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Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

For about 70 years the CIA has been undermining a free press.  It began with Operation Mockingbird, a Cold War operation against communism.  The CIA recruited journalists into a propaganda network.  The CIA paid journalists to write fake stories or to publish stories written by the CIA in order to control explanations that served the agency’s agendas.  Student and cultural organizations and intellectual magazines, such as Encounter, were suborned into the CIA’s propaganda network.  

Thanks to the German journalist, Udo Ulfkotte, we know that every European journalist of any significance is a CIA asset.  In 1977 Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote in Rolling Stone that the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers – both English and foreign language – which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives.”  Like most other people, Western journalists were all too willing to sell out their integrity for money.  The few who were not were blackmailed into submission.

The few honest journalists who remain have been forced out of the “mainstream” or presstitute media onto Internet websites.  Wikileaks is by far the best news organization of our time.  To bring this organization to heel Washington, using its Swedish, British, and Ecuadoran vassals, has persecuted Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, for years.  The CIA’s media vassals, including the New York Times and The Guardian, both of which published the material leaked to Wikileaks that is being used to destroy Assange, have joined wholeheartedly in the persecution of the World’s Best and Most Honest Journalist.  

Currently Assange is being tortured, apparently to death, while bring held in solitary confinement in a maximum security British prison awaiting his extradition to the US on false charges.  As the CIA cannot be certain it has suborned all the federal judges, Washington is just as happy if Assange dies in a British prison as there is no valid case against him under current US law.  Probably the absence of a valid case doesn’t matter as the rule of law in the US is very difficult to find.

The lack of any valid case against Assange is the reason the distinguished documentary film maker John Pilger describes Assange’s persecution as a Stalinist Show Trial.

The worst moment was one of a number of ‘worst’ moments. I have sat in many courtrooms and seen judges abuse their positions, This judge, Vanessa Baraitser—actually she isn’t a judge at all; she’s a magistrate—shocked all of us who were there.

Her face was a progression of sneers and imperious indifference; she addressed Julian with an arrogance that reminded me of a magistrate presiding over apartheid South Africa’s Race Classification Board. When Julian struggled to speak, he couldn’t get words out, even stumbling over his name and date of birth.

When he spoke truth and when his barrister spoke, Baraister contrived boredom; when the prosecuting barrister spoke, she was attentive. She had nothing to do; it was demonstrably preordained. In the table in front of us were a handful of American officials, whose directions to the prosecutor were carried by his junior; back and forth this young woman went, delivering instructions.

The judge watched this outrage without a comment. It reminded me of a newsreel of a show trial in Stalin’s Moscow; the difference was that Soviet show trials were broadcast. Here, the state broadcaster, the BBC, blacked it out, as did the other mainstream channels.

Having ignored Julian’s barrister’s factual description of how the CIA had run a Spanish security firm that spied on him in the Ecuadorean embassy, she didn’t yawn, but her disinterest was as expressive. She then denied Julian’s lawyers any more time to prepare their case – even though their client was prevented in prison from receiving legal documents and other tools with which to defend himself.

Her knee in the groin was to announce that the next court hearing would be at remote Woolwich, which adjoins Belmarsh prison and has few seats for the public. This will ensure isolation and be as close to a secret trial as it’s possible to get. Did this happen in the home of the Magna Carta? Yes, but who knew?

Read more here…

What is astonishing about the CIA’s destruction of Julian Assange is the silence of American law schools and bar associations, the silence of universities, the absence of student and labor union protests, the absence of any protection of Assange’s rights from courts as the last news organization willing and capable of holding governments accountable for their crimes is destroyed openly in full view of the law schools, intellectuals, bar associations, courts, and print and TV media.  

The CIA’s control over explanations is as complete as the control Big Brother has in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.  And this doesn’t bother the citizens of the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Europe.  Only a few individuals speak out for Assange, and they, too, are demonized in turn.  

The Age of Tyranny has now descended upon the Western World. 

Stunning video recorded by a local CBS affiliate captures the aftermath of a bus that was swallowed by a giant sink hole that opened up in downtown Pittsburgh during the Monday morning rush hour.

Emergency crews rushed to the scene after the entire back half of a Port Authority bus went into the ground at Penn Avenue and 10th Street just before 8am as the gaping hole opened up. A statement by the city’s Port Authority indicated the bus “was stopped at a red light when the hole opened underneath it.”

Only two people, including the diver, were on the bus when the sink hold opened up and both were able to escape, one with a minor injury — though initially authorities worried there may have been up to ten on the bus. 

Currently the front half of the bus is sticking up in the air, and efforts to remove the vehicle are expected to take all day, with surrounding streets and at least one block shut down. 

Incredible video of the bus in the sink hole downtown at 10th and Penn. You can see water spraying under the roadway. pic.twitter.com/BBNPmtG3QR

— Heather Abraham (@KDKAHeather) October 28, 2019

According to a CBS affiliate on the scene: 

Officials say it will take quite sometime to remove the bus. Afternoon rush hour traffic and fans looking for parking before tonight’s Pittsburgh Steelers game at Heinz Field could be impacted.

More video. @PGHtransit says no one was injured. pic.twitter.com/7UmLJRX07Z

— Heather Abraham (@KDKAHeather) October 28, 2019

It’s further reported that the city could possibly need two large cranes in order to remove the bus from the crater. 

Other reports say tow trucks are on the scene. The incident is expected to create gridlock throughout the day in the downtown area. 

We’ve noted many time before that no matter what your particular political perspective is, if there is one thing that virtually everyone in the United States can agree upon it is the fact that America’s infrastructure is crumbling. 

Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

The energy needs of the world’s economy seem to be easy to model. Energy consumption is measured in a variety of different ways including kilowatt hours, barrels of oil equivalent, British thermal units, kilocalories and joules. Two types of energy are equivalent if they produce the same number of units of energy, right?

For example, xkcd’s modeler Randall Munroe explains the benefit of renewable energy in the video below. He tells us that based on his model, solar, if scaled up to ridiculous levels, can provide enough renewable energy for ourselves and a half-dozen of our neighbors. Wind, if scaled up to absurd levels, can provide enough renewable energy for ourselves and a dozen of our neighbors.

There is a major catch to this analysis, however. The kinds of energy produced by wind and solar are not the kinds of energy that the economy needs. Wind and solar produce intermittent electricity available only at specific times and places. What the world economy needs is a variety of different energy types that match the energy requirements of the many devices in place in the world today. This energy needs to be transported to the right place and saved for the right time of day and the right time of year. There may even be a need to store this energy from year-to-year, because of possible droughts.

I think of the situation as being analogous to researchers deciding that it would be helpful or more efficient if humans could change their diets to 100% grass in the next 20 years. Grass is a form of energy product, but it is not the energy product that humans normally consume. It doesn’t seem to be toxic to humans in small quantities. It seems to grow quite well. Switching to the use of grass for food would seem to be beneficial from a CO2 perspective. The fact that humans have not evolved to eat grass is similar to the fact that the manufacturing and transport sectors of today’s economy have not developed around the use of intermittent electricity from wind and solar.

Substituting Grass for Food Might “Work,” but It Would Require Whole New Systems 

If we consider other species, we find that animals with four stomachs can, in fact, live quite well on a diet of grass. These animals often have teeth that grow continuously because the silica in grass tends to wear down their teeth. If we could just get around these little details, we might be able to make the change. We would probably need to grow extra stomachs and add continuously growing teeth. Other adjustments might also be needed, such as a smaller brain. This would especially be the case if a grass-only diet is inadequate to support today’s brain growth and activity.

The problem with nearly all energy analyses today is that they use narrow boundaries. They look at only a small piece of the problem–generally the cost (or “energy cost”) of the devices themselves–and assume that this is the only cost involved in a change. In fact, researchers need to recognize that whole new systems may be required, analogous to the extra stomachs and ever-growing teeth. The issue is sometimes described as the need to have “wide boundaries” in analyses.

If the xkcd analysis netted out the indirect energy costs of the system, including energy related to all of the newly required systems, the results of the analysis would likely change considerably. The combined ability of wind and solar to power both one’s own home and those of a dozen and a half neighbors would likely disappear. Way too much of the output of the renewable system would be used to make the equivalent of extra stomachs and ever-growing teeth for the system to work. The world economy might not work as in the past, either, if the equivalent of the brain needs to be smaller.

Is “Energy Used by a Dozen of Our Neighbors” a Proper Metric?

Before I continue with my analysis of what goes wrong in modeling intermittent renewable energy, let me say a few words about the way Munroe quantifies the outcome of his energy analysis. He talks about “energy consumed by a household and a dozen of its neighbors.” We often hear news items about how many households can be served by a new electricity provider or how many households have been taken offline by a storm. The metric used by Munroe is similar. But, does it tell us what we need to know in this case?

Our economy requires energy consumption by many types of users, including governments to make roads and schools, farmers to plant crops and manufacturers to make devices of all kinds. Leaving non-residential energy consumption out of the calculation doesn’t make much sense. (Actually, we are not quite certain what Munroe has included in his calculation. His wording suggests that he included only residential energy consumption.) In the US, my analysis indicates that residential users consume only about a third of total energy.1 The rest is consumed by businesses and governments.

If we want to adjust Munroe’s indications to include energy consumed by businesses and governments, we need to divide the indicated number of residential households provided with energy by about three. Thus, instead of the units being “Energy Consumed by Dozen of our Neighbors,” the units would be “Energy Consumed by Four of Our Neighbors, including Associated Energy Use by Governments and Businesses.” The apparently huge benefit provided by wind and solar becomes much smaller when we divide by three, even before any other adjustments are made.

What Might the Indirect Costs of Wind and Solar Be? 

There are a number of indirect costs:

(1) Transmission costs are much higher than those of other types of electricity, but they are not charged back to wind and solar in most studies.

A 2014 study by the International Energy Agency indicates that transmission costs for wind are approximately three times the cost of transmission costs for coal or nuclear. The amount of excess costs tends to increase as intermittent renewables become a larger share of the total. Some of the reason for higher transmission costs for both wind and solar are the following:

(a) Disproportionately more lines need to be built for wind and solar because transmission lines need to be scaled to the maximum output, rather than the average output. Wind output is typically available 25% to 35% of the time; solar is typically available 10% to 25% of the time.

(b) There tend to be longer distances between where renewable energy is captured and where it is consumed, compared to traditional generation.

(c) Renewable electricity is not created in a fossil fuel power plant, with the same controls over the many aspects of grid electricity. The transmission system must therefore make corrections which would not be needed for other types of electricity.

(2) With increased long distance electricity transmission, there is a need for increased maintenance of transmission lines. If this is not performed adequately, fires are likely, especially in dry, windy areas.

There is recent evidence that inadequate maintenance of transmission lines is a major fire hazard.

In California, inadequate electricity line maintenance has led to the bankruptcy of the Northern California utility PG&E. In recent weeks, PG&E has initiated two preventative cut-offs of power, one affecting as many as two million individuals.

The Texas Wildfire Mitigation Project reports, “Power lines have caused more than 4,000 wildfires in Texas in the past three and a half years.”

Venezuela has a long distance transmission line from its major hydroelectric plant to Caracas. One of the outages experienced in that country seems to be related to fires close to this transmission line.

There are things that can be done to prevent these fires, such as burying the lines underground. Even using insulated wire, instead of ordinary transmission wire, seems to help. But any solution has a cost involved. These costs need to be recognized in modeling the indirect cost of adding a huge amount of renewables.

(3) A huge investment in charging stations will be needed, if anyone other than the very wealthy are to use electric vehicles.

Clearly, the wealthy can afford electric vehicles. They generally have garages with connections to electrical power. With this arrangement, they can easily charge a vehicle that is powered by electricity when it is convenient.

The catch is that the less wealthy often do not have similar opportunities for charging electric vehicles. They also cannot afford to spend hours waiting for their vehicles to charge. They will need inexpensive rapid-charging stations, located in many, many places, if electric vehicles are to be a suitable choice. The cost of rapid-charging will likely need to include a fee for road maintenance, since this is one of the costs that today is included in fuel prices.

(4) Intermittency adds a very substantial layer of costs. 

A common belief is that intermittency can be handled by rather small changes, such as time-of-day pricing, smart grids and cutting off power to a few selected industrial customers if there isn’t enough electricity to go around. This belief is more or less true if the system is basically a fossil fuel and nuclear system, with a small percentage of renewables. The situation changes as more intermittent renewables are added.

Once more than a small percentage of solar is added to the electric grid, batteries are needed to smooth out the rapid transition that occurs at the end of the day when workers are returning home and would like to eat their dinners, even though the sun has set. There are also problems with electricity from wind cutting off during storms; batteries can help smooth out these transitions.

There are also longer-term problems. Major storms can disrupt electricity for several days, at any time of the year. For this reason, if a system is to run on renewables alone, it would be desirable to have battery backup for at least three days. In the short video below, Bill Gates expresses dismay at the idea of trying to provide a three-day battery backup for the quantity of electricity used by the city of Tokyo.

We do not at this point have nearly enough batteries to provide a three-day battery backup for the world’s electricity supply. If the world economy is to run on renewables, electricity consumption would need to rise from today’s level, making it even more difficult to store a three-day supply.

A much more difficult problem than three-day storage of electricity is the need for seasonal storage, if renewable energy is to be used to any significant extent. Figure 1 shows the seasonal pattern of energy consumption in the United States.

Figure 1. US energy consumption by month of year, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration. “All Other” is total energy, less electricity and transportation energy. It includes natural gas used for home heating. It also includes oil products used for farming, as well as fossil fuels of all kinds used for industrial purposes.

In contrast with this pattern, the production of solar energy tends to peak in June; it falls to a low level in December to February. Hydroelectric power tends to peak in spring, but its quantity is often quite variable from year to year. Wind power is quite variable, both from year to year and month to month.

Our economy cannot handle many starts and stops of electricity supply. For example, temperatures need to stay high for melting metals. Elevators should not stop between floors when the electricity stops. Refrigeration needs to continue when fresh meat is being kept cold.

There are two approaches that can be used to work around seasonal energy problems:

1. Greatly overbuild the renewables-based energy system, to provide enough electricity when total energy is most needed, which tends to be in winter.

2. Add a huge amount of storage, such as battery storage, to store electricity for months or even years, to mitigate the intermittency.

Either of these approaches is extremely high cost. These costs are like adding extra stomachs to the human system. They have not been included in any model to date, as far as I know. The cost of one of these approaches needs to be included in any model analyzing the costs and benefits of renewables, if there is any intention of using renewables as more than a tiny share of total energy consumption.

Figure 2 illustrates the high energy cost that can occur by adding substantial battery backup an electrical system. In this example, the “net energy” that the system provides is essentially eliminated by the battery backup. In this analysis, Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) compares energy output to energy input. It is one of many metrics used to estimate whether a device is providing adequate energy output to justify the front-end energy inputs.

Figure 2. Graham Palmer’s chart of Dynamic Energy Returned on Energy Invested from “Energy in Australia.”

The example in Figure 2 is based on the electricity usage pattern in Melbourne, Australia, which has a relatively mild climate. The example uses a combination of solar panels, batteries and diesel backup generation. Solar panels and backup batteries provide electricity for the 95% of annual electricity usage that is easiest to cover with these devices; diesel generation is used for the remaining 5%.

The Figure 2 example could be adjusted to be “renewable only” by adding significantly more batteries, a large number of solar panels, or some combination of these. These additional batteries and solar panels would be very lightly used, bringing the EROEI of the system down to an even lower level.

To date, a major reason that the electricity system has been able to avoid the costs of overbuilding or of adding major battery backup is the small share they represents of electricity production. In 2018, wind amounted to 5% of world electricity; solar amounted to 2%. As percentages of world energy supply, they represented 2% and 1% respectively.

A second reason that the electricity system has been able to avoid addressing the intermittency issue is because backup electricity providers (coal, natural gas, and nuclear) have been forced to provide backup services without adequate compensation for the value of services that they are providing. The way that this happens is by giving wind and solar the subsidy of “going first.” This practice creates a problem because backup providers have substantial fixed costs, and they often are not being adequately compensated for these fixed costs.

If there is any plan to cease using fossil fuels, all of these backup electricity providers, including nuclear, will disappear. (Nuclear also depends on fossil fuels.) Renewables will need to stand on their own. This is when the intermittency problem will become overwhelming. Fossil fuels can be stored relatively inexpensively; electricity storage costs are huge. They include both the cost of the storage system and the loss of energy that takes place when storage is used.

In fact, the underfunding issue associated with allowing intermittent renewables to go first is already becoming an overwhelming problem in a few places. Ohio has recently chosen to provide subsidies to coal and nuclear providers as a way of working around this issue. Ohio is also reducing funding for renewables.

 (5) The cost of recycling wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries needs to be reflected in cost estimates. 

A common assumption in energy analyses seems to be that somehow, at the end of the design lifetime of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries, all of these devices will somehow disappear at no cost. If recycling is done, the assumption is made that the cost of recycling will be less than the value of the materials made available from the recycling.

We are discovering now that recycling isn’t free. Very often, the energy cost of recycling materials is greater than the energy used in mining them fresh. This problem needs to be considered in analyzing the real cost of renewables.

 (6) Renewables don’t directly substitute for many of the devices/processes we have today. This could lead to a major step-down in how the economy operates and a much longer transition. 

There is a long list of things that renewables don’t substitute for. Today, we cannot make wind turbines, solar panels, or today’s hydroelectric dams without fossil fuels. This, by itself, makes it clear that the fossil fuel system will need to be maintained for at least the next twenty years.

There are many other things that we cannot make with renewables alone. Steel, fertilizer, cement and plastics are some examples that Bill Gates mentions in his video above. Asphalt and many of today’s drugs are other examples of goods that cannot be made with renewables alone. We would need to change how we live without these goods. We could not pave roads (except with stone) or build many of today’s buildings with renewables alone.

It seems likely that manufacturers would try to substitute wood for fossil fuels, but the quantity of wood available would be far too low for this purpose. The world would encounter deforestation issues within a few years.

(7) It is likely that the transition to renewables will take 50 or more years. During this time, wind and solar will act more like add-ons to the fossil fuel system than they will act like substitutes for it. This also increases costs.

In order for the fossil fuel industries to continue, a large share of their costs will need to continue. The people working in fossil fuel industries need to be paid year around, not just when electrical utilities need backup electrical power. Fossil fuels will need pipelines, refineries and trained people. Companies using fossil fuels will need to pay their debts related to existing facilities. If natural gas is used as backup for renewables, it will need reservoirs to hold natural gas for winter, besides pipelines. Even if natural gas usage is reduced by say, 90%, its costs are likely to fall by a much smaller percentage, say 30%, because a large share of costs are fixed.

One reason that a very long transition will be needed is because there is not even a path to transition away from fossil fuels in many cases. If a change is to be made, inventions to facilitate these changes are a prerequisite. Then these inventions need to be tested in actual situations. Next, new factories are needed to make the new devices. It is likely that some way will be needed to pay existing owners for the loss of value of their existing fossil fuel powered devices; if not, there are likely to be huge debt defaults. It is only after all of these steps have taken place that the transition can actually take place.

These indirect costs lead to a huge question mark regarding whether it even makes sense to encourage the widespread use of wind and solar. Renewables can reduce CO2 emissions if they really substitute for fossil fuels in making electricity. If they are mostly high cost add-ons to the system, there is a real question: Does it even make sense to mandate a transition to wind and solar?

Do Wind and Solar Really Offer a Longer-Term Future than Fossil Fuels?

At the end of the xkcd video shown above, Munroe makes the observation that wind and solar are available indefinitely, but fossil fuel supplies are quite limited.

I agree with Munroe that fossil fuel supplies are quite limited. This occurs because energy prices do not rise high enough for us to extract very much of them. The prices of finished products made with fossil fuels need to be low enough for customers to be able to afford them. If this is not the case, purchases of discretionary goods (for example cars and smart phones) will fall. Since cars and smart phones are made with commodities, including fossil fuels, the lower “demand” for these finished goods will lead to falling prices of commodities, including oil. In fact, we seem to have experienced falling oil prices most of the time since 2008.

Figure 3. Inflation adjusted weekly average Brent Oil price, based on EIA oil spot prices and US CPI-urban inflation.

It is hard to see why renewables would last any longer than fossil fuels. If their unsubsidized cost is any higher than fossil fuels, this would be one strike against them. They are also very dependent on fossil fuels for making spare parts and for repairing transmission lines.

It is interesting that climate change modelers seem to be convinced that very high amounts of fossil fuels can be extracted in the future. The question of how much fossil fuels can really be extracted is another modeling issue that needs to be examined closely. The amount of future extraction seems to be highly dependent on how well the current economic system holds together, including the extent of globalization. Without globalization, fossil fuel extraction seems likely to decline quickly.

Do We Have Too Much Faith in Models? 

The idea of using renewables certainly sounds appealing, but the name is deceiving. Most renewables, except for wood and dung, aren’t very renewable. In fact, they depend on fossil fuels.

The whole issue of whether wind and solar are worthwhile needs to be carefully analyzed. The usual hallmark of an energy product that is of substantial benefit to the economy is that its production tends to be very profitable. With these high profits, governments can tax the owners heavily. Thus, the profits can be used to aid the rest of the economy. This is one of the physical manifestations of the “net energy” that the energy product provides.

If wind and solar were really providing substantial net energy, they would not need subsidies, not even the subsidy of going first. They would be casting off profits to benefit the rest of the economy. Perhaps renewables aren’t as beneficial as many people think they are. Perhaps researchers have put too much faith in distorted models.

A Swift Air Boeing 737-400, registration N420US, declared an air emergency about 30 minutes after takeoff from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on Oct. 22 after engine failure was detected. The pilots made a quick decision to return to Santo Domingo and safely landed the plane 40 minutes later, reported The Aviation Herald.

While it’s still to be determined what exactly happened to one of the plane’s engines, we ask several questions: Did it completely shut off? Was there reduced engine power? As far as incident reports, we cannot find one.

On Monday, a 27-second video filmed by one of the passengers during the air emergency surfaced on YouTube. The contents of the video are truly terrifying as the plane, clearly under reduced power, is in a steep decline. Passengers are seen holding hands and reciting prayers as their fate remained uncertain. Some passengers were seen swigging whiskey as they wanted to numb the emotional pain that their final moments could be on a shitty Boeing plane. 

The incident occurred one week before Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg is set to explain to US lawmakers and the American people why two 737 Max planes have crashed within the last 12 months. 

Muilenburg will address two key US House and Senate panels this week as the aerospace giant attempts to restore confidence in its planes and get the 737 Max back up in the air by early 2020.  

Muilenburg’s meeting with lawmakers Tuesday comes after the Indonesian transportation safety board on Oct. 25 found significant design flaws in the 737 Max that led to the Lion Air crash on Oct. 29, 2018. Authorities have blamed the Boeing Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) as one of the main reasons behind the crash. 

The second crash was Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on Mar. 10, 2019. Authorities have also blamed MCAS for this crash. 

Global aviation officials have grounded the 737 Max for nearly eight-months. 

At this point, President Trump is right, Boeing needs to rebrand — it should seriously consider a name change after the 737 Max crisis. 

 

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

A New York Times columnist blamed “whiteness” for an alleged racist attack where two Indian students assaulted an African-American girl at a high school football game in New Jersey.

Yes, really.

The two 17-year-old Indian boys allegedly used racial slurs against a group of African-American girls and urinated on one during the game at Lawrence High School last Friday night.

Who’s to blame for the attack? White people, of course.

That’s according to New York Times columnist Nell Irvin Painter, who says that the Indian boys were “enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way.”

“In doing so, the assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions. They show race in the making, and show how race is something we perform, not just something we are in our blood or in the color of our skin,” she added.

How convenient. By making race a “social construct,” the racist actions of non-white people can still be blamed on white people. Incredible.

“In the New Jersey incident, the heritage or skin color of the boys suspected of the assault doesn’t matter,” writes Painter.

“What matters is that they were participating in this pattern and thus enacting whiteness in a very traditional way.”

Her entire argument appears to stem from her claim that a football game is a “white space” and therefore white people are to blame for anything that happens there.

*  *  *

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This week Eric Tse made global headlines when he became a billionaire literally overnight, and in an instant among Asia’s ultra wealthy elite, and he’s only 24-years old. 

He’s son of Sino Biopharmaceutical executive directors Tse Ping and Cheung Ling Cheng, and his billionaire status was secured after his parents issued him about a fifth of the Hong Kong-based company’s share capital this week, gratis. The stake has an estimated value of more than $3.8 billion.

This catapults the youthful looking Tse into onto Forbes’ ranking of the 550 wealthiest people on the planet. He was further named an executive director to the leading pharmaceutical drug manufacturer in China, at a salary of just under $500,000 a year plus bonuses.

Bloomberg calculated the immediate family’s wealth according to the number of Sino Biopharmaceutical shares collectively held to be at $8.5 billion — this includes Tse, his sister and two parents.

Sino Biopharmaceutical said in a Wednesday statement that the share transfer was meant to “refine the management and inheritance of family wealth.” And Fortune.com reported that “One major advantage is that Hong Kong has no tax on gifts or inherited wealth.”

Tse, who is from Hong Kong and spent much schooling in mainland China after being born in Seattle, recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Finance, and has generally attempted to keep a low profile despite often rubbing elbows with celebrities and royalty.

The report in Fortune noted:

He made clear though that he’ll try to keep a low profile and “will endeavor not to participate” in efforts by news organizations to include him individually on global wealth rankings, and would recommend instead that the fortune be ascribed to “the Tse Ping family,” according to the statement.

His powerful, politically connected father is well-known also as formerly a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consulative Conference, Beijing’s top political advisory group.

Tse on Wednesday was also appointed member of Sino Biopharmaceutical’s executive board committee, and he’s reported on at least five other major company boards in Hong Kong.

Submitted by Joseph Carson, Former Director of Global Economic Research, Alliance Bernstein.

Federal budget deficits need to be analyzed nowadays in the context of how much it is propping up the economic growth cycle because after a decade of record federal deficits the current business cycle would ran out of gas without ongoing federal borrowing to support public and private sector spending and activities.

The current decade-long business cycle has received unprecedented support from the federal government. For example, in the last 10 years the federal budget deficit averaged $830 billion per year, and the cumulative deficits of the past decade have exceeded the budget deficits in the previous 50 years combined by nearly $2 trillion.

Measured in relation to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the annual budget deficit in the past decade averaged 4.8%. That’s the first time in the post war period that during an economic growth cycle the scale of the budget deficit exceeded the annual growth (4%) of nominal GDP.

Federal budget deficits require the US Treasury to borrow money from the financial markets because the revenue intake is insufficient to meet all of its financial obligations. At various times these deficits help pay for all of the programs and agencies of the federal government, grants to individuals, businesses and state and local governments, interest payments and enable businesses and individuals to pay less in taxes than what otherwise would occur. In the end, the federal deficit represents excess spending, funded by the US Treasury, which eventually finds it’s way directly or indirectly into the economy.

The decade-long growth cycle might appear that monetary and fiscal policymakers have become so adroit that it can offset every potential dip in economic activity and create an endless and uninterrupted expansion. That would be a mistake. The right question that needs to be asked is whether efforts by policymakers to extend the cycle has increased it vulnerabilities? One area of potential vulnerability has to be the scale of continuous support from federal deficits to finance public and private spending.

To be fair, federal budget deficits have been a common feature of business cycles, but over the course of economic growth cycles deficits have tended to narrow and in some cases disappear. In fact, at the end of the two long expansions of the 1960s and the 1990s the federal government budget recorded a surplus. In the fiscal year ending on September 30th, the US recorded a $984 billion budget deficit (4.6% of GDP), a clear sign that in its 10th year of expansion the current cycle is still heavily dependent on support from the federal sector.

The question is not whether these relatively large deficits can continue but what happens if they do? Based on current policies, the Congressional Budget Office projects that annual budget deficits will average $1.2 trillion a year over the next decade, or 4.7% of GDP, essentially the same scale in relation to the economy of the past decade.

Fiscal policy was always a tool to be used to support the economy from its faults, bad decisions and imprudence. Throughout the post war period fiscal policy has been reactive at times, but it has never been so accommodating for so long.

Conventional wisdom nowadays says deficits don’t matter, but that ignores the “vulnerability” of the current business cycle being so dependent on federal deficits.

Consider the collapse of a building after an earthquake strikes. The most probable cause of the building falling to the ground was the shock from the earthquake, but the underlying cause could well be a faulty foundation. The building was able remain standing as long as no shock came along.

It is always difficult to predict what “shock” could trigger the next recession, but the reliance on federal deficits to support public and private spending should draw attention to the structural weakness of the current cycle. At present, the US economy is vulnerable to any type of shock, and fiscal policy is in a uncertain position as it cannot reverse course and introduce fiscal drag into an economy so dependent on budget deficits, nor is it in a position to help moderate the effects of a shock if one occurs. Policymakers understand that they cannot prevent every recession, but large budget deficits add instability to a weak economic environment, raising the odds of a bad outcome.

New York City officials have been quietly dumping homeless people to more than 370 cities across 32 states, including Honolulu and Houston.

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “Special One-Time Assistance Program,” (SOTA) local homeless families are given a full year’s worth of rent – which has cost NYC taxpayers $89 million on rent alone since August 2017 – before exporting some 5,074 homeless families (12,482 individuals) to cities as far as the South Pacific, according to the New York Post, citing data from the Department of Homeless Services (DHS).

The city also paid travel expenses, through a separate taxpayer-funded program called Project Reconnect, but would not divulge how much it spent. A Friday flight to Honolulu for four people would cost about $1,400. A bus ticket to Salt Lake City, Utah, for the same family would cost $800.

Add to the tab the cost of furnishings, which the city also did not disclose. One SOTA recipient said she received $1,000 for them.

DHS defends the stratospheric costs, saying it actually saves the city on shelter funding — which amounts to about $41,000 annually per family, as compared to the average yearly rent of $17,563 to house families elsewhere. –New York Post

Critics say the solution has failed to curb the city’s homelessness problem. Moreover, officials in the receiving cities are furious – while some of the homeless families are now suing NYC over being abandoned in ‘barely livable conditions,’ according to the report, which claims that “multiple outside agencies and organizations have opened investigations into SOTA.”

The mayor of Willacoochee, Georgia, was similarly stunned. “I’m not familiar with none of that,” Samuel Newson said.

The mayor of Harrisville, Utah — who was so baffled to receive a call from The Post that she questioned if the reporter had the wrong number — asked if SOTA recipients are connected to social services in the towns where they move.

“Are they just cutting them loose and saying, ‘Here you go’? Or are they making sure they don’t find themselves in the same situation a year later?” Michelle Tait asked. –New York Post

“We were initially seeing a lot of complaints about conditions. Now that the program has been in operation long enough that the SOTA subsidy is expiring, one of our main concerns is it might not be realistic for people to be entirely self-sufficient after that first year,” said Jacquelyn Simone, policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless.

According to DHS, 224 SOTA families have returned to NYC shelters.

“We suggested that DHS reach out to people as their subsidy runs out to confirm they will be secure and not have to re-enter shelter, but the agency told us they have no plans to do that,” said Joshua Goldfein, a legal aid attorney whose firm represents SOTA families who claim they were pressured to move to New Jersey slums.

About 56 percent of the families move out-of-state, costing the city an average of $15,600 in annual rent. Thirty-five percent move within city limits with an average rent of $20,500, and 9 percent move elsewhere in New York state, costing approximately $17,900.

Homeless individuals and families are eligible for SOTA if they can prove they have been in a New York City shelter for at least 90 days and that their household income is no more than twice what it owes in rent. DHS would not expand on eligibility rules. –New York Post

Read the rest of the report here.

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The low-ball mudslinging and pantomime palaver among America’s political class is like a theater of absurd. Any form of vilification is now acceptable. President Trump and his Twitter rants may have helped set the bar of indecency to an all-time low, but Democrats and Republicans have quickly joined the descent into madness.

The sanity test was spectacularly failed recently when former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton lashed out at her party member Tulsi Gabbard, inferring she was a “Russian asset”. The Hawaii congresswoman, who is vying for a run at the presidency in next year’s elections, was defended by some fellow Democratic politicians. But many Clinton aides and media pundits doubled down on Clinton’s smear campaign, reiterating that Gabbard was “working for the Kremlin”.

This bipartisan Russophobia can be traced back decades to the Red Scare paranoia of the Cold War and McCarthyite persecution during the 1950s of suspected Soviet sympathizers in Washington and Hollywood. But for the past three years, since the 2016 election, the Cold War has been crazily enlivened with the “Russiagate scandal” of alleged interference in American political affairs by Moscow. It was the Clinton campaign, establishment media and her intelligence agency supporters that launched that canard against Trump.

Despite lack of evidence and credibility as shown by the vacuous Mueller probe earlier this year, the ridiculous Russiagate narrative and its underlying Russophobia still manages to dominate the views of the US political class, as exemplified by how Clinton’s preposterous smearing of Gabbard was given undue media coverage and supportive commentary. Affording trust and respect for such inane paranoia is surely a sign that America has officially gone insane.

Another symptom of collective madness is seen when truth and factual evidence are presented, but then the truth-teller is pilloried and the facts are blankly ignored.

Tulsi Gabbard told the truth on a recent national TV debate when she said plainly that “the US supports Al Qaeda terrorists”. The incredulous looks from the other Democratic candidates indicated that they are cocooned in a fantasy-world of official American propaganda which claims that US military forces are in Syria and elsewhere to “fight terrorism”.

For speaking such unvarnished truth, veteran servicewoman Gabbard was savaged in media reports and commentary for disseminating disinformation and lies. As well as being labelled a “Russian asset”, she is also denounced as an “Assad apologist”.

However, this week, two developments demonstrate that Gabbard is correct in her linking of US support to terror groups in Syria and the Middle East more widely.

First, we had President Donald Trump announcing approval of $4.5 million in aid to the White Helmets, the so-called rescue group operating in Syria. Trump hailed them as “important and highly valued”. Last year, the president also signed off on $6.8 million of aid to the White Helmets.

Despite this group winning an Oscar award for one its propaganda films, the White Helmets have been outed by several investigative reports as a media arm for the Al Qaeda-affiliated Hayat Tahrir al Shams (formerly, Nusra Front) and other Islamic State (ISIS) outfits. The pseudo rescue group only works in the diminished areas that are under the control of the jihadist terror network. The White Helmets are unknown to, or repudiated by, most of the Syrian civilian population. They have been exposed for having mounted false-flag terror attacks with chemical weapons and falsely attributing the attacks to the Syrian Arab Army or allied Russian forces. “They are a complete propaganda construct,” says award-winning journalist John Pilger.

For Trump and other Western governments like the British and French to openly support the White Helmets with millions of dollars is irrefutable proof of the official sponsorship by Western powers of the terrorist network in Syria. Of course, that is consistent with the analysis that these same governments have waged a covert criminal war of regime change against Syria. Again, it is only Tulsi Gabbard among American politicians who has explicitly stated this nefarious involvement of Washington in Syria. Yet she is condemned from all sides as a liar and foreign agent.

The second development this week indicting US links to terror groups – but which is studiously ignored by the Western media – are credible reports of American military force airlifting Al Qaeda-type jihadists out of northeast Syria.

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu this week confirmed that hundreds of suspected jihadi prisoners had escaped from jails and camps amid the turmoil of the Turkish offensive against Kurdish militia.

Syrian state media reports that, “US occupation continues to transport hundreds of Daesh [ISIS] terrorists from Syria to Iraq”.

Many of the detained terror suspects were lifted by American transport helicopters from the giant Al Houl camp near Hasaka city and relocated to western Iraq. Rather than handing over these illegal militants to advancing Syrian state forces, the Pentagon seems intent on holding on to its proxy assets. Maybe to fight in a renewed insurgency against Syria or elsewhere that Washington designates for regime-change operation.

In separate media reports, US forces are also being relocated from eastern Syria to set up bases in western Iraq. This suggests a concerted consolidation between US military forces and the terror groups which were used to wage the failed war in Syria.

Whenever Washington’s political class has descended into name-calling and smearing based on clueless prejudice and paranoia, and whenever the stark truth of America’s criminal war-making is roundly rejected – indeed twisted to demonize truth-tellers like Tulsi Gabbard – then we surely know that the USA now stands for the United States of [Mental] Asylum.