Month: November 2018

Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

“Insulting” – that’s how US President Donald Trump sharply reacted to the idea of a “real European army” proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron.

And it was how Macron rationalized the need for an independent military force for Europe that perhaps most irked the American leader.

Speaking on a tour of World War I battlefields in northern France last week, Macron said that Europe needed to defend itself from “China, Russia and even the United States of America”.

It was a pretty extraordinary choice of words by the French leader. To frame the US among an array of perceived foreign enemy powers was a devastating blow to the concept of a much-vaunted transatlantic alliance.

Since the Second World War, ending 1945, the concept of an American-European alliance has been the bedrock of a supposed inviolable, mutual defense pact. That nearly seven-decade alliance is now being questioned more than ever.

Macron’s call for a European army was further backed up by German Chancellor Angel Merkel who also pointedly said this week that Europe can no longer rely on the US for its defense.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has welcomed the proposal for Europe to form its own military organization, independent from Washington. No doubt, Moscow views such a development as augmenting a move towards a multipolar international order, which Russia and China, among others, have been advocating in opposition to American ambitions of unipolar dominance.

When Trump arrived in Paris last weekend along with dozens of other world leaders, including Putin, to commemorate the centennial anniversary marking the end of World War I, there was a notable frostiness between Macron and the American president. Only a few months ago, Macron and Trump had appeared the best of friends in what some observers referred to as a “bromance”.

During the Paris events, Macron sought to placate Trump by saying that the European army proposal would have a “complementary” role to the US-led NATO military alliance. However, their relationship further soured when Macron later delivered a speech in which he made a veiled rebuke of Trump’s “nationalist” politics.

Days later, on returning to Washington, Trump then fired off a fusillade of angry tweets attacking Macron in very personal terms over a range of issues, including “unfair” economic trade and France’s alleged ungrateful attitude towards the US liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

The rift between the US and Europe has been brewing even before Trump’s presidency. For years, Washington has been carping that the Europeans need to spend more on military defense, claiming that the US has been shouldering the burden for too long. Trump has taken the griping to a new, higher level. Recall that he has threatened to pull out of NATO because the Europeans were “free loading” on American “protection”.

The irony is that now the French and German leaders are talking about setting up their own military defenses, Trump has blown a fuse.

Evidently, the American contention is not about “burden sharing” of defense. If Washington was genuinely aggrieved about supposedly defending Europe at too much of its own expense, then Trump, one would think, would be only too glad to hear that the Europeans were at last making their own military arrangements, and taking the burden off Washington.

This gets to the heart of the matter about the real purpose of NATO and presence of tens of thousands of US troops stationed in bases across Europe since 1945. American military presence in Europe is not about “protecting” its supposed allies. It is, and always has been, about projecting American power over Europe. In reality, American troops and bases in Europe are more functioning as an occupying force, keeping the Europeans in line with Washington’s strategic objectives of hegemony over the continent.

Macron and Merkel’s vision of a European army is probably fanciful anyway, without any real prospect of materializing. How such a new defense arrangement would work independently from the 29-member NATO alliance led by the US seems unwieldy and impractical.

But the latest tensions between Washington and European leaders over military organization demonstrate the real nature of America’s relationship to Europe. It is about domination by Washington over Europe and has little to do with partnership and protection.

When Trump and previous US presidents have urged greater military spending by Europe the ulterior agenda is for Europeans to pay more to underpin American military presence, not for Europeans to find their own independent defense arrangement.

Tensions in the transatlantic axis seem to be coming to a head, heightened by Trump’s nationalistic “America First” policy. Rivalries are sharpening over trade, US sanctions on Iran, Trump’s threats against European energy plans with Russia, the Paris Climate Accord, and squabbling over NATO expenditures.

There is nothing progressive about Macron or Merkel’s call for a European army. It is more to do with France and Germany wanting to assert themselves as great powers and to shake off American tutelage out of frustration with Trump’s domineering petulance.

Only last week, Macron caused controversy when he praised French military general Philippe Pétain who collaborated with Nazi Germany as leader of Vichy France (1940-44). Macron wants a European army to satisfy his own nationalistic ambitions of revamping French global power. This week, he spent the night onboard a refurbished French aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, from which he gave a media interview saying that being “an ally of America meant not being a vassal”. Touché!

A progressive challenge from Europe to American power would not involve setting up a new army. Instead it would involve Europeans pushing for the disbandment of NATO as an obsolete organization and for the withdrawal of US-led forces which are dangerously amassing on Russia’s border.

Nonetheless, the one positive thing to emerge from the transatlantic spat over military defenses is that it illustrates more than ever how European protection is not the real purpose of Washington’s relationship to the continent. The purpose is one of using Europe as a platform for projecting America’s power, in particular against Russia.

The recent announcement by the Trump administration that it is willing to rip up yet another nuclear arms control treaty – the INF following the ABM in 2002 – clearly shows that Washington, ultimately, has recklessly scant concern for Europe’s security with regard to a possible future war with Russia.

For Washington, despite all the chivalrous rhetoric, Europe is not a partner nor even an ally. It is a vassal. Admittedly, thousands of American troops died while bravely fighting wars in Europe. But they are distinct from the US ruling class. At bottom, Europe is merely a battlefield for American military power, just as it was in two previous world wars. One hundred years after the end of World War I, the same callous calculus for the imperial planners in Washington is at play.

European ideas for independent defense is why Washington has reacted so furiously. It’s not willing to give up its European front.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2DpFlAR Tyler Durden

If the European Commission does levy billions of fines against the Italian government (or enforce some other punishment), some “60 million Italians will rise up” against the trade bloc – or at least that’s what a clearly frustrated Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini told a group of Italian reporters following reports that the Commission could move to punish Italy as soon as next week.

The Italian people, Salvini added, would never accept those penalties, according to a report in Italy’s ANSA newswire. And according to the latest polling, there’s more than a little truth to that.

As the 27 EU members who aren’t the UK brace for the inevitable fallout for what increasingly looks to be a bumpy Brexit, one shocking poll revealed that 60% of Italians feel that their country has been mistreated by the European Union. If accurate, that’s several percentage points higher than the percentage of Britons who voted to leave the EU back in 2016.

According to Express, pollsters Coldiretti and Ixè found that some 43% of Italians believe that Brussels’ economic policies were designed by stronger economies with little concern for weaker EU members. And fittingly enough, one of Italians’ biggest concerns about the EU and its unfair treatment of Italy stems from policies related to agriculture.

Two-thirds of Italians believe that the EU’s policies on food damage products made in Italy and only 10 percent believe the Italian agri-food sector is benefitting from EU choices.

A spokesperson for Coldiretti said: “The clear majority of Italians therefore believe that community regulation and the recent choices regarding international treaties are not adequate to guarantee quality, safety but also respect for the gastronomical traditions of Italy.”

But the dissatisfaction runs deeper than food.

Italians expressed their frustration with Europe when they voted for the League and Five Star Movement during the March elections. That vote, and the rising popularity enjoyed by both parties, represented what many believed to be a clear mandate: To shake up a relationship with Brussels that was no longer working for Italians.

Italy, Index poll:

LEGA-ENF: 33%
M5S-EFDD: 26%
PD-S&D: 18%
FI-EPP: 7%
FdI-ECR: 4%
LeU-S&D: 3%
+E-ALDE: 2%

Field work: unrevealed
Sample size: unrevealed pic.twitter.com/BRfxPorzk9

— Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) November 16, 2018

On Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio told reporters in Rome that the EU is asking Italy “for a blood and tears budget,” according to Bloomberg.

“It is unbelievable that they don’t understand our reality.”

But the intensity of Italians’ anger toward the EU has apparently been lost on the European Commission. In comments that sounded lie they were meant to aggravate the situation, EC Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis warned in an interview with an Italian paper that Italy had defied the EU with its irresponsible fiscal policies, and threatened to sanction the country for its reckless spending. 

Meanwhile, Italy’s leaders have insisted that abandoning plans for fiscal stimulus would be like committing “suicide.”

Disillusionment is particularly high among young Italians, who still struggle with high unemployment and other social ills. Support for leaving the bloc is much higher among young Italians when compared with young Europeans in general.

Interestingly, Italy’s GDP growth had kept pace with Germany’s until the 2011 eurozone crisis.

And as Albert Edwards explains, the EU’s budget rules have consistently seen Italy run a budget surplus, keeping fiscal conditions tighter than they would otherwise be (the growth in Italian debt actually slowed after it joined the euro). Edwards compared these rules to a “fiscal straightjacket.”

Which goes back full circle to the austerity being imposed upon Italy by the EU: it is this fiscal straitjacket that the Italian government has been forced to wear over the last decade that has become intolerable to the Italian electorate (see chart below showing persistent large primary surpluses) according to Edwards, who notes that “it was only a matter of time before they broke free, but to be honest I am surprised it has taken so long for this confrontation with the EC to occur.”

The degree to which this tightening has occurred can be seen in cyclically adjusted government spending, which suggests that the country’s fiscal impulse has actually weakened since Italy joined the eurozone. 

All of this certainly supports Edwards’ expectation that if the contemporary populist regime doesn’t take Italy out of the eurozone, the next crisis will yield a government that is even more fanatically opposed to the bloc’s policies. In other words, it’s not so much a question of ‘if’, but ‘when’.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2Q5FKz3 Tyler Durden

Authored by Andrei Akulov via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Finnish Prime Minister (PM) Juha Sipila has accused Russia of interfering with the Global Positioning System (GPS) in Finland’s Lapland region during the Trident Juncture-2018 NATO exercise. NATO fighter jets and surveillance aircraft landed and took off from the airport in Rovaniemi during that training event.

In his weekly interview with the national public broadcasting company YLE Radio Suomi, the PM said the electronic interference was “almost certainly deliberate.” He thinks it is quite likely that Russia was behind the episode, which jeopardized civil aviation in addition to other concerns. An experienced pilot himself, Sipila said that the incident would be treated as a breach of Finnish airspace. Finland has launched an investigation into the matter. Foreign Minister Timo Soini has promised to provide a report to parliament about the alleged Russian jamming.

Norwegian authorities joined in to point a finger at Russia. “The jamming in the period between October 16th and November 7th came from Russian forces on Kola,” said Birgitte Frisch, Special Advisor in the Ministry of Defense. Danish aircraft were not affected but Danish Defense Minister Claus Hjord Frederiksen declared that Russia’s denials of involvement were not convincing. According to him, the GPS jamming incidents were another sign of Russia’s “aggressive” behavior toward neighboring countries. Nothing has been proven, but a Finnish investigation was launched after the accusations had already been made public.

No formal protests have been submitted.

All the charges have been denied by Russia.

It’s worth noting that neither the US Defense Department nor NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg were willing to comment. Is it conceivable that Russia’s alleged activities affected only the aircraft belonging to these two nations, especially since the American military was playing the biggest role in that exercise? Suppose Russia wanted to test its EW systems. How could the jamming exclude US aircraft and ships? All in all, over 30 countries took part in the training event, but only two of them complained. Were the others not subjected to jamming? If the jamming was so powerful, why were there no accidents? Can Finnish and Norwegian officials explain that?

The fact that these very simple questions remain unanswered demonstrates how easy it is to hurl accusations without substantiating one’s claims.

Norway insists the interference came from the Kola Peninsula. The Russians’ best “tactical” electronic warfare (EW) systems, such as the Krasukha-4 or the aircraft-based Khibiny, cannot jam satellites. The state-of-the-art Porubschik EW system is carried by the Ilyushin Il-22PP aircraft. If it had been used, it would have been easy for NATO intelligence to have detected it.

It had to be a “strategic” system. Russia has at least two of them. One is the Samarkand, which has not been deployed as yet. The only system that could have jammed the NATO forces during the exercise would have been the Murmansk-BN. But it is positioned in Kaliningrad, not the Kola Peninsula. Besides, it’s really hard to explain why Russia would have done such a thing. Moscow does not stand to gain anything by jamming NATO GPS communications. The interference could have been caused by solar activity, which can be much more powerful than any conceivable EW system. That happens from time to time. But neither the Finnish nor the Norwegian authorities were willing to consider that possibility. And GPS positioning is normally less accurate in the polar regions anyway.

In 2016, Russia put forward a set of proposals to enhance security in Europe in general and in the Baltic Sea in particular, especially during military exercises. NATO refused to discuss them.

Thank God the Royal Norwegian Navy does not blame Russia for sinking its frigate Helge Ingstad, which hit a tanker during the drills. Many of the foreign servicemen who came to Norway to take part in Trident Juncture behaved badly and drank too much. Underdressed Slovenian soldiers nearly froze to death in Norway. Should Russia be blamed for that too? It has become a trend — Russia is blamed for whatever goes wrong, without any evidence to support such accusations. Those who put the blame on Russia for the glitches affecting the NATO military during these drills that were staged for the purpose of scaring Moscow to death need to do the right thing and provide some answers to these questions.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2PziY3j Tyler Durden

Authored by Tom Luongo,

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” 
H. L. Mencken

The resignation of Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman over the terms of the ceasefire with Palestinians in Gaza has thrown Israeli politics into real turmoil.  

Depending on whose analysis of this situation you read you may be tempted to see this as a good thing or a bad thing. 

Bernard at Moon of Alabama sees a weakened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being forced to sue of peace after the upgraded response from Gaza.  From MoA:

The short conflict demonstrated that:

• Israel is deterred. It does not want to launch another war on Gaza.

• The siege of Gaza, by Israel, Egypt and by the Palestinian authority under Mahmoud Abbas, failed. The reputational cost of the siege became too high after Israel killed some 160 Palestinians during weekly protests along the demarcation fence. It had to allow diesel fuel and money from Qatar to reach Gaza.

• The siege failed to prevent that Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other groups acquired a larger number of missiles and other new capabilities.

• The Palestinians in Gaza are united. The resistance against the occupation is alive and well.

This leaves Netanyahu scrambling to fend off snap elections and the rise of the even more hard-line Naftali Bennett who has threatened Bibi’s coalition outright unless he is made Defense Minister, replacing Lieberman.

MoA sees Netanyahu in a very precarious position, which he is, and will be forced to placate Bennett or risk a snap election that could see his government fall.

And it is on this point that Mintpressnews’s Whitney Webb takes another view, namely, that this is not the political victory for Gaza the Palestinians think it is.  Since Bennett will step up the brutality to include all Gazans, including children.

With Lieberman’s party already withdrawing from Israel’s far-right coalition, Netanyahu will likely capitulate to Bennett’s demands in order to stabilize the current government and avoid dissolving the Knesset and subsequent snap elections. Thus, the current instability facing the Likud-led coalition now seems fated to result in a rightward surge, whether it’s through snap elections or through Netanyahu-led efforts to placate other right-wing parties and prevent them from defecting.

Other powerful politicians within Jewish Home, such as Uri Ariel, have also pushed for Bennett to be appointed. Ariel told Israeli media outlet Arutz Sheva:

Prime Minister Netanyahu should appoint Minister Bennett as defense minister and this government can continue to function. I think there is an advantage in stability, of course assuming that Bennett will bring security policy to a much better place.

Naturally, there is a desire of more than one person to be defense minister, but the most appropriate one is Minister Bennett, who was promised the portfolio by the prime minister in the past, and the promise was not honored.”

Over the past year, Bennett has repeatedly accused Lieberman of showing “restraint and weakness” as defense minister, especially in relation to his approach to Gaza’s Great Return March. Accusing Lieberman of “weakness” is particularly shocking given that the Israeli military under Lieberman repeatedly used lethal force to quell protests in Gaza, killing over 200 unarmed Palestinians – including children, medics and journalists – and wounding over 22,000.

As bad as Bibi and Lieberman are/were Bennett makes them look like Quakers.  

So, the situation in Israel is similar to that in Russia for U.S. anti-Russian types.  If you think Vladimir Putin is a dictator and a dangerous right-wing fanatic (which he isn’t) then you don’t understand what stands behind him.

In other words, be careful what you wish for — regime change — because you just might get it … good and hard, to quote Mencken. 

In effect, weakening figures like them empowers the hyper-nationalists who are 1) eager to prove the other guy was a wimp and 2) untested in actual confrontation.  So, they are unpredictable and likely to go off half-cocked.

For all of his faults, Netanyahu is at least battle-tested and can be reasoned with to some extent.

I think, however, Webb overstates the danger for the Palestinians here.  Israel is in the precarious position.  Too much of the world has turned against them and their handling of this situation.  

And that reputational loss is putting Netanyahu in the bind he’s currently in.  He knows what will happen if Bennett is in charge of Israel’s defense forces.  It will be the best recruitment drive for anti-Israeli sentiment the world over, but most especially here in the U.S.

And that is something he can’t have.

Broadly speaking, the height of Israel’s influence over U.S. politics has already occurred with the peak of the Baby Boomers’ political power.  As the generational shift happens more Gen-X’ers and Millennials who have had their fill of subordinating U.S. foreign policy to the whims of Israel will gain influence over U.S. policy.

This isn’t a judgment, it’s a sober observation.

So if Bennett takes over the IDF and takes things to eleven versus the Palestinians in Gaza, then it will cost Donald Trump politically at home and the best ally Israel has had in two decades in the White House will be lost.  

They, along with the Saudis, are now having to truly deal with international criticism of their behavior and can no longer rely on a compliant (and paid for) western media to spin the narrative in their favor.  

And Trump & Kushner’s Project Netanyahu, as Alistair Crooke recently described it, has been nothing but a disaster for all involved, especially the people it was supposed to help — The Saudis and the Israelis.  

And all of Trump’s enemies, even the ones who are also pro-Israel, will turn up the heat on him over our relationship with these two countries if 

They both overplayed their hands thinking that Trump would back whatever play they made.  

It has played right into the hands of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah by continuing to think the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could be successful.  What Obama thought would be a quagmire for the Russians turned out to be one for the U.S./Israel/Saudi coalition.

This is why Trump and his advisors have pushed all-in on regime change in Iran.  Netanyahu is right that Iran can and will continue to supply the arms needed to grind out a win versus Israel in the long run.  

If Russia’s S-300s and air defense systems are as good as advertised then Bennett will end the myth of Israeli air superiority after Israel loses a few F-16i’s when he inevitably needs to show strength.

Unfortunately for Israel, that myth is one of the few things keeping things relatively quiet.

Iran will find it’s way through the sanctions.  Netanyahu didn’t have many other options and the neocons in D.C. really believe that this time it’ll be different.  But it won’t be.

In fact, if you don’t think Iran and Russia haven’t game-planned this very scenario then you are as clueless as those that think getting rid of Putin would make Russia more pliable.

Oh right, those are the same people.

The silver lining to all of this is now that Bibi is on thinner ice in the Knesset the best path forward for Israel and Trump is to come to the bargaining table as honest brokers to end the conflict in Syria, something to this point hasn’t occurred.

That will get Iran to stand down, because otherwise Israel’s position in the region will continue to erode.  

Putin was forced by his hard-liners to finally protect both Russian and Syrian interests directly from Israeli harassment.  And that set us on the path we’re on today.  The best deal Trump and Netanyahu are going to get from Putin and Assad is on the table today, not next year or 2020.  

Provided, of course, that either one or the both of them survive.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2FBoFJw Tyler Durden

For world leaders, journalists, CEOs, or anyone who has ever had to explain a dicey report card, word selection can have an enormous impact on how a message is perceived.

Does it make any difference whether a presentation went quite good versus pretty good, or if an earnings report is described as awful versus poor? As Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley explains, according to a new survey from YouGov, word sentiment isn’t as cut-and-dry as one would expect.

THE UNITED STATES OF SENTIMENT

Certain words more precisely communicate positive and negative feelings.

Interestingly, very bad edges out words like abysmal and dreadful as the most conclusively negative phrase for those survey respondents based in the United States.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

On the positive end of the spectrum, perfect was most conclusively positive term.

EFFECTIVE WORDS: U.K. EDITION

The version of the survey conducted in the United Kingdom reveals interesting differences in how words are perceived.

In the U.K. visualization, words have a more defined “hump”, meaning that people tended to agreed on where each word fell on the 10-point scale. As well, there appears to be more mutually agreed upon nuance. The U.S. results showed less agreement on words that weren’t on the extreme ends of the sentiment spectrum.

In both regions, the word average was nearly dead-center on the graph and had the highest percentage of people agreeing on its score.

QUANTIFYING LANGUAGE

It’s human nature to attempt to tame complexity and bring order to chaos. Language, with its fluidity and openness to interpretation, has always presented a tempting challenge.

To this end, researchers have developed lists that ascribe a sentiment score to specific words. Using data mining techniques, it’s possible to gauge the tone of a piece of writing.

One compelling example of this is a project by data analyst, Susan Li, who ran a sentiment analysis on Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letters, and found that the majority of the letters had a positive tone.

The one outlier? 2001, which was a challenging year for a number of reasons.

As these techniques continue to evolve, we are likely to better understand why one person’s abysmal is another person’s very bad.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2DrgAnJ Tyler Durden

Authored by Fergus Hodgson, Antigua Report via The Epoch Times,

The city’s absurd fines, crackdowns show hostility for thrift …

The most ingenious arbiter of resource allocation is under attack around the globe: market pricing. In the cross hairs stands the peer-to-peer economy, which circumvents price controls, favoritism, and central planning.

The intermediary platforms – Airbnb, Uber, Kickstarter, Turo, etc. – have enabled a flowering of mutually beneficial exchange. The beauty of these decentralized networks is surpassed only by the economic value they bring to users.

The success of these intermediaries lies in their capacity to send out price signals and allow the invisible hand of the free market to work. Where there is pent-up supply or demand, these applications make that known. The harmonious response is for new participants to enter the market, either as providers or consumers, and for untapped resources to be utilized.

The enemies of peer-to-peer platforms, therefore, are the enemies of the free market and innovation. These Luddites either do not understand the economic benefits or profit artificially from the status quo. As Mariá Marty, the executive director of the Foundation for Intellectual Responsibility once quipped, “You can tell how corrupt a city is by how vehemently it cracks down on the sharing economy.”

The Crime of Serving Customers

Municipal and state officials correctly sense that these platforms challenge and limit their power. For those motivated by power, therefore, even platforms that bear fruit must be stamped out.

In the case of Airbnb—which offers flexible accommodation options to 150 million users—this contrast of peaceful exchange versus top-down dictates has led to bizarre and rising crackdowns. In May, New York fined a couple $1.2 million and Asheville, North Carolina, fined a man $850,000 for serving Airbnb guests.

San Francisco is ground zero for this standoff, and the municipal government this month imposed a $2.3 million fine on two Airbnb hosts.

“The city spent two years investigating the couple,” reports United Press International. While San Francisco is one of the most ardent sanctuary citiesin the nation, the City Attorney Dennis Herrera had the gall to tout the outcome and costly pursuit as a victory for the rule of law and an end to “unfair competition in the marketplace.”

The fact that this couple, Darren and Valerie Lee, were willing to go to great lengths to defy city mandates is a testament to the enormous demand for their accommodation. What the couple did was only a crime against protectionist regulations that patently are not in the interest of consumers.

San Francisco Needs More Airbnb

The irony lost on the officials leading the crackdown is that they are their own worst enemy, as they fret over rising rental rates and a shortage of available accommodation.

Their observations are spot on: San Francisco is one of the nation’s most expensive cities for accommodation, along with Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San José. This year’s International Housing Affordability Survey, published by Demographia and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Canada, showed San Francisco to be “severely unaffordable” and among the worst in the English-speaking world.

The metric the report authors use is the median multiple: How many times the median household income goes into the median house price. That is 9.1 times for San Francisco. Even if a normal San Francisco household were to devote an impossible 100 percent of pre-tax earnings to buying a home with no interest charges, they would need nearly a decade.

Not surprisingly, given the lack of affordable options, homelessness is a glaring problem in the city. Wendell Cox, a senior fellow at Canada’s Frontier Centre for Public Policy, points the finger at restrictive zoning and a constrained supply. Even the progressive Atlantic magazine has recognizedthe relationship between this beleaguered population, rising housing costs, and “zoning laws [that] have limited the construction of new housing units.”

Rather than deal with the pesky causes, though, San Francisco passed a new tax this month (Proposition C) “to fund housing and homelessness services.” In contrast, Airbnb has voluntarily committed $5 million of its own money to address homelessness in the city.

Airbnb’s Price Signal

When demand exceeds supply, the price will rise to clear the market. High prices for rentals and homes send a crucial message: San Francisco needs more houses and apartments!

Insofar as any space not being utilized, Airbnb has responsive, market-driven prices that incentivize offering what is available. In other words, every last inch of available space can more easily be offered and put to use—a win for owners, visitors, and renters who cannot commit to or afford long-term contracts. For those struggling and willing to accept less pristine options, Airbnb can be 40 percent cheaper than conventional hotels.

If you read San Francisco’s Airbnb law, however, you could be forgiven for believing that prices and Airbnb are the enemy. For example, city rent controls must be obeyed or providers will be subject to fines of $1,000 per day. Furthermore, no one can rent on Airbnb for more than 90 days per year if he does not live on-site, while out-of-towners are banned entirely. Naturally, owners need to move to San Francisco to alleviate the housing shortage.

Airbnb is simply allowing people to do the best they can to meet market needs within a painfully constrained housing market. It is an important tool to ease the strain on availability and make San Francisco more accessible, and the profits generated via the platform make the case for both loosened housing regulations and more construction.

Those who campaign for affordable housing with the same number and style of units want to have their cake and eat it too. Though blocked by municipal governments, Airbnb has shown the demand for more options, and the platform simply reflects the wishes of users.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2DJ25wr Tyler Durden

A new report conducted by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania have determined that an excessive amount of time on “social media” sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are making millennials depressed.

“It was striking,” said Melissa Hunt, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study. “What we found over the course of three weeks was that rates of depression and loneliness went down significantly for people who limited their (social media) use.”

The study, “No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression,” is being published in December’s Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

Researchers recruited 143 students for two different trials, one in the spring semester and one in the fall semester. Each subject was required to have a Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat account, plus an Apple iPhone. They collected data on the students for about a week to get a baseline reading of their social media usage, and also had them submit questionnaires that assessed their mental health according to seven different factors: social support, fear of missing out, loneliness, autonomy, and self-acceptance, anxiety, depression, and self-esteem.

“Here’s the bottom line,” Hunt explained to Science Daily. “Using less social media than you normally would leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness. These effects are particularly pronounced for folks who were more depressed when they came into the study.”

The link between increasing social media usage and mental health issues have already been established in past studies. But, depression and loneliness have not, until now. 

Hunt said lonely and depressed people use platforms like Facebook because they are seeking social connections. Social media as a whole is making millennials more lonely, and increasingly depressed.

The study did not cover why social media makes people depressed. Hunt does provide an example:

The first is “downward social comparison.” A person reviews their feed and finds countless posts of their friends enjoying wonderful experiences. The result: “You’re more likely to think your life sucks in comparison,” said Hunt.

Social media sites are a vital tool for many millennials in the modern economy. This means they cannot cut it out altogether, Hunt Said.

That is why the study focused on cutting back usage. While ten minutes might not seem like much, the study showed it certainly helped with depression.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2Drhh0m Tyler Durden

Authored by Colin Liddell via The Unz Review,

One of the frequent comparisons that comes up in the Dissident Right is who was more correct or prescient, Orwell or Huxley.

In fact, as the only truly oppressed intellectual group, the Dissident Right are the only ones in a position to offer a valid opinion on this, as no other group of intellectuals suffers deplatforming, doxxing, and dismissal from jobs as much as we do. In the present day, it is only the Dissident Right that exists in the ‘tyrannical space’ explored in those two dystopian classics.

But, despite this, this debate exists not only on the Dissident Right but further afield. Believe it or not, even Left-wingers and Liberals debate this question, as if they too are under the heel of the oppressor’s jackboot. In fact, they feel so oppressed that some of them are even driven to discuss it in the pages of the New York Times at the despotically high rate of pay which that no doubt involves.

In both the Left and the Dissident Right, the consensus is that Huxley is far superior to Orwell, although, according to the New York Times article just alluded to, Orwell has caught up a lot since the election of Donald Trump. Have a look at this laughable, “I’m literally shaking” prose from New York Times writer Charles McGrath:

And yet [Huxley’s] novel much more accurately evokes the country we live in now, especially in its depiction of a culture preoccupied with sex and mindless pop entertainment, than does Orwell’s more ominous book, which seems to be imagining someplace like North Korea. Or it did until Donald Trump was inaugurated.

All of a sudden, as many commentators have pointed out, there were almost daily echoes of Orwell in the news…The most obvious connection to Orwell was the new president’s repeated insistence that even his most pointless and transparent lies were in fact true, and then his adviser Kellyanne Conway’s explanation that these statements were not really falsehoods but, rather, “alternative facts.” As any reader of “1984” knows, this is exactly Big Brother’s standard of truth: The facts are whatever the leader says they are.

…those endless wars in “1984,” during which the enemy keeps changing — now Eurasia, now Eastasia — no longer seem as far-fetched as they once did, and neither do the book’s organized hate rallies, in which the citizenry works itself into a frenzy against nameless foreigners.

The counter to this is that Trump is the only non-establishment candidate to get elected President since Andrew Jackson and therefore almost the exact opposite of the idea of top-down tyranny.

But to return to the notion that Huxley is superior to Orwell, both on the Left and the Dissident Right, this is based on a common view that Huxley presents a much more subtle, nuanced, and sophisticated view of soft tyranny more in keeping with the appearance of our own age. Here’s McGrath summarizing this viewpoint, which could just as easily have come out of the mouth of an Alt-Righter, Alt-Liter, or Affirmative Righter:

Orwell didn’t really have much feel for the future, which to his mind was just another version of the present. His imagined London is merely a drabber, more joyless version of the city, still recovering from the Blitz, where he was living in the mid-1940s, just before beginning the novel. The main technological advancement there is the two-way telescreen, essentially an electronic peephole.

…Huxley, on the other hand, writing almost two decades earlier than Orwell (his former Eton pupil, as it happened), foresaw a world that included space travel; private helicopters; genetically engineered test tube babies; enhanced birth control; an immensely popular drug that appears to combine the best features of Valium and Ecstasy; hormone-laced chewing gum that seems to work the way Viagra does; a full sensory entertainment system that outdoes IMAX; and maybe even breast implants. (The book is a little unclear on this point, but in “Brave New World” the highest compliment you can pay a woman is to call her “pneumatic.”)

…Huxley was not entirely serious about this. He began “Brave New World” as a parody of H.G. Wells, whose writing he detested, and it remained a book that means to be as playful as it is prophetic. And yet his novel much more accurately evokes the country we live in now, especially in its depiction of a culture preoccupied with sex and mindless pop entertainment, than does Orwell’s more ominous book, which seems to be imagining someplace like North Korea.

It is easy to see why some might see Huxley as more relevant to the reality around us than Orwell, because basically “Big Brother,” in the guise of the Soviet Union, lost the Cold War, or so it seems.

But while initially convincing, the case for Huxley’s superiority can be dismantled.

Most importantly, Huxley’s main insight, namely that control can be maintained more effectively through “entertainment, distraction, and superficial pleasure rather than through overt modes of policing and strict control over food supplies” is not actually absent in 1984.

In fact, exactly these kind of methods are used to control the Proles, on whom pornography is pushed and prostitution allowed. In fact porn is such an important means of social control that the IngSoc authorities even have a pornography section called “PornSec,” which mass produces porn for the Proles. One of the LOL moments in Michael Radford’s film version is when Mr. Charrington, the agent of the thought police who poses as a kindly pawnbroker to rent a room to Winston and Julia for their sexual trysts, informs them on their arrest that their surveillance film will be ‘repurposed’ as porn.

In fact, Orwell’s view of sex as a means of control is much more dialectical and sophisticated than Huxley’s, as the latter was, as mentioned above, essentially writing a parody of the naive “free love” notions of H.G.Wells.

While sex is used as a means to weaken the Proles, ‘anti-Sex’ is used to strengthen the hive-mind of Party members. Indeed, we see today how the most hysterical elements of the Left — and to a certain degree the Dissident Right — are the most undersexed.

Also addictive substances are not absent from Orwell’s dystopian vision. While Brave New World only has soma, 1984 has Victory Gin, Victory Wine, Victory Beer, Victory Coffee, and Victory Tobacco — all highly addictive substances that affect people’s moods and reconcile them to unpleasant realities. Winston himself is something of a cigarette junkie and gin fiend, as we see in this quote from the final chapter:

The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens.

Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the cafe…

In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at a gulp.

But while 1984 includes almost everything that Brave New World contains in terms of controlling people through sex, drugs, and distractions, it also includes much, much more, especially regarding how censorship and language are used to control people and how tyranny is internalised. The chapter from which the above quote comes, shows how Winston, a formerly autonomous agent, has come to accept the power of the system so much that he no longer needs policing.

But most brilliant of all is Orwell’s prescient description of how language is changed through banning certain words and the expression of certain ideas or observations deemed “thought crime,” to say nothing of the constant rewriting of history. The activities of Big Tech and their deplatforming of all who use words, phrases, and ideas not in the latest edition of their “Newspeak” dictionary, have radically changed the way that people communicate and what they talk about in a comparatively short period of time.

Orwell’s insights into how language can be manipulated into a tool of control shows his much deeper understanding of human psychology than that evident in Huxley’s novel. The same can be said about Orwell’s treatment of emotions, which is another aspect of his novel that rings particularly true today.

In 1984 hate figures, like Emmanuel Goldstein, and fake enemies, like Eastasia and Eurasia, are used to unite, mobilise, and control certain groups. Orwell was well aware of the group-psychological dynamics of the tribe projected to the largest scale of a totalitarian empire. The concept of “three minutes hate” has so much resonance with our own age, where triggered Twitter-borne hordes of SJWs and others slosh around the news cycle like emotional zombies, railing against Trump or George Soros.

In Huxley’s book, there are different classes but this is not a source of conflict. Indeed they are so clearly defined – in fact biologically so – that there is no conflict between them, as each class carries out its predetermined role like harmonious orbit of Aristotlean spheres.

In short, Brave New World sees man as he likes to see himself — a rational actor, controlling his world and taking his pleasures. It is essentially the vision of a well-heeled member of the British upper classes.

Orwell’s book, by contrast, sees man as the tribal primitive, forced to live on a scale of social organisation far beyond his natural capacity, and thereby distorted into a mad and cruel creature. It is essentially the vision of a not-so-well-heeled member of the British middle classes in daily contact with the working class. But is all the richer and more profound for it.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2QOXKLj Tyler Durden

Since September when what was gearing up to be a major Syrian-Russian assault on Idlib was called off through a Russian-Turkish ceasefire agreement, possibly in avoidance of the stated threat that American forces would intervene in defense of the al-Qaeda insurgent held province, the war has largely taken a back-burner in the media and public consciousness. 

But as sporadic fighting between jihadists and Syrian government forces is reignited this week along the outskirts of the contested territory, the war could once again be thrust back into the media spotlight as ground zero for a great power confrontation between Moscow and Washington. 

Russia this week condemned “sporadic clashes”, as well as “provocations” by the jihadist group HTS (the main al-Qaeda presence) in northwestern Syria. At the same time Damascus has grown increasingly frustrated with implementation of the Idlib deal while criticizing Turkey for its failures. At a moment when we could be headed toward another major international showdown over Idlib, Russia is once again flexing its muscles by conducting military exercises off Syria’s coast in the Mediterranean. 

“Drills were held to practice searching for and tracking a submarine, searching for, rescuing and providing medical assistance to persons in distress at sea,” a Russian naval press office statement reads.

Russian military and naval officials announced Friday that its warships held extensive anti-submarine warfare drills in the Mediterranean. Specifically the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s frigates Admiral Makarov and Admiral Essen conducted the exercise in tandem with deck-based helicopters near Syrian coastal waters.

According to TASS the Russian Navy deployed sub-killers armed with cruise missiles as part of the drill:

The frigates are armed with eight launchers of Kalibr-NK cruise missiles that are capable of striking surface, coastal and underwater targets at a distance of up to 2,600 km.

The warships of this Project are also armed with Shtil-1, Palash and AK-630M air defense missile and artillery systems, A-190 100mm universal artillery guns, torpedo tubes and RBU-6000 rocket launchers. The frigates also have a take-off and landing strip and a hangar for an anti-submarine warfare helicopter (Ka-27 or Ka-31).

The Russian Navy has over the past years of war in Syria maintained its permanent Mediterranean task force in high numbers of ships and deployable assets. The Kremlin announced earlier this month it would bolster its Mediterranean fleet by sending more long-range cruise missile capable ships. 

Russia’s military began building up its forces last summer ahead of a planned massive assault on Idlib, and again after Israel attacked Syrian government facilities in mid-September, resulting in the downing of a Russian spy plane with 15 crew members on board. Russia’s response was to quickly transfer S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems to the Syrian government. 

via RSS https://ift.tt/2DsZ02Z Tyler Durden