Today’s News 5th April 2018

• Frankfurt Is Winning The Battle For London's Bankers

  Since the UK voted to leave the EU, its biggest financial institutions have been observing the slow moving  Brexit negotiations with a degree of discomfort.

  Last month, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, Theresa May warned that the UK’s financial companies could lose full passporting rights and single market access, leading to even higher anxiety, particularly in the City of London.

  The air of uncertainty had already prompted several companies to take action and prepare for post-Brexit life in new European hubs.

  In recent months, much has been written about the threat of financial relocations but which companies have actually followed through with the threat and announced they will shift staff abroad?

  Bloomberg has kept track of banks announcing plans to relocate staff and the following infographic provides an overview of the situation with London’s loss Frankfurt’s gain.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Goldman Sachs recently announced to its investment bankers and traders that their future may well lie in in Germany’s financial capital. The firm has already said it intends moving 1,000 of its 6,000 strong staff to Frankfurt.

  It’s just one of many organizations to announce a shift to other EU hubs with UBS planning to shift 1,500 of its workforce in the UK to Frankfurt and Paris. Depending on the outcome of talks on a future trade agreeement, these initial moves could just herald the start of London’s financial exodus.

   

  

• The Three Most Important Aspects Of The Skripal Case… And Where They Might Be Pointing

  Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,

  I have now asked a total of 50 questions around the Skripal case, which you can find here and here. Having gone back through these questions, as far as I can see only three have been answered by the release of public information or events that have transpired. These are:

  • Are they (Sergei and Yulia Skripal) still alive?

  • If so, what is their current condition and what symptoms are they displaying?

  • Can the government confirm that its scientists at Porton Down have established that the substance that poisoned the Skripals and D.S. Bailey was actually produced or manufactured in Russia?

  On the first two points we are now told that Yulia Skripal’s condition has significantly improved to the point where she is said to be recovering well and talking. However, although this provides something of an answer to these questions, it also raises a number of others. Is she finally being allowed consular access? Is she being allowed to speak to her fiancé, her grandmother, or her cousin by telephone? Most importantly, how does her recovery comport with the claim that she was poisoned with a “military-grade nerve agent” with a toxicity around 5-8 times that of VX nerve agent?

  On the other point, we do now have a definitive answer from none other than the Chief Executive of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down, Gary Aitkenhead: No, Porton Down was not able to identify the substance as being produced or manufactured in Russia.

  It is important that reasonable questions continue to be raised, as they not only help clarify the actual issues, but the answers — or lack thereof — are also a good barometer as to how the official narrative stacks up. As a keen observer of the case — especially since it took place just a few hundred yards from my home in Salisbury — I have to say that the official narrative of the British Government has not stood up to even the most cursory scrutiny from the outset. In fact, there are three crucial issues that serve to raise suspicions about it, and to my mind these issues are the most important aspects of the case so far:

  1. The absurd speed at which the British Government reacted to the incident

  2. The British Government’s ignoring of legal frameworks and protocols

  3. The large number of discrepancies between events and the official narrative

  Let’s just look at these in turn.

  1. The absurd speed at which the British Government reacted to the incident

  I remain astonished at the manner and the speed with which the British Government reacted to this incident. There was the speed with which the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, first pointed the finger of culpability, less than 48 hours after the incident, and before any investigation or analysis of the substance had taken place. There was the speed with which Porton Down was apparently able to analyse and identify the substance, even though it is set to take the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) at least three weeks to carry out a similar identification. There was the speed with which the British Government officially accused the Russian Government of being behind the incident, and the 36-hour ultimatum given to it to prove its innocence without being given any of the evidence that apparently showed its culpability. There was the speed with which the British Government, armed with evidence that looked like it was put together by a rather dull 14-year-old on work experience, managed to convince a number of other countries to expel diplomats, including 60 from the United States.

  Why, if it was so sure of its claims, did the British Government feel the need to act so hastily and recklessly, rather than await the results of the investigation?

  2. The British Government’s ignoring of legal frameworks and protocols

  Not only has the British Government acted with lightning speed, it has also ridden roughshod over a number of international legal agreements and protocols.

  Firstly, there is the involvement of the OPCW. What ought to have happened is the British Government should have invited the OPCW in as part of the investigation immediately upon suspicion of the use of a nerve agent. However, according to the British Government’s own timeline, it wasn’t until March 14th– the day that Mrs May formally announced the culpability of the Russian State to Parliament – that she actually wrote to the OPCW to involve them in the case. This is, I understand, contrary to the obligations Britain has as a member of the OPCW, and signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

  In addition, the British Government has refused to provide evidence to the Russian Government. Again, my understanding is that this is contrary to the protocols set out in the CWC.

  The British Government has also refused to grant the Russian Embassy in London consular access to two Russian nationals, Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which it is legally obliged to do under Articles 36 and 37 of the 1963 Vienna Convention and Article 35 (1) of the 1965 Consular Convention.

  Why, if it was so sure of its claims, did the British Government feel the need to ignore international agreements to which it is a signatory, and instead act in this opaque and frankly suspicious manner?

  3. The number of oddities and discrepancies in the official narrative

  The speed of apportioning blame and the ignoring of international legal agreements might not have looked nearly as suspicious had the narrative presented by the British Government and the facts on the ground been in harmony with one another. But they have not been.

  Instead, many of the actual events that have transpired over the weeks since the incident was first reported simply do not fit the overarching explanation given.

  Below are five of the most important:

  1. As mentioned above, the Chief Executive of Porton Down, Gary Aitkenhead has confirmed that the laboratory was unable to identify the origin of the substance used to poison the Skripals. This is in direct contradiction to the claims made by the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who said the following on the Andrew Marr Show on 18th March:

  “Obviously to the best of our knowledge this is a Russian-made nerve agent that falls within the category Novichok made only by Russia, and just to get back to the point about the international reaction which is so fascinating…”

  If it’s made only by Russia, as Mr Johnson claimed, then it must have originated in Russia. Right? Yet Mr Aitkenhead says they were unable to identify where it was made.

  Then in an interview with Deutsche Welle two days after his above comments, Mr Johnson was categorical about the source of the nerve agent as being Russian. Here’s the exchange:

  Interviewer: You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it?

  Johnson: “Let me be clear with you … When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory …”

  Interviewer: “So they have the samples …

  Johnson: “They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And he said there’s no doubt.”

  Who “the guy” is, perhaps we’ll never know. The cleaner perhaps? I suppose a politician of Mr Johnson’s calibre will happily try to weasel his way out of the implications of what he said. But to us lesser mortals, it does rather look like he was deliberately misleading, doesn’t it

  2. Much of the investigation initially concentrated on where the Skripals were poisoned. Amongst the suggestions made were the bench on which they collapsed, the Zizzi restaurant where they had eaten, Ms Skripal’s luggage or Mr Skripal’s car. Then, some 24 days after the incident, it was announced that a high concentration of the “military-grade nerve agent” had been found on the front door, and that this was the likely place of poisoning. Yet it is known that after leaving the house, Mr Skripal and his daughter drove into the City Centre, went to the Mill pub, and then to the restaurant where they ate a meal together. In other words, according to the door theory, the two of them were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent, which then took over three hours to have any effect. Odd, wouldn’t you say?

  3. Furthermore, it has been stated that the two of them became ill at the same time on the bench in the Maltings. Therefore, if they were poisoned at the front door, this would mean that not only did the two of them feel little or no effects for the three hours or so that followed, but it would also mean that a large 66-year-old man and an averagely built 33-year-old woman, of different height, weight and metabolism, somehow succumbed to the effects of poisoning at exactly the same time, some three hours or so later. Again, is that not very odd?

  4. The claim that they were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent, of a type said to be 5-8 times the toxicity of VX nerve agent, is itself surely open to question. Both Mr Skripal and his daughter not only survived, but Yulia Skripal is now said to be sitting up and talking just weeks later. Perhaps it is possible to survive a miniscule dose of such a nerve agent. The problem with this is that according to many earlier claims, there were significant traces of the substance in various parts of the City of Salisbury, which indicates that it cannot have been a very miniscule amount that they came into contact with at the door. Which means that we are being asked to believe that they were poisoned by “more than a miniscule amount” of this deadly poison, but both somehow survived, despite neither receiving an antidote (a fact now confirmed by Gary Aitkenhead). Does that not seem improbable?

  5. The official explanation – that this was planned and authorised at the highest level within the Russian Government – would lead one to believe that the action was carried out by top level agents of the FSB. Yet the mode of attack – nerve agent apparently smeared or sprayed on the door – has to be one of the least effective methods that could be used to assassinate anyone. For a start, it rains a lot in Salisbury, and it did indeed rain on the day of the poisoning. If the substance was left at the front door (assuming it was the outside), the attacker(s) could have had no guarantee that it would not be washed off before Mr Skripal touched it. Nor could they have had any guarantee that he, as opposed to his daughter or perhaps a delivery person etc, would come into contact with it. And of course there is the fact that Mr Skripal is still alive. Does any of this seem consistent with the narrative of a professional, Kremlin-authorised hit-job.

  Conclusion

  Where does this leave us?

  The official narrative would have us believe that the Russian Government authorised the killing of a has-been (former?) MI6 spy, who it had freed in 2010 and who presumably posed no threat to it, just a week before the Russian election and weeks before the World Cup, using a nerve agent with an exclusively Russian signature, in a way (on the door) that could not guarantee the intended target would touch it. This would be difficult enough to swallow by itself, but the British Government’s rush to judgement, disregard for law, and the many discrepancies in the actual events themselves make this scenario absurdly implausible.

  Another possibility – that the British Government or intelligence services were behind the incident – has been given great credibility by the British Government itself, in its absurdly quick reaction to the incident and its blatant ignoring of legal protocols. These actions were bound to fuel suspicions about the possibility of its own involvement, and I have to say that such suspicions are absolutely legitimate precisely because of the way it has behaved. However, it must be said that the oddities and discrepancies in the case don’t lend themselves very well to the idea of a carefully planned false flag. If British intelligence had planned a hit job on Mr Skripal using a military-grade nerve agent “of a type developed by Russia”, in order to then pin the blame on the Russian Government, I doubt very much that Mr Skripal and his daughter would still be alive, or that the explanation for where the poison was administered would be changing on a daily basis, or that the British Government’s evidence to other countries would have been as risible as it was (unless of course our intelligence agencies are as incompetent as such a scenario would require them to be, that is).

  My hunch – and it is just that – is that Mr Skripal himself was perhaps still working for British intelligence, and may have been in possession of a nerve agent. Somehow, this involvement went wrong, and he ended up accidently poisoning himself and his daughter on the bench in The Maltings. The Government then scrambled to concoct a story in order to cover up the real story of a Russian working for MI6 and handling nerve agents, and so quickly decided to point the finger at that most convenient scapegoat, the Russian Government.

  The reason that I’m attracted to this possibility is that it explains all three aspects I have described above, and which I think are the most important aspects of the case. The rush to judgement — which looked like panic-mode to me — could have been an attempt to divert attention away from the investigation looking at the possibility of Mr Skripal having military grade nerve agent in his possession. The ignoring of international legal protocols, at least for a time, could have been done to ensure that the case was not probed by any outside body, which may well have exposed discrepancies. And it could also explain many of the oddities mentioned above, such as traces of nerve agent apparently being found in various places in Salisbury, since these could have come about because Mr Skripal was in possession of some sort of nerve agent when he left his house that day.

  As I say, this is just a hunch and purely speculative. I am probably wrong. But unless the British Government is able to produce far better evidence than it has so far produced, to back up the claims it has made, I shall consider it a more credible possibility than the one they have sold to the British public.

  

• Judge Throws Out 12-Year-Old Lawsuit Against Steve Cohen

  More than seven years ago, we reported on the wide-ranging financial conspiracy involving almost every single prominent US-based hedge fund and a Canadian firm called Fairfax Financial Holdings that they schemed to short – and then crush by spreading dubious research and shoddy accounting.

  Around the time that a Reuters report on recently declassified court document from 2008, which outlined details of the plot, including Cohen’s alleged role.

  

  Now, a New Jersey judge has put an end (for now, at least) to the 12-year-long legal saga by ruling that the lawsuit didn’t belong in his court. A state appeals court revived Fairfax’s claims last April after they were previously dismissed in 2011 and 2012. Judges have already thrown out claims against Dan Loeb’s Third Point and Jim Chanos’s Kynikos Associates LP, according to the New York Post.

  Billionaire Steven A. Cohen has won the dismissal of an $8 billion lawsuit accusing him and his former firm SAC Capital Advisors LP of conspiring with other hedge funds to spread false rumors about Fairfax Financial Holdings, hoping to “crush” or “kill” the insurer.

  In a decision last week, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Frank DeAngelis said the nearly 12-year-old case did not belong in that state’s courts because there was no evidence SAC expected or intended to cause injury there while “conspiring to drive down the share price of a Canadian company.”

  According to Reuters, Fairfax said it was victimized in a coordinated raid.

  Fairfax claimed it was victimized by a four-year “bear raid” by hedge funds that engineered bogus accounting claims and biased analyst research, and persuaded reporters to write negative stories about the Toronto-based insurance and investment management company.

  It said the funds did this to profit from short sales, or bets its stock price would fall. Fairfax claimed that hedge fund operatives ran the bear raid from New Jersey.

  Cohen, whose four-year ban from the securities industry ended in January, is also facing another lawsuit from a former female employee alleging a culture of harassment and “hostility toward  women” at Point72.

  

• Brave New World Revisited And The Disease Of Over-Organization

  Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

  When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

  – John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 15, 1817

  Brave New World Revisited is one of the few books I’ve read in my life that I continue to think about on a regular basis.

  In terms of understanding where humanity stands at present and what we need to do to get out of the mess we’ve created, it’s one of the more important pieces of non-fiction you can find.

  I recently felt the need to reread the book for some unknown reason, and I’m glad I did. The choices we make as a species about how we reorganize human affairs in the decades to come will determine the future of human freedom on this planet. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited offers an abundance of wisdom for us to consider as we move forward.

  Huxley was deeply concerned with the importance of individual human freedom and the forces relentlessly trying to stifle it. Here’s a brief description of how Huxley viewed our species:

  In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. We reproduce our kind by bringing the father’s genes into contact with the mother’s. These hereditary factors may be combined in an al­most infinite number of ways. Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature…

  Biologically speaking, man is a moderately gregar­ious, not a completely social animal — a creature more like a wolf, let us say, or an elephant, than like a bee or an ant. In their original form human societies bore no resemblance to the hive or the ant heap; they were merely packs. Civilization is, among other things, the process by which primitive packs are transformed into an analogue, crude and mechanical, of the social in­sects’ organic communities. At the present time the pressures of over-population and technological change are accelerating this process. The termitary has come to seem a realizable and even, in some eyes, a desirable ideal. Needless to say, the ideal will never in fact be realized. A great gulf separates the social insect from the not too gregarious, big-brained mammal; and even though the mammal should do his best to imitate the insect, the gulf would remain. However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totali­tarian despotism.

  It’s that very last line which is key, and forms the basis of most of Huxley’s most dystopian concerns. If you agree with his assessment (as I do), that human beings are “moderately gregarious” at a species level, and biologically unique at the individual level, any ethical conclusion about how human civilizations should be structured must promote and protect the value of human freedom at its core.

  While this may be obvious to many of you, Huxley accurately warns readers of the nontrivial numbers of dedicated ideologues and authoritarian types who disagree and actively work to turn the human being into a mere cog in a large machine of their particular fantasy. The best terms to describe such types and their worldview are: collectivists and collectivism. These sorts insist that the rights of the individual are subservient to the whole, with the whole typically being some artificial construct that happens to be most opportunistic or appealing at any given moment. Collectivism can emerge on the right or the left of the political spectrum — it knows no political party. The key calling card of the collectivist is that he or she wishes to force individuals into a structure of conformity that fits their particular worldview.

  As Mr. William Whyte has shown in his remarkable book, The Organization Man, a new Social Ethic is replacing our traditional ethical system — the system in which the individual is primary. The key words in this Social Ethic are “adjustment,” “adaptation,” “socially orientated behavior,” “belongingness,” “acquisition of social skills,” “team work,” “group living,” “group loyalty,” “group dynamics,” “group thinking,” “group creativ­ity.” Its basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts, that inborn biological differences should be sac­rificed to cultural uniformity, that the rights of the collectivity take precedence over what the eighteenth century called the Rights of Man…This ideal man is the man who displays “dynamic conformity” (delicious phrase!) and an intense loyalty to the group, an unflagging desire to subordinate himself, to belong. And the ideal man must have an ideal wife, highly gregarious, infinitely adaptable and not merely re­signed to the fact that her husband’s first loyalty is to the Corporation, but actively loyal on her own account.

  This isn’t to say we shouldn’t view ourselves as interconnected consciousness on a planetary level — I think we should. The key is this must emerge from an individual understanding of consciousness and not some topdown mandate from some collectivist control-freak dictator enforced via violence and coercion.

  But here’s where it starts to get really interesting. Since humans aren’t naturally collectivist animals like ants or bees, those who desire to turn us into such creatures must construct an artificial paradigm and then resort to intense and systematic propaganda to keep it going. This is precisely why Huxley devotes so much of his book to the mind-control techniques of his time and the ones he imagines will exist in the not too distant future.

  Here’s one passage that really stuck with me:

  In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationaliza­tion — the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationaliza­tion of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manip­ulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these tech­niques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrele­vance the rational propaganda essential to the mainten­ance of individual liberty and the survival of demo­cratic institutions.

  Sound familiar?

  Russia, Russia, Russia.

  Stormy Daniels, Stormy Daniels, Stormy Daniels. 

  Huxley also spent a great deal of time discussing how completely filled with propaganda all of our human societies are, and that it’s not always totally insidious. After all, the use of persuasion and the innate susceptibility for humans beings to be persuaded is in fact part of our social makeup. He notes:

  Huxley notes:

  Suffice it to say that all the intellectual materials for a sound education in the proper use of language — an education on every level from the kindergarten to the postgraduate school — are now available. Such an education in the art of distinguishing between the proper and the improper use of symbols could be inaugurated immediately. In­deed it might have been inaugurated at any time during the last thirty or forty years. And yet children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, state­ments. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education. In this context the brief, sad history of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis is highly significant. The Institute was founded in 1937, when Nazi propaganda was at its noisiest and most effective, by Mr. Filene, the New England philanthro­pist. Under its auspices analyses of non-rational propa­ganda were made and several texts for the instruction of high school and university students were prepared. Then came the war — a total war on all the fronts, the mental no less than the physical. With all the Allied governments engaging in “psychological warfare,” an insistence upon the desirability of analyzing propa­ganda seemed a bit tactless. The Institute was closed in 1941. But even before the outbreak of hostilities, there were many persons to whom its activities seemed profoundly objectionable. Certain educators, for exam­ple, disapproved of the teaching of propaganda anal­ysis on the grounds that it would make adolescents unduly cynical. Nor was it welcomed by the military authorities, who were afraid that recruits might start to analyze the utterances of drill sergeants. And then there were the clergymen and the advertisers. The clergymen were against propaganda analysis as tend­ing to undermine belief and diminish churchgoing; the advertisers objected on the grounds that it might undermine brand loyalty and reduce sales.

  That’s simply fascinating and shows there’s a institutional bias against providing people with the tools needed in order to identify mind-control and propaganda. Dominant institutions may not agree on much, but they agree that people shouldn’t be critical thinkers. This is precisely why my wife and I are determined to teach our children to question everything they’re told, including by us (I’m quite certain I’ll live to regret writing that some day).

  Huxley’s observation reminds me of that classic George Carlin quote:

  There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you’ve got… because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now… the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.

  Indeed it is.

  Going back to Huxley, it’s amazing how prescient he was about the future of the U.S. and indeed much of the Western world. He observed:

  At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worth while to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything? In the United States and America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from now — recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censor­ship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that govern­ment of the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts. That so many of the well-fed young television-watchers in the world’s most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. “Free as a bird,” we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings. If the bread is supplied regularly and copiously three times a day, many of them will be perfectly content to live by bread alone — or at least by bread and circuses alone.

  It’s important to recall that this was written in 1958. Huxley astutely noted that the youth of post WW2 America, too young to recall the horrors of the war, but old enough to appreciate the material benefits which followed total victory, had no real interest in self-government or freedom of thought. Fat on bread and expecting good times to continue indefinitely, the American public had very quickly become a people perfectly primed for those obsessed with turning humans into malleable cogs in a gigantic machine. This machine would eventually evolve into the imperial oligarchy we have today.

  Huxley also noted the following about the media environment:

  Mass commu­nication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory. In the field of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man. As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country could boast of a great number of small journals and local newspapers. Thousands of country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere or other almost anybody could get almost anything printed. Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could possibly approve.

  The advent of the internet and social media leveled this playing field considerably, a development which freaked out the establishment and resulted in hysterical calls to censor the web in the name of fighting “fake news.”

  Finally, while reading Brave New World Revisited can leave you with a sense of despair, I see many reasons for optimism. First, we should remember that the reason freedom and the individual human spirit is so difficult to eradicate in the long-term is precisely because the collectivist model goes against the actual nature of our species. This is why so much time and effort must be placed on propaganda and mind-control. Collectivists need to manipulate and brainwash us into accepting such unnatural and oppressive environments such as the type most of humanity live under to the present day.

  This means we can certainly change things and shift toward a different paradigm for human affairs. As most of you know by know, I believe this model must be rooted in the concept of decentralization. Huxley seems to agree:

  Take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely func­tional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily cooperating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Govern­ment.

  Over-population and over-organization have pro­duced the modern metropolis, in which a fully human life of multiple personal relationships has become almost impossible. Therefore, if you wish to avoid the spiritual impoverishment of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive the small country community, or alternately humanize the me­tropolis by creating within its network of mechanical organization the urban equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and co­operate as complete persons, not as the mere embodi­ments of specialized functions.

  Humanity finds itself at a significant crossroads. The forces of over-organization and centralization remain dominant, but are increasingly on the run as the economic and political paradigm created in their image begins to fracture. As Huxley noted, over-organization is a disease, yet the varied proponents of the status quo will argue for more control and more centralization as a cure to a problem of their own making. In contrast, what we need to do is move in precisely the opposite direction.

  It’s become clear to me that the gigantic, bureaucratic nation-state model of counties as varied as the U.S., China and Russia make little sense in their current forms if we care at all about human freedom. Huxley observed that freedom flourishes best at a far more local level of governance and I completely agree. When you attempt to make blanket, centralized political decisions for hundreds of millions, or even billions of people, everyone ends up unhappy and collectively powerless. Significant amounts of coercion and oppression are then needed to enforce such centralized decisions that typically end up benefiting only the handful of people who are able to game the system and get what they want.

  Huxley noted:

  Self-government is in inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the value of any par­ticular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the individual elector feels himself to be impotent, a neg­ligible quantity. The candidates he has voted into office are far away, at the top of the pyramid of power. Theoretically they are the servants of the people; but in fact it is the servants who give orders and the peo­ple, far off at the base of the great pyramid, who must obey. Increasing population and advancing technology have resulted in an increase in the number and complexity of organizations, an increase in the amount of power concentrated in the hands of officials and a corre­sponding decrease in the amount of control exercised by electors, coupled with a decrease in the public’s regard for democratic procedures. Already weakened by the vast impersonal forces at work in the modern world, democratic institutions are now being under­mined from within by the politicians and their propa­gandists.

  For additional thoughts on this topic, see my 2017 four-part series: “Decentralize or Die.”

  Notes:

  This is the second post I’ve written on Brave New World Revisited. See the first one here: Brave New World Revisited…Key Excerpts and My Summary (2014)

  Read the entire book online here: Brave New World Revisited [1958] 

  *  *  *

  If you liked this article and enjoy my work, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit our Support Page to show your appreciation for independent content creators.

  

• "This Is The Breaking Point" – Manhattan Home Sales Plunge Most Since 2009

  For much of the past year, we’ve been carefully monitoring developments in the high-end of the world’s ritziest property markets – cities like New York, London and Hong Kong as well as tony suburbs like Greenwich, Conn. – for warning signs that America’s torrid post-crisis real-estate rally could be nearly exhausted.

  As US home prices have rocketed to within a hair’s breadth (1%) of their highs from 2006, we’ve pondered the question of whether this is a “market top” or a “breakout.” The high end, ultimately, could be the final piece of this puzzle.

  

  After all, conventional wisdom would have you believe that real-estate values in dynamic urban centers like NYC could never fall – at least not meaningfully. The perception, as we pointed out back in February, is that world-class cities will never go out of style, and their already high-densities deeply limits supply.

  

  But that logic leaves one crucial question unanswered: What happens when too many people pile into a supposedly “safe” asset?

  This is essentially the narrative that unfolded during the housing crisis, as millions of Americans assumed real-estate valuations could never retreat (beyond the occasional “gully”).

  But even the world’s trendiest markets have their breaking points.

  “Even with New York real estate prices, you do hit a point in which resistance sets in,” said Frederick Peters, CEO of brokerage Warburg Realty. “People are very anxious about overpaying.”

  To wit, one month after we reported that Manhattan apartment sales were

  For what it’s worth, analysts at UBS to Morgan Stanley have predicted that a correction is looming in the near future.

  We recently reported that, according to data collected by a private company, Manhattan apartment sales plunged to a six-year low in January.

  And now, Bloomberg is reporting that Manhattan home sales plunged the most since 2009 during the first quarter, according to a popular report compiled by Miller Samuel Inc. and Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The two firms tabulated that sales dropped 25% during the first quarter. 

  Meanwhile, Corcoran Group, which compiles its own report, recorded an 11% decrease. The drop was observed more or less evenly across the market, from the ultra-high end (which has been struggling for months) to studios and one-bedrooms.

  The drop in sales spanned from the highest reaches of the luxury market to workaday studios and one-bedrooms. Buyers, who have noticed that home prices are no longer climbing as sharply as they have been, are realizing they can afford to be picky. Rising borrowing costs and new federal limits on tax deductions for mortgage interest and state and local levies also are making homeownership more expensive, giving shoppers even more reasons to push back on a listing’s price — or walk away.

  While just a few years ago, bidding wars were the norm, “there’s nothing out there today that points to prices going up, and in many buyers’ minds, they point to being flat,” said Pamela Liebman, chief executive officer of brokerage Corcoran Group. “They’re now aggressive in the opposite way: putting in very low offers and seeing what concessions they can get from the sellers.”

  Any seller who wanted to close a deal during the first quarter had to lower their ask. Indeed, 52% of all sales closed during the period were for less than the most recent ask. In 38% of deals, buyers agreed to pay the asking price. But by then, it had already been dramatically reduced.

  Per Bloomberg, no deal is too small to preclude haggling.

  Peters said that these days, he gets dozens of emails a day announcing price reductions for listings. And buyers are haggling over all deals, no matter how small. In a recent sale of a two-bedroom home handled by his firm, a buyer who agreed to pay $1.5 million — after the seller cut the asking price — suddenly demanded an extra $100,000 discount before signing the contract. They agreed to meet halfway, Peters said.

  Buyers also are finding value in co-ops, which in Manhattan tend to be priced lower than condos. Resale co-ops were the only category to have an increase in sales in the quarter, rising 2 percent to 1,486 deals, according to Corcoran Group. Sales of previously owned condos, on the other hand, fell 12 percent as their owners clung to prices near their record highs, the brokerage said.

  The median price of all sales that closed in the quarter was $1.095 million, down 5.2 percent from a year earlier, brokerage Town Residential said in its own report. Three-bedroom apartments saw the biggest drop, with a decline of 7 percent to a median of $3.82 million, the firm said.

  Both new developments (of which there are many) and existing home sales have fallen.

  To be sure, if one insists on believing this is just the beginning of another gully, one could point to expectations that US GDP growth will be relatively subdued during the first quarter – as it often is.

  But even if we see a strong rebound in Q2, perhaps the most important factor that has been driving the high-end real-estate boom exists outside the US. Chinese buyers, who’ve helped fuel the speculative boom, are finding it increasingly difficult to move their wealth offshore as China has cracked down on capital flows and, specifically, foreign real-estate transactions involving wealthy Chinese.

  

   

  

• Yet Another California City Fighting Back Against Unlawful Sanctuary Policy

  Authored by Ann via ThePoliticalInsider.com,

  Huntington Beach is the latest city in California to join a growing backlash against the state’s sanctuary law.

  In a late-night vote Monday, the Huntington Beach City Council decided 6 to 1 to sue the state of California over SB 54, which protects illegal immigrants by limiting the cooperation between local police and ICE agents. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who represents Huntington Beach, praised the decision to sue.

  “I am very proud of the USA. I would suggest that those who advocate for sanctuary states are betraying the American people.”

  BREAKING: The Huntington Beach City Council has voted to sue the state of California over its unconstitutional sanctuary city law!

  If they are successful in this case, it will overturn the law STATEWIDE! pic.twitter.com/hxKGyZ55ny

  — Mike Tokes (@MikeTokes) April 3, 2018

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  Citizens the state over are making it loud and clear that they refuse to sit idly by while California Gov. Jerry Brown unlawfully protects illegals in their state. Los Alamitos was the first city to take action, voting 4-1 on March 19 to pass a city ordinance exempting it from SB 54. That vote created a domino effect, and the cities of Aliso Viejo and Buena Park announced that they would also push for an exemption from the law.

  California citizens aren’t the only ones taking action, either – the Department of Justice is suing the state of California under the contention that SB 54, which essentially forbids local and state law enforcement from enforcing federal immigration law, is unconstitutional. Under the rule, law enforcement officers cannot be deputized as immigration agents, arrest someone for a civil immigration warrant alone, or participate in border patrol activities, among other actions.

  California Cities Against SB 54:
  ✔️Los Alamitos
  ✔️Fountain Valley
  ✔️Huntington Beach
  ✔️San Juan Capistrano

  It’s time to show up, speak out, & take back your state. #WednesdayWisdom

  — #ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) April 4, 2018

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  It goes without saying that SB 54 is a threat to public safety. But liberals would rather protect illegals than their own citizens. No wonder Californians are fighting back.

  

• CDC Finds "Nightmare Bacteria" Across United States

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a new Vital Signs report that identified an alarming trend of antibiotic-resistant genes in “nightmare bacteria” across the United States, on April 03.

  

  The CDC warned that nationwide testing – conducted in 2017, uncovered 221 instances of unique resistance genes in “nightmare bacteria.” According to Fortune, of all the germ samples submitted to the CDC for lab testing, one in four had antibiotic-resistant gene characteristics.

  Is America losing the war against antibiotic-resistant bacteria?

  For some time, the CDC has warned Americans about the deadly, drug-resistant ‘superbugs,’ otherwise now called “nightmare bacteria,” which seems officials have upgraded the term to a much more dangerous name — reflecting the severity of today’s epidemic.

  “Nightmare bacteria” kills more than 23,000 Americans each year, and the report states about 11 percent of Americans who were screened had “no symptoms” before the bacteria aggressively spread.

  “While antibiotic resistance (AR) threats vary nationwide, AR has been found in every state. And unusual resistance germs, which are resistant to all or most antibiotics tested and are uncommon or carry special resistance genes, are constantly developing and spreading,” the CDC said in a report.

  Antibiotic-resistant bacteria can spread like wildfire

  

  “Essentially, we found nightmare bacteria in your backyard,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, Acting Principal Deputy Director of CDC.

  “These verge on untreatable infections” where the only option may be supportive care — fluids and sometimes machines to maintain life to give the patient a chance to recover, Schuchat said.

  Schuchat states about 2 million Americans get infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year, and around 23,000 people die from the deadly infections.

  

  Dr. Jay Butler, the chief medical officer for the state of Alaska and past president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said, “even in remote areas” the antibiotic-resistant bacteria threat is real, because those who are infected can unknowingly transport the deadly bacteria.

  “Rapid identification of the new or rare threats is the critical first step in CDC’s containment strategy to stop the spread of antibiotic resistance. When a germ with significant resistance is detected, facilities can quickly isolate patients and begin aggressive infection control and screening actions to discover, reduce, and stop transmission to others,” the CDC said.

  What can the Federal Government do? 

  • Monitoring resistance and sounding the alarm when threats emerge. CDC develops and provides new lab tests so health departments can quickly identify new threats.

  • Improving identification through CDC’s new AR Lab Network in all 50 states, 5 large cities, and Puerto Rico, including 7 regional labs and a national tuberculosis lab for specialty testing.

  • Supporting prevention experts and programs in every state, and providing data and recommendations for local prevention and response.

  • Testing innovative infection control and prevention strategies with health care and academic partners.

  State and Local Health Departments and Labs must can: 

  • Make sure all health care facilities know what state and local lab support is available and what isolates (pure samples of a germ) to send for testing. Develop a plan to respond rapidly to unusual genes and germs when they first appear.

  • Assess the quality and consistency of infection control in health care facilities across the state, especially in facilities with high-risk patients and long stays. Help improve practices.

  • Coordinate with affected health care facilities, the new AR Lab Network regional lab, and CDC for every case of unusual resistance. Investigations should include onsite infection control assessments to find spread. Consider colonization screenings. Continue until spread is controlled.

  • Provide timely lab results and recommendations to affected health care facilities and providers. If the patient came from or was transferred to another facility, alert that facility.

  “The efforts detailed in the Vital Signs report were made possible through new congressional funding in 2016 to combat antibiotic resistance,” Dr. Auwaerter said. “We urge Congress to sustain and to grow that investment so that further progress will prepare us to meet the future challenges of antibiotic resistance from a position of strength.”

  Antibiotic drugs are beneficial and have been around for decades. Here is the issue, antibiotic-resistant genes in bacteria are getting used to the drugs.  It is a problem the CDC and the federal government have known for a while, but it is an issue that is more widespread than previously thought.

  Mapping Out The Rise of Resistance:

  

  

• Viewers Outraged By CNN's "Sexist" Coverage Of YouTube Shooter

  During the chaotic hours following yesterday’s shooting at YouTube headquarters, news organizations were begging law enforcement sources and interrogating witnesses for any clue or scrap of news about the shooter, their identity and their motive.

  

  And as it so often does, this approach led to some incredibly – even offensively – inaccurate reporting. And nowhere were these violations more blatant than at CNN, which quickly started speculating that the attacker may have been involved in a “love triangle” or some other relationship following reports that the shooter was female, per the Hollywood Reporter.

  One personality, CNN’s crime and justice reporter Shimon Prokupecz, speculated on The Situation Room that the motivation for the shooting was “perhaps a love triangle.” Ongoing conversations centered on the possibility of the shooter reacting to a relationship gone bad.

  Predictably, CNN’s coverage provoked an outrage on Twitter.

   

  Love the @cnnbrk reporter’s conjecture, once he found out the #youtube shooter was female, that the shooting was due to a #lovetriangle. Yes, and she was probably having her period too. 😑🙄

  — RogueFlynn (@rogueflynn51) April 3, 2018

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  Way to speculate without any basis whatsoever that the shooting was a result of a love triangle because the shooter was a woman. Fine reporting @cnn

  — Allison Jagger (@ALLisONELV) April 3, 2018

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  CNN tees up a theory out of nowhere that the shooting must be a love triangle because the shooter was a woman. turning on Cartoon Network

  — geokaren (@geokaren) April 3, 2018

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  @CNN Why did the analyst jump to the #lovetriangle motive? Because shooter was woman? Seems like a sexist jump. Never heard of that motive for other mass shootings.

  — Tampa Is Hot (@Tampaishot) April 3, 2018

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  Of course since the YouTube shooter is a woman, terms like “crime of passion” & “love triangle” are already being used. Stop spinning webs 🙄

  — Colleen Nika (@colleennika) April 3, 2018

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  As fate would have it, the shooting had nothing to do with a “love triangle” or “domestic violence” – the latter of which was widely reported by mainstream media organizations citing anonymous law enforcement sources. They also reported that one of the victims was believed to be the shooter’s boyfriend. Police said the shooter, who was later identified as Nasim Aghdam, had no personal relationship with anybody at YouTube headquarters.

  Instead, Aghdam, a prolific publisher of videos on the site, was seeking revenge on the company for censoring her.

  

• Is Putin Winning The War Of Attrition With The U.S.?

  Authored by Tom Luongo,

  The news that President Donald Trump offered to hold a meeting with his counterpart in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, has the political world in an uproar.

  Furiously keyboards are chattering away as laptop bombardiers are worried that perpetual war for perpetual empire will end if Trump and Putin see eye to eye on anything.

  From the bowels of MI-6 to the think tanks that line K Street schemes are hatched to make it politically unacceptable for Trump to do what he apparently did, if TASS is to be believed.

  If true, the offer represents the biggest shift in U.S./Russian relations since Trump’s election and the subsequent hissy fit thrown by his political opposition in every corner of the political landscape.

  Because they know what’s happening even though you could never get them to admit it in public, the U.S. is vulnerable.

  We’re not vulnerable in any ultimate weapons sense. The U.S. can certainly lob enough nukes at Russia to wipe them out and vice versa.  No, we are vulnerable where our real power comes from: our dominance of the world’s capital markets backed up by both the political will to isolate anyone who doesn’t toe our line and/or the military might to put down any marginal challenges.

  Real Might, Real Power

  So, China finally launching an oil futures contract denominated in Yuan, the so-called petroyuan, and convertible to gold is a financial WMD which doesn’t dwarf Putin’s new hypersonic missiles today.  But, over time that weapon will grow in power and destructive capability.

  

  China is the world’s largest importer of oil.  That makes it the source of marginal demand for oil in the world.  Russia is the world’s second largest oil exporter, that makes them one of the suppliers of the marginal barrel of oil on the world market.

  While the Saudi Arabians export a lot more oil than Russia, they do so at a much higher all-in-sustaining-cost basis than Russia does (see volatility of the Saudi Budget relative to oil prices below).  At current oil prices Russia’s slowly growing economy is capable of meeting its social needs as measured by the government’s budget, which ran a very modest 1.5% of GDP in 2017 and should contract again this year.

  

  On the other hand the Saudis ran an 8.9% budget deficit in 2017 and has zero hope of closing that much further without higher oil prices. The Saudis are simply at the mercy of the oil price.

  Therefore, the Russians are, in my opinion, the producer of the marginal barrel of oil because of their greater economic diversity.

  Economically speaking, the marginal supplier and marginal buyer set the price.  No one else does.

  And when you are the marginal buyer you decide what currency you’ll pay in.  In the 1970’s when the U.S. was so “dependent on foreign oil” we were also the price setters.  This was the framework for the petrodollar deal.  Saudi Arabia got U.S. cover for its crimes against humanity and the U.S. got to export dollars around the world and build up confidence in our government bond markets.

  Today China is where the U.S. was and it’s position is getting stronger by the day.  And that’s why this petroyuan contract can and will succeed where others have failed in the past.

  At some point China will tell the Saudis they no longer are willing to subsidize the U.S. dollar and offer up only Yuan in payment.

  And guess what folks?  The Saudis will play ball.  So will the U.S.

  If they don’t China will continue to buy more and more oil from Russia who will be only too happy to accept Yuan in payment for services rendered.  The Saudis will see their power eroded over this.  The dollar will fall as a percentage of reserves.

  The Waiting Game

  And this brings me to Putin and his near infinite patience.  It is easy to have patience with your opponent when you know your opponent has no end-game strategy other than war.

  Putin understands that the U.S. is living on borrowed time.  That moves like this ‘petroyuan’ contract are the beginning of a new landscape.

  When Chinese banking giant ICBC bought a London Bullion Market Association vault, a seat on the fixing board and became one of thirteen market makers we all wondered what the end game was.  But, it should be plainly clear now.

  The LBMA is the means by which China can make good on its promise to back its Shanghai Oil Futures contract with gold, allaying the fears of institutional investors and traders of an exit strategy for their profits.

  China gets a way to deepen its yuan-denominated debt markets and expand the Yuan’s base via organic growth of demand for it as a trade settlement currency.  Investors are safe knowing they can hold yuan-denominated debt because it is convertible to gold as a hedge.

  The Russians get a willing partner with tremendous capital reserves to invest in Russia and benefit from the growth of their relationship.  Russia gets to diversify its reserves and lessen the impact of an exchange rate shock between the ruble and the U.S. dollar.

  Putin knew the Chinese were making the right moves to pull off what marginal players like Qaddafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq could not do, defy the U.S.’s control over the pricing of oil.

  The petrodollar is the U.S.’s Achilles’ heel.  Trade matters despite Martin Armstrong’s downplaying of it.  It is the basis on which an economy can or cannot sustain a virtuous credit cycle in our absurd fractional reserve banking system.

  It is the M-zero of the international monetary system, as it were.  And if anything about central banking is to be believed, shrinking a particular currency’s portion of global M-zero means shrinking its multiplier through asset valuations, c.f. Exter’s Pyramid.

  

  Because of this the petrodollar is one of the main conduits that allow us to finance our current spending habits.  If the U.S. only ran a trade deficit, then Triffin’s Paradox would be in play and the current system would be sustainable for a lot longer than it is today.

  But with the fiscal and demographic nightmare unfolding in the U.S. and Europe all Russia has to do is deflect the worst of their aggressions while waiting for time to catch up with their profligacy.

  And that time is catching up with us rapidly.

  And that’s been Putin’s plan all along.  Simply win a hybrid war of attrition with the U.S. and Europe.  Trump, I think, understands this, though he’d never admit it in public and nor should he.

  The very fact that he’s willing to meet Putin now after a deadly clash between U.S. forces and Russian mercenaries in the oil fields near Deir Ezzor and Putin’s unveiling weapons that render moot much of the U.S.’s current defense spending means he knows it’s time to begin pulling the world back from the brink of catastrophe.

  That Trump made this offer despite the virulent protestations of the foreign policy wonks in his cabinet (many of whom he recently fired) and the chattering class in Congress and the Media speaks to how serious the situation truly is behind the scenes.

  So, while I don’t believe this petroyuan contract will change the world now, it is another bit of leverage China has in its trade and geopolitical negotiations with Trump over Iran, North Korea, Syria and China’s One Belt, One Road project.

  Putin’s very prudent means of getting Russia’s own house in order put her in the position to outlast the U.S. who will, over the next few years have to retreat or destroy the world.

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