- New EU Copyright Law Could Force Online Platforms To Ban Memes Across Europe
A new law being just passed in European Parliament and in the process of becoming finalized has received scant media attention, but could be nothing short of revolutionary in terms of its lasting impact on the internet, political speech and discourse, and the potential for censorship. So far the EU is moving the law forward, but it has sparked fierce push back, as it looks likely that soon entirely legal content will be caught in the law’s dragnet.
The law, in its full named called The European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, is intended to updated existing copyright laws for social media and the internet, but critics say it’s incredibly short sighted and creates more problems than it does solutions. At the heart of the law is Article 11, which as been dubbed the “link tax,” and Article 13, which is being called the “meme ban” due to the likely potential that internet memes could be banned across Europe.
Whereas so far the onus has been on artists and creators to flag copyright infringements, the new EU law requires platforms like YouTube, Google, Twitter, and Facebook to be responsible for copyright violations.
This means these large platforms which host immense amounts of constantly updated images, memes, and information could be forced to require users to pass all content through an “upload filter” first which would theoretically ensure copyrighted information doesn’t make it onto the platform.
This is where memes, which are most often created using existing official images of political figures, events, or cartoons, could be banned as they would likely be flagged by such upload filters. The intent of the law is to protect the copyrighted content of artists, photographers, companies, and individual content creators, but critics say it will change the internet and social media platforms as we known it.
According to Wired commenting on the so-called “meme ban,” or Article 13:
No one can quite agree how these platforms are expected to identify and remove this content. An earlier version of the Directive referred to “proportionate content recognition technologies” which sounds an awful lot like it’s asking platform owners to use automate filters to scan every piece of upload content and stop anything that might violate copyright from being uploaded…
The reason why this article has been dubbed the “meme ban” is that no one is sure whether memes, which are often based on copyrighted images, will fall foul of these laws. Proponents of the legislation argue that memes are protected as parodies and so aren’t required to be removed under this directive, but others argue that filters won’t be able to distinguish between memes and other copyrighted material so they’d end up being caught in the crossfire anyway.
Likely even before implementation of such upload filters the law itself would have a chilling effect on companies, political groups, and individuals posting memes, for fear of being censored and flagged for copyrighted material.
Will the “distracted boyfriend” meme soon meet with this fate? This image has been redacted due to violating Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive.
the meme ban is upon us https://t.co/UC7AqYumC5
— Jeff Nelson (@jraynels) September 15, 2018
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There will also no doubt be, as Wired explains, and preponderance of incidents where public domain material is filtered out.
The “link tax,” or Article 11 is also deeply worrisome as it will require the same media platforms to pay a small fee every time snippets of a copyrighted article appear in an aggregator.
Wired explains:
The article intends to get news aggregator sites, such as Google News, to pay publishers for using snippets of their articles on their platforms. Press publications “may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for the digital use of their press publications by information society service providers,” the Directive states.
Like with the potential of a meme ban, it is unclear just how this will be enforced, and how broad the impact will be. It could significantly alter the way users receive headlines and news via certain platforms.
Wired continues:
No one is really sure how this one would work either. How much of an article has to be shared before a platform has to pay the publisher? The Directive states that platforms won’t have to pay if they’re sharing “mere hyperlinks which are accompanied by individual words,” but since most links are accompanied by more than a couple of words it seems that many platforms and news aggregators would fall foul of this rule.
The directive is not set to take effect immediately, and it could still be years before it impacts national legislation of EU member states. It’s now set to enter informal negotiations between the European Commission, Council and Parliament, after successfully being passed by EU Parliament.
But the bottom line is the law’s final wording will ultimately be set in the opaque deliberations of EU bureaucrats, and it can’t end well for internet giants Google, Facebook, or even individual users that want to retain the right to share simple memes.
- Orban's Moscow Visit A Middle Finger To EU After Last Week's Humiliation
Authored by John Laughland via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
The “salon des refusés” of political dissidents in the EU is getting bigger by the day. Less than a week after his government was condemned in a vote in the European parliament, Orban is in Moscow for talks about energy with Putin. His visit to Russia is the political equivalent of giving the EU the finger following last week’s humiliation.
Orban is not alone. In his battle with the EU over immigration and the rule of law, he is supported by Poland and the Czech Republic. Poland, which is also facing an Article 7 procedure against it by the European Commission, has vowed to protect Hungary, just as Hungary has vowed to protect Poland. So there is no way that the voting rights of either country can be removed, since the ultimate vote to do so requires unanimity. Orban also recently received the support of Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis and of the Italian Minister of the Interior, Matteo Salvini.
These politicians have voiced support for Orban’s stance against immigration. But they also support his pragmatic approach to Russia. Salvini is a well-known critic of the Russia sanctions, and Italy has said they should end. Parts of the Austrian government agree, the Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl having recently had Putin as a personal guest of honor at her wedding, while the Vice-Chancellor, Heinz-Christian Strache, is well known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin views. On the other hand, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has reassured critics that Austria is rooted in the EU and shares its stance towards Russia.
The striking thing about Orban, and about his Central European allies (who incidentally include the Czech President Milos Zeman), is that they are from countries which, as Orban puts it, suffered greatly “under Russia” in the past. He is referring to the countries’ membership of the Warsaw Pact, and their subjection to communist rule, after World War II. In Hungary’s case, the suffering was especially violent because of the suppression of the 1956 revolution in Budapest by Soviet troops. Yet it is precisely these countries who today advocate a pragmatic relationship with Russia, while countries such as Britain, and even Germany, treat Russia as if it were still a communist dictatorship with the Cold War in full swing.
The irony is all the greater because Orban personally played a key role – but one which is often forgotten by historians – in bringing about the end of Soviet rule in Central Europe. His speech in Heroes’ Square in Budapest on June 16, 1989 on the occasion of the re-burial of the leader of the 1956 uprising, Imre Nagy, was the first time anyone in the Warsaw Pact had publicly called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The very making of this speech showed that the old taboos – and, with them, the power of the communist dictatorship – had collapsed. This was two months before the Hungarian government opened its border with Austria, allowing tens of thousands of East Germans to cross into West Germany, and five months before the Berlin wall came down. Orban’s contribution to the chain reaction which led to these later events was therefore decisive.
There is only one explanation for this apparent paradox that some former anti-communist Central European leaders are now pro-Russian. Unlike their Western colleagues, who were never directly affected by communist rule, the states of the former Warsaw Pact understand not only that Russia is no longer the old USSR, having abandoned communism, but also that national identity, and pride in national identity, were the key to undoing communist rule in Central Europe and then in Russia itself. Orban’s 1989 speech was a patriotic appeal to Hungarians: it traced their battle for national freedom back to 1848. Freedom and national pride went hand in hand.
As in Poland, where not only national identity but also religion played a key role in the downfall of communism, Hungarians (and Czechs and many others) now see with dismay that same national identity which freed them from communism under attack from the new commissars in Brussels. This is because the approach in Western Europe is directly the opposite. Pride in one’s nation is considered backward and dangerous, largely because national pride was irredeemably damaged during the war.
The fact is that all the early member states of the EU were defeated in the war, whether by the Germans or by the Allies. During the process of defeat, national pride was ruined, either through the barbarism of Nazism and fascism or through various forms of nationalist collaboration with it. All these stain the national record. Only in Britain was national pride the key to victory; for everyone else it was the key to defeat. (The only partial exception to this rule is France, which retained some sense of national pride after the war. But, in later decades, the memory of the Gaullist resistance was effaced by a stronger memory of the national shame of Vichy.)
Because of this, Western European states have adopted the EU ideology, according to which European history before the creation of the EU was nothing but wars between nation-states. Indeed, national rivalry was the key to these wars. In order for there to be peace, it is argued, Europe’s nation-states must be dissolved in a supranational entity. Germany has accomplished the task of making a clean slate of its national history in a more complete manner than any other European state but the other countries share parts, sometimes large parts, of this same German historiographical and political model.
To be sure, the states of Central Europe have skeletons in their own cupboards concerning the war. Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany throughout it. But the more recent memory of national victory over communism has rekindled national pride, whereas the Western European states have not enjoyed any comparable victory and so they instead put all their faith in the post-national and post-modern European project. Moreover, whereas Communism was largely rejected as an ideology by the people living under it – including in Soviet Russia – the ideology of liberalism has penetrated very deeply into the Western European consciousness, to the extent even of extinguishing national sentiment. Liberalism has been more successful in this regard than communism was, even though orthodox Marxism also called for an end to the nation-state.
This East-West fracture is a major ideological dividing line inside the European Union. The vote in the European Parliament last week, in which over two thirds of MEPs ganged up on a member state in the name of their biased interpretation of “the rule of law,” was a historic moment which brought into the open the depth of this radically different approach to politics and history. Opposite attitudes to Russia are also part of this division. As Marx said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, as we saw in Strasbourg last week: the European Union, like the Soviet Union, will in due course discover that national identity is stronger even than its political ideology.
- Animated Map: Visualizing 2,400 Years Of European History
The history of Europe is breathtakingly complex. While there are rare exceptions like Andorra and Portugal, which have had remarkably static borders for hundreds of years, as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley points out, jurisdiction over portions of the continent’s landmass has changed hands innumerable times.
Today’s video comes to us from YouTube channel Cottereau, and it provides an informative overview of European history starting from 400 BC. Empires rise and fall, invasions sweep across the continent, and the borders of modern countries slowly begin to take shape (with the added bonus of an extremely dramatic instrumental).
Below are nine highlights and catalysts that shifted Europe’s geographic dividing lines:
146 BC – A YEAR OF CONQUEST
146 BC was a year of conquest and expansion for the Roman Republic. The fall of Carthage left the Romans in control of territory in North Africa, and the ransack and destruction of the Greek city-state of Corinth also kickstarted an era of Roman influence in that region. These decisive victories paved the way for the Roman Empire’s eventual domination of the Mediterranean.
117 AD – PEAK ROMAN EMPIRE
The peak of the Roman Empire is one of the more dramatic moments in European history. At its height, under Trajan, the Roman Empire was a colossal 1.7 million square miles (quite a feat in an era without motorized vehicles and modern communication tools). This enormous empire remained mostly intact until 395, when it was irreparably split into Eastern and Western regions.
370 AD – THE ARRIVAL OF THE HUNS
Spurred on by severe drought conditions in Central Asia, the Huns reached Europe and found a Roman Empire weakened by currency debasement, economic instability, overspending, and increasing incursions from rivals along its borders. The Huns waged their first attack on the Eastern Roman Empire in 395, but it was not until half a century later – under the leadership of Attila the Hun – that hordes pushed deeper into Europe, sacking and razing cities along the way. The Romans would later get their revenge when they attacked the quarreling Goths and Huns, bouncing the latter out of Central Europe.
1241 – THE MONGOL INVASION
In the mid-13th century, the “Golden Horde” led by grandsons of Genghis Khan, roared into Russia and Eastern Europe sacking cities along the way. Facing invasion from formidable Mongol forces, central European princes temporarily placed their regional conflicts aside to defend their territory. Though the Mongols were slowly pushed eastward, they loomed large on the fringes of Europe until almost the 16th century.
1362 – LITHUANIA
Today, Lithuania is one of Europe’s smallest countries, but at its peak in the middle ages, it was one of the largest states on the continent. A pivotal moment for Lithuania came after a decisive win at the Battle of Blue Waters. This victory stifled the expansion of the Golden Horde, and brought present-day Ukraine into its sphere of influence.
1648 – KLEINSTAATEREI
The end of the Holy Roman Empire highlights the extreme territorial fragmentation in Germany and neighboring regions, in an era referred to as Kleinstaaterei.
Even as coherent nation states formed around it, the Holy Roman Empire and its remnents wouldn’t coalesce until Germany rose from the wreckage of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Unification helped position Germany as a major power, and by 1900 the country had the largest economy in Europe.
1919 – THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
The Ottoman Empire – a fixture in Eastern Europe for hundreds of years – was in its waning years by the beginning of the 20th century. The empire had ceded territory in two costly wars with Italy and Balkan states, and by the time the dust cleared on WWI, the borders of the newly minted nation of Turkey began at the furthest edge of continental Europe.
1942 – EXPANDING AND CONTRACTING GERMANY
At the furthest extent of Axis territory in World War II, Germany and Italy controlled a vast portion of continental Europe. After the war, however, Germany again became fragmented into occupation zones – this time, overseen by the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Germany would not be made whole again until 1990, when a weakening Soviet Union loosened its grip on East Germany.
1991 – SOVIET DISSOLUTION
In the decades following WWII, Europe’s geopolitical boundaries remained relatively stable – that is, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Almost overnight, the country’s entire western border splintered into independent nations. When the dust settled, there were 15 breakaway republics, six of which were in Europe.
Bonus: If you liked the video above, be sure to watch this year-by-year account of who ruled territories across Europe.
- The 'Adults In The White House' Trying To Save US From Trump Are Just As Dangerous As He Is
Authored by Patrick Cockburn via Counterpunch.org,
Before his election as president it was understandable that Donald Trump’s critics should have vastly underestimated his ability as a politician. It is much less excusable – and self-destructive to effective opposition to Trump – that they should go on underestimating him almost two years after his victory.
Every week there are more revelations showing the Trump administration to be chaotic, incompetent and corrupt. The latest are the anonymous op-ed in The New York Times in which one of his own senior officials’ claims to be working against him and Bob Woodward’s book portraying the White House as a sort of human zoo.
The media gleefully reports these bombshells in the hope that they will finally sink, or at least inflict serious damage, on the Good Ship Trump. This has been the pattern since he announced his presidential candidacy, but it never happens. Political commentators, overwhelmingly anti-Trump, express bafflement at his survival but, such is their loathing and contempt for him that they do not see that they are dealing with an exceptionally skilled politician.
His abilities may be instinctive or drawn from his vast experience as a showman on television. Priority goes to dominating the news agenda regardless of whether the publicity is good or bad. Day after day, hostile news outlets like The New York Times and CNN lead on stories about Trump to the exclusion of all else.
The media does not do this unless they know their customers want it: Trump is an American obsession, even greater than Brexit in Britain. A friend of mine recently met a group of American folk singers touring the south coast of Ireland who told him that they had often pledged to each other that they would get through the day without mentioning Trump, but so far they had failed to do so.
This tactic of dominating the news by deliberately headline-grabbing behaviour, regardless of the criticism it provokes, is not new but is much more difficult to carry out than it looks. Boris Johnson is currently trying to pull the same trick with outrageous references to “suicide vests” but his over-heated rhetoric feels contrived. MP David Lammy’s jibe about Johnson as “a pound-shop Donald Trump” is apt.
Trump is never boring: it is a simple point and central to his success but is seldom given sufficient weight. During the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s supporters complained that Trump got excessive amounts of free television time, while her speeches were ignored or were given inadequate attention.
The reason was not any pro-Trump bias – quite the contrary given the political sympathies of most people in the media – but because her speeches were boring and his were not. He has the well-developed knack of always saying something the media cannot leave alone.
An example of this is his tweeted retort this week to a claim by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon that he could “beat” Trump in a presidential election and is tough and smarter than him. This silly boast was not much of a news story, until Trump’s tweeted: “The problem with banker Jamie Dimon running for president is that he doesn’t have the aptitude or ‘smarts’ and is a poor public speaker and nervous mess – otherwise he is wonderful.”
Not many politicians or journalists could put so much punching power into a single sentence.
Trump is regarded with a peculiar mixture of fear and underestimation by opponents across the board from the Democratic Party leaders to the EU heads of state. They believe – rightly – that Trump is a monster and hope – wrongly – that this means he will one day implode. This would be deeply convenient for them all because, until this happens, they do not have to act themselves. Trump will hopefully pass away like a bad dream. There is no need for the EU leaders or prominent Democrats to devise and explain policies that would divide them.
Sometimes this policy of sitting on your hands and doing nothing until your opponents make a mistake is the correct one. But it carries the grave risk of creating a vacuum of information that will be filled by your enemies. During the presidential election it was easy to deride Trump’s vague promises to bring factory jobs back to the US, but he did not have to say much about this because Hillary usually said nothing at all.
Trump is at war with the institutions of the US government. This is unsurprising: US presidents have invariably been frustrated by the sense that they reign but do not rule. A convincing explanation for the fall of Richard Nixon is that different branches of the bureaucracy used Watergate to frustrate his grab for power and get rid of him.
They may yet succeed in Trump’s case. Many Americans want to witness a sequel to Watergate with Trump in the starring role. But this is almost impossible to do without control of Congress and the ganging-up of bureaucrats against an elected president will not be palatable to a lot of voters.
The anonymous senior White House official of the New York Times op-ed says that he is part of a group within the administration pledged to thwart “Mr Trump’s more misguided impulses”. This is the latest emergence of “adults in the room” who are going to prevent the US government abandoning policies essential to its existence.
The problem is that these “adults” are promoting policies that are often just as dangerous as anything Trump has in mind, if not more so. For instance, Trump has periodically said that the US ought to pull its 2,000 troops, which are backed by the US Air Force, out of northeast Syria. This would be a sensible move to negotiate because the US has a weak hand in Syria and could not determine the course of events without a full scale war.
Trump is not “an isolationist” in the classic sense, but his instinct is to avoid wars or situations that might lead to one. Talking to Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin may not produce anything very substantial, but it does make war less, rather than more, likely.
Yet, such is the bitterness of divisions in the US, that liberal commentators were furiously denouncing Trump as a traitor for meeting either man in terms that Senator McCarthy would have recognised 70 years ago.
It is easy to sympathise with their rage. Trump is the worst thing to happen to the US since the Civil War, but miscalculating his strengths and weaknesses is not the way to deal with him. His near miraculous ability to survive repeated scandals reminds me of what the diplomat, politician and writer Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote about Charlie Haughey, the Irish political leader, who was notorious for surviving against the odds in similar challenging circumstances. “If I saw Mr Haughey buried at midnight at a crossroads with a stake driven through his heart,” wrote O’Brien, “I should continue to wear a clove of garlic around my neck, just in case.”
- Bill Gates: The Threat Of A "Disease X" Global Pandemic Is "Very Real"
When it comes to global health policy, Bill Gates has never been known for subtlety. So it’s hardly surprising that his charitable foundation’s latest report on the greatest challenges facing mankind might make some readers want to lock themselves in an indefinite quarantine.
Readers familiar with Gates’ previous warnings about the rising risk of a global pandemic will recognize the top three risks: antibiotic resistance, governmental reluctance to fund health-care solutions and the next global contagion. The latter risk factor has become so universally feared by health professionals that the World Health Organization already has a name for it: “Disease X”. The likelihood of an explosive global pandemic breaking out in the relatively near future increases along with the population in the world’s poorest countries, which are presently experiencing explosive population growth even as birth rates in the developed world plummet. And if the world’s wealthiest countries don’t invest resources to combat these issues in Africa, South America and Asia now, it will be infinitely more expensive grappling with the consequences on the back-end, as Gates explained in an interview with the Telegraph.
“We are not fully prepared for the next global pandemic,” he says. “The threat of the unknown pathogen – highly-contagious, lethal, fast-moving – is real. It could be a mutated flu strain or something else entirely. The Swine Flu and 2014 Ebola outbreaks underscored the threat.”
The risks associated with the population boom in the poorest countries in Africa has long been treated as “the elephant in the room” by global policy makers. Even if one sets aside the risk of disease, the developing world must step up to monitor the economic impacts of rapidly increasing populations, confronting issues like political instability to ensure that the expansion will yield unbridled growth like similar periods in China and India.
According to demographers projections, the population of Africa is set to explode to 4 billion by the end of the century.
While the story includes few references to world leaders, Gates paused to praise UK Prime Minister Theresa May for her recent tour of Africa, during which she re-committed to UK aide spending…
Gates commends Theresa May’s recent Africa tour where she recommitted to Britain’s aid spending target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income. He says he has attempted to meet with Jeremy Corbyn, although so far failed, due to a schedule clash.
…And tried what looked to be her first attempt at dancing.
Prime Minister Theresa May has said this year’s Strictly Come Dancing contestants should “get in touch if they need any tips” after she showed off her dance moves during her recent trip to Africa https://t.co/49ft9HHZfY pic.twitter.com/VLpeN76coH
— ITV News (@itvnews) September 8, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Moving on from this talk of global pandemics, Gates spared a few moment to opine on how governments should approach social media. And in his view, they should step up and regulate it with a heavy hand.
“They will step up in a pretty strong way to all those things. People who are super-successful need to be held to a very high standard. Some of that will lead to a very unfair personalisation as though these mistakes are somehow down to flaws in Mark’s character, or something like that. Mark knows he is in a position of responsibility and is trying to learn about this stuff.”
We imagine Mark Zuckerberg will be thrilled to hear that.
- Communist China Moves To Control Billions Through "Social Credit"
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
In a chilling but unsurprising move, Communist China seeks ultimate control over the population by introducing a scorecard which will supposedly keep the public in check. The big brother system will monitor all citizens 24/7 and keep a “score” of their activities.
The Communist Party’s plan in China is for every one of its 1.4 billion citizens to be at the whim of a dystopian social credit system, and it’s on track to be fully operational by the year 2020.
According to News.com.au, an active pilot program has already seen millions of people each assigned a score out of 800. Those people will either reap the benefits of having a high score or suffer the consequences of a low social score. Depending on which end of the scale they sit, their behavior could see them punished.
The data is combined with information collected from individuals’ government records, which include medical and educational, along with their financial and internet browsing histories. Overall scores can go up and down in “real time” dependent on the person’s behavior but they can also be affected by people they associate with.
“If your best friend or your dad says something negative about the government, you’ll lose points too,” the ABC reports. The Chinese will be assumed guilty by association and no longer able to speak out about their own oppression.
Participation in the “social credit” system was first announced in 2014 and is mandatory. The government is attempting to control the actions of the public in a bid to reinforce the notion that “keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful,” according to a government document.
“If people keep their promises they can go anywhere in the world,” said Tianjin general manager Jie Cong. For Jie, it’s black and white with no grey area.
“If people break their promises they won’t be able to move an inch!”
Penalties for a low score range from losing the right to travel by plane or train, social media account suspensions and being barred from government jobs, according to Business Insider. Chinese journalist Liu Hu is one of the millions who have already amassed a low social credit rating. Liu Hu was arrested, jailed and fined after he exposed official corruption.
“The government regards me as an enemy,” Liu Hu told the ABC.
- Trump Weighs In On The Single Worst Mistake In American History
In a wide ranging interview with The Hill on Tuesday conducted in the Oval Office, President Trump was asked to give his take on the biggest mistake in American history.
Considering just how open-ended a question that is, it’s perhaps surprising that he merely went back less than a couple decades into the Bush presidency, though Trump’s base will certainly welcome it as it hearkens back to his “America First” foreign policy vision of the campaign trail.
“The worst single mistake ever made in the history of our country: going into the Middle East, by President Bush,” the president during his interview with Hill.TV.
“Obama may have gotten them (U.S. soldiers) out wrong, but going in is to me the biggest single mistake made in the history of our country,” he said.
Trump explained the reasoning behind this choice, and why it wasn’t something like the civil war or another defining and devastating event reaching far into American History.
“Because we spent $7 trillion in the Middle East. Now if you wanna fix a window some place they say, ‘oh gee, let’s not do it. Seven trillion, and millions of lives — you know, ‘cause I like to count both sides. Millions of lives,” the president explained.
Some scholars and humanitarian groups estimate that over one million Iraqis were killed in the US invasion and occupation of Iraq starting in 2003. A 2008 Opinion Research Business (ORB) poll, for example, found that approximately 1.03 million people had died as a result of the war.
“To me it’s the worst single mistake made in the history of our country. Civil war you can understand. Civil war, civil war. That’s different. For us to have gone into the Middle East, and that was just, that was a bad day for this country, I will tell you.”
Various estimates on the Iraq war’s cost have put the total taxpayer bill as low as near $2 trillion, but none dispute that it is in the multiple trillions, and estimates will vary widely depending on if veteran care is factored into it.
The comments echo things Trump said on the campaign trail in 2016. For example during one of his first major foreign policy speeches then candidate Trump said, “I will never send our finest into battle unless necessary, and I mean absolutely necessary, and will only do so if we have a plan for victory with a capital V.” And referencing the famous quote of John Quincy Adams, he said during the same speech, “The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies.”
He had previously shocked pundits for being the first Republican nominee for president to trash George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq, and has more recently likened it to “throwing a big fat brick into a hornet’s nest”.
All of this is a hopeful sign considering the extremely heightened and dangerous tensions over Syria this week, and given Trump seems to have vacillated between “bringing the troops home” and getting more involved. On Monday Trump hinted that a decision on the U.S. role in Syria is coming soon.
Commenting on the over 2,000 troops now in Syria ostensibly as part of the “anti-ISIL” coalition campaign, Trump indicated this mission could end soon: “We’re very close to being finished with that job,” he said. He followed with: “And then we’re going to make a determination as to what we’re going to do.”
We consider it a hopeful and a good sign that Trump is possibly revisiting his “America First” foreign policy pledges by identifying the Iraq War as the worst mistake in US history.
- What Really Happens When The SHTF Is Over (Spoiler Alert: Not What Most People Expect)
Authored by ‘Selco’ via Daisy Luther’s Organic Prepper blog,
When finally the SHTF was over, when peace came it was not like we imagined it.
It was very different from what we imagined it while we were in the middle of the SHTF.
It was different on many levels.
When peace came we didn’t believe it.
During the war, many ceasefires were signed, and many peace treaties, local or countrywide. Many times high delegations from the EU came to our country or in surrounding countries. They held long elaborate peace conferences with local politicians and tried to make some agreements.
When the agreements were made and when we heard about it somehow, we hoped it could work. But it did not so the war continued.
To add to those real conferences and treaties we also had raging misinformation and rumors about peace settlements and treaties that actually never happened. So after some time, and many “peace agreements” while slaughter continued we simply kinda stop believing that it was going to happen.
And then one day one of those treaties kinda worked.
The war stopped.
It was not like it just stopped immediately one day. But through agreements, the shooting stopped, and through a very complicated process (that in a way still lasts) the situation started to move to some new kind of “normal”.
The fighting stopped, but since there were no real winners, it took time for some things.
For example, for months you could not go into some parts of the country with the “wrong” license plate or sticker on your car or similar…
We changed after the SHTF
After prolonged living in the situation that we went through, people changed on many levels, and some of those changes are pretty much irreversible. What is even more important is that some of those changes are transferred to our children, to new generations.
On the mental level, we learned during the collapse that it may be actually dangerous to hope. For example, when it came to peace we were disappointed many times, so people stop hoping, or at least lowered their expectations.
Hope and hoping in dangerous and prolonged situations sounds and looks good, but in reality, it may blur your vision. It may push you to pay attention to things that are not so relevant for your immediate attention.
One day you may find yourself hoping and dreaming so much that you fail to protect your family or obtain food or similar.
It was weird but not hoping may help you to operate better every and each day by taking care of things that need your immediate attention (food, safety, security…). But on the other side, killing hope had a toll on our mental health, I think.
Life without hope is not much of a quality life.
So when peace came, there were whole bunch of people who forgot to feel things.
They were conditioned to operate with a certain mental attitude in order to have the best chances of survival and no peace could change that, at least in the short term.
For a lot of people, it did not change ever.
It was not that peple were not happy because there was peace, but we lost a lot of “ourselves” in that SHTF, so we changed.
You shoot, you run, you are afraid… you are cold and hungry or you are dirty and sweating for days and months…and then one day all stops and you can go and buy things in the shop.
And you think, “I should be happy and yell and sing.” But somehow you are numb and think, “What was all this about and what I am supposed to do now?”
How everyday life changed when the SHTF was over
It took months for some things to get back to normal when it came to infrastructure.
Electric lines in some regions were almost nonexistent anymore. Phone lines, sewage, water system… all that was destroyed or completely messed up. Some regions were so dirty for numerous reasons that diseases spread.
Roads were “opened” but because the infrastructure was bad, the normal circulation of goods did not happen overnight. It took time.
For example, it took some time for all the different goods come in, and prices slowly came back down to “normal”.
For years there were regions and parts of the cities where it was dangerous to go because of mines. Even these days we have here every month or two someone killed because of an old land mine somewhere in the woods.
Still, more than 20 years after everything.
How people were different after surviving the SHTF
People changed.
For a pretty long period, things were handled between people with brute force, and to have a weapon was important like to breathe air.
When peace came, that weapon was still with people, and attidude and old habits changed very slowly.
Even today every respectable home has an assault weapon here, somewere hidden, but close at hand, even though it means 2 years in prison if you are caught.
People learned to use weapons and to “solve” problems with them.
From the point of survival, people learned a lot of good and useful things. I mean, you had a bunch of civilians who over the time learned to operate as a kind of military unit and to use different kinds of weapons, to recognize and use resources in our sourroundings that most people would not even notice.
We learned to protect our homes or invade others if needed.
At the same time, we learned also not to respect authority (goverment) because (very simplified) authority will simply f*ck you when it benefits them to do so and you will be on your own.
Police, goverment, law, become for a lot of people just words. They counted only on themselves because of the experience they went through.
From the survivalist point of view, a lot of good things maybe. But from the point of a normal functional society, a lot of bad things.
If you are a normal law-abiding citizen here, you are in the minority because most people simply use shortcuts in the corrupted society that war produced.
As I said, it is somehow “generational knowledge” so it passed on young people, too. Especially when it comes to not respecting authority.
Paradoxicaly living in a society like that is actually the recipe for a new SHTF. So at the end, it comes to a full circle. The SHTF that brought a corrupted society and people that are trying to survive in it by their own rules, will most probably bring another SHTF.
What to expect after the SHTF ends
After a real and prolonged SHTF, there is no coming back in a lot of things. Not when it comes to how you gonna feel, and actually what man (or woman) you are gonna be.
There may be celebrations, fireworks and whatever, but you will not be the same person. Survival will teach you a lot of things. You will be prepared for a lot of things in future, but even if in your case society and system rebuilds into something good and positive you will still be changed. And some parts of you that were good will be missing.
It is how it works. There are some skills and experiences you cannot gain without paying for them.
- Wall Street Salaries Hit Highest Level Since Lehman
Thanks to a wave of consolidation that has helped banks compensate for rock-bottom interest rates and tighter capital requirements, Wall Street’s pre-tax profit grew by a staggering 42% last year, according to an annual report from the New York State Office of the Comptroller. And individual bankers continue to reap the rewards: Case in point, the NYS report revealed – amid a welter of coverage surrounding the 10th anniversary of the Lehman collapse – that the the average compensation for Wall Street employees climbed 13% last year to $422,500 last year. That’s the highest (inflation-adjusted) level since Lehman went belly-up in 2008, ushering the most acute phase of the financial crisis.
Financial services professionals still enjoy a higher average compensation than any other industry in New York State. Taxes on their compensation account for more than one-fifth of private-sector wages paid out in the state last year, despite employing only 5% of the state’s workers. And while the highest salaries were paid to workers toiling away in Manhattan skyscrapers, compensation for bankers based out on Long Island were nearly as high as their colleagues down town.
The increase in total comp was largely driven by higher bonuses, with DiNapoli estimating that the bonuses increased by an average 17% to $184,200, the highest level in a decade.
The average salary (including bonuses) in New York City’s securities industry increased by 13 percent to $422,500 in 2017, the highest since 2008 and the third-highest on record after adjusting for inflation. The securities industry has the highest average salary of any industry in New York City, and accounted for 21 percent of all private sector wages in 2017 even though it accounted for less than 5 percent of employment.
The average salary in the securities industry on Long Island is nearly as high as in New York City. On Long Island, the average salary grew by 10 percent in 2017 to $389,000. The level was boosted by the presence of hedge-fund firms in Suffolk County, where the average salary was $599,800, the highest of any county in the nation.
In March 2018, DiNapoli estimated that the average bonus for securities industry employees in New York City increased by 17 percent to $184,200. After adjusting for inflation, it was the highest average bonus in a decade and the fourth-highest on record. Bonuses accounted for an estimated 40 percent of securities industry wages in 2017, a larger share than in any other major industry in New York City.
And while it’s too early to say for certain, data collected during the first half suggest that salaries and bonuses will continue to grow during 2018.
Here’s a breakdown of the report’s highlights (courtesy of a press release from the NYS Comptroller’s Office):
- Nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of securities industry workers in the city earned more than $250,000 in 2017, compared to 2.5 percent of the rest of the city’s workforce.
- The disparity between average salaries in the city’s securities industry and the rest of the private sector peaked in 2007, when it was six times higher. The gap narrowed after the financial crisis but has remained at least 5 to 1 since 2010, with a ratio of 5.5 to 1 in 2017.
- 62 percent of the industry’s employees live in the city, while 38 percent commute, which is the highest share of commuters in any major industry.
- One-fifth of the work force commuted from New Jersey, 6 percent from Long Island and 6 percent from Westchester County. More than half (55 percent) of the commuters from Connecticut and 38 percent from Westchester earned more than $250,000 per year.
- More than two-thirds of the city’s securities industry workers were male and nearly two-thirds were white. More than one-fifth were Asian; 13 percent were Black or Hispanic. One-third were immigrants, the majority from Asia and Europe.
- DiNapoli estimates that tax collections attributable to the city’s securities industry grew by 29 percent to $4.2 billion in CFY 2018, the highest level in a decade. The growth resulted from large increases in profits, bonuses, and capital gains in calendar 2017, which were boosted by recent changes in the federal tax code and a 2008 federal law that required repatriation of deferred compensation held overseas by the end of 2017. The industry accounted for 7 percent of city tax collections in CFY 2018.
- The average salary in the securities industry in New York state increased by 12 percent in 2017 to $403,100, the highest since 2008 and the third-highest on record after adjusting for inflation. New York had the highest average salary of any state in the nation, reflecting the concentration of highly compensated employees, such as chief executive officers, in New York City.
- DiNapoli estimates that tax payments attributable to the securities industry in State Fiscal Year (SFY) 2017-18 rose by 7 percent to $14 billion, the highest level in a decade. As a result, the industry accounted for nearly one-fifth (18 percent) of state tax collections in SFY 2017-18.
- DiNapoli estimates that each job gained or lost in the industry leads to the creation or loss of three additional jobs in other sectors.
- After adjusting for inflation, pretax profits in 2017 were the highest since 2012 and profits in the first half of 2018 were the highest since 2011.
* * *
Bankers’ rising pay is an anomaly in contemporary American society, where wages for the average worker have been stagnating for years (though the August AHE print inspired some optimism, though the stirrings of inflationary pressure highlighted by that data have yet to be confirmed).
It’s just the latest piece of evidence pointing to the hollowing out of the middle class, as nearly all of the wage growth documented since 2009 has occurred in the extreme lower- and higher-end of the wage range.
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