Author: admin

Ever since the start of the space age in 1957, with the launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial Earth satellite, thousands of new satellites and dangerous space debris have been jamming up Earth’s orbit, warns the European Space Agency (ESA). 

The ESA, which monitors space debris, recently published its annual report on the current state of space junk, describes how accumulating rocket boosters, defunct satellites, and spaceborne shrapnel poses a significant risk to spacecraft. 

“The biggest contributor to the current space debris problem is explosions in orbit, caused by left-over energy—fuel and batteries—onboard spacecraft and rockets. Despite measures being in place for years to prevent this, we see no decline in the number of such events. Trends towards end-of-mission disposal are improving, but at a slow pace,” Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Debris Office at ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany, who was quoted by RT News. 

Earlier in the year, two older satellites almost collided, meanwhile three separate incidents resulted in near space junk crashes with the  International Space Station (ISS). In at least one incident, ISS had to use emergency thrusters to move the station out of the path of space debris. 

At the moment, there are an estimated 160 million objects in orbit, and the ESA predicts that collisions between debris and working satellites are high risk. 

“In view of the constant increase in space-traffic, we need to develop and provide technologies to make debris prevention measures fail-safe, and ESA is doing just that through its Space Safety Programme. In parallel, regulators need to monitor the status of space systems as well as global adherence to debris mitigation under their jurisdiction more closely,” Krag said. 

The number of “fragmentation events” has soared over the last three decades. 

Planned for 2025, the ESA recently awarded the Swiss startup company Clearpace, a $117 million contract, to remove space debris from orbit. 

If readers are curious to just how much space junk is floating above, the ESA’s animation shows an incredible view of all the debris:  

The more debris in orbit, the more dangerous space travel becomes – this is happening when the booming private space industry is gearing up to start mining the moon later in the decade. ESA suggested it could be up to the private space industry to deal with all the junk.

By Steve Klinsky of RealClearPolitics,  chairman of the American Investment Council, and founder and CEO of New Mountain Capital; he worked with Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker in the education reform movement, and knew him as a co-author and friend,

Critical race theory, or CRT, is in the news these days but many people still may not know what it really means. They think CRT is part of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s civil rights efforts. In truth, it is directly opposed to the central concept and vision he most stood for. One of the last and greatest civil rights leaders of our time — and one of King’s closest friends and advisers — did understand CRT, and explicitly rejected it. 

Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker (pictured, at right) was a legend in the American civil rights movement. Executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the critical years of 1960-1964, he was a co-founder of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), chief of staff to King, and King’s “field general” in the organized resistance against notorious Birmingham safety commissioner “Bull” Connor. Walker compiled and named King’s “The Letter From Birmingham Jail.” He was with King for the march on Washington that produced the “I have a dream” speech, and in Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Afterward, Dr. Walker came north to New York City to serve as minister of the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem. He was one of the nation’s most respected ministers until his death in 2018. In his book “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell dedicated a chapter to Dr. Walker and his work in Birmingham. The cover of Ebony magazine called Walker “The Man Behind Martin Luther King.”  In short, no one may have known King’s thoughts better or been closer to them than Dr. Walker. 

Even as he aged, Dr. Walker never backed down from the passionate pursuit of civil rights for all. Later in his life, he was chairman of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and a supporter of reparations for African Americans. I got to know him soon after Amadou Diallo had been horribly gunned down in New York City in 1999. We joined together to form New York’s first and longest-surviving charter school, now named the Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Harlem. We stayed friends from that time until he died.  

In 2015, Dr. Walker and I co-authored an essay about education reform and race relations, where we wrote: 

“Today, too many ‘remedies’ — such as Critical Race Theory, the increasingly fashionable post-Marxist/postmodernist approach that analyzes society as institutional group power structures rather than on a spiritual or one-to-one human level — are taking us in the wrong direction: separating even elementary school children into explicit racial groups, and emphasizing differences instead of similarities. 

“The answer is to go deeper than race, deeper than wealth, deeper than ethnic identity, deeper than gender. To teach ourselves to comprehend each person, not as a symbol of a group, but as a unique and special individual within a common context of shared humanity. To go to that fundamental place where we are all simply mortal creatures, seeking to create order, beauty, family, and connection to the world that — on its own — seems to bend too often towards randomness and entropy.” 

Before publishing this essay, I questioned Dr. Walker to make sure he really wanted to be on record with this opposition to CRT.  I was worried this might put him in a bad way with other civil rights leaders. But he had never backed down in his life, and he reiterated that this was his position.  

In hindsight, I believe that Dr. Walker was not so much against anything, as for something. He was for what Dr. King was for, and for what so many well intended people are for who may misunderstand the difference between CRT and traditional (i.e., King-style) civil rights.  

Dr. Walker was for a fundamental respect for all people, without regard to their ethnic group or religion or the color of their skin.  Dr. Walker’s civil rights views tie back to religious values, to humanism, to rationalism, to the Enlightenment. The roots of CRT are planted in entirely different intellectual soil. It begins with “blocs” (with each person assigned to an identity or economic bloc, as in Marxism).  Human-to-human interactions are replaced with bloc-to-bloc interactions. 

As Dr. Walker tried to make clear, thinking in terms of blocs of people, rather than of people as individuals, leads to a whole set of insidious results. How can two people bind together in friendship if they are members of power blocs that are presumed to be inherently opposed?  How can a person prove his innocence if he is branded as inevitably a part of a guilty group? Why should an individual strive to succeed by individual merit if group dynamics are presumed to be overwhelming and inescapable? How can we ever find peace among the races and religions if we won’t look to each other, person by person, based on actual facts and actual intentions?   

The saddest thing is to see well-intentioned people, trying to achieve Martin Luther King’s dream by employing CRT methods that are the opposite of King’s dream. King asked for everyone to be judged by the content of their own individual character, not by their inescapable genetic links to post-Marxist style analytical power groups. Supporters of civil rights should follow the example of Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, and not allow the two incompatible definitions of civil rights — King’s and CRT’s — to be confused with one another.   

The Air Force on Thursday received the first order of next-generation ballistic helmets for security forces as part of a modernization effort, the service said in a press release. 

The new helmets replace the Advanced Combat Helmet that Airmen have been wearing since the mid-2000s. 

Master Sgt. Markus Nelson, an Air Force Security Forces Center (AFSFC) equipment manager, said the new helmet is “lighter, cooler, has better padding and comes with a built-in railing to fit accessories, such as night-vision goggles and tactical communication equipment.” 

Airmen of the 71st Security Forces Squadron (SFS) at Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma, were recently the first in the service to strap on the new helmets. 

“It is actually really quick to put on and easily adjustable, allowing me more time to check my Airmen and make sure everyone’s gear is on straight,” said Senior Airman Craig Smith, a 71st SFS Airman. “The biggest improvement I noticed is it’s lightweight and if I take a hard turn in a Humvee, I know I’m not going to break my neck.”

Master Sgt. Darryl Wright, 71st SFS logistics and readiness superintendent, said the new helmet is the most agile kevlar he’s strapped on his head in nearly two decades. 

“I just got back from a deployment and this helmet is made for hot areas like that; and even where it’s not as hot, the mobility and light weight of the helmet makes a significant difference in what you can do,” Wright said.

“Even back here at home when we do readiness exercises, we bring all our fighting gear, including the helmet. Exercises get you prepared for the fight and having next-generation gear like this helmet improves Vance (AFB’s) security readiness.”

Inside The Air Force: Next-Generation Ballistic Helmet

Along with next-generation helmets, the AFSFC initiative to modernize forces includes high-tech body armor and protective gear, new weapons, and upgraded communication systems. 

“We’re identifying salient characteristics of the best individual equipment industry has to offer at the best value to achieve standardization across the force,” said Lt. Col. Barry Nichols, AFSFC director of Logistics. “This effort is instrumental in keeping Defenders throughout the security forces enterprise-ready and lethal with the procurement of the most cutting-edge and innovative equipment available to accomplish missions safely and effectively.”

Who is making all of this possible? 

Well, President Trump, of course – plowing more than $2.5 trillion of taxpayers funds into the military on one of the biggest spending sprees in history. 

“We’ve spent $2.5 trillion over the term in office, my term,” Trump recently said. “That’s over three and a half years — think of that $2.5 trillion. I took over a depleted military, old equipment, broken equipment.”

Meanwhile, Russia and China continue their military modernization efforts as a looming global conflict could be on the horizon. 

Via PredictIt.org (emphasis ours)

With less than three weeks until Election Day, many states are already seeing historic levels of early voting.

According to figures from 35 states and the District of Columbia, compiled by the Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal, 8.8 million people have voted by mail in the general election and 962,000 have headed to polling places early to cast ballots. For comparison, more than 58 million early ballots were cast in 2016.

Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Virginia have already received more early ballots than they did in the 2016 presidential election. Several other states have topped 2016 numbers for mail-in ballots returned, even as in-person early voting is opening up in much of the country.

Counting the Votes: The unprecedented influx of early balloting, in person and especially by mail, is presenting a logistical challenge for local election officials. How they handle it is likely to figure in whether voters will see a protracted wait for results beyond Election Day in the presidential race, especially from closely fought battleground states.

Election officials are already talking about “Election Week” rather than “Election Day.” They are also urging voters to view lengthy counts in close contests as normal.

States have raced to ramp up, buying extra machines to tabulate votes, adding extra staff to count ballots, and in some cases, extending deadlines. Those rule changes are setting off partisan court battles in key states that will determine which votes count and are adding uncertainty as voters cast ballots in droves.

Hinging on the Swing States: The pace of early voting is poised to increase in the weeks leading up to Nov. 3, as deadlines begin to approach.

In Florida, where polling shows a tight race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, about 1.7 million mail-in ballots have been cast, more than 60 percent of those received in 2016. Floridians can request absentee ballots until Oct. 24. North Carolina, another presidential battleground and host to a competitive Senate race, received more mail-in votes by September than it saw for all of the 2016 general election. Advance polling sites in the state are open from Oct. 15 to 31.

In both North Carolina and Florida, registered Democrats have cast more ballots than registered Republicans so far. In North Carolina, independent voters have also cast more early ballots than registered Republicans.

Mail-In Impact: Several battleground states are also seeing large numbers of requests for mail-in ballots. This could make for a long election night (hence, “Election Week”) in states that prohibit the counting or processing of ballots before Nov. 3.

For example, Michigan doesn’t begin tabulating mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. With a projected count of 3 million of the 5-5.5 million votes cast before Nov. 3, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has said that her office could announce results as late as the following Friday.

Similar is true in Wisconsin, which also starts counting on Election Day and where election officials have received 683,000 of the 1.3 million ballots requested. In 2016, 826,000 people voted early either through the mail or in-person, in total. Polling places for early voting open Oct. 20 in Wisconsin.

So far, at least 11 states have already reached or exceeded 50 percent of their total early vote in 2016. Four have surpassed those levels.

Wisdom of the Crowd: While ballots pour in, court battles are determining issues of how people vote and whether certain ballots are disqualified. How those cases turn could impact who wins and loses in 2020.

Despite the whiff of uncertainty in the political air, traders expect Florida, Pennsylvania and the overall election outcome to all be called on Election Day, albeit with varying degrees of certainty.

In Florida, an outcome on Nov. 3 is trading at 63¢ and Nov. 4 at just 18¢. Pennsylvania, much like the presidential election outcome, has traders zeroed in on Nov. 3 at 33¢ and Nov. 4 at 24¢, but an outcome after Dec. 14 is third at 10¢. The overall race is trading at 38¢ to 32¢ for a Nov. 3 outcome over a Nov. 4 call and after Dec. 14 is trading at 12¢.

Biden’s strong lead in the polls and the markets (i.e. he still holds a 27¢ lead over Trump in the 2020 US presidential winner market) could be contributing to traders expecting a media call on or the day after Election Day.

Will that sentiment hold as we grow closer to Nov. 3?

According to The Baltimore Sun, the IRS has filed a lien against Baltimore City’s top prosecutor for years of unpaid taxes. 

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and husband Nick Mosby – Democratic nominee for City Council president – were slapped with a $45,000 lien via the IRS for three years of unpaid taxes. The lien showed the Mosbys owe $23,000 for 2014, more than $19,000 for 2015, and about $3,000 for 2016.

The Mosbys released a statement to members of the press from their respective offices that read: 

“I have been in ongoing conversations with the IRS for five years about the tax consequences of an early withdrawal from my retirement savings plan, which I did to support unplanned expenses after a series of family tragedies,” the statement said. “I expect to have the issue resolved in the coming days.”

Fox 45 News points out, as per Maryland State Constitution, there is a possibility Marilyn Mosby could be removed from office: 

” There shall be an Attorney for the State in each county and the City of Baltimore, to be styled “The State’s Attorney,” who shall be elected by the voters thereof, respectively, and shall hold his office for four years from the first Monday in January next ensuing his election, and until his successor shall be elected and qualified; and shall be re-eligible thereto, and be subject to removal therefrom, for incompetency, willful neglect of duty, or misdemeanor in office, on conviction in a Court of Law, or by a vote of two-thirds of the Senate, on the recommendation of the Attorney-General (amended by Chapter 99, Acts of 1956, ratified Nov. 6, 1956; Chapter 681, Acts of 1977, ratified Nov. 7, 1978),” part of the constitution reads.

Unpaid taxes are not the only probe swirling above the Mosbys; Marilyn is under investigation for having accepted luxury travel trips, free of charge. In the last two years, she’s traveled to Germany, Portugal, Africa, and Scotland. 

“When Operation Crime and Justice first reported on State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s extensive travel and side business, FOX 45 News filed several public information requests for pertinent documents,” FOX 45 reported in September. 

“Those requests were not fulfilled,” Fox 45 said. “Instead, the State’s Attorney’s Office asked for thousands of dollars in exchange for certain public records, including $6,480 for specific email records and $156,000 for copies of Mosby’s work calendar.

Marilyn has served half of her four-year term as the city’s top prosecutor as she is now being investigated for potential ethics violations. 

Readers may recall Marilyn mishandled the Freedie Gray case, where a young Black male died in police custody on April 2015. Uproar in the community of the death of Gray resulted in weeks of riots around the metro area.

And if the mounting potential ethics violations for Mosby wasn’t enough for the liberal-run city, the former mayor, Catherine Pugh, is serving a three-year prison sentence for her book fraud scheme. 

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times,

Internal CCP documents show patients in Wuhan had symptoms as early as September 2019, but authorities didn’t disclose to the world…

A series of leaked documents shows that patients in China with symptoms similar to COVID-19 were hospitalized months before the regime’s official timeline, throwing into question when exactly the CCP virus began spreading in Wuhan, China’s epidemic ground zero.

At least one patient started experiencing COVID-19-like symptoms in September 2019, according to hospital data obtained by The Epoch Times from a trusted source who has access to government documents. Dozens more were hospitalized over the following month.

Wuhan hospitals also reported several deaths in October 2019 due to severe pneumonia, lung infections, and other symptoms similar to COVID-19 patients.

The city’s health commission only publicly announced an outbreak of a novel form of pneumonia on Dec. 31, 2019—after social media posts by whistleblower doctors had gone viral.

In a letter dated Feb. 19 obtained by The Epoch Times, a national investigation team set up by the central government stated that it wished to trace early cases of the disease. It asked local authorities for data from all Wuhan medical institutions over the period between Oct. 1 to Dec. 10, 2019, including information on patients who visited fever clinics in the vicinity of the Huanan Seafood Market, a wet market that the officials initially identified as the outbreak origin; details of the earliest 10 suspected cases at each medical agency rated tier two or above (three is the highest); and pneumonia deaths with COVID-19-like symptoms.

The letter stated that nine hospitals, which received the most COVID-19 patients in the city, were key to the investigation.

The Epoch Times had access to part of the records in response to the inquiry, those from 11 hospitals.

Despite the collected data, the Wuhan outbreak control task force told media on Feb. 26 that the earliest documented patient was a person surnamed Chen who fell ill on Dec. 8, 2019.

It’s unclear whether authorities conducted any inquiries into early cases prior to February.

To some critics, the investigation appeared rather narrow and came too late.

“For such a massive respiratory disease to break out in the area, how come they didn’t track down all other hospitals?” Sean Lin, former lab director of the viral disease branch at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, told The Epoch Times.

“This should have been done a long time ago,” he said, calling the delayed inquiry “ridiculous.”

A screenshot of a leaked document showing details about patients who died of COVID-like symptoms at Wuhan Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on Feb. 21, 2020. Part of the information is redacted by The Epoch Times to protect the patients’ privacy. (Provided to The Epoch Times)

Suspected Virus Patients

The obtained records showed nine deaths due to COVID-19-like conditions at three hospitals.

Five were severe pneumonia patients who died between November and December 2019 at the Wuhan No. 6 Hospital, one of the hospitals named in the inquiry letter. The Wuhan Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, a tertiary hospital, had three deaths in October. Wuhan No. 8 Hospital recorded one death.

Screenshot of a leaked document showing details of patients with COVID-like symptoms at Wuhan Puren Jiangan Hospital, on Feb. 21, 2020. Part of the information is redacted by The Epoch Times to protect the patients’ privacy. (Provided to The Epoch Times)

Patients died within a period of several days to about four weeks after their first symptoms appeared.

Xu Zhenqian, for example, was hospitalized at Wuhan No. 6 hospital. The 82-year-old started exhibiting symptoms on Oct. 1, 2019, including coughing fits without an apparent cause and coughed up white phlegm, a sign of respiratory infection, according to the hospital’s clinical description. The patient was transferred from another facility shortly before his death on Nov. 3.

Three other patients at the same hospital also had difficulty breathing before they died. Their CT scans showed blurred markings in their lungs—patterns that match the lesions on some COVID-19 patients.

The files also identified at least 40 other suspected COVID-19 patients across eight hospitals, the earliest one being 67-year-old Xiao Niangui, who began exhibiting symptoms on Sept. 25, 2019, and was hospitalized at the Wuhan Puren Jiang’an Hospital.

Screenshot of a leaked document showing details of a patient with COVID-like symptoms at Wuhan No. 6 Hospital, on Feb. 21, 2020. Part of the information is redacted by The Epoch Times to protect the patients’ privacy. (Provided to The Epoch Times)

Wuhan has 205 health facilities at the community and township level and 66 designated hospitals for treating COVID-19 patients, city officials said in March.

China’s lack of transparency has been heavily criticized by government officials. It consistently refused to allow in experts from the United States and the World Health Organization (WHO) to study the outbreak in the country. On Feb. 12, an official from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency was still unable to access “direct data” about the outbreak and “continue to be hopeful that we’ll be invited to do that.”

In a media interview released on May 1, a WHO representative in China also said China has excluded the organization’s experts from the country’s virus probe.

NYC rapper Pop Smoke’s debut album, “Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon”, has dominated the Billboard charts since its July debut. This past month, it sold the second-most albums of any artist.

Oddly, the artist who came in first was another rapper, Juice WRLD, whose album “Legends Never Die” is the No. 1 album in the country.

As Bloomberg reported Wednesday, the two artists are topping its ranking of the most influential figures in music for 2020.

It’s an appropriately morbid trend for 2020, a year that has been marked by images of the sick and suffering, even more so than – well – many of the years that preceded it since the beginning of the 21st century.

But it also highlights an alarming trend in rap music, a genre that has taken over the popular music industry as the best-selling (and most profitable) form of musical entertainment, second only to massive arena tours featuring aging rockers like the Police and Guns N’ Roses – or pop stars like Taylor Swift.

Source: Bloomberg

Many top-selling rap artists have been implicated or convicted of violent crimes, including murder, manslaughter, attempted murder and armed robbery.

It’s a trend that has dovetailed with the surge of gun violence in America’s cities, including Chicago, NYC, LA and even smaller cities like Baltimore and Detroit.

During the gang wars that rocked the south side of Chicago earlier this year, another up-and-coming rapper was shot and killed.

Pop Smoke was shot and killed during a home invasion back in February. Five suspects have been arrested and are awaiting trial on murder charges.

The circumstances behind Juice WRLD’s death were decidedly less violent; he overdosed on drugs he reportedly swallowed for fear they would be discovered by police. He’s far from the only rapper in recent years to die from drug overdoses; two other chart-topping rap artists, Mac Miller and Lil Peep, have also died of overdoses over the past few years.

Then again, violence has been part of rap virtually since its birth in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Tupac and Biggie, among the biggest rappers of the 90s, were famously killed in unsolved drive-by shootings. And 50 Cent, the executive producer of Pop Smoke’s album, was shot 9 times, but survived. The man suspected of organizing the attack was later shot and killed, though no charges have been filed.

Submitted by Nauman Sadiq,

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released an extraordinary statement on Tuesday, decrying a political scene he said “has moved away from spirited debate to a vile, vituperative, hate-filled morass, that is unbecoming of any free nation.” “The world is watching America with abject horror,” he added.

Romney tweeted his statement under the title “My thoughts on the current state of our politics.” “I have stayed quiet,” he said, “with the approach of the election.” “But I’m troubled by our politics,” the sole Republican to vote to impeach Trump added in his statement.

“The president calls the Democratic vice-presidential candidate ‘a monster’. He repeatedly labels the Speaker of the House ‘crazy.’ He calls for the justice department to put the prior president in jail. He attacks the governor of Michigan on the very day a plot is discovered to kidnap her. Democrats launch blistering attacks of their own, though their presidential nominee refuses to stoop as low as others,” Romney, a Utah senator who was the 2012 Republican nominee for president, complained in the statement.

Though superficially trying to appear “fair and balanced” in the didactic sermon patronizingly delivered by the only adult in the room full of political upstarts, Romney’s perceptible bias in the polemical diatribe was hard not to be noticed.

It defies explanation if he didn’t watch the presidential debate or consciously elided over the sordid episode where the Democratic presidential nominee contemptuously sneered at his political rival with derogatory epithets such as “a clown, a racist and Putin’s puppy.”

I’m not sure if Biden was high on meth during the debate, as Trump had repeatedly been insinuating, or he lacks basic etiquette to act like a dignified statesman, but only amphetamines could make a person take leave of his senses and insolently yell at the president of the US, “Will you shut up, man,” while ironically complaining, “This is so unpresidential.”

Though a longtime Republican senator, Mitt Romney’s loyalty to the GOP was compromised due to a personal spat with Trump. In the Republican primaries of the 2016 US presidential elections, Romney severely castigated Trump, calling him “a phony and a fraud.”

After Trump was elected president, he dangled the carrot of the secretary of state appointment to Romney, invited him to a dinner in a swanky New York restaurant, made him eat his words and fawn all over Trump like a servile toady. But later, he gave one of the most coveted appointments in the US bureaucratic hierarchy to oil executive Rex Tillerson.

Romney felt humiliated to the extent that in Trump’s vulnerable moment, after impeachment proceedings were initiated against him in the Senate in February, Romney became the only US senator in the American political history who voted against his own Republican Party president.

Though lacking intellect and often ridiculed for frequent spelling errors on his Twitter timeline, such as “unpresidented” and “covfefe,” implying he gets his news feed from television talk shows and rarely reads book and articles, Donald Trump is street smart and his anti-globalization agenda and down-to-earth attitude appeal to the American working classes.

Nevertheless, it’s quite easy for the neuroscientists on the payroll of the national security establishment to manipulate the minds of such impressionable politicians and lead them by the nose to toe the line of the deep state, particularly on foreign policy matters. No wonder national security shills disparagingly sneer at the president as the “toddler-in-chief.”

In 2017, a couple of caricatures went viral on social media. In one of those caricatures, Donald Trump was depicted as a child sitting on a chair and Vladimir Putin was shown whispering something into Trump’s ears from behind. In the other, Trump was portrayed sitting in Steve Bannon’s lap and the latter was shown mumbling into Trump’s ears, “Who is the big boy now?” And Trump was shown replying, “I am the big boy.”

The meaning conveyed by those cunningly crafted caricatures was to illustrate that Trump lacks the intelligence to think for himself and that he was being manipulated and played around by Putin and Bannon. Those caricatures must have affronted the vanity of Donald Trump to an extent that after the publication of those caricatures, he became ill-disposed toward Putin and sacked Bannon from his job as the White House Chief Strategist in August 2017, only seven months into the first year of the Trump presidency.

Bannon was the principal ideologue of the American alt-right movement. Though the alt-right agenda of the Trump presidency has been scuttled by the deep state, Trump’s views regarding global politics and economics are starkly different from the establishment Democrats and Republicans pursuing neocolonial world order masqueraded as globalization and free trade.

Besides the Trump supporters in the United States, the far-right populist leaders in Europe are also exploiting popular resentment against free trade and globalization. The Brexiteers in the United Kingdom, the Yellow Vest protesters in France and the far-right movements in Germany and across Europe are a manifestation of a paradigm shift in the global economic order in which nationalist and protectionist slogans have replaced the free trade and globalization mantra of the nineties.

Donald Trump withdrawing the United States from multilateral treaties, restructuring trade agreements and initiating a trade war against China are meant to redress, at least cosmetically, the legitimate grievances of the American working classes against the wealth disparity created by laissez-faire capitalism and market fundamentalism.

Michael Crowley reported for the New York Times last month that American allies and former US Officials fear Trump could seek NATO exit in a second term. According to the report, “This summer, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton published a book that described the president as repeatedly saying he wanted to quit the NATO alliance. Last month, Mr. Bolton speculated to a Spanish newspaper that Mr. Trump might even spring an ‘October surprise’ shortly before the election by declaring his intention to leave the alliance in a second term.”

The report notes, “In a book published this week, Michael S. Schmidt, a New York Times reporter, wrote that Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, told others that ‘one of the most difficult tasks he faced with Trump was trying to stop him from pulling out of NATO.’ One person who has heard Mr. Kelly speak in private settings confirmed that he had made such remarks.”

Crowley adds, “Donald Trump now relies on ‘a team of inexperienced bureaucrats’ and has grown more confident and assertive, as he has already sacked seasoned national security advisers, including John F. Kelly; Jim Mattis, another retired four-star Marine general and Trump’s first defense secretary; and H.R. McMaster, a retired three-star Army general and Trump’s former national security adviser.”

In fact, the Trump administration announced plans in July to withdraw 12,000 American troops from Germany and sought to cut funding for the Pentagon’s European Deterrence Initiative. About half of the troops withdrawn from Germany were re-deployed in Europe, mainly in Italy and Poland, and the rest returned to the US.

Similarly, although full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan was originally scheduled for April next year, according to terms of peace deal reached with the Taliban on February 29, President Trump hastened the withdrawal process by making an electoral pledge this week that all troops should be “home by Christmas.” “We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas,” he tweeted last week.

Even the arch-foes of the US in Afghanistan effusively praised President Trump’s peace overtures. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told CBS News in a phone interview last week, “We hope he will win the election and wind up US military presence in Afghanistan.”

The militant group also expressed concern about President Trump’s bout with the coronavirus. “When we heard about Trump being COVID-19 positive, we got worried for his health, but it seems he is getting better,” another Taliban senior leader confided to reporter Sami Yousafzai.

Moreover, Iran-backed militias recently announced “conditional” cease-fire against the US forces in Iraq on the condition that Washington present a timetable for the withdrawal of its troops. The US-led coalition has already departed from smaller bases across Iraq and promised to reduce its troop presence from 5,200 to 3,000 in the next couple of months, though Iraq’s parliament passed a resolution urging the full withdrawal of US troops in January.

There is no denying the fact that the four years of the Trump presidency have been unusually tumultuous in the American political history, but if one takes a cursory look at the list of all the Trump aides who resigned or were otherwise sacked, almost all of them were national security officials.

In fact, scores of former Republican national security officials recently made their preference public that they would vote in the upcoming US presidential elections for Democrat Joe Biden instead of Republican Donald Trump against party lines.

What does that imply? It is an incontrovertible proof that the latent conflict between the deep state and the elected representatives of the American people has come to a head during the Trump presidency.

Although far from being a vocal critic of the deep state himself, the working-class constituency that Trump represents has had enough with the global domination agenda of the national security establishment. The American electorate wants the US troops returned home, and wants to focus on national economy and redress wealth disparity instead of acting as global police waging “endless wars” thousands of miles away from the US territorial borders.

Addressing a convention of conservatives last year, Trump publicly castigated his own generals, much to the dismay of neoliberal chauvinists upholding American exceptionalism and militarism, by revealing: “I learn more sometimes from soldiers what’s going on, than I do from generals. I do. I hate to say it. I tell the generals all the time.”

At another occasion, he ruffled more feathers by telling the reporters: “I’m not saying the military’s in love with me. The soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”

For the majority of Americans wondering when this socially distanced dystopian nightmare of ‘6 feet apart’ and ‘wear a mask!’ and ‘mandatory hand sanitizer’ will finally be over, the Pentagon has just given serious cause for concern. When will it all end?

Perhaps leading the way as an example of where we all might be headed as a country, the United States Army has strongly hinted that it’s looking to make its coronavirus protective measures permanent. 

This according to alarming statements reported by the military site Defense News:

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the defense industry began adjusting its facilities to avoid major outbreaks that could shut down production lines for days or weeks at a time. And now that those changes are in place, the U.S. Army’s top acquisition official thinks they should remain so for good.

Speaking to reporters during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, Bruce Jette, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said he sees long-term benefits from maintaining the kind of social distancing protective measures put in place across industry.

The DoD has observed a significant drop in cases of the common cold, viral infections, and the flu – and expects this will last so long as troops practice a distancing regimen.

Jette’s comments and predictions of what might come sound downright dystopian and inhuman in terms of the holistic well-being of American troops.

“I don’t know that I would ever say it’s totally back to normal,” Jette was quoted as saying. “I don’t see us backing off of using these same techniques on a contouring basis, even as the vaccine continues to mature.”

This senior Army official is essentially saying that even if an effective vaccine is developed there’s no returning to normal.

“I would say we don’t back off of the COVID-19 standards because it will also reduce the impact of flu and other illnesses,” he added. “We think continuing to apply these same techniques would be further beneficial to the people and to the Army overall.”

Consider this: should the Army and eventually the entire DoD implement “permanent” social distancing measures, which would at the very least mean for years to come, that would put the entirety of American society a mere stone’s throw away from being forced to do the same. 

In a sense, US armed forces might be the ‘canary in the coal mine’ in this case, revealing where we’re all headed and what might be forced on the already weary American people, who overwhelmingly are ready to truly return to normal.

By Bloomberg macro commentator Ye Xie

It was another wait-and-see session. The “blue wave” trades — higher stocks and yield-curve steepening — have faded this week.

Mixed bank earnings, dwindling hopes for pre-election stimulus and skittishness about the virus and vaccine left investors with fewer reasons to bid up risky assets. Even with Joe Biden’s current lead, the skepticism toward polling data is understandable given memories of 2016. That said, if President Trump does overcome his deficit in recent polls, it would be the biggest underdog victory since World War II, according to Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid.

Across the Pacific Ocean, President’s Xi’s highly anticipated speech in Shenzhen didn’t break any new ground. But his vision for a clean, efficient and innovative China in a five-year development plan was reflected in markets in the U.S. and Hong Kong Wednesday.

Consider these movements:

A. Electric carmakers, including NIO, Li Auto and BYD, surged. NIO jumped 23% after JPMorgan and Citigroup upgraded their ratings on the stock, extending its gain to 559% this year to outpace a 451% advance in Tesla. JPMorgan analyst Nick Lai expects the market share of new-energy vehicles in China to rise to 20% by 2025, from less than 5% in 2019.

B. Solar energy company JinkoSolar rallied another 9% in the U.S., tripping its price this year, while China’s biggest wind-turbine maker, Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology, surged 22% in Hong Kong. The gains accelerated since Xi made an ambitious pledge this month to go “carbon neutral” by 2060. China tops the global league for emissions, at 28% of the total in 2019. The plan would call for renewables to account for 43% of China’s primary energy mix, from 15% now, according to Citigroup.

C. The yuan outperformed after a PBOC official played down the currency’s recent appreciation, saying the rally has been mild and reflects improvement in the Chinese economy. Sun Guofeng, monetary policy department head, also said China’s liquidity is reasonable and ample across the board, suggesting limited room for policy easing. Keeping a normalized monetary policy has been part of China’s strategy to attract foreign investors to support innovation and the development of its capital markets.

The old saying is that one has to listen to the Party to make money. There may be some truth to that.