Today’s News 23rd October 2017

• "Czech Donald Trump" Wins Landslide Victory

  Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

  • The election outcome, the result of popular discontent with established parties, is the latest in a recent wave of successes for European populists, including in Austria and Germany. The populist ascendancy highlights a shifting political landscape in Europe where runaway multiculturalism and political correctness, combined with a massive influx of unassimilable migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, have given rise to a surge in support for anti-establishment protest parties.
  • "It is unthinkable that the indigenous European population should adapt themselves to the refugees. We must do away with such nonsensical political correctness. The refugees should behave like guests, that is, they should be polite, and they certainly do not have the right to choose what they want to eat…. There is a deep chasm between what people think and what the media tell them." — Andrej Babis, in the Czech daily Pravo, January 16, 2016.
  • As prime minister, Babis would share government with Czech President Milos Zeman, who has described political correctness as "a euphemism for political cowardice."

  Populist tycoon Andrej Babis and his Eurosceptic political party have won the Czech Republic's parliamentary election – by a landslide – making the "politically incorrect" billionaire businessman the main contender to become prime minister after coalition negotiations.

  With all of the votes counted, Babis's anti-establishment party ANO (which stands for "Action of Dissatisfied Citizens" and is also the Czech word for "yes") won nearly 30% — almost three times its closest rival — in elections held on October 20. The Eurosceptic Civic Democratic Party (ODS), the anti-establishment Czech Pirates Party and the anti-EU Freedom and Direct Democracy party (SPD) came second, third and fourth, with around 11% each.

  The Communists came in fifth with 7.8%. The Social Democrats, the center-left establishment party that finished first in the previous election, came in sixth with just 7.2%. The Christian Democrats, the center-right establishment party, won 5.8%, just enough to qualify for seats in parliament. In all, nine parties competed in the election.

  The election outcome, the result of popular discontent with established parties, is the latest in a recent wave of successes for European populists, including in Austria and Germany. The populist ascendancy highlights a shifting political landscape in Europe where runaway multiculturalism and political correctness, combined with a massive influx of unassimilable migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, have given rise to a surge in support for anti-establishment protest parties.

  Babis's victory will also strengthen the role of the Visegrad Group (V4), a political alliance of four Central European states — the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — committed not only to resisting mass migration, but also to opposing the continued transference of national sovereignty to the European Union. A stronger V4 will accentuate the divisions between the pro-EU states of Western Europe and the increasingly Eurosceptic states of Central and Eastern Europe. The European Union consequently will struggle to maintain an outward semblance of unity.

  In his victory speech at the ANO party headquarters, Babis, who campaigned as a centrist, refused to speculate on the composition of a coalition government, but said he wanted the cabinet to be set up as quickly as possible: "This is a huge opportunity to change our country. I would like to assemble a government that will be of the people and for the people and promotes policies that are in their favor."

  Babis also tried to reassure the public that he would not put the Czech Republic on the path to authoritarianism, as some of his detractors have charged:

  "We are a democratic movement. We are a solid part of the European Union and we are a solid part of NATO. I do not understand why some people say we are a threat to democracy. We certainly are not a threat to democracy. I am ready to fight for our national interests and to promote them."

  Babis has been sharply critical of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door migration policy and has repeatedly denounced EU-imposed migrant quotas and other "EU meddling" in Czech politics. Those positions resonate in the Czech Republic, where citizens have the second-lowest trust in the European Union of all 28 member states (only Greeks have less trust in the EU), according to the latest Eurobarometer poll, published in August.

  During the campaign, the 63-year-old Babis, one of the country's wealthiest people, presented himself as a non-ideological results-oriented reformer. He pledged to run the Czech Republic like a business after years of what he called corrupt and inept management. He demanded a return of sovereignty from the European Union and rejected Czech adoption of the euro single currency. He has also promised to cut government spending, stop people from "being parasites" in the social welfare system, and fight for Czech interests abroad. Babis is often referred to as "the Czech Donald Trump."

  Populist tycoon Andrej Babis (pictured) and his Eurosceptic political party have won the Czech Republic's parliamentary election, making Babis the main contender to become prime minister after coalition negotiations. (Image source: Ji?í Vítek/Wikimedia Commons)

  Babis does not want the Czech Republic to leave the EU; he has repeatedly stressed that unimpeded access to the European single market is essential to maintaining the health of the Czech economy, which has the lowest unemployment rate in the EU: "We have six thousand German companies here, investing with us and employing people."

  At the same time, Babis is opposed to the country adopting the euro because doing so would, he believes, constrain national sovereignty and competitiveness:

  "No euro. I don't want the euro. We don't want the euro here. Everybody knows it's bankrupt. It's about our sovereignty. I want the Czech koruna, and an independent central bank. I don't want another issue that Brussels would be meddling with."

  Babis has pledged to reform the European Union from within, especially regarding migration policy: "I want to play a more important role in Europe. But we have to fight for our interests and make proposals. If I were a prime minister, I would say: 'Close this cursed external European border at last.'"

  Babis has expressed his opposition to mass migration: "I have stopped believing in successful integration and multiculturalism." He has also insisted that the Czech Republic alone should decide who will work in the country and who will receive humanitarian aid: "I do not want to have a French or German migration policy; we want our migration policy to be completely different from other countries. Every state has some interests, we have to fight for Czech national interests, we do not want to have that multicultural model."

  Babis has rejected pressure from the European Commission, which has launched infringement procedures against the Czechs, Hungarians and Poles for refusing to comply with an EU plan to redistribute migrants:

  "I will not accept refugee quotas for the Czech Republic. The situation has changed. We see how migrants react in Europe. We must react to the needs and fears of the citizens of our country. We must guarantee the security of Czech citizens. Even if we are punished by sanctions."

  In June 2017, Babis reiterated that the Czech Republic would not be taking orders from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels:

  "We have to fight for what our ancestors built here. If there will be more Muslims than Belgians in Brussels, that's their problem. I don't want that here. They won't be telling us who should live here."

  In an interview with the Czech daily Pravo, Babis said:

  "It is unthinkable that the indigenous European population should adapt themselves to the refugees. We must do away with such nonsensical political correctness. The refugees should behave like guests, that is, they should be polite, and they certainly do not have the right to choose what they want to eat. Europe and Germany in particular are undergoing an identity crisis. There is a deep chasm between what people think and what the media tell them."

  As prime minister, Babis would share government with Czech President Milos Zeman, who has described political correctness as "a euphemism for political cowardice." In an interview with the Guardian, the 71-year-old Zeman recounted a recent conversation with Angela Merkel: "My first sentence in the meeting with Madam Chancellor was: 'If you invite somebody to your homeland, you do not send them to have lunch at your neighbors.'"

  In an interview with Czech Radio, Zeman, who has called mass migration to Europe an "organized invasion," said: "The Muslim Brotherhood cannot start a war against Europe, it doesn't have the power, but it can prepare a growing migrant wave and gradually control Europe."

  Like Babis, Zeman has also expressed skepticism about Muslim integration: "The experience of Western European countries which have ghettos and excluded localities shows that the integration of the Muslim community is practically impossible."

  

  

• Depravity, Frivolity, And Dissent: Are We Watching The End Of An Empire?

  Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

  A 40-year-old essay predicted the end of an empire and current events sure make it look like we’re watching it happen in real time.

  I spend a fair bit of time scanning the news every day for my site, Preppers Daily News. And some days, I just have to shake my head as I realize that people are so desperate for…something…that they just keep going to further and further extremes to try and find that elusive thing their lives are missing.

  The more I read, the more likeness I see to Sir John Glubb’s essay, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. (It’s only 24 pages and you should definitely read it – it’s brilliant.) Sir Glubb wrote this outstanding work when he was 79 years old, after a lifetime of being a soldier, traveling the world, and analyzing history. It’s well worth a read as he goes into detail about the fall of empires past.

  The final stage of the end of an empire is the Age of Decadence.

  

  Some signs of this age are political dissensions (Antifa, anyone?), an influx of foreigners (Europe, anyone?), the welfare state (America, anyone?), despair (350 million people diagnosed), depravity (see below), and the rise of frivolity as people try to fill lives that have less and less meaning.

  Sound familiar?

  This video is a brief synopsis of the signs of an empire that is near its end.

  A synopsis I read makes Glubb’s theory entirely applicable to modern society:

  In the age of decadence many people choose to behave in ways that are unsustainable, apparently unaware of the consequences. They indulge in excessive, often conspicuous, consumption. An absurdly wealthy elite emerges, but instead of repelling the masses it is admired and celebrated. Those outside the elite aspire to similar levels of consumption, and are encouraged by the availability of cheap credit. People become convinced that increased consumption is the key to happiness, but in its pursuit they become measurably less happy. As David Morgan says, “you can never get enough of what you don’t need.”

   

  At this point in the life cycle of an empire frivolity, as Glubb calls it, comes to the fore. In order to distract people from what’s really going on, the economy creates diversions. Voyeurism becomes central to culture: the gladiatorial spectacles in decadent Rome are mirrored in today’s ‘reality’ television. People become fixated on celebrity as the genuinely noteworthty become understandably camera shy. These invented celebrities are ‘famous’ just for being famous…

   

  …Debauchery is another recurring theme at the end of empire. Society develops a strangely immature obsession with sex. People drink themselves to the point of unconsciousness and shamelessly collapse in the street. In Roman times, binge drinkers were left to their fate. Today’s debauchery is supervised by the police; its ‘victims’ are taken care of by hard-pressed health care professionals, placing further pressure on the public purse. And, all the while, supermarkets and corporations make a killing selling discounted booze to people barely old enough to buy it. This is our modern-day bread and circuses, with obese citizens literally becoming a burden on the state.

   

  But the small can never satisfy the large. Cheap pleasures fail to compensate for the absence of meaning in so many people’s lives. A hankering for something greater remains…growing numbers are denied access to work; they can find no meaningful involvement in their community, so their potential goes unfulfilled. When people are prevented from fulfilling their potential, they often self-destruct. (source)

  By “Empire,” I’m not referring specifically just to the United States in particular, but Western Civilization in general. We’re watching our friends in Europe go down the same path. How can anyone look at the following stories and think that we are all okay and that this is sustainable?

  NOTE: The story below isn’t pretty and there is adult content. If you are offended by adult content, take my word for it and do not read on. If you do read on, don’t get mad that you read adult content and complain in the comments. Thanks. DL

  Dissent

  Never have America and Europe seen their citizens more at odds. Here in the United States, the last election caused more division than any other in history. Friendships and family relationships ended over who people’s voting choices. Once Trump was inaugurated, things didn’t settle down. There are still groups who want to overthrow the “Trump-Pence regime.” Some students can’t even tolerate the existence of those with opposite beliefs.

  The education system doesn’t help. Some professors are actually encouraging violent revolt. Californians are talking about seceding from the United States because Trump won.

  In Europe, the UK voted to leave the European Union and Catalonia voted to leave Spain.  People are firmly divided between welcoming immigrants and banishing immigrants.

  Chaos is everywhere and there is little middle ground.

  Unfathomable crimes

  Crimes are becoming more horrific and mindboggling. A 17-year-old girl was trying to walk home through a “no-go zone” in the UK and was sexually assaulted 3 separate times in one hour. A man in Pennsylvania tried to strangle his girlfriend to death because she changed the passcode to the IPad. A Georgia woman murdered her two toddler sons by putting them in the oven and then video-chatted their father.

  A Hollywood fixture has been accused of assaulting and harassing dozens of women, which led thousands of other women to share their horror stories with a #MeToo hashtag on Twitter. I have seen report after report recently of teachers having sex with their high school students.

  Premature Sexuality

  Sexuality is being introduced to our children far too early, For example, libraries around the country are having “Drag Queen Story Hour.” A picture is worth a thousand words.

  

  What’s the purpose of this? Here’s a quote from a magazine write up entitled “An amazing demon drag queen has entertained children in Michelle Obama’s library” that explains:

  Drag Queen Story Hour aims to give young children “glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models,” according to the programme’s website…

   

  …The Drag Queen Story Hour site explains that the event “captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood”.

   

  “In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.

   

  The programme “happens regularly in LA, New York, and San Francisco, and events are popping up all over the world!”

  I actually don’t have an issue with adults who are drag queens – heck, I sang along at a show in Vegas, and as a libertarian, I believe that consenting adults can do what they want. I have not raised my kids to mistreat others because of their sexuality. They’d be in massive trouble if they did. I did, however, manage to teach them to be kind individuals without taking them to Drag Queen Story Hour when they were 3.

  Let me be absolutely clear that while I don’t think Drag Queen Story Hour is an attempt to sexually abuse children, it does lead me to the over-sexualization of kids. I don’t even know the names of all the genders and sexualities that are being claimed and LBGT keeps adding so many initials, I can’t keep up. No wonder kids are confused. I’m confused and I’m a grown-up.

  Decades ago, anything on TV before 9 o’clock was pretty innocent. We didn’t have laptops and cell phones that allowed us to learn way too much, way too soon. We didn’t take quizzes on Buzzfeed to see if we were ready to have anal sex that night and we didn’t turn to Teen Vogue to learn about oral sex. These days, Teen Vogue is racier than Cosmo was in the early 80s. How do we protect our children’s innocence in this environment? How do we let them just be kids and find their own ways? Heck, even in Disney movies, everyone’s gotta have a love interest. Why?

  Normalization of pedophilia

  Children are exposed to far too much, far too young. This makes them ripe targets for pedophiles. Let me be clear on this too. Pedophilia is always, always wrong and extraordinarily harmful to children.

  To make matters worse, there is a sick attempt to normalize pedophilia. Salon magazine had published numerous articles with titles like, “I’m a pedophile but I’m not a monster” which has since been deleted due to the public outcry. There are even forums about “moral pedophilia.” Here’s a quote:

  Our website is intended to reduce the stigma attached to pedophilia by letting people know that a substantial number of pedophiles DO NOT molest children, and to provide peer support and information about available resources to help virtuous pedophiles remain law-abiding, and lead happy, productive lives.  These are our stories.  There are brief bios of the two founders of the site and collections of other personal stories. (source)

  I keep wondering, are the people in charge of media trying to normalize this so that when they inevitably get outed for molesting children, no one will care? Watch this video about the rampant pedophilia in the entertainment industry – and then remember, these are the people who influence the views of the folks who idolize celebrities.

  Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, was spotlighted for his incredibly disturbing art collection that showed the torture and murder of children. (Here is a shocking post with images found using “Tony and Heather Podesta’s art collection” as a search term.) And who can forget that sick “spirit cooking” scandal during the election? There are some things we simply cannot unsee.

  The mainstream wants to blame the collapse of civilization on Trump, but they ignore the fact that in this administration, more than 1500 pedophilia-related arrests took place in the first full month of his presidency. Just last week, 84 children were rescued from a sex-trafficking ring, with the youngest of those sweet angels only 3 months old. A THREE-MONTH-OLD BABY WAS FOR SALE FOR $600!!!!

  Bestiality

  Speaking of “art,” a Slovenian woman just won a prestigious art award for being “in seclusion” with her dogs for 3 months. Of course, for some of us, just hanging with pets sounds awesome, but we don’t hang out with pets like Maja Smrekar does. She breastfed a puppy and fertilized one of her eggs with what she says was a “fat cell” from another of her dogs. Mmm hmm. This video that documents her “art” is another thing to add to the can’t-ever-unsee-it list. The jury that awarded her the prize said, “What is making this artwork so special is the total commitment of the artist.” Apparently, I just don’t understand art. Or commitment. Or what cool people do with their pets.

  They’ve had to make laws in numerous states to combat an apparent uptick in bestiality. One guy was arrested for sneaking into a neighbor’s yard and doing it with their donkey. Numerous times. This lady says she’s literally married to her dog. All of these people (Can’t-Unsee Warning) also claim to have romantic relationships with animals.

  Bestiality is actually legal in these US states: Hawaii, Kentucky, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming, and the District of Columbia. Apparently, parties are organized where people can engage in sex acts with animals. Publicly.

  Not to be outdone, this gal is done with humanity altogether and says she now is…a cat. I wasn’t sure if this went in the bestiality section or where.

  The emptiness of society

  Perhaps people should first examine the depravity and frivolity that passes for art and entertainment these days.  A walk in the woods to look at fall leaves will not suffice for much of the population.

  People are so desperate for that rush of endorphins that they’re constantly seeking something more and more outrageous to give it to them. Normal things no longer give them that fleeting feeling of joy. Their own lives are so empty that they focus on the lives of people famous for being famous to fill them up.

  When society is more interested in reality television than actual reality, how can we expect that same society will be invested in our future?

  

  

• Tesla Reportedly Preparing To Open Factory In Shanghai

  As Tesla falls further and further behind in its quest to produce 10,000 Model 3 sedans a week by the end of next year, WSJ reported Sunday that, after months of talks with local government officials, Tesla has finally received permission to open a factory in Shanghai, one of China’s designated “free trade zones.”

  If accurate, the report would signal a major shift in China’s policy toward foreign automakers. Until now, US carmakers like GM hoping to sell cars in China’s domestic market have been forced to work (and more importantly share profits and technology) with a local partner.

  But more surprising than the news itself is the timing, as Tesla continues to struggle with major production delays at its Fremont Calif factory, a problem that will no doubt be exacerbated by the company’s decision to lay off hundreds of workers and replace them with cheaper contract labor in what has been characterized as a blatant attempt to suppress unionization efforts. WSJ says cars produced at the Shanghai factory would primarily supply local markets while allowing Tesla to sale cars across the region. Meanwhile, any cars shipped to the US from the Shanghai factory would face a 25% tariff.

  

  The scoop comes from WSJ’s Tim Higgins, who has broke a handful of big Tesla stories in recent months, including a report earlier this month about workers at Tesla’s Fremont factory being forced to assemble Model 3s by hand because the factory's production line hadn't yet been completed.

  “Electric-car maker Tesla Inc. has reached an agreement to set up its own manufacturing facility in Shanghai, according to people briefed on the plan, a move that could help it gain traction in China’s fast-growing EV market.

   

  The deal with Shanghai’s government will allow the Silicon Valley auto maker to build a wholly owned factory in the city’s free-trade zone, these people said. This arrangement, the first of its kind for a foreign auto maker, could enable Tesla to slash production costs, but it would still likely incur China’s 25% import tariff.

   

  Tesla is currently working with the Shanghai government about details of the deal’s announcement, such as timing, one of these people said. The effort comes as President Donald Trump, who has been critical of China’s trade policies, prepares to visit Beijing early next month.

   

  A Tesla spokesman didn’t have a comment beyond reiterating the company’s previous statement in June that it planned to “clearly define” production plans in China by year’s end. The Shanghai government didn’t reply to a request for comment."

  While the news isn’t exactly a surprise – Tesla has seemingly been in talks to open a factory in China for ages and has hinted that a factory might be opening soon – given the timing, one can’t help but question whether the reporting is accurate.

  To this point, the Wall Street Journal has a rule – common among legacy media organizations – whereby if a company’s communications department is the source of leaked information in a story, the paper won’t report that the company refused to comment or declined to comment – because it wouldn’t be true. Tesla’s comms department was named in the story, so therefor the information either came from sources close to the Shanghai government, or some other third party (or, of course, a combination).

  As WSJ points out, Tesla is still working out the details of the agreement. Presumably, breaking ground remains a long way off. Perhaps there’s still time for the deal – assuming one is in fact being negotiated – to fall through.

  Of course, being allowed to operate in the country without a local partner would be an unprecedented step for China’s free-trade zones. The Chinese government wouldn’t set such a precedent without careful consideration, though it did circulate a proposal on possibly allowing foreign EV makers to circumvent the partner rule if they build their operations in the country’s free trade zones.

  Until now, foreign auto makers have built cars in China through joint ventures with local manufacturers. That allows them to avoid the 25% tariff on autos, but also forces them to split profits, and potentially share technology, with the local partner—something that has tripped up Tesla’s previous efforts to expand there.

   

  Under current rules, the cars Tesla builds in the free-trade zone would still count as imports and incur the tariff. Auto analysts in Shanghai doubt the Chinese government has any incentive to give Tesla special treatment.

   

  “Government regulators examine every deal and try not to set a precedent,” said Bill Russo, chief executive of Automobility, a Shanghai-based consultancy, and a former Chrysler executive. “Whatever deal Tesla gets, others will want it too."

  Of course, the logic of competing for a foothold in China’s domestic market – despite the myriad obstacles that remain for foreign companies, not the least of which are the PBOC’s stringent capital controls, which make it difficult for foreign corporations to repatriate profits – is unimpeachable. According to a study published by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers this week, Chinese buyers are expected to have purchased 700,000 electric vehicles by the year’s end.

  

  Sales have contineud to climb even as the Chinese government, which has spent billions on EV subsidies, this year pared back financial incentives for EVs by 20%. Of course, the increase is probably because the government has embraced other more coercive methods to push customers toward electric vehicles as it tries to combat a worsening air pollution problem in its cities. For example, the local government has dramatically increased the share of license plates awarded to EV owners to incentivize purchases.

  Elon Musk wouldn’t be the first American to try to compete in China’s EV market. Chinese electric car company BYD, which is backed by Warren Buffett, was the best-selling electric carmaker last year and sells seven models in the country.

  

  In August, General Motors said it would start selling the Baojun E100, a tiny electric car costing about $5,300 after national and local electric vehicle incentives, CNNMoney reported.

  China’s EV market, already the world’s largest, is expected to experience rapid growth over the coming decade, as the Chinese government pushes a plan to eliminate fossil fuel-burning vehicles entirely over the coming decades. The Chinese government is targeting 7 million EV sales a year by 2025, up from 351,000 last year, and in September it ordered all auto makers already operating in China to start producing EVs by 2019. Officials have also said they are working on a plan to ban gasoline cars.

  Tesla won’t report third quarter earnings until next month, but the company reported record cash burn in the second quarter (though it did have about $3 billion of cash on hand)…

  

  …meaning it will likely need to issue more debt to finance the construction of the factory. In August, Tesla announced a $1.5 billion bond offering purportedly to ramp up production on the Model 3.

  But regardless of the cost, China is an essential market for Tesla. And as Elon Musk scrambles to justify the company’s obscene valuation as its recent production difficulties have forced it to cede the mantle of most valuable domestic automaker to GM.

  However, there is plenty of skepticism as to whether this is Muskian 'fake news'…

  How’s the Buffalo Gigafactory coming along? Or even the first Gigafactory, for that matter. Must be near the 3Q reporting date. $TSLA https://t.co/lmCe6fhkPm

  — Diogenes (@WallStCynic) October 22, 2017

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• Neck and Neck: Russian and Chinese Official Gold Reserves

  Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com

  Official gold reserve updates from the Russian and Chinese central banks are probably one of the more closely watched metrics in the gold world. After the US, Germany, Italy and France, the sovereign gold holdings of China and Russia are the world’s 5th and 6th largest. And with the gold reserves ‘official figures’ of the US, Germany, Italy and France being essentially static, the only numbers worth watching are those of China and Russia.

  The Russian Federation’s central bank, the Bank of Russia, releases data on its official gold holdings in the Bank’s monthly “International Reserves and Foreign Currency Liquidity” report which is published towards the end of the third week of each month, and which confirms gold reserve changes as of the previous month-end.

  The Chinese State releases data on its official gold holdings via a monthly “Official Reserve Assets” report published by the State Administration of Foreign Reserves (SAFE) that is uploaded within the Forex Reserves pages of the SAFE website. This gold is classified as held by the Chinese central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC). The SAFE report is published during the 2nd week of each month, reporting on the previous month-end.

  In both reports, official gold reserves (i.e. monetary gold) are specified in both US Dollars and fine troy ounces. Monetary gold is gold that is held by a central bank or other monetary authority as a reserve asset on a central bank’s balance sheet.

  Delta: 63 Tonnes

  For the Bank of Russia, its latest report, published on 19 September 2017 addressing August month-end, shows the Bank holding 57.2 million fine troy ounces of gold (1779 tonnes). For the Chinese State, the latest SAFE release is reporting Chinese official gold reserves of 59.24 million ounces (1842 tonnes).

  Russian gold reserves, as officially reported, now total 1779 tonnes, and are now just 63 tonnes shy of the ‘official’ gold reserves of the Chinese central bank. Given that the Bank of Russia is expected to add about another 36 tonnes of gold to its official reserves during the remainder of 2017,  then if the Chinese State does not reveal any increase in its ‘official’ gold reserves between now and the first quarter of 2018, Russia will most likely surpass China in terms of official gold reserves by April 2018.

  While its possible and probable that the Chinese State / PBoC really holds more gold than it claims to hold, any upcoming scenario in which the Bank of Russia surpasses the People’s Bank of China in terms of gold holdings would at least be symbolic in terms of international monetary developments, and would be sure to generate some chatter in the financial press.

  Although the official gold reserves of these two key nations are now nearly neck and neck, there are still some interesting contrasts between them, not least the way in which the Bank of Russia’s reported gold holdings have been steadily increasing month on month, while the reported gold holdings of the People’s Bank of China have remained totally unchanged for nearly a year now, since the end of October 2016.

  Therefore the situation which is now emerging, i.e. the distinct possibility that Russian official gold reserves will surpass those of China something in early 2018, is a situation which is emerging precisely because the Russian Federation keeps adding to its gold reserves, while the Chinese State seemingly does not.

  Differing Styles of Communication

  The routes via which these two strategically important nations have amassed their official gold reserves are also quite different, at least at a public reporting level.

  

  Bank of Russia Gold Reserves: 2006 – September 2017, Source:www.GoldChartsRUs.com

  It wasn’t so long ago (2007) that the gold reserves of the Russian Federation were still in the region of 400 tonnes. However, beginning in about the third quarter of 2007, the Bank of Russia began a concerted campaign to rapidly expand its official gold holdings, a trend which never subsided and which has been ongoing now for exactly 10 years. By early 2011, official Russian gold reserves had exceeded 800 tonnes. By the end of 2014, the Bank of Russia was reporting holding more than 1200 tonnes of gold. And by the end of 2016, Russian official gold were more than 1600 tonnes. For full details on the Bank of Russia’s gold holdings, including gold storage, gold reserve management, gold purchases and Russian government views on gold, see “Bank of Russia, Central Bank Gold Policies” at BullionStar’s Gold University.

  From the above chart, it can be seen that during 2014, 2015 and 2016, respectively, the Bank of Russia added 171 tonnes, 208 tonnes, and 199 tonnes to its gold reserves, or in total 578 tonnes over a 3 year period. In 2017, with the Bank of Russia having added another 164 tonnes of gold for the year to end of August, its official gold reserves now stand at 1779 tonnes.

  The route to the Chinese State accumulating 1842 tonnes of gold is a different one to that of the Russians, again at least from a publicly reported angle. While the Bank of Russia has historically published changes to its gold reserves on a monthly basis, the Chinese central bank has chosen to remain very secretive, and between 2001 and mid 2015 had only issued four public updates addressing the size and growth of its gold reserves. These 4 updates were as follows:

  • 4th Quarter 2001: From 394 to 500 tonnes: A 106 tonne increase
  • 4th Quarter 2002: From 500 to 600 tonnes: A 100 tonne increase
  • April 2009: From 600 to 1,054 tonnes: A 454 tonne increase
  • July 2015: From 1,054 to 1,658 tonnes: A 604 tonne increase

  Beginning in July 2015, however, the Chinese State started to report changes in its official gold reserves on a monthly basis, and by July 2016 was reporting 1823 tonnes of official gold holdings. The following graphic, taken from a BullionStar infographic on the Chinese gold market, illustrates the sporadic reporting of Chinese official gold reserves between the early 2000s and July 2015. Note that between July 2016 and October 2016, the Chinese State through SAFE reported that the PBoC had acquired another 19 tonnes of gold, taking its total reported gold reserves to 1942 tonnes as of the end of October 2016.

  

  Chinese Official Gold Reserves, 2003 – 2016 Source: Chinese Gold Market Infographic, BullionStar

  The sparse official reporting by the Chinese is also clear in the below chart from the GoldChartsRUS website, which shows cumulative holdings of monetary gold by the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) between 2000 and 2017. Looking at the top panel of the chart, it can be seen that between 2001 and 2015, there were only 4 distinct jumps in the quantity of gold held by the PBoC.

  This was followed by a period of about 15 months from July 2015 during which SAFE reported small monthly accumulations in PBoC’s gold holdings, as can be seen from the gradual increases in the bars in the top panel from July 2015 to October 2016, and the corresponding presence of frequent activity in the monthly changes in the lower panel of the chart.

  

  By September 2016, Chinese State gold reserve holdings had reached 59.11 million ounces. In October 2016, the SAFE report announced that Chinese official gold holdings had reached 59.24 million ounces, a 0.13 million ounce increase from the previous month. However, then something unusual happened, at least in terms of monthly updates. Since October 2016, Chinese official gold reserves have not changed at all. The SAFE updates are still published each month, but the gold holdings figure has remained unchanged at 59.24 million ounces (1842 tonnes).

  Therefore, for nearly a year now, the Chinese authorities are signalling that they have not acquired any new gold. At least that is what they want the public to believe. Hence the constantly recurring headlines from the financial media, such as this one from Reuters a couple of weeks ago, “China gold reserves steady at 59.24 mln ounces at end-September – central bank”.

  But is it true that China only holds 1842 tonnes of gold and that it has not been active during the last year in continuing to accumulate monetary gold as part of its reserve assets? And for that matter, is it the case that the Bank of Russia and Russian Federation only hold 1779 tonnes of monetary gold?

  While its difficult to know for sure, it is possible that the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation both hold additional gold that is not reported by their monetary authorities. This is so for multiple reasons, including the opaque ways in which these monetary gold reserves are accumulated, the traditional secrecy of both governments, and the fact that both countries have access to other investment pools that might hold gold that can be transferred at short notice into the respective central banks’ official gold holdings.

  How Much Gold could the Chinese State really have?

  The historical track record of the Chinese State in sporadically communicating the size of its monetary gold holdings shows that there has often been a large gulf between the true size of its gold reserves and what the Chinese claimed to have via its piecemeal and rare updates. For example, even based on its official numbers, the PBoC accumulated over 600 tonnes of gold between April 2009 and July 2015 but did not reveal this until July 2015.

  The nearly year-long hiatus between October 2016 and the present, during which the Chinese authorities, via SAFE, claim that the PBoC’s gold holdings have remained at 1842 tonnes, could be true, but only in so far as the Chinese State does not wish to inform the world about its sovereign gold reserves. Beyond this, the true gold holdings of the Chinese central bank may be significantly higher than even official published figures suggest.

  There is very little transparency into how the Chinese authorities accumulate monetary gold. In July 2015, when SAFE announced the first update to its gold holdings since 2009, it stated that the “major channels of accumulation” of gold were from purchases in foreign markets, domestic gold production, domestic scrap sources, and other transacting in the domestic market. But beyond this, the Chinese authorities never comment on where they source gold from.

  There is lots of evidence that the Chinese State purchases significant quantities of gold in the international market, including in the London Gold Market, and then monetises this gold (i.e. classifies it as monetary gold) , before transporting it back to Beijing. See “PBoC Gold Purchases: Secretive Accumulation on the International Market”, at BullionStar Gold University for further details.

  The Chinese State is also a possible candidate for having purchased a tranche of the IMF’s gold during IMF gold sales in 2010. See BullionStar blog  “IMF Gold Sales – Where ‘Transparency’ means ‘Secrecy’” for further details.

  There are also plenty of other State entities and state controlled entities in addition to the Chinese central bank that could conceivably be holding gold reserves that could in time be reclassified as PBoC gold, and brought into the sphere of reporting. See section “Gold Transfers from other Chinese State entities” in BullionStar Gold University article “Gold Policies of the People’s Bank of China” for further details.

  There is also evidence to suggest the Chinese State is really buying about 500 tonnes of gold per year, and that it has a first step target of holding at least 4000 tonnes of gold. This evidence, which is from 3-5 years ago, comes from senior people in the China Gold Association (CGA). See section “How much gold might the PBoC be buying each year?” in article PBoC Gold Purchases.

  A gold reserves-to-FX reserves ratio of 5% would currently put Chinese state gold holdings at nearly 4000 tonnes. A gold-to-GDP ratio of about 1.77%, which is the equivalent of the gold-to-GDP ratio of the US, would currently put Chinese state gold holdings at nearly 5000 tonnes of gold.

  Russia: Golden Pipelines and Stockpiles

  In its “Methodological Notes to International Reserves of the Russian Federation“, the  Bank of Russia defines “monetary gold”  as:

  “standard gold bars and coins with a purity of at least 995/1,000 held by the Bank of Russia and the Government of the Russian Federation. It comprises gold in vault, en route and in allocated accounts, including that which is held abroad. The item monetary gold includes unallocated gold accounts with non-residents.”

  The primary source of gold flowing to the Bank of Russia comes from Russian gold mining production, with the Russian Federation acquiring a large percentage of domestic gold mining production each year. In practice, a small group of state influenced Russian banks are authorised to intermediate between the gold mining companies and the State, acting as a gold pipeline between the mines and the Bank of Russia / Government. These banks finance the mining companies, purchase their gold output , have it refined into gold bars by Russian gold refineries, and then offer this gold to the Russian State.

  Some of these banks include Sberbank, VTB, Gazprombank and Otkritie. For details see section “Russian Banks as bulk buyers of Russian Gold” in the Russian gold market article in BullionStar’s Gold University.

  But its possible that some of this gold ends up not with the Bank of Russia, but with other Russian State entities, one of which is the “Gosfund” or “Precious Metals and Gems fund” operated by “The Gokhran”.

  This Gosfund could be buying a portion of Russian gold mining output, stockpiling it, and intermittently releasing some of its stockpile to the Bank of Russia. When I asked the Gokhran last year could it reveal its gold holdings, the Gokhran replied to me that “it does not publish information about the amount of gold reserves in the Russian Gosfund nor any data about its precious metal operations.” See letter reply from Gokhran below (for those who can read Russian):

  

  Gokhran reply January 2016 to query on whether it could publish its Gold Holdings.

  Conclusion

  Given the high degree of opacity with which both the Russian State and Chinese State accumulate monetary gold, and the fact that they both can probably tap additional gold stockpiles to boost their official gold reserves, it will be interesting to see whether China, through SAFE, announces any increase in the PBoC’s gold holdings between now and the end of Q1 2018.

  Because if China does not do so, the Russian Federation will soon have the distinction of being the world’s 5th largest gold holder, pushing China into 6th place. Will China update its gold holdings before the end of 2017, or at least by early 2018? Nothing is certain, but with an ‘official’ difference of only 63 tonnes of gold between them, the race is on.

  This article first appeared under the same title, 'Neck and Neck: Russian and Chinese Official Gold Reserves' on the BullionStar.com website.

  

• 93-Year-Old President Carter: Russians Didn't Alter Election, Obama Didn't Deliver, We Didn't Vote For Hillary

  Spot the odd one out…

  

  One of these six people says that Russians did not alter the election outcome, or vote for Hillary.

  In a lengthy interview with The New York Times recently, 93-year-old former President Jimmy Carter cut loose on some painful establishment 'facts'.

  

  As DailyWire.com's Joseph Curl reports, The Times decided to play up the fact that Carter would love to go over to North Korea as an envoy. But the Times is steadily proving how out of touch it is — and how it no longer seems to actually "get" what real news is.

  Here are some major highlights from the interview:

  1. The Russians didn't steal the 2016 election.

  Carter was asked "Did the Russians purloin the election from Hillary?"

   

  "I don’t think there’s any evidence that what the Russians did changed enough votes — or any votes," Carter said.

   

  So the hard-left former president doesn't think the Russians stole the election? Take note, Capitol Hill Democrats.

  2. We didn't vote for Hillary.

  Carter and his wife, Roselyn, disagreed on the Russia question. In the interview, she "looked over archly [and said] 'They obviously did'" purloin the election.

   

  “Rosie and I have a difference of opinion on that,” Carter said.

   

  Rosalynn then said, “The drip-drip-drip about Hillary.”

   

  Which prompted Carter to note that during the primary, they didn't vote for Hillary Clinton. "We voted for Sanders.”

  3. Obama fell far short of his promises.

  Barack Obama whooshed into office on pledges of delivering "hope and change" to the country, spilt by partisan politics.

   

  He didn't. In fact, he made it worse.

   

  "He made some very wonderful statements, in my opinion, when he first got in office, and then he reneged on that," he said about Obama's action on the Middle East.

  4. Media "harder on Trump than any president."

  A recent Harvard study showed that 93% of new coverage about President Trump is negative.

   

  But here's another shocker: Carter defended Trump.

   

  "I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I've known about," Carter said. "I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation."

  5. NFL players should "stand during the American anthem."

  Carter, who joined the other four living ex-presidents on Saturday for a hurricane fundraiser, put his hand on his heart when the national anthem played — and he has a strong opinion about what NFL players should do, too.

   

  "I think they ought to find a different way to object, to demonstrate," he said. " I would rather see all the players stand during the American anthem."

  Not exactly the narrative The Times was painting.

  

  

• Number Of Bitcoin Miners In Venezuela Swells To 100,000

  Venezuela’s worsening economic collapse has created something of a social experiment in the use of a digital currency as a de facto currency – a phenomenon that’s also playing out in troubled Zimbabwe.

  According to TheNational.ae, bitcoin adoption in Zimbabwe is seemingly skyrocketing as the country’s economic situation looks bleak. So much so, that one bitcoin is trading at nearly $10,000 on the Golix.io exchange, while the global average is, at press time, of $5,642.00.

   

  According to a local trader, bitcoin isn’t just being bought by individuals, but by businesses with bills to pay. The country adopted the U.S. dollar back in 2009 as its fiat currency, as the Zimbabwean dollar had lost nearly all its value.

   

  At press time, LocalBitcoins Zimbabwe has people buying bitcoin at the global average, and some buying the cryptocurrency for cash for well over $10,000 in the country’s capital. Bitcoin, as every bitcoiner would expect, is helping people in the country survive times of economic uncertainty, as Zimbabwe has been embroiled in a crisis for years.

  And as inflation in Venezuela has spiraled further out of control – by one estimated, it peaked above 2,400% in September – more Venezuelans are resorting to mining bitcoin, litecoin and other digital currencies as a means of coping with the country's out-of-control hyperinflation and surviving in a country where staples like food and medicine are scarce.

  "Venezuela was one of the richest per-capita nations in the world… but now, hyperinflation is a very difficult thing to understand until you have to buy lunch…"

   

  "The country has not yet dollarized…  but there's not enough dollars in Venezuela for that to have happened…"

   

  "Venezuela is becoming a cashless society… we are starting to see in Venezuela, the first bitcoinization of a sovereign state."

  

  However, while cryptocurrency mining isn’t explicitly illegal, the country’s Sebin intelligence service has been known to raid establishments that show a suspicious spike in electricity usage. Electricity is heavily subsidized by the state in Venezuela, making mining a particularly lucrative prospect, despite the risks.

  Bitcoin mining consultant Randy Brito estimates that about 100,000 Venezuelans are "mining," although it is impossible to have an exact figure because many are protecting themselves by using servers in foreign countries, AFP reports.

  According to the LocalBitcoins portal, transactions in bitcoins amounted to $1.1 million in Venezuela in the last week of September.

  

  One local who spoke with AFP said her mining rig is producing 20 to 25 litecoins per month.

  "Each litecoin is worth $46, that's $920 a month," said Veronica – a fortune in a country where the minimum monthly salary is 135,543 bolivars ($40), supplemented by a voucher of 189,000 bolivars ($56).

  AFP visited one office building in Caracas that has been converted into a clandestine mining operation, with more than 20 computers hard at work performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to unlock valuable blocks of digital currency.

  Caracas (AFP) – Inside a locked room in an office building in Caracas, 20 humming computers use their data-crunching power to mine bitcoins, an increasingly popular tool in the fight against Venezuela's hyperinflation.

   

  In warehouses, offices and homes, miners are using modified computers to perform complex computations, essentially book-keeping for digital transactions worldwide, for which they earn a commission in bitcoins.

   

  While practiced worldwide, Bitcoin mining is part of a growing, underground effort in Venezuela to escape the worst effects of a crippling economic and political crisis and runaway inflation that the IMF says could reach 720 percent this year.

   

  Having no confidence in the bolivar and struggling to find dollars, many Venezuelans, who are neither computer geeks nor financial wizards, are relying on the bitcoin – currently valued around $6,050, or other virtual currencies.

  As international sanctions have left Venezuela starved for foreign currency, cryptocurrencies have provided one crucial means for the regular people of Venezuela – who arguably have been hardest hit by the sanctions despite marching in the streets and calling for the overthrow of the regime of President Nicolas Maduro – to avoid the consequences of the administration’s economic mismanagement. Now, the question is will Venezuelans abandon the worthless bolivar in favor of relying solely on digital currencies.

  As we noted previously, one trader, John Villar, Caracas-based software developer, most eloquently stated "Bitcoin is a way of rebelling against the system." While the currency remained a niche form of payment in the country, many users purchased food and goods online through online marketplaces such as Amazon.com, albeit indirectly through gift cards purchased with the cryptocurrency.

  Noel Alvarez, former president of the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce, stated that “A maximum of one per cent of the population has access to it, but it is very useful in our situation.”

  Bitcoin’s popularity in Venezuela continued to grow. It became the country’s leading parallel currency. Some vendors even begun accepting Bitcoin exclusively. A popular online travel agency, Destinia, cited that, due to the bolivar’s instability and the trouble many Venezuelans experience when attempting to leave the country, “Giving priority to Bitcoin as a payment method could be of help."

  While Destina admitted that Venezuela is not a primary focal point for their company, they chose to prioritize Bitcoin payments in the Venezuelan market to facilitate the travel needs of the people in light of the persisting economic downturn.

  With infrastructure in place, trading and mining becoming more popular, and the crisis escalating, Maduro’s government began to take notice.

  Maduro’s War on Bitcoin

  The Venezuelan government began to crack down on the Bitcoin community, with police extorting citizens for “misusing electricity” or undermining the country’s economy. These grievances intensified over time, however, and the attack on miners became more apparent. In the largest raid, two miners were caught with 11,000 mining computers and were charged with cybercrime, electricity theft, exchange fraud, and even funding terrorism.

  In Feb. 2017, following the incident, Surbitcoin, Venezuela’s most popular exchange went offline. The company encouraged users to withdraw their money immediately as Banesco, the company’s banking partner, was set to revoke the account associated with the exchange. Rodrigo Souza, the founder and CEO of Surbitcoin, noted that "When it was found that there were 11,000 mining computers consuming the energy to power a whole town at a time when there are severe electricity shortages, it triggered a reaction.” Souza went on to say that the company was not contacted by the government, but Banesco revoked their account as it did not want to be associated with such an operation. Surbitcoin resumed operations two weeks following.

  We suspect it will not be long before Maduro takes further, tougher action against this 'subversive' behavior.

  

  

• US Now Admits Syrian "Rebels" Have Used Chemical Weapons

  From the first moment chemical weapons were used on the Syrian battlefield, the American public was led to believe that only one side could possibly be responsible. The constant refrain in the echo chamber of US government officials and the mainstream media was that only the Assad government possessed chemical stockpiles and the technological capability of deploying such heinous weapons, therefore blame for each and every chemical attack from Ghouta to Khan Sheikhoun was laid at the feet of Assad and the Syrian military.

  And yet last Wednesday, for the first time, the US State Department casually dropped an important admission into its official Syria travel warning for American citizens: that the core rebel group currently operating in northwest Syria not only possesses but has used chemical weapons – to the point that the State Department considers it a major enough threat to publicly warn citizens about.

  The armed opposition group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is referenced early in the document: "Terrorist and other violent extremist groups including ISIS and Al-Qaeda linked Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham [dominated by Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization], operate in Syria.” HTS is the group now holding Idlib province, which it captured in 2015 as part of a coalition of armed groups given direct support from a US-led operations room in southern Turkey – this according to prominent pro-opposition analyst Charles Lister.

  

  The new State Department travel warning has this to say about the tactics of HTS and other anti-Assad groups:

  Tactics of ISIS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and other violent extremist groups include the use of suicide bombers, kidnapping, small and heavy arms, improvised explosive devices, and chemical weapons.

   

  They have targeted major city centers, road checkpoints, border crossings, government buildings, shopping areas, and open spaces, in Damascus, Aleppo, Hamah, Dara, Homs, Idlib, and Dayr al-Zawr provinces.

  

  Hayat Tahrir al-Sham along with other Salafi-Jihadi terror groups such as Ahrar al-Sham, were in control of the Idlib province town of Khan Sheikhoun when the group alleged that Syrian jets launched a massive Sarin gas attack on civilians last April. Relying chiefly on YouTube videos uploaded by "activists" associated with the al-Qaeda linked groups, media and government officials in the West immediately blamed Syria and Russia for the incident which possibly resulted in up to 74 civilian deaths. The White House's own four page assessment released in the wake of the incident relied heavily on, in its words, “a wide body of open-source material” and “social media accounts” to find the Syrian government "guilty" – which means that essentially YouTube videos were used as justification for Trump's subsequent punitive strike on Shayrat military airfield in Syria (a strike which turned out to be largely symbolic for the sake of "doing something").

  Meanwhile, HTS and their affiliates prevented any and all international monitoring groups from entering Idlib to access the site of the alleged attack – a reality which continues to this day. The OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons), for example, acknowledged that, "For security reasons, the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] was unable to visit Khan Shaykhun."

  For this reason, while Western media accused the Syrian government of attacking civilians with Sarin a mere hours after the attack was said to have taken place, OPCW officials urged caution. One prominent official who publicly insisted that Western media cease prematurely blaming Assad for Khan Sheikhoun because they couldn't possibly possess empirical data with objective chain of custody (as no observers had accessed the site) was Jerry Smith.

  Smith was the lead field investigator for the UN-backed operation to remove Syria’s chemical weapons in 2013 after a US-Russia-Syria deal was struck to decommission Syria's declared Sarin stockpiles. In two major UK media interviews, the former OPCW deputy head of Syria field operations said that he considered it entirely plausible that Assad was not responsible, even after the visibly surprised anchors attempted to pressure him into saying Assad did it.  

  Former OPCW head field investigator Jerry Smith to Sky News' Sophy Ridge in the week after the Khan Sheikhoun attack: 

  Ridge: "Is there any way that Assad might not have been responsible for those [chemical attacks]?"

   

  Smith: "The fact of the matter is that there is… We need to listen to every story and then start to pick it apart. Some of the stories that come out are not true. And the stakeholders that are saying them are having a line because of their own narrative. If we start to pick this apart effectively their stories will fall away."

   

  .@OPCW official urges caution on chemical attack, says possible rebels had sarin gas & Assad troops hit a storehouse https://t.co/ftSeaKr6KE

  — Danielle Ryan (@DanielleRyanJ) April 7, 2017

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  A BBC article which initially quoted Smith's expert analysis from the TV interviews subsequently deleted his comments as he expressed views which ran directly contrary to the mainstream media's consensus. The narrative of the Syrian government's guilt became entrenched so early, based so little "evidence" (primarily social media videos), that even contrary analysis by high level OPCW experts was censored. 

  Similarly, this is further what currently has Russia angrily calling foul – the idea that the UN's Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) appears bias toward finding the Syrian government responsible from afar based on assumptions concerning guilt which became entrenched in the West from the beginning. A fresh and contentious vote is expected at the UN on Monday as to whether or note the JIM mandate will be extended for another year.

  And Russia is now pointing to the State Department's updated Syria travel advisory as constituting a US intelligence admission that it is not only entirely plausible that al-Qaeda (HTS) committed the Khan Sheikhoun attack but even likely, considering HTS' chief area of operation for the past year has been in Idlib province (the travel document purports to be an update of the last six months). On Friday, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov issued a statement, saying:

  I would like to point out that that the Department of State has for the first time officially acknowledged that terrorists from Jabhat al-Nusra not only have but also – I would like to stress that – use chemical weapons in this part of Syria in order to carry out terrorist attacks – a thing that we have many times many times warned against and talked about at various levels.

  The State Department in a response given to the Washington Examiner over the weekend, accused the Russians of "cherry-picking language to suit their false narrative that they have been peddling for years about the use of chemical weapons in Syria and those responsible."

  However, the UN's own extensive 2013 investigation into the first reported uses of chemical weapons in Syria support the consistently stated Russian position that the armed opposition in Syria have long possessed and have repeatedly used chemical weapons. When the UN undertook its first on the ground inquiry in Syria, it admitted in its 82-page December 2013 report (initiated after the August 2013 Ghouta attack), that it considered both sides of the war to be in possession of mass casualty producing chemical weapons. This is important, given that at the time the US position was that only the Syrian government could have possibly launched chemical attacks. According to the UN report:

  The United Nations Mission remains deeply concerned that chemical weapons were used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syrian Arabic Republic, which has added yet another dimension to the continued suffering of the Syrian people.

  The report stated that chemical weapons were “probably used” at five sites in Syria during the conflict up to that point (2013). Most significant is that among the five sites the UN could not find a single instance where members of the armed rebels opposition were victims, but instead found that at two sites, the victims were Syrian government soldiers, and at a third, the victims were Syrian Army personnel and civilians.

  While the purpose of the investigation was not to establish the culprit in each attack, the report identified the victims in three out of the five incidents as government soldiers. This was the first tacit UN admission that the rebels possess and have used chemical weapons – an admission made all the way back in 2013. And even the generally pro-rebel New York Times had to admit the following when the 2013 report came out:

  Chemical weapons were used repeatedly in the Syria conflict this year, not only in a well-documented Aug. 21 attack near Damascus but also in four other instances, including two subsequent attacks that targeted soldiers, the United Nations said in a report released Thursday.

  And concerning the first reported usage of chemical weapons in the entirety of the Syrian conflict, the NYT further admitted at the time that Syrian soldiers had been on the receiving end (though the NYT buried the information far away from the front page):

  The report said the panel had corroborated “credible allegations” that chemical weapons were used in the first reported attack — a March 19 episode involving soldiers and civilians [as victims] in Khan al-Assal in the country’s north.

  But even prior to the UN's December 2013 findings, credible allegations of rebel chemical weapons were nothing new. In May of 2013, Carla Del Ponte, a top UN human rights investigator and former UN Chief Prosecutor and veteran International Criminal Court attorney – was the first to accuse the rebels of using Sarin gas against government forces and civilians (also see here, here, and here).

  Del Ponte’s assertions, based upon her information gathering team on the ground, caused a row in Europe at the time, but the only major American outlet to cover the story when it happened was the LA Times. During a Swiss-Italian TV interview, she was convinced enough to be very blunt in her assessment, saying, “I was a little bit stupefied by the first indication of the use of nerve gas by the opposition.”

  So in reality, a number of top experts (as well as documentation) have come forward over the past few years to offer analysis contrary to the West's open and shut "Assad did it" narrative, yet the Western public has for the most part been carefully shielded from such voices (to say nothing of Seymour Hersh's excellent investigative reporting, or MIT rocket scientist Theodore Postol's analysis). With this latest US State Department admission that groups like HTS in Syria possess and have used chemical weapons, it appears that the US government could slowly and reluctantly be catching up to what other experts have long understood.

  

  

• The Global "Bubble Arms Race" Has Ushered In The Age Of Government Strongmen

  Authored by Doug Noland via Credit Bubble Bulletin blog,

  The week left me with an uneasy feeling. There were a number of articles noting the 30-year anniversary of the 1987 stock market crash. I spent “Black Monday” staring at a Telerate monitor as a treasury analyst at Toyota’s US headquarters in Southern California. If I wasn’t completely in love with the markets and macro analysis by that morning, there was no doubt about it by bedtime. Enthralling.

  As writers noted this week, there were post-’87 crash economic depression worries. In hindsight, those fears were misplaced. Excesses had not progressed over years to the point of causing deep financial and economic structural maladjustment. Looking back today, 1987 was much more the beginning of a secular financial boom rather than the end. The crash offered a signal – a warning that went unheeded. Disregarding warnings has been in a stable trend now for three decades.

  Alan Greenspan’s assurances of ample liquidity – and the Fed and global central bankers’ crisis-prevention efforts for some time following the crash – ensured fledgling financial excesses bounced right back and various Bubbles hardly missed a beat. Importantly, financial innovation and speculation accelerated momentously. Wall Street had been emboldened – and would be repeatedly.

  The crash also marked the genesis of government intervention in the markets that would evolve into the previously unimaginable: negative short-term rates, manipulated bond yields, central bank support throughout the securities markets, Trillions upon Trillions of central bank monetization and the perception of open-ended securities market liquidity backstops around the globe. Greenspan was the forefather of the powerful trifecta: Team Bernanke, Kuroda and Draghi. Ask the bond market back in 1987 to contemplate massive government deficit spending concurrent with near zero global sovereign yields – the response would have been “inconceivable.”

  Articles this week posed the question, “Could an ’87 Crash Happen Again.” There should be no doubt – that is unless the nature of markets has been thoroughly transformed. Yes, there are now circuit breakers and other mechanisms meant to arrest panic selling. At the same time, there are so many more sources of potential self-reinforcing selling these days compared to portfolio insurance back in 1987. Today’s derivatives markets – where various strains of writing market insurance (“flood insurance during a drought”) have become a consistent and popular money maker – make 1987’s look itsy bitsy.

  The record $3.15 TN hedge fund industry barely existed in 1987. The $4.1 TN ETF complex didn’t exist at all. To be sure, the amount of trend-following finance dominating present-day global markets is unprecedented. Moreover, the structure of contemporary finance has already (repeatedly) proven itself conducive to financial dislocation. Over the years – and especially post-2008 reflation – boom and bust dynamics have turned only more forceful. Central bank fixation on countering the bust has precariously propelled the latest boom.

  The ’87 crisis response fatefully unleashed the “Terminal Phase” of Japanese Bubble excess – the consequences of which persist to this day. Decades of exceptional development flushed away with a few years of recklessness. In China, officials over the years claimed to have learned from the dismal Japanese Bubble experience. Clearly, they did not. The 2008 crisis was multiples of 1987. The recent post-crisis reflation, as well, has been at an incredibly grander and prolonged scale. This has ensured that China’s Bubble and “Terminal Phase” have inflated so far beyond Japan’s eighties fiasco.

  Bubble mirage had Japan’s economy and banking system poised to lead the world. Now it’s China. In contrast to Japan’s beleaguered post-Bubble political class, China’s communist party won’t have to agonize over elections.

  China faces extremely serious issues – and I’ll assume enlightened Chinese communist party officials are not oblivious. Beijing was the leading culprit behind my disquiet this week. Most focused elsewhere. The Trump administration’s tax package made initial headway in the Senate. There was also market-friendly reporting that Federal Reserve governor “Jay” Powell may be Trump’s leading candidate for Fed chairman. With securities markets rising ever higher into record territory, who cares about some communist party gathering? Heck, is communism even pertinent in today’s tantalizing New Age? Did you see those cryptocurrencies this week?

  Chinese President Xi Jinping has a plan. China will be the world’s super power. The great communist party, with its progressive system of meritocracy, is the only mechanism to adroitly guide Chinese “new era” development. And President Xi is the master – the modern-day Emperor – with the depth of experience, the vision, the charisma, the power to ensure China’s rightful place on the world stage. He embodies the benevolent dictator for the masses; the resolute commander for an increasingly hostile world; the deity to guide and protect an insecure society. Spooky stuff.

  October 20 – Financial Times (Tom Mitchel): “‘Government, military, society and schools — north, south, east and west — the party is leader of all,’ Mr Xi proclaimed in a three-and-a-half hour speech… to the party congress. Next week the congress will appoint a new Politburo Standing Committee stacked with Xi loyalists. One person who advises senior officials attributes Mr Xi’s now seemingly unassailable dominance of Chinese politics to a Machiavellian insight. ‘Because of the economic prosperity of the reform era, almost everyone in officialdom was corrupted,’ he says. ‘Xi used this fact as leverage to scare everyone. They have to follow him because everyone is vulnerable. All you have to do is investigate them.’ In his marathon address to the congress this week, Mr Xi positioned himself not just as modern China’s third great leader after Mao and Deng, but also the heir to a glorious Communist tradition stretching back to Russia’s Bolsheviks. ‘A hundred years ago, the salvos of the October Revolution brought Marxism-Leninism to China,’ Mr Xi said, noting that the Chinese Communist party was founded just four years later. ‘From that moment on, the Chinese people have had in the party a backbone for their pursuit of national independence and liberation, prosperity and happiness.’ According to Mr Xi’s arc of history, China is only three decades away from resuming its traditional and rightful place as the world’s dominant economic and cultural power, with the US caught in a downward spiral accelerated by Mr Trump’s election.”

  Xi’s speech was said to have left young devotees sobbing (and previous leadership yawning and checking their watches). Xi is moving aggressively forward with a consolidation of power – assiduously crafting a cult of leadership. He has shrewdly perched his government’s skill and competence up on a high pedestal, with its leader the unassailable “man now regarded as China’s great centraliser and most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong, the party’s revolutionary hero.”

  October 17 – Bloomberg (Ting Shi): “President Xi Jinping warned of ‘severe’ challenges while laying out a road map to turn China into a leading global power by 2050, as he kicked off a twice-a-decade party gathering expected to cement his influence into the next decade. In a speech that ran for more than three hours on Wednesday, Xi declared victory over ‘many difficult, long overdue problems’ since he took power in 2012. He said China would continue opening its doors to foreign businesses, defend against systemic risks, deepen state-run enterprise reform, strengthen financial sector regulation and better coordinate fiscal and monetary policy. ‘Right now both China and the world are in the midst of profound and complex changes,’ Xi said. ‘China is still in an important period of strategic opportunity for development. The prospects are very bright, but the challenges are very severe.’”

  Xi and Chinese leadership are battening down the hatches. Recall that less than two years ago the Chinese Bubble was at the brink. It was Xi and his “national team” that took incredible measures to reverse a dynamic of collapsing markets and exodus from the Chinese currency. In short, confronting an inconveniently timed bust, they resorted to stoking their historic Bubble. Why not – everyone else has gotten away with it.

  The upshot has been two additional (fateful) years of rapidly inflating apartment prices and economic maladjustment. There has been as well a couple more years of historic compounding Credit growth. It was only fitting that Xi’s overstated exultation elicited a shot of sobriety from China’s respected central bank chief (from his catbird seat).

  October 19 – Financial Times (Gabriel Wildau): “China’s central bank governor has warned in unusually stark language of the risks from excessive debt and speculative investment, as he used the Communist party congress to caution that the country’s fast-growing economy faced a possible ‘Minsky moment’. ‘When there are too many pro-cyclical factors in an economy, cyclical fluctuations will be amplified,’ Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, said at a meeting on the sidelines of the Communist party gathering in Beijing. ‘If we are too optimistic when things go smoothly, tensions build up, which could lead to a sharp correction, what we call a ‘Minsky Moment’. That’s what we should particularly defend against.’”

  Credit growth accelerated into the communist party congress. Chinese Total Social Financing (total non-governmental Credit) expanded a stronger-than-expected $277 billion during September. Year-to-date Total Social Financing growth of $2.375 TN is running 16.3% above last year’s record pace. Lending was led by booming demand for household real estate purchases. Total Chinese Credit could surpass $4.0 TN in 2017, easily outdoing U.S. Credit growth at the height of our mortgage finance bubble. Despite all the talk about excessive debt levels and the need for deleveraging, Chinese officials have yet to get their arms around a historic credit bubble.

  Xi spoke of a focus on financial stability. His comment, “Houses are built to be inhabited, not for speculation,” reiterates official concern for housing prices. Past efforts to counteract apartment inflation with added supply failed to dampen enthusiasm for speculating on ever higher prices. At this late stage of such a prolonged Bubble, only harsh medicine will suffice. Prices will need to fall and speculation punished for the spell to be broken.

  Bubbles are always about a redistribution and destruction of wealth. Its unparalleled global scope makes the current Bubble is so concerning. Xi now owns the Chinese Bubble, and there would appear little prospect that he’ll ever be willing to take responsibility for the damage wrought. Fingers will be pointed directly at foreigners, foremost the U.S. and Japan.

  I believe the global government finance Bubble – history’s greatest financial boom – will conclude this long Credit cycle going back to the conclusion of WWII. As the “granddaddy of Bubbles,” it is fitting that things turn really crazy during an exceptionally prolonged “Terminal Phase.” We’re at the point where no one is willing to risk bursting the Bubble, certainly not timid central bankers.

  There’s so much at stake. Importantly, from the global Bubble perspective, a faltering Bubble would risk surrendering power on the global stage. Xi certainly doesn’t seem willing to see a faltering China retreat from global ascendency. The same can be said for Shinzo Abe in Japan. Here at home, making America great again gets no easier with a bursting Bubble. And while there’s no President of Europe, Mario Draghi has assumed the role of defender of European resurgence with an interminable windfall of free “money.”

  It’s all quite unsettling. Global finance has run completely amok. This has been unfolding for so long now that few are concerned. Most revel in asset inflation drunkenness. Instead of safeguarding sound finance and stable money – the bedrock of civil societies and peaceful global relationships – governments and central banks around the world are harboring Bubble excesses like never before. This ensures catastrophic consequences when Bubbles burst. It has reached the point where these Bubbles have become part and parcel to global power, with countries not willing to risk being left behind. It’s as if it has become An Arms Race in Bubbles.

  Three decades of serial booms and busts begat An Age of Government Strongmen – and weak central bankers. It would only be fitting for President Trump to opt for the milquetoast Jerome Powell to shepherd Fed inflationist doctrine, perhaps even trying to placate his base with a slot on the FOMC for John Taylor. Apparently, there are more urgent fights these days than reform at the Federal Reserve. Everywhere, it seems, various fights are taking precedence over stable finance. It just makes one dread the kind of conflicts that could break out when this historic global financial boom buckles. But, then, who on earth cares? The Dow is mere days away from 24,000, and Bitcoin is surely poised to make a run to $10,000!

  

  

• Censorship In The Digital Age

  Authord by Jason Hirthler via CounterPunch.org,

  The grand experiment with western democracy, badly listing thanks to broadsides from profiteering oligarchs, may finally run ashore on the rocks of thought crime. In the uneven Steven Spielberg project Minority Report, starring excitable scientologist Tom Cruise, Cruise plays a futuristic policeman who investigates pre-crimes and stops them before they happen. The police owe their ability to see the criminal plots developing to characters called pre-cognitives, or pre-cogs, kind of autistic prophets who see the future and lie sleeping in sterile pools of water inside the police department. Of course, it turns out that precogs can pre-visualize different futures, a hastily hidden flaw that threatens to jeopardize the profits of the pre-crime project. Here is the crux of the story: thought control is driven by a profit motive at bottom. As it turns out, just like real life.

  Now, the British government has decided to prosecute pre-crime but has done away with the clunky plot device of the pre-cogs, opting rather to rely on a hazy sense of higher probability to justify surveilling, nabbing, convicting, and imprisoning British citizens. The crime? Looking at radical content on the Internet. What is considered radical will naturally be defined by the state police who will doubtless be personally incentivized by pre-crime quotas, and institutionally shaped to criminalize trains of thought that threaten to destabilize a criminal status quo. You know, the unregulated monopoly capitalist regime that cuts wages, costs, and all other forms of overhead with psychopathic glee. Even a Grenfell Towers disaster is regarded more as a question of how to remove the story from public consciousness than rectify its wrongs.

  The Triple Evils

  Martin Luther King, Jr. famously, or infamously, depending on whether you are a penthouse mandarin or garden-variety prole, linked the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism. These evils are as yet unaddressed in our society, as we are daily shown on the media mouthpieces of imperial capitalism. Wars must be waged. Victims of social injustice must be incarcerated. Society itself must be made poor to ensure higher profits.

  Yet there is another set of evils that are primarily used to mask the original trifecta outlined by King. In fact, the connection between propaganda, surveillance, and censorship is clear and inseparable. Take as your initial premise that imperial capitalists want to control the world. Not an unjustified claim. As an imperial capitalist, you are part of a privileged minority whose objective is to further exploit the disenfranchised whose only recourse is the resources you are pillaging. War, be it with bombs or sanctions or special forces or proxies, is immensely profitable to the capitalists. Arms makers make money. Chemical companies make money. Energy companies make money. Media companies make money. Presidents not only make money, they also make history. But the workers, the poor, and the downtrodden pay the price. That’s why they won’t be happy to hear of your plans. Therefore, they must be lied to, lied to so convincingly and comprehensively that they accept, without a second thought, the plans you have laid out before them.

  This convincing requires three decisive actions: propaganda, surveillance, and censorship. The first is the official lie you craft to convince them to believe you. The second is the dragnet of digital observation by which you assess whether or not they do believe you. The third is the coercive methods by which you punish those that don’t believe you (justified by the imperial tale you first wove).

  

  The official interpretation of reality is already in place: western civilization is beset on all sides by maniacs that want to take away our freedoms. The surveillance is already in place through programs like the Five Eyes alliance and ECHELON, PRISM, Boundless Informant, FISA, Stellar Wind, and many others. What remains is to tighten the noose of censorship around the neck of our open western societies.

  Idiots Abroad

  To that end, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd recently announced that citizens that view too much extremist material online could face up to 15 years in jail. Rudd related,

  “I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law.”

  This flaxen cipher of totalitarian control opened by tabulating some 67,000 tweets by ISIS, along with 44,000 links to ISIS propaganda, had been generated in the last year. Already, Section 58 of the Terrorist Act 2000 criminalized the possession of information that might be useful to a terrorist. But this is not enough for 10 Downing Street. Rudd is taking that law of possession and expanding it into a law of perception. It is now enough to simply watch extremist content. You needn’t download it, distribute it, or otherwise act on it. You need only see it more than once. At that point, by Rudd’s surely flawlessly calculated probabilities, you have become an existential threat to the state, or rather, to national security. You are more likely to commit acts of terror than those who have not seen the extremist content. Pre-crime without the pre-cogs.

  But Rudd’s was another step in a long line of encroachments peddled by fascist-minded western governments. Theresa May, the reviled Thatcherite epigone, wants to play a paternal role in preventing citizens from even having the chance to view extremist content. The Tory manifesto tells us, “Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet. We disagree.” Britain plans, quite proudly it seems, to become the “global leader” in the regulation of the Internet. Just before these announcements were made, Britain had passed the Investigatory Powers Act, which lets the government sweep up user browsing histories. So the surveillance data authorities would use to implement Rudd’s plan is already there. Want to read that eloquent jeremiad against the Tories? Sorry, that was just labeled hate speech. Want to visit your favorite leftist forum? Apologies, mate, but that was deemed a “safe space” for extremist speech and shut down. Want to watch some attractive young people copulate? No problem. Just submit a request to your local minister outlining your precise reasons for wanting access to such nominally proscribed content. Otherwise, forget it.

  The Germans aren’t far behind. The so-called Network Enforcement Act is said to create a framework for managing Internet activity, particularly in social media. The act is part of the country’s fake fight against fake news and hate speech, or rather its quite real fight against progressive, leftist, or communist thought and expression. This law demands, on pain of a fifty million euro penalty, that companies with two million or more web visitors must, on receipt of complaint, remove “unlawful content” from their sites. Facebook has opened a new data center in Germany to deal with removal requests, sure to be flooding in from the Bundestag. As the World Socialist Web Site makes clear, if your fake news promotes war (Iraq 2003), mischaracterizes coup d’états (Ukraine 2014), or spreads anti-immigrant hysteria (Cologne 2015), then you’ve got nothing to fear. Of course, it falls to the government itself to decide what is and what isn’t extremist content, no doubt a comforting thought for myriad Der Spiegel loyalists. And, of course, the erstwhile European Commission, destroyer of Greece and perpetrator of other ills, has published guidelines to help member states remove “illegal” content. Even the Russians have joined in, promoting legislation designed to curtail digital freedoms.

  Stateside Schlemiels

  None of this would be news to Barack Obama, whose own legacy of crumpled writs of habeas corpus, worthless privacy platitudes, and high-altitude wetwork, sits like a canker on the body politic. On his way out the door, through the turnstile of public weal into private gain, he provided the deep state with millions of dollars when he added the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which consecrates black budgets, cost overruns, price gouging, and all other manner of insecurity practiced by the Pentagon and its parasitic defense contractor community. The CDPA, if that’s how it will eventually be known, will effectively pay people to generate officially sanctioned narratives. The U.S. government is fighting fact by calling it propaganda and then producing its own propaganda and calling it fact.

  Thanks in part to pressure from Congressional Senate Intelligence Committee that, and the indefatigable efforts of Democrats Adam Schiff and Mark Warner, major brands have been hopping on the clanging tumbrel of Russiagate, as it wheels unsteadily through the digital space, collecting the corpses of freethinkers. Facebook is now blocking “fake news” from its ads. YouTube has begun to fetter content producers with a more restrictive ad network and murky review policies. Google has tweaked its algorithm to keep “fake news” from surfacing high in Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPS.

  

  What precisely constitutes fake news is evidently up to the Zuckerbergs and Schmidts of the world. For Google, it has decidedly meant suppressing progressive and left-wing content, as plummeting traffic numbers have indicated. Of course, it won’t mean suppressing the fake news produced by the CIA or Mi5 or the standard state-fluffing smorgasbord of lies, deceits and hit jobs offered up by the so-called mainstream media.

  The always sharp Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report writes that the FBI has created a fresh construct to deal with African-American unrest, called, “Black Identity Extremism,” already truncated into another mind-murdering acronym, BIE. (As though an acronym adds just the note of tenability required to pass off a fatuity on a mal-educated populace.) Foreign Policy, in an otherwise surprisingly liberal-minded story, suggests the construct risks reviving the racism the agency has worked so hard to overcome. Ford drily notes the overlooked matter of J. Edgar Hoover targeting blacks since the 1920s, not to mention COINTELPRO and attacks on the Black Panthers. Regardless, in the eyes of the FBI, blacks angry about police abuses, persistent economic inequalities, and the New Jim Crow, are little more than “identity extremists,” a danger to national security, notably the security of the white plutocracy which it serves.

  (Fore) Closing Thoughts

  Remember that much of this apparatus of thought control has been applied beneath the banner of the fake Russia hacking story. That story, created by the Clinton camp to distract from the DNC email revelations provided by WikiLeaks, at first blamed Russia for hacking into “our democracy”, then suggested Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to swing the election, and then emphasized that Russia had launched an “influence campaign” designed to swing the election, with the focus subtly shifting from hacking to collusion to influence. At each turn, the evidence proves paltry, the claims absurd, and the virtue signaling nauseating. The bar is being progressively lowered until it meets a threshold of credibility by which the Senate Intel Committee can prosecute Donald Trump or justify some sort of punitive measures against Russia.

  The story is so transparently false, from the technical detail to the geopolitical motive, that it is only sustained by the permanent – or deep state – elements of the foreign policy community that need a means by which to control and direct the Trump administration. Russia collusion served as an ideal pretext to force Trump away from campaign-trail odes to conciliation and toward a continuation of the hostile foreign policies glibly enabled and advanced by Barack Obama. The comedy of it all is that Facebook found ‘incriminating’ ads that amounted to less than one percent of the Facebook total ad buys. Congress would like to ban RT, which has ratings that are 0.3 percent of Judge Judy’s. And the infamous hack has been shown to be a leak. What are we left with? A grandiose deceit based on a need to sustain a brutal ideology of oppression, austerity, and war.

  But this is how the imperialists do it. They organize globally to oppress locally. That’s why they’ve been rightly rebranded as ‘the globalists’. The workers always trail behind, left to cope with recently discovered alliances of institutional powers collaborating to fence in the prospects for economic equality, social justice, and the fair distribution of a nation’s wealth. We find ourselves beneath the a pregnant cloud of metastasizing repression, conceived and constructed beneath our own gaze. In his recent novel Purity, one of author Jonathan Franzen’s characters, a famous East German exile and whistleblower extraordinaire (a more charismatic Assange), finds himself a global celebrity, the subject of countless interviews wherein,

  “…he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of.”

  Whether it is too late for a world of working class people and the ubiquitous poor to opt out of the globalized imperium dreamed up by our post-war planners, is hard to say. But if you think there’s still time, be extremely careful, since the pre-crime police are nearly omnipresent, and they might overhear you quoting Marx or see you scrawling ideas about redistribution on the walls of some abandoned underpass. Just imagine some future advertisement for the pre-crime program, a glistening LCD ad floating between skyscrapers, a smiling family at play, a nation secure, and an omniscient narrator softly reminding you, “Don’t forget—it’s the thought that counts.”

  

  

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