Month: September 2017

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The Washington Post, whose sole owner is both a CIA contractor and one of the wealthiest plutocrats of all time, has sent its Bezos-paid Ringwraiths after small independent reporters for having the temerity to talk about a lawsuit that had severe implications for the future of democracy in America.

Back in May, comedian and Youtuber Jimmy Dore released a video titled “Washington Post Caught Blatantly Lying To Their Readers Yet Again” about one of the many, many deceptions that WaPo has been caught inflicting upon their unsuspecting audience. Dore pointed out that while corporate media reporters have long served as guard dogs for the establishment, in today’s environment where plutocratic CIA contractors can openly buy up media to advance blatant propaganda, those reporters have now become attack dogs for the establishment. As an example of this new breed of establishment attack dogs who go out of their way to smear and discredit all dissenting voices, Dore named amoral Bezos android Dave Weigel, who then spent months attacking both Dore and his writers.

In a new article titled “In one corner of the Internet, the 2016 Democratic primary never ended”, big brave truth warrior Weigel used his massive platform to tear down writers and Youtubers who earn a fraction of his income because they reported on the DNC fraud lawsuit, which was dismissed last week.

At no point in his insipid article does Weigel mention the Impartiality Clause of the DNC Charter, which was the central point of the fraud lawsuit and which the DNC was shown to have undeniably violated in such WikiLeaks releases as the conversations in the more egregious DNC emails, the Podesta emails showing that the DNC and the Clinton camp were colluding as early as 2014 to schedule debates and primaries in a way that favored her, and then-DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile acting as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing Clinton questions in advance to prep her for debates with Sanders. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was involved in all of these things, thus violating the promise the DNC made to the American people in its Impartiality Clause.

Instead of addressing the lawsuit’s actual claims, Weigel opted to toss out a bunch of red herrings about voter roll purges and state elections officials to make the case that the DNC was not responsible for Sanders’ unfair treatment. But this baseless criticism was tangential to Weigel’s primary driving narrative, which was that independent reporters like HA Goodman and Tim Black belong to a marginal band of online kooks who ought to be scorned and ridiculed. At one point in the article he even argued that they should have spent more time covering the still completely unproven “hack” of the DNC rather than focusing on the contents of the WikiLeaks releases. Weigel’s whole piece revolved around his assigned task of discrediting alternative media, which is of course one of the most threatening enemies of the unelected power establishment that he works for.

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/866700030417059841

Weigel has attempted to argue on multiple occasions that it’s just a wacky, zany conspiracy theory to criticize his publication’s consistent violation of standard journalistic protocol by refusing to disclose its conflict of interest when reporting on the US intelligence community. If you find it at all suspicious that one of the most popular news publications in America downplays the fact that it is exclusively owned by a CIA contractor, you’re no different than someone saying the earth’s flatness is being suppressed by reptilian Illuminati. The second-richest billionaire in the world obviously bought the Washington Post in 2013 because he sensed that newspapers were about to enjoy a lucrative resurgence, you silly child.

Come the fuck on. Jeff Bezos is not paying conscience-free ghouls like Dave Weigel to tear apart anti-establishment media because he thinks it’s a booming business venture. Jeff Bezos did not purchase one of the most respected newspapers in America for less than half the price tag of his CIA contract because he loves you and wants you to know the truth about things. Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post because he knows that the empire that he is building his plutocratic kingdom upon needs a robust propaganda mouthpiece.

A pleasure to host #SecDef James Mattis at Amazon HQ in Seattle today http://pic.twitter.com/JnQZoSOnFN

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) August 10, 2017

“Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states,” says Noam Chomsky. “The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business…the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.”

That is why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. In a corporatist system of government wherein corporate power is not separate from government power, corporate media is state media. It is propaganda. And for Jeff Bezos, only the best propaganda will do. He will continue to use his media arm to bolster the power establishment with which he is interweaving his massive corporatist kingdom, and he knows that winning the media war is an essential part of that agenda. Control the way Americans think and vote, and you’ll never have to worry about them interrupting your metamorphosis into a god.

This shit right here is why I’m constantly talking about the importance of winning the media war. Enemies of humanity like Jeff Bezos know that the front lines of the battle against tyranny are not happening at the ballot box, nor in counter-protests against skinheads, but in the field of propaganda. Freeing mainstream America from the shackles of plutocracy necessarily means combating the mind viruses being dumped into their heads by toxic establishment war machines like the Washington Post.

So please, support independent media, start creating your own independent media to the extent that you are capable, and help fight these bastards. Their propaganda machine remains the weakest point in their armor. We can take it down together. Keep fighting.

via http://ift.tt/2wrF0Z1 Tyler Durden

These days the broad consensus on the future of driving seems to be that the car of tomorrow will be (at least partly) autonomous. Many companies, including traditional car makers, suppliers and leading tech companies are currently working on self-driving technology, all eager to save themselves a piece of what they reckon will be an enormous pie.

Many of these companies are already testing their tech on designated proving grounds for self-driving vehicles, but, as Statista's Felix Richter notes, for people outside the industry it’s hard to judge who is leading the autonomy race.

One possible indicator for a company’s efforts in the self-driving vehicle segment is the number of patent filings in the field.

You will find more statistics at Statista

The Cologne Institute for Economic Research identified and analyzed 5,839 patents related to autonomous driving to find out which companies are most active on that front.

As the chart above illustrates, Germany’s traditionally strong car industry is keen to maintain its strong position in the future: 6 of the top 10 patent holders are German companies with Bosch, a key supplier of car manufacturers, leading the field.

Google, widely considered to be a leader in autonomous driving research just makes the top 10 with 338 patents filed in its name between 2010 and July 2017.

via http://ift.tt/2gtzzVk Tyler Durden

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Following North Korea’s recent missile test, which ominously flew over Japan, the specter of war with the hotheaded nation was raised once again.

As time goes on, it seems less and less likely that the Kim regime will back down from its nuclear program. All forms of diplomacy and appeasement have failed, and not even threats of war from the US seem to have an effect on the regime.

There’s a very good reason for that. North Korea knows something that the United States, the most powerful nation on the planet, would absolutely hate to admit. Our country is is no position to engage in a preemptive strike on north Korea, because any attack would result in unimaginable devastation. The days when Americans would tolerate massive war casualties over a short period of time are long gone, and North Korea knows it. There simply isn’t anything we can offer or threaten that will stop their nuclear program.

And that’s understandable once you know how much destruction North Korea could really bring about if the Kim regime ever decided to let its military loose on South Korea.

If the current situation in East Asia is not resolved, a number of countries “will be living under a threat of a nuclear volcano erupting,” Russian diplomat and an expert in Asian studies, professor Georgy Toloraya told RT.com.

 

Everyone understands perfectly well that for North Korea, if it initiates an aggressive strike, a military conflict will mean a complete and immediate destruction, because no one can deny the US military might,” Toloraya said.

 

“However, for the US, attempts to solve this problem militarily also bring on a retaliatory strike by North Korea that would turn South Korea into a desert,” he warned, saying the North doesn’t even need nuclear weapons for that.

 

While Pyongyang’s artillery is able to reach Seoul, the entire territory of South Korea will also “be no good for life,” as Pyongyang’s missiles – even without nuclear warheads – might hit nuclear facilities in the South, he explained. He said there are some 30 such sites close to North Korea’s border.

Obviously, the destruction of nuclear facilities could have more of an impact than any other attack, by causing widespread radiation leaks. If anything, it could be more devastating than dropping a nuclear weapon, since the radioactive materials in these facilities often have a significantly longer half-life than what we see in atomic bombs.

It’s threats like that which make it clear that no military option is capable of reigning in North Korea. That’s a sentiment that former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon expressed earlier this month.

Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

And let’s not forget that North Korea has one of the largest chemical weapon stockpiles in the world, and is suspected of maintaining a bio-weapons program since the 1960’s. Given those possibilities, Bannon’s belief that North Korea could kill ten million people may be a gross understatement, and that doesn’t even consider the chances that war with North Korea could trigger another world war.

It’s time to accept the truth. We can bargain with the Kim regime, appease it, threaten it, and lay down sanctions on it, but nothing will actually stop that government from continuing its nuclear program without causing mass casualties. The only thing we can do is try to keep a lid on that country until their citizens rebel, or until the Chinese decide that they’ve had enough with their ally.

via http://ift.tt/2enwMIT Tyler Durden

Scientists have confirmed what one renowned weather forecaster has suspected for days: Hurricane Harvey was a “1-in-1,000-year flood.”

That’s according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center, who claim there is nothing in the historical record that rivals the devastation resulting from the flooding in southwest Texas, which has forced more than 30,000 Texans into temporary shelters.

“There is nothing in the historical record that rivals this, according to Shane Hubbard, the Wisconsin researcher who made and mapped this calculation. “In looking at many of these events [in the United States], I’ve never seen anything of this magnitude or size,” he said. “This is something that hasn’t happened in our modern era of observations.”

Of course, one reason for this might be that the modern urban environment is covered in concrete and asphalt, which makes it impossible for floodwater to absorb into the ground, exacerbating the disaster.

Hubbard’s calculations, which he shared with the Washington Post, only accentuate the massive scale of the flooding.

• At least 20 inches of rain fell over an area (nearly 29,000 square miles) larger than 10 states, including West Virginia and Maryland (by a factor of more than two).
• At least 30 inches of rain fell over an area (more than 11,000 square miles) equivalent to Maryland’s size.

To that, we’d like to add the nearly 52 inches of rain recorded by the National Weather Service in Cedar Bayou, Texas, which broke the continental U.S. record.

Making matters worse, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) has just updated its forecast for what it is now referring to as a "rapidly intensifying" Category 2 hurricane in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean. Some models see the storm making landfall in Florida, while others see it landing somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, meaning that another powerful storm could ravage Texas just two weeks after Hurricane Harvey, leaving locals little time to recover.
 

via http://ift.tt/2eJiWBv Tyler Durden

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

Thar she blows!

Once every 600,000 years or so Yellowstone’s supervolcano erupts, making Mt. St. Helens, Pinatubo, and Krakatoa look like firecrackers. It blankets thousands of miles around it in lava and ash, casting a pall over the earth that lowers temperatures and hinders plant life for decades. Compared to Mother Nature we anthropogenic climate changers (if we are that) are pikers. Interestingly enough, that supervolcano is due for another eruption.

Interestingly enough, so too is another supervolcano, one constructed entirely by humans. As to which erupts first, bet on the latter.

Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Coercion and violence generate a reaction, a countervailing pressure. They are historical constants, so like Yellowstone’s volcano, the pressure has been building for centuries, although not 6,000 of them. Like Yellowstone’s geysers, pressure-reducing steam has occasionally been released; coercion has abated and freedom briefly flowered. We know those periods as the times when progress mostly happened: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. However, the twentieth century marked a resurgence of pressure.

Their intellectual degradation complete, the coercive class meets any manifestation of countervailing pressure with still more coercion. The most pathetic case is the US government. Left at a zenith of power at the end of World War II, it has squandered its moral, military, and financial capital trying to squelch the forces that will inevitably topple its empire. After each disaster, it has sought new disasters. President Trump’s tripling down on Bush’s and Obama’s Afghanistan bets is yet another instance of the belief that force which fails can be “fixed” with more force.

The reactive opposites are decentralization and individual autonomy. Individuals now have unprecedented capacities to wage violence, communicate, and compute. Since World War II governments are batting virtually zero trying to suppress insurgencies waged by guerrillas fighting on their home turf.

Try as they might to suppress the Internet, they can’t go too far without severing their economies from the backbone of the information economy. Individuals perform computing feats on their smart phones that were beyond the capabilities of room-size computers fifty years ago. These are the forces pushing back against governmental centralization and coercion.

Lately, not a day has gone by where an article hasn’t appeared arguing that the US government or the media or the globalists or some other nefarious entity is pulling the strings of some nefarious “divide and conquer” strategy. “Divide” needs no help from anyone. Unless humans develop the ability to split themselves, division has proceeded as far as it can go. A solitary soul can work, shop, eat, drink, find amusement and information, and do everything else necessary to sustain life without ever leaving his dwelling or coming into contact with another human being. Undoubtedly some do.

Dividing is a done deal. Conquering is more problematic and in fact won’t happen. A government that’s sixteen years on in Afghanistan and hasn’t won a significant military engagement since World War II is going to have a bit of a problem either maintaining its faltering empire or subjugating its own well-armed population, half of which doesn’t like it very much, the other half expecting a perpetual payday. What if its creditors pull the charge card from the Empire of Debt?

The same problems—imperial inefficiency and debt far in excess of the underlying economy’s ability to support it—will unexpectedly walk in on the globalists’ masturbatory fantasies. Governments at all levels have collectively plighted their troth to a spurious order maintained by force and fraud, resting on a supervolcano. The seismic portents have registered for decades. The Thousand Year Reich lasted twelve years, the Soviet Union sixty-nine. The Chinese government extended its life by rearranging its battery of forces, but the potential—so far successfully suppressed—counter-reaction leaves the rulers in a perpetual state of repressive anxiety.

The western welfare states are beset by bankruptcy, unsustainable expectations, faltering economies, Brexit, Trump, separatist and secessionist movements, and pitched battles over campus speakers, statues, and whatever else triggers the triggered. These are akin to Yellowstone’s recent seismic swarms, and they’ll only get more numerous and intense.

The list of irritations and grievances that can morph into confrontation and chaos is endless. It dawns on the debt-slave young that they are supporting their elders in a style to which they will never become accustomed. The productive tire of funding the unproductive and their government-sponsored rackets. Natives wonder why they should open their arms to migrants, especially those who hate them. Americans rebel against their government’s costly military interventions (okay, that one’s remote). Europe finds the Islamic chokehold increasingly choking and European manhood rediscovers its testicles (even more remote). It would be fitting if the first big morph came at some place like Davos or Jackson Hole.

The think-tank terms for today’s tremors are “devolution” and “decentralization,” always characterized as threats. Supervolcanos take no prisoners. When this one erupts, it will obliterate the rickety superstructures of global governance, finance, and economic. The proper phraseology will be, “blown to smithereens”: the just and unjust, prepared and unprepared, wise and foolish buried under lava flows and choked by ashes, reality beyond a hand in front of one’s face impossible to make out amidst the smoke and haze. The beloved order of the ruling class giving way to entropic atomization.

Atoms are life’s building blocks. Most everything worthwhile—family, community, trade, inquiry, innovation, production, progress—starts with individuals and builds. Most everything deleterious—repression, state-sponsored rapacity, tyranny, war—is imposed from the top by sociopaths masquerading as leaders. Bad as the supervolcano will be, it will blow this “top” to bits, giving the green shoots of decentralized freedom a chance to poke here and there through the ash. It’s about time.

via http://ift.tt/2iNZVlU Tyler Durden

In the days since Trump’s controversial press conference on the Charlottesville tragedy in which he said there was “blame on both sides,” Republicans have been tripping over one another to distance themselves from the White House.  Apparently the mere suggestion that Antifa, a Leftist group that has repeatedly incited violence at protests around the country, was anything more than an innocent bystander was grounds for impeachment, at least according to CNN, and just not something that Republicans in Congress were willing to touch.

One such Republican that has been noticeably silent on the Antifa movement is none other than House Speaker Paul Ryan…that is until Nancy Pelosi took a stand and gave him the courage to actually express his own opinion…well, through a spokeswoman anyway.  Finally, after days of being heavily criticized for a failure to condemn violent Antifa attacks at Berkeley, Ryan’s staff issued the following statement to the Daily Caller last night:

“Speaker Ryan believes, as is obvious, these individuals are left-wing thugs, and those who are committing violence need to be arrested and prosecuted. Antifa is a scourge on our country.”

 

Of course, the statement sets a somewhat different tone when compared to Paul Ryan’s Facebook post from last week, entitled “Let There Be No Confusion,” which was clearly a shot at Trump.

I still firmly believe this hate exists only on the fringes. But so long as it exists, we need to talk about it. We need to call it what it is. And so long as it is weaponized for fear and terror, we need to confront it and defeat it.

 

That is why we all need to make clear there is no moral relativism when it comes to neo-Nazis. We cannot allow the slightest ambiguity on such a fundamental question.

 

This is a test of our moral clarity. The words we use and the attitudes we carry matter. Yes, this has been a disheartening setback in our fight to eliminate hate. But it is not the end of the story. We can and must do better. We owe it to Heather Heyer, and to all our children.

So why the sudden change of heart for Pual Ryan? 

Maybe it’s related to the fact that his predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, managed to muster the political courage to denounce the hate group some 24 hours before him?  Per the Washington Times, Pelosi released the following statement on Antifa earlier this week:

“Our democracy has no room for inciting violence or endangering the public, no matter the ideology of those who commit such acts.  The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.”

Then again, maybe it was the main stream media’s cover that allowed Ryan the strength to acutally speak his mind…The Washington Post recently unleashed this shocking headline…

That was quickly followed by The Los Angeles Times…

 

Then, The Atlantic…

 

And, liberalist of them all, Bloomberg…

 

It seems as though America’s politicians learned nothing from the 2016 presidential election.  If nothing else, Trump’s campaign should have taught our pandering politicos that sometimes people actually like it when you speak your mind…apparently they’re slow learners.

Alas, it does however seem as though Obama’s “lead from behind” strategy sunk in…so maybe politicians just learn lessons on a multi-year lag?

via http://ift.tt/2wWqdZn Tyler Durden

Authored by David Weisberg via TheHill.com,

Tropical Storm Harvey has by now flooded the Houston area with over four feet of rain, causing the deaths of more than 30 people, forcing more than 30,000 residents to flee their homes, and destroying property worth many tens of billions of dollars.

Given the biblical proportions of the deluge, one would think that journalists would be hard-pressed to choose among an over-abundance of gripping and newsworthy stories.

The New York Times and the Washington Post, two pillars of the journalistic establishment, have both identified one such story: the height of Melania Trump’s heels.

I am not making this up; I couldn’t if I tried.

Both newspapers recently featured stories focusing on the height of the heels the first lady was wearing when she boarded a helicopter to take her and the president to Air Force One, which would then fly them from Washington to Texas.

“Melania Trump’s stilettos aren’t insensitive — but using shoes to sow discord is” https://t.co/hs5kMdFobz http://pic.twitter.com/wnzLCp3nXY

— The Hill (@thehill) August 31, 2017

When she exited the plane in Texas, Trump was wearing sneakers, but that fact apparently did not diminish the newsworthiness — at least in the minds of the reporters and editors of those two august newspapers — of the heels she had worn earlier that day.

We’ve encountered the phrase “fake news” quite often over the last year. There was, however, nothing fake about the stories that were published in the New York Times and the Washington Post: Trump was in fact wearing high heels. In that sense, the stories were genuine rather than fake.

So, perhaps we need a new phrase. I would suggest “stupid news,” meaning that, even if the story is factually accurate, you would have to be stupid to think it was worth reporting.

Just what is going on here?

So-called mainstream news outlets are so determined to damage the image and reputation of the president and anyone associated with him that they will publish anything – literally anything – that, in the minds of their news and editorial leaders, might help to achieve that end.

Even the pretense of fairness or objectivity has been abandoned; if a story might possibly damage President Trump, it will be published. “All the news that’s fit to print, including the stupid news.”

Who exactly is the media serving with these stories? Whose interests are being served other than their own?

In 1981, when then-Pres. Ronald Reagan was wheeled into the operating room after being shot by John Hinckley, he said to the surgeons, “Please tell me you’re Republicans.”

It was light-hearted and humorous because the people he was addressing were all doctors, and everyone knows that doctors take an oath to do their utmost to heal every patient, regardless of their personal feelings toward the patient.

Melania Trump’s office: It’s sad that people are worried about her shoes during a natural disaster https://t.co/II7zVZeJtK http://pic.twitter.com/97GIKSQOTM

— The Hill (@thehill) August 30, 2017

In fact, those lines of work that we think of as “professions” typically require that practitioners must put the interests of the people they serve above their own interests.

Fledgling doctors and lawyers, at the beginning of their careers, pledge to put the interests of their patients and clients ahead of their own. Of course, those pledges are not always fulfilled as they should be, but professionals are subject to disciplinary measures when they transgress.

Journalists and journalistic institutions are supposed to serve the interests of the people who consume their stories. Journalists don’t take any oath, but their readers expect them to use their best judgment in choosing the stories they write and the content they include. The editorial and opinion pages, as we all know, are different beasts. The news stories, however, are supposed to reflect what a competent and (dare I say?) professional journalist has learned about an important issue of the day.

There were plenty of stories in the Times and the Washington Post that focused on important aspects of Harvey and also on other major news items. Not everything in those publications is “stupid news.” But some of the stories are just that.

Sometimes little things say a lot. Stories about Melania Trump’s heels, published in the middle of a catastrophic event of almost unimaginable proportions, reveal much more about the media than they do about Mrs. Trump or the Trump administration.

They reveal with startling clarity that certain journalistic institutions are hell-bent on damaging the current administration in any way they possibly can.

And they reveal, in addition, that those institutions have abandoned the practice journalism as a profession; to them, journalism is just a job. They’re not committed to delivering high-quality stories to their readers, because that is what their readers expect and deserve.

Rather, they’re committed to publishing anything that they think will damage the president and his administration, because they just don’t like this president.

via http://ift.tt/2vOhVO1 Tyler Durden

– 4 reasons why “gold has entered a new bull market” – Schroders
– Market complacency is key to gold bull market say Schroders
– Investors are currently pricing in the most benign risk environment in history as seen in the VIX
– History shows gold has the potential to perform very well in periods of stock market weakness (see chart)
– You should buy insurance when insurers don’t believe that the “risk event” will happen
– Very high Chinese gold demand, negative global interest rates and a weak dollar should push gold higher

This week gold broke through the key resistance of $1,300. For some time market commentators have been signalling this level as the point of entry for a new bull market.

Often price can be distracting when it comes to trying to figure out what is going on. Two Schroders fund managers called the new bull market in gold about a week before the price broke through the key level.

Gold has entered into a new bull market. As we have discussed previously, there are four main reasons for our stance:

1. Global interest rates need to stay negative
2. Broad equity valuations are extremely high and complacency stalks financial markets
3. The dollar might be entering a bear market
4. Chinese demand for gold has the potential to surge (indeed, investment demand in China for bar and coin already increased over 30% in the first quarter of 2017, according to the World Gold Council)

via http://ift.tt/2wmAk88 GoldCore

Just minutes after Russia was given 2 days to implement today’s decision by the State Department, shuttering Russia’s consulate in San Francisco, California and two diplomatic annexes in Washington, DC and New York City, in “the spirit of parity invoked by the Russians”, the Russian responses started coming in, and they were not happy. 

Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was first on the tape, saying he  “expressed regret about the escalation of tensions in bilateral ties”, noting “it wasn’t Russia that started the escalation.”

Lavrov told Tillerson that Moscow would “closely study” the new US measures and would inform Washington of its reaction in due course. Ironically, earlier in the day the US said that it “is prepared to take further action as necessary and as warranted,”even as the State Department prompt tweeted that the “US hopes to avoid further retaliation & move forward with improved relations & cooperation with #Russia“

US hopes to avoid further retaliation & move forward with improved relations & cooperation with #Russia https://t.co/M3frokDACn

— Department of State (@StateDept) August 31, 2017

To be sure, former US ambassador to Moscow and vocal Putin critic, Michael McFaul, was skeptical:

Let’s see. https://t.co/zkIWW51zdF

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) August 31, 2017

And judging by the immediate outpouring Russian reactions, he has every right to be. According to AP, the newly arrived Russian ambassador to the US invoked Vladimir Lenin in saying Moscow will carefully consider its response to the latest US diplomatic escalation: Anatoly Antonov flew into Washington on Thursday, hours after the State Department’s announcement of the closure.

Russian news agencies quoted him as saying: “We have to act calmly and professionally. Speaking like Lenin, we don’t need hysterical impulses,” citing a Lenin maxim.

But the heavy artillery was as usual relegated to domestic Russian politicians:  Leonid Slutsky, head of the Russian Duma’s foreign affairs committee, accused the U.S. of a sharp escalation in diplomatic tensions.

Slutsky, one of the top Russian diplomats, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying, “It’s a highly unjust step. It means that the U.S. is declaring the hot phase of diplomatic war.”

Leonid Slutsky

Cited by AP, he also said that closing institutions abroad is more serious than the U.S. decision last year to expel 35 Russian diplomats and close two estates used by the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Other takes on the latest diplomatic spat were just as skeptical. Former US diplomat Jim Jatras said that while President Trump says he wants better relations with Russia, he recently qualified that with “some day” and “eventually.”

“For a lot of people in Washington, having bad relations with Russia is an end in itself, it’s not a means to an end. And they are calling the shots, not President Trump,” Jatras said. “If there is anybody in his administration who wants to improve ties with Russia, it is him – but as far as I can tell, he’s about the only one.”

“This is all part of an escalation of tensions between the US and Russia which, I am sad to say, the US initiated,” Dan Kovalik, who teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told RT. “Just when there appeared to be a welcome breakthrough between the US and Russia at the G-20 Summit, the US Congress reacted to the possibility of a détente by immediately and overwhelmingly acting to impose a new round of sanctions against Russia aimed at Russia’s natural gas trade in Europe,” Kovalik said.

The sanctions were adopted with veto-proof majorities, so President Donald Trump had to sign them into law at the beginning of August.

“It appears that there is strong, bipartisan opposition in the US to a peaceful relationship with Russia, and this opposition is putting the entire world at risk of more war and conflagration,” Kovalik said. “It is high time the US pull back from such provocations of Russia and find a way to work with Russia as a friend and partner, just as Russia has wanted for many years.”

“This tit-for-tat will mean eventual catastrophe for everyone on earth, unless we finally get some sanity in US leadership, to pull back from the brink,” said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University. “Judging from the warlike posture of both parties and the US media, it’s hard to see where such restraint will come from; and yet those of us who see the danger must do all we can to warn against it.”

Finally, retired FBI agent Coleen Rowley told RT that US foreign policy sometimes looks as if five-year-olds were in charge of it. “This childish tit-for-tat game will not end well unless there’s a grown-up in the room who can put an end to it.”

So far the only grown ups in the room are intent on further escalating said “game.”

via http://ift.tt/2wWAi8H Tyler Durden

By Priceonomics

There are more options to get food—as in the kind you eat at home rather than at a restaurant—than ever before. 

Sure, there are traditional brick-and-mortar stores, like Costco and Trader Joe’s. But in the last decade there’s been a boom in food services that can be managed through a digital app.

Depending on where you live in the country, you can get groceries delivered through platforms like Instacart or Amazon Fresh. You can order all the ingredients you need to cook a meal with meal kit services like Blue Apron. Or, you can feast on ready-made meals from the likes of Thistle and Munchery. You might even get your favorite General’s Chicken delivered on Seamless or GrubHub a few times a week.

In this stacked market, which services do people favor?

We analyzed data from Priceonomics customer Earnest, a loan provider, looked at anonymized data from tens of thousands of loan applicants to answer a number of questions about this space: How does spending vary by service? Across sectors, are they any real differences between customers? And which companies, in particular, dominate each space?

We analyzed 2.5 million transactions between January 2016 and August 2017, categorizing by types of services that generally reflect how people consume food at home, rather than eating outside the home in an establishment. The data does not include restaurant transactions. It should be noted that our data, drawn from loan applicants may reflect a younger demographic than the national average. The average age in our data set is 32.

We found that 90% of the overall “eating in” food spend is still at a traditional grocery store. Among grocery delivery, the overwhelming market leader among startups is Instacart. For meal prep, the clear market leader is Blue Apron. 

Men are marginally more likely to visit a grocery store while women are more likely to use grocery delivery and meal-prep services. People in New York, California, and Washington, D.C. order food delivery at rates up to 328% higher than average and a combined AmazonFresh+Whole Foods are poised to make up 14.6% of spending among this demographic, mostly through Whole Foods.

Nom-onomics

In our analysis, we focused specifically on five food sectors: brick-and-mortar outlets (physical grocery stores), grocery delivery, restaurant delivery, meal kit services, and prepped meals.

Brick-and-mortar includes Publix, Whole Foods, Kroger, Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Costco, and Albertsons. Grocery delivery includes Instacart, Fresh Direct, Foodkick, Amazon Fresh, and Thrive. Meal Kit services include Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, and Purple Carrot. Prepped meals include Freshly, Thistle, and Munchery. Restaurant delivery services include UberEATS, Doordash, Seamless, GrubHub, and Caviar.

When we break these categories down by a percentage of total spending—about $120 million over a 20-month period—it’s clear that brick-and-mortar grocery stores dominate with 90% of market share despite industry fears that they are being replaced by alternatives. 

Data source: Earnest

Distantly behind, though still with significant market share, is restaurant delivery with 5.1% of overall sales, followed by grocery delivery (2.8%), meal kits (2%), and prepped meals (0.2%).

On an individual level, customers spend considerably more at brick-and-mortar stores than on other services. At $155 per month, the average customer spends $21 more at physical grocery stores than on grocery delivery, and more than double what they do on restaurant delivery.

Data source: Earnest

On average, customers go to physical grocery stores 3.2 times per month—vastly more than they use delivery (2 times per month), or meal prep services (<2 times per month). That means on a per transaction basis, people spend just over $50 per visit at a grocery store while they spend just more than $30 per restaurant delivery.

Data source: Earnest

That said, some regions are more apt to ordering delivery than others. Country-wide, the percentage of total food purchases that are delivery (restaurant + grocery) is 12.6%. But it seems coastal residents order delivery far more than average.

Data source: Earnest

In New York, 41.4% of all food purchases are delivery; in DC, 31.2%; and in California, 22.2%. The rest of the list is populated mainly by states bordering the oceans (Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island).

Which companies dominate?

Next, let’s turn to the individual companies that make up these categories. Are there certain services or establishments that lead the pack? Here’s how each category breaks down.

Data source: Earnest

Representing 34.5% of all brick and mortar food transactions we analyzed, Costco is the most popular physical grocery chain. Kroger (20%), Whole Foods (16%), Trader Joe’s (13.7%), and Safeway (13.1%) all have relatively similar shares, and Publix (not pictured) represented less than 0.1%. (Note: We should qualify that the brick and mortar stores here reflect the geographic locations of our loan applicants).

In each of the other spaces, one company seems to commandeer the vast majority of sales.

With grocery delivery, Instacart (53.9%) is heads and shoulders above the competition (Amazon Fresh, at 7.8%, is still far behind, but sure to grow in the coming years); restaurant delivery is dominated by the Grubhub/Seamless powerhouse; and Blue Apron has a stronghold on the meal kit space, with 77.2% of all purchases.

Lastly, we looked at how men and women shop. According to this analysis, men go to brick-and-mortar grocery stores marginally more often than women and women use delivery and meal kit services more than men, The data underscores other reports showing that increasingly grocery stores are appealing to male shoppers

Data source: Earnest

The Changing Way We Eat

With new tech emerging in the food space—complete with checkout line-free stores, drones, and artificial intelligence-driven delivery methods—there’s been a lot of talk about the “death” of the traditional grocery store. While delivery companies (and food tech in general) are rapidly growing, our data suggest that these fears may be a bit premature.

This year has also witnessed headline-worthy events about the food business, including Blue Apron’s IPO and the acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon. According to this data, the total slice that Amazon will now control—between Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh—is about 14.6% of total food spending. While that’s a hearty piece of the pie, Amazon will still have to battle incumbents like Costco and delivery service Instacart to be the market leader.

Brick-and-mortar grocery stores still control a vast share of the overall food purchasing space, and customers both spend more money there and go to stores more frequently than they use delivery or meal kit services.

via http://ift.tt/2gtSVtp Tyler Durden