Author: admin

Submitted by Priceonomics

On July 11, 2018, Twitter announced in a blog post they would be removing all “locked” accounts – those exhibiting suspicious or spammy behavior – from the service and warned that by doing a sweep of these accounts, many users would lose a pretty significant number of followers.

One of the metrics Craft tracks on companies is social media engagement, so we looked through our database before and after the purge to see which company Twitter accounts lost the most followers.

The table below shows the 25 companies with the highest number of lost followers:

Ironically, Twitter itself was the account that lost the most followers by a wide margin. Other social media platforms, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook also appeared on the list, as did other news/entertainment companies including The New York Times, ESPN, CNN and others.

Next, we looked at which of the largest accounts were least affected by this purge. We filtered our list of companies to those with more than 500,000 Twitter followers. Of those, twenty-five companies were in fact so unaffected, they actually gained followers in this period.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency-related companies (Coinbase, Bittrex, Bitcoin, and others) are heavily represented in this list above, perhaps surprisingly showing themselves relatively immune to the Twitter purge of bot accounts.

It is possible these accounts gained followers so rapidly that the followers they lost in the purge were quickly gained back, yielding a net positive increase in followers. Epic Games (creator of Fortnite), for example, gained 86,600 followers in the two week period after July 19. Similarly, the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency-related accounts each gained under 10,000 new followers in the two week period after the purge was complete. And therefore, as these post-purge numbers are similar to the increase in followers during the purge, this suggests there were not a huge number of accounts removed from their follower counts.

For companies with over 500,000 followers, the chart below shows how many companies lost what percentage of their followers:

*Note: the <1% category includes the 25 companies that gained followers during the period.

The mean decrease in Twitter followers for these larger accounts was 2.6%. The median loss, however, was 1.7% – the difference is due to a skewed right distribution from a handful of accounts that suffered heavy losses. Four accounts lost over 40% of their followers: CEOWORLD Magazine (-64%), Andrew Christian Inc. (-60%), Yes Bank (-44%), and MusclePharm (-44%).

As markets look beyond financials to measure the health, value, and future potential of a company, alternative metrics can be used to gauge company vitality. One of these metrics is audience engagement on social media. Bots and spam accounts were clearly distorting the true picture regarding companies’ real social media followings, so it was a helpful move from Twitter to reduce fake accounts and improve the signal to noise ratio on the platform.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2n3nRkc Tyler Durden

While the left-er members of California’s sanctuary state decry those who refuse to hug a tree/illegal-immigrant/paper-straw, it was a Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist that most recently attempted to split the state into more co-operative communities (but was denied by the California’s Supreme Court despite over 365,000 signatories believing in the plan).

Now, a month later, a different group of well-meaning Californians wants out of America as it stands.

As RT reports, supporters of a long-running effort to see California secede from the United States have revamped their plans to include the creation of an “autonomous Native American nation,” which would encompass almost half of the new state.

The Calexit campaign held a rally at the California state capitol in Sacramento on July 4, calling for an end to the American “occupation” of the state. A statement released by the campaign said that US Independence Day was “no longer a day to celebrate.”

Having failed in 2017 with CalExit 3.0…

CalExit 4.0 is about to be relaunched with a whole new angle – instead of simply seceding from the US, however, the new plans involve creating a special Native American “autonomous nation” within the new independent state, creating a “buffer zone between between Donald Trump’s America and the new independent California Republic,” according to Yes California co-founder Marcus Ruiz Evans.

Tomorrow we are releasing the details of the new #Calexit plan which establishes an autonomous Native American nation (not a reservation) – the first of its kind in North America – created through the retrocession of (most) federal properties in California to Native Americans. pic.twitter.com/0iFzosNSPL

— #Calexit Campaign (@YesCalifornia) July 31, 2018

Now bear in mind that CalExit 4.0 will also have to get the 365,880 signatures required (just as Tim Draper did above before the Supreme Court banned it) to get the question of California independence on a special 2021 ballot.

Another movement co-founder, Louis J. Marinelli – whose wife is Russian and had previously run into trouble for asking that California “independence” be recognized by Putin, explained the decision as a way to “right the some of the wrongs of the past” by giving back land to Native American people.

In our new #Calexit plan, we retrocede federal land back to Native Americans. Here’s a map of federal lands in California. We return virtually all of it Native Americans to establish the first ever Native American nation in North America. pic.twitter.com/CI2wdNoh7i

— #Calexit Campaign (@YesCalifornia) July 31, 2018

The Calexit campaign said on Twitter that the new Native American autonomous buffer zone would help the new California advance its progressive platform “without all those Trump supporters trying to derail” the new state “at every turn.”

We have two awkward questions – do the native Americans know they are being ‘given back’ the least productive part of the state? And what will happen to the Trump-Buffer-Zone when President Trump’s term expires?

via RSS https://ift.tt/2KoEd02 Tyler Durden

Authored by Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheTollOnline.com,

Beginning in May of this year (for April), this blogger had the idea to track linked internet headlines from various link-aggregating websites as documented transitions and arrange them into catalogued anthologies. The goal was to map a veritable road, if you will, on the way toward future revelations.

Beyond that, the series of encyclopedic atomization was meant for posterity, a means to compare tracking from previous months, and assembled in outright defiance against increasing internet censorship and memory-holed search engine results.

Predictably, like dots formulated into patterns on a grid, or in a matrix, so too have trends come into better focus as we continue our monthly trek toward the 2018 Midterm Elections.

As stated by this blogger before, President Donald Trump is the manifestation of one of the following three possibilities:

A.) The Real Thing

B.) Serving the agenda of the global financial elite unwittingly

C.) Controlled opposition as a Judas Goat or Trojan Horse

If B or C, he was installed to bleed the remaining air out of the brake-lines before the big stop; a last gasp, if you will.  America’s death rattle.

If A – then Trump is truly at war against the Financial-Military Industrial Complex, and if he loses, then the musical artist Frank Zappa described what will happen next:

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

– Frank Zappa

Therefore, if the war in government is real, the midterm elections would represent a fork-in-the road, so to speak.  If the Republicans do well, Trump could (possibly) be provided some breathing room to continue with his professed agenda.  If, on the other hand, the Democrats win big – it would be perceived as a mandate against Trump, and ensure a further loss of support for the President in the GOP; even as congressional impeachment proceedings commence in the House.

In any case, while traveling toward the approaching fork-in-the-road, it should be no surprise that July was a very eventful month.  In fact, the overall itemized compilation was likely too sizable (over 8,000 words) for most web surfers to process adequately and enjoyably during the course of their busy day.

Consequently, and with that in mind, the FULL LIST for July 1-31, 2018 was compiled and placed right here  should anyone wish to take the time to read it all through.

Accordingly, the items below represented what I consider to be the most identifiable 95 signposts on our mid-summer’s journey to either making America Great Again or into a neo-Orwellian hell on earth.

Again, for the reader’s convenience, the revelations are sorted into the same category headings that were utilized last month and the month prior.  For those blog-rolling on a breakneck blitz and wanting to bypass the piddling incidentals, there are some concluding comments and questions at the very end:

The American Experiment

(Short List # / Full List #)

1 / 4.)  Two days prior to the Fourth of July, vandals threw a brick through the window of the Nebraska Republican Party’s headquarters in Lincoln, Nebraska and spray-painted “ABOLISH ICE” in blood-red capital letters there.

2 / 7.) In the Democratic National Committee’s annual Fourth of July statement, chairman Tom Perez said “our most fundamental values are under attack” and lamented the “problems” of low-paying jobs, health care, immigration, injustice to people of color and members of the LGBTQ community, a recent Supreme Court decision on public unions,  and the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. He also expressed concerns that “thousands of children have been separated from their parents at our southern border,” and added:

At our highest court, workers’ rights are being taken away, voting rights are under assault, Muslim Americans are being discriminated against for their faith, and women’s right to choose is under threat like never before.

3 / 9.) In the aftermath of Rep. Maxine Waters calling for unwarranted harassment of Trump administration officials,  nearly 200 black female leaders and allies wrote a letter to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer excoriating them for their “failure” to protect Rep. Maxine Waters from “unwarranted attacks from the Trump administration and others in the GOP”.

4 / 11.) A Reuters/Ipsos opinion showed immigration as a top issue for U.S. voters, with the economy as a close second.

5 / 14.)  Texas land owners reported receiving letters from the government notifying them that their land will be surveyed for “tactical infrastructure, such as a border wall”.

6 / 15.) As President Trump nominated U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court who believes judges must “interpret the U.S. Constitution as written” and “not make law”, the Democrats, in turn, vowed “the fight of a lifetime” to keep Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court.  Senate Democrats later conspired in a plan to stall Kavanaugh’s nomination process.

7 / 18.) Republican alarm bells were sounded upon reports of Democrats having registered 12 million more voters.

8 / 19.)  It was reported that a huge child-sex-trafficking ring was exposed by Trump’s enforcement of the Zero-Tolerance border policy.

9 / 24.) Non-citizens legally registered to vote in San Francisco school elections as Republicans pushed back against the “noncitizen voting push in liberal jurisdictions”.

10 / 26.) July was revealed to have been a “busy month for illegal immigrants committing heinous crimes” as “an illegal immigrant who had been deported eleven times attacked his wife with a chainsaw in front of their children, another got charged with a series of violent rapes and dozens were arrested for operating a major human and drug smuggling enterprise in a major U.S. city”.

11 / 27.) Authorities in Sioux Falls, South Dakota arrested a 43-year-old man after they found explosive devices at his residence, as well as ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, firearms, and multiple items related to the anti-fascist militant group, Antifa.

12 / 28.) Students at Lee University in Tennessee petitioned to override Vice President Mike Pence’s First Amendment right because they perceived his political views as being “at odds with Christian values” and accused Pence of “outright bigotry against the working and poor classes, the LGBTQI+ community, immigrants, and the black community”.

13 / 30.) A report from the Migration Policy Institute  found that 22% of the U.S. population does not speak English at home.

14 / 32.)  Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed with a pickaxe.  The stars of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Kevin Spacey were not damaged in the least.

15 / 33.) As California Rep. Maxine Waters said that Americans should be “out in the streets screaming” about President Trump, a Marine veteran and a man wearing a Trump shirt were violently attacked in Los Angeles.

16 / 35.) According to a new analysis by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, the Democrats “remain substantial favorites for House control” because “Republicans are defending 42 open or vacant seats, a record since at least 1930”.

17 / 36.) President Trump tweeted that he would be willing to “shut down” government if the Democrats did not give Republicans the votes for Border Security, which includes the Wall.  He added:

Please understand, there are consequences when people cross our Border illegally, whether they have children or not – and many are just using children for their own sinister purposes. Congress must act on fixing the DUMBEST & WORST immigration laws anywhere in the world! Vote “R”

18 / 37.) Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saidborder “wall funding looked unlikely to be included in the current legislation”.

19 / 39.) There were reports of a violent Portland, Oregon Antifa cell planning a “direct confrontation” with participants of an upcoming pro-Trump rally.

20 / 40.) Republican strategists claimed President Trump’s approval was sinking “in some educated, affluent congressional districts with lots of independent voters the party needs to hold the House”.  The “current anguish” of the Republican strategists was due to the fact they have swallowed hook-line-and-sinker the Mainstream Media’s false narratives of “Trump’s decision to separate families crossing illegally into the United States” and “his performance at the Helsinki summit”.

Capitalism & Marxism

21 / 44.)  Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman, Tom Perez, declared the Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  to be the future of the Democratic Party.

22 / 50.) The Census Bureau released data showing the U.S. merchandise trade deficit with China set a record through May, hitting $152,237,500,000 for the first five months of 2018.

23 / 56.) The new darling of the Democratic Party, Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said: “Capitalism will not always exist”.

24 / 58.) The Wall Street Journal reported expectations by the Trump administration for annual budget deficits to rise nearly $100 billion more than previously forecast in each of the next three years, pushing the federal deficit above $1 trillion starting next year.

25 / 59.) After President Trump Tweeted that “China, EU are manipulating their currencies” and that “Fed “tightening now hurts all that we have done”, the U.S. dollar tumbled; because truth should be seen but not heard.  Trump also added that “the U.S. should be allowed to recapture what was lost due to illegal currency manipulation and BAD Trade Deals” and said:

Debt coming due & we are raising rates – Really?

26 / 60.)  As the Associated Press (AP) reported that Democratic socialism was surging in the age of Trump, former FBI Director, James Comey, implored his perceived saviors in the Democrat Party to “dump the Socialist Left” because “America’s great middle wants sensible, balanced, ethical leadership”.

27 / 61.) In an interview on CNBC, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) said that Democrats will end the Trump tax cuts if they take power in November and also promoted a 50% tax hike on American earners.

28 / 64.)  Facebook stock entered bear market territory, losing 20 percent off its 52-week highas the company’s daily active users declined and its worldwide daily user growth slid for its sixth straight quarter.  The more than 100 billion dollar rout was reported as the biggest loss in stock market history.

29 / 65.) Unsurprisingly, The New York Times blamed Russian fake news and the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica (i.e. alleged scandal of data-harvesting on behalf of Donald Trump) for Facebook’s stock rout instead of the company’s increasingly Orwellian inclinations.

30 / 68.) As America’s second-quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) jumped 4.1%, The New York Times warned its readers:  “don’t expect the boom to last” because the growth was skewed by “a surge in soybean shipments” in advance of “President Trump’s trade policies”.

Global Geopolitics

31 / 75.) European Union leaders announced that officials from the EU and China were coming together to strengthen and protect their international trade relations from Trump’s “America First” agenda.

32 / 77.) At the NATO Summit in Belgium on July 11, 2018 President Trump told the Secretary General of NATO that it was “totally unfair to the American taxpayer to have to pay to defend Germany from Russia, only to have Germany turn around a pay billions for fuel to Russia and that “something’s got to be done about this”.

33 / 81.) The New York Times admitted that: “Trump Got From NATO Everything Obama Ever Asked For”.

34 / 83.) In an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Jeff Glor in Scotland, President Trump named the European Union his “biggest foe globally right now”.

35 / 87.)  Knife attacks, gun attacks, rape attacks, and homicide, continued to rapidly rise in England; quite possibly due in part to “Leftist London Mayor Sadiq Khan” doing everything in his power to cut “police stop and search tactics” that have “unfairly targeted minority ethnic groups” before “reversing his stance as crime began to surge”.

36 / 88.) In response to Iranian President Rouhani’s warning to U.S. President Donald Trump that hostile policies could lead to the “mother of all wars”, Trump Tweeted back in all capital letters that Rouhani better stop the threats or suffer historic consequences;  as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, lowered the boom on Putin and put Iran on notice.

37 / 89.)  Two days after he sent an all-caps warning of future conflict with Iran, President Donald Trump “tempered his threatening rhetoric” and said “his administration stands ready for Iran to come back to the negotiating table”.

38 / 91.) The EU chief caved-in to Trump’s art of the deal and pledged to lower trade barriers with the US.

Sex Crimes

39 / 95.)  It was reported that “President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, secretly recorded a conversation with Trump two months before the presidential election in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model”.  In response, Trump waived his attorney-client privilege on the secret recordings and Tweeted that he “did nothing wrong”.   It was later reported that U.S. Prosecutors were reviewing 12 audio recordings seized in the April 2018 raid of Cohen’s home, office and hotel room.

40 / 96.) CNN broadcast an audio recording of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump discussing with his attorney Michael Cohen how they would buy the rights to a Playboy model’s story about an alleged affair Trump had with her years earlier.

The President & the Porn Star

41 / 97.) In the investigation of President Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, it was revealed that federal prosecutors had 1.3 million of Cohen’s files.

42 / 98.) President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen hired Lanny Davis who once served as special counsel to former President Bill Clinton.

43 / 99.) President Trump’s attorney and spokesman, Rudy Giuliani, said Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen should cooperate with federal investigators.

The President, Lawyers, Spies, & Media Lies

44 / 101.) Ten days after Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) told Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to release whatever evidence he had in the Russia investigation and “finish it the hell up because this country is being torn apart”, Special Counsel Robert Mueller tapped even more prosecutors to help with his growing Trump probe.  According to Bloomberg’s update on the inquisition of Trump’s suspected treason with Russia:

…more money is being spent on work done by permanent Department of Justice units than on Mueller’s own dedicated operation. The DOJ units spent $9 million from the investigation’s start in May 2017 through March of this year, compared with $7.7 million spent by Mueller’s team.

45 / 103.) In apparent “violation of Justice Department policies and, perhaps, legal prohibitions on disclosure of grand jury secrets”, claims were bolstered that AP reporters and FBI agents colluded in a conspiracy  against Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

46 / 106.) During Peter Strzok’s testimony to Congress, Jim Jordon (R-Ohio) got the former FBI agent to admit that the FBI received the Hillary Clinton Funded “Golden Shower” dossier on Trump from the FBI’s Bruce Orr (whose wife worked for Fusion GPS) – which was an astounding admission on internal collusion – before Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) interrupted the exchange.

47 / 107.) Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas said during the hearing with former FBI official, Peter Strzok, that the Inspector General discovered that nearly all of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails were sent to a foreign entity and that the FBI didn’t follow-up on that finding.

48 / 108.) Furthermore, it was revealed that Strzok, himself, actually knew Clinton’s emails were in the hands of a foreign entity, that a whistleblower from the State Department tried delivering significant evidence in the Clinton email investigation which went nowhere, and that Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, was called four times from someone wanting to brief him about this, and he never returned the call.

49 / 109.) In an effort to divert publicity away from the Capitol Hill testimony of disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok, and to subvert President Trump’s efforts toward peace with Russia, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the Mueller Investigation’s single indictment of Twelve Russian intelligence officers for alleged election hacking under President Obama’s watch; even though, according to Rosenstein , “no American was a knowing participant” in the Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and there was “no allegation in the indictment of any effect on the outcome of the election” .

50 / 110.) Regarding the Russia indictment, President Trump Tweeted questions as to “why didn’t Obama do something”, especially when it was reported that President Obama was informed by the FBI in September [2016], before the election”.  Trump also Tweeted these questions:  “Where is the DNC Server, and why didn’t the FBI take possession of it? Deep State?

51 / 111.) In the wake of Robert Mueller’s 29-page (evidence free) indictment of 12 Russians for election hacking, some in the media once more began to question the extent of American involvement.

52 / 112.) The veteran GOP political operative, Roger Stone, said he was the ‘US person’ mentioned in the Mueller indictment of the 12 Russians.

53 / 113.) Initial  claims were made that Republicans were preparing to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein because they felt Rosenstein had “continually stonewalled their investigation into corruption at the FBI” but Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) later ruled out the possibility of impeaching Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, saying there was “not enough support for his ouster”.

54 / 114.)  In the aftermath of FBI agent Peter Strzok’s appearance before Congress, the full Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal said: “President Trump will have to declassify a host of documents if he wants Americans to learn the truth about what happened in 2016”.

55 / 120.) In the press conference following the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki, Trump shocked the Mainstream Media by again raising legitimate (and still unanswered) questions regarding the Democratic National Committee’s missing server and Hillary Clinton’s missing emails; as Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed U.S. intelligence agents funneled $400 Million to the Hillary Clinton Campaign.

56 / 121.) The AP later reported on Trump’s “week of walk-backs” on Russia and the Federal Reserve and cited the Russian general prosecutor’s office retraction of Vladimir Putin’s claims of his Helsinki reference to $400 million being funneled to Hillary Clinton because, according to the AP:  “The notion of a $400 million donation to the Democrat’s campaign would be out of the question”.

57 / 122.)  In the immediate aftermath of the Trump-Putin meeting, the Obama Administration’s CIA director, John Brennan, charged that President Trump’s post-summit press conference with Russia President Vladimir Putin was an act of treason; as disgraced former FBI Director, James Comey, called for a coup against the sitting president by means of patriots standing up and rejecting Trump’s behavior.

58 / 123.) In a continuing effort to demonstrate his unquestionable professionalism and complete lack of bias, former FBI Director, James Comey, also Tweeted that “anyone voting Republican this fall is un-American”.

59 / 125.) “Just days after special counsel Robert Mueller charged 12 Russian intelligence officials with directing a sprawling hacking effort aimed at swaying the 2016 election” and “just hours after President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin”, federal prosecutors charged an alleged Russian agent and “Gun Rights Activist”, named Maria Butina, for using the National Rifle Association (NRA) as a conduit to influence members of the Republican Party.  It was later discovered that Butina had high-level contacts in Washington DC; even taking part in 2015 meetings between a visiting Russian official and two senior officials at the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department.

60 / 126.) In the wake of the Trump-Putin meeting, Russia’s elite and media celebrated the meeting as victory for Putin and “an end to the West’s attempt to isolate Russia”, as U.S. cable news networks saw “the apocalypse”, Trump as a worse-case-scenario Russian mole, and Trump’s performance as an act that will ‘Live in Infamy’ as much as Pearl Harbor or Kristallnacht.

61 / 132.) During a Q&A with CNN’s Lester Holt at the Aspen Security Forum, FBI Chief Christopher Wray threatened to quit if Trump invited Russian agents to the U.S. and said:

I do not believe Special Counsel Mueller is on a witch hunt. I think it is a professional investigation conducted by a man I’ve known to be a straight shooter.

62 / 137.) As it was announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would give Democratic lobbyist, Tony Podesta, immunity to testify against Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, claims were made that the Deep State was “using the Mueller probe to protect Clinton insiders from criminal investigation”.

63 / 139.) An author by the name of Tim Wiener, who won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for reporting and writing on American intelligence, wrote the following in a Reuters commentary:

…Trump has made real enemies in the realm of American national security. He has struck blows against their empire. One way or another, the empire will strike back.

64 / 140.) The Wall Street Journal identified former CIA Director John Brennan as an “Obama-Clinton partisan” who “was pushing information to the FBI and pressuring it to act” and who “then took the lead on shaping the narrative that Russia was interfering in the election… which quickly evolved into the Trump-collusion narrative”.

65 / 141.) Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper admitted in a CNN interview that former President Obama instigated the ongoing investigations into Donald Trump and those in his orbit.

66 / 142.)  In an example of apparent selective cooperation, the Department of Justice released a heavily redacted copy of the Carter Page FISA warrant application and several renewals to The New York Times, which accused Page of being a Russian spy; even though Page hasn’t been charged in the nearly two years since the application was filed with any of the allegations contained therein.

67 / 143.) The National Review’s Andrew McCarthy described why the FISA applications on Carter Page confirmed the FBI’s reliance on the unverified Steele Dossier.

68 / 145.) As the DoJ released the redacted FISA applications on former Trump aide Carter Page, President Trump Tweeted that it was “Looking more & more like the Trump Campaign for President was illegally being spied upon (surveillance) for the political gain of Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC”, before Republican Senator Marco Rubio refuted Trump’s contentions by telling CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he “wouldn’t consider that spying on a campaign”.  Rubio’s soundbite refutation was then conveniently proliferated all throughout the mainstream media to counter the reporting of Trump’s Tweet on Spygate.

69 / 146.) Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said during a Fox News Sunday interview that President Donald Trump’s advisers should consider leaving the White House if Trump “continues to publicly disparage the nation’s intelligence community and cast doubt on the evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election” before saying:  “if there were any evidence that President Trump committed any crime with regard to Russia, [the Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee] Adam Schiff would have leaked it”.

70 / 147.)  It was reported that President Trump was looking into revoking the security clearances of several top Obama-era intelligence and law enforcement officials, including former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, former CIA Director John Brennan, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and former Director of National Security Michael Hayden (who worked under President George W. Bush).  Of course, Congress pushed back against revoking the clearances.

71 / 149.) The New York Times reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was now examining President Trump’s tweets in a wide-ranging Obstruction of Justice inquiry.  But the times did not identify Mueller in that article as the man who delivered highly enriched stolen uranium to Russia in 2009 on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

72 / 150.)  Pursuant to # 53 / 113 above, Republicans began impeachment proceedings against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein before backing down once again; this time saying “contempt charges will do”.

73 / 153.) As the New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned President Trump about his “divisive but increasingly dangerous” language that could generate “potential” violence against reporters, it was reported that The New York Times had ignored over 538 violent attacksagainst Trump supporters since the 2016 election season.

74 / 154.) In another Tweetstorm, President Donald Trump challenged Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “conflicts of interest” and questioned why Mueller wasn’t “looking at all of the criminal activity & real Russian Collusion” by the Democrats.

Guns R Us

75 / 157.) Just as a headlined-link on The Drudge Report revealed porn websites as dominating online traffic rankings for all internet categories in United States, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared sex addiction a mental-health disorder termed ‘compulsive sexual behaviour’.

76 / 158.) It was reported that the United States, under United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, had signed on to a measure to track every gun in America.

77 / 159.) Ontario police identified the man responsible for a shooting rampage in Toronto’s Greektown as Faisal Hussain. The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the shooting.  In response to the shooting, Toronto Mayor John Tory told reporters the city has a gun problem, with weapons too readily available to too many people.

78 / 160.) Since the tragic shooting in Parkland Florida in February 2018, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence has tracked and recorded a whopping 55 new gun control measures in 26 states.

Big Brother Cometh

79 / 162.) Because a Democratic Party caucus server was replaced by a look-alike, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) stated there was “no evidence” that house computer systems were compromised by Pakistani-American information technology worker Imran Awan.  The judge presiding over the case was Tanya Chutka, who was appointed by Obama after years of contributing to him, was a partner at a very Clinton-friendly law firm, and her husband was also appointed by Obama to the D.C. Superior Court in 2011.

80 / 163.) On July 4th, 2018 it was reported that a Facebook algorithm flagged the Declaration of Independence as hate speech. Ten days later, Facebook’s non-biased algorithms also censored a new gospel song, entitled “What Would Heaven Look Like”, for political content.

81 / 165.) It was revealed that Facebook uses foreign state-run news outlets to online fact-check U.S. “conservative sites into oblivion”.

82 / 167.) In the aftermath of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) claiming that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had “personally redacted information and threatened House Intelligence Committee staffers” and Republican Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert telling a TV morning show that he believed government personnel working for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were spying on his office, NBC News reported the following:

Powerful GOP Rep. Jim Jordan accused of turning blind eye to sexual abuse as Ohio State wrestling coach

“It’s sad for me to hear that he’s denying,” said one former wrestler. “I don’t know why he would, unless it’s a cover-up.”

83 / 168.)  It was later reported that the law firm investigating the accusations against Jim Jordan were also involved in the FISA abuse scandal by assisting both the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to fund the now discredited Steele Dossier.

84 / 173.) After the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that Hispanic unemployment in the United States had reached its lowest level ever, in the 45 years since the agency first started keeping records on the statistic, the findings were ignored by the Spanish television networks, Univision and Telemundo.

85 / 179.) Jack Burkman, a Washington-based attorney and lobbyist who has worked with a private investigative team to find the killer of DNC staffer, Seth Rich, claimed to have found a “credible” witness who will identify the murderers as “a current DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent” and a “current ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) agent”.

86 / 186.) Lawmakers clashed during a contentious hearing over claims that social media platforms and tech companies are biased against conservative viewpoints.

87 / 188.)  Rick Newman, a Senior Columnist for the Finance Division of 5th most visited online platform in the world said President Trump made “Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill look like ethical exemplars” and lamented “Trump’s knifing of American law-enforcement agencies, while on a podium at the Helsinki “summit” with American enemy Vladimir Putin”.

88 / 190.) Just two days after Twitter told Congress that they aren’t politically biased when censoring content, the online social media platform was caught censoring conservative journalists with site-wide shadowbans.

89 / 191.) Days later, it was again reported that Twitter was shadow-banning prominent Republicans including the RNC chair and Trump Jr.’s spokesman.

90 / 192.) President Donald Trump accused Twitter regarding the company’s “discriminatory and illegal practice,” and vowed in a tweet to “look into” the matter and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said he was looking at “legal remedies” to deal with Twitter’s censorship of conservatives.

91 / 193.)  A study for the House Judiciary’s Constitution & Civil Justice Subcommittee showed that Facebook has eliminated 93% of traffic to top conservative websites since the 2016 election.

92 / 195.) In early July, “it came out that among Facebook’s myriad algorithmically induced advertising categories was an entry for users whom the platform’s data mining systems believed might be interested in treason against their government”, causing a contributor writing for Forbes Magazine to question if Facebook was the “ultimate government surveillance tool”.

93 / 196.) New York Governor Andrew Cuomo revealed that facial recognition camerasinstalled at bridge and tunnel toll plazas across New York City were scanning every driver’s face and feeding them into a massive database.

94 / 198.)  A study revealed that immigration had received more airtime on the three broadcast evening news shows than any other policy topic during the 18 months of the Trump presidency with 92% “relentlessly hostile to the administration” and “just 8% positive” while all networks “virtually ignored law enforcement or anyone harmed by illegal immigration”.

95 / 208.) Twitter hired academics from institutions including Oxford University and the University of Amsterdam to study the spread of “hate speech” and combat “intolerant discourse”. Of course, the woman selected to help Twitter develop the algorithm which will target the “hate speech” was reported as a hardcore leftist who hates President Donald Trump.

Conclusion

America continues to break apart as the Political Left grows increasingly unhinged and, now, more violent.  Immigration and the battle for the Supreme Court further divide the country just as Socialism now threatens a burgeoning rift within the Democratic Party.

On the economic front, interest rates continued to rise as deficits soared and rumors of trade wars, and threats of literal wars, created a sense of impending unease around the world.

As the Political Left leveled accusations against Trump for alienating allies while coddling to Russia’s Putin, Trump’s domestic battle raged on across many fronts – from Cohen and sex crimes, to the ongoing work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Attorney Rod Rosenstein as they continue to fabricate a political gallows and knot an imaginary rope into a legal noose around the President’s neck.

Nevertheless, as the nation divides in two like Sean Hannity’s and Rachel Maddow’s childhood friends at a junior high dance, Big Brother runs forward, unencumbered, and with ever-accelerating  speed; in an obvious race to the inevitable finish-line at the end of nowhere good.

In the full compilation of 209 transitional revelations for July, and according to this blogger, 28 could be considered making America (and/or the world) great again, with 27 as being neutral or questionable, and 154 as representing the ever-accelerating slide into Orwellian hell.  These counts were 32, 8, and 104 last month and 40, 8, and 75, respectively, the month prior.

Does it appear the nation is transitioning in the right direction?  Or is it too soon to tell?

Can even a fork in the road make a difference at this point for good or bad?

We’re about to find out.

In the meantime, prepare to round the next corner toward the midterm elections in a final thrust.

It’s August.

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After days of heated barbs exchange back and forth between Washington and Tehran, Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard forces are expected to begin a major exercise in the Persian Gulf as soon as the next 48 hours, which could be aimed at demonstrating their ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, CNN reports citing two US officials.

“We are aware of the increase in Iranian naval operations within the Arabian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and Gulf of Oman. We are monitoring it closely, and will continue to work with our partners to ensure freedom of navigation and free flow of commerce in international waterways,” Captain William Urban, chief spokesman for US Central Command, told CNN.

The Strait of Hormuz – a strategically critical passageway linking the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea which is crucial to shipping of global energy supplies – has emerged as a focal point in the escalating war of words between presidents Trump and Rouhani, after Iran threatened to block off the Persian Gulf if the US proceeds with fully implementing oil export sanctions on Iran.

Officials told CNN that while the US sees no immediate signs of hostile intent from Iran, the IRGC show of force has US military intelligence “deeply concerned” for three fundamental reasons according to officials:

• The exercise comes as rhetoric from the IRGC towards the US has accelerated in recent days.
• It appears the IRGC is ramping up for a larger exercise this year than similar efforts in the past.
• The timing is unusual. These types of IRGC exercises typically happen much later in the year.

In the US military’s assessment, the IRGC has assembled a fleet of more than 100 boats, many of them small fast moving vessels. It’s expected Iranian air and ground assets including coastal defensive missile batteries could be involved, while  hundreds of Iranian troops are expected to participate and some regular Iranian forces could be involved as well.

The IRGC exercise comes as the US has only one major warship, the USS The Sullivans inside the Persian Gulf, several officials say. Other US warships are nearby and there are numerous combat aircraft in the region.

The US military has been trying to encourage other nations in the region, especially Saudi Arabia to take a strong line on keeping the Gulf open in the face of rising Iranian rhetoric. They have also expressed concern about keeping open the waterways off Yemen where Iranian backed rebels have attacked oil tankers.

Defense Secretary James Mattis, responding to rising Iranian rhetoric said on Friday, “Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz. They’ve done that previously in years past. They saw the international community put — dozens of nations of the international community put their naval forces in for exercises to clear the straits.”

And the punchline:

“Clearly, this would be an attack on international shipping, and — and it would have, obviously, an international response to reopen the shipping lanes with whatever that took, because of the world’s economy depends on that energy, those energy supplies flowing out of there.”

And with the public response to any attack on Syria now virtually nil after two consecutive military strikes, if Trump feels he is in urgent need of an international distraction from mounting domestic problems, namely the upcoming conclusion of the Mueller probe which now includes questions about obstruction of justice, Trump may have no choice than to aim for Iran… and outcome Israel would be delighted to assist with.

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Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via The National Review,

Globalism, the tech boom, illegal immigration, campus radicalism, the new racialism . . . Are they leading us toward an 1861?

How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?

Almost every cultural and social institution — universities, the public schools, the NFL, the Oscars, the Tonys, the Grammys, late-night television, public restaurants, coffee shops, movies, TV, stand-up comedy — has been not just politicized but also weaponized.

Donald Trump’s election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.

We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968. Left–Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography — always history’s force multiplier of civil strife. Red and blue states ensure that locale magnifies differences that were mostly manageable during the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton.

What has caused the United States to split apart so rapidly?

Globalization

Globalization had an unfortunate effect of undermining national unity. It created new iconic billionaires in high tech and finance, and their subsidiaries of coastal elites, while hollowing out the muscular jobs largely in the American interior.

Ideologies and apologies accumulated to justify the new divide. In a reversal of cause and effect, losers, crazies, clingers, American “East Germans,” and deplorables themselves were blamed for driving industries out of their neighborhoods (as if the characters out of Duck Dynasty or Ax Menturned off potential employers). Or, more charitably to the elites, the muscular classes were too racist, xenophobic, or dense to get with the globalist agenda, and deserved the ostracism and isolation they suffered from the new “world is flat” community. London and New York shared far more cultural affinities than did New York and Salt Lake City.

Meanwhile, the naturally progressive, more enlightened, and certainly cooler and hipper transcended their parents’ parochialism and therefore plugged in properly to the global project. And they felt that they were rightly compensated for both their talent and their ideological commitment to building a better post-American, globalized world.

One cultural artifact was that as our techies and financiers became rich, as did those who engaged in electric paper across time and space (lawyers, academics, insurers, investors, bankers, bureaucratic managers), the value of muscularity and the trades was deprecated. That was a strange development. After all, prestige cars, kitchen upgrades, gentrified home remodels, and niche food were never more in demand by the new elite. But who exactly laid the tile, put the engine inside the cars, grew the arugula, or put slate on the new hip roof?

In this same era, a series of global financial shocks, from the dot-com bust to the more radical 2008 near–financial meltdown, reflected a radical ongoing restructuring in American middle-class life, characterized by stagnant net income, family disintegration, and eroding consumer confidence. No longer were youth so ready to marry in their early twenties, buy a home, and raise a family of four or five. Compensatory ideology made the necessary adjustments to explain the economic doldrums and began to characterize what was impossible first as undesirable and later as near toxic. Pajama Boy sipping hot chocolate in his jammies, and the government-subsidized Life of Julia profile, became our new American Gothic.

High Tech

The mass production of cheap consumer goods, most assembled abroad, redefined wealth or, rather, disguised poverty. Suddenly the lower middle classes and the poor had in their palms the telecommunications power of the Pentagon of the 1970s, the computing force of IBM in the 1980s, and the entertainment diversity of the rich of the 1990s. They could purchase big screens for a fraction of what their grandparents paid for black-and-white televisions and with a computer be entertained just as well cocooning in their basement as by going out to a concert, movie, or football game.

But such electronic narcotics did not hide the fact that in terms of economics the lifestyles of their ancestors were eroding. The new normal was two parents at work, none at home; renting as often as buying; an eight-year rather than three-year car loan; fewer grandparents around the corner for babysitting or to assist when ill; and consumer service defined as hearing taped messages of an hour before reaching a helper in India or Vietnam.

High-tech gadgetry and the power to search the Internet did not seem to make Americans own more homes, pay off loans more quickly, or know their neighbors better. If in 1970 a nerd slandered one on the sidewalk and talked trash, he might not do it twice; in 2018, he did it electronically, boldly, and with impunity behind an array of masked social-media identities.

The Campus

Higher education surely helped split the country in two. In the 1980s, the universities embraced two antithetical agendas, both costly and reliant on borrowed money. On the one hand, campuses competed for scarcer students by styling themselves as Club Med–type resorts with costly upscale dorms, tony student-union centers, lavish gyms, and an array of in loco parentis social services. The net effect was to make colleges responsible not so much for education, but more for shielding now-fragile youth from the supposed reactionary forces that would buffet them after graduation.

History became a melodramatic game of finding sinners and saints, rather than shared tragedy. Standards fell to accommodate poorly prepared incoming students.

But if campus materialism was at odds with classroom socialism, few seemed to notice. Instead, the idea grew up that one had no need to follow concretely the consequences of his abstract ideology. Or even worse, one’s hard-left politics — the louder and more strident the better — became a psychological means of squaring the circle of denouncing the West while being affluent and enjoying the material comforts of the good life.

Universities grew not just increasingly left-wing but far more intolerant than they were during the radicalism of the Sixties — but again in an infantile way. Speakers were shouted down to prove social-justice fides. “Studies” courses squeezed out philosophy and Latin. History became a melodramatic game of finding sinners and saints, rather than shared tragedy. Standards fell to accommodate poorly prepared incoming students, on the logic that old norms were arbitrary and discriminatory constructs anyway.

The curriculum now was recalibrated as therapeutic; it no longer aimed to challenge students by demanding wide reading, composition skills, and mastery of the inductive method. The net result was the worst of all possible worlds: An entire generation of students left college with record debt, mostly ignorant of the skills necessary to read, write, and argue effectively, lacking a general body of shared knowledge — and angry. They were often arrogant in their determination to actualize the ideologies of their professors in the real world. A generation ignorant, arrogant, and poor is a prescription for social volatility.

Frustration and failure were inevitable, more so when marriage and home-owning in a stagnant economy were now encumbered by $1 trillion in student loans. New conventional wisdom recalibrated the nuclear family and suburban life as the font of collective unhappiness. The result was the rise of the stereotypical single 28-year-old — furious at an unfair world that did not appreciate his unique sociology or environmental-studies major, stuck in his parents’ basement or garage, working enough at low-paying jobs to pay for entertainments, if his room, board, and car were subsidized by his aging and retired parents.

Illegal Immigration

Immigration was recalibrated hand-in-glove by progressives who wanted a new demographic to vote for leftist politicians and by Chamber of Commerce conservatives who wished an unlimited pool of cheap unskilled labor. The result was waves of illegal, non-diverse immigrants who arrived at precisely the moment when the old melting pot was under cultural assault.

The old black–white dichotomy in the United States was being recalibrated as “diversity,” or in racialist terms as a coalition now loosely and often grossly inexactly framed as non-white versus the (supposedly shrinking) white majority. Compensatory politics redefined illegal immigration once it was clear that not just a few million but perhaps one day 20 million potential new voters would remake the Electoral College. Difference was now no longer a transitory prelude to assimilation but a desirable permanent and separatist tribalism, even as it became harder to define exactly what ethnic and racial difference really was in an increasingly intermarried society. We soon went from the buffoonery of a wannabe Native American Ward Churchill to the psychodrama of an Islamist, anti-Semitic Linda Sarsour.

The Obama Project

We forget especially the role of Barack Obama. He ran as a Biden Democrat renouncing gay marriage, saying, “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.” Then he “evolved” on the question and created a climate in which to agree with this position could get one fired. He promised to close the border and reduce illegal immigration: “We will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws.” Then he institutionalized the idea that to agree with that now-abandoned agenda was a career-ender.

Obama weaponized the IRS, the FBI, the NSC, the CIA, and the State Department and redefined the deep state as if it were the Congress, but with the ability to make and enforce laws all at once.

Obama vowed to “work across the aisle” and was elected on the impression that he was a “bridge builder” who would heal racial animosity, restore U.S. prestige abroad, and reignite the economy after the September 2008 meltdown. Instead, he weaponized the IRS, the FBI, the NSC, the CIA, and the State Department and redefined the deep state as if it were the Congress, but with the ability to make and enforce laws all at once. “Hope and Change” became “You didn’t build that!”

President Obama, especially in his second term, soon renounced much of what he had run on. He raised taxes, stagnated what would have been a natural recovery, weighed in on hot-button racialized criminal cases, advanced a radical social agenda, and polarized the country along lines of difference.

Again, Obama most unfortunately redefined race as a white-versus-nonwhite binary, in an attempt to build a new coalition of progressives, on the unspoken assumption that the clingers were destined to slow irrelevance and with them their retrograde and obstructionist ideas. In other words, the Left could win most presidential elections of the future, as Obama did, by writing off the interior and hyping identity politics on the two coasts.

The Obama administration hinged on leveraging these sociocultural, political, and economic schisms even further. The split pitted constitutionalism and American exceptionalism and tradition on the one side versus globalist ecumenicalism and citizenry of the world on the other. Of course, older divides — big government, high taxes, redistributionist social-welfare schemes, and mandated equality of result versus limited government, low taxes, free-market individualism, and equality of opportunity — were replayed, but sharpened in these new racial, cultural, and economic landscapes.

What Might Bring the United States Together Again?

A steady 3 to 4 percent growth in annual GDP would trim a lot of cultural rhetoric. Four percent unemployment will make more Americans valuable and give them advantages with employers. Measured, meritocratic, diverse, and legal immigration would help to restore the melting pot.

Reforming the university would help too, mostly by abolishing tenure, requiring an exit competence exam for the BA degree (a sort of reverse, back-end SAT or ACT exam), and ending government-subsidized student loans that promote campus fiscal irresponsibility and a curriculum that ensures future unemployment for too many students.

We need to develop a new racial sense that we are so intermarried and assimilated that cardboard racial cutouts are irrelevant.

Religious and spiritual reawakening is crucial. The masters of the universe of Silicon Valley did not, as promised, bring us new-age tranquility, but rather only greater speed and intensity to do what we always do. Trolling, doxing, and phishing were just new versions of what Jesus warned about in the Sermon on the Mount. Spiritual transcendence is the timeless water of life; technology is simply the delivery pump. We confused the two. That water can be delivered ever more rapidly does not mean it ever changes its essence. High tech has become the great delusion.

Finally, we need to develop a new racial sense that we are so intermarried and assimilated that cardboard racial cutouts are irrelevant. Our new racialism must be seen as a reactionary and dangerous return to 19th-century norm of judging our appearance on the outside as more valuable than who we are on the inside.

Whether we all take a deep breath, and understand our present dangerous trajectory, will determine whether 2019 becomes 1861.

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Apple Inc. delivered a stellar earnings report for its fiscal third quarter on Tuesday, as demand for premium iPhones remained resilient and services such as App Store, Apple Music, Apple Care and Apple Pay sales expanded to record levels. The result: Apple’s fiscal third quarter shows how the iPhone maker is finding alternative means to grow amid the threat of a smartphone slowdown in developed markets.

Research firms International Data Corporation (IDC), Counterpoint Research, IHS Markit and Canalys all reported that the worldwide smartphone industry has entered into a slowdown.

More specifically, Counterpoint’s Market Monitor service confirms that global smartphone shipments decreased 2 percent annually in 2Q18 and continued a downward trend from a 3 percent decline in 1Q18:

• Smartphone shipments declined 2 percent annually to 360 million units in Q2 2018.

• China’s smartphone market has declined continuously for the last four quarters, affecting the shipment growth of some Chinese brands like OPPO, vivo, Meizu and Gionee.

• Chinese brands have continued investing in countries and regions outside China to offset weak demand in their home market. India, South East Asia, Europe, Middle East and Africa being the key markets for expansion.

The analysis specifies that ten smartphone manufacturers captured roughly 79 percent of the market, thereby leaving 600 brands to fight for the remaining 21 percent. With too many brands saturating the marketplace, the report said smartphone demand has cooled in developed markets like China, North America, and the European Union, where replacement cycles are expanding.

Huawei Technologies Co. surged ahead of Apple Inc. in a deteriorating Chinese market and seized the second spot in the global smartphone shipment rankings for the first time just behind Samsung Electronics Co., solidifying the emergence of Chinese competitors.

Huawei and Apple Inc. Performance Insights:

• Huawei shipments grew 41 percent annually in Q2 2018. The company managed to be the fastest growing (21 percent) smartphone brand amid a declining China smartphone market, and grew fully 71 percent overseas.

• Huawei’s continuous efforts to expand in markets outside China has resulted in strong annual growth in Europe (+75 percent), MEA (+67 percent), and in India (+188 percent), where its Honor brand retained its place in the top five smartphone rankings.

• Apple shipped 41.3 million iPhones during Q2 2018, up 1 percent compared to the same quarter last year. iPhone X remains the top seller for Apple during the quarter. ASP’s fell marginally compared to the previous quarter due to the greater mix of iPhone 8, 8 Plus and older iPhone models.

• Second quarter Apple shipments remain flat in China year over year. During the quarter, share of online sales for Apple grew both sequentially and annually due to comparatively higher discounts available online as compared to offline channels.

• Apple had a slow quarter in India, the third largest smartphone market globally. It underwent changes in its distribution strategy. Apart from this, its domestic assembling is yet to pick-up pace, which means the company is still relying on imports for its sales in India. Apple had 1 percent market share during the quarter, its lowest in recent history.

Reflecting on Huawei dethroning Apple for second place, Tarun Pathak, Associate Director at Counterpoint Research said:

“Huawei had a good second quarter in 2018 as it shipped more smartphones than Apple to capture the second spot in the global smartphone rankings, after seven years of Apple-Samsung dominance. Huawei achieved this by launching smartphones in the premium segment and capturing the mid-tier segment with its fast-growing Honor sub-brand. Huawei with its Honor brand is offering a broad and recently refreshed portfolio at affordable prices that is driving growth in the overseas market. Honor, which is already strong in the e-commerce segment, is now adopting a multi-channel strategy through branded stores in the South East Asia market. We expect store counts to increase in the future.”

Commenting on the increasing trend of the average selling price for major smartphone brands, Research Analyst, Shobhit Srivastava, noted:

“Major Chinese brands like OPPO, vivo, Huawei are now focusing on increasing their ASPs through gradually upgrading their portfolio to higher price bands by bringing in features like Artificial Intelligence, bezel-less displays, dual cameras and with innovative industrial design and colors, materials and finishes in the affordable premium segment. Brands in the mid-tier segment now launch multiple variants of the same smartphone with different storage capacities, tempting customers to spend more on a higher spec’d device. This also helps drive sales by increasing the portfolio breadth as well increased margins by selling devices with a higher price point.”

“The importance of Huawei overtaking Apple this quarter cannot be overstated,” said Ben Stanton, a senior analyst at Canalys, which also reported the shift in quarterly market share. “It is the first time in seven years that Samsung and Apple have not held the top two positions. Huawei’s exclusion from the U.S. has forced it to work harder in Asia and Europe to achieve its goals.”

Samsung Electronics’ quarterly earnings were disappointing when it reported earnings Tuesday. The South Korean company, blamed the drop in revenue on “softer sales of smartphones and display panels.” The company’s most powerful smartphone, the Galaxy S9, went on sale at the end of the previous quarter, but Samsung describes its performance as “slow. Analysts recently forecasted that the Galaxy S9 would be worst-selling Galaxy S flagship phone since 2012’s Galaxy S3.

“Huawei’s momentum will obviously concern Samsung, but it should also serve as a warning to Apple, which needs to ship volume to support its growing services division,” Stanton said in a statement. “If Apple and Samsung want to maintain their market positions, they must make their portfolios more competitive.”

As for now, Huawei overtaking Apple Inc. this quarter as the second largest smartphone brand in the world could be an ominous sign of things to come…

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Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

A National Geographic photographer has admitted that the viral image of a polar bear suffering from climate change is fake news almost a year later. “We had lost control of the narrative,” admitted Cristina Mittermeier, the photographer of the polar bear.

According to The Daily Wire, the magazine’s most viral video ever, which featured heart-wrenching images of a starving polar bear, perpetuated the narrative that the animal’s imminent death was caused by climate change. However, the climate change aspect of the story is void of any real evidence.   Mittermeier has now explained the climate change deception and fake news stunt National Geographic pulled in a piece titled “Starving-Polar-Bear Photographer Recalls What Went Wrong” for the magazine’s August issue.

“Photographer Paul Nicklen and I are on a mission to capture images that communicate the urgency of climate change. Documenting its effects on wildlife hasn’t been easy,” she wrote.

“With this image, we thought we had found a way to help people imagine what the future of climate change might look like. We were, perhaps, naive. The picture went viral – and people took it literally.”

So basically, in summation, Mittermeier admitted that the images of the bony, emaciated polar bear were meant to sound an alarm about climate change, though now she is complaining that people took the image “literally” when that was the exact fake news message she wished to convey.

Perhaps people took the gloom-and-doom climate change narrative “literally” because National Geographic‘s first line of the video was, “This is what climate change looks like.”

Oh, and let’s not leave out the fact that the words “climate change” were even emphasized. They were highlighted in the magazine’s signature yellow. “In retrospect, National Geographic went too far with the caption,” says Mittermeier.

National Geographic admits their mission is to propagate the minds of the public with scary images in order to call for more government control over the masses in order to confiscate even more money.  But it’s all for the greater good, right? In the video below, The Health Ranger explains how climate change alarmists have pulled off the most insane, large-scale mass hypnosis in human history.

And National Geographic has now admitted that they are doing their part to brainwash the masses into accepting the false narrative of climate change.

As noted by Fox News, experts have suggested that other reasons for the polar bear’s condition could have been old age, illness, or injury. Mittermeier even admitted that she could not say for sure “that this bear was starving because of climate change.”

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Confirming long-running speculation that South Africa is on its way to becoming just another Zimbabwe, on Tuesday the country’s president Cyril Ramaphose said the ruling African National Congress should initiate a parliamentary process to amend the constitution to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation.

Back in May, the ANC had said in May it would “test the argument” that land redistribution without compensation is permitted under current laws, a plan that would have avoided the risky strategy of trying to change the constitution. Since then the expropriation movement has only accelerated, and Ramaphosa, who also vowed previously to return the lands owned by the white farmers since the 1600s to the country’s black population after he assumed office in February this year, said on Tuesday that the ANC would introduce a constitutional amendment in parliament.

“The ANC will through the parliamentary process finalize the proposed amendment to the constitution that outlines more clearly the conditions under which expropriation of land without compensation can be effected” Ramaphosa, a prominent trade union leader and a close associate of Nelson Mandela, said in a televised address on Tuesday.

The billionaire former businessman added that “it has become pertinently clear that our people want the constitution to be more explicit” about the expropriation proposal, which is viewed by the South African white minority as forceful expulsion that can incite violence against farmers.

As Reuters notes, most land remains in white hands, making it a potent symbol of lingering inequalities 25 years on from the end of apartheid. Since white minority rule ended in 1994, the ANC has followed a “willing-seller, willing-buyer” model whereby the government buys white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks. Progress has been slow.

There have been growing fears that the planned expropriation will deal a blow to commercial farming in the country and might put it on the verge of a food production crisis, like the one that struck Zimbabwe when it unleashed a similar crackdown on white farmers in 1999-2000.

Promoting his plan to boost land redistribution in March, Ramaphosa sought to assure white citizens, who constitute roughly nine percent of the total population, that the government would handle the controversial matter through “dialog, discussion, engagement, until we find good solutions that take our country forward.”

“There is no reason for anyone of us to panic and start beating war drums,” he said at the time, noting that nothing should prevent farming activities from continuing as normal.  

However, many of the Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa, do not take the government’s promises at face value, instead seeking asylum abroad from what they say is a surge in violence and government-fueled hostility against them.

Rights groups said the initiative incites violence – there were 74 farm murders and 638 attacks, primarily against white farmers, in 2016-17 in South Africa – and while the government doesn’t dispute the figures, officials say farmers are victims of crime like just other citizens of the country gripped by violence and that they are not targeted because they are white.

Last month, a call from Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to provide emergency visas for South Africa’s white farmers, who are reportedly facing persecution at home, sparked a diplomatic scandal, with the head of the South African opposition labeling Australia “a racist country” for granting refuge to white farmers both in the Mandela era and now.

Boers have also appealed to Russia, seeking to resettle farmers who no longer feel at home in South Africa. A delegation consisting of some 30 South African farming families arrived in Russia’s farm belt Stavropol Region last month, asking the local authorities to consider resettling up to 15,000 Boers.

Moving “is a matter of life and death” for them the head of the delegation told the media.

* * *

Meanwhile, South Africa’s economy has barely grown in recent years, with the growth outlook remaining much lower than the 5 percent annual growth government is aiming for to make a dent in near-record unemployment. Tuesday data showed that South Africa’s unemployment rate rose to 27.2% of the labor force in the second quarter from 26.7% in the first quarter.

In other words, South Africa is well on its way to converting itself into a banana republic; as such confiscating the land of the whites appears to be the logical next step.

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Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Within Google, knowledge about Dragonfly has been restricted to just a few hundred members of the internet giant’s 88,000-strong workforce, said a source with knowledge of the project. The source spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to contact the media. The source said that they had moral and ethical concerns about Google’s role in the censorship, which is being planned by a handful of top executives and managers at the company with no public scrutiny.

“I’m against large companies and governments collaborating in the oppression of their people, and feel like transparency around what’s being done is in the public interest,” the source said, adding that they feared “what is done in China will become a template for many other nations.”

From The Intercept article: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

Today’s post will explain why I think the U.S. tech giants are in the early stages of destroying themselves. It will focus on two of the biggest names in the space, Facebook and Google. Both face serious issues that are only now truly coming to a head and rooted in two primary factors, size and politics.

Facebook is further along in the process of being in serious trouble, so let’s start there. The social media company currently has 2.2 billion active users worldwide, which amounts to well over half of all human beings online at the moment (estimated at 3-4 billion). In other words, the company already has a tremendous share of global potential users. Since everybody already knows what Facebook is, you have to assume those who aren’t using it (like me), aren’t using it for a reason. Thus, you have to ask whether or not meaningful growth in active users is remotely realistic for Facebook. I would argue not.

There are many reasons to bet against Facebook significantly growing active users in the years ahead, but the main hurdle seems to be keeping the users it already has actively engaged. Specifically, I think there are two types of users Facebook risks losing going forward. These people might not “delete Facebook” per se, but their engagement with the platform may drop meaningfully.

The first consists of the not insignificant number of Americans who in part blame Facebook and “fake news” for the election of Donald Trump. These types are placing enormous amounts of pressure on politicians to “do something” and you can see Facebook executives starting to squirm. Facebook doesn’t know what to do and risks responding to this political outrage in a manner that could irreparably harm the platform’s appeal.

For example, Facebook executives have recently shown signs of an increased eagerness to grovel to politicians still cranky about Hillary’s loss. Here’s an example from yesterday’s New York Timesarticle, Facebook Has Identified Ongoing Political Influence Campaign:

WASHINGTON — Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November’s midterm elections.

In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week and a public post on Tuesday, the company told lawmakers that it had detected and removed 32 pages and accounts connected to the influence campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of its investigations into election interference. It publicly said it had been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two officials briefed on the matter.

Facebook has been under intense pressure to validate the theory that Russia and fake news led to Hillary’s loss, especially from Senator Mark Warner of Virginia. Executives feel a need to comply, so they rolled out the ridiculousness above. Facebook has 2.2 billion active users and the company is making a big deal about 32 pages and accounts, which it admittedly can’t even tie to Russia (believe me they’re trying). Naturally, this didn’t stop Warner from explicitly linking them to Russia:

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has exerted intense pressure on the social media companies, praised Facebook on Tuesday for bringing the activity into the public but asked for its cooperation in updating laws to prevent influence campaigns.

“Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation,” he said. “And I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity.”

See how this game works? This is pure political theater and Facebook is now an eager participant.

The moment a social media platform takes sides it’s no longer a platform and quickly loses its raison d’être. Facebook is making this mistake and Twitter seems to be moving the same way. This particular era of social media is ending, new platforms are needed.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) July 31, 2018

This is what happens when you become too big, too powerful and then politicians take notice. Facebook’s best days are behind it.

Let’s now turn to Google. If what The Intercept is reporting today is true, Google’s become so desperate for growth and new revenue streams, it’s decided to become an active and willing participant in keeping over 1 billion Chinese ignorant and oppressed in the pursuit of some extra cash.

From the article, Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal:

Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, The Intercept can reveal.

The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans…

Google’s search service cannot currently be accessed by most internet users in China because it is blocked by the country’s so-called Great Firewall. The app Google is building for China will comply with the country’s strict censorship laws, restricting access to content that Xi Jinping’s Communist Party regime deems unfavorable…

Examples cited in the documents of websites that will be subject to the censorship include those of British news broadcaster BBC and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The search app will also “blacklist sensitive queries” so that “no results will be shown” at all when people enter certain words or phrases, the documents state. The censorship will apply across the platform: Google’s image search, automatic spell check and suggested search features will incorporate the blacklists, meaning that they will not recommend people information or photographs the government has banned.

Google executives realize how completely and utterly evil this is, which is why they’re apparently actively hiding the initative from their own employees. Not a good look.

Within Google, knowledge about Dragonfly has been restricted to just a few hundred members of the internet giant’s 88,000-strong workforce, said a source with knowledge of the project. The source spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to contact the media. The source said that they had moral and ethical concerns about Google’s role in the censorship, which is being planned by a handful of top executives and managers at the company with no public scrutiny

There’s a reason Google executives want to keep this on the down low. Recall the company experienced widespread internal protest and even some resignations related to its drone partnership with the U.S. military, Project Maven (see: Preach Less, Live Your Values More).

The China initiative seems even more problematic from a political perspective. It’s one thing to help the U.S. government, it’s another to actively help the primary strategic rival of U.S. imperial dominance maintain its authoritarian government in the name of profit, which is exactly what Google would be doing. This brings me to my next point.

While it’s currently all the rage to yell Russia, Russia, Russia because Hillary lost, the actual geopolitical rival to U.S. imperial dominance on the world stage is unquestionably China. In other words, if Google’s own employees don’t come after it for this despicable move, U.S. politicians will.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you get too big, too powerful and too desperate for growth at all costs.

Google in 3 acts:

Don’t be evil.
Evil is a subjective term.
Evil is profitable. https://t.co/i7Tw4Un8Cq

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) August 1, 2018

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For years, some more skeptical analysts had been stumped by the relentless US consumer demand US for new cars, despite rising household debt levels, stagnant real wages, and concerns about record subprime exposure. Today, we may have found the dynamo that drove purchases to a plateau of between 17 and 18 million units over the past three years: pervasive dealer discounts and incentives.

Almost all major manufacturers reported a sharp drop in U.S. deliveries for July, led by a 15% plunge at Nissan Motor. The reason: for the first time in 55 months, the auto industry – perhaps due to concerns about the impact of auto tariffs – cut back spending on incentives, snapping a streak of monthly consecutive increases that began 4 1/2 years ago, according to J.D. Power.

While General Motors stopped reporting its monthly numbers earlier this year, Bloomberg reports that its sales fell 3.3% last month, the same drop as Ford.

Fiat Chrysler, which recently lost its CEO Sergio Marchionne, was the rare bright spot in July, driven largely by a surge in Jeep SUV sales fueling the Italian-American company’s 5.9% jump.

However, as we reported previously, both automakers could have used some positive headlines. GM lowered its profit expectations last week largely because of rising commodity prices, which have jumped since President Donald Trump put tariffs on steel and aluminum; meanwhile Jeep’s surprisingly weak performance in China – where subsidies for new auto purchases recently ended – was a major reason Fiat Chrysler dropped its forecasts for the year.

As a result of underwhelming numbers from Nissan, Ford and Honda (and GM), the annualized industry sales rate slowed to just 16.8 million, from 17.2 million in June, and just barely above last year’s selling rate.

Fiat shares declined 2.2%, while GM fell 2% and Ford dropped 1.4% in New York trading.

* * *

While generally expected, the drop in sales caps a rough month for the auto industry during which Detroit’s carmakers all revised their earnings guidance lower and Ford embarked on a five-year restructuring plan.

Additionally, as Bloomberg adds, the sales month “will underscore investor fears that auto sales have peaked and that, without ever-higher sales incentives to keep consumers interested, demand will continue to soften.”

“The incentives we’re seeing are more targeted,” in part because inventories are lean, said Michelle Krebs, executive analyst for Autotrader. “They’re not just slathered on.”

The auto industry’s reliance on incentives is troubling for several reasons: not only are they a profit “race to the bottom” as OEMs scramble to preserve and gain market share, but they may also indicate that without at least the impression that they are getting a good deal, many cash-strapped US consumers will be reluctant to purchase autos. Meanwhile, as the tariff picture remains murky at best, changing one day to the next depending on what Trump tweets at any given moment, auto makers will be reluctant to offer the same generous discount that drove sales for the past 5 years.

One possible explanation is that carmakers may have done their discounting early this summer and decided that enough was enough, even as July’s results show some payback for promotions that fueled a better-than-expected close to the first half, according to Bloomberg.

Not everyone agrees: “an incentive pullback is rare for this time of year”, said Mark LaNeve, head of U.S. sales for Ford, which was hurt by steep drops for the Escape crossover and Fusion sedan.

“I don’t ever remember a de-escalation from June to July, as you go into the traditional summer sell-down season,” LaNeve said on a call with analysts. “June received much more benefit than July in terms of the Fourth of July business.”

However, one clear reason for the pullback is that as a result of rising rates, it’s getting prohibitively expensive to offer incentives that are tied to loans. A series of rate hikes have pushed interest rates to levels not seen in a decade, which makes subsidized interest rates more expensive to offer.

“The summer is usually a time for manufacturers to roll out the deals and clear out the inventory,” said Edmunds analyst Jeremy Acevedo. “But interest rates are peaking right now. It’s getting more expensive to offer these deals.”

Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist for Cox Automotive, pointed out another possible issue: that while automakers are pulling back on new-vehicle incentives, there are great deals on used-car lots. Returns of vehicles that have been leased are on the rise, and that added supply gives consumers more choice of lower-priced alternatives to new models.

“There is such tremendous competition from the used-car market,” Chesbrough told Bloomberg. “We have so many off-lease vehicles coming back to market and they are cheaper than new cars.”

Finally, there is the most likely reason: US consumers, dramatic upward revisions to the personal savings rate if only on paper notwithstanding, simply can not afford the extra dollars at a time when the prices of staples and other discretionary purchases are rising sharply. This, of course, is the worst case scenario because it means that even with record auto loans outstanding, many of which have crossed into subprime territory, Americans no longer feel confident enough in their financial future to make a long-term commitment.

Which incidentally is precisely what the latest UMichigan consumer sentiment survey revealed last week, when it showed that vehicle buying conditions have collapsed to the lowest level in five years. WARD’s Automotive reported a 16.68mm US auto sales SAAR for July – the weakest July sales since 2014 and set to go notably lower based on car-buying-sentiment.

While bad news for automaker sales and profits, this is even worse news for the economy, as it confirms that the latest 4.1% GDP print is merely product of some overzealous excel jockey at the BLS who was told to goalseek a 4%+ number at any cost.

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