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A California bill would ban restaurants from giving straws to customers unless they specifically ask for one. The bill’s sponsor explained, “We need to create awareness around the issue of one-time use plastic straws and its detrimental effects on our landfills, waterways, and oceans.”
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As the Italian election season heats up it’s clear that Silvio Berlusconi is right where he wants to be.
In the spotlight.
And because of that, his coalition with the Lega Norda (Northern League), while leading in the polls overall isn’t unified on much more than containing the electoral success of Movimiento 5 Stelle (5 Star Movement, or M5S).
As I talked about over the weekend Lega Norda’s candidate, Matteo Salvini, is moving farther along the populist route, declaring himself a Trump-like change agent while excoriating the EU for its immigration policy.
On the other hand, Berlusconi is tempering his tone with each passing day. First it was not leaving the euro, so-called Italeave, and more recently EU rules on budget deficits.
Ultimately, that’s Berlusconi’s job, to sell the EU to an Italian electorate reaching their breaking point.
M5S, the most radical of parties is leading the polls with anywhere from 26 to 30% overall. No other party including the Democrats of sitting Prime Minister Paolo Gentolini comes close. In fact, the Democrats are looking at support dropping below 20%.
Leaving the euro is supposedly only backed by 30% of the people. Brexit was supposed to fail by 10-12 points and Hillary had a 98.5% chance of winning on election day.
So, while Italy’s new rules for the make-up for parliament almost guarantee a minority government, there is still a possibility of a grand coalition, similar to what Martin Schultz and Angela Merkel are trying to swindle voters into accepting in Germany.
But, the problem for Berlusconi and the Democrats, if that is their plan, is that it’s becoming obvious he is their stalking horse in this election.
He and Salvini do not see eye to eye on the subject of the euro, taxes, immigration or much else.
Salvini is out there stumping that the euro is a ‘crime against mankind.’
Mr Salvini said: “I believe that one single currency for 18 economies, each different in its own way, just won’t work in the long term.” But statistics here is more important than anything else.
“Since the introduction of the current currency, Italy’s debt has risen by €900bn. This experiment has failed and we should not go any further down this road.”
And he’s right. But, the reality is that, as of right now, exiting the euro is not a winning political talking point. Everyone is backing away from it while at the same time, everyone knows it’s in Italy’s best interest.
Including Germany.
Let’s say the current situation holds and Berlusconi and Salvini et.al. limp across the finish line with around 40% of the vote, while M5S takes 30% and the rest is divvied up between the Democrats and minor parties.
Then, with the changes to the representation rules in parliament Berlusconi could easily cut a deal with the Democrats for a Grand Coalition that sells out Italy to Brussels. But, Salvini will still wind up as Prime Minister.
Regardless of how far Lega Norda has come to become a national party, Salvini will still backed directly by a far smaller percentage of the population than M5S’s Luigi De Maio.
So, despite Berlusconi’s best maneuverings, politically, it still leaves Italy with a very weak government, which may be the point.
The difference here is that M5S will have a strong enough voice to support Salvini in any debt relief negotiations with Germany, which will have to come to pass this year. AfD in Germany only got 13.5% of the vote. They are the official opposition. But, M5S is the front-runner being obviously squeezed out by politicians loyal to Brussels first and Italy second (if that).
And the door opens up for him to go to the people and make the case for Italeave after dealing with Brussels. All he has to do is invoke how Greece was treated in 2015.
Because if Germany tries to play the hardball tactics it did with Tsipras, it likely won’t work in Italy.
Tsipras didn’t expect to win. He wasn’t prepared for the game. His finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis was. But Tsipras sold him out and enslaved two generations of Greeks to a debt yoke that is choking the life out of the country.
Salvini, if elected, will be facing the same thing. But will have support from Five Star Movement. So, it will be very hard for him to betray Italy to Brussels the way Tsipras did Greece. In fact, the path of least resistance for him is to call the EU’s bluff and allow the Italian Banks in trouble to fail.
This throws the decision back to Brussels to deal with the problem.
Because remember one thing, Salvini is right, Italy’s debt is 134% of GDP. Most of the Italian banks are dealing with portfolios with NPLs (Non-performing loans) that top 40%.
Italy’s banking system is in terminal decline.
The European Central Bank has been propping up the price of Italian sovereign debt as the only effective buyer for nearly a year now.
Something is going to have to happen. And if Salvini and Berlusconi continue at loggerheads over basic issues like retirement, taxes and spending, then the market is not going to look upon that kindly and will continue selling Italian debt.
Let’s not forget that the ECB will be forced by The Fed to end its bond-buying program and allow rates to rise. So, when, not if, Italy’s debt situation becomes untenable and another crisis breaks out Salvini would be in a very good negotiating position.
Why? Because of the old adage then when you owe the bank a thousand dollars it’s your problem.
But when you owe the bank $2 trillion dollars it’s the bank’s problem.
And the bank in this case is the ECB along with most of the rest of Europe. The only reason anyone still owns Italian debt is because the ECB has been a buyer. But as the chart above shows, every0ne else has been selling to the ECB for the past two years.
So, unless there is the political will to consolidate all of Europe’s debt under one roof, this problem lands squarely at the feet of the ECB, the Bundesbank and the farce that is German politics.
This puts the decision on the Troika – The ECB, The IMF and the European Commission — to bail them out directly or kick Italy out of the euro. And that’s smart politics. Make Brussels the bad guy. And Salvini is already playing that tune perfectly.
If they were all smart, they would have the Lira ready to deploy if things go south.
Since Wolfgang Schauble stepped down as Finance Minister in Germany, there is no one ready to take his place as Mrs. Merkel’s attack dog in these negotiations. I suspect part of the reason talks between Merkel and the Free Democrats broke down was because the FDP head, Christian Lidner, was in favor of kicking countries like Italy out of the euro-zone.
Merkel talks a tough game on this, but ultimately is about EU integration over everything else. Schauble was as well. And Varoufakis knew he had them dead to rights in 2015 but Tsipras folded a winning hand.
Schauble was the one who threatened euro expulsion on the Greeks which both he and Tsipras knew was unpopular. It’s why Tsipras folded. He wasn’t prepared to pay the political price to do what was in Greece’s best interest.
Does Salvini? Does Berlusconi?
The market at this point is handicapping that they don’t. The headlines are all ablaze with all the Italian parties having backed off on Italeave. But is it real or just a vote-buying tactic?
For M5S it’s the latter. The question is still out on Salvini and the Lega Norda.
If Germany tries to strong-arm Italy the same way that they strong-armed the Greeks, I don’t see it going the same way. Ultimately, despite Berlusconi’s wrangling, a plurality of Italians are backing fundamentally Euroskeptic parties.
If Salvini is the real deal, he would use his alliance with Berlusconi to raise Lega Norda’s profile to 20%, then build a coalition with M5S after the votes are tallied, freezing out any chance of hijacking the process.
In the end, it won’t be hard for whoever is in power to make the argument in the face of a major banking and sovereign debt crisis. Framing Germany as the bad guy will be easy and at that point the EU dives head first into its first real challenge to its authority.
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Along the 786 km-long Line of Control (LoC) which divides the State of Jammu Kashmir between India and Pakistan, sporadic cross-border military gunfire between both countries is not that unusual.
However, this weekend, in the region of Noushera, Rajouri and Akhnoor sectors of Jammu and Kashmir, more than 40,000 Indians have fled their homes and shops amid the fourth consecutive day of intense shelling from Pakistani military forces, the Economic Times reports.
In the latest report from Indian 24 News, cross-border firing between both countries continues along the international border in the Kanachak and Pargwal sectors in Jammu, besides the LoC in the Nowshera area of Rajouri district on Sunday evening.
The number of people killed on the Indian side this month has risen to 13 including three armymen, three BSF personnel and seven civilians. The toll is almost as high as number of causalities on the Indian side in the entire of 2017, when nearly a dozen people including security personnel were killed on the entire border from Kathua to Poonch district. In most of the villages, almost entire populations have shifted to safer places fearing an escalation of firing along the border. Sources said that most of the people had shifted to their relatives’ homes.
Arnia, a border town in the Jammu district in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, India, with a population of 18,000, is now deserted as the intense shelling from Pakistan drove residents to safer grounds.
The Economic Times describes a first-hand account of the chaos in Arnia, as 80-year-old Yashpal and his family huddled in their house until two mortar shells damaged it.
“It had happened during the 1965 and the 1971 wars. Such large number of mortar bombs had not since fallen in Arnia,” Yashpal said.
Sub Divisional Police Officer (SDPO), R S Pura, Surinder Choudhary stated, “Arnia town has been vacated. We have evacuated large number of people from Arnia and border hamlets…Most of hamlets are now vacated.”
Choudhary, who coordinated the evacuation of the border towns from R S Pura and Arnia sectors, said homes and livestock had experienced the brunt of the damage from Pakistani shelling.
Forces rescuing public from villages near Arnia IB to safe places in order to avoid any kind of injury and casualties #JammuAndKashmir @narendramodi @sudhirchaudhary pic.twitter.com/s9lkeNok23
— Rocky Khajuria (@rockykhajuria) January 20, 2018
Deputy Commissioner Jammu, Kumar Rajeev Ranjan said a total of 58 villages in Arnia and Suchetgarh sectors of Jammu district had been affected by the military clashes.
“Over 36,000 border dwellers have migrated from their homes”, Ranjan said, and he added that 131 animals have perished, 93 injured, and widespread damage to structures.
Today was with my people and Spent the day at #Arnia where Pak shelling,later 2-3 hours long traffic jam at NH44A,people blocked the #road Kathua @JmuKmrPolice Bullet proof vehicle at arnia and closed market and Kila somewhere border road Dayalechack pic.twitter.com/w64pgjs29m
— Pankaj Khajuria (@KhajuriaPKJ21) January 21, 2018
An unidentified Indian journalist reports on the frontlines, as Indian troops return fire into Pakistan using mortars.
@BSF_India retaliation Mortar Shelling along Loc in RS Pura Sector.#CeasefireViolation #LoC #BSF #JammuAndKashmir @Peacef_Warrior @neeraj_rajput pic.twitter.com/1yn8BhdTB6
— Elite Predators (@Elite_Predators) January 20, 2018
A local Indian media outlet shows the death and destruction erupting on the LoC.
India: “One soldier and four civilians were killed on Saturday in Pakistani shelling and firing along the Line of Control and the International Border while one soldier and one Border Security Force trooper and two civilians were killed on Friday,” police forces said .20-01-2018 pic.twitter.com/5g470PGa0y
— Rowan Van Dijk (@Lastkombo) January 20, 2018
While the world focuses on the Korean Peninsula for the potential outbreak of World War III, many should redirect their attention to the LoC between the Indian–Pakistan border, as this latest flare-up in military clashes between two nuclear states could spiral out of control.
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Authored by Valentin Schmid via The Epoch Times,
Early bitcoin investor makes the case for reserve currency status
After the spectacular run-up in bitcoin in 2017, there are many people who claim to be “early” bitcoin investors — early meaning 2013, or even as late as 2016.
But bitcoin has been around since 2009, and there are few people who have been following the space since then, let alone investing in the volatile cryptocurrency. Trace Mayer, host of the Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast is one of them. He has invested in bitcoin since 2010, and started publicly promoting it in 2011.
Even more impressive than the number of bitcoin he holds from the early years is the knowledge he accumulated in the eight years since he has been following bitcoin.
The Epoch Times spoke to Trace Mayer about bitcoin’s value proposition, its geopolitical significance, and the idea of monetary sovereignty.
The Epoch Times: How did you get into bitcoin so early?
Trace Mayer: I came across sound money in gold and silver. I was taking an American legal history class, and I had to write a paper, so I chose the topic “History of Money and Currency in American Law.”
Gold and silver aren’t barbarous commodities, but essential checks and balances in the political machinery. They are the guarantees of our monetary sovereignty. They enable us to be free humans, especially when it comes to the value we create.
When I finally came across bitcoin in its very early days. I connected all of the dots between the technology, sound money, and the game theory behind it.
I was already a fairly popular blogger in the gold niche, so I shifted the focus on bitcoin to my target audience, which was the libertarians. It was off and running from there. I started the Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast where I interview top people in the bitcoin world.
Epoch Times: What is bitcoin’s value proposition?
Mr. Mayer: It’s about the network effects.
The first network effect is speculation. People have been collecting and speculating in gold and silver and sodium bicarbonate for centuries.
The second network effect is going to be merchants accepting bitcoin because people are holding it speculatively. Then merchants are going to start using it as payment themselves because they accept it.
Because all these people are demanding bitcoin and are giving value to it, it becomes lucrative for miners to provide security to the blockchain.
All the network effects are exponentially reinforcing each other. The more secure the blockchain is, the more developers are going to want to work on that blockchain.
There are also reasons at the protocol level and in companies around it. You want to build your company on the most secure blockchain. Why? Because it will still be around in the future.
Veteran bitcoin expert Trace Mayer has been involved in bitcoin since 2010 and is also a major investor in many related startups. (Courtesy of Trace Mayer)
The sixth network effect is financialization, like the CME futures or ETFs. This enables bitcoin to interact with our current monetary and financial system.
The seventh network effect is going to be world reserve currency status. That’s when bitcoin becomes a reserve asset much like gold or the dollar.
Gold is sound money and limited in supply but it doesn’t move well. The dollar moves well but is not limited in supply. Bitcoin moves well and is limited in supply which is why it has been outcompeting both since its creation in 2009.
The Epoch Times: Do you have a valuation target?
Mr. Mayer: There is $90.4 trillion in broad money supply and $200 trillion plus in the bond markets. If you tried to move some of that volume into bitcoin the market cap of bitcoin would go much much higher because there is not that much of it saleable.
You hear Wall Street talk about this all the time: “Bitcoin is strictly limited in supply.”
Yes, that’s a feature, not a bug. The number of whole bitcoins is limited but there is enough for everyone; it’s just a function of price. We can divide it and make it every extensible with second layer solutions like the lightning network.
Bitcoin can become like a black hole on the world’s balance sheet and suck in all this fiat and fractionally reserved banking money and really give us an equity-based monetary system on the other side.
Currently, we are in the midst of the largest human migration the world has ever seen. There are 360,000 people born every day and we are adding at least one million accounts each day in the bitcoin ecosystem.
Whether they know it or not, people are declaring their monetary sovereignty and their independence from the bonds that tie them to the social structures through the world because they are choosing a new money, a sound money.
A banker asked me whether I had any concerns about bitcoin. And I said: “No. I don’t have any concerns about bitcoin.”
There are concerns about the old system as its being displaced. Just as newspapers were displaced by blogs, just as movies were displaced by BitTorrent, just like radio was displaced by podcasts and mp3s. The world is changing and we have a new technology.
The Epoch Times: Another important feature giving value to bitcoin is decentralization; how does it stand out in this regard?
Mr. Mayer: We have come to a distributed consensus. We are running software that is fully validating the blockchain to make sure all the transactions and everything in it conform to the rules of the protocol, one of them being the hard limit of bitcoin at 21 million.
Everyone who is running a full node is performing a full validation of the blockchain. They are exerting monetary sovereignty. They are not relying on any third party to tell them whether the blockchain is valid or not.
That’s what adds a lot of the decentralization of the bitcoin network. Everybody can run the software and validate it themselves.
But getting the historic immutability is absolutely critical. There are no shredders that can destroy evidence like Worldcom and Enron to cover fraud.
You don’t get to do that with bitcoin. You can’t freeze, you can’t confiscate, you can’t chargeback, you can’t do a lot of the things that our current financial system has introduced.
It’s nice to chargeback money to the credit card when there is fraud involved, but that makes the money very soft. It makes it unreliable.
With bitcoin we have the principle of immutability; but not all blockchains are immutable, and not all are secure.
The Epoch Times: Let’s talk about security for a moment. What makes bitcoin secure?
Mr. Mayer: When we talk about the Bitcoin Core software, core is much more of a process than anything else. It’s a form of science, if you think about it. Everybody is getting together and they are discussing different ideas. When there is a consensus among the technical team, then that makes it into the software.
But even if it makes it into the software, everybody who is using bitcoin has the option of using that software or not. You can’t force anything in that software because someone may download the software and take out the part you forced in there.
It has to be open source because the review of all this development is so critical. The testing and the review that is going on behind the bitcoin core software is unparalleled in the industry.
An example on the negative side would be the Parity wallets on the ethereum blockchain. There wasn’t adequate code review, people were using the wallet with $170 million worth of ether in them.
And somebody who could not even access the wallets at all issued a kill command to the network and that $170 million got completely frozen, never to be recovered.
This is one of the reasons why the bitcoin scripting language is very restrictive. We try to build modules like the base layer blockchain and the lightning network at layer two. Like this we can contain the risk.
Is there any other internet protocol out there that poses any threat to bitcoin? I don’t see it. Email is vastly inferior to other protocols but hasn’t been challenged in 30 years because it has the network effects.
The Epoch Times: Why, according to you, do the best programmers work on the bitcoin protocol?
Mr. Mayer: Why are the best people working on the bitcoin protocol? They fit the creative genius profile that Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises talks about in “Human Action,” and they do the work not to make money but because it’s internally fulfilling.
They are doing it because it’s the highest mountain to climb. It’s the hardest and most fulfilling challenge to accomplish. That’s why I think bitcoin attracts the very best of the best developers.
Even the founder of ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has called the Ethereum community a playground, which is great because they are working on the edges and the best of the smart contracts.
But if you want to work on a censorship resistant, decentralized, immutable, world reserve currency asset internet protocol, there is no margin for error.
It’s got to be really serious, it can’t be a playground. That’s why bitcoin draws the best of the developers, and if you can’t compete over there, then you would go over to some of the other projects and work on the edges.
Whereas if you get something good, working really well, it can get merged back into bitcoin.
The Epoch Times: What do you think about bitcoin’s geopolitical impact?
Mr. Mayer: This is a huge potential, which I think is not given as much airtime. But if bitcoin is being used in the geostrategic sense, this could be big.
For example, we had the software update, Segregated Witness (SegWit) last year, which took a long time to get activated. The community forced the Chinese miners’ hand with the User Activated Softfork, and the miners relented.
Segwit enables a lot of innovation to happen on top of bitcoin, like the second layer scaling solution, the lightning network.
So this was really holding up the development of the protocol. But once it got activated, within a month the Russians, Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, came out with a new gold trading platform.
Within a month, the CME futures get greenlighted, although the regulators here were dragging their feet for years. It’s like the pieces aren’t moving on the chess board. Then Segwit gets activated and China and Russia make their moves.
Perhaps China and Russia, as part of their strategy to reach monetary sovereignty, honed in on the western central banks Achilles’ heel of not having the physical gold, and decided to push in that direction for de-dollarization, to be less influenced by the dollar.
And the United States as a countermove, instead of going to the past, which is to gold, they decide to go to the future, with innovation and bitcoin and other crypto-related assets.
Why else would the Commodity Futures Trading Commission move so quickly, even with protest from Wall Street? So we have seen some very significant events happens that could have geopolitical motives behind them.
Japan has been very supportive of bitcoin, and they are much more aligned with the United States than with China. China and Russia have taken a harsher stance on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, with China even shutting down all exchanges.
But Russia and China are going to get caught flat-footed. Your start-ups, your human capital, people who understand blockchain technology, they are not in Russia and China for the most part and if they are, they are under the radar or on their way out.
On the other hand, China and Russia have been very positive on gold, even for their own citizens to own it. They are selling it through the state banks. It’s called “storing gold with the people.”
But they are going with the past. Who wants to buy a newspaper these days compared with something that has a really good internet property?
A new technology has been developed and what you can accomplish is determined by effort multiplied by tools. If the Chinese and the Russians are going to use inferior tools, how are they going to compete economically with the people who can harness much more powerful tools?
via RSS http://ift.tt/2DwQbpN Tyler Durden
Some have suggested that the FBI losing five months of text messages between anti-Trump investigators is a coverup of an “insurance policy” to smear Donald Trump with claims of Russian collusion in the event of a win. Others have suggested it’s simply bureaucratic incompetence. Paul Manafort’s attorneys, on the other hand, are likely chomping at the bit see if they can argue for a dismissal of the federal charges against their client due to Robert Mueller’s increasingly tainted probe.
Look for Paul Manafort to jump all over this. He’s already fighting his indictment, claiming that Mueller is overstepping his authority and shouldn’t be running the investigation. Throw in this evidence that the investigation may have been tainted before Mueller even took over, and that the DOJ could be covering up damaging information, and a motion to dismiss alleging prosecutorial misconduct is a near certainty.
FBI Agent Strzok was reportedly heading up the Manafort investigation before he was taken off the Mueller probe. Manafort’s attorney might try to say that the missing text messages could contain exculpatory evidence (or evidence favorable to the defendant) and therefore the court should get to the bottom of what the two said. However, two former federal prosecutors who spoke to Law&Crime both contend it would be difficult to get the entire indictment dismissed based on the text messages alone. –LawandCrime.com
“It depends on what FBI’s retention policy is for text messages. It does certainly raise questions as to how these five months came up missing,” explained former federal prosecutor Bill Thomas, adding “However, the court is not going to just dismiss the case. If it comes to it, the judge may hold a hearing to get to that information through calling witnesses. Dismissal is the nuclear option, it would have to be something very very egregious for a court to dismiss the case.”
Very very egregious
The bombshell announcement regarding the missing text messages did not go over well with Congressional investigators. In a letter from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) to FBI director Christopher Wray, Johnson asks five key questions:
When you read Ron Johnson’s letter to Christopher Wray dial in on these 5 questions. #Strzok
PDF> https://t.co/isz1mWL08X pic.twitter.com/AKeSgveyxO— TrumpSoldier (@DaveNYviii) January 22, 2018
Question four is an interesting one – considering the conflicting information discovered last night between the FBI and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). A Friday document submission from the DOJ included a cover letter from the Assistant AG for Legislative Affairs, Stephen Boyd, claiming that the FBI was unable to preserve text messages between the two agents for a five month period between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017 – due to “misconfiguration issues” with FBI-issued Samsung 5 devices used by Strzok and Page (despite over 10,000 texts which were recovered from their devices without incident).
However – as Josh Caplan points out, the lost text messages are in direct contradiction to a December 13, 2017 letter from the DOJ’s internal watchdog – Inspector General Michael Horowitz, to Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley and HSGAC Chairman Ron Johnson, in which he claims he received the texts in question on August 10, 2017.
In gathering evidence for the OIG’s ongoing 2016 election review, we requested, consistent with standard practice, that the FBI produce text messages from the FBI-issued phones of certain FBI employees involved in the Clinton email investigation based on search terms we provided. After finding a number of politically-oriented text messages between Page and Strzok, the OIG sought from the FBI all text messages between Strzok and Page from their FBI-issued phones through November 30, 2016, which covered the entire period of the Clinton e-mail server investigation. The FBI produced these text messages on July 20, 2017. Following our review of those text messages, the OIG expanded our request to the FBI to include all text messages between Strzok and Page from November 30, 2016, through the date of the document request, which was July 28, 2017.
The OIG received these additional messages on August 10, 2017.
As one can see, the deleted text messages are not only highly unusual – but the circumstances surrounding their disappearance are highly suspect, and may even be “very very egregious” upon further analysis.
We’re sure Paul Manafort’s legal team is drafting a motion to dismiss at this very moment.
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The Russian surveillance vessel the Viktor Leonov was reportedly leaving the Caribbean over the weekend bound toward the U.S. East Coast. Florida will be reached by next Friday, and before this, the King’s Bay ballistic missile submarine base in Georgia is also along their projected route. This comes on the heels of what has gone largely unreported by the Mainstream Media. On Friday, 1/19/18, a report from U.S. National News emerged, entitled Submarine off of NJ/DE/MD coasts? US Navy deploys NINE Anti-Submarine Aircraft off East Coast Fearing Sub Missile Launch Against US. Here is an excerpt:
The East Coast of the United States may be subjected to attack by submarine launched missile(s) and the US Navy has scrambled NUMEROUS P-8A POSEIDON anti-submarine aircraft, to repeatedly search coastal waters from New York City to Washington, DC ALL DAY Thursday into Thursday Evening.
According to flight records, at least NINE anti-submarine warfare aircraft were sortied Thursday off the US East Coast, and Flight Records show they were engaged in very active hunting for submarine(s) off the East Coast . . .. well WITHIN the 12-mile territorial limit of the United States.
This article has plenty of photos, and some with the locations of CAP (Civil Air Patrol) enlisted to aid the U.S. Navy with the “shortfall” in radar coverage and area surveillance. The article also gives the disposition of numerous aircraft and shows the locations of monitored Russian submarines.
While all of this has been happening, “statesman” Rex Tillerson just came out and declared this at Stanford University on Wed., 1/17/18, as reported by RT News:
“The Japanese… have had over a 100 North Korean fishing boats that have drifted into Japanese waters. Two-thirds of the people on those boats have died.”
“They [The fishermen] are being sent in the wintertime to fish because there are food shortages. And they are being sent out to fish with inadequate fuel to get back. So, we are getting a lot of evidence that these [sanctions] are really starting to hurt.“
Honorable Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Pure statesmanship, pure diplomacy? No: pure extortion. This coming from a country (the U.S.) that wanted to depose Assad for the “brutal human rights violations” against civilians…but when it involves the civilians of a country we want to crush…what are a few hundred starving North Korean fisherman’s lives worth? Hey, the sanctions work! We oust leaders for human rights violations, but our policies and sanctions are “humane,” and “altruistic.” Let them join the IMF and World Bank, become a vassal, then they can shop at Costco. Then: let them eat cake!
North Korea has the resolve to see through any paper-tiger sanctions initiated by a country that is a dying empire backed up by a “toothless” UN.
China and Russia have the resolve to be positioning their assets now…prior to the conflict…the war that is forthcoming. It has been reported that the Chinese have moved troops and radiation detectors along their border with North Korea.
Just about a week ago, the RAF had to scramble Typhoons to escort Russian bombers conducting practice runs along the Cold War routes that cover the UK.
A very in-depth article came out that reports Russia and China to be skeptical concerning the U.S.’s gold supply.
Economics is another form of warfare: should they prove the U.S. to not have on hand the gold reserves it claims to have, or (as it states) that the gold is of inferior quality to that traded by the rest of the world? This may very well be the final kicker to persuade nations to distrust the falling Petrodollar and remove the dollar as the World Currency exchange. Such would establish the positions of gold-backed Rubles and Yuan that also have oil to trade, to further bolster that worth on a global economy. For those who still watch television, enjoy your football and the upcoming Olympics.
But keep this in mind: the powers that be will not rest in their inexorable march toward global government.
It would not be the first time that bread and circuses were used to keep the mob entertained…and distracted from the sinister actions and purposes of their leaders and governments. In the meantime, other nations are preparing and positioning their forces, as well as conducting intelligence and surveillance on us…prior to the war that may come anytime.
If the politicians are any indicator of how we’ll fare…the prognosis doesn’t look good. All of it can be avoided with diplomacy, but war is a money-maker, and a game changer for an incumbent whose ratings are flagging. War is their solution. Why? Because they live off our labors and our tax dollars ensure they’ll be safe and sound in their bunkers. Their world: opulent feasts, riches, maintaining power, with armies and unlimited resources…it will remain intact. Ours will not.
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After nearly three months of “enhanced interrogations” and at least one reported death, Mohammad bin Salman’s hired mercenaries have nearly finished the job. Bloomberg reported Monday that half of the roughly 180 royals being held at the Riyadh Ritz Carlton have agreed to pay a financial settlement in exchange for their freedom.
The total amount raised is $100 billion in cash, stock, real estate and other assets – enough to cover the state’s 2017 budget deficit, and then some.
Talks with suspects are expected to end by the end of the month and authorities will likely recover more than $100 billion in settlements, a senior official said, asking not to be identified because the details are private. Those who don’t reach deals will be referred to prosecutors, the official said.
Authorities have already agreed to drop charges against about 90 suspects who were released, Attorney General Sheikh Saud Al Mojeb said in a separate interview at the Ritz-Carlton late on Sunday. About 95 people were still at the hotel, including five weighing settlement proposals, with the others reviewing evidence presented against them, he said.
“The royal order was clear,” Al Mojeb said, as Arabic music streamed through loudspeakers in the hotel lobby. “Those who express remorse and agree to settle will have any criminal proceedings against them dropped.”
That group reportedly includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the world’s richest men. Bin Talal was reportedly strung upside down and beaten by mercenaries during his interrogation. He eventually relented and agreed to a settlement. Back in November, we reported that Miteb al Abdullah, a prince accused of embezzlement and corruption, settled for $1 billion.
Major General Ali Alqahtani was reportedly beaten to death by mercenaries after refusing the state’s offer of a settlement. Meanwhile, at least one royal, Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, was killed during a gun battle with Saudi state security after refusing to surrender.
Several other high-ranking officials died in suspicious helicopter crashes around the time the purge was launched on Nov. 4.
Billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal was among those detained, as was former Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf and Adel Al Fakeih, who was removed as minister of economy and planning on the eve of the arrests.
The princes were detained in the 495-room hotel in Riyadh. Shortly after the crackdown began, images began circulating of royals sleeping on what appeared to be dirty mattresses in the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton.
While 95 princes remain at the hotel, Bloomberg reported that only a handful are expected to reach a settlement. The rest will, presumably, serve lengthy prison sentences.
Saudi officials have defended the crackdown, while foreign observers have complained about a lack of transparency and rumors of widespread human rights abuses.
The probe was conducted in a “pretty nontransparent way,” according to Moritz Kraemer, global chief rating officer at S&P Global Ratings, who appeared on Bloomberg TV Monday. The probe “could be a step in the right direction but it could also be a step towards more arbitrary ruling,” he said.
About 350 people have been summoned during the probe, but many came as witnesses or to provide information, with some spending only a few hours or less at the Ritz, the official said.
With the purge nearly over, the remaining guests will presumably soon be moved to their, uh, long-term accommodations, as the hotel has revealed that it will be taking bookings again as of Feb. 14.
According to Bloomberg, Al Mojeb denied the suspects’ rights were violated. All had access to legal council and some did retain lawyers, though many chose to settle voluntarily without outside representation, he said. Those released faced no restrictions on their movement, he said.
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Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
The main function of the National Security Administration is to collect the dirt on members of the house and senate, the staffs, principal contributors, and federal judges.
The dirt is used to enforce silence about the crimes of the security agencies.
The blackmail mechanism was put into gear the minute the news reported that the House Intelligence Committee had assembled proof that the FBI, DOJ, and DNC created Russiagate as a conspiracy to unseat President Trump. Members of Congress with nothing to hide demanded the evidence be released to the public.
Of course, it was to be expected that release of the facts would be denounced by Democrats, but Republicans, such as Rep. Mike Conaway (R, Texas), himself a member of the committee, joined in the effort to protect the Democrats and the corrupt FBI and DOJ from exposure. Hiding behind national security concerns, Conaway opposes revealing the classified information. “That’d be real dangerous,” he said.
As informed people know, 95% of the information that is classified is for purposes that have nothing to do with national security.
The House Intelligence Committee memo has no information in it related to any security except that of Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Hillary, Obama, Mueller, Rosenstein, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, the DNC, and the presstitute media.
The logical assumption is that every member of Congress opposed to informing the American public of the Russiagate conspiracy to unseat the President of the United States is being blackmailed by the security agencies who planned, organized, and implemented the conspiracy against the President of the United States and American democracy.
American insouciance is a great enabler of the ability of the security agencies and their media whores to control the explanations.
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A day after Pope Francis ended his trip to Chile by publicly defending a bishop who victims have accused of covering up widespread pedophilia in the country, by attacking the credibility of child sex abuse victims in a shocking move made at the end of a trip which he had hoped to ‘heal’ the wounds of said abuse, The Holy See has stunned Catholics again… and apologized.
As we detailed over the weekend, Associated Press reported that Francis made the shocking comments in a discussion about Rev. Fernando Karadima who has been found guilty of sexually abusing a slew of minors as a member of the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis accused victims of Chile’s most notorious pedophile of slander Thursday, an astonishing end to a visit meant to help heal the wounds of a sex abuse scandal that has cost the Catholic Church its credibility in the country.
“The day I see proof against Bishop Barros, then I will talk. There is not a single piece of evidence against him. It is all slander. Is that clear?” the pope replied in a snippy tone.
The pope’s remarks drew shock from Chileans and immediate rebuke from victims and their advocates. They noted the accusers were deemed credible enough by the Vatican that it sentenced Karadima to a lifetime of “penance and prayer” for his crimes in 2011.
A Chilean judge also found the victims to be credible, saying that while she had to drop criminal charges against Karadima because too much time had passed, proof of his crimes wasn’t lacking.
And now, as Reuters reports, Pope Francis, in an extremely rare act of self-criticism, apologised to victims of clerical sex abuse on Sunday, acknowledging he had “wounded many” in comments defending a Chilean bishop who is under scrutiny.
However, while the pope was sorry for his choice of words, he hastily added that he was certain that the prelate, Juan Barros, who has been accused of being complicit in the cover-up of the disgusting acts, was innocent.
“I have to apologise,” an unusually contrite pope told reporters aboard the plane returning to Rome from a week-long trip to Chile and Peru, saying he realised he had “wounded many people who were abused”.
“I apologise to them if I hurt them without realising it, but it was a wound that I inflicted without meaning to,” he said. “It pains me very much.”
But, in the latest twist to a saga that has gripped Chile, Francis said Barros, who is accused of protecting a notorious paedophile, would remain in his place in the diocese of Osorno because there currently was no credible evidence against him.
Francis said on the plane: “I know how much they (abuse victims) suffer in hearing the pope say to them ‘bring me a letter with the proof,’ I realise that it is a slap in their faces, and now I realise that my expression was an unfortunate one”.
In his comments on the plane, the pope disclosed that Barros had offered to resign twice in recent years but Francis rejected the offers.
“I can’t condemn him because I don’t have evidence and because I am convinced he is innocent,” Francis said.
He said Barros would remain in his place unless credible evidence is found against him.
Juan Carlos Claret, a spokesman for anti-Barros Catholics in Osorno, southern Chile, said during the trip that he worried the pope’s response to the reporter before the apology would discourage more victims from speaking out.
“What incentive will victims have to come forward when even if the courts and the Vatican have said they are right, in the end the pope says they are pure lies?” he said in an telephone interview.
#SeeToo?
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Congressional investigators learned from a new batch of text messages between anti-Trump FBI investigators that a “secret society of folks” within the Department of Justice and the FBI may have come together in the “immediate aftermath” of the 2016 election to undermine President Trump, according to Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) who has reviewed the texts.
The thousands of texts @TGowdySC and I reviewed today revealed manifest bias among top FBI officials against @realDonaldTrump. The texts between Strzok and Page referenced a “secret society.”
John Ratcliffe (@RepRatcliffe) January 23, 2018
The new texts were included in a 384-page DOJ document release to Congressional investigators last Friday – during which Congress was notified in the cover letter that that five months of text messages from December 14, 2016 to May 17, 2017 have gone missing (If only the NSA had copies).
Ratcliffe was joined by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) to discuss the latest developments with Fox News host Martha McCallum, when Ratcliffe said:
What we learned today in the thousands of text messages that weve reviewed that perhaps they may not have done that (checked their bias at the door). There’s certainly a factual basis to question whether or not they acted on that bias. We know about this insurance policy that was referenced in trying to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.
We learned today from information that in the immediate aftermath of his election that there may have been a secret society of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI to include Page and Strzok to be working against him.
Watch:
.@RepRatcliffe on 5-month gap discovered in new FBI texts: “For former prosecutors like @TGowdySC & myself…it makes it harder & harder for us to explain away one strange coincidence after another.” https://t.co/jTCsiBqaVi pic.twitter.com/yPKVEJoG91
Fox News (@FoxNews) January 23, 2018
Rep. Gowdy deflected a question over a second special counsel, but mentioned “a text about not keeping texts,” and “more manifest bias against President Trump all the way through the election into the transition,” and finally Gowdy said he saw a text that “Director Comey was going to update the President of the United States about an investigation” which would have been Obama – and may, Gowdy speculates, have been about the Trump team.
.@TGowdySC on 50,000+ new @FBI texts, possible 2nd special counsel appointed to investigate Mueller probe: “We saw more manifest bias against @POTUS all the way through the election into the transition.” https://t.co/jTCsiBqaVi pic.twitter.com/CuyZKexf2s
Fox News (@FoxNews) January 23, 2018
Gowdy on FBI text messages: “Today we saw a text about not keeping texts.” https://t.co/beCXGpALF6
Sean Davis (@seanmdav) January 23, 2018
Regarding the “secret society,” Gowdy said “You have this insurance policy in Spring 2016, and then the day after the election, what they really didn’t want to have happen, there is a text exchange between these two FBI agents, these supposed to be fact-centric FBI agents saying, ‘Perhaps this is the first meeting of the secret society.’ So I’m going to want to know what secret society you are talking about, because you’re supposed to be investigating objectively the person who just won the electoral college. So yeah — I’m going to want to know.”
As we have been reporting over the last two days, the FBI “lost” five months of text messages between anti-Trump FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
The explanation for the gap was “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.“
The missing texts conveniently span the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017 – the day Robert Mueller was appointed to take over the FBI’s probe of alleged Trump-Russia collusion, and during the period in which the FBI would ostensibly have been hard at work on their “insurance policy” against a Trump victory – and during the period in which the “secret society” Rep. Ratcliffe referred to would have been hard at work.
A controversy also emerged following the revelation over the missing “textgate” – in that the DOJ’s internal investigative unit, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) wrote a letter in December of last year specifically stating that they had obtained text messages from Strzok and Page covering the “missing” period revealed last Friday.
Alas, it appears the Inspector General Michael Horowitz made this statement in error, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a Monday statement that Horrowitz was in fact the one who “discovered the FBI’s system failed to retain text messages for approximately 5 months,” which was confirmed by Fox News.
A Justice Department spokesperson told Fox News that the Departments Office of Inspector General also does not have any text messages between the two during that time period.
Not to worry – the DOJ, known for its honesty, will leave “no stone unturned.”
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