Author: admin

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

Among Republicans, Gen Z stands out in views on race, climate and the role of government.

Pew has an excellent report on changing attitudes of generations. In that regard, Generation Z Looks a Lot Like Millennials on Key Social and Political Issues.

No longer the new kids on the block, Millennials have moved firmly into their 20s and 30s, and a new generation is coming into focus. Generation Z – diverse and on track to be the most well-educated generation yet – is moving toward adulthood with a liberal set of attitudes and an openness to emerging social trends.

On a range of issues, from Donald Trump’s presidency to the role of government to racial equality and climate change, the views of Gen Z – those ages 13 to 21 in 2018 – mirror those of Millennials. In each of these realms, the two younger generations hold views that differ significantly from those of their older counterparts. In most cases, members of the Silent Generation are at the opposite end, and Baby Boomers and Gen Xers fall in between.

It’s too early to say with certainty how the views of this new generation will evolve. Most have yet to reach voting age, and their outlook could be altered considerably by changing national conditions, world events or technological innovations. Even so, two new Pew Research Center surveys, one of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 and one of adults ages 18 and older, provide some compelling clues about where they may be headed and how their views could impact the nation’s political landscape.

Only about three-in-ten Gen Zers and Millennials (30% and 29%, respectively) approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president. This compares with 38% of Gen Xers, 43% of Boomers and 54% of Silents. Similarly, while majorities in Gen Z and the Millennial generation say government should do more to solve problems, rather than that government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals, Gen Xers and Boomers are more evenly divided on this issue. For their part, most Silents would like to see a less activist government.

Climate Change and Gender Use Pronouns

​

Gen Zers are more likely than Millennials to say they know someone who prefers that others use gender-neutral pronouns to refer to them: 35% say this is the case, compared with a quarter of Millennials. Among each older generation, the share saying this drops: 16% of Gen Xers, 12% of Boomers and just 7% of Silents say this.

Gen Zers’ views about climate change are virtually identical to those of Millennials and not markedly different from Gen Xers. About half in all three generations say the earth is getting warmer due to human activity. Boomers are somewhat more skeptical of this than Gen Zers or Millennials. Members of the Silent Generation are least likely to say this (38%) and are more likely to say the earth is warming mainly due to natural patterns (28%) than are Gen Zers, Millennials and Gen Xers.

View of the US

​

Younger generations also have a different view of the U.S. relative to other countries in the world. While pluralities of nearly all generations (with the exception of the Silent Generation) say the U.S. is one of the best countries in the world along with some others, Gen Zers and Millennials are the least likely to say the U.S. is better than all other countries. Only 14% and 13%, respectively, hold this view, compared with one-in-five Gen Xers, 30% of Boomers and 45% of Silents. Roughly three-in-ten Gen Zers and Millennials say there are other countries that are better than the U.S.

Brainwashing by Educators or a Function of Youth?

There are still more charts and ideas in the article. But here is the question at hand.

Are these views a function of youth and naiveté or a function of programmed bias introduced by academia?

I am inclined to believe quite a bit of both.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2FKI4GY Tyler Durden

Anticipating the weakest GDP growth in nearly three decades, Beijing earlier this month unleashed another widely expected wave of stimulus to try and goose lending and consumption in the world’s second largest economy. But if history is any indication, most of the benefits from this stimulus will accrue to state-owned enterprises, which account for a shrinking share of the country’s overall economy.

As the Financial Times reported on Monday, while state-backed banks swoop in to bailout state-owned firms, the country’s private sector enterprises have been left to figure out how to navigate an unprecedented capital crunch more or less on their own, as Beijing’s deleveraging drive, which as haphazardly continued even as the PBoC has ordered more RRR cuts and tax cuts, falls disproportionately on the shoulders of the country’s private enterprises (many of which accessed funding through the country’s shadowbanking system). 

Many are turning to foreign investors. But if the trade war between China and the US isn’t resolved soon, this lifeline could soon be cut off. But regardless of what happens, China’s private companies have made it clear that they are in need now.

Despite the lip-service paid by the Chinese leadership about economic liberalization and encouraging FDI, private enterprises account for a declining share of overall new loans. Private enterprises account for between 50% and 90% of Chinese tax revenue, and roughly half of the country’s economy. But they receive a paltry 11% of new loans.

If this trend continues as slowing growth and consumption squeeze the Chinese economy, something inevitably has to give, as one analyst pointed out.

“In an economy that is 50 per cent private, Xi cannot repress the private sector without limit,” said Andrew Batson, China research director at Gavekal. “It seems like we reached that limit some time in late 2018.”  An increasing number of influential economists now think that the officials driving China’s economy need to take pressure off the brake and instead feather the accelerator, albeit without resorting to “flood-like” stimulus measures that Beijing employed during the depths of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. 

“Yes we should try to stabilise the [overall] leverage ratio, but you can’t cut the [overall debt] ratio in a hurry,” said Yu Yongding, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a former central bank adviser. “That’s wrong. Growth is still very important for China. Without growth, everything will get worse. We can only tolerate a certain slowdown.”

When Xi Jinping hectored state banks about being more “inclusive” in their lending practices, it received blanket coverage in Chinese media, the FT pointed out.

Within hours, China’s central bank, in an effort to stimulate such lending, announced an Rmb800bn ($117bn) cut in the level of reserves banks are required to hold.

Mr Li and Mr Liu’s admonishments came just two months after Mr Xi, in a similarly hyped meeting with some of the country’s richest entrepreneurs on November 1, pledged “unswerving support” for the private sector. In the weeks that followed that encounter, a financial regulatory commission headed by Mr Liu dispatched inspectors across the country to figure out why the credit “transmission mechanism” between state lenders and private borrowers was not working.

But because bank’s loan officers are ultimately held responsible for loans made to private enterprises, the admonishments of the Chinese leadership have been largely ignored, as one entrepreneur who eventually partnered with the US private equity giant Carlyle Group explained to the FT.

Wu Hai, founder of the Beijing-based Crystal Orange hotel chain, said one problem was that even when a bank’s risk control committee approves a loan, ultimate responsibility still rested with the loan officer who brought it to them. “If the loan defaults, it’s the loan officer who gets blamed,” he said. “So [loan officers] just follow the rule book.”

Like Mr Qin, Mr Wu had difficulty dealing with state banks because Crystal Orange rented rather than owned its hotel premises and could only borrow against its cash flow. Mr Wu instead sought outside private equity investors such as Carlyle Group, which became Crystal Orange’s largest shareholder before its Rmb3.65bn sale last year to a rival Chinese hotel chain. 

Now flush with his own cash from that sale, Mr Wu is investing in a chain of upscale karaoke parlours and other ventures. Across town, however, a worried Mr Qin is still struggling to raise money, even as the country’s most senior leaders seek to reassure him and other entrepreneurs.  “It takes time for policies [supporting the private sector] to be implemented,” Mr Qin said. “So, for now, we do not feel at ease.”

In what looks like a silver lining, it appears Beijing has finally accepted the fact that it needs to shift its policies toward more market-oriented reforms if it wants to alleviate the overwhelming debt burden constraining its economy.

But unfortunately for many of these private firms, this realization might have happened too late, as defaults in the world’s second largest economy – particularly among small- and medium-sized corporate enterprises – continue to soar.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WaZRfs Tyler Durden

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via ConsortiumNews.com,

A new, updated data set is now available on a psychological phenomenon that has been labeled “Trump Anxiety Disorder” or “Trump Hypersensitive Unexplained Disorder,” and it says that the phenomenon only got worse in 2018. The disorder is described as a specific type of anxiety in which symptoms “were specific to the election of Trump and the resultant unpredictable sociopolitical climate,” and according to the 2018 surveys Americans are feeling significantly more stressed by the future of their country and the current political environment than they were last year.

Pacific Standard reports as follows:

“As the possibility of a Hillary Clinton victory began to slip away—and the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency became more and more certain—the contours of the new age of American anxiety began to take shape. In a 2017 column, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank described this phenomenon as “Trump Hypertensive Unexplained Disorder”: Overeating. Headaches. Fainting. Irregular heartbeat. Chronic neck pain. Depression. Irritable bowel syndrome. Tightness in the chest. Shortness of breath. Teeth grinding. Stomach ulcer. Indigestion. Shingles. Eye twitching. Nausea. Irritability. High blood sugar. Tinnitus. Reduced immunity. Racing pulse. Shaking limbs. Hair loss. Acid reflux. Deteriorating vision. Stroke. Heart attack. It was a veritable organ recital.

Two years later, the physiological effects of the Trump administration aren’t going away. A growing body of research has tracked the detrimental impacts of Trump-related stress on broad segments of the American population, from young adults to women, to racial and LGBT communities.

The results aren’t good.”

I do not for one second doubt that Americans are feeling more stressed and suffering more health-degrading symptoms as a result than they were prior to Trump’s election. But Pacific Standard and its “growing body of research” ignore the most obvious and significant culprit behind this phenomenon which is tearing people’s health to shreds: the mass media which has been deliberately fanning the flames of Trump panic.

The always excellent Moon of Alabama blog has just published a sarcasm-laden piece documenting the many, many aggressive maneuvers that this administration has made against the interests of Russia, from pushing for more NATO funding to undermining Russia’s natural gas interests to bombing Syria to sanctioning Russian oligarchs to dangerous military posturing.

New on MoA:
Putin Asks And Trump Delivers –
A List Of All The Good Things Trump Did For Russiahttps://t.co/6p6NldXfmE pic.twitter.com/uUP0xS8GEX

— Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) January 15, 2019

And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence agencies.

If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, there would be a lot less “Putin’s puppet” talk and a lot more “Hey, maybe we should avoid senseless escalations which could end all life on earth” talk among news media consumers. But there isn’t, because the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it’s in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience.

Like His Predecessors 

Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he’s a facilitator of America’s permanent unelected government just like his predecessors, and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he’s not that much different from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump hasn’t even caught up to Obama’s peak ICE deportation years. If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, people would be no more worried about this administration than they were about the previous ones, because when it comes to his administration’s actual behavior, he’s just as reliable an upholder of the establishment-friendly status quo as his predecessors.

Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won’t even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water. Now they’re skipping the middle man and killing them directly by psychologically brutalizing them so aggressively that it ruins their health, all to ensure that Democrats support war and adore the U.S. intelligence community.

They do this for a reason, of course. The Yellow Vests protests in France have continued unabated for their ninth consecutive week, a decentralized populist uprising resulting from ordinary French citizens losing trust in their institutions and the official narratives which uphold them. The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting U.S. government institutions. Right now they’ve got Republicans cheering on the White House and Democrats cheering on the U.S. intelligence community, but that could all change should something happen which causes them to lose control over the thoughts that Americans think about their rulers.

Propaganda is the single most-overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of human society. The ability of those in power to manipulate the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an inverted totalitarianism which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered by the interests of the common man.

The only thing that will lead to real change is the people losing trust in corrupt institutions and rising like lions against them. That gets increasingly likely as those institutions lose control of the narrative, and with trust in the mass media at an all-time low, populist uprisings restoring power to the people in France, and media corporations acting increasingly weird and insecure, that looks more and more likely by the day.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2sM2qqF Tyler Durden

Jardine Matheson – the $45 billion market cap multinational enterprise with a portfolio of businesses
focused on the Asia-Pacific region – is now down 9%…

…after plunging as much as 83%, the most in data going back to 1990…

Three traders said the price action suggested a fat finger…but the step down function of the bid-offer suggests this was algos run wild…

SGX didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment

Jardine Matheson Holdings activities include financial services, supermarkets, consumer marketing, engineering and construction, automobile trading, insurance broking, property investment, and hotels.

Notably, it was just last week that a series of Chinese property developer stocks crashed 80-90% instantly. Are the Asian stock exchanges running of liquidity fumes?

 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2sHhvK7 Tyler Durden

After a contentious divorce, the typical American man of a certain age might buy a motorcycle or a convertible – or maybe start dating a younger more attractive woman. But Citadel founder Ken Griffin isn’t your typical American man.

Days after reports about Griffin’s purchase of a $122 million mansion – 3 Carlton Gardens -near Buckingham Palace (a famous mansion that was once home to Charles de Gaulle) – one of the most expensive purchases in the history of UK real estate – surfaced in the Guardian, the billionaire HFT pioneer’s globe-trotting record-smashing luxury real-estate buying spree continued on Wednesday when he closed on a deal to buy the most expensive home ever sold in the US.

Griffin signed a contract to buy the Central Park apartment in 2015. The seller and developer was Vornado Realty Trust, which was represented by Deborah Kern of the Corcoran Group. Griffin was represented by Tal and Oren Alexander of the Alexander team at Douglas Elliman.

220 Central Park South

According to CNBC, Griffin paid $238 million for a New York penthouse overlooking Central Park. The apartment covers four floors of the new 79-story condo tower known as 220 Central Park South, and is around 24,000 square feet. The deal eclipsed the previous record, the $147 million paid by hedge fund manager Barry Rosenstein for an estate in East Hampton back in 2014. The purchase is undoubtedly a boon for the NYC high-end real estate market, which has been struggling with its worst sales slump in years.

The purchase comes as Citadel has signed a lease to become the anchor tenant in a skyscraper at 425 Park Avenue, eight-tenths of a mile from Griffin’s new apartment (vertical travel not included). Griffin reportedly bought the place because he needed somewhere to stay when in town.

3 Carlton Gardens

With his latest purchase, Griffin has totaled $700 million in high-profile real-estate purchases over the past few years, including the most expensive properties ever sold in Chicago and Miami. He spent more than $200 million to buy land in Palm Beach for a home he plans to build there.

According to the Wall Street Journal, some believe Griffin’s latest deal could be one of the most expensive real-estate transactions ever closed in the world, rivaling records set in Hong Kong and Monte Carlo. Per WSJ, the most expensive piece of property ever sold was the sale of a home at the Peak, one of Hong Kong’s priciest neighborhoods, which sold for $361 million in 2017.

See? Frontrunning – sorry, HFT – does pay.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2HuiFmN Tyler Durden

Authored by Nick Cunningham via Oilprice.com,

The rapid adoption of renewable energy will “redraw the geopolitical map of the 21st century,” according to a new report that surveys the geopolitical implications of the clean energy transition.

The rise of renewable energy can dramatically enhance the degree of energy independence, according to the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation, which authored a report at the request of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

Because energy can be generated by technologies, using the sun and wind, rather than concentrated natural resources in the form of oil and gas, which is not ubiquitous in geographic terms, many countries will be able to reduce their vulnerabilities to price spikes and outright supply disruptions by pivoting to renewable energy. Moreover, the strategic importance of chokepoints – the Straits of Hormuz, or the Straits of Malacca for instance – will diminish as fossil fuels lose their grip on the global energy system.

Another important point is that renewable energy can be scaled up to almost any degree, and installations can also be decentralized. The IRENA report argues that the decentralized nature of renewable energy will be a force for democratization.

“Renewables will also be a powerful vehicle of democratization because they make it possible to decentralize the energy supply, empowering citizens, local communities, and cities,” the IRENA report said.

A key difference between renewable energy and fossil fuels is one of cost. As a technology, rather than a finite natural resource, costs decline the more clean technologies are manufacture and deployed.

“Renewable energy sources have nearly zero marginal costs, and some of them, like solar and wind, enjoy cost reductions of nearly 20% for every doubling of capacity,” the IRENA report argues. That is radically different from natural resources, where higher demand drives up prices due to scarcity.

So, there is a lot to like about the coming energy transition. Fewer chokepoints, less price volatility, reduced power concentrated in a relatively few places.

Still, the energy transition could create new complexities. While many countries can generate more energy at home, reduce air pollution, and slash their import bills, there will be new risks because clean technologies require various minerals and metals. The need for cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, rare earths and other minerals and metals could create similar problems, just as dependence on oil and gas exports bedevil producer countries today. About 60 percent of the world’s cobalt supply comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and the soaring demand for cobalt in electric vehicles has led to social, economic, political and environmental problems in that country.

Moreover, for exporters of fossil fuels – mainly the major oil-producing countries in OPEC – the coming transition to cleaner energy presents serious risks. How countries fare in a world of energy transition obviously depends on the degree to which they consume/produce fossil fuels and the degree to which they are positioning themselves to take advantage of cleaner technologies.

The IRENA report put together a simple matrix, with fossil fuel import dependence on the y-axis and the number of renewable energy patents on the x-axis (see chart). As the chart shows, Saudi Arabia stands out as uniquely vulnerable.

Needless to say such a one-trick pony is in serious trouble unless it undertakes a dramatic economic transformation. Other countries that could see disruptions from the clean energy transition include Qatar, Libya, Angola, the Republic of Congo, Kuwait and the UAE, and to a lesser extent Russia, Iran, Algeria and Azerbaijan.

The problem is that many of these countries are going in the opposite direction, double-downing on oil and gas even in the face of increasing risk. Despite the much-hyped Saudi Vision 2030 announced a few years ago, the now-maligned crown prince Mohammed bin Salman seems to be backing off the lofty goals of his transformation plan.

Instead, Riyadh is pouring money into expanding its oil production capacity. Even as global upstream oil and gas spending has declined by 40 percent since 2014, spending has not declined at all in Saudi Arabia, according to Wood Mackenzie.

In fact, there is perverse logic at play. Saudi Arabia is not at all in denial about the onset of peak oil demand and the rise of renewable energy. “The energy transition and threat that oil demand may peak in the next 20 years has concentrated minds. Even the lowest-cost producers don’t want to run the risk of leaving low-cost oil in the ground,” WoodMac’s Jessica Brewer said in a commentary. Saudi Arabia is scrambling to funnel money into its oil sector so that it can be one of the last producers standing on the other side of peak oil demand.

The U.S., China, the EU and Japan are in much better positions. The U.S., for instance, is the world’s largest oil producer and the world’s largest natural gas producer. Companies in these sectors will lose out over time as fossil fuels are phased out.

 

But the U.S. is also “well positioned in the clean energy race,” the IRENA report argues. “U.S. companies hold strong positions in new technologies, including robotics, artificial intelligence, and electric vehicles.”

But the beneficiaries of a transition to cleaner energy need not be only large, rich countries. The IRENA report pointed to the example of Iceland, which “is a good example of the benefits that can accrue from an economic transformation based on renewables. During the 20th century, it evolved from being one of Europe’s poorest countries, highly dependent on imported coal and oil, to a country with a high standard of living, which derives 100% of its electricity from hydro and geothermal energy.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2HuMmEd Tyler Durden

A new report strategically timed for release with the start of the World Economic Forum boondoggle at Davos, shows that the world’s 26 richest billionaires now own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world’s population.

The report titled “Public Good or Private Wealth,” found that top world’s 26 richest billionaires now hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people. That number was 43 in 2017 and 61 in 2016. According to the Guardian, the report also found that in the 10 years since the financial crisis, the number of billionaires has almost doubled. It also found that between 2017 and 2018, a new billionaire was created every two days.

For development charity Oxfam, that was enough to prompt calls for a global 1% wealth tax. The charity claims that the widening gap of wealth hinders the fight against poverty and called for a 1% wealth tax that it estimated could raise $418 billion a year. The charity believes this money should be re-purposed to educate every child not in school, as well as provide healthcare that would reportedly prevent 3.3 million deaths, according to the Guardian.

The charity also calculated that the total wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires worldwide increased by $900 billion in 2018, which amounts to $2.5 billion per day. This increase of 12% contrasts with a fall in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population by 11%.

To be sure, while some billionaires engage in philanthropy and charity work – including Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, who gives away money in the hope of eradicating poverty – others seem to assume little responsibility for the world’s increasingly alarming future. The Oxfam report picks on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man with an estimated fortune of $112 billion, who once said that he sees no better way to dispose of his tremendous wealth than to fund space travel.

While his admission might have excited space enthusiasts, it also sparked outrage, strengthening the case for more taxes for the rich. According to Oxfam, just 1% of Bezos’ fortune is equivalent to the whole health budget for Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people.

Oxfam also said the impression that the wealthiest one percent don’t give back enough to the community is justified, as they are indeed paying less and less: “In rich countries, the average top rate of personal income tax fell from 62% in 1970 to 38% in 2013,” the report says, while in the developing countries it stands at 28% on average.

Director of campaigns and policy for Oxfam, Matthew Spencer, stated:

 “The massive fall in the number of people living in extreme poverty is one of the greatest achievements of the past quarter of a century but rising inequality is jeopardising further progress. The way our economies are organised means wealth is increasingly and unfairly concentrated among a privileged few while millions of people are barely subsisting. Women are dying for lack of decent maternity care and children are being denied an education that could be their route out of poverty. No one should be condemned to an earlier grave or a life of illiteracy simply because they were born poor.”

He continued:

“It doesn’t have to be this way – there is enough wealth in the world to provide everyone with a fair chance in life. Governments should act to ensure that taxes raised from wealth and businesses paying their fair share are used to fund free, good-quality public services that can save and transform people’s lives.”

Oxfam is also calling for governments to tackle more universal public services and to force taxation on corporations who are under-taxed or avoiding taxes outright. The idea of a global wealth tax has been advocated for by French economist Thomas Piketty, who believes it can help stop the widening inequality gap worldwide.

Meanwhile, with the world’s attention focused on Davos for the next few days where the world’s richest are headed in their private jets to party in sheer opulence while lamenting the evils of global wealth inequality, we are confident that many of them will voluntarily offer a portion of their net worth to the world’s poortest in line with Oxfam’s recommendations, and to confirm that their money is where their noble mouth is, lest they be accused of another year of abject hypocrisy.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2U7GWjG Tyler Durden

Via Daisy Luther’s Organic Prepper blog,

Something a lot of people forget when they think about survival is what happens after you’ve survived. When you get through something terrible, there’s always a price you must pay for your survival. You won’t get through it unscathed. 

Oftentimes, that price is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. This is a very real condition triggered by experiencing or witnessing a horrifying event or series of events.  You can learn more about PTSD here on the VA website. Once called “shell shock” or “battle fatigue syndrome” it can affect more than just soldiers.

You can’t survive something awful and expect to live unscathed. PTSD isn’t a symptom of weakness. It’s a sign that you have a conscience and a heart. It’s a sign that you love and you care. It’s part of being a survivor, and that’s why all of us are here – we want to survive.

In this article, Selco shares his deeply personal experience with PTSD.

The Price You Pay for Survival

by Selco

I am not alone.
he’s here now.
sometimes I think he’s
gone
then he
flies back
in the morning or at
noon or in the
night.
a bird no one wants.
he’s mine.
my bird of pain.
he doesn’t sing.
that bird
swaying on the
bough.

—Charles Bukowski 

For all people out there, who carry this ugly bird on their shoulders.

Anxiety, phobias, PTSD, depression… are just words.

For the people who have not experienced it personally, those words cannot portray feelings of being lost, alone and cornered while you are fighting for air, or simply thinking that you are going to die. Or that you are not gonna make it. Or that it is not worth to make it.

I imagine it like a big black bird, ugly bird, hovering above your head in circles, then landing on your shoulders, pinching your shoulders with claws, and with its wings covering your vision. It suffocates you, blurs your judgment, pushes you to make decisions, or more often not to make decisions…

How many times you were in a situation when you felt that you are in your own private hell, while the world around you was still turning, unaware of the darkness in you?

When I am there, I do not care for anything. That ugly bird pinches my shoulders (and my shoulders hurt for real)  and blurs my vision, so I do not see reasons to push on and on.

I know that the reasons are there but I cannot see them. I just keep hoping I will be able to push on, to the moment when again I see reasons for life.

It comes, and it goes…PTSD

So this post is about all of us who carry that bird on shoulders.

Do not make a mistake: it can be anybody… war veteran, housewife, kid…father.

And do not make the mistake of telling that person “oh, it is nothing, you just imagining it” because no, it is not “nothing.” It is everything that matters for that person, and nothing else matters actually for that person.

Every one of us has our own breaking point. The important thing here is that often you will NOT recognize what and when your breaking point is.

I have been through many situations that can be described like pure horror, and I endured it without problems. (You can read more about those experiences in my PDF book or my paperback book.)

Then years later, decades later, I drive my car through the town, and I see something, like two kids playing with their mother, and I suddenly feel that black bird hovering high above my head…

And it hits me like a train, something from my violent past… maybe dead kids that I have seen 25 years ago.

I guess I broke down 25 years ago. Now it is just me “breaking down” over and over again, through repetition of memories and feelings.

I’m an expert on experiencing PTSD.

I am not really fond of the word “expert” and I do not proclaim myself to be a survival expert. But if I am an expert about anything it might be PTSD.

Long experience in that.

Often after having articles where I mentioned psychological problems and coping with them, I read comments where people call it pathetic or portray me as a weak.

It is nothing like that, and often I would love to prove that to those couch warriors by messing them… But it is pointless. It is always about people without experience talking about topics where they lack that particular experience, and acting like experts.

People who suffer PTSD are not weak. On the contrary to that, they are very strong, because it is a hell of a thing to have and carry, trust me.

Since I am writing this in one of the worst episode of it, trust me when I say some things.

You must push on and on.

There are books and programs on how to cope with it, but the only real and good start how to cope with it is to “push on and on” until that ugly bird goes away… not completely, but far and high enough so you can live something like a normal life.

My second piece of advice is: have someone close, someone that you can talk to about what you are going through, someone who will listen to you.

You need a friend.

That bird can not be killed, but it can go away for long periods, or very high above you if you ask for help.

Ask for help!

Again, this post is not about Selco the “expert.”

It is to reach out to all of you who feel the same as I do, to all of you who think it is not worth it, to all of you who are pinched by that bird claws, or who maybe had thoughts about ending everything…

I often keep my gun on the table in front of me when I feel like this, and listen to some music. I look at the gun, how nice piece of work it is, effective and definitive piece of work… and yea, it does look often like an easy solution to use it.

But you know what?

Often the easy solutions are the wrong ones.

So f*ck off that bird from your shoulders and push on and on.

Do not forget: real survival is just that -pushing on and on, day by day.

*  *  *

About Selco: Selco survived the Balkan war of the 90s in a city under siege, without electricity, running water, or food distribution. In his online works, he gives an inside view of the reality of survival under the harshest conditions. He reviews what works and what doesn’t, tells you the hard lessons he learned, and shares how he prepares today. He never stopped learning about survival and preparedness since the war. Regardless what happens, chances are you will never experience extreme situations as Selco did. But you have the chance to learn from him and how he faced death for months.

• Read more of Selco’s articles here.
• Buy his PDF books here.
• Buy his #1 New Release paperback, The Dark Secrets of Survival here.
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via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Uc7Map Tyler Durden

Despite $400 million in equity investments by NBC Universal since 2015, BuzzFeed is preparing to lay off 15% of its staff, or around 250 people, according to the Wall Street Journal which cites people familiar with the matter. 

The company says it will refocus its resources towards content-licensing and e-commerce in order to try and steer the beleaguered news outlet on the path to profitability. 

Another driver of the cuts is to help the company avoid raising money again, one of the people said. BuzzFeed has raised about $500 million and was valued at about $1.7 billion following its last funding round in 2016.

Its investors include Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal—which has invested $400 million—Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, RRE Ventures and Hearst Ventures. –WSJ

The Journal notes growing pressure in the online publishing space and digital advertising sales – pointing to competition from Google and Facebook, and recent industry moves such as the $5 million sale of online publisher Mic to women-focused publisher Bustle Digital Group. Lifestyle-focused publisher Refinery29, meanwhile, laid off 10% of its workforce last fall. 

BuzzFeed, launched in 2016 by CEO Jonah Peretti, was a pioneer in “native advertising,” designed to mimic the look and feel of editorial content. As that model has become increasingly difficult to grow, the company began selling ads using “programmatic,” or automated platforms last year. 

Last week the news outlet came under fire after publishing a story that President Trump instructed his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie about the timeline of a Trump Tower Moscow project that never panned out. In response to the report, Special Counsel Robert Mueller took the rare step of issuing a public statement refuting the report, with the Washington Post later reporting that “Mueller’s denial, according to people familiar with the matter, aims to make clear that none of those statements in the story are accurate.”

The 15% workforce cut follows a 2017 round of layoffs, when BuzzFeed cut loose around 100 staffers after missing its revenue target of around $350 million by a 15% – 20%; a miss which put the company’s IPO on hold. In 2016 the company brought in around $250 million in revenue. 

Since then, BuzzFeed closed its French operations and fired their in-house podcast production team. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2RKf8FE Tyler Durden

WikiLeaks announced in a Wednesday statement that it’s seeking to force the Trump administration to unseal any charges against founder Julian Assange, according to AP. 

According to the statement, they have filed a legal challenge with the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights in Washington, while also asking Ecuador to prevent Assange’s extradition to the United States. 

The charges against Assange were accidentally revealed due to a copy-paste error in an unrelated federal case involving a 29-year-old who had been charged with enticing a 15-year-old girl into sex acts.

You guys should read EDVA court filings more, cheaper than a Journal subscription pic.twitter.com/YULeeQphmd

— Seamus Hughes (@SeamusHughes) November 16, 2018

Assistant US Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, urging a judge to keep the matter sealed, writing that “due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.” Later in the filing, Dwyer wrote that the charges would “need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested.”

That Kokayi case involved previously classified information and prosecutors were planning to use information obtained under the FISA act. Kokayi was indicted last week and is set to be arraigned on Friday. His case has been sealed since September.

Since the revelation was made in error, no other details about the charges against Assange were revealed.

Dwyer is also assigned to the WikiLeaks case. People familiar with the matter said in November that what Dwyer was disclosing was true, but unintentional.

Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for EDVA, said “the court filing was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing.”

The DOJ has for years refused to reveal whether charges have been pending against Assange under seal, though it was widely believed that they were. But seeing as filings like Dwyer’s are probably vetted by multiple readers, the fact that an error of such magnitude was allowed to be made is almost suspicious in and of itself.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2FKaGjx Tyler Durden