In yet more confirmation that US sanctions don’t fundamentally punish or weaken regimes they seek to bring down, but hurt the common population America feigns to be helping, a new report finds that relief efforts in the wake historic floods which have created a disaster zone in Iran are being hindered due to Washington’s sanctions.
The Middle East’s main regional emergency response and humanitarian aid arm, the Red Crescent, says that US sanctions have prevented the bulk of badly needed external emergency relief from getting through after record rains have caused the worst floods in nearly a century in multiple provinces across Iran, killing at least 70 and displacing many tens of thousands.
The worst flooding in 70 years has hit Iran over the past 3 weeks, via the AP.
“No foreign cash help has been given to the Iranian Red Crescent society. With attention to the inhuman American sanctions, there is no way to send this cash assistance,” the Red Crescent said in a statement, cited by Reuters.
In all, international humanitarian groups say up to 90,000 have sought emergency shelter amid response efforts which are faltering due to lack of external help.
The floods began on March 19, and produced surreal scenes coming out of the country involving flash floods sweeping away cars and whole towns over the past three weeks.
Poldokhtar is among the cities hit hard, via Sky News
The US has acknowledged the crisis, with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pledging the US government was prepared to help through the Red Cross and Red Crescent.
However, in rhetoric that sounded similar to his tough talk on Venezuela amid ongoing economic and infrastructural collapse there, he blamed Iran’s woes on “mismanagement in urban planning and in emergency preparedness” due to the inept and corrupt leadership of Iran’s Ayatollah and other leading clergy.
Surreal scenes of entire towns being swept away by flash floods have come out of Iran over the past weeks.
The level of international attention to #Iran‘s unprecedented #floods is surprisingly low. People of Iran are in need of help and attention, regardless of international politics.
Will be on today’s @BBCNewshour at 20:30 (& 21:30) GMT, going over floods in Iran with @BBCTimFranks. pic.twitter.com/ffMIZZWehf
— Kaveh Madani | کاوه مدنی (@KavehMadani) April 2, 2019
But Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in statements last week pointed the finger at Washington for imposing an economic blockade by seeking to prevent European and other international companies from doing business with Iran: “Blocked equipment includes relief choppers: This isn’t just economic warfare; it’s economic TERRORISM,” he said on Twitter.
.@realDonaldTrump ‘s “maximum pressure”—flouting UNSC Res 2231 & ICJ ruling—is impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedCrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods. Blocked equipment includes relief choppers: This isn’t just economic warfare; it’s economic TERRORISM. pic.twitter.com/EEKTMiXLEi
Over the weekend sustained rains continued to unleash floods in the southwest of the country, and new evacuation efforts are underway for towns along the Iraq border, near rivers and dams already bulging under the strain.
Meanwhile the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Ali Asghar Peyvandi, in fresh statements slammed the US for blocking the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).
Iran – Lorestan
The flood has reached the roof of the houses and destroys them in Pol-e Dokhtar in Khorramabad city . The Citizens don’t have any government assistance.
April 1,2019#IranFloodshttps://t.co/M4eumQ52I6pic.twitter.com/Jd5WvnAktX
Peyvandi said: “We used a number of bank accounts connected to SWIFT, which we used for receiving international aid. But at the moment these accounts are subject to sanctions.”
Six cities along the Karkheh River in southwestern Khuzestan province were ordered evacuated over the weekend. Image source: Tasnim News/AFP
“It’s impossible to transfer cash from other countries as well as the International Federation of [Red Cross and] Red Crescent Societies,” he added.
Thus far it’s unclear just how the US State Department plans to help, other than send funds through the Red Cross and Red Crescent organizations; however, that would ironically run the risk of violating Washington’s own sanctions against Tehran.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2G9CBZb Tyler Durden
White liberals can be maddening. They proceed through life happily proclaiming their devotion to progressivism, completely oblivious to the brewing demographic dangers on the horizon. Indeed, most polls show them doublingdown on their beliefs in the era of Donald Trump. If you try to warn them, they will stare at you blankly. If you are a friend or relative, count yourself lucky that they still tolerate you and your beliefs.
Unfortunately, such delusional obstinacy cannot be ignored. Their views are a fundamental component of the broader, systematic threat to Western Civilization. History has shown what the world’s European peoples can accomplish when we are reasonably united. No foreign enemy or ideology could destroy us without the assistance of a substantial share of our own people. To turn the tide, we must win them back.
White liberals are neither evil nor irredeemable. They are temporarily misguided. The longer history of white liberalism, which in the past was far more hardheaded and realistic, clearly shows how much the latest iteration has gone off the rails.
The road to perdition may be paved with good intentions, but most of them will awaken before we get there. Our collective struggle will be difficult, but they will be standing with us when we emerge on the other side.
Liberal Psychology
Understanding how white liberals will change requires first understanding how their minds work. Entire fields of scientific inquiry have been devoted to explaining human behavior, including evolutionary psychology, social psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and political psychology to name a few. Although no single theory adequately covers the entire spectrum of behaviors, one framework will do for our purposes.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, first proposed in 1943 by Abraham Maslow, explains human motivation as the product of a variety of competing needs. These needs, shown in the figure below, are presumed to have been evolutionarily derived. According to the theory, lower order basic needs are more primitive and must be met before an individual will turn his or her attention to higher-order needs. Someone who has met all of the needs is assumed to be fulfilled and happy.
Although neuroscience has advanced considerably since Maslow first outlined his theory, the framework remains popular today. Many of his ideas have been substantially confirmed by more recent research.
Two of the needs in this framework are particularly important for understanding white liberals: self esteem and love / belonging. These needs can be evolutionarily traced to our status as a social species.
Morality, which research suggests is also a byproduct of evolution, is closely linked with these needs. Morality helped tribes survive and thrive in humanity’s early history and may also help explain the relative prosperity of nations today. Individuals who are viewed as moral derive significant status within society, while those who are immoral can face serious social or legal punishments ranging from shunning to banishment or even death. Even without such punishments, humans are extremely sensitive to the possibility of social rejection.
In today’s Western societies, anti-racism has come to be viewed as the morally correct position and racism as the ultimate evil. This creates substantial incentives for conformity in our racial views and rewards status-seeking behavior (sometimes referred to as “virtue signaling”) on racial issues. In those cases where this dominant moral paradigm conflicts with an individual’s other needs, such as the desire to live in a safe neighborhood, rationalizationsprovide the necessary cover so that white liberals can avoid guilt and cognitive dissonance while simultaneously engaging in hypocritical behavior.
In sum, white liberals are simply acting on the same hard-wired psychological motivations that are present in all human beings. As social creatures, they are programmed to conform to the dominant moral paradigm in their social environment. Of course, this tendency also affects conservatives. This universal human tendency toward conformity is one reason why American politics are so strongly polarized, not just ideologically but also geographically.
As challenging as these barriers may seem, however, it gets worse. Research has shown that human beings are highly resistant to facts that challenge their core convictions. They will seize on any information that confirms their preexisting beliefs and if their beliefs are challenged, they will simply ignore or disbelieve the source. Stronger challenges to core beliefs can even backfire, causing people to double down on their original position.
Troy Campbell, a researcher on the topic, explained it this way: “As causes become our identity, we don’t just believe we are right anymore; we need to believe we are right to maintain self-worth.”
The Missing Ingredient: Fear
Liberalism’s close ties to its own version of morality – combined with the universal human needs for self-esteem and social belonging – make this an exceedingly tough nut to crack. But crack it will. How do we break through these barriers? The answer can be found near the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy: the need for safety.
The biological basis for safety-seeking behavior is well known. Incoming sensory information is first processed in an ancient portion of the brain called the amygdalawhere perceived threats can trigger a near instantaneous fight or flight response. The amygdala are also responsible for a variety of other emotional reactions that can play a central role in decision-making.
These and other recent developments in neuroscience and evolutionary biology have substantially confirmed many of Maslow’s earlier findings. This includes the needs for self esteem, love, and belonging that lie at the heart of the liberal worldview. However, it also includes safety needs, which recent research suggests are even more dominant than Maslow first thought.
The implications of this research are clear. Most white liberals will not be convinced by rational arguments, no matter how strong or well-supported those arguments may be. They will only be convinced by threats to their basic safety. This, in turn, points to the real barrier. Most white liberalsdo not feel threatened.
Most of them do not see a civilization that is crumbling around them or a brewing threat on the horizon. They see a thriving economy and a skyrocketing stock market. Yes, race relations are not perfect, but they think those problems will sort themselves out as soon as we solve the challenge of poverty and get rid of Donald Trump. Immigration is beneficial. There are no meaningful differences between people. Trump voters are just suffering from irrational phobias and “white anxiety.” Times are good. What on earth is there to be afraid of?
For the average white liberal, strident anti-immigration positions are not just racist, but pointlessly so. According to one poll, 73 percent of Hillary Clinton’s white voters reportedly thought it was racist for white Americans to even have an opinion on immigration.
The sad reality is that few people who are living in a bubble are able to see it until it pops. The rare iconoclasts who are right too soon are usually viewed as social outcasts and misfits. The liberal bubble is about to pop, however. The signs are all around us.
The Growing Threat
The coming awakening of white liberals, which in the United States will probably occur over the next decade, will be primarily due to five factors. The first, instinctual ethnocentrism, affects humans and animalsalike and is present in babies. Although such ethnocentrism is not new, it remains centrally important and provides a baseline for the other factors.
The second is growingdirect contact with minorities, which will only increase as the nation continues to change over time. Some academics argue that such contact can improve race relations, but other research has shown that the negativeeffects are stronger. Ongoing white flight in neighborhoods and schools provides the most definitive answer on this question.
A third factor is growing cultural threat. Unlike direct contact, which is lessened by white flight, there is no escaping mass culture. As was noted in a recent Vox article, White Threat in a Browning America:
We live in an America where television programs, commercials, and movies are trying to represent a browner country; where Black Panther is a celebrated cultural event and #OscarsSoWhite is a nationally known hashtag; where NFL players kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality and pressing 1 for English is commonplace.
This unavoidable onslaught is a constant reminder to America’s white population that their nation is changing. Research hasshown that such messages make them more conservative, view minorities less positively, and feel more attachment to other whites.
A fourth factor is the growth of explicitly anti-white rhetoric. The idea that “whiteness” is inherently evil and should be abolished originated in academia, but now it is seeping into our broader culture and political discourse. Treating people equally and with decency regardless of their race was once sufficient to avoid the racist label, but now it elicits charges of color-blind racism and implicit bias. Unsurprisingly, research has found that accusations of white privilege can make people feel defensive and resentful. Even white allies are not immune. Black Lives Matter demonstrators protested Bernie Sanders’ candidacy. White feminists were blamed for Trump’s election and criticized for their “white supremacy in heels.”
The fifth factor, political threat, may be the most important because, unlike the others, it cannot be avoided or ignored. The principal source of this threat is the nation’s changing demographics, which are empowering minorities and shiftingthe Democratic Party sharply to the left. The effects of this change have been evident in elections throughout the nation this year. These have included the well-publicized primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, Andrew Gillum in Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, and Stacey Abrams in the Georgia Democratic gubernatorial primary, as well as victories for lesser known candidates in governors’ races in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Maryland.
While many of these candidates will probably lose in November, they are paving the way for likely victories down the road as more states become majority-minority in the lead up to 2045, when the nation as a whole will reach that milestone. These changes, most of which are concentrated in the Democratic Party, can also be expected to shift future Democratic presidential nominees further left.
The reaction of white voters to such hard-left ideological swings is well-established. Two of the most left-leaning presidential nominees in modern history, George McGovern and Walter Mondale, weretrounced at the polls. More recently, moderate Republican gubernatorial candidates have a solid trackrecord of defeating far-left Democrats in deep blue states. What accounts for this? Many white liberals, particularly those with high household incomes, are not as far left as they think.
White liberals may not feel threatened by the left today, particularly with Republicans controlling Congress and Trump dominating the news on a daily basis, but that will change in the coming decade. As the nation changes, the mainstream media and social media companies may try to clamp down on opposing views, but they are unlikely to repress the emerging voices of the far left, who will do far more to open the eyes of white liberals than conservatives ever could. They are our unwitting allies.
“Useful idiot” was once a term applied by communists to their supporters in the West, but the concept is still applicable today. Every day that someone kneels during the national anthem, calls for abolishing whiteness, or attacks another cherished Western tradition for its roots in “white supremacy” or “institutional racism” is another day that more white people will wake up to the growing threat.
“White People Riot Quietly”
In 1995, a white liberal named Roger Boesche wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times after the OJ Simpson verdict. In it, he warned that when white people riot, they do it quietly. Channeling other white liberals, he wrote:
I am afraid that even liberals, in the face of cheers by African Americans who saw the not guilty verdict as a victory over racism, will say: “I supported affirmative action; I applauded programs for the poor, and I thought Rodney King’s attackers were guilty. But I am still jeered as a racist. To hell with it. I’m going to close my doors and pull down the shades. It’s time to retreat to private life and ignore public affairs.”
How will we know when white liberals have changed their views? It will probably not be immediately obvious. Most will not publicly proclaim their shift. There will instead be occasional calls for bipartisanship and arguments against the growing tide of identity politics. And then there will be silence as former liberals say less and less, daring only to whisper among friends about their growing concern about the direction of the country.
The real sign will be at the ballot box, where the racial divide will become obvious and stark. Over time, it is not unrealistic to assume that voting patterns at the national level will begin to mirror those of the South, where white support for Republican presidential candidates commonlyreaches 80-90 percent. In the long run, however, it will not be enough. Demographics are still political destiny.
In another article, I suggested that America may be on a path toward partition at some point in the middle of this century. Such an outcome is not as far-fetched as it might seem. It would not be the first time the United States has faced secession. Polls alreadyshow significant cross-party support for the idea. Moreover, there is a long and significant globalhistory of such partitions. Recent examples in white nations include the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ireland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden. And this does not include the many brewing independence movements like those in Scotland, Quebec, and Brazil.
The Soviet Union, one of the 20th Century’s two superpowers, was destroyed by its adherence to an ideology that ignored human nature. It should not be surprising that the world’s other superpower might also be destroyed by an unrealistic ideology, in this case one that willfully ignores the world’s long history of ethnicconflict. Should that occur, it would be sad, but it would also serve as an important wake-up call and object lesson for the rest of Western Civilization.
The primary purpose of nations is to preserve and protect their peoples. When a nation stops serving that purpose, the time has come to build a new one.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2YYRyoh Tyler Durden
Grant’s Almost Daily, submitted by Grant’s Interest Rate Observer
So far this year, the Renaissance U.S. IPO Index is up a cool 32%, more than double the 15% advance logged by the S&P 500. The booming market for new issues is making bull-market noises.
This morning, CEC Entertainment, Inc., parent company of children’s restaurant Chuck E. Cheese’s, announced plans to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange. This will be no straightforward offering. Instead, the transaction will feature a reverse merger between CEC’s own parent company Queso Holdings, Inc. with a special purpose acquisition company called Leo Holdings Corp. The press release explains:
Concurrent with the closing of the transaction, Leo will domesticate as a Delaware corporation, following which Queso will merge with and into Leo with the result that CEC will continue as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Leo, which will be renamed Chuck E. Cheese Brands, Inc.
CEC was bought by Apollo Global Management, LLC in 2014 for $1.3 billion including debt. In February 2017 Reuters reported that the private equity giant had hired Deutsche Bank A.G. and Credit Suisse A.G. to solicit bids for its portfolio company, with Bloomberg reporting that Apollo was seeking a roughly $2 billion sale price.
With no buyer in hand, the deal was withdrawn six months later. As a public entity, CEC is expected to garner an enterprise valuation of about $1.4 billion, which is 7.5 times forecast 2019 adjusted EBITDA of $187 million, while the anticipated $300 million of proceeds “will be used to pay transaction expenses and de-leverage the Company’s existing capital structure.”
De-leveraging appears wise. CEC ended 2018 with total debt of $982 million, 6.5 times trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA, while operating income of $66 million failed to cover the $76.3 million in interest expense.
As Chuck-E-Cheese’s prepares to re-join the ranks of publicly-traded companies, recent IPO Lyft, Inc. has a bone to pick with its underwriters. Digital news site The Information relayed Friday that the ride-share company, which debuted on March 29, threatened to sue Morgan Stanley after the New York Post reported the investment bank had offered Lyft investors a chance to hedge their positions through short sales, despite being subject to lock-up restrictions.
For Lyft, which generated a $943 million adjusted-EBITDA loss in 2018 on revenues of $2.2 billion and warned in its S-1 filing that it “may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future,” the attention paid to short-sellers has been mutual. According to S3 Partners, LLC, short interest in LYFT exceeded 38% of the 32.5 million share float as of Tuesday, despite prohibitive borrowing costs that reached an annualized rate 101.4% as of Tuesday. Lyft stock finished the day at $70.23 a share, down from the $72 issue price and 20% below the intraday peak see on its March 29 debut.
Meanwhile, new issue supply continues apace as the IPO pipeline remains robust. This morning, social media site Pinterest, Inc. filed a form S-1 detailing plans to offer up to 75 million shares at a range of $15 to $17 per share, valuing the company at $11.3 billion using the high end of the range. That’s down from a $12.3 billion valuation achieved during the most recent fundraising round in 2017. As noted by Business Insider on March 24, an unusual bit of language in Pinterest’s filing may give some investors pause:
Pinterest’s S-1 paperwork, filed publicly Friday, disclosed an unusual stipulation that retains full voting rights for CEO Ben Silbermann’s shares in the company from 90 days to 540 days after his “death or permanent incapacity.”
The clause means that after Silbermann dies, whoever inherits his shares will retain his super-voting powers for a period of time
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VyupH8 Tyler Durden
Ray Dalio doesn’t think he’s a “policy failure”, as some leftists have alleged. But he does think Bridgewater Associates made a mistake when it accepted a $22 million tax subsidy from the state of Connecticut.
The billionaire investor continued his media barnstorming on Monday with a morning interview on CNBC, where he sparred with host Joe Kernen over the nature of the reforms that Dalio is recommending. After standing by his argument that the system of American capitalism is in dire need of reform, co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Dalio how he squares some of his proposals with the fact that Bridgewater has taken tax handouts.
When asked if the tax incentive was “a mistake”, Dalio clarified that he felt it was a mistake for Bridgewater to accept the incentive – not for the state to offer it.
“I think it was a mistake because everybody pays too much attention to that because people pay too much attention to those types of things, and not enough attention to what it means to pull together to do things right.”
“The spirit of the people at Bridgewater is this is our home, this is our community, we don’t want to move.”
“The important thing here is to pull together and to do this.”
Asked if he agreed with a Democratic strategist’s comment that ‘every billionaire is a policy failure’, Dalio replied: “No, no, no – that’s so screwed up.”
Continuing on, Dalio said he has personally witnessed the impact of the financial – and at times nutritional – starvation happening in Connecticut’s school system. Asked whether his philanthropic giving should be taxed as well, Dalio artfully evaded giving a straight answer, replying instead that philanthropy and taxation serve different roles, before launching into a tangent about Connecticut’s incarceration rate.
The billionaire investor, who was raised middle class as the son of a jazz musician and homemaker, said he is advocating reforms that he feels will help all Americans enjoy the same benefits he had growing up, including well-functioning schools. Following Dalio’s appearance, Connecticut’s recently elected Governor Ned Lamont appeared on the program to tout the philanthropy fueled program to try and improve Connecticut’s poorest school districts. Though he did say that he’d be “open” to paying higher taxes.
In late 2017, actor Morgan Freeman announced in a video created by a who’s who of senior U.S. Intelligence officials that Russia had attacked the United States and that ‘we’ were at war. Freeman, whose net worth is said to be about a quarter-billion dollars, claimed that ex-Soviet ‘authoritarian’ Vladimir Putin, bitter about the dissolution of ‘his’ country, was behind the attack. The terms ‘attack’ and ‘war’ were not qualified as metaphors.
The crudeness of the appeal – provoking naked fear of invading hordes of godless communists led by an evil dictator, had a retro quality that undid thirty years of technocratic upgrading of American agitprop Where is the Reagan-era Patrick Swayze packing a grenade launcher when you need him? Or going back a bit further in agitprop history, where is Kevin McCarthy with a panicked warning about your neighbors going to sleep as good Americans and waking up as communists stooges of the Kremlin?
Within weeks of Donald Trump’s electoral victory the ‘true American’ press, in the form of the Washington Post, revealed that it had a list of known communists who had infiltrated the U.S. government political websites that were acting as witting or unwitting agents of the Kremlin, current company included. One could be forgiven for imagining that the ‘authoritarian’ Donald Trump was behind the smear. But no— it appears to have been Ukrainian ‘patriots’ with ties to both the Democratic Party leadership and actual European Nazisthat struck this blow for freedom.
Freedom through censorship might seem an odd construct until it is understood that Kremlin agents are everywhere. By 2017, my friends from New York were suddenly afraid to venture out of Manhattan for fear of encountering a ‘Trump voter.’ (This is true). Never mind that a half-century of neoliberal predation had left the economy a shadow of its former self, the only possible explanation for Trump! was Russian subversion of our electoral process. That the U.S. ranks low in terms of free and fair elections has nothing to do with ‘Russian interference.’
The inclusion of Mr. Freeman as a modern-day Minuteman signaled that the target audience for the video wasn’t marginally literate ‘deplorables’ swilling beer in their underwear as they watched Dancing with the Stars, but rather the people who spend their days in offices or on airplanes. Because they wear suits, these good people must be smart and sophisticated, not the ‘low information’ voters who see a picture of an eagle in front of a waving flag and nod their heads approvingly with whatever nonsense follows (irony alert).
At the height of George W. Bush’s war against Iraq, there wasn’t a trading floor on Wall Street where CNN or Fox News wasn’t blaring 24/7 that WMDs had been found in Iraq. Better a million dead Iraqis over there than a mushroom souffle for lunch over here. Those who remember ‘Poppy’s war,’ Gulf War I that buried tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts alive in the desert after Iraq had surrendered, may remember that it was also Wall Street that hosted the ticker tape parade that followed that glorious victory.
Any of the intelligence officials associated with the Morgan Freeman video could have acted in it as competently as Mr. Freeman. Most had spent more than a bit of face time lying under oath to congress. But no mention was made of the fact that they were behind the video. Mr. Freeman, wearing casual clothes with the hipster single earing in each ear, was the face of ‘the people’ rising in righteous anger at the afront to ‘our democracy.’ That no one had died in ‘the attack’ likely made the video the least lethal project these intelligence officials had participated in in their adult lives.
A few Democrats and ‘the left’ had remained outside of the George W. Bush administration’s propaganda effort in the run up to the Iraq war. The demonstrations held before the war began were the largest in history. In contrast, the people who found the administration’s argument for war compelling were liberal hawks amongst the urban bourgeois and the people who fought it. The overlap between these two groups n’existe pas. And it was the latter who brought back stories of the clusterfuck quality of the war to its liberal proponents comfortably ensconced in their armchairs of freedom.
That propaganda effort was politics 101, divide and conquer. As Mr. Bush put it,you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists. That 9/11 was 1) both a rational response to American foreign policy in the Middle East and 2) planned and financed by business associates of the Bush family, would seem to muddy the waters of binary divisions. Following, as Mr. Freeman put it, you’re either with us, or you’re with Putin. Never mind the business intereststhat tied the intelligence agencies to U.S. based energy companies competing with Russia to supply Europe with oil and gas.
One might have imagined that the historical break that Mr. Trump’s election represented, as put forward by the Democratic operatives who lost the election, would speak for itself. Of course, racism, sexism and misogyny have no place in American history— just watch Mr. Freeman’s / the U.S. intelligence agency’s video for a clear recounting of the unalloyed virtues of American democracy. When Israeli strongman freedom fighter Benjamin Netanyahu gave the U.S. Congress instructions for future U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in 2015, the word ‘collusion’ wasn’t mentioned even once in New York Times reporting on the event.
The first round of Mueller indictments against Russian internet advertising firms produced charges that stood little chance of being contested. An analogy is to indict figures from history, say Plato or the Marquis de Sade who, because they are dead, pose little risk of asking for the evidence against them. But surprise! Concord Management, one of the firms charged by Mueller, responded with counsel seeking discovery. Mr. Mueller used a procedural move to precludehanding his evidence over to actual lawyers. Lonely are the brave.
The Hamilton 68 ‘Russian interference’ tracking website turns out to be affiliated with the German Marshall Fund which itself is filled with ex-Obama administration officials with ties to the National Security Council. The German Marshall Funds runs the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a neo-con think tank that includes John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. The U.S. State Department and NATO are major contributors to the German Marshall Fund.
Of course, everyone knows that these coalitions of Democratic Party insiders and intelligence agency officials are behind most of the ‘Russian interference’ hysteria because the New York Times and Washington Post put them front and center as their sources, right? Surely no reputable newspaper would give front page coverage to unproven allegations made by political operatives working against the Party and personages currently in power, right? Doing so could be perceived as taking sides in an internecine political battle to undo the democratic will of at least a bit more than a quarter of eligible voters.
It was John Podesta’s emails that were alleged to have been hackedand released to news agencies during the 2016 campaign that would have deeply embarrassed Clinton campaign officials if they were capable of embarrassment. Yes, this is the very same John Podesta that ‘advises’ several of the groups cited by the New York Times and Washington Post as sources for stories about who hacked someone named John Podesta’s emails. Of course, everyone knows that ‘hacked’ is a euphemism for ‘leaked.’
Why Democratic strategists preferred Morgan Freeman as the face of righteous outrage, rather than John Podesta’s brother Tony, is a mystery for the ages. Brother Tony, who was set to be charged with former Trump something-or-other Paul Manafort with colluption, a newfangled amalgam of collusion and corruption, decided that omerta is for suckers. Brother Tony squealed to Robert Mueller, decidedly complicating circumstances for Mr. Manafort, if making Brother Tony laud-worthy amongst his fellow Democratic Party lobbyists.
Of course, the intelligence-Democrats’ insight that Morgan Freeman is a better front-man than omerta-lite Brother Tony, or any of the other sixty-something pallid white guys in suits who have spent their careers making life miserable for something called ‘humanity,’ proves they are anti-racist, right? It is universally known that Bob Mueller loves both Muslims and immigrants so much that he rounded up and threw a thousand of them in jail without charges following 9/11 to protect them from being not in jail. He has that much heart.
Likewise, the CIA has long been known for promoting black and brown people – from the material to the ethereal plane. Responding to earlier red menace incursions, CIA ‘advisors’ sent four million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians to what Christians speculate is a better place. Later, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua the CIA provided free education through the School of the Americas to peasant-scholars in how to be tortured to death with dignity. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands graduated and went on to decompose with dignity.
The NSA heroes who keep us safe from authoritarian creeps who would otherwise skirt the law to create illegal spy programs to gather and keep information on people suspected of no crime in direct contravention of the U.S. Constitution and existing law and then repeatedly lie about doing so under oath to congress certainly deserve the trust of the American people. If they say that Pump (Putin + Trump) represents an existential threat to our freedom, then let them shut down the opposition press, arrest anyone they think might be inconvenient to American business interests and unseat a leader that a lot of people voted for. As the saying goes, freedom ain’t free.
Support for increasing the power of the FBI, CIA and NSA and local and regional police departments while Donald Trump has been in office has been bi-partisan. If the national Democrats believed a word of their bullshit that Mr. Trump is a foreign agent, they would be, in the parlance, ‘traitors’ to give him more power. By the time that ‘high information voters’ figure out that they’ve been had, it will be on to the next diversion. Reportedly, about the same proportion of the population still believes the collusion story as believes that WMDs were found in Iraq.
Here’s the punchline – even if you believe the worst accusations of Russian interference in U.S. elections, they are orders of magnitude lower than the influence of American oligarchs and the state of Israel. If the Democrats want Donald Trump out, they should run someone that people will vote for. I would try to bring in some of the nearly half of the electorate that is eligible to vote but that doesn’t. Calling them deplorable seems a weak strategy for getting them to vote for you. In fact, it seems remarkably like Donald Trump’s disparagement of immigrants. But as a card-carrying puppet of the Kremlin, what do I know?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2D5C2hd Tyler Durden
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted Amazon a new patent that could transform an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) into a mini airship.
The USTPO published the schematics on March 9, first reported by SlashGear, which shows the UAV will have an inflated membrane and compressed gas chamber containing hydrogen – mounted into its airframe that could be deployed when entering a location where noise reduction is desirable.
“This disclosure describes an unmanned aerial vehicle (“UAV”) including an inflatable membrane (e.g., a balloon) and a compressed gas chamber containing a gas (e.g., helium, hydrogen, etc.) for inflating the membrane.
When the UAV is approaching or departing from a location where noise reduction is desirable (e.g., a delivery location), the membrane may be inflated so as to increase the buoyancy of the UAV and allow the propulsion system (e.g., utilizing propellers, etc.) to be operated with less thrust and correspondingly with less noise.
Once the UAV has departed and reached a certain distance from the location, the membrane may be deflated and retracted back into a storage area of the UAV,” the patent summary read.
The patent doesn’t envision flying the drone like the Airlander or Zeppelin, however. The inflatable membrane would be deployed to raise and lower the UAV from the delivery location. The goal behind the technology is to reduce noise and energy in vertical takeoffs and landings.
Amazon has had several blimp patents that suggest the company’s ambition is to build a mothership. A visualization of one went viral last week, with many social media users believing it was an actual video.
Amazon was also granted a patent that showed delivery drones could drop packages from the sky with parachutes.
Another patent describes a self-destructing drone, so if it were to malfunction in the air, the drone would take apart itself to minimize the impact on the ground.
Amazon plans to have drones in the sky in the next several years. However, there are significant obstacles the company is facing from US lawmakers who demand drone pilots operate in line-of-sight and have constant communication with air traffic control. Also, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) doesn’t have a robust framework into regulating commercial drone operations, which has temporarily prevented Amazon from deploying drone services across the U.S.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2P1rLaM Tyler Durden
Most Americans who have been around for a while know life is nothing like it used to be…
When someone wanted a job one was found with a little bit of searching. Today jobs are difficult to find, especially in small communities.
When I was growing up in the 70’s, there were several car dealers in my community. There were three tractor dealers and too many mom and pop stores to count. Today there are two used car dealers and the nearest tractor dealer is twenty miles away. So how is it that we now have more people, but fewer businesses to employ them?
A nations wealth is derived from having a product to sell. That wealth needs to circulate in towns and cities to compound the wealth effect and create jobs and businesses. When wealth is not created or it is siphoned off to other places, the wealth effect can not happen, and in many cases goes into reverse. A community needs a certain amount of service related jobs to function but it also needs some type of production jobs to bring in money from the outside. This can be mining , agriculture or manufacturing type jobs, but they must exist to insure a healthy economy.
America has two major problems today. A large amount of our production is done outside the country eliminating production jobs in local communities and many of the small local businesses that kept wealth within communities have been supplanted by large corporations that siphon wealth out of communities and send it to wall street.
In the past when a small business made profit, that profit was kept in the local community because that is where the owner lived. Now, that profit leaves the community never to be seen again. With less money to circulate within the community the businesses that depend on people spending their extra dollars, have fewer customers and eventually go out of business. With fewer jobs there is that much less money circulating and the economic situation spirals down until nothing is left.
These days corporate businesses and government jobs make up the major part of many local communities. In many cases if it were not for the government jobs, many communities would no longer exist. So what do you think would happen if the government suddenly no longer had money to pay those workers? What would happen if corporate profits dropped to the point where corporate stores decided to close and cut their losses?
To some extent we are seeing this happen now in many places. Corporate stores moved in and drove small local businesses out. Then when the profits dried up the corporate stores closed leaving the community with no jobs or products to buy. With no capital in the local communities to rebuild small businesses, the people simply drive to other areas to do their shopping.
The corporate cronies and government laggards control most of the money flowing through communities now and they want to keep it that way. Any attempt to rebuild local businesses is met with luke warm results. Any business that might make a difference is either killed outright or regulated into oblivion before it can get off the ground. The county where I live has all but abandoned local businesses. The bulk of their income comes from property taxes generated by vacation homes and retirement homes of retired government employees. As long as the government pensions and paychecks continue, they see no reason to change the status quo. The result is that the younger people leave as soon as they can and the average age of the population continues to get older. As with many places today, this area has no future.
Where I live is a microcosm of the nation.
Corporate and government entities continue to siphon what little money there is out of communities and just as small communities are dying, the nation will soon follow if current trends do not change. A return to small local economics is the only way to reverse some of the damage and keep our communities livable.
But, do not be deceived. There is no way to undo all of the damage that has been done and even if we survive, we will only be a shadow of what we once were as a nation.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VwTAdl Tyler Durden
But unfortunately for the average renter (a group that includes the bulk of millennials who don’t still live with their parents), this housing market weakness hasn’t translated to lower rents. In fact, in March, the average national rent increased by 3.2% YoY to $1,430 (up $44) to a fresh all-time high. What’s worse, the increases were spread throughout the country, with 92% of the 253 largest cities in the US registering an increase in the average rent paid, while 6% of cities registered no change, and rents dropped in just 2% of cities, according to data from the Yardi Matrix published by RentCafe.com.
On a monthly basis, rents climbed 0.3% (or $4), which was in line with last year’s rate for March. And unfortunately for all of those cash-strapped creatives living in Brooklyn, the 20 largest rental markets in the US continued to see robust price appreciation, with the average rent in the borough climbing to $2,860. Manhattan’s rental market remained the most expensive in the country, with the average rent a staggering $4,141.
While coastal enclaves like San Francisco and NYC continued to dominate the most expensive list, cities in the South and Midwest remained the most affordable markets, with Wichita, Kansas claiming the title of most affordable city for renters, with an average rent of just $645.
Here’s a map of the biggest increases and decreases for small cities…
…mid-sized cities…
…and large cities…
…And the official ranking of the 20 most unaffordable (and affordable) rental markets:
Average rents in the US have continued their push to all-time highs…but the Federal Reserve is still convinced that there’s no inflation in the economy?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2YXxGCa Tyler Durden
Without free speech returning in full force to college campuses across the United States, the country will see itself perish of politically correct induced culture. One American journalist says that the PC culture will be the entire country’s downfall.
Nothing less than the U.S.’s survival is at stake, according to American journalist and author Robert Bridge. In 2013, Bridge’s book, Midnight in the American Empire: How Corporations and Their Political Servants Are Destroying the American Dream, was released. The book details how corporations work with the government to kill the American Dream. Now he’s saying that the suppression of free speech on college campuses has gone way too far, and unless people are allowed to think and say things freely once again without repercussions, the entire country will perish.
“America seems to have reached the point in its ‘progressive’ development where those who seem to have literally lost their minds – much like the authority figures in Ken Kesey’s masterful 1962 novel, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ – wish to institutionalize the remainder of the sane population.”
And Bridge is not far from that truth.
Every day we are bombarded by the PC crowd telling us just what we can say and how we are allowed to say it. It is actually pretty difficult to say anything anymore without someone dictating the manner in which it can be said. And it all stems from America’s most insane of all asylums, college campuses.
[This] leads us to the greatest insane asylums of them all, the American university. Once the proud home of intellectualism and academic freedom, these centers of higher learning now resemble fanatic hotbeds of intolerance and bigotry where an invasive type of poison ivy has overrun the structures, leaving the ivory towers to whither in perpetual darkness. Most people are only too familiar with horror stories of campus censorship where activist-minded students work to prevent guest speakers – sometimes by resorting to outright violence – from airing their ‘controversial’ ideas.” – Robert Bridge, viaRT
Free speech, free thought, and the free exchange of ideas are now all to “radical” for institutions of higher learning. Unless both sides can agree that all speech, whether you like it or not, whether it’s fake news or not, whether you agree with it or not, should not be punished. Words cannot hurt anyone and shutting down speech has been the beginning of the decline of several once great nations.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GcUUwV Tyler Durden
Astronomers at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international collaboration of astronomers in pursuit of documenting the first-ever blackhole on camera, will hold press conferences around the world Wednseday to announce “groundbreaking results.”
EHT intends to announce the results at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) on Wedsenday (April 10) at 9 a.m. EST (1300 GMT) at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Related press conferences will also co-occur in Brussels; Santiago, Chile; Shanghai; Taipei, Taiwan; and Tokyo. The presenters at these events include top astronomers from around the world, such as Carlos Moedas, the European commissioner for research, science and innovation; James Liao, president of the Academia Sinica; European Southern Observatory Director General Xavier Barcons; and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array Director Sean Dougherty.
The press conferences will be live streamed via the following channels below:
Astronomers on Wednseday will demonstrate how the international collaborative effort utilized many radio dishes from around the world that collectively formed a virtual telescope approximately the size of planet Earth to capture the first-ever blackhole.
Since black holes don’t emit light, they cannot be seen by the human eye and are technically invisible. So the radio dishes examined regions surrounding the black holes, specifically the gas which circulates around it due to its extreme gravitational pull, all in the attempt to capture images of its internal dynamics.
“Black holes are regions within the fabric of outer space that have such strong gravitational pulls that nothing, whether it be mass particles or light waves, can escape from it. The point within the black hole which nothing can escape from is called its event horizon. Scientists believe black holes form out of the remains of recently collapsed stars, which pull in all mass and light from its surrounding areas to grow bigger, and that supermassive black holes form the center of most galaxies, creating gravitational forces that link the various stars together,” said CBS News.
Albert Einstein once said a black hole with a mass of 4.1 million suns would be about 24 million miles wide.
EHT discovered two massive black holes at Sagittarius A*, a bright and very compact astronomical radio source at the heart of the Milky Way, which could be the origin of the “groundbreaking” images expected to be released Wednseday.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IkLZe1 Tyler Durden
