Month: February 2020

The United States has been ramping up its force readiness in the Persian Gulf region following the killing of IRGC Gen. Qassem Soleimani and subsequent Iranian ballistic missile attack on US forces stationed in Iraq in early January. 

Addressing the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman in the gulf, the top U.S. commander for the region, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, said while on a brief visit aboard the ship: 

“You’re here because we are preventing Iran from starting a war.”

The top commander explained that US decisive action against the IRGC Quds force chief as well as the US force build-up which has included an additional thousands of troops in the region as well as a carrier presence and supporting warships, along with American jets roaring overhead, has sent a ‘deterrence’ message which has forced Iran’s own posture to recalibrate. 

“You’re here because we don’t want a war with Iran and nothing makes a potential adversary think twice about war than the presence of an aircraft carrier and the strike group that comes with it,” Gen. McKenzie told the nearly 5,000 service members aboard the USS. “So, we achieve deterrence, which is preventing Iran from starting a war.”

The Truman was in the North Arabian Sea when McKenzie and his command staff landed on the carrier Saturday. He said that Iran had clearly received Washington’s “message” and appears to be standing down for the moment. 

Commanding officer of the Trumpan, Navy Capt. Kavon Hakimzadeh, said additionally: 

“When an aircraft carrier is in your neighborhood you know it,” according to Military Times. 

He further indicated the ship was deployed from Norfolk, Virginia, in mid-November and “almost made a beeline for the Suez Canal.”

This also after a summer of “tanker wars” between Iran in the West, which had included Iranian elite units capturing a British-flagged tanker after Gibraltar and the UK had held an Iranian tanker captive, which sent tensions between Tehran and the US soaring. 

Aircraft carrier presence in Persian Gulf delivers message of deterrence to Iran, says top US Central Command leader

“You’re here because we are preventing Iran from starting a war,” says commander.

Starve Iranians and then keep them from lashing out. https://t.co/RN8BTINSnK

— Joshua Landis (@joshua_landis) February 3, 2020

Thus far President Trump has essentially claimed “victory” after assassinating the Islamic Republic’s most popular and influential elite general, while also downplaying US troop injuries in the wake of the Jan.8 Iranian ‘retaliatory’ strike. 

McKenzie’s message over the weekend appeared to underscore the administration’s message that the risky drone strike on the Iranian commander was necessary to prevent further Iranian aggression. 

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Most of you reading this will be aware that Zerohedge’s prolific and highly popular twitter account with over 670,000 followers was on the receiving end of a lifetime ban by the Twitter politburo. This post won’t focus on the details of this specific ban, but if you want to read more about it, see the following: Zerohedge Suspended On Twitter.

It’s imperative not to overly focus on the individual victims of tech giant bans, and instead zero in on the bigger picture. Rather than debating whether or not you like Zerohedge, or whether you think it crossed a line, I want to highlight the dangerous implications of dominant social media companies wielding permanent bans as a weapon against freedom of speech in practice.

This post will cover three main issues.

First, the fact that Twitter and other social media companies have essentially created a caste system when it comes to engagement on their platforms.

Second, the question of whether or not a lifetime ban from social media platforms is an ethical concept.

Third, the dangers of Twitter essentially throwing the entire timeline of a banished account into the memory hole.

For all intents and purposes, @Twitter has created a caste system on its platform. This goes against the entire spirit of why almost all of us joined social media. It’s a massive, dangerous problem and it must be addressed.

I’ll be touching on this and much more in a post later.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 3, 2020

As the internet and social media started gaining traction, the idea of the “citizen journalist” grew increasingly popular and the public discovered how all sorts of previously unknown people can bring a great deal of hidden information and interesting perspectives to the table. This led to competing narratives on all sorts of topics, and we all basically agreed it’s best to treat people like adults and let them sort things out for themselves. That is, until Hillary Clinton lost an election.

At that point, a certain segment of the population went completely mental and started demanding social media companies fight and censor “fake news.” This anti-liberal perspective, largely promoted by self-proclaimed liberals, deeply affected how social media executives think about and treat platform content in the subsequent years. The result has been that Twitter and other tech giants have effectively created a caste system on their platforms. Though they won’t explicitly admit it, the executives at these companies now seem to believe certain people and organizations should be given priority to shape the national narrative, while others should be diminished. While they tolerate the latter group until they become too influential and disruptive, the former class exists at a level entirely above Twitter’s terms of service. Certain people and organizations are permitted to do whatever they like on the platform, while others are subject to increasingly arbitrary and subjective bans. It’s rapidly becoming an intentionally rigged system designed to reallocate narrative control in a certain direction.

Ask yourself, do you think there’s anything CNN could do to get banned from Twitter for life? I don’t. I genuinely think the news organization CNN can do absolutely anything it wants on or off Twitter and never be considered for a lifetime ban. Why? It’s a protected organization. CNN is above the Twitter law, and as such exists at the very top of the social media caste system. It’s not just CNN of course, there are many individuals and organizations simply not subject to Twitter’s terms of service in the way you or I are. A politician calling for mass government violence abroad (war) is another example. This sort of thing happens regularly without any consequences. Why? Twitter has determined advocating for preemptive government violence is considered reasonable. They’ve determined advocating for one form of violence (war) is fine, but advocating for other kinds of violence is not. Nobody asked for any of this, but here we are.

The next thing I want to discuss is the entire concept of a lifetime ban from a dominant social media company like Twitter. The more I think about it, the more ethically indefensible this practice appears to be. Just as we shouldn’t jail a person for life except under the most extreme circumstances, we shouldn’t be comfortable flippantly banning people forever on large social media platforms. Such action assumes people can’t and don’t change, but Twitter doesn’t seem to be looking at the enforcement of its terms of service from a fundamentally fair or ethical point of view. Executives are increasingly utilizing this most extreme form of punishment, the lifetime ban, at the drop of a hat for minor or misunderstood violations. There are many other ways Twitter could deal with what it deems to be serious violations. You can have three month, six month or even year long bans, but a lifetime banishment is an extreme and indefensible position in almost all cases I’ve observed in recent months.

As such, it’s become clear to me Twitter isn’t using this tool in order to enforce its terms of service, but rather its terms of service exist to provide an excuse to eliminate anyone or any account executives or professional bloggers in Brooklyn deem unpalatable.

I wonder if there’s a direct line from Buzzfeed blue checks to @jack to report thought crime.

1-800 protect me from opinions that conflict with yuppie Brooklyn

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 2, 2020

I know, I know “muh private company,” but let’s discuss reality. If I were to be personally banned from Twitter, my voice in the public sphere would be materially diminished.

This is when you’re supposed to instruct me to start my own Twitter or join an alternative, but the truth is Twitter dominates the very socially and politically important micro-blogging space in the U.S. It’s the preferred communications platform of President Trump for crying out loud. You end my existence there and you extinguish my voice in a very material way for the foreseeable future, yet Twitter can do this at any moment for whatever reason. If a social media company decides they want you gone, they can always come up with an excuse eventually. Is this a major problem? I think so.

If I were Trump I’d make social media bans central to my entire 2020 run.

But he isn’t doing that because he’s too focused on pumping the stock market and not finding Ghislaine Maxwell.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 3, 2020

Finally, I want to end with another disturbing aspect of the lifetime Twitter ban. Even if you accept it as a justifiable concept, and I generally speaking do not, the way they handle it is particularly problematic. When an account like Zerohegde is banned, you lose the ability to easily search historical tweets, which is in this case means hundreds of thousands of comments made over a decade. If you go to the defunct @zerohedge handle this is what you’ll see:

This page is completely dead. You can’t go back and look at old tweets, 99% of which didn’t violate any terms of service and collectively make up an important part of post-financial crisis history. It becomes far more challenging for any of us, or future historians who want to research this period, to write about Zerohedge and the role it played over the past decade with this information now much harder to find. This is fundamentally unethical and feels like the modern equivalent of burning books. If the company’s going to ban accounts for life, it should at the very least leave the historical record up and easily searchable.

But Twitter doesn’t care. It doesn’t care because the lifetime ban functions as an intentionally arbitrary, cruel and vindictive tool of coercion. It’s intended to scare people and ultimately create a rigged playing field where different individuals and organizations play by distinct rules on the platform. That way the overall public narrative can be manipulated in a certain direction that tends to overlap with the dominant consensus opinions of San Francisco, New York and Washington D.C.

The beatings will continue until thought crimes are extinguished.

*  *  *

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Before we start detailing the results of this evening’s Iowa caucuses, we have to get something off our chests…

I truly cannot believe, in the year 2020, part of the democratic process in the United States involves clustering people in corners and having them raise their hands while someone counts them.

— Anthony Romano (@ARomanoWDBJ) February 4, 2020

Ok, with that said, heading into the caucus, Bernie was soaring in the bookies odds with Biden, Betty, and Buttigieg crashing…

And while Tom Steyer spent more money on ads in Iowa than any other candidate, isn’t even registering a blip…

As a reminder, a candidate wins the nomination if they can secure a majority of delegates – 2,376 or more. That includes a combined total of pledged delegates – those awarded based on election results – and unpledged superdelegates – party leaders who can vote for the candidate of their choosing.

As Bloomberg notes, Superdelegates, also known as “unpledged” or “automatic” delegates, are Democratic delegates who get a ticket to the convention based on their role in the party – 445 national committee members, 280 members of Congress, 24 governors and 22 other party leaders like former presidents and national chairmen. Their role has been controversial because they can vote their own conscience and could conceivably overturn the will of rank-and-file delegates in a contested convention. New rules this year ensure that won’t be the case – but only on the first ballot.

Here’s how it works:

• If one candidate has enough delegates to win the convention outright—at least 2,376 delegates—superdelegates can vote because they won’t make a difference.

• If one candidate has a majority of pledged delegates—at least 1,991—only those pledged delegates can vote on the first ballot and that candidate becomes the nominee.

• If no candidate has a majority of pledged delegates on the first ballot—less than 1,991—the convention moves to a second ballot in which superdelegates can vote.

Got that? Clear as mud right?

The Iowa rules are even more complex, but simply put, Iowa has 41 ‘pledged’ delegates and 8 ‘super-delegates’.

*  *  *

The results are notably delayed

Iowa’s State Democratic Party, seemingly terrified of blowback if something untoward occurs (note that they canceled the Des Moines poll due to irregularities), initially said it is doing “quality control” on results “out of an abundance of caution.”

Then they slowly started to admit there were real issues with abrand new app that had been created especially to ease transmission and transparency of the results.

One precinct chair in Polk County told Bloomberg News he still has not been able to report his results because the phone app was not working and he has been on hold with an alternative hotline for more than 30 minutes.

“We are experiencing some issues in terms of people being able to load and connect with the app for their precinct reporting,” said Bret Nilles, chairman of the Linn County Democratic Party.

ABC’s Rick Klein noted:

“What we can say confidently is there are massive technical issues that are delaying the vote count right now in Iowa and it is 100% better for this to be right rather than to be fast.”

State party Communications Director Mandy McClure said in a statement.

“The integrity of the results is paramount. We have experienced a delay in the results due to quality checks and the fact that the IDP is reporting out three data sets for the first time. What we know right now is that around 25% of precincts have reported, and early data indicates turnout is on pace for 2016.”

“A lot of us are going to be doing it on paper and calling it in,” said Kelcey Brackett, the chairman of the Muscatine County Democratic Party.

CNN just interviewed Shawn Sebastian, secretary from the Story Country Precinct 1-1, who said:

“I am the caucus secretary for Story County Precinct 1-1. I’ve been on hold for over an hour to report the results. We have 6 delegates”

The results.. at time of writing…nothing!

 

One guest on Fox News has already raise the question “…it makes one wonder if the app was hacked… and by whom?”.

Was there some meddling? Did Rachel Maddow blame the Russians yet?

The state party has said it has no cybersecurity concerns over the app’s use.

As one wit noted”

“…and these are the people who want to run our healthcare system?”

*  *  *

Congrats to Cory Booker, who is no longer running for president, but appears to have actually won a state delegate equivalent, thanks to strategic voting from non-viable candidates.

Here a twist at Drake U: @CoryBooker, who has dropped out of the race, has won one of six delegates awarded at precinct 38.

Supporters of non-viable candidates (Yang, Biden, and Klobuchar) banded together to deny Sanders, Warren, or Buttigieg that extra delegate.

— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) February 4, 2020

Oh and at least one vote was decide by coin toss…

Buttigieg and Warren tie. Coin toss about to happen pic.twitter.com/fJVqDDN5pS

— John Pemble (@johnpemble) February 4, 2020

Finally, in an attempt at foreseeing the spin-fest that is bound to erupt after these results, we note that a lot has been said about Iowa and New Hampshire’s lack of racial diversity. Make no mistake, their status will be questioned, especially if the IA/NH Democratic winner(s) don’t win the nomination or the White House.

Oh, and one more thing, Trump won 97% of the vote in Republican caucuses.

8 days until New Hampshire…

Fathom’s China Exposure Index (CEI), which monitors the relative stock market performance of US-listed firms with significant revenue exposure to China, has plunged after the signing of the phase one trade deal and coronavirus outbreak in the country. The downward move suggests a much broader stock market selloff could be ahead.

Fathom created CEI using the top 25 US-listed corporations that derive at least 15% of their revenues from China, and the weight of these firms is proportional to the share of their revenues that are derived in the country.

As shown in the chart below, CEI fell after the signing of the phase one trade deal between the US and China. It declined even more, as the coronavirus outbreak in the country led to the creeping economic paralysis that risks a hard landing. At least two-thirds of China’s economy has ground to a halt, many firms have already shuttered manufacturing plants and closed retail stores across the country.

And what does this all mean? Investors are now de-risking their portfolios of US-listed firms with the most significant revenue exposure to China. The reason: these companies will likely see depressed business activity in 1Q and lead to terrible earnings ahead. 

A plunge in the CEI has usually been seen as a leading indicator, suggesting that a much broader stock market correction could be around the corner. 

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

During recent increased US-Iran confrontation, so many people viewed the Selective Service website to find out about the draft that the website crashed. People were right to be concerned about a return of the draft.

With the ongoing military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan unlikely to end any time soon, and the possibly of the US being neoconned into war with Iran and possibly even Russia or China, the demand for troops is likely to rise. At the same time, soldiers return home with lifelong medical problems, including psychological problems, causing a horrifying number of veterans to commit suicide. All this can make it more difficult for the military to attract recruits. And it can leave a Congress unwilling to pursue nonintervention with a choice: increase spending on troops’ pay and benefits or bring back the draft. A Congress facing an over 25 trillion dollars debt may reinstate the draft instead of further increasing spending on the troops.

Any future draft will probably include women, thanks to judges, politicians, and feminists who think women should have the “opportunity” to be forced to join the military.

A military draft violates the principle that individuals have inalienable rights that no government should violate. A draft also puts all of our rights at risk. If we accept that the government has the legitimate authority to force individuals to fight, kill, and die in a war, then how can we argue that the government cannot force citizens to pay high taxes, purchase health insurance, or submit to TSA screenings? How can we argue against the government forbidding people from smoking marijuana or owning “assault” weapons? Many traditional conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, opposed the draft, pointing to its threat to individual rights.

Some antiwar individuals have endorsed the draft on the theory that a draft makes politicians less likely to support war. But the draft did not stop politicians from supporting unnecessary wars like World War One, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. While the draft helped galvanize opposition to the Vietnam War, it took almost a decade of American casualties for opposition to reach critical mass. More importantly, the draft violates the nonaggression principle, which is the moral heart of libertarianism. Advocating use of force to advance even as noble a goal as peace is itself immoral and sets back the cause of liberty.

Some antiwar progressives oppose a military draft but support forcing young people to participate in a “national service” program. Some conservatives join these progressives to say that national service is a way for young people to “pay back” government for the privilege of living in a free society, as if our rights and liberties are gifts from government. Mandatory national service will likely gain support when the next market meltdown occurs, as it would serve as a jobs programs for young people.

All those who support liberty must be prepared to fight any attempt to reinstate the military draft or to mandate any other type of national service. We must mobilize as many people as possible to tell the politicians it is unacceptable for the US government to enslave people in the military or otherwise. We must also support those who engage in civil disobedience. As Ronald Regan stated, the draft “rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state…. That assumption isn’t a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea.”

Until now, the prevailing conventional wisdom was that China’s coronavirus epidemic, which has spread to over 20,600 people around the globe as of February 3, did so by air or, according to some recent and unconfirmed speculation, human feces. That may be about to change.

According to the Global Times, new ways of transmitting the coronavirus have been reported, and virus nucleic acid has been detected outside human bodies, sparking public fears that the virus could be transmitted in unknown and undetected ways. Concerns emerged after scientists found coronavirus nucleic acid on the doorknob of a confirmed Guangzhou-based patient’s house, the first case of novel coronavirus detected outside the human body, Guangzhou Daily reported Monday. The finding was confirmed by China’s Health Commission, which said on Monday that the coronavirus can survive for five days maximum on smooth surfaces under suitable circumstances.

That would mean that mobile phone screens, computer keyboards, faucets and other household objects may indirectly transmit the virus, experts said.

A man from Northeast China’s Jilin Province, who was confirmed with coronavirus infection on Monday, shared his experience, saying he had used the same microphone with another confirmed patient during a meeting in January.

In another case, a 40-year-old man from North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, who lives upstairs of a confirmed patient, was also diagnosed with coronavirus infection on Saturday. Aside from respiratory droplets and contact transmissions, the person has no clear contact histories with people from other cities, patients, or wild animals and has never been to a market, according to the local health authority on Sunday.

Chinese netizens were concerned the patient from Inner Mongolia might have been infected through toilet plumbing or ventilation devices.

Over the weekend, some experts warned that the novel coronavirus could be transmitted through the digestive system as they found 2019-nCoV nucleic acids in patients’ stool and rectal swabs, and health authorities had suggested the central air conditioning system be discontinued if coronavirus patients are found. The case drew attention to a case during the SARS outbreak in 2003 – In Amoy Gardens residential complex in Hong Kong, aerosolized feces spread from floor to floor through plumbing, infecting over 300 people with the virus, reports said.

Authored by Daniel McAdams via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

There is a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs. Needless to say it’s even worse when they believe they can create their own reality and invent outcomes out of whole cloth.

Things seldom go as planned in these circumstances.

President Trump was sold a bill of goods on the assassination of Iran’s revered military leader, Qassim Soleimani, likely by a cabal around Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the long-discredited neocon David Wurmser. A former Netanyahu advisor and Iraq war propagandist, Wurmser reportedly sent memos to his mentor, John Bolton, while Bolton was Trump’s National Security Advisor (now, of course, he’s the hero of the #resistance for having turned on his former boss) promising that killing Soleimani would be a cost-free operation that would catalyze the Iranian people against their government and bring about the long-awaited regime change in that country. The murder of Soleimani – the architect of the defeat of ISIS – would “rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them upon which the [Iranian] regime depends for stability and survival,” wrote Wurmser.

As is most often the case with neocons, he was dead wrong.

The operation was not cost-free. On the contrary. Assassinating Soleimani on Iraqi soil resulted in the Iraqi parliament – itself the product of our “bringing democracy” to the country – voting to expel US forces even as the vote by the people’s representatives was roundly rejected by the people who brought the people the people’s representatives. In a manner of speaking.

Trump’s move had an effect opposite to the one promised by neocons. It did not bring Iranians out to the street to overthrow their government –  it catalyzed opposition across Iraq’s various political and religious factions to the continued US military presence and further tightened Iraq’s relationship with Iran. And short of what would be a catastrophic war initiated by the US (with little or no support from allies), there is not a thing Trump can do about it.

Iran’s retaliatory attack on two US bases in Iraq was initially sold by President Trump as merely a pin-prick. No harm, no foul, no injuries. This despite the fact that he must have known about US personnel injured in the attack. The reason for the lie was that Trump likely understands how devastating it would be to his presidency to escalate with Iran. So the truth began to trickle out slowly – 11 US military members were injured, but it was just “like a headache.” Now we know that 50 US troops were treated for traumatic brain injury after the attack. This may not be the last of it – but don’t count on the mainstream media to do any reporting.

The Iranian FARS news agency reported at the time of the attack that US personnel had been injured and the response by the US government was to completely take that media outlet off the Internet by order of the US Treasury!

Last week the US House voted to cancel the 2002 authorization for war on Iraq and to prohibit the use of funds for war on Iran without Congressional authorization. It is a significant, if largely symbolic, move to rein in the oft-used excuse of the Iraq war authorization for blatantly unrelated actions like the assassination of Soleimani and Obama’s thousands of airstrikes on Syria and Iraq.

President Trump has argued that prohibiting funds for military action against Iran actually makes war more likely, as he would be restricted from the kinds of military-strikes-short-of-war like his attack on Syria after the alleged chemical attack in Douma in 2018 (claims which have recently fallen apart). The logic is faulty and reflects again the danger of believing one’s own propaganda. As we have seen from the Iranian military response to the Soleimani assassination, Trump’s military-strikes-short-of-war are having a ratchet-like effect rather than a pressure-release or deterrent effect.

As the financial and current events analysis site ZeroHedge put it recently:

[S]ince last summer’s “tanker wars”, Trump has painted himself into a corner on Iran, jumping from escalation to escalation (to this latest “point of no return big one” in the form of the ordered Soleimani assassination) — yet all the while hoping to avoid a major direct war. The situation reached a climax where there were “no outs” (Trump was left with two ‘bad options’ of either back down or go to war).

The Iranians have little to lose at this point and America’s European allies are, even if impotent, fed up with the US obsession with Saudi Arabia and Israel as a basis for its Middle East policy.

So why open this essay with a photo of Trump celebrating his dead-on-arrival “Deal of The Century” for Israel and Palestine? Because this is once again a gullible and weak President Trump being led by the nose into the coming Middle East conflagration. Left without even a semblance of US sympathy for their plight, the Palestinians after the roll-out of this “peace” plan will again see that they have no friends outside Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. As Israel continues to flirt with the idea of simply annexing large parts of the West Bank, it is clear that the brakes are off of any Israeli reticence to push for maximum control over Palestinian territory. So what is there to lose?

Trump believes he’s advancing peace in the Middle East, while the excellent Mondoweiss website rightly observes that a main architect of the “peace plan,” Trump’s own son-in-law Jared Kushner, “taunts Palestinians because he wants them to reject his ‘peace plan.’” Rejection of the plan is a green light to a war of annihilation on the Palestinians.

It appears that the center may not hold, that the self-referential echo chamber that passes for Beltway “expert” analysis will again be caught off guard in the consequence-free profession that is neocon foreign policy analysis. “Gosh we didn’t see that coming!” But the next day they are back on the teevee stations as great experts.

Clouds gathering…