Month: February 2020

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said Thursday that China might need more time to fulfill its commitment to buy tens of billions of dollars in American farm products. But while President Trump has already promised more money will flow to beleaguered farmers as part of the White House’s farm bailout, impoverished farmers in southeast Asia have nowhere to turn to compensate for the thousands of tons of fruits and veggies rotting along their borders with China.

For years, China has been the biggest buyer for farmers in Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam, Nikkei reports. Now, with the coronavirus closing down importers and weighing on demand, farmers are being forced to instead sell their products in local markets for a serious discount.

“The coronavirus has undoubtedly hurt business,” said Maung Phyu, a 48-year-old farmer north of Yangon, in an interview with the Nikkei Asian Review. “There aren’t many things the [Myanmar] government can do for us in this situation.”

Over the last decade, as China’s population boomed, the county became the biggest buyer of fruits and vegetables from its neighbors. Thailand and Vietnam now export about 25% of their agricultural products to China, while Myanmar sends more than 50% of its harvest according to ASEANStats.

In the poorest, most rural parts of these three countries, farming is critical: without it, local economies could collapse.

One farmer said he sent dozens of truckloads of fruit to the border with China’s Yunnan Province every day during the harvest season. Now, those shipments have stopped, while some have spoiled after being unexpectedly held up at the border.

Three years ago, Maung Phyu contracted with several Chinese traders to supply watermelons and muskmelons. Almost every day during the harvest season, he would send truckloads of fruit to Muse, a border town in China’s southernmost Yunnan Province. He sent 70 shipments in December followed by 120 in January.

But now all shipments have stopped, and even transporting goods to the border is discouraged. “We were told not to send our produce to the border, as there was nobody to buy it,” said Maung Phyu.

Fishery products like crabs and eels are also being held up, said a commerce ministry official in Muse.

The situation has forced Maung Phyu to sell at domestic markets in Yangon, where watermelons go for only 3,000 kyat to 5,000 kyat ($2.00 to $3.50) each, compared with 10,000 kyat on the export market. Muskmelons also only fetch 50% to 70%. “Many farmers haven’t harvested their crops, and when they do they’ll have nowhere to bring them,” he said.

Since millions of Chinese have been ordered not to leave their homes, shopping for fresh fruit and vegetables has become far more difficult.

He said the lockdowns in Chinese cities have disrupted logistics while tighter border inspections have lengthened wait times, causing fruit to spoil before it gets to market. “Chinese have been ordered to stay home, and that means no shoppers,” said Jira. “And if they manage to go out, they only buy necessities, not durian.”

Thailand’s durian farmers, who recently expanded their operations following a spike in demand for durian in China, are being left in the lurch.

Durian farms in Thailand have also been hit just as the harvest season is set to begin. Production is forecast at 956,000 tons this year – up about 27% from 2019 – on the back of growing demand from Chinese traders and tourists.

Helping drive China’s newfound appetite for the fruit has been Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding. In April 2018, Ma said he would start selling durian online. He then stunned Thai officials by selling 80,000 durians in just one minute on his shopping site.

But instead of cashing in on increased Chinese sales this year, growers face disaster. Nearly one million tons of durian is expected to flood the market from late February, with few buyers in sight. “We can’t do anything except pray for an end to the outbreak,” said Jira Payungporn, a durian trader in Chantaburi Province, home to Thailand’s premium durian.

Paiboon Wongchatsathit, president of the Thai Fresh Fruit Traders and Exporters Association, said Thailand has lost a good chance to boost durian exports.

He said prices are expected to fall sharply this year, angering farmers, who will likely call for government support. “Prices could fall to 50 baht ($1.60) per kilogram, down from 180 baht during last year’s boom,” Paiboon said.

Presently, hundreds of containers of Vietnamese dragonfruit are at risk of spoiling at the border after China closed nine border crossings with its neighbor (likely in response to Vietnam’s decision to cut off movement of people and goods from China).

Meanwhile, local media in Vietnam have reported that hundreds of containers loaded with dragon fruits and watermelons are stuck at border crossings. “China closed nine border crossings [with Vietnam] for import and export activities last week,” the vice chairman of Lang Son Province said on Monday. “If the border remains closed, Vietnamese exports will suffer significant harm.”

The official said more than 300 container trucks are waiting at the Lang Son border crossing, including 190 containers of dragon fruit.

Hopefully, these farmers can cultivate markets elsewhere: given America’s ever-changing food trends, maybe durian will be the next “super fruit”?

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

German politics is in turmoil. State elections last fall left Chancellor Angela Merkel weakened, forcing her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to make an unwanted coalition in Brandenburg with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens.

The surge in the former East German states of Merkel’s political nemesis, Alternative for Germany (AfD), complicates an already complicated web of tenuous alliances to allow Merkel’s CDU to remain in power.

That surge in AfD’s support reached crisis proportions recently in Thuringia. Last fall Die Linke (31.0%) and AfD (23.4%) took a majority in Thuringia. While both are committed euroskeptics, they are also oil and water.

Die Linke is a committed leftist party while AfD is a more populist center-right party, characterized by histrionic German and European media as the far-right bogeyman of Germany’s Nazi past.

Merkel’s CDU (21.0%) came in third.

For months since the election ended with no clear path to a majority government because the establishment parties refuse to work with AfD, the parties have wrangled to try and cobble together a coalition.

And after two noncommittal ballots the deadlock was broken by AfD backing the Free Democrat (FDP) candidate Thomas Kemmerlich. Chaos ensued.

Their plans were unexpectedly halted on Wednesday when the AfD sided with the CDU and pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) to narrowly outvote Ramelow’s candidacy and elect FDP’s Thomas Kemmerich instead.

The move instantaneously sent shockwaves across Germany, creating a rift between Thuringia’s CDU branch and its leadership in Berlin. CDU’s chief and Federal Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer accused her colleagues of breaking rank by violating the party’s usual policy of avoiding any cooperation with the anti-establishment and anti-migrant AfD.

AfD pulled support for their own candidate and backed Kemmerlich, freezing the Greens, who barely qualified for even one seat, out of the government.

The untenable situation in Thuringia finally blew up in Merkel’s face. Denying the existence of nearly a quarter of its electorate in coalition talks is ultimately slow-motion political suicide.

It is yet another example of the desperation of German political elites to hold onto power.

They did this successfully in Brandenburg but only by doing there what Merkel couldn’t do at the national level in 2017, agree to a deal with the SPD and Greens.

AfD is here to stay, especially in the former East German states. The left parties are fluid and Merkel keeps using the CDU’s nominal center-right status as a cudgel to strong arm her preferred results.

The more this happens, the harder opposition gets. And the result in Thuringia was local CDU members, in revolt against Merkel’s prohibition against working with AfD, defied her to stymie the Die Linke/SPD/Green minority coalition that was supposed to win.

In the end, why is Merkel so angry about this result, beyond the obvious issues within her own party? Why did she force Kemmerlich to dissolve the government and go for snap elections in Thuringia?

It has everything to do with the German upper house, the Bundesrat. I covered this back in November after the vote. Merkel has a de facto alliance with the Greens to ensure control over the Bundesrat and, by extension, the Bundestag.

As was pointed out to me by German political observers the game Merkel has been playing by working with the SPD in the Bundestag only works if she keeps the Greens in the Bundsrat happy.

But because of the nature of the Bundesrat, where state delegation must vote as a block, up until Thuringia the Greens held veto power over 37 out of 69 seats there and could stop all legislation cold.

But those four seats now will likely go to someone else and this defection by CDU party members in Thuringia threatens a constitutional crisis in Germany if AfD make it into the Bundesrat.

Adding the Greens to Brandenburg was meant to offset the potential loss in Thuringia. So that the current Bundesrat map looks like this with the Greens holding 41 seats plus potentially 4 more from Thuringia.

This lays bare the reality that Merkel has been using the Greens to push her EU agenda without looking like it’s her doing so. This gives her domestic political cover.

The Greens losing out of Thuringia bring them to 41 seats.

But here’s the real rub and no one in German media will report on it but it is happening. AfD has formally challenged the apportionment of seats in Hesse where the CDU and the Greens have a tenuous alliance and a majority of just one seat.

That challenge could, and likely will, bring down the government in Hesse. As the body overseeing this there isn’t a political body. It’s an administrative one. The laws are clear and once the case is decided upon Hesse’s five seats will be up in the air.

Ultimately, if/when that happens I expect the SPD will be added to the coalition and order restored from Merkel’s point of view. But since there’s going to be new elections in Thuringia the possibility exists that things deteriorate for Merkel there even faster.

That their only option was snap elections is deeply embarrassing for the establishment. It’s going to give wind to the minor parties while the SPD continues to rethink its coalition with a CDU that is losing control of its membership.

German politics is all about projecting consistency, from my understanding of things. Change is to be measured and gradual. But that comes from economic stability and prosperity. The rapid shifts in the German political landscape that has given rise to these events undermine that thesis.

Poor economic conditions in the eastern states is driving conservative Germans to AfD. Germany getting squeezed by Brexit and Trump’s hostility to Merkel doesn’t help matters. A Europe incapable of economic growth for German companies to export to is a third factor. And continued sanctions against Russia has stymied that market for nearly six years.

After nearly a decade of ruinous ECB policy and Merkel’s insistence on holding all challenges and changes in abeyance is coiling the spring for a political revolution against her soon.

What happens if AfD wins the majority in the new election? What happens if the Greens fail to hit 5% and not qualify for any seats? What happens if her CDU members in Thuringia make another deal with AfD?

These are questions, Angela Merkel doesn’t want to face but Germany needs to.

*  *  *

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The independent Turkish news source Ahval along investigative journalists on the ground in Syria and Libya have picked up on a disturbing trend: many among the reported thousands of Syrian ‘rebel’ mercenaries being transferred to Tripoli to fight on behalf of the UN-backed government there against pro-Haftar forces believe they are being sent “to fight the Russians”. Ahval news reports the following: 

To boost motivation, Turkey is telling Syrian rebels it is sending to Libya they will fight Russians, the Investigative Journal said on Wednesday, citing sources in Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. 

“There are Russians here,” said a 21-year-old Syrian mercenary from Kafr Nabl, a town in Syria’s Idlib province. “The Turks confirmed this to us. I wouldn’t even hurt a Libyan here. But if I find a Russian, I will put a stick up his ass.”

Since last month Ankara has confirmed that Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army fighters are being flown into Tripoli to back the Government of National Accord, busy defending the Libyan capital from a months-long offensive by Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA). 

“With the help of the Turkish forces and their equipment, we will defeat the Russians,” one Syrian militant said. It’s apparently become a widespread running joke that the mercenaries being sent to Libya blindly “believe whatever Turkey tells them”. 

“Of course there are no Russian soldiers there. If the Turks tell them there are Russian troops in Libya, and that the [TFSA] will get fight them, they believe they are fighting the same enemy that is destroying their cities in Syria,” another local Syrian commander told investigative reporter Lindsey Snell. “But of course, this is a lie, and Libya is not Syria. But these mercenaries believe whatever Turkey tells them.”

The Ahval report says that some 4,700 Turkey-backed Syrian mercenaries have been transferred to Libya over the past month, which reportedly began happening even before the Turkish government last month ago voted to send military assistance and national army troops to assist and advise Tripoli forces. 

Meanwhile, Moscow has been considered a significant political backer to Gen. Haftar, but most of the LNA’s military support comes from the UAE. There’s been no reporting or suggestion that any Russian national forces or advisers are inside Libya, other than possibly private contractors. 

Last September it was widely reported that some one hundred Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group have been bolstering pro-Haftar forces. 

Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to toughen sentencing guidelines for convicted terrorists after a newly-released prisoner carried out a jihadist attack in London.

On February 2, Sudesh Amman, a 20-year-old jihadist from Harrow in north-west London, stabbed two people in a knife rampage on Streatham High Road before he was shot dead by police. He had been released from prison just days earlier after serving less than half of his sentence for terrorism offenses.

Amman, who was carrying a 10-inch kitchen knife, wearing a fake suicide bomber vest, and shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”), had been under active police surveillance at the time of the attack, which London police described as an “Islamist-related terrorist incident.”

In December 2018, Amman was sentenced to three years and four months in prison after pleading guilty to 13 counts of expressing support for Islamist terrorism and possessing and sharing Islamic State and al-Qaeda propaganda. He was 18 years old at the time.

Amman was arrested in May 2018 after posting Islamist propaganda online. At the time, police said that he had expressed support for the Islamic State, sent beheading videos to his girlfriend, and asked her to kill her “kuffar” (non-Muslim) parents. He also wrote about carrying out a jihadist attack:

“If you can’t make a bomb because family, friends or spies are watching or suspecting you, take a knife, Molotov [cocktail], sound bombs or a car at night and attack the crusaders, police and soldiers of taghut [idolatry], or western embassies in every country you are in this planet.”

In a search of Amman’s computer, police found documents titled, “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”, “U.S. Army Knife Fighting Manual Techniques” and “Bloody Brazilian Knife Fighting Techniques.”

During Amman’s trial, police noted that he had a “fierce interest in violence and martyrdom.” Acting Commander Alexis Boon, then head of the Metropolitan police counter terrorism command, explained:

“His fascination with dying in the name of terrorism was clear in a notepad we recovered from his home. Amman had scrawled his ‘life goals’ in the notepad and top of the list, above family activities, was dying a martyr and going to ‘Jannah‘ — the afterlife.”

“It’s not clear how Amman became radicalized, but it is apparent from his messages that it had been at least a year in development. Whatever the circumstances, this case is a reminder of the need to be vigilant to signs of radicalization and report it.”

Amman’s attack is the second one in the British capital in the past three months. On November 29, 2019, Usman Khan, a 28-year-old jihadist from Stoke-on-Trent, stabbed and killed two people in a knife rampage near London Bridge. Like Amman, Khan had also been released early from prison.

A day after Khan’s attack, Boris Johnson announced a review into the license (parole) conditions of 74 terrorists who had been released from prison early. He also vowed to end the practice of automatically releasing serious offenders from prison before the end of their terms:

“The terrorist who attacked yesterday was sentenced 11 years ago under laws passed in 2008 which established automatic early release.

“This system has got to end. I repeat, this has got to end…. If you are convicted of a serious terrorist offense, there should be a mandatory minimum sentence of 14 years — and some should never be released.

“Further, for all terrorism and extremist offenses, the sentence announced by the judge must be the time actually served — these criminals must serve every day of their sentence, with no exceptions.”

A Sentencing Bill included in the Queen’s Speech in October 2019 would have changed the automatic release point from halfway to two-thirds for adult offenders serving sentences of four years or more for serious violence or sexual offenses. The bill, however, stalled due to a hung parliament, and was shelved later that month when new elections were called.

The latest attack sparked considerable anger. In an interview with Sky News, the editor of Spiked magazine, Brendan O’Neill, spoke for many when he said:

“The Streatham terror stabbing is a scandal. This man was an Islamist maniac. He was devoted to ISIS and he had planned to kill non-believers. And yet he was let out of jail after just 18 months. We’ve got to start taking Islamic terrorism more seriously.”

Paul Stott, a terrorism researcher with the London-based Henry Jackson Society, added:

“We need an immediate moratorium on the release of terrorist prisoners, whilst the government reviews each individual case.”

In an interview with the Daily Mail, an unidentified government source said that according to British law, Amman had to be released from prison early, despite the threat he posed to society:

“There had been concerns when he [Amman] was in prison but there were no powers for any authority to keep him behind bars.

“There was nothing that could be done to keep him behind bars under existing laws, hence why he was under surveillance and strict licensing conditions.

“He had served half of his sentence, which was more than three years, so he had to be released despite concerns over his conduct.

“The public will look at this case and say why was this individual not kept behind bars and the Prime Minister shares that view.”

After the latest attack, Johnson promised “fundamental changes” to the system for dealing with convicted terrorists. He said that terrorists currently in prison will lose their right to automatic early release halfway through their sentences. Johnson stressed that the legal concept of automatic early release for people “who obviously continue to pose a threat to the public has come to the end of its useful life.”

On February 3, Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland announced that the government would introduce emergency legislation — The Counterterrorism Bill — to end the automatic early release from prison of terror offenders:

“We cannot have the situation, as we saw tragically in yesterday’s case, where an offender — a known risk to innocent members of the public — is released early by automatic process of law without any oversight by the Parole Board.

“We will, therefore, introduce emergency legislation to ensure an end to terrorist offenders getting released automatically having served half of their sentence with no check or review.”

Buckland added that the changes would be retroactive and apply to jihadists currently in prison:

“We face an unprecedented situation of severe gravity and, as such, it demands that the government responds immediately and that this legislation will therefore also apply to serving prisoners.

“The earliest point at which the offenders will now be considered for release will be once they have served two-thirds of their sentence and, crucially, we will introduce a requirement that no terrorist offender will be released before the end of their full custodial term unless the Parole Board agrees.”

A total of 353 convicted and suspected Islamist terrorists were released from prison between June 2012 and June 2019, according to Home Office statistics cited by the Daily Mail.

In October 2018, the Islamist firebrand preacher Anjem Choudary, described as Britain’s “most dangerous extremist,” was released from prison after serving only half of the five-and-a-half-year sentence he received in 2016 for pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.

Prison authorities could not prevent his release: under British sentencing guidelines, prisoners — even those who are still a risk to the public — automatically become eligible for release under license (parole) after serving half their terms.

In an essay published by the Daily Mail, Philip Flower, a former chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, warned that the fight against violent Islamism in Britain was being hampered by political correctness:

“As a retired senior police officer involved in containing terrorist and other threats during a 40-year career, I want to tell you of the intense frustrations that will be felt today across British policing. They will feel utterly let down by the judicial system.

“When I was a constable, I could arrest and process a suspect in an hour, maximum. Today, it takes a day or more.

“The police are mired in bureaucracy, while the judicial system has become an institutional cloud-cuckoo land.

“As a society, we have to decide how to deal with terrorist suspects. It takes around 32 police officers to maintain around-the-clock surveillance of a single terror suspect.

“It is insane to attempt to maintain this level of supervision of the thousands of individuals known to be of interest to the security services and counter-terrorism police. It seems as though the Streatham perpetrator was being watched by armed police, yet still he managed to stab shoppers….

“If we are to release convicted terrorists from jail early, then we would have to recruit thousands and thousands more police to oversee them, which of course will never happen because there is not enough money and we would find that level of intrusion unacceptable in a free society.

“There is a wider problem of maintaining the morale of the officers charged with keeping the public safe from fanatics.

“Bluntly, how would you feel if you were told to keep track of known terrorists who have been released from prison to satisfy the politically correct assumptions of our justice system?”

Ian Acheson, a veteran prison officer who in 2015 led an independent review of Islamist extremism in British prisons, told the BBC’s Today program that the UK’s risk-management system is fundamentally broken:

“We are going to have to accept that we have to be much more skeptical and robust about dealing with the risk of harm.

“We may need to accept that there are certain people who are so dangerous they must be kept in prison indefinitely….

“I am still unconvinced that the prison service itself has the aptitude or the attitude to assertively manage terrorist offenders.”

Authored by Peter Hasson, op-ed via WashingtonExaminer.com,

For better or worse, social media is the new public square. Of adults, 68% use Facebook, 73% use YouTube, and a quarter use Twitter. The numbers are much higher for adults under 50. Two-thirds of adults and roughly 4 in 5 under 50 use social media to consume news. Three-quarters of Facebook users are on the site every day, and Twitter users have a disproportionate influence on the media because so many journalists are on the service.

The size and scale of social media companies exploded primarily because they presented themselves as open platforms — blank slates. Google, Facebook, and Twitter all characterized their products as engines for social improvement. “We think of Twitter as the global town hall,” said former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. “We are the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

Costolo was Twitter’s chief executive from 2010 until 2015 and the immediate predecessor of current CEO Jack Dorsey. Twitter’s general manager in the United Kingdom, Andy Yang, likewise described Twitter as the “free speech wing of the free speech party” in March 2012. Google became a multibillion-dollar company by offering a portal for free, unrestricted information to anyone with access to the internet; famously, its original motto was “Don’t be evil.” An internal Facebook memo circulated in June 2016 stated that at Facebook, “we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.”

The public has given these three tech companies (and others) enormous power to select the information we read, share, and discuss with our neighbors and friends. We’ve gotten so accustomed to the role they play in our lives that we fail to notice that Big Tech is sifting through the available information and narrowing, and prioritizing, our choices. Although Facebook, Google, and Twitter once touted themselves as bastions of democracy and free speech, they are now openly moving toward direct censorship and media manipulation – and specifically targeting conservative ideas and personalities.

They have already acquiesced to their new censorship fetish. In March 2018, Google circulated an internal memo that instructed employees on the benefits of censorship. In the memo, which was titled “The Good Censor,” Google conceded that while the internet was “founded upon utopian principles of free speech,” free speech is no longer en vogue. “Tech companies are adapting their stance towards censorship” in direct response to “the anxiety of users and governments.” The memo said that “tech firms have gradually shifted away from unmediated free speech and towards censorship and moderation” but framed that shift as a positive development. One major way that tech companies are “stepping into the role of moderator” is by “significantly amping up the number of moderators they employ — in YouTube’s case increasing the number of people on the lookout for inappropriate content to more than 10,000.” It argued that censorship was necessary partly because of users “behaving badly.”

The most alarming part of the missive, however, was that it spoke approvingly of foreign governments that were censoring online speech. Google framed the acts as “taking steps to make online spaces safer, more regulated, and more similar to their offline laws. Protected from hate speech on the street? Now you are on the net too …” Twitter has completely and publicly abandoned its brand as the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” with Dorsey claiming the whole “free speech wing” thing was one giant “joke.” His company, once seemingly devoted to the free expression of its users, now says it is prioritizing making users feel safe from others’ speech. Facebook, too, is openly rebranding itself as a benevolent censor. Here’s what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees in April 2018 (emphasis added):

Overall, I would say that we’re going through a broader philosophical shift in how we approach our responsibility as a company. For the first 10 or 12 years of the company, I viewed our responsibility as primarily building tools that, if we could put those tools in people’s hands, then that would empower people to do good things. What I think we’ve learned now across a number of issues, not just data privacy, but also fake news and foreign interference in elections, is that we need to take a more proactive role and a broader view of our responsibility. It’s not enough to just build tools. We need to make sure that they’re used for good. And that means that we need to now take a more active view in policing the ecosystem and in watching and kind of looking out and making sure that all of the members in our community are using these tools in a way that’s going to be good and healthy.

Three forces are driving Big Tech’s online censorship.

• Two are external and related: market pressures and de-platforming campaigns by liberal activists and journalists.

• The third pressure is internal: Silicon Valley is staggeringly one-sided politically.

Profit margins and market pressures are crucial levers that left-wing ideologues use to pull tech giants and other corporations in the direction of censorship. Companies want to avoid controversy, and, in the era of outrage mobs, that means avoiding offending the Left, which controls most of the cultural institutions in America. That’s part of the reason why massive companies are embracing left-wing politics in advertising, such as what Gillette did with its “toxic masculinity” ad. Left-wing activists amplify those pressures with smear campaigns and boycotts intended to rattle advertisers and investors, forcing the hands of tech companies. If you convince corporate marketing agencies that advertising on Facebook is risky, you can be certain that Facebook will take some form of action to shed controversy and reassure investors.

The external pressures of left-wing activists are compounded by the internal pressures of the companies’ employees, who want Big Tech to embrace censorship against nonliberal opinions as a moral and political necessity. The internal office cultures at Facebook, Google, and Twitter have always been overwhelmingly left-leaning, but the election of Donald Trump as president has made them far more radical. I told one Silicon Valley insider that I thought tech culture now resembled the left-wing, activist culture on college campuses. He replied, “They’re the exact same people.” Their political opinions are certainly monochromatic. Of the $8.1 million that tech industry workers donated to presidential candidates during the 2016 campaign, 95% of it went to Hillary Clinton. Among donations from the Silicon Valley area specifically, 99% went to Clinton.

So, maybe it’s not surprising that Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all become vehicles for left-wing activism. The companies encourage employees to bring their “authentic selves” to work. One Silicon Valley executive told me, “We want people to … bring their entire perspective and all their values to work, and in the positive sense, that means getting rid of a huge distinction between my professional life and my personal life.” For left-wing activists in Silicon Valley, their professional, personal, and political lives are all one. That’s why Twitter launched an “intersectionality” initiative for its employees and Google gives millions to left-wing causes — to signal its allegiance to the tribe.

In 2017, the nonprofit Lincoln Network conducted a survey of tech workers in Silicon Valley, including those employed at Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. The political leanings of those surveyed were more politically diverse than Silicon Valley’s overall population: 29% were liberal, 24% were libertarian, 22% were conservative, and 16% were centrist. But on one thing, they agreed: 75% of the liberals and 70% of the conservatives characterized their workplace as either “liberal” or “very liberal” and fewer than 2% of the survey-takers said their places of work were conservative.

Even some of the liberal respondents thought that left-wing intolerance had gone too far. One liberal tech worker said, “I witnessed repeated calls from managers and nonmanagers alike for people to be fired for the political views they expressed.” Another liberal employee said, “There are people who are looking for a reason to be offended, and any sort of disagreement would make them wonder if I’m a secret Trump supporter. The idea of ‘I agree with you 90%’ is not enough.” One self-identified libertarian said, “I have lost multiple talented colleagues who resigned rather than continue in the face of an increasingly extreme, narrow-minded, and regressive environment here at Google. It’s terrifying here. A real horror show. Every day could be my last.”

Eighty-nine percent of respondents who identified as “very conservative” said they didn’t feel comfortable expressing their opinions at work. “It’s a postmodern, secularist Silicon Valley viewpoint. Highly liberal. It’s motivated by changing the world masquerading as intellectualism,” said one conservative tech employee. A libertarian said “there were many groups devoted to identity politics” in his company, and every one of them was leftist. “If you’re not part of the liberal Democrat crowd, you’re an outsider. Talks are often politicized, whether overtly or not. The entire executive team leans in a certain direction, and you don’t want to be the odd one out for fear of being ostracized … Nobody who didn’t fit the company’s mold talked about their political views. The company was very homogenous in that sense.” One conservative employee said, “There is overwhelming internal support for leftist political candidates, policies, and ideas, and they are frequently expressed … There are zero to very few senior people who dare to speak up or represent an alternative (more conservative) point of view in company debates or policy decisions.”

This groupthink affects everything that Big Tech does, every decision it makes, every program it releases. As a former Google engineer noted, Google’s algorithms reflect the assumptions and biases of their creators. The discussion about tech platforms and political bias often (and understandably) centers on what is or isn’t allowed on Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, but the other half of the picture is what is and isn’t prioritized on a platform. Broadly speaking, tech companies censor users and content in two ways.

• The first, which we’ll call “hard censorship,” is pretty straightforward: deleting content or suspending users.

• The second method, which we’ll call “soft censorship,” involves tech companies making content harder to find.

Hard censorship is tearing down a roadside billboard; soft censorship is making the billboard difficult to see by erecting other billboards in front of it. Soft censorship by tech companies can be just as effective as hard censorship. Studies show that people rarely click past the first page of Google or YouTube results. Even fewer click past the second or third page. So, pushing a link off the first page (or two or three) of Google is nearly the same as removing it from Google results altogether. The same is true with your Facebook and Twitter feeds: Companies don’t have to delete content to make sure you don’t see it.

Since 2016, every major tech company, including Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter, has been busy retooling algorithms or news feeds or monetization standards in ways that benefit liberals and sideline conservatives. Big Tech also partners with left-wing groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center to “flag” supposedly problematic content. The group falsely labels individual conservatives as “extremists” and conservative organizations as “hate groups” and then promotes more restrictive content policies against alleged “hate speech.”

To give you some idea of the advocacy group’s standards, it once accused Ben Carson of being an “extremist” for stating his belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. Immersed in scandals of its own, the organization has been widely discredited. But it still works closely with Google engineers who design the digital tools and algorithms to police hate speech on YouTube as part of Google’s “Trusted Flaggers” program. Google kept its collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center a secret, hidden behind a confidentiality agreement, and the group only admitted the partnership after I broke the story. All of these partnerships are occurring while the advocacy group publicly keeps pressure on Facebook, Google, and Twitter, calling for them to do more to combat “hate speech” on their platforms, which invariably means giving the organization more power in its private dealings with the companies. The Southern Poverty Law Center led five other left-wing groups in forming a coalition called “Change the Terms” that aims to pressure all major technology service providers into setting speech codes governing what their clients say both on and off their platforms.

The coalition demands that each company agree to implement a specific set of policies already drafted by the activists. Among the required changes: empowering third-party organizations (such as, say, the Southern Poverty Law Center) to flag “hateful” actors. The activists’ targets aren’t limited to Facebook, Google, and Twitter (although those companies are certainly on the list) but also include credit card companies and crowdfunding sites. Once a company caves to the pressure and agrees to adopt the left-wing contract, it has essentially deputized the coalition to decide who can stay on its platform or use its services and who must leave. Once the contract is official, the activists immediately shift gears to identify the users or customers the company is now required to ban from its platform. Left-wingers’ plan for weaponizing tech platforms bears a resemblance to the “social credit score” system adopted by the Chinese government. Only instead of the government monitoring your private behavior and limiting your access to society as a result, it’s a collective of left-wing advocacy groups partnered with multinational corporations.

First Amendment rights do not protect you from private organizations’ limitations on speech. It’s a devious strategy, and it’s working. Media Matters is a left-wing political group devoted to silencing conservative viewpoints in the media. For much of its history, it focused on attacking Fox News, but in recent years, it targeted conservative voices online as well. Media Matters presented a 44-page memo to liberal donors at a January 2017 summit that bragged about its plans to work with Facebook and Google to destroy nonliberal media outlets. The memo argued that enlisting Big Tech in the left-wing campaign to eliminate conservative media is essential if liberals hope to defeat Trump in 2020. Media Matters promised to accomplish exactly that. “Key right-wing targets will see their influence diminished as a result of our work,” it promised.

Leftists don’t need to banish every conservative from social media; they only need to dominate social media the way they dominate the mainstream media. They’re OK with discussion that takes place within boundaries they set (as on MSNBC) and so long as they win the elections that matter to them (such as the White House). Since Nov. 8, 2016, they have shifted the digital landscape against conservative voices. By Nov. 3, 2020, they will have transformed (or rigged) social media in ways that will have far-reaching implications for America.

The initial major rationale and justification the US administration offered for the drone assassination of IRGC Gen. Qassem Soleimani and commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was the Dec.27 rocket attack on K1 camp in Kirkuk, which houses coalition forces. 

That attack involving surface-to-surface missile strikes killed an American contractor and reportedly wounded several US troops. Washington immediately blamed the Iran-backed Iraqi paramilitary group Khataib Hezbollah, with Mike Pompeo saying of the attack: “We will not stand for the Islamic Republic of Iran to take actions that put American men and women in jeopardy,” after he briefed President Trump. But top Iraqi military and intelligence officials are now calling this entire narrative into question.

A new lengthy New York Times investigative report cites multiple top Iraqi officials who go on record to say of their analysis of the Dec.27 Kirkuk incident: “These facts all point to the Islamic State, Iraqi officials say.”

The Pentagon says it has evidence decisively pinning it on Khataib Hezbollah, known for its closeness to Tehran; however, the paramilitary group itself has denied that it was behind the operation. US officials have from the start been scant on details and have not made public any evidence or intelligence.

This led some analysts in the days after the attack to question whether ISIS cells, still known to be active in the area, might have been behind it — given also it would be to the Sunni terrorist group’s benefit to sow a major rift between US and local Iraqi Shia forces, which is precisely what happened (Trump has recently gone so far as to threaten “very big sanctions” on Baghdad if US forces are kicked out). Alternately the White House perhaps appeared ready to manufacture a justification to take out Soleimani.

Further, as detailed in the Times report, the white Kia pick-up from which the rockets were launched was found near a known ISIS execution site, in a heavily Sunni area not known to have had a Shia paramilitary presence since 2014:

But Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started the spiral of events, saying they believe it is unlikely that the militia the United States blamed for the attack, Khataib Hezbollah, carried it out.

…Iraqi officials say their doubts are based on circumstantial evidence and long experience in the area where the attack took place.

The rockets were launched from a Sunni Muslim part of Kirkuk Province notorious for attacks by the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, which would have made the area hostile territory for a Shiite militia like Khataib Hezbollah.

Khataib Hezbollah has not had a presence in Kirkuk Province since 2014.

The Islamic State, however, had carried out three attacks relatively close to the base in the 10 days before the attack on K-1. Iraqi intelligence officials sent reports to the Americans in November and December warning that ISIS intended to target K-1, an Iraqi air base in Kirkuk Province that is also used by American forces.

And the abandoned Kia pickup was found was less than 1,000 feet from the site of an ISIS execution in September of five Shiite buffalo herders.

The NYT further says this single event set off “a chain of events that brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war” which President Trump confided at a private luncheon this week was “closer than you thought”.

The attack that provoked the Soleimani killing may have been an ISIS false flag. It wouldn’t be the first time unfortunately that the US has been manipulated by Sunnis Islamists to do their bidding. Also can’t rule out US intelligence itself having known. https://t.co/ryJg3dW5Nb pic.twitter.com/3QRb779ivL

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) February 6, 2020

Brig. General Ahmed Adnan, the Iraqi chief of intelligence for the federal police at K-1, told the NYT: “All the indications are that it was Daesh.” He said further: “I told you about the three incidents in the days just before in the area — we know Daesh’s movements.”

“We as Iraqi forces cannot even come to this area unless we have a large force because it is not secure. How could it be that someone who doesn’t know the area could come here and find that firing position and launch an attack?” he questioned.

Anonymous US officials, however, claim that evidence from within the Kia pickup points to Khataib Hezbollah, and also cited “multiple strains of intelligence” though without making it known.

Interestingly, amid a general breakdown in trust between Baghdad and Washington, a top Iraqi general has said the US side hasn’t even shared its claimed evidence that Khataib Hezbollah was behind the Kirkuk attack:

“We have requested the American side to share with us any information, any evidence, but they have not sent us any information,” Lt. Gen. Muhammad al-Bayati, the chief of staff for former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, said in an interview.

The director general of Iraqi Intelligence and Counterterrorism, Abu Ali al-Basri, said the United States did not consult Iraq before carrying out the Dec. 29 counterattacks on Khataib Hezbollah.

“They did not ask for my analysis of what happened in Kirkuk and neither did they share any of their information,” he said. “Usually, they would do both.”

The bombshell NYT report further collects eyewitness accounts and other Iraqi official statements, all of which strongly suggests the chain of events which led to Soleimani’s Jan.3 killing, which in turn led to an Iranian ‘revenge’ attack with ballistic missiles on Ain al-Asad Air Base, wounding scores of troops (we later found out as part of an ever growing number of solders with ‘Traumatic Brain Injury’ from the blasts), was a possible ‘false flag’ event undertaken by ISIS meant to be pinned on the Islamic State’s Shia enemies backed by Iran.

As Northeastern University counter-terrorism expert Max Abrahms observes: “Let’s recap. Pompeo said Soleimani was killed because he was an imminent threat, a claim he couldn’t substantiate even in private settings.”

Abrahms said further on Twitter: “The escalation began with a Shia militia attack in which the best evidence indicates the perpetrators were actually ISIS, Soleimani’s enemy.”

The White House wanted to kill Soleimani. So, they manufactured a narrative to justify the decision. https://t.co/sMiOVA0b9H

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) February 6, 2020

Ultimately, the United States stood on the brink of major war with Iran which could have spiraled into a World War 3 scenario — all of which was potentially initiated by an ISIS false flag event designed to unleash more regional chaos.

Authored by Andre Vltcheck via Off-Guardian.org,

There are obviously some serious linguistic issues and disagreements between the West and the rest of the world. Essential terms like “freedom”, “democracy”, “liberation”, even “terrorism”, are all mixed up and confused; they mean something absolutely different in New York, London, Berlin, and in the rest of the world.

Before we begin analyzing, let us recall that countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the United States, as well as other Western nations, have been spreading colonialist terror to basically all corners of the world.

And in the process, they developed effective terminology and propaganda, which has been justifying, even glorifying acts such as looting, torture, rape and genocides. Basically, first Europe, and later North America literally “got away with everything, including mass murder”.

The native people of Americas, Africa and Asia have been massacred, their voices silenced. Slaves were imported from Africa. Great Asian nations, such as China, what is now “India” and Indonesia, got occupied, divided and thoroughly plundered.

And all was done in the name of spreading religion, “liberating” people from themselves, as well as “civilizing them”.

Nothing has really changed.

To date, people of great nations with thousands of years of culture, are treated like infants; humiliated, and as if they were still in kindergarten, told how to behave, and how to think.

Sometimes if they “misbehave”, they get slapped. Periodically they get slapped so hard, that it takes them decades, even centuries, to get back to their feet. It took China decades to recover from the period of “humiliation”. India and Indonesia are presently trying to recuperate, from the colonial barbarity, and from, in the case of Indonesia, the 1965 U.S.-administered fascist coup.

But if you go back to the archives in London, Brussels or Berlin, all the monstrous acts of colonialism, are justified by lofty terms. Western powers are always “fighting for justice”; they are “enlightening” and “liberating”. No regrets, no shame and no second thoughts. They are always correct!

Like now; precisely as it is these days.

Presently, the West is trying to overthrow governments in several independent countries, on different continents. From Bolivia (the country has been already destroyed) to Venezuela, from Iraq to Iran, to China and Russia. The more successful these countries get, the better they serve their people, the more vicious the attacks from abroad are, the tougher the embargos and sanctions imposed on them are. The happier the citizens are, the more grotesque the propaganda disseminated from the West gets.

In Hong Kong, some young people, out of financial interest, or out of ignorance, keep shouting: “President Trump, Please Liberate Us!” Or similar, but equally treasonous slogans. They are waving U.S., U.K. and German flags. They beat up people who try to argue with them, including their own Police Force.

So, let us see, how the United States really “liberates” countries, in various pockets of the world.

Let us visit Iran, a country which (you’d never guess it if consuming only Western mass media) is, despite the vicious embargos and sanctions, on the verge of the “highest human development index bracket” (UNDP). How is it possible? Simple. Because Iran is a socialist country (socialism with the Iranian characteristics). It is also an internationalist nation which is fighting against Western imperialism. It helps many occupied and attacked states on our planet, including Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia (before), Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, to name just a few.

So, what is the West doing? It is trying to ruin it, by all means; ruin all good will and progress. It is starving Iran through sanctions, it finances and encourages its “opposition”, as it does in China, Russia and Latin America. It is trying to destroy it.

Then, it just bombs their convoy in neighboring Iraq, killing its brave commander, General Soleimani. And, as if it was not horrid enough, it turns the tables around, and starts threatening Teheran with more sanctions, more attacks, and even with the destruction of its cultural sites.

Iran, under attack, confused, shot down, by mistake, a Ukrainian passenger jet. It immediately apologized, in horror, offering compensation. The U.S. straightway began digging into the wound. It started to provoke (like in Hong Kong) young people. The British ambassador, too, got involved!

As if Iran and the rest of the world should suddenly forget that during its attack on Iraq, more than 3 decades ago, Washington actually shot down an Iranian wide-body passenger plane (Iran Air flight 655, an Airbus-300), on a routine flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. In an “accident”, 290 people, among them 66 children, lost their lives. That was considered “war collateral”.

Iranian leaders then did not demand “regime change” in Washington. They were not paying for riots in New York or Chicago.

As China is not doing anything of that nature, now.

The “Liberation” of Iraq (in fact, brutal sanctions, bombing, invasion and occupation) took more than a million Iraqi lives, most of them, those of women and children. Presently, Iraq has been plundered, broken into pieces, and on its knees.

Is this the kind of “liberation” that some of the Hong Kong youngsters really want?

No? But if not, is there any other performed by the West, in modern history?

Washington is getting more and more aggressive, in all parts of the world.

It also pays more and more for collaboration.

And it is not shy to inject terrorist tactics into allied troops, organizations and non-governmental organizations. Hong Kong is no exception.

Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia, China, Venezuela, but also many other countries, should be carefully watching and analyzing each and every move made by the United States. The West is perfecting tactics on how to liquidate all opposition to its dictates.

It is not called a “war”, yet. But it is. People are dying. The lives of millions are being ruined.

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