Aug 05

Today’s News 5th August 2018

  • Here's Why 3D-Printing Guns Are A Win For World Peace And A Potential Death Blow To Tyranny

    Authored by Matt Agorist via ActivistPost.com,

    As the debate continues about whether or not 3D-printed firearm plans should be banned, even the ostensible pro-2nd Amendment folks are worried that shooting rampages will occur as a result of these plans being published online. But the reality is far different.

    For generations, advocates of private gun ownership have been fighting exhaustively through political channels to protect their right to keep and bear arms. Gun owners even have one of the strongest lobby groups in Washington, the highly disappointing NRA. Yet over the years, gun rights continue to diminish in America, despite the constant political campaigns by the NRA and politicians that claim to support gun rights.

    However, in the past few years, one guy with a good idea has managed to do more to protect gun rights than the NRA has in decades of political involvement. Cody Wilson is the founder of “Defense Distributed” and the “Wikiweapon” project, which allows anyone with a 3D printer to create their own untraceable gun in the privacy of their own home.

    While alarmists claim that 3D-printed guns will be the end of humanity, the fact is that these plans have been online on torrent and dark web sites for years and we’ve yet to see a single person killed with one.

    What’s more, as the gruesome murder-suicide on a college campus in Walnut Creek, California illustrates is that people don’t even need these plans if they want to make their own untraceable gun. Scott Bertics built the gun he used to shoot himself and Clare Orton without anyone knowing and entirely through legal measures.

    Psychopaths who want to cause harm to others will cause harm to others using any means necessary. Limiting the ability for law-abiding citizens to protect themselves will never change this.

    Wilson makes no secret that the intention behind distributing CAD files to create homemade guns is to make gun control measures obsolete and bolster the Second Amendment, which is under continual assault from anti-gun activists.

    As Wilson explains, these files could be used to empower oppressed people all over the world who’ve been disarmed and ruled by criminals and warlords.

    “We put a lot of world governments on notice, and I think that’s good in the history of the balance of power between sovereigns and subjects,” Wilson told the Brown Political Review.

    From the Armenian Genocide to the Nazi Holocaust to “Black Gun Codes” in America: throughout history, societies who have been disarmed by their governments have given way to massive bloodshed. This is still the case today in countries who’ve turned in their guns.

    Depending on the current government, life in disarmed societies can go on peacefully for a while. However, in some cases, citizens — men women and children — are slaughtered by the millions.

    Even when gun control seems to work in the short term, the scapegoatists are never satisfied. As we are seeing in the United Kingdom, politicians are now going after knives as the “evil weapon” that no law-abiding citizen should ever need.

    For those who don’t recall, the disarming of citizens took place in the US and was used as a means to slaughter blacks and Native Americans.

    Perhaps the first known attempt at disarming citizens in the new world occurred in 1751 when the French Black code was enacted requiring colonists to “stop any blacks, and if necessary, beat any black carrying any potential weapon, such as a cane.”

    This attempt to disarm blacks was repeated under United States’ rule 50 years later when the U.S. purchased the Louisiana territory. According to a paper published in the Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy:

    When the first U. S. official arrived in New Orleans in 1803 to take charge of this new American possession, the planters sought to have the existing free black militia disarmed, and otherwise exclude “free blacks from positions in which they were required to bear arms,” including such non-military functions as slave-catching crews.

    Upon the defeat of the confederacy in the Civil War, many southern states enacted “Black Codes” that barred the newly freed slaves from exercising their basic civil rights. One such example of these new laws was an act passed in the state of Mississippi that stated:

    no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife, and on conviction thereof in the county court shall be punished by fine

    After the passage of these laws, numerous studies concluded that the newly freed slaves had essentially been rendered defenseless against groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Disarming them, essentially made them slaves once again.

    Guns — in the hands of good people — level the playing field against guns in the hands of bad people. It is this simple. Just imagine the power a 3D-printed gun would give a mother in an African village as warlords come through hacking off the limbs of children with machetes. With enough of the villagers having these guns, they could effectively defend themselves against large groups of tyrants even if they had automatic weapons.

    Sadly, the statists only see the potentially negative aspects of these 3D-printed guns.

    “The people who make them will be state actors or well-financed criminal cartels who have the ability to execute well-organized criminal attacks in the United States and elsewhere,” said Avery Gardiner, the co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

    This protectionist attitude is self-serving and one-sided and ignores the benefits of an armed society as well as history. And, it only serves to further the oppression of those who cannot defend themselves.

    While it would certainly be an amazing thought to be able to live in a world without guns, that is simply not the case. Until it is the case, anyone who wants to defend themselves and their family, should be able to do so in any manner they see fit — as the only other option is tyranny.

    As Wilson notes, “I think the state should be as weak as possible relative to the individual. The proper posture of the state is one that at least is in fear of its citizen, not one that lords over it.”

  • Visualizing Every US Valuation Milestone From 1781: The Road To A Trillion Dollars

    The market has been buzzing about Apple’s $1 trillion market valuation.

    It’s an incredible amount of wealth creation in any context – but, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, getting to 12 zeros is especially impressive when you consider that Apple was just 90 days from declaring bankruptcy in 1997.

    Today’s chart shows this milestone – as well as many of the ones before it – through a period of over 200 years of U.S. market history. It was inspired by this interesting post by Global Financial Data, which is worth reading in its own right.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    MARKET CAP MILESTONES

    Over the last couple of centuries, and with the exception of brief moments in time such as the Japanese stock bubble of 1989, the largest company in the world has almost always been based in the United States.

    Here are the major market cap milestones in the U.S. that preceded Apple’s recent $1 trillion valuation, achieved August 2nd, 2018:

    Bank of North America (1781)
    The first company to hit $1 million in market capitalization. It was the first ever IPO in the United States.

    Bank of the United States (1791)
    The first company to hit $10 million in market capitalization had a 20 year charter to start, and was championed by Alexander Hamilton.

    New York Central Railroad (1878)
    The first company to hit $100 million in market capitalization was a crucial railroad that connected New York City, Chicago, Boston, and St. Louis.

    AT&T (1924)
    The first company to hit $1 billion in market capitalization – this was far before the breakup of AT&T into the “Baby Bells”, which occurred in 1982.

    General Motors (1955)
    The first company to hit $10 billion in market capitalization. The 1950s were the golden years of growth for U.S. auto companies like GM and Ford, taking place well before the mass entry of foreign companies like Toyota into the domestic automobile market.

    General Electric (1995)
    The first company to hit $100 billion in market capitalization was only able to do so 23 years ago.

    THE OTHER TRILLION DOLLAR COMPANY

    Interestingly, Apple is not the first company globally to ever hit $1 trillion in market capitalization.

    The feat was achieved momentarily by PetroChina in 2007, after a successful debut on the Shanghai Stock Exchange that same year.

    And as we noted previously, the $800 billion loss it experienced shortly after is also the largest the world has ever seen.

  • "Civil Disturbance" Declared After Portland Riot Cops Use Flash Grenades On Antifa
    Photo: Mike Bivins

    Police in Portland, Oregon declared a civil disturbance on Saturday after counter-protesters from Antifa showed up at a downtown Patriot Prayer rally and threw projectiles at the police, resulting in the deployment of flash grenades. 

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    Another angle:

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    The disturbance comes around a month after “Rose City” Antifa squared off with conservatives in a violent altercation that took place in the middle of Second Avenue.

    Meanwhile, Portland PD announced that they were shutting down the protest near SW Naito Parkway and SW Columbia streets: 

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    Earlier in the day a man “got in a struggle with some black clad dudes over a flag and one of them clubbed him,” according to journalist Mike Bivins, after which the man bled onto the street.

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    Live: 

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  • There Will Be No American-Russian Alliance Against China

    Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Since 1991 and the formal end of the first Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the world has experienced an American “unipolar moment” as the bipartisan US policy establishment sought to consolidate and perpetuate its hegemonic control over the entire plant. Doomed to fail even before it received its fullest articulation in 1996 by neoconservative ideologists William Kristol and Robert Kagan (misleadingly billed as “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy”), that misbegotten moment thankfully is coming to an end.

    The main question today is whether the grinding to a halt of a quest so foolish and destructive can peacefully devolve into a tripolar entente among the US, Russia, and China – or whether the entrenched Washington establishment will, Sampson-like, crash everything down in a desperate but futile attempt to hang on to its power and privileges. We appear to be approaching the cusp at which that question will be resolved one way or the other. What the Trump Administration does next with respect to Iran will be a key, perhaps decisive, indicator.

    However, of late there has emerged an alternative concept that may be seen as a middle way between America’s stubbornly hanging onto our diminishing hegemony versus working out a new Concert of Powers with the two countries the Trump Administration has dubbed rivals in a new “great power competition.” This concept suggests that the United States should play odd-man-out, teaming up with one of the other two powers against the third. Such a triangulation conceivably could perpetuate and enhance America’s global dominance (it is assumed the other nation would be the junior partner) while limiting the influence of the designated adversary.

    Strangely, given the unhinged  levels of Russia-hatred that define the American political class, no one seems to have proposed trying to flip Beijing away from its quasi-alliance with Moscow in a repeat of President Nixon’s “playing the China card” against the USSR in the early 1970s. Rather, the hot talk is all the other way ‘round, that the US should woo Russia as an ally against China. As presented by Harry J. Kazianis of the Center for the National Interest (“The Coming American-Russian Alliance Against China”):

    ‘[T]here is a very real possibility that Washington and Moscow will collude for a very big reason—and soon.

    ‘Both nations have a reason to fear a coming change in the international order that will impact them both. And as history shows us time and again, a rising power that seeks to overturn the international system can make the most dedicated enemies join forces—and fast.

    ‘I can only be talking about one thing: a growing and more powerful China. [ … ]

    ‘While it might not happen right away, and an armed clash over, say, Ukraine or Syria could delay or even destroy any chance of a geopolitical realignment, there is the very real possibility that the stars could align for Russia and America to take on China in the future. Stranger parings have occurred in the past. While we might rightly see Moscow as a rogue nation today, tomorrow it could be a partner in containing a common foe. History and circumstance still stand for no one.’

    Playing the Russia card against China is even presented by former Indian diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar as part of a long term strategy (“Trump Has a Grand Strategy, He Wants to Do a ‘Reverse Nixon’ — Partner Russia for an Alliance vs China”) foreseen by the architect of Nixon’s long-ago outreach to communist China, Henry Kissinger (who reportedly is advising Trump to this end):

    ‘As far back as 1972 in a discussion with Richard Nixon on his upcoming trip to China, signifying the historic opening to Beijing, Kissinger could visualize such a rebalancing becoming necessary in future. He expressed the view that compared with the Soviets (Russians), the Chinese were “just as dangerous. In fact, they’re more dangerous over a historical period.” Kissinger added, “in 20 years your (Nixon’s) successor, if he’s as wise as you, will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese.”

    ‘Kissinger argued that the United States, which sought to profit from the enmity between Moscow and Beijing in the Cold War era, would therefore need “to play this balance-of-power game totally unemotionally. Right now, we need the Chinese to correct the Russians and to discipline the Russians.” But in the future, it would be the other way around.’

    The possibility that Trump or some people in his Administration may be seriously considering the idea can’t be dismissed. It should be noted that among the few sane voices about Russia in US public life, such as Fox News’ Laura Ingraham (Trump “wants to triangulate China, Russia, does he not?”) and Tucker Carlson, it is axiomatic that “China is the real threat, not Russia.”

    However, whether or not the US is open to teaming up with Russia against China doesn’t address the question of whether such a ploy would be objectively viable. There are three strong reasons to suppose it wouldn’t be:

    US hostility toward Russia is unalterable for the foreseeable future. In a rational policymaking context, it should be obvious that there is no inherent reason for US-Russia animosity. The basic interests of the two states do not conflict and there is much, other than China, that should be a basis for cooperation, such as the common threat of Islamic terrorism (as opposed to the decades-long US penchant of employing jihadists against Russia and other countries, like Serbia, Libya, and Syria).

    Unfortunately, there is little rationality about Russia in Washington. Diehard, uncompromising detestation of Russia, which decent people are not suppose to see as anything but an enemy, is inseparable from the transatlantic conspiracy to eject Trump from office. Indeed, Trump’s pledge to improve relations with Moscow is among the top reasons Trump is being targeted for removal.

    Hostility to Russia (and to any Trumpian hopes of détente) unites virtually all the Democrats, almost all prominent Republicans, the entire legacy media (of course), almost every prestigious think tank, and seemingly every high-level official on Trump’s own team. In the wake of his Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump’s innocuous skepticism on supposed election “meddling,” the hysteria of this phalanx of hate has reached new heights of derangement. Senators promise a new “sanctions bill from hell” even as Trump insists existing sanctions are here to stay, presumably forever. The new Senate measure even includes a preposterous requirement that the Secretary of State “submit a determination of whether the Russian Federation meets the criteria for designation as a state sponsor of terrorism” – evidently ignoring the fact that for over seven years the US has armed and funded bona fide al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in Syria while Russia has been killing them.

    Trump’s own top officials openly press him not only on bogus 2016 meddling but already accusing Moscow of interfering in advance in the 2018 Congressional vote with the intent, without any sense of irony, to “undermine our democracy.” Social media like Facebook are on a search-and-destroy mission against anything even suspected of being “Russian-linked,” whatever that means. A young Russian student advocating gun rights and networking in Washington is treated as a conflation of Anna Chapman and Natasha Fatale while being smeared and slut-shamed across the major media(and her lawyer is threatened with a gag order). Stepped-up military aid is being provided to Kiev. The NATO Pac-Man is set to gobble up next (the Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia, while in the process alienating Russia from longtime Orthodox Christian friend Greece.

    No wonder Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov can only look on with sardonic laughter.  

    In short, anything and everything Russian is toxic and becoming more so. Even if Trump really wanted to change this state of affairs – sure proof the evil Russians must “have something on him,” according to former CIA Director Leon Panetta – he couldn’t do it. Not only his opposition but his own team will see to that. US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley says Russia “is never going to be our friend.” The Russians have every reason to take her at her word.

    This makes any notion of enlisting Russia as an ally against China impractical, to say the least. To even contemplate it the US would have to be able to extend some sort of olive branch to Russia, but that can’t happen anytime soon, if ever. You can’t build a partnership on the basis of unremitting antagonism.

    Russia is once burned, twice shy. Even in the event, currently inconceivable, that the US did offer to bury the hatchet with Russia, the Russians would have to be fools to accept.

    They are not fools.

    Apart from the most minimal, easily verified circumstances, why would anyone in Moscow believe any assurance from anyone in Washington? Did the US honor our commitment to Boris Yeltsin not to move NATO “one inch” further east following Germany reunification? Did the US respect the United Nations Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, and UN Security Council Resolution 1244 during the Bill Clinton Administration’s 1999 military aggression against Serbia over Kosovo or the George W. Bush Administration’s spearheading of Kosovo’s purported secession in 2008? Does the US show good faith in baseless accusations of Russian guilt in false flag chemical attacks in Syria and the United Kingdom?

    While Russian officials by nature remain open to “businesslike” and professional discussion with those they still insist on referring to as “partners,” they also know blind ideological and zoological hatred when they see it.

    Even if tomorrow the US would offer the Russians the sun, the moon, and the stars in exchange for cooperation against China, they wouldn’t bite. Nor should they.

    Russia has more objective incentives to get along with China than with the US. The main thing Russia needs from the US is basically – well, nothing. That is to say, there is very little of a practical, especially economic, nature Russia needs in a positive sense from the US, and vice versa. What Russia mainly wants from the US is negative: to stop regarding Russia as an enemy and get out of Moscow’s face in regions vitally important to Russia but of little or no value to the US.

    Without taking the analogy to George Orwell’s 1984 too far (with America as the primary component of Oceania, Russia of Eurasia, and China of Eastasia), geographically America and Russia not only have no reason for conflict, they have little natural need for interdependence. Russia is the closest approximation of the “Heartland” of Halford Mackinder’s “World Island. The United States is the principal in Mackinder’s “Outlying Islands” (Western Hemisphere and Australia) and “Offshore Islands” (British Isles and the Pacific “First Island Chain”). But, contra the fantasies of some half-baked graduates of an elementary geopolitical “Mackindergarten,” this configuration need not give rise to a predetermined and inevitable conflict but points as easily to the self-sufficiency of each dominant power within its own exclusive sphere.

    With a common boarder of over 2,500 miles, Russia and China are locked into a relationship by the simple fact of geography in a way neither is with the United States, which inherently is in the most secure position of the three. The Russo-Chinese relationship can be hostile (as it notably was in the late 1960s, when the two then-communist giants fought a short border war that threatened to escalate into a nuclear conflict and set the stage for Nixon’s China initiative) or it can be cooperative. Fueled in part by an entrenched American animus against Russia and a growing one towards China, Moscow and Beijing have chosen full-spectrum partnership via the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the New (formerly BRICS) Development Bank (NDB), and other initiatives. Finally, Russia and China are working in concert to de-dollarize their financial systems in favor of local currency and of gold, which both countries have been buying in massive amounts.

    Such ties between Russia and China are as natural, complimentary, and obvious as are America’s with Canada and Mexico. It’s hard to picture Moscow (or Beijing) abandoning them because someone in Washington flashes a come-hither look.

    *  *  *

    If Trump survives the efforts to remove him (either politically or physically) – a tall order, given the forces arrayed against him – and doesn’t plunge the US and the Middle East into an Iran misadventure that would destroy his presidency, it is still an open question whether he can deliver on an America First policy. Along with getting control of our borders and restoring America’s industrial base eroded by bad trade policies, that must mean completing his demolition of the failed neoliberal order of which the US has been the guarantor and enforcer.

    In its place the only stable and mutually advantageous arrangement for America is a Big Three accord with both Russia and China. The notion of turning one against the other should be dismissed as the distraction it is.

  • Facebook's Attention Machine, Explained

    Authored by Azeem via The Exponential View,

    A brief guide into why Facebook doesn’t sell your data

    You read that right.

    Facebook does not sell your data, despite the widespread belief that it does.

    We at Exponential View united with Qriously to research how people think about their data on Facebook, finding that two-thirds misunderstand the ways the information they provide serves this business.

    Hoping to bring the machinery closer to you, we worked with Tremendo.us to illustrate the process. Understand it, share it, and educate others around you.

    Source: Exponentia lView

  • Gold…Yuan…Crypto…

    Authored by “Dr.D” via Raul Ilargi Meijer’s Automatic Earth blog,

    It’s been a while since we last heard from Dr. D, but here he’s back explaining why neither gold nor the yuan nor cryptocurrencies can or will replace the dollar as the reserve currency, but together they just might:

    Dr. D:

     “Some debts are fun when you are acquiring them, but none are fun when you set about retiring them.” –Ogden Nash

    Over the last year or two there’s been discussion about the U.S. Federal spending moving beyond $4 TRILLION dollars, and whether a $1+ trillion dollar annual deficit, on top of a $20 Trillion national debt – Federal only – is sustainable. It isn’t.

    “What can’t go on, doesn’t” is the famous quote of economist Herbert Stein. Since a spiraling deficit of $1 trillion deficit on a $20 trillion debt can’t go on, what will we replace it with when it very soon doesn’t? Historically gold. Whatever gold exists in the nation’s coffers, whether one coin or 8,000 tons, is used to as the national wealth, and fronted by paper to re-boot the currency. With some additions such as oil and real estate, this was the solution in Spain, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union among hundreds of fiat defaults. Why? Because at a time of broken promises — real goods, commodities that can be seen, touched, and used – are the tangible proof of wealth, requiring no trust, and from which the human trust system of paper and letters of credit can be rebuilt.

    But in these complicated, digital times perhaps that’s too simplistic. Perhaps we have grown smarter than all our fathers and this time it will be different. Will it really be the same? Let’s look at how the system works now.

    Before WWI, the world was on the gold standard. This had variations, exceptions, corruptions, but on the whole there was gold in the back that was fronted by paper promises issued by private banks. The paper moved, the promises were delivered by telegraph and telephone, and the gold remained in the vaults. It was only when men felt unsure of the truth of the promise they could and did demand delivery, called the bluff, and the bank did – or ominously didn’t – deliver the gold, and thereby keep the paper system in line with reality, with real wealth, and with the economy. This method kept men and nations honest, mostly.

    The main part is that the gold didn’t move: it stayed in the same vaults and its ownership changed, just like today. It didn’t matter how much gold existed: it simply changed price, just like today.

    All this changed after WWI. The nations had so impoverished themselves that they could no longer repay their real debts and restore their currencies following a 1,000 year tradition of inflating during wars and deflating after. The deflation was too high for Britain and France even while removing the total wealth of Germany, and they began to cheat, double-counting the gold on their books to relieve the pressure. And so the non-gold system began. With other causes, the inflation of this change began to be felt through the Roaring 20’s, until when the phantom money was called on – as was tradition when people began to suspect that the paper they owned was no longer backed with adequate real goods – the illusion popped.

    The inflation was shown to be a fraud supported by the highest powers in government and finance, and the real economy withdrew their lack of trust until the matter was fixed. It wasn’t. As the system was fundamentally unchanged and no trust was restored, the rich were protected and law and property rights were trampled in a decade of Tom Joads, the economy never recovered. Although destroying half the nations on earth restored the real balance between paper fantasy and real production, the unemployment that never existed before WWI was never cured and has continued, ever worsening to this day. But note: before, during, and after the Depression, there was the same amount of gold. The gold did nothing, it was meaningless, only the paper promises over it expanded and contracted.

    With the systemic dishonesty still in place preventing the books from matching the real wealth and production, the economy soon returned to a diseased state. While gold was illegal for men to own, the rich do as they please and as tradition, removed the gold of the United States to hold them to truth and honesty from printing too much fake money for guns and butter. They withstood the 12 year bank run until, in 1971, they folded, having lost 2/3s of the national savings, gold.

    The world was now in uncharted territory. Much more than they never returned to honesty and a gold standard after WWI, they never attempted it after WWII, going to the -Bretton Woods” standard: the world would use the US$ as the standard, and the US$ would be backed with their 20,000 tonnes of gold. Now there was no gold, no gold standard, only unbacked US$ paper, a debt you could neither call on nor prove. As Nixon’s Treasury Secretary Connally said: “the dollar may be our currency, but it’s your problem.’

    Inflation started immediately, and as the U.S. still resisted re-establishing physical trust, the connection between the books and reality, they quickly spiraled into South American malaise and high inflation, as seen in the gold price. From $20/oz, or rather a dollar value of 0.029, the dollar ran to 0.0011 – 1/26th of its former price — and looked to disappear altogether. This was not unexpected as fiat currencies on average live 40 years before collapsing. If you take 1941 as the start date, the unbacked US$ would have collapsed in 1981, exactly when it did. What to do? How to re-start the system without having to actually reform, give up war, be honest, and return to trust?

    Henry Kissinger had the plan. As no one on earth was on the gold standard – not really – the US$ had only two legs, its worldwide use and military force. He made use of them both by demanding the Saudis accept only US$ for oil transactions. Although U.S. production was diminishing, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were still the two largest oil producers at that time. Most other nations imported oil, especially Europe.

    To have assurity of access to that oil — and not run afoul of the U.S. military – they needed to keep a substantial portion of their national accounts in US$, or more technically U.S. Treasury debt, sparking not just the ability, but the REQUIREMENT of a massive U.S. deficit. Kissinger just discovered social media: the truth that virtual things have value simply because other people use them. This was for all practical purposes the first virtual currency, existing only in room-sized mainframes in central banks worldwide. The world’s currency now looked like this:

    (Courtesy of Dr. Willie)

    A virtual currency backed by nothing, based on the usage in trade. But that isn’t a full chart and isn’t meant to be. On the side, back in the corners, the US$ was still convertible to gold for the “right kind of people”, using delivery in NY and London to banks in Switzerland. The volumes of US$ grew to trillions while the gold component withered to billions, yet still the Saudis banked billions in gold before it was recently stolen from their Swiss accounts, lawsuits pending. Why? Because there is still no trust between nations and billionaires who have a long history of cheating each other. The gold-in-hand safety valve existed to retain some trust, however distant, in the now-digital system.

    “Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, where no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match it.” –Alan Greenspan, 2014 interview of the Council on Foreign Relations.

    So is the system still gold backed with gold as the “premier”, that is, first, real, and primary currency as Greenspan said? You tell me:

    Apart from the Iraq war, the price of oil has been stable for 50 years. In 1950, two silver dimes would buy a gallon of gas. In 2018 two silver dimes are worth $2.22, or the price of a gallon of gas, minus the new taxes. Meanwhile the US$ value has dropped steadily:

    Doesn’t that mean that it’s still gold and not the dollar that is the standard, the “store of value”, and the “reserve currency”, however unspoken? If not and it’s a relic, a rounding error we cannot return to, why, as Ben Bernanke was asked, do all the banks and nations still own it?

    Back to the $20,000,000,000,000 debt the U.S. as reserve currency was REQUIRED to issue, it’s now been 40 years since 1978: what happens when the U.S. Dollar disappears as all fiat currencies do? Because it seems we would have to do something. It may be that even before 1988, people already knew this conversion, this transfer, must happen roundabout 2018:

    If the old currency burns as predicted 30 years ago, what next? Will it be replaced by a gold coin or a “zero” coin, chained under the fleur-de-lis? It would seem the new currency must be trusted, which is the original problem, must be a replacement in trade, and must be large enough to handle what are now multi-billion trade and multi-trillion Forex flows. Is the answer gold? Well yes…and no. Certainly China thinks so:

    And Russia:

    And for that matter Germany and Holland and even Texas, who have repatriated their gold back home. But there’s one little problem:

    These are the official western gold reserves; however, while the gold base remained stable, the overall financial system has expanded. This can be seen in all paper assets, but a good example can be found here:

    That’s what? A 20,000-fold rise? And this is only marking “credit”, not equities or cash. We are indeed in an inflationary period: inflation in assets owned by the 1%. How out of line is this? Here’s the kindred chart in productive terms, GDP:

    A 9-fold increase in ability versus 20,000-fold increase in promises. Sounds like someone won’t get paid. And you know what bankers and economists call that?

    Default. Massive, system ending default, the size of WWI or the Great Depression. That’s how fiat standards end.

    How big would that be? Here are some relative sizes:

    Actually, that’s pretty understated. Derivatives in 2018 may be as much as $2 QUADRILLION. No one knows. Compare to this:

    $3 Trillion in gold. Now that’s “official” gold and we already showed that “official” Chinese gold is 4,000 tonnes when it may be as high as 30,000 tonnes, but the principle is the same: gold is wildly smaller than the needs of the financial system. Or is it? In previous financial inflations…which I just showed we have had since 1971, in 20,000x scale…gold simply rose until it became the right size.

    It’s perfectly simple. Gold rises 20,000 times or however much it must to re-back the system. It always has before, even in 1979 when the price rocketed from $35 to $880 where US debt to gold holdings ratio stabilized at a very reasonable 10:1…the classic level of fractional reserve trust. If China officially owns 5,000 tonnes, and Russia 2,000, with the west also 15,000 collectively, we have 22,000 tonnes over what BusinessInsider says is $160 Trillion in assets, and you get $7.27B/tonne or $226,000/oz.

    That’s a 188x increase. 1979 was a 25x increase on an awful lot less trouble, inflation, and fraud. That’s only 7x larger. Is that unreasonable? With 40 years of inflation and very little comparative rise in gold, why shouldn’t it catch up as it did in 1979? So gold will rise and we’ll have a $200,000 gold standard? That’s what will happen?

    Not so fast. We COULD have a gold standard, and China, Russia and other major nations appear ready to do so if necessary, but remember we didn’t return to the gold standard last time either. Instead, we cheated and moved to a digital standard stored in ancient mainframes. Why wouldn’t we just cheat again? Back to this:

    The two problems in the original chart are trust and price. The price must restore a connection between reality -real value and real production- and price; and the “reserve currency”, the medium of exchange, must be a trusted agent or method. Why would we need coins in our pockets to make that happen? For that matter, why would we need banks, who have widely proven to be the most corrupt, untrustworthy element in the whole system? We can’t go to a new system if it’s the same as the old: that’s WHY the system failed and cycles from gold to silver, silver to paper, paper to gold. We can’t go from paper to paper, that won’t work; but we also can’t so easily go to gold, asking an 800-fold increase since 2000. It would have the same disruptions Weimar had that brought Hitler, or the Jacobins had that brought Napoleon, or that Venezuela has today. And why should we? There’s no need.

    The chart above has the US/Saudi oil as the critical mass of trade that allows the US$ reserve. But that isn’t necessarily true today. Today the mass of trade is in goods to and from China. But China isn’t large enough, deep enough, or trusted enough to be the new world currency. And why should they? The reserve currency is what just hollowed out and bankrupted the United States: they would just be imitating our faults. We’d also be moving from one untrusted, unbacked currency to another, and history says that doesn’t happen. So why don’t we do this:

    (Courtesy Dr. Willie)

    China demands not US Treasuries in NY as collateral to ship goods as presently, and not Yuan bonds, but gold bullion posted in their hot new Shanghai market, which allows physical delivery on demand. This bullion never moves as collateral, but is simply posted by one party then released on delivery. Shanghai is already larger than London, and the largest banks are already in China, which probably has the largest economy. The West and their banks are a has-been: we’re only admitting to a reality that happened years ago.

    This solves our two problems: how do we know we’re returning to fair trade, like-for-like? Real goods on container ships are trading for real goods in vaults. How do we know it’s fair, mostly? You can convert the Yuan-sponsored, gold trade note to physical delivery from Shanghai, a thing which is no longer truly possible in London and NY. Will this reversion increase the gold price? Probably. How much? Every number is a state secret, but assuming the 10:1 ratio the United States showed in 1980, let’s say it’s 1:10 of our $226,000 number above or $22,600/oz. That’s reasonable, practicable, and neither stops business nor starts wars. We can do it today, and given China, Russia, Japan, Asia, Australia, and even London appear to be joining China’s AIIB front bank, I would say it already IS happening.

    Which leads to one more problem. Certainly TODAY you can take gold delivery in Shanghai, but as London, NY, and the Saudis discovered, the first thing that happens once you build a system of trust is to close the doors and cheat on it. How do we know the gold is there? Even though Shanghai is a “third party” allowing delivery, who’s to say they will be tomorrow? The banks are notorious for “hypothecating”, doubling, tripling the gold on their books with accounting fraud backed by the full faith and credibility of governments, and no one’s in the mood for trusting the Chinese any more than Wells Fargo or DeutscheBank. That would drop us back to a hard gold standard, a $220,000 price, a halt to world trade, and possible world war we were trying to avoid. We need an accounting method that is better trusted and can’t be gamed. How to fix it?

    The gold in Shanghai has a chain of custody, no different from “London Deliverable” standards we have today. An original audit, adjusted for receipts and deliveries is all we need. Which is where we add the blockchain. With it, Shanghai cannot double the gold on their books like Europe did in 1922 or the CME does today, marking it both received and loaned, because the blockchain only allows one position, one state at a time. Gold assayed and entered by refiner is tagged to a kilo, and you can follow that kilo bar through the system, not with double counts and vanishing, ever-changing serial numbers as the Federal Reserve and the GLD ETF showed.

    Can it be cheated? All systems can be cheated, that’s the nature of men. But it makes it much harder, hard enough to establish adequate trust in banks and governments that otherwise would go to war. Will it be tied to Bitcoin? Yes, but no differently than it will be tradable to the Thai bhat or the ruble. With near-zero cost conversions, all currencies, crypto or otherwise, will be far more interchangeable and thus to some extent identical. They may even disappear, as happened when Jackson closed the 2nd central bank 182 years ago and the nation essentially moved to private currencies.

    What will happen to the Dollar? It will still exist, but in some new, revised form. But the US$ today is transferring 3% of the nation’s wealth from the poor to the rich via inflation. Do we really want to keep it? And if it’s not a store of value and it’s already not the reserve currency — we just showed it’s a diluted proxy for gold and oil — why should the reformed US$ be any different? The dollar will be our national currency, still diluted and still referring to the real currency: gold, the attached Trade Note, and its crypto accounting. Until the next fraud and next crisis, perhaps in 2058.

    And that’s the long story of how we leave the present debt-backed U.S. paper dollar and move to a Yuan-sponsored gold trade note that is a gold-backed cryptocurrency. In some ways we already have. Watch and see as they have the public opening of a structure planned and established years ago.

  • Streaming TV Doubles During Second Quarter, Report Says

    As a result of the accelerating cord-cutting trend, streaming TV increased in the second quarter, according to a new report from Conviva, a real-time measurement and intelligence platform for many of the world’s largest streaming TV publishers, which found content consumption more than doubled over the last 12 months.

    The Conviva sensor is installed in 3 billion streaming video applications for over 200 brands. This represents the largest, independent census data collection and measurement network in the world. The data is a fully anonymized census measuring every stream from Conviva’s customer base between April 01 and June 30, 2018, and cross-referencing it with datasets from the same period last year.

    In Q2 2018, viewing hours increased by 115 percent as compared to the same period last year indicative of a surge in growth, as represented by Conviva’s customer base.

    Another indication of growth in streaming is the massive increase Conviva saw in peak concurrent plays (the peak number of simultaneous active sessions at any given second. This is a real-time measure of the audience scale (concurrency)), as 7.9 million people watched the World Cup, which resulted in 118 percent spike in peak concurrency from the same period last year.

    France and Croatia on July 15 drove a peak concurrency of 9.12 million plays, shattering previous records. 

    The report specified when excluding the World Cup, peak concurrency in Q2 2018 was still elevated by more than 45 percent y/y, surge to 5.3 million concurrent plays during the NBA Western Conference Finals.

    “These spikes demonstrate that sports continue to drive ‘appointment TV’ – even in the streaming TV space,” the report said. “They create opportunities, but they also create massive load on the video delivery ecosystem, which much continues to improve in order to meet growing demand.”

    Conviva finds that North America remains the most robust growth market, showing y/y growth in both plays up 124 percent and viewing hours up 139 percent. Asia’s growth in plays soared y/y by 63 percent, but with modest growth of 22 percent in viewing hours.

    Different types of content is being viewed on various devices, the report determined. Streaming TV is shifting away from PCs (24 percent of plays) to mobile devices (49 percent of plays), particularly for content that is of short-form, including TV series, sports, and live broadcasts. Connected TVs (51 percent of viewing hours) are favored for long-form content, such as movies.

    “The shift away from PCs and to mobile is unmistakable when comparing this data to Q2 2017 when mobile had a 39 percent share of plays while PCs had a 38 percent share. Among connected TV platforms, Roku continues to emerge as a leader with nearly 8 percent of all plays, while Sony’s PlayStation and Google’s Chromecast experienced the fastest YoY growth, both north of 150 percent YoY,” said Conviva.

    Overall, cord-cutters continue to prefer smartphones as consuming devices for short-form content and TVs for consuming long-form movies. The newest trend spotted in the research is that PCs are losing dramatic share to mobile devices, while among connected TV platforms, Samsung and other TV platforms are losing ground to Roku, Google’s Chromecast, Sony’s PlayStation, and Amazon’s Fire TV.

  • Venezuela's Maduro Targeted In Assassination Attempt Using Explosive Drones

    A speech by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro at an army commemoration event was abruptly cut off due to a reported assassination attempt using several drones packed with explosives, injuring seven National Guard soldiers. The extent of their injuries is not known, however they are reportedly receiving medical care.  

    In live footage, Maduro and officials standing behind him can be seen looking up as an explosion is heard in the distance, after which soldiers can be seen running in disarray before the transmission ends. 

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    Speaking on state television, Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez confirmed that it was an assassination attempt, and that Maduro is was evacuated from the scene. Firefighters near the scene, however, are disputing the official version of events. 

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    “Today’s attempt has failed and the people stand by Maduro,” said Rodriguez. 

    Security forces check blast heard during ceremony with dictator Nicolás Maduro in Caracas – Juan Barreto / AFP

    Maduro was giving a speech in the capital of Caracas during a celebration of the National Guard’s 81st anniversary. He was wearing the presidential banner.

    “To the conscious Venezuela, we are going to bet for the good of our country, the hour of the economic recovery has come and we need…,” Maduro was saying before the cameras quickly moved away from him.

    Maduro was standing next to his wife Cilia Flores and several high-ranking military officials for the event.

    A video shows Flores wince, and both she and Maduro look up after an unidentified sound. –AP

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    Venezuelan journalist Roman Camacho reported on Twitter, citing “unofficial sources,” that a drone loaded with the explosive C4 was detonated near the presidential box, and that several army cadets were injured.

    Maduro was speaking at the 81st anniversary celebration of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) when the incident took place. We expect allegations that this was a false flag to emerge at any moment, as it’s not that hard to fly a drone if one knows what they’re doing. 

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  • Government Silent As Mystery Meteor Almost Explodes Over US Air Force Base

    On August 01, the director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, Hans Kristensen, tweeted: “Meteor explodes with 2.1 kilotons force 43 km (26 miles) above missile early warning radar at Thule Air Base.”

    Kristensen quoted a tweet that originated from “Rocket Ron” (@RonBaalke), whose profile allegedly indicates he is a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center in La Cañada Flintridge, California. The original tweet on July 31 said: ” A fireball was detected over Greenland on July 25, 2018 by US Government sensors at an altitude of 43.3 km (43 miles). The energy from the explosion is estimated to be 2.1 kilotons.”

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    Data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows reported fireball events for which geographic locations are provided. Each event’s calculated total impact energy is indicated by its relative size and by color. The record shows a meteor traveling at 24.4 kilometers per second (54,000 mph) at 76.9 degrees north latitude, 69.0 degrees west longitude, on July 25 at 11:55 p.m, slammed into the atmosphere directly over Thule, Greenland.

    According to the Military Times, the meteor “struck…miles from a key U.S. early warning air base,” which is home to the 12th Space Warning Squadron based at Thule, that operates and maintains the Air Base in support of missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite command-and-control operations missions. Thule is located 1,207 km (750 miles) north of the Arctic Circle and 1,524 km (947 miles) from the North Pole on the northwest side of the island of Greenland.

    UHF Phased Array Radar at Thule Air Base (Source/ Air Force)

    The story was first reported by Australian media, then blasted across America via Fox News on Friday. The article’s title read “Air Force remains silent after huge meteor hits near US military base,” which generated tremendous buzz on social media and triggered a swarm of journalist contacting the Air Base about the matter.

    “No, we don’t have any reports of damage, why are we getting calls on this now?” said Steve Brady, a spokesman at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, which handles Thule’s media queries, even though Thule is located in Greenland.

    The Aviationist’s Tom Demerly, who reported on the mystery meteor, wrote in an analysis that it is disturbing because there was no public warning from the U.S. government about the meteor impact. “Had it entered at a more perpendicular angle, it would have struck the earth with significantly greater force,” he wrote.

    As to “significantly greater force,” well, Demerly does not specifically define what that means as far as kilotons. However, the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor incident (below) provides the very real understanding of the destructive nature of these space objects. We ask just one question: Why did the US government initially fail to alert citizens of Greenland and the US of an incoming meteor that could have potentially been very dangerous?

    *  *  *

    The Chelyabinsk meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere over Russia on February 2013, with a speed of 19 kilometers per second (42,500 mph). It quickly became a dazzling superbolide meteor over the southern Ural region. The bulk of the meteor’s energy was absorbed by the atmosphere, with total kinetic energy before atmospheric impact estimated from infrasound and seismic measurements to be equivalent to the blast yield of 400–500 kilotons or roughly 26 to 33 times as much energy as that released from the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima.

    This footage below from multiple closed-circuit television systems recorded the moment when the meteor slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere generating a massive shockwave across the Ural region.

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