Month: September 2019

Serbian Armed Forces have reportedly bought Chinese-built armed drones, could receive the drones in the coming months, Stars and Stripes reported Tuesday, citing local media reports and officials.

Serbia is expected to take delivery of nine Chengdu Pterodactyl-1 drones from now until February 2020. Media reports in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, said follow up orders in 2020 could exceed 15 more. 

Stars and Stripes said the sale “marks Beijing’s most significant foray into a continent where armed forces have traditionally relied on US and European weapon-makers.”

Earlier this year, Serbian President Aleksander Vucic signed several agreements with Beijing to expand the Belt and Road in the country. 

Under the agreement, China is expected to construct new power plants, lay transmission cables, and fiber optics, build new railways, and ports in the country. 

So it becomes increasingly clear why China is beefing up the Serbian military: They want to protect critical assets of the Belt and Road in the country or at least use the drones as deterrence against American/NATO forces.

“This (sale) will greatly strengthen the Serbian military, which will gain capabilities it has not had in the past,” Serbian Defense Minister Aleksander Vulin said in an interview with state media Tuesday. 

Belgrade military analyst Miroslav Lazanski said in a TV interview that “the Chinese have very good pilot-less aircraft, probably second only to the United States,” adding that “they obviously copied some American systems (but) Chinese drones are very effective and very cheap.”

Lazanski also said the cost of the drones was an important consideration for Serbia, adding that Chinese drones are cheaper than US’ and offer “top” performance.

The Chengdu Pterodactyl-1 has very similar characteristics to the US’ General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones. These drones have been sold to Asian, African, and Middle Eastern countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Egypt. 

In an earlier report, we noted how Chinese armed drones are ending up in countries where the US has placed weapons embargos on. This has created a deadly network of Chinese drones above Middle East battlefields. 

And a Chinese military strategist said drone technology in China is comparable to the US but lacks global market share.

“The Chinese product now doesn’t lack technology, it only lacks market share,” said Song Zhongping, a Chinese military strategist and former lecturer at the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force University of Engineering. “And the United States restricting its arms exports is precisely what gives China a great opportunity.”

By exporting drones across the world, and with the latest report now into Europe, the Chinese are rapidly shrinking America’s military-industrial complex’s international drone market share. This will not sit well with US defense firms who will continue to tell the Trump administration to pressure China so that their market share doesn’t continue to erode away. 

Authored by Whitney Webb via MintPressNews.com,

Today the event that defined the United States’ foreign policy in the 21st century, and heralded the destruction of whole countries, turns 18. The events of September 11, 2001 remains etched into the memories of Americans and many others, as a collective tragedy that brought Americans together and brought as well a general resolve among them that those responsible be brought to justice. 

While the events of that day did unite Americans in these ways for a time, the different trajectories of the official relative to the independent investigations into the September 11 attacks have often led to division in the years since 2001, with vicious attacks or outright dismissal being levied against the latter. 

Yet, with 18 years having come and gone — and with the tireless efforts from victims’ families, first responders, scientists and engineers — the tide appears to be turning, as new evidence continues to emerge and calls for new investigations are made. However, American corporate media has remained largely silent, preferring to ignore new developments that could derail the “official story” of one of the most iconic and devastating attacks to ever occur on American soil.

For instance, in late July, commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks and lost one of their own that day, called for a new investigation into the events of September 11. On July 24, the board of commissioners for the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which serves a population of around 30,000 near Queens, voted unanimously in their call for a new investigation into the attacks.

While the call for a new investigation from a NY Fire Department involved in the rescue effort would normally seem newsworthy to the media outlets who often rally Americans to “never forget,” the commissioners’ call for a new investigation was met with total silence from the mainstream media. The likely reason for the dearth of coverage on an otherwise newsworthy vote was likely due to the fact that the resolution that called for the new investigation contained the following clause:

Whereas, the overwhelming evidence presented in said petition demonstrates beyond any doubt that pre-planted explosives and/or incendiaries — not just airplanes and the ensuing fires — caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings, killing the vast majority of the victims who perished that day;”

In the post-9/11 world, those who have made such claims, no matter how well-grounded their claims may be, have often been derided and attacked as “conspiracy theorists” for questioning the official claims that the three World Trade Center buildings that collapsed on September 11 did so for any reason other than being struck by planes and from the resulting fires. Yet, it is much more difficult to launch these same attacks against members of a fire department that lost a fireman on September 11 and many of whose members were involved with the rescue efforts of that day, some of whom still suffer from chronic illnesses as a result.

Rescue workers climb on piles of rubble at the World Trade Center in New York, Sept. 13, 2001. Beth A. Keiser | AP

Another likely reason that the media monolithically avoided coverage of the vote was out of concern that it would lead more fire departments to pass similar resolutions, which would make it more difficult for such news to avoid gaining national coverage. Yet, Commissioner Christopher Gioia, who drafted and introduced the resolution, told those present at the meeting’s conclusion that getting all of the New York fire districts onboard was their plan anyway.

“We’re a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an unstoppable force,” Gioia said. “We were the first fire district to pass this resolution. We won’t be the last,” he added.

While questioning the official conclusions of the first federal investigation into 9/11 has been treated as taboo in the American media landscape for years, it is worth noting that even those who led the commission have said that the investigation was “set up to fail” from the start and that they were repeatedly misled and lied to by federal officials in relation to the events of that day. 

For instance, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote in their book Without Precedent that not only was the commission starved of funds and its powers of investigation oddly limited, but that they were obstructed and outright lied to by top Pentagon officials and officials with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). They and other commissioners have outright said that the “official” report on the attacks is incomplete, flawed and unable to answer key questions about the terror attacks.

Despite the failure of American corporate media to report these facts, local legislative bodies in New York, beginning with the fire districts that lost loved ones and friends that day, are leading the way in the search for real answers that even those that wrote the “official story” say were deliberately kept from them.

Persuasive scientific evidence continues to roll in

Not long after the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District called for a new 9/11 investigation, a groundbreaking university study added even more weight to the commissioners’ call for a new look at the evidence regarding the collapse of three buildings at the World Trade Center complex. While most Americans know full well that the twin towers collapsed on September 11, fewer are aware that a third building — World Trade Center Building 7 — also collapsed. That collapse occurred seven hours after the twin towers came down, even though WTC 7, or “Building 7,” was never struck by a plane.

It was not until nearly two months after its collapse that reports revealed that the CIA had a “secret office” in WTC 7 and that, after the building’s destruction, “a special CIA team scoured the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports stored in the station, either on paper or in computers.” WTC 7 also housed offices for the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, the New York Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and the bank Salomon Brothers. 

Though the official story regarding the collapse of WTC 7 cites “uncontrolled building fires” as leading to the building’s destruction, a majority of Americans who have seen the footage of the 47-story tower come down from four different angles overwhelmingly reject the official story, based on a new poll conducted by YouGov on behalf of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and released on Monday. 

Source | Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

That poll found that 52 percent of those who saw the footage were either sure or suspected that the building’s fall was due to explosives and was a controlled demolition, with 27 percent saying they didn’t know what to make of the footage. Only 21 percent of those polled agreed with the official story that the building collapsed due to fires alone. Prior to seeing the footage, 36 percent of respondents said that they were unaware that a third building collapsed on September 11 and more than 67 percent were unable to name the building that had collapsed.

Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, told MintPress that the lack of awareness about WTC 7 among the general public “goes to show that the mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people about even the most basic facts related to 9/11. On any other day in history, if a 47-story skyscraper fell into its footprint due to ‘office fires,’ everyone in the country would have heard about it.” 

The fact that the media chose not to cover this, Walter asserted, shows that “the mainstream media and the political establishment live in an alternative universe and the rest of the American public is living in a different universe and responding to what they see in front of them,” as reflected by the results of the recent YouGov poll.

Another significant finding of the YouGov poll was that 48 percent of respondents supported,  while only 15 percent opposed, a new investigation into the events of September 11. This shows that not only was the Franklin Square Fire District’s recent call for a new investigation in line with American public opinion, but that viewing the footage of WTC 7’s collapse raises more questions than answers for many Americans, questions that were not adequately addressed by the official investigation of the 9/11 Commission.

The Americans who felt that the video footage of WTC 7’s collapse did not fit with the official narrative and appeared to show a controlled demolition now have more scientific evidence to fall back on after the release of a new university study found that the building came down not due to fire but from “the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.” The extensive four-year study was conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska and used complex computer models to determine if the building really was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely due to office fires. 

The study, currently available as a draft, concluded that “uncontrolled building fires” did not lead the building to fall into its footprint — tumbling more than 100 feet at the rate of gravity free-fall for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second collapse — as has officially been claimed. Instead, the study — authored by Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Feng Xiao and Dr. Zhili Quan — found that “fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] and private engineering firms that studied the collapse,” while also concluding “that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global [i.e., comprehensive] failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”

This “near-simultaneous failure of every column” in WTC 7 strongly suggests that explosives were involved in its collapse, which is further supported by the statements made by Barry Jennings, the then-Deputy Director of Emergency Services Department for the New York City Housing Authority. Jennings told a reporter the day of the attack that he and Michael Hess, then-Corporation Counsel for New York City, had heard and seen explosions in WTC 7 several hours prior to its collapse and later repeated those claims to filmmaker Dylan Avery. The first responders who helped rescue Jennings and Hess also claimed to have heard explosions in WTC 7. Jennings died in 2008, two days prior the release of the official NIST report blaming WTC 7’s collapse on fires. To date, no official cause of death for Jennings has been given.

Still “crazy” after all these years?

Eighteen years after the September 11 attacks, questioning the official government narrative of the events of those days still remains taboo for many, as merely asking questions or calling for a new investigation into one of the most important events in recent American history frequently results in derision and dismissal. 

Yet, this 9/11 anniversary — with a new study demolishing the official narrative on WTC 7, with a new poll showing that more than half of Americans doubt the government narrative on WTC 7, and with firefighters who responded to 9/11 calling for a new investigation — is it still “crazy” to be skeptical of the official story?

Firefighters hose down the smoldering remains of 7 World Trade Center Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2001, in New York. Ryan Remiorz | AP

Even in years past, when asking difficult questions about September 11 was even more “off limits,” it was often first responders, survivors and victims’ families who had asked the most questions about what had really transpired that day and who have led the search for truth for nearly two decades — not wild-eyed “conspiracy theorists,” as many have claimed. 

The only reason it remains taboo to ask questions about the official narrative, whose own authors admit that it is both flawed and incomplete, is that the dominant forces in the American media and the U.S. government have successfully convinced many Americans that doing so is not only dangerous but irrational and un-American. 

However, as evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative, it becomes ever more clear that the reason for this media campaign is to prevent legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve, even smearing victims’ families and ailing first responders to do so. For too long, “Never Forget” has been nearly synonymous with “Never Question.” 

Yet, failing to ask those questions — even when more Americans than ever now favor a new investigation and discount the official explanation for WTC 7’s collapse — is the ultimate injustice, not only to those who died in New York City on September 11, but those who have been killed in their names in the years that have followed.

News for US farmers gets worse by the week. From collapsing farm incomes to plunging crop exports to China, the trade war has likely ushered in the next farm crisis, set to explode across the Central and Midwest US next year. 

A new report from Reuters outlines how China has ditched US farmers for Argentina. An agreement between both countries is expected to be signed on Wednesday in Buenos Aires, describes how Argentina, the world’s biggest exporter of the animal feed, will allow China to import soy meal for the first time. 

Last month Chinese officials examined several Argentine soy meal companies ahead of the signing ceremony on Wednesday. 

Argentina’s Agriculture Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that after two decades of discussions, the Asian giant will begin imports of soy meal in the near term.

The deciding factor for the landmark deal was the US-China trade war, which strengthened Argentina’s hand after China halted all US agriculture product imports this summer, prompting China to source more agriculture products from South America. 

“This is a historic agreement,” Gustavo Idigoras, president of Argentina’s CIARA-CEC chamber of grains exporting companies told Reuters, though he added the deal still required a two-step process of plant authorizations and then registrations that could take several more months.

Idigoras said, “shipments aren’t expected to start immediately,” but could start in the near term. China still has some bureaucratic bottlenecks before cargoes can set sail, he added. 

In a separate report last month, China is preparing a bid that would allow it to dredge Argentina’s Parana River, the country’s only river that acts as a waterway for bulk vessels that transport soybean and corn from the Pampas farm belt to the South Atlantic.

An increased waterway would allow China to create a grain superhighway in Argentina that would effectively be able to replace US farmers. 

Argentina, already the top exporter of processed soy, is expected to export 26 million tons of soy meal this year worldwide, and 8.5 million tons of raw beans. 

“It is excellent and timely news. Argentina needs to add more value to its exports to China and the world,” said Luis Zubizarreta, president of Argentina’s ACSOJA soy industry organization that represents farmers.

Allowing China to buy from Argentine farmers would tremendously boost exports next year. China has come at the right time, considering profit margins have been falling, and idle capacity has increased to more than 50%.

China has been busy in South America. They’ve been building massive infrastructure projects across Argentina, from hydroelectric plants to railways.

Business-friendly President Mauricio Macri has said the new partnership with China would boost the country’s agricultural sector and create enormous opportunities for farmers. 

While boom times are here for Argentine farmers, a bust cycle is imminent for US farmers who are on the brink of collapse after being shut out of China thanks to President Trump’s trade policies. 

Authored by Danny Sjursen via AntiWar.com,

When they saw Afghanistan, all they could think of was Iraq. Indeed, most military thinkers are perennially driven by the tunnel-vision of personal experience; rarely a good thing. Indeed, the generals and colonels managing the foolish, politically driven 2009-12 Obama “surge” into Afghanistan – what he’d absurdly labeled the “good war” – had few fresh ideas. Convinced, and feeling vindicated, by the myth that Baby Bush’s 2007-09 Iraq surge had “worked,” most commanders knew just what to do and sought to replicate these tactics in the utterly dissimilar war in Afghanistan. That meant the temporary infusion of some 30,000 extra troops, walling off warring neighborhoods, and plopping small American units among the populace.

Some of us, mostly captains who’d cut our teeth in the worst days of the Iraq maelstrom, were skeptical from the start. I, for one, had long sensed that the “gains” of that surge were highly temporary, that the U.S. military had simply bought the fleeting loyalty of Sunni insurgents, and that the whole point of the surge – to allow a political settlement between warring sects and ethnicities – had never occurred. The later rise of ISIS, breakdown of centralized governance, and rout of the U.S.-trained Iraqi Army in 2013-14 would prove my point. But that was in the future. From my viewpoint, the legacy of surge 1.0 had really only been another 1,000 or so American troop deaths – including three of my own men – and who knows how many Iraqi casualties.

Then again, no one cared what one lowly, if dreamy yet cynical, officer thought anyway. I was a tool, a pawn, a middle-managing “company man” expected to carry out surge 2.0 with discipline and enthusiasm. And so I tried. My team of cavalry scouts raised a dubiously loyal local militia, partnered with the often drug-addicted, criminal Afghan Army and police, and parsed out my squads to live within the local villages semi-permanently. That’s when things got weird.

Impressed by the minor, momentary drop in violence – such deceptive stats were a way of life in the US Army – these early measures had allegedly produced, both my squadron commander, and his boss, the brigade commander, suddenly took interest in my troop. Now they wanted to expand on what we were doing and toss in their own misguided two cents. What was needed, my colonel informed me, was to wall off the nearest contested village – Charcusa – with tall concrete “T-walls.” That way, so his twisted logic went, the Taliban couldn’t get in. See, for him, a complex war was that simple. In an oddly prescient foreshadowing of his future commander-in-chief, Donald Trump’s, border tactics, my squadron commander never saw a problem a section of wall couldn’t solve.

Now, once again, it was my turn to attempt to pour a dose of reason all over his best laid plans. This rarely ended well. Thus, I explained that surrounding the small agricultural village with concrete barriers would separate farmers from their fields, and thus their livelihood. Besides, even if we created a few guarded exits to the fields, the T-walls would seal off the many canals the villagers used for drinking and irrigation, essentially drying out the whole joint. Oh, and the Taliban could climb, I reminded him. The Taliban were probably already in the village, related to the villagers, and didn’t wear uniforms or big Ts on their foreheads. The aesthetic nightmare of walling off a village would alienate the people and cause psychologically deep reactions of insecurity combined with resentment of us Americans. I tried, well, every single argument I could muster.

Mister “lower-caters-to-higher” was far from pleased. See, the real brainchild of the Charcusa concrete bonanza was actually the brigade commander, and my lowly unit certainly couldn’t defy his wishes. Heck, my squadron commander’s own evaluation and career progression might be on the line. Weighed against that, what did tactical commonsense or the livelihood of meaningless Afghans matter? The brigade commander had himself been a battalion commander in Western Baghdad during surge 1.0, where he and others, gleefully walled off the area neighborhoods and divided conflicting Muslim sects. It “worked” in urban Baghdad, so why not rural, no electrical grid, religiously homogenous, Southern Afghanistan? There it was again: a colonel who saw an Afghan problem and reflexively sought to apply an uncreative Iraqi solution.

Well, after weeks of wrangling, and certainly another blight on my leadership reputation with the squadron commander, my irrigation ditch argument won out with the more practical elements on the brigade staff…sort of. There’d be no concrete barriers, the commander reluctantly conceded, but we just had to “throw a bone” to the brigade commander’s Baghdad-based vision. The solution: I was ordered to surround the village after all, only with thousands of strands of menacing, ugly, triple strand concertina (barbed) wire. I wasn’t going to stop this one, and hardly bothered.

For days on end my weary troopers turned the village of Charcusa into what discomfiting resembled a concentration camp. Not that it worked, or mattered. The results produced amounted to little more than the few hundred cuts on my soldiers’ hands. Within a couple years my unit was gone, and so were our successors. Today, most of Kandahar is again contested by the Taliban, the rusting barbed wire naught but a monument to American obtusity. Still, it pleased both of my bosses, one off which told me I’d done a “great” job with the concertina wire mission, a macabre gold star of sorts for my own impending evaluation.

So today, on that wars rolls in an ongoing combination of stalemate and quagmire. Just this week, another American soldier was killed by a suicide car bomb. His death, ultimately, changes nothing as the Afghan War now has a preposterous inertia all its own. As for my colonel, he got the next promotion and his own brigade. His boss, the king of concrete himself, well he’s a rising star and a prominent general officer today. Now that President Trump has foolishly called off seemingly promising peace talks with the Taliban, maybe my old brigade commander will lead the next phase of an Afghan War with no end in sight. If he does, expect more of the same. He’ll have his troops and their Afghan mentees needlessly walling off more tiny villages in no time…

*  *  *

Series note: It has taken me years to tell these stories. The emotional and moral wounds of the Afghan War have just felt too recent, too raw. After all, I could hardly write a thing down about my Iraq War experience for nearly ten years, when, by accident, I churned out a book on the subject. Now, as the American war in Afghanistan – hopefully – winds to something approaching a close, it’s finally time to impart some tales of the madness. In this new, recurring, semi-regular series, the reader won’t find many worn out sagas of heroism, brotherhood, and love of country. Not that this author doesn’t have such stories, of course. But one can find those sorts of tales in countless books and numerous trite, platitudinal Hollywood yarns.

With that in mind, I propose to tell a number of very different sorts of stories – profiles, so to speak, in absurdity. That’s what war is, at root, an exercise in absurdity, and America’s hopeless post-9/11 wars are stranger than most. My own 18-year long quest to find some meaning in all the combat, to protect my troops from danger, push back against the madness, and dissent from within the army proved Kafkaesque in the extreme. Consider what follows just a survey of that hopeless journey…

*  *  *

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

A new report from Vote Hemp, a top hemp advocacy group, indicates the amount of licensed acreage of hemp farming across the US has more than quadrupled this year. 

The report, 2019 US Hemp License Report, says the number of acres of hemp licensed across 34 states totaled 511,442 in 2019, a 455% jump YoY. State licenses to produce hemp were issued to 16,877 farmers and researchers, a 476% YoY jump. 

“We are seeing hemp cultivation dramatically expand in the US in 2019, with over quadruple the number of acres licensed in hemp compared to last year and the addition of 13 more states with hemp programs,” said Eric Steenstra, President of Vote Hemp. “Now that we have lifted federal prohibition on hemp farming, it’s time build the infrastructure and expand hemp cultivation and the market for hemp products across the country so that all can reap the benefits of this versatile and sustainable crop.”

Vote Hemp notes that not all of the 511,442 acres will yield hemp this year. It estimates only 230,000 acres of hemp will be planted. Of that, only 50% will be harvested due to crop failure.

Thirteen new states this year have allowed farmers to cultivate hemp following its removal from the federal Controlled Substances Act via the 2018 Farm Bill. However, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire and South Dakota were the only states that continued the ban. 

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is expected to release new hemp legalization that will allow for the mass production of hemp in the 2020 growing season. 

USDA officials said last week that hemp farmers would be eligible for federal crop insurance.

The Federal Credit Union Administration has recently said credit unions in rural America are now allowed to provide services for hemp producers.

The Environmental Protection Agency also announced that it’s currently reviewing and will be regulating what pesticides can be used on the crops. 

The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing how hemp-derived CBD could be used in food products or nutritional supplements.

With a record-setting amount of new hemp acreage coming online, spot hemp prices have been stagnating this year.

In red, Hemp Benchmark shows the states where growing hemp is commercially legal. 

Hemp Benchmark breaks down the number of licenses and acreage grown in each state. 

So if any readers are soybean and corn farmers devastated by President Trump’s trade war, now could be the time to overhaul operations and switch fields over to hemp – this could boost farm income as Americans are now stuffing their faces with CBD products.

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

August gun sales were up 15% thanks to Democrats’ totalitarian demands for mandatory buybacks. Those who bought guns were Americans seeking self-protection and with deep concerns that President Donald Trump is on board with gun control.

According to the Washington Examiner, the overall number of background checks recorded in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System surged 15.5%.  Those numbers were courtesy of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). That figure includes background checks done for security, concealed carry permits, and gun sales and was the highest August number ever recorded.

Adjusted for sales, the NSSF industry group said that August FBI background checks for sales surged 15.2% over August 2018. The adjusted August number was second only to August 2016 during the heated presidential election.  It’s become evident that gun control authoritarians are the best gun salespeople on the planet.

Trump’s rhetoric on guns and his apparent desire to curb the gun rights of innocent people is likely also playing a role in the increase in gun sales. The new surge came in the wake of heightened pressure for gun control, sales bans on “military-style rifles,” limits on ammo, and a slew of democrats saying they will take guns at the end of a gun, but force.

Justin Anderson, the marketing director for Hyatt Guns in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the nation’s largest sellers, said fears of a liberal gun grab and a drive for self-protection are pushing sales higher.

“As we’ve seen in the past, the recent publicizing of mass shootings has fueled people’s concerns about their personal safety. We are seeing many first-time gun buyers, and our concealed carry classes are booking up quickly,” said Anderson.

“Political figures talking about gun bans and confiscation is also starting to figure into sales. We’ve seen a slight uptick in the sale of tactical rifles as a result,” he added. –Washington Examiner

Democrats continue to prove themselves to be the best people to drive up gun sales. They are literally making their goal of an enslaved populace harder by spewing propaganda seconds after a mass shooting. It looks like innocent people don’t like being told they aren’t allowed to protect themselves and considering the second amendment was written to protect Americans from tyrants, it makes sense that democrats want it gone, while free people stock up.

As Saxo Bank’s Peter Garnry recaps yesterday’s Apple event, the company introduced its iPhone 11 which now comes in three different versions with cheapest version selling for $699 which a price cut aimed to lure smartphone buyers back into Apple’s realm (at the expense of a drop in Apple’s ASP). The stock market reacted positively to the news, but criticism has surfaced that Apple is falling behind as the new iPhone 11 is not coming with a 5G integration which makes almost impossible for Apple to have growth in China where local smartphone makers such as Huawei is introducing smartphone with 5G integration. Beginning in the second half of 2020 this will be a constraint for Apple.

Why does 5G matter?

To answer that question, we have excerpted from a recent Deutsche Bank report explaining “how 5G will change your life.”

Amidst hype and high expectation, the 5G roll-out has begun. It recently launched in Korea, while the US, UK and others have commenced trial versions and China has said it will soon grant commercial licenses for its network. To take advantage, companies such as Samsung and LG have launched 5G smartphones. In total, $160bn is being invested annually in the construction of 5G networks according to GSMA, the mobile network operators’ association. It expects 5G to contribute $2.2tn to the global economy in the coming 15 years, just a little less than the size of the UK economy.

Yet, for all the fanfare, many in the industry are quietly nervous. Among other things, one of the biggest concerns is that there is no ‘killer application’ ready and waiting to be unleashed that requires the 5G network. That trepidation stands in direct contrast to the 4G and 3G roll-outs. The former allowed good-quality streaming video and the latter photo sharing and other types of multimedia. Both were a boon for hardware, software, and network providers.

This is backed up by our dbDig primary research1 which shows that in the US, only ten per cent of customers are prepared to pay $6 or more for 5G services and one-quarter of customers say they are not prepared to pay any extra at all. Yet when we look at China a different picture emerges. Indeed, two-thirds of Chinese customers are willing to pay for 5G if it means quicker uploads to social media or the ability to play mobile games with very low load time. That is double the proportion of US customers who are willing to pay for the same services. It seems part of the reason is that the Chinese are far more likely to report issues with signal strength when they are in rural areas. Given smart phones have become a crucial engagement tool in rural Asian areas (see our piece titled, ‘The emerging market technology skip’) the willingness of the Chinese to upgrade is not surprising. However, the future for 5G smartphone service in developed markets seems more uncertain.

On top of the concerns about user uptake are the voices of health professionals, environmentalists, and politicians who worry about radiation emissions. Take Brussels, for example, a city with very strict radiation regulations. There, a pilot 5G project was halted on health grounds with the environment minister proclaiming, “The people of Brussels are not guinea pigs.” In Switzerland, authorities have commenced a 5G radiation monitoring programme. And all this comes before considering the stern political rhetoric that has accompanied the choice of Chinese suppliers for 5G infrastructure (see our piece titled, ‘The politics of 5G’).

So given that many smartphone users are wondering whether they should bother upgrading to 5G, the network providers cannot be blamed for wondering just how aggressively they should spend the money to roll out 5G networks. Consider that 5G works on a much shorter wavelength than 4G. Because of that, it cannot travel as far as the longer wavelengths of earlier networks. It also has more trouble penetrating the thick walls of buildings. To deal with this, network providers will need to install perhaps five times more base stations than they have with 4G, and some of those stations may be more costly to build. The extra cost, then, is significant and the initial roll-outs will almost certainly be confined to densely-populated urban areas.

So, is it a situation of “build it and they will come”? Will the roll out of 5G spur a frenzied development of 5G-specific applications in a similar way to how 4G catalysed a plethora of video-related products? Or will network providers need to see evidence of a demand for 5G and a willingness to pay before they can justify the expense of rolling out 5G beyond city centres? While we wait for the ‘killer app’ to be developed, the answer is it will probably be a bit of both until a virtuous cycle is established.

The thing is that unlike the move to 3G and 4G, some of the most important uses of the 5G network are unlikely to take place on a smartphone, at least for now. Instead, the initial uptake in 5G will likely be driven by the manufacturing industry and public utilities, not individual consumers. Some countries have made significant plans for this. Germany, for example, has reserved a 100 megahertz band between 3.7 and 3.8 gigahertz to be used exclusively by industrial companies for their local networks. German company Siemens is one of the companies at the forefront of 5G industrial applications (see our piece titled, ‘Siemens case study’).

Some call it the Industrial Internet of Things, others Industry 4.0. Either way, the story is the same. The IIoT is a network of intelligent industrial devices, that is, machines that have in-built sensors that collect data and communicate with each other. This allows them to adjust how they perform a task to what is happening elsewhere in the factory, or inform a human of a certain need to make the process more efficient. The idea is not new, but so far, ‘smart factories’ have been extremely limited. One key problem is the latency of existing 4G networks. Although it may be small, just a second’s delay for a precision manufacturing job can result in serious damage to the product. The 5G network with latency at the lower end of the millisecond range will go a long way to fixing that. For example, a robot arm will be able to stop itself immediately if a camera identifies a foreign object on the conveyor belt.

The very-low latency of 5G opens up the possibilities for using machines in remote locations or where it is difficult to lay cables. For example, industrial companies use IWLAN networks for the monitoring of power networks on islands or the identification of leaks in oil and gas pipelines.

Reliable wireless connectivity will also enable autonomous robots on the factory floor. These will be able to move themselves to where they are needed, particularly in cases where a breakdown or bottleneck occurs at one point on the production line. It is true that factories are currently configured for cable-connected robots and reorganising the factory to allow for autonomous robots will be expensive. But in time this will change as the design of many factories is currently very inefficient as they are frequently back-solved to account for the requirements of cable-connected robots. Not only that, but it will also allow for more mobile human staff in factories. Currently, most control panels are wired as they are generally deemed too critical to be left to a wireless connection. Reliable 5G connections will change that. Furthermore, ultra-low latency augmented reality applications will also be enabled for technicians.

Of course, industrial markets are just at the beginning of their digitisation journey. As factories begin to implement 5G, the network will grow. That will allow control to be increasingly decentralised. It will also allow for a link to be made with suppliers. This is great news for those that engage in just-in-time inventory processes, or wish they could. For example, if a supplier can be notified of a factory delay the moment a machine detects it, shipments from that supplier can be delayed to accommodate. This also trims energy costs and reduces throughput times.

Another application factory owners have long desired is predictive maintenance. Apart from the speed and latency benefits of 5G, the network is much better than 4G at handling multiple devices at once. In fact, 5G makes it possible to transmit the data generated by one million IoT devices per square kilometre in a factory complex. That should cover the complete production line of most factories and their associated temperature measurement and flow sensors. Indeed, by some estimates there will be 80 billion connected devices generating 180 zettabytes of data in 2025, 45 times the amount of data generated in 2013.

All that data allows for the strain on components to be better analysed and the cost savings can be significant. This is best illustrated with an example. Take a brewery which has thousands of valves that secure the smooth transfer of liquid through the machines. From time to time, one will break causing downtime or, even worse, a contamination of the product. To avoid this, the norm is to exchange all valves at specific intervals based on historic projections of breakage rates. In a 5G smart factory, sensors can measure the actual strain on the valves and alert the human controllers when a specific one needs to be replaced before it breaks and without throwing away otherwise perfectly good valves.

Further down the road, 5G technology should accelerate the adoption of industrial and enterprise mobile internet use case beyond factories. One example is the opening up of new technology acceptance models for mainstream consumer internet companies to expand into enterprise solutions. In fact, given the potential applications, this will likely become a mega-trend. The US will likely lead the way. To put the figures in context, the technology software and services industry represents one-third of all US listed technology companies’ market value. In North Asia by contrast, the figure is under ten per cent and it is difficult to identify many strong enterprise software companies in the region. That said, it will not be all one-way traffic from North America. China has strong ambitions to build stronger digitally-connected infrastructure and aims to become less reliant on foreign and overseas technology for enterprise software.

While the first applications of 5G may be in the industrial space, one of the most anticipated consumer-facing applications is the autonomous car. The necessity is the close-to-zero latency of 5G – critical if autonomous cars are to be linked together and make split-second decisions. Although the world is some way from widespread adoption of autonomous cars, they have the potential to offer safety and environmental benefits with 5G as the backbone. They will also likely be the most visible part of a smart city (see our piece titled, ‘Who wants to live in a Smart City’).

Other consumer-facing applications currently under development include remote surgery which requires very-low latency services. On the entertainment front, virtual reality films will require the high speed of 5G networks. Consider that a standard two-hour film streamed in high-definition on Netflix will consume four gigabytes of data. The same film in virtual reality will use ten times the amount.

To examine just the consumer and industrial benefits of 5G is to merely see one side of the coin. The other is which companies and industries will benefit and, crucially, when.

In the first instance, it is the hardware equipment makers that should benefit as they are the ones to construct the infrastructure to lay out the 5G network. Then it will be the turn of the software makers. History shows that the providers of content, such as video and games, have benefitted at this point as digital content tends to be more intuitive from a business model standpoint and thus has faster adoption. Following this are businesses that require more infrastructure support. With 3G and 4G, this included the e-commerce and food delivery industries.

The consumer internet industry is likely to be a ‘late cycle’ beneficiary of 5G technology. Internet companies tend to identify and release new innovative services and content once there is sufficient reach and penetration. Thus, a sufficiently installed 5G base is a likely pre-requisite for the consumer internet industry.

Yet, the industry will also note how market valuations reacted to the 3G and 4G upgrades in the past. At first, investors were pessimistic, fearing the unknown costs and worried about the extent of adoption of the applications enabled by the technology as well as cannibalisation. These fears weighed on market valuations early in the cycle before becoming a tailwind later. This was particularly noticeable in Asia. During 2011 and 2012, major Asian internet stocks reached then-historic valuation lows in China, Japan, and Korea. In China, the market valuation of these large listed stocks remained flat in 2011 despite the jump of one-third in the underlying earnings outlook. In the more mature Japanese market, the aggregate sector’s market value fell eight per cent despite a six per cent increase in earnings.

As the industry decides the extent of its initial roll-out, it will be cognisant of the lessons learnt from the transition from 3G to 4G. Then, streaming video was the ‘killer application’ that was ready to go as soon as the 4G network was installed, and customers were enthusiastic in their take-up. The net consequence was lower earnings for consumer internet companies as the increase in bandwidth and content procurement costs skyrocketed, relative to the periods where text and static image-based content consumption were mainstream. In other words, the early phase of improving network quality was a cost that wracked on the nerves of investors. It would be safe to assume telecommunication executives will use this experience and temper their enthusiasm for an immediate wide-spread 5G roll out.

But despite the nerves of suppliers, the concerns of health professionals, and the political complications, the tangible benefits of 5G networks, will likely become commonplace far sooner than many expect.

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”

– Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

It’s been 230 years since James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights – the first ten amendments to the Constitution – as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, and what do we have to show for it?

Nothing good.

In America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We can pretend that the Constitution, which was written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing document, but the reality of life in the American police state tells a different story.

“We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, etc.), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called named of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago.

Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, the courts and the like)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

Here is what it means to live under the Constitution today.

The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.

Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly, Americans are being arrested and charged with bogus “contempt of cop” charges such as “disrupting the peace” or “resisting arrest” for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech zones.” And under the guise of “government speech,” the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a government forum.

The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against SWAT team raids and government agents armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited for the battlefield. As such, this amendment has been rendered null and void.

The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or invading you, unless they have some evidence that you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise) and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.

The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the government’s actions—and thereby help balance the scales of justice—is not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that “we the people” retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.

The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.

The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.

As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and the courts. Indeed, the federal governmental bureaucracy has grown so large that it has made local and state legislatures relatively irrelevant. Through its many agencies and regulations, the federal government has stripped states of the right to regulate countless issues that were originally governed at the local level.

If there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.

Yet those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.” As the Preamble proclaims:

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

In other words, we have the power to make and break the government. We are the masters and they are the servants. We the American people—the citizenry—are the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

Still, it’s hard to be a good citizen if you don’t know anything about your rights or how the government is supposed to operate.

As the National Review rightly asks, “How can Americans possibly make intelligent and informed political choices if they don’t understand the fundamental structure of their government? American citizens have the right to self-government, but it seems that we increasingly lack the capacity for it.”

Americans are constitutionally illiterate.
Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, when Newsweek asked 1,000 adult U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 44% were unable to define the Bill of Rights.

A survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more than one-third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a single one. Only a quarter of Americans (27 percent) know it takes a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to override a presidential veto. One in five Americans (21 percent) incorrectly thinks that a 5-4 Supreme Court decision is sent back to Congress for reconsideration. And more than half of Americans do not know which party controls the House and Senate.

A survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that only one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsons television family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the freedoms in the First Amendment, a majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV program American Idol, 41% could name two and one-fourth could name all three.
It gets worse.

Many who responded to the survey had a strange conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, 21% said the “right to own a pet” was listed someplace between “Congress shall make no law” and “redress of grievances.” Some 17% said that the First Amendment contained the “right to drive a car,” and 38% believed that “taking the Fifth” was part of the First Amendment.

Teachers and school administrators do not fare much better. A study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis found that one educator in five was unable to name any of the freedoms in the First Amendment.

In fact, while some educators want students to learn about freedom, they do not necessarily want them to exercise their freedoms in school. As the researchers conclude, “Most educators think that students already have enough freedom, and that restrictions on freedom in the school are necessary. Many support filtering the Internet, censoring T-shirts, disallowing student distribution of political or religious material, and conducting prior review of school newspapers.”

Government leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic,” their lack of education about our fundamental rights often causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.

So what’s the solution?
Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties”  is the only real assurance that freedom will survive.

As Jefferson wrote in 1820: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.

Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.

Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.

If this constitutional illiteracy is not remedied and soon, freedom in America will be doomed.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have managed to keep the wolf at bay so far. Barely.

Our national priorities need to be re-prioritized. For instance, some argue that we need to make America great again. I, for one, would prefer to make America free again.

As actor-turned-activist Richard Dreyfuss warned:

“Unless we teach the ideas that make America a miracle of government, it will go away in your kids’ lifetimes, and we will be a fable. You have to find the time and creativity to teach it in schools, and if you don’t, you will lose it. You will lose it to the darkness, and what this country represents is a tiny twinkle of light in a history of oppression and darkness and cruelty. If it lasts for more than our lifetime, for more than our kids’ lifetime, it is only because we put some effort into teaching what it is, the ideas of America: the idea of opportunity, mobility, freedom of thought, freedom of assembly.”