Author: admin

A newly released Pentagon unclassified intelligence report authored by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) comes to some shocking and alarming conclusions concerning China’s rapid advances in advanced military technology in answer to the question: “What are Beijing’s strategic intentions?”

The report finds that as a result of “acquiring technology by any means available” — especially in the areas of naval and missile systems, including intermediate range missiles and hypersonic weapons, capable of allowing missiles to travel at many times the speed of sound — China’s defense tech is not only at the cutting edge but “In some areas, it already leads the world.”

The “by any means available” charge leveled at Beijing is a reference to what American political leaders and businesses have slammed as unfair Chinese domestic laws forcing foreign partners to divulge secrets as the cost of doing business in China, with its massive population and ever expanding markets. 

The 140-page DIA report is titled simply “China Military Power” and the introduction presents the thesis and purpose of the study according to the following central questions:

“What do we need to know about China?” What is China’s vision of the world and its role in it? What are Beijing’s strategic intentions and what are the implications for Washington? How are the PLA’s roles and missions changing as it becomes a more capable military force?

For over a year Pentagon officials and Washington defense planners have been sounding the alarm over the US rival’s rapidly advancing pace of weapons tech and research. 

Gen. Paul Selva, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs last year warned concerning China’s advances in hypersonic missiles: “If we just sit back and don’t react we will lose our technological superiority” over China, Selva said at a think tank event last June. 

The new Pentagon study confirms these warnings by concluding:

“The result of this multifaceted approach to technology acquisition is a PLA (People’s Liberation Army) on the verge of fielding some of the most modern weapon systems in the world.”

The report notes further that the PLA’s advances in air, sea and space, including in cyberspace and cybersecurity, will “enable China to impose its will in the region.”

This comes at a moment when tensions are soaring over the Taiwan question, which China sees as part of its territory. This week a high level Chinese military official, General Li Zuocheng, told the head of the United States Navy, Admiral John Richardson, in a face to face meeting that Beijing would defend its claim to Taiwan “at any cost”. 

And according to The Guardian China’s new confidence and willingness to defend the claims has Pentagon leaders worried: 

Speaking to Pentagon reporters, a senior defense intelligence official said he was worried China’s military is now advanced enough that PLA generals could feel confident they could invade Taiwan.

“The biggest concern is that as a lot of these technologies mature… [China] will reach a point where internally within their decision-making they will decide that using military force for a regional conflict is something that is more imminent,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

Also of note is that the DIA report comments on China’s rapidly developing stealth bomber program “capable of striking regional and global targets.”

The report says the advanced jets could enter operational use by 2025 in what would be another huge milestone for the PLA, and of extreme worry to a US military committed to continued sailing through the Taiwan Strait and other “international waters” routes near China. 

via RSS http://bit.ly/2RBOONO Tyler Durden

Authored by Andrea Germanos via CommonDreams.org,

Nation classified as a “flawed democracy”…

A new index released this week offers a sobering look at how democracy is faring in the United States.

According to the 2018 edition of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the U.S. doesn’t even make the list of top 20—its demonstrably “flawed democracy” notching it the 25th spot.

The ranking is based on 60 indicators spanning five interrelated categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Each category gets a 0-10 score, with the final score being the average of those five.

Topping out the index are Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Denmark. They are each declared “full democracies,” as their scores, all above 9.22, were easily above the 8.2 threshold. With a final score of 7.96, the United States, in contrast, earned the “flawed democracy” label. The country’s highest score was 8.22, which it earned back in 2006 and again in 2008.

North America still holds the claim for the highest average score of any region, but that’s thanks to Canada’s 9.15, which landed it the number 6 spot overall. Twenty countries (12 percent) were designated as full democracies, 14 of which are located in Western Europe.

Rounding out the bottom of the list, meanwhile, are Chad, the Central African Republican, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, and North Korea, with scores identifying them as “authoritarian regimes.”

In the United States, according to the analysis:

Most of the major policy actions in 2018—including the escalation of the trade war with China; diplomatic engagement with North Korea; and extensive deregulation of the energy, mining, and automotive industries—have not required congressional approval. Moreover, [President Donald] Trump has repeatedly called into question the independence and competence of the U.S. judicial system with regard to the ongoing federal investigation, led by Robert Mueller, into potential ties between Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, and various courts’ efforts to block some of his policy orders, particularly regarding immigration. Although we expect the U.S. system of checks and balances to remain intact, this internal conflict risks further undermining public confidence in institutions. As a result, the score for political culture declined in the 2018 index.

The analysis also found that the political participation category overall is on the rise, halting the three-year trend of a decline in the Democracy Index. For that, thanks go to women. From the new report:

In fact, in the past decade, of all 60 indicators in the Democracy Index, women’s political participation has improved more than any other single indicator in our model. Formal and informal barriers to women’s political participation, including discriminatory laws and socioeconomic obstacles, are gradually being knocked down.

[…] In perhaps the most notable advance in women’s participation in 2018, quotas proved unnecessary; in the wake of the U.S. mid-term election in November 2018, participation of women in Congress reached an all-time high of 20.3 percent. This is just above the top threshold in our model, which sits at just 20 percent, reflecting the historical reality of extremely limited female legislative representation.

Still, there’s not cause for breaking out the champagne just yet. While the index didn’t decline overall, it didn’t improve either.  In addition, the analysis found that global disillusionment with the functioning of government continued as did a decline in civil liberties.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2SXH6Ko Tyler Durden

If you have been on social media recently, you’ve likely been subjected to the “10 year challenge”, a growing trend of people posting photos of themselves from 10 years ago and comparing themselves to current photos. Like most social media “challenges”, it isn’t much of a “challenge” at all, but rather an excuse for insecure social media users to post more Snapchat and Instagram-filtered photos of themselves in hopes of proving to the world that their life has deep meaning beyond, well, being constantly on Facebook, SnapChat or Instagram. 

But one author and expert in the field had a different take: she raised an interesting conspiratorial view that stemmed from a semi sarcastic tweet she put out on January 12. Speaker, entrepreneur and author Kate O’Neill wrote the following:

Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram
Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition

— Kate O’Neill (@kateo) January 12, 2019

She then took the time to write an article for Wired that “goes down the rabbit hole” a bit and runs with the conspiracy theory.

O’Neill’s has a background in integrated experience strategy and human-centric digital transformation as a result of her “more than 20 years of experience and entrepreneurship leading innovations across technology, marketing, and operations, developing human-centric, data-guided, and brand-aligned growth and retention strategies for companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500s.”

She claims that if you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age related characteristics and age progression, you would want a lot of people’s photos and you would want to know that they were all taken a fixed number of years apart – 10 years, in this case.

There’s certainly the counter-argument that you could mine Facebook data as it stands, making the “challenge” unnecessary, but photos are sometimes put up out of order and often feature images of items that are much more than users: word images, cartoons, patterns, and others. The EXIF data on these photos is also unreliable, as people have uploaded and scanned photographs from different eras at different times.

And so it would help if there was a clean, simple and rigorously labeled set of “then and now” photographs, much like we are seeing with the “10 year challenge”. 

O’Neill makes a cogent and objective point: thanks to this meme challenge, there’s an extremely large data set of carefully picked photos of people from roughly 10 years ago and now.

Some people argue that there is too much useless data for this challenge to be useful. But the article makes the argument that people (and arguably a company using this data for nefarious purposes) would know you’re supposed to place more trust in the validity of data earlier on in a trend. This just means that someone would have to be more likely to mine the data that started coming out at the beginning of the challenge. And, by now, algorithms are smart enough to separate human faces from the joke memes that people are putting up, like photos of their cats and dogs.

Facebook denies having any involvement. They told Wired: “This is a user-generated meme that went viral on its own. Facebook did not start this trend, and the meme uses photos that already exist on Facebook. Facebook gains nothing from this meme (besides reminding us of the questionable fashion trends of 2009). As a reminder, Facebook users can choose to turn facial recognition on or off at any time.”

Of course, the idea that the information is being used for nefarious purposes hasn’t been proven and is certainly still a conspiracy theory. But a key point O’Neill tries to get across in her piece certainly isn’t: “humans are the richest data sources for most of the technology emerging in the world”. 

You can read the full piece here. 

via RSS http://bit.ly/2SWbDbz Tyler Durden

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

We want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and that is our only demand for global human justice.

The “deplorables” now include vast swaths of citizenry around the world: everyone who voted for Trump in the U.S. (and all those who haven’t virtue-signaled their contempt for everyone who voted for him); everyone who voted for Brexit in the U.K. (and all those who haven’t virtue-signaled their contempt for everyone who voted for Brexit), and more recently, everyone who wears a yellow vest in France, and everyone who has yet to virtue-signal their contempt for the yellow vest dissenters.

So why not establish a political party for the “deplorables,” one whose sole aim is to reveal the facts of the matter and let the consequences manifest?Longtime correspondent Simon Hodges has penned a proposed Manifesto for just such a ‘Deplorable’ Party, which is published here in its entirety.

* * * * *

Proposal for the Manifesto of a Deplorable Party

We the Deplorables, wish to stand for election as a government for the following reasons and with the following aims.

‘Power’ at present is currently in the throes of its own existential crisis. The strength of this crisis is such that power has now reached a state of complete hysteria as it cannot accept the unwanted conclusions of Brexit or Donald Trump and the agony that arises when the ‘powerful’ realise that despite their assumption of ‘power’, and all the incredible array and daily barrage of ‘forces’ that were deployed in Brexit – via project economic fear which was deployed alongside project racial slur in trying to control the masses – they were inevitably confronted by the now historically documented and measured social reality that the masses were simply not available for their control.

So power’s hysterical reaction to the stark revelation of its own powerlessness in existential crisis is to hysterically declare the depraved deplorability of the masses in general whom they now openly despise. Without any conscience the progressive elites who preach about the danger of stereotyping – hysterically stereotyped every single person who voted for Trump to be an ignorant, bigoted racist. It has become clear that in recognising the masses as ‘deplorables’ that progressive governments have finally admitted that they despise the masses. It is only in the midst of power’s existential crisis that they confirm this for us.

Brexit, Trump and the current democratic yellow vest protests in France, and even the Bitcoin phenomenon – are all symptoms of the stark reality that neoliberalism has been a degenerative, corrupted political, social and economic failure and that it has become obvious that governments around the world are not serving the best interests of their peoples and that what are presented as representative parliamentary democracies are in fact unrepresentative parliaments going through the motions of democracy. Once the choices of ‘fake’ democracy are deconstructed, then it becomes rather necessary for the masses to want to mount an investigation as to whose best interests all our governments have actually been serving all this time.

To all those of who might politically identify themselves on the left, centre, right and also the apolitical, we must advocate a “Deplorable” party that can be formed to fight coming elections around the world. This will be a party advocating a short term government with no political or economic manifesto to govern their country but a simple promise to uncover and reveal the truth.

Many countries have operated perfectly well without a functioning government for years so this will not be an issue. If required, markets can be suspended for the duration it takes for us to come to our senses.

This party not in government so to speak, would abolish official secrets acts and reveal all the possible evils that have been carried out by our governments across decades. It will examine and make public all damning information it finds as we will fully expose what has been done in our names by our governments around the world. How can you have open government and still retain an official secrets act where evil and corruption can hide behind its curtains? We need honesty and openness in government.

Once our work is done, we can step down and politicians can re-enter the scene in new conditions of complete openness. Without an official secrets act, D-notices and all the dubious machinery of concealment there will be no logical need for conspiracy theories any more.

All any of us really want is the truth. Once we have the truth then we can proceed to acknowledge and redress the evils carried out in our names around the world and begin to establish social and economic fairness and true justice. There are terrorists because the people of the Middle East have justified grievances from our governments imperialist involvement in their histories. The only way to defeat ‘terrorism’ is to be honest and show that our governments were entirely wrong in pursuing the ends that they did. Once the truth is revealed and the evil that has been carried out in our names established then this will bring great shame upon our governments and trash our international reputations. Good. If these things have all occurred as we suspect, then we fully deserve all international shaming and in terms of justice nothing else will suffice. To do any less is pure hypocrisy.

We want the truth about the invasion of Iraq, we want the truth about the Great Financial Crisis, we want the truth about the Arab spring, about the bombing of Libya and the truth about Syria and Yemen. We want the truth about destabilizing Russia and events in Georgia and the Ukraine which were so fundamental to destroying the anti-imperialist axis between France, Germany and Russia which so frustrated Tony Blair and US Neoconservative deep state in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We want the truth about JFK and 9/11. The citizens of Greece need the truth about their corrupted politicians whom in conspiracy with a corrupted neoliberal EU state saddled them with their odious public debts in order to impose austerity upon them and rob them of their assets and dignity. We need the truth about governmental manipulation of statistics and information in general.

We need the truth about Unipolar globalism and the deep state hiding in plain sight. We need the truth about attempted government and corporate manipulation of us via the mass media. We want the truth about Brexit, we want the truth about the EU, we want the truth about the functioning of military industrial complex and its role in all of this. We want the truth about how corrupted neoliberal and neoconservative governments and capitalism have actually become.

All we want is the truth. Once that truth is revealed and established we can start to view the world with clear eyes and help rebuild it honestly with justice for all.

So now we need to build a comprehensive list of all the things we want the truth about, get our truth seeking governments elected and start going through all the secret records. We will prosecute the war criminals as we expose them. If it proves that Bush and the Neocons knew about 9/11 and let it happen as acceptable collateral damage to get the political momentum to justify the invasion of Iraq and prosecute their war on socialism in the Middle East, then they will be held to full account.

Where there is corruption we will expose them and we will hold the guilty to full account. But we will also be merciful in our judgements because the true quality of a society is best judged by the quality of its mercy and we are deplorably merciful because we abhor power, war, violence, social conflict, poverty and human suffering everywhere and will erase the conditions for their possibility in principle and in showing the fallacies of the terms of such discredited practices.

We want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and that is our only demand for global human justice.

Zero Redaction

Vote Deplorably

* * * * *

Thank you, Simon, for proposing such a revolutionary manifesto.

*  *  *

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($6.95 ebook, $12 print): Read the first section for free in PDF format. My new mystery The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake is a ridiculously affordable $1.29 (Kindle) or $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF). My book Money and Work Unchained is now $6.95 for the Kindle ebook and $15 for the print edition. Read the first section for free in PDF format. If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2HjCGvZ Tyler Durden

Instead of fighting cartel criminals in Colombia, one US narcotics agent has been implicated in a multi million dollar money laundering scheme involving them. Jose Irizarry, a once heralded DEA agent, is now accused of conspiring with an informant to launder more than $7 million in drug money, sometimes using an underground network called the black market peso exchange, according to a new report by AP.

Officials who spoke about the case called it “one of the biggest black eyes in the history of the DEA”, which has been plagued with scandals over the last few years. They also believe that the case could compromise undercover operations that are ongoing in South America and in the United States.

Not only did the scheme benefit Irizarry, but it is also believed to have worked to the benefit of a top money launderer in South America, who is also a relative of Irizarry’s. The DEA’s Colombia office continues to draw scrutiny and has fallen deeper in turmoil as a result, even though Colombia is producing record high levels of cocaine. Some of the details emerged when a former DEA informant pled guilty to money laundering. That case referred to an “unnamed co-conspirator” who turned out to be Irizarry.

It’s currently unknown where Irizarry is living or whether not he’s been charged in the ongoing criminal probe. A former attorney that represented him in a bankruptcy case provided no comment to AP and a Miami defense attorney who also represented him once did not return comment.

Irizarry had resigned from the DEA after he was recalled from Colombia to Washington in 2017.

The controversy has raised new questions about DEA screening practices and how it hires. Irizarry was hired despite the fact that he showed signs of deception during a polygraph exam and he was permitted to handle financial transactions in his role despite filing for bankruptcy in 2010 with over $500,000 in debt.

Prior to his scheme being uncovered, he was known as a model agent who often won the praise of his supervisors. He was initially based out of Miami before he won special permission to set up an undercover operation to send money and ship contraband to Colombia using front companies. His investigations helped lead to numerous arrests and earned him his transfer to the much coveted location of Colombia, where his offices were in the resort city of Cartagena.

“He was the superstar everyone wanted to be,” one former law enforcement official told AP.

In Gustavo Yabrudi’s case – Irizarry’s informant – Yabrudi testified that he knew money he was giving Irizarry was for him acting outside of the scope of his authority as a DEA agent. His lawyer described the case as involving “serious corruption” by a DEA agent.

It was also said that at times, Irizarry faked DEA seizure orders to pocket money. His clients often chalked up the losses to the normal course of business in money laundering. And Irizarry started to embrace the lifestyle of the drug traffickers that he was supposed to be busting. He bought a home and a Land Rover in Colombia, he often traveled first class to Europe with Louis Vuitton luggage and he reportedly hosted yacht parties with bikini clad prostitutes, where fellow DEA agents and at least one supervisor were said to have attended.

This all, of course, despite the fact of the DEA banned these types of gatherings after the 2015 sex party scandal that prompted the retirement of the agency’s administrator at the time.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2MgY6sy Tyler Durden

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

We are in the midst of the longest government shutdown in history.

Don’t get me wrong, I like having the government shut down. As I’ve said before, I believe it is my moral duty to pay as little taxes as possible.

The government does some really stupid things with your tax dollars. I’d rather not pay for a $2 billion Obamacare website that doesn’t work, or to defend Congressmen against sexual assault allegations.

So, by starving the beast, I at least ensure they’re not squandering my money.

But I think it’s ridiculous that this government posturing is financially crippling the 800,000 government workers (and millions of contractors) who are now out of work – or being forced to work without pay. To be fair, last night the president signed a law guaranteeing they would be paid for past work – a month into this fiasco. It’s a step in the right direction, as there’s a word for forcing people to work without pay – slavery.

That’s why I offered to pay the rent of any government workers hurt by the shutdown. I am using my tax savings to bail out some of these government workers the feds left high and dry.

But at its core, this whole shutdown comes down to a disagreement over $5 billion. That is how much money Trump wants to build the border wall between the US and Mexico. And Congress refuses to fund it.

Granted, that’s a lot of money to you and me. And it should be a lot of money to the government, too.

But the government is almost $22 TRILLION in debt and adding another trillion every single year.

We are talking about a fight over an expenditure that amounts to .02% of the total national debt.

Social Security is $50 TRILLION underfunded by the government’s own estimates. Tens of millions of Americans are relying on Social Security for retirement.

How is that going to be funded? That’s a problem 10,000 times bigger than this fight over funding a border wall.

But does Congress shut down the government to solve that? Do they refuse to budge until the Americans that have spent their lives paying into a broken pension system are made whole?

No.

But they’ll put millions of people out of work in the blink of an eye over a comparably tiny sum.

And then the politicians have the nerve to get on a high horse and fake moral superiority while it plays out.

I hate that the government spends money so callously and recklessly. And I really don’t care much whether the wall gets built or not… Taking advantage of Puerto Rico’s tax laws, I won’t be paying for it either way.

If the government had any respect for the taxpayers, they would pinch every single penny. That’s obviously not the case.

They clearly don’t care about their employees, either. Otherwise, they wouldn’t let $5 billion stand in the way of millions of paychecks that these people depend on to pay their rent.

And don’t fool yourself. This shutdown isn’t about money. It is an ideological fight with both sides digging their heels in.

The politicians dragging the shutdown on are showing their true colors. This dysfunction is a tiny preview of what will happen when the real problems come home to roost.

So here’s the truth: they are building a wall. And every single member of Congress is helping. But it’s not the wall you think…

Behind that wall, the government is hiding the real crisis.

Forget the $5 whatever billion dollars the government wants for the border wall.

Instead, you should focus on the national debt – which is a problem 4,400 times bigger than the wall.

And the collapse of Social Security is a problem 10,000 times bigger than the funding needed for the wall.

So don’t be fooled by this dummy crisis the government is conjuring. That’s what they want.

Just remember, if you rely on the government for anything, they’ll happily throw you under the bus to further their own agenda.

The real power is with the individual. You have the tools and resources to solve these issues for yourself.

For example, you could consider a retirement structure like a Solo 401(k) or self-directed SEP IRA that allows you a greater breadth of investment options– everything from real estate to crypto to private equity.

Meanwhile, the guy living in Puerto Rico and not paying any taxes is happy to pitch in to help his fellow man.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2Fypodk Tyler Durden

New Yorkers traveling in the Holland Tunnel, a vehicular tunnel underneath the Hudson River connecting Lower Manhattan and New Jersey, are now discovering that the next generation of communication technology is being tested right outside their car windows, said Bloomberg. 

Lining the 8,558 feet tunnel is a fiber-optic cable that harnesses the power of quantum mechanics to guard corporations and government against potential hackers or spies.

A technology startup called Quantum Xchange said last Fall it signed a contract giving it exclusive access to 500 miles of fiber-optic cable running along the East Coast to build what it claims will be the nation’s first quantum key distribution (QKD) network. The first span of the system links New York City to New Jersey via the Holland Tunnel will allow financial institutions and government agencies to safely transport information between offices in Manhattan and data centers abroad.

Bloomberg said the QKD approach used by Quantum Xchange works by sending an encoded message in bits while the keys to decode it are sent in the form of quantum bits, or qubits. These packets are sent via photons, which travel through fiber-optic cables. The key to this technology is that any attempt to snoop on a qubit immediately destroys its fragile quantum state, wiping out all data it caries, which basically means this technology is unhackable at the moment.

“Financial firms see this as a differentiator,” says John Prisco, chief executive officer of Quantum Xchange. Prisco says several large financial institutions are testing his fiber pipes, but he declined to tell Bloomberg the names of them, citing nondisclosure agreements.

The Chinese government has already constructed a 1,200-mile QKD-protected link between Beijing and Shanghai.

QKD has distance limitations. It can only protect data in transit, not when it is resting in data centers. And because fiber-optic cabling itself absorbs some light, a single photon cannot travel far.

Researchers have managed to stretch the network 260 miles in lab conditions. For real-world conditions, the total distance is about 60 miles.

Further transmissions require a series of “trusted nodes,” however nodes are prone to hackers or physical tapping. China solves this by placing armed guards at each of the node stations along the 1,200-mile route.

With six QKD startups in the US. Qubitekk Inc., a startup in Southern California, has a US Department of Energy contract for a pilot program to secure the communications between power plants.

Telecommunications companies including the UK’s BT Group Plc and Japan’s NTT Corp. have indicated they would soon explore options for QKD-protected networks.

There has been a significant push towards QKD networks thanks to Edward Snowden, a contractor working for the US National Security Agency, leaked documents that showed intelligence agencies were spying on networks via hard taps into fiber-optic cables. With QKD technology, government and or spies can no longer do that.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2FynhGq Tyler Durden

Authored by José Niño via The Mises Institute,

Is Venezuela paying the price for adopting gun control?

The shocking nature of Venezuela’s economic collapse has been covered ad nauseam. However, one aspect of the Venezuelan crisis that does not receive much coverage is the country’s gun control regime.

Fox News recently published an excellent article highlighting Venezuelan citizens’ regret over the gun control policies the Venezuelan government has implemented since 2012. Naturally, this regret is warranted. The Venezuelan government is among the most tyrannical in the world, with a proven track record of violating basic civil liberties such as free speech, debasing its national currency, confiscating private property, and creating economic controls that destroy the country’s productivity.

Elections have proven to be useless, as they’ve been mired with corruption and charges of government tampering. For many, taking up arms is the only option left for the country to shake off its tyrannical government. However, the Venezuelan government has done well to prevent an uprising by passing draconian gun control which will be detailed below.

Venezuela’s Lack of a Second Amendment Tradition

Historically speaking, Venezuela has never had a robust history of private gun ownership like that of the United States. The absence of a Second Amendment or check on the federal government’s monopoly on firearm usage is a vestige of its colonial legacy. Its Spanish colonial overlords did not possess a political culture of civilian firearms ownership. It was mostly the military and the landed nobility that held firearms throughout the colonial era. This tradition has persisted even after Latin American countries broke away from Spain in the 1820s.

Fast forward to the 20th century, Venezuela began its first attempts to modernize its gun policy. In 1939, the Venezuelan government enacted the Law on Arms and Explosives (Ley de Armas y Explosivos) which established the Venezuelan state’s monopoly on firearm usage. The state was the only entity that could possess “weapons of war” which include: canons, rifles, mortars, machine guns, sub-machine guns, carbines, pistols, and revolvers. Civilians could only possess .22 rifles and shotguns, and in certain circumstances could possess handguns provided that they obtained a license.

Progressive Ideas Role in Consolidating Venezuelan Statism

Ideas matter.

It’s no surprise that Venezuela embarked on this gun control escapade during the late 1930s. This was a period where statism was in vogue throughout the world as witnessed with the rise of Fascism and Communism in Europe. Even during the New Deal era, the US initiated its first foray into federal gun control with the passage of the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934. Despite its anti-gun policies, Venezuela at least maintained some semblance of limited government in economic affairs up until the 1970s.

However, the nationalization of its oil industry in the 1970s and the subsequent economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s shook up Venezuela’s institutional foundations. The country was then ripe for a demagogic takeover.

Hugo Chavez’s Anti-Gun Agenda

When socialist strongman Hugo Chávez took power, not only was Venezuela’s previous gun control order kept intact, but it was also expanded upon. Article 324 of Venezuela’s current Constitution (the 26th in its history) maintained the State’s previous monopoly on firearms and placed the National Armed Forces of Venezuela as the entity in charge of regulating all firearms in Venezuela.

In 2002, the Venezuelan government passed the first version of the Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law, reinforcing the state’s iron grip on firearms in Venezuela. A decade later, the law was modified to enhance the scope of gun control and gave the Venezuelan Armed Forces exclusive power to control, register, and potentially confiscate firearms.

Under the banner of fighting crime, Venezuela implemented a ban on the sale of firearms and ammo in 2012. Like other gun bans, this proved futile in fighting crime. According to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory’s statistics, Venezuela’s murder rate increased from 73 murders per 100,000 people in 2012 to 91.8 murders per 100,000 people in 2016.

Gun Control: Turning Citizens into Disarmed Subjects

Venezuelans are now defenseless against a government that runs roughshod over their civil liberties, while also destroying their economic livelihood. As if it weren’t enough, everyday Venezuelans must put up with rampant crime and the constant threat of colectivos, Venezuela’s infamous pro-government paramilitary units.

Although gun control in and of itself does not automatically lead to tyranny, historical events remind us that well-intentioned interventions from previous governments can be used by the next round of political operatives for nefarious purposes. Firearms bans, confiscation, and registration give the state a virtual monopoly on violence, thus turning its citizens into defenseless subjects. When the rubber meets the road, a disarmed populace has no chance against a well-armed Leviathan.

Foreigners may scoff at the US’s Second Amendment, but it is one of the most far-reaching rights the framers of the Constitution made sure to protect. Political turmoil can emerge at any time and citizens must have a final means of protecting themselves in the case that all institutional options have been exhausted. 

via RSS http://bit.ly/2HiUszJ Tyler Durden

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been sued by an immigration watchdog group after the left-leaning arbiter of social justice labeled it a “hate group,” reports the Washington Times. 

The Center for Immigration Studies says the SPLC’s accusations that it is racist and anti-immigrant are wrong and have cost the nonprofit support and financial backing by scaring people away from doing business with the center.

The center brought its challenge to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by filing a civil complaint under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act against SPLC President Richard Cohen and Heidi Beirich, who runs the group’s Hatewatch blog. –Washington Times

Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian asserts that his organization doesn’t meet the SPLC’s definitaion of a hate group, and their decision to continue labeling it as such is evidence of the racket. 

“SPLC and its leaders have every right to oppose our work on immigration, but they do not have the right to label us a hate group and suggest we are racists,” said Krikorian. “The Center for Immigration Studies is fighting back against the SPLC smear campaign and its attempt to stifle debate through intimidation and name-calling.”

The SPLC defines hate groups as organizations whose official statements or activities “attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

Krikorian says that doesn’t apply to the Center for Immigration Studies – whose motto is “pro immigrant, low immigration,” and which makes the case for “fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted.” He adds that the Supreme Court holds that simply being an immigrant is not an immutable characteristic, so maligning them doesn’t qualify as hate either way. 

Last June the SPLC settled for $3.375 million and issued a public apology after including former Islamic radical named Maajid Nawaz in the group’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” 

Since abandoning Islamic radicalism, he has advised three British prime ministers and created the Quilliam Foundation, to fight extremism. He is not anti-Muslim. He is a Muslim and has argued that “Islam is a religion of peace.”

So how did he end up in the SPLC’s pseudo-guide to anti-Muslim bigots? His crime, apparently, is that he has become a leading critic of the radical Islamist ideology he once embraced. Thanks to his courage, the SPLC has been forced to pay a multimillion-dollar penalty and acknowledge in a statement that it was “wrong” and that Nawaz has “made valuable and important contributions to public discourse, including by promoting pluralism and condemning both anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism.” –Washington Post

In June, PJ Media reported that no fewer than 60 organizations and 47 nonprofit leaders are considering lawsuits against the SPLC for similar smears by the radical left-wing organization. 

“We, the undersigned, are among the organizations, groups and individuals that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has maligned, defamed and otherwise harmed by falsely describing as ‘haters,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘Islamophobes’ and/or other groundless epithets,” the signatories declared. “We are gratified that the SPLC has today formally acknowledged that it has engaged in such misrepresentations.”

“Journalists who uncritically parrot or cite the SPLC’s unfounded characterizations of those it reviles do a profound disservice to their audiences,” the signatories added.

Meanwhile, as the Daily Caller noted last year, the SPLC is widely relied upon by Silicon Valley social media platforms to police “hate speech.” 

Four of the world’s biggest tech platforms have working partnerships with a left-wing nonprofit that has a track record of inaccuracies and routinely labels conservative organizations as “hate groups.”

Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter all work with or consult the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in policing their platforms for “hate speech” or “hate groups,” a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.

The SPLC is on a list of “external experts and organizations” that Facebook works with “to inform our hate speech policies,” Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja told TheDCNF in an interview.

…

Of the four companies, Amazon gives the SPLC the most direct authority over its platform, TheDCNF found.

While Facebook emphasizes its independence from the SPLC, Amazon does the opposite: Jeff Bezos’ company grants the SPLC broad policing power over the Amazon Smile charitable program, while claiming to remain unbiased.

“We remove organizations that the SPLC deems as ineligible,” an Amazon spokeswoman told TheDCNF.

Amazon grants the SPLC that power “because we don’t want to be biased whatsoever,” said the spokeswoman, who could not say whether Amazon considers the SPLC to be unbiased. –Daily Caller

In fact, Apple pledged $1 million to the organization, while J.P. Morgan has given the group $500,000. “Companies like Lyft and MGM Resorts have partnered with the group, while Pfizer, Bank of America, and Newman’s Own have each contributed over $8,900 to the SPLC in recent years,” according to the PJ Media report. 

via RSS http://bit.ly/2FL0rdU Tyler Durden

Authored by James Bovard via The Mises Institute,

Franklin Roosevelt did more than any other modern president to corrupt Americans’ understanding of freedom. Last week was the 75th anniversary of his 1944 speech calling for a second Bill of Rights to guarantee economic freedom to Americans. Nation magazine whooped up the anniversary, proclaiming that Democrats now have a “unique—and likely fleeting—opportunity to deliver where FDR fell short” with vast new government programs.

The 1944 speech, given as the tide in World War Two was finally turning, was a followup of his 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech which exploited Americans’ rising apprehensions to see far more power for the government. Roosevelt promised citizens freedom of speech and freedom of worship and then, as if he was merely enumerating other self-evident rights, declared:

“The third [freedom] is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world.”

Proclaiming a goal of freedom from fear meant that government should fill the role in daily life previously filled by God and religion. Politicians are the biggest fearmongers, and “freedom from fear” would justify seizing new power in response to every bogus federal alarm.

FDR’s list was clearly intended as a “replacement set” of freedoms, since otherwise there would have been no reason to mention freedom of speech and worship, already guaranteed by the First Amendment. The “four freedoms” offered citizens no security from the State, since it completely ignored the rights guaranteed in the original Bill of Rights that restricted government power, including the Second Amendment (to keep and bear firearms), the Fourth Amendment (freedom from unreasonable search and seizure), the Fifth Amendment (due process, property rights, the right against self-incrimination), the Sixth Amendment (the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury), and the Eighth Amendment (protection against excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments).

And, while Roosevelt pretended to magnanimously recognize a right to freedom of speech, that did not include freedom to dissent:

“A free nation has the right to expect full cooperation from all groups…. The best way of dealing with the few slackers or trouble makers in our midst is, first, to shame them by patriotic example, and, if that fails, to use the sovereignty of government to save government.”

Roosevelt sounded like James Madison had simply forgotten the asterisk to the First Amendment about using “the sovereignty of government to save government.” FDR’s “new freedom” would justify suppressing anyone who balked at the political ruling class’s latest goals.

Regardless of its authoritarian overtones, FDR’s Four Freedoms doctrine quickly became enshrined, by Norman Rockwell and others, in American political mythology. President George H.W. Bush, speaking on the fiftieth anniversary of the Four Freedoms speech, called FDR “our greatest American political pragmatist” and praised him for having “brilliantly enunciated the 20th-century vision of our Founding Fathers’ commitment to individual liberty.” President Bill Clinton declared in October 1996, “In Franklin Roosevelt’s view, government should be the perfect public system for fostering and protecting the ‘Four Freedoms’ . . . Roosevelt . . . enumerated these freedoms not as abstract ideals but as goals toward which Americans—and caring people everywhere— could direct their most strenuous public efforts.” President George W. Bush invoked Roosevelt’s Four Freedom proclamation in Bush’s most fraudulent speech — his “Mission Accomplished” huff-and-strut aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003.

Three years later, in his 1944 State of the Union address , Roosevelt revealed that the original Bill of Rights had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Roosevelt called for a “Second Bill of Rights,” and asserted that: “True individual freedom can’t exist without economic security.” And security, according to FDR, included “the right to a useful and remunerative job,” “decent home,” “good health,” and “good education.” Thus, if a government school failed to teach all fifth graders to read, the nonreaders would be considered oppressed (lawsuits over public school failures in Michigan and elsewhere against local and state governments have relied on similar claptrap). Similarly, if someone was in bad health, then that person would be considered as having been deprived of his freedom, and somehow it would be the government’s fault. Freedom thus required boundless control over health care.

Roosevelt also declared that liberty requires “the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.” In other words, government should inflate food prices high enough to keep the nation’s least efficient farmer behind his mule and plow. But FDR-style freedom also required unlimited federal control over every farmer. At that point, USDA was dictating to every wheat farmer exactly how many acres of the grain they could grow. An Indiana farmer exceeded his quota to grow wheat to feed to his hogs. The Roosevelt administration hounded him all the way to the Supreme Court, claiming it needed a free hand to “suppress … a public evil.” And what was the “public evil”? Wheat surpluses and uppity farmers who failed to kowtow to every USDA bureaucrat.

FDR also proclaimed “the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition.” Here was another new freedom that could be secured only by giving bureaucrats unlimited control of the private sector. Two years earlier, Congress enacted the Emergency Price Control Act, which created an Office of Price Administration with sweeping power to set or strike down prices in practically any industry. The act contained no substantive guidelines for the administrator’s decisions but merely required prices that “in his judgment will be generally fair and equitable.” When the Supreme Court upheld the law in 1944, Justice Owen Roberts bitterly dissented that “it is plain that this Act creates personal government by a petty tyrant instead of government by law.” Roberts scoffed at the court’s rubber-stamping of the law as a “solemn farce” because the law was written so that “the courts are unable to say that the Administrator has exceeded the discretion vested in him.”

Pundits and progressives who are whooping up Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights almost always ignore perhaps the biggest surprise in that speech. While Roosevelt spoke gaudily of new rights, he scooped George Orwell’s 1984 by revealing that slavery was freedom – or at least “close enough for government work.” FDR urged Congress to enact a “national service law— which for the duration of the war . . . will make available for war production or for any other essential services every able-bodied adult in this Nation.” FDR invoked the “eternally just principle of ‘fair for one, fair for all’” to justify destroying the freedom of every worker in the nation. He promised that this proposal, described in his official papers as a Universal Conscription Act, would be a “unifying moral force” and “a means by which every man and woman can find that inner satisfaction which comes from making the fullest possible contribution to victory.” Presumably, the less freedom people had, the more satisfied they’d become. And anyone who did not feel liberated by federal commands was a bastard who deserved all the misery officialdom heaped upon them.

H.L. Mencken wisely observed, “One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.” Americans are still suffering because Franklin Roosevelt’s freedom bunkum was not immediately laughed off the national stage. Any politician who seeks more power today to bestow more freedom in the distant future deserves all the ridicule Americans can heave his way.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2sAcJhH Tyler Durden