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Members of the United Nations recoiled in horror last year when President Trump slashed the US’s UN budget by nearly $300 million after the international agency rebuked the US over its decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem. Looks like the jokes on them.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has accepted the resignation of UN Environmental Chief Erik Solheim, a veteran Norwegian diplomat, after an internal audit by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services criticized the environment agency for “a culture of scant regard for internal controls and existing rules” on the use of public funds. This “misuse” included Solheim racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal flights to Paris (sound familiar?), according to the New York Times. Unfortunately for Solheim, those flights had nothing to do with the agency’s work on the Paris Accords.

What’s even more embarrassing for the agency, the alleged overspending happened at a time when resources for combating climate change were shrinking. Some of the agency’s biggest donors even decided to withhold funds pending the final results of the audit.

Aside from the profligate spending, the report also found Solheim was routinely absent from the office without accounting for where he was or why.

The report found “uneconomical routing of flight itineraries, opting for more expensive airlines, implementation of teleworking arrangements that were outside the existing policy on flexible working arrangements.”

In fact, Solheim spent as much as 80% of his time away from the agency’s office in Nairobi, and frequently took flights to Paris and Oslo for what appeared to be personal reasons. Right after accepting the position in July 2016, Solheim flew to Paris for a “one-day meeting.” He ended up staying for a month. Many of the “official” trips were also taken during public holidays when he apparently had no official business there. 

At issue in particular were his frequent trips to Paris and Oslo. The audit found that Mr. Solheim, referred to in the audit as “a senior manager,” had spent 79 percent of his time away from the agency’s headquarters in Nairobi and incurred $488,519 in travel expenses over a 22-month period.

According to the audit, he selected flight itineraries that passed unnecessarily through Oslo and Paris and failed to account for what he did in those cities for a total of 72 days. The audit found that the travel arrangements were “uneconomical” and contravened United Nations travel rules.

“Most of the rerouted trips to the two cities were made prior to or during weekends or public holidays,” the audit found. Immediately after taking office, in July 2016, the audit found, Mr. Solheim flew to Paris for a one-day meeting but stayed for a month, accounting for nine days as his annual leave. Then, he went on a six-city tour of North and South America. His travel costs for the whole trip exceeded $14,000.

Sometimes, Solheim took flights on circuitous routes, or flew back to Europe between back-to-back meetings in the US – without any apparent reason.

Separately, he flew through Oslo on his way to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which is only a two-hour flight from Nairobi. On another occasion, he flew to Paris between meetings in Washington and New York. He refunded the world body $7,022 in travel expenses after an internal investigation of that trip.

But tell us again how President Trump is dismantling crucial international institutions for wanting to cut costs, abuse and waste?

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Authored by Carl Miller via Wired.co.uk,

They are soldiers, but the 77th Brigade edit videos, record podcasts and write viral posts. Welcome to the age of information warfare…

A barbed-wire fence stretched off far to either side. A Union flag twisted in a gust of wind, and soldiers strode in and out of a squat guard’s hut in the middle of the road. Through the hut, and under a row of floodlights, I walked towards a long line of drab, low-rise brick buildings. It was the summer of 2017, and on this military base nestled among the hills of Berkshire, I was visiting a part of the British Army unlike any other. They call it the 77thBrigade. They are the troops fighting Britain’s information wars.

“If everybody is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking,” was written in foot-high letters across a whiteboard in one of the main atriums of the base. Over to one side, there was a suite full of large, electronic sketch pads and multi-screened desktops loaded with digital editing software. The men and women of the 77th knew how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos. Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media advertising, and data analytics. Some may have taken the army’s course in Defence Media Operations, and almost half were reservists from civvy street, with full time jobs in marketing or consumer research.

From office to office, I found a different part of the Brigade busy at work. One room was focussed on understanding audiences: the makeup, demographics and habits of the people they wanted to reach. Another was more analytical, focussing on creating “attitude and sentiment awareness” from large sets of social media data. Another was full of officers producing video and audio content. Elsewhere, teams of intelligence specialists were closely analysing how messages were being received and discussing how to make them more resonant.

Explaining their work, the soldiers used phrases I had heard countless times from digital marketers: “key influencers”, “reach”, “traction”. You normally hear such words at viral advertising studios and digital research labs. But the skinny jeans and wax moustaches were here replaced by the crisply ironed shirts and light patterned camouflage of the British Army. Their surroundings were equally incongruous – the 77th’s headquarters were a mix of linoleum flooring, long corridors and swinging fire doors. More Grange Hill than Menlo Park. Next to a digital design studio, soldiers were having a tea break, a packet of digestives lying open on top of a green metallic ammo box. Another sign on the wall declared, “Behavioural change is our USP [unique selling point]”. What on Earth was happening?

“If you track where UK manpower is deployed, you can take a good guess at where this kind of ‘influence’ activity happens,” an information warfare officer (not affiliated with the 77th) told me later, under condition of anonymity.

“A document will come from the Ministry of Defence that will have broad guidance and themes to follow.” He explains that each military campaign now also has – or rather is – a marketing campaign too.

Ever since Nato troops were deployed to the Baltics in 2017, Russian propaganda has been deployed too, alleging that Nato soldiers there are rapists, looters, little different from a hostile occupation. One of the goals of Nato information warfare was to counter this kind of threat: sharply rebutting damaging rumours, and producing videos of Nato troops happily working with Baltic hosts.

Information campaigns such as these are “white”: openly, avowedly the voice of the British military. But to narrower audiences, in conflict situations, and when it was understood to be proportionate and necessary to do so, messaging campaigns could become, the officer said, “grey” and “black” too. “Counter-piracy, counter-insurgencies and counter-terrorism,” he explained. There, the messaging doesn’t have to look like it came from the military and doesn’t have to necessarily tell the truth.

I saw no evidence that the 77th do these kinds of operations themselves, but this more aggressive use of information is nothing new. GCHQ, for instance, also has a unit dedicated to fighting wars with information. It is called the “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” – or JTRIG – an utterly unrevealing name, as it is common in the world of intelligence. Almost all we know about it comes from a series of slides leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Those documents give us a glimpse of what these kinds of covert information campaigns could look like.

According to the slides, JTRIG was in the business of discrediting companies, by passing “confidential information to the press through blogs etc.”, and by posting negative information on internet forums. They could change someone’s social media photos (“can take ‘paranoia’ to a whole new level”, a slide read.) They could use masquerade-type techniques – that is: placing “secret” information on a compromised computer. They could bombard someone’s phone with text messages or calls.

JTRIG also boasted an arsenal of 200 info-weapons, ranging from in-development to fully operational. A tool dubbed “Badger” allowed the mass delivery of email. Another, called “Burlesque”, spoofed SMS messages. “Clean Sweep” would impersonate Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries. “Gateway” gave the ability to “artificially increase traffic to a website”. “Underpass” was a way to change the outcome of online polls.

They had operational targets across the globe: Iran, Africa, North Korea, Russia and the UK. Sometimes the operations focused on specific individuals and groups, sometimes the wider regimes or even general populations. Operation Quito was a campaign, running some time after 2009, to prevent Argentina from taking over the Falkland Islands. A slide explained “this will hopefully lead to a long-running, large-scale, pioneering effects operation”. Running from March 2011, another operation aimed for regime change in Zimbabwe by discrediting the Zanu PF party.

Walking through the headquarters of the 77th, the strange new reality of warfare was on display. We’ve all heard a lot about “cyberwarfare” – about how states could attack their enemies through computer networks, damaging their infrastructure or stealing their secrets. But that wasn’t what was going on here. Emerging here in the 77th Brigade was a warfare of storyboards and narratives, videos and social media. An engagement now doesn’t just happen on the battlefield, but also in the media and online. A victory is won as much in the eyes of the watching public as between opposing armies on the battlefield. Warfare in the information age is a warfare over information itself.

Propaganda published on Facebook by Russian PR firms in an attempt to affect the 2016 US presidential election

Over a decade ago, and a world away from the 77th Brigade, there were people who already knew that the internet was a potent new tool of influence. They didn’t call what they did “information warfare”, media operations, influence activities, online action, or any of the military vernacular that it would become. Members of the simmering online subcultures that clustered around hacker forums, in IRCs, and on imageboards like 4chan, they might have called it “attention hacking”. Or simply lulz.

In 2008, Oprah Winfrey warned her millions of viewers that a known paedophile network “has over 9,000 penises and they’re all raping children.” That was a 4chan Dragon Ball-themed in-joke someone had posted on the show’s messageboard. One year later, Time magazine ran an online poll for its readers to vote on the world’s 100 most influential people, and 4chan used scripts to rig the vote so that its founder – then-21-year-old Christopher Poole, commonly known as “moot” – came first. They built bots and “sockpuppets” – fake social media accounts to make topics trend and appear more popular than they were – and swarmed together to overwhelm their targets. They started to reach through computers to change what people saw, and perhaps even what people thought. They celebrated each of their victories with a deluge of memes.

The lulz were quickly seized upon by others for the money. Throughout the 2000s, small PR firms, political communications consultancies, and darknet markets all began to peddle the tactics and techniques pioneered on 4chan. “Digital media-savvy merchants are weaponising their knowledge of commercial social media manipulation services,” a cybersecurity researcher who tracks this kind of illicit commercial activity tells me on condition of anonymity.

“It’s like an assembly line,” he continues. “They prepare the campaign, penetrate the target audience, maintain the operation, and then they strategically disengage. It is only going to get bigger.”

A range of websites started selling fake accounts, described, categorised and priced almost like wine: from cheap plonk all the way to seasoned vintages. The “HUGE MEGA BOT PACK”, available for just $3 on the darknet, allowed you to build your own bot army across hundreds of social media platforms. There were services for manipulating search engine results. You could buy Wikipedia edits. You could rent fake IP addresses to make it look like your accounts came from all over the world. And at the top of the market were “legend farms”, firms running tens of thousands of unique identities, each one with multiple accounts on social media, a unique IP address, its own internet address, even its own personality, interests and writing style. The lulz had transmogrified into a business model.

Inside the base of the 77th, everything was in motion. Flooring was being laid, work units installed; desks – empty of possessions – formed neat lines in offices still covered in plastic, tape and sawdust. The unit was formed in a hurry in 2015 from various older parts of the British Army – a Media Operations Group, a Military Stabilisation Support Group, a Psychological Operations Group. It has been rapidly expanding ever since.

In 2014, a year before the 77th was established, a memo entitled “Warfare in the Information Age” flashed across the British military. “We are now in the foothills of the Information Age” the memo announced. It argued that the British Army needed to fight a new kind of war, one that “will have information at its core”. The Army needed to be out on social media, on the internet, and in the press, engaged, as the memo put it, “in the reciprocal, real-time business of being first with the truth, countering the narratives of others, and if necessary manipulating the opinion of thousands concurrently in support of combat operations.”

Then the business of lulz turned into geopolitics. Around the world, militaries had come to exactly the same realisation as the British, and often more quickly. “There is an increased reliance on, and desire for, information,” Nato’s Allied Joint Doctrine for Information Operations, published in 2009, began. And it reached the same conclusion as the British military memo: wars needed to have an “increased attention on Info Ops”. Simply put, information operations should be used to target an enemy’s will. “For example, by questioning the legitimacy of leadership and cause, information activities may undermine their moral power base, separating leadership from supporters, political, military and public, thus weakening their desire to continue and affecting their actions,” the document explains.

Russia, too, was in on the act. The Arab Spring, the revolutions in several post-Soviet states, Nato’s enlargement – each of those had chipped away at the crumbling edifice of Russian power. Russia had a large conventional army but that seemed to matter less than in the past. The Chief of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, began to rethink what a military needed to do. Warfare, he argued in an article for Voyenno-Promyshlennyy Kurier (The Military Industry Journal), was now “hybrid” – blurring the lines between war and peace, civilian and military, state and non-state. And there was another blurring too: between force and ideas. “Moral-psychological-cognitive-informational struggle”, as Gerasimov put it, was now central to how conflicts should be fought.

We now know what Russian information warfare looks like. Moscow has built an apparatus that stretches from mainstream media to the backwaters of the blogosphere, from the President of the Russian Federation to the humble bot. Just like the early attention hackers, their techniques are a mixture of the very visible and very secret – but at a vastly greater scale.

Far less visible to Western eyes, however, were the outbreak of other theatres of information warfare outside of the English language. Gerasimov was right: each was a case of blurred boundaries. It was information warfare, but not always just carried out by militaries. It came from the state, but sometimes included plenty of non-state actors too. Primarily, it was done by autocracies, and was often directed internally, at the country’s own inhabitants.

A Harvard paper published in 2017 estimated that the Chinese government employs two million people to write 448 million social media posts a year. Their primary purpose is to keep online discussion away from sensitive political topics. Marc Owen Jones, a researcher at Exeter University’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, exposed thousands of fake Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia, “lionising the Saudi government or Saudi foreign policy”. In Bahrain, evidence emerged of spam-like operations, aiming to stop dissidents finding each other or debating politically dangerous topics online. In Mexico, an estimated 75,000 automated accounts are known locally as Peñabots, after President Enrique Peña Nieto, flooding protest hashtags with irrelevant, annoying noise burying any useful information.

Disinformation and deception have been a part of warfare for thousands of years, but across the world, something new was starting to happen. Information has long been used to support combat operations, but now combat was seen to taking place primarily, sometimes exclusively, through it. From being a tool of warfare, each military began to realise that the struggle with, over and through information was what war itself actually was about. And it wasn’t confined to Russia, China or anyone else. A global informational struggle has broken out. Dozens of countries are already doing it. And these are just the campaigns that we know about.

On their shoulders, the soldiers of the 77th Brigade wear a small, round patch of blue encircling a snarling golden creature that looks like a lion. Called an A Chinthe, it’s a mythical Burmese beast first worn by the the Chindits, a British and Indian guerrilla force created during the Second World War to protect Burma against the advancing Japanese Army. An army of irregulars, the Chindits infiltrated deep behind enemy lines in unpredictable sorties, destroying supply depots and severing transport links, aiming to spread confusion as much as destruction.

It’s no accident that the 77th wear the Chinthe on their shoulder. Like the Chindits, they are a new kind of force. An unorthodox one, but in the eyes of the British Army also a necessary innovation; simply reflecting the world in which we all now live and the new kind of warfare that happens within it.

This new warfare poses a problem that neither the 77th Brigade, the military, or any democratic state has come close to answering yet. It is easy to work out how to deceive foreign publics, but far, far harder to know how to protect our own. Whether it is Russia’s involvement in the US elections, over Brexit, during the novichok poisoning or the dozens of other instances that we already know about, the cases are piling up. In information warfare, offence beats defence almost by design. It’s far easier to put out lies than convince everyone that they’re lies. Disinformation is cheap; debunking it is expensive and difficult.

Even worse, this kind of warfare benefits authoritarian states more than liberal democratic ones. For states and militaries, manipulating the internet is trivially cheap and easy to do. The limiting factor isn’t technical, it’s legal. And whatever the overreaches of Western intelligence, they still do operate in legal environments that tend to more greatly constrain where, and how widely, information warfare can be deployed. China and Russia have no such legal hindrances.

Equipping us all with the skills to protect ourselves from information warfare is, perhaps, the only true solution to the problem. But it takes time. And what could be taught would never keep up with what can be done. Technological possibility, as things stand, easily outpaces public understanding.

The Chinthe was often built at the entrances of pagodas, temples and other sacred sites to guard them from the menaces and dangers lurking outside. Today, that sacred site is the internet itself. From the lulz, to spam, to information warfare, the threats against it have become far better funded and more potent. The age of information war is just getting started.

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When it comes to reporting new legislation planned by the European Union, many British tabloids have a tendency to “overdo it”.

A story from September 1994 is a notable example. Reported by The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and Daily Express, it stated that “Brussels bureaucrats banned curved bananas with shops ordered not to sell fruit which is too small or abnormally bent”. The Commission debunked the story and responded that regulation simply classifies bananas according to quality and size for the sake of easing international banana trade. It added that the minimal rules are applied solely to green, unripe bananas, rather than those destined for the processing industry. It should also improve the quality of bananas on sale in the EU.

In fact, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the Commission maintains a webpage solely devoted to debunking “Euromyths” reported by the British press.

The banana example is just one of hundreds of myths and others include “Commission to outlaw mushy peas (1995)” and “Queen’s corgis to be outlawed (2002)”. The number of false stories about the EU reported in the UK reached its height in 1993 with the Commission listing 100 myths in total.

The number fell drastically between 2007 and 2012 but it started to climb again in 2013 after Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a Conservative government would hold an in-or-out referendum on EU membership.

You will find more infographics at Statista

You can find the European Commission page wth the full A-Z index of Euromyths here.

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Authored by Tom Luongo via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Watching the complete betrayal of Brexit by British Prime Minister Theresa “The Gypsum Lady” May is proving to be a wake up call for Italians. The latest polling results coming out of Italy show that while the populist coalition in Italy is unpopular in Brussels it is still very popular with Italians.

And that’s a good thing because when you look closely at Brexit negotiations it is clear that all that matters is the EU retaining power over the U.K. and not what is in the best interest of anyone involved, British or otherwise.

The Italian coalition partners still command nearly 60% of all Italians’ support, only their preference has changed. Lega now outpolls Five Star Movement (M5S) 33% to 26%, while the other center-right parties, namely Silvio “Stalking Horse” Berlusconi’s Forza Italia have collapsed (from 14% at March’s elections to just 7% now).

And roughly that same number now see the EU as mistreating Italy. These numbers will only get worse if the EU goes through with levying fines against Italy for submitting a budget Brussels doesn’t like.

Moreover, now we’re seeing support for Italeave rise as well. A recent poll by Politico Magazine posted over at Zerohedge shows a slight majority of Italians under age 45 are ready to do just that, leave the European Union.

The over 45 crowd is still enamored with the ideal of the EU tying together a warring Europe rather than confront the reality of what it actually is, a distant and tyrannical oligarchy led by unelected technocrats with strong ties to old money and old power.

The source of this support comes from, I think, the stark contrast between May’s appeasement of rankled EU leadership over the British people’s temerity to want out of their wretched union and how Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini is attacking Brussels’ hypocrisy over fiscal restraints.

Salvini is doing exactly what he needs to do to shore up support and push the Italian electorate away from Brussels. It was a stroke of political genius to submit a budget which placated both halves of the coalition – tax and regulation cuts along with universal basic income – while ever so gently flaunting EU budget rules.

Salvini and his partner in insurrection Luigi Di Maio crafted a perfect piece of political poison for the EU to swallow. There’s nothing really objectionable in the budget proposal. It won’t solve any of Italy’s problems nor make them materially worse.

It was put forth to rankle EU leadership that has grown fat and lazy on having everything rigged in their favor. And they have over-reacted in the most predictable manner.

Think about what the EU is doing over this budget. They are threatening billions in fines to an Italian government that is in debt up to its eyeballs.

This is the very definition of “bad optics.”

But, consider the way they’ve handled Brexit. They’ve demanded a massive fee from the U.K. for leaving. This is on top of the money it already pays into the EU budget every year.

And don’t forget folks that the only reason the Italian sovereign debt issue isn’t front page news is because the European Central Bank is the only marginal buyer of Italian debt. And ECB President Mario Draghi isn’t doing this out of the goodness of his Goldman-Sachs-trained heart.

He’s doing it because if he doesn’t then the entire European banking system collapses.

So this whole thing is nothing more than Kabuki theatre. And Salvini knows it.

He understands that the euro is a death trap for Italy. He also knows he has all the leverage because of the size of the debt pile.

And yet, watching the EU now is exactly like watching it in handle the Greek debt talks in 2015.

They refused to negotiate. They make unreasonable demands. In Greece’s case they had a feckless Greek electorate which wouldn’t back Grexit and give equally feckless Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras the support he needed to take Greece out of the Euro.

So the strategy worked.

And the same thing is happening with Brexit. The British aristocracy do not want to leave the EU. Theresa May is a Remainer and so obviously on the take it’s not even funny at this point. From the beginning she’s had all the leverage and yet she acts as if she doesn’t.

So now she’s thrown together the exact deal that Brussels wanted all along, control over Britain’s tax and trade policy while removing their voice from the EU parliament. Honestly, Britain’s status once this deal is signed off on is simply a glimpse into every country’s future that stays.

Taxation without representation.

It should, then, come as no shock to anyone that the EU is handling Salvini and his government with the same disdain and derision. And that’s exactly what Salvini wants. He has to maneuver Brussels into making them be the bad guys.

Because if he’s going to get Italy free from Brussels it can’t be his idea. It has to be a popular groundswell.

Thankfully for him and Italians in general, the dopes in high places in Brussels are only too happy to oblige. I think they like being odious jerks, frankly.

They really do think they can lawyer their way through this. But the truth is they can’t.

Why do you think French President Emmanuel Macron and Lame Duck German Chancellor Angela Merkel want a Grand Army of the EU so badly? It’s to invade and occupy wayward member states not protect themselves from Russia.

The more the EU tries to bully and force Italy to do what it wants the more Italians, even older ones, will support Salvini’s crusade against them. Populism is popular all over Europe.

And the EU parliamentary elections in May will likely prove to be a major turning point in the EU’s trajectory. All of the Euroskeptic parties are vastly under-represented versus their current polling numbers. Hundreds of seats are set to change hands in May.

And many of the newcomers will not be in the pay of The Davos Crowd.

Maybe then the EU will realize just how fragile the entire project is.

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Authored by M K Bhadrakumar via IndianPunchline.com,

After prolonged hibernation, the Astana Process on Syrian peace is kinetic, with the troika of ‘guarantor’ states – Russia, Turkey and Iran – set to hold a round of talks in the Kazakh capital on November 28-29. Delegations of Syrian government and the opposition are also expected to attend. A renewed effort is commencing to create traction for the UN-sponsored negotiations in Geneva.

(Astana-9 meeting on Syria, May 2018)

Much water has flown down the Euphrates since the 9th round of the Astana Process took place in May. Six months is a long time in politics – especially in Middle East politics. But, paradoxically, while Middle Eastern politics is in turmoil, the prospects for peace in Syria may have improved. The setting for tomorrow’s meet – it’s unclear at what level the event will take place – has become largely favorable. At least 10 major reasons can be attributed.

One, Syria is witnessing a period of relative calm. There has been no major fighting for months.

Two, Syrian-Jordanian border had reopened and nothing of a feared flare-up happened in the Golan Heights.

Three, the Russian-Turkish understanding on Idlib is holding.

Four, Israel has been effectively ‘defanged’ (thanks to deployment of Russian S-300 ABM system to Syria).

Five, Russia and Iran intend to retain their military footprints in Syria for a foreseeable future, while on the contrary, the US lacks the political will or the military capability to impact the strategic calculations of Moscow, Tehran, Damascus or Ankara.

Six, importantly, Turkey has become an implicit ally of Russia and Iran and is inching closer and closer to a political deal that leaves President Bashar Al-Assad in power.

Seven, Russia, Turkey, and Iran are in the lead in shaping the Syria policy, with clear strategic goals and, even more so, the means to achieve them.

(Tehran Summit on Syria, September 2018)

Eight, on the other hand, a growing determination on the part of Russia, Iran, and Turkey is discernible to freeze out the United States from any role in shaping Syria’s geo-strategic future. Although the three countries would have tactical differences between them, broadly, Turkey will accommodate Russia and Iran so long as it has a free hand to check the Kurdish forces threatening its security. Significantly, the announcement on the rebooting of the Astana Process comes after the visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Turkey on November 19.

Nine, the crisis in Turkish-American relations not only persists but may even deepen in the period ahead.

Finally, the Trump administration’s calculations that its re-imposition of sanctions against Iran will either force Iran out of Syria or, better yet, produce a veritable collapse of the Iranian government are turning out to be a mere pipedream. In fact, the opposite has happened.

Iran is intensifying its coordination with Russia and Turkey, and is creating firewalls to protect its strategic gains in Syria. Again, it is clear by now that the US cannot count on the new government in Baghdad to act against Iranian interests.

On the other hand, the dangerous situation that has arisen on Israel’s border with Gaza (which was precipitated entirely by Israeli hardliners) and the ensuing mayhem in Israel’s domestic politics will seriously delimit Benjamin Netanyahu’s energy and resources to act as ‘spoiler’ in Syria. Moscow has openly snubbed Netanyahu lately by refusing him to schedule his visit.

Similarly, the widening cracks in the US-Saudi alliance in the downstream of the Khashoggi murder all but means an overall Saudi disengagement from the Syrian conflict. The UAE has already begun mending fences with the Syrian government, which would only have been possible with Saudi approval. (See my blog UAE, Saudi sense convergence with Syria.)

Suffice to say, the so-called Syrian opposition is finding itself rudderless. Their erstwhile mentors – US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE – have either reached a dead end or have turned to new priorities in their self-interests accepting the defeat in the Syrian conflict.

Meanwhile, the appointment of Norwegian diplomat Geir Pederson as the UN Secretary-General’s new special envoy for Syria becomes a positive factor. Russia has warmly noted that “we know him as an experienced and unbiased diplomat.” Pederson’s predecessor Staffan de Mistura was widely perceived as a sidekick of the US. Clearly, the Astana Process is not wasting time by kickstarting the work on a Syrian settlement even as Perdersen moves in.

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Damien Boey, a research analyst at Credit Suisse, has warned that economic growth in Australia could slow quite sharply next year, raising the prospect that a slowdown could be immient.

Boey expects the recent growth spurt driven by strong infrastructure investment, could fade in the first half of 2019, and the risks associated with housing construction and household spending from the downturn in real estate could signal that the Reserve Bank of Australia’s rate hike cycle would have to be put on hold.

“Our view is that the economy is overshooting,” Boey said.

“We believe that growth will eventually slow as timely leading indicators [such as PMIs] are suggesting.”

Boey said infrastructure investments had driven the recent surge in economic activity.

“We think that the [economy] is still being supported by infrastructure,” he said.

“The latest Access Economics data for Q3 suggest that growth in the stock of infrastructure spending has re-accelerated. And recently, project spending growth has been remarkably positively correlated with the cycle in domestic demand.”

While actual infrastructure investment has been substantial, Boey did not expect the trend to last due to the lack of new projects in the pipeline. 

“In 2018 to date, actual project spending growth has accelerated, even as the project pipeline has thinned out,” he said.

“It is in this sense that we think infrastructure spending growth has been overshooting, contributing to the overshooting we are also seeing in domestic demand growth relative to leading indicators,” Boey added.

“However, the more growth in spending we experience today, the more we also eat into future growth, unless policy makers are able to adequately top up the project pipeline.

“As the saying goes, ‘serenity now, insanity later’.”

The boom in infrastructure investment in 2018 is creating a high benchmark for growth rates in 2019, a significant factor Boey believes will morph into a slowdown next year. 

“Our concern is that the economy is very much driven by housing and consumption,” Boey said.

“Indeed, the multiplier effects of housing on the rest of the economy are very large. In this respect, conditions do not look particularly healthy.”

And, if Boey is correct about infrastructure spending cooling next year, this could materialize into a significant issue for households that could further compound the real estate slowdown. 

“Infrastructure spending is providing a circuit breaker between falling house prices and the aggregate spending. Employment growth has been remarkably resilient, allowing households to absorb negative wealth and credit effects from housing downturn,” he said.

“But if the infrastructure pipeline is not topped up in a timely fashion, the risk is that the public spending impulse will fade, employment growth will slow, and private sector de-leveraging forces will take over.”

This all comes at a time of declining home prices in many regions of the country, Boey also warns this could see “residential investment fall materially.”

Boey, like many other forecasters, thinks the Sydney-led national housing downturn could result in a crash. 

On Thursday, we covered yet another gloomy report, this time from UBS, who warns housing prices in Australia could fall as much as 30% in a deep recession scenario.

UBS analyst Jonathan Mott assembled five different scenarios to predict the direction that Australia’s housing market could go. The worst case includes the first recession in 27 years, a 30% collapse in house prices and widespread litigation against the banks for mortgage mis-selling. The bear case would also include the central bank cutting rates to zero before embarking on its own version of quantitative easing, the suspension of dividends and equity raisings from the big banks.

Mott thinks that current conditions are already reflecting the very real possibility of a housing correction and also warns that risk of a credit crunch “is real and rising.”

Mott stated: “The rapidly deteriorating housing market is a signal of even tougher times ahead. The housing credit squeeze experienced over the last six months is expanding. The outlook for the banks has not been as challenged since at least 2008.”

As a reminder, the Australian household debt to income ratio has ballooned to shocking levels over the past three decades as Sydney is ranked as one of the most overvalued cities in the world. According to the Daily Mail Australia, credit card bills, home mortgages, and personal loans now account for 189% of an average Australian household income, compared with just 60% in 1988:

Australia’s economy is a house of cards. It seems that multiple analysts have realized the party could stop in 2019.

 

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Authored by JG Martinez D via Daisy Luther’s Organic Prepper blog,

In this update, Jose talks about the worsening corruption, hunger, and crime in Venezuela. It’s hard to imagine, but things are still getting worse there. As we get together to feast with our families this week, please remember the people of Venezuela, where 80% of the population does not have enough food. ~ Daisy

I have been trying to solve a couple of issues this past week, mainly related to my parents’ health. Dad just had an event with his equilibrium (he is almost 80 so it is perfectly understandable), and he hardly could come back home in his old car. Amazingly, he did not crash or got injured in the way back. In the pictures, I have seen he is alarmingly thinner. I will send him some nutritional additions as soon as I can. I have been going through some personal and familial issues that demanded lots of attention and care and had to leave the city for some days up to work a few days in a place without any kind of coverage, not even landline, in the middle of nowhere. I survived though.

Let’s begin.

Why the collapse is still going on.

Well, it is a known fact that a slow, painful collapse is definitely the worst possible scenario. Its effects are long term, the suffering it inflicts has effects on too many people, and last too much time. It affects other countries’ economies and societies, on time.

In our example, this is exactly what is happening.  I read the report of a Venezuelan journalist, much smarter than me, where he explains the exact reason with very clever words, of why the mafia is still in power. His analysis is that the regime is not a vertical structure. Otherwise, it would have been much easier to overcome with conventional methodologies. The reason is that the structure is not like, for example, the Iraq government where Saddam controlled everything.

In Venezuela, the power is exerted by small, powerful because they are armed and have support from traitors as internal sources) gangs that are scattered all over the country. These can be with or without uniforms. It is very likely there are foreigners with them too, not openly but in the torture/imprisonment facilities.  This kind of division offers new perspectives to know where exactly the combat should start. I would dare to say that, once we understood how they operate, it should be much easier to remove them.

Local warlords should have local interests…and local thugs to “attend” such interests, too. With some basic surveillance and taking care of the local snitches, enough information could be collected for some groups to start cooking something decent.

Yes, I am a libertarian. This kind of love for freedom is beyond nationality. That is why the communist world fears it that much and wants to eliminate it so badly.

But I would not like to analyze too much the political aspects this time. It is effectively covered, at least in its main aspects, in other articles.

An update from my wife’s family

I hadn’t written some other articles because I was waiting for my wife’s family to arrive, so I could include personal information they collected from their conversations with other travelers.

They made the trip, and the information is outstanding. They confirmed the 18 dead by freezing story in the mountains of Colombia. Being a large family with small children, they received assistance in some of the parts of the trip, even being hosted without charge in a hotel room.

To summarize, this is the general situation: people have to get into a large truck (regular buses are out of the game, there are no tires or spare parts) just to buy some basic staples, at incredible prices that increase every single day. The power grid is working just 4/5 hours a day in most of the country. Sending money is now increasingly difficult. The price of food is such that, even in a foreign currency like dollars, the numbers just don´t match: a dozen eggs is 9$, and one kilo of meat about 13$ depending on the area. Corn flour for our arepas is just found by the 12 kilos package. Rice and pasta, the same. If someone can live with those prices…

Law “enforcement” is completely corrupt.

It is quite interesting to hear what they have to say about the role of the law “enforcement” corps. They kidnapped people, asking for ransoms in foreign currency. The situation in the imprisonment facilities was…apocalyptical. Once they have collected enough money from the ransoms and what not, almost the technical stuff LEOs all of that city flee the country for good, and they are now in some place in Latin America (Colombia, perhaps?)…or even planning how to sneak up to the USA.

Go figure.

One of the most interesting investigators of this kind of stuff I have read these last few days analyzed very thoroughly about how the atomization and redistribution of power schemes are what has allowed the mafia to be in relative control so much time. With many small bands of thugs operating at the same time all over the country, and the LEO corps obeying just their own rules (presidential convoy was stopped recently by an armed group of intelligence corps, with the consequent aggressive attitude of the bodyguards, and this impasse conducted to the removal of their director, Gustavo Gonzalez L. from the chair. (You can google it). There is a lot of stuff happening under the sheets.

It is quite likely that we will see lots of nasty things in the near future, as the power structures diminishes and more and more members are “purged”. Losing control for this structure means that the ruling party in the rest of the country will be those with the uniform, the badge, and the gun or the AK. And without a legal system working, that is bad. VERY bad. As it can be supposed, this will not be a happy ending for those involved. They know that the entire world is against them. They are considered (as it should be) delinquents for good people all over the world.  They have stolen our gold and destroyed our capacity to generate wealth via oil production.

Stealth mode is essential to survive in Venezuela right now.

This said, I have suggested to my fellows to activate their stealth mode. Old clothing and shoes, avoid too clean cars, use the vehicles as little as possible…Jeez, even using dark bags in case they found some food is wise. There are plenty of stories about thugs grabbing grocery bags, sometimes even stabbing the holder, if some resistance was found.  Parking the car ready to leave the place is a need. A lot of assaults are carried on when people are getting into the vehicle. In my case, with my SUV busted, I had a backpack and perhaps my wife or one of the kids with another smaller backpack, and we got to the bike quickly. (How I miss my old motorbike!).

I have a lot of stuff that I was going to move from our house to my parent´s place, mainly equipment like electrical tools and similar productive, useful devices that a prepper usually has in place. But nowadays, roads are so lonely and LEOs are so…predaceous, that it is not a good idea any longer. A truck loaded with stuff will be a gold mine for those thugs. That is, provided that the gangs roaming in the desert interstate roads can be avoided, which is highly unlikely.

Rules have changed, and the very weak empire of law that once existed (the middle 70s to 90s?) is no longer present. It is not a countrywide situation, though. But now the Southern states, Amazonas and Apure are the kingdoms of the Colombian guerrilla. Thanks, Uncle Hugo!. You f—ed us well.

There have been reports on the roads to the East of the country (Cumana city for example) where 20 or 25 people gangs stop the cars and take whatever they want. LEOs will take whatever food you happen to carry, without bothering in giving you something else than a warning that you are lucky to not be going to jail. This is something to be expected in such a situation, and it can´t be more dangerous. However, it will not develop itself from one day to another; once things start to get bad and dope starts to be scarce…the hunger will make the beast leave out. The predators will go after the easier preys first. Or whatever they believe these preys are.

It is a hard compromise, but you can´t look helpless and unable to defend. There are a lot of psychos here that will shoot innocent people in the head just because they can, and they know that no one is going to come after them. If you could see some of the videos that have been uploaded about what the gangs are able to do…you would understand why I am so freaked out. Hands chopped. Picks used to drill someone´s head while a woman laughs as she is recording the footage. Jeez.

If you carry, and the situation goes the wrong direction, people under such a dangerous situation, should not draw without being ready to use their piece. Once someone knows you are armed, you will become a target: a good piece is a survival tool for the thugs, a very coveted element, and finally, a prestige symbol.

And that is the update.

This is the updating, people. I will write some more articles, as I can interview and gather everything that my family that just arrived a couple of weeks ago is able to transmit everything while it is fresh in their memories.

Thanks for your much-needed assistance, and your moral support! I won’t disappear again.

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A newly published September sales report via the Detroit Free Press indicates that residential real estate sales in metro Detroit could be topping.

The number of units sold in southeastern Michigan was down 5.7% in Sept. compared with the same month last year, while the median sale price continued to inch higher by 5.5% to $169,900.

Real Estate Statistics For Detroit  

RealComp, a Farmington Hills-based multiple listing service, provided new housing data to Detroit Free Press, which showed the tri-county metro Detroit area could be nearing a peak in the residential real estate market. The report said Oakland County felt the most pain, with residential homes sales down 8.9% to 1,399 last month, compared with 1,529 in September 2017.

The median sale price of homes in Oakland County rose 1.8%, far less than the metro’s average, to $235,000. The number of listings collapsed 13.6% to 5,209.

“The decline in home sales during September is a combination of the seasonality of the market along with buyers taking in rising home prices and watching where interest rates are heading,” said Jeanette Schneider, vice president of RE/MAX of Southeastern Michigan, in a press release. “Even with fewer sales, we still have a tight supply of homes and that keeps pricing rising in a market that favors sellers.”

Schneider noted that national housing trends show year-over-year sales dropped by 11.6%, although the median sales price was up 5.6%.

We reported in late Sept. that Bank of America rang the proverbial bell on the US real estate market, warning that existing home sales have peaked, reflecting declining affordability, greater price reductions and deteriorating housing sentiment. In the Sept. report from chief economist Michelle Meyer, the bank warned that “the housing market is no longer a tailwind for the economy but rather a headwind.”

There were 23,832 homes in 18 counties of southwestern Michigan on the market last month, 15% less than September 2017, according to RealComp.

RealComp warned that real estate professionals “are pointing to 2018 as the final period in a long string of sentences touting several happy years of buyer demand.”

“Although residential real estate should continue along a mostly positive line for the rest of the year, rising prices and interest rates coupled with salary stagnation and a generational trend toward home purchase delay or even disinterest could create an environment of declining sales,” the listing service added.

The bottom line: higher borrowing costs — and higher home values — only make it tougher for millennials to make a deal and buy a home. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate could be at 5.55% in Nov. 2019, according to Robert Dye, chief economist for Dallas-based Comerica. The too-hot-to-handle housing market in metro Detroit has now plateaued.

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Authored by Walter Williams, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Much of today’s incivility and contempt for personal liberty has its roots on college campuses, and most of the uncivil and contemptuous are people with college backgrounds.

Let’s look at a few highly publicized recent examples of incivility and attacks on free speech.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, were accosted and harassed by a deranged left-wing mob as they were leaving a dinner at Georgetown University. Sen. McConnell was harassed by protesters at Reagan National Airport, as well as at several venues in Kentucky. Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife were harassed at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Afterward, a group called Smash Racism DC wrote: “No — you can’t eat in peace — your politics are an attack on all of us. You’re (sic) votes are a death wish. Your votes are hate crimes.” Other members of Congress — such as Andy Harris, Susan Collins and Rand Paul — have been physically attacked or harassed by leftists. Most recent is the case of Fox News political commentator Tucker Carlson. A leftist group showed up at his house at night, damaging his front door and chanting, “Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night!” “Racist scumbag, leave town!”

Mayhem against people with different points of view is excused as just deserts for what is seen as hate speech.

Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray discovered this when he was shouted down at Middlebury College and the professor escorting him was sent to the hospital with injuries. Students at the University of California, Berkeley shut down a controversial speaker and caused riot damage estimated at $100,000. Protesters at both UCLA and Claremont McKenna College disrupted scheduled lectures by Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has discovered so-called bias response teams on hundreds of American college campuses. Bias response teams report to campus officials — and sometimes to law enforcement officers — speech that may cause “alarm, anger, or fear” or that might otherwise offend. Drawing pictures or cartoons that belittle people because of their beliefs or political affiliation can be reported as hate speech. Universities expressly set their sights on prohibiting constitutionally protected speech. As FIRE reported in 2017, hundreds of universities nationwide now maintain Orwellian systems that ask students to report — often anonymously — their neighbors, friends and professors for any instances of supposed biased speech and expression.

A recent Brookings Institution poll found that nearly half of college students believe that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. That’s nonsense; it is. Fifty-one percent of college students think they have a right to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. Nineteen percent of students think that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. Over 50 percent agree that colleges should prohibit speech and viewpoints that might offend certain people. One shouldn’t be surprised at all if these visions are taught and held by many of their professors. Colleges once taught and promoted an understanding of Western culture. Today many professors and the college bureaucracy teach students that they’re victims of Western culture and values.

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.” Much later, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.”

From the Nazis to Stalinists to Maoists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, just as American leftists did during the 1960s. Their support for free speech is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. The right to say what they please is their tool for indoctrination, propagandizing and proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses. Much of the off-campus incivility we see today is the fruit of what a college education has done to our youth.

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