- The Essence Of Evil: Sex With Children Has Become Big Business In America
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Children, young girls – some as young as 9 years old – are being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.
This is America’s dirty little secret.
Sex trafficking—especially when it comes to the buying and selling of young girls—has become big business in America, the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.
As investigative journalist Amy Fine Collins notes, “It’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a ‘righteous’ pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.”
Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.
According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
Who buys a child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life.
“They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.
In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.
On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period of servitude.
It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.
“Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,” said prosecutor Krishna Patel.
This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.
This is not a problem found only in big cities.
It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.
As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”
Don’t fool yourselves into believing that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.
It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves. They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have no choice.
In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.
For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.
No doubt about it: this is a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.
Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.
The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“
“For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”
Where did this appetite for young girls come from?
Look around you.
Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.
“All it takes is one look at MySpace photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”
This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”
“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”
In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?
Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.
Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.
Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.
While Debbie was fortunate enough to be rescued, others are not so lucky. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).
With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.
For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.
Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.
Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:
Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”
What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become. “They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”
Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted, “We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”
This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said: “In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”
A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men. One woman recounts how her trafficker made her lie face down on the floor when she was pregnant and then literally jumped on her back, forcing her to miscarry.
Holly Austin Smith was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.
Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old. “I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”
As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”
One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.
This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.
Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.
Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking—much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime—has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to make our communities safer.
So what can you do?
Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.
Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.
This epidemic is largely one of our own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.
Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.
Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.
That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.
- Midsized Metro Areas Are "In" Again
The era of the mid-sized metro area is back, according to a new Bloomberg op-ed. In fact, for the first time since 2007, midsize metropolitan areas in the United States grew faster than large ones in the year ended July 1, 2018. The areas, with populations between 250,000 and 999,000, grew 0.8% versus 0.7% for large metropolitan areas. That data could signal that growth may be shifting back to smaller areas.
As we just wrote about, large metropolitan areas like New York, LA and Chicago have seen their populations dwindle in recent years. However, most of the rest of the country is still seeing growth.
The 21 metro areas with more than 2.5 million and less than 9 million people accounted for 48.1% of US population growth from 2017 to 2018. These metro areas make up 20.3% of the country’s population. Overall, 56.2% of Americans lived in the 53 metro areas with 1 million people or more in July 2018. This figure is up from 54.6% in 2010 and 56.1% in 2017. And so even though the country may not necessarily be getting more urban, it is definitely getting more metropolitan.
And signs of a momentum shift are becoming clear. There’s been an inflection since 2015 away from large metro areas and towards mid-sized and smaller ones.
One way to look at this is “as a contest between economics and livability”, according to the op-ed. The bigger areas continue to have an advantage in the former, as incomes rise with their population, and growth in per capita income from 2010 to 2017 has also generally favored the large areas.
University of California at Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti wrote in 2012: “Large metro areas have been experiencing more income growth because the knowledge economy has an inherent tendency toward geographical agglomeration.”
There are still smaller metro areas that outdo bigger ones in things like percentage of the population with college degrees, but larger metro areas have had an advantage in attracting these people, because their size offers them more opportunities. If your first job doesn’t work out, for instance, there’s probably another one right around the corner. But the trade-offs of large metropolitan areas remain longer commutes and higher costs.
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And large metropolitan areas have had the edge in harder to measure aspects of livability, including entertainment and food quality. Many metro areas with populations between 250,000 and 999,000 offer great restaurants, cultural attractions and appealing neighborhoods.The mid-sized metro revival should be welcomed, the piece concludes, arguing that the shift is a remedy to the concentrations of wealth in large metropolitan areas, where proposed solutions like subsidizing moves to higher-income regions and dismantling zoning regulations and other barriers to housing construction in in-demand cities are not getting traction.
And the belief that the comeback can continue is real. Brookings Institution’s Alan Berube wrote in January:
Although these regions lack the size and global reach of their much larger metro counterparts, they arguably retain the requisite scale to offer a distinctive economy and quality of life to their businesses and residents. Moreover, their size may also facilitate the sort of pragmatic, cross-sector problem solving that often bedevils larger metro areas; to wit, the average midsized metro area encompasses just 2.8 U.S. counties, versus 8.2 counties in the average large metro area.
You can read the full op-ed here.
- Will Trump Nominate A Gold Standard Advocate To Fed?
Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,
Trump has already exerted more influence over one institution than any other president in over 100 years — the Federal Reserve.
That’s because Trump has had more control over Fed personnel than any president since the Fed was founded in 1913. As I’ve written before, Trump now “owns” the Fed.
When Trump was sworn in, he inherited two vacant seats on the seven-person board of governors of the Federal Reserve System. Holders of those two seats are also members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the group that sets U.S. interest rates and monetary policies.
President Obama also had the same vacancies, but he did not nominate anyone to fill the seats because he doubted his chances of getting the nominees past the Republican-controlled Senate and he was sure “President Hillary” would do the right thing and appoint pro-Democratic nominees.
In the end, Trump beat Clinton and the vacancies fell to Trump. Then Trump got another windfall. Within 14 months of becoming president, three additional Fed governors resigned (Dan Tarullo, Stan Fischer and Janet Yellen), and Trump suddenly had five vacancies to fill, or 70% of the entire Fed board.
Trump promoted Jay Powell to chair and appointed Richard Clarida as vice chair, Randy Quarles as vice chair for regulation and Michelle Bowman to fill a seat reserved for community bankers.
All of those appointments were well regarded by Wall Street and the media. But that still left Trump with the two original vacancies.
Trump indicated he wanted to appoint Herman Cain and Steve Moore to fill those seats. Cain is a former presidential candidate, chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and CEO of the Godfather’s Pizza chain. Moore is a think tank analyst, founder of the Club for Growth and a former member of the editorial board of TheWall Street Journal.
Cain has now withdrawn his nomination after running into opposition from Senate Republicans based in part on old allegations of sexual misconduct. Moore is also being opposed by those who fault him for not having a Ph.D. in economics.
Whatever the merits, the real reason they have been opposed by monetary elites is that they are “friends of Trump” and will hold Jay Powell’s feet to the fire to cut interest rates and keep the economic expansion going ahead of the 2020 election.
But if Moore withdraws next or if his nomination is defeated, no worries. There’s some indication that Trump’s next nominee will be Judy Shelton.
She does have a Ph.D. and is a well-known advocate of a new gold standard. Just this Sunday she wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal, “The Case for Monetary Regime Change,” that challenged the current system and defended the classical gold standard.
She has also defended Trump’s trade policies, arguing that those who embrace unfettered free trade dogma “disregard the fact that the ‘rules’ are not working for many American workers and companies.”
For those who want Moore to step aside next, the best advice may be “Be careful what you wish for.”
Regardless, the 2020 presidential election is already beginning to take shape.
A few weeks ago, I unveiled my first forecast on the outcome of the 2020 presidential race. My estimate was that Trump had a 60% chance of winning.
I was also careful to explain that my forecasting model includes constant updating and would no doubt change between now and Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020.
That’s normal. Politics is a highly volatile process and it’s foolish to put a stake in the ground this early. My model has quite a few factors, but the leading factor right now is that Trump’s chances are the inverse of the probability of a recession before the third quarter of 2020.
If recession odds by 2020 are 40%, then Trump’s chances are the inverse of that, or 60%. With the passage of time, Trump’s odds go up because the odds of a recession go down.
If a recession does hit, then Trump’s odds go way down. This dynamic can be used to explain and forecast Trump’s economic policies, including calls for interest rate cuts and efforts to place close friends on the Fed Board of Governors.
It’s all connected.
As usual, I found myself out on a limb with my forecast; the mainstream media are sure Trump will lose in 2020, if he’s not impeached sooner. So it was nice to get some company who sees things my way…
A new Goldman Sachs research report also projects that Trump will win in 2020. Goldman shows a narrower margin of victory than my model, but a win is a win.
Of course, their forecast will be updated (like mine) but we’re starting to see more signs from other professional analysts that Trump is a likely winner after all.
- Watch: Chinese University Successfully Launches Hypersonic Rocket
According to a Weibo post by Xiamen University, “Jia Geng No. 1” hypersonic rocket, developed by Xiamen University Aerospace Academy and Beijing Lingkong Tianxing Technology Co., Ltd., was successfully tested in Northwestern China.
The pictures, embedded in the post, show the Jia Geng No. 1 rocket to be 28.5 feet long by 8.2 feet wide and weighing a little over 8,000 pounds.
The rocket features a gas turbine that could accelerate the vehicle to more than Mach 3, and has characteristics of a hypersonic ramjet engine.
The purpose of Jia Geng No.1 is likely to examine shockwaves at hypersonic speeds.
The Shanghai Morning Post notes that Xiamen University is the first university in the world to have developed and flown a hypersonic rocket.
“We call [the design] the double waverider,” said Zhu Chengxiang, an assistant professor at the university’s School of Aerospace Engineering and part of the Jia Geng No. 1 team.
Unlike American hypersonic rockets such as Boeing’s X-51 Waverider, which rides on a hot layer of gas known as a “shock wave,” the Jiageng-1 No.1 rides on two layers of shock waves, one underneath the rocket and the other in the air intake of its ramjet engine.
The Jiageng-1 No.1 has several innovative advantages over Western hypersonic rockets: it can transition from supersonic to hypersonic speeds with ease, and the design produces more lift allowing it to travel further with more efficient fuel consumption.
Chengxiang said the Pentagon is deeply disturbed by China’s rapid development of hypersonic vehicles and had tried to severe Chinese scientists’ collaboration efforts with Western researchers.
Another Weibo post by Xiamen University shows the hypersonic rocket in flight. The rocket flies throughout the Stratosphere with a maximum altitude of about 90,000 feet. During the test, the rocket performed as planned after making some maneuvers to “reproduce real flight conditions and conduct aerodynamic tests,” then glided down and deployed a parachute to land safely on the ground.
Xiamen University Aerospace Academy with Beijing Lingkong Tianxing Technology Co., Ltd. successfully launched and recovered the reusable winged suborbital JiaGeng-1 technology tester rocket. (max alt 26.2Km)
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— LaunchStuff (@LaunchStuff) April 23, 2019
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The Post said details of the flight were classified because the project was partly funded by the government.
Chen Yong, an associate professor of physics who was part of the team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said the test by Xiamen University was historic.
“Conducting hypersonic study in a university is quite difficult, especially when it comes to the stage to bring the concept from laboratory to the sky.”
Xiamen University is striving to develop a hypersonic aircraft capable of two hour flight time to any airport in the world, although the team acknowledged that such a goal was several decades out.
US Air Force Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said last year that he supports Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin’s push to develop space-based sensors that would defend the nation from hypersonic attacks by America’s adversaries [China and Russia].
“The hypersonic threat is real, it is not imagination,” Lt. Gen. Greaves explained last summer at the Capitol Hill Club.
Griffin warned that the US could be falling behind in hypersonic arms race.
“In the last year, China has tested more hypersonic weapons than we have in a decade. We’ve got to fix that.”
The latest Chinese hypersonic rocket test – exposes just how far the US is behind the curve.
- CA Logic: Raise Gas Taxes, Then Demand An Investigation Into Why Gas Prices Are High
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
California is home to some of the most power-hungry politicians on Earth. These people actually hiked the gasoline tax, and are now demanding an investigation into why gas prices are higher in California than elsewhere in the United States. It would be sad if it wasn’t so insane.
California Governor Gavin Newson is demanding an investigation into why the state’s gas prices are so high. But as Reason points out, it’s not all that difficult to see what that California politicians are the culprit. In fact, the reason the gas prices are high is that Newsom (and other politicians) raised taxes on gasoline.
As lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom supported a 2017 bill increasing the state’s gas taxes. When running for governor in 2018, he opposed a ballot initiative that would have repealed that same increase, reported Reason. But like all politicians, Newsom is unwilling to admit that he and his comrades in the California government have caused the problem. So begins the finger-pointing. The governor sent a letter to the California Energy Commission (CEC) on Tuesday demanding that the state agency “investigate” California’s roughly $4.03 per gallon gas prices, which are currently the highest in the country. Those prices are also well above the national average of $2.86 per gallon.
“Independent analysis suggests that an unaccounted-for price differential exists in California’s gas prices and that this price differential may stem in part from inappropriate industry practices,” wrote Newsom in his letter to the CEC.
“These are all important reasons for the Commission to help shed light on what’s going on in our gasoline market.”
California currently imposes the second-highest gas taxes in the country. A state excise tax currently adds $.417 per gallon (almost 42 cents per gallon), and that rate that will increase to $.473 (47 cents per gallon) come July. But that’s not all. On top of that tax, the state imposes a 2.25 percent gasoline sales tax. There’s more. California has also added a low-carbon fuel standard and a cap-and-trade scheme for carbon emissions which together already increase the state’s gas prices by $.24 per gallon above the national average, according to a 2017 state government report.
The worst part is that Newsom isn’t the only problem causer asking for blame to shifted to “inappropriate industry practices” as opposed to their gas tax hikes. In January, 19 state legislators (17 of whom had voted in favor of that 2017 gas tax increase, while the other two had only entered office in 2018) sent a letter to State Attorney General Xavier Becerra, in which they demanded that the state’s Department of Justice (DOJ) investigate the “unexplained gasoline surcharge” that was estimated to cost Californian families $1,700 a year.
Yeah. It’s a real head-scratcher.
Even someone who understands just the basics of economics knows that high levels of taxation and regulation and a lack of competition in the state’s fuel sector are not mutually exclusive explanations to the high gas prices. Government fees and red tape often have the effect of squeezing out marginal producers and retailers (eliminating competition) giving remaining firms greater ability to raise prices. It’s called supply and demand. The demand remains but much of the supply is gone. Once the competition (supply) is gone by way of taxation and regulation, the companies that remain can jack the prices up as high as they want.
California’s government is not doing its residents any favors when it comes to their policies.
- 400,000 New Yorkers Face "Subway Hell" As L Train Shutdown Begins
In what is likely going to prove to be a fascinating, if not all-out frightening experiment, New York City is about to find out what happens when its vital L train shuts down. Starting Friday night, the tunnel that ties Brooklyn and Manhattan together on the line is partially shutting down on nights and weekends for repairs, according to Bloomberg. Riders are anxious about what this will do to the already dilapidated and crowded subway system. And the true test will come during Monday morning’s commute, when the tunnel is supposed to re-open.
Rebecca Pappa, an art therapist who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn said: “For me, it’s going to be a pain. I still don’t know exactly what’s happening. There’s been a lot of different information out there.”
In January, Governor Andrew Cuomo called off a full shut down of the tunnel for 15 months and instead offered a new approach that would close one tunnel at a time and limit the closures to just nights and weekends.
The new plan is called the “L train slowdown” and was cheered by riders who will keep their line to Manhattan. At the same time, it raises questions over safety and whether or not riders are going to have alternatives on nights and weekends when transit officials have already warned that crowding may make it so bad that stations could close temporarily.
This leads to the obvious question: then what’s the point of keeping them open?
The repairs are going to be a major challenge for the MTA which is constantly under fire for slow work and going over budget. It’s also a test for Governor Cuomo, who essentially took on responsibility for the entire project.
While planning for the project, officials had concerns that removing concrete would create silica dust, a toxic mineral that can cause lung cancer. The MTA has said – surprise – they’re confident that the dust will not pose a risk.
But this doesn’t mean that some riders aren’t doubtful. Michael Magner, an L train rider who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said he was concerned about the dust, especially since there was no independent review of the construction approach. He said: “I don’t know enough about exactly how dangerous silica dust is compared to something like asbestos. It seems bad, but not as bad as that.”
The authority’s chief development officer, Janno Lieber, responded: “This is not new stuff — we deal with concrete and its demolition every day, and have well established methods in place to handle this work safely. We have adopted a hyper-conservative standard, and have every precaution in place to protect workers and the public.”
His agency said it will post the silica dust levels online once a week to keep the public informed.
This didn’t stop transit workers from holding a protest at the Bedford Avenue station in Brooklyn earlier this month. The MTA’s managing director, Veronique Hakim, called the protests “irresponsible”, saying “It’s ludicrous to think that we would do anything to put our employees or our customers at risk.”
In typical New York fashion, other riders are concerned less about inhaling toxic dust that might kill them and more about getting where they’re going.
Amy Lucker, a librarian at New York University said: “It’s going to be a pain in the butt anytime I want to leave my neighborhood
on the weekend. Anybody who thinks it’s not going to spill over to the weekdays is deluding themselves. It’s going to be general annoyance for at least a year and a half.”The MTA’s Twitter account said this week that “stations will be way more crowded than usual”.
Mitchell L. Moss, the director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University said that car sharing and ride sharing services will be the beneficiary: “The real winners are Uber Pool and Shared Lyft. That’s how
people are going to come and go to bars and restaurants.”But still, ride sharing isn’t a realistic solution for many New Yorkers. Sam Kerins, an actor who lives in Brooklyn, said simply: “I can’t afford to Uber everywhere.”
Stephanie Rosario, a hearing screener for newborns who lives in Ridgewood, Queens, thinks the plan is too little, too late from Cuomo: “I honestly think they should have shut the whole thing down. If you want to build something and to fix it, then fix it well.”
- Game Of Crypto-Thrones
Authored by Alena Nariniani via HackerNoon.com,
Specially for Game of Thrones fans I’ve decided to imagine the crypto market in the GoT universe.
Here is what came out of it.
State governments and other regulatory agencies — House Lannister
Would eagerly take control of absolutely everything, but so far it’s not quite working out. Not the type to back down either. Stubbornly trying to regulate more and more areas, they claim people user security is the key motivation behind their actions, saying that crypto regulation lays far outside of their interests since they have plenty of other matters to be taking care of (the Lannisters also frequently claim they neither need or care for King’s Landing and they are content with Casterly Rock, and all they are doing is for the benefit of the people)…
The people users believe. Or pretend to be doing so. They gather into small and large groups to air their grievances, but ultimately, having discussed them, disperse. However, since the Lannisters have such valuable assets as Qyburn, a necromancer, and the Mountain, a towering brutal warrior, such gatherings are not a concern to anyone.
Authorities and regulators are in a constant power struggle between each other, trying to make their way into the very top of their hierarchy, however, when faced with a common enemy (think industry that is not yet regulated to the grown) they quickly rally up. Most of House Lannister members are there illegitimately in some way, but it’s almost impossible to drive them away from the Iron Throne.
SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) — House Stark
The SEC representatives would surely prefer to be Daenerys Targaryen, but they are frequently reminded that they are not directly relevant in the crypto industry, so they sigh and take on the role of House Stark.
They dream of controlling the crypto market the same way they control the US securities market — with an iron fist. Their motto, “Winter is coming”, is said with the intention to hurry the regulation of the market… They almost never scheme, but from time to time they try to speak to Lannisters as equals (bringing suggestions, expressing opinions). This gives the Lannisters a good laugh, while the Starks are walking back to Winterfell gritting their teeth.
Commonly seen as having great reputation — in the eyes of a layperson, that is, as once you get deeper into their values, rules and laws, it becomes apparent their worldview is incompatible with the digital age…
Crypto enthusiasts, analysts, experts — House Greyjoy
In their dreams they also wish to be the Daenerys Targaryen of the crypto world, while also realizing they would be out of their depth in the role, so they stick to the homely castle on the Iron Islands. “We do not sow”, nor do they reap, or do anything at all, for that matter. They are akin to marketing people who are always going on about how everybody will be living large or die in the gutter (underline as appropriate).
Lie. Incessantly and egregiously, just as the Grey King who, in addition to the islands, ruled the very seas (since he had taken a mermaid as his wife), all crypto enthusiasts claim to either be buddies with Buterin and Nakamoto, or have the insider scoop that is about to yield them millions which they are so conveniently ready to share for a modest donation of $10 to $30.
Information and advertisement platforms — Brotherhood Without Banners
These guys, just like anyone else, would be excited to hit it big in the industry just like Daenerys Targaryen, but for the most part (with a few exceptions) are only capable of showing off and quietly sobbing over the great times past when they could charge a few thousand dollars for publishing a shabby advertorial… Since these groups are so disparate, they can only cut it as the Brotherhood Without Banners.
Social media — House Tully
Seven bloody hells, who wouldn’t want to be Daenerys? Social media sure would. House Lannister is, perhaps, the only exception, they do just fine as they are. So House Tully is what social media most resembles. Proliferating and multiplying without much issue, they are nonetheless trying to influence the status quo, without much success. They generally play nice (although they do tend to scheme a great deal behind closed doors), but nothing they touch seems to work the way they want it to, despite their best intentions.
Facebook — Petyr Baelish (Littlefinger)
In the most direct relation to House Tully (friend since childhood, was raised in Riverrun), but is different from the rest of the family. On a friendly footing with the Lannisters. Flips its stance as it sees fit — initially stood against crypto and even banned crypto-related advertisement, but later, as the true Master of Coin, realized that this venture smells like money and announced its own token! Naturally, the ban on crypto-related ads was never lifted… All for the sake of the people users, as they say. Everyone dealing with Baelish, for the sake of their own safety, must remember one thing: Baelish, above all other things, is concerned with himself alone.
Vitalik Buterin — Prince Oberyn
Dorne and its ruler seem quite positive amidst the rest of the leaders — they mind their own business and don’t participate in others’ squabbles. From time to time, however, the Red Viper of Dorne does turn his attention to the affairs around him, shakes his head saying “how did it come to this?”, but doesn’t act and keeps others from compromising their safety. After all, the consequences of getting his hands dirty in others’ affairs are far too apparent to him, thanks to his intellect. With that in mind, Dorne stance seems more than reasonable.
Satoshi Nakamoto — Daenerys Targaryen
The Mother of Bitcoin, Queen (King) of Andals and the First Crypto… Enough said: the creator of the first cryptocurrency, champion of all things good… Nobody has ever seen him, but he has their respect! The regular folk — digital currency users — are anxious for his return, hoping the saviour will free them from the tight grip of House Lannister. Whether or not he comes is unknown, so Lannisters are barely concerned about him. They have enough stuff to be taking care of!
ICO/STO/IEO investors — Khalasar
Investors are the army of Daenerys, left under the walls of an unconquered Meereen. They still remember how great it was in the beginning, but wondering, where are the promised dragons, nudity and liberated slaves now?
- With Assad Victorious, US Oil Sanctions Now Strangle Entire Syrian Population
The deep irony of the tragic Syria war is that after seven years of massive bloodshed, as the government has emerged victorious, it is only now with relative stability and ensuing calm over most of the country that an “economic siege” has hit the population with full force.
Damascus even during some of the worst years of war was always a bustling traffic-packed economic center for its six million inhabitants, but as we noted previously the country has been plunged into a fuel crisis that is the result of new US-led oil sanctions targeting Damascus and Tehran. As one recent WSJ report put it, Iranian oil deliveries to Syria have “fallen off a cliff” since January.
New sanctions on fuel have created the greatest gas crisis in Syria’s recent history. Image via the WSJ “Lifeless” and “decimated economy” are words used to describe the Syrian capital city and home to Assad in a new Bloomberg piece (which appeared just as busy as most any global cosmopolitan center only months ago), as further “traffic is light” and “morale is down,” according to the report.
“Waiting 19 hours for gas in a lifeless city” — the headlines read. The ongoing weeks-long crisis has now been made especially worse after the Trump administration this week ended embargo exemptions for eight countries allowed to purchase Iranian crude.
“Lines of cars stretching for miles wait hours to fill their tanks with the 20 liters of gasoline that Syrians in government-controlled areas are allowed every five days,” Bloomberg describes. “The last shipment of oil from Iran, which was sending up to 3 million barrels a month, came in October before sanctions were resumed.”
It was thought runaway inflation during the height of the war years would reverse course, but as one Damascus resident related:
“I thought once the war ended, our currency would become stronger and our living standards better,” said Saeed al-Khaldi, who transports vegetables across the sprawling city. Damascus’s population has almost doubled since the war started, to over 6 million, as civilians fled violence in other regions. “Instead, we’re living from one crisis to the other.”
The WSJ reported last month that Iranian oil had been routinely delivered to Syria throughout most of the war, but now “U.S. sanctions have cut off Iranian oil shipments to Syria, taking an unprecedented toll on a flow of crude that had persisted in the face of long-term international restrictions and helped sustain the Assad regime through years of civil war.”
So why did Washington previously keep it flowing? Why cut off supplies now through increased sanctions? Simply put, Assad and his Iranian allies won the war.
And so long as there were US-Saudi supported “rebels” entrenched in Damascus’ suburbs, such as Eastern Ghouta, and other pockets across the country, any targeting of Syrian oil imports at that time would have strangled not only the regime but America’s proxies on the ground as well.
How would #Syria ‘s State have been able to avoid the latest sanctions on Petroleum Products?
By not going for the final “win” in April 2018 in Eastern Ghouta & other opposition held areas near Damascus.
OFAC prepared its directive & delivered it barely 6 months afterwards pic.twitter.com/XaeHrQodWV
— EHSANI2 (@EHSANI22) April 18, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
But now, as last year the final anti-Assad pockets of insurgents were rooted out by the Syrian Army, Washington is content to economically strangle the entire region.
One little acknowledged fact is that by United Nations figures, the majority of the displaced from the war are actually “internally displaced persons” (7 million IDP’s based on past years’ estimates by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR), which means Washington’s policy of economic strangulation is directly impacting every part of the population, whether pro-government or not.
The White House still fundamentally prioritizes weakening Syria as crucial in its ultimate goal of regime change in Tehran. In this sense, the “long war” for Syria could merely be in its middle phase.
- Kashmir: The Constant Conflict
Authored by Jayant Bhandari via Liberty Unbound blog, annotated by Acting-Man.com,
Threats of Nuclear War
On February 26, 2019, the Indian Air Force, for the first time since 1971, conducted a raid inside Pakistan, and allegedly hit a terrorist training camp, killing more than 250 terrorists. Pakistan showed photographs of damage to a tree or two. According to Pakistani officials, no one died and no infrastructure was damaged.
Mirage 2000 warplane of the Indian Air Force in medias res. [PT]
Photo credit: hindustantimes.com
It is hard to know the truth, for India did not provide any evidence, nor did Pakistan allow journalists access to the site. Both governments blatantly lie to their citizens, retailing falsehoods so hilarious that even a half-sane person could see through them. But drunk in nationalism, Indians and Pakistanis normally don’t.
Photo of the damage the Indian strike of February 26 did as shown by Pakistan
Photo credit: BBC News
India’s intrusion was in response to a suicide car-bombing on February 14 in Kashmir, a bombing that killed 45 troops. Indians were moving a convoy of 2,500. They were in buses, not in armoured cars, as officially stated. Challenging the army is sacrilegious, so no one asks why their movement was so badly planned, and why they had not been airlifted, which would have been far cheaper and easier.
Image from the suicide attack in Kashmir that preceded the Indian air strike [PT]
PTI Photo / S. Irfan
In all the ramping up of emotions in the aftermath of the suicide bombing on the troops, it became very clear that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would lose the next elections (which are due in a couple of months) unless he retaliated. Sending India to war was a small price.
Soon after India’s intrusion, Pakistan closed its airspace. Tension at the border went up significantly, and continues to be high.
A day later, Pakistan attempted airstrikes in India. In the ensuing challenge, one of India’s MIG-21 planes, known as flying coffins because they are very old and outdated, was shot down by a Pakistani missile. The Indian pilot parachuted into Pakistani territory. India claimed to have downed a Pakistani F-16. Pakistan denied the claim.
The Indian pilot captured by Pakistan was beaten up by locals and obviously by the Pakistani army to get him to praise Pakistani “hospitality” and “kindness”
TV stations in both countries were singing songs about the valor of their troops, which consist of uneducated rural people with no other job opportunities and absolutely no clue about what they are fighting for. These troops act as gladiators for the spectacle of the bored, TV-watching masses, who feel vicariously brave while munching their chips. Of course, the social media warriors know that it is not they who will be at the front-lines in any serious conflict.
A video from the Hindustan Times – “Pulwama attack triggers national outrage, protests at many places” [PT]
It is not in the culture of the Third World masses to feel peace and happiness. Either they are slogging away in the field and going to sleep a bit hungry — which helps to keep them focused and sane — or, if they have time on their hands, they become hedonistic and graduate to deriving pleasure from destructive activities. The latter becomes apparent as soon as they have enough to eat. This feedback system in their culture applies entropic force to take them back to Malthusian equilibrium.
Pakistan’s raison d’etre is to obsess over Kashmir and the human rights violations therein that the Indian army inflicts, oblivious of a much worse tyranny provided by its own army and fanatics, particularly in Baluchistan. Once Pakistan’s social media had put the people into a trance of war, officials had no option but to retaliate.
Both armies are thoroughly incompetent and disorganized, and extremely corrupt (troops in India actually double up as house-servants of their bosses — something that would be inconceivable to a well-organized and truly nationalistic body of soldiers.) The tribal societies of Pakistan and India merely posture; they have no courage to go into a real war. But alas! Posturing can become reality.
Army cartoon from an Indian newspaper [PT]
On this occasion, threats of nuclear bombing were made. The bombs would probably have failed to explode, but it was obvious that the United States could not be a bystander. Despite the fact that Trump was busy in Vietnam with another nuclear-armed country, North Korea, he had to make a few calls.
He had to interfere, as an adult does when two kids are fighting. Those of us who complain — quite rightly — about the US military-industrial complex should consider the unseen, unrecognized good that the US does in helping to avoid a nuclear holocaust.
Kashmir, Bone of Contention
The cause of such a war – the stated point of contention between India and Pakistan – is Kashmir. They both want to have Kashmir. And, just to complicate things, some Kashmiris want full independence. But it must be said: the approach of everyone involved is grossly stupid.
Three countries are laying claim to Kashmir [PT]
Kashmir (including Jammu, “the gateway to Kashmir”) has a GDP of US $22 billion. It has only 1% of India’s population, but it gets 10% of federal grants. India’s defense budget is US $52 billion, with Kashmir as the primary reason; and because of Kashmir, a lot of additional funds are spent on internal security, including the 500,000 Indian troops positioned there.
Kashmir is a bottomless pit for India, and the money does no good for Kashmir, either. Kashmir must exist under the tyranny of terrorists and of Indian forces, who under the law do not face accountability in the courts. Kashmir has no resources of value or any economy of substance; its populace is inward-looking and fanatic. There is no reason for India not to kick Kashmir out of the federation.
Pakistan, with a fraction of India’s economy, spends money comparable to India’s to try to take over Kashmir, occupy the one-third of Kashmir that it has right now, train terrorists, and, as a consequence, destroy itself economically and socially. Were Kashmir to join Pakistan, it would offer only negative value, dragging down Pakistan’s per capita GDP. There is no rational reason for Pakistan to accept Kashmir, let along fight for it.
Kashmir as an independent country would be landlocked and not much different from Afghanistan. No sane Kashmiri would want to be independent from India. Although India is backward and wallows in poverty and tyranny, in relative terms it is the best hope for Kashmir. Moreover, Ahmadi Muslims who went to Pakistan after the separation of 1947 are deemed non-Muslims by mainstream Pakistanis and by Pakistan’s constitution. The same fate awaits Kashmiris if they join Pakistan.
In a sane world, there is nothing to negotiate. As you can see above, I could be on any of the three sides of the negotiating table and accept the demands of the other two without asking for anything in return.
Unfortunately, my compromises would not be seen as such. In keeping with Third World proclivities, they would be seen as signs of weakness, and new demands would soon be made, ceaselessly generated by superstition, ego, expediency, tribalism, and emotion. This, not Kashmir, is the primary problem, and this is the reason why here is no solution, ever.
Institutionalized Irrationality
Muslims are not the only culprits — it is merely that talking about them post-9/11 is politically more acceptable. In the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Africa, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims are all included in the cycle of tyranny and irrationality. If Islam comes across as worse, it is mostly because in these places it has institutionalized irrationality, fed on it, and been self-victimized by it.
Since the inclusion of the sharia in Pakistan’s constitution in the 1980s, Pakistan, which was until then richer than India on a per capita basis, has taken a rapid slide downwards. Today, freedom of speech is so constrained that any accusation of having said a word against the “holy” book or the army can result in capital punishment — if, that is, one avoids getting lynched before reaching the courts.
Protests erupt in Pakistan after a conviction for blasphemy against Asia Bibi – a Christian woman – was overturned [PT]
A Christian woman, Asia Bibi, was sentenced to death in Pakistan in 2010 for the crime of drinking water from a cup reserved for Muslims. After a decade of prison, she was released, not because the Supreme Court saw the case as utterly stupid, which it should have, but because it didn’t see clear proof that she had committed the “crime.”
Pakistan erupted in civil chaos as millions thronged the streets, asking for her blood. In my totem pole of values and consequences, Pakistan is 25 years ahead of India in self-destruction.
An Ocean of Corruption
Corruption these days hits me soon after I land in Delhi. It has now become customary for the toilet-caretaker at the airport to demand a tip. With his dirty hands he offers tissue paper to me and tries to make me feel guilty if I don’t accept it.
The Indian government has tried to control corruption, through the demonetization of 86% of currency in 2016 and the imposition of a nationwide sales tax a year later. While these haven’t controlled corruption, they have managed to seriously harm the economy by destroying the informal sector, which employs 82% of Indians. And without the informal sector, the formal sector will falter.
Financial corruption is not even the real problem. Were bribery to stop, India would rapidly become North Korea or Eritrea. I say that because financial corruption is a necessary safety valve in over-regulated societies. When such backward societies do manage to control bribery in isolation, they create extremely suffocating environments.
North Korea and Eritrea have actually controlled bribery by getting their citizens to snitch on each other and by extraordinary levels of punishments. Backward societies like these are necessarily subdued and stagnant, lack of skills being the real reason for their backwardness; and the lack of the safety valve of bribery constricts whatever potential they have.
But financial corruption, a symptomatic problem, is seen as the prime problem by politically correct kids who go to study at Ivy League colleges and then to work for IMF, the World Bank, etc., without any real-life experience. They see financial corruption being removed from one place, only to find it reappearing in another; they don’t understand what is happening.
India is an ocean of corruption, but it’s not just financial. More importantly, it is cultural. The real corruption is cultural irrationality, the irrationality of people who operate not through honesty, pride, compassion, or honor, but through expediency. Trying to control bribery in such societies does not work, because bribes are just a part of the whole package of social corruption and irrationality.
As the economy has grown, India has been on a path to increased fanaticism and violent nationalism. These days, if you are found to be in possession of beef, you risk getting lynched. Nationalism is on the rise, rather rapidly. You are forced to stand up for the national anthem before the start of movies in cinema halls.
Complaining about the Prime Minister on social media can land you in prison. Opposing his policies can get you beaten up. India’s constitution stays secular, but the trend is in the same direction that Pakistan has been on.
Dubious Economic Miracle
The World Bank, IMF, etc. continue to report that India is among the fastest growing economies in the world, and is perhaps even faster growing than China. While these numbers are completely erroneous, even if they weren’t, institutionally the Indian subcontinent has been rudderless since the time the British left. All economic growth since the time of so-called independence has come because of importation of technology from the West.
But what about the fact that India has one of the largest numbers of engineers and PhDs in the world? It is easy to get a degree without studying — and not just in India — and the results are obvious. In the age of the internet, when a competent engineer can work remotely for a Western client, Indian “engineers” work as taxi drivers, deliver Amazon products, or get jobs as janitors. Their degrees are just degrees on paper.
Moreover, education is a tool; so is technology. They must be employed by reason. Without reason, “education” and technology serve the wrong masters: tribalism and superstitions. No wonder that with increasing prosperity, “educational” achievement, and better technology, India is regressing culturally.
India is massively lacking in skills. Finding a plumber or an electrician is an uphill task—they create more problems than they solve. Indians are completely unprepared for the modern economy. This is the reason why you hardly see anything in Western markets that is made in India, despite India’s having more than one-sixth of the world’s population. It is virtually impossible to form a company of five people in India and expect it to work with any kind of efficiency.
People often blame China for copying Western technology. While that is true, one must recognize that copying takes a certain amount of skill that people in some other economies simply don’t have. The situation of India has worsened as the best of Indians now increasingly prefer to leave for greener pastures, including even Papua New Guinea.
Lacking leadership, post-British India is rapidly becoming tribal, fanatic, and nationalistic. We must remember that India as a union is together only because of inertia from the days of the British. When the inertia is gone, India will disintegrate into tribal units, as will Pakistan and much of the rest of the Third World.
Conclusion
A horrible war will one day break out between India and Pakistan. It will not be because of Kashmir, which is just an excuse, but because irrational people always blame others, envy them, and hate them. They fail to negotiate. They have no valor, but constant posturing will eventually trigger something. There is no solution to their problems. Every problem that the British left behind has simmered and gotten worse.
As soon as India reaches a stage where it can no longer grow economically because of imported technology, its cultural decline will become rapidly visible. Though India is 25 years behind Pakistan, both are walking toward self-destruction, to a tribal, medieval past.
As for the US, the job of any rational US president is to help ensure that destruction stays within the borders of India and Pakistan.
Modi’s electoral chances restored by militarism [PT]
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