Burger King will begin delivering food to drivers stuck in Los Angeles freeway gridlock, notorious for becoming a virtual parking lot during rush hour.
After a successful test in Mexico City, the fast food chain will use motorcyclists to deliver piping hot food using real-time data to pinpoint hungry drivers within a 1.9-mile radius from the closest Burger King, according to CBS LA.
Burger King’s ordering app will use voice commands to avoid tickets. Once placed, the delivery motorcyclist will use Google mapping technology to deliver – typically within 15 minutes from when the order was placed.
Lane-splitting LA motorcycle commuters may want to double-check their life insurance policies.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2w52WBV Tyler Durden
America’s self-imagined custodianship of human rights and freedom epitomize problems associated with fake prophesies. That Americans now rally behind the latest battle-cry of the Republic, ‘Make America Great Again’, indicate that they are indifferent to the fact that their country has been barnstorming across the globe these past six decades killing vast numbers of innocent people with the objective of creating a pre-eminently militaristic empire to strategically control the skies, oceans, their market-share plus control of space. In implementing these belligerent objectives, the US has repeatedly unleashed auto-da-fés to destroy many countries across the globe who failed to fall in line.
Foremostly, America’s firebrand passage through Muslim countries clearly illustrate how a neophyte culture with racist baggage can implode the nation’s reputation, leaving it bereft of respect and credibility. This now appears to be what is happening in America. The two-tiered (or three) aspect of this enterprise requires closer examination.
It would appear that ‘greatness’ in the American context amounts to nothing more than upholding vulgar white-middle-class racist values as the measure of excellence, with fake ‘principled’ notions of cultural superiority leading the chase. When the dogs-of-war were unleashed to wreak havoc, pillage and plunder on the habitats of millions of hapless people across the globe, the silence of so-called conscionable America was deafening.
Violence had become an American staple and the voice of the Peace Movement is all but mute. It’s now impossible to ignore the fact that the three tiers of state, the top tier, the middle tier and the lower tier…the three classes…collude in a program whose singular use of power expresses an unwavering desire to ride the gravy train to the hilt and devil take the hindmost.
These three classes, battle hardened and indifferent to the chaos caused by their bloodthirsty military have been blindsided by their own government. There is the sense that the flag… the stars-and-strips…has become the nation’s birth certificate and each person’s birth certificate a little bit of a collective ‘stars and stripes’ denouement that entitles them to extrajudicial considerations and the right to be proud of their dubious record. However, finding one’s niche in this hierarchal edifice is another matter altogether.
The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are missives of choice for the middle class in matters relating to America’s monopolistic capitalist system. Predatory incursions into foreign countries resulting in bloodshed are routinely explained away in false-flag gibberish or in some other fashion to justify the actions of the government. This business of doing business attitude exists to negate everything else and the middle-class appear to have no qualms with this scenario. The sub-text here being, as God’s own people they believe that they have the right to expect ‘mana-from-heaven’ to rain down upon them from all quarters of the globe.
For the working class however, tweeting along with the paymaster appears to be an act of convenience. But when the music stops, as it most certainly will, the birthright question (all men are equal) will inevitable come into contention again when the issue of inequality needs to be confronted. However, the next generation may be more strident should they once again find themselves being herded back into a holding-pen position to await casino-capitalism’s next ‘flurry’ at the roulette table.
But irony of ironies, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal etc. are merely institutions that employ smoke and mirror tactics to conceal the nastiness of a two-tiered (or three) system that entails subjecting the public to a game of musical chairs, whose prime objective is to unseat a competitor each time Wall Street chooses to play its favourite game of ‘pass-the-stock-market-parcel’…the one designed to consolidate wealth in fewer hands each time it is played.
Musical chairs, also known as Trip to Jerusalem, is a game of elimination involving players, chairs, and music, with one fewer chair than players. When the music stops whichever player fails to sit on a chair is eliminated, with a chair then being removed and the process repeated until only one player remains. Alas! The origins of the game are unknown. On the other hand, we may safely assume that Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci are not its authors.
So, the questions we need to ask here are, have Americans taken to wearing masks to hide their lack of conscience, like their President wears his hairpiece… do their masks, like Donald’s hairpiece, only make an appearance when orchestrating auto-da fes, or when administering sanctions designed to economically incinerate…or starve… apostates?
Or should we defer to another Donald…Donald Rumsfeld…for insights into America’s moral stature. “We don’t know what we don’t know. There are too many unknowns too many factors that we may not have yet considered,” said he. Which, when translated might mean, ‘Life is like a game of musical chairs and America has the right to take occupancy of the limited number of chairs available or our armed forces will be forced to use terror to procure knowable ends that are ultimately unknowable but desirable because they make us feel great.’
Narratives fed to the public by special interest groups come as hybridised versions of Hollywood cypher-speak-gibberish and are passed off as truths to the public for the purpose of indoctrinating them. A continuous repetition of false declamatory statements praising American exceptionality pour from the media to reinforce fake news. If there were a Noble Peace prize for hypocrisy, it would surely go to America.
America, the so-called leader of the so-called free world is awash with fallacious narratives that are put in place by corporate entities to implement a two-tiered (or three) system that strives to gain support in the public domain by using fearmongering tactics to implement its propaganda in every way possible. Fake narratives ceaselessly eat into public consciousness while cleverly concealing their real purpose, which is full spectrum Mafioso dominance. Think of the numerous corporate ploughshares that have insidiously penetrated a country near you!
As we now live in a technological age that has provided humans with the ability to engage in nuclear Armageddon, we can’t help but notice how worse-case scenarios abound. Some even suggest that evolution has run out of steam. Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine (MAD) is a minefield without canaries and we, in the lower tiers, are left painfully aware of our impotence on discovering that we are without a voice in the decision- making process. We are required to seal our lips and accept the reality that nuclear buttons now hang over our heads like the sword of Damocles.
We are constantly reminded that states exist, super and otherwise, their nuclear dogs-of-war straining on the leash in readiness should lines be crossed. We are repeatedly reminded of the fact that it is now possible to cause enormous casualties and destruction to civilian populations anywhere in the world by simply pressing a button from thousands of miles away.
We can no longer feel free because we can no longer free ourselves from the shadow of Dr. Strangelove. The more bloated the military budget becomes, the deeper we sink into gloom upon realizing how our anxiety increases exponentially with increases to the military budget.
Knowing that unknown knowns have consigned us to carceral spaces where modern-day Caesars busy themselves toying with their nuclear buttons, suggests that the middle and working classes have become prisoners in an ill-defined reality. The knowledge that capitalism engenders fear through its ‘security’ narrative has now become the problem. The ideology that keeps capitalism frothing at the mouth has produced its own evil doppelganger…a pedagogic Promethean pariah responsible for global degradation, its power ever more lethal in a world that has learned to fear its score card.
Four in ten Americans sometimes face what economists call “material hardship,” struggling to pay for basic needs such as food and housing, according to a new study from the Urban Institute. Even middle-class families routinely struggle financially and are occasionally unable to pay their bills and more and more ordinary citizen are beginning to feel that they no longer have a part to play in a secular agenda that has become the property of the military establishment.
So, the problem now is that civilians seem unable to deal with facts. A shut-the-fuck-up mentality now exists to banish issues that relate to questions relating to social criteria and the people who write and whistle-blow the inequities of their government. People are relentlessly exposed to facts, but as civilians, are incapable of dealing with them. Facts appear on electronic screens ad nauseam to reveal how citizens have become captive to a static reality that uses fearmongering as a way of castrating public dissent. Facts that indicate that only the elite have skin in the game are everywhere in evidence.
At the Colosseum level…the elite level…the grand referee in the orange hairpiece keeps tweeting dealership gibberish while the classes in the lower tiers are expected to remain on standby to applaud this kind of hubris. Many are amused but few are chosen…unless you are an exponent of the rules of Republican Likud or are Likud Democrats building separation walls to keep Zion in and Allah out, per medium of a nasty game of musical chairs…a la currency wars!
Secondary development is fine, but at what cost to that primary narrative within us that depends on freedom of expression? It is ironic that many of the ‘learned’ amongst us strategically position themselves between the people and the elites, thereby limiting the potential for development within the masses. Traditionally, the policy of our rulers…shepherds… was to herd the ‘sheeple’ into the shepherd’s fold, lest he or she escape the soporific effects of propaganda or holy writ. To our great dismay, most of our teachers to this day do little other that look in the rear-view mirror for inspiration.
Justifications for releasing the ‘Dogs of War’ on civilians who can’t defend themselves are inevitable meaningless. For example, the American-Zionist agenda which manufactures fear for the purpose of manufacturing enemies for the purpose of manufacturing wars, has of itself become a war on truth. Sadly, the reason why investigative reporting became so highly selective is that in the US, truth had lost its place in the established media. The fact of the matter is, white-middle-class Americans respond with pique when confronted with criticism of their values. Sadly, exposing the injustices perpetrated on Muslims, Palestinians or Black People is a matter of little concern…a poignant example of what happens to complacent people when they turn away from the truth.
What William Kristol and Robert Kagan proposed when helping to draft the ‘Project for the New American Century’, was a manufactured narrative that led the average citizen to believe that their security depended on elites who could explain the threats they were exposed to…a win-win solution designed to keep them believing that they needed the protection of elites. And what the elites were telling them was that the military establishment was a bulwark against chaos, and the destruction of their state and the possibility that they might become subservient to non-white people.
The West, having created a bifurcated paradigm called democracy sold it to the public as a vector capable of promoting the verity of good governance. But unfortunately, as all paradigms contain bias, the model in question went to great lengths to conceal the presence of the schism within. An upper tier and a lower tier came into existence, whereby the resolution of conflicts was subject to the veto powers of the upper tier. Soon the upper tier set about training minds in the lower-tier to shepherd the resources of the state in ways that benefited the upper-tier. Sadly, over time, the upper tier became more interested in the subject of fiscal welfare (for themselves) rather than pursuing outcomes that could serve the interests of the entire polity.
The bifurcated concept of democracy as propounded by our learned founding-fathers was from the beginning a sleight of hand operating in deference to proprietorial principles enabling the architects of the system to retain control of their plan by fostering the notion that their vector of choice, democracy, could deliver justice for all.
In the US, a tiny number of people cream off virtually all the wealth. Ever since the first Cold War, the ‘sheeple’ have been led to believe that an external threat to their security existed and that it could only be managed by the ruling elite. Spending money to secure the two-tiered realm would require the creation of a global military force capable of warding off threats to American hegemony.
In recent times, emotions pertaining to loss of kudos led to acrimonious debate within the US. Insisting that the Western alliance would work better if individual members paid a bigger share of the costs involved in maintaining NATO came to the fore. This policing agency, the tip of the economic iceberg that was put in place to secure right-of-passage for US hegemony in the first instance, was now upping the ante…the cost of missiles had increased. To date, the dust may have settled, but the opprobrium (phlegm) released by Emperor continues to rile the ruled.
In middle America…the beltway…the media, academia and the entertainment industry share a quasi-moral narrative which floats like an iceberg in an inland sea. This inland sea has a mirror-like surface which reflects the vanity of its citizenry who need to bathe in the unholy waters of hubris. For the upper and middle classes, focusing on America’s military might enables them to revel in unadulterated vainglory. Hubris within the upper class had reached a point where debasement of human values became the norm. Celebrations of inhouse grandiosity suggesting that inverted middle-class American perspectives had passed their use-by-date.
And as the wealth of the nation continued its rise upwards, the lower tier showed signs that something had become unsustainable. The top-heaviness of the unequal economic order had begun to impact unfavourably on the lower tier. From the anonymity of the sheep-pen, the so-called sheeple people had discovered a flaw in that aphorism which stated, ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. They discovered that these perspectives were held by pedagogic Prometheans peering into histories rear-view mirrors. They were teachers who would never experience the thrill that came with grassroot activity or feel passions that could change the course of history.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JNY1NG Tyler Durden
Agriculture automation has the potential to reshape the farming industry in the 2020s and beyond.
A new analysis from Bloomberg shows robot farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means tractors will have no cabs – able to spray, plant, plow, and weed cropland with artificial intelligence.
Autonomous farming is a popular theme among all farming equipment manufacturers. Several years ago, the Australian government studied robot tractors from John Deere, Case New Holland, CNH Industrial, AGCO, CLAAS, Same Deutz-Fahr, and Kubota. The key takeaway from the matrix below is that Deere and CNH are leading when it comes to making tractors fully autonomous, with both companies having released working prototypes.
Bloomberg notes that several startups in Canada and Australia have already made their autonomous farm equipment commercially available.
In Saskatchewan, a Canadian province that borders the US, Dot Technology Corp. sold fully autonomous power platforms for the spring planting season.
In Australia, SwarmFarm Robotic is selling weed-killing robots that can also mow and spread. These companies say their new machines are much smaller and efficient than traditional field equipment.
Sam Bradford, a farm manager at Arcturus Downs in Australia’s Queensland state, was one of the first adopters of SwarmFarm’s robots last year. He has four truck-sized weed-killing robots to manage thousands of acres.
Before, Bradford had used a Case Patriot 4430 Sprayer with a 120-foot boom that “looks like a massive praying mantis.” It would cover the field in chemicals, he said.
However, robots are more precise than traditional sprayers. Bradford said his robots work 20,000 acres, will save him 80% of his chemical costs.
“The savings on chemicals is huge, but there’s also savings for the environment from using less chemicals and you’re also getting a better result in the end,” said Bradford, who’s run the farm for about 10 years. Surrounding rivers run out to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s eastern cost, making the farm particularly sensitive over its use of chemicals, he said.
Costs savings have become important as a deepening trade war has sparked a potential agriculture recession in the US. On top of that, spot prices for agriculture products have been in decline for five years.
The S&P GSCI Grains Index Spot has collapsed more than 50% in 81 months from the August 2012 peak. Meanwhile, inflationary cost pressures have been seen in farming equipment, labor, seeds, fertilizers, fuel, and other farming inputs has led to low margins.
Personal incomes plummeted the most in three years last quarter, as the entire industry is on the verge of collapse from the ongoing trade war.
Several months ago, we reported that federal data showed the number of farmers filing for bankruptcy has climbed to its highest level in a decade.
A farm crisis has developed across the American Heartland. Farmers will need to adopt robots to achieve higher profitability and efficiency in operations. SwarmFarm’s Chief Executive Officer Andrew Bate said robots would allow farmers to grow crops more efficiently, adding to their bottom line.
Before the start of Saskatchewan’s growing season, Dot sold autonomous tractors to farmers throughout the region.
Alex Purdy, head of John Deere Labs and director of precision agriculture technology, said, Deere hasn’t released fully autonomous tractors because the technology hasn’t yet matured to replace people.
Purdy said artificial intelligence, deep learning, and advances in computer vision would transform agricultural machinery even further.
Brett McClelland, product manager of autonomous vehicles at CNH Industrial, said the modern tractor does thousands of tasks, and to fully automate those tasks, a deep understanding of each is needed to automate them.
One of the most challenging areas is “sensing and perception,” said McClelland.
CNH Industrial revealed an autonomous tractor at the 2016 Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa. The tractor is still undergoing test pilots and not yet commercially available.
The proliferation of commercially available farm robots could be what save’s the American farming industry after it crashes in the early 2020s.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JqwClK Tyler Durden
Human trafficking is the crime of transporting a person from one country to another, usually for the purposes of sexual exploitation, and it’s much more common that one may know. Underlying much of the prostitution industry and illegal massage parlors is the horrible fact that many of the women supposedly working there are being held against their will.
Spotting when someone is being trafficked against their will is challenging, but increasingly airlines, hotels, and other industries are training their employees to spot when it’s happening and to alert authorities. Increasingly, flight attendants and hotel receptionists are helping to spot and rescue these victims.
Just how common is human trafficking in the United States and where is it taking place? Along with Priceonomics customer, Geoffrey Nathan Law Offices.com we analyzed data from The National Human Trafficking Hotline organization on the number of reports it receives each year and their location. While it’s important to recognize that only a small fraction of actual human trafficking cases get detected and reported, the data set provides a glimpse into the prevalence of the crime.
We found that reported human trafficking has been increasing over the last decade, though thankfully 2018 was first recent year that saw a decline. Reports of human trafficking is most prevalent in Washington DC, Nevada and Florida and least prevalent in New Hampshire, Idaho and Massachusetts. The US cities where human trafficking is most reported per capita are Washington DC, Atlanta, Orlando, and Las Vegas.
***
Since 2007, the National Human Trafficking Hotline receives approximately 200,000 calls, texts, emails, and webform submissions. These “signals” have been distilled into around 45,000 distinct cases of human trafficking. Each case may refer to one or more victims of human trafficking and it’s not necessarily an indication of a police investigation.
The chart below shows the registered cases per year over the last seven years:
In 2018, there were over 5,000 cases of human trafficking, an increase of 57% from 2012. Since 2012, there has been an uptick of human trafficking reports reports until a steep decline between 2017 and 2018.
Likely, the number of cases stated above dramatically understates the magnitude of human trafficking in the United States. The Hotline states that the covert nature of the operations and lack of awareness of the issue means these statistics under represent the scale of the issue. What’s more, some experts argue that the opioid crisis has caused an increase in human trafficking, as those suffering from drug addiction are particular susceptible to being trafficked.
Where are human trafficking reports most prevalent in the United States. Next, we breakdown the number of cases per state in 2018 per 100,000 people who live in the state:
On a per capita basis, Washington DC and Nevada have the most reports of human trafficking in the nation. In each of those states, trafficking reports are more than five times more likely than in States like Wisconsin and Utah and Wisconsin.
What drives the prevalence of human trafficking in places like Washington DC and Nevada? The prostitution industry. While some prostitutes may work entirely on their own accord, a very significant number of them are working against their will. Even in Nevada, where prostitution is legal in certain parts of the state with a license, there are widespread reports of women working at brothels against their will or with falsified identification.
Beyond sex trafficking, the second major category of human trafficking is coerced labor. As a result, heavy agricultural states also make an appearance in the top ten states where trafficking reports are highest.
Lastly, let’s look at the cities with the most reports of human trafficking. The chart below shows the total number of cases from 2007 to 2016 per capita among the 100 largest cities in America.
The top five cities in America for human trafficking reports are Washington DC, Atlanta, Orlando, Miami, and Las Vegas. In addition to the prostitution issue mentioned previously, each of these locations are major tourist destinations and have international airports.
While virtually all of the top 25 cities for human trafficking prevalence are large metropolises, the cities where human trafficking is less common tend to be smaller cities. One notable exception is New York City, the largest city in America. New York has the twenty second lowest rate of human trafficking in the country.
***
While in the past, people might joke that prostitution is the “world’s oldest profession” people that study the industry often refer to it as the “world’s oldest oppression” because so many of the prostitutes involved are there against their will. As a result, some of the US cities with the highest rates of prostitution like Washington DC and Las Vegas also have the highest prevalence of human trafficking reports. Even in rural areas human trafficking is a serious issue as laborers are forced into illegal work conditions.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2YBU174 Tyler Durden
One of the main goals of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies of the past decade was to generate the “wealth effect”: by pushing the valuations of homes higher, would make American households feel wealthier. But it didn’t. Most Americans can’t afford the traditional home with a white picket fence around a private yard (otherwise known as the American dream), and as a result, has led to the popularity of tiny homes among heavily indebted millennials.
Tiny homes are popping up across West Coast cities as a solution to out of control rents and bubbly home prices, also known as the housing affordability crisis.
Amazon has recognized the hot market for tiny homes among millennials and has recently started selling DIY kits and complete tiny homes.
One of the first tiny homes we spotted on Amazon is a $7,250 kit for a tiny home that can be assembled in about eight hours.
A more luxurious tiny home on the e-commerce website is selling for $49,995 +$1,745.49 for shipping. This one is certified by the RV Industry Association’s standards inspection program, which means millennials can travel from Seattle to San Diego in a nomadic fashion searching for gig-economy jobs.
Those who want a 20 ft/40 ft expandable container house with solar energy, well, Amazon has that too. This tiny home has it all: a post-industrial feel using an old shipping container, virtue signaling with solar panels, full bathroom, and a kitchen to make avocado and toast.
The mainstream media in the United States has made a shift in the past few decades. Now, they appeal to emotions as opposed to reporting the facts. This “cultural schizophrenia” is tearing the U.S. apart at the seams.
Based on the conclusions to a RAND Corporation study, the mainstream media is actively sowing discord in American society, award-winning journalist Chris Hedges tells RT. The media is focusing on making two sides hate each other instead of reporting on the facts, and the majority of the public is unaware and doesn’t care that their minds are being manipulated by their own emotional responses.
The study, which was released by RAND earlier this week, states that between 1987 and 2017, news content has shifted from event- and context-based reporting to coverage that is “more subjective, relies more heavily on argumentation and advocacy, and includes more emotional appeals.” According to RT, prime-time cable news shows and online journalism lead the way in this shift to emotional and hate-based rhetoric. It has been noticed in print journalism as well, the government-funded think tank concluded.
This is contributing to what RAND termed “Truth Decay.”This is described as a shift away from facts and analysis in public discourse.
Hedges claims that the deterioration of the mainstream media is “far worse” than the RAND report suggests. And he isn’t alone in that assessment.
[American journalist Matt]Taibbi says that the result of this journalistic decay and emotional fear mongering is a public addicted to hating each other.
Americans have become addicted to the news that agrees with their bias, and it was set up that way on purpose. The only thing anyone will hear when they turn on the news are stories specifically crafted to manufacture outrage, make you hate the other side, and fuel the addiction to anger. –SHTFPlan
The mainstream media has succeeded in addicting the average American to anger and hatred. The idea that the media could profit off of facts was lost long ago.
“Commercial structure that created the old media is gone and it has eviscerated journalism within the country because it is not sustainable. We saw it with the collapse of the classified advertising, which was 40 percent of the newspapers’ revenues. It is not sustainable economically anymore,” Hedges said.
It is becoming difficult to tell apart facts and opinion now, and people believe whatever they want to believe, Hedges explained. “We spent years watching CNN and MSNBCpromoting this conspiracy theory that Trump was a Kremlin agent… It was all garbage but it attracted viewers,” Hedges added as an example. And, if you don’t mind your IQ dropping, turn on MSNBC for just a few minutes. It’s likely you’ll still hear something about Russiagate to keep the public pissed off beyond comprehension.
Now people can claim their emotions as facts and never have to actually view anyone who disagrees with them as a fellow human being. This will be successful at keeping the fighting amongst the public as the politicians steal more of their money, take away more of their freedom, and get away with it.
“It creates cultural schizophrenia,” Hedges said, noting that he observed this during the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. At that time, the media drove antagonisms and hatreds between ethnic groups. Similar things are happening in the US right now, as “right-wing media are demonizing Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama by comparing them to Hitler and the left-wing media label all Trump supporters as racists and deplorables,” Hedges said. “It all creates societal fragmentation and discord,” Hedges told RT.
“These schisms could lead to civil unrest – that is what happens here.”
“You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Yuabzs Tyler Durden
The Pentagon wanted to reimburse the Taliban for expenses the group incurred attending recent peace talks, according to the BBC, citing a US Congressional aide.
The request to cover the militants’ costs such as transportation, lodging and food was ultimately denied by a Congressional committee, despite the Pentagon’s request “to use funds to facilitate [the] meetings.”
The funding requested by the Pentagon was intended to reimburse the group for costs incurred while participating in the talks, including supplies, food, accommodation and transportation, according to Kevin Spicer, spokesman for Representative Peter Visclosky of Indiana [D]. –BBC
“The Defense Department requested fiscal year 2020 funding to support certain reconciliation activities, including logistic support for members of the Taliban and, in March 2019, they sent a notification letter to the Committee on using fiscal year 2019 funds for similar activities,” said the spokesman.
Visclosky chairs the House Appropriations defence subcommittee, which approved a $390.2 billion spending bill that specifically denies the Pentagon from reimbursing the expenses of the militants, as none of the funds may be used “to pay for the expenses of any member of the Taliban to participate in any meeting that does not include the participation of members of the Government of Afghanistan or that restricts the participation of women,” reads the legislation.
According to the report, the language was included to avoid breaking laws concerning material support for terrorist groups, said Kevin Spicer, citing “the Taliban’s ongoing offensive operations against US service members, and their continuing lack of acknowledgement of the government of Afghanistan or the rights of women in Afghan society.”
The Pentagon says the funds were needed in order to negotiate ceasefires.
“Following the June 2018 ceasefire in Afghanistan, the Commander of U.S. Forces, Afghanistan requested the authority to use funds to facilitate meetings between the Afghan government and insurgent groups looking to implement local ceasefires in order to be poised to take advantage of further opportunities to reduce levels of violence in the country should such opportunities present themselves,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Cdr. Rebecca Rebarich.
Life imitates “The Onion”
As Roll Call points out, the Taliban is rich – netting by some estimates at least $800 million per year from opium trafficking and related activities, while having battled US troops for over 18 years.
Afghanistan’s opium trade in 2017 was estimated to be valued at between $4.1 billion and $6.6 billion, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. The Taliban is believed to be netting about 20 percent of that, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan has reported. If those figures are accurate, the Taliban earns more than $800 million a year on drugs, and U.S. officials have said this drug money funds most of the Taliban’s activities. –Roll Call
Moreover, “Afghanistan’s opium trade has, in turn, contributed to a surge in opioid-related deaths in the United States that hit nearly 48,000 in 2017, according to federal statistics,” according to the report.
Steve Ellis, executive vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense says that the Taliban expense report story is like “life imitating The Onion.”
“Even if you leave aside that they are still conducting operations against our interests and allies, having to pay for someone to be at the table undercuts our bargaining position and demonstrates their lack of enthusiasm for a deal,” Ellis told Roll Call, adding “I’m sure the Taliban would like whatever cash we’re willing to give them, but it’s not like they aren’t able to continue funding their fighting. How about using some of that cash instead of American taxpayer dollars.“
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JNBhNU Tyler Durden
What happens when our government takes down its interior checkpoints north of the border in New Mexico? Well, the cartels, with the drug and human smuggling, are “kicking our butts,” according to one local official.
In an interview with CR, Couy Griffin, the chairman of the Otero County, New Mexico, county commission, explained how our government has exposed his county, and by extension, the rest of the nation, to unprecedented criminal activity from the Mexican cartels. In his view, by taking down the two secondary Border Patrol checkpoints in his county in order to focus on more processing of illegal immigrants, the federal government is missing the point.
“The cartel is winning and winning big; they are kicking our butts,” complained the commissioner of this sparsely populated but large county bordering Texas, near El Paso.
“We get so tied up and focused on the asylum seekers or the illegal immigrant aspect of what’s going on at our southern border, but the reality of it is that it’s nothing but a mere smoke screen for the cartel. They’re using these large groups of migrants as nothing more than a smoke screen to smuggle their drugs across the southern border. Meanwhile, as soon as those agents are exhausted, those critical spots, they’re sending boatloads of drugs across the border in unsecured areas. The shutting down of the checkpoints on the major drug smuggling corridors is a recipe for disaster. Now they have a green light to shuttle drugs through our counties and through our rural areas, with no security in place.”
Otero County, while itself not on the international border, has two highways originating from the two main border towns where the illegal immigrants are coming in and the cartels are operating – U.S. Highway 70 and U.S. Highway 54. For years, there has been a checkpoint on each highway on the way to Alamogordo, the foremost town in this county. Griffin noted that while the cartels used to relegate their activity to remote parts of the southeast corner of the county, “Now, with our checkpoints being shut down, there’s no need to take it out to the middle of nowhere when they can just run it right up to main road.”
Otero County Sheriff David Black told me that his tiny three-man narcotics team and other deputies now have to deal with the cartels all on their own without any help from Border Patrol: “We have rerouted all of our overtime money to interdictions on the highway.” Black noted that his informants tell him the large stash houses in El Paso and even in source cities in Mexico like Juarez are now empty because the cartels “are taking advantage of the unprecedented open borders because nothing is stopping them.”
Obviously, his three-man narcotics team catches only a small amount of the drugs, but what they’ve seen demonstrates the relationship between the surge in the border migration distracting agents, the taking down of checkpoints, and the increased drug traffic.
“In February, before the closing of the checkpoints, we seized $3,500 worth of drugs, including meth, heroin, and marijuana. In March we seized $23,000, and in April we seized $61,790. For our county, that’s a lot.”
In total, there are six checkpoints in the El Paso Border Patrol sector: one in El Paso County, Texas, two in Otero County, N.M., and three in Doña Ana County, N.M. Customs and Border Protection has confirmed with CR that all six remain shut down. Thus, there is not a single checkpoint operating in New Mexico. While the politics of Doña Ana County and the central state government in the urban areas of Albuquerque and Santa Fe have rolled out the welcome mat to illegal immigration and cartel activity, officials in the more conservative and rural counties, such as Otero and its neighboring county to the north, Lincoln, resent the secondary effects and fear that more is coming.
“I’ve never seen all these checkpoints closed in my life, and I’ve been in Lincoln and Otero Counties for 30 years,” said Lincoln County Sheriff Robert Shepperd in an interview with CR.
“I have friends who are out on ranches who now have to lock their doors and do things they shouldn’t have to do. It’s eerie watching these checkpoints look like ghost towns.”
Sheriff Black in Otero believes that in the greater El Paso area, the cartel operatives are picking up those who sneak in while Border Patrol is tied down. “I guarantee you they are picking them up in truckloads and driving them north with nothing stopping them in our county.” Black feels a responsibility not only for his county but as a gatekeeper for the entire country. But he has only the resources of a 65,000-person county to deal with the largest transnational criminal organizations at a volatile international border.
The El Paso-Juarez region is a hotbed for transnational cartel and gang activity. Kyle Williamson, the special agent in charge (SAC) for the DEA’s operations in the El Paso sector, explained to me in an interview last week that three major cartels are operating in the region: Sinaloa, Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), and La Linea (Juarez Cartel). They are all served by three major transnational gangs operating in the Juarez-El Paso region, including the violent Barrio Aztecas, which were just elevated to a Tier 1 threat by Texas DPS’ gang threat assessment. According to Williamson, Sinaloa is still the dominant cartel in the region, but Cartel Jalisco New Generacion is “coming on strong and pushing a lot of meth.”
Williamson echoed the concerns of the local officials about the lack of checkpoints – with a federal perspective of particular concern to the DEA. “When they catch drugs at the checkpoints, unlike at the points of entry, we as DEA actually respond to those. At the points of entry, it’s Homeland Security Investigations that responds. Border Patrol catches a lot of drugs at those checkpoints, then we go out there and take the prisoners and drugs, continue to develop the investigation and get them into court.”
Thus, when the Border Patrol is diverted in order to process the influx of illegal aliens, it hampers the DEA’s core mission. “These checkpoints are a very effective and important second line of defense, absolutely vital and necessary.”
And while most of the politicians and the media are focused on opioids, Williamson believes there needs to be more attention paid to meth.
“My biggest threat in New Mexico and West Texas is methamphetamine without a doubt. When you talk about Mexican cartels, the transnational criminal groups, and drugs, you can’t do so in the same breath as the opioid crisis.”
On top of the diverted federal resources, the more conservative rural counties in New Mexico must deal with the open-border policies of the governor, who doesn’t seem concerned about the empowerment of the cartels or the drugs coming into her state. Earlier this year, Governor Michelle Grisham scoffed at the notion that there even was an emergency and initially rebuffed requests for help from Hidalgo County when it was slammed with thousands of migrants. She even removed the National Guard troops from the border, who could have been used to free up more border agents, so they could return to the checkpoints.
Three weeks ago, Couy Griffin and his fellow commission members declared an emergency in Otero Countybecause of the closure of the checkpoints. “If Governor Grisham really had a heart for the people, she would redeploy the National Guard to our border, which would relieve those agents from the border to come back to our checkpoints, but she won’t do that,” said Griffin in our interview.
Couy believes it all boils down to politics.
“The politics of our state is what’s killing our state. It all just boils down to politics.”
Meanwhile, as American leaders fight over politics, cartel leaders fight over turf, drugs, and human smuggling routes made possible by these policies. Those with years of experience in law enforcement seem certain that things will only get worse from here. “About six months down the road is when we are going to start seeing a spike in property crimes and a spike in overdoses,” predicted Sheriff Black ominously. “We have not seen the worst of it yet; it’s still coming.”
Sheriff Shepperd sees the same picture just one county north. “It’s like the calm before the storm.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Jogdyl Tyler Durden
Investigators say last Sunday’s mysterious “sabotage” attack on four tankers which included two Saudi ships off Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates was “highly likely” the work ofIran’s elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) deploying underwater attack drones.
Specifically an IRGC surface vessel is believed to have launched the underwater drones packed with between 30 and 50kg of explosives which detonated on impact, according to a new report issued this week by the Norwegian Shipowners’ Mutual War Risks Insurance Association, known as DNK. Among the vessels hit were a Norwegian-flagged vessel as well as a UAE ship.
A new report by Reuterssummarized the Norwegian insurance investigators’ preliminary findings as based on analyzing shrapnel from the attacks which was “similar” to shrapnel recovered from surface drones used off Yemen by Iran-backed Houthi militia.
Illustrative image of underwater drone via the WSJ.
However, the insurance assessment seen by Reuters is “confidential” with an investigation still ongoing, and thus must be treated with skepticism.
Further, the evidence appears largely circumstantial at this point, with Iran’s guilt appearing to hinge on the assumption that shrapnel from Houthi operations and remnant material found at the port of Fujairah are from the same source.
Reuters lists the following summary points and “evidence” from the DNK assessment which allege the IRGC’s inolvement as follows:
A high likelihood that the IRGC had previously supplied its allies, the Houthi militia fighting a Saudi-backed government in Yemen, with explosive-laden surface drone boats capable of homing in on GPS navigational positions for accuracy.
The similarity of shrapnel found on the Norwegian tanker to shrapnel from drone boats used off Yemen by Houthis, even though the craft previously used by the Houthis were surface boats rather than the underwater drones likely to have been deployed in Fujairah.
The fact that Iran and particularly the IRGC had recently threatened to use military force and that, against a militarily stronger foe, they were highly likely to choose “asymmetric measures with plausible deniability”. DNK noted that the Fujairah attack had caused “relatively limited damage” and had been carried out at a time when U.S. Navy ships were still en route to the Gulf.
The attack location, so close to the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz – which the IRGC has previously threatened to close in order to strangle global oil shipping – was also a key factor in pointing to Iran’s guilt, according to the report.
The DNK noted the sabotage attacks occurred between six and 10 nautical miles off Fujairah, just off the vital and narrow strait. No boat was sunk, but the Saudi-flagged crude oil tanker Amjad and the UAE-flagged bunker vessel A.Michel had damage to their engine rooms.
Norwegian oil tanker Andrea Victory, one of the four tankers damaged in alleged underwater drone “sabotage attacks” early this week. Via the AFP
The insurance assessment lines up with Saudi and US accusations which came quickly on the heels of the bizarrely timed incident (following Bolton’s previously announced heightened “Iran threat” against US troops and allies in the region) that Iran orchestrated it to show its military has the power to disrupt global oil markets.
The WSJ had reported just a day after the alleged attack that according to an initial U.S. assessment, “Iran was likely behind the attack”on the four vessels, according to an anonymous US official. Iran for its part dismissed these and other accusations as part of “psychological warfare” – according to one top Iranian parliamentarian and spokesman.
Meanwhile, we could actually be headed toward rapid de-escalation even as US warships continue to enter the Persian Gulf late this week, as multiple headlines Friday noted “Trump doesn’t want war” and appears to be clamping down on hawks in his own administration.
With all of the Fake and Made Up News out there, Iran can have no idea what is actually going on!
And perhaps most interesting is that Trump tweeted something which actually lends credibility to Iran’s dismissing both the “sabotage” accusation and heightened bluster out of Washington over the past two weeks as a continuing Psyop, part of Bolton and Pompeo’s broader “maximum pressure” campaign.
Trump tweeted the following astounding statement on Friday: “With all of the Fake and Made Up News out there, Iran can have no idea what is actually going on!”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WT7MhA Tyler Durden
American interventionists learned a lesson from Iraq: pre-empt the debate. Now everyone is for regime change…
The United States has just suspended flights to Venezuela. Per the New York Times:
CARACAS — The United States banned all air transport with Venezuela on Wednesday over security concerns, further isolating the troubled South American nation…
A disinterested historian — Herodotus raised from the dead — would see this as just the latest volley in a siege tale. America has been trying for ages to topple the regime of President Nicholas Maduro, after trying for years to do the same to his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
The new play in the Trump era involves recognizing Juan Guaidó as president and starving and sanctioning the country. Maduro, encircled, has been resisting.
The American commercial news landscape, in schism on domestic issues, is in lockstep here.
Every article is seen from one angle: Venezuelans under the heel of a dictator who caused the crisis, with the only hope a “humanitarian” intervention by the United States.
There is no other perspective. Media watchdog FAIR just released results of a study of three months of American opinion pieces. Out of 76 editorials in the New York Times, Washington Post, the “big three Sunday morning talk shows” or PBS News Hour, zero came out against the removal of Maduro. They wrote:
“Corporate news coverage of Venezuela can only be described as a full-scale marketing campaign for regime change.”
Allowable opinion on Venezuela ranges from support for military invasion to the extreme pacifist end of the spectrum, as expressed in a February op-ed by Dr. Francisco Rodriguez and Jeffrey Sachs called “An Urgent Call for Compromise in Venezuela”:
“We strongly urge… a peaceful and negotiated transition of power rather than a winner-take-all game of chicken…”
So we should either remove Maduro by force, or he should leave peaceably, via negotiation. These are the options.
After the disaster of Vietnam eons ago, American thought leaders became convinced we “lost” in Indochina because of — get this — bad PR.
The real lesson in Vietnam should have been that people would pay any price to overthrow a hated occupying force. American think-tankers and analysts however somehow became convinced (andamazingly still are) that the problem was Walter Cronkite and the networks giving up on the war effort.
Quietly then, over the course of decades, lobbyists pushed for changes. In the next big war, there would be no gruesome pictures of soldiers dying, no photos of coffins coming home, no pictures of civilian massacres (enforced more easily with new embedding rules), and no Cronkite-ian defeatism.
They got all of that by the time we went into Iraq. The TV landscape by then was almost completely sterilized. Jesse Ventura and Phil Donahue were pulled from MSNBC because they opposed invasion. Networks agreed not to film coffins or death scenes.
Yet the invasion of Iraq was a failure for the same reason Vietnam was a failure, and Libya was a failure, and Afghanistan is a failure, and Venezuela or Syria or Iran will be failures, if we get around to toppling regimes in those countries: America is incapable of understanding or respecting foreigners’ instinct for self-rule.
The pattern in American interventions has been the same for ages. We are for self-determination everywhere, until such self-determination clashes with a commercial or security objective.
Disrupting trade is also a frequent theme in these ploys, with a late-Fifties coup attempt in Indonesia or our various Cuban embargoes key examples. The plan often involves stimulating economic and political unrest in target nations as a precursor for American intervention.
We inevitably end up propping up dictators of our own, and the too-frequent pattern now — vividly demonstrated in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan — is puppet states collapsing and giving way to power vacuums and cycles of sectarian violence. Thanks, America!
Opposing such policies used to be a central goal of American liberalism. No more. Since 2016, it’s been stunning to watch the purging and/or conversion of what used to be antiwar voices, to the point where Orwellian flip-flops are now routine.
Earlier this month, onetime fierce Iraq war opponent Rachel Maddow went on TV to embrace John Bolton in a diatribe about how the poor National Security Adviser has been thwarted by Trump in efforts to topple Maduro.
“Regardless of what you thought about John Bolton before this, his career, his track record,”Maddow said.
“Just think about John Bolton as a human being.”
The telecast was surreal. It was like watching Dick Cheney sing “Give Peace a Chance.”
Bolton stood out as a bomb-humping nut even among the Bush-era functionaries who pushed us into Iraq. He’s the living embodiment of “benevolent hegemony,” an imperial plan first articulated in the nineties by neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan.
When Bush gave his famed “Axis of Evil” speech about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, Bolton — prophetically, it seemed — gave a speech called “Beyond the Axis of Evil,” adding Cuba, Syria and Libya to the list.
Bolton, of course, is also on board with regime change in Venezuela, saying “this is our hemisphere.” Echoing the sentiment, Alabama Democratic Senator Doug Jones said Maduro, and his allies in Russia, need to vacate “our part of the world.”
This has all been cast as opposition to Russian support of Maduro. Maddow was ostensibly reacting to triggering news that Trump was stepping back on Venezuelan action after a chat with Vladimir Putin.
This isn’t about Russia, however. MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post were open cheering sections even when it came to endorsing Trump’s original decision to recognize Guaidó. It’s been much the same script with Syria, too, where even the faintest hint of discomfort with the idea of regime change has been excised from public view.
The social media era has made it much easier to keep pundits in line. Propaganda is effective when it’s relentless, personal, attacking, and one-sided. The idea isn’t to debate people, but to create an “ick” factor around certain ideas, so debate is pre-empted.
Don’t want to invade Syria? Get ready to be denounced as an Assadist. Feel ambivalent about regime change in Venezuela? You must love Putin and Maduro.
People end up either reflexively believing these things, or afraid to deal with vitriol they’ll get if they say something off-narrative. In the media world, it’s understood that stepping out of line on Venezuela or Syria will result in being removed from TV guest lists, loss of speaking income, and other problems.
This has effectively made intellectual objections to regime change obsolete. In the Trump era, things that not long ago aroused widespread horror — from torture to drone assassination to “rendition” to illegal surveillance to extrajudicial detention in brutal secret prisons around the world — inspire crickets now.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an exposé about Guantanamo Bay that should have been a devastating piece of journalism. It showed site officials building a hospice, because prisoners are expected to grow old and die rather than ever sniff release. One prisoner was depicted sitting gingerly in court because of “chronic rectal pain” from being routinely sodomized in CIA prisons.
Ten years ago, Americans would have been deeply ashamed of such stories. Now, even liberals don’t care. The cause of empire has been cleverly re-packaged as part of #Resistance to Trump, when in fact it’s just the same old arrogance, destined to lead to the same catastrophes. Bad policy doesn’t get better just because you don’t let people talk about it.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VzEGSS Tyler Durden
