Month: December 2018

After police arrested dozens of demonstrators who tried to storm the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest earlier this week, the country’s ruling Fidesz Party has blamed socialist lawmakers and liberal billionaire George Soros – whose “Open Society Foundation” was recently driven out of the country by a series of laws penalizing foreign interlopers in Hungarian politics – for stoking civil unrest in response to reforms to labor laws and the country’s judiciary that were recently passed by parliament.

Since the laws passed Parliament on Tuesday despite opposition lawmakers’ attempts to stymie the vote with harassment tactics (one lawmaker even blocked the speaker’s podium in an attempt to stop the vote), police in Budapest have struggled to repel large crowds of demonstrators. Some of the protesters have even put on masks despite organizers of the demonstration asking participants not to cover their face.

Police responded to the increasingly violent demonstration with tear gas and defensive tactics after being pelted with eggs, beer cans, and sound grenades, leaving five officers injured. According to News Wars, Socialist Party leader Bertalan Toth is facing fines after trolling Prime Minister Viktor Orban on the floor of parliament. Toth told reporters that he organized the protest action.

MUST WATCH: As the National Assembly of Hungary descends into chaos, opposition MP Bence Tordai rolls up on PM Orban and trolls him to his face. This is unprecedented. Orban is visibly uncomfortable. He was not counting on this. #Hungary pic.twitter.com/C8XCKN9A6G

— Benjamin Novak (@b_novak) December 12, 2018

Fidesz said in a statement that the opposition “made clowns of themselves” by “colluding” with Soros in a desperate attempt to stop the vote.

“The opposition, in a hopeless position, made clowns of themselves in Parliament, acting aggressively and colluding with the Soros organizations that organized violent street protests,” Fidesz said in a statement. “The point of the labor code amendment is to ensure that those who want to work and earn more don’t face bureaucratic obstacles.”

The more controversial of the two laws passed has been nicknamed the “Slave Law” by those who oppose it. It allows employers to circumvent unions and make deals with employees to work up to 400 hours of overtime a year. Another law created a new federal court to handle cases related to business and employment.

Judges on that court will be selected by the country’s Justice Minister, which has elicited criticism that Fidesz is trying to subvert the country’s justice system to cement its “authoritarian” rule. However, Fidesz remains incredibly popular in Hungary, and won an overwhelming parliamentary victory in elections earlier this year.

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Authored by Ann Garrison via ConsortiumNews.com,

Hungarian scholar George Szamuely tells Ann Garrison that he sees a 70 percent chance of combat between NATO and Russia following the incident in the Kerch Strait and that it is being fueled by Russia-gate.

An Interview with George Szamuely

George Szamuely is a Hungarian-born scholar and Senior Research Fellow at London’s Global Policy Institute. He lives in New York City. I spoke to him about escalating hostilities on Russia’s Ukrainian and Black Sea borders and about Exercise Trident Juncture, NATO’s massive military exercise on Russian borders which ended just as the latest hostilities began.

Ann Garrison: George, the hostilities between Ukraine, NATO, and Russia continue to escalate in the Sea of Azov, the Kerch Strait, and the Black Sea. What do you think the latest odds of a shooting war between NATO and Russia are, if one hasn’t started by the time this is published?

George Szamuely: Several weeks ago, when we first talked about this, I said 60 percent. Now I’d say, maybe 70 percent. The problem is that Trump seems determined to be the anti-Obama. Obama, in Trump’s telling, “allowed” Russia to take Crimea and to “invade” Ukraine. Therefore, it will be up to Trump to reverse this. Just as he, Trump, reversed Obama’s policy on Iran by walking away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal. So expect ever-increasing US involvement in Ukraine.

AG: NATO’s Supreme Commander US General Curtis M. Scaparrotti is reported to have been on the phone with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “offering his full support.” Thoughts on that?

GS: There has been a proxy war within Ukraine since 2014, with NATO backing Poroshenko’s Ukrainian government and Russia backing the dissidents and armed separatists who speak Russian and identify as Russian in Ukraine’s southeastern Donbass region. But in the Kerch Strait the hostilities are between Russia and Ukraine, with NATO behind Ukraine.

A shooting war will begin if it escalates to where NATO soldiers shoot and kill Russian soldiers or vice versa. Whoever shoots first, the other side will feel compelled to respond, and then there’ll be a war between Russia and NATO or Russia and a NATO nation.

We don’t know whether NATO would feel compelled to respond as one if Russians fired on soldiers of individual NATO nations – most likely UK soldiers since the UK is sending more of its Special Forces and already has the largest NATO military presence in Ukraine. Russia could defeat the UK, but if the US gets involved, all bets are off.

Szamuely: U.S. ready to fight to last Brit.

AG: It’s hard to imagine that the US would allow Russia to defeat the UK.

GS: It is, but on the other hand, the US is the US and the UK is the UK. The United States might well be ready to fight to the last Brit, much as the United States is definitely ready to fight to the last Ukrainian. There are already 300 US paratroopers in Ukraine training Ukrainians, but the British would be well advised that words of encouragement from Washington don’t necessarily translate into US willingness to go to war.

AG: The US Congress passed a law that US troops can’t serve under any foreign command, so that would require US command.

GS: Yes, and without that, any British military defeat could be blamed on traditional British military incompetence rather than US weakness or foolish braggadocio.

AG: This latest dustup between the Russian and Ukrainian navies took place in the Kerch Strait. I had to study several maps to understand this, but basically neither Russian nor Ukrainian vessels, military or commercial, can get to or from the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea without passing through the Kerch Strait. That doesn’t mean that neither could get to the Black Sea, because both have Black Sea borders, but they couldn’t get from ports in the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea and back.

And neither Ukraine nor Russia can get from the Black Sea to Western European waters without passing through the Bosporous and Dardanelles Straits in Turkey to the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, and then further to the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar, which is bordered on one side by Spain and the British territory of Gibraltar, and on the other by Morocco and the Spanish territory Ceuta. So there are many geo-strategic choke points where Russian ships, naval or commercial, could be stopped by NATO nations or their allies, and Ukraine has already asked Turkey to stop them from passing through the Bosporus Strait. Thoughts on that?

GS: Well, of course Ukraine can ask for anything it likes. There’s no way in the world Turkey would try to stop Russian ships going through the Bosporus Strait. That would be a violation of the 1936 Montreux Convention and an act of war on the part of Turkey. It isn’t going to happen. As for the Kerch Strait, it is Russian territorial water. Ukraine is free to use it and has been doing so without incident since 2014. The only thing the Russians insist on is that any ship going through the strait use a Russian pilot. During the recent incident, the Ukrainian tug refused to use a Russian pilot. The Russians became suspicious, fearing that the Ukrainians were engaged in a sabotage mission to blow up the newly constructed bridge across the strait. You’ll remember that an American columnist not so long ago urged the Ukrainian authorities to blow up the bridge. That’s why the Russians accuse Kiev of staging a provocation.

AG: There’s a longstanding back channel between the White House and the Kremlin, as satirized in Dr. Strangelove. Anti-Trump fanatics keep claiming this is new and traitorous, but it’s long established. Obama and Putin used it to keep Russian and US soldiers from firing on one another instead of the jihadists both claimed to be fighting in Syria. Kennedy and Khrushchev used it to keep the Bay of Pigs crisis from escalating into a nuclear war. Shouldn’t Trump and Putin be talking on that back channel now, no matter how much it upsets CNN and MSNBC?

GS: Well, of course, they should. The danger is that in this atmosphere of anti-Russian hysteria such channels for dialogue may not be kept open. As a result, crises could escalate beyond the point at which either side could back down without losing face. What’s terrifying is that so many US politicians and press now describe any kind of negotiation, dialogue, or threat-management as treasonous collusion by Donald Trump.

Remember Trump’s first bombing in Syria in April 2017. Before he launched that attack, Trump administration officials gave advance warning to the Russians to enable them to get any Russian aircraft out of harm’s way. This perfectly sensible action on the part of the administration—leave aside the illegality and stupidity of the attack—was greeted by Hillary Clinton and the MSNBC crowd as evidence that the whole operation was cooked up by Trump and Putin to take attention off Russia-gate. It’s nuts.

AG: Most of us have heard Russia and NATO’s conflicting accounts of why the Russian Navy seized several Ukrainian vessels in the Sea of Azov. What’s your interpretation of what happened?

Poroshenko: Provocation with elections near?

GS: As I said, I think the Russians had every right to be suspicious of the intent of the Ukrainian vessels. The Ukrainians know that these are Russian territorial waters. They know that the only way to go through the Kerch Strait is by making use of a Russian pilot. They refused to allow the Russians to pilot the ships through the strait. Whatever the Ukrainians’ ultimate intent was—whether it was to carry out an act of sabotage, to provoke the Russians into overreaction and then to demand help from NATO, or simply to go through the strait without a Russian pilot in order to enable President Poroshenko to proclaim the strait as non-Russian—whatever Kiev’s intent was, the Russians were entitled to respond. The force the Russians used was hardly excessive. In similar circumstances, the US would have destroyed all of the ships and killed everyone on board. Recall, incidentally, Israel has seized Gaza flotilla boats and arrested everyone on board. In 2010, the Israeli Navy shot nine activists dead during a flotilla boat seizure, and wounded one who died after four years in a coma.

AG: Don’t the US, Ukraine, and the UN Security Council refuse to recognize the Kerch Strait as Russian territory, and insist that Russia’s claim to it violates various maritime treaties? I know the UNSC refuses to recognize the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, not that that does Syria any good.

GS: According to the 2003 agreement, Russia and Ukraine agreed to consider the strait as well as the Sea of Azov as shared territorial waters. From 2014 on, Russia considered the strait as Russian waters, though it’s made no attempt to hamper Ukrainian shipping. The Azov Sea is still shared by Russia and Ukraine. During the recent incident, the Ukrainian Navy acted provocatively, deliberately challenging the Russians. As for what the UNSC accepts, how would NATO respond if Serbia entered Kosovo on some pretext or other?

AG: OK, now let’s go back to NATO’s Exercise Trident Juncture, a massive military exercise on Russia’s Scandinavian and Arctic borders that concluded on November 24, one day before the Kerch Strait incident. The first phase was deployment, from August to October. The second phase was war games from October 25th to November 7th. The war games were based on the premise that Russia had invaded Scandinavia by ground, air, and sea. They included 50,000 participants from 31 NATO and partner countries, 250 aircraft, 65 naval vessels, and up to 10,000 tanks and other ground vehicles, and I hate to think about how much fossil fuel they burned.

The final phase was a command post exercise to make sure that, should NATO forces ever face a real Russian invasion of Scandinavia, their response could be safely coordinated in Norway and in Italy, far from the war zone.

So George, do Scandinavians have reason to worry that Russia might invade any of their respective nations?

GS: Not at all. This is ridiculous. It was the largest military exercise since the end of the Cold War, and why? Why did they do this? Russia isn’t threatening Scandinavia, but it’s more likely that it will if NATO continues conducting war games on its borders. Right now tension between East and West is escalating so fast that a single event could be like a match that triggers an explosion, and then there’ll be a war.

Stranger than Strangelove.

AG: There was a recent Russian exercise, or joint Russian and Chinese exercise, based on the premise that the US had invaded Korea, right?

GS: Right. But it wasn’t anywhere near Europe, so it wasn’t threatening the Europeans. It took place in eastern Siberia, so it shouldn’t have caused panic in NATO countries. It shouldn’t have caused panic in the US either, because the Pacific Ocean separates the US and the Korean Peninsula.

What’s striking about Trident Juncture is that it involved Sweden and Finland, both of whom are traditionally neutral. They were neutral during the Cold War, not joining any alliances. Finlandization came to mean a foreign policy that in no way challenged or antagonized the USSR. So now here’s Finland rolling back that policy and joining NATO in this massive military exercise to stop nonexistent Russian aggression.

AG: Has Russia ever attempted to seize territory outside its own borders since the end of the Cold War?

GS: No. Russia never attempted to seize territory outside its own borders. The case cited by the West is Crimea, but that was really an outstanding issue that should have been addressed during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin, the drunken, incompetent stooge that the US installed, just neglected it.

The Russian-speaking and Russian-identified people of Crimea were unhappy about Ukraine claiming sovereignty over them. They had been an autonomous republic within the USSR, and after its dissolution, they still retained their constitutional autonomy. That’s what gave them the right to hold a referendum to join the Russia Federation in 2014.

If the West is involved in an uprising, as in Ukraine, it recognizes the “independence” of the government it puts in power. It won’t recognize the constitutional autonomy of Crimea, which predated the 2014 Ukrainian revolution or illegal armed coup, whichever you call it, because it wasn’t part of their plan.

AG: The NATO nations and their allies say that Russia invaded and occupied Crimea, violating Ukrainian sovereignty according to international law. Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman referred to the “illegal annexation” of Crimea at least three times after the Kerch Strait incident. How do you explain the presence of Russian soldiers in Crimea prior to the referendum?

GS: They didn’t invade and occupy Crimea. Their forces were there legally, according to a 25-year lease agreement between Russia and Ukraine.

Crimea had been a part of Russia for more than 200 years. For most of the time, during the USSR era, it was an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation. In 1954, Khrushchev transferred some degree of sovereignty over the Crimean Republic to Ukraine. I’m not entirely sure why he did that, but the issue wasn’t that important then because Ukraine, Russia and Crimea were all part of the USSR.

Khrushchev didn’t envisage an independent Ukraine walking off with such a prize piece of real estate. Crimea is not only a huge tourist destination, it is also the site of Russia’s primary naval base on the Black Sea in Sevastopol. Yeltsin failed to address the problem in 1991. Since then, every time Crimeans talked about holding a referendum on their future, Kiev threatened to use force to stop them. Kiev would have used force again in 2014 if the Russians in the Port of Sevastopol had not left their Crimean base and made their presence known.

AG: The US, aka NATO, has an empire of military bases all over the world, and troops right up against Russia’s borders as in Exercise Trident Juncture. Does Russia have anything remotely like it?

NATO practices war with Russia. Exercise Trident Juncture.
(Master-Corporal Jonathan Barrette, Canadian Forces Combat Camera)

GS: No. Russia does not have military bases outside its borders, which are now more or less as they were in 1939, when the USSR was surrounded by hostile states that were more than happy to join Hitler. So it’s ridiculous to tell Russia, “Don’t worry about our troops and war games all over your borders because we don’t really mean any harm.” Washington is calling Russia an existential enemy, and the UK is promising to stand shoulder to shoulder with its NATO allies and partners against “Russian aggression,” which is really Russian defense. So now we have an explosive situation on the Ukrainian and Russian borders that could easily turn into a shooting war.

AG: I read some US/NATO complaints that Russia was conducting exercises on its own side of the border. And last week NATO accused the Russian military of jamming its signals during its rehearsal for a war on Russia’s borders.

GS: Yes, that’s what the US considers Russian aggression, even though its troops and bases are all over the world and all over Russia’s borders.

AG: Competition between US and Russian energy corporations is one of the main undercurrents to all this. The US State Department even said that Europe should abandon the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project with Russia because of the Kerch Strait incident, but that received a cool response, particularly from Angela Merkel. What are your thoughts about that?

GS: Well, obviously, the Trump administration is determined to push the Europeans to give up on natural gas from Russia and to opt, instead, for US liquefied natural gas (LNG). The problem is that LNG shipped across the Atlantic is much more expensive than natural gas piped to Europe from Russia. So it’s clearly not in the interests of the Europeans to have a bigger energy bill. Look what’s happening in France. Ordinary people are not making so much money that they can afford to shell out more for energy, particularly when there is no need to do so. Some countries such as Poland are so imbued with hostility toward Russia that they’re willing to pay more for gas just to hurt Russia, but Germany won’t go down this path.

AG: Anything else you’d like to say for now?

GS: Yes, I think it’s amazing that this many years after the Cold War we’ve reached a point where there’s almost no public criticism of a policy that has led to the US abandoning a major arms control agreement, namely the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987.

There’s almost no public criticism of the US getting involved in an armed confrontation on Russia’s doorstep, in Ukraine, Syria, Iran, or conceivably even Scandinavia. There’s almost no public criticism of roping formerly neutral European powers like Sweden and Finland into NATO military exercises.

Given the fact that the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that went into effect in 2011 will expire in 2021, and given that there’s nothing on the horizon to take its place, this is an extraordinarily perilous point in time.

And much of this has to be blamed on the liberals. The liberals have embraced an anti-Russian agenda. The kind of liberal view that prevailed during the Cold War was that we should at least pursue arms control agreements. We might not like the Communists, but we need treaties to prevent a nuclear war. Now there’s no such caution. Any belligerence towards Russia is now good and justified. There’s next to no pushback against getting into a war with Russia, even though it could go nuclear.

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Overall, arms sales increased in 2017, with total global sales nearing 400 billion dollars, marking a 2.5 percent increase from last year and the third year of continued growth for the industry.

But, as Statista’s Sarah Feldman points out, U.S. arms companies still produce the most weapons worldwide.

You will find more infographics at Statista

About 57 percent of weapons produced last year came from the United States, according to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute SIPRI.

Russia comes in second, with year-over-year growth in arms production. In 2017, Russia provided the world with 10 percent of arms sales, closely followed by The UK.

Only major arms companies were included in this study. China was excluded due to insufficient data.

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

There are many serious issues to address, relevant to current events. Just to skim some of what has happened most recently, the Dow Jones (although a “lagging” indicator) has been extremely volatile within the past month, appearing to be headed toward a loss for the year overall. Spending is down, and the “bubble” of pseudo-consumer confidence prior to Thanksgiving seems to have dissipated.

The main focus: the unrest that is swiftly crossing national borders has a common denominator in France, and now in Belgium and the Netherlands. That common denominator is that of the populace being fed up with the amount of taxation, coupled with the politicos pushing illegal Muslim aliens into nations that have been predominantly Christian for almost a thousand years.

In countries such as Germany, Sweden, and Norway (whose ancestors were not known for playing “softball,” i.e. the Saxons and Vikings, respectively) we have been witness to rapes and beatings perpetrated by Muslim illegal aliens with the governments either looking the other way or encouraging it. Soros and those of his ilk in the EU have been pushing this “forced integration” of an invasion of illegals with a huge ethnic and religious gap between them and the host nations.

The controllers (oligarchs and politicos) are pushing these (numerically speaking) armies of aliens into previously stable nations…for several express purposes:

1. The denigration of the nations’ borders, language, religion, family structure, and culture

2. To reduce the nations’ original populace to a state of abandoning their nationalities and nationalism

3. To place these aliens into a position where they will weaken the economies of the nations (by being forced onto the dole) and also utilizing their numbers for support when it comes time to “vote” in these nations.

We have been witnessing an internal conquest fomented upon each of these European nations more effective than any invasion with military resources. The controllers are “injecting” these aliens into the populations and allowing their destructive natures and habits (completely at odds with the host nation) to destroy those countries….from within.

On December 7, 2018, Zero Hedge published a piece entitled Viral Video Of French Students Lined Up Execution-Style Sparks Outrage; Protesters Want Macron’s “Scalp” that really bears looking at. The cops there are way out of hand. The most interesting part of the article, however, may be the interview that was conducted with a Parisian cab driver, and his stance in that interview summarizes the rage and betrayal felt by the French people. Here’s a piece of it for you, and the article highlighted some words in the excerpt…and I’m leaving them that way, as they are worth reading and keeping in mind:

One angry Paris taxi driver called for Macron’s “scalp” in a half-hour monologue, according to Bloomberg.

“We’re going out there to fight,” he said, adding: “I want Macron’s scalp, I’m not afraid of anything. I have nothing to lose. You have to risk your life or you don’t get anything from these people.”

And why does the cab driver feel this way about Macron? Read this other part, showing it is not “blind rage” for no reason:

For people like the taxi driver, there’s no limit when it comes to removing the youngest French leader since Napoleon who, as the country’s economy minister between 2014 and 2016, deregulated the taxi business and was a strong supporter of car-booking apps.

“He ruined us, he broke our business,” the taxi driver said. “He wants everything new, digital, the new world, and he did it all without thinking of the cost for us. Replace everyone, have everything young, new? Yeah, well that’s not how you do things. Now it’s payback time.”

Reminds me of Jesse Ventura’s words in the movie “Predator,” but you see the point: after they push you into a corner, you have to come out swinging. We are facing a similar situation in this country. The President has been holding his own, and it appears with the Mueller witch hunt and the Democrat Party gathering torches and pitchforks, the offensive is going to take a new direction. In January, the House (now Democrat-controlled) is back in control of defense expenditures, and that is going to place actions that the President is taking (troops on the border to halt the illegal alien “caravan of love,” and to build a wall) in danger of being halted and/or defunded.

Another article came out on December 3, 2018, entitled German biker gangs are standing up for their country’s women by beating the hell out of the Muslim ‘refugees’ in the[ir] midst who keep assaulting them, by ludinfo24.com.

Here is an excerpt:

Days after the sexual assaults on German women in Cologne city came to light, local gangs are uniting in a “manhunt” of foreigners.  And just this weekend, two Pakistanis and a Syrian man were injured in attacks by gangs of people in Cologne, German police said. On New Year’s Eve, Cologne was the scene of dozens of assaults on women, a number that has grown into hundreds as more and women have come forward to register complaints. Local newspaper Express reported that the attackers were members of rocker and hooligan gangs who via Facebook arranged to meet in downtown Cologne to start a “manhunt” of foreigners.

You can plainly see the fawning media over there is no different than ours…as it labeled the bikers as “members of rocker and hooligan gangs.” Hooligans, eh? So, if they are “hooligans” for stepping up to the plate and defending their women, then what are the Polizei for permitting these crimes to occur against the women?

What they are: conspirators, who are complicit with the crimes committed by the controlling politico-oligarchy…the crimes of not protecting the German citizens from these Muslim invaders. Here’s the picture posted by ludinfo24.com with the article:

Look closely at the photograph. These guys are (even with the masks you can see it) pretty clean cut, dressed cleanly and normally…and they’re not “soy boys” by any stretch of the imagination. The prediction? German bikers 1, Arabs 0, plain and simple….and as it should be. It is a beautiful thing to see them stand up for their women…since their rights have been flushed into the toilet, or swept under a prayer rug or magic carpet.

When law enforcement fails to enforce the law and protect citizens from illegal aliens…then it is no longer law enforcement….it is an armed tyrannical enforcer of a dictatorship….voted into office legally, but pursuing actions that are not approved by the populace. Just as Marbury vs. Madison pointed out under our system, if something is onerous to the Constitution, then it is not to be considered lawful in any way, shape, or form. That also includes [mis]representatives who circumvent the will of the people by using the power of their position.

They were elected legally, but to represent the will of the people, not to accomplish the “fundamental transformations” of countries in stark contradiction to their constitutions, charters, and laws, and to the detriment and/or physical harm of their citizenry.

In previous articles I outlined 3 measures the globalists will take to collapse the systems and usher in a totalitarian global government (in order): A pandemic (fostered or artificially-created), an EMP event, or a Nuclear war.

You are seeing the final methods being used as a precursor to those three actions: the collapsing of the economies, the inculcation of the complete surveillance state, and the dissolution of the nations through internal subterfuge as has been outlined within this article.

One of the advantages that the European nations have in dealing with confronting their governments is ethnic homogeneity. This leads to a single-minded purpose, in which they will not settle for anything less than the capitulation of the government, and at a bare minimum, forcing the resignation of the leadership. Look at Merkel: not going to run for office again. Now look at Macron, one step from being shown the door by the angry mobs. They called out almost 90,000 police to deal with these riots in France, only to find that a great number of the police are siding with the populace!

Look at what is happening in the United States. Look at the crimes ranging from rape to murder that are being inflicted upon American citizens who live on our southern borders. Hungary has set up barbed wire and machine gun positions to keep out the illegals. We, on the other hand, send the National Guard…to do what? Play “Yahtzee” or “Scrabble” with the illegals? Best 3 out of 5 wins?

It is an invasion, plain and simple. The controllers originally intended for the U.S. to be where South Africa is now…with the reins of power taken away from white South Africans…and soon for them to be completely vilified and driven off of their land…and worse. It hasn’t happened that way here yet, but they have been pushing the destruction of the country through forced “immigration” for decades. Remember that President Reagan gave amnesty to a million illegals. Such actions are not monopolized by the Democrats and Obama. The former President they just buried was the one who created NAFTA….Clinton merely signed it into law.

In order for a nation to continue, it needs to maintain all of the elements that made it a nation. Those elements can be found within the borders, language, religions, and culture of its people. When the laws that are made within a nation to protect its citizens and maintain it are flagrantly disobeyed or circumvented by its politicians, courts, and legislators, it is time for that nation to return to the grass roots and exercise their rights. Just because a government is of and by the people doesn’t mean that it is “for” the people.

The instabilities we are seeing are a precursor of things to come, and the Parisian cab driver was correct… in order to change an evil, sometimes you have to be willing to risk everything you have. Let’s close with a quote from our recently-departed former President, George H.W. Bush that may stem the flow of the single tear coursing down the cheek in mourning:

“Sarah, if the American people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.” – President George H.W. Bush to Sarah McLendon, Journalist, in 1992 Press Corps Interview, when he was asked about Iraq-gate and Iran Contra              

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Perhaps still seeking to justify imposing martial law over broad swathes of his country, and attempting to keep international pressure and media focus on a narrative of “Russian aggression,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko denounced what he called the high “threat of Russian invasion” during a press conference on Sunday, according to Bloomberg. 

Though what some analysts expected would be a rapid flair up of tit-for-tat incidents following the late November Kerch Strait seizure of three Ukrainian vessels and their crew by the Russian Navy has gone somewhat quiet, with no further major incident to follow, Poroshenko has continued to signal to the West that Russia could invade at any moment. 

“The lion’s share of Russian troops remain” along the Russian border with Ukraine, Poroshenko told journalists at a press conference in the capital, Kiev. “Unfortunately, less than 10 percent were withdrawn,” he said, and added: “As of now, the threat of Russian troops invading remains. We have to be ready for this, we won’t allow a repeat of 2014.”

Poroshenko, who declared martial law on Nov. 26, citing at the time possible imminent “full-scale war with Russia” and Russian tank and troop build-up, on Sunday noted that he will end martial law on Dec. 26 and the temporarily suspended presidential campaign will kick off should there be no Russian invasion. He also previously banned all Russian males ages 16-60 from entering Ukraine as part of implementation of 30 days of martial law over ten provinces, though it’s unclear if this policy will be rescinded. 

During his remarks, the Ukrainian president said his country should push to join NATO and the EU within the next five years, per Bloomberg:

While declining to announce whether he will seek a second term in the office, Poroshenko said that Ukraine should achieve peace, overcome the consequences of its economic crisis and to meet criteria to join the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during next five years.

But concerning both his retaining power and his ongoing “threat exaggeration” — there’s even widespread domestic acknowledgement that the two are clearly linked.

According to The Globe and Mail:

While Mr. Poroshenko’s domestic rivals accuse him of exaggerating the threat in order to boost his own flagging political fortunes — polls suggest Mr. Poroshenko is on track to lose his job in a March election — military experts say there are reasons to take the Ukrainian president’s warning seriously.

As we observed previously, while European officials have urged both sides to exercise restraint, the incident shows just how easily Russia and the West could be drawn into a military conflict over Ukraine.

Certainly Poroshenko’s words appear designed to telegraph just such an outcome, which would keep him in power as a war-time president, hasten more and massive western military support and aid, and quicken his country’s entry into NATO — the latter which is already treating Ukraine as a de facto strategic outpost. 

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Authored by Mark Hendrickson via The Mises Institute,

The New York Times obituary opened with a simple recitation of facts:

“Zhores A. Medvedev, the Soviet biologist, writer and dissident who was declared insane, confined to a mental institution and stripped of his citizenship in the 1970s after attacking a Stalinist pseudoscience, died … in London.”

Zhores Medvedev, his twin brother Roy (still alive at 93), the physicist Andrei Sakharov, and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were leading dissidents. They courageously put their lives on the line to smuggle manuscripts out of the Soviet Union. They wanted the wider world to learn the truth about the “the workers’ paradise” that so many Western intellectuals (some deluded, others having gone over to the dark side) praised.

A generation of Americans has been born since the Soviet Union, the USSR that President Ronald Reagan boldly labeled “the evil empire,” ceased to exist.

They have little to no concept of how ferociously the USSR’s communist tyranny suppressed dissent. As the Times obit of Dr. Medvedev illustrates, one Soviet technique of oppression was to declare that political dissidents were insane. They were then incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals where they were tormented and tortured. Some were used as human guinea pigs for dangerous experiments. (Shades of Hitler’s buddy, Dr. Mengele.) Some even succumbed to the not-so-tender ministrations of those “hospitals.”

I recall one particular example of the disgusting abuse of human beings in Soviet psychiatric hospitals. Vladimir Bukovsky, who will turn 76 later this month, spent a dozen years being shuffled between Soviet jails, labor camps, and psychiatric hospitals. One of the “therapies” administered in a psychiatric hospital was putting a cord into Bukovsky’s mouth, then threading it from his throat up through his nasal passages, and then drawing it out through one of his nostrils. (Maybe the cord went in the opposite direction; I’ve never been interested in memorizing torture techniques.) Alas, this communist “treatment” did not “cure” Bukovsky of his rational (NOT irrational) abhorrence of tyranny and brutality.

The warped thought process that led to the perversion and weaponization of psychiatry in the Soviet Union can be traced back to communist icon and thought leader Karl Marx. Marx propounded a spurious doctrine known as “polylogism” to justify stifling dissent. According to Marx, different classes of people had different structures in their minds. Thus, Marx declared the bourgeoisie to be mentally defective because they were inherently unable to comprehend Marx’s (allegedly) revelatory and progressive theories. Since they were, in a sense, insane, there was no valid reason for communists to “waste time” arguing with them. On the contrary, communists were justified in not only ignoring or suppressing bourgeois ideas, but in liquidating the entire bourgeois class.

The practice of categorizing one’s enemies as “insane” became a ready tool of suppression in the Soviet state founded by Lenin and developed under Stalin. The USSR’s infamous secret police energetically wielded quack psychiatry as a club with which to destroy political dissidents. If you want more information about how the Soviets kidnapped and misused psychiatry, here is a link to a document that describes what American agents of the USSR were taught about psycho-political techniques in the late 1930s. (The provenance of the booklet is murky, and Soviet apologists have long tried to discredit it, but in light of numerous psychiatric abuses known to have been committed with the approval of the USSR’s rulers, the content of the book is highly plausible.)

The incarceration of Zhores Medvedev in psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s was a monstrous injustice. His “crime” was having exposed the bizarre pseudoscience of Lysenkoism that Stalin had embraced in the 1950s. Lysenko’s quack theories led to deadly crop failures and widespread starvation. Nevertheless, Stalin backed him by executing scientists who dared to disagree with Lysenko. Millions of innocents lost their lives because “truth” in the Soviet Union wasn’t scientific, but political.

Another vivid example of the destructive consequences of politicizing truth is related in Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of Soviet labor camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Certain Soviet officials decided to increase the steel shipped to a certain area. When the planners issued orders for trains to carry double the steel to the designated destination, conscientious engineers informed them that it couldn’t be done. They pointed out that the existing train tracks could not support such great weights. The politicians had the engineers executed as “saboteurs” for opposing “the plan.” What followed was predictable: The loads were doubled, the tracks gave out, and the designated area ended up getting less steel, not more.

This episode shows where the true insanity was in the USSR. The central planners believed that constructing their ideal country was simply a matter of will.

Alas, reality doesn’t conform to the whims or will of any human being, but the arrogance of central planners remains stubbornly impervious to that inescapable fact of life. Instead, as the havoc wrought by Soviet central economic planners repeatedly demonstrated, the communist central planners refused to abandon their insufferable self-delusion and mystical belief in the power of their own will to alter reality. This was the true insanity, compounded by the error of persecuting competent scientists like Zhores Medvedev.

Sadly, the practice of branding political opponents as “insane” is not confined to the now-defunct Soviet state. In 1981, when I was completing my master’s thesis on Solzhenitsyn, I telephoned an American college professor of history to ask whether he recalled if Solzhenitsyn had been granted honorary U.S. citizenship. (He hadn’t. President Ford didn’t want to offend the Soviet leadership.) The reply to my question was this: “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn belongs in an insane asylum.” The virus of Marx’s polylogism is, unfortunately, alive and well in American academia.

As for Zhores Medvedev, may he now rest in peace and receive his reward for his integrity and courage.

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FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn’t believe a key claim contained in the “Steele Dossier,” the document the Obama FBI relied on to obtain a surveillance warrant on a member of the Trump campaign.

The Post‘s Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats, reports the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross. 

“We’ve talked to sources at the FBI and the CIA and elsewhere — they don’t believe that ever happened,” said Miller during the October event which aired Saturday on C-SPAN. 

We literally spent weeks and months trying to run down… there’s an assertion in there that Michael Cohen went to Prague to settle payments that were needed at the end of the campaign. We sent reporters to every hotel in Prague, to all over the place trying to – just to try to figure out if he was ever there, and came away empty. -Greg Miller

Ross notes that WaPo somehow failed to report this information, nor did Miller include this tidbit of narrative-killing information in his recent book, “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy.”

Miller also admits that the dossier’s broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down once you focus on individual claims. 

Steele, using Kremlin sources, claimed in his dossier that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin officials for the purpose of discussing “deniable cash payments” made in secret so as to cover up “Moscow’s secret liaison with the TRUMP team.” 

Cohen’s alleged Prague visit captured attention largely because the former Trump fixer has vehemently denied it, and also because it would seem to be one of the easier claims in Steele’s 35-page report to validate or invalidate.

Debate over the salacious document was reignited when McClatchy reported April 15 that special counsel Robert Mueller had evidence Cohen visited Prague. No other news outlets have verified the reporting, and Cohen denied it at the time.

Cohen last denied the dossier’s allegations in late June, a period of time when he was gearing up to cooperate with prosecutors against President Donald Trump. Cohen served as a cooperating witness for prosecutors in both New York and the special counsel’s office. –Daily Caller

Cohen’s attorney and longtime Clinton pal Lanny Davis vehemently denied on August 22, one day after Cohen pleaded guilty in his New York case – that Cohen had never been to Prague, telling Bloomberg “Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier, but he has never been to Prague in his life.” 

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Authored by Kerry McDonald via The Foundation for Economic Education,

Parents are increasingly required to obey, to conform to a school’s demands even if they believe such orders may not be appropriate for their child…

Schooling is adept at rooting out individuality and enforcing compliance. In his book, Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky writes:

“In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on—because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.”

This filtering process begins very early in a child’s schooling as conformity is rewarded and divergence is punished.

Public Schooling Breeds Obedience

Most of us played this game as schoolchildren. We know the rules. The kids who raise their hands, color in the lines, and obey succeed; the kids who challenge the rules struggle. The problem now is that the rules are extending beyond the classroom. Parents are increasingly required to obey, to conform to a school’s demands even if they believe such orders may not be appropriate for their child.

In my advocacy work with homeschooling families across the country, I frequently hear stories from parents who decided to homeschool their kids because schools were pressuring them to comply with various special education plans, push medications onto their children, or submit to other restrictive procedures they felt were not in their child’s best interest. Even more heartbreaking is the growing trend of school officials to unleash child protective services (CPS) on parents, homeschooling or not, who refuse to give in to a district’s demands.

Weaponizing Child Protective Services

An investigative report by The Hechinger Report and HuffPost released last month revealed that schools are increasingly using child protective services as a “weapon” against parents. It said:

Fed up with what they see as obstinate parents who don’t agree to special education services for their child, or disruptive kids who make learning difficult, schools sometimes use the threat of a child-protection investigation to strong-arm parents into complying with the school’s wishes or transferring their children to a new school. That approach is not only improper, but it can be devastating for families, even if the allegations are ultimately determined to be unfounded.

More troubling, these threats disproportionately target low-income and minority parents. According to the report:

Such families also have fewer resources to fight back. When a family in a wealthy Brooklyn neighborhood learned roughly two years ago that their child’s school had initiated an ACS [New York’s Administration for Children’s Services] investigation against them, they sued the city education department. Parents from lower-income, majority-black and Latino neighborhoods, few of whom can afford that option, say such investigations can be a regular, even expected, part of parenting.

Bullying Proactive Parents

For parents who are unhappy with their child’s school and decide to withdraw their child for homeschooling, threats of child welfare investigations can sometimes turn to actions. In Massachusetts, a mother is reportedly suing the Worcester Public Schools after school officials called the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) on her for alleged “educational neglect,” even though the mother contends that she dutifully filed her homeschooling paperwork for her eight-year-old son mid-year.

Brian Huskie, a public high school teacher and homeschooling father in New York, noted a similar case last year with one of his students. Dissatisfied with the school, the parents decided to remove their daughter from the district, filed the necessary homeschooling paperwork, and were soon visited by child protective services investigating “educational neglect.” Huskie detailed the incident on his blog, writing that the school made a “decision to weaponize CPS against a district family.”

Parents who push back against a district’s recommendations or withdraw their child from school for homeschooling are often trying to ensure their child’s well-being. Questioning various educational interventions and examining alternatives is part of a parent’s job. They should be praised for looking out for their child’s best interest, while schools should be sure that they use social services agencies to investigate serious claims of abuse and neglect—not just district snubs or paperwork quarrels.

If, as Chomsky suggests, many of us have grown acquiescent to power due to our successful schooling, it can be hard to challenge authority. It can be even harder when that authority is strengthened by government force and when we may not have the resources to fight it.

Supporting parents, broadening their education choices, and respecting their decisions are crucial steps in liberating families and curbing government coercion.

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Thanks to the notoriously brutal working conditions at its fulfillment centers, Amazon has become a lighting rod of criticism from the American labor movement and the Democratic Socialists of America, who claim to champion the rights of workers (despite the fact that most of the organization’s members are college students and creative-class workers relying on handouts from their parents to pay their expensive Brooklyn rents). The e-commerce giant even won the dubious distinction of being specifically called out in a bill proposed by Socialist champion Bernie Sanders (his “Stop BEZOS” act).

As investigative reporters on multiple continents have burnished Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ reputation as a ruthless capitalist by exposing some of the company’s more extreme labor abuses, like effectively forcing employees to pee in bottles to avoid taking unpaid bathroom breaks and hiring ambulances to wait outside some of its warehouses to cart away workers suffering from heat stroke.

As the debate about what, exactly, Amazon owes its workers and the municipalities that host its facilities has taken on renewed relevance following the backlash to the generous tax breaks offered by NYC for Amazon to build a new headquarters in Long Island City (the city’s subway is crumbling, but Amazon is getting taxpayer-funded handouts to build a helipad!), more Amazon workers are rising up to protest their brutal working conditions.

This month, workers at the Amazon’s MSP1 fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota gathered outside the facility on a cold Friday evening to protest several of these ‘abuses’, including the company’s refusal to accommodate Muslim workers by not providing adequate space and time for prayer as well as its refusal to accommodate workers observing the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which this year coincided with the company’s Prime Day sale. 

A Gizmodo story about the protest in Minnesota included an interesting detail about another demonstration at a facility in Staten Island. Workers at the Amazon facility in Staten Island who recently announced their intention to unionize complained about the company’s refusal to install air-conditioning in its sweltering facility.

The reason given by Amazon for refusing to provide the air conditioning? The robots in its facility can’t function optimally in cold weather.

MSP1 is a fairly new and heavily-roboticized factory, much like the facility on Staten Island, New York, where workers recently announced their intention to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). One worker at the Staten Island facility, in a protest outside New York’s City Hall last week, expressed concern over long shifts, non-functioning smoke detectors and sprinkler systems, and inhumane temperatures. “We have asked the company to provide air conditioning,” she explained to the crowd, “but they told us that the robots inside can’t work in the cold weather.”

One worker who was leaving work during the demonstration in Minnesota, which involved some 250 workers and labor activists, told Gizmodo that he felt “utterly expendable” and offered a comment that sounded like a line of dialogue ripped straight from Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”

One worker getting off his shift at MSP1 (we were unable to get his name) told Gizmodo that the rate of the work continues to climb while the workers remain utterly expendable, toiling in poor conditions. “If you work with me,” he said, “you will be sick within a week.” Another MSP1 worker, Khadra Kassim, told the crowd through a translator that due to a workplace injury she nearly miscarried her unborn daughter.

Amazon pulled out all the stops in trying to suppress the action and play down coverage in the media – including requesting the presence of police officers, who mostly stood around in confusion unable to discern which workers were demonstrating, and which were just leaving work (sound familiar?).

Just before 5pm, the crowd of protesters moved from the sidewalk in front of MSP1 – where they had set up a massive prayer rug as well as an amplification system from the bed of a pickup truck – and marched on the building itself.

Police officers, who had not been present earlier in the day, lay in wait in the parking lot and were joined by additional units including Minnesota State Patrol officers and the Scott County sheriff, approximately 16 vehicles in total. The Shakopee Police Department confirmed in a phone call with Gizmodo, “no arrests, no property damage, no injuries.” In the moment, officers seemed confused as to which individuals were protesters and which were simply leaving work.

The crowd, meanwhile, dispersed peacefully, chanting, “Amazon – we’ll be back.”

Unfortunately for the striking workers, Amazon has every incentive to dig in its heels. Amazon’s economic heft is enough to cow municipal and state governments into cooperation, and as management seeks to assuage investors’ festering fears about ‘peak earnings’, we imagine the company’s much-maligned productivity targets will become increasingly stringent.

And while Amazon’s workers gripe about the company treating them like they’re expendable, the fact is that as Amazon robotics’ continues to innovate and upgrade, pretty soon, the company’s dependence on its human workers will decline, leading to lower head counts and – by extension – fewer jobs.

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Authored by Max Albert via HackerNoon.com,

The latest congressional technology hearing was as cringeworthy as you would expect.

There were politicians who thought Google was the same company as Apple.

There were politicians that wondered why Google was censoring hate-speech.

There were politicians that thought Sundar Pichai’s salary and some aggressive alpha-male shouting would enable him to reveal the answer to the age old mystery of “is Google tracking our every step?”

Confused? So am I.

Through all the hardships, Pichai remained calm and collected. He provided insight to a group of politicians who clearly lacked expertise. This is difficult to do and I give him credit. For 99% of the hearing, Sundar Pichai was on fire.

But there’s one crucial question that Pichai botched. It was about the ethics of algorithms.

Listen to this question by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA),

Right now, if you google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that,” she said. “How would that happen?”

This is Pichai’s response,

Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of [websites’] pages in our index. And we take the keyword and match it against their pages and rank them based on over 200 signals — things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query. And then we evaluate them with external raters, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines. And that’s how we make sure the process is working.

Representative Zoe Lofgren later concludes that she looks forward to working with Pichai on serious issues and,

It’s pretty obvious that bias against conservative voices is not one of them [google’s priorities].

Pichai’s response was not wrong or nefarious. Pichai did an excellent job at explaining the technical-side of how Google handles queries in Layman’s terms.

However this exchange as a whole may be misleading to the public eye. It lends itself to a common, dangerous misconception that sophisticated algorithms are always unbiased.

With this exchange, Rep. Lofgren and Pichai establish a defensive narrative that Google takes hundreds, thousands, even billions of data points into consideration before listing a website at the top. Furthermore, Google’s algorithm takes into account an unfathomable number of ‘objective guidelines’ and ‘external raters’ to evaluate. Lastly but most importantly, algorithms like this are too sophisticated to experience bias.

Of course Pachai knows this narrative is not true. But does Rep. Lofgren know? Do the other congressmen and congresswomen know? Does the public know?

Well the fact remains that algorithms were built by people. People have agendas. When people get to define what is a success and what is a failure, there will always be at least some inherent bias.

Just because a solution was discovered by an algorithm doesn’t necessarily make the solution unbiased. Sometimes, algorithms can make bias decisions and the amount of ‘data’ and ‘guidelines’ the algorithm has access to does not make the algorithm more credible.

For instance, there are criminal justice algorithms that are prone to label African Americans as ‘high risk’ (and thus ineligible for parole) more often than Caucasians. This algorithm has access to a wide array of ‘data’ and ‘objective guidelines’ yet it still makes biased decisions. Why? Because the court system is bias. All of the data the algorithm has access to is bias.

Additionally, there is an infamously bias flight algorithm that chose to remove Dr. Dao from a United Airlines flight and resulted in this traumatic video:

This is another extremely sophisticated algorithm that failed to provide biased-free judgement. So to suggest that Google’s search algorithm is unbiased because it’s a sophisticated algorithm is false. Algorithms can be incredibly prejudice if not careful.

The fact of the matter is, Google’s search algorithm is very close to being unbiased because of meticulous evaluation and consistent reevaluation by the team.

To my knowledge, the only way to validate an algorithm’s credibility is to consistently reevaluate the results by a third party. But even then, the term ‘bias’ is subjective. So this evaluation process is more like a short-answer question than a true or false question.

Pichai’s answer to the question of “how does searching ‘idiot’ reveal a picture of Donald Trump” was technically true but culturally disappointing.

Instead, consider what would’ve happened if Pachai answered Rep. Lofgren’s question with, “we have policies in place so that humans can not directly manipulate search results to make Donald Trump appear on the search of idiot. We’ve proven through independent parties that Google’s search does not show political bias and that this particular query-result could happen to a democratic president under the same conditions. Furthermore we are always reevaluating how the search engine could improve.”

This answer may not instill the same confidence of Pichai’s original answer, but it’s the most honest and complete answer in the context of bias.

Moving into an era where algorithms have more decision-making power, the general public is going to need to learn about what makes an algorithm credible and what makes an algorithm biased.

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