Jul 07

Today’s News 7th July 2018

  • This Is What Modern War Propaganda Looks Like

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    I’ve been noticing videos going viral the last few days, some with millions of views, about Muslim women bravely fighting to free themselves from oppression in the Middle East. The videos, curiously, are being shared enthusiastically by many Republicans and pro-Israel hawks, who aren’t traditionally the sort of crowd you see rallying to support the civil rights of Muslims. What’s up with that?

    Well, you may want to sit down for this shocker, but it turns out that they happen to be women from a nation that the US war machine is currently escalating operations against. They are Iranian.

    Whenever you see the sudden emergence of an attractive media campaign that is sympathetic to the plight of civilians in a resource-rich nation unaligned with the western empire, you are seeing propaganda. When that nation is surrounded by other nations with similar human rights transgressions and yet those transgressions are ignored by that same media campaign, you are most certainly seeing propaganda. When that nation just so happens to already be the target of starvation sanctions and escalated covert CIA ops, you can bet the farm that you are seeing propaganda.

    Back in December a memo was leaked from inside the Trump administration showing how then-Secretary of State, DC neophyte Rex Tillerson, was coached on how the US empire uses human rights as a pretense on which to attack and undermine noncompliant governments. Politico reports:

    The May 17 memo reads like a crash course for a businessman-turned-diplomat, and its conclusion offers a starkly realist vision: that the U.S. should use human rights as a club against its adversaries, like Iran, China and North Korea, while giving a pass to repressive allies like the Philippines, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

    “Allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies,” argued the memo, written by Tillerson’s influential policy aide, Brian Hook.

    The propaganda machine doesn’t operate any differently from the State Department, since they serve the same establishment. US ally Saudi Arabia is celebrated by the mass media for “liberal reform” in allowing women to drive despite hard evidence that those “reforms” are barely surface-level cosmetics to present a pretty face to the western world, but Iranian women, who have been able to drive for years, are painted as uniquely oppressed. Iran is condemned by establishment war whores for the flaws in its democratic process, while Saudi Arabia, an actual monarchy, goes completely unscrutinized.

    This is because the US-centralized power establishment, which has never at any point in its history cared about human rights, plans on effecting regime change in Iran by any means necessary. Should those means necessitate a potentially controversial degree of direct military engagement, the empire needs to make sure it retains control of the narrative.

    This is what war propaganda looks like in the era of social media. It will never look ugly. It will never directly show you its real intentions. If it did, it wouldn’t work. It can’t just come right out and say “Hey we need to do horrible, evil things to the people in this country on the other side of the world in your name using your resources, please play along without making a fuss.” It will necessarily look fresh and fun and rebellious. It will look appealing. It will look sexy.

    And it’s working. I am currently getting tagged in these videos multiple times a day by Trump supporters who are eager to show me proof that I’m on the wrong side of the Iran issue; the psyop is so well-lubricated with a combination of sleek presentation and confirmation bias that it slides right past their skepticism and becomes accepted as fact, even the one with the Now This pussyhat propaganda logo in the corner.

    Be less trusting of these monsters, please. The people of Afghanistan haven’t benefitted from the interminable military quagmire that has cost tens of thousands of their lives. The invaders of Iraq were never “greeted as liberators” by an oppressed population. The humanitarian intervention in Libya left a humanitarian catastrophe in its wake far more horrific than anything it claimed to be trying to prevent. Saving the children of Syria with western interventionism has left half a million Syrians dead.

    If the Iranians do in fact wish to change their government, it should happen without crippling sanctions, collaboration with extremist terror cults, or the rapey tentacles of the CIA manipulating the situation. There has never been a US-led regime change in the Middle East that wasn’t disastrous. People should be screaming at the US and its allies to cease these interventions, not applauding propaganda that is clearly being manufactured by that same empire.

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  • A Record Number Of 85-Year-Old Americans Are Still Working

    As we saw with Friday’s jobs report, the booming US economy has continued to draw in workers from “the sidelines” – ie people who weren’t actively looking for work and were considered to be “out” of the workforce – as the participation rate has ticked higher in recent months (though it remains well below its pre-crisis levels). Still, economists have been largely unable to explain how wages have remained stagnant in a supposedly “tight” labor market. But a recent story in the Washington Post might hold a few clues…

    Participation

    According to Census data analyzed by WaPo, the number of Americans aged 85 and older who are still working has risen to record highs in recent years.

    Meanwhile, the number of workers between the ages of 18 and 30 who are out of the workforce hasn’t been this high since the 1970s, before large numbers of women entered the workforce.

    WaPo

    At last count, there were 255,000 Americans aged 85 and older who had been working or looking for work in the past 12 months. That’s approximately 4.4% of Americans that age – up from 2.6% in 2006. Indeed, it appears Ruth Bader Ginsburg (85) and Warren Buffett (87) are not alone.

    Overall, 255,000 Americans, 85-years-old and over, were working over the past 12 months. That’s 4.4 percent of Americans that age, up from 2.6 percent in 2006, before the recession. It’s the highest number on record.

    They’re doing all sorts of jobs – crossing guards, farmers and ranchers, even truckers, as my colleague Heather Long revealed in a front-page story last week. Indeed, there are between 1,000 and 3,000 U.S. truckers age 85 or older, based on 2016 Census Bureau figures. Their ranks have roughly doubled since the Great Recession.

    America’s aging workforce has defined the post-Great Recession labor market. Baby boomers and their parents are working longer as life expectancies grow, retirement plans shrink, education levels rise and work becomes less physically demanding. Labor Department figures show that at every year of age above 55, U.S. residents are working or looking for work at the highest rates on record.

    The oldest workers in the workforce, many of whom have been forced out of retirement for financial reasons, have clustered in 26 of the 455 occupations tracked by the Census Bureau data.

    WaPo

    As one might expect, these are industries like sales or management, which don’t require physically demanding labor. Farmers and ranchers has perhaps the largest percentage of elderly workers compared with younger ones, according to WaPo.

    Crossing guards are relatively likely to be age 85 or above. The same goes for musicians, anyone who works in a funeral home, and product demonstrators like those you might find at a warehouse club store.

    But that chart only tells half the story. Few people of any age get the opportunity to work as crossing guards, funeral directors or musicians. So, while they may be elder-friendly jobs, they’re not the top jobs for older people.

    By sheer numbers, the top job among the 85-plus-year-olds is farmers and ranchers. It’s also the one in which the distribution of older workers is most different from the distribution of the rest of the population. That category, which is distinct from farm laborers, houses 3.5 percent of the oldest workers – but just 0.5 percent of the rest of the population.

    Generational shifts drive much of the split. When today’s oldest workers were entering the labor force, farmers and ranchers had far more options than computer scientists did, and that’s shaped their professional choices today, seven decades down the line.

    Perhaps the bizarre phenomenon that older workers are entering the workforce at levels never seen before, while a growing number of young people have been sidelined from the workforce for whatever reason (be it because of drugs, illness or simply because they don’t want to work), has something to do with the fact that wages are stagnant. According to WaPo, at every age above 55, US residents are working or looking for work at the highest rates on record. Workers who are coming out of retirement, or just trying to hang on in the face of ageism in the workforce, aren’t exactly in the best position to negotiate for higher wages.

  • Brandon Smith: The Meaning Of Good And Evil In Perilous Times

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    Perhaps the most destructive idea ever planted in the minds of the general public is the notion that nothing in this world is permanent – that all things can and must be constantly changed to suit our whims. The concept of impermanence fuels what I call “blank slate propaganda.”

    The usefulness of the blank slate as a weapon for social control should be explained before we examine the nature of good and evil, because these days it infects everything.

    The push for never ending social “evolution” has been called many things over the decades. In the early 1900s in Europe it was called “futurism;” an art and philosophical movement that helped spawn the rise of communism and fascism in politics. The argument that all old ideas and longstanding traditions should be abandoned to make way for new ideas, new technologies, news systems etc., assumes that the supposedly new ways of doing things are superior to the old ways of doing things. Things are rarely this simple, and in most cases the new methods so proudly championed by movements for social change are usually recycled and repackaged old ideas that are notorious for failure.

    The blank slate theory is designed to confuse people with self-doubt and to misrepresent the constructs of nature as constructs of society. It most effectively disrupts people’s relationship to their own moral compass by suggesting that moral compass should be completely ignored as artificial. The argument by blank slate proponents is that all boundaries are created by society instead of by inborn conscience, and that these boundaries often hold us back from achieving our goals, bettering ourselves as a species and generally getting what we want out of life.

    But the things we want are not always the things we need, and this is something that movement’s for social change often refuse to grasp. If we are all blank slates and if morality and the human soul are myths, why not do whatever the hell we want, whenever we want and live life as if it is one big Roman orgy of feasting, self-medicating and overall addiction to sensation?

    The problem with the blank slate concept is that while it purports that all restrictions in the human psyche are taught to us rather than being inborn and that they can be abandoned any time we want, we still can’t seem to avoid the consequences of breaking those restrictions.  People lose their sanity, societies crumble and nations fall to ruin over time the more we cast aside our principles in the name of social evolution or short term gain. It is unavoidable.

    The only people who seem to benefit from the spread of the blank slate are the people already in political and economic power. For if they can convince the masses to ignore their conscience, they can then convince us to accept almost any other conditions.

    To act in a manner consistent with inherent conscience, or to ignore conscience and act destructively, is a choice. It is the core pillar of free will. The choice to act destructively does not erase the reality of inherent conscience; in fact, people often have to be fooled into believing that a destructive and immoral action is a “good thing” before they are convinced to carry it out. Inherent conscience must be bypassed through trickery.

    The problem with choosing to stick by one’s principles is that it is easy during times of relative stability, but increasingly difficult during times of struggle. In perilous days, the temptation to use destructive tactics to maintain an expectation of comfort or to merely survive can be high. It is no coincidence that power elites, the same people that tend to promote blank slate propaganda, also tend to deliberately engineer social crisis and chaos. But perhaps this needs a deeper explanation. We must define something most of us already understand intuitively. We must define “evil.”

    Like inherent conscience and moral boundaries, blank slate theorists and social change advocates attempt to muddy the waters of what constitutes evil. Some will say there is no such thing — that evil is whatever we deem it to be in any given era depending on our biases.  Others will claim that tradition, permanence and anything in society that remains static is evil. The only “good” for them is constant change.

    But evil is not as illusory and changing as these people suggest. In fact, most men and women recoil automatically from certain specific behaviors regardless of how they were raised, what environment they come from, what culture they were born into or what era they lived.  The people who don’t recoil at these behaviors are the people we have to watch out for because they are missing something integral to the heart and mind that makes the rest of us human.

    In psychological terms, the characteristics of high level narcissists and sociopaths match most closely with our historic concept of evil.  And, in my view, most great evils done in history are in fact done by people with multiple narcissistic traits.  As far as global elitists are concerned, they represent a rather insidious threat, because they are narcissistic sociopaths that have organized into a predatory gang, so all the traits consistent with the behavior of your average serial killer are now magnified a thousandfold by their access to unlimited resources.

    How do we identify these people? Well, this is a difficult prospect at times because narcissistic sociopaths commonly hide in plain sight.  Some people live with them for years before realizing exactly what they are. They also like to insert themselves into nonprofit organizations that claim to do good for the community as a cover for their more insidious motives.

    Some traits and behaviors that are common are a lack of normal emotional response to traumatic events or joyous events, or they will mimic the responses of others to blend in but they come off as “forced” or “fake.” They have no concept of empathy; it does not exist for them.

    They seek out centers of power and are drawn to positions of authority. They always seem to be demanding the efforts of others while rarely offering their own help. They make terrible leaders, always attempting to lead from a place of safety while letting their conscripts take the risks. Leading by example is a foreign concept to them.

    They will lie repetitively about their accomplishments and their accolades. They will misrepresent their professional achievements in order to gain people’s trust. Ask them to prove through actions that they can do all the things they claim they can do, and they will try to avoid the test or respond indignantly and angrily.

    They will gaslight their ideological enemies or people they are trying to control. They will accuse others of being “narcissists” or “sociopaths” or fascists or any moniker that will push the buttons of their target. Whatever evils they are guilty of, they will try to flip and lay at the feet of their enemies.

    They always seem to have “minions” to do their dirty work for them and attack those that oppose them. People that have dealt with narcissistic sociopaths in their personal lives sometimes refer to these minions as “flying monkeys,” referencing the flying monkeys enslaved by the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz. Flying monkeys are essentially useful idiots that the narcissist employs through fraud and sometimes through pay. Whenever the narcissist is under threat of being exposed, they unleash their flying monkeys onto the streets or onto the internet to undermine truth tellers.

    They do not believe in moral or personal boundaries which is why they are always trying convince people that such boundaries are a myth.  They will cross moral lines, always testing the fences for weaknesses; trying to wear others down until they give up and stop fighting back.

    They desperately want to come out of the shadows and into the light of day. They want to be adored as the monsters they are, rather than the fake philanthropists they portray themselves as. In order to do this, every narcissistic sociopath makes it their duty to erase the idea of conscience, whether they are part of the globalist cabal or just another ghoul down the street. Their natural inclination is to corrupt whatever they touch, and if they cannot corrupt a thing, they will attempt to destroy that thing.

    Most of all, narcissistic sociopaths want everyone around them to believe that we are just like them. That “deep down” all of us are unprincipled and morally bankrupt and all it takes is a crisis or calamity, just a little chaos to bring out the devil in everyone.

    But if this were really the case, then humanity would have died out long ago through endless self-destruction; something keeps bringing us back from the brink in our personal lives and in society as a whole. Conscience keeps defeating evil by refusing to grant evil people the utopia of blank slate chaos they want so badly. And this is what give me confidence that no matter how terrible our days might become there is something on our side that goes beyond the physical world.

    Every crisis is a test, a test of each person and a test of our culture. Can we act with reason and courage and principle even in the worst of times, or will we be lured to make our struggle easier through malicious means? Will we do right by those around us, or will we happily trample over them in the name of “survival?”

    In the end, the worst men bring the best men to the surface. This is the only “good” they will ever do.

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  • Syria: "Rebels Played Russian Roulette, And Lost"

    Middle East analysts are appropriately noting, “Rebels played Russian roulette, and lost” after Syrian Army ground forces accompanied by overwhelming Russian airstrikes in Syria’s contested southwest region have collapsed anti-government lines with rapid speed. 

    Early Friday a major strategic victory was announced as government forces took the Nassib border crossing after recapturing a string of over 8 border outposts in Daraa province.

    The Nassib crossing is among Syria’s most important and busiest international border crossings, and sits along the Damascus-Amman international highway. Prior to the war it was a main artery for Syrian exports to GCC countries. 

    Opposition leaders have confirmed the crossing will now be controlled by Syrian government and Jordanian authorities for the first time after the FSA flag long flew over the outpost since anti-Assad militants captured it in 2015. 

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    The ongoing major offensive to take back Daraa and Al-Quneitra provinces from long entrenched FSA, al-Qaeda, and ISIS groups began last month, and though predicted by many to be a long and grinding affair that held the potential for external state military intervention, the unexpectedly rapid advance of pro-government forces has stunned observers. 

    Al Masdar reports that three quarters of the region that witnessed the start of armed conflict in 2011 is now back under the control of Damascus:

    As a result of these advances, the Syrian Army finds themselves in control of approximately 72 percent of southwest Syria. The remaining 28 percent is under the control of the Free Syrian Army, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and Jaysh Khaled bin Walid (ISIS affiliate).

    Meanwhile Reuters reports that hundreds of troops in a large military convoy with Russian and Syrian flags have been seen heading to the newly liberated Nassib border crossing as anti-government fighters are laying down their weapons in droves.

    According to Reuters:

    Syrian rebels reached a deal with Russian officers on a phased handover of their weapons and the deployment of Russian military police near the Jordanian border, a rebel spokesman said.

    Ibrahim Jabawi said the agreement was reached during ongoing talks in a town in southern Syria that also includes a cessation of hostilities by both sides.

    The past week especially has witnessed mass handovers as well as abandonment of weaponry on the part of anti-government insurgents, resulting in some interesting photographs. 

    Since the Syrian Army offensive in the southwest, many thousands of weapons have been recovered, including advanced anti-tank and shoulder fired rockets — a significant bulk of them originally supplied via the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, and other western allies:

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    Anti-tank “TOW” missiles supplied as part of a CIA program have been recovered recently:

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    And in some cases Israeli supplied items have been recovered in Syria’s southwest, near the contested Golan border:

    https://twitter.com/theLemniscat/status/1011873978158407680

    Even this far into the Syrian conflict and after many other such weapons seizures throughout the country, analysts and journalists have commented that the sheer numbers of advanced weapons — in most cases obviously externally supplied — are “staggering”.

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    Meanwhile, all of this begs the question: where will all the surviving jihadists currently fleeing the Syrian battlefield go? (assuming Syria-Russia will hit the last major expansive jihadist bastion of Idlib next).

    Days ago Middle East based journalist Elijah Magnier translated a command issued and circulated by senior al-Qaeda operatives in northern Syria.

    The al-Qaeda terror leaders urged followers to take action outside Syria now that the government and Russia are emerging victorious: “put your explosive belt on, take your family to a safe place, don’t think of coming to Idlib for there only humiliation & rely on guerrilla/ insurgency.”

    Communiqué by AQ in Syria (Hurras al-Deen) to foreign fighters & Syrian fighting among Mujahedeen: “put your explosive belt on, take your family to a safe place, don’t think of coming to Idlib for there only humiliation & rely on guerrilla/ insurgency”

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    As we’ve never been shy to point out over the years, the West and its gulf allies armed al-Qaeda to the teeth in Syria — something so well documented that international arms monitoring groups can pinpoint weapons serial numbers down to identifying particular European transit points through which weapons flowed as part of CIA covert shipments. 

    Surely, just as many or more quantities of weapons as have already been recovered will remain in the hands of jihadists seeking to exit Syria… but where will they go? 

    Very unfortunately, we have an idea of where they might end up… as we predicted years ago in the following: They Sow the Cyclone – We Reap the Blowback. 

  • First-Of-Its-Kind University Study Proves Without A Doubt That Your Phone Is Spying On You

    Authored by Matt Agorist via ActivistPost.com,

    For years, conspiracy theories about smart phones listening to users without their permission to show them advertisements have abounded.

    While some researchers have shown this could happen, a first of its kind study just found something far more insidious. Academics at Northeastern University have just proven that your phone is recording your screen – as in taking video – and uploading it to third parties.

    For the last year, Elleen Pan, Jingjing Ren, Martina Lindorfer, Christo Wilson, and David Choffnes ran an experiment involving more than 17,000 of the most popular Android apps using ten different phones. Their findings were alarming, to say the least.

    As Gizmodo points out, during the study, the researchers started to see that screenshots and video recordings of what people were doing in apps were being sent to third-party domains. For example, when one of the phones used an app from GoPuff, a delivery start-up for people who have sudden cravings for junk food, the interaction with the app was recorded and sent to a domain affiliated with Appsee, a mobile analytics company. The video included a screen where you could enter personal information – in this case, their zip code.

    GoPuff did not disclose in its terms of use that its app was recording users screens and uploading this data to a third party. What’s more, when they were contacted by the researchers GoPuff merely added a disclosure to their policy acknowledging that “ApSee” might receive users PII.

    The fact that these apps can record your screen without you knowing and use this data is chilling. It illustrates how easy it would be for a malicious actor to be able to look at your private messages, personal information, passwords, photos, and videos. None of this is stopped by your phone’s security either as it is a function built into the apps and you don’t have an option to disallow it.

    According to Gizmodo, the researchers will be presenting their work at the Privacy Enhancing Technology Symposium Conference in Barcelona next month. (While in Spain, they might want to check out the country’s most popular soccer app, which has given itself permission to access users’ smartphone mics to listen for illegal broadcasts of games in bars.)

    As for the theory that your phone is listening through your mic, the researchers could not debunk it. Due to the nature of the study — using automated programs to interact with apps — the spying apps may have not been triggered the same way they would if a human was using them.

    Although they didn’t find evidence your phone was listening to you, this does not mean it doesn’t still happen.

    “We didn’t see any evidence that people’s conversations are being recorded secretly,” said David Choffnes, one of the authors of the paper. “What people don’t seem to understand is that there’s a lot of other tracking in daily life that doesn’t involve your phone’s camera or microphone that give a third party just as comprehensive a view of you.”

    The authors of the study, titled Panoptispy: Characterizing Audio and Video Exfiltration from Android Applications, concluded:

    Our study reveals several alarming privacy risks in the Android app ecosystem, including apps that over-provision their media permissions and apps that share image and video data with other parties in unexpected ways, without user knowledge or consent. We also identify a previously unreported privacy risk that arises from third party libraries that record and upload screenshots and videos of the screen without informing the user. This can occur without needing any permissions from the user.

    In the age of technology, privacy and security are the only things that separate us from a total surveillance grid. Unfortunately, as this study illustrates, we have very little of both.

  • Spacecraft With Revolutionary Heat Shield Will "Touch The Sun"

    NASA has unveiled a “cutting-edge heat shield” that will make it possible for a space probe to “touch the sun” — or at least get a spacecraft to within 4 million miles of it, which scientists are hailing as nothing short of a “revolutionary” development in space technology. 

    The announcement was made via the official site NASA.gov as the launch of the Parker Solar Probe is readied for its August 4 liftoff date: “The launch of Parker Solar Probe, the mission that will get closer to the Sun than any human-made object has ever gone, is quickly approaching, and on June 27, 2018, Parker Solar Probe’s heat shield — called the Thermal Protection System, or TPS — was installed on the spacecraft.”

    Image source: NASA

    The heat shield, measuring eight feet in diameter, will reach nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit while keeping the probe’s instruments at about 85 degrees, allowing the probe to “collect unprecedented data” on the giant ball of fire and earth’s most vital source of energy, previously impossible to access without a protective shield, and will allow “the spacecraft’s orbit will carry it to within 4 million miles of the Sun’s fiercely hot surface,” according to NASA. 

    For comparison, the closest that planet Mercury ever gets to the sun during its orbit is approximately 29 million miles, allowing surface temperatures to reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit (430 °C). And Earth’s average distance to the sun is 93 million miles. At the core of the sun, temperatures can reach more than 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million °C), scientists have estimated. 

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    The TPS shield will enable the probe to reach more than seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before, to within the sun’s outer atmosphere known as the corona, as a NASA statement explains, “Parker Solar Probe will employ a combination of in situ measurements and imaging to revolutionise our understanding of the corona and expand our knowledge of the origin and evolution of the solar wind.”

    And further NASA has defined the mission as to “trace how energy and heat move through the solar corona and to explore what accelerates the solar wind as well as solar energetic particles.”

    Via Mail Online

    The description of the heat shield is as follows:

    The heat shield is made of two panels of superheated carbon-carbon composite sandwiching a lightweight 4.5-inch-thick carbon foam core. The Sun-facing side of the heat shield is also sprayed with a specially formulated white coating to reflect as much of the Sun’s energy away from the spacecraft as possible.

    The Parker Solar Probe itself is about the size of a car but is light-weight, along with its protective shield:

    The heat shield itself weighs only about 160 pounds — here on Earth, the foam core is 97 percent air. Because Parker Solar Probe travels so fast — 430,000 miles per hour at its closest approach to the Sun, fast enough to travel from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in about one second — the shield and spacecraft have to be light to achieve the needed orbit.

    The agency has previously said the probe will “touch the sun” when it arrives at the star’s outer atmosphere, revealing more than ever before about its mysterious “inner workings,” according to researchers. 

  • Myth: Gold Makes Boom-Bust Cycles Worse

    Authored by Frank Shostak via The Mises Institute,

    According to some commentators on the gold standard, an increase in the supply of gold generates similar distortions as money out of “thin air” does.

    Let us start with a barter economy.

    John the miner produces ten ounces of gold. The reason why he mines gold is because he believes there is a market for it. Gold contributes to the well-being of individuals.

    He exchanges his ten ounces of gold for various goods such as potatoes and tomatoes.

    Now people have discovered that gold apart from being useful in making jewelry is also useful for some other applications.

    They now assign a much greater exchange value to gold than before. As a result, John the miner could exchange his ten ounces of gold for more potatoes and tomatoes.

    Should we condemn this as bad news because John is now diverting more resources to himself? This however, is just what is happening all the time in the market.

    As time goes by people assign greater importance to some goods and diminish the importance of some other goods. Some goods now then considered as more important than other goods in supporting people’s life and well-being.

    Now people have discovered that gold is useful for another use, such as the medium of the exchange. Consequently, they lift further the price of gold in terms of tomatoes and potatoes. Gold is now predominantly demanded as a medium of exchange — the demand for the other uses of gold, such as for ornaments is now much lower than before.

    Let us see what is going to happen if John were to increase the production of gold. The benefit that gold now supplies people is by providing the services of the medium of the exchange. In this sense, it is a part of the pool of real wealth and promotes people’s life and well-being.

    One of the attributes for selecting gold as the medium of exchange is that it is relatively scarce. This means that a producer of a good who has exchanged this good for gold expects the purchasing power of his effort to be preserved over time by holding gold.

    If for some reason there is a large increase in the production of gold and this trend were to persist, the exchange value of the gold would be subject to a persistent decline versus other goods, all other things being equal. Within such conditions, people are likely to abandon gold as the medium of the exchange and look for another commodity to fulfill this role.

    As the supply of gold starts to increase its role as the medium of exchange diminishes while the demand for it for some other usages is likely to be retained or increase.

    Therefore, in this sense the increase in the production of gold is not a waste and adds to the pool of real wealth. When John the miner exchanges gold for goods, he is engaged in an exchange of something for something.

    He is exchanging wealth for wealth.

    Contrast all this with the printing of gold receipts, i.e., receipts that are not backed 100% by gold.

    This is an act of fraud, which is what inflation is all about, it sets a platform for consumption without contributing to the pool of real wealth. Empty certificates set in motion an exchange of nothing for something, which in turn leads to boom-bust cycles.

    The printing of unbacked gold certificates divert real savings from wealth generating activities to the holders of unbacked certificates. This leads to the so-called economic boom.

    The diversion of real savings is done by means of unbacked certificates, i.e., unbacked money.

    Once the printing of unbacked money slows down or stops all together this stops the flow of real savings to various activities that emerged on the back of unbacked money.

    As a result, these activities fall apart – an economic bust emerges. (Note that these activities do not produce real wealth, they only consume. Obviously then without the unbacked money, which diverts real savings to them, they are in trouble. These activities did not produce any wealth hence without money given to them they cannot secure the goods they want.)

    In the case of the increase in the supply of gold, no fraud is committed here. The supplier of gold – the gold mine – has increased the production of a useful commodity. Therefore, in this sense we do not have here an exchange of nothing for something. Consequently, we also do not have an emergence of bubble activities. Again, the wealth producer, because of the fact that he has produced something useful, can exchange it for other goods. He does not require empty money to divert real wealth to him.

    Note that a major factor for the emergence of a boom is the injections into the economy of money out of “thin air.” The disappearance of money out of “thin air” is the major cause of an economic bust. The injection of money out of “thin air” generates bubble activities while the disappearance of money out of “thin air” destroys these bubble activities.

    On the gold standard, this cannot take place. On a pure gold standard without a central bank, money is gold. Consequently, on the gold standard money cannot disappear since gold cannot disappear.

    We can thus conclude that the gold standard, if not abused, is not conducive to boom-bust cycles.

  • Raytheon Is Developing A 100kW Tactical Laser For The US Army

    Raytheon is developing a mobile 100 kW laser weapon system under the U.S. Army’s $10 million High Energy Laser Tactical Vehicle Demonstration (HEL TVD) program contract. With the Pentagon flush with cash from the Trump administration, laser weapon systems have been a significant focus regarding research and development before the next round of global hybrid conflicts.

    In a recent news release, Raytheon said the 100 kW laser would be mounted on a Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV).

    “The beauty of this system is that it’s self-contained,” said Roy Azevedo, vice president of Intelligence, Reconnaissance and Surveillance Systems at Raytheon’s Space and Airborne Systems business unit.

    As Azevedo adds, “multi-spectral targeting sensors, fiber-combined lasers, power and thermal sub-systems are incorporated in a single package. This system is being designed to knock out rockets, artillery or mortar fire, or small drones.”

    HEL TVD is part of the Army’s Indirect Fire Protection Capability, Increment 2 — Intercept (IFPC Inc 2-I), which is a rugged, mobile, pre-prototype laser system that meets the size, weight and performance requirements of the Army.

    The laser system mounted on the FMTV can eliminate aerial threats, including artillery, cruise missiles, drones, mortars, and rockets.

    To date, the program tested lasers at various strengths, from 2kW to 50 kW. Last year, Lockheed Martin announced it completed the development of a single-beam 60 kW laser for the program. The next phase, which could be as early as 2019, could test a massive 100kW multi-beam fiber-laser design, considered to be just enough directed energy to take down most aerial threats.

    Ahead of the coming “hybrid wars“, the Army recognizes that lasers could provide a significant advantage over its adversaries. Laser weapons have “unlimited” ammunition, as long as a power plant can continue to deliver energy. With an average cost per kill of $30, laser weapons are significantly cheaper than traditional kinetic weapons, such as mortars and rockets that can range from several hundred to thousands of dollars per round.

    The Army will test and evaluate the mounted laser system on an FMTV in the first half of 2019. If successful, a three-year system development, and demonstration contract estimated at $130 million, to build and integrate a weapon system, could be next. The Army hopes by the Fiscal year 2022, the HEL TVD will have enough data through field training exercises that it could enter service shortly thereafter.

    The HEL TVD could see its first mission in the mid-2020s, as the most likely place for deployment could be the U.S. and allied force’s fixed and semi-fixed bases.

    Over the year, the Army and U.S. defense contractors have been busy mounting lasers on all sorts of war machines.

    In March, Raytheon decided to mount a 5 kW laser on a militarized all-terrain Polaris light-vehicle. The company’s press release describes the vehicle as an “agile, mobile, and effective” war machine to protect troops from weaponized unmanned drone threats.

    The push for lasers could be explained by the Army’s rush to plug the gap in short-range defenses.

    Richard P. DeFatta, director, Future Warfare Center, U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command spilled the beans in February on air and missile defense and told an audience that Army conducted field training exercises with the first-ever Mobile High Energy Laser (MEHEL) mounted on the M1126 Stryker armored personnel carrier. The Stryker-mounted MEHEL is designed for short-range aerial threats, such as weaponized drones.

    MEHEL is a 5kW laser system mounted on a Stryker-armored fighting vehicle chassis and serves as the primary vehicle for research and development. The Army acknowledges that high-energy lasers are a “low-cost, effective complement to kinetic energy to address rocket, artillery, and mortar, or RAM, threats; unmanned aircraft systems and cruise missiles,” said Army Recognition.

    However, it is not just Washington and its military-industrial-complex mounting laser systems on exciting things. China announced earlier this week that its ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle could “burn through clothes in a split second… If the fabric is flammable, the whole person will be set on fire.

    So as Washington mounts lasers on dune buggies, tanks, and trucks, China is also testing and deploying laser weapon systems of its own, as both countries gear up for the next round of hybrid conflcit  that could emerge some time in the mid-2020s or sooner. All this is, of course, happening in the context of the greatest Thucydides Trap in modern history: one in which China’s army and military spending is expected to surpass that of the US, some time in the late 2030, on its way to becoming the world’s dominant military (and perhaps economic) superpower

  • Jim Rickards Warns "Volatility Is On The Way Back"

    Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

    When geopolitical events create crises in the world, volatility usually follows in world markets. The results of this volatility is important to note and I will discuss this below.

    In January 2018, two significant market events occurred nearly simultaneously. Major U.S. stock market indexes peaked and volatility indexes extended one of their longest streaks of low volatility in history.

    Investors were happy, complacency ruled the day and all was right with the world.

    Then markets were turned upside down in a matter of days. Major stock market indexes fell over 11%, a technical correction, from Feb. 2–8, 2018, just five trading days.

    The CBOE Volatility Index, commonly known as the “VIX,” surged from 14.51 to 49.21 in an even shorter period from Feb. 2–6. The last time the VIX has been at those levels was late August 2015 in the aftermath of the Chinese shock devaluation of the yuan when U.S. stocks also fell 11% in two weeks.

    Investors were suddenly frightened and there was nowhere to hide from the storm.

    Analysts blamed a monthly employment report released by the Labor Department on Feb. 2 for the debacle. The report showed that wage gains were accelerating. This led investors to increase the odds that the Federal Reserve would raise rates in March and June (they did) to fend off inflation that might arise from the wage gains.

    The rising interest rates were said to be bad for stocks because of rising corporate interest expense and because fixed-income instruments compete with stocks for investor dollars.

    Wall Street loves a good story, and the “rising wages” story seemed to fit the facts and explain that downturn. Yet the story was mostly nonsense. Wages did rise somewhat, but the move was not extreme and should not have been unexpected.

    The Fed was already on track to raise interest rates several times in 2018 with or without that particular wage increase. Subsequent wage increases in the February, March, April and May employment reports have been moderate.

    The employment report story was popular at the time, but it had very little explanatory power as to why stocks suddenly tanked and volatility surged.

    The fact is that stocks and volatility had both reached extreme levels and were already primed for sudden reversals. The specific catalyst almost doesn’t matter. What matters is the array of traders, all leaning over one side of the boat, suddenly running to the other side of the boat before the vessel capsizes.

    The technical name for this kind of spontaneous crowd behavior is hypersynchronicity, but it’s just as helpful to think of it as a herd of wildebeest that suddenly stampede as one at the first scent of an approaching lion. The last one to run is mostly likely to be eaten alive.

    Markets are once again primed for this kind of spontaneous crowd reaction.

    Except now there are far more catalysts than a random wage report.

    The U.S. has ended its nuclear deal with Iran and has implemented extreme sanctions designed to sink the Iranian economy and force regime change through a popular uprising. Iran has threatened to resume its nuclear weapons development program in response. Both Israel and the U.S. have warned that any resumption of Iran’s nuclear weapons program could lead to a military attack.

    Three faces of volatility, from left to right: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the spiritual and de facto political leader of Iran; Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela; and Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader of North Korea. Iran and North Korea may soon be at war with the U.S. depending on the outcome of negotiations. Venezuela is approaching the status of a failed state and may necessitate U.S. military intervention.

    Venezuela, led by the corrupt dictator Nicolás Maduro, has already collapsed economically and is now approaching the level of a failed state. Inflation exceeds 14,000% and the people have no food. Social unrest, civil war or a revolution are all possible outcomes.

    If infrastructure and political dysfunction reach the point that oil exports cannot continue, the U.S. may have to intervene militarily on both humanitarian and economic grounds.

    North Korea and the U.S. have pursued on-again, off-again negotiations aimed at denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. While there have been encouraging signs, the most likely outcome continues to be that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is playing for time and dealing in bad faith.

    The U.S. may yet have to resort to military force there to negate an existential threat.

    This litany of flash points goes on to include Iranian-backed attacks on Saudi Arabia and Israel, a civil war in Syria, confrontation in the South China Sea and Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine.

    These traditional geopolitical fault lines are in addition to cyber threats, critical infrastructure collapses and natural disasters from Kilauea to the Congo.

    Investors have a tendency to dismiss these threats, either because they have persisted for a long time in many instances without catastrophic results, or because of a belief that somehow the crises will resolve themselves or be brought in for a soft landing by policymakers and politicians.

    These beliefs are good examples of well-known cognitive biases such as anchoring, confirmation bias and selective perception. Analysis tells us that there is little basis for complacency. Yet the VIX is back near all-time lows as shown in Chart 1 below.

    Chart 1

    Even if the probability of any one event blowing up is low, when you have a long list of volatile events, the probability of at least one blowing up approaches 100%.

    With this litany of crises in mind, each ready to erupt into market turmoil, what are my predictive analytic models telling us about the prospects for an increase in measures of market volatility in the months ahead?

    Right now they’re telling us that investor complacency is overdone and market volatility is set to return with a vengeance.

    Changes in VIX and other measures of market volatility do not occur in a smooth, linear way. The dynamic is much more likely to involve extreme spikes rather than gradual increases. This tendency toward extreme spikes is the result of dynamic short-covering that feeds on itself in a recursive manner — or what is commonly known as a feedback loop.

    Shorting volatility indexes has been a very popular income-producing strategy for years. It’s been like selling flood protection in the desert; seems like easy money. The problem is that every now and then a flash flood does hit the desert.

    The future often diverges sharply from the recent past. Markets gap up or down, giving investors no opportunity to trade at intermediate prices. Extreme events occur with much greater frequency than standard models such as value-at-risk expect.

    When the threat emerges, traders who are short volatility have to buy the index in options or futures form to hedge their short positions. This buying drives the price up higher and causes more traders to hit pre-programmed stop loss limits. This generates even more buying and so on.

    Now the buying and short covering feeds on itself and the feedback loop dynamic drives the index to extreme levels before the panic buying is satisfied.

    This is what happens when the flash flood hits the desert. The storm clouds are gathering now, and the rain is coming.

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