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
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.
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.
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.
Image via Extreme Tech
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.
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.
Underwater internet cable, via Wikimedia Commons
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
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.
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.
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)
(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.
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.
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.
“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
Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, as Max Blumenthal points out in his insightful book “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump,” was made possible not only by massive social inequality and concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the oligarchic elites but by the national security state’s disastrous and prolonged military interventions overseas.
From the CIA’s funneling of over a billion dollars to Islamic militants in the 1970s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union to the billion dollars spent on training and equipping the radical jihadists currently fighting in Syria, the United States has repeatedly empowered extremists who have filled the vacuums of failed states it created. The extremists have turned with a vengeance on their sponsors. Washington’s fueling of these conflicts was directly responsible for the rise of figures such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden and ultimately laid the groundwork for the 9/11 attacks. It also spawned the rabid Islamophobia in Europe and the United States that defines Trump’s racist worldview and has been successfully used to justify the eradication of basic civil liberties and democratic rights.
The misguided interventions by the national security apparatus have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, over 5 million desperate refugees fleeing to Europe, the destruction of entire cities, the squandering of some $5 trillion of U.S. taxpayer money, rampant corruption and criminality. The mandarins of national security, rather than blunt the rise of radical jihadism, have ensured its spread across the globe. The architects of this imperial folly have a symbiotic relationship with those they profess to hate. The two radical extremes—the interventionists in the national security apparatus and the radical jihadists—play off of each other to countenance ever-greater acts of savagery. The more perfidious your enemy, the more your own extremism is justified. We are locked in a macabre dance with the killers we created and empowered, matching war crime for war crime, torture for torture and murder for murder. This unrestrained violence has a dark momentum that escapes management and control. It exacerbates the very insecurity it claims to be attempting to eliminate by constantly creating legions of new enemies.
“Drone strikes take out a few bad guys to be sure, but they also kill a large number of innocent civilians,” Nabeel Khoury, a former U.S. deputy chief of mission in Yemen, argues. “Given Yemen’s tribal structure, the U.S. generates roughly forty to sixty new enemies for every AQAP [al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula] operative killed by drones.”
The binary view of the world imagined by right-wing ideologues such as Richard Pipes during the Cold War, defined as a battle to the death against godless communism, has been reimagined by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American neocons such as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Fred Fleitz, Robert Kagan, Steve Bannon, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and leaders of the Christian right including Gary Bauer and William Bennett to become a battle to the death between the “barbarity” of Islam and the “civilized” ethic of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a rebranding of the Cold War, so useful to the retrograde forces of capitalism in crushing popular dissent and so profitable to the arms industry. Its most prominent voices are a bizarre collection of neofascist ideologues and quack conspiracy theorists such as Bannon, Sean Hannity, Stephen Miller and Pam Geller, who claims that Barack Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.
This ideology, like the ideology of anti-communism, erases not only history but context. Those who oppose us are removed from the realm of the rational. They are seen as incomprehensible. Their hate has no justification. They are human embodiments of evil that must be eradicated. They despise us for our “values” or because they are driven by a perverted form of Islam. The failure, as Blumenthal writes, to place these conflicts in context, to examine our own complicity in fueling a justifiable anger, even rage, dooms us to perpetual misunderstanding and perpetual warfare. Our response is to employ greater and greater levels of violence that only expand the extremism at home and abroad. This demented project, as Blumenthal writes, collapses “the fragile space where multi-confessional societies survive.” It bifurcates political space into competing forms of extremism between the jihadists and the counter-jihadists. It creates a strange and even comforting “mutually reinforcing symbiosis” that depends “on a constantly escalating sense of antagonism.”
The methods used on a wary public by the national security state, especially the FBI and the intelligence agencies, to justify and advance these wars are increasingly unsavory. Muslims, many suffering from emotional and mental disabilities, are baited by law enforcement into “terrorist” plots that few of them could have conceived or organized on their own. The highly publicized arrests and quashing of these nascent “terrorist plots” exaggerate the presence of radical jihadists within the country. They keep fear at a fever pitch among the U.S. population. Trevor Aaronson, the author of “Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terror,” found that nearly half of all terror prosecutions between Sept. 11, 2001, and 2010 involved informants, including some with criminal backgrounds who were paid as much as $100,000 by the FBI. Aaronson noted that during the last year of the George W. Bush administration the government did not prosecute anyone arrested in a terrorist “sting.” But such stings exploded under Barack Obama, a tactic that Blumenthal writes was “designed to cast his administration as just as tough on terror as any Republican”—the Obama administration “announced an arrest resulting from a terrorism sting every sixty days.” This suggested, Aaronson writes, “that there are a lot of ineffective terrorists in the United States, or that the FBI has become effective at creating the very enemy it is hunting.”
The longer and more confusing the “war on terror” becomes, nearly two decades on, the more irrational our national discourse becomes. The paranoid and racist narratives of the far right have poisoned the mainstream dialogue. These racist tropes are repeated by the White House, members of Congress and the press.
“Islamophobia had become the language of a wounded empire, the guttural roar of its malevolent violence turned back from the sands of Iraq and the mountain passes of Afghanistan, and leveled against the mosque down the turnpike, the hijabi in the checkout line, the Sikh behind the cash register—the neighbors who looked like The Enemy,” Blumenthal writes.
Far-right parties are riding this rampant Islamophobia, fueled by the catastrophic failures in the Middle East, to power in Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Sweden, Poland and Hungary. This toxic hatred is also a central theme of the Trump administration, which demonizes Muslims, especially Muslim refugees, and seeks to bar them from entering the United States.
The arrival of millions of Muslim refugees in Europe from states such as Libya, Syria (which alone has produced a million refugees in Europe), Iraq and Afghanistan has dramatically bolstered the appeal of European neofascists. Nearly 73 percent of Britons who voted for their nation to leave the European Union cited the arrival of immigrants as their most important reason for supporting the referendum.
The radical jihadists have long expressed a desire to extinguish democratic space in the West. They are aware that the curtailment of civil liberties, evisceration of democratic institutions, especially the judicial system, and overt hatred of Muslims push Muslims in the West into their arms. Such conditions also increase the military blunders of the United States and its allies abroad, providing jihadists with a steady supply of new recruits and failed states from which they can operate. The jihadist strategy is working. In the year before the 2016 presidential election, violence against Muslims in the United States soared, including shootings and arson attacks on mosques. Public disapproval of Muslims, according to opinion polls, is at a record high.
The Democratic Party, signing on to the forever crusade by the national security state in the name of humanitarian intervention, is as complicit. The Obama administration not only accelerated the sting operations in the United States against supposed terrorists but, in its foreign operations, increased the use of militarized drones, sent more troops to Afghanistan and foolishly toppled the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, creating yet another failed state and safe haven for jihadists.
The radical jihadists, in an irony not lost on Blumenthal, are often deliberately armed and empowered by the U.S. national security apparatus, along with Israel, as a way to pressure or remove regimes deemed antagonistic to Israel and the United States. Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, in audio leaked from a closed meeting with Syrian opposition activists, admitted that the U.S. had used Islamic State as a tool for pressuring the Syrian government. He also acknowledged that Washington’s complicity in the growth of IS in Syria was the major cause for Russian intervention there.
In a 2016 op-ed titled “The Destruction of Islamic State Is a Strategic Mistake,” Efraim Inbar, the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, argued that “[t]he West should seek the further weakening of Islamic State, but not its destruction.” He said the West should exploit IS as a “useful tool” in the fight against Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah. “A weak IS is, counterintuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS,” Inbar concluded. He went on to argue for prolonging the conflict in Syria, saying that extended sectarian bloodshed would produce “positive change.”
Earlier in 2016, Israel’s former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon had said similarly, “In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State.”
Israel seeks to create buffer zones between itself and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. It sees its neighbor Syria, because of its alliance with Iran, as a mortal enemy. The solution has been to cripple these traditional enemies by temporarily empowering radical Sunni jihadists and al-Qaida. There are numerous reports of Israel, along with the United States, using its aircraft and military in Syria to aid the very jihadists Washington and Jerusalem claim to want to wipe from the face of the earth.
This intractable morass, Blumenthal argues, led directly to the demonization of Russia. Trump’s anti-interventionist rhetoric, however disingenuous, triggered what Blumenthal calls “a wild hysteria” among the foreign policy elites. Trump calls the invasion of Iraq a mistake. He questions the arming of Syrian jihadists and deployment of U.S. forces in Syria. He is critical of NATO. At the same time, he has called for better relations with Russia.
“Joining with the dead-enders of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, who were desperate to deflect from their crushing loss, the mandarins of the national security state worked their media contacts to generate the narrative of Trump-Russia collusion,” Blumenthal writes.
“Out of the postelection despair of liberals and national security elites, the furor of Russiagate was born. This national outrage substituted Russia for ISIS as the country’s new folk devil and painted Trump as Russian president Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate.”
“Almost overnight, hundreds of thousands of liberals were showing up at postelection rallies with placards depicting Trump in Russian garb and surrounded by Soviet hammer-and-sickle symbols,” Blumenthal writes.
The FBI and the intelligence community, organizations that have long spied upon and harassed the left and often liberals, became folk heroes. NATO, which was the instrument used to destabilize the Middle East and heighten tensions with Russia because of its expansion in Eastern Europe, became sacrosanct.
“In its obsession with Moscow’s supposed meddling, the Democratic Party elite eagerly rehabilitated the Bush-era neoconservatives, welcoming PNAC [Project for the New American Century] founder William Kristol and ‘axis of evil’ author David Frum into the ranks of the so-called ‘resistance,’ ” Blumenthal writes. “The Center for American Progress, the semiofficial think tank of the Democratic Party, consolidated the liberal-neocon alliance by forging a formal working partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, the nest of the Iraq war neocons, to ‘stand up to Russia.’ ”
Those in the alternative media who question the Russia narrative and chronical the imperial disasters are in this new version of the Cold War branded as agents of a foreign power and hit with algorithms from Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to deflect viewers from reading or listening to their critiques. Politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who push back against the war lust are smeared with the same nefarious charge. It is, as Blumenthal writes, a desperate bid by the war industry and the interventionists to mask the greatest strategic blunder in American history, one that signals the end of American hegemony.
“In the face of their own failure, America’s national security elites had successfully engineered a new Cold War, wagering that the reignited conflict would preserve their management of savagery abroad and postpone the terrible reckoning they deserved at home,” Blumenthal concludes.
The corporate state, its legitimacy in tatters, seeks to make us afraid in order to maintain its control over the economic, political and military institutions. It needs mortal enemies, manufactured or real, at home or abroad, to justify its existence and mask its mismanagement and corruption. This narrative of fear is what Antonio Gramsci called a “legitimation doctrine.” It is not about making us safe—indeed the policies the state pursues make us less secure—but about getting us to surrender to the will of the elites. The more inequality and injustice grow, the more the legitimation doctrine will be used to keep us cowed and compliant. The doctrine means that the enemies of the United States will never be destroyed, but will mutate and expand; they are too useful to be allowed to disappear. It means that the primary language of the state will be fear. The longer the national security state plays this game, the more a fascist America is assured.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2uSkgJU Tyler Durden
A revolt among progressive Democrats forced House Democratic leaders to scrap a planned Wednesday vote to set the budget for spending this year – an “embarrassing outcome for leadership” as the Washington Post describes it.
The vote was canceled after progressive Democrats objected to top-line numbers, while demanding more money for non-defense spending.
At stake Tuesday was legislation setting overall federal spending levels for domestic and military programs that depend on annual congressional appropriations, including the Pentagon and agencies such as the Education and Health and Human Services departments that affect many Americans. (The bill would not set spending levels for programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that are funded automatically.)
Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus were pushing an amendment calling for higher levels of domestic spending. With Republicans expected to unanimously oppose the legislation, leaders could lose only 17 Democrats on the vote, giving the group of lawmakers the power to exact their demands. –Washington Post
“I don’t think we’d have the votes if we went to the floor right now,” said Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-KY), adding “It’s not going to happen.”
The bill would have increased 2020 defense spending by $17 billion and non-defense spending by $34 billion, bringing the totals to $664 billion for defense and $631 billion for non-defense spending – which progressive Democrats vowed to reject until the two numbers were at parity – demanding an additional $33 billion for non-defense spending.
“If we can’t get full parity then we don’t need a budget cap vote,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
The Blue Dog Democrats, meanwhile, applied pressure to pass the bill as-is.
“Blue dogs have long been committed to fiscal responsibility at a time when we are $22 trillion in debt, in large part [because] of the profligacy of the Republicans and their irresponsible tax bill. Somebody needs to be the adult in the room,” said Blue Dog Co-Chair Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), according to The Hill.
Democrats brushed off suggestions that the division within the party reflected an ability to govern.
The House successfully passed a rule Tuesday that would allow appropriators to begin piecing together spending legislation at the cap levels outlined in the spending bill. –The Hill
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) anounced on Tuesday that a bipartisan staff-level working group would be established to negotiate a final spending deal. Sources within House Democratic leadership have pointed to McConnell’s announcement to justify scrapping Wednesday’s vote, per The Hill.
“The Speaker and Leader McConnell are negotiating a caps deal. We’ll see what happens with those discussions,” said one Democratic aide.
Some progressives – such as Rep. Ro Khanna of California, disagree. “I don’t think this is an issue of divided government, this is an issue of a divided Democratic caucus on issues of defense spending.”
The inter-party split has some Democrats worried.
“We’re able to have some differences, but at the end of the day, we have to be able to govern,” said Rep. Daniel Kildee (D-MI) who sits on the Budget Committee. “We can’t let ourselves fall off the cliff here.“
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2uU603c Tyler Durden
Japan is the very model of fiscal irresponsibility. If ever there was a bond vigilante, surely they would have a Japanese address.
At the end of what was the Bank of Japan’s 133rd fiscal year, on March 31, 2018, Japan’s central bank reported total assets of ¥528,285,679,854,140. Of which, ¥448,326,107,324,120 was Japanese government bonds (JGB). Officials became increasingly confident these were sufficient balances whereby the bank’s top managers could openly plan an end to the programs raising them.
By my unofficial count, there have been ten distinct varieties of LSAP’s dating back to the first one in March 2001. Alternately, given how many times each has been adjusted, you can make the case how the Japanese have endured 23 QE’s over the years. It has been the last three, those that fall under the QQE label, which have absorbed almost all monetary policy focus.
Variety number ten, this QQE stuff, was the QE to end all QE’s, filling Paul Krugman’s mandate of “credibly promise to be irresponsible.”
It was begun under much fanfare and promise in April 2013. Five years later, half a decade, BoJ’s Governor Haruhiko Kuroda last March said that was probably enough. Looking ahead a year to the end of fiscal year 134, Japanese officials were sure QE’s 21 through 23 were going to be conclusively judged sufficient by then.
Right now [March 2018], the members of the policy board and I think that prices will move to reach 2 percent in around fiscal 2019. So it’s logical that we would be thinking about and debating exit at that time too.
Fiscal year 135 began a week ago. At the central bank’s branch managers meeting in Tokyo today, Governor Kuroda maintained his usual optimistic forecast. The economy is, as always in the official view, “expanding moderately” benefiting from a “virtuous cycle from income to spending.” If you follow these speeches drawn from the official monetary policy documents, they say practically the exact same thing month after month, year after year.
Nothing ever changes along those lines. You might even start to think there is something else to all this.
Kuroda didn’t spend much time referencing BoJ’s recent downgrades to industrial production, exports, and, as everywhere else in the world, global growth.
There is no longer any talk about an exit from QQE, whichever index number it might be recorded under. Inflation was supposed to have been near enough to 2% to make that possible. Instead, the CPI in January and February 2019 (the latest data available) gained 0.2% year-over-year in each. Right back near zero all over again.
The history of Japan’s bond market had said all along throughout Reflation #3 (as before) that Japanese officials were far more likely to be disappointed. Even as cannibalized as the JGB market has become due to so many government bonds and notes ending up in the central bank’s hands, hundreds of trillions on its balance sheet, what’s left of it still functioned enough to project a high probability for (continued) monetary policy failure. QQE, or QE’s 21, 22, and 23, didn’t really change perceptions.
If economic growth and inflation were meaningfully shifted by this credibly irresponsible monetary policy to the long-sought recovery paradigm, the bond market is right where it would show up first. You don’t want to be holding a low-yielding safety instrument, especially one issued by a government with the fiscal profile of Japan, on the verge of tremendous opportunity.
The entire point of QE23, this YCC stuff, was Kuroda’s imagination translating Paul Krugman’s orthodox philosophy. It was Krugman who in 1999 wrote his “liquidity trap” paper which provides the intellectual support for most if not all of what the BoJ is doing (there’s your problem!)
In other words, the point of YCC was for the central bank to promise to keep yields low even as recovery emerged. This was Krugman’s central premise, that the bond market will kill a nascent economic acceleration with rising interest rates before it ever gets started. And that tells you something about how Economists just don’t understand bonds.
If the recovery scenario is being priced into higher JGB yields, which it would be, investors are already taking into account those rising yields and seeing recovery anyway. That’s the nature of sustainability. The bond market has to judge the economic acceleration as of sufficient speed as well as robustness; that’s what makes a recovery a recovery in the first place (this applies currently in America to those who think fed funds 241 bps has choked off the US one).
Kuroda and his fellow Japanese officials in September 2016 mistook Reflation #3 for Recovery #1, and therefore began seeing “globally synchronized growth” as the endgame. The bond market, as you can see above, didn’t make that mistake – YCC or not.
The only time when yields appeared close to a breakout was last summer. And even then, it was far more modest than it was made to be under the death throes of globally synchronized inflation hysteria.
In fact, while all that was taking place in 2018 there were numerous escalating warning signs which uniformly indicated the opposite case from recovery and acceleration. Japan’s Industrial Production, for example, was perhaps the best one – for the whole global economy, not just in Japan. Japanese IP historically has been among the most accurate reflation/deflation bellwethers out there – and it is validating the JGB market’s persistent skepticism with an already pretty visible downturn emerging.
Kuroda and his gang (including Krugman) don’t understand bonds, therefore they keep dismissing the pessimistic signal embedded within these persistently shrunken yields. Those low yields are not the result of central bank bond buying, rather they result from the failure of central bank bond buying (German yields providing the cleanest example of their basis).
Because of this, there are no bond vigilantes at least there aren’t any possible right now. First comes recovery and the very much related removal of liquidity fears – the specific monetary concerns and overall economic pessimism which fully override all considerations of fiscal imbalance and long-term deficits/debts. Only when those are solved will the vigilantes be reconstructed and let loose.
We don’t need central banks to hold down interest rates or even think they should try. In fact, we should want officials to shoot for bond market destruction; that should be their only goal. If recovery shows up there, the first taste of fiscal vigilantism, get out of the way. The economy will have by then already made it to the promised land.
Rising interest rates are not something to fear, they are the checkered flag waving you to the finish line. The most effective yield curve control ever conceived is continued economic failure. You don’t really need 23 QE’s to see this, but apparently that’s how thick Economics dogma has become.
If Kuroda (like any other Economist) actually understood bonds, he’d have realized he never had a chance. Not only would it have saved him fiscal year 135’s QQE embarrassment, it might have even told him to do something else. As it is, the economy going the wrong way for a fourth time in the last decade, JGB’s are betting the central bank will be stung enough by this economic downturn for QE24 if not a new QE-type 11.
Attorney General William Barr has assembled an internal team at the Justice Department to review controversial counterintelligence decisions made by DOJ and FBI officials – including actions taken in the summer of 2016, according to Bloomberg, which cites a person familiar with the matter.
This indicates that Barr is looking into allegations that Republican lawmakers have been pursuing for more than a year — that the investigation into President Donald Trump and possible collusion with Russia was tainted at the start by anti-Trump bias in the FBI and Justice Department -Bloomberg
Barr seemingly confirmed the Bloomberg report earlier Tuesday, when he told a House panel “I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016.”
Barr confirms that he is “reviewing the conduct of the [Russia] investigation,” and indicates he still takes Devin Nunes seriously pic.twitter.com/2L7Tk19ZqN
For starters, Barr’s team may want to investigate exactly how information flowed from a self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation – Joseph Mifsud – who told Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos in March of 2016 that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
Papadopoulos would later tell Australian diplomat Alexander Downer about the so-called Clinton dirt, which resulted in the launch of “operation crossfire hurricane,” the code name for the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.
In September 2016, the FBI would send spy Stefan Halper to further probe Papadopoulos on the Clinton email allegation, and – according to an interview with pundit Dan Bongino, Papadopoulos says Halper angrily accused him of working with Russia before storming out of a meeting.
Of note, Halper was hired by the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment for $244,960.00 on September 15, 2015. Overall, the Obama DoD paid Halper more than $1 million starting in 2012.
Then of course there’s the purported FISA abuse that the FBI committed when it used a salacious and unverified dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. According to senior FBI lawyer Sally Moyer, there was a “50/50” chance that the FISA warrant would have been issued without the Clinton-funded anti-Trump opposition research.
While Barr’s internal team is separate from a long-running investigation by the DOJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, it falls short of appointing a special counsel to investigate the Obama DOJ and its many holdovers. Horowitz’s inquiry is expected to be done by May or June, according to Barr’s Tuesday testimony.
Barr is also looking into a criminal investigation launched against former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2017 for misleading lawmakers about his contacts with Russians during his time as a senator advising the Trump campaign. It was eventually closed without charges.
“That’s great news he’s looking into how this whole thing started back in 2016,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) – the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee. “That’s something that has been really important to us. It’s what we’ve been calling for.”
Before the GOP lost control of the House, Jordan and California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes were aggressively pursuing how the FBI and DOJ harbored animus and bias against Donald Trump, and showed favoritism towards Hillary Clinton. The pair interviewed over 40 witnesses, held hearings, and demanded that the Justice Department hand over hundreds of thousands of documents related to the 2016 election.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said in a March 28 interview with Fox News “Once we put the Mueller report to bed, once Barr comes to the committee and takes questions about his findings and his actions, and we get to see the Mueller report, consistent with law, then we are going to turn to finding out how this got off the rails.”
Technology has made a lot of things once only seen in sci-fi works of fiction a reality, and now floating cities may join the list. Earlier this month, UN-Habitat, the UN’s Human Settlement Programme, showcased a project for floating villages that could house up to 10,000 people.
Oceanix City was developed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and the MIT Center for Ocean with the support of a specially set up vehicle, Oceanix, and is truly impressive. What’s more important, however, is that it is realistically buildable, according to the people behind it.
The city will be a cluster of small islands, each capable of accommodating up to 300 people. Below the surface, there will be farms for seafood, including scallops and kelp, and above the surface will be the regular land farms that will allow the community to be self-sufficient. Plans are to also have the islands produce their own energy and have all waste repurposed or recycled.
The islands will be car-free, although there is space for autonomous vehicles to take people to the coast and back, as well as drone deliveries, according to a Business Insider report. It will also be resilient enough, thanks to its construction, to withstand tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes, and continue to operate without suffering any devastating consequences. In case of an extremely harsh weather event, the platforms could be towed to safety.
Though all this sounds like a project from the future, the truth is that floating homes are nothing new. There are many floating homes in various parts of the world where waterways allow it.
In Europe, the Netherlands and Denmark are notable for it. Yet, a repurposed ferry like the one the Oceanix City architects lives on is not really the same as a city. According to Ingels, however, a city is better. “At the city scale you can achieve more,” the architect told Business Insider.
The project aims to address the problem of rising sea levels that are threatening some coastal communities and, according to its authors, there are virtually no technological challenges. There are other ones, though.
“The biggest question in people’s minds is if these cities can actually float,” the chief executive officer of Oceanix, Marc Collins Chen, told the BBC.
“The main obstacles at this point are psychological and are not technological,” said another supporter of the project, Richard Wiese, president of The Explorers Club. “People psychologically get nervous at the term ‘floating city’. I used this term to my wife, and her immediate response was not technological but rather visceral, she didn’t like the idea of something that could drift away.”
Whatever the misgivings of land dwellers, the project is already getting a prototype on the East River in New York, courtesy of UN-Habitat’s support. Oceanix, The Explorers Club, and the MIT will work jointly on the prototype.
“Everybody on the team actually wants to get this built,” Oceanix’ Collins says, as quoted by Business Insider. “We’re not just theorizing.”
Some people have found cause for concern with the project: according to them, this sort of project goes counter to the idea of fighting climate change because it suggests there is a way of dealing with the consequences of climate change instead of trying to prevent them.
Since there are many scientists who argue it is already too late to prevent the consequences of climate change, it might actually be a good idea to try and find ways around them rather than lament the possibility that such ways exist.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UIFgB9 Tyler Durden
