where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself says one of the two people guarding him the night he died wasn’t a correctional officer.
The person wasn’t authorized to disclose information about the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The person said Epstein hanged himself with a bedsheet, days after being taken off a suicide watch.
Federal prisons facing shortages of fully trained guards have resorted to having other types of support staff fill in for correctional officers, including clerical workers and teachers.
– Both of the Guards Fell Asleep at the Exact Same Time Giving Epstein a Chance to Die
Guards were supposed to have checked on Epstein every 30 minutes, but rather both of them fell asleep for 3 hours during the window of Epstein’s death.
Via Business Insider:
The two prison guards assigned to monitor Jeffrey Epstein in a high-security jail fell asleep for three hours, the night he died of an apparent suicide, The New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed officials…
According to reports, there were multiple breaches in protocol regarding the supervision of Epstein: prison guards were required to check on Epstein every 30 minutes, which they failed to do, officials told The Times, and Epstein was being housed alone after his cellmate was transferred and was not replaced.
– Epstein Guards Suspected of Falsifying Logs
AP reports:
A person familiar with the probe of Jeffrey Epstein’s death at a federal jail says guards are suspected of falsifying log entries to show they were checking on inmates in his unit every half hour, when they actually weren’t.
– Key People at the Prison Are Not Cooperating with the FBI
CNN reports
Even top officials in the department have been frustrated by their inability to get some answers from the prison, in part because initial answers turned out to be inaccurate in some cases…
The FBI probe is complicated by the fact that key people involved aren’t cooperating, people briefed on the matter say.
– Epstein Was Taken off Suicide Watch Less Than a Week After His Initial Suicide Attempt
New York Magazine reports:
Epstein was taken off of suicide watch on July 29 and returned to the MCC’s special housing unit after a psychiatric evaluation determined he was no longer at risk of harming himself. The Wall Street Journal reported that Epstein’s lawyers had requested he be removed from suicide watch.
– Epstein’s Cellmate Was Removed the Day Before Epstein Died
This makes no sense, unless you’re trying to create the perfect conditions for Epstein to die.
Via CNN:
In one instance over the weekend, officials believed the former Epstein cellmate had been released on bail. But it turns out he had been moved to another facility, one person briefed on the matter said. One of the first tasks for FBI agents this week was interviewing that former cellmate, who could provide information on Epstein’s behavior in the days before his suicide.
Who was Epstein’s cellmate before he died? After the first incident, it was revealed almost immediately who his cellmate was, but there’s been little to no details about the second cellmate. Who was he and what does he have to say?
Details Surrounding the Death Itself
– Epstein Hung Himself from a Bunkbed
Via The Washington Post:
Epstein, 66, was found in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan on Saturday morning, and an official said he hanged himself with a bedsheet attached to the top of a bunk bed. Epstein was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The bunkbed was conveniently available due to the fact his cellmate was inexplicably moved a day before.
– Epstein Suffered Multiple Breaks in His Neck Bones, Which Is More Common in Homicides
Also via The Washington Post:
An autopsy found that financier Jeffrey Epstein suffered multiple breaks in his neck bones, according to two people familiar with the findings, deepening the mystery about the circumstances around his death.
Among the bones broken in Epstein’s neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam’s apple. Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they are older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject. But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.
– Little to No Details About Prison Camera Footage
I assume some narrative will emerge here, but it’s already been too long for my comfort. We had all sorts of details emerge in the days following Epstein’s death, but almost nothing regarding the crucial hallway camera footage in the prison. This is something investigators would likely check immediately so why didn’t they, or if they did, why is it taking so long to inform the public?
Even Epstein’s lawyers seem confused as to whether the video footage exists.
Here is part of a statement from Epstein’s attorneys via NBC News:
“It is indisputable that the authorities violated their own protocols. The defense team fully intends to conduct its own independent and complete investigation into the circumstances and cause of Mr. Epstein’s death including if necessary legal action to view the pivotal videos — if they exist as they should — of the area proximate to Mr. Epstein’s cell during the time period leading to his death.”
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the NYC Medical Examiners Office, which ruled Epstein’s death a suicide, has a pretty sordid history.
Check out the following from a 2014 New York Post article, Lost Bodies, Wasted Money: Inside NYC’s Medical Examiner’s Office
The city Medical Examiner’s Office is a mess — plagued with errors, including bodies being lost, mistakenly cremated or wrongly donated to science — while millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on plans and equipment useful only in a mass disaster…
Meanwhile, insiders say ME chiefs, caught up in the glamor of disaster, neglect the agency’s primary mission.
“They can’t take care of day-to-day business. They play war games,” one said.
The ME’s Office, with 625 employees and a $63.6 million budget, has a history of criminality, waste and incompetence.
The ME’s former chief of management information systems, Natarajan “Raju” Venkataram, and his co-worker girlfriend, Rosa Abreu, were busted in 2005 for embezzling more than $9 million from a $11.4 million FEMA grant meant to track and identify remains of 9/11 victims.
And bosses take lavish taxpayer-funded trips to conferences and symposiums.
Frank DePaolo, assistant commissioner for emergency management, has traveled to Las Vegas, the Hague, Hong Kong and Israel. Chief of Staff Barbara Butcher has gone to Croatia and Thailand…
The number of investigators, who examine bodies at death scenes, was slashed from about 40 to 20, among other cuts, they said.
“We’re told to do more with less, but the work is suffering,” one said.
Here’s some more while we’re at it:
If after everything I’ve highlighted, you still believe this was a simple suicide that’s fine. Anything is possible, but it really doesn’t matter. Even if it was mere incompetence that allowed a suicide to occur, this still demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt that the federal government is incapable or unwilling to protect the public.
The Epstein case was and remains a matter of extreme public interest since this was a man who systematically sexually abused and trafficked children while closely associating with, and collecting blackmail on, a large slew of the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet. If the government can’t protect you from that, and it most certainly went out of its way to deny justice for this criminal over decades including within prison itself, then you can’t trust the government for anything. As such, whenever the feds claim they’re doing something extreme to protect you, whether it’s mass surveillance or encryption backdoors, you can be 100% sure it is a giant heap of stinking bullshit.
The narrative now being formed is that it was all just a lot of incompetence. That the guards were tired and overworked. We’re also being told that it’s normal for an inmate on suicide watch to come off after a few days, but Jeffrey Epstein was not a normal inmate. Epstein and the people around him belong to a class I refer to as super predators, which are the most dangerous predators in society because their elite connections allow them to get away with anything and everything.
It’s become completely clear that rather than stopping such people and their criminal rings, the U.S. government protects them and ensures no justice is ever served upon them, even up to their last breath.
Our government isn’t there to protect us, save us or dispense any justice. Instead, it seemingly exists to protect, serve and encourage the elite criminal rings operating around us in plain sight, whether it’s bank CEOs or pedophile sex traffickers with apparent intelligence links.
We are truly ruled by gangsters.
Keep talking about Epstein. Don’t let it go. Keep digging. It’s a giant middle finger in the face of humanity. Never forget.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) August 19, 2019
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- Militarization Of North Australia Is A Must To Win A War Against China, Report
Expanding on our June report, that outlined Australia is constructing a new naval port on its northern coast to counter a rising China in the Indo-Pacific region, Australian Defence Minister Linda Reynolds said the government recognized the “vital importance” of militarizing northern Australia for national security purposes.
Senator Reynolds said, “over $8 billion will be invested in defense infrastructure in the Northern Territory alone. Northern Australia is key to Australian international engagement in support of our strategic partnerships.”
This comes at a time when Washington and its strategic allies are falling into Thucydides Trap, referring to China, the rising power, challenging the US, the status quo, could one day lead to a shooting war somewhere in the heavily contested South China Sea and western Pacific waters.
Senator Reynolds said Australia had been warned it must militarize its northern borders amid threats of Chinese expansion in the Indo-Pacific region and prepare for the US losing its “military primacy” in the area.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and United States Studies Centre are expected to sound the alarm Monday on the lack of troops and military hardware in northern Australia and the need to increase weapon stockpiles and fuel reserves.
ASPI’s report requests the government to stress test defense, intelligence, and border security agencies in the North against sudden threats.
ASPI suggests troop deployment in the North is at decade lows calls for a “single scalable defense and national security ecosystem.”
Senator Reynolds said about 13,000 Australian Defence Force (ADF) troops are stationed in the North, and “thousands more participate in operations or training scenarios across the North annually.”
“We host over 2,500 US Marines and Air Force members in Darwin yearly, providing security benefits for Australia and the United States by deepening our interoperability and enhancing capabilities through increased combined training and exercises, stepping up our engagement with regional countries, and better position both nations to respond to crises in the region,” she said.
The US Studies Centre is also expected to release its report on Monday, stating that Washington no longer “enjoys military primacy in the Indo-Pacific” and that its ability to “uphold a favorable balance of power is increasingly uncertain.”
The reshifting of focus on northern Australia and the Indo-Pacific region comes as China is attempting to become a dominating power in the area.
Both reports stress: Australia needs to fund military infrastructure projects across the North to combat a rising China.
The ADF operates army bases in Darwin and Townsville; the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) operates stations in Darwin, Katherine and Townsville; and the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) operates naval ports at Trinity Bay and Darwin.
John Coyne, author of ASPI’s report, Strong and Free?, indicates northern Australia is becoming the ADF’s forward operating base or its “lily pad to another forward position within the Pacific or the first or second island chain. There’s a need to reconceptualize northern Australia, defined as those areas north of the 26-degree south parallel, as a single scalable defense and national security ecosystem.”
Coyne said the forward operating base would allow the ADF to be in a “state of readiness to support a range of defence contingencies with little advance warning.”
The US Studies Centre report offers nine suggestions to respond to a rising China that is threatening the US’s supremacy in the Indo-Pacific region. It states that the readiness of US forces has been “eroded” after two decades of “near-continuous combat and budget instability.”
“Given the stresses of preparing for a possible conflict with China … the joint force will have to scale back other responsibilities, particularly in secondary regions like the Middle East,” report authors Ashley Townshend, Brendan Thomas-Noone and Matilda Steward said.
Writing in The Australian today, Alan Dupont, chief executive of geopolitical risk consultancy the Cognoscenti Group and member of the Northern Territory’s Strategic Defence Advisory Board, says “serious threats are emerging with disconcerting rapidity.”
“The problem is that we are underdone on defence infrastructure and manufacturing in the north and haven’t done nearly enough to think through, and invest in, the sustainment of forces deployed from the north,” Dupont writes.
“At a national level our fuel reserves and refining capacity are too thin. In a crisis, we can’t rely on others to provide the fuel we need for ADF operations and national emergencies. But a land-based, or offshore floating refinery in the North could help solve this problem.”
The US and its allies are preparing for war with China. Northern Australia could become a “lily pad” for coalition forces, used to attack Chinese militarized islands in the South China Sea.
- Chinese Social Credit Score Prevents 2.5 Million "Discredited Entities" From Buying Plane Tickets
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
The Communist Chinese government is bragging about its social credit system has prevented 2.5 million “discredited entities” from purchasing plane tickets and 90,000 people from buying high speed train tickets in the month of July alone.
“China restricted 2.56 million discredited entities from purchasing plane tickets, and 90,000 entities from buying high-speed rail tickets in July,” tweeted the Global Times, a Chinese government mouthpiece.
China restricted 2.56 million discredited entities from purchasing plane tickets, and 90,000 entities from buying high-speed rail tickets in July: NDRC #socialcredit pic.twitter.com/4zAwJ7hrBn
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) August 16, 2019
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As I document in the video below, Chinese citizens are punished by having their social credit score lowered for engaging in a number of different behaviors, including;
– Bad driving.
– Smoking on trains.
– Buying too many video games.
– Buying too much junk food.
– Buying too much alcohol.
– Calling a friend who has a low credit score .
– Having a friend online who has a low credit score.
– Posting “fake news” online.
– Criticizing the government.
– Visiting unauthorized websites.
– Walking your dog without a leash.
– Letting your dog bark too much.
As of November 2018, 6.7 million Chinese people had already been banned from buying air and train tickets. That number now appears to be surging.
While many on the left and in the media decry China’s Orwellian social credit score system, they simultaneously advocate for a similar thing in the west, where people are deplatformed and have their right to engage in commerce revoked because of their political views.
“Big Tech has already implemented their own “social credit score” system where they punish people for their political views by deplatforming them, censoring their websites and closing their PayPal/bank accounts,” writes Chris Menahan.
“On the other hand, media outlets which push propaganda in accordance with the desires of our ruling oligarchs are rewarded by having their content algorithmically artificially boosted and handed millions of dollars.”
Imagine going to buy groceries with your credit card, but then having your payment declined because someone in an office in San Francisco thinks you posted something “hateful” on the Internet.
That’s our collective future.
Here’s a dystopian vision of the future: A real announcement I recorded on the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train. (I’ve subtitled it so you can watch in silence.) pic.twitter.com/ZoRWtdcSMy
— James O’Malley (@Psythor) October 29, 2018
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- "It's $8 Billion, That's A Lot Of Jobs": Trump OKs F16 Taiwan Deal; Beijing Says "Consequences" Coming
Beijing will take “countermeasures” and impose serious “consequences” on Washington for its fast-moving deal to sell 66 F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan after President Trump approved the $8 billion deal this weekend.
“The US has to bear all the consequences triggered by the sale,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said on Monday. “China will take necessary measures to defend its self-interest based on the development of the situation.”
Image source: Lockheed Martin Geng indicated further Chinese officials have lodged multiple formal protests with the US over its weapons sales to Taiwan, which Beijing asserts historic claims over.
While the statement didn’t give details as to what those “consequences” would be, Chinese rhetoric has in the recent past gone so far as to threaten war, and Beijing has backed this threat with frequent war games in the waters around Taiwan.
On Sunday Trump told reporters that he approved the sale, set to be ratified by a supportive Senate.
“It’s US$8 billion. It’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of jobs. And we know they’re going to use these F-16s responsibly,” he said.
The last US transfer of F-16s to Taiwan was based on a deal all the way back in 1992. The Obama administration had since rejected repeat requests by Taipei for more, only offering to upgrade the ageing fleet.
The new variant of the F-16, the Viper, is expected to hold up better in the event of a mainland China attack, with a statement from the Taiwan presidential office saying the new jets would ensure “safeguarding peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and in the region.”
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