- Embattled Lukashenko Raises Possibility Of Fresh Elections In First Hint At Compromise
Embattled Lukashenko Raises Possibility Of Fresh Elections In First Hint At Compromise
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/09/2020 – 02:45Embattled Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has remained defiant after weeks of mass protests have brought parts of the country, especially the capital of Minsk, to a standstill, following his disputed August 9 reelection to a sixth term. He’s actually been seen walking the presidential compound grounds in combat fatigues while holding an automatic rifle, to show just how serious he is about resisting the unrest increasingly at the gates of his residence.
But on Tuesday he showed the first signs he might be willing to compromise as both domestic and international pressures grow toward holding a fresh election. The opposition claims the Aug.9 election was “rigged” as exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya urges “international pressure on this regime” while issuing regular messages from neighboring Lithuania
Lukashenko was quoted in Interfax as saying Tuesday that he may have “overstayed” his time in office and that he would “not exclude early presidential elections” in a significant first sign of possibly softening his stance.
Putin recently indicated he would host Alexander Lukashenko in Moscow “in the next couple of weeks”. Source: AFP However, he underscored in the comments that he remains the only leader capable of carrying out any need reform, saying the possibility of a rerun of the contested election would only be accomplished after constitutional reform takes place.
“We are ready to carry out the reform of the Constitution; after that I do not exclude early presidential elections,” Lukashenko said according to Interfax news agency.
Notably he also rebuffed calls to hold cooperative dialogue with Belarus’ opposition Coordination Council, saying “I do not know who these people are.” This after European Union leaders are urging “dialogue” between the two sides.
Previously Lukashenko has made statements suggesting a replay of the Ukraine crisis, warning that “NATO is at the gates” and that he’d never given into the demands of foreign forces. At the same time he’s held out the possibility of Russian security services support if the situation unravels and Belarus comes under threat of NATO.
There he is again, its Sunday-Kalaschnikow-Time for Lukaschenko. Picture is from his office, released just now. pic.twitter.com/JG8ZD2pfEa
— Paul Ronzheimer (@ronzheimer) August 30, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
It should be noted that indeed NATO military drills are currently being conducted across the border in Lithuania; however, NATO leadership has stressed the games were “pre-planned” and are not directly connected to the crisis.
Lithuania’s defense ministry has stressed the war games are “pre-planned and not associated with any events in the region.”
- Sweden: The Violence Is "Extremely Serious"
Sweden: The Violence Is “Extremely Serious”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/09/2020 – 02:00Authored by Judith Bergman via The Gatestone Institute,
Things in Sweden have now deteriorated to such a degree that on August 29, the Swedish police published a statement titled “The trends in violence are extremely serious.” It said:
“Recently, there have been serious incidents and serious acts of violence linked to criminal networks, in which several people have been murdered and others seriously injured…
“In Stockholm, two people were murdered in the past week, and in Gothenburg, criminal groups have tried to demonstrate power by controlling vehicles entering certain districts. Earlier in August, an innocent 12-year-old girl was murdered… [during a gang incident], and in other parts of the country there are conflicts between various criminal networks and other ruthless crime, as well. On Friday night, a violent riot also occurred in Malmö where several police officers were injured…”
Sweden’s National Police Chief, Anders Thornberg, made what sounded like a plea for help from the rest of society: “Swedish police are in a tough operational situation. It is now a matter of society joining forces behind the police,” he said.
“We will continue to fight organized crime with all the tools we have available. Other good forces in society, everything from municipal officials and civil society to law enforcement agencies and not least the general public, also need to focus on facing the current situation. The police must ensure that the criminals are arrested and can be prosecuted. The criminals need to disappear from our streets and squares so that no more ruthless crimes are committed…
“The everyday life many police officers face when they go to work right now is worrying and very tiring. We work intensively, around the clock, despite this, the severe violence continues. The police are there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We do not give up and we do not back down, but the situation is currently very stressful.”
The police statement did not mention that two boys were raped, tortured and nearly buried alive in a cemetery close to Stockholm. The atrocity added to the growing number of so-called “humiliation crimes“. These are crimes where the victim is not only robbed, but also violently humiliated to demonstrate the power of the perpetrator. Another such humiliation crime, for instance, took place in Gothenburg in October 2019, when a criminal gang forced their victim to kiss the gang leader’s feet, while they filmed him. After that, they stomped on his face until he lost consciousness.
“Sweden is losing control of its own territory,” Ivar Arpi, a Swedish columnist, recently told the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende.
“These heinous crimes and humiliations are connected to a ghetto culture… Journalists do not like to write about it, politicians do not want to talk about it and researchers do not want to touch it. There is a systematic ignorance.”
In the riot that took place in Malmö on August 28, an estimated 300 people burned car tires, shot fireworks and threw stones at the police. The riot occurred close to Rosengård, a so-called “vulnerable area”, populated mainly by immigrants. Video footage posted to social media showed the rioters shouting “Allahu Akbar” and “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Mohammed is returning” — a reference to the massacre of the Jews of Khaybar by the Islamic prophet Mohammed and his followers in the year 628, in what is today Saudi Arabia. The Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities released a statement in reaction to the riot, saying:
“Unfortunately, this is not the first time a crowd has chanted similar threats against Jews in Malmö. The Council of Swedish Jewish Communities takes this incident extremely seriously and calls on the police and other responsible authorities to prosecute those individuals who have thereby committed incitement against an ethnic group.”
According to Swedish media, the riot was a reaction to the burning of a Koran earlier in the day in one part of Malmö and the kicking of a Koran in a central square in the city by followers of the small Danish anti-Islam party, Stram Kurs. The leader of the party, Rasmus Paludan, has previously toured Denmark with his anti-Islam protests.
Paludan’s demonstrations frequently feature a “Koran stunt.” In it, he either throws a Koran around, burns it or puts bacon on it. Dan Park, a Swedish street artist, who has been convicted of inciting hatred against an ethnic group, had invited Paludan to Malmö to participate in a demonstration. Paludan was stopped at the Swedish border and denied entry by Swedish police, who told him that he was banned from entering the country for two years.
“We believe that his actions and freedom of entry would be a threat to fundamental societal interests,” said Mattias Sigfridsson, Malmö’s Acting Police Chief. Asked whether the decision did not go against the freedom of expression, Sigfridsson said:
“We see it as the opposite. We do our utmost to protect the democratic values that exist. The public gathering for which we have denied permission today would have been a danger to safety and order at the event”.
“I think it is those who react to what I do, who constitute a threat,” Paludan told Swedish media. The decision to ban Paludan’s demonstration was upheld by the Swedish Administrative Court. It held that while the freedom of assembly and demonstration are constitutionally protected rights and that there is therefore a very limited scope to refuse permission to demonstrate, the threat from the demonstration was so serious that it justified banning him. The Koran burning that ensued despite the police decision happened in contravention of the ban. Three people were arrested and charged with incitement, reportedly for kicking around a Koran in central Malmö.
In the Gothenburg suburb of Angered, a criminal gang set up roadblocks and manned them with masked armed men who checked the identities of people driving in and out of the area. According to Berlingske Tidende, the roadblocks were set up by a gang centered around the Ali Khan family, who deal in financial fraud and other crimes. The clan has been reported to the police more than 200 times but the police have had to close almost all cases because the gang threatens the victims and witnesses to stay silent.
Also recently in Gothenburg, a teacher at the Lövgärdes School reported two armed men moving around outside the school and notified the police, but by the time they arrived the men had disappeared. When the teacher drove home from school later that day, he was kidnapped and beaten.
The leader of the main Swedish opposition party, Moderaterna (The Moderate Party), Ulf Kristersson, now says that he wants to make it a crime to be member of a gang.
“Several children have died only this year in stabbings and shootings,” Kristersson wrote in a Facebook post.
“This weekend, two boys were subjected to terrible atrocities in a cemetery in Solna for an entire night. On Tuesday, a teacher in Gothenburg was kidnapped and beaten after contacting the police.
“What we now experience almost daily is not normal — not for Sweden or for Europe. Almost all of us who live here know that. The development is destroying Swedish trust and cohesion, the violence is threatening the system. The criminal gangs terrorize entire residential areas and kill children and adults who happen to be in the way. They set up their own roadblocks and control people’s everyday lives. They are like Sweden’s domestic terrorists — and must therefore be met with the full force of our democracy. Pattern-breaking measures that really lead to change, not just adjustments in the margin.
“Sweden should start by making it a crime to be part of a criminal gang, in the same way that it should be a crime to be part of a terrorist organization. It would thus give the police new opportunities to act against the activities we have seen in Gothenburg in recent days, such as establishing roadblocks or arranging meetings in which various criminal gangs participate.”
In other news, the Västra Skrävlinge church in Malmö was recently vandalized seven nights in a row. Windows were smashed and statues broken, including a statue of Jesus that was smashed to pieces. The perpetrators are unknown, but the Sweden Democrats Party in Malmö has asked the Church of Swedish to look deeper into the matter, adding in a statement:
“Considering the vandalism of Västra Skrävlinge Church that we have seen and the systematic vandalism we see in our cemeteries, this is an area that the Church of Sweden must work with. Unfortunately, there is a grudge against Christian culture among certain groups and the Church of Sweden in Malmö cannot be passive while the Christian cultural heritage is vandalized.“
- Whitney: Is BLM The Mask Behind Which The Oligarchs Operate?
Whitney: Is BLM The Mask Behind Which The Oligarchs Operate?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 23:40Authored by Mike Whitney,
Here’s your BLM Pop Quiz for the day: What do “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning tell us about what’s going on in America today?
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They point to deeply-embedded racism that shapes the behavior of white people
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They suggest that systemic racism cannot be overcome by merely changing attitudes and laws
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They alert us to the fact that unresolved issues are pushing the country towards a destructive race war
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They indicate that powerful agents — operating from within the state– are inciting racial violence to crush the emerging “populist” majority that elected Trump to office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to transform America into a tyrannical third-world “shithole”.
Which of these four statements best explains what’s going on in America today?
If you chose Number 4, you are right. We are not experiencing a sudden and explosive outbreak of racial violence and mayhem. We are experiencing a thoroughly-planned, insurgency-type operation that involves myriad logistical components including vast, nationwide riots, looting and arson, as well as an extremely impressive ideological campaign. “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning are as much a part of the Oligarchic war on America as are the burning of our cities and the toppling of our statues. All three, fall under the heading of “ideology”, and all three are being used to shape public attitudes on matters related to our collective identity as “Americans”.
The plan is to overwhelm the population with a deluge of disinformation about their history, their founders, and the threats they face, so they will submissively accept a New Order imposed by technocrats and their political lackeys. This psychological war is perhaps more important than Operation BLM which merely provides the muscle for implementing the transformative “Reset” that elites want to impose on the country. The real challenge is to change the hearts and minds of a population that is unwaveringly patriotic and violently resistant to any subversive element that threatens to do harm to their country. So, while we can expect this propaganda saturation campaign to continue for the foreseeable future, we don’t expect the strategy will ultimately succeed. At the end of the day, America will still be America, unbroken, unflagging and unapologetic.
Let’s look more carefully at what is going on.
On September 4, the Department of Homeland Security issued a draft report stating that “White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States”. According to an article in Politico:
“…all three draft (versions of the document) describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups…. John Cohen, who oversaw DHS’s counterterrorism portfolio from 2011 to 2014, said the drafts’ conclusion isn’t surprising.
“This draft document seems to be consistent with earlier intelligence reports from DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement sources: that the most significant terror-related threat facing the US today comes from violent extremists who are motivated by white supremacy and other far-right ideological causes,” he said….
“Lone offenders and small cells of individuals motivated by a diverse array of social, ideological, and personal factors will pose the primary terrorist threat to the United States,” the draft reads. “Among these groups, we assess that white supremacist extremists …will pose the most persistent and lethal threat.”..(“DHS draft document: White supremacists are greatest terror threat” Politico)
This is nonsense. White supremacists do not pose the greatest danger to the country, that designation goes to the left-wing groups that have rampaged through more than 2,000 US cities for the last 100 days. Black Lives Matter and Antifa-generated riots have decimated hundreds of small businesses, destroyed the lives and livelihoods of thousands of merchants and their employees, and left entire cities in a shambles. The destruction in Kenosha alone far exceeds the damage attributable to the activities of all the white supremacist groups combined.
So why has Homeland Security made this ridiculous and unsupportable claim? Why have they chosen to prioritize white supremacists as “the most persistent and lethal threat” when it is clearly not true?
There’s only one answer: Politics.
The officials who concocted this scam are advancing the agenda of their real bosses, the oligarch puppet-masters who have their tentacles extended throughout the deep-state and use them to coerce their lackey bureaucrats to do their bidding. In this case, the honchos are invoking the race card (“white supremacists”) to divert attention from their sinister destabilization program, their looting of the US Treasury (for their crooked Wall Street friends), their demonizing of the mostly-white working class “America First” nationalists who handed Trump the 2016 election, and their scurrilous scheme to establish one-party rule by installing their addlepated meat-puppet candidate (Biden) as president so he can carry out their directives from the comfort of the Oval Office. That’s what’s really going on.
DHS’s announcement makes it possible for state agents to target legally-armed Americans who gather with other gun owners in groups that are protected under the second amendment. Now the white supremacist label will be applied more haphazardly to these same conservatives who pose no danger to public safety. The draft document should be seen as a warning to anyone whose beliefs do not jibe with the New Liberal Orthodoxy that white people are inherently racists who must ask forgiveness for a system they had no hand in creating (slavery) and which was abolished more than 150 years ago.
The 1619 Project” is another part of the ideological war that is being waged against the American people. The objective of the “Project” is to convince readers that America was founded by heinous white men who subjugated blacks to increase their wealth and power. According to the World Socialist Web Site:
“The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of American history is rooted in race hatred—specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of “black people” by “white people.” Hannah-Jones writes in the series’ introduction: “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”
This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and development….Hannah-Jones’s reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antagonisms from innate biological processes….where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.” Thus, it must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions…
…No doubt, the authors of The Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided arguments.”
– “The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history”, World Socialist Web Site
Clearly, Hannah-Jones was enlisted by big money patrons who needed an ideological foundation to justify the massive BLM riots they had already planned as part of their US color revolution. The author –perhaps unwittingly– provided the required text for vindicating widespread destruction and chaos carried out in the name of “social justice.”
As Hannah-Jones says, “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country”, which is to say that it cannot be mitigated or reformed, only eradicated by destroying the symbols of white patriarchy (Our icons, our customs, our traditions and our history.), toppling the existing government, and imposing a new system that better reflects the values of the burgeoning non-Caucasian majority. Simply put, The Project 1619 creates the rationale for sustained civil unrest, deepening political polarization and violent revolution.
All of these goals conveniently coincide with the aims of the NWO Oligarchs who seek to replace America’s Constitutional government with a corporate Superstate ruled by voracious Monopolists and their globalist allies. So, while Hannah-Jones treatise does nothing to improve conditions for black people in America, it does move the country closer to the dystopian dream of the parasite class; Corporate Valhalla.
Then there is “Critical Race Theory” which provides the ideological icing on the cake. The theory is part of the broader canon of anti-white dogma which is being used to indoctrinate workers. White employees are being subjected to “reeducation” programs that require their participation as a precondition for further employment . The first rebellion against critical race theory, took place at Sandia Labs which is a federally-funded research agency that designs America’s nuclear weapons. According to journalist Christopher F. Rufo:
“Senator @HawleyMO and @SecBrouillette have launched an inspector general investigation, but Sandia executives have only accelerated their purge against conservatives.”
Sandia executives have made it clear: they want to force critical race theory, race-segregated trainings, and white male reeducation camps on their employees—and all dissent will be severely punished. Progressive employees will be rewarded; conservative employees will be purged.” (“There is a civil war erupting at @SandiaLabs.” Christopher F Rufo)
It all sounds so Bolshevik. Here’s more info on how this toxic indoctrination program works:
“Treasury Department …
The Treasury Department held a training session telling employees that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” and demanding that white staff members “struggle to own their racism” and accept their “unconscious bias, White privilege, and White fragility.”
The National Credit Union Administration
The NCUA held a session for 8,900 employees arguing that America was “founded on racism” and “built on the blacks of people who were enslaved.” Twitter thread here and original source documents here.
Sandia National Laboratories
Last year, Sandia National Labs—which produces our nuclear arsenal—held a three-day reeducation camp for white males, teaching them how to deconstruct their “white male culture” and forcing them to write letters of apology to women and people of color. Whistleblowers from inside the labs tell me that critical race theory is now endangering our national security. Twitter thread hereand original source documents here.
Argonne National Laboratories
Argonne National Labs hosts trainings calling on white lab employees to admit that they “benefit from racism” and atone for the “pain and anguish inflicted upon Black people.” Twitter thread here.
Department of Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security hosted a Training on “microaggressions, microinequities, and microassaults” where white employees were told that they had been “socialized into oppressor roles.” Twitter thread here and original source documents here.” (“Summary of Critical Race Theory Investigations”, Christopher F Rufo)
On September 4, Donald Trump announced his administration “would prohibit federal agencies from subjecting government employees to “critical race theory” or “white privilege” seminar...
“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” read a Friday memo from the Office of Budget and Management Director Russ Vought. “These types of ‘trainings’ not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce … The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions.”
The next day, September 5, Trump announced that the Department of Education was going to see whether the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project was being used in school curricula and– if it was– then those schools would be ineligible for federal funding. Conservative pundits applauded Trump’s action as a step forward in the “culture wars”, but it’s really much more than that. Trump is actually foiling an effort by the domestic saboteurs who continue look for ways to undermine democracy, reduce the masses of working-class people to grinding poverty and hopelessness, and turn the country into a despotic military outpost ruled by bloodsucking tycoons, mercenary autocrats and duplicitous elites. Alot of thought and effort went into this malign ideological project. Trump derailed it with a wave of the hand. That’s no small achievement.
Bottom line: “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning represent the ideological foundation upon which the war on America is based. The “anti-white” dogma is the counterpart to the massive riots that have rocked the country. These phenomena are two spokes on the same wheel. They are designed to work together to achieve the same purpose. The goal is create a “racial” smokescreen that conceals the vast and willful destruction of the US economy, the $5 trillion dollar wealth-transfer that was provided to Wall Street, and the ferocious attack on the emerging, mainly-white working class “populist” movement that elected Trump and which rejects the globalist plan to transform the world into a borderless free trade zone ruled by cutthroat monopolists and their NWO allies.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer that must be eradicated.
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- Rich Americans Flock To Caribbean Ahead Of US Presidential Election Turmoil
Rich Americans Flock To Caribbean Ahead Of US Presidential Election Turmoil
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 23:20Wealthy Americans aren’t just fleeing big cities for rural communities amid the virus pandemic, social unrest, and surge in violent crime; some of these folks are leaving the country until the dust settles. Citizenship advisers, government agencies, and real estate developers are pointing out a surge in inbound migration flow of Americans to countries in the Caribbean Sea ahead of the US presidential election.
Forbes spoke with Mohammed Asaria, whose Range Developments is constructing six new Senses resorts in Grenada, said Americans are flocking to the Caribbean as a means to ‘hideout’ from the socio-economic implosion stateside.
“You’ve got the election coming. That’s number one. You’ve had Covid and certain places in the U.S. have been challenged through that, and more working remotely,” Asaria said.
Requests for long-term stays at Secret Bay in Dominica have soared 66% this year as Americans seek isolation in the mountainous Caribbean island nation.
“It’s the first time the U.S. has gone through a period like this and it’s not just the Covid-19 situation,” Gregor Nassief, its owner, told Forbes. “It is the fear of what an extreme outcome on the left or right may look like after the presidential election.”
Petra Roach, head of Global Markets for Visit Barbados, said Barbados recently unveiled a new 12-month “Welcome Stamp” program that is intended to target Americans who want to escape the chaos in the US and work remotely in a peaceful country for an extended period. Since the launch, more than 1,100 applications have been seen, nearly half of the applicants are from the US, UK, and Canada.
To accommodate the increasing demand for long-term stays, hotels in Barbados, such as Hilton and Marriott, are now offering long-term packages for wealthy Americans.
Hilton Barbados As turmoil continues into late summer, wealthy Americans have already begun to apply for citizenship by investment, which means some Caribbean nations are requiring a minimum of $200,000 for investment in real estate to access citizenship.
“We have seen an uptick in applications from the U.S. for people who want an alternative passport,” said Les Khan, chief executive of the St Kitts and Nevis Citizenship by Investment Unit.
“We’re looking at alternatives outside of our hotels,” said Khan. “Individuals are looking for opportunities outside of those hotels and get access to our citizenship through private homes. It’s something that we’re exploring.
While some are hiding out in the Caribbean until the chaos subsides, there are other Americans who are renouncing their citizenship at a record clip as they fear the country is on a pathway towards collapse.
- Iran Seeks Revenge For Sabotage Attack On Natanz Nuclear Plant
Iran Seeks Revenge For Sabotage Attack On Natanz Nuclear Plant
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 23:00Iran has identified the perpetrators of an act of sabotage at Natanz nuclear facility in the central part of the country in July, according to a spokesperson for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. Behrouz Kamalvandi said that while the details of the act of sabotage are still being investigated, the security forces “have detected the agents [who committed the act of sabotage] as well as the motive, methods and manner of the sabotage.”
According to the Iranian side, the saboteurs sought to disrupt the uranium enrichment process at the Natanz facility, but they were not successful in this respect. The act of sabotage reportedly caused no casualties and failed to stop the enrichment work at the facility. The AEOI spokesman likened the current conditions facing the country to the battleground adding that security forces allegedly “succeeded in confronting a large number of cyber attacks on its nuclear facilities.”
The AEOI for the first time described the July 2 incident at the Natanz nuclear facility as a sabotage attack on July 23, and since then pro-Iranian sources have repeatedly vowed to take revenge for the attack.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Defence Minister Amir Hatami announced that the country is working to expand its missile capabilities even further. In particular, the military is working on air-launched cruise missiles that would be able to hit targets in the range of up to 1,400km.
These statements cause expected concern in Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia, as the main geopolitical opponents of Iran in the region. They also claim that Teheran has been ramping up its proxy efforts against the Saudi-Israeli-US block in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
Despite loud claims by Iranian officials and state-linked media, Iran is in fact not interested in an open military confrontation with the US-Israeli alliance. Therefore, it is logical that the Iranian response to the Natanz attack will likely be asymmetric. The recently increased IED attacks on US convoys and rocket strikes on US-affiliated facilities in Iraq could be a part of this campaign.
At the same time, Israel has been actively strengthening security measures on the contact lines with Lebanon and Syria, and continues its low intensity bombing campaign against ‘Iranian-linked targets’ in Syria.
Iran cannot leave attacks on its nuclear infrastructure unanswered. Nonetheless, if the Iranian asymmetric response appears to be too successful, Israel and its allies in any case will blame Iran, even if they have no smoking gun evidence. Therefore, the confrontation will escalate even further.
- China Puts Finishing Touches On First "New Generation" Nuclear Power Plant
China Puts Finishing Touches On First “New Generation” Nuclear Power Plant
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 22:40Bill Gates better hurry up and build those “homegrown” nuclear reactors across the Pacific Northwest, because China is already on track to outpace the US in applying the newest generation of nuclear power technology to its respective power grid. Bloomberg reported Monday that the country took a significant step forward as its Hualong One reactor began loading fuel for the first time.
China National Nuclear Power company, a unit of China National Nuclear, the country’s state-controlled nuclear authority, said Monday that fuel loading started at the Fuqing No. 5 reactor, the first to use the new technology, on Sept. 4. The company recently secured an operating license from the Ministry of Ecology & Environment. It’s nclear when the reactor might restart.
As Bloomberg explains, China is on track to develop the new nuclear technology without any help from the US, and Beijing has abruptly ended a three-year freeze to move this $10 billion project to build more of these reactors across China.
Hualong One development is being closely watched in the battle for the nation’s next-generation nuclear power systems. Its success could mean a nuclear revival in China that would have little to do with western developers including Westinghouse Electric Co. from the U.S. and France’s Electricite de France SA.
China had almost 49 gigawatts of nuclear power installed as of 2019 and should get into the mid-fifties this year. GlobalData Plc predicts it will pass France as the world’s No. 2 nuclear generator in 2022 and claim the top spot from the U.S. four years after that.
Beijing gave the green light to four Hualong One reactors last year in a clear sign of support, ending a three-year freeze on new approvals caused by the government’s consideration of different technologies and the ongoing trade dispute with the U.S. Two more projects that will use Hualong One designs, with a combined cost of $10 billion, were approved last week.
The country started up the world’s first next-generation reactors in 2018, including four AP1000 units designed by Westinghouse as well as a project using EDF’s EPR technology.
Bill Gates is going to need to step on it if he hopes to keep the US power grid one step ahead of China while helping to make “fossil fuels extinct” at the same time by positioning nuclear power as a ‘supplement’ to renewables.
- MKULTRA & The CIA's War On The Human Mind
MKULTRA & The CIA’s War On The Human Mind
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 22:20Authored by Jason Morgan via The Mises Institute,
[Review of Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019)]
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a fearsome reputation. The author and executor of countless coups and political assassinations, the CIA is notorious for waterboarding, “extraordinary rendition,” regime change, kidnapping, narcotics smuggling, financing of guerrilla wars, and many other unsavory activities around the world, including against Americans, even inside the United States.
But “fearsome” does not mean “flawless.” The CIA has failed at least as often as it has succeeded, and sometimes the failures are so flagrant—such as sending thousands of anticommunist guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines in Korea, Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia during the Cold War, where nearly all of them died—that CIA insiders wryly refer to their organization as “Clowns In Action.”
Which is it? Is the CIA a dastardly menace or a hotbed of horrible mistakes? If Stephen Kinzer’s new book, Poisoner in Chief, is any indication, the answer is both.
A veteran reporter on foreign conflicts such as those in Rwanda, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iran, Kinzer is a former New York Times correspondent and, most famously, the author of the 2006 bestseller Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. In his latest effort he brings his analytical skills to bear on perhaps the most disturbing CIA project of them all: MKULTRA, the top-secret, long-running effort to find a method for controlling the human mind.
“History’s most systematic search for techniques of mind control,” Kinzer writes, was a by-product of World War II.
At the end of 1942, a University of Wisconsin bacteriologist named Ira Baldwin – “America’s first bio-warrior” and a part-time Quaker preacher – was loaned to Washington (with the blessing of the University of Wisconsin president) in order to set up and run a bioweapons program for the United States military (p. 16). Based out of Camp Detrick in Maryland, the Baldwin lab cranked out bioweapons for possible use against Allied enemies. In one of Baldwin’s bigger projects, shipment of tons of anthrax spores, ordered by Winston Churchill for potential use against the Nazis, was approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and almost ready for delivery when the Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945 (p. 19).
For many, even for Quaker preachers, World War II cleared away the last of the psychological hurdles against unleashing bioweapons against an enemy. Kinzer’s book tells the tale of how the targeting of unsuspecting populations was later justified by the bigger war, the Cold War, which followed the demise of the Third Reich.
The ruined Third Reich provided much of the original brainpower for MKULTRA. Immediately after World War II, the CIA—formed out of the Office of War Information in 1945—was faced with a choice. The Germans and the Japanese had been conducting advanced experiments on germ warfare and other forms of biological weaponry. Should the Allies prosecute as war criminals the scientists involved with such projects, or hire them as expert advisors? With the Cold War starting and the Soviets looming as an unpredictable enemy, the CIA, with the tacit approval of the few members of the United States Congress who were allowed to know even the existence of the Central Intelligence Agency, decided to make use of the bioweapon expertise of erstwhile foes in order to counter the new adversary in Moscow.
For example, Kurt Blome, the Nazis’ director of biowarfare research and development whose work had been championed by Heinrich Himmler, was acquitted, by American political fiat, at the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg in 1947 and sent to work – as part of Operation Paperclip designed mainly to bring German rocket scientists to the US – at Camp Detrick (pp. 20–24).
It was at Camp Detrick that Blome encountered a rising star in the CIA, Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb, a bacteriological specialist who had been a star student of Ira Baldwin’s at Wisconsin, is the main figure in Kinzer’s book. His career is virtually synonymous with MKULTRA. Under the direction of Gottlieb, the CIA’s laboratories at Camp Detrick transitioned from R&D on bioweapons—often using unwitting American subjects, such as in 1950 when a US Navy minesweeper “specially equipped with large aerosol hoses” spent six days spraying the Serratia marcescens bacterium into the San Francisco fog, infecting some eight hundred thousand people (pp. 37–38)—to drugs which could be used for mind control. (MKNAOMI, MKULTRA’s sister CIA project, was also tasked with finding poisons and biotoxins which the CIA and the US government could use in various operations.) Gottlieb provided the big ideas into which to fit Blome’s nefarious knowledge of mass murder by bacillus. Gottlieb became, virtually overnight and with the help of former Nazi doctors, America’s “poisoner in chief.”
The CIA’s mind control program, which was assuming a bigger and bigger importance as fears of Soviet brainwashing grew in the US, was originally called Operation Bluebird and was personally overseen by CIA higher-up Allen Dulles. (47)
At first, the Bluebird team experimented with “hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation,” along with drugs like sodium amytal, at CIA sites in “secret prisons in Germany and Japan,” looking for a way to extract information out of POWs and captured spies (pp. 44, 48–49). But Dulles was unsatisfied with the results and decided to give the young CIA recruit Sidney Gottlieb control of Bluebird’s updated iteration: Operation Artichoke (pp. 51–52). The goal of Artichoke was to do whatever it took to get prisoners to divulge military and state secrets to the CIA. The Cold War would brook nothing short of full-scale war against the human mind.
Dulles became deputy director of central intelligence three days after launching Artichoke in 1951, and Gottlieb, invisible to the outside world, was given virtually unlimited rein to carry out any experiments thought necessary to achieve mind control (p. 51). This drive to achieve total operational control over the human psyche eclipsed all reality and tactical limitation. If the US didn’t win the race to the mind control method, many in the CIA thought, the entire American population lay vulnerable to mental enslavement by the Soviets. Dulles, Kinzer writes, despite a disastrously unsuccessful three-year “Artichoke” attack on a Bulgarian political prisoner named Dmitri Dimitrov, “had convinced himself not only that mind control techniques exist but that Communists had discovered them, and that this posed a mortal threat to the rest of the world” (pp. 52–53).
Mind control was the pressing need, but nothing brought it within reach. Technique after technique, drug after drug, was tried on prisoners, but to no avail. In frustration, Artichoke agents under Gottlieb upped the ante, turning to marijuana, cocaine, and then heroin as possible catalysts of CIA-directed, anti-Soviet brainwashing. As part of Artichoke, a University of Rochester psychology professor was given a grant by the US Navy to test heroin on his students. The control of the mind remained as elusive as ever, despite the massive dosing of the Rochester student population with opiates. Nothing seemed to have the potential to crack open the mind for the CIA (p. 59).
Someone in Artichoke suggested using mescaline after the other narcotics failed, and this gave Sidney Gottlieb an idea. He remembered hearing about a drug called LSD which Dr. Albert Hofmann had discovered during an experiment at Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, in 1943. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), an ergot enzyme, produced extraordinary and disturbing psychological effects, Dr. Hofmann found when he ingested some and recorded the drug’s effects. Washington learned of Hofmann’s discovery in 1949, and one of the chemical specialists in the US military complex told Gottlieb of the new substance (pp. 34–35) In 1951, Gottlieb asked Harold Abramson, who had been a physician in the Chemical Warfare Service during World War II, to administer LSD to him. Gottlieb experienced the same psychedelic state as Dr. Hofmann had described. Other subjects were tested, as well, not all of them wittingly, and all seemed to exhibit similar reactions. LSD most definitely altered the mind (pp. 60–61). Gottlieb was convinced that he had found the magical drug which would allow the CIA to control the psyche, and therefore to beat the Soviets at (what Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and many others at CIA thought, at least, was) the Soviets’ own game.
The experiments on human subjects followed rapidly after Gottlieb’s conversion to belief in the powers of LSD. These experiments often ended in death, often by murder. One study quoted by Kinzer reports that
in 1951 a team of CIA scientists led by Dr. Gottlieb flew to Tokyo….Four Japanese suspected of working for the Russians were secretly brought to a location where the CIA doctors injected them with a variety of depressants and stimulants….Under relentless questioning, they confessed to working for the Russians. They were taken out into Tokyo Bay, shot and dumped overboard. (p. 64)
The CIA carried out similar experimentation and executions in Korea and Germany (p. 64). Gottlieb was usually personally involved.
Throughout the 1950s the experimentation continued. An American artist named Stanley Glickman was lured to a bar near his studio in Paris by CIA agents in 1951 and a chemical was slipped into his drink. Glickman began to hallucinate wildly. He fled in a state of panic and remained in his Paris apartment for the next ten months in paranoid hiding until his family came to take him home, and then he spent the rest of his life as a near invalid. The chemical which the CIA had slipped into Glickman’s drink was almost certainly LSD, and Glickman, Kinzer suggests, had been chosen by the CIA because he had just recovered from hepatitis and the Artichoke team was conducting an experiment on the effects of hepatic infection on the efficacy of LSD (pp. 66–67)
Things got worse from there. In 1952, the CIA commissioned underworld denizen and former vice cop George Hunter White to run a human-subjects experiment site at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, New York (pp. 74–75). White’s job was to bring to the CIA’s apartment “expendables” on whom Gottlieb and his team could test LSD. White “knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs,” as one of Gottlieb’s MKULTRA colleagues later explained, and this made him invaluable for procuring the “drug users, petty criminals, and others who could be relied upon not to complain about what had happened to them” when the CIA’s experiments were finished (pp. 76–77). Many of these “expendables” suffered nervous breakdowns, and some died.
In order to keep the supply of LSD flowing, CIA agents went to Basel, where LSD had been discovered, and tried to buy all the LSD in stock. Allen Dulles authorized a $240,000 outlay to pay for it (p. 86). Sandoz held the patent for Hofmann’s 1943 discovery, but Sandoz wanted nothing to do with the troublesome substance and so Gottlieb, freed of any need to scruple over IP infringement, tasked US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly with making LSD in the States (pp. 85–86) With their mind control serum in production, MKULTRA agents could focus on how to dose experimental subjects. The CIA even hired a professional magician, John Mulholland, to teach Gottlieb and his agents how to deliver LSD into unsuspecting subjects’ drinks and food without being detected (pp. 89–94)
Gottlieb recruited a Kentucky addiction specialist, Dr. Harry Isbell, to test LSD and new mind-altering drugs on prisoners and patients. More lives were destroyed (pp. 94–96). Among the victims of another of Gottlieb’s agent-doctors was none other than James “Whitey” Bulger, the mafioso who, along with “nineteen other inmates” at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, beginning in 1957 “was given LSD nearly every day for fifteen months, without being told what it was” (pp. 98–99). Bulger was plagued for the rest of his life with nightmares, suicidal thoughts, and “deep depression” (p. 98). Bulger, who had been told that he was taking part in experiments designed to find a cure for schizophrenia, did not learn the truth about what had happened until 1979 (pp. 263–64).
The human toll of Gottlieb’s MKULTRA experiments continued to mount. One of Gottlieb’s closest associates in the project, Frank Olson—a bacteriologist trained at the University of Wisconsin who had also been recruited for the CIA by Gottlieb’s mentor Ira Baldwin—began to express doubts about what the MKULTRA team was doing. He told his wife that he had made a “terrible mistake” in his work (p. 114). He shared his misgivings with his CIA colleagues as well. Olson’s conscience appeared to be getting the better of him, and he became a liability to the team.
In late 1953, Gottlieb surreptitiously dosed Olson with LSD at a backwoods MKULTRA gathering, “Deep Creek Rendezvous,” outside Camp Detrick (p. 113). Olson spiraled into a frightening disorientation, and early in the morning on November 28, 1953—a few days after Thanksgiving—Olson “fell or jumped” from a window of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan, dying few moments after hitting the concrete below. Another MKULTRA agent, Gottlieb’s lieutenant Robert Lashbrook, was the only other person in the room when Olson “fell or jumped” (pp. 120–21). Lashbrook told the New York City police that Olson had jumped out of the window and Olson’s death was originally designated a suicide, but the Olson family eventually grew suspicious and an investigation was carried out, including a new autopsy on Olson’s body. The forensic pathologist, after a month’s examination of the corpse, declared: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window” (p. 250). Wounds on Olson’s body were consistent with methods taught in CIA manuals for incapacitating people and then killing them in order to make their deaths look self-inflicted.
Gottlieb and MKULTRA were shaken by Olson’s demise, but they carried on with their work. They spent the next few years looking for magic mushrooms in Mexico (157); arranging suicide capsules for American agents, including U-2 pilot Gary Powers (who chose not to use his when he was shot down over the Soviet Union) (pp. 172–75); attempting, at the order of then attorney general Robert Kennedy, to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (after exploding cigars and exploding conch shells were ruled out, Gottlieb tried with a wetsuit laced with fungi and bacteria) (p. 184); and hooking Allen Ginsberg and other radicals on LSD (pp. 188–90). Gottlieb personally delivered to the American embassy in Leopoldville in the Congo poisons that Gottlieb had developed to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, but the Belgians and the Africans beat the CIA to it (pp. 176–80).
Gottlieb’s career brought ruin and suffering to untold numbers of people, many of them innocent. He retired from the CIA in 1973 after receiving the Distinguished Intelligence Medal (p. 211). Lifelong devotees of folk dance, Gottlieb and his wife, Margaret, moved to the countryside in rural Virginia and attempted to blend in with the small community there, volunteering, dancing, and experimenting with radical ecology. However, “investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam,” learned of the MH-CHAOS program targeting Americans, and the Congress was forced to act. Gottlieb’s career, long a well-kept secret, was being brought into the open, and his retirement would therefore be far from peaceful.
But there were still many who tried to cover up what Gottlieb and the other MKULTRA agents had done. In 1975, after the outcry caused by the Hersh reporting, President Gerald Ford deputized Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to chair a commission on the CIA. The new CIA director, William Colby, was remarkably frank. Colby informed the Rockefeller Commission that “the CIA had conducted LSD experiments that resulted in deaths. Later he referred to assassination plots” (p. 216). Nelson Rockefeller, attempting to prevent the CIA director from revealing too much, buttonholed Colby later: “Bill, do you really have to present all this material to us?” (p. 216).
In 1977, in the wake of the Church Report on further American intelligence excesses, Senator Edward Kennedy, Robert’s brother, spurred on by some documents which had been discovered as the result of a FOIA request (Gottlieb had ordered all MKULTRA files burned, but some undetected copies remained), called Admiral Stansfield Turner to testify before Congress on MKULTRA. The walls were closing in. Gottlieb himself was eventually forced to testify—albeit in a closed-room setting his lawyer had helped arrange—but Gottlieb essentially pleaded amnesia (nearly all of his answers to questions about MKULTRA were some version of “I do not recall”) and the matter seemed to end there.
Still, the skeletons in Gottlieb’s closet would not go away. In 1984 Gottlieb agreed to meet with the family of Frank Olson, the former MKULTRA colleague who had “fallen or jumped” from his Manhattan hotel room in 1953. Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, was unconvinced by Gottlieb’s explanation for the “accident,” and, after Frank Olson’s widow and Eric’s mother passed away, ordered Frank’s body exhumed in 1994. As information about MKULTRA built in the public’s awareness, other cases were reopened, including that of Stanley Glickman. (257) The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA to get him out of his legal trouble. Gottlieb pushed back the trial for Glickman’s murder as long as he could, and then, in early March, 1999, Sidney Gottlieb died.
Like Frank Olson, it was not officially revealed whether or not the death had been a suicide (p. 259).
Stephen Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief is a highly readable, thoroughly researched introduction to the life and work of one of America’s most unknown, and yet infamous, government agents. Kinzer is to be thanked for his plainspoken, courageous book. Even those who have studied the CIA and the various schemes and crimes which “the Agency” has committed over the past seventy-five years will be surprised by some of the information Kinzer relates. To see in one volume a rendering of just some of the lives ruined by just one CIA program, MKULTRA, is a sobering revelation.
Sidney Gottlieb, the person directly responsible for much, if not most, of the MKULTRA devastation over more than twenty years, remains as mysterious at the end of Kinzer’s volume as at the beginning, however. By all accounts Gottlieb was a good student from a stable family. Kinzer speculates that perhaps Gottlieb’s having been rejected for military service in World War II—Gottlieb stuttered and had a clubfoot—left him unsatisfied and impatient to prove his patriotism, an urgent task for the son of immigrant Jews (p. 50). Gottlieb was heavily involved in New Age mysticism and meditation and appears to have expended considerable energy psychologically compartmentalizing his “work,” so there are indications that he was aware that the experiments he and his MKULTRA team were carrying out were, at best, unethical, and objectively speaking often outright crimes.
But Gottlieb was hardly alone in his endeavors, and the explanation that Gottlieb, Allen Dulles, and many others in the CIA gave—to themselves and to each other, and to the world around when pressed—makes the most sense. They had a country to defend, they faced an enemy of unprecedented cruelty in the Soviet Union, and they were willing to do whatever it took, even sacrificing innocent people, to keep Americans as a whole from falling under the spell of communist mind control.
- Japanese Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa Says He "Regrets" Losing $41 Million In The Stock Market
Japanese Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa Says He “Regrets” Losing $41 Million In The Stock Market
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 22:00Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa – who is best known for participating in Twitter stunts, including agreeing to be Elon Musk’s lab rat for SpaceX’s planned trip to the moon – took to the internet this week and offered up a deep bow in the form of a Twitter post revealing he had lost $41 million in an attempt to trade stocks during the midst of the pandemic.
In a post he called “Deep Regrets”, the founder of online fashion retailer Zozo Inc, said he lost money on day trading and publicly expressed regret for the enormous sum of money he lost. He then “vowed to recover it through his business,” according to the South China Morning Post. In the industry, we call that chasing your losses.
Maezawa wrote: “I was blinded by the virus-driven market swings and lost 4.4 billion yen through repeated short-term trading of stocks, something I haven’t familiarised myself with. With 4.4 billion yen, how many people could the money have been given out to and saved? There’s no end to this regret.”
Maezawa made his money like any poor capital allocator does; by finding a worse capital allocator. He sold his company Zozo Inc. to Yahoo Japan, a subsidiary of Softbank, last year.
Maezawa had previously said he was going to give away $9 million USD to 1,000 of his Twitter followers that were selected at random for re-tweeting a post he made on January 1. He called it a “serious social experiment” to see if money made people happier.
But judging by his own “deep regrets” due to his massive trading losses, there may not be a point of such an experiment now – plus, he may just need to hold on to the money.
- Leaked Document Reveals How CCP Uses ByteDance-Owned App To Spread Propaganda
Leaked Document Reveals How CCP Uses ByteDance-Owned App To Spread Propaganda
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 21:40Authored by Nicole Hao via The Epoch Times,
Chinese tech companies have been documented to cooperate with Chinese authorities on censoring information and pushing Beijing’s propaganda messages.
One way the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses a popular news aggregator app owned by ByteDance to promote the regime’s propaganda content to users was unveiled in an internal document recently obtained by The Epoch Times.
Meanwhile, previous comments by staff at ByteDance’s app platforms, detailing the extent to which the software collects user data, raises questions about whether algorithms work similarly at ByteDance’s most widely-used app internationally, TikTok, as it seeks to sell its U.S. business before the U.S. administration’s appointed deadline of Sept. 15. Citing the app’s Chinese ownership, risks to national security, and user data collection, President Donald Trump in late July signed executive orders to effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States, unless it finds a U.S. buyer.
Document
In 2016, the Luohe city government propaganda bureau issued a notice to all Chinese Communist Party committees in the county and district-level government offices in the city. Luohe is a city located in central China’s Henan Province.
The notice informed all-party committees to set up accounts on Toutiao, a popular news aggregator app owned by ByteDance. It then describes how Toutiao can make the propaganda information issued by these accounts appear as recommendations for users that the government has targeted.
“When there’s a big event or emergency incident happening, it can distribute information to designated users and users in designated regions. It supports the government in spreading information efficiently,” the document stated.
The document said that the CCP committees would not need to increase their following for this to be effective.
The internal document that Luohe city government propaganda bureau issued in 2016. (Provided to The Epoch Times by Insider)
Algorithm
As early as Jan. 2018, Cao Huanhuan, software architect at Toutiao, explained how its algorithms track users’ preferences and habits, in a post on the app’s official website.
The algorithm needs to collect three types of information before promoting a post to a user: the characteristics of a post the user interacts with; the user’s characteristics; and where the user is when he/she opens the app, according to Cao.
The post’s characteristics include which kind of media it is, such as video, photo, picture, or text; the subject of the post, such as yoga, travel, or hip hop; how long it takes the user to read the post, such as video length, photos quantity, and text length; characteristics of the post’s creator.
The user’s characteristics include hobbies, profession, age, gender, which kind of phone he/she uses, the user’s browsing history on ByteDance apps, searching and surfing histories on the internet, shopping history, and so on.
The environment characteristics include the exact position of the user, such as at home, in a restaurant, or traveling abroad, etc.; what time of day; which kind of network the user is using, such as 3G, 4G, 5G, and Wifi; and weather conditions.
The algorithm will also cull the watch histories of other users who are similar to a particular user, such as those with similar hobbies or similar profession.
After the app obtains all three categories of information, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool will generation recommendations to the user.
Cao added that the algorithm can also be used to show suitable advertisements for this user.
ByteDance also created several blacklist databases, Cao said, in which millions of keywords or pictures the Chinese authorities have prohibited would not be allowed on its social media platforms. Any post containing one or more of these contents would be removed immediately, Cao said.
He did not give specifics as to how ByteDance or Toutiao is able to collect such vast amounts of data on users’ behavior and preferences, nor how its algorithm would pick up on prohibited content.
ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment.
The TikTok logo is displayed outside a TikTok office in Culver City, California on August 27, 2020. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Implications for TikTok?
But Cao noted that “The different social media platforms from our company [ByteDance] use this same powerful algorithm, but make adjustments according to each platform’s business models.”
And during the World AI Conference held virtually on July 11, Li Lei, director of ByteDance’s AI lab, said that his team’s designs are for all of ByteDance’s owned apps. The company owns over 20 apps.
In a recent job posting for an “algorithm engineer,” ByteDance said that the position would be “responsible for the company’s domestic and international products’ recommendations, ads, system infrastructure, big data, open platforms, and other core technologies.”
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment about its algorithm models.
The app’s algorithm may be the linchpin of any U.S. deal—as the Chinese regime revised its export control rules on Aug. 28, mandating that “technology based on data analysis for personalized information recommendation services” must be approved by Chinese authorities before export.
Market analysts have noted that this could mean ByteDance’s sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations would need approval from Beijing.
Meanwhile, TikTok’s Chinese ownership is the crux of the U.S. administration’s concerns about the possibility of user data being exploited by Beijing.
In The Epoch Times’ previous interview with former Chinese internet censor Liu Lipeng, he said he was scouted by ByteDance in China to become part of a team that would handle censorship on TikTok.
Another Epoch Times report also divulged the close ties between ByteDance and the Chinese Communist Party, with many of its managers also being members of the company’s Party unit. Companies in China are required to establish such Party organizations within their offices to ensure that business policies and employees toe the Party line.
Though TikTok has sought to distance itself from its Beijing owner, pointing to its American board members and executives, the app’s data collection and alleged censorship practices on international users have come under scrutiny in recent months.
The Epoch Times previously interviewed a Chinese international student whose TikTok account was blocked after he uploaded a video of himself lampooning the Chinese national anthem.
And the Wall Street Journal reported that some TikTok users were praising China in their videos in the hopes of gaming an algorithm that would favor China-friendly content and give them more exposure.
- California Towns Are Leasing Back Their Own Streets To Build Prisons, Finance Pensions
California Towns Are Leasing Back Their Own Streets To Build Prisons, Finance Pensions
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 21:20California’s municipal fiefdoms have found a new way to unilaterally “refinance” their debt and book imaginary savings by eploiting an interesting-sounding financing alternative explored by Forbes writer Elizabeth Bauer: two cities in California are issuing bonds with their own city streets as collateral to pay down their unfunded pension liabilities, according to Forbes.
The two cities, West Covina and Torrance, are in SoCal. The city councils of the two communities in recent months have borrowed a combined $550 million in funds backed by their own city streets to try either to “refinance” money owed to CALPers, or to use on projects – or even more hospital beds and respirators, depending the circumstances.
These so-called “lease-revenue bonds” have one primary advantage to the local officials authorizing the borrowing. Unlike normal general-obligation bonds, LRBs can be undertaken without a vote, and quickly enough to allow officials a range of excuses, like taking advantage of low rates. According to Forbes, some of the money is being used to offset past under-funding of pension contributions.
Here’s the layperson’s description of LRBs from Schwab:
6. Lease revenue bonds: Lease revenue bonds are a unique structure in the muni market. Instead of issuing long-term debt, like general obligation bonds do, to finance improvements on a public facility, the municipality may enter into an arrangement that uses lease revenue bonds. Often a trust, not the municipality, issues bonds and generates revenues to pay the bonds back by leasing the facility to the municipality. The municipality will generally appropriate money during each budget session to meet the lease payment.
What matters most: The unique structure of a lease revenue bond makes the essentiality of the facility being leased and the legal protections on appropriating funds very important. Bonds backed by structures with lower essentiality and limited protections for appropriating funds will usually be lower-rated and have higher yields. Our opinion is to be cautious of bonds backed by lease revenues, as these bonds should be viewed more like general government bonds, not revenue bonds.
Although the name of the bonds implies that the streets are nominally being “leased,” the bondholders will not have any particular rights to lay claim to the streets; despite their status as “collateral,” the bondholders can’t take them over and charge tolls if a city defaults on the rent.
Instead, the town “leases” the area to a ‘financial authority’, which forks over the cash up front. The city will then pay the “rent” to the leased-back land. The “lease” component then becomes little more than a gimmick. The LRB is effectively an example of Wall Street helping to supplant the will of the voters.
Surprisingly, LRBs, or LROs (lease revenue obligations) are frequently used in Sacramento to help California finance prisons, something that’s almost impossible to do in california via a general obligation bond since it requires voter approval (and California is…California).
A group opposed to prisons has devised this ‘Q&A’ about Lease Revenue Bonds.
Like they say: “The only reason to use an LRB to build a prison is to bypass the will of the voters”.
- China Looks To Build Espionage Hub In Iran Under 25-Year Deal
China Looks To Build Espionage Hub In Iran Under 25-Year Deal
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 21:00Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,
The next phase of the 25-year deal between China and Iran will focus on a large-scale roll-out of electronic espionage and warfare capabilities focused around the port of Chabahar and extending for a nearly 5,000 kilometer (3,000 mile) radius, and the concomitant build-out of mass surveillance and monitoring of the Iranian population, in line with the standard operating procedure across China, senior sources close to the Iranian government told OilPrice.com last week.
Both of these elements dovetail into Beijing’s strategic vision for Iran as a fully-functioning client state of China by the end of the 25-year period. By that time, Iran will be an irreplaceable geographical and geopolitical foundation stone in Beijing’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ project, as well as providing a large pool of young, well-educated, relatively cheap labor for Chinese industry. The mass surveillance, monitoring, and control systems to cover Iran’s population is to begin its full roll-out as from the second week of November, after the final agreement on event sequencing has been reached in the third week of October at a meeting between Iran’s most senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and intelligence services figures and their Chinese counterparts.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, already agreed on the broad plans in July, according to the Iran sources.
“The plan is for nearly 10 million extra CCTV [closed-circuit television] cameras to be placed in Iran’s seven most populous cities, to begin with, plus another five million or so pinhole surveillance cameras to be placed at the same time in another 21 cities, with all of these being directly linked in to China’s main state surveillance and monitoring systems,” said an Iran source.
“This will enable the full integration of Iran into the next generation of China’s algorithmic surveillance system that allows for the targeting of behavior down to the level of the individual by combining these inputs with already-stored local, national, and regional records on each citizen, together with their virtual data footprints,” he said.
“At the same time as this, China will start to trial its own heavily-censored version of the internet via the Great Firewall of China [that prohibits foreign internet sites], in Iran, and to begin the broad roll-out of Mandarin as a key foreign language to be learned in school, initially alongside English, but then to replace English,” one of the Iran sources added.
“By the end of this process, these seven cities in Iran will be among the top 25 most surveilled cities in the world,” he underlined.
This Sino-technologicalisation of Iran is essential to the use of Iran’s labor force by China, as envisioned in the original 25-year plan that was agreed between Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Zarif, and his China counterpart, Wang Li, last year – itself a development of the previous strategic co-operation deal agreed in 2016. Specifically, Beijing intends to build factories and other centers of business that function as extensions of existing businesses in China, with the same machinery, technology, and production lines, managed by Chinese personnel who have been overseeing identical production lines in mainland China.
“It will be exactly like a factory has been picked up from the middle of China by a giant hand and then placed into Iran, just like Apple operates in China or Chinese firms operate in various African countries,” one of the Iran sources said.
The resultant products will then be able to access Western markets by dint of another element of the new 25-year deal, which will be the new transport infrastructure to be financed and implemented by Chinese companies in Iran. Shortly after the new 25-year deal was presented by Iran’s Vice President, Eshaq Jahangiri (and senior figures from the Economic and Finance Ministry, the Petroleum Ministry, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei) late last year, Jahangiri announced that Iran had signed a contract with China to implement a project to electrify the main 900 kilometer railway connecting Tehran to the north-eastern city of Mashhad. Adjunct to this, Jahangiri added that there are also plans to establish a Tehran-Qom-Isfahan high-speed train line and to extend this upgraded network up to the north-west through Tabriz.
In tandem with this increased surveillance of the population, China will use the end of the global arms embargo on Iran on 18 October to begin fast-tracked preparations for its increased military presence in Iran, as part of the ‘China-Iran Integrated Defence Strategy’ of the 25-year deal exclusively revealed by OilPrice.com in July. The top priority in these preparations will be ensuring that the military hardware and personnel that China, and Russia, are set to deploy as from the second week of November, are not vulnerable to attack. This equally applies to the oil and gas resources upon which Chinese and Russian firms are still working, despite the U.S. sanctions on Iran, under the guise of standalone contracts. Such efforts would encompass each of the three key EW areas – electronic support (including early warning of enemy weapons use) plus electronic attack (including jamming systems) plus electronic protection (including of enemy jamming), although in the Chinese system, unlike in the traditional Western model, cyber and electronic warfare have been merged into a single discipline.
More specifically, Iran will be host to a range of technology, equipment, and systems coming from both China and Russia, as part of a three-pronged usage strategy for Iran that includes – in addition to the monitoring, surveillance of the workforce – proactive intelligence-gathering capabilities, and an extensive defensive apparatus, as part of, in particular, Russia’s standard anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) operational approach in these conditions. Included in the hardware of the military package, according to the Iran sources, will be the highly-regarded Russian S-400 anti-missile air defense system and the Krasukha-2 and -4 systems that proved successful in Syria. This equipment will function alongside the new dual-use civilian/military centers across Iran, for the air force and naval assets. “In the same way that the Russian military Khmeimim Air Base near Latakia functions alongside the civilian Bassel Al-Assad International Airport in Syria, sharing many facilities, so many of the existing Iranian airports that are designated for this dual-use will be extended to accommodate warplanes from China, and to a lesser degree, Russia,” according to one of the Iranian sources.
“This process will begin with purpose-built dual-use facilities next to the existing airports at Hamedan, Bandar Abbas, Chabahar, and Abadan,” he added.
Indeed, OilPrice.com understands from these sources that the bombers to be deployed in the first instance will be China-modified versions of the long-range Russian Tupolev Tu-22M3s, with a manufacturing specification range of 6,800 kilometers (2,410 km with a typical weapons load), and the fighters will be the all-weather supersonic medium-range fighter bomber/strike Sukhoi Su-34, plus the newer single-seat stealth attack Sukhoi-57. It is apposite to note that in August 2016, Russia used the Hamedan airbase to launch attacks on targets in Syria using both Tupolev-22M3 long-range bombers and Sukhoi-34 strike fighters.
At the same time, Chinese and Russian military vessels will be able to use newly-created dual-use facilities at Iran’s key ports at Chabahar, Bandar-e-Bushehr, and Bandar Abbas, constructed by Chinese companies. These companies will have attached to their workforces another 5,000 Chinese ‘security personnel’ on the ground to protect the Chinese projects, although many of these will be air force pilots, warship and submarine officers, special forces officers, and intelligence officers, in addition to straightforward army personnel. “This number will be increased to nearly 50,000 military and neo-military Chinese and Russian personnel within the next 14 months, with around half of that number focussed on developing and safeguarding China’s oil and gas assets in Iran and the other half being used in air force, navy, and intelligence hands-on and training roles,” one of the Iran sources said.
In tandem with all of this, as from the second week of November, China plans to build one of the biggest intelligence gathering listening stations in the world, in Chabahar.
“It will have a staff of nearly 1,000, comprising top Chinese intelligence and communications experts, plus some Russians to support their equipment and technology in the field, with a very small number of Iranians chosen from the top ranks of the IRGC in training, and will have a near-5,000 kilometer radius range,” he said.
“This will allow the station to intercept, monitor, and neutralize the C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] systems used by NATO members and associate members, including U.S.-friendly countries in the region, most notably, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel,” he added.
As such, the Chabahar facility will allow Beijing to extend its reach in monitoring and disrupting the communications of its perceived enemies across an area ranging from the edge of Austria in the West (including all the former Yugoslav states, Greece, and Turkey), to Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya in the south, and back to the East across all of Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Thailand. The Chabahar facility will also be connected into Russia’s intelligence gathering stations in and around its core military bases in Syria – the naval facility in Tartus, and the Khmeimim Air Base near Latakia – which, in turn, would allow it to be easily be tied in to Russia’s Southern Joint Strategic Command 19th EW Brigade (Rassvet) near Rostov-on-Don, which links into the corollary Chinese systems.
- Secondary-Market 'Rolex Bubble' At Risk Of Imploding, Top Watch Trader Warns
Secondary-Market ‘Rolex Bubble’ At Risk Of Imploding, Top Watch Trader Warns
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 20:40At the start of September, the new Rolex Submariner was launched by the famed Swiss watchmaker in eight different variations. As new subs are released, the second market for mass-produced Rolex’s are in a “bubble” and at risk of ‘imploding,’ said WatchPro, quoting one of the world’s largest pre-owned watch traders.
WatchBox’s chief revenue officer Mike Manjos said new watch launches from Rolex were unveiled on Sept. 1. He said a global shortage of watches developed after the pandemic-related lockdowns that resulted in price increases for Rolex watches on the secondary market.
“Now that [Rolex] retailers have reopened, we are seeing global shortages and prices continuing to rise,” Manjos said.
“We have offices all over the world, and everywhere we find empty cases,” he added.
Manjos said investors bidding up Swiss watches with limited quantities or ones that are being discontinued would make sense, but he warned Subs and Daytonas, ones that are manufactured on an industrial scale, could soon see a shift in the market as new references are released that would result in declining prices on the secondary market.
“I understand rising prices for Hulks and Batmans that are no longer produced, but I am nervous about Submariners and Daytonas. These are watches that are produced in decent quantities,” he suggested.
“Yesterday a dealer was asking $11,500 for a stainless steel Sub. This is watch that used to sit in a case. I do not know why people would want that watch when a new one comes out, so it scares me that the air could come out of that bubble,” he said.
Manjos said “white Daytonas are selling for well over $25,000 and heading quickly towards $30,000. I think that is a piece we might see come back to reality in the coming weeks.
Manjos described, in the video below, the secondary market bubble developing in Subs and Daytonas.
Readers may recall, the Swiss watch industry experienced an “unparalleled shock” in the first half of the year as watch exports crashed thanks to the virus-related lockdowns. Though our reporting in August suggested the worst could be over for the industry.
To sum up, readers should probably avoid purchasing used Subs and Daytonas as supply comes online.
- AstraZeneca Shares Plunge As COVID Vaccine Study Put On Hold Due To "Adverse Reaction"
AstraZeneca Shares Plunge As COVID Vaccine Study Put On Hold Due To “Adverse Reaction”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 20:29Amid the biggest selloff in markets since March, we suspect news from AstraZeneca’s massive Phase 3 COVID-19 study will not help at all.
Stat News reports that the large, Phase 3 study testing a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford at dozens of sites across the U.S. has been put on hold due to a suspected serious adverse reaction in a participant in the United Kingdom.
An individual familiar with the development said researchers had been told the hold was placed on the trial out of “an abundance of caution.”
Full statement from AstraZeneca:
“As part of the ongoing randomized, controlled global trials of the Oxford coronavirus vaccine, our standard review process triggered a pause to vaccination to allow review of safety data.
This is a routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials.
In large trials, illnesses will happen by chance but must be independently reviewed to check this carefully.
We are working to expedite the review of the single event to minimize any potential impact on the trial timeline. We are committed to the safety of our participants and the highest standards of conduct in our trials.“
AstraZeneca ADRs are down over 8% after hours…
Perhaps of even greater import, Stat News reports that a second individual familiar with the matter, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the finding is having an impact on other AstraZeneca vaccine trials underway – as well as on the clinical trials being conducted by other vaccine manufacturers.
There are currently nine vaccine candidates in Phase 3 trials. AstraZeneca’s is the first Phase 3 Covid-19 vaccine trial known to have been put on hold.
- Can The US Recover All COVID-Fueled Job Losses By Early 2021?
Can The US Recover All COVID-Fueled Job Losses By Early 2021?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 20:20Authored by Daniel Lacalle, op-ed via The Epoch Times,
The employment recovery in the United States is as impressive as the collapse due to the lockdowns.
In April, I wrote a column stating that the U.S. labor market can heal quickly, and the improvement has been positive. Very few would have expected the unemployment rate to be at 8.4 percent in August after soaring to almost 15 percent in the middle of the pandemic.
This means that the unemployment rate is in August 2020 lower than what analysts projected for the end of 2020. Even the measure of underemployment (U-6) has fallen from 22.8 percent to 14.2 percent.
In August, the number of people who usually work full time rose by 2.8 million to 122.4 million, or 8.5 million below the level of August 2019, and the number of people not in the labor force who currently want a job declined by 747,000 to 7 million, which is still 2 million higher than in February. This means both incredibly positive news and that there’s a lot left to do. Few would have expected full-time employment to be as close to last year’s level by now.
Since the reopening, the United States has recovered almost 11 million jobs, continuing jobless claims have fallen rapidly from 25 million to 13.25 million, and full-time employment is rising strongly, while the Atlanta Fed median wage growth tracker remains at 3.9 percent for 2020.
It’s true that the good jobs data for August includes part-time workers hired for census activity, but the truth is that those accounted for about one out of every six new jobs created.
Even acknowledging that there’s a lot of work to do to recover the record levels of employment of February 2020, at this rate the United States would be able to return to all-time high levels of employment by the first quarter of 2021, instead of 2023 as the Federal Reserve estimates. We must remember that the track record of the Federal Reserve in estimating unemployment has been to err on the side of pessimism, particularly in the past three years.
What the United States needs to do to recover jobs and return to real wage growth and the path to full employment is both easy and challenging.
The United States needs to cut red tape and bureaucratic burdens to new business creation, lift regulatory and fiscal burdens that prevent small and medium enterprises from growing into large companies, and maintain an attractive tax system that incentivizes investment, capital repatriation, and supports job creation.
Anyone can understand this. Why is it challenging, then?
In the middle of an election year there are too many misguided proposals from the left demanding higher taxes, more government interventionism, and more regulatory burdens. It seems that many politicians cannot learn from the mistakes of the eurozone.
Higher taxes and more interventionism will not deliver better public services and stronger finances. The eurozone is the proof that higher taxes still drove most countries to historic high levels of debt and unemployment while public services did not improve. Deficit spending is not solved by raising taxes but by cutting unnecessary spending. With a rising tax wedge, growth is weaker, job creation is poorer, and the deficit remains stubbornly high because expenditures rise in growth and crisis periods significantly above receipts.
The French Prime Minister Jean Castex announced last week at the presentation of the country’s latest tax cut and stimulus plan that “there will be no tax increase.”
“We will not reproduce the past mistake of making tax increases that weaken our growth and send negative signals to both households and companies,” he said.
France has one of the highest tax wedges in the world and has suffered stagnation for two decades, high deficits, and constant public service cuts due to the unsustainability of its finances. The United States should not fall into the trap that France is slowly trying to get out of.
The best social policy is strong job creation and rising wages. Entitlements do not make a society more prosperous and ultimately drive it to stagnation.
The employment recovery in the United States has been a positive surprise for most commentators, but the path to full employment will not be achieved by putting the brakes on job creation and investment. This is a time in which no politician should be doing any other job than to listen to employers, investors, and businesses. Copying European mistakes is not just pointless, it’s irresponsible.
- Tokyo Olympics Will Happen In 2021 'With Or Without Coronavirus': IOC VP
Tokyo Olympics Will Happen In 2021 ‘With Or Without Coronavirus’: IOC VP
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 20:00The 2021 Olympics will proceed as scheduled ‘with or without Covid,’ according to the Vice President of the International Olympic Committee, adding that the competition in Japan would be the “Games that conquered Covid.”
“It will take place with or without Covid. The Games will start on July 23 next year,” said John Coates, head of the IOC’s Coordination Commission for the Tokyo Games, according to the Daily Mail.
“The Games were going to be the Reconstruction Games after the devastation of the tsunami,” Coates added, referring to the 2011 Fukushima disaster. “Now very much these will be the Games that conquered Covid, the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Originally scheduled to take place in 2020, the Olympics was postponed due to the pandemic, and are now scheduled to begin on July 23, 2021 – just over ten months from now, despite the fact that Japan’s borders are still largely closed to foreign visitors, and a vaccine is nowhere in sight. That said, Japanese officials have made clear, according to the Mail, that they won’t delay the event a second time beyond 2021.
There are signs that public enthusiasm in Japan is waning after a recent poll found just one in four Japanese want them to go ahead next year, with most backing either another postponement or a cancellation.
Coates said the Japanese government ‘haven’t dropped the baton at all’ following the postponement, despite the ‘monumental task’ of putting the event back a year. –Daily Mail
“Before Covid, (IOC president) Thomas Bach said this is the best prepared Games we’ve ever seen, the venues were almost all finished, they are now finished, the village is amazing, all the transport arrangements, everything is fine,” Coates added. “Now it’s been postponed by one year, that’s presented a monumental task in terms of re-securing all the venues… something like 43 hotels we had to get out of those contracts and re-negotiate for a year later.”
“Sponsorships had to be extended a year, broadcast rights.”
In order to pull off the games amid the pandemic, a task force has been assembled to assess everything from how border controls will affect athlete movements, to whether fans will be able to pack stadiums (as tight as a BLM rally?).
IOC officials met with Japanese officials for the first time last week to discuss.
“Their job now is to look at all the different counter-measures that will be required for the Games to take place,” said Coates – who has served as the president of the Australian Olympic Committee since 1990 after becoming an executive in 1982.
“Some countries will have it (Covid) under control, some won’t. We’ll have athletes therefore coming from places where it’s under control and some where it is not,” he added. “There’s 206 teams… so there’s a massive task being undertaken on the Japanese side.“
Tokyo 2020 chief Toshiro Muto on Friday repeated that organisers hoped to avoid a Games without spectators — an option that has been mooted given Japan is still limiting audiences at sports events.
While the country is cautiously reopening its economy, with professional baseball, football and sumo resuming in front of limited numbers of fans, the nation continues to see a steady stream of new coronavirus cases.
Japan has already ploughed billions of dollars into the Olympics, with the delay only adding to the cost. –Daily Mail
According to Coates, the IOC is doing its part – contributing “something like an extra $800 million to support the international federations, whose income isn’t happening this year, and national Olympic Committees.”
- GoFundMe For Salon Owner Who Exposed Pelosi's Maskless Hypocrisy Raises Over $310K
GoFundMe For Salon Owner Who Exposed Pelosi’s Maskless Hypocrisy Raises Over $310K
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 19:40Authored by Ben Wilson via SaraACarter.com,
The salon owner, who released footage of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) getting her hair done without a mask, has received over $310,000 on GoFundMe at the time of publication.
Pelosi notably said owner Erica Kious had created a “set-up” to sting her but supporters across the nation have rallied behind the San Francisco small business owner on the crowd fundraising site.
The video was released by Kious last week and showed a maskless Pelosi walking through the salon after thousands of hair shops across the nation have closed, many permanently and some were even jailed, as a result of the policies encouraged by Pelosi.
Hell yall. Its the SALON LADY here.😂
Just wanted to say thanks for the support on gofundme. I COULDNT HAVE IMAGINED THIS. Thanks for the follows and retweets. Nancy doesnt get an apology ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸😘 praise the Lord🙏— Erica (that salon girl)🇺🇸 (@EricaKiou6) September 3, 2020
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Pelosi took to her podium at a news conference and trashed on the salon, calling it a “set-up” and claiming that she deserved an apology for the video release. Kious held a news conference on Sep. 3 to give her side of the story.
I wasnt one of you patriots before Nancy was exposed and lied, but i am now #Trump2020Landslide 😽🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
— Erica (that salon girl)🇺🇸 (@EricaKiou6) September 5, 2020
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Thousands of Americans have rallied behind Kious, who now has over 78 thousand Twitter followers. She tweets frequently in support of the President and against Democrats. She even claims the whole situation made her a “Patriot.”
Even the President has taken to Twitter to defend the shop and call out the hypocrisy by Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi said she got “set up” by the owner (a very good one) of a beauty parlor. If so, how will she do in negotiations against President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia, or Kim Jong Un of North Korea. Not so well, I suspect, but far better than Joe Hiden’ would do!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2020
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How business is going at the salon in California is not known, but perhaps if the location was moved to other states across the nation, Kious would have lines out the door.
The GoFundMe can be found here.
- New Footage Of Sino-Indian Border Hand-To-Hand Clash Hits The Web As Tensions Soar
New Footage Of Sino-Indian Border Hand-To-Hand Clash Hits The Web As Tensions Soar
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 19:20New dramatic video is circulating on Chinese social media purporting to show a recent fierce clash along the flashpoint Himalayan Sino-Indian Line of Actual Control (LAC).
The video, which appears to show a major hand-to-hand combat incident between large groups of Chinese PLA and Indian soldiers, is of unknown date and origin but is being described as the “newest” among circulating border fight videos.
While nearly impossible to verify the precise location or authenticity of the video, it was reposted by Carl Zha, who Western media reports often describe as a Chinese-American Twitter user and “pro-Beijing influencer”.
New video.#ChinaIndiaStandOff #PLA #IndiaChinaStandoff #PangongTso pic.twitter.com/5K1tfsdawm
— 维基百科（中文）🇺🇸🇨🇳🇷🇺🇬🇧🇫🇷 (@Decryptworld) September 8, 2020
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The video may be months old, and is being circulated on the same day that China and India have each accused the other of firing shots across the LAC. The footage shows sticks and metal rods being used, and possibly the butts of rifles, given some of the soldiers appear to be armed, but no shots are fired in the clip.
Beijing charged India with a “severe military provocation” after it claimed Indian troops breached the LAC and entered the Chinese administered side. The Indian troops then “opened fire to threaten the Chinese border defense patrol officers,” according to the PLA charge on Tuesday.
Other videos showing intense border clashes, such as the one below posted to YouTube in early June, sometimes involve sticks and rocks, and other makeshift weapons.
The initial events of June 15 were what set off current soaring tensions, with both sides lately seeking to deescalate through a series of talks by each’s military high command.
The June 15 clash, considered the single deadliest border incident not involving firearms in the contested region’s history, saw the rival sides enter hand-to-hand combat, resulting in 20 Indian troop deaths and a presumed unknown number of PLA casualties.
The Indian troops may have actually fallen to their deaths amid the high altitude nighttime melee, though details remain disputed and unclear.
- The Trojan Donkey
The Trojan Donkey
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 19:00Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,
Since earning the nomination as the 2020 Democratic candidate for the presidency, Joe Biden has stated that he is a “transition candidate.”
This was an odd statement, especially for someone who has hardly begun his formal campaign. (He’s not even in office yet and he’s discussing being on the way out?)
Yet this was not just another one-off Biden gaff, as has been suggested by some. Since announcing his pick for vice president, he has stated, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”
So what’s up here? The candidate is only a place-holder for the real, intended president?
Well, let’s have a look at that possibility.
Joe Biden, by any measure, is a poor candidate for the office. After almost half a century in politics, he’s had a career mostly as a political hack who would support any issue that seemed popular at the time. Similarly, his voting record in the Senate has been that of a man who supported whatever bill would please his peers and further his career.
Seemingly, he either has no inner core of belief, or he’s been willing to sacrifice it at a moment’s notice, if it might help his next election. After forty-seven years of elected office, he’s not regarded as having a commitment to… well, anything.
And yet he became the choice of the Democratic party as one candidate after another dropped out of the presidential race. Clearly this was a party that was not only leaderless, but couldn’t even seem to invent a leader for the sake of the election.
Kamala Harris, his presumptive vice president, dropped out of the presidential race in December 2019, when her popularity amongst democrats dropped to 3.4%. Since democrats make up roughly half of the population, this means that less than 2% of Americans would have wanted her as their president.
And yet, as stated above, candidate Biden announces, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”
That’s quite curious. He apparently is stating that his only purpose is to win the election, then pass the baton to the next leader. Presumably, his vice president.
This has never occurred in US politics, although it is true that, at this point, Mr. Biden may well be too far gone to even begin to handle the job.
And that leads us to the possibility that the deal has already been brokered – that Mr. Biden would win the election, then have, let’s say, a “medical emergency,” at which point he would pass the reins to the new president – Kamala Harris.
Clearly, Ms. Harris could not have been elected on her own merit, as even democrats found her to be fundamentally lacking last December. Even the more radical elements of the party have sensed that she is untrustworthy and even dangerous.
At this point in America’s history, there’s much debate as to whether the president is the supreme leader, or whether he or she is merely the face presented by the Deep State, who run the country from the background and give the president his marching orders.
Either way, this eventuality would not bode well for the US. As supreme leader, Ms. Harris, based upon her reputation, would be an autocratic figure who behaved rather ruthlessly toward those who failed to comply with her edicts.
But as the figurehead for the Deep State, she would be a very powerful tool, implementing the loss of freedoms that were passed into law with the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act and the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act.
These two acts, taken together, essentially eliminate the US Constitution in practical terms. All that’s necessary to implement them would be for a highly demonstrative president to declare a national emergency. Both acts would then be in force.
It would not be difficult to imagine Ms. Harris in this role.
Presently, we’re watching a very odd set of events unfolding in the US.
Major cities have seen months of continual protests and even rioting, which apparently have been very organized and well-funded.
In a normal situation, the mayors and governors would call in the police to quell such riots.
Yet we’re seeing the opposite. Local political leaders are consistently hamstringing local police, making it impossible for them to do their jobs, thereby increasing the extent of devastation by rioters.
Rioters are routinely let off with a slap on the wrist, whilst those who defend their homes from rioters are arrested and charged.
This, of course, is the exact opposite of what the Rule of Law is meant to achieve.
There’s every reason to believe that this condition will continue to worsen well after the 2020 election, and at some point, Americans from both the right and left will find themselves begging for the federal government to step in – to return the US to a state of relative safety.
Central governments, of course, perennially dislike local policing, as local police tend to be loyal their own communities. However, federal troops have no such loyalty. They perform as their superiors dictate, regardless of where they are deployed.
But once the local police have been gotten out of the way, it would be quite easy for an authoritarian president to deploy federal troops to re-establish order, and initially, this would meet with the approval of worried Americans.
Historically, this has occurred countless times throughout the world. In every case, martial law is instituted as a “temporary measure,” to quell existing unrest. But, as Milton Friedman said, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”
If this development is in America’s future, as events indicate, it’s likely that the media will repeat the words, “public safety” endlessly as the situation unfolds. The words “martial law” and “police state” may be heard amongst some of the populace, but will be unlikely to dominate the news programmes.
Another word that’s unlikely to appear often in the media is “tyranny,” yet this will be precisely the result of the introduction of a police state.
But all the above is dependent upon a political leader who has the forceful demeanour to ensure that the job gets done with a minimum of dissent.
The American public are therefore left to ponder whether it may be that a vastly unpopular Trojan donkey may be closer to the presidency than she presently appears.
* * *
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- 46-Year-Old Professor Collapses And Dies During Virtual Class After Succumbing To 'Long-Haul' COVID-19 Symptoms
46-Year-Old Professor Collapses And Dies During Virtual Class After Succumbing To ‘Long-Haul’ COVID-19 Symptoms
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/08/2020 – 18:40A history professor in Argentina who had been suffering from ‘persistent coronavirus symptoms’ for over a month collapsed and died while teaching a virtual lecture form her home, according to The Sun, citing Diari Mes.
Professor Paola De Simone, 46, was teaching a remote class via Zoom for the Universidad Argentina de la Epresa in Buenos Aires, when she complained that she was feeling unwell. Her condition worsened as students begged her to give them her home address so they could send an ambulance.
Paola De Simone en su máxima expresión, me pareció interesante su postura tan relajada para dar una clase que no dude en capturar ese momento. pic.twitter.com/z3QfGGOQAt
— Nawel ♛ (@naweljimenez) September 3, 2020
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She reportedly gasped “I can’t,” before collapsing mid-lecture.
In the days leading up to the tragedy she had expressed concerns about her health.
The teacher had been suffering persistent coronavirus symptoms – including a cough – for more than a month.
Local media reported her husband, a doctor, found her dead when he arrived home. –The Sun
It is unknown if she had any comorbidities.
De Simone’s friends, colleagues and students paid tribute to her, describing her as an “unforgettable teacher.” She leaves behind a daughter, and had previously said that her husband was fighting the pandemic in Argentina – which has suffered 471,806 cases and 9,379 deaths, with approximately 10,000 daily infections since August.
At the end of august, De Simone tweeted “It is very complicated. I have been here [with the virus] for more than four weeks and the symptoms do not go away,” adding “My husband is exhausted from working so much at the moment.“
Student Ana Breccia shared: “My classmates and I in class were the last ones she spoke to,” adding “She began by saying that she had pneumonia, we saw it was worse than in previous classes.”
“At one point she could not continue passing slides, nor speak and she became unbalanced.”
Another one of her students described Professor De Simone as an “excellent teacher, but above all an excellent person, loved and admired by all her students”.
The university confirmed her death in a statement, saying it had left the them with “deep pain”.
It added: “Paola was a passionate and dedicated teacher, and a great person, with more fifteen years of experience”. –The Sun
Another student commented that De Simone was an “Unforgettable teacher, one of those who give you a hand in everything, who make you love what you study, who go out of their way for their students. We are going to miss you a lot.”
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