Dec 24

Today’s News 24th December 2017

  • Bitcoin Breakdown: How-to, Step by Step

    Third part in a series. Part 1, Part 2 

    Article First Appeared on HedgeAccordingly.com

    By @sellputs

    Merrrrrrrrrry Bitmas!

    Bitcoin has been crashing like a Bad Santa all week long—it had surged up to $19,856 last Monday and had plunged as low as $11,590 by Friday, bouncing back up to $14k and change. So anyone who bought bitcoin last Monday is still smarting, and those who bought below $12k yesterday are feeling just plain smart.

    Either way, this column will tell you how to join the fun.

    In search of a Christmas miracle, we’re going to map out the ten steps for setting up your own bitcoin trading account. It is so fast and simple that in 15 minutes or so, you will be linked-up, “appified” and able to invest in bitcoin and other digital currencies from your smartphone. Once you are set up, you can make each crypto purchase in seconds.

    If you dare. Lately it has been a pretty scary videogame.

    Millions of people seem undaunted; convinced this bubble still has plenty of room to grow.  Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, now is said to have 13.3 million accounts—more than Charles Schwab & Co. (10.6 million) and, maybe, sign of just how much this Bitcoin Bubble is inflating.

    This, at a time when stocks are especially hot since the Trump election that has so many of my liberal pals in New York apoplectic and foaming at the mouth. (Then again, they never have felt so outraged and alive—they love it.)

    It took a full year for stocks to go up 30%, yet you can lose 20% on bitcoin in just two days. Example: if you bought into bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin this past Wednesday evening (12/20), by Friday afternoon you were down a sickening 20% in bitcoin and almost as much in ETH and LTC. Don’t ride this wild rollercoaster if you can’t stomach that kind of a setback.

    For those of you who can, and for those of you who believe you are ready to get started on this tumultuous investing journey, here’s an easy guide, step by step, to setting up a cryptocurrency trading account. We did it the other day at Coinbase. When in doubt, go with the biggest, it may be the biggest for a good reason.

    Step 1: Go to app store, download Coinbase app. In a minute or two it’s ready to go.

    Step 2:  Before you open up the app for the first time, make sure you know, ahead of time, the online password to your checking account, if that is the account you will link up to Coinbase to transfer real U.S. dollars into purchases of tiny increments of untraceable bits. Same goes for the credit card you might link to your new Coinbase account (which triggers a 4% fee rather than the 1.5% fee charged for linking to your bank account).

    Step 3: Open the app. Give fingerprint, and the opening screen shows the Bitcoin price at the moment, and a year-long fever chart that starts at $800 in January 2017 and soars to $19,205 by December 2017.  It is exhilarating. Two buttons beckon: Sign Up or Log In. Touch on Sign Up.

    Step 4: A few screens in, the app has you use your phone-cam to snap a picture of your driver’s license, front and back, and then it has you take a selfie of your face.  It tells you it must verify the photos and will get back to you in five to 10 minutes.

    Step 5:  Five minutes or so later, you are verified, and a fast questionnaire pops up: fill in your occupation and “employed by,” and a message flashes: “You’re almost ready to invest.” Click the green box labeled, “Complete account setup.”

    Step 6:  The app teases you with the current flashing prices of the coins you anxiously are waiting to buy (BTC, ETH, LTC), as it sends a verification number to your phone. You enter that number into a box on-screen, and the next message says: “You’re almost ready to buy.” (Italics added). Note the change in verbiage from “ready to invest.”

    Step 7:  “Please complete your account,” the app instructs. You add a payment source (your banking account is recommended), a user name and a password (write it down on a slip of paper and slide the paper into your wallet; security pros might preach against it, but they preach against most everything, and hacks keep happening anyway.)

    Step 8:  Now take a deep breath and psyche up. For some people wary of how bubbly bitcoin is, talking yourself into making the first bet is like a testosterone-soaked trader trying to talk himself into getting married.  You never will be truly ready, so just take the leap. Do it in a small way, and don’t flinch when what you bought suddenly slides in value. 

    Step 9: Commence buying. Touch the teensy “Prices” icon in the bottom left of your phone to see the latest coin bids, then touch “Accounts” and you get a screen of “wallets,” one for each coin type. Touch the bitcoin (BTC) wallet and a new screen pops with two buttons: Buy. Sell. Can’t sell what you don’t yet own, so you click Buy.

    Step 10: Instantly a new screen shows up, with the numbers pad helpfully displayed near the bottom so you can enter in the dollar amount you are about to spend. You tap in the dollar figure into a box marked USD, the app calculates the microscopic portion of coin that sum will fetch, you tap on “Buy” at the top of the screen, confirm the buy on the next screen and BAM!

    A new screen shows, against a field of royal blue, a checkmark in a circle at the top, and below it a headline declaring: “Your buy was successful!” And below that, the exact portion you just bought, starting with a zero and carried out to eight decimal places. Or in the case of this purchase (of bitcoin cash, BCH, a new offshoot that we bought at 11:19 p.m. on Friday night):

    0.08721555 BCH

    At the bottom of the screen a bar instructs: Go to Accounts. When you press it, up comes the listing of the asset you just bought, with the Buy and Sell buttons at the ready. One back-arrow press and you are back to the full Accounts page listing five “wallets” for buying five separate currencies (BCH, BTC, ETC, LTC and the good ol’ USD).

    From there you can get fancier, setting price alerts to learn when a currency has fallen to the price you were waiting to see. “Never miss an opportunity,” the Coinbase app advises. This can get obsessive pretty quickly (and drain your time away from Facebook, Instagram and Snap). The app also can alert you when your bitcoin crashes down through a floor you specified, in case you want to sell.

    Although, selling isn’t really the point here, is it? If you are bold enough (or unwise enough) to bet on this ethereal thing everyone is talking about, then maybe it is best to put up your money and leave it there for a while, electing patience over panic. You are a rough rider trying to stay on top of this giant, swelling bubble and hold on long enough to reap returns from those who jump on after you. With easy apps like Coinbase, millions more investors may be aiming to do just that. Giddyap!

    Next: Five Easy Pieces of advice for bitcoin trading.

  • Trump Saved St. Pete's Because He Wants A Piece Of The Syrian Pie

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

    Trump saved St. Petersburg after the CIA tipped off the FSB about an impending terrorist attack there.

    Russia immediately acted on the information and arrested several terrorist suspects who were said to be plotting an attack on the famous Kazan Cathedral, and President Putin was so grateful for the many lives that were saved as a result of this joint cooperation between the two Great Powers that he even called Trump and extended his personal thanks to the CIA and its Director.

    This was a model-breaking moment for some because it shattered their worldview of the US, Trump, and especially the CIA as inherently evil forces obsessed with plotting against Russia.

    That’s not to say that these three are angels, but just that the pursuit of their interests can sometimes take surprising forms such as the recent example of high-profile anti-terrorist cooperation with Russia that was so useful to Moscow that President Putin felt obliged to thank the CIA, something which would have otherwise been unthinkable for the former head of the FSB to do in the presently tense atmosphere of the New Cold War.

    This just goes to show that Russia genuinely appreciates what the US did and is willing to work with it on all areas of shared interests across the world, which brings the analysis around to discussing why Washington would uncharacteristically engage in an act of goodwill such as this one towards its rival.

    There’s of course a catch, and it’s that the US did the right thing for self-interested reasons that aren’t visibly or immediately apparent but have to do with its envisioned role in determining the outcome of the Russian-led “political solution” to the War on Syria.

    The US has thus far been largely sidelined from this process, but has informally found a way to nevertheless make itself indispensable to it through the 2000 troops that it’s deployed in northeastern Syria and the 10 bases that it built there in support of the Kurdish-led “Syrian Democratic Forces” that now occupy this oil-rich and agriculturally wealthy one-third of the country.

    In exchange for saving the lives of an untold number of people in President Putin’s hometown, the US expects Russia to respect its post-war interests in northeastern Syria by encouraging Damascus to agree to the northeastern region’s Kurdish-led “decentralization”, a goal which also overlaps with Moscow’s own for vastly different reasons.

    Russia therefore isn’t opposed in principle to this implicit quid-pro-quo because it stands to benefit from expanding its “balancing” strategy in Syria to include the US, as this opens up the potential for furthering the long-desired objective of a so-called “New Détente” with Washington. That’s not to say that Russia will succeed in this scenario or that it’s even moving in that direction per se, but just that the US hopes that it will, otherwise the CIA might neglect to inform the FSB the next time they discover another imminent terrorist plot.

  • How Wealthy Americans Are Already Trying To Game Trump's Tax Bill

    Earlier this month, Trump touted the idea that, under his tax plan, 1,000’s of Americans would be able to “file their taxes on a single, little beautiful sheet of paper.”  Of course, this so-called “postcard” that Trump and Paul Ryan have referenced repeatedly over the past several months is basically nothing more than a 1040EZ shrunken down to fit on a smaller piece of paper but who are we to rain on their parade?

    Postcard

    That said, while many Americans will enjoy an easier tax filing in 2018, or at least as easy as the 1040EZ, others, especially high-income folks living in high-tax states like New York and California, are suddenly scrambling to retain accountants to figure out how they might best game the new tax code to avoid higher rates. 

    Of course, one of the key opportunities for ‘gaming’ results from the new taxation rules for “pass-through” entities.  Unlike high-income earners filing as individuals who lost a substantial portion of their deductions, pass through entities, with the exception of certain professionals like doctors, lawyers and stockbrokers, are still eligible for a 20% deduction from their earnings.  To put that into perspective, a 20% deduction reduces Trump’s top marginal tax rate for pass-through entities to 29.6% from the 37% that will be paid by individual filers.

    Not surprisingly, as CBS points out, the change has pretty much everyone suddenly plotting a post-holiday discussion with their boss to see if they can be fired and promptly re-hired as an independent contractor.

    First, you convince your boss to let you quit and hire you back as a contractor after you’ve set yourself up as a sole proprietorship. Assuming you can do that and your tax treatment is better, you can offer your ex-employer the same services for less — the company does not have to worry about giving you benefits or paying its share of your Social Security and Medicare taxes. That latter part is the iffy one for you, and the numbers would have to work out. “Do you really want to go without health care and a 401(k)?” asked online financial adviser group Betterment’s tax expert, Eric Bronnenkant.

    Meanwhile, even lawyers, who are specifically excluded from the pass-through rules, could qualify by leaving their law firms and pursuing a position as an in-house counsel.

    An end run works like this: A law partner, sick of the barricade to a kinder tax rate other pass-through people enjoy, moves over to be in-house counsel at an engineering firm, which is not on the ban list. “Now she’s no longer in a specified service,” wrote Ari Glogower, a law professor at Ohio State University, on Vox.com. “Voila, she may qualify for the pass-through deduction.”

    As we pointed out earlier this week (see: Why Wall Street Is Furious At The Trump Tax Plan), for others who can’t game the pass-through system, like most of the traders earning big bucks on wall street, the best option might be to simply move from New York to a lower-taxed state like Florida or Texas.

    Still others are considering a move to lower-taxed states like Florida and Texas which, as Todd Morgan, chairman of Bel Air Investment Advisors in Los Angeles notes, sounds like a great idea right to the point that you realize that actually entails uprooting your entire family and starting a whole new life in a different part of the country…something that generally doesn’t go over well with teenage kids…”If you’re already rich why would you move to another state and live a different life just to save some money on taxes?  What are you going to do with the money? Buy more clothes? Eat more food?”

    Finally, the tax bill could even influence decisions on if/when people decide to get a divorce.  As Bloomberg points out, starting January 1, 2019 divorce suddenly becomes way more attractive for the recipients of alimony and punitive for payers as the payments will not longer be counted as income or allowed as a deduction.

    Tax considerations are even changing for those getting a divorce.

     

    Under the law, divorced taxpayers who pay alimony would no longer be able to deduct those payments from their income, and recipients of alimony would also no longer need to report the money as income. However, the provision doesn’t go into effect right away and instead applies to divorces finalized after Dec. 31, 2018. So, depending on whether you’re set to pay or receive alimony, you might want to speed up or slow down those divorce proceedings.

    …which may or may not have been a clause specifically added by Melania…

  • Israeli Military Capabilities – Scenarios For The Third Lebanon War

    Via Southfront.org,

    The Current State of Affairs

    At the present time, Israel’s top political leadership is in the state of outright hysteria regarding Lebanese Hezbollah.  Senior Israeli officials have repeatedly claimed that Israel will not allow Hezbollah and Iran to concentrate its forces in border areas and to expand their influence in the region, particularly in Syria and Lebanon.

    The already difficult situation in southern Lebanon and Syria was further complicated by the series of events, which contributed to the growing tensions in the region in November and early December. It started with a resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri announced from Saudi Arabia on November 7, continued with Saudi accusations of military aggression through missile supplies to Yemen against Iran and rose to a new level on December 6 when US President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital sparking further escalation.

    Some experts also said Israel, Saudi Arabia and the US are conspiring to start a new war in the region. In this light, “The Light of Dagan”, a major military exercise named in honour of the former Director of Foreign Intelligence Service of Israel, Mossad, Meir Dagan, was described as a part of the preparations for armed aggression against Lebanon.

    The exercise lasted eleven days, from 4 to 14 September 2017, and involved tens of thousands of troops from all branches of service.

    The exercise legend posited that terrorists attacked the village of Shavey Zion, fifteen kilometers from the Lebanese border and, together with hundreds of Hezbollah fighters from the Radwan units, carried out the invasion in the north, captured civilians and occupied the local synagogue. Their ultimate goal was to plant Hezbollah flag of the movement on Israeli soil and send a photo to Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. In response, Israel carried out the evacuation of civilians, then units of the IDF conducted a large-scale operation in southern Lebanon, which was carried out in three stages. The first stage was defensive, including a counter-attack and the deployment of additional units to counter the Hezbollah movements. The second stage consisted of launching an assault on southern Lebanon. The third phase pushed Hezbollah forces back into Lebanon. The exercises were held in southern Galilee to the south from Highway 85 Akko-Carmiel. The goal of the exercises was the full capitulation of the Hezbollah movement, “depriving them of their ability and willingness to resist”. According to the IDF command, the IDF excelled at these tasks.

    The IDF Today

    Currently the IDF in the regional scale is a formidable force with the budget of 15.9 bn USD.

    According to the yearbook Military Balance 2017, IDF numbers 176 thousand servicemembers, of which 133 thousand are in the Army, 34 thousand in the Air Force, 9.5 thousand in the Navy. In addition, there are 465 thousand troops in reserve. The border police (MAGAV) may provide 8000 troops to assist the military.

    Land forces are organized into three regional commands (North, Central, South), two armoured divisions, five territorial infantry divisions, three battalions of Special Forces, and a team of special operations forces. Overall they command a number of separate reconnaissance battalions, three tank brigades, three mechanized brigades (consisting of three mechanized battalions, a combat support battalion and a signal company), a mechanized brigade (consisting of five mechanized battalions), a separate mechanized brigade, two separate infantry battalions, an airborne brigade (composed of three airborne battalions, a combat support battalion and a signal company), and a training tank brigade. Three artillery brigades, three engineering battalions, two military police battalions, a company of sappers, a chemical protection battalion and a brigade of military intelligence provide battlefield support.

    The Navy consists of a surface ship group, a submarine group, as well as a battalion of commandos.

    The Israeli Air Force consist of two fighter squadrons, five attack squadrons, six mixed fighter-attack squadrons (plus two squadrons in reserve), an ASW squadron, a maritime patrol and support squadron (patrol and transport aircraft, tanker aircraft), two EW squadrons, an AWACS squadron, two squadrons of transport and tanker aircraft, two training squadrons, two squadrons of attack helicopters, four squadrons of transport helicopters, an air ambulance division and three squadrons of UAVs. Additionally, on December 6, Israel officially declared its fleet of nine F-35I warplanes operational.

    It is believed that Israel has nuclear weapons. The number of nuclear warheads is debatable, but its delivery vehicles include F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, the Jericho-2 ballistic medium-range missiles, and Dolphin/Tanin class diesel-electric submarines capable of carrying cruise missiles.

    There are nine orbital military and dual-purpose satellites:

    • Three Amos-type satellites.
    • One reconnaissance satellite with remote sensing of the Earth of the EROS type, located on the sun-synchronous orbit.
    • Four optical reconnaissance satellites of the Ofeq type (No. 7, 9, 10 and 11), located in the low earth orbit.
    • One radar-reconnaissance satellite of the TecSAR-1 type, located in low earth orbit.

    IDF Problems

    The IDF at the moment is a unique and astounding combination of nuclear weapons with delivery vehicles, an arsenal of equipment produced in the 1960s and of modern weapons on par with the leading world powers. This combination has its drawbacks and they do not make themselves wait for long.

    For example:

    • In September 2016, during the removal of the machine gun from a tank at the training base in Shizafon in the south of Israel several soldiers were severely injured.
    • On 5 October 2016 on the approach to the Ramon airbase in southern Israel the pilot was killed as a result of the ejection from the F-16.
    • In July 2017 during the course of an exercise, due to his own negligence Lieutenant David Golovenchick was shot dead by a soldier.
    • On 8 August 2017 an AH-64 helicopter crashed at the Ramon airbase, as a result the pilot was killed, and others sustained injuries.
    • On 9 August 2017 during IDF operations in the suburbs of Bethlehem, an Israeli soldier suffered wounds of moderate severity as a result of friendly fire.
    • At the end of August 2017 ten soldiers were lightly injured at the Shizafon base in southern Israel after a smoke grenade exploded.
    • At the beginning of September 2017 an Israeli soldier was severely injured by a grenade that exploded during military training on the base in the south of the country.

    These incidents indicate that the Israeli military has serious shortcomings in the realm of personnel proficiency and equipment maintenance.

    The Gideon Plan

    In order to give the IDF the ability to confront modern threats from various armed groups, while implementing budget cuts and minimizing the number of accidents, Israel adopted the five-year Gideon Plan in 2015.

    Main Provisions of the Plan:

    • Reduction of the number of professional soldiers and officers to 40,000.
    • Reduction of military service of male draftees from 36 to 32 months. (Reduction of military service of female soldiers from the draft is not considered so far).
    • Reduction of the age of commanders. If the average age of the regiment staff officers, including the commander of the regiment, was 35 to 37 years, now for these positions officers from the age of 32 will be appointed. The staff officers of the brigade, including the brigade commander, 40 to 42 years instead of 45 to 46 years respectively.
    • The reduction in the number of reservists to 100 thousand. The reservists who will remain in service will be trained and armed as support troops.
    • Reducing the number of artillery and light infantry brigades.
    • Eliminating two army divisions.
    • Structures such as the Education Corps, Military Rabbinate, Chief Reserve Officer, the Chief of Staff’s Advisor on Women’s Affairs, Army Radio and the Military Censor must undergo reduction and optimization. The command of the Northern District will be merged with the command of the land forces.
    • Creation of the cyber-troops. Jerusalem Post, citing a senior officer of the IDF, reported at the beginning of 2017 that it was decided to postpone establishing the cyber-troops center.
    • Bolstering of the Navy group through the procurement and construction of surface ships and a submarine.
    • Rearming the Air Force by purchasing the American F-35 and UAVs of American and local production. This includes the retirement of an air-force squadron, and the early retirement of F-16 multirole fighter aircraft.
    • Ending deferment to students in yeshivas (religious high schools) is not mentioned in this plan.

    These provisions indicate IDF’s leaders had decided to focus on transforming it from conscript army to a professional one, staffed with a large number of trained soldiers as well as young and promising officers, capable to implement and employ in practice new ideas.  The fact that the command of the Northern District will be united with the command of the land forces indicates that this area (south of Lebanon and Hezbollah) is given special attention. The new army will be armed with more modern equipment and thus will be able to withstand modern threats.

    The Israeli Missile Defence Systems vs. the Hezbollah Missile Arsenal

    Knowing that Hezbollah will not invade Israel itself, its most capable units are involved in the fighting in Syria, and Hezbollah’s armored forces are in the development stages, for the Israeli military the biggest threat is Hezbollah’s missile arsenal.

    Israel has a multi-layer missile defense network, which includes the following systems: Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow and Patriot. Furthermore, a ship-mounted version of Iron Dome [Tamir-Adir] was declared fully operational for use on a gunship off coasts on November 27. However, so far, it has been installed only on one vessel, the Sa’ar 5-class INS Lahav.

    Israeli Military Capabilities, Scenarios for the Third Lebanon War

    Click to see the full-size image

    There are 17 batteries of MIM-23 I-HAWK available for air defence but presumably due to their obsolescence they are not in active service.

    For comparison purposes, the cost of Qassam type rockets of Palestinian production according to Israeli experts is in the neighbourhood of a few hundred dollars. Rockets for the BM-21 Grad cost few thousand. The cost of production of ballistic, anti-ship and medium-range missiles is unknown, but may be assumed that they do not exceed several hundred thousand dollars.

    Of course, human life is priceless and the potential loss in this case from Grad rockets, not to mention Scud and Iranian missiles, exceeds the cost of the interceptor missile. While the Iron Dome control system will only launch missiles if incoming missiles are calculated to fall in residential areas, the cost balance is still not in Israel’s favor.

    Scenarios for the Third Lebanon War

    Over time, IDF’s military effectiveness had declined. Israel has won the 1967 fully and unconditionally. The Egyptian and Syrian armies were dealt a powerful blow, and the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula and the western shore of the river Jordan were occupied. The war of 1973 was won by Israel with heavy human and material losses; however, neither the Egyptian nor the Syrian army was completely defeated. In the 1982 war, where the IDF had numerical superiority, it had won a tactical victory but the task of reaching Beirut to link up with the right-wing Christian Phalangists was not completed. In the Second Lebanon War of 2006 due to the overwhelming numerical superiority in men and equipment the IDF managed to occupy key strong points but failed to inflict a decisive defeat on Hezbollah. The frequency of attacks in Israeli territory was not reduced; the units of the IDF became bogged down in the fighting in the settlements and suffered significant losses. There now exists considerable political pressure to reassert IDF’s lost military dominance and, despite the complexity and unpredictability of the situation we may assume the future conflict will feature two sides, IDF and Hezbollah. Based on the bellicose statements of the leadership of the Jewish state, the fighting will be initiated by Israel.

    The operation will begin with a massive evacuation of residents from the settlements in the north and center of Israel. Since Hezbollah has agents within the IDF, it will not be possible to keep secret the concentration of troops on the border and a mass evacuation of civilians. Hezbollah units will be ordered to occupy a prepared defensive position and simultaneously open fire on places were IDF units are concentrated. The civilian population of southern Lebanon will most likely be evacuated. IDF will launch massive bombing causing great damage to the social infrastructure and some damage to Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, but without destroying the carefully protected and camouflaged rocket launchers and launch sites.

    Hezbollah control and communications systems have elements of redundancy. Consequently, regardless of the use of specialized precision-guided munitions, the command posts and electronic warfare systems will not be paralyzed, maintaining communications including through the use of fibre-optic communications means. IDF discovered that the movement has such equipment during the 2006 war. Smaller units will operate independently, working with open communication channels, using the pre-defined call signs and codes.

    Israeli troops will then cross the border of Lebanon, despite the presence of the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, beginning a ground operation with the involvement of a greater number of units than in the 2006 war. The IDF troops will occupy commanding heights and begin to prepare for assaults on settlements and actions in the tunnels. The Israelis do not score a quick victory as they suffer heavy losses in built-up areas. The need to secure occupied territory with patrols and checkpoints will cause further losses.

    The fact that Israel itself started the war and caused damage to the civilian infrastructure, allows the leadership of the movement to use its missile arsenal on Israeli cities. While Israel’s missile defence systems can successfully intercept the launched missiles, there are not enough of them to blunt the bombardment. The civilian evacuation paralyzes life in the country. As soon IDF’s Iron Dome and other medium-range systems are spent on short-range Hezbollah rockets, the bombardment of Israel with medium-range missiles may commence. Hezbollah’s Iranian solid-fuel rockets do not require much time to prepare for launch and may target the entire territory of Israel, causing further losses.

    It is difficult to assess the duration of actions of this war. One thing that seems certain is that Israel shouldn’t count on its rapid conclusion, similar to last September’s exercises. Hezbollah units are stronger and more capable than during the 2006 war, despite the fact that they are fighting in Syria and suffered losses there.

    Conclusions

    The combination of large-scale exercises and bellicose rhetoric is intended to muster Israeli public support for the aggression against Hezbollah by convincing the public the victory would be swift and bloodless. Instead of restraint based on a sober assessment of relative capabilities, Israeli leaders appear to be in a state of blood lust. In contrast, the Hezbollah has thus far demonstrated restraint and diplomacy.

    Underestimating the adversary is always the first step towards a defeat. Such mistakes are paid for with soldiers’ blood and commanders’ careers.  The latest IDF exercises suggest Israeli leaders underestimate the opponent and, more importantly, consider them to be quite dumb. In reality, Hezbollah units will not cross the border. There is no need to provoke the already too nervous neighbor and to suffer losses solely to plant a flag and photograph it for their leader. For Hezbollah, it is easier and safer when the Israeli soldiers come to them. According to the IDF soldiers who served in Gaza and southern Lebanon, it is easier to operate on the plains of Gaza than the mountainous terrain of southern Lebanon. This is a problem for armoured vehicles fighting for control of heights, tunnels, and settlements, where they are exposed to anti-armor weapons.

    While the Israeli establishment is in a state of patriotic frenzy, it would be a good time for them to turn to the wisdom of their ancestors. After all, as the old Jewish proverb says: “War is a big swamp, easy to go into but hard to get out”.

    *  *  *

    If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: southfront@list.ru or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront,

  • China Admits To Fake Data (Again) – Hidden Debt & Inflated Revenues

    It's not the first time (and it won't be the last), but a recent nationwide audit found some local governments inflated revenue levels and raised debt illegally, once again crushing China's credibility on the global stage when it comes to economic performance.

    As Bloomberg reports, ten cities, counties or districts in the Yunnan, Hunan and Jilin provinces, as well as the southwestern city of Chongqing, inflated fiscal revenues by 1.55 billion yuan ($234 million), the National Audit Office said in a statement on its website dated Dec. 8.

    The inspection, which covered the third quarter, also found that five cities or counties in the Jiangxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Hunan and Hainan provinces raised about 6.43 billion yuan in debts by violating rules, such as offering commitment letters.

     

    The findings are a blow to China’s bid to rein in data fraud, which has been widespread in some of the poorer provinces where officials were incentivized to inflate the numbers as a way of advancing their careers.

     

    Concern from investors wanting to be able to trust data out of the world’s second-largest economy led to the government trying to crack down on the practice, with President Xi Jinping saying in March that data fraud “must be throttled,” according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

    While historically investors would rapidly shrug this news off and buy more stocks, with Chinese sovereign bond yields near their Maginot Line of 4.00%, losing credibility could be critical.

    A new supervisory body was set up within China’s statistics office in April to bolster and ensure data authenticity and quality.

    The country is also shifting to the latest United Nations-based statistical standard and using computers — rather than local reports — to calculate provincial gross domestic product, the chief economist said in September.

  • Social Media Platforms Need To Be Regulated! NYU Prof Sees "Dangerous Issues For Society"

    Authored by Vasant Dhar, NYU Sterm Professor, op-ed via CNBC,

    Unregulated social media platforms pose significant societal risks. That's what we found out after the 2016 election, when it became clear that social media had been used for political mass manipulation in the world's oldest democracy.

    We should not be surprised. Despite a large scale scientific study conducted by Facebook in 2012 demonstrating that users' moods could be manipulated via messages fed to them, it continued to maintain a position of "algorithmic neutrality" on content. Given what we've witnessed, this won't do going forward.

    The Facebook study of 2012 had sparked outrage and concern around the use of data for social experimentation without consent of human subjects. It was worrisome that data usage policies of virtually all digital platforms had become increasingly rapacious over the years, allowing them to do what they please with the data they collect assiduously. Facebook's social experiment wouldn't have been approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) for university research involving human subjects.

    But the outrage has resulted in little thus far. There was no regulatory body and there still isn't one that addresses unethical or harmful uses of platform data even though the implications are arguably as serious as those involving national security. The very real possibility that a party with meager resources can potentially influence a democratic election represents an incalculable "externality" imposed on us through a trust vulnerability in our social media ecosystem.

    Because trust is so important when it comes to our money, we have historically held banks and financial firms to much higher standards of compliance and control than other businesses. Financial institutions are required to follow well-defined processes with oversight and failsafe plans aimed at minimizing risk and maximizing public trust.

    The terror attacks of 2001 ushered in stringent Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations requiring such institutions know their customers in great detail. The 2008-2009 crisis resulted in further regulation aimed at mitigating economic instability and curbing the use of funds for financing terrorism and other illicit activity.

    In contrast, the news industry is expected to largely regulate itself. We pride ourselves on our freedom of the press, and the freedom of expression. Indeed, one of the wonders of the Internet era is the empowerment of individuals as publishers on digital platforms.

    However, unlike news organizations whose reputations ultimately depend on careful verification, we have allowed digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter to function without much regard to the risks of propaganda and bias they create. They are now promising us they will do better in the future by employing more people for fact checking. Would we have trusted the bankers with such a promise after the financial crisis and left them alone to regulate themselves?

    An important lesson learned from the rise of digital platforms is that they disrupt industries by blurring the boundaries between them. Which industry does Amazon belong to? What about Google? Facebook? Apple? The answers are increasingly vague. And yet regulation continues to be siloed largely by industry, like finance, retail, and telecommunication despite their increasing irrelevance in classifying some of our largest and most powerful businesses.

    KYC is critical to finance because every industry uses financial services. Since digital platforms are becoming similarly ubiquitous to virtually every industry, KYC requirements should be considered for them, similar to those for financial institutions.

    Advertisements on mass media are plain for everyone to see, and political ads require disclosing who paid for them. Yet in the narrowcasting world of digital targeting it is possible for parties to target individuals with customized hate speech ads completely under the radar without the public or regulators ever noticing, or even without the platform designers being aware of their algorithms being used in ways they had never envisioned or intended!

    Requiring KYC requirements on digital platforms is not new. Airbnb already does an automated KYC in real time through verification of government issued IDs. Social media platforms could be required to do something similar but with the added restriction of requiring foreign publishers to obtain legitimate U.S. issued IDs to advertise in the U.S. This would pre-empt the use of legitimate identities issued by governments who may be sponsors of illicit activity or harmful propaganda.

    Secondly, we need better guidelines around the ethical use of data, especially around profiling and social manipulation. Business should follow IRB policies around the use of human subjects for social experimentation similar to university researchers, regardless of their stated data usage policies which most individuals don't even read let alone understand.

    For too long, regulators have turned a blind eye to the use of data, emboldening digital platforms to do as they please with no oversight. We need something more proactive approach, where social platforms disclose broadly their data mining goals and policies and demonstrate that they are not violating the implicit intentions of users who entrusted them with their data. These points are not intended to be critical of Facebook and Twitter, but a warning that social media platforms in general pose risks that need to be considered seriously by regulators in free societies.

    There are no easy answers, but turning a blind eye to this new Internet phenomenon will continue to expose us to considerable peril in the future. The U.S. government and our regulators need to understand how digital platforms can be weaponized and misused against its citizens, and equally importantly, against democracy itself.

    *  *  *

    Scared yet… you should be… you'll be begging for governemnt to regulate the freedom of speech out of social media soon enough… because it's for your own security… or democracy itself is at stake – right? </sarc..>

  • US Marine Corps General Warns "I Hope I'm Wrong, But There's A War Coming"

    Pointing towards the near future possibility of Russia and the Pacific theater being the next major areas of conflict, a US Marine Corps commandant warned troops station in Norway to be prepared for a coming war.

    As Military.com reports, the stated goals of the Marine Corps' newest rotational force in Norway are to enhance partnerships with European allies and improve the service's ability to fight in cold weather.

    But on a brief visit to the 300-member unit ahead of Christmas, the commandant and the sergeant major of the Marine Corps both described the strategic role the small unit fills — and the fact that a peacetime mission can be preface to combat if circumstances change.

    “I hope I’m wrong, but there’s a war coming,” Gen. Robert Neller told them.

     

    “You’re in a fight here, an informational fight, a political fight, by your presence.”

    Fox News writes that Neller pointed to the near future possibility of Russia and the Pacific theater being the next major areas of conflict.

    Sgt. Maj. Ronald Green sounded a similar tone.

    "Just remember why you're here," Green said.

     

    "They're watching. Just like you watch them, they watch you. We've got 300 Marines up here; we could go from 300 to 3,000 overnight. We could raise the bar."

    The warnings came a day before Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., that "storm clouds are gathering" over the Korean Peninsula.

    At a Q&A session with the troops in the Norwegian Home Guard base near Trondheim, Neller said that the U.S. could shift its focus from the Middle East to Eastern Europe, citing Russia’s conflicts with Ukraine and Georgia as justification.

    He told the Marines that they should be prepared for a “big-ass fight” on the horizon.

  • From Camo To 'Lucky Charms' – Tucker Carlson's Hilarious List Of 100 "Racist" Things

    Authored by Amber Athey via The Daily Caller,

    Fox News’ Tucker Carlson tweeted out Friday a hilarious list of 100 things people have deemed “racist” this year, and some of the entries are just unbelievable.

    The Daily Caller founder geared up for the list by telling his followers that “we live in revolutionary times” and that some “wild things” happened in the past year.

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

    Carlson gave each “racist” item its own separate tweet, and while the list is worth reading in its entirety, we’ve compiled some of the best ones for you here.

    googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1422917324169-2’); });

    #1: Trees

    A group of trees in Palm Springs, California, was considered racist because the trees separated an upscale golf course from a historically black neighborhood. City officials promised to kill the trees, ridding Palm Springs of a longtime symbol of oppression.

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

    #8. Disney movies

    googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1422917324169-1’); });

    Kat George, a writer for Vh1’s website, insisted in 2017 that some of your favorite Disney movies are racist. The Little Mermaid was listed as an offender because Sebastian, Ariel’s crab sidekick, spoke in an exaggerated Jamaican accent.

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

    #13. Milk

    Milk apparently became a symbol of the alt-right and neo-Nazis this year because racial minorities may be more likely to suffer from lactose intolerance. Even worse, the USDA’s dietary guidelines further such oppression by advertising dairy as an essential part of a healthy diet.

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

    #18. Science

    Students in South Africa declared that science is racist because it cannot explain “black magic” — no, really.

    “I have a question for all the science people. There is a place in KZN called Umhlab’uyalingana, and they believe that through the magic, the black magic–you call it black magic, they call it witchcraft–you are able to send lightening to strike someone,” one student explained. “Can you explain that scientifically? Because it’s something that happens.”

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

    #29. Military Camouflage

    Don’t use face paint while sneaking through the jungle, or you might be accused of racism! The British Army was accused of donning “blackface” after they posted a picture of a soldier wearing dark face paint and holding a rifle.

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

    #41. Lucky Charms

    A diversity officer at Miami University was actually open to the idea of banning Lucky Charms because some undercover students claimed the cereal was racist against Irish Americans. Yikes.

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

    #49. Expecting people to show up on time

    In this case, timeliness is NOT next to godliness. Expecting students to show up on time to class might be insensitive to “cultural differences,” Clemson University said in a diversity training program.

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

    #64. Babies

    Looks like that diversity training might have to start sooner than expected. According to a study by the University of Toronto, babies show preferences to adults of their own race.

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

    You can follow the full thread on Tucker’s Twitter account HERE.

  • American Life-Expectancy Falls For Second Straight Year As Drug Overdoses Soar

    The twin scourges of opioid addiction and worsening wealth inequality are literally draining the lifeblood from the American public. Case in point: The Centers for Disease Control confirmed earlier today that the average life expectancy at birth declined in 2016 for the second consecutive year – the first multiyear decline since 1963, when a flu epidemic led to a rash of deaths as hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans succumbed to the virus.

    The increase has been fueled by a 21% rise in drug overdose deaths, according to the Washington Post.

    Let that sink in for a second: In 1963, penicillin was a relatively recent innovation. We live in an age of unprecedented medicinal efficacy. Despite this, Americans are sicker than ever before.

    And as if that weren’t enough, they’re also spending more on health-care than ever before. Data from the NHE shows the US spent a staggering $3.3 trillion on healthcare in 2016, equivalent to roughly 18% of GDP.

    “I think we should take it very seriously,” said Bob Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, told the Washington Post. “If you look at the other developed countries in the world, they’re not seeing this kind of thing. Life expectancy is going up."

    As we’ve highlighted time and time again, more than 42,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses alone in 2016 – a 28% increase over 2015. When deaths from drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines are included, the overall increase was 21%.

    A multiyear decline in life expectancy is more commonly associated with AIDS epidemics in southern and eastern Africa or wars in Syria and Afghanistan, said Majid Ezzati, a professor of public health at Imperial College London who has studied life expectancy.

    “The story does come down to young people,” he said. “It’s the overdose story, to a large extent."

    Last year – when the CDC data showed the first annualized drop in life expectancy since the early 1990s – public health observers declared that this could be the beginning of a seriously troubling trend that could have far reaching repercussions for the US economy. Experts, including Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, examined the impact of so-called “diseases of despair” – drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism – as well as small increases in deaths from heart disease, strokes and diabetes as the Baby Boom generation ages into retirement.

    Furthermore, the 2016 data shows that just three major causes of death are responsible: unintentional injuries, Alzheimer’s disease and suicides, with the bulk of the difference attributable to the 63,632 people who died of overdoses. That total was an increase of more than 11,000 over the 52,404 who died of the same cause in 2015. This trend was largely driven by deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which more than doubled from the previous year. Heroin and prescription opioid overdose deaths also rose, but more modestly.

    At the same time, a long decline in deaths from heart disease continued a six-year trend of leveling out, Anderson said. The small decrease last year in the rate of the nation’s leading cause of death no longer canceled the drug epidemic’s impact on life expectancy, Anderson said.

    “The key factor is the increase in drug overdose deaths,” he said.

    Overall, life expectancy dropped by a tenth of a year, from 78.7 to 78.6. It fell two-tenths of a year for men, who have much higher overdose death rates, from 76.3 to 76.1 years. Women’s life expectancy held steady at 81.1 years.

    While drug mortality has been increasing among all age groups since 1999, it’s highest among those ages 25 to 54. Their fatal overdose rate for all drugs was roughly 35 cases per 100,000 individuals in 2016, compared with 12 deaths per 100,000 for people under 24 and six deaths per 100,000 among seniors 65 and older.

    Examining this data through the lens of gender reveals another startling detail: The bulk of this increase is driven by a spike in overdose deaths among men.

    As WaPo points out, men of all ages (26 deaths per 100,000) are twice as likely to die of a drug overdose as women (13 per 100,000). At the state level, West Virginia stands alone as the epicenter of overdose mortality, with 52 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2016. The next two states, New Hampshire and Ohio, each saw 39 deaths per 100,000 last year.

    “This is no longer an opioid crisis,” said Patrick Kennedy, a former Rhode Island congressman who was a member of President Trump’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. “This is a moral crisis . . . we know how to answer this problem, but we can’t get around our own prejudices."

    During the campaign, President Trump promised to do everything in his power to combat the opioid epidemic. But so far, his actions have fallen far short of the recommendations from a committee that he created in March to study options to suppress the crisis. Most notably, Trump ignored a recommendation from the committee to declare the opioid crisis a national emergency – a designation that would’ve allowed the hardest-hit states to access federal disaster-relief funds. Instead Trump declared it a national health crisis, leaving states empty-handed.

    Another factor that shows just how damaging opioids have been to the American public: last year, rates of heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, strokes, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease fell, as did the nation’s overall death rate. But this wasn’t enough to offset the impact of opioids.

    Increasing incidences of Alzheimer’s disease have also contributed to this trend.

    “As people avoid [cancer and heart disease], they’re going to survive long enough to die of Alzheimer’s,” he said.

    And while only limited provisional data is available for 2017, things don’t look any better.

    “My guess is that when all of the data are in that the [2017] trend line will be at least as steep as for 2016, if not steeper,” Anderson said.

    And in case you wondered what all this has to do with me… apart from it's "your" life expectancy, well this is what happened to the only thing that really matters to everyone… The Dow… the last time that US life expectancy dropped for two straight years…

Digest powered by RSS Digest