- JFK: What The CIA Hides
JFK: What The CIA Hides
Authored by Jefferson Morley via Counterpunch.org,
When I launched JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 2012, I was often asked by strangers, “So who killed JFK?” “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “It’s too early to tell.” Given that the handsome liberal president had been shot dead a half-century before, my answer was a lame joke based on an apocryphal story. Henry Kissinger once said that when he asked Zhou Enlai, “What was the effect of the French Revolution on world history?” the Chinese statesmen replied, “It’s too early to tell.”
True to Kissingerian form, the story turns out to be not exactly true. Zhou was actually responding to a question about France’s political convulsions in 1968, not 1789.
But Kissinger’s spin on the anecdote struck me as perceptive.
The meaning of a great historical event might take a long time–a very long time–to become apparent. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions about the causes of JFK’s murder in downtown Dallas on November 22, 1963.
It’s still too early to tell. Fifty six years after the fact, historians and JFK researchers do not have access to all of the CIA’s files on the subject The 1964 Warren Commission report exonerated the agency with its conclusion that Kennedy was killed by one man alone. But the agency was subsequently the subject of five official JFK investigations, which cast doubt on its findings.
The Senate’s Church Committee investigation showed that the Warren Commission knew nothing of CIA assassination operations in 1963. JFK records released in the last 20 years show the Commission’s attorneys had no real understanding the extensive counterintelligence monitoring of Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK was killed. We now know that senior operations officers, including counterintelligence chief James Angleton, paid far closer attention to the obscure Oswald as he made his way to Dallas than the investigators were ever told.
To be sure, there is no proof of CIA complicity in JFK’s death. And conspiracy theories spouted by the likes of the Alex Jones and James Fetzer deserve no attention. The fact remains some of the most astute power players of 1963–including Lyndon Johnson, Charles DeGaulle, Fidel Castro, and Jackie and Robert Kennedy–concluded that JFK was killed by his enemies, and not by one man alone. Did these statesmen get it wrong, and the under-informed Warren Commission get it right?
The new documentary, Truth is the Only Client, says yes. The film, shown last month in the auditorium of the U.S. Capitol, features interviews with numerous former Warren Commission staffers. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who served as a fact checker for the Commission in 1964, defends the lone gunman conclusion, saying, “You have to look at the new evidence and when you do, I come to the same conclusion.”
Justice Breyer, oddly, passes judgment on evidence he has not seen. The record of the CIA’s role in the events leading JFK’s assassination is far from complete. In 2013 I reported on JFK Facts that Delores Nelson CIA’s information coordinator had stated in a sworn affidavit filed in federal court, that the agency retained 1,100 assassination-related records that had never been made public.
A small portion of this material was released in 2017, including new details about the opening of the CIA’s first Oswald file in October 1959.
Yet thousands of JFK files remain secret. According to the latest figures from the National Archives, a total of 15,834 JFK files remain fully or partially classified, most of them held by the CIA and FBI. Thanks to an October 2017 order from President Trump, these documents will not be made public until October 2021, at the earliest.
The assumption of Justice Breyer and many others is that any and all unseen CIA material must exonerate the agency. It’s an odd conclusion. If the CIA has nothing to hide, why is it hiding so much? While 95 percent of the still-secret files probably are trivial, the remaining 5 percent—thousands of pages of material–are historically pregnant. If made public, they could clarify key questions in the long-running controversy about JFK’s death.
These questions have been raised most concisely by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a career CIA officer who served in senior positions. Now a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, Mowatt-Larssen has implicated his former employer in the Dallas ambush. In a presentation at Harvard last December, Mowatt-Larssen hypothesized that a plot to kill JFK emanated from the CIA’s station in Miami where disgruntled Cuban exiles and undercover officers loathed JFK for his failure to overthrow Castro’s government in Cuba.
Mowatt-Larssen has yet to publish his presentation and documentation, so I can’t say if he’s right or wrong. But he asks the right question: “How can intelligence operational and analytical modus operandi help unlock a conspiracy that has remained unsolved for 55 years?” And he focuses on the right place to dig deeper: the CIA’s Miami office, known as WAVE station.
My own JFK questions involve George Joannides, a decorated undercover officer who served as branch chief in the Miami station in 1963. He ran psychological warfare operations against Cuba. In 2003, I sued the CIA for Joannides’ files. The lawsuit ended 15 years later in July 2018, when Judge Brett Kavanaugh, in his last opinion before ascending to the Supreme Court, tossed my case. Kavanaugh declared the agency deserved “deference upon deference” in its handling of Freedom of Information Act requests about JFK files.
Nonetheless, my lawsuit illuminated the extraordinary sensitivity of the psy-ops Joannides ran out of WAVE station. As reported in the New York Times, Fox News, Associated Press, and Politico, Morley v. CIA forced disclosure of the fact Joannides had received the CIA’s Career Intelligence Medal in 1981. The honor came two years after he stonewalled the House Select Committee on Assassination about what he knew of Oswald’s contacts with pro-and anti-Castro Cubans in the summer and fall of 1963.
I believe Joannides was honored because he concealed the existence of an authorized covert operation involving Oswald that has never been publicly acknowledged. In CIA lingo, Joannides protected the agency’s “sources and methods” concerning Oswald. And he might have done more. His actions may have also shielded other officers who knew of a scheme to kill the liberal president and lay the blame on Cuba.
Never been seen by JFK investigators, they contain details about his Joannides’ undercover work in Miami in 1963, when he funded Oswald’s antagonists among the anti-Castro Cuban exiles. They also detail his work in 1978, when he duped chief investigator Robert Blakey and the House Select Committee on Assassination. These records, the agency says, cannot be released in 2019 without risk of “irreversible harm” to national security.
It’s a bizarre claim, at odds with the law. These ancient documents, all of them more than 40 years old, meet the statutory definition of “assassination-related,” according to federal judge John Tunheim. He chaired the Assassination Records Review Board which oversaw the declassification of 4 million pages of JFK files between 1994 and 2017. In an interview, Tunheim told me that, under the terms of the 1992 JFK Records Act, the Joannides files are subject to mandatory review and release. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said.
Yet the files remain off-limits to the public. Thanks to the legal consensus, articulated by Justices Kavanaugh and Breyer, the CIA enjoys “deference upon deference” when it comes to the JFK assassination story. As a result, the JFK Records Act has been flouted. The public’s interest in full disclosure has been thwarted.
Yet legitimate questions persist: Did a plot to kill JFK originate in the agency’s Miami station as Mowatt-Larssen suggests? The fact that the CIA won’t share the evidence that could answer the CIA man’s question is telling.
So these days, when people ask me who killed JFK, I say the Kennedy was probably victimized by enemies in his own government, possibly including CIA officers involved in anti-Castro and counterintelligence operations. I have no smoking gun, no theory. Just look at the suspicious fact pattern, still shrouded in official secrecy, and it’s easy to believe that JFK was, as Mowatt-Larssen puts it, “marked for assassination.”
* * *
Jefferson Morley is editor of the Deep State blog and author of The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 23:45 - Doctors Have Officially Frozen And Reanimated A Human Being For The First Time
Doctors Have Officially Frozen And Reanimated A Human Being For The First Time
One of the biggest problems with exploring the furthest reaches of space is the sheer time scale involved. Without a breakthrough in physics that would allow human beings to enter a state of suspended animation (or faster than light travel), it wouldn’t be possible.
But now, it looks like doctors have made progress with actually freezing and reviving human beings. Samuel Tisherman, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, has led a team that has actually put a human being into suspended animation, according to the Daily Star.
Tisherman told New Scientist that he replaced a human’s blood with ice-cold saline solution. He called the whole ordeal “a little surreal”. The patient was then removed from the cooling system and taken to an operating theater for a two hour surgical procedure before having their blood restored and their body warmed back up to its normal temperature.
Tisherman says he’s going to be producing a full account of the procedure in a new scientific paper that will be released in 2020. He aims to pause life long enough to perform emergency surgery, rather than use the technology for space travel.
He recalled the story of a young man who, after being stabbed, didn’t have enough time to make it to surgery: “He was a healthy young man just minutes before, then suddenly he was dead. We could have saved him if we’d had enough time. I want to make clear that we’re not trying to send people off to Saturn. We’re trying to buy ourselves more time to save lives.”
But, of course, it’s only a matter of time until everybody’s favorite “I can’t keep my nose out of anyone’s achievements and if you don’t believe me, ask Vernon Unsworth” tech entrepreneur will weigh in on the issue and, undoubtedly, comment on how it can be used for space travel, and to further his own PR agenda.
Tisherman also did not release how many studies took place before this one successful one. The experiment had the blessing of the FDA, who waived the requirement for patient consent, as the patient could not be saved by any other means. The biggest obstacle remains limiting damage to people as the patient is re-warmed – reperfusion injuries.
“We haven’t identified all the causes of reperfusion injuries yet,” Tisherman said.
But one way or another, the “future” we could only imagine in movies is now at our doorstep…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 23:25 - Mapping The Global Divide
Mapping The Global Divide
Authored by Naresh Jotwani for The Saker Blog,
What exactly does “the resistance” resist? What should “the resistance” resist?
Clearly, the target of any resistance has to be some form of unethical behaviour. Only that can justify – and indeed call for! – resistance. So what is the underlying ethic?
The following is an attempt to uncover a possible answer.
* * *
Imagine a transaction between a farmer and a trader of farm produce.
The farmer’s time and energy are fully committed to getting a decent harvest in the face of fickle weather and uncertain market prices, while also looking ahead to the next season. He can spare no time or energy for complex business transactions or financial calculations.
The trader has plenty of time, energy and incentives to master the tricks of finance and business. To him, the farm produce is merely a commodity which he can buy or sell, process further for value addition, pledge as collateral, dump in a foreign market … or whatever else brings in good profit. Only the trader’s cunning limits what he can or cannot do with a given commodity – and there is no limit to that cunning.
The farmer’s life depends on hard work; the trader’s life depends on cunning. Therefore the farmer would invariably have a weaker hand in any transaction with a dealer.
The argument made here extends to any other primary producer – factory worker, miner or bus driver – whose life depends on “the sweat of his brow”. Cunning business and finance types can run circles around such people in any business dealing, and economic exploitation of primary producers extends seamlessly into violent crime, usury, money-laundering et cetera.
In the so-called “free-market economies” being touted all over the world, there is therefore a tragic and seemingly inevitable chasm of inequity between hard work and cunning.
In any society, the business and managerial class devises the laws and mechanisms of “free markets”, the education system promoting “free markets” – and even the incessant media hype around “free markets”. The interests of primary producers play, at best, a marginal role in the sophisticated economic superstructure of a “free-market” society.
This has been true throughout history; but in recent decades – with technology and transport spanning the world – rigging of “free markets” has become hugely exacerbated. Owners and managers make big profits, while primary producers get the short end of the stick.
Around the world, economic systems are designed so as to exploit with maximum efficiency low-cost natural resources and primary labour. This is the so-called “globalist agenda” of the business and managerial classes. The fig leaf of this narrative of greed and power is that maximum economic efficiency of exploitation is somehow “good for all of us”; of course no proof is needed for that cunning and noble-sounding claim.
In practice, there is almost no upper limit to how much primary producers can be exploited. The game is designed by the cunning people and totally rigged in their favour.
* * *
Up to a point, primary producers put up with some exploitation. Their lives and their needs are simple. As long as the family is able to take care of their children, celebrate once in a while, and cope with occasional difficulties, life goes on. Indeed, provided that certain basic requirements of life are met, a primary producer is not even envious of a wealthier owner or manager. The abstract concept of “complete economic equality” is not on his mind.
“To each his own”, the primary producer may say. But he would also surely need the assurance that the system would not let his family go under; that line must not be crossed.
This is exactly where a serious problem arises. The cunning ones do not really care if a few families of primary producers – deplorables! – do go under. For these self-proclaimed “elites”, other human lives do not count for much. While the simple-minded primary producers accept having to share the planet with the cunning ones, that courtesy is not reciprocated.
There is virtually no upper limit to human cunning. Sophisticated mechanisms of leveraged speculation, risk management and money-printing are devised to ensure that the cunning types profit under any conceivable economic situation. In catastrophic situations, when huge risk insurance payoffs would endanger the whole system, the government – also under the hidden control of the cunning – arranges huge bailouts, at public expense.
In this way, the most cunning 1% of the people around the world have built a seemingly crash-proof economic bubble – or cocoon – around themselves. They seem to harbour the illusion that, contrary to the law of impermanence, their cocoon will last forever.
As economic exploitation worsens, the chasm between primary producers and the most cunning 1% grows wider. Because the rules and laws governing any economy are man-made, this phenomenon is in reality the deliberate tearing of the fabric of society.
Because this phenomenon is today global in scope, it has created the global divide which we are witnessing. The primary motive force behind this phenomenon is “big finance” seeking big and risk-free returns. To that end, their core strategy is: “Whatever it takes”!
This worsening divide running through societies, and across national boundaries, seems to play a greater role in current geopolitics than race, religion or ideology.
Over recent decades, the “sole superpower” – fronted by armies of MBAs, PhDs and other assorted pseudo-academics – has been leading in this game of “global Monopoly”. More recently, the “sole superpower” is being challenged by others, who have by now figured out how “global Monopoly” is being played, and wish to alter its one-sided rules.
In this situation, what can a primary producer hope for?
A primary producer in any society has only one rational, human hope: A life of basic dignity for him and his family. Not much to ask, surely – but the cunning will grudge him even that.
We can only hope that the future global economic system will be fairer to all segments of the global population; and that it will not, as at present, favour only the cunning, self-proclaimed “elites”. The economic system should heal the global divide rather than aggravate it.
Therein lies a difficult contradiction. Left to themselves, the pulls, pressures and inequities of any economic system tend to exacerbate rather than heal economic divides. The underlying reasons, as outlined briefly above, are that the operators of the system (a) lack a standard of fairness, and (b) have a huge stake themselves in “the game of privilege”.
* * *
It is possible to understand or correlate certain clear trends in world politics today with the above analysis of economic exploitation.
1. There is much talk today of “globalism” versus “nationalism”. But if “globalism” implies the tearing apart of a society by global economic forces, then “nationalism” is the resistance put up by those who do not wish to see their society torn apart. In this debate, it seems that the much-maligned “nationalists” could benefit by a clearer articulation of their position.
2. In the US, the President is caught between his firm supporters, mostly primary producers, and the far more cunning types who have wielded unbridled power over many decades.
3. In Russia, the government seems to be taking great care that unbridled “globalists” do not tear the Russian society apart again, as they did during the decade of the 1990s.
4. In Europe, the struggle between “nationalists” and “globalists” is at a different stage in every country, and it is complicated by the phenomenon of immigration. In the UK, the exploiting class have got themselves into a tangle of their own making.
5. In India, even while he is seen to be very active globally, the Prime Minister appears to have given very clear instructions down the line that the many welfare schemes aimed at common people constitute a central part of his overall government policy.
6. In China, hundreds of millions of primary producers have been brought out of poverty over the last three or four decades; that would not be possible without clear state policy.
7. In most countries, the interests of indigenous primary producers are sold out by their own economic “elites”, working in cahoots with other “globalists”. Cynical and ruthless “regime change” style techniques are employed to break or subvert any resistance.
8. Everywhere, the forces of “law and order” are invariably aligned with exploitative economic systems, since the “economic stability” of even a hugely unjust system is seen as a virtue; hence the birth of ridiculous concepts such as “too big to fail”.
When we connect many such dots, we see the current global divide as being caused by limitless “free-market” exploitation versus the natural human reaction to resist being exploited.
* * *
While there is no limit to the cunning schemes of exploiters, there is a limit on how much deprivation and degradation primary producers will tolerate. Depending on history and culture, this limit varies from society to society. Beyond that limit, when they have nothing to lose, primary producers have no option but to rely on the strength of their numbers.
When primary producers unite to resist exploitation, the qualities of solidarity and unity are far more important than cleverness. Games of enticement and subversion played by the cunning have to be countered and exposed. The world will never run equitably or smoothly on self-promoted “high IQ” alone; more useful are solidarity, unity and healthy communities.
If the above analysis is accepted, then all “ideologies” – of the “right” and the “left” – are seen merely as obfuscatory tools of the cunning, aimed at herding labouring masses into their assigned zones of economic exploitation. Indeed, even the term “controlled opposition” does not give an accurate picture. Rather, an array of “fake ideological fences” achieves the intended herding, aided by “bread and circuses” media brainwashing.
A parallel to this situation can be visualized as a pack of sheepdogs employed to help manage a herd of sheep. Some dogs bark from the left, some from the right, while the rest drive the herd from behind towards its designated pen – all under the smug supervision of the owner.
* * *
The analysis here is based on fundamental human needs and propensities, independent of race, religion, education, state of development … et cetera. Tragically, all so-called “academic discourse” today misses out on basic human needs and propensities, in favour of highly esoteric theories and ideologies. One reason behind such “fake academics” is that basic human truths are not “publishable”; they do not contribute to academic career-building.
Imagine a simple truth of life articulated by, say, Jesus Christ, Gautam Buddha or Jalaluddin Rumi. Although the truth may have enormous value to communities, it has no “academic respectability” today because it is not “original research”. Strange notions of “academics” exclude time-tested human wisdom from “sophisticated policy discourse”!
A research paper such as “Revised Chi-Squared Analysis of the Seasonal Incomes of Farmers in Southern Namibia” has a far better chance of influencing public policy today than anything that Jesus, Buddha or Rumi might have said. Overpaid eggheads seem to have missed this simple and unalterable fact of human life, proven time and again by history:
If basic human needs are provided for, all other aspects of “civilized life” – including peace – arise organically. Happy communities generate higher value.
A naive person may ask: Who would possibly argue against fulfilling simple, basic human needs? Sadly, today the answer is: Cunning people with their cunning theories!
But then how can one possibly re-educate uncaring and arrogant eggheads? One can only hope that the emerging “multi-polar” world will be an economically fairer one as well.
* * *
Related reading: Two earlier essays on this site, Gutless Wonders and The ABC of Modern Empire, attempted to probe these same issues, but in a slightly more indirect manner. Also relevant is Identity and Peace.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 23:05 - China Pops Electric Car Bubble By Slashing Subsidy Program, Weighs On Lithium Prices
China Pops Electric Car Bubble By Slashing Subsidy Program, Weighs On Lithium Prices
China’s adoption of electric vehicles has been driven by a government subsidy program that seems to be coming to an end at the moment.
The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) said earlier this month that weak demand for vehicles is one of the reasons for the pullback in the subsidy program.
CAAM reported that sales of electric vehicles plunged 45% in October.
“Because of the insufficient demand of the domestic market, the pressure for automakers to upgrade their technology to the national standard, and the major subsidy cuts for new energy vehicles, the recovery of production and sales is still limited,” said Chen Shihua, assistant secretary-general of the group.
CAAM warned that the electric car market would continue to deteriorate through 2020. It won’t be until the global economy troughs that the industry could stabilize.
The slowdown has also rippled through manufacturers of car batteries.
Data from SNE Research, via Bloomberg, shows battery demand in September plunged as electric car demand decreased.
Batteries sold by some of the largest manufacturers in the country, such as Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., dropped 10% in September. Other manufacturers were less fortunate, as battery sales for BYD crashed 71%.
“Weak demand in China is expected to continue, and there’s still uncertainty in the U.S. market,” SNE Research said. “We could continue to see smaller growth for the full year.”
As a result of subsidy reduction as the market cools, going down the supply chain, battery makers have been some of the hardest-hit companies, which the slump has pressured spot lithium prices. As shown in the chart below, spot prices have plunged 37% since 2H18.
Perhaps the downturn in China’s electric vehicle industry is an ominous sign for global stocks?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 22:45 - David Stockman Exposes The Ukrainian Influence-Peddling Rings, Part 2
David Stockman Exposes The Ukrainian Influence-Peddling Rings, Part 2
Authored by David Stockman via AntiWar.com,
Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade, and Tuesday’s testimony before Adam’s Schiff Show by former NSC official Tim Morrison is just such an occasion. In spades!
In his opening statement, this paranoid moron uttered the following lunacy, and it’s all you need to know about what is really going on down in the Imperial City.
“I continue to believe Ukraine is on the front lines of a strategic competition between the West and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia. Russia is a failing power, but it is still a dangerous one. The United States aids Ukraine and her people so they can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.
Folks, that just plain whacko. The Trump-hating Dems are so feverishly set on a POTUS kill that they have enlisted a veritable posse of Russophobic, right-wing neocon cretins – Morrison, Taylor, Kent, Vindman, among others – to finish off the Donald.
But in so doing they have made official Washington’s real beef against Trump crystal clear; and it’s not about the rule of law or abuse of presidential power or an impeachable dereliction of duty.
To be sure, foolish politicians like Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and the Clintonista apparatus at the center of the Dem party are so overcome with inconsolable grief and anger about losing the 2016 election to Trump that their sole purpose in life is to drive the Donald from office. But that just makes them “useful idiots” or compliant handmaids of the Deep State, which has a far more encompassing and consequential motivation.
To wit, whether out of naiveté, contrariness or just plain common sense, the Donald has declined to embrace the War Party’s Russian bogeyman and demonization of Putin. He thereby threatens the Empire’s raison d’être to the very core.
Indeed, that’s the real reason for the whole concerted attack on Trump from the Russian Collusion hoax, through the Mueller Investigation farce to the present UkraineGate and impeachment inquisition. The Deep State deeply and profoundly fears that if Trump remains in office – and especially if he is elected with a new mandate in 2020 – he might actually make peace with Russia and Putin.
So in Part 1 we advert to the basics. Without the demonization of Russia, Ukraine would be the no count failed state and cesspool of corruption it actually is, and not a purported “front line” buffer against Russian aggression.
Likewise, it would not have been a recipient of vast US and western military and economic aid – a condition that turned it into a honeypot for the kind of Washington influence peddling which ensnared the Bidens, induced its officials to meddle in the 2016 US election, and, in return, incited Trump’s justifiable quest to get to the bottom of the malignancy that has ensued.
So the starting point is to identify Russia for what it actually is: Namely, a kleptocratic state sitting atop an aging, Vodka-chugging population and third-rate economy with virtually zero capacity to project 21st century offensive military power beyond its own borders.
That truth, of course, shatters the whole foundation of the Warfare State. It renders NATO an obsolete relic and eviscerates the case for America’s absurd $900 billion defense and national security budget. And with the latter’s demise, the fairest part of Washington’s imperial self-importance and unseemly national security spending-based prosperity would also crumble.
But in their frenzied pursuit of the Donald’s political scalp, the Dems may be inadvertently sabotaging their Deep State masters. That’s because the neocon knuckleheads they are dragging out of the NSC and State Department woodwork are such bellicose simpletons – just maybe their utterly preposterous testimony about the Russkie threat and Ukrainian “front line” will wake up the somnolent American public to the absurdity of the entire Cold War 2.0 campaign.
Indeed, you almost have to ask whether the bit about fighting the Russkies in the Donbas rather than on the shores of New Jersey from Morrison’s opening statement quoted above was reprinted in the New York Times or The Onion?
The fact is, the fearsome Russian bogeyman cited by Morrison yesterday – and Ambassador Taylor, George Kent and Lt. Colonel Vindman previously – is a complete chimera; and the notion that the cesspool of corruption in Ukraine is a strategic buffer against Russian aggression is just plain idiocy.
Russia is actually an economic and industrial midget transformed beyond recognition by relentless Warfare State propaganda. It is actually no more threatening to America’s homeland security than the Siberian land mass that Sarah Palin once espied from her front porch in Alaska a decade ago.
After all, how could it be? The the GDP of the New York City metro area alone is about $1.8 trillion, which is well more than Russia’s 2018 GDP of $1.66 trillion. And that, in turn, is just 8% of America’s total GDP of $21.5 trillion.
Moreover, Russia’ dwarf economy is composed largely of a vast oil and gas patch; a multitude of nickel, copper, bauxite and vanadium mines; and some very large swatches of wheat fields. That’s not exactly the kind of high tech industrial platform on which a war machine capable of threatening the good folks in Lincoln NE or Worchester MA is likely to be erected.
And especially not when the Russian economy has been heading sharply south in dollar purchasing terms for several years running.
GDP of Russia In Millions of USD
Indeed, in terms of manufacturing output, the comparison is just as stark. Russia’s annual manufacturing value added is currently about $200 billion compared to $2.2 trillion for the US economy.
And that’s not the half of it. Not only are Russia’s vast hydrocarbon deposits and mines likely to give out in the years ahead, but so are the livers of its Vodka-chugging work force. That’s a problem because according to a recent Brookings study, Russia’s working age population – even supplemented by substantial in-migration and guest worker programs – is heading south as far into the future as the eye can see.
Even in the Brookings medium case projection shown below, Russia’s working age population will be nearly 20% smaller than today by 2050. Yet today’s figure of about 85 million is already just a fraction of the US working age population of 255 million.
Russia’s Shrinking Work Force
Not surprisingly, Russia’s pint-sized economy can not support a military establishment anywhere near to that of Imperial Washington. To wit, its $61 billion of military outlays in 2018 amounted to less than 32 days of Washington’s current $750 billion of expenditures for defense.
Indeed, it might well be asked how Russia could remotely threaten homeland security in America short of what would be a suicidal nuclear first strike.
That’s because the 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons on each side represent a continuation of mutual deterrence (MAD) – the arrangement by which we we got through 45-years of cold war when the Kremlin was run by a totalitarian oligarchy committed to a hostile ideology; and during which time it had been armed to the teeth via a forced-draft allocation of upwards of 40% of the GDP of the Soviet empire to the military.
By comparison, the Russian defense budget currently amounts to less than 4% of the country’s anemic present day economy – one shorn of the vast territories and populations of Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and all the Asian “stans” among others. Yet given those realities we are supposed to believe that the self-evidently calculating and cautious kleptomaniac who runs the Kremlin is going to go mad, defy MAD and trigger a nuclear Armageddon?
Indeed, the idea that Russia presents a national security threat to America is laughable. Not only would Putin never risk nuclear suicide, but even that fantasy is the extent of what he’s got. That is, Russia’s conventional capacity to project force to the North American continent is nonexistent – or at best, lies somewhere between nichts and nothing.
For example, in today’s world you do not invade any foreign continent without massive sea power projection capacity in the form of aircraft carrier strike groups. These units consist of an armada of lethal escort ships, a fleet of aircraft, massive suites of electronics warfare capability and the ability to launch hundreds of cruise missiles and other smart weapons.
Each US aircraft carrier based strike group, in fact, is composed of roughly 7,500 personnel, at least one cruiser, a squadron of destroyers and/or frigates, and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircraft. A carrier strike group also sometimes includes submarines and attached logistics ships.
The US has eleven such carrier strike groups. Russia has zero modern carrier strike groups and one beat-up, smoky old (diesel) aircraft carrier that the Israeli paper, Haaretz, described as follows when it recently entered the Mediterranean:
Russia’s only aircraft carrier, a leftover from the days of Soviet power, carries a long history of mishaps, at sea and in port, and diesel engines which were built for Russia’s cold waters – as shown by the column of black smoke raising above it. It needs frequent refueling and resupplies and has never been operationally tested.
Indeed, from our 19th floor apartment on the East River in NYC, even we could see this smoke belcher coming up Long Island Sound with an unaided eye – with no help needed at all from the high tech spyware of the nation’s $80 billion intelligence apparatus.
Yet Morrison had the audacity to say before a committee of the U.S. House that we are aiding Ukraine so we don’t have to fight Russians on the banks of the East River or the Potomac!
For want of doubt, just compare the above image of the Admiral Kuznetsov belching smoke in the Mediterranean with that of the Gerald R. Ford CVN 48 next below.
The latter is the US Navy’s new $13 billion aircraft carrier and is the most technologically advanced warship ever built.
The contrast shown below serves as a proxy for the vastly inferior capability of the limited number of ships and planes in Russia’s conventional force. What it does have numerical superiority in is tanks – but alas they are not amphibious nor ocean-capable!
Likewise, nobody invades anybody without massive airpower and the ability to project it across thousands of miles of oceans via vast logistics and air-refueling capabilities.
On that score, the US has 6,100 helicopters to Russia’s 1,200 and 6,000 fixed wing fighter and attack aircraft versus Russia’s 2,100. More importantly, the US has 5,700 transport and airlift aircraft compared to just 1,100 for Russia.
In short, the idea that Russia is a military threat to the US homeland is ludicrous. Russia is essentially a landlocked military shadow of the former Soviet war machine. Indeed, for the world’s only globe-spanning imperial power to remonstrate about an aggressive threat from Moscow is a prime facie case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Moreover, the canard that Washington’s massive conventional armada is needed to defend Europe is risible nonsense. Europe can and should take care of its own security and relationship with its neighbor on the Eurasian continent.
After all, the GDP of NATO Europe is $18 trillion or 12X greater than that of Russia, and the current military budgets of European NATO members total about $280 billion or 4X more than that of Russia.
More importantly, the European nations and people really do not have any quarrel with Putin’s Russia, nor is their security and safety threatened by the latter. All of the tensions that do exist and have come to a head since the illegal coup in Kiev in February 2014 were fomented by Imperial Washington and its European subalterns in the NATO machinery.
Then again, the latter is absolutely the most useless, obsolete, wasteful and dangerous multilateral institution in the present world. But like the proverbial clothes-less emperor, NATO doesn’t dare risk having the purportedly “uninformed” amateur in the Oval Office pointing out its buck naked behind.
So the NATO subservient think tanks and establishment policy apparatchiks are harrumphing up a storm, but for crying out loud most of Europe’s elected politicians are in on the joke. They are fiscally swamped paying for their Welfare States and are not about to squeeze their budgets or taxpayers to fund military muscle against a nonexistent threat.
As the late, great Justin Raimondo aptly noted,
Finally an American president has woken up to the fact that World War II, not to mention the cold war, is over: there’s no need for US troops to occupy Germany.
Vladimir Putin isn’t going to march into Berlin in a reenactment of the Red Army taking the Fuehrer-bunker – but even if he were so inclined, why won’t Germany defend itself?
Exactly. If their history proves anything, Germans are not a nation of pacifists, meekly willing to bend-over in the face of real aggressors. Yet they spent the paltry sum of $43 billion on defense during 2018, or barely 1.1% of Germany’s $4.0 trillion GDP, which happens to be roughly three times bigger than Russia’s.
In short, the policy action of the German government tells you they don’t think Putin is about to invade the Rhineland or retake the Brandenburg Gate.
And this live action testimonial also trumps, as it were, all of the risible alarms that have emanated from the beltway think tanks and the 4,000 NATO bureaucrats talking their own book in behalf of their plush Brussels sinecures.
And as we will outline in Part 2, that’s what Washington’s Ukraine intervention is all about, and why the Donald’s efforts to get to the bottom of that cesspool has brought on the final Deep State assault against his presidency.
Part 2 – Democrats Empower a Pack of Paranoid Neocon Morons
Yet his related claim that Ukraine is a victim of Russian aggression is even more ludicrous. The actual aggression in that godforsaken corner of the planet came from Washington when it instigated, funded, engineered and recognized the putsch on the streets of Kiev during February 2014, which illegally overthrew the duly elected President of Ukraine on the grounds that he was too friendly with Moscow.
Thus, Morrison risibly asserted that,
Support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty has been a bipartisan objective since Russia’s military invasion in 2014. It must continue to be.
The fact is, when the Maidan uprising occurred in February that year there were no uninvited Russian troops anywhere in Ukraine. Putin was actually sitting in his box on the viewing stand, presiding over the Winter Olympics in Sochi and basking in the limelight of global attention that they commanded.
It was only weeks later – when the Washington-installed ultra-nationalist government with its neo-Nazi vanguard threatened the Russian-speaking populations of Crimea and the Donbas – that Putin moved to defend Russian interests on his own doorstep. And those interests included Russia’s primary national security asset – the naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea which had been the homeport of the Russian Black Sea Fleet for centuries under czars and commissars alike, and on which Russia had a long-term lease.
We untangle the truth of the crucial events which surrounded the Kiev putsch in greater detail below, but suffice it here to note the whole gang of neocon apparatchiks which have been paraded before the Schiff Show have proffered the same Big Lie as did Morrison in the “invasion” quote cited above.
As the ever perspicacious Robert Merry observed regarding the previous testimony of Ambassador Bill Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, the Washington rendition of the Maidan coup and its aftermath amounts to a blatant falsehood:
The Taylor/Kent outlook stems from the widespread demonization of Russia that dominates thinking within elite circles. Taylor’s rendition of recent events in Ukraine was so one-sided and selective as to amount to a falsehood.
As he had it, Ukraine’s turn to the West after 2009 (when he left the country after his first diplomatic tour there) threatened Russia’s Vladimir Putin to such an extent that he tried to “bribe” Ukraine’s president with inducements to resist Western influence, whereupon protests emerged in Kyiv that drove the Ukrainian president to flee the country in 2014. Then Putin invaded Crimea, holding a “sham referendum at the point of Russian army rifles.” Putin sent military forces into eastern Ukraine “to generate illegal armed formations and puppet governments.” And so the West extended military assistance to Ukraine.
“It is this security assistance,” he said, “that is at the heart of the [impeachment] controversy that we are discussing today.”
Taylor’s right that this narrative is at the center of UkraineGate, but there is not a shred of truth to it. Nevertheless, defense of this false narrative, and the inappropriate military and economic aid to Ukraine which flowed from it, is the real reason this posse of neocon stooges took exception to the Donald’s legitimate interest in investigating the Bidens and the events of 2016.
As Morrison put it Tuesday and Vindman said last week, their interest was in protecting not the constitution and the rule of law, but the bipartisan political consensus on Capitol Hill in favor of their proxy war on Putin and the Ukraine aid package through which it was being prosecuted.
As I stated during my deposition, I feared at the time of the call on July 25 how its disclosure would play in Washington’s political climate. My fears have been realized.
Not surprisingly, the entire Washington establishment has been sucked into this scam. For instance, the insufferably sanctimonious Peggy Noonan used her Wall Street Journal platform to idolize these liars.
As she portrayed it, bow-tie bedecked George P. Kent appeared to be the very picture of the old-school American foreign service official. And West Pointer Bill Taylor – with a military career going back to (dubious) Vietnam heroism – was redolent of the blunt-spoken American military men who won WW II and the cold war which followed.
As Robert Merry further noted,
She saw them as “the old America reasserting itself.” They demonstrated “stature and command of their subject matter.” They evinced “capability and integrity.”
Oh, puleeze!
What they evinced was nothing more than the self-serving groupthink that has turned Ukraine into a beltway goldmine. That is, a cornucopia of funding for all the think tanks, NGOs, foreign policy experts, national security contractors and Warfare State agencies – from DOD through the State Department, AID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Board for International Broadcasting and countless more – which ply their trade in the Imperial City.
But Robert Merry got it right. These cats are not noble public servants and heroes; they’re apparatchiks and payrollers aggrandizing their own power and pelf – even as they lead the nation to the brink of disaster:
But these men embrace a geopolitical outlook that is simplistic, foolhardy, and dangerous. Perhaps no serious blame should accrue to them, since it is the same geopolitical outlook embraced and enforced by pretty much the entire foreign policy establishment, of which these men are mere loyal apparatchiks. And yet they are playing their part in pushing a foreign policy that is directing America towards a very possible disaster.
Neither man manifested even an inkling of an understanding of what kind of game the United States in playing with Ukraine. Neither gave even a nod to the long, complex relationship between Ukraine and Russia. Neither seemed to understand either the substance or the intensity of Russia’s geopolitical interests along its own borders or the likely consequences of increasing U.S. meddling in what for centuries has been part of Russia’s sphere of influence.
They obviously didn’t get it, but we must. So let us summarize the true Ukraine story, starting with the utterly stupid and historically ignorant reason for Washington’s February 2014 coup.
Namely, it objected to the decision of Ukraine’s prior government in late 2013 to align itself economically and politically with its historic hegemon in Moscow rather than the European Union and NATO. Yet the fairly elected and constitutionally legitimate government of Ukraine then led by Viktor Yanukovych had gone that route mainly because it got a better deal from Moscow than was being demanded by the fiscal torture artists of the IMF.
Needless to say, the ensuing US sponsored putsch arising from the mobs on the street of Kiev reopened deep national wounds. Ukraine’s bitter divide between Russian-speakers in the east and Ukrainian nationalists elsewhere dates back to Stalin’s brutal rein in Ukraine during the 1930s and Ukrainian collusion with Hitler’s Wehrmacht on its way to Stalingrad and back during the 1940s.
It was the memory of the latter nightmare, in fact, which triggered the fear-driven outbreak of Russian separatism in the Donbas and the 96% referendum vote in Crimea in March 2014 to formally re-affiliate with Mother Russia.
In this context, even a passing familiarity with Russian history and geography would remind that Ukraine and Crimea are Moscow’s business, not Washington’s.
In the first place, there is nothing at stake in the Ukraine that matters. During the last 800 years it has been a meandering set of borders in search of a country.
In fact, the intervals in which the Ukraine existed as an independent nation have been few and far between. Invariably, its rulers, petty potentates and corrupt politicians made deals with or surrendered to every outside power that came along.
These included the Lithuanians, Poles, Ruthenians (eastern Slavs), Tartars, Turks, Muscovites, Austrians and Czars, among manifold others.
At the beginning of the 16th century, for instance, the territory of today’s Ukraine was scattered largely among the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Ruthenia (light brown area), the Kingdom of Poland (dark brown area), Muscovy (bright yellow area) the Crimean Khanate (light yellow area).
The latter was the entity which emerged when some clans of the Golden Horde (Tartars) ceased their nomadic life on the Asian steppes and occupied the light yellow stripped areas of the map north of the Black Sea as their Yurt (homeland).
From that cold start, the tiny Cossack principality of Ukraine (blue area below), which had emerged by 1654, grew significantly over the subsequent three centuries. But as the map also makes clear, this did not reflect the organic congealment of a nation of kindred volk sharing common linguistic and ethnic roots, but the machinations of Czars and Commissars for the administrative convenience of efficiently ruling their conquests and vassals.
Thus, much of modern Ukraine was incorporated by the Russian Czars between 1654 and 1917 per the yellow area of the map and functioned as vassal states. These territories were amalgamated by absolute monarchs who ruled by the mandate of God and the often brutal sword of their own armies.
In particular, much of the purple area was known as “Novo Russia” (Novorossiya) during the 18th and 19th century owing to the Czarist policy of relocating Russian populations to the north of the Black Sea as a bulwark against the Ottomans. But after Lenin seized power in St. Petersburg in November 1917 amidst the wreckage of Czarist Russia, an ensuing civil war between the so-called White Russians and the Red Bolsheviks raged for several years in these territories and elsewhere in the chaotic regions of the former western Russian Empire.
At length, Lenin won the civil war as the French, British, Polish and American contingents vacated the postwar struggle for power in Russia. Accordingly, in 1922 the new Communist rulers proclaimed the Union of Soviet Social Republics (USSR) and incorporated Novo Russia into one of its four constituent units as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) – along with the Russian, Belarus and Transcaucasian SSRs.
Thereafter the border and political status of Ukraine remained unchanged until the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 between the USSR and Nazi Germany. Pursuant thereto the Red Army and Nazi Germany invaded and dismembered Poland, with Stalin getting the blue areas (Volhynia and parts of Galicia) as consolation prizes, which where then incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR.
Finally, when Uncle Joe Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev won the bloody succession struggle in 1954, he transferred Crimea (red area) to the Ukraine SSR as a reward to his supporters in Kiev. That, of course, was the arbitrary writ of the Soviet Presidium, given that precious few Ukrainians actually lived in what had been a integral part of Czarist Russia after it was purchased by Catherine the Great from the Turks in 1783.
In a word, the borders of modern Ukraine are the handiwork of Czarist emperors and Communist butchers. The so-called international rule of law had absolutely nothing to do with its gestation and upbringing.
It’s a pity, therefore, that none of the so-called conservative Republicans attending Adam’s Schiff Show saw fit to ask young Tim Morrison the obvious question.
To wit, exactly why is he (and most of the Washington foreign policy establishment) so keen on expending American treasure, weapons and even blood in behalf of the “territorial integrity and sovereignty” of this happenstance amalgamation of people subdued by some of history’s most despicable tyrants?
Needless to say, owing to this very history, the linguistic/ethnic composition of today’s Ukraine does not reflect the congealment of a “nation” in the historic sense.
To the contrary, central and western Ukraine is populated by ethnic Ukrainians who speak Ukrainian (dark red area), whereas the two parts of the country allegedly the victim of Russian aggression and occupation – Crimea (brown area) and the eastern Donbas region (yellow area with brown strips) – are comprised of ethnic Russians who speak Russian and ethnic Ukrainians who predominately speak-Russian, respectively.
And much of the rest of the territory consists of admixtures and various Romanian, Moldovan, Hungarian and Bulgarian minorities.
Did the Washington neocons – led by Senator McCain and Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland – who triggered the Ukrainian civil war with their coup on the streets of Kiev in February 2014 consider the implications of the map below and its embedded, and often bloody, history?
Quite surely, they did not.
Nor did they consider the rest of the map. That is, the enveloping Russian state all around to which the parts and pieces of Ukraine – especially the Donbas and Crimea – have been intimately connected for centuries. Robert Merry thus further noted,
As Nikolas K. Gvosdev of the US Naval War College has written, Russia and Ukraine share a 1,500-mile border where Ukraine “nestles up against the soft underbelly of the Russian Federation.” Gvosdev elaborates: “The worst nightmare of the Russian General Staff would be NATO forces deployed all along this frontier, which would put the core of Russia’s population and industrial capacity at risk of being quickly and suddenly overrun in the event of any conflict.” Beyond that crucial strategic concern, the two countries share strong economic, trade, cultural, ethnic, and language ties going back centuries. No Russian leader of any stripe would survive as leader if he or she were to allow Ukraine to be wrested fully from Russia’s sphere of influence.
And yet America, in furtherance of the ultimate aim of pulling Ukraine away from Russia, spent some $5 billion in a campaign to gin up pro-Western sentiment there, according to former assistant secretary of state for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who spearheaded much of this effort during the Obama administration. It was clearly a blatant effort to interfere in the domestic politics of a foreign nation – and a nation residing in a delicate and easily inflamed part of the world.
Indeed, Ukraine is a tragically divided country and fissured simulacrum of a nation. Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard called Ukraine “a cleft country, with two distinct cultures” causing Robert Merry to rightly observe that,
Contrary to Taylor’s false portrayal of an aggressive Russia trampling on eastern Ukrainians by setting up puppet governments and manufacturing a bogus referendum in Crimea, the reality is that large numbers of Ukrainians there favor Russia and feel loyalty to what they consider their Russian heritage. The Crimean public is 70 percent Russian, and its Parliament in 1992 actually voted to declare independence from Ukraine for fear that the national leadership would nudge the country toward the West. (The vote was later rescinded to avoid a violent national confrontation.) In 1994, Crimea elected a president who had campaigned on a platform of “unity with Russia.”
In short, in modern times Ukraine largely functioned as an integral part of Mother Russia, serving as its breadbasket and iron and steel crucible under czars and commissars alike. Given this history, the idea that Ukraine should be actively and aggressively induced to join NATO was just plain nuts, as we will amplify further in Part 3 (to come).
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 22:25 - Taylor Swift's Army Of Ride-Or-Die Fans Sent A Flurry Of Death Threats To Music Manager And Family
Taylor Swift's Army Of Ride-Or-Die Fans Sent A Flurry Of Death Threats To Music Manager And Family
When Taylor Swift called on her legion of die-hard fans (the “Swifties”, as they’re known) to pressure music manager Scott “Scooter” Braun into letting her perform a medley of hits from throughout her career at the American Music Awards on Sunday, she apparently opened up Pandora’s Box.
Because Swift’s ride-or-die fans have apparently been peppering Braun and his family with death threats, prompting Braun to break his six-month silence on the feud to plead with Swift to call off her dogs.
In an Instagram post on Friday, Braun accused Swift of putting his wife and children in danger.
Here’s a couple of snippets from the text:
“This morning I spoke out publicly for the first time saying I wouldn’t participate in a social media war. However, I came home tonight to find my wife had received a phone call threatening the safety of our children, as well as other threats seen above,” Braun, 38, wrote. “I won’t go in to the details of this past week. I have been at a loss. Thinking of my wife and children, my team and their families, I have gone through a range of emotions on how to deal with this.”
“It is important that you understand that your words carry a tremendous amount of weight,” Braun said. “Your message can be interpreted by some in different ways.”
According to the New York Daily News, one of the threats sent to Braun’s family read: “Hi, why do you just die with your children??? I will buy a gun [tomorrow] and [then] shoot you [all in] the head.”
Taylor Swift
Braun told the Daily News that he contacted Swift via her attorney to complain about the threats four days ago, but has yet to hear back. But even before the threats, Braun said he’d tried to contact Swift several times to try and quash the beef, but has had “no luck.”
Swift and Braun have been feuding for years, but the long-time music manager’s decision to buy the rights to Swift’s back catalogue as part of a deal to buy her old record label earlier this year reignited their feud, and ratcheted it up to absurd new heights.
Scooter Braun
On June 30, Braun’s Ithaca Holdings acquired Swift’s old record label, Big Machine Records, along with Taylor Swift’s six-album catalog in a $300 million deal that was financed (as we’ve mentioned) by private equity firm Carlyle Group.
Since the deal, there’s been a lot of “he said, she said”-type drama between Swift, Braun and Big Machine founder Scott Borchetta, who helped launch Swift’s career as a country darling in Nashville.
Since her post earlier this week accusing Braun and Borchetta of trying to stop her from performing a medley of her hits at the AMA Sunday night, Swift clarified a few days later that the two had apparently changed their minds, and that Swift would be allowed to perform the songs.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 22:05 - Which Branch Of Government Is The Worst? A Ranked List
Which Branch Of Government Is The Worst? A Ranked List
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
The US federal government is divided up into a variety of institutions, with the three main “branches” of government designed to compete against each other. Theoretically, these three branches were initially thought to place checks on the other branches of government, thus minimizing abuses of power by the federal government overall.
Things haven’t really worked out that way. Thanks to the rise of political parties, coordination between the branches — along party lines — has often replaced competition between the branches. Moreover, as political parties vie for the a controlling majority in the various branches, they are loath to limit the power of these institutions lest these partisans limit their own power in the process. Nor do the different branches represent different socio-economic groups in the manner imagined by John Adams in his Defense of the Constitutions.
So weakened had this imagined separation of powers become by the time of the New Deal that Franklin Roosevelt asserted during the days of his court-packing scheme that the various branches of government existed to work together, rather than to mutually obstruct each other. In a 1937 “fireside chat,” Roosevelt claimed the federal government is
a three-horse team provided by the Constitution to the American people so that their field might be plowed. The three horses are, of course, the three branches of government – the Congress, the Executive and the Courts. Two of the horses are pulling in unison today; the third is not.
FDR’s point was that the Supreme Court was being obstructionist, and it ought to conform itself to the other two branches of government, since it was the duty of each branch to assist the other branches in “plowing the field.”
The fact many people would find this theory remotely plausible speaks to the magnitude of the public’s disregard for the notion the division of the federal government into branches was supposed to prevent government action, not facilitate it.
Not All Branches Are Equally Terrible
FDR, of course, is the poster child for claims the presidency has become lopsidedly more powerful than the other branches of government. Through the party structure, FDR was able to dominate Congress, and through the cult of personality that surrounded him, he was even able to intimidate the Supreme Court as well.
But FDR certainly isn’t the only example of how the presidency has come to be the driver behind most of the federal government’s worst abuses and usurpations of power.
For detailed accounts of these many crimes, the reader may consult Reassessing the Presidency, published by the Mises Institute in 2001.
In it, the authors explore how the presidency has greatly expanded its power at the expense of Congress (of, of course, ordinary Americans).
This has been made possible by both inaction and support from the other branches. For example, except in rare cases, the Supreme Court has tended to defer to the other branches of government — and especially the presidency — when the court perceived both of the other branches were unlikely to oppose the court’s decisions on a topic.
Meanwhile, the Congress’s danger has mostly manifested itself through inaction and through its deference to both the Presidency and the Supreme Court. Over the past century, Congress has repeatedly handed over its lawmaking authority to the executive branch and to a variety of independent regulatory agencies.
The Rise of the Fourth Branch
This capitulation to the presidency and the administrative state, however, has enabled what has become an essentially independent fourth branch of government. Yesterday, in an article titled “The Deep State: The Headless Fourth Branch of Government,” I described how the regulatory and national-security agencies of the executive branch have evolved over the past century to become more or less autonomous in their own right.
These organizations are sometimes collectively called “the deep state,” and their are characterized by a lack of responsiveness to the electorate or to any other branch of government.
Although the president is technically the head of these agencies, he can only count on cooperation if there is general agreement among the agencies’ personnel that the president’s agenda does not threaten them. In other words, the president can often count on cooperation from this deep state to expand the executive branch’s power. These same agencies, however, tend to place insurmountable obstacles in the way of any president who might attempt to significantly curtail the powers of the federal bureaucracy.
While the president’s formal power is certainly quite vast, the informal power of this permanent bureaucracy is much greater. The agency personnel can usually wait out any president, and if a president becomes too inconvenient, these same bureaucrats can engage in a variety of investigations, indictments, and leaks designed to undermine the president. What they do is often secret, protecting it from public scorn.
The fact many of these bureaucrats have tenured positions, and function largely in the shadows, increases their power further. Even enormous failures on their part — as evidenced in the failure to prevent 9/11, or to “win” the failed War on Drugs — only leads to even larger budgets and even broader prerogatives.
From Worst to Least-Awful
Since the New Deal, and especially since 9/11, I suggest this fourth branch of government has actually become the most dangerous one. Ranking the branches of government from the worst to least bad, it looks like this:
-
The Permanent Administrative State
-
The Presidency
-
The Supreme Court
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The Congress
The bureaucracy, as we’ve seen, is dangerous largely because of its permanence and the lack of any means in ensuring accountability. While elected officials come and go, career bureaucrats (military and otherwise) are more or less permanent. Moreover, since the other branches depend on the bureaucracy to enforce the “rules,” there is no means of enforcing accountability on the bureaucracy beyond the short term.
The Presidency, on the other hand, is dangerous for both administrative and political reasons. It can use hero worship and mass media to ram through legislation. The President can also issue executive orders, essentially creating new legislation without Congressional approval.
The problem with the Supreme Court stems largely from its exalted position in the minds of voters. Polls show Americans trust the “judicial branch” more than either the Presidency or Congress. Thus, when the Supreme Court hands down its decisions, these decrees are often considered to be indubitable fait accomplis. On the other hand, the court has no means of enforcing its decisions, lessening its de facto power.
And then there is the Congress — the least popular, least respected, and most disorganized branch of the federal government. This is the branch which has the least ability to capitalize on a cult of personality given its lack of any single established figurehead. Moreover, turnover in Congress is higher than most people think. Although some members of Congress serve for decades, most members have tenures that are much shorter. The average tenure for current members is 8.6 years in the House and 10.1 years in the Senate.This means many members of Congress come and go as quickly as the presidents.
So What?
But if we’ve determined which federal institutions are the worst, the question remains: so what?
Well, this sort of analysis may help us determine which side is the greater threat when observing conflicts within the federal government. It also helps us to see through the rhetoric of political parties who always insist attempts at limiting their guy’s power is unconstitutional or inappropriate.
One example of this was Nancy Pelosi’s diplomatic trip to Syria in 2007, during which the Speaker attempted to assert some Congressional control over the White House’s foreign policy. Vice president Dick Cheney denounced the move, insisting “we don’t need 535 secretaries of state” and claiming Congress should defer to the president on all matters of foreign policy. Cheney, of course, was wrong, and it would be a good thing if Congress spent quite a bit more time “meddling” in the White House’s foreign policy agenda. The proper view of this relationship between Congress and the White House, however, is often clouded by partisan loyalties.
On the other hand, during the Trump administration, we’ve seen the permanent bureaucracy assert itself in its attempts to undermine the presidency, and to protect the deep state’s own interests. The House majority has been supportive of this for partisan reasons. But more fundamentally — as a recent New York Times article concludes — this has really been a conflict between the presidency and the deep state. Although the presidency’s power is already bloated to dangerous levels, the power of the permanent administrative state is even greater, more unaccountable, and most dangerous of all.
Mere partisan analysis would impel us to overlook this, but by keeping an eye on the relative danger of each branch within the federal government, we may perhaps be more able to identify the worst of the bad guys in each new political controversy.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 21:45 -
- "More Eco-Friendly" Meets "Horrors Of Capitalism": $34 Toilet Paper 'With A Conscience'
"More Eco-Friendly" Meets "Horrors Of Capitalism": $34 Toilet Paper 'With A Conscience'
Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, known for bizarre health advice such as advocating that women use jade “vaginal eggs”, for which her company Goop has recently been sued, is now out with more outrageous health and ‘environment conscious’ products in her annual holiday gift guide.
Attracting the most attention, and subsequent mocking, is the “essential bamboo toilet paper” listed at $34 for the pack. Advertised as a toilet roll “with a conscience” due to it’s being made out of “100% sustainable bamboo” the ‘No. 2’ toilet role has a “silky, smooth texture that’s gentle on skin” — though bamboo sounds just a step above a pine cone in terms of “silky” smoothness.
Via Goop.com The Oscar-winner Paltrow has long pushed interesting toilet products to say the least, including an expensive spray that can be added to the “gold standard” toilet paper for a ‘wet-wipe’ experience. Additionally, the coffee enema kit listed in last year’s holiday offering at a cool $135 went viral when it was widely mocked.
Additionally Goop shoppers can buy a six-figure tree house, $43,000 earrings, a $949 cat jungle gym, a $1,495 marble Connect Four set, a $2,600 bassinet, a $250 Luxe Brass Fire Extinguisher and a $199 Elvie pelvic floor exercise device; and then there’s the $425 pair of gold handcuffs offered alongside sex toys.
Founded by Paltrow in 2008 as an extension of her strange public health product advocacy, Goop is currently worth an estimated $250 million.
She’s previously claimed in interviews that “Our stuff is beautiful, the ingredients are beautiful,” and that: “You can’t get that at a lower price point.”
Confession: I oohed at a few of the wellness things, goddess help me. But if you’re buying $34 toilet paper, it better be made from cashmere. pic.twitter.com/vl62V9YlPM
— Amina Akhtar (@Drrramina) November 14, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
She also said upon coming under fire for the less than accessible prices for the average shopper: “You can’t make these things mass-market.”
Make no doubt about it: it’s now trendy to be the most planet-loving, alternative energy supporting, climate changing fighting Captain Planet that you can be.
Getty Images And what would being a friend to environment be without sanctimoniously ridiculing those who disagree with you, while wiping your rectum with the $34 luxury “with a conscience” toilet paper?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 21:25 - Trump's Impossible Fight To Stop Theft Of Ideas
Trump's Impossible Fight To Stop Theft Of Ideas
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,
Trump is on a mission to stop China from stealing US IP. It’s not possible, but what if it was?
Assume we could stop 100% of IP theft by “free riders” who improve the product and pass it off as their own.
Would we want to?
Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics, says We’re All Free Riders. Get over It!
The free rider problem is real enough. If it costs vast sums to test a new drug, we can’t expect the market to do so if all that investment can be undercut by imitators. But here’s the thing. In addition to the free rider problem, which we should solve as best we can, there’s a free rider opportunity.
The American economist Robert Solow demonstrated in the 1950s that nearly all of the productivity growth in history – particularly our rise from subsistence to affluence since the industrial revolution – was a result not of increasing capital investment, but of people finding better ways of working and playing, and then being copied.
If, as a society today, we had to choose between addressing the free rider problem and seizing the free rider opportunity, taking the latter option wins hands down.
Free Rider Problem
Gruen quotes Thomas Jefferson:
“Ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition.”
One can solve the free rider “problem” with paywalls and tight controls but tight controls also limits the number of buyers.
Gruen notes that Google generates many hundreds of billions of dollars every year but monetizes only a small fraction of that value. But $60 billion per annum is enough to make its founders rich beyond their wildest dreams.
German Firms Abandon China, US Firms Should Do the Same
A few days ago, I penned German Firms Abandon China, US Firms Should Do the Same.
The headline does not precisely match the sentiment I expressed inside. Here is my key point:
Tariffs Will Not Fix the Problem
If anything, tariffs made matters worse. And don’t expect a trade deal in pieces to do anything about IP theft either.
What to Do?
For well over a year, a friend kept asking, what would you do about it?
My answer was then and remains now “nothing”. This is not a matter for Trump to solve. Businesses need to decide for themselves whether or not it is worth it to do business in China.
That’s the key. This is not a problem Trump can solve. If businesses feel they are losing money doing business in China, they have a choice: They can decide they are making enough money anyway and it’s all worth it, or they can leave.
My headline title “German Firms Abandon China, US Firms Should Do the Same” caters to those who believe they are not making enough money or the risk isn’t worth it.
If enough companies leave, China will change its ways.
Here’s another view.
Chinese IP ‘Theft’ Doesn’t Justify Trump’s Tariffs
Donald Boudreaux, professor of economics and Getchell Chair at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. makes the case Chinese IP ‘Theft’ Doesn’t Justify Trump’s Tariffs
Much of this “theft” is in fact in-kind taxation. Beijing requires that certain foreign companies seeking to do business in China share their intellectual property with the Chinese. Companies that attach a high value to the opportunity to do business in that large country often agree to these terms. But IP belonging to companies that are willing to forego the opportunity to operate in China is not stolen or otherwise acquired by the Chinese.
This in-kind tax is unfortunate. But IP acquired through it no more counts as stolen property than does cash paid in taxes to Beijing (or, for that matter, to Uncle Sam) count as stolen property.
Like all taxes, Beijing’s requirement of IP sharing discourages foreign companies from doing business in China. And so by making China a less-attractive place to invest, this in-kind tax reduces China’s rate of capital accumulation. In turn, worker productivity there grows more slowly, as does the Chinese economy as a whole.
In short, the chief victims of this tax are the people of China.
Second, Uncle Sam’s taxes imposed on Americans who buy imports from China is a poor remedy for China’s IP violations. The direct harm that these tariffs inflict on us Americans might be a price worth paying if they offered the best hope of persuading the Chinese to treat our IP with greater respect. But they don’t.
Fight to Halt the Theft of Ideas is Hopeless
Martin Wolf at the Financial Times writes the Fight to Halt the Theft of Ideas is Hopeless
I believe this is the first time in history I have ever agreed with a major point of Wolf.
His opening gambit is perfect “China will not accept inferiority and the west should not want it to.”
That is the correct answer to the question I posed at the top of this article.
Wolf provides a history lesson on “free riders” noting that in the 18th century England criminalised the export of textile machinery to the US. Technology managed to make it to the US anyway.
Technology transfer was unstoppable then and it is unstoppable now. And then it was the US “stealing” technology.
Here is Wolf’s key point in one short paragraph:
“China will not accept permanent inferiority. We should not want it to be permanently inferior either. We should instead want the energies of the Chinese people to build on our ideas. That is how progress occurs.”
I agree 100%.
Michael Pettis Chimes In
I found that FT article reference in a series of Tweets by Michael Pettis.
US Dominates in Global IP
The US has the top four IP spots globally and 7 of the top 12. Germany is the lone EU entry at spot 12.
Why is that?
Because as Pettis notes,
“The great strength of the US is its restless and at times uncomfortable creativity and innovation, driven by a complex set of legal, financial, political, cultural, educational and other institutions that few countries have been able to match, and which is why foreigners come to the US to create the billion-dollar companies that they cannot anywhere else. The US didn’t get rich by preventing the spread of technology but rather by staying ahead of it.”
And as I have pointed out many times, the US has the largest, most open capital markets in the world. Google, Apple, and Microsoft could not exist in the EU because the EU would bust them up in the name of competition.
Google thrives because it allows people free use of its search engine. People use it because they like it. Those who don’t like it are free to try something else. From its enormous search engine profits, Google started the entire new field of autonomous driving.
Autonomous driving competition is intense. That ensures further progress. Please note that Commercial Driverless Taxis Have Arrived.
Please Keep Elizabeth Warren Out
Elizabeth Warren would bust up all four of the leaders. So would the EU. For what?
Trump Seeks to Protect Companies From Themselves
Trump finds fault in all of this.
He wants to protect companies from themselves.
At one point he proposed not letting Apple do business in China. Sheeesh, if Apple thinks it can prosper in China, that should be Apple’s business business, not Trump’s.
Meanwhile, US farmers are suffering. Ironically, even US steel companies are suffering and steel companies were supposed to be the big beneficiary of his tariffs.
Industrial Production Dives and It’s Not All Strike Related
We are in a manufacturing recession co-sponsored by Trump. Note that Industrial Production Dives and It’s Not All Strike Related.
Also note that GDP Estimates Crash on Dismal Economic Reports
This isn’t all Trump’s fault, but some of it it.
Has Trump Inflicted Enough Pain Upon Himself Yet?
Trump’s tariffs are so wrong that it prompted me to ask on October 26: Has Trump Inflicted Enough Pain Upon Himself Yet?
Since Trump is still dickering with China over “part 1” of a trade deal, the unfortunate answer is “no, not yet”.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 21:05 - Consumer Next Shoe To Drop As Wall Street Ignores Data "Decelerating Hard"
Consumer Next Shoe To Drop As Wall Street Ignores Data "Decelerating Hard"
ECRI’s Lakshman Achuthan spoke with CNBC Monday about the continuing cyclical slowdown in US economic growth that Wall Street continues to ignore.
Stocks are zooming to new highs in recent months on “trade optimism” and a tsunami of liquidity via central bank money printing.
Investors have taken their eyes off decelerating hard data that clearly shows manufacturing is in a recession, and the consumer could be the next domino to fall ahead of the holiday season.
“The actual data itself is just decelerating pretty hard actually,” Achuthan said. “I don’t think we can remove recession risk from the table. It’s still out there as long as you’re slowing.”
The chart below shows YoY industrial production growth in manufacturing is in a recession, already at a 3.5 year low. And real retail sales growth is falling simultaneously, indicating that the manufacturing slowdown has already transmitted weakness into services.
“On the manufacturing side, you have IP [industrial production] at a 3½-year low. It’s deeply negative,” he said. “On the retail sales front, you have deceleration.”
Achuthan said the US economy is likely to continue slowing in the months ahead. There’s no indication that a turning point in economic growth will be seen in 2019, as it’s likely the consumer will continue to deteriorate.
“All the hopes are the consumer is somehow going to rev up, and that’s coinciding with the holiday season here,” said Achuthan. “But when we look at all of our leading indexes that anticipate turning points in the US economy, it’s not there yet. So, we have more slowdown to go.”
ECRI’s leading indicators first spotted the cyclical slowdown in growth in mid-2018. By October of last year, Achuthan made an inflation downturn call that signaled the economy was decelerating, way ahead of Wall Street, who figured out something was wrong with the economy when stocks crashed in December.
And today, with a burst of poor US economic data, including last week’s disappointing retail sales and dismal industrial production, the US economic surprise index has slipped back into the negative, further indicating the US economy is on a slippy slope into year-end.
US GDP in Q4 is set to print at the lowest level in 4 years at around 0.35%, and would be only the fifth time in 42 quarters since the Q3 2009 exit from the recession when US growth has risen by less than 0.5% Q/Q.
The answer to the slowdown is ‘Not QE’, which has expanded the Fed’s balance sheet by $288 billion in the past two months, a faster rate of increase than that observed during QE3.
As a reminder to the bulls, the S&P500 closed at new highs two months before the Great Recession began. Also, stocks hit their highs the same month that the 1990-91 recession began. And right after the 2001 recession began, stocks rallied 20% in a month and a half.
Could the latest rally in stocks be the lead up to the next recession?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 20:45 - John Stossel Exposes The "Climate Myths"
John Stossel Exposes The "Climate Myths"
Authored by John Stossel, op-ed via Townhall.com,
“How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood!” insisted teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations.
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction!”
Many people say that we’re destroying the Earth.
It all sounds so scary.
But I’ve been a consumer reporter for years, and I’ve covered so many scares: plague, famine, overpopulation, SARS, West Nile virus, bird flu, radiation from cellphones, flesh-eating bacteria, killer bees, etc. The list of terrible things that were going to get us is very long.
Yet we live longer than ever.
Now I’m told global warming is different.
The Earth’s average temperature is rising. It’s risen 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880. The U.N. predicts it will rise another 2 to 5 degrees this century. If that happens, that will create problems.
But does that justify what’s being said?
“We have 12 years to act!” says Joe Biden.
“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change!” adds Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Twelve years? That’s the new slogan.
The Heartland Institute invited some climate alarmists to explain the “12 years” and other frightening statements they keep making.
The alarmists didn’t even show up. They never do. They make speeches and preach to gullible reporters, but they won’t debate anyone who is skeptical.
Over the years, I repeatedly invited Al Gore to come on my TV shows. His staff always said he was “too busy.”
At a Heartland Institute event I moderated, climatologist Pat Michaels put the 12-year claim in perspective by saying, “It’s warmed up around 1 degree Celsius since 1900, and life expectancy doubled in the industrialized democracies! Yet that temperature ticks up another half a degree and the entire system crashes? That’s the most absurd belief!”
Astrophysicist Willie Soon added:
“It’s all about hand-waving, emotion, sending out kids in protest. It has nothing to do with the science.”
Is that true? I wish the alarmists would show up and debate.
Alarmists say, “Miami will soon be underwater!”
Few serious people deny that the Earth has warmed and that sea levels are rising. But Michaels points out that even if the warming increases, humans can adjust.
For example, much of Holland is below sea level.
“They said,” Michaels recounts, “we’re going to adapt to the fact that we’re a low-lying country; we’re going to build these dikes. Are you telling me that people in Miami are so dumb that they’re just going to sit there and drown?”
Climatology professor David Legates added a point the climate alarmists never make:
“The water has been rising for approximately 20,000 years and probably will continue.”
But aren’t sudden climate changes happening now? Aren’t hurricanes suddenly far more violent?
“No they aren’t!” responded Michaels.
“You can take a look at all the hurricanes around the planet. We can see them since 1970, because we’ve got global satellite coverage. We can measure their power… There is no significant increase whatsoever — no relationship between hurricane activity and the surface temperature of the planet!”
He’s right. That’s what government data shows.
Nevertheless, activists and politicians demand the United States move toward zero carbon emissions. That would “put you back in the Stone Age,” says Michaels.
Another myth is that carbon dioxide, the prime creator of greenhouse gases, threatens the food supply.
But carbon dioxide helps plants grow.
“There are places on Earth where it is greening up like crazy,” says Michaels.
But if the crisis isn’t real, why do governments race to respond to it with regulations and big spending projects? Why is the U.N.’s Panel on Climate (IPCC) so alarmed?
Well, IPCC does stand for Inter governmental Panel on Climate Change.
Legates says, “Governments want to keep control… Carbon dioxide becomes that molecule by which (they) can take control of your lives.”
Government is the real crisis.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 20:25 - "It Was A Coup. Period": Tulsi Gabbard Slams US 'Interference' In Bolivia
"It Was A Coup. Period": Tulsi Gabbard Slams US 'Interference' In Bolivia
Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has come out swinging on Bolivia, following an initial period of being silent and reflection on the issue after leftist President Evo Morales was forced to step down on November 10 over growing anger at election irregularities, whereupon he was given political asylum in Mexico.
“What happened in Bolivia is a coup. Period,” Gabbard wrote on Twitter in the early hours of Friday while warning against any US interference.
Bolivian Interim President Jeanine Anez, via Reuters. “The United States and other countries should not be interfering in the Bolivian people’s pursuit of self-determination and right to choose their own government,” she argued.
Washington had been quick to endorse and recognize opposition senator Jeanine Anez as ‘interim president’ after she controversially declared herself such without a senatorial quorum or public vote, and as Morales’ Movement for Socialism was said to be barred from the senate building when it happened.
What happened in Bolivia is a coup. Period. The United States and other countries should not be interfering in the Bolivian people’s pursuit of self-determination and right to choose their own government.
— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) November 22, 2019
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Gabbard’s statement, which again sets her far apart from a large field of establishment and centrist candidates on foreign policy issues, comes a few days after Bernie Sanders was the first to condemn the events which led to Evo’s ouster as a military coup.
“When the military intervened and asked President Evo Morales to leave, in my view, that’s called a coup,” Sanders tweeted Monday, while linking to a video showing Bolivian security forces dispersing an indigenous pro-Morales protest using a volley of tear gas canisters.
I oppose the intervention of Bolivia’s security forces in the democratic process and their repression of Indigenous protesters. When the military intervened and asked President Evo Morales to leave, in my view, that’s called a coup. pic.twitter.com/TPFGxw1wWP
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) November 18, 2019
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Meanwhile, in a new interview with Russian media this week, Evo Morales said the right-leaning Organization of American States (OAS), which had initially cited “clear manipulations” in the voting surrounding his controversial re-election to a fourth term, played a prime role in deposing him, and that ultimately Bolivia’s huge reserves of lithium were being eyed by the United States and its right-wing Latin American allies.
“The OAS made a decision and its report is not based on a technical report, but on a political decision,” Evo told RT in the interview from Mexico.
Addressing his country’s most valued natural resource, he said, “In Bolivia we could define the price of lithium for the world…Now I have realized that some industrialized countries do not want competition” — while implying Washington had helped engineer his downfall.
Most estimates put the impoverished country’s Lithium supply at about 60% of the world’s known reserves.
The White House in the days after Evo’s ouster had called it a “significant moment for democracy in the Western Hemisphere”; however, the now exiled former president described it as “the sneakiest, most nefarious coup in history.”
* * *
Watch key moments of the translated RT interview below:
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 20:05 - Absurdity Update: British Academic Union Rules Members Can 'Identify' As "Black" And "Disabled"
Absurdity Update: British Academic Union Rules Members Can 'Identify' As "Black" And "Disabled"
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity.
College newspaper will no longer report “triggering” news
Northwestern is one of the finest universities in the world and is particularly renowned for its journalism school.
The Daily Northwestern student paper, staffed by these aspiring journalists, recently apologized for covering a “traumatic” event on campus.
The traumatic event in question was a speech by former Trump official Jeff Sessions.
Unsurprisingly, some students protested the ex-Attorney General’s speech, and the newspaper covered the protest. But the paper said they inadvertently “retraumatized” these protesters in reporting the story.
Past generations were traumatized by fighting in the Vietnam War, or having police dogs sicced on them while marching for equal rights.
All it takes for these snowflakes is to be traumatized is a newspaper article about a man who has differing political opinions.
So the paper apologized and published an editorial promising that if a news event could be ‘triggering’ to the snowflakes, it just won’t be reported.
Once again– this is supposed to be one of the finest journalism schools in the world.
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
University professor hates rural Americans
Sometimes Twitter reveals the true beliefs of the Bolshevik intelligentsia.
Like this tweet from a University of California at Berkeley instructor who teaches philosophy:
“I unironically embrace the bashing of rural Americans. They, as a group, are bad people who have made bad life decisions… this nostalgia for some imagined pastoral way of life is stupid and we should shame people who aren’t pro-city.”
The University of California at Berkeley is legendary for stifling any views that don’t conform to the Bolshevik agenda as “hate speech”. But it’s apparently fine with denigrating broad swaths of Americans as “bad people” who should be shamed for not living in a city.
(I wonder how many mid-westerners were “traumatized” by the tweet.)
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
British academic union says you can now ‘identify’ as black and disabled
Remember Rachel Dolezal, the white women who pretended to be black and became an NAACP official?
Turns out she was just ahead of her time.
Now the Universities and Colleges Union in Great Britain is seriously arguing that people should be able to identify as any race they want.
The union for professors and other academics put out its official stance in a recent report which said:
“Our rules commit us to ending all forms of discrimination, bigotry and stereotyping. UCU has a long history of enabling members to self-identify whether that is being black, disabled, LGBT+ or women.”
Disabled? Seriously? I guess the competition for the best parking spots is really going to start heating up.
And just to be crystal clear about the union’s views, a spokesman confirmed that, yes, members can choose to identify and be recognized as black. Or disabled. Or whatever else.
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
Cop tackles quadruple amputee teen, arrests friend for filming
Teenagers are known for mood swings and temper tantrums.
Now imagine being a 15 year old boy, a quadruple amputee, who has been abandoned by his parents, and forced to live in a group home.
I’d imagine you’d have a bad day from time to time.
And during one of the teenager’s bad days, staff at the group home called police over to the house.
You already know where this is going: the cop reacted aggressively… and it was all caught on video.
The footage shows the officer screaming at, tackling, and finally arresting the boy.
It’s unclear exactly what the officer was afraid would happen if the teen wasn’t restrained, because, reminder, he has no arms and legs. It’s not like the kid was going to reach for a weapon or run away.
Another boy at the group home filmed the incident, and hands the phone off to another teen when the officer approaches him.
Despite his compliance, the teen’s head is seen being slammed into the wall by the officer, before he is also arrested.
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
US government bans sleeping at the office
Apparently there’s a problem with US government employees sleeping on the job… and the problem is so bad that Uncle Sam felt the need to explicitly ban taking naps at the office.
If any US government employee wants to sleep in a federal building, for any amount of time, they now have to get permission from an agency official.
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
And to continue learning how to ensure you thrive no matter what happens next in the world, I encourage you to download our free Perfect Plan B Guide.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 19:45 - Did Schiff Turn Trump Into Billionaire Martyr With Ill-Advised Impeachment Gambit?
Did Schiff Turn Trump Into Billionaire Martyr With Ill-Advised Impeachment Gambit?
After weeks of impeachment testimony by angry ambassadors and opinionated bureaucrats who decided to take US foreign policy into their own hands, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) failed to produce a single ‘smoking gun’to use against President Trump.
Instead, the paper-tiger charade has fired up the Republican base and awakened a “sleeping giant” of support for Trump – whose request that Ukraine investigate seemingly obvious corruption by Joe and Hunter Biden set off a hornet’s nest of triggered Democrats which Nancy Pelosi warned against (before caving to her party), predicting this exact outcome.
Perhaps the Democrats don’t realize that voters care more about finding out if Biden is corrupt than whether Trump would have weaponized a negative outcome. That’s called politics, and the American public hasn’t forgotten that the Obama / Biden DOJ sent spies into the Trump campaign based on a fabricated dossier assembled by a former UK spy.
And by failing to find impeachable evidence while shielding Biden from scrutiny in light of the failed Russiagate narrative, Schiff may have turned Trump into a billionaire martyr.
To that end, The Hill‘s Joe Concha highlights poignant commentary by Fox News host Mark Levin, who says that Schiff has awakened a “sleeping giant” of Republican support for Trump – comparing the Democratic lawmaker to WWII Japanese Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto.
After we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto of Japan said, ‘I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve’,” Levin told host Sean Hannity. “You know, Adam Schiff, you are in some ways Admiral Yamamoto: You just awakened a sleeping giant. You threw everything you had at the president, at the Republicans, at 63 million voters who voted for this president.“
“This is the best you have? You have nothing,” added Levin. “You are the Democratic Party’s Yamamoto.”
“This was the weakest conga line of hand-picked witnesses I’ve ever seen in any hearing at any time … There’s no smoking gun.”
Watch:
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 19:25 - NYT Names FBI "Resistance" Lawyer Under Criminal Investigation For Fabricating FISA Docs
NYT Names FBI "Resistance" Lawyer Under Criminal Investigation For Fabricating FISA Docs
The New York Times has revealed that the “low-level lawyer” under criminal investigation for allegedly doctoring materials used to obtain renewals of the Carter Page surveillance warrant is Kevin Clinesmith – who worked on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia probe, was part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, and interviewed Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos.
Clinesmith, a 37-year-old graduate of Georgetown Law, “took an email from an official at another federal agency that contained several factual assertions, then added material to the bottom that looked like another assertion from the email’s author, when it was instead his own understanding,” according to the report.
Mr. Clinesmith included this altered email in a package that he compiled for another F.B.I. official to read in preparation for signing an affidavit that would be submitted to the court attesting to the facts and analysis in the wiretap application.
The details of the email are apparently classified and may not be made public even when the report is unveiled. –New York Times
In other words, we won’t get to see whatever the FBI used to trick the FISA court into granting Page’s renewals.
Clinesmith, a former attorney with the FBI’s National Security and Cyber Law Branch while working under FBI’s top lawyer, James Baker, resigned two months ago after he was interviewed by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horrowitz’s office. Horrowitz in turn sent a criminal referral to US Attorney John Durham, who was tasked with investigating the Obama DOJ’s conduct surrounding the 2016 US election.
The referral appears to at least be part of the reason that Durham’s inquiry was elevated from an administrative review to a criminal investigation, according to the report. The findings are set to be revealed on December 9, when Horowitz will release his long-awaited report, which Trump’s allies believe will reveal an effort to undermine his 2016 campaign.
In addition to Clinesmith’s fabricated FISA evidence, the FBI used an unverified dossier from former British spy Christopher Steele, paid for in part by the Clinton campaign via law firm Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS, in their pursuit of Carter Page. The agency has claimed in court filings that the Steele Dossier was not used in warrant appplications, affidavits or courtroom evidene – but was used in “criminal proceedings.”
The Conservative Treehouse notes of Clinesmith:
(1) While Clinesmith, as a normal function of his FBI job, did not report to Peter Strzok, when the teams were assembled for MYE, Crossfire Hurricane, and Robert Mueller investigation, Clinesmith DID work directly for Peter Strzok. When the teams were selected, Kevin Clinesmith reported to Peter Strzok. Therefore when the inappropriate behavior was identified; and when the action of manipulating FISA evidence was done; Kevin Clinesmith was reporting directly to FBI supervisory agent Peter Strzok.
(2) Kevin Clinesmith remained in the FBI during the entirety of the Horowitz investigation. He was not released until the investigation was complete and the draft report was submitted. So the FBI knew they had a problem with Clinesmith back in February of 2018 and he was allowed to continue work until September of this year. It would seem obvious he was being monitored.
(3) Clinesmith’s status during the investigation aligns with another Main Justice employee also connected to the FISA process who was similarly in position throughout and also left in September 2019. That would be Tashina Guahar.
According to the Washington Post, however, Horowitz has concluded that the altered email “did not affect the overall validity of the surveillance application.”
Mr. Trump’s allies have complained about how the Justice Department used information from the Steele dossier in the wiretap applications. Along with evidence from other sources, the filings cited some information from Mr. Steele’s dossier about meetings that Mr. Page was rumored to have had with Kremlin representatives during a trip to Russia that year.
…
Still, people familiar with questions asked by Mr. Horowitz’s investigators have suggested that he is likely to conclude that the filings exaggerated Mr. Steele’s track record in terms of the amount of value that the F.B.I. derived from information he supplied in previous investigations. The court filings in the Page wiretap application said his material was “used in criminal proceedings,” but it was never part of an affidavit, search warrant or courtroom evidence. –New York Times
The Times has suggested that Horowitz will criticize FBI officials involved in the investigations but will ultimately absolve them of wrongdoing.
What’s more, the Times says that Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud – a self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation who fed Papadopoulos the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton, was “not an FBI informant.”
The Times is using purposefully misleading language here, as Mifsud was never accused of being an FBI asset.
Gotta love the straw-manning here. The FBI claimed without evidence that Mifsud was a Russian asset. He’s actually a Western intel asset (not an FBI informant, which nobody credible has claimed). Halper was the corrupt FBI informant. https://t.co/xGEi0BLLv0
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 22, 2019
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Viva la resistance
Clinesmith was identified by Horowitz as one of several FBI officials who harbored animus towards President Trump, after which he was kicked off the Mueller Russia investigation in February 2018. Two other FBI officials removed for similar reasons were Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, both of whom also worked on the Clinton and Trump investigations, and both of whom have similarly left the bureau.
On November 9, 2016 – the day after Trump won the election, Clinesmith texted another FBI employee “My god damned name is all over the legal documents investigating his staff,” adding “So, who knows if that breaks to him what he is going to do.”
Then on November 22, 2016, he said “Hell no” when asked by another FBI attorney if he had changed his views on Trump.
“Viva la resistance,” he added.
When asked to explain himself, Clinesmith told Horowitz: “It’s just the, the lines bled through here just in terms of, of my personal, political view in terms of, of what particular preference I have,” adding “But, but that doesn’t have any, any leaning on the way that I, I maintain myself as a professional in the FBI.”
A professional document fabricator. We’re sure he’ll be a GoFundMe millionaire by tomorrow.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 19:00 - 'Bombshells Upon Explosions': Watch How The Media Primed The Public With Impeachment Narrative
'Bombshells Upon Explosions': Watch How The Media Primed The Public With Impeachment Narrative
If you tuned into any of the major networks during the impeachment hearings, you may have gotten the impression that – once again, the end is nigh for President Trump.
Watch as the totally unbiased MSM falls all over itself to ensure the American public that virtually everything said during the last two weeks of impeachment testimony was a “bombshell” sure to devastate Trump.
SUPERCUT: Media trying their best to hype “Bombshell!” “Explosive!” impeachment hearings pic.twitter.com/q3TzIFCOmu
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 22, 2019
We’re starting to suspect they don’t like the guy…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 18:46 - Dirt Cheap Gasoline Is Fueling Colombia's Cocaine Cartels
Dirt Cheap Gasoline Is Fueling Colombia's Cocaine Cartels
Authored by Julianne Geiger via OilPrice.com,
Every day, $3 million worth of fuel is smuggled into Colombia from various neighbors who can’t seem to keep their borders under control. Even worse, this is the gas that fuels the mighty cocaine industry.
Although only a handful of ingredients – aside from the coca plant – are used in the manufacture of cocaine, fuel is critical, whether it’s diesel, kerosene, jet fuel or just plain gasoline.
This demand for cross-border fuel is causing headaches for Latin American countries–particularly Ecuador, which is taking a big hit from the illicit exporting of its dirt-cheap, heavily subsidized gasoline to ‘Cocaine Central’ Colombia, where it is used to make the drug.
And the list of ingredients, which include sulfuric acid, caustic soda, and gasoline or a gasoline equivalent, are the number-one expense in the manufacturing of cocaine. This means that drug cartels are motivated to find the cheapest source of gasoline possible.
“It’s not the coca leaf, it’s not the workers, and it’s not the cost of building the cocaine laboratory. The number one cost is the chemicals,” Jay Berman, then Chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Andean division said back in 2011.
And it is often a shortage of these “precursor chemicals” as they are called, that routinely shut down cocaine labs—not the shortage of the coca leaf.
For this reason, Colombia has rationed and regulated gasoline, kerosene, and other precursor chemicals to kick its narcotic habit. But it has not been enough, thanks to its neighbors who have plenty of cheap gasoline.
It takes approximately 38 liters (or 10 gallons) of gasoline to manufacture just one kilogram of cocaine.
This means that Colombia’s cocaine manufacturing process each year consumes 9.21 million gallons of gasoline.
The Ecuador Conundrum
Smuggled gasoline has created a crisis for Latin American countries such as Ecuador, which has particularly cheap gas, courtesy of extremely generous government subsidies. Attempts by Ecuador to end these fuel subsidies earlier this year ended in disaster, after violent protests erupted in the country.
Eventually, Ecuadorian President Lenin Morena reversed his decision to end the cuts to the subsidies, once again lowering the price of gasoline to make it more palatable for the country’s poor—and more lucrative for fuel smugglers who can almost double their profits by selling the cheap fuel across the border into a more expensive market.
It is this way in which Ecuador effectively subsidizes not just gasoline for its downtrodden citizens, but the drug trade of its northern neighbor, Colombia.
How cheap is cheap? A Colombian drug lab would have to pay $0.716 per liter of Colombian gasoline, if it weren’t for Ecuador’s cheaper gasoline of $0.489 per liter.
Data source: GlobalPetrolPrices.com
Ecuador estimates that about 431 million liters of fuel are smuggled annually into Colombia, for a total annual loss of $212 million per year.
Venezuela’s Gasoline Too Good to Quit
As one can imagine, smuggling gasoline from its eastern neighbor, Venezuela, which can be bought for less than a penny per liter, is even more lucrative for the drug trade – except that crisis-stricken Venezuela is struggling to produce gasoline, so Venezuelan fuel may be harder to come by.
But even as recently as last year, Venezuelan authorities in Zulia seized 772,000 liters of oil that were en route to Colombia—an amount worth millions of dollars, according to Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek Saab.
Still, some routes previously used to smuggle gasoline from Venezuela to Colombia–such as the highway between Cucuta and Puerto Santander–now looks deserted in the wake of PDVSA’s downward spiral as it is unable to export crude thanks to US sanctions.
For Venezuela’s military, who are supposed to be keeping smugglers in check, the pricing disparity is tempting—and the drug trade banks on precisely that.
Venezuela’s situation is dire. The country’s estimated annual losses are measured in billions of dollars, according to Colombia Reports, and at its height, Venezuelan authorities have estimated that the gasoline smuggling trade moved as many as 50,000 barrels per day– all at the expense of the government doling out the subsidies.
Based on a 40,000-liter gasoline tanker truck, what costs $40 in Venezuela or $19,500 in Ecuador costs, on average, $28,600 in Colombia.
How Its Done
Fuel smuggling in Latin America is a thriving business, and one that relies heavily on manpower. it’s a low-tech process most of the time, with multiple means of transporting the precious commodity across borders.
In Venezuela, for instance, the smuggling can be on a very small scale, with a single smuggler carrying a 50-litre tank on his or her back. Others carry fuel oil in plastic bags across the border. Others strap barrels of fuel to their motorcycles.
Image source: Al Jazeera
Image source: Al Jazeera
Other fuel smuggling operations are conducted on a grander scale, but still often low tech. Some of these operations consist of large caravans of cars, each carrying about 50 gallons of fuel.
But no matter how it’s done, the fact remains: fuel price discrepancies between neighbors creates an environment that incentivizes smuggling. And what’s more, this smuggling fuels the cocaine trade, which makes its way to North America.
Any headway these countries make to curb fuel smuggling outside or inside of its borders will have a trickle down effect on the drug trade.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 18:25 - "Oh My F*cking God": Elon Musk’s Bizarre Cybertruck Unveiling Goes Horribly Wrong
"Oh My F*cking God": Elon Musk’s Bizarre Cybertruck Unveiling Goes Horribly Wrong
Elon Musk took to the stage on Thursday night to
peddle his latest desperate cash grab pile of shitintroduce the first Tesla truck model at yet another sycophant-sell-out unveiling “party”. In our wildest dreams, we couldn’t imagine a more ridiculous revealing of Tesla’s new “Cybertruck” than what took place.As the old saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
And here’s that picture: a truck with two shattered windows that looks like it rolled out of a dumpster heap at a metal scrapyard, being offered for the low low price of just $39,900.
We know you have questions. What am I looking at? Why are the windows broken? We’ll get to it.
The theme of the Cybertruck unveiling, after getting over the way the thing looked, was its durability. “We created an exoskeleton,” Musk says at one point, describing the truck’s exterior. It was something Musk literally “hammered home” starting at the beginning of his presentation. In fact, after revealing the truck, he had one of his assistants come on stage and hit the door with a sledge hammer. The door didn’t budge.
No dents! Incredible! Musk’s genius shines through again!
Musk then went on to talk about how the truck was bulletproof. The crowd begged him to “shoot it” live on on stage, but Musk settled for showing photos and animations of the truck supposedly being shot at with 9mm bullets.
And it’s a good thing they didn’t try to shoot it on stage, because if it went anything like testing the armored glass, we could have wound up with somebody dead.
Then, in what can only be described as a massively embarrassing failure, Musk then had his assistant come on stage and try to break the truck’s armored glass.
“Normal glass shatters immediately,” Musk said as his assistants, dressed like characters from The Matrix, dropped a metal ball on conventional glass, causing it to shatter.
At which point another of Musk’s assistants gently threw a similar metal ball at the Cybertruck parked on stage. The driver’s side window promptly broke.
“Oh my fucking God,” Musk nervously said, live on the stream, after the front window shattered into a million pieces.
Tesla’s “Armored Glass” demonstration
Spoiler alert: the glass breaks $TSLAQ pic.twitter.com/NR75gOwlxZ
— Quoth the Raven (@QTRResearch) November 22, 2019
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Musk then, assuming it was just a one-off and an aberration, implored his assistant to try again and throw at the back window. You can probably guess what happened next: the second window also broke.
So Musk nervously joked his way through the rest of the skit, claiming maybe his assistant had thrown at the truck “too hard”. In other words, Musk’s presentation of the indestructable Cybertruck had been bested by a skinny Silicon Valley beta male lofting a small object at it.
Musk then moved on and talked about the suspension on the truck – with the smashed glass still present in the windows – where it remained for the rest of the demonstration.
Meanwhile, in almost real-time, one alert viewer pointed out that the truck’s back left wheel also appeared to be in the process of falling off. The FUD saboteurs must be at it again!
wheel already whompy – pic.twitter.com/ibP0qCf7bK
— andykat (@hilinetrail) November 22, 2019
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Musk then showed video (pre-recorded, of course) of the Cybertruck supposedly beating a Ford pickup in a “tug of war”. Musk claimed that the Cybertruck could go 0 to 60 in 2.9 seconds and do a quarter mile in 10.8 seconds. He showed the truck drag racing a Porsche, to make his point.
Not only do you win your drag races, you win in style!
Musk then said the truck would come in three ranges: 250 miles, 300 miles and 500 miles. He priced the truck in three models, at $39,000, $49,900 and $69,000. He then claimed the “actual cost of ownership” was much lower because you didn’t have to pay for gasoline – similar to the claims the company was making on its website that drew the ire of German regulators, who eventually forced Tesla to change how they were presenting the sales price of their vehicles.
And of course there was a “one more thing moment” when Musk announced that the company had also made an ATV. But the live video stream cut out before we could hear more details about it.
To no one’s surprise, after the video ended, viewers were immediately hit with an “Order Now” page.
The responses from social media were mixed, to say the least:
How they made the #Cybertruck pic.twitter.com/2rZ2r0BSaF
— Greg Kachadurian (@GregCKach) November 22, 2019
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Is this a troll? pic.twitter.com/khsQsDIFoA
— Elvis Viskovic ❎ (@presley1000) November 22, 2019
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First if someone – anyone loves Elon Musk – Maye, Kimbal- Grimes – snag him now get him to rehab. It’s embarrassing $TSLAQ pic.twitter.com/8FISlLyVSz
— $TSLAQ (@G650Secured) November 22, 2019
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You know what happens when you’re surrounded by yes men?
you get a cyber truck.$TSLAQ
— Jonathan Krier (@Jonathankrier1) November 22, 2019
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If owning a big truck means you have a small ****, what does owning a #cybertruck mean?$tslaq
— Chris (@ChrisLeeterman) November 22, 2019
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Ok, did I just see @elonmusk bring out a triangle on wheels called a #Cybertruck filled with Mad Max cosplay dudes, beat it with sledgehammers, break it’s windows, drag around an F150, race a Porsche and then stick an ATV up it’s ass and then say ‘good night!’? pic.twitter.com/8DJrhdT9Ey
— Mr. Maquee (@MrMaquee) November 22, 2019
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Bruh what the FUCK is elon smoking.
The truck looks like shit and he literally shattered both windows on stage. Absolute joke of a CEO.$TSLA $TSLAQ pic.twitter.com/CDqreMu8Lj— Sunny Digital 🐝 🇰🇷🇺🇸 (@NEET_poster) November 22, 2019
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LOL LOOK AT THIS FUCKING THING pic.twitter.com/WFe9B1zpzU
— Quoth the Raven (@QTRResearch) November 22, 2019
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I’m not sure I would have the right words to express my gratitude and admiration to real-life @ElonMusk, should I ever have the opportunity to meet him in person; however, if I were somehow able to hold it together, in his presence, I would want to say this- #ConversationWithElon pic.twitter.com/75TbBG73w7
— Jessica Kirsh (@jessica_kirsh) November 19, 2019
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— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) November 22, 2019
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Simpsons predicted this. pic.twitter.com/3eAi77Uqhg
— Space Force Admiral-✝️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@GLoves247) November 22, 2019
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Even Denny’s took a shot:
Revealed our Dynertruck the same day as the Cybertruck… smh pic.twitter.com/Wmucb5evHk
— Denny’s (@DennysDiner) November 22, 2019
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You can watch the full replay here:
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 18:11 - "That's Not Safe! Somebody's Going To Die!": Senator Markey Slams Tesla Autopilot At Commerce Committee Hearing
"That's Not Safe! Somebody's Going To Die!": Senator Markey Slams Tesla Autopilot At Commerce Committee Hearing
It appears that the government is finally starting to realize some of the much deserved scrutiny that Tesla deserves for its claims to “full self driving” and its human beta testing of its Autopilot feature on unknowing everyday drivers.
On Wednesday, during a Commerce Committee hearing focused on self-driving vehicles called “Highly Automated Vehicles: Federal Perspectives on the Deployment of Safety Technology”, the topic was broached in detail. During the hearing, companies like Tesla and Uber underwent sharp criticism from several senators, according to CNBC.
During the meeting, Senator Ed Markey slammed the NHTSA, asking what they were doing to prevent Tesla Autopilot “cheats” – people who rig their vehicles to enable Autopilot even if they don’t have their hands on the wheel, as is required.
Markey said: “Tesla drivers have identified a variety of tricks to make Autopilot believe they are focused on the road even if they are literally asleep at the wheel. Alarmingly, you can go to YouTube right now and learn about some of these tricks.”
He pointed out several tricks people use, like affixing water bottles or other inanimate objects to their steering wheels to add weight to it, fooling the car into thinking the driver’s hands are on the wheel.
Markey said of the tactics: “That’s not safe! Somebody’s gonna die!”
Market also repeatedly pressed NHTSA acting chief James Owens for details on how his agency would compel Tesla to fix the “cheat”. Owens responded, promising to follow up on the issue and stating: “It is unfortunate when drivers misuse their vehicles and engage in unsafe behaviors.”
Market retorted: “I would urge you to do that very quickly. Tesla should disable Autopilot until it finds the problem, until it fixes the problem, until it can assure consumers who don’t own that vehicle that they are safe on the roads or sidewalks from an accident occurring.”
Markey also revealed that he sent a formal letter to Tesla this week, urging them to fix these autonomous “design defects”.
As CNBC notes, “that letter is now in the committee’s records, and NHTSA is under pressure to deliver answers.”
Chair of the committee, Sen. Roger Wicker, said of one crash by an Uber test vehicle: “Ms. Elaine Herzberg was tragically struck and killed by an Uber test vehicle while crossing the street. Records show that the vehicle detected Ms. Herzberg’s presence 5.6 seconds before the crash, but failed to brake. It is imperative that manufacturers learn from this incident and prevent similar tragedies from happening again.”
At the hearings, heads of both the NTSB and the NHTSA faced questions from senators who came off as exciting about the technology, but concerned about the issues and fatalities that have arisen from it thus far.
The NTSB is now urging the NHTSA to put conditions on developers that want to market and test semi or fully autonomous vehicles on U.S. roads. Robert Sumwalt, the chairman of the NTSB said: “Whatever’s working right now is not working as well as we believe it should.”
You can watch a webcast of the full hearing here.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2019 – 18:05
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