Jul 26

Today’s News 26th July 2018

  • Russia Unveils 20-Ton Sixth Generation Drone Fighter

    Russian defense industry sources have recently unveiled a massive, 20-ton stealth drone fighter to be flight-tested later this year — will be the prototype for their sixth-generation jet, according to TASS, a Russian state-owned media outlet.

    According to the defense official, the sixth generation jet program “has not yet taken full shape, its main features are already known.”

    “First of all, it should be unmanned and capable of performing any combat task in an autonomous regime. In this sense, the stealth drone will become the prototype of the sixth generation fighter jet,’ the source said, adding that the drone will be able to “take off, fulfill its objectives and return to the airfield.”

    “However, it will not receive the function of decision-making regarding the use of weapons – this will be decided by a human,” he said.

    TASS notes, in the report, that they were not able to officially confirm the information provided by the defense official.

    Another defense expert told TASS that the single-engine Okhotnik (“Hunter” in Russian) stealth drone has a top speed of roughly 621 mph (.809 Mach), and would start flight tests in the second half of this year.

    “The Russian Defense Ministry and the Sukhoi Company signed a contract for developing the 20-ton Okhotnik (Hunter) heavy unmanned strike aircraft in 2011. The drone’s mock-up model was made in 2014. According to unconfirmed reports, composite materials and anti-radar coating were used to create the Okhotnik. The drone is equipped with a reaction-jet propulsion and is supposed to develop a speed of 1000 kilometers per hour,” said TASS.

    Earlier this month, Popular Mechanics published a picture of the Okhotnik, which was posted on a Russian aviation forum called paralay.iboards.ru.

    On Tuesday, Defense One published another alleged picture of the Okhotnik aircraft.

    Here is another photo of the stealth drone circulating defense forums.

    Sam Bendett, a researcher at the CNA Corporation and a member of CNA’s Center for Autonomy and AI, told Defense One, “Sounds like Russia wants everything to be included into the new design at once. In reality, they will probably have to compromise, selecting more realistic qualifications for the new aircraft. Most importantly, this will be an expensive endeavor, further pushing Russian designers and the Ministry of Defense to be more selective in approving the final aircraft specs. However, some qualifications, like optional manning, autonomy and some form of artificial intelligence will probably be included.”

    Bottom line, said Bendett: “Ohotnik is barely flying yet and some time will pass before it becomes an operational variant. Nonetheless, this unmanned aerial vehicle and Russia’s future combat aircraft plans offer a glimpse into Moscow’s thoughts on future warfare.”

    Defense One notes that Russia’s new stealth jet could include radio-photon radar, anti-radar skin, directed energy and electromagnetic weapons, and have the ability to store missiles and precision-guided bombs internally.

    While Russia appears to be building a sixth-generation aircraft, the Sukhoi Su-57, a twin-engine multirole fifth-generation jet fighter, has recently tested some sixth-generation systems, including the radio-photonic radar.

    At this point, you are starting to develop the critical knowledge of how the next round of hybrid wars, expected to start in the mid-2020s will be fought.

    * * *

    As shown in the 53.5 Year War Cycle, there is an increasing probability that from now until the mid-2020s, domestic and international unrest remains elevated.

  • They Knew Too Much

    Via Oriental Review,

    The countries of the West used Israel to evacuate members of the White Helmets from southern Syria.  They couldn’t be allowed to fall into the hands of the Syrian government  – at least, not while they are still alive.

    Essential human-rights defenders

    Damascus is almost finished liberating southwestern Syria. The military’s Operation Basalt was extremely successful, allowing them to regain control of the occupied provinces of Quneitra and Daraa(at present the Syrian army has only a small chunk of land left to liberate from the jihadists).  Many of the local gangs simply surrendered. Those militants who wanted to remain underwent a procedure of reconciliation with the authorities, while the others were put onto green buses and sent to Idlib.

    However, those militants included some very valuable specimens — members of the “Syrian civil defense”, or, as they are more simply known, “the ​​White Helmets.”

    If they were taken prisoner, that would be a serious problem for the US and its allies, since the members of that organization might have a lot to say once they were in front of the cameras. And the damage caused by their statements would be far worse than the fallout over the admissions made by Hassan Diab — the boy the “helmets” named as a victim of a chemical attack in Douma, who admitted that the attack had been staged for the photographers. And it would be so much worse, simply because the White Helmets — or at least their leaders — knew so much more.

    This is not Aleppo, Syria, but rather the streets of Europe where a “save Aleppo” protest was staged. Actors posing in fake dust and blood proved just how easy it is for anyone to create “war victims” anytime, anywhere.

    The White Helmets have been the West’s most important weapon on the propaganda front of the Syrian war. They have acted as the local human-rights activists who have been snapping photos and shooting videos about the “chemical attacks” that that “bloody tyrant” has carried out against his own people. And based on precisely these facts, the US and its partners imposed sanctions against Damascus and have carried out acts of revenge in the form of attacks that would have been nothing less than carpet bombing, had Moscow not been careful to issue stern warnings about the consequences of these attacks.

    They’ve gotten out of hand

    The Syrian authorities, as well as Moscow, Tehran, and anyone else who gives it a minute’s thought, have naturally cautioned that this data is unreliable and that the White Helmets are, in fact, a PR service for terrorists, whose members chop off their captives’ heads once they take off those helmets, just as their un-helmeted counterparts do. And in order to rein in any growing doubts, the West began to create an image for the White Helmets as heroes without fear and above reproach — as fighters for human rights, who rescue ordinary Syrians from the rubble that was created when Assad’s troops bombed peaceful villages.

    According to the official legend, the White Helmets have saved a total of 80,000 lives since 2012 -and some of them right in front of the cameras, after which the “seriously wounded” then stood up and ran somewhere else so they could be heroically saved again. A movie about them even won an Oscar. This means that no decent, upright person (including experts from the OPCW) should harbor any doubts that those pictures — taken from mobile phones somewhere or other, filming something or other — delivered to them by the White Helmets are anything other than real evidence of chemical attacks by Assad.

    Over time, relations between Americans and the Helmets have deteriorated — in part because the new White House administration understood the futility of the Syrian front in the battle against Iran and did not want to get entangled in it. Fulfilling the orders of those who were, in contrast, interested in sucking the US further in, the Helmets staged more and more fake stories, trying to drag Trump into the war, which was the only chance the anti-Assad resistance had for victory. It was no surprise that the United States first stopped funding the organization, and then, when the progressive-minded public was outraged by this infringement of the rights of the heroes of the fight against that bloody tyrant, Washington agreed to allocate several million dollars anyway, so that the “heroes” could keep working until the end of the year. However, Washington was not ready to leave them in the lurch — those people know too much, and must not end up in Bashar al-Assad’s hands.

    Let’s kill guys

    In fact, a few other options did exist. For example, they could order a few killings and then claim those snipers had been employed by that “bloody tyrant,” who had apparently decided to take revenge on the Syrian heroes for exposing his crimes. That would be both cheaper and safer. But there were two problems with that. First of all, there were hundreds of people involved. Someone might dodge a bullet and scamper off to Assad. Second, pulling that tool out of their kit would damage their reputation – other potential tools in other conflicts would simply be too afraid to work with them in the future. To paraphrase Roosevelt, “They might be bastards, but they’re our bastards.”

    Members of the Syrian White Helmets and their families are evacuated out of southern Syria by Israel, in an exceptional humanitarian operation overnight on July 22, 2018

    And this is exactly why the West decided to pull the White Helmets out of southwestern Syria anyway. And they had to be pulled out as quickly as possible — the Syrians had taken control of the Jordanian border, and the “PR reps” were trapped on a small strip of land along the Golan Heights. And according to Benjamin Netanyahu, it was faced with this situation that US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked him to arrange the evacuation of the White Helmets and their family members, since “the people who saved lives were now under life-threatening danger.”  The Israelis first brought them into their own country, before turning them over to the Jordanians.

    A total of 422 people (the White Helmets and the members of their families) were pulled out, according to official figures.  Now they are being held in a secret shelter inside Jordan, and in three months they will be resettled in Britain, Canada, and Germany. Far from the cameras. And since the data on their subsequent whereabouts will be strictly classified, no one will be able to stop the West from quietly killing off the most important and most dangerous of them. Just to be on the safe side.

  • US Army Secretary: Army Building Next-Gen Weapons To Counter Russia And China

    The US Army has begun to develop and field next-generation weapon systems – like autonomous killer robots, fifth-generation fighters, hypersonic technologies, laser cannons, rail guns, new squad automatic rifles, and quantum computers – in order to contend with its top rivals [Russia and China] on the modern battlefield across multiple domains—space, cyberspace, air, land, maritime, before the next round of hybrid wars break out around 2025 to 2040 timeframe.

    During the Aspen Security Forum, which took place from July 18 to 21, Army Secretary Mark Esper spoke about the new Austin-based “Futures Command” as “the biggest organizational change since 1973” when the Army established Force Command and Training and Doctrine Command to counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

    Almost half a century later, the purpose of adding a new command [Futures Command] is to maintain America’s empire of 800 military bases around the globe, along with countering new economic systems [Belt and Road Initiative and Maritime Silk Road] that Russia and China are attempting to bring online.

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    “It is important to note that the National Defense Strategy released earlier this year tells us that we need to be prepared for a high-intensity conflict and that we should consider strategic competitors such as China and Russia as those against us”, said Esper, emphasizing that the military is “ready for any kind of threat today”.

    “In the meantime, as we implement our vision, we want to make sure that in a number of areas we can ensure that we are superior in different areas to ensure that we are able to deal with Russia, and eventually with China over this longer period,” he added.

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    Since the September 11 attacks, the Army has concentrated on fighting insurgents across the Middle East. To pay for the warfighting, military planners cut funding for next-generation weapon programs to fund the trillions of dollars needed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    But with the Pentagon withdrawing forces from Afghanistan, the Army is pivoting back to another Cold-War style era against Russia, and now China.

    Esper said the Army plans on replacing weapons that have been in service since the 1980s, with replacements sought for aircraft, tanks, Paladin artillery systems, and M4 carbine/ M249 light machine guns.

    Esper told the audience to expect next-generation weapons deployed in the near term, including semi-autonomous robots that can scout the battlefield for soldiers, killing enemies without risking American lives.

    “As we think about future challenges and future threats we see an immediate near-term, what’s right in front of us, of course, is North Korea, over the five to 15-year period, we see Russia as our pacing threat, if you will, so we look to them in terms of their formations, their tactics, their equipment, those things that they would bring to bear against us, but the long-term threat is clearly China,” Esper said.

    “This is the strategic competitor we aim for, because the country’s economic power, size, ambitions, all these things are our focus, and why the National Defense Strategy calls us to focus on the People’s Republic as a longer-term, bigger threat,” he added.

    To counteract this, Esper said the Army is accelerating the development and acquisition of new emerging technologies. With Futures Command, he said the Army’s modernization efforts have been centralized and focuses on priorities such as long-range hypersonic missiles, laser weapon systems, robots, artificial intelligence, and new light machine guns.

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    Esper also talks about multi-domain warfare, which he describes as air, land, sea, cyber, outer space, and across the electronic warfare spectrum. He said the Army needs to have “capabilities” across all those domains for future battle.

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    Esper concluded and said it is a race America cannot afford to lose.

    “Whoever gets there first will have unmatched lethality on the battlefield for years to come,” Esper said.

    Considering Russia and China are, in fact, years ahead of the US hypersonic program, one can only hope that this time around – America is not the loser. 

  • Escobar: "Tweet Of Mass Destruction" Ratchets Up Tension On Iran

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    The Trump administration’s ultimate goal is regime change in Tehran, but was this just a distraction from the ‘treason’ in Helsinki as US Mid-Term elections loom? Or did he just want to destabilize the Eurasian giants and their New Silk Roads?

    President Trump’s late-night, all-caps Tweet of Mass Destruction threatening Iran is bound to be enshrined in the Art of Diplomacy annals.

    But let’s go back to how this all started. After unilaterally pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, the Trump administration has issued what amounts to a declaration of economic war on Iran and will go no holds barred to squeeze the Islamic Republic out of the global oil market – complete with threatening allies in Europe with secondary sanctions, unless they cut all imports of Iranian oil by November 4.

    This past weekend, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said he would support blocking all Middle East oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz if Iran’s European trade partners succumb to pressure from Washington and stop buying Iranian oil altogether.

    Then President Hassan Rouhani followed Khamenei and warned the US about “playing with the lion’s tail.”

    Rouhani, as his record attests, has always behaved as the epitome of cool diplomacy. Contrary to predictable US media spin, he never “threatened” to attack the US. His premise was that Tehran was pleased to offer Washington the “mother of all peace.” But if Trump instead decided to attack Iran, then (italics mine) that would open the way to the Mother of all Wars.

    Ultimate goal: Regime change

    The fact remains that the Trump administration ditched a UN-sponsored multilateral treaty and has now launched serious covert ops with the ultimate goal of regime change in Iran.

    Trump’s explosion of rage, coupled with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s touting of the interests of “the long-ignored voice of the Iranian people” has been met with derision and scorn all across Iran.

    Geopolitically, Russia-Iran relations remain extremely solid, as shown by the recent meeting between President Putin and Khamenei’s top foreign policy adviser Ali Akbar Velayati. As Professor Mohammad Marandi at the University of Tehran told me: “The Putin-Velayati meeting went very well. Velayati plans to go to Beijing in a few weeks. People in Iran hate Trump, and all political parties and factions have become much more united. Rouhani’s speech was widely watched and very well received.”

    Khamenei and Rouhani are on the same page – and that’s very significant in itself. They now agree any negotiation with Washington is futile. Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif provided the coup de grace, tweeting that Iran had lasted millennia and had seen many empires fall. He wrapped up with an all-caps Trumpism: “BE CAUTIOUS!”

    The whole soap opera is ridden with pathetic overtones as US “experts” posing as extras digress that there are only two outcomes left for Iran: capitulation or implosion of the “regime”.

    Anyone claiming Tehran will capitulate shows an utter ignorance of the overall mood of defiance and scorn among the Iranian people, even as they are faced with massive economic hardship. And anyone stating there will be regime change in Tehran basically parrots a US “policy” that is just wishful thinking.

    The US neo-conservatives that brought the world the failed, multi-trillion-dollar Iraq war should have been buried not six feet, but six miles under. Yet, like the Walking Dead, they will never give up.

    But, in the Middle East, at the moment there are three characters who are singin’ and dancin’ like everything is going according to plan: Saudi Arabia’s Mohamed Bin Salman (MBS), his mentor, the United Arab Emirates’ Mohamed bin Zayed, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Surely they are not heeding the expert advice of former Mossad head Meir Dagan, who stated that a military attack on Iran was “the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”

    Deliberate distraction?

    It’s always possible that Trump’s all-caps spectacular may be a ruse to distract Americans from the Helsinki “treason” scandal. That gets traction when associated to the looming mid-term elections and Trump’s absolute need to sound tough and keep the Republicans in line. Call it a brilliant Trump strategic maneuver. Or was it Putin’s?

    Back to reality, the stark options would come down to either Iran becoming a US satellite or closing the Strait of Hormuz – something that for all practical purposes would collapse the global economy.

    I have been assured that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has the technological means to block the Strait and would not flinch to go for it rather than yield, if the going gets tough. President Rouhani cannot resist the IRGC. The Trump administration has, in fact, forced Rouhani to show his cards. All branches of the Iranian government are now united.

    War hysteria, already on, is extremely irresponsible. In the worst Strait of Hormuz scenario, the US Navy would be impotent, as Russian-made SS-N-22 Sunburn missiles could wreak havoc. Washington could only bomb from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar or Incirlik in Turkey. Neither Qatar nor Turkey is inclined to antagonize Iran.

    The Pentagon would have to bomb coastal missile sites on Iran’s Persian Gulf shoreline. But these are heavily camouflaged; missiles are portable, and there’s no reliable on the ground intel. Iran only needs to fire one missile at a time. No oil tanker would possibly try to get through.

    Things don’t even need to degrade towards a shooting war. All Tehran needs to do is to make the threat credible. Insurance companies would stop insuring oil carriers. No oil carrier will navigate without insurance.

    Breaking Russia-China-Iran

    The geopolitical game is even more complex. Velayati was in Moscow only a few days before Helsinki. Diplomatic sources say Iran and Russia are in synch – and closely coordinating policy. If the current strategy of tension persists, it raises the price of oil, which is good for both Russia and Iran.

    And then there’s China. A tsunami of sanctions or not, Beijing is more likely to increase oil imports from Iran. “Experts” who claim that Iran is becoming a pawn of Russia and China are hopelessly myopic. Russia, China and Iran are already firmly aligned.

    Short of war, the Trump administration’s top priority is disruption of the New Silk Roads – the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – between China and Europe. And the key economic connectivity corridor goes across Iran.

    The fundamental “enemy” is China. But to make any divide-and-rule plan work, first, there’s got to be an attempt to lure Russia into some sort of entente cordiale. And in parallel, Persian destabilization is a must. After all, that’s what the Cheney regime used to describe as “the great prize”.

  • Radioactive Cesium-137 From Fukushima Found In California Wine

    Following the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan – which left Japanese residents contending with toxic water and radioactive wild boars, World Health Organization (WHO) officials said that particles of radioactive fallout which made its way to the Western United States and elsewhere was no biggie and didn’t pose a health risk.

    California wine lovers will get to test that theory, after researchers at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) discovered cesium-137 in several golden-state vintages. The researchers tested 18 bottles of California rosé and cabernet sauvignon from 2009 onward – finding increased levels of the radioactive isotope in bottles produced after the Fukushima disaster. The cabernets had double the radiation of the other wine, according to the study. 

    “We can measure some radioactive level that is much higher than the usual level,” said Michael Pravikoff, a physicist at a French research center who worked on the study.

    The French research team has in recent years examined wines from around the world, trying to correlate the level of radioactive material with the date the wine grapes were picked.

    Wines made around major nuclear events, including American and Soviet nuclear tests during the Cold War and the Chernobyl accident, should show higher levels of radioactive isotopes, called cesium-137, according to the researchers. The man-made isotope cannot be found in nature and would be present only at certain levels after the nuclear events. –NYT

    While ingesting cesium-137 elevates one’s risk of cancer, the radioactive particles found in California wine “are not seen as a health hazard” according to Pravikoff, who said: “These levels are so low, way below the natural radioactivity that’s everywhere in the world.” 

    The California Department of Public Health said Friday that it had not previously heard of the study, but that there were no “health and safety concerns to California residents.”

    “This report does not change that,” a department spokesman, Corey Egel, said in an emailed statement.

    Mr. Pravikoff said the California bottles had radioactive levels so low that the researchers had to use a special technique to measure them: burning the wine to ashes.

    In other cases, where radiation is higher, the team’s equipment can measure the radiation through the glass of the wine bottle, so the bottle does not have to be opened. –NYT

    In 2016, AP reported that “Radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster detected on Oregon shores,” however officials claimed that the samples from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach were “at extremely low levels not harmful to humans.” 

    That said, as Whitney Webb of TrueActivist noted at the time, Even if we can’t see the radiation itself, some parts of North America’s western coast have been feeling the effects for years. Not long after Fukushima, fish in Canada began bleeding from their gills, mouths, and eyeballs. This “disease” has been ignored by the government and has decimated native fish populations, including the North Pacific herring. Elsewhere in Western Canada, independent scientists have measured a 300% increase in the level of radiation. According to them, the amount of radiation in the Pacific Ocean is increasing every year. Why is this being ignored by the mainstream media? It might have something to do with the fact that the US and Canadian governments have banned their citizens from talking about Fukushima so “people don’t panic.”

    Also in 2016, Japanese officials admitted there was a cover-up, and there was a concerted effort to downplay the significance of the reactor meltdowns. 

    Multiple reactors at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant menlted down after 50-foot a tsunami wave crashed through barriers and knocked out the reactors’ backup generators. The disaster spewed radioactive fallout into the air and water – sickening the crew of the nearby USS Ronald Reagan as they provided support.

    And while the sailors were undoubtedly exposed to concentrated doses of radioactive isotopes that are nowhere near the levels which have been found along the West Coast – and now in California wine, it is premature – and perhaps highly irresponsible, for officials to claim that such small doses will have no effect, as radiation exposure is cumulative and the Fukushima disaster was an unprecedented event due to its massive release of radioactivity into the Pacific Ocean. 

  • The Greedy Little Nation That Sold Its Soul For House Prices

    Via MacroBusiness.com.au,

    There was a time when Australia’s housing bubble was not much more than a curiosity. Contained mostly to Sydney it seemed it would pass with a little pop and be forgotten.

    Then there was a time when the bubble went national. And suddenly the little pop was going to be a big pop so monetary and fiscal policy began to distort in support of it.

    Next there was a time when moral hazard became so great that the bubble grew to engulf all policy and media, marginalising an entire generation from home ownership. Politicians routinely lied to cover the collapse in evidence based policy-making.

    Finally, we come to today. When notions of managing the macro-economic levers of an economy now boil down to just one thing:

    • low interest rates to prevent the housing bubble bursting;

    • fiscal repair to prevent the bubble bursting, and

    • mass immigration to prevent the bubble bursting even though it is crushing living standards and gutting wages.

    This classic slippery slope upon which one bad policy choice cannoned directly into the next is not over.

    Three ridiculous further steps are being mulled that will ensure the complete selling of the nation’s soul in a vain attempt to save house prices.

    The first is captured by Anthony Bubalo of the Lowy Institute:

    Not long ago I listened to four Australians of Chinese heritage speak at the Lowy Institute about the impact on their communities of the foreign interference question. Some of the issues they raised were similar to those articulated by Muslim Australians when they talked about the effect of terrorism on their relationship with broader society.

    …The government is certainly seized of this challenge. New legislation has been passed and a new position, the National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator, has been created in the Department of Home Affairs, similar to the longer-standing position of Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator.

    But alongside these measures the government will also need to protect the bonds in our society that allow people and communities to cooperate and trust each other despite cultural, ethnic, religious, or ideological differences.

    …Some lessons are obvious, such as the importance of precise language. In the same way that it is vital to distinguish between the ideas of Islamist extremists and those of the Islamic mainstream, we must avoid using the the word “Chinese” in relation to foreign interference to ensure we are not conflating the CCP with Chinese Australians.

    Feel good drivel aside, the only response that will work to prevent the spread of influence within said community from corrupting the wider democracy is to cap its numbers. There is no need at all for discrimination. That is anathema in a modern multicultural nation. We should simply slash the permanent migrant intake in total. Problem solved.

    Literally, the only thing standing in the way? House prices.

    The second slippery slope we find ourselves on is the responses being mulled to collapsed wages. This time from Peter Hartcher:

    There is a case to update and improve the current enterprise bargaining system, but it needs to done intelligently. Inflexible new industry standards could be disastrous.

    The McManus ACTU also demands the scrapping of the current practice of secret worker ballots before a union can call a legal strike, and banning outright any enterprise agreements that are agreed without a union.

    So Aldi supermarkets, for example, a generous employer that offers pay and conditions above and beyond the rest of the industry, resists any union involvement in its workplace negotiations. On the McManus agenda, Aldi would be obliged to deal with the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Union. This union commonly negotiates lower pay for workers so long as the employer eases the way for its workers to join the union.

    How can the ACTU endorse these policies while at the same time being in favour of the very mass immigration program that has destroyed industrial relations standards? Easy, house prices. The CFMMMEU now runs the ACTU and it wants more building for its members. In classic building site style, everyone else can fuck off.

    Finally, we have the Coalition musing on a new immigration management brain fart, migrant tag and release in the bush:

    A new population policy that could produce sweeping changes to keep new migrants in regional Australia and improve the co-­ordination of infrastructure development to take account of growth trends is being developed by the Turnbull government.

    The policy, slated to be released later this year, comes amid increasing backbench pressure for a firmer and more clearly articulated immigration policy, with MPs citing concerns in key Sydney and Melbourne electorates about the impact of population growth on quality of life.

    Totally unmanageable without migrant proof fences and satellite tracking bracelets. But house prices need support so let’s abolish freedom too.

    It’s all so bizarre. All we need to do is cut immigration and let house prices fall. There’ll be a period of adjustment while wages and the currency correct but it won’t be too bad. We’ll still be on the doorstep of Asia. The students and tourists will still come, in greater numbers than ever as we get cheaper, but they’ll also go home not pressuring living standards. Broader tradables (40% of the economy) will boom. Commodity income will surge, lifting the Budget. Our maginalised youth will have much greater opportunities to advance their global opportunities as Dutch Disease ends. Incomes will ultimately be much more sustainable.

    Then we can all move on with a much healthier economy, polity, society and strategic outlook.

    The alternative is to sell our freedom to China, our standards of living to a few rich developers, our politics to carpet baggers and our society to fractious class wars. Just for higher house prices.

    If a more ignominious fate awaited any nation in history then I’m not aware of it.

  • Twitter Responds To Conservative Outrage As VICE Confirms "Shadow Ban" Reports

    A Wednesday article in VICE confirmed a report from last week by the Daily Wire‘s Ryan Saavedra which revealed that Twitter has been “shadow banning” conservative users by limiting the number of people who are able to view content from the affected users. 

    While last week’s discussion focused on a site-wide “Quality Filter Discrimination” shadow ban, which prevents anyone not already following a user from viewing their posts, Vice notes that many conservative accounts aren’t able to be found when typing names into the Twitter search engine. 

    The Republican Party’s chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican Congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter, VICE News has learned. It’s a shift that diminishes their reach on the platform — and the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility. The profiles continue to appear when conducting a full search — but not in the more convenient and visible drop-down bar. (The accounts appear to also populate if you already follow the person.)

    Vice found the same wasn’t true for Democrats: 

    Democrats are not being “shadow banned” in the same way, according to a VICE News review. McDaniel’s counterpart, Democratic Party chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress — including Reps. Maxine Waters, Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan — all continue to appear in drop-down search results. Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same in Twitter’s search.

    After being shown screenshots of the searches, a Twitter spokesperson told VICE News: “We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box and shipping a change to address this.” Asked why only conservative Republicans appear to be affected and not liberal Democrats, the spokesperson wrote that “I’d emphasize that our technology is based on account *behavior* not the content of Tweets.”

    The undercover investigative journalists at Project Veritas even caught a Twitter employee admitting to the shadow bans in January: 

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    Abhinav Vadrevu:  “One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting but no one sees their content.”

    “So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it. I don’t know if Twitter does this anymore.”

    Meanwhile, Olinda Hassan, a Policy Manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team said on December 15th, 2017 at a Twitter holiday party that the development of a system of “down ranking” “shitty people” is in the works:

    “Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the shitty people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.”

    Twitter responds

    Twitter’s product lead Kayvon Beykpour issued a mostly useless explanation over the platform on Wednesday morning, suggesting that they’re “always working to improve our behavior-based ranking models,” and that their “breadth an accuracy doesn’t make judgements based on political views.”

    CEO Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, says “It suffices to say we have a lot more work to do to earn people’s trust on how we work.” No word on whether that will be before or after midterms.  

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    We’ve heard questions from some of you relating to our work to drive healthy conversation on Twitter. People are asking us 1) about the breadth and precision of our work & 2) the impact of our work on the Search experience. We wanted to address these questions transparently here.

    In May, we started using behavioral signals and machine learning to reduce people’s ability to detract from healthy public conversation on Twitter. This approach looks at account behavior & interactions with other accounts that violate our rules.

    On 1) We’re always working to improve our behavior-based ranking models – their breadth and accuracy will improve over time. It’s important to note that these behavior signals are not binary, and they are one of many other signals that factor into ranking.

    To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgements based on political views or the substance of tweets. We recently publicly testified to Congress on this topic https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Pickles-Testimony.pdf

    On 2) Some accounts weren’t being auto-suggested even when people were searching for their specific name. Our usage of the behavior signals within search was causing this to happen & making search results seem inaccurate. We’re making a change today that will improve this.

    We believe this work is really important to creating a healthier Twitter and we want to continue improving. Your feedback helps us do that so please keep it coming.

    Meanwhile, conservative outrage erupted Wednesday in response to Vice‘s report. 

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    In May, Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, along with Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, wrote a letter calling for the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter to address concerns over conservative censorship ahead of the 2020 election, as well as a call for transparency.

    “We recognize that Facebook and Twitter operate in liberal corporate cultures,” the letter reads. “However, rampant political bias is inappropriate for a widely used public forum.”

    The letter notes “In 2016, former Facebook workers reported that they manipulated the “trending” section to exclude news tailored to conservative users, despite those topics trending on their own,” while “A former trending news curator admitted in an interview that nearly all members of the trending news teams identified as liberal… Moreover, some Facebook employees in 2016 reportedly pushed to ban then-candidate Donald Trump’s Facebook posts and label them as hate speech” 

    Meanwhile, conservative Twitter users have accused the company of unfairly targeting them, purging thousands of their followers in an attempt to stem “fake news” content, and unnecessarily prompting them to confirm their identity. Twitter claims its tools are free from political bias, but has allegedly targeted predominantly Republicans as part of a “shadow banning” practice, which covertly limits those accounts’ visibility on the platform.

    Parscale and McDaniel pointed out that during congressional testimony, Facebook apologized for suppressing “Diamond & Silk,” two popular Trump supporters with a highly popular YouTube channel, which the platform deemed “unsafe to the community” for no reason.

     

    They also noted that Facebook says it’s “working with a third party to encourage voter registration,” and asked for transparency over how those advertisements are displayed in people’s news feeds. “This is to make sure that the new feature does not become essentially an in-kind contribution to liberal candidates.“

    Since Facebook and Twitter are platforms used widely by the majority of voters, we request an explanation about how you will ensure all content is managed equally and fairly. How will you safeguard voters’ access to fair content on your platform? How will you guarantee that conservative voices are no longer censored, and conservative news no longer buried or otherwise hidden?

    In an interview with Fox News, McDaniel and Parscale reiterated their concerns: 

    McDaniel: “It’s a legitimate fear. Brad and I hear it all the time as we’re traveling the country. People are very concerned that conservative voices are going to be suppressed on social media. Of course, many of their users are conservatives and so Brad and I feel preemptively, we have to get out ahead of this, talk to Facebook, talk to Twitter, ask them for transparency, let us know what you’re going to do to make sure that every voice has a say on these social media platforms especially before this critical midterm.”

    Parscale: “Every day I receive thousands of messages saying, “I’m being shadow-banned.” And what we want to do in this letter is make sure that we understand what’s happening. We want to ask them for transparency. I think the public deserves that transparency and we need to know that conservative voices have a chance to get their message out. This is a big problem.”

    Watch: 

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  • Is Bill Browder The Most Dangerous Man In The World?

    Authored by Philip Giraldi via Unz.com,

    The darling of the war party needs to answer some questions…

    At the press conference following their summit meeting in Helsinki, Russian President Vladimir Putin and American President Donald Trump discussed the possibility of resolving potential criminal cases involving citizens of the two countries by permitting interrogators from Washington and Moscow to participate in joint questioning of the individuals named in indictments prepared by the respective judiciaries. The predictable response by the American nomenklatura was that it was a horrible idea as it would potentially require U.S. officials to answer questions from Russians about their activities.

    Putin argued, not unreasonably, that if Washington wants to extradite and talk to any of the twelve recently indicted GRU officers the Justice Department has named then reciprocity is in order for Americans and other identified individuals who are wanted by the Russian authorities for illegal activity while in Russia. And if Russian officials are fair game, so are American officials.

    A prime target for such an interrogation would be President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who was widely criticized while in Moscow for being on an apparent mission to cultivate ties with the Russian political opposition and other “pro-democracy” groups. But McFaul was not specifically identified in the press conference, though Russian prosecutors have asked him to answer questions related to the ongoing investigation of another leading critic, Bill Browder, who was named by Putin during the question and answer session. Browder is a major hedge fund figure who, inter alia, is an American by birth. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1997 in exchange for British citizenship to avoid paying federal taxes on his worldwide income.

    Bill Browder is what used to be referred to as an oligarch, having set up shop in 1999 as Hermitage Capital Management Fund, a hedge fund registered in tax havens Guernsey and the Cayman Islands. It focused on “investing” in Russia, taking advantage initially of the loans-for-shares scheme under Russia’s drunkard President Boris Yeltsin, and then continuing to profit greatly during the early years of Vladimir Putin. By 2005 Hermitage was the largest foreign investor in Russia.

    Yeltsin had won a fraudulent election in 1996 supported by the oligarch-controlled media and by President Bill Clinton, who secured a $20.2 billion IMF loan that enabled him to buy support. Today we would refer to Clinton’s action as “interference in the 1996 election,” but at that time a helpless and bankrupt Russia was not well placed to object to what was being done to it. Yeltsin proved keen to follow oligarchical advice regarding how to strip the former Soviet Union of its vast state-owned assets. Browder’s Hermitage Investments profited hugely from the commodities deals that were struck at that time.

    Browder and his apologists portray him as an honest and honorable Western businessman attempting to operate in a corrupt Russian business world. Nevertheless, the loans-for-shares scheme that made him his initial fortune has been correctly characterized as the epitome of corruption by all parties involved, an arrangement whereby foreign investors worked with local oligarchs to strip the former Soviet economy of its assets paying pennies on each dollar of value. Along the way, Browder was reportedly involved in money laundering, making false representations on official documents and bribery.

    Browder was eventually charged by the Russian authorities for fraud and tax evasion. He was banned from re-entering Russia in 2005 and began to withdraw his assets from the country, but three companies controlled by Hermitage were eventually seized by the authorities. Browder himself was convicted of tax evasion in absentia in 2013 and sentenced to nine years in prison.

    Browder, who refers to himself as Putin’s “public enemy #1,” has notably been able to sell his tale of innocence to leading American politicians like Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Ben Cardin and ex-Senator Joe Lieberman, all of whom are always receptive when criticizing Russia, as well as to a number of European parliamentarians and media outlets. In the wake of the Helsinki press conference he has, for example, claimed that Putin named him personally because he is a threat to continue to expose the crimes of the mafia that he claims is currently running Russia, but there is, inevitably, another less discussed alternative view of his self-serving narrative.

    Central to the tale of what Browder really represents is the Magnitsky Act, which the U.S. Congress passed into law to sanction individual Kremlin officials for their treatment of alleged whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, arrested and imprisoned in Russia. Browder has sold a narrative which basically says that he and his “lawyer” Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive tax fraud and, when they attempted to report it, were punished by a corrupt police force and magistracy, which had actually stolen the money. Magnitsky was arrested and died in prison, allegedly murdered by the police to silence him.

    The Magnitsky case is of particular importance because both the European Union and the United States have initiated sanctions against the identified Russian officials who were allegedly involved. In the Magnitsky Act, sponsored by Russia-phobic Senator Ben Cardin and signed by President Barack Obama in 2012, the U.S. asserted its willingness to punish foreign governments for human rights abuses. The Act, initially limited to Russia, has now been expanded by virtue of 2016’s Global Magnitsky Act, which enabled U.S. sanctions worldwide.

    Russia reacted angrily to the first iteration of the Act, noting that the actions taken by its government internally, notably the operation of its judiciary, were being subjected to outside interference, while other judicial authorities also questioned Washington’s claimed right to respond to criminal acts committed outside the United States. Moscow reciprocated with sanctions against U.S. officials as well as by increasing pressure on foreign non-governmental pro-democracy groups operating in Russia. Some have referred to the Magnitsky Act as the start of the new Cold War.

    The contrary narrative to that provided by Browder concedes that there was indeed a huge fraud related to as much as $230 million in unpaid Russian taxes on an estimated $1.5 billion of income, but that it was not carried out by corrupt officials. Instead, it was deliberately ordered and engineered by Browder with Magnitsky, who was actually an accountant, personally developing and implementing the scheme, using multiple companies and tax avoidance schemes to carry out the deception. Magnitsky, who was on cardiac medication, was indeed arrested and convicted, but he, according to his own family, reportedly died due to his heart condition, possibly exacerbated by negligent authorities who failed to medicate him adequately when he became ill.

    The two competing Browder narratives have been explored in some detail by a Russian documentary film maker Andrei Nekrasov, an outspoken anti-Putin activist, who was actually initially engaged by Browder to do the film. An affable Browder appears extensively in the beginning describing his career and the events surrounding Magnitsky.

    As Nekrasov worked on the documentary, he discovered that the Browder supported narrative was full of contradictions, omissions and fabrication of evidence. By the time he finished, he realized that the more accurate account of what had occurred with Browder and Magnitsky had been that provided by the Russian authorities.

    When Nekrasov prepared to air his work “The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes,” he inevitably found himself confronted by billionaire Browder and a battery of lawyers, who together blocked the showing of the film in Europe and the United States. Anyone subsequently attempting to promote the documentary has been immediately confronted with 300 plus pages of supporting documents accompanying a letter threatening a lawsuit if the film were to be shown to the public.

    A single viewing of “The Magnitsky Act” in Washington in June 2016 turned into a riot when Browder supporters used tickets given to Congressional staffers to disrupt the proceedings. At a subsequent hearing before Congress, where he was featured as an expert witness on Russian corruption before a fawning Senate Judiciary Committee, Bill Browder suggested that those who had challenged his narrative and arranged the film’s viewing in Washington should be prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which includes penalties of up to five years in prison.

    Because of the pressure from Browder, there has never been a second public showing of “The Magnitsky Act” but it is possible to see it online at this site.

    Bill Browder, who benefited enormously from Russian corruption, has expertly repackaged himself as a paragon among businessmen, endearing himself to the Russia-haters in Washington and the media. Curiously, however, he has proven reluctant to testify in cases regarding his own business dealings. He has, for example, repeatedly run away, literally, from attempts to subpoena him so he would have to testify under oath.

    When one gets past all of his bluster and posturing, by one significant metric Bill Browder might well be accounted the most dangerous man in the world. Driven by extreme hatred of Putin and of Russia, he personally and his Magnitsky Myth have together done more to launch and sustain a dangerous new Cold War between a nuclear armed United States and a nuclear armed Russia. Blind to what he has accomplished, he continues to pontificate about how Putin is out to get him when instead he is the crook who quite likely stole $230 million dollars and should be facing the consequences. That the U.S. media and Congress appear to be entranced by Browder and dismissive of Moscow’s charges against him is symptomatic of just how far the Russia-phobia in the West has robbed people of their ability to see what is right in front of them. To suggest that what is taking place driven by Browder and his friends in high places could well lead to tragedy for all of us would be an understatement.

  • It's Gotten So Bad, Darts Outperform The Best Hedge Funds

    First thing this morning, an overzealous WSJ Heard of the Street editor Spencer Jakab decided to mock Jeffrey Gundlach’s predictions made three months ago at the Ira Sohn conference, recalling how Gundlach had the temerity to go against the grain of virtually every single hedge fund when revealing his trade recommendations:

    Gundlach’s suggestion to short the shares of Facebook and to go long on an exchange-traded fund of oil and gas explorers, for example, would have lagged behind an S&P 500 Index fund by 24 percentage points through Monday’s close.

    And surely at 6am this morning, Mr. Jakab would have preferred the following sellside “recommendations”:

    Of course, we now know that just 10 hours later, following a historic 20% drop and $130 billion less in market cap, making fun of Gundlach for advising the Sohn conference to short Facebook was not exactly… prudent.

    Jakab, however, at least correctly quoted Gundlach’s words, that “Nothing new ever occurs in the business of speculating. What’s happened in the past will happen again and again and again”, and was also right to mock the stupidity of the professional investor crowd, which as today’s fiasco showed are about a clueless as everyone else, and all they really do is chase momentum while collecting 2 and 20.

    And here’s why: as Jakab reports, “at the time of the conference, Heard on the Street columnists took on the stock pickers by throwing darts to create a portfolio of 10 stocks to go up against the 12 stocks picked by the Sohn speakers.”

    Readers an probably guess where this is going:

    Three months later, the darts have prevailed. The Heard team’s 10 picks, eight long and two short, have returned 7.23% on average. The combined performance of 12 picks by Sohn attendees has been slightly negative, lagging behind the S&P 500 by more than 6 percentage points.

    What were some of the names the best and brightest in the business could come up with? The top “expert” pick belonged, ironically, to former Facebook exec (and current critic) Chamath Palihapitiya who said to buy Box. Since than it is up 16% which is great… until one compares the top 5 dart returns.

    The top pick from the darts was railcar leasing company GATX , up 27% in the past three months.

    The other dart “picks” were PagSeguro, Paychex, Park Hotels and Four Corners, all of which have outperformed their respective “2 and 20” recos.

    In parting, Jakab tells us that he will update this competition ever three months until the next Sohn conference.

    Maybe the Heard on the Street team will be invited to throw its darts on stage next year.

    And maybe he can charge a 20% dart performance fee: they deserve it, which is far more than we can say about all those hedge funds who decided to follow the flocks and all invested in the biggest stock disaster (so far) of 2018.

     

     

     

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