May 21

Today’s News 21st May 2018

  • Scientists Revise Understanding Of Novichok After It Fails To Produce Expected Lethal Effects

    Authored by Rob Slane via The BlogMire blog,

    Warning: This article is likely to contain traces of satire.

    In the aftermath of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury on 4th March, scientists are currently re-evaluating their understanding of A-234 – or Novichok as it is more commonly known. Prior to the poisoning, it had been thought that the substance was around 5-8 times more toxic than VX nerve agent, and therefore that just a tiny drop would be likely to kill a person within minutes or possibly even seconds of them coming into contact with it. In the unlikely event of a person surviving, it was believed that their central nervous system would be completely destroyed, and that they would suffer numerous chronic health issues, including cirrhosis, toxic hepatitis, and epilepsy before dying a premature and miserable death, probably within a year or so.

    However, according to an anonymous source at the Porton Down laboratory, which is located just a few miles down the road from Salisbury, scientists now believe they may have completely misunderstood the properties and effects of the chemical:

    “All the available information we had about Novichok before March this year suggested that it was by far the most lethal nerve agent ever produced, and we had assumed that even the tiniest drop would kill a person within minutes. However, after studying the movements of the Skripals after being poisoned, we have now revised our understanding, and we now believe that one of its primary effects is to generate in its victims a strong desire to go out for a beer followed by a pizza.”

    Yet it’s not only the effects of the substance that have led to this reappraisal, but also its mysterious ability to move about from location to location, seemingly at will. According to the source:

    “At first, differing reports of the location of the poisoning baffled us. First it was the restaurant, then it was the pub, followed by the bench, the car, the cemetery, the flowers, the luggage, the porridge, and then finally the door handle three weeks after the incident. However, we now believe we have an explanation for this phenomena. When Novichok was developed, we think it may have been given the ability to appear in one place, only to then disappear and turn up in an entirely different place.

    This is what we saw in the Skripal case, where the media would assure the public that investigators had found the source of the poisoning, only to report a day or two later that it wasn’t in fact there at all, but somewhere else entirely. It’s all remarkably clever, and it seems to have been specifically designed to generate the impression to the uninitiated that investigators are simply making it up as they go along.”

    Another quality of the substance, which at first puzzled the scientists, is its apparent ability to multiply:

    “We now know that the substance was poured on a door handle,” said the source.

    “Yet according to all our experiments where we’ve replicated this scenario, no matter how carefully we’ve poured liquid on a door handle, what we’ve found is that it has an uncanny tendency to run off, leaving a fairly insignificant amount. Yet we know that from this tiny amount, the substance has been turning up in multiple hotspots around Salisbury. The most probable explanation for this, we think, is that the along with it being developed to appear, disappear and reappear in various places, it was also developed with the alarming ability to replicate itself.”

    Asked why this hasn’t led to the deaths of hundreds or thousands of residents in the City, the source pointed back to their revised conclusion of the effects of Novichok as being more likely to lead to a craving for beer and pizza than to death.

    They also mentioned another surprising revision that they have had to make, which is the seemingly mundane way in which objects that have come into contact with Novichok can be decontaminated:

    “Given our prior understanding about the toxicity of Novichok, we had of course assumed that cleaning it up could only be done by specialists wearing protective clothing,” said the source.

    “And so when Public Health England advised people who thought they might have come into contact with it to wash their clothes and wipe their phones with baby wipes, I must admit we were a bit surprised. None of the research papers out there mentions baby wipes as being an effective method of treating exposure to Novichok, and we did wonder whether they were perhaps talking about another chemical altogether. But of course they can’t have been, can they? Still,” he added with a wry smile, “I guess it all goes to prove the old saying: you learn something new every day.”

    Yet, although the new discoveries of the properties of Novichok mentioned above have taken the scientific community by surprise, the one that is causing the most excitement is the revelation that it can apparently render its victims invisible:

    “To be frank, this has created a huge buzz,” said the source.

    “I mean, the Skripals apparently came into contact with Novichok over two months ago, as did Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. And yet since then nothing has been seen of any of them. It’s almost as if they’ve vanished into thin air, a bit like Bilbo Baggins at his 111th birthday party when he slips the Ring of Power on.”

    And it’s not just the scientific community that is excited about the potential this might have. The Magic Circle has also a expressed an interest in knowing more about the substance, since its ability to make those who come into contact with it disappear without trace could potentially be a huge addition to the illusionist’s toolkit.

    However, any excitement that this might bring comes with considerable caution. According to a spokeswoman for the Magic Circle:

    “Of course we’re bound to be interested in the existence of a substance that can make a person disappear. However, whilst making someone disappear is great, what we’d really like to see is their reappearance at some point. Otherwise, I think it unlikely that it will ever catch on amongst our members.”

    My previous (and less satirical) pieces on the Skripal Case:

  • Visualizing What Happens In An Internet Minute In 2018

    In your everyday life, a minute might not seem like much.

    But, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, when it comes to the vast scale of the internet, a minute of time goes much further than you ever could have imagined. That’s because the internet has a degree of scale that our linear human brains are unaccustomed to operating on.

    An internet minute in 2018

    Today’s infographic is from Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan of Cumulus Media, and it shows the activity taking place on various platforms such as Facebook or Google in each 60 second span.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    It really helps put an internet minute in perspective.

    Just a minute, please

    The numbers for these services are so enormous that they can only be shown using the 60 second time scale.

    Any bigger, and our brains can’t even process these massive quantities in any useful capacity. Here are just a few key numbers scaled to a monthly basis, for fun:

    42,033,600,000 Facebook logins

    159,840,000,000 Google searches

    1,641,600,000,000 WhatsApp messages sent

    8,078,400,000,000 emails sent

    On an annualized basis, the data becomes even more ridiculous, with something close to 100 trillion emails sent. (No wonder it’s so hard to get to inbox zero!)

    Previous minutes

    If the internet minute visualization looks familiar, that’s because it gets updated and re-released every year using the latest data available. See below for a direct comparison of the last two years:

    Image: Visual Capitalist

    The biggest and most noticeable jump comes in Netflix hours watched – a number which we believe may be too good to be true. While we have not seen the exact methodology of these calculations, we do know that in December it was announced by Netflix that users were watching approximately 140 million hours per day. This works out to roughly 100,000 hours per minute according to our math, which is still mind-boggling.

    See the additional evolution of this chart by checking out the 2016 version as well.

  • Russia's Navy Establishes Permanent Presence In Mediterranean Sea

    Authored by Peter Korzun via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Russian President Vladimir Putin said a naval standing force, including warships with Kalibr long-range land attack cruise missiles, will be permanently deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. The statement was made at a meeting with top military officials and defense industry leaders that took place in Sochi on May 16. One of the missions is delivering strikes against terrorist targets in Syria.

    102 expeditions of ships and submarines are planned in 2018. The force will go through intensive training.

    The Russian Black Sea Fleet has become a much different force in comparison to what it was just three years ago. Since 2015, the year the operation in Syria was launched, it has received 15 new ships, including two frigates and six conventional submarines armed with Kalibr cruise missiles. With S-400 and S-300V4 air defense systems, Krasukha-4 electronic warfare systems and shore-based anti-ship Bastion batteries deployed on the Syrian coast, the ships in Eastern Mediterranean operate in a relatively safe environment. Kalibr missiles have already been fired from frigates and submarines at terrorist targets in Syria.

    Last July, a 15-strong Mediterranean Task Force was established to be based out of Tartus, Syria’s leased naval facility. The ships provide a buffer on the southern flank of NATO. Russia needs to counter aggressive activities of the bloc in the region, including the Black Sea. Maintaining robust presence in the Mediterranean is the best way to defend Russia’s Black Sea borders.

    All southern Europe, including such NATO military assets as Allied Joint Force Command in Naples, Italy, Combined Air Operations Centers in Larissa, Greece, and in Poggio Renatico, Italy, Headquarters Allied Land Command and Air Power Command in Izmir, Turkey, NATO Incirlik air base in Turkey, Graf Ignatievo and Bezmer air bases in Bulgaria used by US Air Force as well as a lot of other key NATO defense infrastructure sites happen to be within the range of Kalibr missiles installed on the platforms patrolling the Mediterranean Sea. They’ll all be knocked out with first salvos in case a Russia-NATO war starts.

    The Fleet’s operations are not limited to the Black Sea basin and the Mediterranean. It is on the way of transition from a green-water naval formation to a blue water force, demonstrating the Russian flag as the ships move beyond the Strait of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal on the way to the World Ocean.

    The establishment of permanent naval presence in the region can be explained by a number of rational calculations. The Mediterranean Sea is Russia’s only exit to the open ocean for the Black Sea Fleet. The permanent presence is a logical step in view of Russia’s growing political influence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

    Foreign Ministries are not the only ones to shape external policy. Any port call is a diplomat mission, providing an opportunity for official meetings and public diplomacy, with the events covered by media. Take the famous German Kiel Week or Kieler Woche in German, the biggest annual maritime festival and international forum visited by about three million people coming from all over the world. Warships from many countries are an important element of the event. Ships also take part in the Irish maritime festival at Drogheda Port. Russian frigate The Shtandart, a replica of the man-of-war built by Peter the Great in 1703, will visit Drogheda on June 10-11 this year.

    The naval visits reflect foreign policy trends. In 2017, Russian ships made 46 port calls to drop anchor at 28 ports of 27 countries worldwide. The list includes five Western or West-friendly states: Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Japan and South Korea, which account for 19% of the countries visited by Russian ships. Nine (33%) of the states on the list belong to the Asia-Pacific region, with other 13 (48%) situated in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. The 81% vs.19% ratio illustrates Russia’s rebalancing from the “collective” West toward other countries and power poles. The Russian Navy also conducted six international exercises, demonstrating its global presence and power projection capability.

    The growing trade brings to the fore the task of sea lanes’ protection. Russia has longstanding economic ties with many Mediterranean states, including Greece, Libya, Cyprus, and Algeria. The relations include defense cooperation.

    US Navy deployments in support of ballistic missile defense are viewed as provocative moves to downgrade Russia’s strategic nuclear capability. With Russia’s continuous presence in the region, Aegis ships as well as aircraft carriers become sitting ducks for state-of-the art anti-ship missiles.

    Like it or not, the Mediterranean Sea has ceased to be a “NATO Lake” dominated by US 6th Fleet. American vessels don’t own these waters anymore. As a great power, Russia has its own interests in the region and it has a powerful naval force permanently deployed to defend them.

  • Roger Stone Says He's "Prepared For Mueller Indictment"

    Roger Stone, one of President Trump’s earliest political advisors and a fixture on the Sunday show circuit, told NBC News’ Chuck Todd that he’s “prepared” to be indicted as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

    “I am prepared should that be the case,” Stone said on “Meet The Press”. “But I think it just demonstrates, again, this was supposed to be about Russian collusion, and it appears to be an effort to silence or punish the president’s supporters and his advocates.”

    “It is not inconceivable now that Mr. Mueller and his team may seek to conjure up some extraneous crime pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election,” Stone said. “I would chalk this up to an effort to silence me.”

    Stone, who has already testified before the House Intelligence Committee, said he has not been interviewed by Mueller. He also reiterated that Mueller’s team had found “no evidence whatsoever” to connect Trump to Russia, and that it hasn’t found any evidence to connect Stone to Russia, either.

    Regardless, Stone speculated that Mueller might try to bust him on some unrelated charges – perhaps something pertaining to his business.

    Continuing with his attack on Mueller, Stone said some friends and associates of his had been subpoenaed by the special counsel. He also continued to deny having a relationship with Wikileaks or with Russia, adding that he had “no advance notice of the content, source, or the exact disclosure time of the Wikileaks disclosures.”

  • Canada's Debt Spiral: Does Justin Trudeau Live In An Alternative Reality?

    Authored by Lee Friday via The Mises Institute,

    Living beyond our means requires us to borrow money to cover the difference between our income and our spending. Many Canadians now understand the financial consequences of this practice and regret the choices they’ve made. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Trudeau is not one of them, as evidenced by his government’s budget deficits which are further eroding the financial wellbeing of Canadians. He has broken a campaign promise, ignored basic economic principles, and seems hell-bent on setting an ignominious record.  According to the Fraser Institute: “Justin Trudeau is the only prime minister in the last 120 years who has increased the federal per-person debt burden without a world war or recession to justify it.”

    The Broken Promise

    The Liberals had won the 2015 federal election with a pledge to run annual shortfalls of no more than $10 billion over the first three years of their mandate, and to eliminate the deficit by 2019-20.

    The deficit for 2016-17, Trudeau’s first full fiscal year, was $17.8 Billion. The forecast for 2017-18 is $19.9 Billion, and for 2018-19, the forecast is $18.1 Billion.

    And now, from the government’s 2018 budget, we read this:

    While austerity can come from fiscal necessity, it should not turn into a rigid ideology about deficits that sees any investment as bad spending.

    The government says deficits are economically beneficial, and compares deficits to loans taken out by entrepreneurs and business owners. But here’s the rub: in order to spend, the government must first raise money by taxing or borrowing (deficits). This deprives the private sector of money which would otherwise be available for businesses to borrow and invest in new production, thereby creating jobs and raising our standard of living.

    Moreover, government ‘borrowing and spending’ imposes a financial burden on future taxpayers who must pay pay back both the loan and the interest payments.  In contrast, repayment of private business loans imposes a burden on the entrepreneurs — and because entrepreneurs are held personally liable, they are incentivized to be prudent decision makers. Politicians, on the other hand, lacking personal liability, tend to be fickle, reckless, arbitrary, and wasteful.

    Why Government Spending is Bad

    When a private business earns a profit by converting various resources (labour, raw materials etc.) into products which consumers voluntarily buy, this means it has made efficient use of the resources. Wealth is created. In contrast, a private business incurs losses when it fails to persuade consumers to voluntarily buy its products, which means it is wasting resources. If the firm cannot improve, it will discontinue operations, thereby conserving resources for entrepreneurs who can use them efficiently. 

    Economic progress (wealth creation, rising living standards) comes from efficient allocation of resources through profitable enterprises, where consumers determine what gets produced. These are the basic economic principles which Justin Trudeau ignores.

    Politicians can pander to special interest groups because profit/loss calculations do not exist within government. This prevents consumers (taxpayers) from expressing their preferences as they do in the marketplace, where they “vote with their dollars.” The government forces taxpayers to subsidize whatever it supplies, at a price it dictates, whether we want it or not. Thus, the government’s coercive taxing and spending tends to waste resources, which is economically counterproductive. And, as noted earlier, government spending reduces private investment.

    As Charles Lammam and Hugh MacIntyre wrote in the Financial Post (emphasis added):

    business investment in Canada has declined by a staggering 18 per cent (after accounting for inflation) since the end of the third quarter of 2014.”

    Crucial to any plan to improve our country’s long-term economic prospects is encouraging private-sector investment, innovation and entrepreneurship … on this front, federal policy choices have been counterproductive.

    And Morneau’s fiscal update makes clear that the government will continue to run persistent deficits and rack up more debt, which signals potentially higher taxes in the future (since debt is simply deferred taxation), creating yet more uncertainty today among investors and entrepreneurs.

    … 64 per cent of CEOs said Canada’s investment climate had worsened in the last five years, noting growth in the tax and regulatory burden.

    Does Justin Trudeau Live in an Alternate Reality?

    That is the economic reality to which the Prime Minister seems oblivious. Private business investment is limited by government spending and regulations, but Trudeau’s government thinks everything is fine. From their 2018 budget, we read this:

    … Canadians are feeling more optimistic about the future. Everyday dreams — whether it’s paying down debt, saving for a first home or going back to school to train for a new job — are closer to reality.

    I’m not sure what reality Justin is living in, but here is the reality on Earth:

    One third of Canadians have stretched themselves so thin that they can no longer cover monthly bills and debt payments, according to a survey …

    Thirty-three per cent of respondents … admitted to being stretched beyond their means on a monthly basis, marking an eight-point increase since MNP’s last survey in September …

    … almost four in 10 respondents … admitted they regret the amount of debt they’ve taken out in their lifetime.

    … Forty-two per cent of respondents … said they’ll be in financial trouble if rates rise much higher. Moreover, nearly one-third said they could be forced into bankruptcy because of rising interest rates.

    Trudeau’s government is either out of touch with reality or they simply don’t care about economic growth and the financial plight of Canadians. Either way, the lack of personal accountability among politicians is a concern.

    Accountability

    If I break my neighbour’s window, accident or not, I pay for the replacement. The compensation comes out of my own pocket. I am accountable for my actions.

    If the Liberals lose the federal election next year, there are many who will say they have been held accountable for various mistakes. In fact, this is what we are always told, “If you don’t like the government, then don’t forget to vote, because this is your opportunity to hold them accountable.”

    Really? That’s how we define accountability in politics? Does our anger disappear simply because we kicked the bums out of office? Is it enough to see teary-eyed politicians deliver concession speeches on election night?

    If I walk around the neighbourhood and break all the windows in all the houses, then lose my job, do my neighbours forgive and forget? I think not.

    What about the financial hardship that government spending inflicts on Canadians? The private investments not made. The wealth and jobs not created. The products not manufactured. The debt incurred. These are real financial consequences which individual Canadians are forced to absorb. Who will compensate them?

    If politicians knew they would be held personally accountable for the damage they inflict — they would inflict far less damage.

    Conclusion

    Many ‘experts’ have encouraged the government to balance the budget, but the size of the budget is the real problem. Government spending, and taxes, must be slashed. How much? The sky is the limit. There is nothing the government does that the private sector can’t do better, at far less cost.

    A drastic reduction in the size and scope of government would trigger massive private investment and economic growth. But until voters learn some basic economic principles, they will continue to get the government they deserve, whether it be the Trudeau regime, or a different party of con artists.

  • Contaminated Fukushima Water Storage Tanks "Close To Capacity", TEPCO Admits

    The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it’s also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum, a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima.

    The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo – and it’s a miracle it hasn’t run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities.

    Fukushima

    At some point, TEPCO and the government will need to make a difficult decision. Until then, ground water will continue to seep into the ruined reactor, where it becomes contaminated. Afterward, TEPCO can treat the contaminated water to purify it, but they can’t remove the tritium, which is why the supply of water contaminated with tritium continues to grow.

    As one government official pointed out, Japan can’t simply store the radioactive water forever. As of now, the company should be able to store water until 2020.

    Efforts have been made to increase storage capacity by constructing bigger tanks when the time comes for replacing the current ones. But a senior official of the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry said, “Operation of tanks is close to its capacity.”

    TEPCO plans to secure 1.37 million tons of storage capacity by the end of 2020, but it has not yet decided on a plan for after 2021. Akira Ono, chief decommissioning officer of TEPCO, said, “It is impossible to continue to store [treated water] forever.”

    But after that, Tepco is either going to need to start releasing the tritium water into the ocean (something that has been done by many power plants, but is politically popular in Japan) or find another solution. In fact, an average of 380 trillion becquerels had been annually released into the sea across Japan during the five years before the accident. If the water from Fukushima is diluted to the point that tritium content is only 1 million becquerels per liter, which is more than 10 times higher than the national average for sea release. But if it’s diluted, it can eventually be released. However, an industry report has determined that sea release would be the safest and most efficient option.

    Regarding disposal methods for the treated water, the industry ministry’s working group compiled a report in June 2016 that said that the method of release into the sea is the cheapest and quickest among five ideas it examined. The ideas were (1) release into the sea, (2) release by evaporation, (3) release after electrolysis, (4) burial underground and (5) injection into geological layers.

    After that, the industry ministry also established an expert committee to look into measures against harmful misinformation. Although a year and a half has passed since the first meeting of the committee, it has not yet reached a conclusion.

    At the eighth meeting of the committee held on Friday, various opinions were expressed. One expert said, “While the fishery industry [in Fukushima and other prefectures] is in the process of revival, should we dispose of [the treated water] now?” The other said, “In order to advance the decommissioning, the number of tanks should be decreased at an early date.”

    The working group is planning to hold a public hearing to consider other methods of disposal. But if none can be found, Japan will have no choice but to dump the contaminated water into the ocean.

  • How The FBI And CIA Restarted The Cold War To Protect Themselves

    Authored by Thomas Farnan via Townhall.com,

    On December 29, 2016, the Obama Administration – with three weeks remaining in its term – issued harsh sanctions against Russia over supposed election interference.  Two compounds in the United States were closed and 35 Russian diplomats were ordered to leave the country.  

    Russia responded by calling the actions “Cold War déjà vu.”

    In the two years that have elapsed since, it has been learned that the “intelligence” that formed the basis for the sanctions was beyond dubious.   

    A single unverified “dossier” compiled by an ex-British spy with no discernable connections to Russia was shopped to FISA judges and the media as something real.

    The dossier was opposition research by the Hillary Clinton campaign, a fact that was not disclosed and actively hidden by off-the-book transactions through the law firm Perkins Coie.

    As a dog that chases its tail, the fake dossier was being used to cause the investigation which itself lent credibility to the notion of Russian interference.

    The FBI and CIA thumbed the eye of an armed nuclear state based on false intelligence.  Why?  

    The answer is now obvious: to cover up their own election year shenanigans they thought would remain forever hidden in the inevitable Hillary Clinton victory.

    Russian collusion had first come to the electorate’s attention in July.  The DNC had lost a cache of its emails either to a phishing scheme or to a hacker.  The emails showed the Clinton campaign and the DNC conspiring to fix primaries against Bernie Sanders. 

    The outcry among Sanders supporters was sufficiently loud that DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned on the eve of the democratic convention.   

    It was a huge scandal.  To squelch it for their expected future boss Hillary Clinton, the FBI and CIA constructed a Rube Goldberg machine of “Russian collusion” to blame Trump.

    The FBI never bothered to test the computers for a hack.  That task was left to CrowdStrike, a private contractor whose CTO and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a Russian ex-patriot and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank with an anti-Russian agenda.

    The Atlantic Council is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a $10 million donor to the Clinton Foundation.  The fix was in.  CrowdStrike dutifully reported that the Russians were behind the hack.

    Lat year The Nation, a progressive publication, got a group of unaffiliated computer experts to test CrowdStrike’s hypothesis and they concluded that the email files were removed from the computer at a speed that makes an off-site download from Russia impossible.  

    Incredibly, Trump was placed on the defensive for email leaks that showed his opponent fixing the primaries.  His campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, resigned because of past dealings with Russia.

    Trump protested by stating the obvious: the federal government has “no idea” who was behind the hacks.

    The FBI and CIA called him a liar, issuing a “Joint Statement” that suggested 17 intelligence agencies agree that it was the Russians.  Hillary Clinton took advantage of this “intelligence assessment” in the October debate to portray Trump as Putin’s stooge.  

    She said, “We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber-attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin.  And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.”

    The media’s fact checkers excoriated Trump for lying.  It was the ultimate campaign dirty trick: a joint operation by the intelligence agencies and the media against a political candidate.

    Trump won anyway against this level of cheating.  It has since been learned that the “17 intelligence agencies” claptrap was always false.  Powerful insiders at the FBI and CIA authored the intelligence assessment and deceptively packaged it as a consensus.

    By December 2016, the FBI and CIA needed something to justify their illegal wiretaps and spying.  If not the quid, they at least needed the pro quo: an event that could be portrayed through a hard squint as collusion.

    They were not without means.  They had members of Trump’s transition improperly wiretapped.  If they could catch one making a concession to the Russians, they could say “gotcha” – this proves you were always in bed with them.

    That is when the CIA and FBI shopped their phony intelligence assessments to President Obama and he sanctioned Russia.  Then they listened in on the Trump transition’s conversation with the Russian ambassador the next day.  

    Surely General Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security advisor, would scoff at the sanctions and promise to lift them.  That would be the pro quo that proved the quid.   They would finally have anecdotal evidence that showed Trump delivering for Putin.

    General Flynn, though, was uncharacteristically noncommittal.   It didn’t work.  

    The machinations that followed, the secret memos and special counsel, the prosecution of Flynn anyway for what happened in his conversation, the whole sordid mess, is a cover-up.

    In the inverse logic of Russian collusion, the investigation itself supplies credibility to the collusion narrative.  Any attempt to end the investigation is obstruction of justice.   

    One person has the constitutional responsibility end this nonsense.  Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who himself was duped into recusing himself by since discredited intelligence, should bow to recent disclosures of impropriety and say enough is enough.  

    His Inspector General will be issuing a report to him sometime soon.   Maybe then he will lift his recusal and start the prosecutions.  People should go to jail for this.

  • "The Outlook Is Not Good": Goldman Sees U.S. In Dire Straits As Deficit Hits $2 Trillion In 10 Years

    Three months ago, Goldman first among the big banks warned that the US fiscal trajectory was dire, warning that “US fiscal policy is on an unusual course” with the budget deficit expected to widen over the next few years, as a result of prior imbalances and recently enacted policies – namely Trump’s dramatic fiscal stimulus – which should lead to a federal debt/GDP ratio of around 85% of GDP by 2021.

    This, Goldman’s economists warned, stands in contrast to the typical relationship between the economic cycle and the budget balance, as shown in Exhibit 2, which shows that the US deficit should be small and shrinking, not large and growing at this stage in the business cycle when the unemployment rate is near its cyclical lows.

    But the biggest risk by far, according to Goldman, was the rising interest expense on the Federal Debt, which all else equal, would send the US into banana republic “uncharted territory.” This is what Goldman warned back in February:

    … we project that, if Congress continues to extend existing policies, including the recently enacted tax and spending legislation, federal debt will slightly exceed 100% of GDP and interest expense will rise to around 3.5% of GDP, putting the US in a worse fiscal position than the experience of the 1940s or 1990s.

    The bank’s conclusion in February was just as dire: “the continued growth of public debt raises eventual sustainability questions if left unchecked.”  Of course, “sustainability questions” is a polite bank euphemism for economic and financial catastrophe.

    * * *

    Fast forward to today when, three months after its original dire assessment, Goldman doubles down and in a note assessing “what’s the worst that could happen” with the US budget deficit, writes that “the US fiscal outlook is not good” and among other things, predicts that the US fiscal deficit will double from $1 trillion over the next 12 months to $2 trillion by 2028, pr a near record 7% of GDP:

    We project the federal deficit will increase from $825bn (4.1% of GDP) to $1,250bn (5.5% of GDP) by 2021. By 2028, we expect it to rise to $2.05 trillion (7.0% of GDP) in our baseline scenario, which assumes that expiring tax provisions will be extended and that discretionary spending, which was recently increased, will increase only slightly further in
    nominal terms    .

    All else equal, Goldman’s distressing forecast sees US federal debt rising to 105% of GDP in ten years, a whopping 9% higher than CBO’s latest projections.

    Making matters worse, that is the baseline forecast, or as analysts on the sellside call it, the optimistic outlook. As a result, as Goldman warns, while surprises are clearly possible in both directions, the bank believes “the risks are tilted in the direction of larger deficits than projected” and presents four possible alternative, and adverse, scenarios:

    1. Congress keeps revenue and discretionary spending in line with historical averages;
    2. the interest rate-growth differential worsens due to slower than expected growth;
    3. a recession; and
    4. Congress agrees on a deficit reduction package similar to the major deals of the early 1990s.

    Of course, while nobody wants to say it, the recession scenario is a guaranteed on as otherwise the US would have been in an expansion for nearly 20 years, or 234 consecutive months by December 31, 2018, as we calculated one month ago, with the laughable pro forma result shown below.

    A recession, as Goldman points out, would obviously widen the deficit and boost the debt/GDP ratio more than any of our other scenarios over the next few years. However, as report author Alec Phillips warns, “over the next ten years the outlook is worse under a low-growth scenario or continued fiscal laxity.“

    And while a recession is a given, if nobody wants to admit it, Goldman points out that the “most striking scenario” would be the most optimistic one, where Congress enacts a deficit reduction package as large (as a share of GDP) as the largest two deficit reduction packages of the early 1990s.

    What is especially concerning, is that even under this best case scenario, with a budget-friendly assumption, “the deficit and debt level would still reach around 5% and 95% of GDP respectively, very close to CBO’s baseline forecast for 2028.”

    What does all this mean in practical terms? Adding soaring deficits to rising rates, and an exponential debt issuance calendar, and you get a very troubling outcome: much higher rates, at least in the beginning, as eventually the stock market will crash, and trillions in capital flows will once again flee stocks for the “safety” of US bonds, fiscal crisis be damned. Goldman, focuses on “the beginning” part, and notes that “An expanding deficit and debt level is likely to put upward pressure on interest rates, expanding the deficit further.”

    This also changes the sensitivity analysis between deficit and yields as follows:

    Building on our recent work on deficits and interest rates, our baseline scenario suggests that the widening of the deficit from 3.5% to 5% of GDP should boost 10-year yields by 30bp, other things equal, while our forecast of a chronic deficit in the range of 6-7% of GDP in the next decade would imply a cumulative boost of around 70bp over time.

    Of course, before everyone panic sells their duration exposure, Goldman has one big caveat: “whether such an interest rate move occurs depends in part on if market participants believe lawmakers would allow such a fiscal outcome.” The problem, as Phillips conclude, “while Congress will eventually address the widening budget gap, it also seems quite likely to take longer than most market participants might expect.”

    Here is the full assessment of what happens next from a political standpoint:

    Little Chance of Near-Term Fiscal Reforms

    Eventually, lawmakers are likely to become more sensitive to the fiscal situation and will take action to reduce the budget deficit. However, this doesn’t seem likely in the near-term, for at least two reasons.

    • First, we will soon enter the period in the political cycle where deficit reduction measures are less common. Deficit reduction legislation is more common at the start of the four-year political cycle (1990, 1993, and 1997 marked the major deficit reduction packages of the 1990s for example) than just before a presidential election. Admittedly, the 2011 Budget Control Act that introduced the current spending caps stands as at least one exception to this pattern. Nevertheless, the odds of meaningful deficit reduction policies seem likely to decline further as the 2020 presidential election approaches.
    • Second, there is less political consensus than usual regarding the need for reform. Only 2-3% of the public in recent polling cite the deficit as one of the most important problems facing the government, compared with levels of 15-20% during the fiscal battles of the mid-1990s or the 2011-2013 period. This could change if political leaders increase their focus on the issue, as they did during those earlier periods. However, it seems unlikely that Congress will reverse any of the recently enacted tax cuts or discretionary spending increases, which leaves entitlement spending as the only  area of the budget where fiscal consolidation seems plausible over the next few years. However, the Trump Administration has not made this a priority—the President opposed cutting Medicare and Social Security spending in the 2016 campaign, though the most recent White House budget proposed modest savings in these areas—and one of the chief proponents of entitlement reform in Congress, Speaker Paul Ryan, is retiring from Congress at year end.

    Deficit reduction proposals do not seem likely to figure prominently in 2018 midterm election campaigns and, at least at this early stage, do not seem likely to become an important issue in the 2020 election either. This suggests  that the fiscal outlook is unlikely to change substantially due to policy actions until at least 2021, leaving it dependent largely on the path of the economy until then.

    Said otherwise: with the 10Y now well north of 3.00%, Goldman newly reconstituted prop trading desk is buying all the paper its clients wish to sell. Trade accordingly.

  • Is Wikipedia An Establishment Psyop?

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    If you haven’t been living in a hole in a cave with both fingers plugged into your ears, you may have noticed that an awful lot of fuss gets made about Russian propaganda and disinformation these days.

    Mainstream media outlets are now speaking openly about the need for governments to fight an “information war” against Russia, with headlines containing that peculiar phrase now turning up on an almost daily basis.

    Here’s one published today titled “Border guards detain Russian over ‘information war’ on Poland“, about a woman who is to be expelled from that country on the grounds that she “worked to consolidate pro-Russian groups in Poland in order to challenge Polish government policy on historical issues and replace it with a Russian narrative” in order to “destabilize Polish society and politics.”

    Here’s one published yesterday titled “Marines get new information warfare leader“, about a US Major General’s appointment to a new leadership position created “to better compete in a 21st century world.”

    Here’s one from the day before titled “Here’s how Sweden is preparing for an information war ahead of its general election“, about how the Swedish Security Service and Civil Contingencies Agency are “gearing up their efforts to prevent disinformation during the election campaigns.”

    This notion that the US and its allies are fighting against Russian “hybrid warfare” (by which they typically mean hackers and disinformation campaigns) has taken such deep root among think tanks, DC elites and intelligence/defense circles that it often gets unquestioningly passed on as fact by mass media establishment stenographers who are immersed in and chummy with those groups. The notion that these things present a real threat to the public is taken for granted to such an extent that they seldom bother to even attempt to explain to their audiences why we’re meant to be so worried about this new threat and what makes it a threat in the first place.

    Which is, to put it mildly, really weird. Normally when the establishment cooks up a new Official Bad Guy they spell out exactly why we’re meant to be afraid of them. Marijuana will give us reefer madness and ruin our communities. Terrorists will come to where we live and kill us because they hate our freedom. Saddam Hussein has Weapons of Mass Destruction which can be used to perpetrate another 9/11. Kim Jong Un might nuke Hawaii any second now.

    With this new “Russian hybrid warfare” scare, we’re not getting any of that. This notion that Russians are scheming to give westerners the wrong kinds of political opinions is presented as though having those political opinions is an inherent, intrinsic threat all on its own. The closest they typically ever get to explaining to us what makes “Russian disinformation” so threatening is that it makes us “lose trust in our institutions,” as though distrusting the CIA or the US State Department is somehow harmful and not the most logical position anyone could possibly have toward historically untrustworthy institutions. Beyond that we’re never given a specific explanation as to why this “Russian disinformation” thing is so dangerous that we need our governments to rescue us from it.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    The reason we are not given a straight answer as to why we’re meant to want our institutions fighting an information war on our behalf (instead of allowing us to sort out fact from fiction on our own like adults) is because the answer is ugly.

    As we discussed last time, the only real power in this world is the ability to control the dominant narrative about what’s going on. The only reason government works the way it works, money operates the way it operates, and authority rests where it rests is because everyone has agreed to pretend that that’s how things are. In actuality, government, money and authority are all man-made conceptual constructs and the collective can choose to change them whenever it wants. The only reason this hasn’t happened in our deeply dysfunctional society yet is because the plutocrats who rule us have been successful in controlling the narrative.

    Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. This has always been the case. In many societies throughout history a guy who made alliances with the biggest, baddest group of armed thugs could take control of the narrative by killing people until the dominant narrative was switched to “That guy is our leader now; whatever he says goes.” In modern western society, the real leaders are less obvious, and the narrative is controlled by propaganda.

    Propaganda is what keeps Americans accepting things like the fake two-party system, growing wealth inequality, medicine money being spent on bombs to be dropped on strangers in stupid immoral wars, and a government which simultaneously creates steadily increasing secrecy privileges for itself and steadily decreasing privacy rights for its citizenry. It’s also what keeps people accepting that a dollar is worth what it’s worth, that personal property works the way it works, that the people on Capitol Hill write the rules, and that you need to behave a certain way around a police officer or he can legally kill you.

    And therein lies the answer to the question. You are not being protected from “disinformation” by a compassionate government who is deeply troubled to see you believing erroneous beliefs, you are being herded back toward the official narrative by a power establishment which understands that losing control of the narrative means losing power. It has nothing to do with Russia, and it has nothing to do with truth. It’s about power, and the unexpected trouble that existing power structures are having dealing with the public’s newfound ability to network and share information about what is going on in the world.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Until recently I haven’t been closely following the controversy between Wikipedia and popular anti-imperialist activists like John Pilger, George Galloway, Craig Murray, Neil Clark, Media Lens, Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson. Wikipedia has always been biased in favor of mainstream CNN/CIA narratives, but until recently I hadn’t seen much evidence that this was due to anything other than the fact that Wikipedia is a crowdsourced project and most people believe establishment-friendly narratives. That all changed when I read this article by Craig Murray, which is primarily what I’m interested in directing people’s attention to here.

    The article, and this one which prompted it by Five Filters, are definitely worth reading in their entirety, because their contents are jaw-dropping. In short there is an account which has been making edits to Wikipedia entries for many nears called Philip Cross. In the last five years this account’s operator has not taken a single day off–no weekends, holidays, nothing–and according to their time log they work extremely long hours adhering to a very strict, clockwork schedule of edits throughout the day as an ostensibly unpaid volunteer.

    This is bizarre enough, but the fact that this account is undeniably focusing with malicious intent on anti-imperialist activists who question establishment narratives and the fact that its behavior is being aggressively defended by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales means that there’s some serious fuckery afoot.

    “Philip Cross”, whoever or whatever that is, is absolutely head-over-heels for depraved Blairite war whore Oliver Kamm, whom Cross mentioned as a voice of authority no fewer than twelve times in an entry about the media analysis duo known collectively as Media Lens. Cross harbors a special hatred for British politician and broadcaster George Galloway, who opposed the Iraq invasion as aggressively as Oliver Kamm cheered for it, and on whose Wikipedia entry Cross has made an astonishing 1,800 edits.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Despite the overwhelming evidence of constant malicious editing, as well as outright admissions of bias by the Twitter account linked to Philip Cross, Jimmy Wales has been extremely and conspicuously defensive of the account’s legitimacy while ignoring evidence provided to him.

    “Or, just maybe, you’re wrong,” Wales said to a Twitter user inquiring about the controversy the other day. “Show me the diffs or any evidence of any kind. The whole claim appears so far to be completely ludicrous.”

    “Riiiiight,” said the totally not-triggered Wales in another response. “You are really very very far from the facts of reality here. You might start with even one tiny shred of some kind of evidence, rather than just making up allegations out of thin air. But you won’t because… trolling.”

    “You clearly have very very little idea how it works,” Wales tweeted in another response. “If your worldview is shaped by idiotic conspiracy sites, you will have a hard time grasping reality.”

    As outlined in the articles by Murray and Five Filters, the evidence is there in abundance. Five Filterslays out “diffs” (editing changes) in black and white showing clear bias by the Philip Cross account, a very slanted perspective is clearly and undeniably documented, and yet Wales denies and aggressively ridicules any suggestion that something shady could be afoot. This likely means that Wales is in on whatever game the Philip Cross account is playing. Which means the entire site is likely involved in some sort of psyop by a party which stands to benefit from keeping the dominant narrative slanted in a pro-establishment direction.

    A 2016 Pew Research Center report found that Wikipedia was getting some 18 billion page views per month. Billion with a ‘b’. Youtube recently announced that it’s going to be showing text from Wikipedia articles on videos about conspiracy theories to help “curb fake news”. Plainly the site is extremely important in the battle for control of the narrative about what’s going on in the world. Plainly its leadership fights on one side of that battle, which happens to be the side that favors western oligarchs and intelligence agencies.

    How many other “Philip Cross”-like accounts are there on Wikipedia? Has the site always functioned an establishment psyop designed to manipulate public perception of existing power structures, or did that start later? I don’t know. Right now all I know is that an agenda very beneficial to the intelligence agencies, war profiteers and plutocrats of the western empire is clearly and undeniably being advanced on the site, and its founder is telling us it’s nothing. He is lying. Watch him closely.

    *  *  *

    Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing my daily articles is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my new bookWoke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Digest powered by RSS Digest