- STDs On The Rise In England
New figures from Public Health England have revealed a jump up in the sexually transmitted infection (STI) diagnosis rates in the country in 2018.
As Statista’s Martin Armstrong points out, when compared to 2017, the overall number of diagnoses per 100,000 population went from 763.6 to 804.9, representing a rise of 5.4 percent.
You will find more infographics at Statista
As Statista’s infographic shows, one of the STIs with the largest increase was Gonorrhoea which saw a massive increase of 25.4 percent. The 2018 rate of 101.1 represents the most cases since at least 2012 (the earliest year with which figures can accurately be compared due to methodology changes.
- Russia's Lavrov Blasts D-Day Memorials As Part Of A "False History" Of WWII
Speaking at a weekly news conference in Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova offered a tribute to those who died on the western front of World War Two but her comments likely irked many war veterans in Britain where the 75th anniversary on Wednesday of the largest seaborne invasion in history was marked at a ceremony in Portsmouth attended by Queen Elizabeth and world leaders including Donald Trump and Angela Merkel.
As Reuters reports, Russia told the West on Wednesday the Normandy landings on D-Day in 1944 did not play a decisive role in ending World War Two and that the Allied war effort should not be exaggerated.
“It should of course not be exaggerated. And especially not at the same time as diminishing the Soviet Union’s titanic efforts, without which this victory simply would not have happened,” she said.
“As historians note, the Normandy landing did not have a decisive impact on the outcome of World War Two and the Great Patriotic War. It had already been pre-determined as a result of the Red Army’s victories, mainly at Stalingrad (in late 1942) and Kursk (in mid-1943),” Zakharova told reporters.
The Soviet Union lost over 25 million lives in what it calls the Great Patriotic War, and Moscow under President Vladimir Putin has taken to marking victory in the war with a massive annual military parade on Red Square.
This followed an op-ed from Russian foreign minister Sergie Lavrov, saying that D-Day memorials are part of a ‘false’ history of World War II meant to airbrush out the Soviet Union.
The month of May and the fireworks are now behind us. The country and the world celebrated Victory Day, which is a holiday of war veterans, home front workers, and all the people of Russia and other victorious nations. There was a grand parade on Red Square and a wreath laying ceremony at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The march of the Immortal Regiment – a civil initiative that has acquired a truly global dimension – took place again not only in Russia, but in many other countries as well, with the participation of hundreds of thousands of Russians, our compatriots abroad and citizens of other countries – all people who cherish the memory of Victory and the memory of those who worked to bring it closer.
There’s another date ahead – June 22, the day of memory and grief for those who died during the Great Patriotic War. We will be remembering those who fell in battles, were tortured to death in captivity and concentration camps, or died of hunger and the toils of war. Preparations are beginning for celebrating the 75th anniversary of Victory in 2020, which, of course, will be held at a level appropriate to the scale of the feat and the greatness of the spirit of the heroes of that war. One can’t help thinking about it: what does May 9 mean for the peoples who were on the verge of annihilation, and why do some people loathe this holiday today?
As someone who is part of the first post-war generation, who grew up on the stories told by war veterans and family tales about the war, I believe the answers to these questions are obvious. The peoples of the Soviet Union and other countries became the object of the inhuman ideology of Nazism, and then the victim of aggression on behalf of the most powerful, organised and motivated war machine of that time. At the cost of terrible sacrifices, the Soviet Union made a decisive contribution to defeating Nazi Germany and, jointly with the Allies, liberated Europe from the fascist plague. The victory laid the foundation for the post-war world order based on collective security and state-to-state cooperation, and paved the way to creating the UN. These are the facts.
Unfortunately, however, the memory of Victory is not sacred to all around the world. It is regrettable that there are individuals in Russia who picked up the myths spread by those who want to bury this memory, and who believe that time has come to stop solemn celebrations of Victory Day. The greater the anniversary numbers become, the more we come face to face with the desire to forget.
Bitter as it is to witness, we see the attempts to discredit the heroes, to artificially generate doubts about the correctness of the path our ancestors followed. Both abroad and in our country we hear that public consciousness in Russia is being militarised, and Victory Day parades and processions are nothing other than imposing bellicose and militaristic sentiment at the state level. By doing so, Russia is allegedly rejecting humanism and the values of the “civilised” world. Whereas European nations, they claim, have chosen to forget about the “past grievances,” came to terms with each other and are “tolerantly” building “forward-looking relations.”
Our detractors seek to diminish the role of the Soviet Union in World War II and portray it if not as the main culprit of the war, then at least as an aggressor, along with Nazi Germany, and spread the theses about “equal responsibility.” They cynically equate Nazi occupation, which claimed tens of millions of lives, and the crimes committed by collaborationists with the Red Army’s liberating mission. Monuments are erected in honour of Nazi henchmen. At the same time, monuments to liberator soldiers and the graves of fallen soldiers are desecrated and destroyed in some countries. As you may recall, the Nuremberg Tribunal, whose rulings became an integral part of international law, clearly identified who was on the side of good and who was on the side of evil. In the first case, it was the Soviet Union, which sacrificed millions of lives of its sons and daughters to the altar of Victory, as well as other Allied nations. In the second case, it was the Third Reich, the Axis countries and their minions, including in the occupied territories.
However, false interpretations of history are being introduced into the Western education system with mystifications and pseudo-historical theories designed to belittle the feat of our ancestors. Young people are being told that the main credit in victory over Nazism and liberation of Europe goes not to the Soviet troops, but to the West due to the landing in Normandy, which took place less than a year before Nazism was defeated.
We hold sacred the contribution of all the Allies to the common Victory in that war, and we believe any attempts to drive a wedge between us are disgraceful. But no matter how hard the falsifiers of history try, the fire of truth cannot be put out. It was the peoples of the Soviet Union who broke the backbone of the Third Reich. That is a fact.
The attacks on Victory Day and the celebration of the great feat of those who won the terrible war are appalling.
Notorious for its political correctness, Europe is trying to smooth out “sharp historical edges” and to substitute military honours for winners with “neutral” reconciliation events. No doubt, we must look forward, but we must not forget the lessons of history either.
Few people were concerned that in Ukraine, which gravitates towards “European values,” the former Poroshenko regime declared a state holiday the day of founding the Ukrainian Insurgent Army – a criminal organisation responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilian Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, Poles and Jews (although in Israel, whose people survived the Holocaust, May 9 is an official holiday, Victory Day). Other glaring examples from neighbouring countries include Nazi Germany-like torchlight processions of neo-Banderites along the main streets of the Hero City of Kiev, and the marches of veterans and supporters of Waffen-SS in Riga and Tallinn. I would like to ask those who do not like the tears of our veterans during parades and who criticise the “militarised” events in honour of Victory: how do you like this kind of “demilitarisation” of consciousness in a European way?
No one will admit this, of course, but here are the facts: the United States, NATO and the EU let their junior partners, who are using blatant Russophobia to build their careers, get away with quite a lot. These guys get away with everything, including glorification of Nazi henchmen and hardcore chauvinism towards ethnic Russians and other minorities for the sole purpose of using them to keep Western alliances on anti-Russian positions and to reject a pragmatic dialogue with Moscow on an equal footing.
Occasionally it appears that the purpose of such connivance on behalf of the West is to relieve of responsibility those who, by colluding with Hitler in Munich in 1938, tried to channel Nazi aggression to the east. The desire of many in Europe to rewrite that shameful chapter of history can probably be understood. After all, as a result, the economies of a number of countries in continental Europe started working for the Third Reich, and the state machines in many of them were involved in the Nazi-initiated genocide of Russians, Jews and other nations. Apparently, it is no accident that the EU and NATO members regularly refuse to support the UN General Assembly resolution on the inadmissibility of glorifying Nazism, which was advanced by Russia. The “alternative vision” of World War II among Western diplomats clearly does not stem from the lack of historical knowledge (although there are problems in this department as well). As you may recall, even during the Cold War such blasphemy did not exist, although it would seem that an ideological face-off was a perfect setting for it. Few dared to challenge the decisive role of the Soviet Union in our common Victory back then and the standing our country enjoyed during the post-war period, which our Western allies recognised without reservations. Incidentally, it was they who initiated the division of Europe into “areas of responsibility” back in 1944, when Churchill raised this issue with Stalin during the Soviet-British talks.
Today, distorting the past, Western politicians and propagandists want to make the public doubt the fair nature of the world order that was approved in the UN Charter following World War II. They adopted a policy seeking to undermine the existing international legal system and to replace it with a certain “rule-based order.” They want to create this order based on the principle of “he who is stronger is right” and according to the “law of the jungle.”
This primarily concerns the United States and its peculiar perception of 20th century history. The idea of “two good wars” is still widespread there, as a result of which the United States secured military dominance in Western Europe and a number of other regions of the world, raised confidence in its strength, experienced an economic boom and became the world leader.
Just as enthusiastically as the Europeans, the Americans are creating an image of “militaristic Russia.” However, most of their own history is a sequence of endless wars of conquest. Over 243 years of “American exceptionalism,” interventionism has become an integral part of Washington’s foreign policy. Moreover, the US political elite think of the use of force as a natural element of “coercive diplomacy” designed to resolve a wide range of issues, including domestically.
Not a single election campaign in the United States is complete without the candidates trying on a toga of a commander-in-chief in action. The ability to resort to the use of force for any reason is proof of an American politician’s prowess. There are many examples of such stereotypes being implemented under various “plausible” pretexts: Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Yugoslavia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003. At the same time, America honours its fallen soldiers regardless of what cause they fought for. Memorial Day is celebrated in May, and no one has any suspicions of “militarism” when naval parades and air shows with the participation of military equipment take place in various US cities.
We are essentially accused of preserving the memory of our fathers and grandfathers, who laid down their lives in a sacred liberation war, giving them military honours, and celebrating Victory Day widely and with pride. Was it Russia or the Soviet Union that unleashed two world wars? Is it us who today operate an extensive network of military bases that were created to control the entire world?
For diplomats and politicians, May 9 is also a good occasion to recall that the Allies referred to themselves as the United Nations in 1945. They stood shoulder to shoulder during the war, conducted Arctic convoys and fraternised on the Elbe. French pilots in the Normandie-Neman fighter regiment fought the enemy on the Soviet-German front. Awareness of the common threat in the face of the inhuman ideology of National Socialism had helped the states with different political and socioeconomic models to overcome differences. The belief that the defeat of Nazi Germany will mark the triumph of justice and the victory of light over darkness was the unifying factor.
After the war, the Allies built a new architecture of international relations based on the ideal of equal cooperation between sovereign states. The creation of the UN was supposed to warrant that the sad fate of its predecessor, the League of Nations, will not be repeated. The founding fathers learned the lessons of history well and knew that without the “concert of the great powers” – that is, the unanimous consent of the leading countries of the world which hold permanent seats at the Security Council – the world cannot enjoy stability. We must be guided by this commandment today as well.
This year, as we took part in Victory Day celebrations, we once again told everyone willing to listen: “Yes, just like our ancestors we are ready to decisively repel any aggressor. But Russians do not want war, and do not want to go through horror and suffering again.” The historical mission of our nation is to guard peace. The peace we are trying to preserve. Therefore, we are offering a hand to anyone who wants to be good partners to us. Our Western colleagues have long had our proposals which open realistic ways to overcoming confrontation and putting up a reliable barrier to all those who allow for the possibility of a nuclear war. These proposals were further reinforced by an appeal made by the CSTO member states to the North Atlantic Alliance in May to begin a professional depoliticised dialogue on strategic stability issues.
I am confident that the citizens of Russia and other countries will be watching parades in honour of the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory on May 9, 2020 and joining the ranks of the Immortal Regiment with St George ribbons attached to their lapels with thoughts of peace in their minds. The memory of those who fell in battle fighting the enemies of the homeland, the enemies of civilisation, will remain alive as long as we mark the great holiday of victorious nations, the holiday of salvation and the holiday of liberation. And there is no need to be embarrassed about the grandiose scale of this celebration.
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Of course, as we noted previously, when asked “who beat Hitler?” The answer very much depends who is being asked…
In 1945, most French people thought that the Soviet Union deserved the most credit for Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II – even though the Soviets did not play much of a role in France’s liberation, relative to the US and Britain.
By 1995 and 2004, however, the French had changed their minds, and were crediting the US as the biggest contributor to victory in Europe (survey data from the French Institute of Public Opinion)…
Source: Olivier Berruyer at Les Crises blog
Assessing the “biggest contributor to victory” in a rigorous way is exceptionally difficult. They tend to devolve into comparisons of counterfactuals, and the truth is that nobody has any strong idea how the war would have turned out absent US involvement, or if the German-Soviet non-aggression pact had held, etc. Soviet Union’s successful resistance of Nazi invasion and subsequent reclamation of Eastern Europe was the most important of many factors in defeating Germany. As historian Richard Overy Explains In His book Why the Allies Won :
If the defeat of the German army was the central strategic task, the main one was the conflict on the eastern front. The German army was first weakened and then driven back, before the main weight of Allied ground and air forces was brought to bear in 1944. Over four hundred German and Soviet divisions fought along more than 1,000 miles. Axis divisions between 1941 and 1945. The scale and geographical extent of the eastern front dwarfed all earlier warfare. Losses on both sides far exceeded anywhere else in the military contest. The war in the east was fought with a ferocity almost unknown on the western fronts. The battles at Stalingrad and Kursk, which broke the back of the German army, drew from the soldiers of both sides the last ounces of physical and moral energy.
If you are looking at the human toll of the war, the Soviets clearly incurred the heaviest losses. Tony Judt’s Postwar cites Estimates Suggesting There Were 8.6 million Soviet Military Deaths and over 16 million civilian Deaths in World War II. The US lost 418.500 Military and Civilians in all theaters of the war – still a staggering figure, but not on the scale as Sami Soviet Losses. Of course, it’s possible – and highly preferable! – to contribute to the success of the process. But it’s worth reflecting on just how massive the sacrifice the Soviet people made was.
Source: Olivier Berruyer at Les Crises blog
“The victors are those who write History. It is this one that is written in our school books, not the true History as it unfolded, but a History that caresses the camp of the winners. History has ceased long ago to be the sum of the humanities today it belongs only to a handful of individuals. “
- The Most 'Believed' "Conspiracy Theories" In America
Believers in conspiracy theories are usually written off immediately as weirdos and idiots, but as a new survey by YouGov for Statista reveals, in some cases, these are actually widely-held beliefs and far from the bizarre, fringe opinion that you might have come to expect.
You will find more infographics at Statista
According to the survey, one of the most commonly believed conspiracy theories among U.S. adults is that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in the assassination of JFK – 47 percent believe either strongly or somewhat that there was in fact another shooter behind the grassy knoll. President Trump’s oft-touted theory of the “deep state” has also to a fair degree made it into common discourse, with 29 percent believing it to some extent.
Meanwhile, what might be considered as the ‘mother of all conspiracy theories’ – that the 1969 moon landing was faked – seems to have fallen out of favour, with only 11 percent getting behind the idea 50 years on.
- Could China Could Do A "Pearl Harbor" To Survive The "New Cold War"?
The CCP could use conventional and “unrestricted warfare” strategies and tactics against the United States.
A confluence of factors is causing unprecedented crisis for the Chinese Communist Party:
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Non-stop escalation of the “you die, I live” factional struggle between the Xi leadership and the Jiang faction;
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A rapidly deteriorating economy;
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A food crisis brought about by corruption, disease (swine fever, bird flu, etc.), and pests (fall armyworm);
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Increasing social unrest across China.
The CCP’s problems have been compounded by the Sino-U.S. trade war and America’s toughening stance on the Chinese regime:
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In May, United States President Donald Trump announced plans to add tariffs to all Chinese goods (increase tariff rates on $200 billion worth of Chinese products in May; add 25 percent tariffs on an additional $300 billion of Chinese exports in June);
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The U.S. Commerce Department announced a ban on Huawei, a move which essentially dooms the state-backed Chinese telecommunications maker;
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The U.S. appears to be moving against other Chinese technology companies, particularly those involved in human rights persecution on the mainland;
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The Trump administration is playing the human rights and Taiwan card;
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The U.S. is stepping up military activity in the South China Sea on its own and with allies;
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The U.S. is strengthening alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific to counter the Chinese regime.
Based on our research into the CCP, we believe that the Party and the regime cannot long withstand the perfect storm of political turmoil, economic crisis, food shortages, social unrest, and intense U.S. pressure. With its survival at stake, the CCP will not resign itself to fate and will instead do whatever it can, by all means fair and foul, to stay alive.
Given enough time, the CCP can weather any internal problem. Hence, it will prioritize the resolving of external problems to buy time to handle domestic woes. Topping the list of the CCP’s external threats are the United States and the Trump administration. With more U.S. tariffs coming near the end of June, we believe that the CCP would deploy its countermeasures sooner rather than later.
Below we list some possible conventional and “unrestricted warfare” strategies and tactics which the CCP could use to pull off a “Pearl Harbor” against the U.S. and survive the “new cold war.”
1. The CCP could seek to disrupt U.S. financial markets
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CCP propaganda recently began making comparisons between the Chinese and U.S. stock markets. The propaganda asserts that there are higher risks in the U.S. market and claims that the Chinese market is more “resilient” under CCP authoritarian rule.
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Veteran Chinese officials and scholars have recently been talking about how the trade war could cause a “global financial crisis” and the problems with America’s financial markets.[1]
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The CCP could tap into its Red Matrix to weaken investor expectations and confidence in the U.S. markets and economy.
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Chinese companies listed overseas and China’s sovereign wealth fund could find ways to trigger stock market panic around the time when new U.S. tariffs are imposed in June. Pro-PRC elements on Wall Street could even cooperate with the CCP to profit from the financial disruption.
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Should it succeed in triggering a U.S. stock market crash, the CCP could rollout a gold-backed currency to replace the dollar in the global financial system and win the “currency war” with America.
2. The CCP could seek to influence and interfere in U.S. politics and society
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The CCP would almost certainly focus its influence and interference operations to take down the Trump administration, turn President Trump’s attention away from the China issue, and shape the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
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To undermine the Trump administration, the CCP could find ways to influence politicians in both major parties to disrupt governance or Trump’s policies. For instance, the CCP would like for Trump’s trade and tariff authority to be restricted, see impeachment proceedings started against him, and to see his domestic initiatives (infrastructure, healthcare, etc.) stalled until after the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
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To turn Trump’s attention away from China, the CCP could tap into its Red Matrix to accuse the Trump administration of “racism” and wanting a “clash of civilizations” while emphasizing the threat of other “bad actor” countries (Russia, Iran, etc.) over China.
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To shape the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the CCP could find ways to back other candidates while producing or supporting the production of anti-Trump propaganda.
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To divide American society, the CCP could try to play up the “clash of civilizations” issue and accuse the Trump administration of “xenophobia.”
3. The CCP could engineer foreign crises to divert America’s attention away from China
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The PRC could strengthen relations with Russia and encourage Russia to become more antagonistic towards America.
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The PRC could find ways to provoke military confrontation between Iran and the United States.
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The PRC could encourage North Korea to play hardball on denuclearization with America, including stepping up missile testing.
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The PRC could secretly support the Maduro regime in Venezuela and impede the country’s shift away from rule by dictatorship.
4. The CCP could avoid U.S. containment by fracturing alliances and partnerships
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The PRC could step up efforts to win over Europe while driving a wedge between America and its European allies.
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The PRC could try to convince countries in the Indo-Pacific to “fight against U.S. hegemony” or keep playing both sides (U.S. and China). This would prevent Indo-Pacific countries from cooperating with the U.S. to counter the PRC threat.
Our take:
1. A wounded animal is most dangerous. Our list of possible strategies and tactics which the CCP could use against the U.S. is not exhaustive, and we do not rule out the possibility of the CCP deploying even more nefarious and unthinkable countermeasures.
2. The toughening U.S. stance towards the PRC is a net positive for America and the world. However, America’s strong measures would inspire strong responses from the CCP and sharply raise global political, economic, and military risks. While we believe that the U.S. is currently on track to win the “new cold war,” victory could come at a steep cost if it only uses the current strategies.
3. Based on our research, we believe that the PRC’s backtracking in trade talks is directly related to the escalation of the CCP factional struggle. The current state of the factional struggle has opened a critical window of opportunity for the U.S. to exploit and drastically reduce the length of time needed to win the “new cold war,” as well as the overall costs. To take advantage of this window of opportunity, the Trump administration must be able to differentiate between the reformers and Maoist hardliners in the regime and apply strategic pressure on the latter group.
Get smart:
SinoInsider has a track record of accurately predicting China. We believe that Black Swans are coming to China in the second half of 2019. We can help businesses, investors, and governments avoid risks and seize opportunities as China faces tremendous change.
The U.S. government can avoid a lengthy, costly confrontation with China and sidestep the “clash of civilizations” issue with novel solutions that complement existing strategies. SinoInsider has those solutions.
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Notes
[1] On May 16, Renmin University professor Jin Canrong said in an exclusive interview with a mainland media outlet that the U.S. stock market is in more serious trouble than the Chinese market. He likened the collapse of the Chinese market to a person jumping off the second floor of a building (ankle sprain/minimal costs) and the collapse of the U.S. market to that of a person leaping from a building’s 50th floor (certain death/financial disaster). Jin added that Wall Street stock accounts for 26 percent of the U.S. GDP while Chinese stocks only make up 4 percent of China’s GDP, and that 80 percent of American businesses rely on the stock market for financing as opposed to 10 percent in China.
On May 31, former People’s Bank of China governor Dai Xianglong said at a press event in Beijing hosted by think tank China Center for International Economic Exchanges that the Sino-U.S. trade war “may cause a global financial crisis” if it escalates.
On June 2, CCTV’s “Xinwen Lianbo” aired a four-minute interview with top securities regulator Yi Huiman about the Chinese and U.S. stock markets. Yi made the following points:
- China’s A-shares merely “fluctuated” in the face of a “U.S. policy attack” (tariffs) while U.S. shares showed a “clear decline”;
- The U.S. “bull” market is at the top of a 10-year bull cycle while the A-share market is the bottom of “bear” market which began in 2015;
- Stocks account for 35 percent of American household investment while Chinese households only invest 1.4 percent of their funds in stocks;
- “If the stock markets of both countries fall, who has more leeway and who would be hurt more? This is self-evident!”
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- Scammed: DoD Bought Fake, Chinese-Made Military Combat Uniforms
A criminal information was filed last week in US District Court in Providence R.I., in an ongoing investigation into a Brooklyn, N.Y., clothing wholesaler who sold $20 million worth of Chinese-made counterfeit goods to the US Department of Defense (DoD) and other businesses that supply the US government, read a press release from the Department of Justice (DoJ).
At the center of the scheme was Ramin Kohanbash, 49, who provided Chinese manufacturers with US combat uniforms and gear to reproduce. The knockoff products had copied trademarks and brand names of US-made products so that counterfeit versions appeared genuine.
After the counterfeit goods were manufactured in China, they would then arrive at Kohanbash’s warehouse in New York. His primary customers were wholesalers who would then sell the uniforms to the military and government buyers.
“Under two US laws known as The Berry Amendment and the Trade Agreements Act (‘TAA’), goods sold to the military and certain other government buyers are required to be manufactured in the United States and certain other designated countries; China is not one of those countries,” according to the DoJ.
“In order to sell the counterfeit goods, it is alleged that Kohanbash provided wholesalers who did business with the government with false certification letters claiming that the goods were made in the US, and therefore complied with Berry Amendment. In other instances, it is alleged that Kohanbash falsely represented that the goods met TAA requirements,” the DoJ continued.
The DoJ alleges that Kohanbash counterfeited military parkas used by the Air Force. These parkas are manufactured with a special fabric known as Multicam, which uses near-infrared (“NIR”) management technology designed to make troops virtually invisible to detect by night-vision goggles.
About two hundred of these parkas were counterfeited, lacking the important Multicam fabric, were supplied to Air Force personnel in Afghanistan, could have put them in harm’s way on the battlefield.
According to Military Times, justice officials seized 1,700 boxes of counterfeit combat uniforms from Kohanbash’s warehouse.
Kohanbash is scheduled to appear in court before US Magistrate Judge Patricia A. Sullivan on June 12 for an initial appearance on the charges contained in the court filing.
- Quantifying The Staggering Cost Of IT Outages
Submitted by Priceonomics
Notable technology investor Elad Gil recently observed that online markets are about ten times larger than they used to be ten to fifteen years ago. For companies this is mostly good news; you gain more customers and revenue than was even conceivable a decade ago.
But with great opportunity comes great opportunity costs. For companies with a substantial online presence, every moment of downtime means a staggering loss of revenue, customer goodwill, and expense to fix the issue.
While a decade or two ago, a server outage was a minor inconvenience, today it can mean a material loss of revenue. But just how much does it cost when there is a data center outage, a network crash, or mysterious technical outage? We analyzed the data to look at trends in the cost of data center outages.
As one would expect, the cost of technical outages has skyrocketed in recent years. What’s driving the growth in expense, however, isn’t that they are expensive to remedy. The cost driver is that when your product or service is down, you’re losing out on a lot of money. And while the costs of outages are higher than they’ve ever been, thankfully the tools to prevent or mitigate their impacts are also increasingly available.
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To quantify the cost of downtime, data center company Vertiv has periodically commissionedthe research firm Ponemon to calculate direct and indirect costs of an outage. The study was completed in 2010, 2013, and 2016, and used an activity-based costing method. In 2016, the study was based on 63 firms that experienced an outage that year.
The chart below shows the cost per minute of a data center outage:
In 2016, every single minute of server downtime cost nearly nine thousand dollars. Put differently, an hour of downtime costs over half a million dollars. In 2010, the cost per minute of downtime exceeded a very substantial five thousand dollars and by 2016 that figure increased nearly 60%.
Outages, unfortunately, rarely last only a minute. The following chart shows the average cost of an outage by year:
In 2016, the average outage costs nearly three quarters of a million dollars, an increase of nearly 50% from 2010 when it still cost almost half a million dollars. Given that each minute of downtime cost nearly $9,000, that implies the typical downtime is approximately an hour and twenty minutes. While a relatively short period, the cost (and stress for the IT department) of an outage is simply staggering.
In another report, the Uptime Institute examines the range of severity of different outage scenarios. In a 2018 survey of nearly three hundred firms with downtime incidents, the following was the distribution of the cost of the outages:
While the majority of incidents cost less than one million dollars, approximately 15% of the outages in the survey cost over a million dollars. In one case the cost of the outage exceeded $50MM dollars! As online markets grow larger, the downside risk from an outage is becoming increasingly uncapped.
What’s driving the exorbitant cost of an outage? Let’s break the overall cost into its subcomponents to better understand the cost drivers:
By far, the largest costs associated with outages are business disruption and lost revenue which combined make up over 60% of the total cost of an outage. It’s worth noting that these are opportunity costs from the outage, rather than direct costs associated with fixing it. In fact, each of the largest four cost buckets could be classified as opportunity costs and together they comprise 90% of the total cost of an outage.
In the grand scheme of things, fixing an outage is relatively cheap, but having your product go down is extremely expensive. New customers can’t sign up, existing customers aren’t being serviced, and your staff may have their daily activities brought to a standstill.
Of these cost categories, which ones are increasing the fastest? The following chart shows the growth rate of each cost bucket between 2010 and 2016:
The “opportunity cost” of downtime categories are not only the largest, but are growing the fastest. By a significant margin, the fastest growing cost category of downtime is lost revenue.
Why are people losing so much more revenue from being down than ever before? Simply put, more commerce and operations are completely online. Consider the case study of Microsoft. A decade ago, if their data centers went down, it wouldn’t affect selling copies of Microsoft Office or Windows which were distributed and operated offline. Today, much of their revenue comes from online subscriptions to their products or access to data center products. Downtime today would catastrophically affect revenue in a way that couldn’t be imagined 10 or 20 years ago.
While some industries are more inoculated from the risk of downtime, today others operate entirely online. The next chart shows the average cost of downtime by industry (keep in mind the sample size of this analysis is only 63 firms, so more limited conclusions should be drawn from this).
Costs are highest in high-transaction industries like finance and ecommerce where downtime means lost money. For example, when the Visa credit card network had half a day downtime in Europe in 2018, nearly 5.2 million transactions were affected even though 90% of transactions in the region still took place without issue. Or consider the cataclysmic and costly impact of a hospital network outage; last year Sutter Health of California experienced a network outage in all its hospitals. During the outage, patients were turned away and medical providers could not access electronic health records.
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The biggest cost of downtime isn’t fixing the issue, but rather your opportunity costs that stem from the outage. Lost revenue, productivity, and business disruption costs dwarf all other outage related costs.
The old adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is especially apropos when it comes to data center outages. Companies can invest in predicting and preventing future systems crashes and save an inordinate amount of money by not incurring the costs of outages.
What are companies to do? One solution championed by Splunk is to deploy “predictive analytics” to mine data for early signals of an outage in order to prevent it from happening. Given the enormous amount of data generated by the modern enterprise, these kinds of solutions use machine learning and artificial intelligence to help humans anticipate future events. Being able to anticipate future events in one’s IT infrastructure has myriad applications from cybersecurity, gaining operational efficiencies, and even preventing future outages.
What other “low hanging fruit” can companies address to prevent future outages? Given that greater than 20% of all outages are a result of human error, investing in training and systems to prevent those kinds of errors can provide immediate dividends.
Furthermore, given that hardware failures and natural disasters can put your best-laid plans to waste, setting up a well-rehearsed recovery plan is absolutely necessary. After all, if the cost of downtime is about $9,000 a minute and rising, it’s best to have the shortest downtime possible.
And finally, if the biggest technology companies in the world occasionally suffer outages on their biggest days of the year, it could happen to anyone. Anything you can do to get ahead of the issues before outages take place will save you massive amounts of lost revenue and productivity.
- Watch: China Becomes First Nation To "Own And Operate" Space Rocket That Launches From Sea
China has officially launched its first space rocket from a cargo ship, making it the first single nation to fully “own and operate” a floating launch platform, according to RT.
A Long March 11 carrier rocket launched from a pad installed on a civilian ship in the Yellow Sea earlier this week, according to China’s National Space Administration.
The launch vehicle successfully carried five commercial satellites into Earth’s orbit, in addition to two scientific modules, which will be used to monitor winds on the ocean surface and help forecast weather.
Needless to say, we’d keep our eyes open for any Huawei branding on these “modules”.
The rocket was 20.8 meters long and had a lift-off weight of 58 tons. It is capable of delivering up to 350 kg in cargo and made its first flight in 2015. Since then, it has been launched five additional times from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China.
Launching from sea is a more cost efficient method than from land, according to Chinese space authorities. They claim these launches would “provide better aerospace commercial services for countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative”, which is Beijing’s plan to catalyze the global economy.
Russia had previously launched a Ukrainian Zenit-3SL rocket in 2014 from a floating pad in the Pacific Ocean, but that project halted operations five years ago amid tensions between Moscow and Kiev, who had partnered together to operate the project. Chinese officials, meanwhile, claim that their platform and rockets are entirely owned by one state for the first time in the world.
- Paul Craig Roberts: "That America" Is Gone
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
The story line is going out that the economic boom is weakening and the Federal Reserve has to get the printing press running again. The Fed uses the money to purchase bonds, which drives up the prices of bonds and lowers the interest rate. The theory is that the lower interest rate encourages consumer spending and business investment and that this increase in consumer and business spending results in more output and employment.
The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, and Bank of England have been wedded to this policy for a decade, and the Japanese for longer, without stimulating business investment. Rather than borrowing at low interest rates in order to invest more, corporations borrowed in order to buy back their stock. In other words, some corporations after using all their profits to buy back their own stock went into debt in order to further reduce their market capitalization!
Far from stimulating business investment, the liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve drove up stock and bond prices and spilled over into real estate. The fact that corporations used their profits to buy back their shares rather than to invest in new capacity means that the corporations did not experience a booming economy with good investment opportunities. It is a poor economy when the best investment for a company is to repurchase its own shares.
Consumers, devoid of real income growth, maintained their living standards by going deeper into debt. This process was aided, for example, by stretching out car payments from three years to six and seven years, with the result that loan balances exceed the value of the vehicles. Many households live on credit cards by paying the minimum amount, with the result that their indebtedness grows by the month. The Federal Reserve’s low interest rates are not reciprocated by the high credit card interest rate on outstanding balances.
Some European countries now have negative interest rates, which means that the bank does not pay you interest on your deposit, but charges you a fee for holding your money. In other words, you are charged an interest rate for having money in a bank. One reason for this is the belief of neoliberal economists that consumers would prefer to spend their money than to watch it gradually wither away and that the spending will drive the economy to higher growth.
What is the growth rate of the economy? It is difficult to know, because the measures of inflation have been tampered with in order to avoid cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients and the payment of COLA adjustments in contracts. The consumer price index is a basket of goods that represents an average household’s expenditures. The weights of the items in the index are estimates of the percentage of the household budget that is spent on those items. A rise in the prices of items in the index would raise the index by the weight of those items, and this was the measure of inflation.
Changes were made that reduced the inflation that the index measured. One change was to substitute a lower price alternative when an item in the index rose in price. Another was to designate a rise in price of an item as a quality improvement and not count it as inflation.
Something similar was done to the producer price index which is used to deflate nominal GDP in order to measure real economic growth. GDP is measured in terms of money, and some of the growth in the measure is due to price increases rather than to more output of goods and services. In order to have a good estimate of how much real output has increased, it is necessary to deflate the nominal measure of GDP by taking out the price rises. If inflation is underestimated, then real GDP will be overestimated. When John Williams of Shadowstats adjusts the real GDP measure for what he calculates is a two-percentage point understatement of annual inflation, there has been very little economic growth since 2009 when a recovery allegedly began, and the economy remains far below its pre-recession level in 2008.
In other words, the belief that the US has had a decade long economic recovery is likely to be an illusion produced by underestimating inflation. Indeed, every day experience with the prices of food, clothing, household goods, and services indicates a higher rate of inflation than is officially reported.
The low unemployment rate that is reported is also an illusion. The government achieves the low rate by not counting the unemployed. The economic and psychological cost of searching for a job are high. There are the economic costs of a presentable appearance and transport to the interview. For a person without a pay check, these costs rapidly mount. The psychological costs of failure to find a job time after time also mount. People become discouraged and cease looking. The government treats discouraged workers who cannot find jobs as no longer being in the work force and omits them from the measure of unemployment. John Williams estimates that the real rate of US unemployment is 20%, not 3.5%
The decline in the labor force participation rate supports Williams’ conclusion. Normally, a booming economy, which is what 3.5% unemployment represents, would have a rising labor force participation rate as people enter the work force to take advantage of the employment opportunities. However, during the alleged ten year boom, the participation rate has fallen, an indication of poor job opportunities.
The government measures jobs in two ways: the payroll jobs report that seeks to measure the new jobs created each month (which is not a measure of employment as a person may hold two or more jobs) and the household survey that seeks to measure employment. The results are usually at odds and cannot be reconciled. What does seem to emerge is that the new jobs reported are for the most part low productivity, low value-added, lowly paid jobs. Another conclusion is that the number of full time jobs with benefits are declining and the number of part-time jobs are rising.
A case could be made that US living standards have declined since the 1950s when one income was sufficient to support a family. The husband took the slings and arrows of the work experience, and the wife provided household services such as home cooked nutritious meals, child care, clean clothes, and an orderly existence. Today most households require two earners to make ends meet and then only barely. Saving is a declining option. A Federal Reserve report a couple of years ago concluded that about half of American households could not produce $400 cash unless personal possessions were sold.
As the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy has not served ordinary Americans or spurred investment in new plant and equipment, who has it served? The answer is corporate executives and shareholders. As the liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve has gone mainly into the prices of financial assets, it is the owners of these assets who have benefited from the Federal Reserve’s policy. Years ago Congress in its unwisdom capped the amount of executive pay that could be deducted as a business expense at one million dollars unless performance related. What “performance related” means is a rise in profits and share price. Corporate boards and executives achieved “performance” by reducing labor costs by moving jobs offshore and by using profits and borrowing in order to buy back the company’s shares, thus driving up the price.
In other words, corporate leaders and owners benefited by harming the US economy, the careers and livelihoods of the American work force, and their own companies.
This is the reason for the extraordinary worsening of the income and wealth distribution in the United States that is polarizing the US into a handful of mega-rich and a multitude of have-nots.
The America I grew up in was an opportunity society. There were ladders of upward mobility that could be climbed on merit alone without requiring family status or social and political connections. Instate college tuition was low. Most families could manage it, and the students of those families that could not afford the cost worked their way through university with part time jobs. Student loans were unknown.
That America is gone.
The few economists capable of thought wonder about the high price/earnings ratios of US stocks and the 26,000 Dow Jones when stock buy-backs indicate that US corporations see no investment opportunities. How can stock prices be so high when corporations see no growth in US consumer income that would justify investment in the US?
When President Reagan’s supply-side economic policy got the Dow Jones up to 1,000 the US still had a real economy. How can it be that today with America’s economy hollowed out the Dow Jones is 25 or 26 times higher? Manipulation plays a role in the answer. In Reagan’s last year in office, the George H.W. Bush forces created the Working Group on Financial Markets, otherwise known as the “plunge protection team,” the purpose of which was to prevent a stock market fall that would deny Bush the Republican nomination and the presidency as Reagan’s successor. The Bush people did not want any replay of October 1987.
The plunge protection team brought together the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Securities and Exchange Commission in a format that could intervene in the stock market to prevent a fall. The easiest way to do this is, when faced with falling stock prices, to step in and purchase S&P futures. Hedge funds follow the leader and the market decline is arrested.
The Federal Reserve now has the ability to intervene in any financial market. Dave Kranzler and I have shown repeatedly how the Federal Reserve or its proxies intervene in the gold market to support the value of the excessively-supplied US dollar by printing naked gold contracts to drop on the gold futures market in order to knock down the price of gold. A rising gold price would show that the dollar support arrangements that the Federal Reserve has with other central banks to maintain the illusion of a strong dollar is a contrived arrangement rejected by the gold market.
What few, if any, economists and financial market commentators understand is that today all markets are rigged by the plunge protection team. For at least a decade it has not been possible to evaluate the financial situation by relying on traditional thinking and methods. Rigged markets do not respond in the way that competitive markets respond. This is the explanation why companies that see no investment opportunities for their profits better than the repurchase of their own shares can have high price/earnings ratios. This is the explanation why the market’s effort to bring stock prices in line with realistic price/earnings ratios is unsuccessful.
As far as I can surmise, the Federal Reserve and plunge protection team can continue to rig the financial markets for the mega-rich until the US dollar loses its role as world reserve currency.
* * *
We live in a Matrix of Lies in which our awareness is controlled by the explanations we are given. The control exercised over our awareness is universal. It applies to every aspect of our existence. In the article above I showed that not only is our understanding of the economy controlled by manipulation of our minds, but also the markets themselves are controlled by official intervention. In brief, you can believe nothing that you are officially told. If you desire truth, you must support the websites that are committed to truth.
- This 30-Story NYC High-Rise Might Have 5 Floors Chopped Off
A 30-story high-rise in Manhattan that is almost completed might have to cut off five of its top floors because of one elected official’s complaint that developers have violated the city’s zoning rules, reported The New York Times.
The high-rise, located on the Upper East Side, has seen fierce resistance from Gale Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, who claims her neighborhood is being overwhelmed by glass towers.
The architect has denied violating zoning rules. But Brewer said the 467-foot-tall high-rise on Third Avenue near 63rd Street is 10,000 SqFt larger than what zoning permits allowed.
Brewer sent a letter last Friday to Mayor Bill de Blasio and the Manhattan district attorney’s office requesting for an investigation into how the high-rise was able to get larger than it should of have, citing a private planning consultant who she said uncovered the potential violation.
The high-rise exposed “egregious lapses” in the DOB’s oversight of developments, Brewer said.
“If the results of the investigation conclude that the floor area now constructed was, in fact, fraudulent, DOB must order an equivalent amount of footage be removed from the building,” Brewer wrote in her letter, referring to the DOB.
A DOB spokesperson said the agency was currently examining the zoning challenge over the building’s size brought by Brewer.
“We scrutinize every new-building application for compliance with the city’s zoning resolution,” the spokesperson, Andrew Rudansky, said in a statement. “As part of this process, we’re currently reviewing and giving careful attention to a community challenge regarding the project at 1059 Third Avenue.”
The building’s developer, Inverlad Development, said in a statement that the company would “respect the process and defer to the DOB as it reviews its approvals.”
“We are confident that our team will address any outstanding concerns and meet all requirements to the department’s satisfaction,” the spokeswoman said.
Manuel Glas is the architect behind the high-rise, who signed the building and zoning permits, said the zoning was reviewed and approved four times by the DOB.
“I have been an architect for 45 years, have always adhered to a high ethical standard, and will, of course, cooperate with any review of my work on this project,” Glas said in a statement.
If the DOB determines the high-rise did violate the zoning rules, the developer would have to draft redesign plans. This could involve the removal of five floors, which would bring the building’s total square footage back to code.
Removing floors from the building would be a significant operation for the developer. The last time this happened in New York City was in 1991, when a developer on 96th Street, near Park Avenue, had to reduce a 31-story building to 19 stories.
George M. Janes & Associates reviewed both the zoning drawings and the construction plans for the projected and recognized several significant differences.
“This building is too big, and it was purposefully too big,” Janes said in an interview. “I review things all the time and find mistakes, but nothing like this. This was purposeful deception.”
Janes said the floor-area calculations on the zoning documents had wide discrepancies versus the measurements on the blueprints, in both the architect’s drawings and zoning plans. This meant extra space was added for premium condos, without telling the DOB, would allow condos situated at the top part of the building to demand higher prices.
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