Jan 06

Today’s News 6th January 2020

  • The Cause Of America's Dysfunctionality
    The Cause Of America’s Dysfunctionality

    Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

    In analyzing the causes for the dysfunctional nature of American society (e.g., soaring suicide rates, especially among young people, massive drug addiction and alcoholism, and widespread violence, including irrational mass killings), among the things to consider is the replacement of America’s founding economic, monetary, and governmental system with a different system.

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    There were good founding principles in America and bad founding principles. Among the bad ones, needless to say, were slavery and denial of women’s rights. It was a good thing that America abandoned its bad founding principles.

    But there were also good founding principles. It was the abandonment of those principles that has to be considered a major cause of the many woes that America is undergoing today.

    Let’s consider those good founding principles that were abandoned in favor of the system that Americans live under today:

    1. Americans were free to keep everything they earned.

    No income tax returns. No IRS. No rushing to the Post Office on April 15. No withholding or payroll taxes. No threats of audits, liens, garnishments, and criminal prosecution for failure to pay income taxes. Whatever people earned or received, they kept 100 percent of it.

    2. Americans were free to decide for themselves what to do with their own money.

    No mandatory charity, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, farm subsidies, corporate bailouts, and foreign aid. Charity was entirely voluntary. No one was forced to take care of anyone. No federal welfare departments and agencies.

    3. No drug laws.

    Americans were free to ingest whatever they wanted, no matter how harmful or destructive, without fear of being punished for it by the government.

    4. No immigration controls.

    Except for a cursory tuberculosis and mental health examination at Ellis Island, the borders were open to the free movement of foreigners into the United States.

    5. No minimum-wage laws and very few economic regulations.

    Economic enterprise was free of federal governmental management and control. No federal regulatory departments and agencies.

    6. No public schooling systems.

    With the exception of Massachusetts in the 1850s, there were no compulsory school-attendance laws at the state and local level. No federal involvement or subsidization of education. The matter of education was left largely to the free market.

    7. No gun control.

    No gun registration or background checks. While communities sometimes imposed gun restrictions, Americans were free to keep and bear arms without federal governmental control or infringement.

    8. No Federal Reserve, fiat (i.e., paper) money, or monetary inflation or debasement of the currency.

    The Constitution called into existence a monetary system in which gold coins and silver coins were the official money of the country. The states were expressly prohibited from making anything but gold and silver coins legal tender.

    9. No national-security state, foreign military bases, or foreign interventionism.

    The Constitution brought into existence a limited-government republic. No Pentagon, military-industrial complex, CIA, NSA, or FBI. No wars of aggression (except the Mexican War), undeclared wars, coups, state-sponsored assassinations, foreign military bases, foreign aid, war on terrorism, war on communism, or alliances with foreign dictatorships or other regimes.

    10. No denial of due process of law or trial by jury. No unreasonable searches and seizures. No cruel and unusual punishments. No coerced confessions.

    Whenever federal officials targeted a person for criminal prosecution, the accused was guaranteed due process, trial by jury, and other civil liberties.

    Those were the founding principles that caused our American ancestors to consider themselves the freest people in history. Moreover, not only did America become the country with the highest standard of living in history, which was why poor people were flooding into America from foreign lands, it also became the most charitable society in history, entirely on a voluntary basis.

    Those were the good founding principles that were abandoned by later generations of Americans, in favor of what is commonly known today as a welfare-state, warfare-state way of life.

    Ironically, even though they live under an opposite type of system from that of their American ancestors, today’s Americans are themselves convinced that they live lives of freedom. That sentiment is best manifested by the eagerness of modern-day Americans to thank imperial troops serving in faraway lands for protecting “our freedom” by killing and destroying people over there.

    Johann Goethe wrote, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

    I submit that that psychological denial of reality with respect to freedom as well as the abandonment of America’s good founding principles are the root cause of the dysfunctional nature of American society today.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 23:30

    Tags
    Social Issues

  • China Replaces Top Hong Kong Official; Appoints "Strongman" In Signal To Protesters
    China Replaces Top Hong Kong Official; Appoints “Strongman” In Signal To Protesters

    China changed its top representative to Hong Kong in the first major leadership reshuffle since anti-government protests broke out in the city seven months ago, unexpectedly replacing Wang Zhimin with a “strongman” party stalwart who has no experience in Hong Kong as its new top official based in the city, signaling its intention to restore law and order after almost seven months of social unrest. Luo Huining, the former party leader of Shanxi province, has been named as the new director of the central government’s liaison office in the city, Xinhua reported on Saturday.

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    Luo Huining is the new head of Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong.

    According to the SCMP, Wang, who was blamed in some quarters for the unrest, will be given a dignified exit: he will be recalled to Beijing and reassigned to another position unrelated to Hong Kong affairs; the Hong Kong publication notes that the reshuffle should not be seen as a punishment for Wang but a change of strategy.

    Wang was liaison office director since September 2017. His term of two years and three months made him the shortest-serving head of the office since the return of Hong Kong to the mainland. Before taking the position in Hong Kong, he served as director of the liaison office in Macau for around a year. One reason for Wang’s short tenure: his inability to normalize the situation in Hong Kong which has been in the grip of protests since June last year, sparked by the now-withdrawn extradition bill before morphing into a wider anti-government campaign that has been marked by mass rallies and often-violent clashes.

    As for Luo’s appointment, it appears to presage a new phase in Beijing’s crackdown of ongoing Hong Kong protests.

    Having reached the retirement age of 65 in October, he was just named on December 28 as the deputy director of the financial and economic affairs committee of the national people’s congress – a position usually reserved for retired officials. Luo served for more than a decade in China’s far-flung western province Qinghai – one of the poorest regions populated by ethnic minorities – and became deputy chairman of the financial and economic committee of the National People’s Congress last month. According to Bloomberg, Chinese media credited him with bringing Shanxi back to its feet, enforcing the central government’s campaign to purge corruption and weed out disloyal officials.

    In Shanxi, Luo excelled himself and impressed the top leadership by swiftly weeding out corruption and overhauling the government. He is among a selected few Chinese officials who could boast the experience of having managed two provinces, each with the population of a midsized European country.

    It is this “strongman” background that made Luo China’s perfect candidate to take over Hong Kong, even though he has never held any position directly related to Hong Kong before. Apart from one business trip to Hong Kong in 2018, he has no known connections here.

    “Luo seems to have had the experience to end chaos and restore stability in Shanxi,” said Victoria Hui, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. “Since the outbreak of anti-extradition protests, Beijing has been trying to rein in Hong Kong,” and “it’s not clear why a strongman like him was not picked earlier.”

    Luo will be the first Hong Kong liaison director with such rich local experience. Most of his predecessors were specialist bureaucrats who worked in the central government before taking up the Hong Kong assignment.

    “One key consideration is that Luo does not have connections with Hong Kong’s business and other community, therefore his work will not be complicated by any relationship,” the source said.

    Li Xiaobing, an expert on Beijing’s policies on Hong Kong at Nankai University in Tianjin, said the choice highlighted Beijing’s will to break the deadlock in Hong Kong.

    “The problem of choosing someone from the Hong Kong and Macau system is they will be constrained by the existing frameworks and relationships,” he said. “His past experiences showed that he is capable of providing out-of-box solutions.”

    Luo, who held a PhD in Economics, is known for his efforts in curbing corruption and boosting economies in less-developed regions in Anhui, Qinghai and Shanxi. A Shanxi official who had worked under Luo told the Post: “He seldom raises his voice. But he is very determined and demanding when he wants to get things done. No jokes.”


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 23:00

    Tags
    Politics

  • Ricky Gervais Slams "Woke" Virtue-Signaling, Drops "Epstein Didn't Kill Himself" Joke At Golden Globes
    Ricky Gervais Slams “Woke” Virtue-Signaling, Drops “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” Joke At Golden Globes

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    British comedian Ricky Gervais is dropping red pills at the Golden Globes, joking about “Epstein didn’t kill himself” while telling ‘woke’ virtue signaling celebrities to stop talking about politics.

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    “Spoiler alert, season 2 is on the way, so in the end he obviously didn’t kill himself – just like Jeffrey Epstein,” said Gervais, before adding, “Shut up, I know he’s your friend but I don’t care, you had to make your own way here in your own plane didn’t you?”

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    In another quip, Gervais slammed actors for calling themselves “woke” while taking money from Apple, Amazon and Disney, who use slave labor.

    “If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent,” joked Gervais.

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    “If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your God and fuck off,” he added.

    Will Gervais be invited back again after this? Unlikely.

    *  *  *

    My voice is being silenced by free speech-hating Silicon Valley behemoths who want me disappeared forever. It is CRUCIAL that you support me. Please sign up for the free newsletter here. Donate to me on SubscribeStar here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 22:30

    Tags
    Human Interest

  • Meet Qassem Soleimani's Replacement: Esmail Ghaani Is Iran's New Top Military Leader
    Meet Qassem Soleimani’s Replacement: Esmail Ghaani Is Iran’s New Top Military Leader

    While Iran’s iconic military leader, Qassem Soleimani, has yet to be buried, a new Iranian general has stepped out of the shadows to lead the country’s elite Quds Force, becoming responsible for Tehran’s numerous proxies across the Mideast as the Islamic Republic threatens the US with “harsh revenge” for killing Soleimani.

    Meet Esmail Ghaani.

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    Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday appointed Qassem Soleimani’s deputy, Maj. Gen. Esmail Ghaani as the new commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force.(Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP)

    In announcing Ghaani as Soleimani’s replacement, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the new leader “one of the most prominent commanders” in service to Iran. The Quds Force “will be unchanged from the time of his predecessor,” Khamenei said, according to IRNA.

    As the AP reports, like his predecessor, the young Ghaani faced the carnage of Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s and later joined the then-newly founded Quds, or Jerusalem, Force. The elite Quds Force is part of the 125,000-strong Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary organization that answers only to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Guard oversees Iran’s ballistic missile program, has its naval forces shadow the US Navy in the Persian Gulf and includes an all-volunteer Basij force.

    While much still remains unknown about Ghaani, 62, Western sanctions suggest he’s long been in a position of power in the organization. And likely one of his first duties will be to oversee whatever revenge Iran intends to seek for the U.S. airstrike early Friday that killed his longtime friend Soleimani.

    “We are children of war,” Ghaani once said of his relationship with Soleimani, according to Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency. “We are comrades on the battlefield and we have become friends in battle.”

    The Guard has seen its influence grow ever-stronger both militarily and politically in recent decades. Iran’s conventional military was decimated by the execution of its old officer class during the 1979 Islamic Revolution and later by sanctions. A key driver of that influence comes from the elite Quds Force, which works across the region with allied groups to offer an asymmetrical threat to counter the advanced weaponry wielded by the U.S. and its regional allies. Those partners include Iraqi militiamen, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

    Soleimani had long has been the face of the Quds Force; his fame surged after American officials began blaming him for deadly roadside bombs targeting U.S. troops in Iraq. Images of him, long a feature of hard-line Instagram accounts and mobile phone lockscreens, now plaster billboards calling for Iran to avenge his death.

    And while Soleimani’s exploits in Iraq and Syria launched a thousand analyses, Ghaani has remained much more in the shadows of the organization. He has only occasionally come up in the Western or even Iranian media. But, as the AP notes, his personal story broadly mirrors that of Soleimani.

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    Born on Aug. 8, 1957 in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad, Ghaani grew up during the last decade of monarchy. He joined the Guard a year after the 1979 revolution. Like Soleimani, he first deployed to put down the Kurdish uprising in Iran that followed the shah’s downfall. Iraq then invaded Iran, launching an eight-year war that would see 1 million people killed. Many of the dead were lightly armed members of the Guard, some of whom were young boys killed in human-wave assaults on Iraqi positions.

    Volunteers “were seeing that all of them are being killed, but when we ordered them to go, would not hesitate,” Ghaani later recounted. “The commander is looking to his soldiers as his children, and in the soldier’s point of view, it seems that he received an order from God and he must to do that.”

    He survived the war to join the Quds Force shortly after its creation. He worked with Soleimani, as well as led counterintelligence efforts at the Guard. Western analysts say that while Soleimani focused on nations to Iran’s west, Ghaani’s remit was those to the east like Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, Iranian state media has not elaborated on his time in the Guard.

    In 2012, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Ghaani, describing him as having authority over “financial disbursements” to proxies affiliated with the Quds Force. The sanctions particularly tied Ghaani to an intercepted shipment of weapons seized at a port in 2010 in Nigeria’s most-populous city, Lagos. Authorities broke into 13 shipping containers labeled as carrying “packages of glass wool and pallets of stone.” They instead found 107 mm Katyusha rockets, rifle rounds and other weapons. The Katyusha remains a favored weapon of Iranian proxy forces, including Iraqi militias and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

    An Iranian and his Nigerian partner later received five-year prison sentences over the shipment, which appeared bound for Gambia, then under the rule of dictator Yahya Jammeh. Israeli officials had claimed the rockets would be shipped to militants in the Gaza Strip, while Nigerian authorities alleged that local politicians could use the arms in upcoming elections.

    Also in 2012, Ghaani drew criticism from the U.S. State Department after reportedly saying that “if the Islamic Republic was not present in Syria, the massacre of people would have happened on a much larger scale.” That comment came just after gunmen backing Syrian President Bashar Assad killed over 100 people in Houla in the country’s Homs province.

    “Over the weekend we had the deputy head of the Quds Force saying publicly that they were proud of the role that they had played in training and assisting the Syrian forces — and look what this has wrought,” then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said at the time.

    In January 2015, Ghaani indirectly said that Iran sends missiles and weapons to Palestinians to fight Israel.

    “The U.S. and Israel are too small to consider themselves in line with Iran’s military power,” Ghaani said at the time. “This power has now appeared alongside the oppressed people of Palestine and Gaza in the form of missiles and weapons.”

    Now, Ghaani is firmly in control of the Quds Force. Yet while Iran’s leaders say they have a plan to avenge Soleimani’s death, no plan has been announced yet as the country prepares for funerals for the general starting Sunday.

    Whatever that plan for revenge is, Ghaani will be leading it.

    “That Qaani survived at such high ranks in the (Guard), and remained Soleimani’s deputy for so long, says a lot about the trust both Khamenei and Soleimani had in him,” said Afshon Ostovar, the author of a book on the Guard. “I suspect he’ll have little difficulty filling Soleimani’s shoes when it comes to operations and strategy.”


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 22:00

    Tags
    Politics
    War Conflict

  • "It's Like An Atomic Bomb" – Australia Deploys Military As Monstrous Storm Creates It's Own Weather Crisis
    “It’s Like An Atomic Bomb” – Australia Deploys Military As Monstrous Storm Creates It’s Own Weather Crisis

    Authored by Elias Marat via TheMindUnleashed.com,

    Australia’s government has announced that it would call up 3,000 military reservists to confront an unprecedented bushfire crisis that is producing nightmarish “firenados” – cyclonic fire-tornadoes – and conditions that some are comparing to the aftermath of nuclear warfare.

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    On Saturday, beleaguered Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought to reassure the country’s population that his government would take unprecedented measures to contain the fires, which have raged since September. According to AFP, Morrison said:

    “Today’s decision puts more boots on the ground, puts more planes in the sky, puts more ships at sea.” 

    The addition of 3,000 reservists to firefighting efforts, which have already seen the deployment of roughly 2,000 military personnel, amounts to what authorities say is most likely the largest maritime rescue operation in Australia’s history, reports the New York Times.

    NASA issued this stunning satellite-based visualization of the state of the fires in Australia…

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    Military aircraft, naval ships, and other materiel will also be made available to assist evacuation and firefighting efforts.

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    Defense Minister Linda Reynolds said:

    “The government has not taken this decision lightly … It is the first time that reserves have been called out in this way in living memory.”

    The environmental calamity has been stoked by a combination of extreme winds, record-shattering heat waves, and drought-parched forests, grasslands, and brush.

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    Australia’s bushfires have also grown so monstrous that they are generating their own weather in the form of pyro-cumulonimbus clouds – dry thunderstorms that create more fires – according to Victoria’s Bureau of Meteorology. Fire-generated thunderstorms have appeared over the fires in two different locations. NASA describes them as the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds.”

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    The storms have further introduced an unpredictable dynamic to the spread of fires and rapid, erratic changes, CNN reports. Bureau of Meteorology spokesman Neil Bennett told Australia’s ABC:

    “The prediction of fire weather in terms of wind is critical and when you’ve got a highly variable wind environment as you do with a thunderstorm, if you have that in the fire environment, those winds become very, very difficult to predict.”

    The dry thunderstorms have also triggered cyclonic fire-tornadoes, or “firenados,” which have ripped through arid regions of southern Australia in recent days.

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    On Monday, firefighter Samuel McPaul was killed in a “truly horrific” incident when extreme weather produced by the fire lifted his 12-ton fire truck into the air and dumped it on its roof. Two other firefighters on the scene are being treated for serious burns due to the “freakish” weather incident.

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    Shane Fitzsimmons, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner, was visibly shaken when he announced how the truck was flipped in what he described as a “pyro-convective line” of “cyclonic type winds.” He said:

    “The local crews that were able to catch up with him in the field at the accident scene describe what they experienced as truly horrific. They described it as an extraordinary wind event, describing it as a fire tornado.

    We have a completely devastated family, a devastated local community at what just has been an extraordinary loss.”

    As of Saturday, over 23 lives have been claimed by the deadly fires, which have burned over 12 million acres of land, an area larger than Switzerland. On Saturday, Fire Commissioner of the Rural Fire Service in New South Wales (NSW), Shane Fitzsimmons, confirmed to reporters that over 148 active fires continue to burn in his state, 12 of which are at emergency levels. Meanwhile, in Victoria, authorities say that 50 active fires continue to burn.

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    Ecologists fear that nearly 500 million mammals, reptiles and birds—including 8,000 koalas—are estimated to have been killed, although the current death toll is impossible to calculate. The massive loss of life threatens to forever tip the balance for entire species of animals and plants on an island continent where 87 percent of wildlife is endemic to the country, meaning it can only be found on Australia.

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    Kangaroos, koalas, wallabies, wombats, potoroos, bandicoots, echidnas, possums, and other species all have populations that live in regions currently being devastated by the fires—and because the fires have extended to the wetlands, dry eucalyptus forests, and even rainforests, the animals have no place to find refuge.

    Jim Radford, a research fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne, told the Times:

    “We’ve never seen fires like this, not to this extent, not all at once, and the reservoir of animals that could come and repopulate the areas, they may not be there.”

    Many experts are using terms to describe the crisis that would have previously been unimaginable. New Zealand Herald reports that Andrew Constance, the transport minister in NSW, told ABC radio:

    “I’ve got to be honest with you, this isn’t a bushfire, it’s an atomic bomb.

    It’s indescribable the hell it’s caused and the devastation it’s caused.”

    Perhaps this will add some more context…

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    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 21:30

    Tags
    Environment
    Disaster Accident

  • Fake Noose? '60 Minutes' Shreds Epstein Suicide Theory
    Fake Noose? ’60 Minutes’ Shreds Epstein Suicide Theory

    ’60 Minutes’ has revealed several new data points in the death of wealthy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein which raise more questions than they answer, and suggest that the financier did not kill himself – an opinion the New York City Medical Examiner’s office stands “firmly” behind.

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    The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Epstein’s death a suicide by hanging, but a forensic pathologist who observed the four-hour autopsy on behalf of  Epstein’s brother, Mark, tells 60 Minutes the evidence released so far points more to murder than suicide in his view. Dr. Michael Baden’s key reason: the unusual fractures he saw in Epstein’s neck. –CBS News

    While we’ve heard all sorts of theories about the improbabilities of the force required by the nearly 6 foot tall Epstein to successfully hang himself while breaking an unusual three bones in his neck usually seen in strangulations, that’s nowhere near the most peculiar part of Epstein’s demise (notwithstanding the ol’ homeless guy switcharoo theory).

    For the first time, we get to look at the noose Epstein used to allegedly kill himself. Photos admitted as evidence reveal a clean cloth with no blood, despite Epstein’s clearly bloody neck. Moreover, both ends of the noose were hemmed, not cut – while the guard who found Epstein reportedly cut him down.

    Also odd is that Epstein’s ligature wound, allegedly left by said bloodless noose, is fairly low on his neck.

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    “It doesn’t look like anybody ever took scissors to it,” said 60 Minutes’ Sharyn Alfonsi. “So there is some question—is that the right noose?”

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    The photos also reveal other potential nooses – none of which are bloodied, as well as orange sheets strewn around the room.

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    “There were fractures of the left, the right thyroid cartilage and the left hyoid bone,” said Baden. “I have never seen three fractures like this in a suicidal hanging.”

    “Going over a thousand jail hangings, suicides in the New York City state prisons over the past 40-50 years, no one had three fractures,” he added.

    Other irregularities include Epstein being taken off suicide watch, broken cameras which didn’t record the front of his cell during the cruicial period, and of course, the fact that his guards failed to check on perhaps the most high-profile inmate in modern history – and were instead browsing the web and sleeping.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 21:00

    Tags
    Social Issues

  • 2020: Get Ready For The Geopolitical Olympics
    2020: Get Ready For The Geopolitical Olympics

    Authored by Peter Tasker via Japan-Forward.com,

    According to Vladimir Lenin, “There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.”

    As Japan moves into the second year of the Reiwa era, there is a palpable sense that world history is going through a phase of acceleration, driven by the rapid economic rise of Asia and the relentless worldwide spread of the internet and social media.

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    Hence, the intensifying confrontation between the United States and China. This may appear to have been sparked by the unpredictable trade policies of President Donald Trump, which came as a shock after the laid-back attitude toward China of his predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush. In reality, though, the clash of wills was inevitable, as there is a fundamental incompatibility of national interests between the world’s two largest economies.

    What is at stake is supremacy in two vital and interconnected areas: new technologies — such as A.I., 5G, and biogenetics — and influence in Asia.

    Calm Before the Storm

    As with the original Cold War, it is a struggle for control of the future. The contest will be long drawn out and multi-faceted, involving high-tech, trade, finance, soft power, political values, alliances, cyber warfare, espionage, and military muscle.

    Though there will be ebbs and flows in tensions, these fundamentals will remain in place — regardless of whether President Trump wins re-election in 2020 or not. And the logic of U.S.-China strategic competition means that Japan cannot be a passive observer, as it was largely in the first Cold War. Thanks to geography, it is on the front line, like it or not.

    In recent years, Japan has been an oasis of calm in a turbulent global landscape. Indeed, the most heated political controversies concern such trivialities as the budget for the government’s annual cherry blossom viewing party.

    Compare that with the street violence and bitter political polarization in Hong Kong, which has been experiencing a few of those “weeks that contain decades.” This follows two decades when, basically, nothing happened.

    Hong Kong people used to be famous for their apolitical pragmatism and single-minded devotion to business, so the scenes of masked demonstrators fighting riot police were shocking to many observers. Perhaps the increasingly obvious flaws of Hong Kong’s governance should have been debated more openly before.

    Perhaps in recent times Hong Kong has been too calm. In contrast, the United Kingdom’s long and heated debate about Brexit appeared chaotic, but in fact the political system has been working as it should. Brexit is now a fait accompli and will soon fade from the world’s headlines.

    The lesson for Japan is that crucial and divisive issues are better debated in the open than ignored until a “Lenin week” occurs. And that could happen at any time. Nothing has changed concerning the North Korean missile threat or China’s military build-up and expansionist tendencies.

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    Geopolitical Olympics and 21st Century Realities

    Fortunately, in the coming year it is likely that Japanese citizens will have the opportunity to engage in a thorough, ongoing debate about national security as part of the process of constitutional reform. It will be controversial and divisive, but also necessary and healthy.

    Indeed, Reiwa 2 will be a year packed with politics. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may call a general election in order to establish the necessary two thirds majority in the twin houses of the Diet for passing his constitutional bill. If successful, he would then hold a referendum, the first in Japan’s history, in order to gain the public’s approval.

    For the first time, ordinary Japanese citizens would be given a direct voice in their own governance. Leaving aside the specific issue in question — the legitimacy of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces — this would be a spectacular illustration of Japan’s democratic maturity.

    Japan is unusual in never having amended its constitution. Globally, about 30 constitutional amendments take place every year.

    Germany’s constitution has been amended some 60 times since it was established in 1949. India’s constitution has been amended over 100 times in a similar timespan.

    Constitutional reform was the official policy of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, which was in power through nearly all that period, but nothing was attempted. Both politicians and the public lacked the sense of urgency and, more important, the confidence in their own institutions to make it happen.

    Circumstances have changed, as has the national mood, especially among younger people. Opinion surveys show that it is the older generation which is most opposed to constitutional revision — the same generation that is most opposed to increasing numbers of immigrant workers. The under-30s are much more comfortable with 21st century realities.

    2020 is the year of the Tokyo Olympics. It is to be hoped that the event passes off in fine style and the host nation secures a satisfying haul of medals.

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    Of more lasting significance will be how Japan performs in the geopolitical Olympics that lies ahead. It will be a test of agility, stamina, strength, guile, and concentration — closer to martial arts than synchronized swimming.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 20:30

    Tags
    Politics

  • "This Is Unprecedented!" Guaido Denied Entry To Venezuelan Parliament, Only To Be Reelected Hours Later
    “This Is Unprecedented!” Guaido Denied Entry To Venezuelan Parliament, Only To Be Reelected Hours Later

    Between Turkey, Venezuela and efforts to remove Donald Trump from office, it’s been tough sledding for coup d’états over the last several years.

    In the case of Venezuela, would-be President Juan Guaido’s journey is just sad at this point – after the opposition leader said on Sunday that police prevented him from entering the country’s National Assembly, only to be reelected for a second term as speaker of parliament hours later.

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    Guaido has led opposition to Venezuela’s socialist president Nicolas Maduro for the past 12 months and had hoped to be confirmed in the post in a key vote.

    When he arrived for the special parliament session, police prevented him from entering. –DW

    At one point he tried to jump the fence, only to be repelled.

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    “This is unprecedented!” Guaido told a guard amid a heated exchange.

    “The regime is kidnapping and persecuting deputies, militarizing the Federal Legislative Palace, preventing access and blocking entry to the free press,” he later tweeted.

    “This is the reality in Venezuela: the desire for change in the face of a dictatorship that continues to persecute.”

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    That said, despite the earlier impasse, Guaido was reelected president of Parliament by the majority of deputies hours later.

    The standoff outside the parliamentary chambers went on for more than an hour as troops reviewed the credentials for each lawmaker. According to DW, critics said this was a delay strategy to prevent the assembly from reaching quorum. Journalists were denied entry as well.

    Guaido declared Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro illegitimate after the May, 2018 elections.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 20:00

    Tags
    Politics
    War Conflict

  • Trump Says "US Will Not Leave" Iraq Unless Billions For Air Base Are Repaid, Threatens Baghdad With "Very Big" Sanctions
    Trump Says “US Will Not Leave” Iraq Unless Billions For Air Base Are Repaid, Threatens Baghdad With “Very Big” Sanctions

    Just hours after Iraq voted to expel US troops stationed in Iraq, Trump made it clear that he has no interest in vacating the nation that has been a stalwart US military outpost in the middle east for nearly two decades ever since it was invaded by, well, the US in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and speaking to reporters on Air Force One said “we’re not leaving” unless Iraq “pays us back” for a US air base built in Iraq.

    “We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.” Trump told the AF1 reporter pool.

    That, however, wasn’t enough, and Trump also made it clear that that in addition to billions in reimbursements, unless the US left on a “very friendly basis”, the US would hit Iraq with “very big” sanctions like “they’ve never seen before ever.”

    “If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis. We will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”

    And just to make it abundantly clear, Trump also added that “if there’s any hostility, that they do anything we think is inappropriate, we are going to put sanctions on Iraq, very big sanctions on Iraq.”

    Trump also addressed his Saturday threat to attack various Iranian cultural sites in retaliation to any escalation out of Tehran, threatening “major retaliation” on Iran if they “do anything” and saying that “they’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. they’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural sites? It doesn’t work that way.”

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    Amusingly, if Trump is indeed serious that Iraq will have to reimburse the US for its countless military bases, camps and other installations, the US will be able to repay its $23 trillion in debt (and have money leftover), when all is said and done: here is a partial list of the US camps in iraq:

    • Camp Abu Naji / FOB Garry Owen (Al Amarah)
    • Camp Adder also known as Tallil Air Base and Ali Air Base located in Nasiriyah
    • Camp Al Adala / Camp Justice / Camp Bonzai (Kadhamiyah / Baghdad)
    • Camp Al Amal / Camp Hope (Baghdad)
    • Camp Al Asad (Al Asad Air Base)
    • Camp Al-Hurya Al-Awal / Camp Freedom I / Camp Warhorse (Baqubah Air Field)
    • Camp Al-Hurya Al-Thani (Green Zone)
    • Camp Al-Isdehar (Al Salam)
    • Camp Al-Istiglal (Baghdad Air Base)
    • Camp Al-Khalis (Rock City F.O.B.)
    • Camp Al-Nasr (Abu Ghurayb)
    • Camp Al Qa’im (Al Qa’im train station, Al Anbar)
    • Camp Al-Saqr (Rasheed Air Base)
    • Camp Al-Sharaf / Camp Honor (Green Zone)
    • Camp Al-Tadamum (Adhamiyah / Baghdad)
    • Camp Al-Tahreer (Abu Ghurayb)
    • Camp Al-Tawheed Al-Awal (Al Sijood)
    • Camp Al-Tawheef Al-Thani (Al Sijood)
    • Camp Al Watani (Green Zone)
    • Camp Anaconda (Balad Air Base)
    • Camp Anah / COP Anah
    • Camp Andaluz (Kufa)
    • Camp Anderson (Diwaniyah)
    • Camp Apache / Camp Gunner Main
    • Camp Arkansas (Al Salam)
    • Camp Arrow (Ad Dawr)
    • Camp Ashraf, also known as Camp New Iraq, located near Khalis
    • Camp Avalanche (Abu Ghurayb)
    • Camp Babylon
    • Camp Baharia (Fallujah)
    • Camp Balad (Bala Air Base)
    • Camp Basilone (Qalat Sikar Air Base)
    • Camp Basrah
    • Camp Bastard / Camp Ellis (near Haqlaniyah / Barwanah ?)
    • Camp Black Jack
    • Camp Blackjack (Abu Ghurayb)
    • Camp Blue Diamond (Ar Ramadi)
    • Camp Bonzai (Kadhamiyah / Baghdad)
    • Camp Boom (Baqubah)
    • Camp Brassfield Mora (Samarra)
    • Camp Bristol (BIAP)
    • Camp Bucca, located near Umm Qasr
    • Camp Buffalo (Tikrit)
    • Camp Bulldog (Baghdad)
    • Camp Bushmaster (Najaf)
    • Camp Bushwaker
    • Camp Buzz
    • Camp Caldwell (Kirkush)

    … This is just through the letter C – clearly there are many, many more. Click here for the full list.

    In any event, earlier, Axios reported that The Trump administration tried to stop an Iraqi vote to expel the U.S. military from the country and citing unnamed sources, said that the Trump administration tried to persuade top Iraqi officials to kill the parliamentary effort. As a reminder, earlier on Sunday, Iraq’s parliament voted to approve of the expulsion of the U.S. military following last week’s attack that killed Soleimani.

    A US official told Axios that expelling the U.S. military from Iraq “would be inconvenient for us, but it would be catastrophic for Iraq”, adding that “it’s our concern that Iraq would take a short-term decision that would have catastrophic long-term implications for the country and its security.”

    “But it’s also what would happen to them financially if they allowed Iran to take advantage of their economy to such an extent that they would fall under the sanctions that are on Iran,” the official added. “We don’t want to see that. We’re trying very hard to work to have that not happen.”

    A senior Iraqi official told Axios that many Kurdish and Sunni members of parliament, who tend to be more supportive of the U.S. presence in Iraq, did not attend the vote to expel the U.S. presence.

    “This is a temporary victory for the parties which are pro-Iranian,” the official told Axios. “But it’s also a clear message from the Sunnis and from the Kurds [who didn’t vote] and from some Iraqi Shia for the Americans to tell them we want you to stay in Iraq.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 19:49

    Tags
    War Conflict

  • Iran's Deep Distrust Of America Is Rooted In History
    Iran’s Deep Distrust Of America Is Rooted In History

    Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

    Our agreement with Iran reached under the Obama administration and canceled by President Trump was viewed, by many, as an alternative to the unsavory option of taking military action to halt Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. John Kerry crafting the agreement with Iran always stressed that if Iran fails to meet the requirements of the current deal, all options remain on the table. With this in mind, we should not give the Obama administration too much credit for bringing us a great or even good agreement.

    Remember that during the Obama years many people considered Middle-east policy a mess as he flip-flopped ignoring the red lines he boldly drew in the sand. At the time, Iran held more cards than we were told because ISIS was a growing threat. In many ways, Iran held the fate of Baghdad in their hands. If the Shia militias from Iran that were defending Baghdad wavered both the Iraqi capital and the American Green Zone could have come under fire from ISIS, this would have been very embarrassing for Obama and our government. When Kerry talked about offsetting the one hundred and fifty billion dollars Iran was to receive when the sanctions were lifted by “upping our game in the area” questions arise as to the cost and how Washington intended to pay for this gambit.

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    Iran Has Little Reason To Trust America

    While officials claimed the agreement would halt much of Iran’s nuclear program and ratchet back other elements, several U.S. senators, both Democrat and Republican, voiced displeasure with the agreement. They argued that the U.S. and its partners offered too much for something short of a full freeze on uranium enrichment. Also, if part of the boatload of money released at the signing of the agreement was used to fund Iran’s many proxy wars it would create chaos. If  Iran does not halt and reverse its course it can always ramp up its plans to develop a nuclear bomb at off-site locations.

    Much of the problem America has with Iran stems from the perception that we have created over the years by portraying Iran as a larger than life boogeyman that threatens our very way of life and existence. Iran was elevated to this level when President George W. Bush included Iran as a member of the “Axis Of Evil” in his State of the Union Address in 2002. Unfortunately, Washington and the politicians who reside there often mislead us as they allow agendas of special interest to influence policy. When it comes to Iran’s official stance towards America anyone saying that Iran has good reason not to trust the American government is making an understatement. America through its foreign policy has wreaked havoc upon many countries few have been affected or suffered from our meddling as much as Iran.

    A somewhat neutral source for information on the history of Iran post-World War II is Wikipedia. It shows America has constantly interfered in their internal politics. In 1953 the British M16 and the American CIA organized a military coup d’etat to oust the nationalist and democratically elected Prime Minister and put in power Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi, the man we all know as the Shah of Iran, in Persian Shah means king. It is only fair to call attention to some very damning declassified documents released recently, the approximately 1,000 pages of documents, shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s central role in the 1953 coup that brought down Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh.

    The documents conflict with the U.S government’s long denied involvement in the coup. The State Department first released coup-related documents in 1989 but edited out any reference to CIA involvement. Public outrage coaxed a government promise to release a more complete edition, and some material came out in 2013. Two years later, the full installment of declassified material was scheduled but the release was delayed fearing it might interfere with the Iran nuclear talks that were taking place. Now they have finally been released, it should be noted they are not complete because numerous original CIA telegrams from that period are known to have disappeared or were destroyed long ago.

    What is clear and finally brought to light is the CIA plot known as Operation Ajax, was about oil. In early 1951, amid great popular acclaim, Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. A fuming Great Britain began conspiring with U.S. intelligence services to overthrow Mossadegh and restore the monarchy under the Shah. While some of the U.S. State Department, the newly-released cables attempt to blame the British for the tensions and indicate efforts to work with Mossadegh plans were made for a coup. The coup attempt began on August 15th but was swiftly thwarted. Mossadegh made dozens of arrests. General Fazlollah Zahedi, a top conspirator, went into hiding, and the Shah fled Iran. At that point according to a newly declassified cable sent on August 18, 1953, the CIA under the impression the coup had failed decided to end their role. The message read, “Operations against Mossadegh should be discontinued.”

    Washington wanted to make sure nothing “could be traced back to the U.S,” however, this cable was ignored by Kermit Roosevelt, the top CIA officer in Iran. What unfolded next is pivotal, on August 19, 1953, with the aid of “rented” crowds widely believed to have been arranged with CIA assistance, the coup succeeded and Iran’s nationalist hero jailed and the Western-friendly Shah placed in power. The existence and extent of Operation Ajax have long been a major point of contention for many Iranians from which the flames of anti-Western sentiment grew fueling a surge of nationalism. In 1979 this culminated in the U.S. hostage crisis, the Shah being overthrown and the creation of the Islamic Republic.

    During his time in power, the Shah maintained a close relationship with America and shared our views towards the Soviet Union its northern neighbor. Iran was a strong ally in efforts to keep the Russians contained during the cold war. While the Shah westernized and modernized Iran arbitrary arrests and torture by the Shah’s secret police were used to crush all forms of political opposition. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini an active critic of the Shah publicly denounced the government and was arrested and imprisoned for 18 months. After his release when Khomeini publicly criticized the United States government he was sent into exile. When oil prices spiked in 1973 due to an oil embargo declared by OPEC and several other countries a flood of foreign currency into Iran caused double-digit inflation;

    Social unrest from waste, corruption and a recession resulted in protests and strikes that spread until they reached a point where the Shah fled the country. Ayatollah Khomeini returned in 1979 and formed a new government. Over the next several years uprisings were violently subdued as the new government went about purging itself of the non-Islamist political opposition that had joined with them to overthrow the Shah. Tens of thousands of Iranians were executed by the Islamic regime.

    A part of history that lingers strongly in the minds of many Americans is that in November 1979, a group of Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy taking  52 U.S. citizens and embassy personnel hostage after the U.S. refused to return the former Shah to Iran to face trial and execution.

    The hostages were finally set free but many Americans continue to view this as a slap in the face.

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    America Supported Iraq Which Attacked Iran

    A serious point of discord among Iranians is what happened next. On September 22, 1980, the Iraqi army invaded Iranian Khuzestan which signaled the start of the Iran–Iraq War. The United States, alongside regional and international powers, supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein with loans, military equipment, and satellite imagery during Iraqi attacks against Iranian targets. Although Saddam Hussein’s forces made several early advances, by mid-1982 the Iranian forces successfully managed to drive the Iraqi army back into Iraq and Iran decided to invade Iraq in a bid to conquer Iraqi territory. The war continued until 1988 when the Iraqi army defeated the Iranian forces inside Iraq and pushed the remaining Iranian troops back across the border.

    Subsequently, Khomeini accepted a truce mediated by the UN, but the war cost Iran many lives and huge economic damage. Half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers, with an equivalent number of civilians, are believed to have died and many more injured. It must be noted that during the conflict America and the international community remained silent as Iraq used chemical weapons of mass destruction against Iran as well as the Kurds in northern Iraq. Following the war, Iran concentrated on a pragmatic pro-business policy of rebuilding and strengthening the economy without making any dramatic break with the ideology of the revolution.

    Tensions with the United States dramatically increased after the 2005 presidential election brought the conservative populist candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to power. His over the top rhetoric galvanized the feeling Iran had no intention to take a peaceful place in the world community. In 2009 protests erupted in Iran after he was reported to have won nearly 60 percent of the vote despite voting irregularities. Despite the relatively peaceful nature of the protests, the police and the Basij (a paramilitary group) crushed the people by using batons, pepper spray, sticks and, in some cases, firearms. Images of Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot and died were uploaded to mass media and broadcast around the world. It was reported that thousands were arrested and tortured in prisons around the country, with former inmates alleging mass rape of men, women, and children by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Relatives of those killed are forced to sign documents claiming they had died of heart attack or meningitis.

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    Many Iranians Want More Freedom

    In truth, few Americans know much about Iran or its 78 million inhabitants or have ever visited the country. Many people would have difficulty pinpointing its location on an unmarked map and the chief source of what knowledge they do have is usually from the evening news. The official name of the country is the Islamic Republic of Iran and it is an area that history called Persia with Persian being the official language and the rial is its currency. Iran’s unique political system based on its 1979 constitution combines elements of a parliamentary democracy with a theocracy governed by the country’s clergy. The country is made up of several ethnic and linguistic groups but most inhabitants are officially Shia.

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    Travel Documentary Shows Little Malice Towards America

    This recall of history is necessary to understand the real nature of the American-Iranian relationship and how we arrived at today. It should be noted that many Iranians have no malice towards America and are far more moderate than the political apparatus with its strong links to the country’s clergy. A few years ago Rick Steves produced a documentary that explored Iran in a one-hour, ground-breaking travel special. This is a good place to meet the people of this nation whose government so exasperates our own.

    On June 15, 2013, the electoral victory of new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani took place but the moderate has not had as much impact as hoped. The fact is if current trends continue in the future Iran looks to face a defanged and economically weakened America with less power in the region. Regardless the fact remains that one way or the other we must deal with Iran and war is not a great option.

    Two things are clear.

    • The first is that many Iranians want more freedom.

    • The second is that history shows war to be a poor option to bring about positive change. War brings about change but to what degree and for how long.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 19:30

    Tags
    Politics
    War Conflict

  • Durham Probes Early, Suspicious Contacts Between Obama State Dept And Papadopoulos
    Durham Probes Early, Suspicious Contacts Between Obama State Dept And Papadopoulos

    Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) dropped some interesting tidbits regarding the ongoing investigation into the Obama-era intelligence community and its actions during the 2016 US election.

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    In an appearance with Maria Bartiromo on Fox‘s Sunday Morning Futures, Ratcliffe said “Now we come up with evidence that’s recently been reported that one of the folks that John Durham talked to was an embassy official who reached out to George Papadopoulos three months before Crossfire Hurricane was ever opened,” adding “That’s a sign that John Durham is looking at the fact that this may include Obama administration officials beyond law enforcement, perhaps to include our intelligence community.”

    As the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross noted in September of 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller interviewed US embassy official Terrence Dudley about his contacts during the 2016 election with Papadopoulos – several months before the FBI launched operation Crossfire Hurricane to officially investigate the Trump campaign.

    Terrence Dudley, a former Navy commander who works with the Office of Defense Cooperation, told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Mueller’s office contacted him to discuss several meetings that he and a colleague had during the campaign with Papadopoulos.

    The former Trump aide recently identified Dudley and his colleague, Greg Baker, in a tweet alleging that the pair were sent to spy on him on behalf of the U.S. government. –Daily Caller

    (relevant portion starts at 7:15)

    Ratcliffe also said that Durham is looking into conflicting statements between former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan regarding the Steele Dossier.

    “Brennan says Comey was pushing the Steele dossier to be included in the intelligence community assessment. Comey says that it was Brennan that was pushing it. They both testified under oath, before Congress and to investigators, to that fact,” said Ratcliffe, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee.

    “They both can’t be telling the truth.”

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    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 19:00

    Tags
    Politics

  • Trump Derangement Syndrome Skyrockets Over Soleimani
    Trump Derangement Syndrome Skyrockets Over Soleimani

    Authored by Roger Simon via The Epoch Times,

    Remember “politics ends at the water’s edge”?

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    In the Trump era, that patriotic phrase is not only dead, it’s decomposed.

    And ironically so, since the latest manifestation of this decomposition is over the termination of Qasem Soleimani, the terror mastermind who was, on analysis, even more dangerous to the United States and the world than bin Laden and al-Baghdadi, monumentally evil as they were.

    Neither bin Laden, nor al-Baghdadi ever had remotely the power at their disposals – even when the latter controlled his caliphate – Soleimani did as the military leader of by far the greatest state sponsor of terrorism. They were not even close to him who was head of Iran’s Quds force and the second most powerful person in that country of eighty plus million, with all its attendant weaponry and technology and ties to China and Russia.

    Besides the thousands of Americans who either died or were maimed for life because of Soleimani, hundreds of thousands across the Middle East have met their fates at least in part through this man’s ministrations.

    The once shining state of Lebanon is practically decimated through the rise of his Hezbollah, a fate he was replicating in Iraq. And then there’s Yemen and his Houthi and their simultaneous war against Saudi Arabia and their own people. And of course Israel where he kept the Jewish state in a crossfire between his clients Hamas, Islamic Jihad and, again Hezbollah (when Hezbollah was not busy exporting drugs into the United States).

    It’s worth remembering Soleimani was in charge of all these operations at once, a veritable superstar of terror.

    On top of all this, he had as much influence as anyone in keeping the Syrian Civil War alive. Current death (under)count: 400,000. Number of refugees: 5.7 million. He may have changed Europe as we knew it forever.

    And let’s not forget Iran itself where only in the last few weeks Soleimani’s footprints were all over the deaths of thousands of peaceful anti-regime demonstrators. Nobody knows how many. And torture as well—something the Islamic Republic has made a specialty since 1979. Only the other day, they once again executed a man for homosexuality.

    Yet the supposedly liberal and progressive Democrats are all in a dither about the assassination of Soleimani. After all, Trump did it. It has to be wrong.

    Not only would these same Democrats obviously have applauded the action if it had been done by one of their own, equally obviously many of them would have attacked Trump even if had he assassinated Hitler in 1940, blaming the president for escalating the conflict.

    It’s that simple—and nauseating—and every honest person in America knows it, especially the vets almost all of whom have friends incinerated by one of Soleimani’s roadside bombs, if they are not themselves walking around on prosthetic devices.

    And this leaves aside whatever Qasem’s plans were that constituted the proximate cause of the assassination. If past performance is any indication, he had many.

    Meanwhile the Democratic candidates are demonstrating uniform cowardice in the face of the action. Is there one of them you would want to have beside you in a foxhole?

    It would seem to have been impossible, but as bad as it has been for the last three years, Trump Derangement Syndrome has reached unforeseen levels.

    But a deeper cause of this increased derangement may stem from events that began September 11, 2012 – the Obama administration’s behavior in the aftermath of the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

    As most will recall, the administration sent Susan Rice to inform the nation that the lethal terror attack occurred because of a spontaneous emotional reaction to an amateur anti-Islamic video that barely anyone had ever watched. It was not a planned attack by a terror group, Rice said. That was a despicable lie.

    Kenneth Timmerman wrote in the NY Post in June 2014: “My sources, meanwhile, say Suleymani [sic] was involved in an even more direct attack on the U.S.—the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya.”

    Timmerman goes on to detail a complicated and clever plot behind Benghazi worthy of the evil mastermind Qasem Soleimani. (Read it here.)

    If this is true – and it seems vastly more likely than Susan Rice’s “explanation” – then what just occurred at Baghdad Airport is a prime, and highly-justified, example of that old saw: what goes around comes around.

    *  *  *

    Senior Political Analyst Roger L. Simon’s new novel “The GOAT” is available on Amazon.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 18:30

    Tags
    Politics
    War Conflict

  • Gold Spikes To 6-Year High, Oil Jumps, Stocks Dump As Asia Opens
    Gold Spikes To 6-Year High, Oil Jumps, Stocks Dump As Asia Opens

    Amid the weekend’s escalating tensions, threats, and retaliations in the middle east, futures trading has opened with some significant market moves…

    Spot gold is at its highest since April 2013…

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    Source: Bloomberg

    Gold futures are up around 2%…up near $1600

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    WTI Crude futures are also up notably, tagging $64 and taking out last week’s highs…

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    Dow futures are down around 150 points, taking out Friday’s lows…

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    And bond futures are higher…

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    2020 has not been kind to risk assets…so far.

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    How many more points down will The Dow be allowed before somebody gets on the phone!??

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    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 18:15

    Tags
    Business Finance

  • Bernanke Hints At Negative Rates, "Purchases Of Private Securities" To Fight Next Recession
    Bernanke Hints At Negative Rates, “Purchases Of Private Securities” To Fight Next Recession

    Nearly a decade after his now laughably idiotic prediction that the Fed could hike rates in “15 minutes if we have to” – which of course it could and it would then promptly crash markets as late 2018 showed which is also why the Fed will never be able to normalize monetary policy ever again – former Fed Chairman, who together with Alan Greenspan will be responsible for blowing the three biggest asset bubbles in history of which the current one may well be last one as it will mark the end of central banking as we know it, Ben Bernanke delivered what he called “a relatively upbeat” assessment of the U.S. central bank’s ability to fight the next recession.

    Ahead of his address to the American Economic Association’s annual meeting on Saturday, Bernanke wrote in a blog post that “the new policy tools are effective,” perhaps seeking to reassure himself and other central bankers rather than the population and commercial banks around the globe, which is reeling form an onslaught of populism in response to the historic wealth transfer programs initiated by central banks whose negative rate policies have brought the European financial sector to the edge of the abyss.

    “Central bank purchases of longer-term financial assets, popularly known as quantitative easing or QE, have proved an effective tool for easing financial conditions and providing economic stimulus when short rates are at their lower bound. The effectiveness of QE does not depend on its being deployed during a period of market turbulence.”

    “Quantitative easing and forward guidance can provide the equivalent of about 3 additional percentage points of short-term rate cuts.” By which he meant that the Fed, which is currently engaging in QE4, can boost markets to even recorded highs, at which point trickle down may finally happen… although it won’t, and instead the rich will get even richer as the US becomes an even greater Banana republic thanks to people like Bernanke.

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    While the Fed has limited room to cut short-term interest rates because they’re already so low – and negative across Europe and Japan – Bernanke argued that quantitative easing and forward guidance could provide enough extra punch to combat a future economic contraction.

    Anticipating that the next market crash will test the central bank’s liquidity injecting skills (and reputation) like never before, Bernanke said the Fed should also consider adopting the same “tools” employed by other central banks, including purchases of private securities, negative interest rates, funding for lending programs, and yield curve control. More importantly, the man who in 2005 said on TV he did not think US housing could ever decline, urged the Fed against ruling out the possibility of pushing short-term interest rates below zero, a very clear hint of what awaits the US during the next recession.

    “The Fed should also consider maintaining constructive ambiguity about the future use of negative short-term rates, both because situations could arise in which negative short-term rates would provide useful policy space; and because entirely ruling out negative short rates, by creating an effective floor for long-term rates as well, could limit the Fed’s future ability to reduce longer-term rates by QE or other means.”

    And yes, Bernanke did also commend banks such as the ECB for purchasing corporate bonds, just so everyone is on the same page as to what happens when corporate bonds sporing record leverage, finally crater in the next recession.

    Then there was an amusing tangent on helicopter money and MMT, which as Bernanke explained, has been going on for quite a while now: “the risk of capital losses on the Fed’s portfolio was never high, but in the event, over the past decade the Fed has remitted more than $800 billion in profits to the Treasury, triple the pre-crisis rate.”

    Just in case it wasn’t clear why the Fed is a socialist’s best friend…

    That said, no matter if the Fed has to buy equities first, or cut rates to, say, -10% and threaten to make all paper currency illegal in order to fight future market drops, pardon recessions, longer-term yields will probably spend extended periods of time at zero or below, according to Bernanke, now a Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who appears to realize that reliance on the Fed’s monetary policy has pushed the entire world into a twilight zone of negative real rates, from which there is no escape, but at least forces even more disastrous monetary policy which makes the rich even richer, at least until the next civil war erupts and the poor masses retake what they believe is theirs.

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    There was one moment when the prevailing idiocy of Bernanke’s blog actually gave way to fact, namely when he admitted that pervasive negative rates pose risks to financial stability. “Monetary easing does work in part by increasing the propensity of investors and lenders to take risks,” Bernanke said, perhaps eyeing the fact that the Fed had no choice but to inject $100 billion per month in the last quarter of 2019 just to push stocks to new all time highs.

    “Vigilance and appropriate policies, including macro-prudential and regulatory policies, are essential”, he added without a dose of sarcasm, perhaps hoping that none of those who read his steaming pile of dogshit were alive when he said that “subprime is contained.”

    Bernanke was also kind enough to point out that the Fed’s grossly erroneous inflation metric will never be fixed to accurately capture true inflation, which is not just within the economy but also among asset prices. Because to the Fed, the latter is mysteriously a non-issue.

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    While Bernanke’s blog post was unfortunately devoid of any moments of factual or truthful insight unlike his oddly honest and accurate May 2014 prediction that “there would be no rate normalization” in his lifetime, Bernanke did admit that his entire monetary policy dogma is predicated on a crucial hypothesis: that the neutral level of short-term rates which neither spurs nor restricts economic growth is between 2% and 3%. According to Bernanke, if the equilibrium rate is much below that then QE and forward guidance won’t be sufficient to fight off a downturn. “In that case, other measures to increase policy space, including raising the inflation target, might be necessary,” he said.

    Of course, as we first warned back in December 2015 when the Fed’s QT was just starting, the Fed’s balance sheet shrinkage would prove to be a giant mistake precisely because soaring US debt and slowing US growth meant precisely that: the equilibrium rate is now roughly zero.

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    Of course, four year later, we know that this was also spot on: the Fed’s attempt to “normalize” rates resulted in the first and only mini bear market of the post-crisis era, and the central bank had to quickly cut rates while launching “NOT QE.”

    So besides negative rates and purchases of bonds, and eventually stocks, what does Bernanke believe will happen in the next downturn? His first policy prescription should come as no surprise: echoing virtually every other talking head over the past year, Bernanke said that fiscal policy may also have to play a more central role in countering a contraction. This is better known as the “it takes debt to undo the consequences of record debt and a debt crisis.” How it actually works out and leads to a happy ending is anyone’s guess.

    That’s not all: going back to his famous November 2002 speech in which he first hinted at helicopter money, Bernanke said that central banks in Europe and Japan face even greater difficulties, largely because inflation expectations there have fallen too far. “In those jurisdictions, fiscal as well as monetary policy may be needed to get inflation expectations up. If that can be done, then monetary policy, augmented by the new policy tools, should regain much of its potency.”

    Naturally, such a JV between fiscal and monetary policy, which is where the central bank officially monetizes the government’s debt, is also known as helicopter money, and it’s only a matter of time before it arrives.

    In parting, Bernanke reminded everyone of the farce that defined his entire tenture, saying that unlike Volcker’s days, the problem is not that inflation is too high, “it’s the risk that it’s too low.”

    “Low inflation can be dangerous,” Bernanke wrote in his blog. “Consistent with their declared ‘symmetric’ inflation targets, the Federal Reserve and other central banks should defend against inflation that is too low as least as vigorously as they resist inflation that is modestly too high.”

    While we would challenge Bernanke (or his acolyte Neel Kashkari) to show up at anywhere in public and tell the struggling consumers drowning in credit card debt that inflation is not too high, it is in fact too low, we know this will never happen, and instead we urge the former Fed Chair to highlight to us which asset class he deems as having “too low” inflation ever since he launched QE1… and QE2… and QE3.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 18:00

    Tags
    Business Finance

  • Iraq Votes To Expel US Troops As Iranian MPs Chant "Death To America"
    Iraq Votes To Expel US Troops As Iranian MPs Chant “Death To America”

    Update (1545ET): The US State Department has expressed its “disappointment” at the Iraqi parliament’s vote to expel US forces. However, as Axios’ Jonathan Swan notes in a tweet, that he just spoke with a senior Iraqi government official, who explained that people should be very cautious about drawing certain conclusions from Iraq’s parliamentary vote to expel the U.S.

    This is a far from certain outcome. It’s a resolution & the PM who must sign it has already resigned.

    “This is a temporary victory for the parties which are pro-Iranian,” the senior Iraqi govt official told me.

    “But it’s also a clear message from the Sunnis and from the Kurds [who didn’t vote] and from some Iraqi Shia for the Americans to tell them we want you to stay in Iraq.”

    *  *  *

    If President Trump wanted to reduce America’s troop presence in the Middle East, he may have just got his wish, albeit not at his orders.

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    During an emergency parliamentary session this morning, the Iraqi government just voted to have foreign troops removed from the country.

    Interim Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul Mahdi, stressed during the session, that while the US government notified the Iraqi military of the planned strike on Soleimani, his government denied Washington permission to continue with the operation.

    As RT reports, Mahdi said after the incident that it was clear it was in the interest of both the US and Iraq to end the presence of foreign forces on Iraqi soil.

    “Despite the internal and external difficulties that we might face, it remains best for Iraq on principle and practically.”

    Still there are plenty more US bases around…

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    Meanwhile, as the Iraqi government voted, the Iranian parliament took to the Parliament podium to chant “death to America.”

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    After a speech by parliamentary Speaker Ali Larjani, who exclaimed “Mr. Trump, this is the voice of the Iranian nation,” MPs surged united to the podium…

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    The Iranian MPs echoed a popular sentiment heard on the streets as 1000s mourned the death of Qasem Soleimani.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 17:55

    Tags
    Politics
    War Conflict

  • Chris Hedges: The American Empire Will Not Die With A Whimper, But A Bang
    Chris Hedges: The American Empire Will Not Die With A Whimper, But A Bang

    Authored by Chrius Hedges via TruthDig.com,

    The assassination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The existing mayhem, violence, failed states and war, the result of nearly two decades of U.S. blunders and miscalculations in the region, will become an even wider and more dangerous conflagration. The consequences are ominous. Not only will the U.S. swiftly find itself under siege in Iraq and perhaps driven out of the country—there is only a paltry force of 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq, all U.S. citizens in Iraq have been told to leave the country “immediately” and the embassy and consular services have been closed—but the situation could also draw us into a war directly with Iran. The American Empire, it seems, will die not with a whimper but a bang.

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    The targeting of Soleimani, who was killed by a MQ-9 Reaper drone that fired missiles into his convoy as he was leaving the Baghdad airport, also took the life of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, along with other Iraqi Shiite militia leaders. The strike may temporarily bolster the political fortunes of the two beleaguered architects of the assassination, Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is an act of imperial suicide by the United States. There can be no positive outcome. It opens up the possibility of an Armageddon-type scenario relished by the lunatic fringes of the Christian right.

    A war with Iran would see it use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, mines and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20% of the world’s oil supply. Oil prices would double, perhaps triple, devastating the global economy. The retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel, as well as on American military installations in Iraq, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead. The Shiites in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would turn in fury on us and our dwindling allies. There would be an increase in terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would renew attacks on northern Israel. War with Iran would trigger a long and widening regional conflict that, by the time it was done, would terminate the American Empire and leave in its wake mounds of corpses and smoldering ruins. Let us hope for a miracle to pull us back from this Dr. Strangelove self-immolation.

    Iran, which has vowed “harsh retaliation,” is already reeling under the crippling economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration when it unilaterally withdrew in 2018 from the Iranian nuclear arms deal. Tensions in Iraq between the U.S. and the Shiite majority, at the same time, have been escalating. On Dec. 27 Katyusha rockets were fired at a military base in Kirkuk where U.S. forces are stationed. An American civilian contractor was killed and several U.S. military personnel were wounded. The U.S. responded on Dec. 29 by bombing sites belonging to the Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia. Two days later Iranian-backed militias attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, vandalizing and destroying parts of the building and causing its closure. But this attack will soon look like child’s play.

    Iraq after our 2003 invasion and occupation has been destroyed as a unified country. Its once-modern infrastructure is in ruins. Electrical and water services are, at best, erratic. There is high unemployment and discontent over widespread government corruption that has led to bloody street protests. Warring militias and ethnic factions have carved out competing and antagonistic enclaves. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan is lost, as the Afghanistan Papers published by The Washington Post detail. Libya is a failed state. Yemen after five years of unrelenting Saudi airstrikes and a blockade is enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The “moderate” rebels we funded and armed in Syria at a cost of $500 million, after instigating a lawless reign of terror, have been beaten and driven out of the country. The monetary cost for this military folly, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, is between $5 trillion and $7 trillion.

    So why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other jihadist groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State? Why shatter the de facto alliance we have with Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?

    The generals and politicians who launched and prosecuted these wars are not about to take the blame for the quagmires they created. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, including at least 200,000 civilians, and the millions driven from their homes into displacement and refugee camps cannot, they insist, be the result of our failed and misguided policies. The proliferation of radical jihadist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault. The generals, the CIA, the private contractors and weapons manufacturers who have grown rich off these conflicts, the politicians such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, along with all the “experts” and celebrity pundits who serve as cheerleaders for endless war, have convinced themselves, and want to convince us, that Iran is responsible for our catastrophe.

    The chaos and instability we unleashed in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its mistake other than to attack Iran.

    Trump and Netanyahu, as well as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, are mired in scandal. They believe a new war would divert attention from their foreign and domestic crises. But they have no more rational strategy for war with Iran than they did for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria. European allies, whom Trump alienated when he walked away from the Iranian nuclear agreement, will not cooperate with Washington if the U.S. goes to war with Iran. The Pentagon lacks the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran. And the Trump administration’s view that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is seen by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counterforce to the Iranian government is ludicrous.

    International law, along with the rights of 80 million people in Iran, is ignored just as the rights of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The Iranians, whatever they feel about their despotic regime, would not see the United States as allies or liberators. They do not want to be occupied. They would resist.

    A war with Iran would be seen throughout the region as a war against Shiism. But these are calculations that the ideologues, who know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate, cannot fathom. Attacking Iran would be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen if we begin to pound a country of 80 million people whose land mass is three times the size of France?

    The United States, like Israel, has become a pariah that shreds, violates or absents itself from international law. We launch preemptive wars, which under international law is defined as a “crime of aggression,” based on fabricated evidence. We, as citizens, must hold our government accountable for these crimes. If we do not, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that would have terrifying consequences. It would be a world without treaties, statutes and laws. It would be a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, would be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. Such a new order would undo five decades of international cooperation—largely put in place by the United States—and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. Diplomacy, broad cooperation, treaties and law, all the mechanisms designed to civilize the global community, would be replaced by savagery.

    *  *  *

    Chris Hedges, an Arabic speaker, is a former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. He spent seven years covering the region, including Iran. 


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 17:30

    Tags
    Politics
    War Conflict

  • Is Global Manufacturing Staging A Comeback?
    Is Global Manufacturing Staging A Comeback?

    Authored by Chetan Ahya, chief economist and global head of economics at Morgan Stanley

    What was your defining moment of 2019? For the global economy, it would have to be the recessionary conditions in the manufacturing and trade sectors and their drag to global growth. The good news? As we enter 2020, these sectors are staging a comeback.

    Consider the recent run of both soft and hard data. In November, the soft data, most notably the manufacturing PMIs, improved for the first time in seven months. In December, both the headline and new orders index held on to their previous month’s values, as the further improvement in PMIs in EM was offset by weaker PMIs in DMs, particularly the US.

    Encouragingly, the bounce in the soft data in November has translated to an uptick in the hard data for December. Korea’s exports volume – the first real-time indicator for global trade – returned to a positive growth rate of 6.9%Y in December, after contracting for the past seven months. Similarly, we estimate that global trade, as per our trade indicator, is likely to post 1.3%Y growth in December, the first month of positive growth after seven months of contraction.

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    We have reasons to believe that this improvement in manufacturing and trade can be sustained.

    • First, trade tensions are easing. On current indications, a phase 1 deal between the US and China is likely to be signed on January 15. As further escalation is averted, this reduces the drag from a key overhang on corporate confidence. Moreover, the global economy received a substantial amount of monetary and fiscal stimulus and its effects are kicking in now to support end demand.
    • Second, the weakness in global manufacturing and trade was exacerbated by the inevitable inventory adjustment that corporates had to undertake in response to weak demand conditions. However, judging by the current low levels of inventory, we believe that the inventory adjustment cycle is nearly complete in China and Europe (the two big manufacturing hubs). Globally, the new orders to inventory ratio for the manufacturing PMIs has rebounded sharply over the last four months.

    At a micro level, the turnaround in the Asia tech cycle provides another avenue of optimism. The tech sector accounts for a sizeable share in Asia excluding Japan manufacturing, and Asia excluding Japan accounts for ~40% of global manufacturing. Shawn Kim, our head of Asia technology research, is highlighting that many tech verticals, including global semis, DRAM, display panels and smartphones to name a few, are inflecting higher in terms of their year-on-year rate of change, which Shawn believes marks a fundamental cyclical upturn. As tech is a big part of global manufacturing, its improvement, even if it is driven by sector-specific reasons, will support a recovery in global manufacturing.

    To be sure, this rising tide of better growth in manufacturing and trade will help to lift global growth, but not all economies will benefit to the same extent. Compared with the rest of the world, the US has a smaller exposure to these sectors. Hence, we expect a more robust growth recovery in the world excluding the US. The US economy is also constrained by late-cycle dynamics while resources are less stretched elsewhere.

    At the same time, the effects of policy support are fading in the US but policy easing is gaining momentum elsewhere. Fiscal policy is turning more supportive of growth in the euro area, Japan and the UK. In China, as trade tensions ease and corporate confidence improves, it will increase the effectiveness of the tax cuts. Moreover, policy-makers are continuing their push to support growth with the increase in the annual quota of local government special bond issuance for 2020, which is likely to be front-loaded.

    As the upturn in trade and manufacturing continues, it should provide an upswing to the global economy. We expect global GDP growth to improve from a trough of 2.9%Y in 4Q19 to 3.4%Y in 4Q20, driven by a more robust improvement in the rest of the world. The risks to the recovery will be if trade tensions between the US and China escalate again, a rise in geopolitical tensions in the Middle East or if late-cycle challenges in the US – for instance, if financial stability risks rise or there is a much sharper acceleration of wage growth relative to capex and productivity growth – result in a more pronounced rise in inflation. In this context, the Fed’s reaction to these scenarios playing out would be key, as it could prompt an earlier-than-expected rate hike by the Fed (relative to our expectation of an extended hold in 2020).

    Enjoy your Sunday. On behalf of all my colleagues at Morgan Stanley Research, we wish you a happy new year.


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 17:00

    Tags
    Business Finance

  • Scientific Models Too Often Prove Whatever The Grant-Provider Wants Proven
    Scientific Models Too Often Prove Whatever The Grant-Provider Wants Proven

    Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

    Most people seem to think, “The difference between models and myths is that models are scientific, and myths are the conjectures of primitive people who do not have access to scientific thinking and computers. With scientific models, we have moved far beyond myths.” It seems to me that the truth is quite different from this.

    History shows a repeated pattern of overshoot and collapse. William Catton wrote about this issue in his highly acclaimed 1980 book, Overshoot.

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    Figure 1. Depiction of Overshoot and Collapse by Paul Chefurka

    What politicians, economists, and academic book publishers would like us to believe is that the world is full of limitless possibilities. World population can continue to rise. World leaders are in charge. Our big problem, if we believe today’s models, is that humans are consuming fossil fuel at too high a rate. If we cannot quickly transition to a low carbon economy, perhaps based on wind, solar and hydroelectric, the climate will change uncontrollably. The problem will then be all our fault. The story, supposedly based on scientific models, has almost become a new religion.

    Recent Attempted Shifts to Wind, Solar and Hydroelectric Are Working Poorly

    Of course, if we check to see what has happened when economies have actually attempted to switch to wind, water and hydroelectric, we see one bad outcome after another.

    [1] Australia’s attempt to put renewable electricity on the grid has sent electricity prices skyrocketing and resulted in increased blackouts. It has been said that intermittent electricity has “wrecked the grid” in Australia.

    [2] California, with all of its renewables, has badly neglected its grid, leading to many damaging wildfires. Renewables need disproportionately more long distance transmission, partly because they tend to be located away from population centers and partly because transmission must be scaled for peak use. It is evident that California has not been collecting a high enough price for electricity to cover the full cost of grid maintenance and upgrades.

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    Figure 2. California electricity consumption including amounts imported from out of state, based on EIA data. Amounts shown are average daily amounts, by month.

    [3] The International Rivers Organization writes that Large Dams Just Aren’t Worth the Cost. Part of the problem is the huge number of people who must be moved from their ancestral homeland and their inability to adapt well to their new location. Part of the problem is the environmental damage caused by the dams. To make matters worse, a study of 245 large dams built between 1934 and 2007 showed that without even taking into account social and environmental impacts, the actual construction costs were too high to yield a positive return.

    Developed economies have made hydroelectric power work adequately in areas with significant snow melt. At this point, evidence is lacking that large hydroelectric dams work well elsewhere. Significant variation in rainfall (year-to-year or seasonally) seems to be particularly problematic, because without fossil fuel backup, businesses cannot rely on year-around electricity supply.

    The Pattern of Overshoot and Collapse Is Well-Established

    Back in 1974, Henry Kissinger said in an interview:

    I think of myself as a historian more than as a statesman. As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. [Emphasis added.]

    History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved.

    Historians tend to define collapse more broadly than “the top level of government disappearing.” Collapse includes many ways of an economy failing. It includes losing at war, population decline because of epidemics, governments overthrown by internal dissent, and governments that cannot repay debt with interest, and failing for this reason.

    A basic issue that often underlies collapse is falling average resources per person. These falling average resources per person can take several forms:

    • Population rises, but land available for farming doesn’t rise.

    • Mines and wells deplete, requiring more effort for extraction.

    • Soil erodes or becomes polluted with salt, reducing crop yields.

    One of the other issues is that as resources per capita become stretched, it becomes harder and harder to set aside a margin for a “rainy day” or a drought. Thus, weather or climate variations may push an economy over the edge, as resources per person become more stretched.

    Scientific Models Too Often Prove Whatever the Grant Provider Wants Proven

    It is incredibly difficult to figure out what the future will hold. Our experience is almost entirely with a growing economy. It is easy to accidentally build this past experience into a model of the future, even when we are trying to make realistic assumptions. For example, when making pension models in the early 1980s, actuaries would see interest rates of 10% and assume that interest rates could remain this high indefinitely.

    The question of whether prices will rise to allow future energy extraction is another problematic area. If we believe standard economic theory, prices can be expected to rise when resources are in short supply. But if we look at Revelation 18: 11-17, we find that when Babylon collapsed, the problem was low prices and lack of demand. There were not even buyers for slaves, and these were the energy product of the day. The Great Depression of the 1930s showed a similar low-price pattern. Today’s economic model seems to need refinement, if it is to account for how prices really seem to behave in collapses.

    If there is an issue that is difficult to evaluate in making a forecast, the easiest approach for researchers to take is to omit it. For example, the intermittency of wind and solar can effectively be left out by assuming that (a) the different types of intermittency will cancel out, or (b) intermittency will be inexpensive to fix or (c) intermittency will be handled by a different part of the research project.

    To further complicate matters, researchers often find that their compensation is tied to their ability to get grants to fund their research. These research grants have been put together by organizations that are concerned about the future. These organizations are looking for research that will match their understanding of today’s problems and their proposed solutions for the future.

    A person can guess how this arrangement tends to work out. Any researcher who points out endless problems, or says that the proposed solution is impossible, won’t get funding. To get funding, at least some partial solution must be provided along the lines outlined in the Request for Proposal, regardless of how unlikely the proposed solution is. Research showing that the grant-writer’s view of the future is not really correct is left to retired researchers and others willing to work for little compensation. All too often, published research tends to say whatever the groups funding the research studies want the studies to say.

    Myths Are of Many Types; Many Are Aimed at Giving Good Advice

    The fact that myths have survived through the ages lets us know that at least some people found the insights that they provided were worthwhile.

    If an ancient people did not know how the earth and the people on it came into being, they would likely come up with a myth explaining the situation. Most of us today would not believe myths about Thor, for example, but (as far as we know), no one was being paid to put together stories about Thor and how powerful he was. The myths were stories that people found sufficiently useful and entertaining to pass along. In some sense, this background gives these stories more value than a paper written in order to obtain funds provided by a research grant.

    Some myths relate to what types of activities by humans were desirable or undesirable. For example, the people in Uganda have traditional folklore about a moral monster that is used to teach children the dangers of craftiness and deceit. My sister who visited Uganda reported that where she visited, people believed that people who stole someone else’s crops were likely to get sick. Most of us wouldn’t think that this story was really right, but it has a moral purpose behind it. There are no doubt many myths of this type. They have been passed on because passing them on seemed to serve a purpose.

    Clearly, which actions are desirable or undesirable changes over time. For example, Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11 seem to condemn wearing fabrics that are a mix of linen and wool. Today, we use many fabrics that are mixes of two types of yarns. Perhaps there was a problem with different amounts of shrinkage. Today, our issues are different. Perhaps, myths associated with issues such as these need to be discarded, because they are not relevant any more.

    How about myths of an afterlife? Things on earth don’t necessarily go well. The promise of a favorable afterlife has a definite appeal. Some people would even like a story in which people who don’t act in the desired manner are punished. Some religions seem to provide such an ending as well.

    Follow a Religion Based on Scientific Models, or Based on Myth, or Neither?

    Nature’s solutions and mankind’s solutions in a finite world both involve complexity, but the two types of complexity are very different.

    Mankind’s solutions seem to involve more and more devices using an increased amount of resources and debt. The overhead of the system becomes greater and greater as the economy increasingly shifts toward robots and owners/overseers of the robots. The big problem that can be expected to develop comes from not having enough purchasers who can afford to purchase the end products created by this system. In fact, we seem to already be reaching an era of too much wage disparity and too much wealth disparity. Eventually, such a system can be expected to collapse under its own weight.

    We can already see signs that wind and solar are not scalable to the extent that people would like them to be. Together, they currently comprise only 3% of the world’s energy supply. We need very large supplies of energy to provide food, housing, and transportation for 7.7 billion people.

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    Figure 3. World Energy Consumption by Fuel, based on data of 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

    Regardless of what politicians would like proven, nature doesn’t move in a constant path upward. Instead, nature provides a self-organizing system of individual parts, none of which is permanent. Humans are temporary residents of this earth. Businesses are temporary, and the products they sell are constantly changing and adapting. Governments are temporary. Weather patterns are also temporary. Religions are constantly changing and adapting, and new ones are formed.

    Nature’s way doesn’t seem to require much overhead. Over the long run, it seems to be much more permanent than mankind’s attempts at solutions. As the system changes, each replacement differs in random ways from previous systems of a particular type. The best adapted replacements survive, without the need for excessive overhead to the system.

    We may or may not agree with the religions that have formed over the years in the self-organizing way that nature provides. The fact that religions have stayed around indicates that at least for some people, they continue to play a significant role. If nothing else, religious groups often provide social gatherings with others in the area. This provides an opportunity for friendship. In some cases, it will allow people to find potential marriage partners who are not closely related.

    One of the roles of religions is to pass down “best practices.” These will change over time so some will need to be discarded and changed. For example, in some eras, it will be optimal for women to have several children. In others, it will make sense to have only one or two.

    The book, Oneness: Great Principles Shared by All Religions by Jeffrey Moses, lists 64 principles shared by several religions. Of course, not all religions agree on all of these 64 principles. Instead, there seems to be a great deal of overlap in what religions of the world teach. Some sample truths include “The Golden Rule,” it is “Blessed to Forgive,” “Seek and Ye Shall Find,” and “There Are Many Paths to God.” This type of advice can be helpful for people.

    People will differ on whether it makes sense to believe that there really is an afterlife. There may very well be; we can’t know for certain. At least this is better odds than the knowledge that all earthly civilizations have eventually failed.

    I personally have found belonging to and attending an ELCA Lutheran Church to be helpful. I find its earthly benefits to be sufficient, whether or not there is an afterlife. I will, of course, be attending around Christmas time. I will also be getting together with family.

    I recognize, too, that not everyone is interested in one of the traditional religions. Some would even like to believe that with our advanced science, we can now find a way around every problem that confronts us. Perhaps this time is different. Perhaps this time, world leaders, with their love for overhead-heavy solutions, will finally discover a solution that can produce long-term growth on a finite earth. Perhaps energy from fusion is around the corner. Wish! Wish!


    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 16:30

  • 3 Dead, 2 Wounded After Terrorist Attack On US Base In Kenya 
    3 Dead, 2 Wounded After Terrorist Attack On US Base In Kenya 

    Update (1615ET): The U.S. military’s Africa Command confirmed that one American serviceman and two Department of Defense (DOD) contractors were killed on Sunday when the al-Shabaab terrorist group attacked the Manda Bay Airfield in Kenya.

    Two additional DOD members were also wounded in the assault, according to a Sunday afternoon statement from Africa Command, adding that they are being evacuated and are in stable condition.

    “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of our teammates who lost their lives today,” said U.S. Army General Stephen Townsend, the chief of Africa Command.

    “As we honor their sacrifice, let’s also harden our resolve. Alongside our African and international partners, we will pursue those responsible for this attack and al-Shabaab who seeks to harm Americans and U.S. interests. We remain committed to preventing al-Shabaab from maintaining a safe haven to plan deadly attacks against the U.S. homeland, East African, and international partners.”

    *  *  *

    U.S. Africa Command has confirmed militants attacked a base used by U.S. forces in Kenya on Sunday.  The Sunday attack was led by terrorist organization al-Shabaab at Manda Bay Airfield. 

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    U.S. Africa Command said, “Working alongside our Kenyan partners, the airfield is cleared and still in the process of being fully secured” adding that the security situation at Manda Bay is “fluid.”

    “Al-Shabaab is a brutal terrorist organization,” said U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William Gayler, U.S. Africa Command director of operations. “It is an al-Qaeda affiliate seeking to establish a self-governed Islamic territory in East Africa, to remove Western influence and ideals from the region, and to further its jihadist agenda. U.S. presence in Africa is critically important to counter-terrorism efforts.” 

    There was no report of U.S. or Kenyan deaths. U.S. Africa Command said, “accountability of personnel assessment is underway.” There were reports on Twitter that infrastructure and equipment on the base were heavily damaged during the intense firefight. 

    Twitter handle Intel Air & Sea provided several pictures of a commercial twin-engine passenger aircraft engulfed in flames. 

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    Hot 96 FM Kenya tweeted pictures of dense black smoke rising from “Camp Simba army bases that hosts U.S. & Kenya soldiers in Lamu’s Manda Bay.” 

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    Here’s a closer view of the destruction, where a broadcast journalist with BBC News Swahili tweeted: “Al-Shabaab say they have launched a dawn attack on Kenya/U.S. military base in Lamu County. A suicide car bomb reportedly breached the entry to Camp Simba, Manda Bay. The explosion sent plume of dark smoke into the sky.”

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    Al Shabaab claims it destroyed seven planes and three vehicles during the attack. 

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    The organization released a statement indicating there were “severe casualties on both # U.S. and #Kenya troops.” 

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    “Imagery from Manda Bay #Keynya suggests at least two aircraft destroyed in #AlShabaab attack – one (#US Dash-8?) on apron [A] and one on taxiway/runway [B],” said Joseph Dempsey, a research analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

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    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 01/05/2020 – 16:25

    Tags
    War Conflict

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