Apparently, the incident occurred just as the US was ordering the abrupt closure of China’s consulate in Houston, citing a need to protect American intellectual property and data. The decision, which rattled global equity markets, has been decried as a dramatic escalation in bilateral tensions as Beijing condemned the order as an outrageous violation of international law. Spokespeople for the Chinese government also slammed the decision as outrageous and unprecedented.
Washington’s order, which according to WSJ was issued just yesterday, marks an “unprecedented escalation” and “a political provocation unilaterally launched by the US,” according to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, who addressed the issue during his regular press briefing in Beijing.
“China urges the US to immediately rescind its erroneous decision, otherwise China will undertake legitimate and necessary responses.”
Reuters is now reporting that China is considering closing the US consulate in Wuhan in retaliation. Though we suspect those diplomats wouldn’t mind being stationed elsewhere.
Even Hu Xijin, the typically long-winded editor of the Global Times, could only manage a surprisingly brief “that’s crazy”.
The US asked China to close Consulate General in Houston in 72 hours. This is a crazy move.
State Department Spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus didn’t specify which specific actions, if any, inspired Washington’s decision, though she did say: “President Trump insists on fairness and reciprocity in U.S.-China relations.”
“The United States will not tolerate the PRC’s violations of our sovereignty and intimidation of our people, just as we have not tolerated the PRC’s unfair trade practices, theft of American jobs and other egregious behavior.”
So far, details from official sources are scant. However, it’s probably worth remembering the scene from yesterday’s ‘document fire’ incident: the Houston police and fire departments responded Tuesday night to a reported document fire at the Chinese Consulate. Footage taken from the building next door shows what appears to be barrels with burning material inside of them.
Seems like a totally normal and non-suspicious reaction to a closure order.
Stocks slumped during the Asian trading session; the offshore yuan also slumped against the greenback.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman continued to hammer the US, saying China has always treated American diplomats ‘with respect’ (including monitoring their every move), while this isn’t the first incident involving China’s diplomatic personnel in the US.
“In contrast, the US put restrictions on Chinese diplomats in June and last October, respectively, with no valid reason. [The US] has seized and opened mail and official supplies,” Wang said.
Back in December, Washington quietly expelled two Chinese diplomats suspected of espionage after they were caught driving to a sensitive military base in Virginia. But Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang rejected the claims when asked about them by reporters.
China’s diplomats are widely regarded members of Chinese society, probably holding a higher status than American diplomats hold. State-controlled media has praised China’s diplomats as “Wolf Warriors”. Read more about that here.
The HPD said it began receiving reports just after 2000 local time warning about documents being burned at 3417 Montrose Boulevard, where the consulate is located.
The consulate holds a special significance. According to information available online, the consulate “was the first one to be established” in 1979 when the US and China official re-established diplomatic relations. The consulate’s district covers eight southern US states, namely Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and an unincorporated territory, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32HKJfl Tyler Durden
Coronavirus Infections 13x Higher Than Reported In Some Parts Of US Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 06:30
As scientists get a better grasp on the coronavirus and how it has spread across the US, a new survey from the CDC purports to show that the true number of coronavirus cases is between 2x and 13x the official count, varying from state to state,
Data released by the CDC suggest that large numbers of asymptomatic people may have kept the virus spreading in their communities, directly contradicting the findings of another study cited by the WHO last month.
Following a similar finding by scientists in Sweden,the researchers working with the CDC found that even the hardest-hit area in the study – ie NYC, where 1 in 4 people have been exposed according to antibody surveillance studies – isn’t anywhere near achieve herd immunity, which scientists believe will require 60% infection rate.
If these seroprevalence rates are accurate, then Missouri is suffering from an outbreak that is 13x its reported rate.
The analysis, based on antibody tests, is the largest of its kind to date, and the full breakdown has been released after some surveillance numbers focusing on limited areas were released last month.
Media orgs like the FT, NYT and Washington Post started trying to gauge the number of unconfirmed cases and deaths by calculating the “excess fatality” rate, measure the average deaths during equivalent time periods from the past 5 years vs. the numbers from this year.
On the other hand, the data illustrate how large swaths of the US remain relatively untouched by the virus. Parts of Utah have just over 1% exposure rates, while Minneapolis-St. Paul’s rate is 2.2%.
Nearly 40% of infected people reportedly never develop symptoms, but they can still pass the virus along (though the exact risk factors here are still under investigation) The US now tests roughly 700,000 people a day, per the NYT.
“These data continue to show that the number of people who have been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 far exceeds the number of reported cases,” said Dr. Fiona Havers, the C.D.C. researcher who led the study. “Many of these people likely had no symptoms or mild illness and may have had no idea that they were infected.”
Dr. Havers emphasized that even those who do not know their infection status should wear cloth face coverings, practice social distancing and wash their hands frequently.
In some areas, like NYC, the gap between the true number of cases (according to CDC estimates) and the number confirmed improved as testing capacity expanded.
In some regions, the gap between estimated infections and reported cases decreased as testing capacity and reporting improved. New York City, for example, showed a 12-fold difference between actual infections and the reported rate in early April, and a 10-fold difference in early May.
“This is not coming as a shock or surprise to epidemiologists,” Carl Bergstrom, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in an email. “All along, we have expected that only about 10 percent of the cases will be reported.”
Tracking the numbers over time can provide useful insights into the virus’ spread and about a region’s capacity to cope with the epidemic, other experts said.
“The fact that they’re sort of marking it out over time and looking at it over a longer duration will actually be super-informative,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, a researcher at Harvard University who wrote an editorial accompanying the JAMA paper.
Like most studies, the CDC data aren’t perfect. For example, critics have warned that samples analyzed by the researchers might overrepresent the presence of COVID since only the most ill people, who might not be representative of the general population.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30zfC2R Tyler Durden
There is growing concern that US stocks are replaying the tech-driven bubble phase of the late 1990s. Today’s S&P rally fits that narrative. The CBOE VIX Index will tell us if it will be our fate to live through 1999 again. Back then, the VIX generally held above 20. In every other sustained rally back to 1990, it went below 20 and generally stayed there for years.
Just one “Markets” topic today: the CBOE VIX Index. The mathematical mechanics of the VIX are grimy, of course. To the letter of the law, it is the implied volatility priced into short term options on S&P futures contracts. Metaphysically, the VIX is the one variable in the Black-Scholes pricing model you can’t measure elsewhere but rather the number that falls out of the equation once you plug in asset and strike prices, interest rates and time to expiration.
But the world simply knows it as the Fear Index… When the VIX is rising quickly you can be sure stock prices are likewise falling. And when the VIX is heading lower after a spike, you know the S&P is recovering from a recent drop.
And that’s where we find ourselves today: the VIX declined to 24.46 and the S&P rallied to 3,252, respectively a post-COVID Crisis fresh low and high. And if one looks at the VIX’s long run distribution of observations, there would seem to be reason to think the rally can continue:
The average of all CBOE VIX closes back to its start in 1990 is 19.4.
The standard deviation of the VIX over that time is 8.1 points.
At today’s 24.46 VIX level we’re well within 1 standard deviation (27.5 being the upper band), indicating that the options market thinks we are not set up for another bout of market volatility in the near future.
As comforting as that message may be, we need to acknowledge that Monday’s breakout in the S&P and correlated break down in the VIX was entirely due to the Tech sector plus Facebook/Google (Communication Services) and Amazon (Consumer Discretionary). No other industry groups were in the green. US mid-caps and small-caps also ended the day lower.
There was, of course, another period in market history with similar fundamentals, so let’s look at the VIX across multiple cycles to see what we can learn. The chart below shows monthly VIX data back to 1990, with the January 2000 VIX level highlighted as a way to focus our attention on this potentially analogous historical period.
In this 30 years of VIX history we see 3 things that are relevant to understanding today’s US equity market:
Put aside the idea that US equities can only rally in a sleepy, grinding way once a crisis has passed. This is the most common pattern, to be sure; look at how the VIX chart makes a smile shape through every market cycle. But it isn’t the only way stocks rally…
Instead, focus on what happened from 1997 – 2000; that’s why we highlighted January 2000’s 24.95 average level. This was a relatively unusual period of market history, with higher than average VIX readings (reliably above 20) pairing up with stellar S&P 500 returns (1997 +33.1%, 1998 +28.3%, 1999 +20.9%).
Consider how similar the setup in 2020 is to the 1997 – 2000 time period, except that now a handful of very profitable Big Tech companies dominate important verticals and provide market leadership rather than the free-for-all that drove stock prices higher during the late 1990s dot com bubble.
We totally understand why this is not necessarily a welcomed interpretation of current market psychology. It does, however, fit the facts and it certainly describes the S&P’s break out on Monday anchored purely on Big Tech’s strength. There have been 10 turns of Moore’s Law since the year 2000, but those in conjunction with the disruption wrought by COVID-19 may finally be delivering the tech-driven world many imagined in 1999.
The good news is that the VIX will tell us if we’re in another speculative bubble, because if that’s the hand we have to play we will see the Fear index stay mostly above 20. This won’t be a sell signal, just as it wasn’t in 1997. But it will be a sign that we’re in a different sort of market from the ones we usually see after a crisis.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3fWPYf2 Tyler Durden
Global Pop Star Dua Lipa ‘Cancelled’ Over Tribute To Albanian Nationalism Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 05:30
As celebrities continue to grapple with the explosion of SJW culture into the mainstream – all of a sudden, wealthy white celebrities are talking about ‘colonizers’ and the ‘erasure’ of indigenous cultures – their awkward embrace of international struggle against oppression has led to a handful of accidental controversies.
On Tuesday, the BBC reported on a ‘scandal’ involving British-Albanian pop singer Dua Lipa. Lipa, who occasionally tweets about her Albanian ‘heritage’, shared a map of ‘Greater Albania’ – an ultra-nationalist vision of a new Albanian state encompassing territory belonging to Albania’s neighbors that is occupied by mostly ethnic Albanians. Kosovo is perhaps the most glaring example. Having declared independence from Serbia in 2008, Serbia, Russia and their geopolitical allies still refuse to recognize Kosovo as an independent state.
au•toch•tho•nous adjective
(of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists pic.twitter.com/OD9bNmLcZ4
Lipa’s tweet included a definition of the word “autochthonous” – pronounced ah-tak-then-us – not exactly a common component of the popular lexicon. Its essentially a fancy synonym for “indigenous”.
Albanians believe their claim to the land in and around Albania dates back centuries to long before the Serbs arrived in the region.
According to the BBC, Lipa was accused of supporting Albanian expansionism after posting the map which forms part of hard-line nationalist dreams of creating a Greater Albania encompassing all ethnic Albanians. Taken a certain way, one could argue that this nationalist ‘dream’ is vaguely reminiscent of Hitler’s justification for invading Poland and the Sudetenland – that German-speaking peoples were in danger.
Some on twitter accused Lipa of being a “fascist” and even trotted out the hashtag #CancelDuaLipa. However, considering that most Americans probably don’t even know what Kosovo is (older Americans might remember the NATO bombing campaign, but that’s about it), we doubt Ms. Lipa will experience any lasting financial backlash over the controversy. We wouldn’t be surprised to learn that her ‘critics’ are pro-Serbian bots.
Lipa’s parents are from Kosovo, but she was born in London after they moved to the UK. She pursued a successful modeling career in her teens and went on to achieve pop superstardom with a series of hit singles over the past few years. She is currently dating Anwar Hadid, the brother of model sisters Bella and Gigi.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3hqfRnw Tyler Durden
The researchers found that as a result of falling fertility rates—which is the average number of children a woman gives birth to, nearly every country in the world could have a declining population by the year 2100.
Once the fertility rate falls below 2.1, populations begin to decline. For context, the fertility rate was 4.7 in 1950 and had fallen all the way to 2.4 in 2017. The researchers predict that the fertility rate will decline to 1.7 by 2100.
They predict that 23 countries, such as Japan, Spain, South Korea and Thailand, will see their populations decline by roughly half by 2100 as a result of declining fertility rates.
The researchers predict the global population will peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, after which it will fall to 8.8 billion by 2100. They note that 183 out of 195 countries will have fertility rates below the 2.1 threshold by then.
“That’s a pretty big thing; most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline,” researcher Professor Christopher Murray told the BBC. “I think it’s incredibly hard to think this through and recognize how big a thing this is; it’s extraordinary, we’ll have to reorganize societies.”
China, which is the world’s most populous country, will see its population peak in about four years at 1.4 billion before falling to 732 million by 2100. India is expected to take China’s place as the world’s most populous nation.
Japan, which has seen its aging population analyzed for years, will see its population fall to 53 million in 2100 after peaking at 128 million in 2017. Over the same period, Italy is expected to see its population fall from 61 million to 28 million.
The population of Africa is expected to triple in size by 2100 to more than three billion people, with Nigeria becoming the world’s second-most populated country with 791 million people.
“We will have many more people of African descent in many more countries as we go through this,” Murray said. “Global recognition of the challenges around racism are going to be all the more critical if there are large numbers of people of African descent in many countries.”
The researchers believe the trend is largely driven by more women in education and the workforce, as well as greater access to contraception.
Just last week Reckitt Benckiser, the manufacturer of Durex condoms, said demand for the product has fallen as a result of the coronavirus.
“The number of intimate occasions is down in a few countries because, if you think of it, the level of socialization is low, and so it has had an impact on Durex.”
Declining fertility rates is likely to become an increasingly hot topic in the years to come as it will lead to a “jaw-dropping” impact on societies, according to the researchers.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2OI6uDs Tyler Durden
UK Inquiry Finds Leaders “Ignored” Russian Interference, “Welcomed Oligarchs & Their Money With Open Arms” Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 04:15
FT writes of the newest Russian interference report out of the UK which is now driving headlines, “A long-awaited report into Russian interference in British politics has concluded that Moscow’s influence is ‘the new normal’ with senior figures with Kremlin links enjoying access to top business and political leaders.” And further:
The report by the Intelligence and Security Committee concludes that successive governments have “welcomed the oligarchs and their money with open arms, providing them with a means of recycling illicit finance through the London ‘laundromat’, and connections at the highest levels with access to UK companies and political figures”.
Some have observed that it’s amazing how without fail these reports filled with explosive ‘meddling’ allegations are so convenient to those overseeing such investigations:
A rather convenient outcome for the pro-Brexit, anti-Scottish independence British government which commissioned the report…. just fancy that, etc! pic.twitter.com/V07GtzWpig
The report put out today by UK parliament’s cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee comes after an eight-month investigation which examined “Russian influence” in UK politics. It’s a 55-page report documenting somewhat nebulous Russian “influence campaigns”.
Despite admission that there’s no evidence of Russian interference in the Brexit vote, the new report is still being used to suggest just that.
Former chair of the committee which conducted the UK inquiry, Dominic Grieve, charged the Russia and Brexit issue had been intentionally “glossed over”. Grieve said, “There was no government desire to look at it and it hasn’t looked at it.”
And look at this astounding follow-up line via CNN:
He added that it “troubled” the committee that there was so little intelligence on Russia’s role in the vote.
“Because it seems to me that it was a very significant democratic event, that there is now plenty of evidence of Russian interference in democratic processes, and it there ought really to be a proper focus on whether it happened in this particular case or not,” Grieve added.
So there it is: very similar to how the Mueller report in the US fell flat, the very chair of the investigative committee is on record admitting that in essence, we set out from the beginning to “confirm” Russian meddling in Brexit but were disappointed when we didn’t find anything… so the only explanation is cover-up!
Meanwhile the report calls for a fuller investigation into alleged Russian manipulation related to the Brexit vote.
Like the big nothing-burger that the Meuller report ended up being, this one in the end will likely prove to be even more suspect. Just look at some of the key sources for the report:
Among the committee’s expert witnesses were former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, author of the explosive Trump-Russia dossier that painted a picture of widespread conspiracy of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, a document that Trump has dismissed as “phony” and full of lies.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said ahead of the report’s official publication that he would bet that the document would be “just a new round of evidence-free allegations.”
The Kremlin quickly responded by batting it down as “just a new round of evidence-free allegations” and that with regards to election meddling it ultimately “produced negative results and failed to prove anything.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eRLAwc Tyler Durden
The media – at least in Europe – seems to be abuzz with talk about green hydrogen.
As an energy source, backers envision hydrogen powering everything from aircraft, to steel mills, to global shipping fleets, cars, and homes.
The catalyst (no pun intended) came from the E.U.’s recent greenhouse gas emission policy review.
Hydrogen power moves up the E.U. agenda
The review pushed hydrogen options up the agenda as the only way many industries would achieve carbon neutrality in the next few decades.
Plans old and new have been dusted down or reexamined to push the agenda in an environment awash with stimulus in the hope financial support will make some of them possible.
The Financial Times is far from alone, but its recent coverage in multiple articles illustrates the wide interest in the topic.
Hydrogen power would reduce emissions … but not without challenges
While hydrogen carries huge potential for some industries to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, steel being a major sector dear to our hearts, it isn’t without challenges beyond the pure economics.
To be considered blue hydrogen — that is, without the carbon footprint that comes from its traditional production route of splitting natural gas — it either has to come from the electrolysis of water or from natural gas combined with carbon capture and sequestration. In the latter’s case, both are established technologies but are hugely expensive.
Furthermore, the electricity needed to power the process needs to come from solar or wind power sources if it isn’t to have its own carbon footprint.
Hydrogen production’s impact on emissions
It is debatable whether Europe has the available unused landmass to build enough solar parks or erect enough wind turbines to create sufficient power to power the plethora of industries being promoted as candidates for a switch to hydrogen.
According to the International Energy Agency, almost all hydrogen is supplied from fossil fuels. Furthermore, 6% of global natural gas and 2% of global coal are going to hydrogen production.
As a consequence, the production of hydrogen is responsible for CO2 emissions of around 830 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
That total is equivalent to the CO2 emissions of the United Kingdom and Indonesia combined — hardly a clean fuel based on current industrial production practices.
Nor is hydrogen a particularly energy-intensive fuel source.
Only some 35% of the electricity generated at the solar cell makes its way through to the fuel at the point of use. In many cases, why wouldn’t you just use electricity, for example, in powering cars?
For steel production, electricity can be a direct substitute for hydrogen required as a reductant in blast furnaces by switching steel production to electric arc furnaces. Then, however, iron ore needs to be refined to pellets to make that technologically viable.
Once again, that is a potentially polluting and power-consuming process.
Hydrogen is at a crossroads once again
Hydrogen has been boosted as the fuel of the future on at least two occasions in the past, both crossroads of one sort or another.
The oil crisis of the early 1970s and the onset of the climate change campaign in the late 1980s both boosted hydrogen’s profile.
However, neither event proved successful in producing significant change with respect to hydrogen.
Will this time be any different?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2WJSP36 Tyler Durden
Africa Has A Huge Advantage Over The US When It Comes To Fighting Coronavirus Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 02:45
As SARS-CoV-2 sweeps across India, Latin America and – of course – the US, epidemiologists are looking toward Africa, which has seen cases surge higher in recent weeks, due to outbreaks in South Africa, Egypt and a few other countries that comprise the majority of the continent’s confirmed cases.
According to the WHO, 47 of Africa’s 54 member states are affected, with 701,807 total cases…
…and 14,946 deaths. South Africa, the worst-hit country, is now reporting more than 10k new cases a day, surpassing 300k cases late last week.
We mentioned earlier that more than half of the cases confirmed on the continent can be traced to five countries: South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria and Ghana. Although higher testing capacity is a factor, those countries also have more international ties than other relatively more isolated countries on the continent.
But as Africa’s daily totals move higher, the question of whether the continent is on the verge of a major outbreak is certainly worth considering. In a recent piece, the FT lays out the risks, as well as evidence to suggest that the worst might already be over.
Despite having far fewer public health resources, when facing down the coronavirus, Africa has one huge advantage over the US: the age of its population.
This fact alone makes the average African up to 6x more likely to survive infection by the coronavirus than the average American. In Africa, the median age is 19.4, while in the US it’s 38.
All the ventilators in the world couldn’t compensate for the tremendous age difference. This is just one more reason to wonder: Is it possible the level of ‘silent’ community spread is even larger than authorities understand?
Sema Sgaier, executive director of Surgo Foundation, a non-profit organisation, agrees that the pandemic has much further to run in Africa. Her foundation has compiled an index from open source data of regions most vulnerable to the social, economic and health impacts of Covid-19. Among those highlighted are Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Malawi, Ethiopia and Uganda — all countries where the pandemic is yet to really take hold. There remains some cause for cautious optimism, Ms Sgaier says. Even if the virus ends up spreading as widely in Africa as in Europe and the Americas, it is likely to kill fewer people, she says, because of the continent’s more youthful population. Africa has a median age of 19.4 years against 38 in the US and 43 in Europe. Based on age and gender distribution, the Surgo Foundation estimates Africa’s infection fatality rate — the proportion of deaths among those infected — at 0.1 to 0.15 per cent. Adjusting for the poor quality of health services with a lack of oxygen and ventilators as well as for co-morbidities, such as HIV/Aids, it puts the infection fatality rate at an average 0.55 per cent, with the best countries in Africa at 0.22 and the worst at 0.76 per cent. That compares with 1.3 per cent in the US, meaning that an African infected with Covid-19 is between twice and six times more likely to survive than an American.
An FT illustration contrasts the average age of Africa’s population not only with the west, but with Asia as well.
Several studies have suggested that Africans, due to their young age, may see up to 2/3rds of cases as asymptomatic.
There is also tentative evidence emerging that African countries may have a high prevalence of asymptomatic cases thanks to its young population. An antibody study conducted by the Mozambican government in the northern city of Nampula with a population of 750,000 found that some two-thirds of people infected had suffered only very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. In addition, the study found that 5 per cent of people in the community and 10 per cent of market vendors had been infected with coronavirus. Yet only four Covid-19 deaths have been recorded in Nampula province out of nine in the country as a whole. Even Mr Nkengasong at the Africa CDC, who has strongly cautioned against complacency, acknowledges that the continent’s young population means the death rate is likely to be lower. “We see these young people running around with Covid, just living their lives normally,” he says. “But we need to back this up with appropriate studies.”
But even if the lower-end estimates prove correct, if 60% of the continent’s population is infected, more than 4 million could die. Even half that number would be a catastrophe. Complicating things is Africa’s endemic poverty, which often means lockdowns are an impossibility, since people would effectively be doomed to starve.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/39k46MU Tyler Durden
President Bill Clinton’s favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes against humanity. In 1999, the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to fifteen hundred civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias. That war, like most of the pretenses of US foreign policy, was always a sham.
Kosovo president Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague, in the Netherlands. It charged Thaci and nine other men with “war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture.” Thaci and the other charged suspects were accused of being “criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders” and the indictment involved “hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents.”
Hashim Thaci’s tawdry career illustrates how antiterrorism is a flag of convenience for Washington policymakers. Prior to becoming Kosovo’s president, Thaci was the head of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fighting to force Serbs out of Kosovo. In 1999, the Clinton administration designated the KLA as “freedom fighters” despite their horrific past and gave them massive aid. The previous year, the State Department condemned “terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.” The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden.
But arming the KLA and bombing Serbia helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many shameless members of Congress anxious to sanctify US killing. Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CN) whooped that the United States and the KLA “stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.” And since Clinton administration officials publicly compared Serb leader Slobodan Milošević to Hitler, every decent person was obliged to applaud the bombing campaign.
Both the Serbs and ethnic Albanians committed atrocities in the bitter strife in Kosovo. But to sanctify its bombing campaign, the Clinton administration waved a magic wand and made the KLA’s atrocities disappear. British professor Philip Hammond noted that the 78-day bombing campaign “was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called ‘dual-use’ targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorize the country into surrender.”
NATO repeatedly dropped cluster bombs into marketplaces, hospitals, and other civilian areas. Cluster bombs are antipersonnel devices designed to be scattered across enemy troop formations. NATO dropped more than thirteen hundred cluster bombs on Serbia and Kosovo, and each bomb contained 208 separate bomblets that floated to earth by parachute. Bomb experts estimated that more than ten thousand unexploded bomblets were scattered around the landscape when the bombing ended and maimed children long after the ceasefire.
In the final days of the bombing campaign, the Washington Post reported that “some presidential aides and friends are describing Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton’s ‘finest hour.’” The Post also reported that according to one Clinton friend “what Clinton believes were the unambiguously moral motives for NATO’s intervention represented a chance to soothe regrets harbored in Clinton’s own conscience….The friend said Clinton has at times lamented that the generation before him was able to serve in a war with a plainly noble purpose, and he feels ‘almost cheated’ that ‘when it was his turn he didn’t have the chance to be part of a moral cause.’” By Clinton’s standard, slaughtering Serbs was “close enough for government work” to a “moral cause.”
Shortly after the end of the 1999 bombing campaign, Clinton enunciated what his aides labeled the Clinton doctrine: “Whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.” In reality, the Clinton doctrine was that presidents are entitled to commence bombing foreign lands based on any brazen lie that the American media will regurgitate. In reality, the lesson from bombing Serbia is that American politicians merely need to publicly recite the word “genocide” to get a license to kill.
After the bombing ended, Clinton assured the Serbian people that the United States and NATO agreed to be peacekeepers only “with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold.” In the subsequent months and years, American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serb civilians, bombing Serbian churches and oppressing any non-Muslims. Almost a quarter million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Mr. Clinton promised to protect them. By 2003, almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in Kosovo in 1999 had fled and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic Albanian.
But Thaci remained useful for US policymakers. Even though he was widely condemned for oppression and corruption after taking power in Kosovo, Vice President Joe Biden hailed Thaci in 2010 as the “George Washington of Kosovo.” A few months later, a Council of Europe report accused Thaci and KLA operatives of human organ trafficking. The Guardian noted that the report alleged that Thaci’s inner circle “took captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market.” The report stated that when “transplant surgeons” were “ready to operate, the [Serbian] captives were brought out of the ‘safe house’ individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic.”
Despite the organ trafficking charge, Thaci was a star attendee at the annual Global Initiative conference by the Clinton Foundation in 2011, 2012, and 2013, where he posed for photos with Bill Clinton. Maybe that was a perk from the $50,000 a month lobbying contract that Thaci’s regime signed with the Podesta Group, comanaged by future Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, as the Daily Caller reported.
Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo, where a statue of him was erected in the capital, Pristina. The Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton “with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999.” It would have been a more accurate representation to depict Clinton standing on a pile of corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the US bombing campaign.
In 2019, Bill Clinton and his fanatically pro-bombing former secretary of state, Madeline Albright, visited Pristina, where they were “treated like rock stars” as they posed for photos with Thaci. Clinton declared, “I love this country and it will always be one of the greatest honors of my life to have stood with you against ethnic cleansing (by Serbian forces) and for freedom.” Thaci awarded Clinton and Albright medals of freedom “for the liberty he brought to us and the peace to entire region.” Albright has reinvented herself as a visionary warning against fascism in the Trump era. Actually, the only honorific that Albright deserves is “butcher of Belgrade.”
Clinton’s war on Serbia was a Pandora’s box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq, for the Obama administration to bomb Libya, and for the Trump administration to repeatedly bomb Syria. All of those interventions sowed chaos that continues cursing the purported beneficiaries.
Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing of Serbia was as big a fraud as George W. Bush’s conning this nation into attacking Iraq. The fact that Clinton and other top US government officials continued to glorify Hashim Thaci despite accusations of mass murder, torture, and organ trafficking is another reminder of the venality of much of America’s political elite. Will Americans again be gullible the next time that Washington policymakers and their media allies concoct bullshit pretexts to blow the hell out of some hapless foreign land?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30z8vaB Tyler Durden
So, how are you enjoying the “New Normal” so far? Is it paranoid and totalitarian enough for you? If not … well, hold on, because it’s just getting started. There is plenty more totalitarianism and paranoia still to come.
I know, it feels like forever already, but, in fact, it has only been a few months since GloboCap started rolling out the new official narrative. We’re still in the early stages of it. The phase we’re in now is kind of like where we were back in February of 2002, a few months after the 9/11 attacks, when everyone was still in shock, the Patriot Act was just a few months old, and the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t even been created yet.
You remember how it was back then, when GloboCap was introducing the official “War on Terror” narrative, don’t you?
OK, maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re too young to remember, or you were caught up in the excitement of the moment and weren’t paying attention to the details. But some of us remember it clearly. We remember watching (and futilely protesting) as GloboCap prepared to invade, destabilize, and restructure the entire Middle East, as countries throughout the global capitalist empire implemented “emergency security measures” (which, 18 years later, are still in effect), as the corporate media bombarded us with official propaganda, jacked up The Fear, and otherwise prepared us for the previous “New Normal” … some of us remember all that clearly.
Personally, I remember listening to a liberal academic on NPR calmly speculating that, just hypothetically, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we might need to sacrifice our principles a bit, and torture some people, to “keep America safe.” I recounted this to other Americans at the time, among my many other concerns about where the post-9/11 mass hysteria was heading. Most of them told me I was just being paranoid, or that they didn’t really care, because we needed to do whatever was “necessary” to protect Americans, and, in any event, “the terrorists deserved it.” Shortly thereafter, I started making plans to get the hell out of the country.
I mention that, not to signal my virtue — leaving the U.S.A. didn’t achieve anything, except for improving my standard of living — but to jog your memory, and maybe prompt you to compare that period to the one we are in now. The parallels are overwhelming.The “state of emergency.” The propaganda. The mass hysteria. The mob mentality. The exaggeration of the actual threat. The police-state atmosphere. The suppression of dissent. The constant repetition of the new official narrative. The exhortative catchphrases and meaningless slogans. The confusion. The chaos. The existential fear. And so on. It is all so very familiar.
I’m referring to the simulated pandemic, of course, but also to the racialized civil unrest and identitarian polarization that GloboCap has fomented throughout the United States, and, to varying degrees, the rest of the empire. I’ve been covering the War on Populism and GloboCap’s “Trump-is-literally-Hitler” propaganda since 2016, so the civil unrest isn’t terribly surprising. But, I confess, I did not see the fake plague coming. Running the two psy-ops together was brilliant. The effect on people has been devastating. Everyone is either depressed or enraged, or in some stage of paranoid paralysis. Some have been so thoroughly terrorized that they are literally refusing to leave their houses. Others are lining up at gun shops. White people are getting down on their knees and publicly washing Black people’s feet in “symbolic demonstrations of forgiveness.” Condiments are changing their names. It’s like we’re all trapped in a gratuitously didactic Netflix zombie-apocalypse series set in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, written, directed, and produced by Spike Lee.
The official propaganda could not be more Orwellian, nor could people’s willingness to go along with it. It doesn’t even have to appear to make sense. Doublethink has taken over. For example, most of the developed world has been in some form of totalitarian lockdown, and subjected to other police-state measures (like being beaten and arrested for not wearing a mask), for no justifiable reason whatsoever, for going on the last five months, but, according to the corporate media (and the millions of people they have apparently brainwashed), it’s only now that Trump has sent his Homeland Security goons into Portland that, suddenly, “democracy is under attack!”
Seriously, though, just like in 2002, when GloboCap was still rolling out the “War on Terror” narrative, the facts are all available for anyone who cares. The falsification of Covid statistics and hospital capacity figures, the unreliability of the tests, and so on … it has all been repeatedly documented. Anyone with a positive test result who later dies of any cause (including a fatal motorcycle accident) is counted as a “Covid death.” Anyone admitted to a hospital for anything who tests positive for the virus is a “Covid hospitalization.” And, I’m sorry to disappoint my liberal friends (assuming I have any left at this point), but systematic racism and police brutality did not suddenly begin in 2016.
What suddenly began in 2016 was a concerted effort on the part of GloboCap to put down a growing populist backlash against global capitalism and its soulless ideology. Yes, most of that backlash is neo-nationalist in character, but it also includes a significant number of old-fashioned lefty-types like myself, and a lot of other un-woke folks who aren’t quite ready to embrace their new identities as interchangeable human commodities.
We are experiencing the culmination of that effort (or what they hope is the culmination of that effort) to put down this motley populist insurgency, and ensure that it never happens again. GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. The lesson is:
“This is what you get when you fuck around with GloboCap. This is what voting for Trump, Brexit, and all the rest of that ‘populist’ nonsense gets you … global pandemics, civil race wars, riots, lockdowns, economic depression, societal collapse, chaos, fear. Go ahead, fuck around with us some more. We will make you wear ridiculous face masks forever. We will paint little arrows and boxes on the floor to show you where to walk and stand. We will bankrupt your businesses, shut down your schools, psychologically torture your children. We’ll inject them with any fucking thing we want. There is nothing you can do about it. We will make you get down on your knees and apologize for fucking with us, or we will stigmatize you as a ‘racist,’ sic our mobs of fanatics on you, and ‘cancel’ you and your entire family.”
This, essentially, is the message that GloboCap is delivering to disobedient populists (left or right, it makes no difference; GloboCap doesn’t care which political labels we cling to or slap on each other). It is our final warning to quit playing grab-ass, get with the global capitalist program, and start behaving and thinking as we’re told … unless we want to get locked down again, and ordered to wear things on our faces, and be otherwise ritually humiliated.
See, the so-called “New Normal” (i.e., the new ideological narrative that GloboCap is rolling out) is actually not that new at all … or, OK, the pathologization part is (and I’ll be paying close attention to that aspect of it), but, basically, it’s just plain old totalitarianism. It isn’t state-totalitarianism, because our world isn’t ruled by nation-states. It is ruled by global capitalism. We are being reminded of that fact at the moment … and being shown what happens if we start to forget it.
Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. My hunch is, it is only going to get worse until they can get Trump out of office, which Americans are liable to help them do, simply to make the whole nightmare stop. Once he’s gone, they’ll probably retire the fake pandemic, call off the riots, and stage some sort of international celebration of the Rebirth of Democracy, after which they can get finally back to the business of ruthlessly destabilizing, restructuring, and privatizing the planet, sanitizing history, curing humanity of racism, hate, and other pathologies, and otherwise enforcing rigid conformity to global capitalist ideology.
Maybe they could get the Hamilton composer to write them a hip hop Deutschlandlied to use as a supranational anthem. They could call it GloboCap Über Alles … it kind of has a ring to it, doesn’t it?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eL1WGV Tyler Durden
