Aug 09

Today’s News 9th August 2017

  • Russia Launches $100 Million Bitcoin-Mining Operation

    In what some have called a “watershed” moment for bitcoin, Bloomberg reports that a company co-owned by an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to expand Russia’s bitcoin-mining industry, leveraging Russia's cheap energy to rival China as the world’s largest mining market.

    The company, known as Russian Miner Coin, or RMC, is seeking to raise $100 million in an initial coin offering, promising buyers a right to 18% of the company’s mining revenue, according to a presentation cited by Bloomberg.

    “Russian Miner Coin is holding a so-called initial coin offering, where investors will use units of Ethereum or bitcoin to buy new RMC tokens. These new tokens will have rights to 18 percent of the revenue earned with the company’s mining equipment, according to a presentation posted on its website.”

    According to Brian Kelly, a frequent CNBC contributor, the announcement is a “watershed” development in the history of bitcoin because it suggests that Putin recognizes the value of the pioneering digital currency as a reserve asset. The Russian president has already expressed an interest in blockchain technology – particularly Ethereum. In June, he met with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum and offered his support for Buterin’s plans to help local partners adopt the technology in Russia.

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    Russia offers several advantages for bitcoin miners: For example, its excess power capacity is substantial.

    “Russia has 20 gigawatts of excess power capacity, with consumer electricity prices as low as 80 kopeks (1.3 cents) per kilowatt hour, which is less than in China, RMC said in the presentation."

    The company plans to build its own mining hardware using computer chips designed in Russia.

    “RMC plans to use semiconductor chips designed in Russia for use in satellites to minimize power consumption in computers for crypto-mining, Putin’s internet ombudsman, Dmitry Marinichev, said at a news conference in Moscow. Russia has the potential to reach up to 30 percent share in global cryptocurrency mining in the future, Marinichev said, adding that $10 million from the proceeds of the ICO may be spent developing the processors.”

    Though, in the beginning, the firm will rely on Bitfury chips. Bitfury, a company that manufactures mining equipment and also operates its own mining operations, was founded by Valery Vavilov, a Russian-speaking native of Latvia.

    “The company initially plans to locate mining computers based on Bitfury chips in individual Russian households to challenge Bitmain by using Russia’s lower power prices.”

    Already, at least one Russian government entity is experimenting with blockchain tech. The Central Bank of Russia has already deployed an Ethereum-based blockchain as a pilot project to process online payments and verify customer data with lenders including Sberbank PJSC.

    The vote of confidence from a close Putin associate has helped lift the bitcoin price to all-time highs, according to data from CryptoCompare.

     


     

  • Australian City Council Halts Construction Of Synagogue Over Fears That ISIS Could Target It

    Authored by Daniel Lang via SHTFplan.com,

    People living in the West have given up a lot to satisfy their government’s concerns over terrorism. Here in the US for instance, our right to privacy in our homes, on our persons, and especially in our communications, has essentially died since 9/11. Everything we say on our phones or search on the internet is catalogued by the NSA without a warrant, we can’t fly on an airplane without being groped and prodded by TSA agents, it’s now fairly common to be forced through police checkpoints many miles away from any border.

    The US isn’t alone in this regard. Across the board, every Western nation has sacrificed essential freedoms in the name of combating terrorism. The only difference is that unlike in the US, most Western nations have sacrificed more speech related freedoms rather than privacy (though all Westerners have lost both rights to some degree). This is especially true in Europe and Canada, where expressing right wing opinions or criticizing Islam is now considered a hate crime, and is believed to be an invitation for more terrorist attacks.

    Australians however, seems to be close to losing their right to practice any religion they want. That’s what the Jewish community in Sydney learned recently when they tried to build a synagogue. Residents and city council members decided to not let the structure come to fruition because they feared it would invite terrorist attacks.

    The temple was to be built in Bondi, a short walk from Australia’s famous Bondi Beach. But locals worried that the space would pose a security risk to nearby residents, motorists and pedestrians. As evidence of that threat, the council pointed to the synagogue’s own design, which included setback buildings and blast walls. They also said the design would have an “unacceptable impact” on the street and neighbourhood.

     

    “A number of residents agreed with the contentions … and provided additional evidence against the development of the site,” the council said in a statement.

    And on top of that, the courts complained that the building’s design would only protect the worshipers inside.

    But the court sided with the council. In its decision, the court explained that western countries are under threat from Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and that the potential of an attack in Australia is considered “probable” by government officials. The court also noted that the designs would serve only to protect those inside the building, not those outside.

    You know the West is slipping into collectivist madness, when you can’t construct a building that is only designed to protect the people inside of it from an external threat. That would be like saying that you’re not allowed to own body armor because it doesn’t protect bystanders from gunfire. (Oh wait, body armor is highly regulated in Australia and most people who aren’t cops, soldiers, or security guards can’t own it? Color me shocked.) But worst of all, the refusal to let this synagogue be built is nothing more than an admission that the terrorists have won.

    “The decision is unprecedented,” Rabbi Yehoram Ulman told news.com.au. “Its implications are enormous. It basically implies that no Jewish organization should be allowed to exist in residential areas. It stands to stifle Jewish existence and activity in Sydney and indeed, by creating a precedent, the whole of Australia, and by extension rewarding terrorism.”

    It’s such a big win for terrorism that I doubt any terrorist organization ever expected to have these results. Here’s a country of 24 million people that has lost less than 10 people to terrorism over the past 20 years. They all died at the hands of Islamic radicals, who are known to despise Judaism. Sydney’s response is to prevent a Synagogue from being built in a vain effort to prevent more terrorist attacks. The city is doing exactly what Islamic terrorists want them to do, and these terrorists barely had to lift a finger.

    If this kind of moral weakness isn’t overcome in the West, then our freedoms will not survive the next generation.

  • The Opioid Crisis Is Even Worse Than We Thought

    America’s opioid epidemic is now killing more than 100 people every day, fueling a public-health crisis that’s straining state and local resources – even forcing at least one Pennsylvania coroner to increase his freezer capacity to make room for all of the bodies.

    And according to one recently published study, the epidemic may be killing more Americans than previously believed. The study, published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, suggests that certain states may have underestimated the rate of opioid- and heroin-related deaths, skewing national death totals by more than 20%. In 2014, the most recent year covered by the study, the rate of opioid-related deaths was, in reality, 24% higher than the official count.   

    Meanwhile, data from the CDC released Tuesday show that drug overdose deaths peaked in the third quarter of last year, with 19.7 for every 100,000 people, compared with 16.7 in the same period the year before.

    Trump signed an executive order in March creating a national opioid commission to recommend strategies for combating the crisis. The commission, which is being led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, has already urged Trump to declare a national emergency to deal with the opioid crisis. A final list of recommendations is expected by Oct. 1.

    "We will fight this deadly epidemic and the United States will win," Trump said during a press briefing on Tuesday called to address the opioid epidemic. "We will win. We have no alternative."

    Discrepancies arise when death certificates don’t specify the class of drug, or the specific drug, responsible for a given death. In certain states, the corrected opioid-related death rates were significantly higher than what had previously been reported. In Pennsylvania, which had the highest discrepancy, the real rate was more than double the official rate, with deaths per 100,000 rising to 17.8 from 8.5. Indiana, Alabama, Louisiana and Kentucky were also guilty of “substantially” underreporting death rates.

    According to government data, Pennsylvania had the 32nd highest reported opioid mortality rate and the 20th highest reported heroin mortality rate in the country. But the study found that nearly half of opioid and heroin-related deaths weren’t counted. When the data were corrected, Pennsylvania’s ranking rose to the fourth-highest opioid mortality rate, and seventh-highest heroin mortality rate.

    The corrected data also yielded more “coherent” geographic patterns by eliminated discrepancies caused by quirks in how fatality data are collected in each state.

    “Specifically, the corrected death rates demonstrate that opioid involved mortality was concentrated in the Mountain States, Rust Belt, and Industrial North—extending to New England—and much of the South, whereas heroin deaths were particularly high in the Northeast and Rust Belt, but less so in the South or Mountain States. The results were less apparent when using reported rates, because high mortality in states such as Pennsylvania and Indiana were concealed by a frequent lack of specificity about drug involvement on death certificates.”

    The study, which analyzed data on drug-related deaths collected between 2008 and 2014, found that heroin-related deaths increased more rapidly in most states, except for Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska. Nationwide, the increase in heroin-involved mortality was underestimated by around 18%, while the change in opioid-related fatalities was negligible.

    Drug-overdose deaths in 2015 killed 52,000 Americans, more than gun homicides or car accidents. Preliminary data suggest that number grew to nearly 60,000 in 2016. In one Ohio county, deaths from drug overdoses – the bulk of which were caused by powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl – surpassed deaths from homicides, suicides and car crashes combined.

    And 2017 is expected to be even worse.

    Read the full study below:

    2017.08.08ajpmopiates by zerohedge on Scribd

     

     

     

  • The Globalist Agenda Is Being Met: "To Collapse The United States Internally And Attack It Externally"

    Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

    “An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as easily as a king.”

    Mel Gibson as Benjamin Martin, in “The Patriot”

    The rights of the American people have been, and are being trampled into the dust, as the pseudo-representatives glut themselves from the trough of lobbyists and oligarchs alike.  It could be proven, but won’t be proven: the investigating “authority” is not accountable to the people and there is no oversight.  The FBI, and any investigations under special counsel?  Look at Fast and Furious and how the Attorney General’s office covered that one up.  What is needed to prove it?  Something that doesn’t exist.  Here is what is needed:

    A team of spotless individuals with a leader of unquestionable character and service…with complete authority and impunity: unable to be hindered by any federal, state, or local police and army of “authorities.”  This Special Investigative Team would have the power to investigate fully any and all ties to Congressmen, Senators, and Supreme Court judges…to find evidence of bribery, kickbacks, and influence peddling…and then arrest them and bring them to trial.

    Everyone can jump up and down, desiring to boil in oil anyone making such a suggestion; however, without some kind of accountability, these elected officials are running rampant and trampling the rights of the citizens.  Who is going to stop it?  The courts?  The courts are the biggest pack of crooks of all.  Yes, “Your Honor,” and “The Honorable,” ad infinitum.

    I guarantee that a Special Investigator with impunity would have found plenty of coral snakes under Chief (in)Justice John Roberts’ front porch…if Obama and Holder had been made to step aside and an investigation had been done.  This should have been done after he cast his deciding vote on Obamacare.  Going back a few years, Obamacare would have never made it to the floor of the Senate if Olympia Snow (R, ME) had not allowed it to come up for a vote.  Who paid her off?

    In order to follow the money, you have to be allowed to follow it: or you’ll just end up arrested or dead.

    The special unit of investigators I suggested?  They need to be armed to the teeth, and they need giant, shiny badges that every human in the Western Hemisphere will recognize.  And why not?  It worked for Elliot Ness and his team.  This won’t be done, of course, for one reason:

    The method would work and the crooked politicos would be caught.

    In a system replete with corruption, we can’t have a group of investigators who are not corrupt and “untouchable,” because that would threaten the existing social, political, economic, and religious order.  We have a Supreme Court that selectively interprets legislation, effectively bypassing checks and balances under the Constitution and establishing themselves as lawmakers, or “law-breakers,” whichever you prefer.  But they are “jaw-breakers,” and in essence breaking the people’s jaws to prevent argument as they stick the rings in their noses and then recess for three months to hide.  There is no accountability fostered upon them, no recourse for their “Supreme Decisions” that affect 315 million people.

    The “Tyranny of the Majority” in action once more.

    McCain.  McCain is the epitome of the reason that term limits should be placed upon representatives.  McCain is the prime example of why a Special Investigative Unit is needed.  Really?  Champion McCain, just coming off of the deck from brain surgery in the 13th round, to score a knockout against the American people?  Who lined his pockets?  Who?  Was it the insurance companies, or was it Soros?  Where do we find the individuals who will not be bought to investigate this matter?

    We will never be allowed to have such special personnel to investigate a matter such as McCain’s “vote”: this is because the people are not in charge.  We are ruled, not governed.

    McCain was the one who orchestrated the ousting of the duly elected President of Ukraine, Yanukoyvich, who was elected under Ukrainian Constitutional law.  Is that in itself not a violation of the Logan Act?  Oh, but since McCain and company were acting on behalf of the American people as their elected officials, it’s all well and good, then.

    McCain is part of the bigger picture, and look at the titanic struggle that has already transpired for clarification: the struggle between the establishment to impose an individual mandate, and the public to resist it.  The vote?  It is scripted at this point.

    McConnell and Ryan all “ooh’s” and “aah’s” with the Don Adams/Agent 86 line: “Missed it by that much!”

    Wrong.  They didn’t miss a beat.  All of the Congress (in this latest vote…the word “vote,” what a joke) with a final tally of 49-51…making it appear to be a close one.  They only did it that way to not unseat half of Congress (Republican or not), and the Republicans who voted to repeal could point at it, “They voted to repeal”…when the failed vote was a done deal long before it came to the floor.   McCain did his job for the Establishment, and he’ll be on his way out of the Senate to retire soon enough…. and voila!  The individual mandate remains.

    The individual mandate is the prize they have fought for more than 100 years.  They will not relinquish that stranglehold from the throat of the American people.  The steppingstone to a single-payer system, the individual mandate assures that you will be accountable to the State whether you are a housewife or a homeless beggar.

    Of course, Congress, the Administration, the Courts, and the rest of the Politburo are exempt from the individual mandate, now, aren’t they?

    The President has no effectiveness.  I wrote a piece earlier this year, entitled The President Needs to Purge and Start Fresh: White House Staff Has Been Infiltrated and Infested.  Here is an excerpt from that piece:

    “…the President is beset by forces in Washington and in the White House who are determined to derail his “cleansing” efforts and continue with their own actions.  Those forces are spearheaded by the RINO (Republicans In Name Only) “5th Columnists” either working directly for and with the Democratic Party or independently of them but for the interests of the Globalist Network.”

    I also wrote another article entitled Trump Off and Running But He Can’t Do It Alone: Six Things Americans Must Do To Make Real Change Happen.  Please read this:

    “Around November [2017] the Congressmen and Senators will begin to campaign.  They will be a year out, and in order to keep their seats in the midterm election in November of 2018, there will have to be a good track record for the next year, with visible results within 6 to 8 months.  There is also no excuse, now.  The Republican Party holds the House and the Senate.  There is nothing from a legislative perspective that the President cannot accomplish, at least for the next year and nine months.  Of course, this will take solidarity within the Republican Party, and the Republicans have not had a very good track record in this department…”

    I also wrote about this , after the President was elected, but before his inauguration, with this article entitled Trump Can’t Stop It: The People Who Have Been Orchestrating the Collapse Have Not Halted Their Agendas.  This excerpt explains the entire point of this current piece, as well:

    “The globalists need the illusion of a two-party system to enable a “reprieve” in the minds of the people with the rise of a Bush or a Trump…but the reprieve is merely an illusion.  If these Marxist traitors forced their agenda on the people all at once, there would have been a revolution at its inception.  They alternate: destroy the society and the culture to the max under a Democrat administration, and then “scale back” a bit under a Republican administration while still nipping away at the edges with an “Act” here or a “piece of legislation” there.

     

    It may take them a little longer, but Trump will not be able to undo the current course toward the collapse of the United States and the relinquishing of national sovereignty in favor of global governance.”

    McCain just became the key player in the “it just takes one man” mantra…with the refusal to repeal Obamacare and negate the individual mandate.  In the meantime, the Cloward and Piven, Alinsky, and Van Jones methods employed to collapse American society are paralleled by the threats of war, either orchestrated by the U.S. or otherwise.  Bush Jr. was flagging in popularity and then decided to invade Iraq.  It gave him the election and another 4 years.  History repeats itself.

    War is right around the corner, and the globalist agenda is being met: to collapse the United States internally and attack it externally.  I stand by my prior statements regarding the latter:

    The next world war will be initiated by an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) weapon detonated over the continental U.S., followed by a nuclear exchange and an attack by conventional forces.

    In the meanwhile, traitors such as McCain continue to collapse the system within and advance the agendas of their paymasters.  Can anyone honestly take one look at McConnell and say that he did not know of McCain’s vote prior to it being cast?  They are not representatives…they have misrepresented themselves and do not reflect the will of the American people.  Because of this, the U.S. has been on its deathbed for more than 8 years.  We all hoped that with a new President things would turn around, but that doesn’t appear to be very likely at this point in time.

  • South Dakota Airmen Arrive "Ready To Fight Tonight" From Guam

    It appears things are starting to move fast…

    Pacific Air Forces Public Affairs reports from Joint Base Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

    Two U.S. Air Force B-1B bombers, under the command of U.S. Pacific Air Forces, joined their counterparts from the Republic of Korea and Japanese air forces in sequenced bilateral missions, August 7.

    This serves as the first mission for the crews and aircraft recently deployed from Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota in support of U.S. Pacific Command’s Continuous Bomber Presence missions.

    After taking off from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, the B-1s assigned to the 37th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron, flew to Japanese airspace, where they were joined by Koku Jieitai (Japan Air Self Defense Force) F-2 fighter jets. The B-1s then flew over the Korean Peninsula where they were joined by Republic of Korea Air Force KF-16 fighter jets. The B-1s then performed a pass over the Pilsung Range before leaving South Korean airspace and returning to Guam.

    Throughout the approximately 10-hour mission, the aircrews practiced intercept and formation training, enabling them to enhance their combined capabilities and tactical skills, while also strengthening the long standing military-to-military relationships in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region.

    Ellsworth B-1s were last deployed to Guam in August 2016 when they took over CBP operations from the B-52 Stratofortress bomber squadrons from Minot AFB, North Dakota, and Barksdale AFB, Louisiana.

    “How we train is how we fight and the more we interface with our allies, the better prepared we are to fight tonight,” said a 37th EBS B-1 pilot. “The B-1 is a long-range bomber that is well-suited for the maritime domain and can meet the unique challenges of the Pacific.”

    Aircrews, maintenance and support personnel, will continue generating B-1 bomber sorties to demonstrate the continuing U.S. commitment to stability and security in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region, providing commanders with a strategic power projection platform and fulfilling the need for anytime mission-ready aircraft, an important part of national defense during a time of high regional tension.

    “While at home station my crews are constantly refining their tactics and techniques so that we can better integrate with our counterparts from other nations,” said Lt. Col. Daniel Diehl, 37th EBS, commander. “As demonstrated today, our air forces stand combat-ready to deliver airpower when called upon.”

    The U.S. has maintained a regular bomber presence in the Indo-Asia-Pacific since 2004 and this mission demonstrated our continued ironclad commitment to regional allies. Further, it increased our readiness and exercised our rights under international law to fly legally in the place and time of our choosing.

  • North Korea and the POTUS

    A couple of days, I did a post in which I mused about “One Possible Path“, which included this critical element that would precede a market tumble:

    0808-something

    Well, maybe we’ve already got our “something”

    Now look, I’m not so naive as to think that some sabre-rattling from the chubby monster in North Korea is necessarily meaningful. Threats from North Korea are about as game-changing as peace talks in the Middle East………..I’ve heard of them both for decades, and nothing ever, ever changes. Not even a little.

    And yet this time seems a little different, at least for the moment, and the US dollar is getting a bit freaked out:

    0808-usd

    In particular, North Korea isn’t just tossing around their unusual nonsense about the mongrel bastards of the United States, but is very specifically stating it is getting prepared for a possible attack on Guam, of all places.

    0808-guam

    An interesting little thought occurred to your favorite blogger, however. It’s quite cynical, but let me lay it out……….

    Trump probably realizes deep down how unpopular he is among a big chunk of the public. He’s also shrewd enough to know that the way to popularity is war. Look no farther than the first President Bush. Just after the Gulf War, his approval rating was way above 90%. Can you imagine that? Honestly – – think about it –  that means that almost every person who voted for Hillary in 2016 also APPROVED of George Bush back in 1990! (Assuming they were adults in both cases). That’s really saying something.

    Now, the whole North Korea thing is impossible to solve if you want to avoid death. There simply is no way to create a regime change without a lot of dead bodies.

    But……..what if those dead bodies aren’t ‘Mericuhn? How about, instead, if they were, oh, say……..from this lovely city:

    That is – Seoul, Korea.

    So we a situation something like this:

    (a) Trump launches a small, targeted military attack at North Korea’s regime, fully accepting that someone close by is going to get the shit blown out of them;

    (b) North Korea retaliates with a vicious, deadly assault on Seoul, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths;

    (c) The United States then opens up the gates of hell and blows North Korea into the dark ages, as revenge;

    (d) When all the dust has settled, the world is glad Kim is gone, but is mad at hell at the United States and demands the U.S. basically pay for the mess it just created (what’s another few trillion in debt, eh?)

    Thus, Trump does not one but TWO impossible things: (a) he eliminates the Kim regime, which no one else could do (b) he becomes, for a while at least, much, much more popular than he is now in the United States, while at the same time scaring the holy hell out of the entire world, since he obviously means what he says.

    Of course, the above scenario is pretty damned far-fetched, but………so was Trump winning the election in 2016.

  • "On The Beach" 2017 – The Beckoning Of Nuclear War

    Paul Craig Roberts writes that the admirable and honorable truth-teller John Pilger warns us that nuclear war is closer than we think.

    The 1957 book, On The Beach, introduced awareness that war in the nuclear age is terminable for life on earth. This realization explains President John F. Kennedy’s rejection of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s recommendation to launch a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Today as evidenced by the behavior of the US government, its European vassal states, and neoconservative pundits, this realization no longer informs US policy.

     

    Pilger speaks of the lobotomy performed on each generation that removes facts from history. Pilger himself is a victim when he chooses to stress that Ronald Reagan defended the Vietnam war instead of emphasizing that Reagan worked with Gorbachev to reduce the threat of nuclear war. The lobotomy that has been performed on the Western world has destroyed knowledge that the US and Russia were on peaceful terms prior to the Soviet collapse.

     

    These peaceful terms lasted a short time, only through the administration of President George H.W. Bush. With the advent of the Clinton regime, all peaceful agreements that were made have been consistently broken by Washington for 24 years throughout the two-term presidencies of three regimes, and now Congress is set on destroying what remains of the work of 20th century US administrations to remove the specter of nuclear armageddon. The defense authorization bill currently before Congress overturns the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. This treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons and signaled the end of the Cold War.

    John Pilger tells us of the certain consequences of the renewed nuclear arms race:

     

    The US submarine captain says, "We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming. Well, now we do know and there's nothing to be done about it."

     

    He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.

     

    The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and lifeless now.

     

    A curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and New Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last cities, towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most buildings will remain untouched, some illuminated by the last flickers of electric light.

     

    This is the way the world ends

     

    Not with a bang but a whimper

    These lines from T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men appear at the beginning of Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, which left me close to tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same.

    Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent.

    Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the living world.

    I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as the US Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world's second most lethal nuclear power.  There was no justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder.

    The "sanctions" are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.

    Their main aim seems to be war – real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.

    The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste whole societies – the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called "a noble cause" and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an "exceptional people"He was not referring to the Vietnamese.

    Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young teenagers. "Listen up," he said. "We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom."

    At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders took their own lives. Listen up, indeed.

    A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls "an eternal present".

    Harold Pinter described this as "manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

    Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously "the left" are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today revert to one name: Trump.

    Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for "liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics", wrote Luciana Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man – not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system – beckons great danger for all of us.

    While they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardian suppress the essence of the most important political story of our time as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.

    On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a "Soviet agent"), the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the United States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war on Russia. Unlike every other Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a caveat from Trump himself that it was "clearly unconstitutional".

    A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia.

    This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the "national security" managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther King called them "the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today".

    They have encircled Russia and China with missiles and a nuclear arsenal. They have used neo-Nazis to instal an unstable, aggressive regime on Russia's "borderland" – the way through which Hitler invaded, causing the deaths of 27 million people.  Their goal is to dismember the modern Russian Federation.

    In response, "partnership" is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin – anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon. Their history tells them to get ready.

    The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea, through which pass China's economic lifelines.

    The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, "if required", he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute's fiction.

    None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits, dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding clichés. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.

    The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on China, John Bordne, a member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based in Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 – during the Cuban missile crisis – he and his colleagues were "told to launch all the missiles" from their silos.

    Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded – but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not "stand down".

    At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United States was such that US officials who were on official business in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 – the year Shute wrote On the Beach – no official in the State Department could speak the language of the world's most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed, aimed at Russia.

    The bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. The terms "left" and "right" are meaningless. Most of America's modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats.

    When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America's longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings – murder – by drones.

    In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study, Obama, the "reluctant liberal warrior", dropped 26,171 bombs – three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.  Having pledged to help "rid the world" of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War.

    Trump is a wimp by comparison. It was Obama – with his secretary of state Hillary Clinton at his side – who destroyed Libya as a modern state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration groups knew him as the "deporter-in-chief".

    One of Obama's last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a record $618billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has endorsed this.

    Buried in the detail was the establishment of a "Center for Information Analysis and Response". This is a ministry of truth. It is tasked with providing an "official narrative of facts" that will prepare us for the real possibility of nuclear war – if we allow it.

  • High-End Manhattan Real Estate Gets A Reality Check As 40-50% Of Listings See Price Cuts

    After a temporary dip in 2016, prices for expensive Manhattan and Brooklyn real estate seems to be on the rise yet again.  But no matter how quickly the bubble re-inflates, it can’t seem to keep up with the perpetually positive outlook of New York’s home sellers. 

    As Bloomberg points out today, despite a rise in prices YoY, 25% of homes sold in 2Q still experienced a price cut at closing versus their original listing prices.  Moreover, as much as 40-60% of the homes sold in the more trendy neighborhoods are seeing price cuts.

    In most Manhattan neighborhoods, at least 25 percent of homes on the market in the second quarter had their prices cut. The share was smaller only at the borough’s northernmost tip, in Inwood and Marble Hill. In prime areas such as the West Village and Chelsea, about half of listings had their prices trimmed.

     

    Even in high-demand Brooklyn, owners realized they’d gotten too ambitious. Forty-one percent of Williamsburg listings saw a reduction in asking price, while in Bushwick, the share was 48 percent. The waterfront area that includes Red Hook had the biggest share of cuts, at 59 percent.

     

    The whittling shows “that even in these areas that are really hot, it’s possible for sellers to be out of sync with the market, and that there is a limit to how high prices can go,” said Grant Long, senior economist with StreetEasy, which provided the data.

     

    But, it’s not all bad news for Manhattan real estate owners these days as Douglas Elliman notes that 2Q prices and volume were both up fairly substantially, on a sequential and YoY basis.

    NYC

     

    That said, the new development market, which has been flooded by supply additions courtesy of Yellen’s accommodative interest rates, remains a key weak spot for the Manhattan market with prices per foot down 15% sequentially and listing discounts soaring to 7.5% versus units that were flying off the shelf at a 1% premium to listing price last year.

    As we like to say, eventually things like math and supply/demand models actually matter…

  • PANIC: CNN REPORTS FROM BUNKER, AS AMERICA PREPARES FOR NUCLEAR WAR WITH N. KOREA

    Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

     

     

    Ladies and gentlemen, this is Le Fly reporting to you live from his nuclear bomb shelter. I’ve been planning for this day all of my life. Ever since I was a baby, I knew the world would be destroyed by thermal nuclear detonations. It will be an ironic end to this perfidious way of living, with bombs raining down upon us by way of technology given to North Korea from our own government.

    But enough of that. We do not have time to blame one another for misdeeds. After all, this is the end. The world is ending and you’re going to hell.

    At the front of this war is the tiny island of Guam. They’ll be smoked inside 10 minutes flat. North Korea’s MIRV guided missiles will turn that paradise into a literal hell, ssomething you might see while watching your favorite teevee show after a dragon attack.

    Here’s the Congresswoman of Guam, Rep. Bordallo, chimping the fuck out on CNN. She thinks our THAAD interceptors can save her. Silly moron.

    CNN is reporting LIVE from a nuclear bomb bunker in Hawaii, enlightening people to some very key pieces of information. For example, in the event of nuclear war, THERE WILL BE SURVIVORS.

    ‘A lot of people on this island think if they’re hit with a nuclear warhead that everyone is going to die. And the emergency folks here say THAT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE. NOT TRUE. There will be lots of survivors.’

    Watch.

     

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    Full clip.

    This all comes in response to the President’s very real threat, saying he’d rain ‘fire, fury, and quite frankly power’ down upon the heads of N. Korea — if they so bothered to look at us sideways.

    N. Korea responded, in kind, suggesting they’d turn Guam into an ashtray.

    It was nice knowing all of you. I expect N. Korea’s missile guidance systems will veer off a bit, generously depositing nuclear missiles all across the US, including the Northeast corridor where I am presently domiciled. It was an honor and privilege to shit-post for you all of these years.

    As for the stock market, I expect it will trade up 0.3% tomorrow on this world ending news.

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