- For Americans, War Has Always Been A Spectator Sport
Authored by Nick Turse via TomDispatch.com,
From the Civil War to Vietnam, Americans have always been captivated by war’s spectacle…
Sometimes war sounds like the harsh crack of gunfire and sometimes like the whisper of the wind. This early morning – in al-Yarmouk on the southern edge of Libya’s capital, Tripoli – it was a mix of both.
All around, shops were shuttered and homes emptied, except for those in the hands of the militiamen who make up the army of the Government of National Accord (GNA), the UN-backed, internationally recognized government of Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj. The war had slept in this morning and all was quiet until the rattle of a machine gun suddenly broke the calm.
A day earlier, I had spent hours on the roof of my hotel, listening to the basso profundo echo of artillery as dark torrents of smoke rose from explosions in this and several other outlying neighborhoods. The GNA was doing battle with the self-styled Libyan National Army of warlord Khalifa Haftar, a US citizen, former CIA asset, and longtime resident of Virginia, who was lauded by President Donald Trump in an April phone call. Watching the war from this perch brought me back to another time in my life when I wrote about war from a far greater distance—of both time and space—a war I covered decades after the fact, the one that Americans still call “Vietnam” but the Vietnamese know as “the American War.”
During the early years of US involvement there, watching the war from the hotels of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was a rite of passage for American journalists and the signature line of unfortunate articles that often said far more about the state of war reporting than the state of the war. “On clear days patrons lunching in the ninth-floor restaurant in the Caravelle Hotel can watch Government planes dropping napalm on guerrillas across the Saigon River,” Hedrick Smith wrote in a December 1963 New York Times article.
As that war ground on, the pastime of hotel war-watching never seemed to end, despite a recognition of the practice for what it was. Musing about the spring of 1968 in his fever dream memoir, Dispatches, Esquire’s correspondent in Vietnam, Michael Herr, wrote:
“In the early evenings we’d do exactly what the correspondents did in those terrible stories that would circulate in 1964 and 1965, we’d stand on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel having drinks and watch the airstrikes across the river, so close that a good telephoto lens would pick up the markings on the planes. There were dozens of us up there, like aristocrats viewing Borodino from the heights, at least as detached about it as that even though many of us had been caught under those things from time to time.”
“IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT THERE WAS A WOMAN KILLED THERE BY OUR GUNS”
Today, few know much about Borodino—unless they remember it as the white-hot heart of the war sections of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace—a Napoleonic victory that proved so pyrrhic it would have been regarded as the French Emperor’s Waterloo, if the actual battle of that name hadn’t finally felled him. Still, even for those who don’t know Borodino from Bora Bora, Herr’s passage points to a grand tradition of detached war-watching. (Or, in the case of Ernest Hemingway’s famed Spanish Civil War coverage, war-listening: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”)
In fact, the classic American instance of war-as-spectator-sport occurred in 1861 in the initial major land battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (or, for those reading this below the Mason-Dixon line, the first battle of Manassas).
“On the hill beside me there was a crowd of civilians on horseback, and in all sorts of vehicles, with a few of the fairer, if not gentler sex,” wrote William Howard Russell who covered the battle for the London Times.
“The spectators were all excited, and a lady with opera glasses who was near me was quite beside herself when an unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood—‘That is splendid, Oh my! Is not that first rate? I guess we will be in Richmond tomorrow.’”
That woman would be sorely disappointed. US forces not only failed to defeat their Confederate foes and press on toward the capital of the secessionist South but fled, pell-mell, in ignominious retreat toward Washington. It was a routof the first order. Still, not one of the many spectators on the scene, including Congressman Alfred Ely of New York, taken prisoner by the 8th South Carolina Infantry, was killed.
But that isn’t to say that there were no civilian casualties at Bull Run.
Judith Carter Henry was as old as the imperiled republic at the time of the battle. Born in 1776, the widow of a US Navy officer, she was an invalid, confined to her bed, living with her daughter, Ellen, and a leased, enslaved woman named Lucy Griffith when Confederate snipers stormed her hilltop home and took up positions on the second floor.
“We ascended the hill near the Henry house, which was at that time filled with sharpshooters. I had scarcely gotten to the battery before I saw some of my horses fall and some of my men wounded by sharpshooters,” Captain James Ricketts, commander of Battery 1, First US Artillery, wrote in his official report.
“I turned my guns on that house and literally riddled it. It has been said that there was a woman killed there by our guns.”
Indeed, a 10-pound shell crashed through Judith Henry’s bedroom and tore off her foot. She died later that day, the first civilian death of America’s Civil War.
No one knows how many civilians died in the war between the states. No one thought to count. Maybe 50,000, including those who died from war-related disease, starvation, crossfire, riots, and other mishaps. By comparison, around 620,000 to 750,000 American soldiers died in the conflict—close to 1,000 of them at that initial battle at Bull Run.
“WHAT YOU SAW WAS THEM SHELLING MY HOME.”
A century later, US troops had traded their blue coats for olive fatigues and the wartime death tolls were inverted. More than 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam. Estimates of the Vietnamese civilian toll, on the other hand, hover around two million. Of course, we’ll never know the actual number, just as we’ll never know how many died in air strikes as reporters watched from the rooftop bar of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel, just as I’ll never know how many—if any—lives were snuffed out as I scanned the southern edge of Tripoli and watched smoke from artillery shells and rockets billow into the sky.
That same afternoon in Libya’s capital, while taking a break from war watching, I met Salah Isaid and his two children. They were, like me, guests at the Victoria Hotel, although we were lodged there for very different reasons. When I mentioned having spent the previous hour on the roof as a suburb was being shelled hard, a glimmer of recognition flashed across Isaid’s face. “That’s Khalat Furjan,” he replied with a sad smile. “What you saw was them shelling my home.”
Isaid, his wife, and his two boys had found it difficult to escape the war zone, but finally made it to the safer north side of Tripoli, to this very hotel, in fact, a few weeks earlier. Worried that his house had been looted or destroyed, he tried several times to investigate only to be turned away at militia checkpoints. Now, he was homeless, jobless, and—even with the hotel’s special displaced-persons’ rate—rapidly burning through his savings. “I sold real estate, but who wants to buy a house in a war zone?” Isaid asked me with a wry smile that faded into a grimace.
My own experience as a reporter, in country after country, has more than confirmed his assessment. The “real estate” I saw in Tripoli’s war-ravaged suburbs was spectral, the civilian population having fled. Other than a car that had been hit by an air strike, the only vehicles were tanks or “technicals”—pickup trucks with machine guns or anti-aircraft weapons mounted in their beds. Many buildings had been peppered with machine-gun fire or battered by heavier ordnance. The sole residents now were GNA militiamen who had appropriated homes and shops as barracks and command posts.
Real estate, as Isaid well knows, is a losing proposition on a battlefront. After Judith Carter Henry’s hilltop home in Manassas Junction, Virginia, was blasted by artillery, its remains were either demolished by Confederate soldiers or burned down during the Second Battle of Bull Run, another staggering US defeat with even heavier casualties in August 1862. A photograph of Henry’s home, possibly taken in March 1862, months before that battle, already shows the house to be a crumpled ruin. (It wouldn’t be rebuilt until 1870.) Judith Henry was buried in a small plot next to her devastated home. “The Grave of Our Dear Mother Judith Henry” reads the tombstone there, which notes that she was 85 years old when “the explosion of shells in her dwelling” killed her.
One hundred and fifty years after Henry became the first civilian casualty of the Civil War, Libyans began dying in their own civil strife as revolutionaries, backed by US and NATO airpower, ended the 42-year rule of dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Before the year was out, that war had already cost an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 lives. And the killing never ended as the country slid into permanent near-failed-state status. The current conflict, raging on Tripoli’s doorstep since April, has left more than 4,700 people dead or wounded, including at least 176 confirmed civilian casualties (which experts believe to be lower than the actual figure). All told, according to the United Nations, around 1.5 million people—roughly 24 percent of the country’s population—have been affected by the almost three-month-old conflict.
“Heavy shelling and airstrikes have become all too common since early April,” said Danielle Hannon-Burt, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s office in Tripoli.
“Fierce fighting in parts of Tripoli includes direct or indiscriminate attacks against civilians and their property. It also includes attacks against key electricity, water, and medical infrastructure essential for the survival of the civilian population, potentially putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk.”
In this century, it’s a story that has occurred repeatedly, each time with its own individual horrors, as the American war on terror spread from Afghanistan to Iraq and then on to other countries; as Russia fought in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere; as bloodlettings have bloomed from the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Sudan, from Myanmar to Kashmir. War watchers like me and like those reporters atop the Caravelle decades ago are, of course, the lucky ones. We can sit on the rooftops of hotels and listen to the low rumble of homes being chewed up by artillery. We can make targeted runs into no-go zones to glimpse the destruction. We can visit schools transformed into shelters. We can speak to real estate agents who have morphed into war victims. Some of us, like Hedrick Smith, Michael Herr, or me, will then write about it—often from a safe distance and with the knowledge that, unlike Salah Isaid and most other civilian victims of such wars, we can always find an even safer place.
War has an all-consuming quality to it, which is at least part of what can make it so addictive for those blessed with the ability to escape it and so devastating to those trapped in it. A month of war had clearly worn Isaid down. He was slowly being crushed by it.
In the middle of our conversation, he pulled me aside and whispered so his boys couldn’t hear him, “When I go to bed at night, all I can think is ‘What is going on? What does war have to do with me?’” He shook his head disbelievingly. Some days, he told me, he gets into his car and weaves his way through the traffic on the side of the capital untouched by shelling but increasingly affected by the war. “I drive by myself. I don’t know where I’m going and don’t have any place to go. My life has stopped. This is the only way to keep moving, but I’m not going anywhere.”
I kept moving and left, of course. Isaid and his family remain in Tripoli – homeless, their lives upended, their futures uncertain – pinned under the heavy weight of war.
- Recreational Drug Use Surges Worldwide
The use of recreational drugs rose 30% between 2009 and 2017, according to new data from the United Nations World Drug Report, counting some 271 million people aged 15 to 64 in the study.
Marijuana is the most popular drug, followed by opioids, amphetamines and cocaine, Bloomberg reports.
The most popular drug globally continues to be cannabis, with an estimated 188 million people having used it in 2017, according to the study. Cannabis usage is most prevalent in North America, where there are an estimated 56.6 million users, followed by Asia with 54.2 million. –Bloomberg
Meanwhile, the global area under opium poppy cultivation is the second largest ever estimated, after a record high in 2017.
Stoned Israelis, Baked Jamaicans
According to the UN report, one-third of Israeli men aged 15-64 and 28.5% of Jamaican men in the same age range use marijuana at a greater frequency than the other countries studied. American men followed at 21.4%, while Canadians and New Zealanders came in at 19.1% and 18.6% respectively.
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The legalization of cannabis in some North American jurisdictions has contributed to a decline in seizures, which have slumped 77% since 2010, the study said.
Meanwhile, a record 693 tons of opiates was seized worldwide in 2017, a 5% increase from the previous year, as law enforcement efforts and international cooperation curtailed the global distribution of opium. –Bloomberg
Last week a Brazilian Air Force sergeant traveling with President Jair Bolsonaro’s entourage to the G20 in Japan was busted with 86 pounds of cocaine.
- 40 Lessons To Teach Your Kids Before They Leave Home
Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper,
“Millennials” have been the butt of a million jokes about incompetence. The generation born between 1981 and 1996 is considered entitled, ultra-liberal, and naive about how life works. But maybe they’ve gotten a bad rap because what no one ever points out is that maybe the issue isn’t with these young people but with how they were raised. I know that my own millennial daughter is competent, frugal, and independent.
As a parent, the most important job I will ever hold is “mom” to my two daughters. And if I’m not teaching them the important life lessons they need to survive and thrive in this crazy world, I’m not doing a very good job at all. Of course, once they get out there, there are a million variables, but how they deal with those variables has a lot to do with whether they were raised to think independently or raised to wait for rescue.
While I raised girls, I think it’s essential that we teach our kids skills outside the typical gender roles. Boys need to know how to cook. Girls need to know how to fix things. Maybe it won’t be their lot in life to do things outside their traditional roles, but take it from someone who never planned to become a single mom, things don’t always go the way you expect.
As my younger daughter prepares to leave the nest (*mom sobbing*) I feel confident she’ll be just fine because I’ve taught her to the best of my ability the things she needs to know to be a successful adult.
The skills you teach your children while they’re your captive audience will see them through many things – not just everyday life but also through a potential disaster.
Everyday skills every young person should have
Here are the lessons that I think every parent needs to teach their child, whether you’re raising boys or girls. Before leaving the nest, they should be able to:
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How to use up leftovers
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Get from point A to point B using public transit or under their own power
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Budget limited money so that the most important things are paid first
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Mend and repair items instead of replacing them
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Take a course in First Aid, CPR, and anything else applicable that is offered. The more you know, the calmer you are able to remain during a crisis.
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Have a good basic First Aid kit and know how to use everything in it
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Know some home remedies for various common illnesses: teas for tummy aches, treatment for flu symptoms, how to soothe skin irritations, and how to care for a fever
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Drive. Not only an automatic transmission but also a standard transmission
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Change a tire. You don’t want your teenage daughter stranded on the side of the road at the mercy of whoever stops to help. My daughters were not allowed to drive the car until they demonstrated their ability to change the tire with the factory jack.
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Perform minor maintenance, like checking the oil and fluid levels, filling up the washer fluid, checking tire pressures and topping them up if needed, and changing the windshield wiper blades.
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Use basic tools for repairs
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Cook a healthy meal from scratch
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Cook a “company” meal – everyone needs one delicious meal that’s a little fancier they can cook when they have a guest
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Grocery shop within a budget and have healthy food for the week ahead
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Speaking of that, how to budget in general, so that they don’t have “too much month and not enough money”
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How to clean
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How to do laundry, including stain removal
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How to think for themselves and question authority
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How to manage their time to get necessary tasks accomplished by the deadlines
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How to tell the difference between a want and a need
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How to be frugal with utilities and consumable goods
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How to pay bills
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How to stay out of debt (not easy with the college credit card racket that you see on campuses across the country and rampant student loans)
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How to pay off debt if they have it
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How to keep safe: they need to have basic self-defense and weapons-handling skills.
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How to navigate with a paper map – not Google or their car’s GPS
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How to make extra money fast if an emergency arises
Emergency skills every young person should have
Some of the skills above will cross over into emergencies, like First Aid. Outside of the basics of everyday life, your kids leaving home should know:
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How to light a fire
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How to cook safely over an open fire
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How to keep warm when the power is out, whether that means safely operating an indoor propane heater, using the woodstove/fireplace, or bundling up in a tent and sleeping bags in the living room
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How to keep themselves fed when the power is out – they should have enough supplies on hand that they can stay fed at home for up to two weeks: cereal, powdered milk, granola bars, canned fruit, etc.
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How to deal with the most likely disasters in their area
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About the dangers of off-grid heating and cooking, such as the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning in unventilated rooms.
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How to purify water
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How to keep safe both at home and when they’re out. Be sure they know the difference between cover and concealment
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How to acquire food: foraging, fishing, gardening, hunting
It’s our job to make sure our kids are competent when they leave home.
- US Army Wants 500,000 Active Troops By 2020, Amid Threats Of War
The US Army wants 500,000 active duty military personnel by 2020, amid threats of war with Iran near the Strait of Hormuz and potential conflict with China across the South China Sea. The service’s recruiting goals, however, first reported by Army Times, is facing significant difficulties with unhealthy, ineligible millennials.
“It’s a difficult market because it’s a very healthy job market,” said Acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. “This environment is as challenging as we’ve faced- 3.6% unemployment. We have no benchmark historically for the all-volunteer force.”
McCarthy told the Times that it would be difficult to reach the recruitment goal by year’s end.
“We are on target, but it’s close,” McCarthy said. “We, statistically, can make it, but we’re going to have to run through the finish line- undoubtedly a full sprint.”
McCarthy said Army officials are speaking with municipalities across the country to formulate a strategy to enhance recruitment at a local level.
Army officials are shocked that a soaring stock market, booming job market, and low unemployment hasn’t translated into higher recruiting numbers.
“That’s coupled with all the other factors we talk about all the time: obesity, mental health, challenges with law enforcement,” McCarthy said. “Things of that nature that would require waivers.”
McCarthy is expected to meet with trainers and NCOs at Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Kentucky, next week to strategize how future recruitment programs can attract more millennials.
“You got to engage kids,” McCarthy said. “It’s the mentality that a recruiter needs to have to get someone to understand their story — why an opportunity to serve in the US Army would be a great thing.”
“It’s the lifeblood of our business, and it’s something, in particular in the last six months, I’ve tried to invest more of my time because the first 18 [months] has been predominately modernization and the budget,” he added.
President Trump’s “America first” foreign policy with interventionists John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, attempting to force regime change in Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and trying to kill a rising power, China, through economic warfare, has led to massive military spending, modernization efforts, and forced the service to increase active duty personnel amid the recent threats of war.
- Wikipedia Co-Founder Unveils "The Declaration Of Digital Independence"
Humanity has been contemptuously used by vast digital empires. Thus it is now necessary to replace these empires with decentralized networks of independent individuals, as in the first decades of the Internet. As our participation has been voluntary, no one doubts our right to take this step. But if we are to persuade as many people as possible to join together and make reformed networks possible, we should declare our reasons for wanting to replace the old.
We declare that we have unalienable digital rights, rights that define how information that we individually own may or may not be treated by others, and that among these rights are free speech, privacy, and security. Since the proprietary, centralized architecture of the Internet at present has induced most of us to abandon these rights, however reluctantly or cynically, we ought to demand a new system that respects them properly. The difficulty and divisiveness of wholesale reform means that this task is not to be undertaken lightly. For years we have approved of and even celebrated enterprise as it has profited from our communication and labor without compensation to us. But it has become abundantly clear more recently that a callous, secretive, controlling, and exploitative animus guides the centralized networks of the Internet and the corporations behind them.
The long train of abuses we have suffered makes it our right, even our duty, to replace the old networks. To show what train of abuses we have suffered at the hands of these giant corporations, let these facts be submitted to a candid world.
They have practiced in-house moderation in keeping with their executives’ notions of what will maximize profit, rather than allowing moderation to be performed more democratically and by random members of the community.
They have banned, shadow-banned, throttled, and demonetized both users and content based on political considerations, exercising their enormous corporate power to influence elections globally.
They have adopted algorithms for user feeds that highlight the most controversial content, making civic discussion more emotional and irrational and making it possible for foreign powers to exercise an unmerited influence on elections globally.
They have required agreement to terms of service that are impossible for ordinary users to understand, and which are objectionably vague in ways that permit them to legally defend their exploitative practices.
They have marketed private data to advertisers in ways that no one would specifically assent to.
They have failed to provide clear ways to opt out of such marketing schemes.
They have subjected users to such terms and surveillance even when users pay them for products and services.
They have data-mined user content and behavior in sophisticated and disturbing ways, learning sometimes more about their users than their users know about themselves; they have profited from this hidden but personal information.
They have avoided using strong, end-to-end encryption when users have a right to expect total privacy, in order to retain access to user data.
They have amassed stunning quantities of user data while failing to follow sound information security practices, such as encryption; they have inadvertently or deliberately opened that data to both illegal attacks and government surveillance.
They have unfairly blocked accounts, posts, and means of funding on political or religious grounds, preferring the loyalty of some users over others.
They have sometimes been too ready to cooperate with despotic governments that both control information and surveil their people.
They have failed to provide adequate and desirable options that users may use to guide their own experience of their services, preferring to manipulate users for profit.
They have failed to provide users adequate tools for searching their own content, forcing users rather to employ interfaces insultingly inadequate for the purpose.
They have exploited users and volunteers who freely contribute data to their sites, by making such data available to others only via paid application program interfaces and privacy-violating terms of service, failing to make such freely-contributed data free and open source, and disallowing users to anonymize their data and opt out easily.
They have failed to provide adequate tools, and sometimes any tools, to export user data in a common data standard.
They have created artificial silos for their own profit; they have failed to provide means to incorporate similar content, served from elsewhere, as part of their interface, forcing users to stay within their networks and cutting them off from family, friends, and associates who use other networks.
They have profited from the content and activity of users, often without sharing any of these profits with the users.
They have treated users arrogantly as a fungible resource to be exploited and controlled rather than being treated respectfully, as free, independent, and diverse partners.
We have begged and pleaded, complained, and resorted to the law. The executives of the corporations must be familiar with these common complaints; but they acknowledge them publicly only rarely and grudgingly. The ill treatment continues, showing that most of such executives are not fit stewards of the public trust.
The most reliable guarantee of our privacy, security, and free speech is not in the form of any enterprise, organization, or government, but instead in the free agreement among free individuals to use common standards and protocols. The vast power wielded by social networks of the early 21st century, putting our digital rights in serious jeopardy, demonstrates that we must engineer new—but old-fashioned—decentralized networks that make such clearly dangerous concentrations of power impossible.
Therefore, we declare our support of the following principles.
Principles of Decentralized Social Networks
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We free individuals should be able to publish our data freely, without having to answer to any corporation.
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We declare that we legally own our own data; we possess both legal and moral rights to control our own data.
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Posts that appear on social networks should be able to be served, like email and blogs, from many independent services that we individually control, rather than from databases that corporations exclusively control or from any central repository.
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Just as no one has the right to eavesdrop on private conversations in homes without extraordinarily good reasons, so also the privacy rights of users must be preserved against criminal, corporate, and governmental monitoring; therefore, for private content, the protocols must support strong, end-to-end encryption and other good privacy practices.
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As is the case with the Internet domain name system, lists of available user feeds should be restricted by technical standards and protocols only, never according to user identity or content.
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Social media applications should make available data input by the user, at the user’s sole discretion, to be distributed by all other publishers according to common, global standards and protocols, just as are email and blogs, with no publisher being privileged by the network above another. Applications with idiosyncratic standards violate their users’ digital rights.
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Accordingly, social media applications should aggregate posts from multiple, independent data sources as determined by the user, and in an order determined by the user’s preferences.
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No corporation, or small group of corporations, should control the standards and protocols of decentralized networks, nor should there be a single brand, owner, proprietary software, or Internet location associated with them, as that would constitute centralization.
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Users should expect to be able to participate in the new networks, and to enjoy the rights above enumerated, without special technical skills. They should have very easy-to-use control over privacy, both fine- and coarse-grained, with the most private messages encrypted automatically, and using tools for controlling feeds and search results that are easy for non-technical people to use.
We hold that to embrace these principles is to return to the sounder and better practices of the earlier Internet and which were, after all, the foundation for the brilliant rise of the Internet. Anyone who opposes these principles opposes the Internet itself. Thus we pledge to code, design, and participate in newer and better networks that follow these principles, and to eschew the older, controlling, and soon to be outmoded networks.
We, therefore, the undersigned people of the Internet, do solemnly publish and declare that we will do all we can to create decentralized social networks; that as many of us as possible should distribute, discuss, and sign their names to this document; that we endorse the preceding statement of principles of decentralization; that we will judge social media companies by these principles; that we will demonstrate our solidarity to the cause by abandoning abusive networks if necessary; and that we, both users and developers, will advance the cause of a more decentralized Internet.
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- Vancouver Housing Unaffordability Due To Foreign Ownership, Chinese Funds, & Migrant Millionaires, Study Says
A new study has provided evidence linking unaffordable housing in Vancouver to foreign ownership, Chinese capital and millionaire migrants, according to the SCMP.
A white paper published by Josh Gordon, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University’s school of public policy, found a stunning 96% correlation between metro Vancouver municipalities’ price to income ratios and the proportion of their detached houses in which at least one owner was a non-resident. The correlation was called “unimpeachable” by a leading research who commented on the paper.
In short, this means that the more that a Vancouver municipality was sought after by non-resident owners, the more unaffordable it became.
Gordon said: “When I plugged the numbers in it blew my mind … I mean, holy smokes.”
His paper stated: “This is compelling evidence that when it comes to the extreme ‘decoupling’ [of prices from local incomes] seen in the Vancouver housing market, foreign ownership is the primary culprit.”
Vancouver has often been considered the world’s most unafforable housing, second only to Hong Kong. It has a price-to-income ratio for all housing of 12.6. Among detached houses, the ratio climbs to 25 to 30 to one, especially in areas popular with Chinese buyers, like the City of Vancouver, Richmond and West Vancouver.
Gordon’s paper was checked afterwards by University of British Columbia geography professor David Ley, who has studied Vancouver real estate unaffordability for decades. It was also checked by Andy Yan, director of the City Programme at Simon Fraser University.
Ley commented: “Such a high correlation is rarely seen in social science research … It indicates a very strong relationship. So it is the presence of non-resident buyers that is forcing up prices. But there’s a qualifier here because it forces up prices relative to incomes … we can more accurately say that non-resident demand shapes affordability.”
In the country’s condo market in 2016, the correlation between the unaffordability ratio and non-resident ownership was “strong” at 75%. His research shows that the correlation would rise to 88% if the single municipality of West Vancouver was discounted.
Yan commented that the study was “very straightforward” and said: “This puts together the story about the forces that are behind Vancouver real estate … [it] gives us a foundation and a direction, for how we [produce] effective housing policy. Key to that was understanding just how much Vancouver real estate is connected to the global economy, of which a large component is being driven by China.”
Gordon also sought out to investigate “satellite families” who live in Vancouver, but whose breadwinners earned money abroad. The study said: “[A] family with a low declared Canadian income might live in a multimillion-dollar mansion. This particular situation would represent ‘decoupling’ on steroids.”
Millionaire migration from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan is primarily responsible for the satellite family phenomenon. As the article notes, “Vancouver was long the world’s most popular destination city for such migrants under wealth-determined schemes, attracting them by the tens of thousands.”
Now, the country has “become a global test bed for affordability policies, with the introduction of a foreign buyers’ tax, a speculation and vacancy tax, and increased provincial property taxes.”
The average price of a detached house in metro Vancouver is now $1.2 million.
Gordon’s study was the result of Richard Wozny’s 2017 report, which concluded that local incomes could not support prices. Wozny examined 14 Vancouver municipalities and Gordon, who said his work was “testament to Richard Wozny’s instincts and character”, looked at the same municipalities during his study.
Yan concluded: “These are proxies for foreign money at times when we don’t have direct measures of foreign money. So we have these various scholars, with various data sets, all pointing in the same direction. That is a call for action.”
And how bad has the market gotten in Vancouver? Just 2 weeks ago, we wrote that desperate developers in Vancouver were trying to woo millennials into buying using avocado toast and free wine.
“It’s a slower, more competitive market,” according to Vancounver-based Wesgroup Properties VP Brad Jones, adding “The onus is on us to show we have the most attractive offering.”
As we noted in April, the decline of Vancouver’s housing market has become worldwide news – with sales plummeting 46% over the past year to levels not seen since 1986.
In late 2018, we wrote about how Chinese fentanyl kingpins had laundered over $5 billion through Vancouver homes since 2012.
- What America Needs Is A Paradigm Shift
Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
From the Democratic Party debates, it’s not difficult to see that there really isn’t any difference in principle between any of the Democratic presidential candidates and, for that matter, between Republicans and Democrats.
Oh, yes, I know how the mainstream media is portraying the “big” differences between the Democrats and President Trump but that’s just because their mindsets are stuck in the statist paradigm. For a person whose mind is stuck in the statist paradigm, the various candidates within the paradigm appear to have monumental differences. But once a person breaks out of the statist paradigm, he realizes that the differences between the various Democratic and Republicans candidates are minor and really go to degree, not principle.
Consider healthcare. The Democrats favor Medicare for All. Trump and his fellow Republicans favor Medicare for Some.
Now, that’s obviously a big difference to the mainstream media because they are operating within the statist paradigm.
From a libertarian perspective, my reaction is, big deal. There is no difference in principle between Medicare for All and Medicare for Some. The only difference is in degree. The point is that they all support government involvement in healthcare because that’s a core feature of the statist paradigm, just like it is in Cuba.
Consider immigration controls. A Berlin Wall versus a Berlin Fence. Big deal. Well, okay, it is considered a big deal by the mainstream media because, again, they are operating within the statist paradigm. For that type of person, a Berlin Wall is very much different from a Berlin Fence.
We libertarians? Big deal. There is no difference in principle. Both Republicans and Democrats believe in a system of immigration controls, a system that is based on the socialist principle of central planning. Oh, yes, Trump and his cohorts say, “Let in less immigrants (or no immigrants)” while the Dems says, “Let in more immigrants.” But the operative word is “let.” They both believe that the government should be the central planner and that, given such a role, it should “let” in more or less immigrants.
Like I say, big deal. One of the amusing aspects of the immigration debate is that none of these people realize that their decades-long, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis is due to their system of immigration controls. That’s because it is a socialist system, and as anyone in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela can attest, socialism produces crises, mayhem, and a police state, just like what Republicans and Democrats have foisted upon us here in the United States with their system of immigration controls.
Consider Social Security, the crown jewel of America’s system of mandatory charity. Both Republicans and Democrats fight with each other as to who is going to better protect and preserve this gigantic socialist program, one that forcibly takes money from people to whom it belongs in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong. Never mind that young people — the people who are funding this welfare for seniors — are financially strapped, can’t make ends meet as it is, are unable to save any money, can’t afford to get married, and can’t afford to buy a house. That’s unimportant. What’s matters to the Republicans and Democrats, first and foremost, is the preservation of this socialist program. If young people have to be plundered and looted even more to cover the costs of the ever-increasing number of Baby Boomers who are retiring every day, so what? They should be thankful they live in a “free” society — one in which the IRS is forcing them to be good and caring.
The battle in the 2020 presidential race is over who is going to get to manage this statist paradigm
To the mainstream media, that’s exciting. Just think, they write: We have a chance to get rid of Trump and have a Democrat running the welfare-warfare state. But everyone knows that regardless of who is running this crooked, corrupt, and immoral system, nothing fundamental is going to change, at least not with respect to genuine freedom.
What we need in this country is not better people in public office but rather a complete change of paradigms — the replacement of the statist paradigm with the libertarian paradigm. That would mean no more mandatory charity, no more drug war, no more government planning or control of economic activity (i.e., free enterprise), no more trade wars and tariffs, no more immigration controls, no more sanctions and embargoes, no more assassinations, no more indefinite-detention-torture camps, no more public (i.e., government) schooling, no more national-security state, and no more foreign wars, foreign meddling, foreign aid, and foreign interventionism.
For those who want to continue with the mandatory charity, the mass incarceration, the socialist envy and covetousness, and the forever wars, assassinations, torture, invasions, occupations, coups, support of dictators, sanctions, trade wars, embargoes, and other dark-side practices, you can support any Republican or Democratic candidate. It makes no difference which one you choose.
For those who want to restore liberty, peace, prosperity, harmony, voluntary charity, morality, and a limited-government republic to our land, there is but one paradigm that will accomplish that: libertarianism.
- Mainstream Media "Outraged!" That US Missiles Are In "Unknown" Libyan Rebel Hands
The New York Times is outraged, just outraged! — that US anti-tank missiles have been found in “unknown” Libyan rebel hands. Of course, when tons of American military hardware was covertly sent to al-Qaeda linked “rebels” fighting to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and when those same weapons were later transferred to the anti-Assad insurgency in Syria, many of them no doubt used by ISIS and al-Nusra Front, the mainstream media didn’t find much to complain about. But now the “scandal” is being uncovered in 2019?
Currently, it’s the UN-backed government in Tripoli which finds itself on the receiving end of deadly accurate high-tech US-made weapons systems, according to the Times:
Libyan government fighters discovered a cache of powerful American missiles, usually sold only to close American allies, at a captured rebel base in the mountains south of Tripoli this week.
The four Javelin anti-tank missiles, which cost more than $170,000 each, had ended up bolstering the arsenal of Gen. Khalifa Hifter, whose forces are waging a military campaign to take over Libya and overthrow a government the United States supports.
Markings on the missiles’ shipping containers indicate that they were originally sold to the United Arab Emirates, an important American partner, in 2008.
It was only months ago that President Trump for the first time voiced public support to Haftar’s forces, which are engaged in a renewed civil war against the UN-supported Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. The president’s April comments signaled a complete reversal of US policy, given that up to that point the US had officially backed the GNA.
“We take all allegations of misuse of U.S. origin defense articles very seriously,” a State Department official said in a statement following the Javelin anti-tank missile recovery.
“We are aware of these reports and are seeking additional information. We expect all recipients of U.S. origin defense equipment to abide by their end-use obligations,” the statement continued.
When the world’s most capable shoulder-fired anti-tank guided missile falls into unknown rebel hands https://t.co/HWBZZn3WV4
— John Ismay (@johnismay) June 29, 2019
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The Times report noted further, “If the Emirates transferred the weapons to General Hifter, it would likely violate the sales agreement with the United States as well as a United Nations arms embargo.”
Gen. Haftar — who solidified control of Eastern Libya over the past two years and swept through the south early this year, has sought to capture Tripoli and seize military control of the entire country, with the support of countries like the UAE and France, but is strongly opposed by Turkey and most European countries.
Haftar has long been described by many analysts as “the CIA’s man in Libya” — given he spent a couple decades living in exile a mere few minutes from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia during Gaddafi’s rule.
He was inserted back onto the Libyan battlefield before Gaddafi’s eventual capture and field execution at the hands of NATO supported Islamist fighters in 2011.
#Libya: Weapons captured from #LNA when the #GNA captured Garyan, including M79 Osa, HMGs, a 9K113, and at least 4 FGM-148 Javelin!
Also included was Chinese GP-1 155mm Guided Artillery Shells, known to be in Libya & other arms marked as from the UAE.
Partially via @Oded121351 pic.twitter.com/aEksokPl8G
— Cᴀʟɪʙʀᴇ Oʙsᴄᴜʀᴀ (@CalibreObscura) June 28, 2019
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The NYT offered further details of the US weapons recovered this week as follows:
Markings on the missile crates identify their joint manufacturer, the arms giants Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and a contract number that corresponds with a $115 million order for Javelin missiles that was placed by the United Arab Emirates and Oman in 2008.
Again, isn’t it a little late for the mainstream media to somehow only now discover and care about the “scandal” of major US weapons systems in “unknown rebel hands”?
From Libya to Syria: Walkie talkie courtesy of Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Missile launcher courtesy of Hillary Clinton’s Libya War. For a trip down memory lane, and to review just what Obama and Hillary’s original Libya war has wrought, see Dan Sanchez’s 2015 essay, “Where Does ISIS Get Those Wonderful Toys?”
- Everyone's Got A "Surveillance Score" And It Can Cost You Big Money
Authored by Dagny Taggart via Our Organic Prepper blog,
In these Orwellian times, when it is revealed that yet another government agency is spying on us in yet another way, most of us aren’t one bit surprised. Being surveilled nearly everywhere we go (and even in our own homes) has become the norm, unfortunately.
Yesterday, it was revealed that the NSA improperly collected Americans’ call and text logs in November 2017 and in February and October 2018 – just months after the agency claimed it was going to delete the 620 million-plus call detail records it already had stockpiled.
But this article isn’t about that.
It is about something far more insidious.
When it comes to spying on people, the government has competition.
The Chinese government is currently implementing a social credit system to monitor its 1.3 billion citizens (China already has 200 million public surveillance cameras). Facial recognition technology and personal data from cell phones and digital transactions are being used to collect intimate details about people’s lives, including their purchasing habits and whom they socialize with.
The gathered data is used to create mandatory social credit ratings for every citizen. These ratings will score citizens’ “general worthiness” and provide those with higher scores opportunities like access to jobs, loans, and travel. Those with lower scores will not have access to those opportunities.
While the United States government has yet to implement such a system, companies in the country are, reports The Hill:
Consumer advocates are pushing regulators to investigate what they paint as a shadowy online practice where retailers use consumer information collected by data brokers to decide how much to charge individual customers or the quality of service they’ll offer.
#REPRESENT, a public interest group run by the Consumer Education Foundation in California, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Monday asking the agency to investigate what the group is calling “surveillance scoring” of customers’ financial status or creditworthiness. (source)
Companies are using Secret Surveillance Scores to evaluate you.
The opening paragraphs of the 38-page complaint are chilling:
Major American corporations, including online and retail businesses, employers and landlords are using Secret Surveillance Scores to charge some people higher prices for the same product than others, to provide some people with better customer services than others, to deny some consumers the right to purchase services or buy or return products while allowing others to do so and even to deny people housing and jobs.
The Secret Surveillance Scores are generated by a shadowy group of privacy-busting firms that operate in dark recesses of the American marketplace. They collect thousands or even tens of thousands of intimate details of each person’s life – enough information, it is thought, to literally predetermine a person’s behavior – either directly or through data brokers. Then, in what is euphemistically referred to as “data analytics,” the firms’ engineers write software algorithms that instruct computers to parse a person’s data trail and develop a digital “mug shot.” Eventually, that individual profile is reduced to a number – the score – and transmitted to corporate clients looking for ways to take advantage of, or even avoid, the consumer. The scoring system is automatic and instantaneous. None of this is disclosed to the consumer: the existence of the algorithm, the application of the Surveillance Score or even that they have become the victim of a technological scheme that just a few years ago would appear only in a dystopian science fiction novel. (source)
These scores are used to discriminate based on income.
Written by lawyers Laura Antonini, the policy director of the Consumer Education Foundation, and Harvey Rosenfield, who leads the foundation, the complaint highlights four areas in which companies are using surveillance scoring: pricing, customer service, fraud prevention, and housing and employment.
“This is a way for companies to discriminate against users based on income and wealth,” Antonini told The Hill.
“It can range from monetary harm or basic necessities of life that you’re not getting.”
Antonini and Rosenfield argue that the practices outlined in the complaint are illegal – and that consumers are largely unaware that they’re being secretly evaluated in ways that can influence how much they pay online.
“The ability of corporations to target, manipulate and discriminate against Americans is unprecedented and inconsistent with the principles of competition and free markets,” the complaint reads. “Surveillance scoring promotes inequality by empowering companies to decide which consumers they want to do business with and on what terms, weeding out the people who they deem less valuable. Such discrimination is as much a threat to democracy as it is to a free market.”
Stores are using this scoring system to charge you higher prices.
Here’s more detail, from The Hill:
The filing points to a 2014 Northeastern University study exploring the ways that companies like Home Depot and Walmart use consumer data to customize prices for different customers. Rosenfield and Antonini replicated the study using an online tool that compares prices that they’re charged on their own computers with their own data profiles versus the prices charged to a user browsing sites through an anonymized computer server with no data history.
What they found was that Walmart and Home Depot were offering lower prices on a number of products to the anonymous computer. In the search results for “white paint” on Home Depot’s website, Rosenfield and Antonini were seeing higher prices for six of the first 24 items that popped up.
In one example, a five-gallon tub of Glidden premium exterior paint would have cost them $119 compared with $101 for the anonymous computer.
A similar pattern emerged on Walmart’s website. The two lawyers found the site was charging them more on a variety of items compared with the anonymous web tool, including paper towels, highlighters, pens and paint.
One paper towel holder cost $10 less for the blank web user. (source)
To see screenshots of different “personalized” prices shown for items from Home Depot and Walmart, please see pages 12-16 of the complaint. The examples presented demonstrate just how much these inflated prices for common household goods can really add up.
The travel industry is particularly sneaky.
A few days ago, we reported on hidden fees that could be costing you big bucks. The travel industry is a particularly large offender when it comes to sneaky fees, and they are also implicated in this scheme:
Travelocity. Software developer Christian Bennefeld, founder of etracker.com and eBlocker.com, did a sample search for hotel rooms in Paris on Travelocity in 2017 using his eBlocker device, which “allows him to act as if he were searching from two different” computers. Bennefeld found that when he performed the two searches at the same time, there was a $23 difference in Travelocity’s prices for the Hotel Le Six in Paris.
CheapTickets. The Northeastern Price Discrimination Study found that the online bargain travel site CheapTickets offers reduced prices on hotels to consumers who are logged into an account with CheapTickets, compared to those who proceed as “guests.” We performed our own search of airfares on CheapTickets without being logged in. We searched for flights from LAX to Las Vegas for April 5 through April 8, 2019. Our searches produced identical flight results in the same order, but Mr. Rosenfield’s prices were all quoted at three dollars higher than Ms. Antonini’s.
Other travel websites. The Northeastern Price Discrimination Study found that Orbitz also offers reduced prices on hotels to consumers who were logged into an account (Orbitz has been accused of quoting higher prices to Mac users versus PC users because Mac users have a higher household income); Expedia and Hotels.com steer a subset of users toward more expensive hotels; and Priceline acknowledges it “personalizes search results based on a user’s history of clicks and purchases. (source)
There is an industry that exists to evaluate you and sell your data to companies.
The complaint also describes an industry that offers retailers evaluations of their customers’ “trustworthiness” to determine whether they are a potential risk for fraudulent returns. One such firm – called Sift – offers these evaluations to major companies like Starbucks and Airbnb. Sift boasts on its website that it can tailor “user experiences based on 16,000+ real-time signals – putting good customers in the express lane and stopping bad customers from reaching the checkout.”
The Hill contacted Sift for comment, and the company was not able to respond. But, back in April, a Sift spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that it rates customers on a scale of 0 to 100, likening it to a credit score for trustworthiness.
While credit scores can wreak havoc on a person’s ability to make big purchases (and sometimes, gain employment), they at least are transparent. Surveillance scoring is not. There is NO transparency for consumers, and Rosenfield and Antonini argue that companies are using them to engage in illegal discrimination while users have little recourse to correct false information about them or challenge their ratings.
We are being spied on and scored on a wide variety of factors.
“In the World Privacy Forum’s landmark study “The Scoring of America: How Secret Consumer Scores Threaten Your Privacy and Future,” authors Pam Dixon and Bob Gellman identified approximately 44 scores currently used to predict the actions of consumers,” the complaint explains:
These include:
The Medication Adherence Score, which predicts whether a consumer is likely to follow a medication regimen;
The Health Risk Score, which predicts how much a specific patient will cost an insurance company;
The Consumer Profitability Score, which predicts which households may be profitable for a company and hence desirable customers;
The Job Security score, which predicts a person’s future income and ability to pay for things;
The Churn Score, which predicts whether a consumer is likely to move her business to another company;
The Discretionary Spending Index, which scores how much extra cash a particular consumer might be able to spend on non-necessities;
The Invitation to Apply Score, which predicts how likely a consumer is to respond to a sales offer;
The Charitable Donor Score, which predicts how likely a household is to make significant charitable donations;
The Pregnancy Predictor Score, which predicts the likelihood of someone getting pregnant. (source)
The government isn’t doing anything to stop these practices.
Back in 2014, the Federal Trade Commission held a workshop on a practice they call “predictive scoring” but the agency has done little since to reign in the practice. Antonini said that their complaint is pushing the agency to reexamine the industry and investigate whether it violates laws against unfair and deceptive business practices, according to The Hill:
“It’s far, far worse than when they looked at it in 2014,” she said. “There’s an exponentially larger amount of data that’s being collected about the American public that’s in the hands of data brokers and companies. Their ability to process that data and write algorithms have also improved exponentially.” (source)
We seem to be past the point of expecting our data to remain private, The Introduction to the complaint begins with a passage that sums up reality for us now:
This Petition does not ask the Commission to investigate the collection of Americans’ personal information. The battle over whether Americans’ personal data can be collected is over, and, as of this moment at least, consumers have lost. Consumers are now victims of an unavoidable corporate surveillance capitalism.
Rather, this Petition highlights a disturbing evolution in how consumers’ data is deployed against them. (source)
We can’t go anywhere without being surveilled now.
It is now impossible to shop in any large chain stores without being spied on. Stores are starting to use “smart coolers”, which are refrigerators equipped with cameras that scan shoppers’ faces and make inferences on their age and gender. And, a recent article from Futurism describes how security cameras are no longer being used solely to reduce theft:
“Instead of just keeping track of who’s in a store, surveillance systems could use facial recognition to determine peoples’ identities and gathering even more information about them. That data would then be out there, with no opportunity to opt out. (source)
A new ACLU report titled “The Dawn of Robot Surveillance” describes how emerging AI technology enables security companies to constantly monitor and collect data about people.
“Growth in the use and effectiveness of artificial intelligence techniques has been so rapid that people haven’t had time to assimilate a new understanding of what is being done, and what the consequences of data collection and privacy invasions can be,” the report concludes.
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