- Iceland's Wow Air Suddenly Shuts Down, Leaving Thousands Stranded; Analysts Warn Of Economic Backlash
Thousands of passengers who had booked flights with Iceland’s low-cost Wow Air have been left stranded after the airline suddenly stopped flights on Thursday, offering passengers no recourse other than to book another flight with a rival carrier and try and get their money back from their credit card company or travel agent.
According to the BBC, the airline released a statement on its website saying it would cancel all scheduled flights and cease operations immediately. It recommended that customers with urgent travel needs try and book with other airlines, which might be willing to offer a reduced “rescue” fare. Wow said it would published information about these fares when it becomes available.
BREAKING: WOW Airlines ceases operations and cancels all flights; stranding passengers around the world. Airline advises passengers to search for rescue fares with other carriers. pic.twitter.com/5Q8HWnfoOc
— Sam Sweeney (@SweeneyABC) March 28, 2019
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Any passengers who didn’t buy their tickets via a protected booking method could be entitled to compensation “in accordance with European regulation on Air Passenger Rights” or by filing a claim “in case of a bankruptcy.”
However, a bankruptcy wasn’t a foregone conclusion, as the airline said it would resume operations after an equity deal with a group of investors had been finalized. Though we imagine the uproar over the cancellations could be a deal breaker. On March 24, Wow announced that a deal with rival Icelandair would not materialize, so it’s unclear who these other investors might be.
While Wow’s customers were left in the lurch, Icelandair shareholders benefited from the catastrophe as the rival airline’s shares surged nearly 30%. One passenger who had been stranded at an airport in Frankfurt with his family spoke with an FT reporter about his group’s struggle to book new flights.
Christian Luisi, 22, said he and nine other members of his family were stranded at the airport in Frankfurt after their Wow Air flights to the US via Keflavik airport in Iceland’s capital were cancelled this morning. He said his grandparents had “just paid thousands of dollars for tickets” to cover tickets back to the US for half the group, while the rest were attempting to find affordable flights.
Mr Luisi, who works as a supermarket manager in New York, said this was the first foreign holiday he had been on since he was eight years old. “I didn’t imagine anything like this could ever happen,” he said.
“The entire morning has been terrifying and stressful. I just can’t believe they’ve left us stranded.” Mr Luisi showed an automated text message sent by Wow Air at just after 6am on Thursday that stated the family’s flight was cancelled because of “operational restrictions.”
The automated message also informed passengers that they could choose between a full refund and changing their reservation to the next available flight. After receiving the messages, Mr Luisi said, the family “checked out of our hotel, returned the rental car and went to check in”, he said.
Mr Luisi said that, when he went to the designated Wow Air check-in desk at Frankfurt airport, “no one from Wow Air was there and of course there were no other Wow Air flights.” He said members of his group were then handed a paper note by a Frankfurt employee, a photo of which he shared with the Financial Times, signed in the name of Wow Air operations controller Andri Hrafn Armannsson. The note also informed passengers they could have a full refund or alternative flight.
According to Bloomberg, all 29 of Wow’s scheduled flights were canceled, leaving 2,700 passengers to try and find flights with other airlines. The government activated contingency plans and issued a statement seeking to offer reassurances about the consequences for the local economy.
In a letter to employees, Wow’s founder and chairman, once hailed as one of the country’s savviest businessmen, apologized for not taking action sooner.
“We have run out of time and have unfortunately not been able to secure funding for the company,” Chairman Skuli Mogensen said in a letter to employees. “I will never be able to forgive myself for not taking action sooner.”
While the cancellations elicited a torrent of outrage from stranded fliers, the airline’s sudden closure wasn’t entirely unexpected. Earlier in the week, creditors had reportedly seized Wow planes due to its financial difficulties, while dozens of flights had been cancelled earlier in the week.
According to the FT, the lossmaking carrier had suffered from falling tourism to Iceland as well as a rise in oil prices, which raised its fuel costs. In addition, more rival airlines had been offering low-cost long-haul flights, which had been a crucial business for the airline.
In a sign that Wow’s failure could have wide-ranging implications for Iceland’s economy, a government task force’s analysis published late last year found that, were Wow to collapse, it could trigger a 3% contraction in GDP for the Icelandic economy, as well as a steep drop in the Krona that would cause inflation to climb by as much as 6%. Meanwhile, exports could drop by 10%. The study had been ordered to examine the risks from a slowing tourism industry.
This could lead to the biggest economic contraction since Iceland’s economy collapsed during the financial crisis.
- The EU Bows To "Systemic Rival" China
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
Slowly but surely, the EU is shifting its priorities to the East..
Let’s start with the essential background for the meeting in Paris on Tuesday between Chinese President Xi Jinping and three EU heavyweights – French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President of the European Commission (EC) Jean-Claude Juncker.
As imperfect as these figures may be, economic growth for the past 10 years after the 2008 financial crisis – which was a made in the West phenomenon – do tell an enlightening story.
China’s growth: 139%. India’s growth: 96%. the US’ growth: 34%. EU growth: a negative2%.
French mainstream media, controlled by a rarified group of oligarchs, spun a risible narrative that Macron “imposed” this four-way meeting on Xi to press on him the new EC strategy aiming to “clarify” Chinese ambiguity in relation to the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
As I previously reported, the EC now brands China a “systemic rival,” and seems to have realized that Beijing is an “economic competitor in search of technological leadership.” And that may translate as a threat to European values and norms.
Xi had just come from Rome – where the populist, eurosceptic Lega, Five Stars coalition government became the first G7 nation to sign a partnership with the BRI, igniting massive sparks of Atlanticist fear.
So in the end, what did we get from Chancellor Angela Merkel as the EU faced a process French elites describe as Sino-globalization?
We had realpolitik. Merkel stressed the BRI was an “important” project: “We, as Europeans, want to play an active part and that must lead to certain reciprocity and we are still wrangling over that a bit.” She added: “We are seeing the project as a good visualization of interaction, interrelation and interdependence.”
Merkel was essentially relaying the position of German business elites – as a trade powerhouse, the future of Germany lies in turbo-charging business with Asia, especially China.
So, instead of demonizing Rome, in practice Berlin will eventually embark on the same path. After all, Duisburg, in the Ruhr valley, is already the de facto top BRI terminal in northern Europe.
Xi and his EU partners did not fail to emphasize multilateralism. There could not be a more glaring contrast to the Trump administration’s narrative that China is a threat and the BRI is all about Chinese “vanity.” Juncker even tried to defuse the “systemic” tension: “We understand that China does not like the expression ‘rivals,’ but it is a compliment describing our shared ambitions.”
Add to it that Xi also felt the need to remind the EU leadership of the obvious. China will continue to “open up,” as it managed in only 40 years to accomplish what Europe did over the course of the entire industrial revolution.
New Silk Air, anyone?
On the – embattled – Macron front, more than New Silk Roads a de facto New Silk Air seems to be in effect.
No one – apart from Boeing – argues about a 30 billion euro-plus Chinese order to buy 300 Airbuses. And that’s only the beginning. The fact that Beijing will use Airbus technology to enhance its aviation prowess under the framework of Made in China 2025 is another matter entirely.
So Paris may not have turned, like Rome, into an official partner to the New Silk Roads – at least not yet. But the promises are quite telling – on three fronts.
1) The emphasis on multilateralism – “strong and efficient.” That’s not exactly Trumpian rhetoric.
2) Common action with Beijing on climate change and biodiversity.
3) An economic-trade partnership that respects mutual interests. That is, in fact, New Silk Roads-BRI official policy since the beginning, in 2013.
So when we compare the different strategies by Rome and Paris, Xi has, in fact, come out with a win-win.
Merkel, predictably, was careful to hedge to the hilt: “The triangle between EU, China and US is very important. Without the US, we will not be able to have multilateralism.”
At the same time, she stressed, the US-China trade war was “hitting our German economy.”
As for Team Macron, with the leader obsessed with posing as the savior of the EU ahead of the European Parliament elections in May, they could not help but go after the administration in Rome.
According to a Macron acolyte:
“There is this bad European habit to have 28 different policies, with countries competing against each other to attract investment. We need to speak with a common voice if we want to exist. We have the same approach on the 5G issue: avoiding 28 different decisions.”
The 5G Monaco Grand Prix
Which brings us to the case of Monaco, not exactly a shabby prize – and duly visited by Xi, who was received, literally, as royalty.
The principality is absolutely avid to gobble up the fast-growing Chinese luxury tourism market. And that explains why Monaco has already signed a deal with Huawei to be the first country to be entirely covered by 5G before the end of 2019.
Paris, by the way, has not ruled out using Huawei equipment. And as a cherry on the cake, guess which city Huawei chose to globally unveil its spectacular new P30 series of smartphones? Paris.
Make no mistake, for Beijing, in terms of trade and economic relations, Berlin is way more relevant than Paris. But these big three – Berlin, Paris and Rome – all have major roles to play.
The New Silk Roads being re-connected to Italy after half a millennium will accelerate Euro-Asia integration, and even, in the long run, more influence for both the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
EU businesses, if not political Eurocrats, are starting to realize that Europe cannot afford to become a battlefield in Cold War 2.0 between the US and Russia, cannot afford to become a hostage of Washington tearing up international law – see, for instance, the destruction of the Iran nuclear deal and recognizing the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel – and cannot afford to become a victim of Washington’s trade whims.
It’s no wonder that slowly but surely, the EU is shifting its priorities to the East – including to its “systemic rival.”
- Dubai Economic Growth Stalls, At Lowest Level Since Financial Crisis
Investors earlier this week were shocked when Dubai’s long-awaited economic growth printed sub 2% — the slowest since 2009, and a sign that the country’s property sector could be in grave danger, reported Reuters.
Data released by the Dubai Statistics Center on Tuesday showed gross domestic product grew 1.9% in 2018, a steep fall from 3.1% the previous year.
“A weakening external backdrop, a strong U.S. dollar and the ongoing correction in the property market are headwinds for a number of vital sectors,” said Monica Malik, chief economist at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank.
Real estate prices in Dubai have dropped by more than 25% from their 2014 peak. S&P’s latest assessment of the market shows prices could fall by 10% in the coming quarters, before a potential trough in 2020.
The last time property prices crashed in Dubai; the government asked for a $20 billion bailout from oil-rich Abu Dhabi in 2009.
Analysts believe the economy could recover ahead of 2020 when the city hosts the World Expo event, but judging by the rapid global slowdown in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., one year from now seems far fetched.
Government data revealed GDP growth was driven by trade-related activities, which rose by 1.3% in 2018 from a year earlier, representing 18.1% of total growth last year. In 2017, wholesale and retail trade increased by 0.9%.
Data showed that real estate increased by 7% in 2018 and accounted for 25% of total economic growth.
Growth in the transport and storage industries came to a screeching halt to 2.1% last year from a revised 8.4% in 2017.
London-based Capital Economics said real estate in the city would remain under pressure while a slowdown in the global economy will weigh on Dubai’s manufacturing and transport industries.
Capital Economics is forecasting GDP growth of 3.8% for 2019 before accelerating to 4.5% (considering global economic growth has slowed already in 1Q19 – the assessment could be too optimistic).
The independent macroeconomic research firm warned there are significant risks to the country’s outlook from long-standing debt problems, citing IMF data that show the debt of Dubai’s government-related entities (GREs) – which is the reason why a debt crisis formed in 2009 – is back to crisis levels, amounting to $60 billion or 50% of Dubai’s GDP.
“Debt restructurings in 2014 have masked the problems in recent years. But around half of GRE debt is due to mature between now and 2021,” said Jason Tuvey, senior emerging markets economist at Capital Economics.
“We’ve warned before that the risk of overcapacity after the World Expo means that the GREs could face weaker-than-expected revenues, harming their ability to service these debts,” he said.
Reuters said Abu Dhabi could roll over for the second time, $20 billion of debt, due sometime this month, that was injected into Dubai during the financial crash a decade ago.
Dubai’s downturn indicates broad stress across the global economy. Western manufacturers have spent decades integrating supply chains into the city’s top ports. So, it’s not surprising that Dubai is a coal mine canary for Western economies-now showing a trade recession could be immient.
- Escobar: Empire Of Chaos In Hybrid War Overdrive
Authored by Pepe Escobar via ConsortiumNews.com,
Is this the Age of Anxiety? The Age of Stupidity? The Age of Hybrid War? Or all of the above?
As right populism learns to use algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and media convergence, the Empire of Chaos, in parallel, is unleashing all-out hybrid and semiotic war.
Dick Cheney’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) is back, metastasized as a hybrid mongrel.
But GWOT would not be GWOT without a Wild West scarecrow. Enter Hamza bin Laden, son of Osama. On the same day the State Department announced a $1 million bounty on his head, the so- called “UN Security Council IS and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee” declared Hamza the next al-Qaeda leader.
Since January 2017, Hamza has been a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department – on par with his deceased Dad, back in the early 2000s. The Beltway intel community “believes” Hamza resides “in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.”
Remember these are the same people who “believed” former Taliban leader Mullah Omar resided in Quetta, Baluchistan, when in fact he was safely ensconced only a few miles away from a massive U.S. military base in Zabul, Afghanistan.
Considering that Jabhat al-Nusra, or al-Qaeda in Syria, for all practical purposes, was defined as no more than “moderate rebels” by the Beltway intel community, it’s safe to infer that new scarecrow Hamza is also a “moderate”. And yet he’s more dangerous than vanished fake Caliph Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi. Talk about a masterful example of culture jamming.
Show Me The Big Picture
A hefty case can be made that the Empire of Chaos currently has no allies; it’s essentially surrounded by an assortment of vassals, puppets and comprador 5thcolumnist elites professing varied degrees of – sometimes reluctant – obedience.
The Trump administration’s foreign policy may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and late-night comedy – as in the whole episode of designating State Department/CIA regime change, lab experiment Random Dude as President of Venezuela. Legendary cultural critic Walter Benjamin would have called it “the aestheticization of politics,” (turning politics into art), as he did about the Nazis, but this time it’s the Looney Tunes version.
To add to the conceptual confusion, despite countless “an offer you can’t refuse” antics unleashed by psychopaths of the John Bolton and Mike Pompeo variety, there’s this startlingnugget. Former Iranian diplomat Amir Moussavi has revealed that Trump himself demanded to visit Tehran, and was duly rebuffed. “Two European states, two Arab countries and one Southeast Asian state” were mediating a series of messages relayed by Trump and his son-in-law Jared “of Arabia” Kushner, according to Moussavi.
Is there a method to this madness? An attempt at a Grand Narrative would go something like this: ISIS/Daesh may have been sidelined – for now; they are not useful anymore, so the U.S. must fight the larger “evil”: Tehran. GWOT has been revived, and though Hamza bin Laden has been designated the new Caliph, GWOT has shifted to Iran.
When we mix this with the recent India-Pakistan scuffle, a wider message emerges. There was absolutely no interest by Prime Minister Imran Kahn, the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani intelligence, ISI, to launch an attack on India in Kashmir. Pakistan was about to run out of money and about to be bolstered by the U.S., via Saudi Arabia with $20 billion and an IMF loan.
At the same time, there were two almost simultaneous terrorist attacks launched from Pakistan – against Iran and against India in mid-February. There’s no smoking gun yet, but these attacks may have been manipulated by a foreign intelligence agency. The Cui Bono riddle is which state would profit immensely from a war between Pakistan and Iran and/or a war between Pakistan and India.
The bottom line: hiding in the shadow of plausible deniability – according to which what we understand as reality is nothing but pure perception – the Empire of Chaos will resort to the chaos of no-holds-barred Hybrid War to avoid “losing” the Eurasian heartland.
Show Me How Many Hybrid Plans You Got
What applies to the heartland of course also applies to the backyard.
The case of Venezuela shows that the “all options on the table” scenario has been de facto aborted by Russia, outlined in an astonishing briefing by Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, and then subsequently detailed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Lavrov: (Wikimedia Commons)
Meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj at a crucial RIC (part of BRICS) summit in China,Lavrov said,“Russia keeps a close eye on brazen US attempts to create an artificial pretext for a military intervention in Venezuela… The actual implementation of these threats is pulling in military equipment and training [US] Special Forces.”
Lavrov explained how Washington was engaged in acquiring mortars and portable air defense systems “in an East European country, and mov(ing) them closer to Venezuela by an airline of a regime that is… rather absolutely obedient to Washington in the post-Soviet space.”
The U.S. attempt at regime change in Venezuela has been so far unsuccessful in several ways.
Plan A – a classic color revolution -has miserably failed, in part because of a lack of decent local intelligence.
Plan B was a soft version of humanitarian imperialism, with a resuscitation of the nefarious, Libya-testedresponsibility to protect (R2P); it also failed, especially when the American tale that the Venezuelan government burnt humanitarian aid trucks at the border with Colombia was a lie exposed, no less, than byThe New York Times.
Plan C was a classic Hybrid War technique: a cyberattack, replete with a revival of Nitro Zeus, which shut down 80 percent of Venezuela’s electricity.
That plan had already been exposed by WikiLeaks, via a 2010 memo by a U.S.-funded, Belgrade-based color revolution scam that helped train self-proclaimed “President” Random Dude, when he was just known asJuan Guaidó. The leaked memo said that attacking the Venezuelan power grid would be a “watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”
But even that was not enough.
That leaves Plan D – which is essentially to try to starve the Venezuelan population to death via viciously lethal additional sanctions. Sanctioned Syria and sanctioned Iran didn’t collapse. Even boasting myriad comprador elites aggregated in the Lima group, exceptionalists may have to come to grips with the fact that deploying the Monroe doctrine essentially to contain China’s influence in the young 21stcentury is no “cakewalk.”
Plan E—for extreme—would be U.S. military action, which Bolton won’t take off the table.
Show Me the Way to the Next War Game
So where do all these myriad weaponizations of chaos theory leave us? Nowhere, if they don’t follow the money. Local comprador elites must be lavishly rewarded, otherwise you’re stuck in hybrid swamp territory. That was the case in Brazil – and that’s why the most sophisticated hybrid war case history so far has been a success.
In 2013, Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks revealed how the NSA was spying on Brazilian energy giant Petrobras and the Dilma Rousseff government beginning in 2010. Afterwards, a complex, rolling judicial-business-political-financial-media coup ended up reaching its two main objectives; in 2016, with the impeachment of Rousseff, and in 2018, with Lula thrown in jail.
Now comes arguably the juiciest piece of the puzzle. Petrobras was supposed to pay $853 million to the U.S. Department of Justice for not going to trial for crimes it was being accused of in America. But then a dodgydeal was struck according to which the fine will be transferred to a Brazilian fund as long as Petrobras commits to relay confidential information about its businesses to the United States government.
Mattis: Wrote on hybrid war in 2005.
Hybrid war against BRICS member Brazil worked like a charm, but trying it against nuclear superpower Russia is a completely different ball game. U.S. analysts, in another case of culture jamming, even accuse Russia itself of deploying hybrid war – a concept actually invented in the U.S. within a counter-terrorism context; applied during the occupation of Iraq and later metastasized across the color revolution spectrum; and featuring, among others, in an article co-authored by former Pentagon head James “Mad Dog” Mattis in 2005 when he was a mere lieutenant general.
At a recent conference about Russia’s military strategy, Chief of General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov stressed that the Russian armed forces must increase both their “classic” and “asymmetrical” potential. In the U.S. this is interpreted as subversion/propaganda hybrid war techniques as applied in Ukraine and in the largely debunked Russia-gate. Instead, Russian strategists refer to these techniques as “complex approach” and “new generation war”.
Santa Monica’s RAND Corporation still sticks to good ol’ hot war scenarios. They have been holding “Red on Blue” war games simulations since 1952 – modeling how the proverbial “existential threats” could use asymmetric strategies. The latest Red on Blue was not exactly swell. RAND analyst David Ochmanek famously said that with Blue representing the current U.S. military potential and Red representing Russia-China in a conventional war, “Blue gets its ass handed to it.”
None of this will convince Empire of Chaos functionary Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who recently told a Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon will continue to refuse a “no first use” nuclear strategy. Aspiring Dr. Strangeloves actually believe the U.S. can start a nuclear war and get away with it.
Talk about the Age of Hybrid Stupidity going out with a bang.
- Guess How Much Americans Spend Online While Drunk?
A new survey reveals that nearly 80% of people who drink alcohol have shopped on the web while intoxicated.
And while the results can be hilarious, drunk shopping is a multi-billion dollar national habit.
@HeleneStJames Helen This was my best drunk eBay purchase pic.twitter.com/jNWnPtLzF7
— Phil Barry (@invecta18) February 26, 2017
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According to a survey by tech and business newsletter The Hustle, drunk Americans spend approximately $45 billion per year, with an average annual spend of $444 per drunk shopper.
Most common? Clothing and shoes, while Amazon remains the shopping platform of choice.
The findings are based on a survey of 2,174 alcohol-consuming readers between March 11-18 of this year. The average respondent was 36-years-old, and has an income of $92,000 per year, more than double the national average. Thus, The Hustle‘s wealthier readers may skew the results when extrapolated – but we’re having fun with this one.
Overall, 79% of all alcohol-consuming respondents have made at least one drunken purchase in their lifetime — though this varies a bit based on demographics. –The Hustle
Women (80%) are slightly more likely than men (78%) to drunk shop. This makes sense since women generally shop more than men — especially online.
Drunk shoppers also tend to be younger. Millennials outrank baby boomers by 13%, which might be attributed to the rise of e-commerce (we’ll get to this later).
Certain professionals also seem to be more inclined to shop drunk than others. We limited our data to jobs with the highest response rates then parsed out the 5 industries that are most and least likely to shop under the influence. –The Hustle
my drunk purchase from two months ago finally got here from china pic.twitter.com/Wfzx7pnvk1
— jim, agent of chaos (@urvillageidiot) March 20, 2018
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What’s the alcohol of choice while drunk shopping? Beer, followed by wine, followed by whiskey.
Another interesting metric is that people who shop while drunk have around 10 drinks per week, while those who typically shop sober consume half as much.
As far as average spent per year:
Our average respondent reports dropping $444 per year on drunk purchases — from life-size cut-outs of Kim Jong-un to 30-pound bags of Idaho potatoes.
A little back-of-the-napkin math gives us a rough estimate of the drunk shopping market at large: There are ~130m alcohol-consuming adults in the US. In our survey findings, 79% of alcohol-consuming adults shop drunk at an average annual spend of $444. Assuming these rates hold true at a national level (purely speculative), drunk shopping is a ~$45B per year market.
Extrapolating this further, we determined the average lifetime spend on drunk purchases is $4,187 — good for a total drunken expenditure of nearly half a trillion dollars.
When it comes to drunk shopping by profession, those in the fashion industry are the biggest, richest drunks – at an average of $949 spent per year, followed by writers, medical professionals and those in the fitness industry.
Let’s all take a minute to appreciate this drunk Amazon purchase 🙌🏽 pic.twitter.com/N8L09HKD7e
— Morgan Stamper (@MorganLStamper) July 24, 2016
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Who spends the least while shopping drunk? Government workers, engineers and – in last place, those working in retail.
Geographically speaking Kentucky is oddly at the top along with Connecticut. Though, the survey may have had one really rich respondent in each state that skewed the results. Who knows.
Kentuckians top the charts with a $742 annual spend. In fact, the entire South — a region known for its fine bourbon — is a blanket of red. California, the country’s wine capital, is the lone over-achiever on the otherwise mediocre West Coast.
This bears little semblance to the CDC’s analysis of the heaviest binge-drinking states (in fact, it’s almost opposite). But it shows that the economics of drunk shopping is a more complex matter than simply parsing out where people drink the most.
As far as platform of choice, Amazon leads the pack, followed by Ebay, Etsy, Target and Walmart. At least two of those are worth an intervention if you ever catch your friends drunk shopping at Walmart, for example.
Clothing and shoes are the goods of choice while drunk.
Studies have shown that people who base their self-worth on appearance are more likely to imbibe alcohol, so there is some tenuous linkage here. But this also ties in with the rapid rise of the direct-to-consumer fashion industry.
Entertainment (movies, games) and tech gadgets are also popular choices — though the party train seems to abruptly halt at software (if you’ve purchased a copy of Microsoft Excel drunk, we need to talk.)
Weirdest purchases, according to The Hustle‘s readers?
- 200 pounds of fresh, 10-foot tall bamboo
- A World War 2-era bayonet
- A full-size inflatable bouncy castle (“For my living room”)
- A breast pump (“I’m a dude”)
- A splinter that was removed from the foot of former NBA Star, Olden Polynice
- The same vest Michael J. Fox had on in Back to the Future
- A $2,200 pair of night vision goggles
- Tons of international fights (Azerbaijan, Iceland, Ukraine, Tunisia)
- An NRA membership
- A trilogy of Satanic religious books
Who could regret $2,200 night vision goggles?
- The Slogan That Unleashed This Hell
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic research,
In 1969, the salad days of New Left activism, a writer named Carol Hanisch penned an essay that the editor called “The Personal Is Political.” She was seeking to explain the ethos of the women’s therapy sessions she was running. The point was not to improve psychological well being. The point was “political therapy;” that is to motivate people to political action. The idea is that one’s own grievances ought to be turned into political action. “There are no personal solutions at this time,” she wrote. “There is only collective action for a collective solution.”
Let’s leave aside the case for or against her brand of politics. The slogan itself was fire. It spread to every cause, every group, every nook and cranny of life. If you experience dissatisfaction in your life, don’t look within for a personal solution; get active, join a collective, and demand a political solution. Think of this as the left-wing application of the Schmittian principle that only through politics do we find meaning (the very opposite point that has become the main theme of Jordan Peterson’s work).
Fifty years later, I’ve been following the meltdown of a number of “social justice” organizations and causes over the past months, as they turn in on themselves, purge themselves of their own self-defined evil and ultimately crumble based on their own inner contradictions. This happenedto the Women’s March. It has happened to the US Congress. It has happened to the most well-funded social justice activist organization in the country. It’s happened in Hollywood, which faces the problem that the more it complies with the identitarian code, the less profitable are its films.
There seems to be no end to the feeding frenzy caused by the politicization of every personal tick. A new entrant into the Democratic Party presidential race cannot even give a public speech without spending the week wailing mea maxima culpa for all the ways in which he violated the canon, however inadvertently. There are no penances sufficient to put one back in the good graces of the moral police of the left.
There are other absurdities, such as the candidate Elizabeth Warren’s alarming dalliance with genetic testing to verify family lore that she is part Native American and thus entitled to sympathy as a victim of oppression. The test not only failed to verify her lore; it produced outrage among tribal groups who clarified that their collective identity is cultural and social, not genetic.
When politics becomes so driven by personal identity that candidates imagine that DNA testing can garner them votes, we’ve reached not a moral high but a low that compares with some of the worst political experiments of the past (see Eugenics).
What’s happening here? The attempt to turn every subjectively felt personal issue into a collective cause with a collective action has hatched a brutal form of identity politics that has generated no end to social conflict, with vast carnage along the way.
The Theory Went Wrong
There are many problems with the slogan “the personal is the political” but two stand out. First, personal experience is as diverse as the people on the planet; surely not every personal experience can become a political cause without infinite clashes and contradictions. Second, the plan results in all-consuming state power to the point that you can’t speak, act, or even breathe without bumping into a cop – or a screaming mob.
Both problems have reached their boiling point sometime in the last two years. Surely you have noticed. In the name of justice, equity, and fairness, people are being fired from jobs for utterances or writings from decades ago. The wrong word or look can result in a mob attack and the loss of a career, no matter how successful one happens to be. The spotting of evil is endless and so fast-moving that it is impossible to keep up. Words and phrases that were the height of political compliance just five years ago (“his or her”) are now denounced as oppressively binary.
And the howling attacks against anyone and everyone who dissents is shutting down debate. One dares not take issue with, for example, the pummeling of a prominent person in absence of evidence for fear of doxing and flogging from howling moralists who will exact retribution against you. This explains the many strange pockets of silence on certain topics in the Twittersphere.
Impossible Ideals
The moral system being constructed by those who made “personal is political” their mantra has become infinitely complex to the point of being nonoperational. They once said that discrimination is wrong and many people agreed. The trouble is that the law is not a mind reader and so it uses proxies for what it deems to be discriminatory. That means racial and sexual quotas at the least but that’s only the beginning.
To achieve an absolutely even balance in every profession, at every level, not only in position but also in salary, is inconsistent with the actual choices of individuals. So what if those individuals are conscripted by outside observers into a group that the experts believe to be more decisive than mere choice? Instead of mere non-discrimination, the new demand became mandatory diversity.
But a diversity of what? That depends on how you want to slice and dice up the human family based on identity. There is race, sex, age, religion, physical ability, and also sexual preference, language, accent, gender identity, geography, class, and educational background. Maybe you think the diversity mandate should stop at physical biology alone but those too are in dispute (there is no pure race and, more recently, biological sex itself is said to be malleable).
The new additions to the canon include anti-harassment rules based on any of the above categories but that term has no clear definition, no evidentiary rules, no guidelines for compliance, and no statute of limitations. What it means in practice is to have as little human contact with others as possible, especially in a business environment. Literally, anyone can be accused and play-it-safe companies would rather toss out the targetted employee rather than risk bad public relations and an unwinnable lawsuit. The toll adds up daily.
Do Not Appropriate
Then most recently the architects of the identitarianism have added another impossible-to-keep law to its canon: you may not appropriate another culture. The intuition here stems from a genuine appreciation for the contributions of a people who deserve some kind of social credit for having made them. But does this mean that no one else may imitate, or be influenced by, another culture for the purpose of celebrating it? Hard to know for sure: we’d better ask official representatives of the culture to tell us. They will probably say no, and accuse you of theft.
The crucial theoretical problem with appropriation theory is that culture is at once malleable and infinitely reproducible at least in its outward appearance. Culture is not inextricably attached to a certain people however you want to identify those collective people, the members of which may or may not appreciate the identification. The crucial historical problem is that it is impossible to think of any point of progress in history that did not depend on appropriating cultural traits from beyond the experience of a small tribe. Follow this logic through far enough and you have to end in condemning all of human experience as inherently exploitative – and many do exactly this
Endless War
So let’s put all this together. The demand that we politicize every personal grievance presumes that people only exist as part of groups and those groups must be defined politically and such groupings can be infinitely complex as intersectionality theory demonstrates. One group’s winnings come at the expense of everyone else, and thus does every advance create the conditions for more oppression, disgust, outrage, condemnation, activism, and power grabbing, even as those groups are constantly changing in composition depending on political influence. There is no safety for anyone under this moral code; there is only fear and dread of exposure, and a miserable life overall.
Consider the old code of civic norms that all of this complexity of identity is designed to replace. As regards the law, it is simple: compulsion should only be deployed in the case of attacks on life and property. A wall exists that separates the use of state power from that which should be dealt with personally and in cooperation with others. The courts of manners and taste govern the rest. Keep your promises. Cultivate good relationships with others. Be empathetic. Admit failings when appropriate. Forgive when necessary. Respect the dignity of others. Do what you can to make others comfortable. Seek to live a good life but never at others’ expense.
This old code made a distinction between the personal and the political, with full knowledge that once you politicize anything, you create a zero-sum environment in which compulsion and bureaucracy rule. It is for this reason that the old code sought to restrain the state and empower society to be the primary venue for the development and cultivation of everything we call civilization. This is the code that brought to the world peace, prosperity, and understanding. Any “activism” that seeks to achieve social good should be animated by that ideal.
What we are seeing in our time are the results of a mandate that all personal problems must and should be channeled to political solutions demanded by a collective activist army, with the goal of constructing an apparatus of coercion and compulsion that knows no limits to its power. The results are pouring in: division, vituperation, personal destruction, and no end to the carnage. The implosion of the individuals and institutions that have professed fealty to the creed is a testament to its unworkability in real life.
- The Story Behind Quadriga's Collapse Just Got Even Weirder
Since QuadrigaCX first started having “liquidity issues” late last year, aggrieved clients of the crypto exchange have been subjected to one wild twist after another, all of which have supported the conclusion that the roughly $150 million in customer deposits (estimates of the total sum vary) has mysteriously vanished, and will likely never be recovered.
In January, the exchange revealed that its co-founder and CEO, Gerald Cotten, had died suddenly from complications related to Crohn’s disease during a vacation in India. Cotten was responsible for the exchange’s day-to-day operations, and in a bankruptcy filing, his widow claimed that he had taken the keys to the exchange’s ‘cold storage’ wallets to his grave. Efforts to infiltrate the wallets proved futile, and according to the exchange, it appeared that customers’ coins would be trapped forever.
But as amateur sleuths and the auditing firm retained by the exchange dug deeper, inconsistencies began to emerge. The exchange refused to reveal the public addresses of these wallets. And when the auditors finally got them, they found that six wallets that were supposed to hold nearly $100 million in coins had been emptied months before Cotten’s death.
Gerald Cotten
Weeks later, Bloomberg reported that a co-founder of the exchange who eventually quit had once been jailed for fraud.
All of this came as a shock to the exchange’s clients. At one point, Quadriga had been the largest crypto exchange in Canada. And according to a regulatory attorney who had been retained by the firm during its early days, at one time, Cotten had been on the path to building the most transparent and secure exchange in Canada, if not the world. Quadriga had four law firms advising it. It hired an auditor, and even secured insurance for its cold-storage deposits.
Then one day, he suddenly broke bad, fired all the outside advisors and auditors, and decided to go it alone, according to Christine Duhaime, a lawyer who had been working with the firm. Duhaime shared her experience with Quadriga during a lengthy essay published earlier this week on CoinDesk.
As Duhaime put it, Cotten wanted to get rid of all the “‘law and order’ folks.”
The QuadrigaCX story is by no means over but our bit of the story ended abruptly one morning when its CEO, Gerald Cotten, made the decision that he no longer wanted QuadrigaCX to be a listed company.
On that day, he terminated the professionals that were, in his mind, the “law and order” folks – the accountant, the auditor and me, the regulatory attorney.
From that moment onwards, Mr. Cotten solely took over QuadrigaCX and operated the exchange as if it had no investors, no shareholders, no regulatory agencies and no law that applied to it – no corporate law, no securities law, no anti-money-laundering law and no contract law. I don’t know why Mr. Cotten decided to eschew regulatory law but I never spoke with him after that day. (In January of this year, QuadrigaCX announced he had died a month earlier.)
From there, Duhaime’s story gets even stranger. According to the essay, she was never privy to the motivations behind Cotten’s decision. Though a few months before her firm was brought on, Quadriga separated into three separate companies, allowing it to take on a raft of new shareholders, many of whom hadn’t been vetted.
Why is this relevant? Duhaime can’t say for sure, but while she was working on Quadriga’s account, she came to believe that the whole Quadriga team fell under the impression that the company had unwittingly stumbled into a “Vancouver pump-and-dump scheme”. Duhaime doesn’t provide any more details about this supposed scheme, saying only that the team consisted of tech professionals who were unfamiliar with the vicissitudes of financial markets.
No story of QuadrigaCX is complete without understanding one more fact – six months before we were retained, it had gone through a court-approved plan of arrangement and become three companies, and as a result, it inherited a slew of new shareholders it knew nothing about. (A fourth company was later set up.)
It is my belief that the whole QuadrigaCX team came to believe that the company may have unwittingly become involved in a Vancouver pump-and-dump scheme. Whether it had been drawn into a pump-and-dump is not for me to say because it was before my time, but I can say that QuadrigaCX was run by tech geeks, who were competitive, ambitious and smart but who were unfamiliar with the capital markets ecosystem in Vancouver.
Though most of her essay focuses on the team’s good intentions, the fact that Cotten made this abrupt, unexplained change may suggest that whatever issues resulted in the loss of its customers’ coins – assuming it wasn’t outright theft by Cotten or his associates – Cotten may have tried to conceal it for years.
Customers have been impacted to varying degrees. One Canadian software engineer lost his entire life savings. Another crypto trader lost $75,000 due to one ill-timed trade. And while it’s likely they will never recover their money, we can only guess what the next Quadriga-related bombshell might reveal.
Read the full essay here.
- The Failure Of Party Politics Is Everywhere
Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
Bit unusual, but why not. I was reading British press earlier, trying to figure out what the fcuk is going on in London two days before March 29, and in an article in the Guardian I saw this comment, and thought it should be saved for posterity.
Since the article is/was one of those live updates ones, which tend to get very long, and moreover at the point I read it it already had well over 11,000 other comments, posting it here seemed to be the way to go to achieve that.
It was posted by someone who named themselves Tintenfische (German for squid, octopus?!), and that’s all I know about this person(s), who imagines a speech someone should stand up and deliver in the house. I think it says exactly what needs to be said, what politicians should say, in Britain where civil unrest is much closer than anyone wants to see, in the US where very similar scenarios are playing out, and in many other countries.
The failure of party politics is everywhere to be seen.
Tintenfische: Speech I wish someone would have the courage to give.
As I stand in Parliament today I see the faces of friends and colleagues I’ve worked alongside, struggled alongside, triumphed and lost alongside. Good men and women all from both sides of the house.
We and the parties we represent have fought for our beliefs and battled for our constituents for centuries. We’ve done what we believed to be right, we’ve fought battles we believed should be fought and shown the people across the globe how democracy when at its best is the only route to freedom. In this place too I’m confronted with history. It was here that our predecessors decided to stand up to fascism, where we ended slavery and wrote into law that no man or woman, no matter their race, colour, who they fall in love with or who they pray to is less than any other of us. We declared as a house that injustice must be fought, that evil opposed and democracy triumphed.
Great things have been done in this place, great things by great men, great women and even greater parties. However my friends that legacy is now at an end.
We have failed.
We have failed and our failure has broken this house and the institution we love. We have failed and with that too comes the failure of party politics.
None of us can run from that reality, none of us can hide, deny or challenge that reality. We have through partisan means on both sides of this house broken government of this once united nation. I could list the decisions, the politics, the loyalties which delivered this rupture. I could name names, point out lies and tell of moments when through advantage, greed or idiocy we decided to do what was best for our parties rather than our country, what was best for us rather than our constituents. I could list all those many many occasions when we as servants of the people failed the people, but what would be the point?
The truth is none of us are innocent, none of us escape blame. We as the leaders of this country could have stopped a collapse but we all chose this place and control over it as being more important than those outside. We chose ourselves and our parties ahead of our people.
But what else could we do? We could have stood up, we could have protested, we could have denied our own leaders but to what end? We all believe that we and the parties we represent are best placed to do what is right for this country. We all think that the shared policies, morals and ethics of ourselves and our parties are the right way for a country to be run. If we didn’t believe we knew best we wouldnt be here. But there’s the problem, circumstance has shown this not to be the case. Now we stand atop of a divided, fractured nation one which may never be able to be reformed and that has happened because of us. It is our fault. By following those certainties of righteousness and rightness both of ourselves and of our parties we have precipitated this collapse. We are now the problem.
So what’s to be done? We could just carry on, we could just continue down this same path which every day makes this country more divided, more ungovernable, more leaderless. We certainly could do that and looking around this room it’s easy to see so many of us already resigned to the path of destruction. Resigned to a rapid decline because we’re all too Cowed too timid to say no.
But we could also say no. We could as one house say to the country “I’m sorry but no. We can’t make these decisions, we’re not good enough. We can’t do anything but fail you or your future from here on in”. The people elected us to represent them it is true but we’re no longer capable of that, our parties are no longer capable of that. It is no longer in the national interest that we continue to represent the people when we can’t even govern ourselves.
We need to change ladies and gentlemen, we need to be better. We need to be greater than the sum of our parts. Each and everyone of us needs to decide who and what we are, who we represent. We need to turn away from the safety and comradeship of party loyalty and act and vote on what we believe to be right, what we believe to be in the best interests of our nation, not what our leaders tell us is best because if we’ve failed then our leaders are double damned by their double failure.
What I’m asking is extreme, I’m asking you my fellow members to destroy the parties you all represent. I’m asking you for the sake of the nation to walk away from rosette loyalty and remember your oaths. I’m asking you to do the right thing.
We are no longer able to govern, we cannot lead and we cannot decide. We must return the question of our place in the world back to the people and once that’s done we must dissolve this house and our parties and a new slate be mined because right now not one of us is fit to stand in this place and claim leadership of this disunited kingdom.
- China Testing Long-Range Cruise Missile Fired From Concealed Ship Container
Could the next great Chinese advanced missile threat come disguised as an innocuous looking shipping transport vessel? A new report in The Washington Free Beacon suggests so, as it details China’s new long-range cruise missile which can be launched directly from a shipping container device, which is meant to conceal detection of the threat right up until the moment of launch.
Alarmingly, it’s already being flight tested, according to analysts cited in the report, which further finds the technology “could turn Beijing’s large fleet of freighters into potential warships and commercial ports into future missile bases.” If cruise missiles can be hidden in international shipping containers, China could be a major threat to western targets simply as it moves millions of tons of goods every year.
A Russian previously unveiled a similar weapon system in the international arms market called the Club K cruise missile system. Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, told the Free Beacon, “Shipping container missile launchers can be smuggled through ports or via highway ports of entry and stored for years in a climate-controlled building within range of U.S. military based and taken out when needed for military operations.”
“Potentially, Chinese missile launching containers could be stored near the Port of Seattle, waiting for the day they can launch an electromagnetic pulse warhead-armed missiles over the Bangor nuclear ballistic missile submarine base,” he speculated.
The concealed nature of a launch-ready long-range missile also presents the nightmare scenario of ease of proliferation to rogue actors such as Iran or North Korea. “Containerized missiles give China, Russia, and its rogue state partners new options for directly or indirectly for attacking the United States and its allies,” Fisher added.
However, it should be noted that a defense company in Russia appears to have been the first to develop and market shipping container weapons nearly a decade ago. Yet even at that time analysts began to worry of that Russian private sector defense technology development, “Unless sales are very tightly controlled, there is a danger that it could end up in the wrong hands.”
The new missile being developed as part of the container-launch device program is said to be a variant of an advanced anti-ship missile called YJ-18C, according to US defense officials cited in the report.
Israel has also for years been developing a similar container launch system for a short range ballistic missile, called the “LORA”. One career US military officer and former Pacific Fleet intelligence chief described how a container concealed Chinese cruise missile could be a game changer in terms of assessing threats near US waters and ports:
Retired Navy Capt. Jim Fanell, a former Pacific Fleet intelligence chief, said a containerized YJ-18 anti-ship cruise missile would add a significant threat to the Navy given the volume of Chinese container ships that enter U.S. ports on the west and east coast, well within range of the vast majority of the U.S. fleet.
“If this capability is confirmed, it will require a completely new screening regime for all PRC flagged commercial ships bound for U.S. ports,” Fanell said.
Additionally the container-launched missiles could be targeted in foreign ports used by Chinese-flagged merchant vessels.
On that front, Washington military planners say there is much to be concerned about. One adviser and research professor at the US Army War College described China’s military activities in Latin America and the Caribbean as “extensive”.
A Russian company had previously simulated how its “container weapons” systems would operate.
Professor R. Evan Ellis said that during a conflict, “China’s substantial commercial base, its access to ports, and its military-to-military contacts in the Caribbean might prove useful,” as cited in the Free Beacon.
“All of these add up to growing Chinese influence in a region located close to the U.S. as well as its most important Atlantic coast military facilities,” he added.
The report noted that Israel has also for years been developing a similar container launch system for a short range ballistic missile, called the “LORA”.
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