Author: admin

Via The Saker blog,

By Aleksandr Khaldey
Translated by Ollie Richardson and Angelina Siard
cross posted with https://www.stalkerzone.org/basel-3-a-revolution-that-once-again-no-one-noticed/
source: http://www.iarex.ru/articles/65626.html

Real revolutions are taking place not on squares, but in the quiet of offices, and that’s why nobody noticed the world revolution that took place on March 29th 2019. Only a small wave passed across the periphery of the information field, and the momentum faded away because the situation was described in terms unclear to the masses.

No “Freedom, equality, brotherhood”, “Motherland or death”, or “Power to Councils, peace to the people, bread to the hungry, factories to the worker, and land to the farmers” – none of these masterpieces of world populism were used. And that’s why what happened was understood in Russia by only a few people. And they made such comments that the masses either did not fully listen to them or did not read up to the end. Or they did listen to the end, but didn’t understand anything.

But they should’ve, because the world changed so cardinally that it is indeed time for Nathan Rothschild, having crumpled a hat in his hand, to climb onto an armoured Rolls-Royce [a joke referencing what Lenin did – ed], and to shout from on top of it to all the Universe: “Comrades! The world revolution, the need for which revolutionaries spoke about for a long time, came true!” [paraphrasing what Lenin said – ed] And he would be completely right. It’s just that the results of the revolution will be implemented slowly, and that’s why they are imperceptible for the population. But the effects, nevertheless, will be soon seen by absolutely everyone, up to the last cook who even doesn’t seek to learn to govern the state soon.

This revolution is called “Basel III”, and it was made by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Its essence is in the following: BIS runs the IMF, and this, in turn, runs the central banks of all countries. The body of such control is called BCBS – the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. It isn’t just some worthless US State Department or Congress of American senators. It’s not a stupid Pentagon, a little Department of the Treasury, which runs around like the CIA’s servant on standby, or a house of collective farmers with the name “White House”.

This isn’t even the banks of the US Federal Reserve, which govern all of this “wealth”. This is a Government of all of them combined. That real world Government that people in the world try not to speak about aloud.

BCBS is the Politburo of the world, whose Secretary General, according to rumours, is comrade Baruch, and the underground structure of the Central Committee is even more secret. It has many euphemisms, the most adequate of which is “Zurich gnomes”. This is what Swiss bankers are called. Not even owners of commercial banks, but namely those ordinary-looking men sitting in the Swiss city of Basel who Hitler – who tried to attach the whole world to the Third Reich, and who preserved neutrality with Switzerland during all the war – didn’t dare to attack. And, as is known, in Switzerland, besides Swiss rifleman, in reality there isn’t even an army. So who was the frenzied Fuhrer afraid of?

Nevertheless, the “recommendations” that were made by BCBS on March 29th 2019 were immediately, at the snap of the fingers, accepted for execution by all the central banks of the world. And our Russian Central Bank is not an exception. There is even the statement of the press service of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation posted on the official website of the Central Bank. It is called “Concerning the terms of implementation of Basel III”. The planned world revolution was in 2017 (magic of dates and digits or just a coincidence [a reference to 1917 – ed]?), but it has started only now.

Its essence is simple.

In the world the system of exclusive dollar domination established in 1944 in Bretton Woods and reformed in 1976 in Jamaica, where gold’s equivalency to money was cancelled. The dollar became world money and gold became an ordinary exchange good, like metal or sugar traded in London on commodity exchanges. However, this was determined there by only three firms of the “Pool of London” that belong to an even smaller number of owners, but, nevertheless, it’s not gold, but oil that became the dollar filler.

We have lived in such a world ever since. Gold was considered as a reserve of the third category for all banks, from central to commercial ones, where the reserves were, first of all, in dollars and bonds of the US. The norms of Basel III demand an increase, first of all, in monetary reserves. This impeded the volumes of monetary resources of banks that could be used to carry out expansion, but it was a compulsory measure for saving the stability of a world banking system that showed to be insufficient in a crisis.

In Russia pseudo-patriots were very much indignant at this, demanding to reject Basel III, which they called a sign of “a lack of sovereignty”. In reality, this is a quite normal demand to observe international standards of bank security, which were becoming more rigid, but since we [Russians – ed] were not printing dollars, so of course it had an impact on us. And since the alternative is an exit from world financial communications into full isolation, so our authorities, of course, did not want to accept such nonsense that was even designated by pseudo-patriots as a “lack of sovereignty”. To call sovereignty – freedom, to put your head in the noose is, let’s agree, a strange interpretation of the term.

The Basel III decision meant that gold as a reserve of the third category was earlier estimated at 50% of its value on the balance sheets of world banks. At the same time, all owners of world money traded in gold not physically, but on paper, without the movement of real metal, the volume of which in the world wasn’t enough for real transactions. This was done in order to push down the price of gold, to keep it as low as possible. First of all, for the benefit of the dollar. After all, the dollar is tied to oil, which had to cost no less than the price of one gram of gold per barrel.

And now it was decided to place gold not in the third, but “just” in the first category. And it means that now it is possible to evaluate it not at 50, but at 100% of its value. This leads to the revaluation of the balance sheet total. And concerning Russia, it means that now we can quietly, on all legal grounds, pour nearly 3 trillion rubles into the economy. If to be precise, it is 2.95 trillion rubles or $45 billion at the exchange rate in addition to the current balance sheet total. The Central Bank of the Russian Federation can pour this money into our economy on all legal grounds. How it will happen in reality isn’t yet known. Haste here without calculating all the consequences is very dangerous. Although this emission is considered as noninflationary, actually everything is much more complicated.

During the next few months nothing will change in the world. The U-turn will be very slow. In the US the gold reserves officially total 8133.5 tons, but there is such a thing as a financial multiplier: for every gold dollar, the banks print 20-30 digital paper ones. I.e., the US can only officially receive $170 billion in addition, but taking into account the multiplier – $4.5 trillion. This explains why the Federal Reserve System holds back on increasing interests rates and so far maintains the course towards lowering the balance sheet total – they are cautious of a surge in hyperinflation.

But all the largest states and holders of gold will now revalue their gold and foreign exchange reserves: Germany, Italy, France, Russia, China, and Switzerland – countries where the gold reserves exceed 1,000 tons. Notice that there is no mumpish Britain in this list. Its reserves are less than 1000 tons. Experts suspect that it is perhaps not a coincidence that the dates of Brexit and the date of Basel III coincide. The increased financial power of the leaders of Europe – Germany and France – is capable of completely concluding the dismantlement of Britain on the European continent. It was necessary to get out as soon as possible.

Thus, it seems that it is possible to congratulate us – the dollar era lasting from 1944 to 2019 has ended. Now gold is restored in its rights and is not an exchange metal, but world money on an equal basis with the dollar, euro, and British pound. Now gold will start to rise in price, and its price will rise from $1200-1400 per troy ounce up to $1800-2000 by this autumn. Now it is clear why Russia and China during all these years so persistently decanted its export income into the growth of gold reserves. There is now such a situation where nobody in the world will sell gold.

Injections of extra money will suffice for the world economy for 5-6 months. In the US this money can be used to pay off the astronomical debt. Perhaps this wasn’t Zurich’s last motive for making such a decision. But after all, the most important thing is an attempt to slip out from under the Tower of Pisa that is the falling dollar.

Since the dollar and oil are connected, the growth of the price of gold will directly affect the growth of the price of oil. Now a barrel costs as much as 1.627 grams of gold. A price growth will cause the world economy – where 85% of the money dollar supply turns into stock surrogates like shares, bonds, and treasuries – to cave in. The stock exchange will not be able to bundle together such an additional mass of money any more.

It will be good for oil industry workers – even, perhaps, best of all, but not for long. The economical crash because of expensive oil will become a crash for all oil industry workers too. It is precisely this that is the main reason why our rights for additional emissions can remain unused in full volume, although a gift in such a form will not be completely ignored. The May ‘Decrees of Putin’ in the current context are being understood completely differently. Russia runs away from the oil-based economic model in all ways. Including by political reforms and changing the elites.

However, why is the decision of Basel a revolution?

Because from the autumn the financial flood in the world economy will begin. It will entail the acceleration of Russia and China’s isolation from the dollar system and the crash of the economies that completely depend on the dollar – the vassal countries of the US. It will be worst of all for them. And this means that the reasons for increased distancing between the EU and the US will increase in number manyfold.

A redrawing of the map of global unions awaits the world.

And the redrawing of these unions will be carried out not least by military methods. Or with their partial use, but in one way or another, reasoning involving force in the world will increase almost to the level of guaranteed war. “Almost” is our hope for rescue, because the US loses all main instruments of influence on this world. Except force.

But it’s not for this purpose that the “Zurich gnomes” created this world, so that the US is so simply turned into radioactive ashes. The US will be drenched with cold water like a broken down nuclear reactor, while the world has entered the zone of the most global transformations over the past few centuries. The revolution that so many waited for, were afraid of, and spoke so much about has started. Buckle up and don’t smoke, the captain and crew wish you a pleasant flight.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Z3T1Km Tyler Durden

Russian president Vladimir Putin said he’s ready to turn the leaf on the first two years of diplomatic scandals between the US and Russia, and is seeking areas of cooperation with his US counterprart (and according to various now debunked lunatics, spy) Donald Trump, calling the furor over election-meddling allegations part of the deep political crisis in Washington.

In his first public comments on the outcome of Robert Mueller’s investigation which found no collusion or conspiracy between Trump and Russia, Putin welcomed the controversial findings.

“We said from the very start that this notorious commission of Mr. Mueller wouldn’t find anything because we know this better than anyone,” Putin told the International Arctic Forum in St. Petersburg on Tuesday, adding that it was “utter nonsense aimed solely at a domestic audience and used for internal political struggle in the U.S.”

In retrospect, he was right.

As a reminder, Trump scored the biggest political victory of his presidency – even as the credibility of the US liberal medial plumbed new lows – last month after AG William Barr published a summary of Mueller’s finding that there was no collusion during the campaign. Trump, who repeatedly – and correctly – condemned the 22-month inquiry as a “witch hunt” said he’d been completely exonerated.

Agreeing with his US colleague, Putin said that witch hunts are “a black page” in U.S. history and “I would not like it ever to happen again” (here the conspiracy nuts should be ready to chime in with a witty rejoinder). The outcome of the Mueller investigation showed that “a mountain gave birth to a mouse,” the Russian president said.

While Putin said when the two leaders met in Helsinki last year that he’d wanted Trump to win the 2016 election because of his pledge to improve relations – and because Hillary Clinton’s State Department did everything in its power to set the stage for a war between Russia and Ukraine – he avoided generating more controversy, and said he supports Trump’s re-election in 2020.

“We respect the wishes of the American people,” he said. “Whoever is president, we’re ready to work with them.”

To be sure, much bad blood remains between the US “deep state” and Moscow: recall that US intelligence agencies “concluded” that Russia was behind hacking aimed at damaging Democratic Party contender Hillary Clinton (which unveiled that the DNC had rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders, and that Hillary Clinton was a professional in saying one thing to the public and something else to Wall Street). Russia, naturally, rejects the allegations. Trump pledged during his campaign to improve ties with Russia and has repeatedly said he wants good relations with Putin.

As for how the former KGB spy and Trump are getting along currently, Putin said he has “plenty of disagreements” with Trump, whose administration has imposed a series of new sanctions on his country, but is ready to work with the U.S. on issues of joint interest including terrorism and arms control.

“We hope that when this situation normalizes, opportunities will emerge for bilateral cooperation on all issues,” Putin said.

* * *

Separately, Putin also said that Russia will dramatically increase its presence in the Arctic region by building new ports and other facilities and expanding its fleet of icebreaker vessels, as the competition for the area’s natural resources intensifies.

Putin told the leaders of Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden at the Forum that Russia’s efforts will help quadruple the level of cargo shipments across the Arctic sea route.

“This is a realistic, well-calculated, and concrete task. We need to make the Northern sea route safe and commercially feasible,” he said.

And here is another irony: climate change is directly benefiting Russia – the shrinking polar ice in the Arctic region is expected to offer new opportunities for resource exploration and the development of new shipping lanes, leading Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, and Norway into a competition for jurisdiction in the region.

Putin set a goal for the amount of cargo carried across the shipping lane to rise to 80 million metric tons by 2025 from the 20 million tons transported in 2018, the majority under Russian-flagged vessels. Russia, the only country with a fleet of nuclear icebreakers, is moving to expand its current inventory of four nuclear-powered vessels to a total of nine by 2035, he said. It also has four nonnuclear icebreakers in its fleet, according to RFE.

In 2017, Jim Mattis, the former U.S. defense secretary noted the Russian buildup and said that “America has got to up its game in the Arctic.”

“The Arctic is key strategic terrain. Russia is taking aggressive steps to increase its presence there. I will prioritize the development of an integrated strategy for the Arctic,” said Mattis, who left his position at the end of 2018.

At the Arctic forum, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov defended the military buildup, saying, “We don’t threaten anyone.”

“We ensure sufficient defense capabilities given the political and military situation around our borders,” He added.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2G1nlwr Tyler Durden

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.

Don’t ask me what I want it for
If you don’t want to pay some more
‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman…
And you’re working for no one but me.
— George Harrison, “Taxman”

We’re not living the American Dream. We’re in the grip of a financial nightmare.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

We get taxed on how much we earn, taxed on what we eat, taxed on what we buy, taxed on where we go, taxed on what we drive, and taxed on how much is left of our assets when we die, and yet we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used.

Case in point: Lawmakers across the country have been acting as fronts for corporations, sponsoring more than 10,000 model laws written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks such as the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Make no mistake: this is fascism disguised as legislative expediency.

As a recent investigative report by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity points out, these copycat bills have been used to “override the will of local voters” and advance the agendas of the corporate state. “Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called ‘model’ bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.”

In this way, laws that promise to protect the public “actually bolster the corporate bottom line.”

For example, “The Asbestos Transparency Act didn’t help people exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations who wanted to make it harder for victims to recoup money. The ‘HOPE Act,’ introduced in nine states, was written by a conservative advocacy group to make it more difficult for people to get food stamps.”

Talk about Orwellian.

So we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn.

This is true whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities. Even monetary awards in lawsuits against government officials who are found guilty of wrongdoing are paid by the taxpayer.

We’re being forced to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, for misguided pork barrel projects that do little to enhance our lives, and for the trappings of a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

All the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

We’re being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.

Truly, if there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the taxpayers—who fuel the nation’s economy and fund the government’s programs—always get ripped off.

Examples abound of wasteful government spending.

$28 million for a camouflage pattern for the Afghan National Army’s uniforms that had to be discarded because it clashes with the desert; $80 million to corral wild horses that would fare better unpenned; $5 million for a study to conclude that fraternity and sorority members drink more than their peers; and more than $1 billion worth of small arms, mortars, Humvees, and other equipment that has gone “missing” in Iraq.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its money grabs.

Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.

With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

The overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the NSA; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; roving TSA sweeps; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies such as the IRS, Dept. of Education, the Smithsonian and others with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Meanwhile, the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and the agencies under their command—Defense, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, etc.—have switched their allegiance to the Corporate State with its unassailable pursuit of profit at all costs and by any means possible.

We are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the police state is spending our hard-earned tax dollars to further entrench its powers and entrap its citizens.

If you want to know the real motives behind the government’s agenda, follow the money trail.

When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.

It gets worse.

Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

Those football stadiums that charge exorbitant sums for nosebleed seats? Our taxpayer dollars subsidize them.

Those blockbuster war films? Yep, we were the silent investors on those, too.

This isn’t freedom.

You’re not free if the government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes.

You’re not free if government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing.

And you’re certainly not free if the IRS gets the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

As former Congressman Ron Paul observed, “The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.”

Unfortunately, somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), and representative government has been rejected in favor of a kakistocracy (a government run by the most unprincipled citizens that panders to the worst vices in our nature: greed, violence, hatred, prejudice and war) ruled by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.

The American kleptocracy continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight.

It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president.

It has been a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

By playing on our prejudices about those who differ from us, capitalizing on our fears for our safety, and deepening our distrust of those fellow citizens whose opinions run counter to our own, the powers-that-be have effectively divided us into polarized, warring camps incapable of finding consensus on the one true menace that is an immediate threat to all of our freedoms: the U.S. government.

We are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few.

Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us.

All of those nefarious government deeds that you read about in the paper every day: those are your tax dollars at work.

So what are you going to do about it?

There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?

What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if we don’t have the right to decide what happens to our hard-earned cash, then we don’t have any rights at all.

After all, the government isn’t taking our money to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

This is nothing less than financial tyranny.

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

A UK computer hacker working for a Russian crime group has been jailed for six years and five months for his role in blackmailing unsuspecting would-be masterbators who visited pornography websites, according to the UK’s National Crime Agency. 

An undisclosed number of victims from over 20 countries were pumped for millions of dollars in the scheme, in which 24-year-old computer scientist Zain Qaiser of Barking in Essex used fraudulent identities and fake companies to buy advertising space on legal porn sites, which were “laced with malicious software.” Once a victim’s computer was infected, a pop-up message purporting to be law enforcement would accuse people of crimes – which they could rectify by paying a fine.

When users clicked on the ads they were redirected to another website, hosting highly-sophisticated malware strains including the infamous Angler Exploit Kit (AEK) – believed to have been created, managed and marketed by one of Qaiser’s Russian-speaking associates. Users with any vulnerabilities would subsequently be infected with a malicious payload.

One of those malicious payloads was a piece of software called Reveton – a type of malware that would lock a user’s browser. Once locked, the infected device would display a message purporting to be from a law enforcement or a government agency, which claimed an offence had been committed and the victim had to pay a fine of anything between $300-$1,000 in order to unlock their device. –National Crime Agency

According to UK authorities, Qaiser spent his more than £700,000 ($912,000 US) share of the ill-gotten-booty on stays in high-end hotes, hookers, gambling, drugs and luxury items – including a £5,000 ($6,500 US) Rolex watch. During one 10-month stretch, Qaiser spent £68,000 ($88,000 US) on gambling in one London casino. 

Qaiser was brought down in the “extremely long-running, complex cyber-crime investigation” in which UK investigators worked with agencies in the US, Canada and Europe – while the FBI and US Secret Service arrested others in connection to the global malware campaign. 

“Zain Qaiser was an integral part of this organised crime group generating millions of pounds in ransom payments by blackmailing countless victims and threatening them with bogus police investigations,” reads the report. 

Qaiser admitted to 11 offenses – including blackmail, fraud, money laundering and computer misuse. He was jailed at Kingston Crown Court. Zain better hope that nobody in prison uses a backdoor exploit to access his mainframe. 

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

Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,

The Great Russia Deception all began with John Brennan.

It was Brennan who reported “contacts… between Russian officials and persons in the Trump campaign”, just as it was Brennan who first referred the case to former FBI Director James Comey. It was also Brennan who “hand-picked” the analysts who stitched together the dodgy Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which said that “Putin and the Russian government aspired to help…Trump’s election chances.”) And it was Brennan who persuaded Harry Reid to petition Comey to open an investigation. At every turn, Brennan was there. He got the ball rolling, he pulled all the right strings, he whipped up a mood of public hysteria, and he excoriated the president at every opportunity. For those who want to know where Russiagate began, look no further than John Brennan.

Here’s a bit of what Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee during his testimony in 2017:

“We were uncovering information and intelligence about interactions and contacts between U.S. persons and the Russians. And as we came upon that, we would share it with the bureau.”

Brennan’s statement clarifies his role in the operation, he was providing the raw intelligence to Comey and Comey was reluctantly following up with surveillance, wiretaps, leaks to the media, and the placing of confidential informants in the Trump campaign. It was a tag-team combo, but Brennan was the primary instigator, there’s no doubt about that.

And let’s not forget that Comey didn’t really want to participate in Brennan’s hairbrain scheme to smear candidate Trump. At first he balked, which is why Brennan leaned on Senate Majority leader Harry Reid to twist Comey’s arm. Here’s a little background from Tom Fitton at artvoice.com:

“Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid reportedly believed then-Obama CIA Director Brennan was feeding him information about alleged links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in order to make public accusations:

According to ‘Russian Roulette,’ by Yahoo! News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff and David Corn… Brennan contacted Reid on Aug. 25, 2016, to brief him on the state of Russia’s interference in the presidential campaign. Brennan briefed other members of the so-called Gang of Eight, but Reid is the only who took direct action.

Two days after the briefing, Reid wrote a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey asserting that ‘evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount.’ Reid called on Comey to investigate the links ‘thoroughly and in a timely fashion.’

Reid saw Brennan’s outreach as ‘a sign of urgency,’ Isikoff and Corn wrote in the book. ‘Reid also had the impression that Brennan had an ulterior motive. He concluded the CIA chief believed the public needed to know about the Russian operation, including the information about the possible links to the Trump campaign.’

According to the book, Brennan told Reid that the intelligence community had determined that the Russian government was behind the hack and leak of Democratic emails and that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind it. Brennan also told Reid that there was evidence that Russian operatives were attempting to tamper with election results. Indeed, on August 27, 2016, Reid wrote a letter to Comey accusing President Trump’s campaign of colluding with the Russian government.” (“The John Brennan-Harry Reid Collusion to ‘Get Trump’”, artvoice.com)

So Brennan fed Reid a load of malarkey and the credulous senator swallowed it hook, line and sinker. It may sound incredible now, given the results of the Mueller report, but that’s what happened. Here’s more of Brennan’s testimony to Congress:

“I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals and it raised questions in my mind, again, whether or not the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”

Okay, so Brennan says he gathered “information and intelligence that revealed contacts between Russian officials and persons in the Trump campaign.”

What information? What intelligence? What officials? Brennan has never identified anyone and never produced a lick of evidence to back up any of his claims, and yet, his testimony was taken as gospel truth. Why? Why would anyone in their right mind trust anything Brennan has to say? Hasn’t Brennan lied to Congress in the past? Didn’t the CIA’s inspector general find that Brennan’s agents “improperly” spied on US Senate staffers”? Hasn’t Brennan defended the use of torture and promoted Obama’s homicidal drone program? Hasn’t Brennan revealed his personal animus and vitriolic hatred for Donald Trump many, many times before. So why would anyone trust what he has to say? It makes no sense. The man has a major credibility problem which is a polite way of saying he’s a serial liar. Here’s more from Brennan:

“I don’t know whether or not such collusion — and that’s your term, such collusion existed. I don’t know. But I know that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.”

Got that? So Brennan had zero hard evidence of anything, but he thought that a few scratchy phone intercepts were sufficient for the FBI to hector, harass and spy on the GOP nominee for president of the United States. Can you see how ridiculous this is? No one elected John Brennan to anything, and yet, he arbitrarily decided that he had the right to sex up the intelligence so Comey and Clapper would do his bidding and try to bring down Trump. This is the type of thing you’d expect to see in a police state not America.

We are told by the Guardian that:

“GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters) played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016. One source called the British eavesdropping agency the “principal whistleblower”. (Guardian)

This might be true, but I seriously doubt it. I suspect the Guardian is just covering for Brennan because they know that his ridiculous claims of “contacts between Russian officials and persons in the Trump campaign” are complete, utter nonsense. There were no contacts between Russian officials and the Trump campaign because–as the Mueller report states– there was no coordination, no cooperation, and no collusion. In other words, Brennan just made it up to pursue his own personal vendetta against Trump which is what you’d expect from the most partisan CIA chief in history. Here’s more from the same article:

“The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow ahead of the US election. This was in part due to US law that prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of American citizens without warrants. “They are trained not to do this,” the source stressed.” (Guardian)

“The extensive nature of contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow”???

There were no extensive contacts nor were there any illegal, unethical or improper contacts. If there were, AG Barr would have highlighted them in the 4-page Mueller report summary released last weekend. But he didn’t, because they don’t exist. The Democrats are now clinging to the feint hope that their flimsy obstruction case can be pulled from the ash-heap, but that’s not going to happen. It’s impossible to obstruct a case when you already know the case is is a fraud. Trump did not break the law. It’s that simple.

As for Brennan, well, he was providing classified briefings to ranking members of Congress (expressing his belief that Moscow was helping Trump win the election) as early as August 2016. The date seems particularly relevant given that Trump did not become the GOP’s official presidential nominee until July 21, 2016. Was that just a coincidence or did it suddenly dawn on Brennan that Trump must be a Kremlin mole shortly after he clinched the top spot on the ticket? Funny how that works, isn’t it? Trump nabs the nomination and all of a sudden Brennan shifts into high gear digging up all kinds of fictional intercepts from Estonia and god-knows where else. Is this the looniest story you’ve ever heard or what?

There’s really no part of Brennan’s implausible storyline that holds water. Even his flagship Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which was supposed to provide iron-clad proof of Trump’s culpability, fizzled out like a Roman candle in a summer downpour.

Brennan of course hit all the cable news stations shortly after the ICA was released touting its wishy-washy findings as rock-solid proof of wrongdoing but, strangely enough, the report undermined its own credibility by providing a sweeping disclaimer that cautions readers against drawing any rash conclusions from the analysts observations. Here’s the money-quote from the report:

“Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”

Nice, eh? So, while Brennan continues to insist that the Kremlin meddled in our elections, his own analysts suggest that any such judgements should be taken with a very large grain of salt. Nothing is certain, information is “incomplete or fragmentary”, and the entire report is based on what-amounts-to ‘educated guesswork.’ It’s a wonder why anyone took the report seriously to begin with.

There’s no way to get around the fact that Brennan was glitzing up the intelligence to persuade Comey into hounding Trump. That’s the bottom line here. The unelected agents in the bureaucracy decided to use their considerable power to try to sabotage the election, prevent the normalisation of relations with Russia, and pave the way for impeachment proceedings. Only they got caught with their pants down, so someone’s going to have to take the fall.

Who is responsible for placing spies in the Trump campaign? That’s what we want to know.

Who is Stefan Halper and who did he work for?

Why did he cozy up to Trump campaign advisers Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos?

Was it all part of an ‘entrapment’ scheme?

How many other spies were assigned to the Trump campaign?

What was their purpose and who did they work for?

Who signed off on the FISA applications that were improperly obtained?

How was the Steele dossier used to build the case against Trump?

Who authorized or participated in the leaks to the media? Who approved the wiretapping of Trump advisors?

Was Trump wiretapped too?

What was Obama’s role in all of this? How much did he know and how much did he authorize?

How has Brennan escaped blame for the political firestorm he started?

(According to Mother Jones, it was not the FBI that initiated the “Trump-Russia connection”.. but ..”Former CIA Director John Brennan … was the one who got the ball rolling.”)

The only way the American people are going to find out what really happened is by interrogating the people who know. Putting John Brennan in the docket would be a good place to start.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UKtZ3k Tyler Durden

The warm weather is back, and with it Chicago’s iconic weekend mass shootings (which somehow never make it to the front pages).

Twenty four people were shot in 24 hours in Chicago between April 6-7, including three adults and three children, who died from gunshot-related injuries, according to the Chicago Police Department. The mayhem started early Saturday morning and continued into the afternoon hours on Sunday.

Police, and common sense, both allege that warmer weather was responsible for the surge in violent crime.

During the weekend horror, Chicago police investigated multiple homicides and a mass shooting of six people in West Englewood. Three people were shot in East Garfield Park at 3:30 am Sunday. A 34-year-old was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital with a gunshot wound to the leg, a 26-year-old was taken to Norwegian American Hospital with a gunshot wound to his foot, and a 33-year-old was taken to Rush University Medical Center after he was shot in the arm.

There is some good news: so far in 2018, Chicago shooting are trending about 20% below 2018, and well below the recent record hit in 2016, when nearly double the number of people had been shot through April 8.

A teenager was shot to death Saturday afternoon, in the 1700 block of West Steuben Street in Morgan Park.

About 6:10 a.m on Sunday, officers found a 32-year-old man, shot in the back multiple times, was transported to University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

Two of the three homicide investigations were conducted on Sunday. About 8:30 a.m. officers found a man, 52, with a single gunshot wound to the head at the 700 block of South Normal Boulevard in Englewood. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Chicago Tribune listed the other shootings: “A 13-year-old boy wounded in the 1200 of West 73rd Street in Englewood, a 45-year-old man wounded in the 2000 block of West 68th Place, a 28-year-old man was wounded in the 5100 block of West Madison Street in South Austin, a 28-year-old man wounded in the 4900 block of West Hubbard Street in South Austin, a 29-year-old man wounded in the 4100 of West Belmont Avenue in Kilbourn Park, a 30-year-old man wounded in the 400 block of East 103rd Street in Roosemoor, a 29-year-old man wounded in the 7900 block of South Halsted Street in Gresham, a 27-year-old man wounded in the first block of East 102nd Street in Roosemoor, a 20-year-old man and a 43-year-old man wounded in the 10300 of South Corliss Avenue in Roseland, a 39-year-old man wounded in the 200 block of North Long Avenue in South Austin.”

As temperatures soar, so does violent crime in concentrated urban areas. Besides Chicago, Baltimore, Detriot, and New Orleans also suffer from out of control gun violence, despite strict weapons restrictions: it is almost as if criminals choose not to obey gun control laws.

Shootings in the Windy City tends to rise in spring, peak in late summer months, then trough in late fall and winter. 

Temperatures over the weekend were above average, so far, the hottest day of the year.

“Temperatures certainly rebounded in the Chicago area this weekend versus temperatures in March and even the first few days of April. During March, the temperature averaged 3.6°F below normal at Chicago-O’Hare, with two days reaching the low to middle 60s during the month. This past weekend, the high was 66°F on Saturday and 67°F on Sunday, the warmest days of 2019, respectively (before Monday’s high temperature of 73°F). With some sunshine, the weather was very favorable for outdoor activities during this time, reported Meteorologist and owner of Empire Weather LLC., Ed Vallee.

Warm weather encourages people to go outside, where more social interactions occur. Probabilities of violence tend to soar on hot days, especially in neighborhoods where 15–24-year-old unemployment rates are elevated.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2G6gguv Tyler Durden

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

As a society we appear to be really dropping the ball, because the numbers indicate that American boys are deeply struggling in just about every area. 

Many professionals are pointing to a “crisis of fatherhood” as one of the key factors, and as I pointed out the other day, approximately a third of all U.S. children are now being raised in a home without a father.  Of course this negatively affects our girls as well, but there is something about that lack of a masculine role model that seems to particularly hurt boys.  However, the lack of a traditional family structure cannot explain all of the numbers that I am about to share with you.  As you will see, we are facing a crisis that will not easily be solved.

Warren Farrell, the co-author of a new book entitled “The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It”, has identified three key areas that he is most concerned about.

The first is education…

It is a crisis of education. Worldwide, 60% of the students who achieve less than the baseline level of proficiency in any of the three core subjects of the Program for the International Assessment are boys. Even boys’ IQs are dropping.

Today, girls are educationally outperforming boys in elementary school, middle school and high school.

And by the time college rolls around, the performance gap is absolutely enormous.  In fact, females have earned at least 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the United States for 18 years in a row.

The second area Farrell is deeply concerned about is mental health…

It is a crisis of mental health. Boys’ suicide rate goes from only slightly more than girls before age 14 to three times that of girls’ between 15 and 19, to 4 1/2 times that of girls between 20 and 24. Mass shooters, prisoners and Islamic State terrorism recruits are at least 90% male.

In addition to all of that, males commit 90 percent of all homicides in the United States, and men lead women by a very wide margin in just about every other violent crime category as well.

This is one area where the lack of a father in the home really seems to make a difference.  According to one very alarming study, when there is a 1 percent increase in fatherlessness in a neighborhood, on average it leads to a 3 percent rise in adolescent violence.

Sadly, it appears that our young people are steadily becoming unhappier over time.  The following numbers come from the Free Beacon…

Recent years have seen a rise in Americans 12 to 25 saying they are unhappy. Since 2012, the proportion of 8th and 10th graders who tell the Monitoring the Future survey that they felt unhappy has crept up from 13 percent to 18 percent. In roughly the same time, the proportion of 18- to 25-year-olds who say they are unhappy has risen from 11 to 17 percent, according to the General Social Survey.

And as I pointed out in one recent article, other studies have found a clear link between unhappiness and social media use.

The Internet can be used for great good, but it can also be heavily toxic, and today many of our young people are “plugged in” almost constantly…

Essentially 100 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds are on social media. Fifty-four percent think they spend too much time on their cellphone; 72 percent of teens say their phone is sometimes the first thing they look at upon waking up.

This, Twenge argues in her book iGen, explains a lot about why they are unhappy. Using several national surveys, Twenge argues that screen-using activities are linked to indicators of depression and unhappiness. For example, she finds that kids using devices more than three hours a day are 30 percent more likely to have an indicator of suicidality.

The third major area that Farrell is deeply concerned about is physical health…

It is a crisis of physical health. American men’s life expectancy has decreased two-tenths of a year even as American women’s has remained the same. Boys and men are dying earlier in 14 out of 15 of the leading causes of death.

Overall, men are living 4.9 years less than women in the United States.

One thing that would help would be to encourage our young men to avoid engaging in extremely risky behavior.  Young males tend to get hooked on drugs and alcohol at much higher rates than young females, and one recent study found that an alarming percentage of our boys are having sex before they reach the age of 13.  The following comes from CBS News…

Talking to your children about sex can be awkward, but new research suggests that parents need to have those conversations much earlier than they do.

In two national surveys, investigators found that between 4% and 8% of boys reported having sex before they were 13. That number varied greatly depending on where the boys lived. In San Francisco, just 5% of boys said they had sex before 13, but in Memphis that number jumped to 25%.

Can that number for Memphis possibly be accurate?

I certainly hope not.

Unfortunately, it is not just in the United States where boys are falling behind.  If you can believe it, boys are educationally behind girls in each of the 63 largest developed nations.

The world has changed, and it appears to be leaving boys behind.

But what is going to happen when all of those boys grow up?

The young people of today are the future, and right now that future is not looking very promising at all.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Ia5WVO Tyler Durden

A new op-ed in Bloomberg Quint has noted what the United States should really be worried about regarding Beijing’s intentions after a year of tense China-US Navy encounters in the South China Sea. This potential threat, which is “far harder to discern,” involves the world’s some 380 underwater cables carrying more than 95% of all data and voice traffic between the continents. Could China be stealthily hacking them? It is certainly now in a better position to do so. 

The piece details how the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies — already at the center of a broader US-China dispute over theft of trade secrets and unlawful dealings with sanctioned regimes like Iran — now has contracts to construct or improve nearly 100 submarine cables globally. 

In what sounds like a quick pivot away from now deflated ‘Russiagate’ (which seemed to also involve bi-monthly articles suggesting Putin was ever ready to cut the world’s submerged internet cables), western intelligence officials are now sounding the alarm over Beijing’s increased access and influence over such key global communications infrastructure. 

The report summarizes the view of “Western intelligence professionals” in the following: 

Just as the experts are justifiably concerned about the inclusion of espionage “back doors” in Huawei’s 5G technology, Western intelligence professionals oppose the company’s engagement in the undersea version, which provides a much bigger bang for the buck because so much data rides on so few cables.

The report notes further that last year Huawei Marine Networks in a joint project with China Unicorn, a state-controlled telecom operator, successfully laid a cable running nearly 4,000 miles from Brazil to Cameroon, and there’s plans for greater involvement in global internet traffic cables which would necessitate cooperating and in some case competing with US internet giants such as Google and Facebook, who lease or buy vast cable networks from companies that constructed them, whether private or state-owned.

The WSJ observed last month, “Chinese company Huawei is embedding itself into cable systems that ferry nearly all of the world’s internet data.” 

Map Of Underwater Cables That Supply The Worlds Internet, via MapPorn

Amidst the debate and resulting US official restriction on federal agencies using Huawai’s 5G equipment for fear of vulnerability to Chinese hacking, underwater internet infrastructure constructed by Huawai could prove the most sensitive global backdoor.

The report continues:  

Naturally, Huawei denies any manipulation of the cable sets it is constructing, even though the US and other nations say it is obligated by Chinese law to hand over network data to the government…

A similar dynamic is playing out underwater. How can the US address the security of undersea cables? There is no way to stop Huawei from building them, or to keep private owners from contracting with Chinese firms on modernizing them, based purely on suspicions. Rather, the US must use its cyber- and intelligence-gathering capability to gather hard evidence of back doors and other security risks. This will be challenging — the Chinese firms are technologically sophisticated and entwined with a virtual police state.

One of the more bizarre scenarios that the report floats is the possibility of submarines to “tap” the cables externally. This has long been discussed among military and intelligence analysts regarding Russia, but increasingly Beijing will come under scrutiny. 

One of those analysts, US Admiral Jamie Foggo, identified as a career submariner, told Bloomberg Quint: “Underwater cables are part of our critical infrastructure and essential to the global economy. The US must protect the integrity and security of them as surely as we provide international freedom of the high seas.” 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2uWF3ft Tyler Durden

Authored by Patrick Armstrong via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The West – its governments and its governments’ scribes – are obsessed with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Obsessed” is probably too weak a word to describe the years of impassioned coverage, airy speculation and downright nonsense. He is the world’s leading cover boy: military hats, Lenin poses, imperial crowns, scary red eyes, strait-jackets, clown hats; anything and everything. He’s the avatar of Stalin, he’s the avatar of the Tsars, he’s the Joker, he’s Cthulhu, he’s Voldemort, he’s Satan. He’s the palimpsest for the New World Order’s nightmares. Putin is always messing with our minds. He weaponises information, misinformation and sexual assault accusations. Childrens’ cartoons, fishsticks, Pokemon and Yellow Vests, “Putin’s warships” are lurking when they aren’t stalking; “Putin’s warplanes” penetrate European airspace; “Putin’s tanks”, massing in 2016, massing in 2018, still massing. His empire of rogue states grows. All Putin, all the time.

In an especially imbecile display in 2015, Western reporters (unable to find his website) thinking he hadn’t been seen for several days started a contest of speculation about coups, death, wars, plastic surgery, secret births and other nonsense; when he “re-appeared”, the story went down the Memory Hole.

For some reason, Americans personalise everything. In meetings with US intelligence agencies I was always fascinated how they would reduce every complicated reality to a single individual. But it isn’t Saddam, or Assad, or Qaddafi, or Osama, or Aidid, or Milosevic, or Maduro, or Castro or any of the other villains-of-the-day, it’s a whole country: these people got to the top for good reasons. Removing the boss makes some difference but never all the difference. They go but they never leave a Washington-friendly country behind and Washington does it all over again somewhere else. This peculiar blindness drives Putin Derangement Syndrome and has infected everybody else.

But Putin is much worse than the others. The other enemies had relatively weak countries but Russia could obliterate the USA. But worse, Putin’s team has steadily become more powerful and more influential. And worst of all, he’s still there: huffing and puffing has not blown him down, sanctions strengthen the economy and there is nothing to suggest he won’t be succeeded by someone who carries on the same policies. It’s a whole country, not just one man.

Vladimir Putin is the biggest man on earth.

Except that he’s short and can’t hide it. He’s a megalomaniac because he’s short; he’s trying to prove his bigness; napoleon complex says some shrink. Just another in a long list of crackpot “expert” opinions. From a list I complied in 2015: Asperger’s Syndrome, cancer of the spinal cord, personality disorders, gayness, Parkinson’s Disease, psychopath, people don’t like him so animals have to, sinister, lonely life, fears his own people, envious of Obama. Remember the “gunslinger walk”? Oh, in case you hadn’t heard, he was in the KGB and that explains everything: “Once a KGB man, always a KGB man”. Nothing is too absurd.

But laughing has passed – Putin Derangement Syndrome has become dangerous.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost a sure-fire election to Donald Trump and, looking for an excuse, jumped on the Russia claim. Putin Derangement Syndrome was ramped up to a much more dangerous level. War-level dangerous.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder said President Donald Trump’s administration is doing nothing to stop Russians from interfering in the 2018 election cycle, comparing the lack of action on the part of the president to the 9/11 and Pearl Harbor attacks that killed thousands of Americans.

A popular actor made a video to tell us we were at war. “Warfare” says Haley, “act of war” said John McCain, could be says Cheney, 911 says Clinton, disappointed CIA guy agrees, Pearl Harbor says Nadler. Diplomatic expulsions and sanctions and more sanctions. These are much more serious than gassy op-eds about Putin’s gait or fish weights, these are actions: actions have consequences. Moscow doesn’t find war talk very funny.

Clinton’s victory was 99% certain until it wasn’t and excuses were needed. Clinton went through a lot of them but “Russian interference” was always the big one.

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. [9 November 2016] Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument. (From Shattered, quoted here.)

In What Happened, Clinton also says Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support for Trump was driven by his own anti-women sentiment, stacking the deck against her: “What Putin wanted to do was…influence our election, and he’s not exactly fond of strong women, so you add that together and that’s pretty much what it means.” At press events for her memoir, Clinton continues to warn Americans against Russia’s power over Trump and the country. “The Russians aren’t done. This is an ongoing threat, and that is one of the reasons why I wrote the book and one of the reasons I’m talking about it,” she said on Sunday at Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival. (Newsweek)

Her claim is, to put it mildly, unproven; the so-called “all 17 agencies” report notwithstanding. (The first premise that it was hacked is here disproved: downloaded by someone in the building). Her accusation moved Putin Derangement Syndrome away from the realm of mere craziness into war talk. Taking the hint, Western politicians, under attack for their lacklustre performances, were happy to push the blame onto Putin. He’s attacking democracy! Western media weighed in until it became completely accepted by some people that anything that spoiled the happy complacency of the Western world must be a result of Putin’s interference: gilets jaunes, “assistance provided to far-right and anti-establishment parties”, he’s the poster boy of the dreaded populism, his populist tentacles reach Hungary and Italy. And the next thing we knew, Putin was mucking around in everybody’s votes: Brexit; Catalonia; Netherlands; Germany; Sweden; Italy; EU in particular and Europe in general; Mexico; Canada. Newsweek gives a helpful list. Sometimes he loses elections: Germany, Ukraine but he goes on, unstopping. But his greatest triumph was said to have been in the US election: he “won” because Donald Trump was his willing puppet.

(None of these “experts” ever seem to wonder why Putin’s influence, so decisive far away, is so ineffective in Ukraine or Georgia. But then, it’s not actually a rational, fact-based belief, is it?)

The entire ramshackle construction is collapsing: if Mueller says there was no collusion then even the last ditch believers will have to accept it: Robert Mueller Prayer Candles are out of stock, time to toss the other tchotchkes, it wasn’t a Mueller Christmas after all. Clinton’s fabrication had two parts to it: 1) Putin interfered/determined the election 2) in collusion with Trump. When the second part is blown up, so must the first be. And then what will happen to all the loyal little allies crying “ours were interfered with too”!? The two halves of the story had the same authors and the same purpose: if one dies, so must the other. Now that Trump is secured from the obstruction charges that hung there as long as Mueller was in session, he is free to declassify the background documents that will show the origin, mechanics, authors and extent of the conspiracy. And he has said he will. In the process, both halves of the story will be destroyed: they’re both lies.

(For those who now realise there is something they have to catch up on: Conrad Black has a good exposition of the overall conspiracy and here is a quick round-up of the mechanics of the conspiracy. This may show its very beginning, three years ago).

Will the exposure of the plot and the plotters end the war-talk stage of Putin Derangement Syndrome? In a rational world, it would (but can its believers be embarrassed by the exposure of their credulity? Can they be made to think it all over again from the beginning?). It is true that Russia stands in the way of the neocons and liberal interventionists who have been guiding Washington this century, but that hardly means that Putin is the enemy of the American people. Because, properly considered, it’s the neocons/liberal interventionists and their endless wars burning up lives, money and good will that are the enemies of Americans; in that respect Putin (unintentionally) stands with the true best interests of the American people. But the propaganda is so strong and the hysteria so unrestrained, that anyone who suggests that blocking the war party is in the best interests of Americans would be run out of town on a rail. (As the attacks on Tulsi Gabbard show.) The USA is far down the rabbit hole.

(Although I should say US elites: a Rasmussen poll shows that slightly more Americans think Clinton colluded with a foreign power than think Trump did. Considering the news coverage of the last two and a half years, that’s a very interesting finding.)

So, the sad conclusion is that Putin Derangement Syndrome will probably endure and the best we can hope for is that it is dialled down a bit and the “act of war” nonsense is quietly forgotten. Derangement was strong before the interference/collusion lie and it will exist as long as Putin does: the war party is too invested in personalities ever to realise that it’s Russia, not its president, that’s the obstacle. Let alone ever understand that much of what Moscow does is a pushback against Washington’s aggression.

Let The Onion have the last laugh at this dismal matter:

“What the hell? I worked so hard on this – if I wasn’t colluding with the Trump campaign, who the hell was I colluding with?” said the dumbfounded Russian president, growing increasingly angry as he scrolled through his email inbox and recounted his numerous efforts at covert communication with individuals who he had thought were high-ranking Trump officials, but now he suspected were bots or anonymous internet trolls.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UO1FNu Tyler Durden

For bitcoin traders, 2019 is starting to look like a repeat of 2017 in more ways than one.

While that might be a slight exaggeration (though bitcoin’s sudden surge over $5,000 last week  was certainly a welcome relief from more than a year of market doldrums, even sending the moribund bitcoin futures market higher), a headline that hit the tape this morning is bound to provoke comparisons to bitcoin’s heyday, when Chinese authorities briefly provoked a panic in the market by abruptly cracking down on crypto exchanges operating in the country, part of a campaign to bring the cryptocurrencies trade under state control.

Late Monday, China’s National Development Reform Commission listed crypto-mining among industries it intends to eliminate because of its environmental impact. The agency will allow public comment on the guidelines until May 7, but warned that they could take effect as soon as they are issued. As Bloomberg reports, China was once home to more than 90% of bitcoin trading and 70% of mining, thanks to notoriously cheap subsidized energy, particularly in the countryside. But after a crackdown began in 2017, most of the big mining pools in the country – including Bitmain – decamped for abroad, setting up mining pools in Canada and elsewhere. Back in 2018, Beijing reportedly asked local authorities to try and push crypto miners out.

Still, according to a consultant who spoke with Reuters, roughly half the bitcoin network is probably still located in China. And Chinese companies remain the largest manufacturers of bitcoin mining rigs.

Nearly half of bitcoin mining pools – groups of miners that team up for economies of scale – are located in the Asia-Pacific, a Cambridge University study said in December.

“Half of the network is probably located in China,” said Alex de Vries, a consultant with PwC in Amsterdam who specializes on blockchain and researches cryptocurrency mining. He added that the number of mining facilities in the world is still limited to several hundred.

One blockchain investor said China’s decision to finally ban crypto mining outright was probably part of a push to “reboot” the crypto industry to bring it under state control.

“The NDRC’s move is in line overall with China’s desire to control different layers of the rapidly growing crypto industry, and does not yet signal a major shift in policy,” said Jehan Chu, managing partner at blockchain investment firm Kenetic.

“I believe China simply wants to ‘reboot’ the crypto industry into one that they have oversight on, the same approach they took with the Internet.”

As Reuters pointed out, three Chinese makers of bitcoin mining equipment filed for IPOs in Hong Kong, but two have allowed their applications to lapse.

However, the two largest, Bitmain Technologies, the world’s largest manufacturer of bitcoin mining gear, and Canaan Inc, have since let their applications lapse.

People familiar with the deals said that Hong Kong regulators had many questions about the companies’ business models and prospects.

Bitmain declined to comment on the NDRC’s proposal to ban bitcoin mining. Canaan did not respond to requests for comment.

According to Canaan’s IPO prospectus filed last year, sales of blockchain hardware primarily for cryptocurrency mining in China were worth 8.7 billion yuan ($1.30 billion) in 2017, 45 percent of global sales by value.

In any event, any miners who are still operating in China will likely follow their peers abroad. Which could be a boon for Canadian ghost towns with access to abundant power sources who are looking for a tech revolution to save their ailing communities.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KpXPq7 Tyler Durden