Author: admin

Authored by Kevin Barrett via Unz.com,

When we get tired of blowing up Muslims for Israel, will we turn on ourselves?

Scenarios for a second American Civil War have existed ever since the first one ended. Some hyperbolists called Reconstruction the Second Civil War. Alt-history novelists have imagined the ascension of Huey Long or George McGovern to the presidency as Civil War II trigger. The real-life (?!) ascension of Trump has inspired similar fantasies, leading red state partisans to gleefully thump their chests and imagine how easy and fun it would be to take San Francisco—a fantasy that triggers the hell out of the SF-based blue staters.

How might civil unrest spill over into civil war?

One common scenario is race war. The late Charles Manson, we are told, staged his killer-hippie mass knifings because he thought the Beatles were sending him secret orders to start a black-vs. white apocalypse. Obviously Manson must have been taking some really, REALLY bad acid while playing Beatles records backward in hopes of hearing John sneering “Paul is dead”—then suddenly grokked that the White Album, whose mysterious title does not appear on the record and makes no sense anyway, is really about white power! Manson lieutenant Tex Watkins explained: “and what it (the song ‘Helter Skelter’) meant was the Negros were going to come down and rip the cities all apart…Before Helter Skelter came along, all Charlie cared about was orgies.”

Though Manson was a raving nut, his vision of race war was inspired by contemporary reality. Indeed, while the hippies carried on with their orgies, “the Negros” did rip cities apart. Even before the Deep State murdered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., blacks in New Jersey, Detroit, Minneapolis, and many other cities had been tearing things up and burning neighborhoods down. The “Long, Hot Summer” of 1967 featured 159 race riots in dozens of US urban centers, and elements of the National Security State were drawing up contingency plans for a race based civil war.

William Pepper – the King family’s attorney who proved in a court of law that the CIA, FBI, and US army killed Dr. King with the help of their organized crime assets – once spoke with a US Army Colonel who admitted to helping plan the assassination. The Colonel said that the military had done extensive focus group style interviews with participants in the 1967 race riots and determined that Dr. King’s charisma was the biggest factor driving the riots. Counterintuitively, the apostle of nonviolence was inspiring the psychological liberation of black people in such a way that a certain percentage felt empowered to act out their repressed anger. So when King determined to bring half a million followers to Washington, DC and stay there until the feds pulled out of Vietnam and declared a real war on poverty, the Colonel and his friends immediately envisioned the nation’s capital erupting into mass violence that could spread nationwide on a scale many orders of magnitude beyond what had happened during 1967’s Long Hot Summer, perhaps precipitating a real civil war culminating in the revolutionary overthrow of the American State. This, the Colonel explained to Pepper, was the primary reason King had to be terminated…with extreme prejudice.

Predictably, the Deep State’s murder of Dr. King did not solve the racial violence problem. The assassination itself set off a wave of new riots in cities including Chicago, Baltimore, and – sorry, Colonel – Washington, DC. White-dominated forces of the State retaliated with escalating repression. Black communities felt increasingly under siege, and have continued to feel that way until the present day. Whether it is panicky white police shooting down black people during traffic stops, on sidewalks, or in the black people’s own backyards, or whether it is black people “acting out” against whites (an interesting and under-reported case is the possibly-Cointelpro-orchestrated[*] Zebra killings discussed here by Ron Unz) the simmering racial violence in America is a seemingly unavoidable component of most projections for a New Civil War.

Most red state vs. blue state scenarios, of course, have a race war component. When Trump’s red-staters invade San Francisco, for example, it will not only be to punish the latté liberals and happy homos for their mushy-headedness and luxuriously deviant lifestyles, but more importantly to “make America white again” by ending the sanctuary city movement and deporting the illegal immigrants…while presumably also putting any black people who have managed to remain in America’s highest-rent city, as well as the déclassé ones across the Bay, in their properly subservient place. In other words, just as the first Civil War was really about race (i.e., slavery) the second one will build on the same theme.

American War

Or will it? Omar al-Akkad’s notable 2017 novel American War begs to differ.

In El-Akkad’s dystopian vision, the War on Muslims mutates into the War on Southerners—but has nothing to do with race. Instead, the Yankee Terror State turns its savagery against the New Rebels of the Free Southern States because those good ole boys and girls (of all shades of skin pigmentation and sexual preference) refuse to give up fossil fuels, choosing instead to secede from the Union.

Al-Akkad’s vision of blue vs. red global-warming-driven war run amok in a near-future America that has completely forgotten about the whole concept of race is surprisingly plausible, at least while you are reading it. (Civil War I, after all, was really about economics not race, so why shouldn’t Civil War II also be over an economic issue?) The plot turns on the adventures of Sarat, a young Red State woman of mixed and meaningless (near-black Chicano and po’ white trash) ancestry who awakens politically and goes after the Blue State occupiers in pretty much the same way the Iraqi resistance went after George W. Bush’s storm troopers.

Unlike most dystopian science fiction, American War is not just showing us a terrible future that is really an exaggerated (we hope) depiction of the present-day world we live in. Al-Akkad’s fictional 2074 America is not so much a pessimistic caricature of actual 2017 America as a wish-fulfillment dream of Americans karmically reaping what they’ve sown in their War on Muslims, euphemistically known as the “war on terror.” The horrors that Sarat and other southerners experience under Yankee occupation – drone killings, rape, massacres, torture, internment camps, orange jumpsuits – are precisely those that Muslims have been experiencing since the false flag event of September 11th, 2001. Sarat’s fictional resistance, which culminates in a fantastically horrific act of revenge against the Yankees, represents gratifying fantasy payback for the real-life Terror War’s murder of 32 million Muslims, and a prescient and timely warning about what GWOT is likely to lead to. The whole thing is premised on helping the American/Western reader empathetically imagine what the post-9/11 world looks like to Muslims in general and resistance fighters in particular: Al-Akkad fosters empathy and identification with our victims by casting the archetypal victim-turned-resistance-fighter as ordinary American rather than exotic foreigner.

Zone 23

An even better dystopian “new civil war” novel, C.J. Hopkins’ Zone 23, hasn’t yet garnered the kind of mainstream support that helped American War collect positive reviews in such outlets as The New York Times, win awards, and generally get noticed and sell plenty of copies.

Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us, since Hopkins, a regular contributor to Unz Review, is on the red side in the real red-vs.-blue civil war that is raging all around us. (I’m talking about the red-pill vs. blue pill war, of course, not the phony culture wars thing ginned up by the Deep State.) Omar El Akkad, despite the subversive aspects of his book, is basically a blue pill kind of guy: His global warming alarmism, gratuitous decision to make his heroine a lesbian, denial of the existence of race, and general penchant for victimology (not to mention his complete avoidance of 9/11 truth in a Muslim-POV takedown of the “war on terror”) all go down well with the Establishment.

C.J. Hopkins offers a deeper, more accurate, vastly funnier, more genuinely subversive vision. His far-future America, which bears an uncanny resemblance to our nightmarish present, features drone-patrolled hyper-surveiled cities, each of which is divided by an Israeli-style Wall complete with Israeli-style checkpoints and incursions featuring Israeli-style killings of hapless untermenschen. But instead of Israelis vs. Palestinians, the divide here is between the Normals on one side of the wall and the Anti-Socials on the other.

The Normals –  good corporate citizens who are submitting to pharmaceutical and genetic correction so they can work and consume and conform and live meaningless lives like everybody else without batting an eyelash – are conditioned to fear and loathe the Antisocials, who retain enough humanity to rebel, in whatever pathetically insignificant way, against corporatist dystopia.

Zone 23, like American War, imagines the future as post-racial: Hopkins’ Normal vs. Antisocial divide isn’t about race. But it is, nonetheless, very much about behavioral genetics. In this (not so) far future, the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin has developed a variant-corrected version of the MAO-A gene. Inserted into embryos via germline genetic engineering, this patented DNA produces “clears”: people who are intelligent but incurious, incapable of emotionally-driven fight-or-flight aggression (including the most common defensive variety), “easily trained, highly responsive to visual and verbal commands,” and so on. In other words, perfect corporate citizens!

The corporatist state naturally strives to perfect itself, imposing a “final solution” to the ASP (anti-social person) problem by mandating that henceforth no non-genetically-engineered babies may be born. The result is a very one-sided “race war” in which a few antisocial malcontents try to hold out against what amounts to a genocide against “uncorrected” humanity. The plot follows two of those ASP antiheroes as they throw rocks at the Israeli bulldozer of corporatist genocide.

Hopkins’ ferociously funny yarn is not just a satire on our ever-worsening techno-dystopia. In imagining a genetic basis to the difficulties many of us experience adjusting to hyperconformist “technologically-enhanced” lifestyles, and in portraying individuals struggling and flailing against the uber-civilization around them like flies caught a spider web, Zone 23 resonates with the great critiques of technological civilization. According to this tradition, which runs from Taoist Chinese hermits through Middle Eastern prophets and Marxian critics of “alienation” to contemporary scientists who insist that humans are genetically suited to be hunter-gatherers not high tech city dwellers, we are grossly unsuited for living the kind of lives that most modern humans are, for all practical purposes, forced to lead. Through the Brechtian device of estrangement, Hopkins forces us to recognize ourselves in his beleaguered ASP antiheros.

The apostles of race war, from Hitler to Charles Manson to today’s ultra-Zionists, are hugely bothered by what they see as a supposed basic and massive incompatibility between races, i.e. broad, loosely-identifiable swathes of the human genome. According to their bleak vision, we are doomed to fight and kill our cousins whose slightly different average genetic profiles mark them as Other.

Perhaps there is some truth to this notion. Perhaps our nature includes a strong tendency to in-group vs. out-group hostility. And perhaps we tend to divide in-group from out-group on the basis of ascribed ancestry, that is, along tribal lines.

But those who are hugely bothered by other races (or their own race), like those who loathe people of a different ideology or religion or language, may be getting all worked up over nothing. They may in fact be projecting their own experience of a much deeper alienation. They may simply be natural-born hunter gatherers caught in the trap of modern technological civilization, living fantastically comfortable yet somehow miserable lives, desperately seeking someone Other to blame for their predicament.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2vP8XlD Tyler Durden

The last time we looked at Japan’s giant pension fund, the Government Pension Investment Fund (or GPIF) which is the largest in the world and manages 158.6 trillion yen ($1.43 trillion), we found a problem: according to the latest quarterly release, Japanese equities accounted for 25.14% of the GPIF’s portfolio at the end of March (which equates to over 40 trillion yen worth of shares covering roughly 2,300 issues).

This is a problem because the GPIF’s portfolio has exceeded its 25% allocation target for domestic stocks for the first time, a milestone that – unless the world’s largest pension fund changes its strategy for “stable returns” – could have severely adverse consequences for local risk assets, as it would mean one of the “whale” buyers of Japanese equities – the BOJ being the other – would no longer be in the market.

But while it would hardly surprise market watchers to see the GPIF once again bend the rules and further stretch the definition of what is considered a “safe” asset for retirees as it seeks to boost returns, some have proposed even more radical “solutions.”

According to Bloomberg, former Fed senior economist Yoshio Nozawa – who researched corporate bond spreads for the Fed over the past five years – suggested that the world’s largest pension fund should step even further out of its comfort zone and buy more high-yield bonds and alternative assets such as real estate. The reason: the pension fund’s long-term performance of its 158.6 trillion yen ($1.43 trillion) in assets is more important than quarterly results.

Speaking in an interview in Tokyo after winning a GPIF award for corporate bond research in July. Nozawa said that “investors that can own assets for a long period have a high risk tolerance,” and continued: “pension funds have the advantage of being able to hold low-liquidity products that other investors usually shy away from, so there’s room for them to consider investing in more of those assets.“

In other words, just because the GPIF has what some would say an infinite investment horizon, it can take virtually unlimited risks with its investments in order to generate higher yields: after all the BOJ is there to make sure it doesn’t blow up.

Earlier this year, the GPIF’s investment guidelines were revised to include the buying of Japanese debt rated below BBB, i.e., junk bonds, “under certain conditions.” And, as of the first quarter, it had allocated about 415 billion yen to actively managed foreign high-yield bond funds run by firms such as Nomura Asset Management, MacKay Shields and UBS Asset Management.

Apparently it’s not enough, especially since “alternative investments” such as junk bonds made up only 0.17% of the GPIF’s total assets, below its self-imposed limit of 5%, as of the end of June.

So what can possibly go wrong by dumping tens of billions into the riskiest of fixed income instruments? According to the Fed researcher, not much (of course):

The key to analyzing corporate bonds is understanding the composition of their spread, which is affected by the expected default loss and risk premium, according to Nozawa, who currently teaches finance at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. If the risk premium is driving the spread, then it may indicate that it’s time to buy the debt rather than sell, he said. This also applies to stocks and other assets, he added.

Or, as another former Fed “researcher” would say, “the risk of massive junk bond defaults is contained.”

Potential junk bond losses aside – which of course are guaranteed during the next global recession – there may be another problem: not enough junk bonds to buy as issuers tend to cater to a domestic institutional audience the prefers IG bonds.

Japanese investors such as pension funds and life insurers tend to invest in investment-grade bonds. According to a report by Nomura Institute of Capital Markets Research, corporate debt issuance was about 11 trillion yen in 2017, with more than 95% of the securities rated A or higher.

And yet, as Sumitomo Mitsui strategist Ayako Sera said, the GPIF has little choice but to diversify into alternative assets and high-yield bonds if it wants higher returns because Japan’s bonds, which make up about 27% of the GPIF’s assets, have virtually zero returns (well, the may rise as high as 0.2% as per the BOJ’s latest announcement) as the Bank of Japan maintains its unprecedented monetary easing.

“The GPIF’s biggest problem is it can’t keep taking in domestic bonds – especially government bonds – as a staple with Japanese interest rates so low,” Sera said. “The fund needs to sample a wider variety of dishes.”

Apparently that’s prudent banker talk for “we need to put more pensions into, well, junk.” What it really is, is the famous yield creep to justify buying ever riskier securities, which of course, are “not risky” because the GPIF can hold in perpetuity, which somehow means the laws of the business cycle no longer matter.

As for the problem of finding enough junk bond supply: fear not – we hear that Elon Musk is in market with a roughly $70 billion junk bond deal that no self-respecting pension fund can possibly afford to miss…

via RSS https://ift.tt/2OnDtLj Tyler Durden

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via Oilprice.com,

Indian Oil Corp, the biggest refiner in India, has purchased a total of 6 million barrels of U.S. crude oil for delivery between November and January, as it has started to look for a replacement of Iranian oil cargoes ahead of the U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil exports returning in early November.  

The 6-million-barrel purchase was the first time that Indian Oil Corp (IOC) – which was the first Indian refiner to buy U.S. oil last summer – has bought U.S. crude oil through a mini-term tender, the Indian company’s Director of Finance A.K. Sharma told Reuters on Wednesday.

IOC is buying 2 million barrels of U.S. Mars for November delivery, one million barrels of Mars and Eagle Ford each in a combination cargo for December delivery, and 2 million barrels of Louisiana Light Sweet (LLS) to be delivered in January next year, Sharma said.

Ahead of the return of the U.S. sanctions on Iran, India’s state refiners boosted their Iranian oil purchases, pushing up Indian oil imports from Iran by 30 percent from June, to a record 768,000 bpd in July, according to preliminary tanker arrival data that Reuters has obtained from trade sources.

Iran is said to have started to offer India cargo insurance and tankers operated by Iranian companies as some Indian insurers have refused to cover oil cargoes from Iran in the face of the returning U.S. sanctions on Tehran.

Hindustan Petroleum was said to have cancelled a crude oil shipment from Iran after its insurer refused to provide coverage for the cargo on concern about U.S. sanctions.

India’s imports from Iran could start to slow from August as some big Indian refiners worry that their access to the U.S. financial system could be cut off if they continue to import Iranian oil, prompting them to reduce oil purchases from Tehran.

HPCL, for example, will not be buying oil from Iran in August, chairman M. K. Surana told Reuters last week, but did not elaborate on whether the refiner would resume importing Iranian oil after that.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2AQZu2U Tyler Durden

via RSS https://ift.tt/2AUApnT Tyler Durden

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg,

During my time in Iraq working for the State Department, a time that I initially was a red, white and blue government official, I frequently lied to the media. I lied to them about how things were going, I lied to them about how successful we were.

My colleagues and I were contemptuous of them, most of the people we talked to in the media didn’t know enough to ask important questions, most of them didn’t care enough to ask questions and simply jotted down whatever we told them, and it was just remarkably easy to fool them. It’s almost as if they wanted to play along with us.

At one point I described it as they weren’t looking for “the story,” just “a story.” I made some remarks about how many of them were more concerned about looking good in their stand-ups, getting their makeup on straight than looking for details or questioning the lies that the government put forward. 

– Peter Van Buren, Iraq War Whistleblower, banned from Twitter a few days ago

The above quote is from an extraordinary discussion between Daniel McAdams, Scott Horton and Peter Van Buren that occurred yesterday.

Stop whatever you’re doing right now and watch this, it’s that important.

Let’s now get right into why this is so incredibly problematic. Mr. Van Buren claims that he was deleted from Twitter after making a mainstream journalist named Jonathan Katz uncomfortable with what was an obvious joke that no honest person would ever take as a real threat of violence.

pic.twitter.com/2mLVWObQRf

— Jonathan M. Katz✍🏻 (@KatzOnEarth) August 8, 2018

Van Buren wrote “I hope a MAGA guy eats your face,” which apparently led Katz to complain to the Twitter authorities. Shortly afterwards, Van Buren was disappeared from Twitter.

Here’s where what Twitter did becomes extremely problematic. When the company, or its secret algorithms, banned Van Buren it sent all his tweets down the memory hole. Thus, we can’t go back and look at the history of everything that happened in this specific incident, nor can we review his history of tweets. He just gets vanished with no recourse for writing something pretty innocuous in the grand scheme of things.

If Twitter’s going to disappear someone from the platform it should do two things. First, offer that person a detailed account of why they were banned and let them appeal the decision. Second, simply because a person can’t tweet going forward, that person’s history of tweets should be left up for posterity and history’s sake, provided the person who composed the tweets wants to keep them up. This Orwellian vanishing of years and years of compliant tweets and valuable information is unethical and indefensible.

I’ve been an active user and major proponent of Twitter since 2012, but Jack Dorsey and company are flirting with disaster if they keep this up. If what Daniel McAdams says is true and he was temporarily suspended for a retweet, something is seriously broken at the platform.

Although I ultimately hope Twitter can get back on track, the problems faced by using centralized platforms in which humans are relied upon to make arbitrary decisions on who gets to speak and who doesn’t based on their whims, biases and emotions needs to be addressed. A platform needs to be just that, a platform.

This gets to one of the main reasons I’ve been and remain such a ardent supporter of Bitcoin. The principles of decentralization, open source code and censorship resistant peer-to-peer interaction is applicable to human society on multiple levels. Not just when it comes to money, but it’s also instrumental when it comes to protecting free speech and creating a genuine digital “public square.”

*  *  *

If you liked this article and enjoy my work, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit the Support Page to show your appreciation for independent content creators.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2M4DaIr Tyler Durden

Yet another world nation appears to be joining the anti-hegemonic order…

US foreign policy is based on expansionism and oppression, President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua told RT Spanish, adding that those countries that refuse to submit to Washington’s will are demonized and destabilized.

“We have always wanted to have normal relations with the US but we see only aggression in return,” Ortega said in an exclusive interview with RT Spanish. 

He believes Washington clearly does not need good relations, as it constantly “attacks” the Nicaraguan government. Ortega added that the US demands “submission, even servility,” while trampling on those who refuse to bow to Washington’s will.

As RT notes, the US has long sought to absorb Nicaragua into its sphere of influence, even resorting to a direct military occupation in the early 20th century, the president explained.

“Washington’s expansionist culture” apparently makes the US unable and unwilling to forgive the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) for the fact that it overthrew the last Nicaraguan dictator that was supported by the US, said Ortega.

Additionally, just as we have seen throughout Europe, Ortega points out that Washington actively pushes its “human rights agenda” through various NGOs as well as directly through its embassy in Managua in an attempt to present the Latin American state as a country “lacking democracy.”

“The activities of all those ‘human rights commissions’ has long turned into business,” he said.

Ortega’s remarks came as his country copes with months-long civil unrest, which began as student demonstrations over the government’s failure to handle forest fires in one of the most protected areas of the Indio Maiz Biological Reserve last April. Tensions increased further as the FSLN government announced unpopular welfare reforms.

On the bright side, at least Ortega has not been the victim of a drone assassination attempt.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2vOnIFn Tyler Durden

Authored by Toni Airaksinen via Campus Reform,

A new study reveals that conservative college students cope with left-leaning professors by self-censoring during class discussions and parroting their professors’ political views on homework assignments.

The study, “Students’ Religiosity and Perceptions of Political Bias: Some Empirical Lessons for Sociology Professors,” was led by Jeremiah Wills, a political science professor at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina.

To learn about conservative students, Wills and his team surveyed 394 students at Wayne State University using an online questionnaire. Survey questions were designed to gauge students’ political stance, and whether that stance impacts students’ behavior in class.

For example, students were asked to report if they felt the need to “censor their own political beliefs to preserve their grade” and if, while doing homework, they “feel obligated to incorporate their professors’ beliefs rather than their own.” 

The study is the first of its kind to “document a link between religious and conservative and moderate students’ perceptions of political bias in the classroom and their reactions to such perceived biases,” Wills noted during an interview with Campus Reform.

However, Wills asserted that more research needs to be done. 

His study was designed to gauge the interaction effect between student values and how they react, and not the proportion of students who self-censor, per se, or what proportion feel they cannot truly speak their mind during class discussions. 

Future research could shed light on “generalizable estimates of the pervasiveness of…[how often] students feel compelled to censor themselves in the classroom, acquiesce to their professors’ political beliefs on exams and assignments, or otherwise have negative experiences related to perceived bias,” said Wills. 

“We simply do not know how often this happens or how many students have such negative experiences in the classroom. This needs to be established by additional research,” he noted. “That these undesirable student experiences happen at all, however, is problematic.”

If students feel the need to censor themselves, Wills warns, this may “derail” the learning experience. 

“Student learning is derailed when students perceive a need to censor their beliefs or write on an exam what they think a professor wants to hear. That is not a positive learning experience, or really a learning experience at all,” he explained.

“We are not suggesting that students themselves are responsible for the derailing,” Wills clarified. “It’s a missed learning opportunity. Given their position of authority in the classroom, professors must take responsibility for such outcomes—especially if they are creating a classroom environment in which students do not think they can honestly express their own views.”

To foster a more inclusive learning environment, Wills suggests that professors could go out of their way to acknowledge politically divergent theories during class, and to create a welcoming environment for diverse viewpoints. 

When professors fail to do this, conservative students aren’t the only ones who are hurt, Wills said, noting that “it also deprives liberal students of the learning opportunity to defend their positions, have their ideas challenged, and to hear alternative views.”

Further, he warned that professors may inadvertently “send the message to students that holding a particular ideology is more important than evidence.” 

“We think it is valuable [when professors] give students space to wrestle with the implications of social science research findings—not to provide students a liberal or conservative interpretation that must be accepted to succeed in a class,” he asserted.

Wayne State University Professors Zachary Brewster and Gerald Roman Nowak III also contributed to the research study, which was published in the recent issue of The American Sociologist. 

via RSS https://ift.tt/2MuN42g Tyler Durden

In a historic first, a California Jury is now deliberating whether Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer gave a school groundskeeper terminal cancer, after lawyers for both sides delivered their closing arguments on Tuesday. 

Groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson is one of more than 5,000 plaintiffs across the United States who claim Monsanto’s glyphosate-containing herbicides, including the widely-used Roundup, cause cancer. His case, the first to go to trial, began in San Francisco’s Superior Court of California four weeks ago. –Reuters

On Tuesday, Johnson’s attorney Brent Wisner urged jurors to hold Monsanto liable and slap them with a verdict that would “actually change the world” – after arguing that Monsanto knew about glyphosate’s risks of cancer, but decided to ignore and bury the information. 

Monsanto is a unit of Bayer AG following a $62.5 billion takeover by the German multinational conglomerate. Monsanto’s attorneys deny the allegations and refuted expert testimony relied on by Johnson and others as unreliable, claiming it does not satisfy any scientific or legal requirements. 

“The message of 40 years of scientific studies is clear: this cancer is not caused by glyphosate,” said George Lombardi, attorney for Monsanto.

In September, 2017 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that glyphosates were not likely carcinogenic to humans, based on a decades-long assessment. In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO)’s cancer arm issued an opposite statement – warning that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans.” 

If Monsanto is found liable, the jury can tack on punitive damages on top of more than $39 million in compensatory damages demanded by Johnson. 

Johnson’s case, filed in 2016, was fast-tracked for trial due to the severe state of his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system that he alleges was caused by Roundup and Ranger Pro, another Monsanto glyphosate herbicide. Johnson’s doctors said he is unlikely to live past 2020.

A former pest control manager for a California county school system, Johnson, 46, applied the weed killer up to 30 times per year. –Reuters

Johnson’s case isn’t part of the consolidated proceedings in Missouri, Delaware or California state court, where most of the cases are pending. It’s also separate from a federal multidistrict litigation waiting to be heard by US District Judge Vance Chhabria of San Francisco – who allowed hundreds of Roundup lawsuits to proceed to trial after ruling that there was sufficient evidence for a jury to hear the cases despite calling a plaintiff’s expert opinions “shaky.” 

Documents released in August of 2017 led to questions over Monsanto’s efforts to influence the news media and scientific research and revealed internal debate over the safety of its highest-profile product, the weed killer Roundup. 

As the New York Times noted last year, new internal emails, among other things, reveal ethical objections from former employees to “ghost writing” research studies that were pawned off as ‘independent’ analyses.

The documents underscore the lengths to which the agrochemical company goes to protect its image. Documents show that Henry I. Miller, an academic and a vocal proponent of genetically modified crops, asked Monsanto to draft an article for him that largely mirrored one that appeared under his name on Forbes’s website in 2015. Mr. Miller could not be reached for comment.

A similar issue appeared in academic research. An academic involved in writing research funded by Monsanto, John Acquavella, a former Monsanto employee, appeared to express discomfort with the process, writing in a 2015 email to a Monsanto executive, “I can’t be part of deceptive authorship on a presentation or publication.” He also said of the way the company was trying to present the authorship: “We call that ghost writing and it is unethical.”

The newly disclosed emails also reveal internal discussions which cast some doubt over whether internal scientists actually believed in the company’s external messaging that Roundup was, in fact, safe.

“If somebody came to me and said they wanted to test Roundup I know how I would react — with serious concern.”

And, here’s more:

The documents also show that a debate outside Monsanto about the relative safety of glyphosate and Roundup, which contains other chemicals, was also taking place within the company.

In a 2002 email, a Monsanto executive said, “What I’ve been hearing from you is that this continues to be the case with these studies — Glyphosate is O.K. but the formulated product (and thus the surfactant) does the damage.”

In a 2003 email, a different Monsanto executive tells others, “You cannot say that Roundup is not a carcinogen … we have not done the necessary testing on the formulation to make that statement.”

Not surprisingly, Monsanto’s lawyers have argued that the comments above have simply been taken out of context… 

Monsanto said it was outraged by the documents’ release by a law firm involved in the litigation.

“There is a standing confidentiality order that they violated,” said Scott Partridge, vice president of global strategy for Monsanto. He said that while “you can’t unring a bell,” Monsanto would seek penalties on the firm.

“What you’re seeing are some cherry-picked things that can be made to look bad,” Mr. Partridge said. “But the substance and the science are not affected by this.”

…you know, because the phrase, “we call that ghost writing and it is unethical,” can be interpreted in so many different ways.

* * *

For those who missed it, below is our note on similar revelations that came to light back in March 2017.

If we had a dime for every kooky, left-wing theory we’ve heard alleging some vast corporate conspiracy to exploit the treasures of the earth, destroy the environment and poison people with unknown carcinogens all while buying off politicians to cover their tracks, we would be rich.  The problem, of course, is that sometimes the kooky conspiracy theories prove to be completely accurate.   

Lets take the case of the $60 billion ag-chemicals powerhouse, Monsanto,  and their controversial herbicide, Roundup as an example.  For those who aren’t familiar, Roundup Ready is Monsanto’s blockbuster weedkiller, credited with transforming U.S. agriculture, with a majority of farm production now using genetically modified seeds resistant to the chemical. 

For years the company has assured farmers that their weed killing product was absolutely safe to use.  As proof, Monsanto touted the approval of the chemical by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

That said, newly unsealed court documents released earlier today seemingly reveal a startling effort on the part of both Monsanto and the EPA to work in concert to kill and/or discredit independent, albeit inconvenient, cancer research conducted by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)….more on this later.

But, before we get into the competing studies, here is a brief look at the ‘extensive’ work that Monsanto and the EPA did prior to originally declaring Roundup safe for use (hint: not much).  As the excerpt below reveals, the EPA effectively declared Roundup safe for use without even conducting tests on the actual formulation, but instead relying on industry research on just one of the product’s active ingredients.

“EPA’s minimal standards do not require human health data submissions related to the formulated product – here, Roundup.  Instead, EPA regulations require only studies and data that relate to the active ingredient, which in the case of Roundup is glyphosate.  As a result, the body of scientific literature EPA has reviewed is not only primarily provided by the industry, but it also only considers one part of the chemical ingredients that make up Roundup.” 

Meanwhile, if that’s not enough for you, Donna Farmer, Monsanto’s lead toxicologist, even admitted in her deposition that she “cannot say that Roundup does not cause cancer” because “[w]e [Monsanto] have not done the carcinogenicity studies with Roundup.”

And just in case you’re the super skeptical type, here is Farmer’s actual email, from back in 2009, which seems pretty clear:

“you cannot say that Roundup does not cause cancer..we have not done carcinogenicity studies with “Roundup”.

And while the revelations above are quite damning by themselves, this is where things get really interesting. 

In early 2015, once it became clear that the World Health Organization’s IARC was working on their own independent study of Roundup, Monsanto immediately launched their own efforts to preemptively discredit any results that might be deemed ‘inconvenient’.

That said, Monsanto, the $60 billion behemoth, couldn’t possibly afford the $250,000 bill that would come with conducting a legitimate scientific study led by accredited scientists.  Instead, they decided to “ghost-write” key sections of their report themselves and plotted to then have the independent scientists just “sign their names so to speak.”

“A less expensive/more palatable approach might be to involve experts only for the areas of contention, epidemiology and possibly MOA (depending on what comes out of the IARC meeting), and we ghost-write the Exposure Tox & Genetox sections…but we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak.”

Finally, when all else fails, you call in those “special favors” in Washington D.C. that you’ve paid handsomely for over the years. 

And that’s where Jess Rowland, the EPA’s Deputy Division Director for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention and chair of the Agency’s Cancer Assessment Review Committee, comes in to assure you that he’s fully exploiting his role as the “chair of the CARC” to kill any potentially damaging research…”if I can kill this I should get a medal.” 

Nothing to see here folks! 

via RSS https://ift.tt/2vRFXK3 Tyler Durden

Authored by Tom Luongo,

Rey; “How do we rebuild The Resistance from this…?”

Leia: “We have everything we need.”

— The Last Jedi

Monday’s coordinated hit on Alex Jones and InfoWars was an act of desperation.  Control of information is one of the pillars of social control and Jones, for all of his faults, is a threat to that.

And today he is an even bigger threat than he was the other day.  I could do this entire post comparing moments in Star Wars to the Banning of Alex Jones and by the time I was done even the alt-right guys would appreciate The Last Jedi a little more.

I won’t stretch the metaphor too far.  The Deep State is like Kylo Ren on seeing Luke Skywalker for the first time in years.  They’ve searched for years for ways to destroy Alex Jones, marginalize him, etc.; hoping he would fade away into obscurity.  Just like Ren search the galaxy for what he thought was The Last Jedi.

But, he was instrumental in electing Donald Trump.  The coordinated effort to create a Ministry of Truth, ferreting out purveyors of “fake news” began the morning after the 2016 election.

And Alex Jones was public enemy #2, right behind Donald Trump himself.

So, when the time comes, when the moment of victory arrives, Luke shows up to drive Ren mad while The Resistance escapes.  Ren lashes out in fury turning the entire might of the First Order on a mirage (spoiler alert) only to be left with defeat.

And after Luke’s deception and Ren’s impotence is revealed Luke leaves him with the most cutting jibe he could, “See you around, kid.”

It’s not as eloquent as Obi-Wan Kenobi’s ‘If you strike me down… ” But, Luke was never eloquent.  He’s ultimately a hayseed, a nobody who grew up in Flyover Country.

Ren is impotent to kill the spirit of Luke Skywalker’s legend.  He mistakes killing the man with killing the idea of him.  But, the movie reminds us of the lesson of another freedom fighter, V, that ideas are bulletproof.

And so too will the Deep State be impotent to kill Alex Jones.  InfoWars app today is the #4 downloaded app on the iOS Store.  What’s a shame is that even the Porn guys can’t seem to keep their virtue signaling in their pants.

This report from RT tells you that everyone was given the order behind the scenes to de-platform Alex Jones before the mid-term elections. 

Why, all of a sudden would the biggest porn site in the world decide to take down Jones’ material posted by users?

Shemale gangbangs are wholesome but questioning Sandy Hook is beyond the pale?

This is cucking out big time, Yuge even.

No, this was directed by very powerful people.

And everyone knows it.  They may not want to admit it to themselves, especially those that view Jones as the impediment to regaining power. But, they know where this came from.

The mid-term elections are the last chance for the Deep State to truly stop Trump Draining the Swamp.  They know the poll numbers.  Last night’s special election in Ohio, a supposedly ‘purple’ state, tells you the tale.

Taking out Alex Jones will only make him a martyr.  It will only make him bigger.  It will only spur even more people to find alternative social platforms.  Peak Facebook is already here.

Minds is growing and now has a Steemit-like reward pool built on the Ethereum blockchain.  BitChute will host your videos in a peer-to-peer network.  Gab auto-cross-posts to Twitter and is far better organized into topics and conversations.

The point being that single-points of failure for your voice make you vulnerable.  It’s obvious now to a great number of people that big tech is in bed with big government to ensure you don’t get off their reservation.

When the Internet started, Alex Jones was at the forefront of leveraging it to provide an alternate voice.  Infowars was always The Resistance.  And this is where the Star Wars metaphor breaks down. Because today’s Resistance to the Panopticon is orders of magnitude bigger than Alex Jones.

He’s just the figure-head.  And like all authoritarians who believe in the fear-based policing model, he was made an example of to chill everyone’s enthusiasm for change.

Too bad it’s not going to work.

My generation turned off the evening news and went there for their information.  And that loosened the grip on information flow.

For the past twenty years they have been working to get that control back.  And to do so it had to be voluntary.

And, more importantly, it had to be free.

So, it was built with cheap money, cheap credit and a Ponzi scheme of massive government subsidy and debt to get everyone hooked into these platforms as a substitute for having real relationships with real people.

And through them the subtle manipulation of what information you received was always there, but unobtrusive.  Alternate voices were always Faux News to the left.  The establishment media through their FCC licenses and relationships with various government agencies maintained market share they didn’t deserve.

And Alex Jones went after them all.  Sometimes too far.  But, so what?

We’re not children.  We don’t need to be protected from ‘bad ideas.’  Hell, we’ve suffered through Marxism for the past 150 years, I think we can survive an Alex Jones rant about Sandy Hook.

And that’s what has to come next.  It’s time to look at these other platforms and assist them in building value.  The next phase of social media is upon us, one where consumers and producers can interact directly and the profit from their activity pay for the cost of the transaction without the middle man, like Google and Facebook, taking 95% in between for providing the ‘platform.’

This is known as ‘controlling the wire’ and ‘the wire’ is a commodity.  The value of the Internet is the information contained on it not the indexers of that information.  Their profits should be ground to zero while those of the creators rise to meet the value they provide their consumers.

That’s the lesson of Alex Jones’ banning and that’s how The Resistance needs to rebuild itself.

*  * *

To support more work like this and get access to exclusive commentary, stock picks and analysis tailored to your needs join my more than 135 Patrons on Patreon and see if I have what it takes to help you navigate a world going slowly mad.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2vQfFYL Tyler Durden