The Irish Spend More On Eating-Out Than Any Other European Nation
According to new data from Eurostat, households across the European Union spend more than €600 billion on catering services such as restaurants, cafes and canteens.
Ireland devoted the largest share of household expenditure to eating out in 2018 at 14.4 percent, followed by Spain with 13 percent and Malta’s 12.6 percent.
Romania was at the very bottom of the eating out spending league at just 1.9 percent household income in 2018. Romania’s spending is decreasing and it stood at 2.9 percent back in 2008.
The ruling Establishment has learnt a profound lesson from the debacle over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lesson they have learnt is not that it is wrong to attack and destroy an entire country on the basis of lies. They have not learnt that lesson despite the fact the western powers are now busily attacking the Iraqi Shia majority government they themselves installed, for the crime of being a Shia majority government.
No, the lesson they have learnt is never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong. They see the ghost-like waxen visage of Tony Blair wandering around, stinking rich but less popular than an Epstein birthday party, and realise that being widely recognised as a lying mass murderer is not a good career choice. They have learnt that the mistake is for the Establishment ever to admit the lies.
The Establishment had to do a certain amount of collective self-flagellation over the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, over which they precipitated the death and maiming of millions of people. Only a very few outliers, like the strange Melanie Phillips, still claimed the WMD really did exist, and her motive was so obviously that she supported any excuse to kill Muslims that nobody paid any attention. Her permanent pass to appear on the BBC was upgraded. But by and large everyone accepted the Iraqi WMD had been a fiction. The mainstream media Blair/Bush acolytes like Cohen, Kamm and Aaronovitch switched to arguing that even if WMD did not exist, Iraq was in any case better off for having so many people killed and its infrastructure destroyed.
These situations are now avoided by the realisation of the security services that in future they just have to brazen it out. The simple truth of the matter – and it is a truth – is this. If the Iraq WMD situation occurred today, and the security services decided to brazen it out and claim that WMD had indeed been found, there is not a mainstream media outlet that would contradict them.
The security services outlet Bellingcat would publish some photos of big missiles planted in the sand. The Washington Post, Guardian, New York Times, BBC and CNN would republish and amplify these pictures and copy and paste the official statements from government spokesmen. Robert Fisk would get to the scene and interview a few eye witnesses who saw the missiles being planted, and he would be derided as a senile old has-been. Seymour Hersh and Peter Hitchens would interview whistleblowers and be shunned by their colleagues and left off the airwaves. Bloggers like myself would be derided as mad conspiracy theorists or paid Russian agents if we cast any doubt on the Bellingcat “evidence”. Wikipedia would ruthlessly expunge any alternative narrative as being from unreliable sources. The Integrity Initiative, 77th Brigade, GCHQ and their US equivalents would be pumping out the “Iraqi WMD found” narrative all over social media. Mad Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council would be banning dissenting accounts all over the place in his role as Facebook Witchfinder-General.
Does anybody seriously wish to dispute this is how the absence of Iraqi WMD would be handled today, 16 years on?
If you do wish to doubt this could happen, look at the obviously fake narrative of the Syrian government chemical weapons attacks on Douma. The pictures published on Bellingcat of improvised chlorine gas missiles were always obviously fake. Remember this missile was supposed to have smashed through ten inches of solid, steel rebar reinforced concrete.
As I reported back in May last year, that the expert engineers sent to investigate by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) did not buy into this is hardly surprising.
That their findings were deliberately omitted from the OPCW report is very worrying indeed. What became still more worrying was the undeniable evidence that started to emerge from whistleblowers in the OPCW that the toxicology experts had unanimously agreed that those killed had not died from chlorine gas attack. The minutes of the OPCW toxicology meeting really do need to be read in full.
“No nerve agents had been detected in environmental or bio samples”
“The experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure”
I really do urge you to click on the above link and read the entire minute. In particular, it is impossible to read that minute and not understand that the toxicology experts believed that the corpses had been brought and placed in position.
“The experts were also of the opinion that the victims were highly unlikely to have gathered in piles at the centre of the respective apartments, at such a short distance from an escape from any toxic chlorine gas to much cleaner air”.
So the toxicology experts plainly believed the corpse piles had been staged, and the engineering experts plainly believed the cylinder bombs had been staged. Yet, against the direct evidence of its own experts, the OPCW published a report managing to convey the opposite impression – or at least capable of being portrayed by the media as giving the opposite impression.
How then did the OPCW come to do this? Rather unusually for an international organisation, the OPCW Secretariat is firmly captured by the Western states, largely because it covers an area of activity which is not of enormous interest to the political elites of developing world states, and many positions require a high level of technical qualification. It was also undergoing a change of Director General at the time of the Douma investigation, with the firmly Francoist Spanish diplomat Fernando Arias taking over as Director General and the French diplomat Sebastian Braha effectively running the operation as the Director-General’s chef de cabinet, working in close conjunction with the US security services. Braha simply ordered the excision of the expert opinions on engineering and toxicology, and his high-handedness worked, at least until whistleblowers started to reveal the truth about Braha as a slimy, corrupt, lying war hawk.
FFM here stands for Fact Finding Mission and ODG for Office of the Director General. After a great deal of personal experience dealing with French diplomats, I would say that the obnoxious arrogance revealed in Braha’s instructions here is precisely what you would expect. French diplomats as a class are a remarkably horrible and entitled bunch. Braha has no compunction about simply throwing around the weight of the Office of the Director General and attempting to browbeat Henderson.
We see now how the OPCW managed to produce a report which was the opposite of the truth. Ian Henderson, the OPCW engineer who had visited the site and concluded that the “cylinder bombs” were fakes, had suddenly become excluded from the “fact finding mission” when it had been whittled down to a “core group” – excluding any engineers (and presumably toxicologists) who would seek to insert inconvenient facts into the report.
France of course participated, alongside the US and UK, in missile strikes against Syrian government positions in response to the non-existent chlorine gas attacks on Douma. I was amongst those who had argued from day one that the western Douma narrative was inherently improbable. The Douma enclave held by extreme jihadist, western and Saudi backed forces allied to ISIL, was about to fall anyway. The Syrian government had no possible military advantage to gain by attacking it with two small improvised chemical weapons, and a great deal to lose in terms of provoking international retaliation.
That the consequences of the fake Douma incident were much less far-reaching than they might have been, is entirely due (and I am sorry if you dislike this but it is true) to the good sense of Donald Trump. Trump is inclined to isolationism and the fake “Russiagate” narrative promoted by senior echelons of his security services had led him to be heavily sceptical of them. He therefore refused, against the united persuasion of the hawks, to respond to the Douma “attack” by more than quick and limited missile strikes. I have no doubt that the object of the false flag was to push the US into a full regime change operation, by falsifying a demonstration that a declared red line on chemical weapon use had been crossed.
There is no doubt that Douma was a false flag. The documentary and whistleblower evidence from the OPCW is overwhelming and irrefutable. In addition to the two whistleblowers reported extensively by Wikileaks and the Courage Foundation, the redoubtable Peter Hitchens has his own whistleblowers inside OPCW who may well be different persons. It is also great entertainment as well as enlightening to read Hitchens’ takedown of Bellingcat on the issue.
But there are much deeper questions about the Douma false flag. Did the jihadists themselves kill the “chlorine victims” for display or were these just bodies from the general fighting? The White Helmets were co-located with the jihadist headquarters in Douma, and involved in producing and spreading the fake evidence. How far were the UK and US governments, instrumental in preparing the false flag? That western governments, including through the White Helmets and their men at the OPCW, were plainly seeking to propagate this false flag, to massively publicise and to and make war capital out of it, is beyond dispute. But were they involved in the actual creation of the fake scene? Did MI6 or the CIA initiate this false flag through the White Helmets or the Saudi backed jihadists? That is unproven but seems to me very probable. It is also worth noting the coincidence in time of the revelation of the proof of the Douma false flag and the death of James Le Mesurier.
Now let me return to where I started. None of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Guardian nor CNN – all of which reported the Douma chemical attack very extensively as a real Syrian government atrocity, and used it to editorialise for western military intervention in Syria – none of them has admitted they were wrong. None has issued any substantive retraction or correction. None has reported in detail and without bias on the overwhelming evidence of foul play within the OPCW.
Those sources who do publish the truth – including the few outliers in mainstream media such as Peter Hitchens and Robert Fisk – continue to be further marginalised, attacked as at best eccentric and at worse Russian agents. Others like Wikileaks and myself are pariahs excluded from any mainstream exposure. The official UK, US, French and Spanish government line, and the line of the billionaire and state owned media, continues to be that Douma was a Syrian government chemical weapons attack on civilians. They intend, aided and abetted by their vast online propaganda operations, to brazen out the lie.
What we are seeing is the terrifying rise of the zombie state narrative in Western culture. It does not matter how definitively we can prove that something is a lie, the full spectrum dominance of the Establishment in media resources is such that the lie is impossible to kill off, and the state manages to implant that lie as the truth in the minds of a sufficient majority of the populace to ride roughshod over objective truth with great success. It follows in the state narrative that anybody who challenges the state’s version of truth is themselves dishonest or mad, and the state manages also to implant that notion into a sufficient majority of the populace.
These are truly chilling times.
In the next instalment I shall consider how the Establishment is brazening out similar lies on the Russophobe agenda, and sticking to factually debunked narratives on the DNC and Podesta emails, on the Steele Dossier and on the Skripals.
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Unlike his adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, Craig’s blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate. Subscriptions to keep Craig’s blog going are gratefully received.
There are a multitude of false assumptions out there on what the collapse of a nation or “empire” looks like. Modern day Americans have never experienced this type of event, only peripheral crises and crashes. Thanks to Hollywood, many in the public are under the delusion that a collapse is an overnight affair. They think that such a thing is impossible in their lifetimes, and if it did happen, it would happen as it does in the movies – They would simply wake up one morning and find the world on fire. Historically speaking, this is not how it works. The collapse of an empire is a process, not an event.
This is not to say that there are not moments of shock and awe; there certainly are. As we witnessed during the Great Depression, or in 2008, the system can only be propped up artificially for so long before the bubble pops. In past instances of central bank intervention, the window for manipulation is around ten years between events, give or take a couple of years. For the average person, a decade might seem like a long time. For the banking elites behind the degradation of our society and economy, a decade is a blink of an eye.
In the meantime, danger signals abound as those analysts aware of the situation try to warn the populace of the underlying decay of the system and where it will inevitably lead. Economists like Ludwig Von Mises foresaw the collapse of the German Mark and predicted the Great Depression; almost no one listened until it was too late. Multiple alternative economists predicted the credit crisis and derivatives crash of 2008; and almost no one listened until it was too late. People refused to listen because their normalcy bias took control of their ability to reason and accept the facts in front of them.
There are a number factors that cause mass blindness to economic and social reality. First and foremost, establishment elites deliberately create the illusion of prosperity by rigging economic data to the upside. In almost every case of economic crisis or geopolitical disaster, the public is conditioned to believe they are in the midst of a financial “boom” or era of “peace”. They are encouraged to ignore fundamental warning signs in favor of foolish faith in the system. Those people that try to break the apathy and expose the truth are called “chicken little” and “doom monger”.
In the minds of the cheerful lemmings a “collapse” is something very obvious; they think they would know it when they saw it. It’s like trying to teach a blind person about colors; it’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult to get all these Helen Kellers to understand that what they perceive is not the whole reality. There’s a vast world hidden from them and they have no concept of how to observe it.
Crash events are like stages in the process of collapse; they create moments of clarity for the blind. However, they are also often engineered to benefit the establishment. There’s a reason why the elites put so much energy into hiding the real data on the state of the economy, and it’s not because they are trying to keep the system from faltering by using sheer public ignorance. Rather, a crash event is a tool, a means to an end. As Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. warned after the panic of 1920:
“Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created; the present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical problem…”
Central bankers and their cohorts manipulate economic data and promote the false notion of a boom before almost every major crash because they WANT to ambush the populace. They WANT to create panic, and then use it to their advantage as they rebuild and mutate the system into something unrecognizable only decades ago. Each consecutive crash contributes to the collapse of the whole, until eventually the society we once had is barely a distant memory.
This process can take decades, and the US has been subject to it for quite some time now. Once again in 2019 we are seeing the lie of an “economic boom” being perpetuated in the mainstream. The public was growing too aware of the danger and had to be subdued. More specifically, conservatives were growing too aware. The sad thing is that the boom propaganda is most prominent today among conservatives, who are desperately trying to ignore the fundamentals in an attempt to defend the Trump Administration.
The same people who were pointing out the economic bubble under Obama are now denying its existence under Trump. Trump himself argued that the markets were a dangerous economic fraud created by the Federal Reserve during his campaign, yet once he was in office he flip-flopped and started taking full credit for the bubble. What is mind boggling to me is that many people, even in the liberty movement, still choose to dismiss this behavior in favor of worshiping Trump as some kind of hero on a white horse.
This only reinforces my theory that the system is due for another major engineered crash event, and that the ongoing collapse of the US is soon to accelerate. Each case of economic calamity in modern history was preceded by peak delusional optimism and peak greed. When the people traditionally most vigilant against crisis suddenly capitulate and claim victory, this is when reality strikes hardest. This is when the establishment triggers yet another controlled demolition.
In order to determine how long an empire will last, one has to take into account the agenda of the elites that control its institutions. As long as they are in key positions of power within the system and as long as they can inject their own puppet politicians, they will have the ability to influence the collapse timeline of that system.
Can they prolong and stave off crisis? Yes, for a short while. However, once the machine of a crash has been set in motion the best they can do is slow down the Titanic; they cannot change its path towards the iceberg. And frankly, at this point why would they? I hear it argued often that the elites are going to “keep the plates spinning” on the economy and that they don’t want to lose their “golden goose” in the US economy. This reveals an naivety among skeptics of the true agenda.
Firstly, the elites have a highly useful political puppet in the form of Donald Trump; he is useful in that he inspires sharp national division, and, he is a self proclaimed conservative champion and nationalist. If the elites did not trigger a crash under Trump, then this would give the public the impression that conservative ideals and national sovereignty works. This is the opposite of what they want. Why would globalists that want the erasure of nation states and the creation of a centralized socialist “Utopia” seek to make conservatives and nationalists look good? Well, they wouldn’t.
The only concern of the banks is that they do not take the blame as their engineered collapse of the old world order hits the public with increasingly painful consequences. These consequences are already becoming visible.
The next major crash has begun in the form of plunging fundamentals, and far too many conservatives are placing their heads in the sand for the selfish sake of proving the political left wrong. Declines in US manufacturing, US freight, global exports and imports, mass closures in US retail, as well as all time highs in consumer debt, corporate debt and national debt are being shrugged off and rationalized as nothing more than “hiccups” in an otherwise booming economy. The Fed’s repo market purchases, barely keeping up with demand from liquidity starved corporations are also not being taken seriously.
Conservatives and analysts are going to have to forget about supporting Trump, a Rothschild owned proxy, and start acknowledging reality once again. The only question now is, will the elites allow the crash to spread further into mainstreet and strike markets before or after the 2020 election?
As noted above, to predict the timing of a collapse in a nation or empire, one has to examine the agendas of the elites that dominate its institutions. We can gain some sense of timing from the public admissions of globalist organizations like the IMF and the UN. Each has announced the year 2030 as a target date for the finalization of globalization, a cashless society and sustainability goals. This means that the elites have around ten years to create a crisis and then “solve” that crisis with globalism.
Ten years is a narrow window, and if the elites intend for conservatives to take the blame for the next crash, they will have to initiate it soon. They may not have a choice anyway, as the chain of dominoes was already been set in motion by the Fed in 2018 with its liquidity tightening policies.
We can also gauge timing of a collapse to a point by understanding the common tactics the establishment uses to hide what they are doing. Generally, when a collapse is about to accelerate the elites use crisis events as cover to distract the public and produce scapegoats. In my article ‘Globalists Only Need One More Major Event To Finish Sabotaging The Economy’, I outlined three potential distractions that could be used in the near term, and if any of these events took place, then people should watch for the collapse to move faster. Two of these events now appear imminent: The first being a war with Iran, and the second being a ‘No Deal’ Brexit.
Finally, we can take into account the globalist need for a scapegoat, and it appears that conservatives and nationalists are their target for blame. This leaves less than one year for a crisis event if Trump is intended to leave the White House in 2020, or less than four years if he is intended to stay in for a second term. Keep in mind that A LOT can happen in a single year, and a second Trump term is certainly not guaranteed yet.
But why create a collapse in the first place? Crash events allow the establishment to consolidate control over hard assets as poverty forces the population to sell what they have to survive. This poverty also creates fear, which makes the public malleable and easier to control. Each new crisis opens doors to political and social changes, changes which end in less freedom and more centralization. Collapse is a succession of crashes leading to a complete erasure of the original society. It’s not a Mad Max event, it’s a hidden and insidious cancer that takes over the national body and warps it into a wretched form. The collapse is complete when the nation either breaks apart, or is so damaged for so long that no one can remember what it used to look like.
What we are witnessing today is the beginning of a new crash, and the final phases of a collapse of our way of life. The economic boom narrative among conservatives is a farce designed to trick us into complacency. The bubble that we warned about under the Obama Administration has been popped under the Trump Administration. Nothing has changed in the ten years since the 2008 crash except that the motivation for keeping the crash hidden is quickly disappearing.
Crashes are inevitable, but collapse is only possible when the public remains unprepared. Our civilization and its values are under attack, but they can only be destroyed if we stay apathetic to the threat and refuse to prepare for their defense. We must adopt a philosophy of decentralization. We need localized and self sufficient economies, as well as a return to localized production. Beyond that, we have to prepare for the eventuality of a fight. The fate of the US economy has already been sealed, but the people who are destroying it can still be stopped before they use the collapse to force society into subservience. We have to offer security, we have to offer alternatives to the “new world order” and we have to remove the globalist threat permanently.
Make no mistake, we are living in the midst of an epoch moment; the outcome of collapse depends on us and our reactions. This is not the task of the next generation, it is a task for our generation. We do not have another couple of decades to take the danger seriously. The plates are not spinning, they have already dropped.
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2019 was a year that changed the face of migration on the U.S. Southwestern border. Not only did many more immigrants try to cross it, but a majority – almost 56 percent – arrived together with their families, fleeing violence in Central America. As a result of this fundamental change in who is seeking to immigrate to the United States, Non-Mexicans outnumbered Mexicans 4:1 at the Southern border in the fiscal year of 2019. These numbers are inferred from arrest records of Customs and Border Protection.
The number of undocumented immigrants reached its peak in May 2019, when more than 132,000 people were apprehended. In November 2019 (FY2020) was back down to approximately 33,500.
Because many of the new arrivals are applying for asylum, the Trump administration has overhauled its application process, making many asylum seekers wait in camps on the Mexican side without much assistance. These changes were implemented after another system overhaul – the separation of families in U.S. custody and the tendency to release fewer immigration detainees on bail – had caused chaotic scenes at detention centers and an international outcry.
Historically, Mexicans made up the largest share of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. but have been more successful at finding work in Mexico, where the economy is improving and workers are more sought after as the country’s population ages. As more asylum seekers and less work migrants arrive, the U.S. has also slashed the number of refugees it accepts annually to the historic low of 18,000 for 2020.
A remarkably non-propagandistic news-report, in the New York Times, by Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and Mark Mazzetti, included powerful evidence that the impeachment-effort against US President Donald Trump is motivated, in part if not totally, by a desire by US Senators and Representatives – as well as by career employees of the US Departments of Defense, State Department, and other agencies regarding national defense – to increase the sales-volumes of US-made weapons to foreign countries.
Whereas almost all of the contents of that article merely repeat what has already been reported, this article in the Times states repeatedly that boosting corporations such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop-Grumman, has been a major — if not the very top — motivation driving US international relations, and that at least regarding Ukraine, Trump has not been supporting, but has instead been trying to block, those weapons-sales — and creating massive enemies in the US Government as a direct consequence.
In an Oval Office meeting on May 23, with Mr. Sondland, Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Blair in attendance, Mr. Trump batted away assurances that [Ukraine’s current President] Mr. Zelensky was committed to confronting corruption. “They are all corrupt, they are all terrible people,” Mr. Trump said, according to testimony in the impeachment inquiry.
In other words, Trump, allegedly, said that he didn’t want “terrible people” to be buying, and to receive, US-made weapons (especially not as US aid — free of charge, a gift from America’s taxpayers).
The article simply assumes that Trump was wrong that “they are all terrible people.”
Indeed, Trump himself has sold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of US-made weapons to the Royal Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, and he refuses to back down about those sales on account of that family’s having been behind the widely-reported torture-murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and on account of their effort since 2015 to starve into submission — by bombing the food-supplies to — the Houthis in adjoining Yemen, and on account of their using US weapons in order to achieve that mass-murdering goal. Consequently, even if Trump is correct about Ukraine’s Government, he would still have a lot of explaining to do, in order to cancel congressionally authorized US weapons-sales to Ukraine but not to Saudi Arabia.
For the New York Times, in its ’news’-report — even this article that’s less prejudiced than most of mainstream US ’news’-reporting is — to simply presume that Trump had no valid reason for asserting what he did against Ukraine’s present (the Obama-installed) Government of Ukraine, constitutes merely anti-Trump (and pro-Obama) propaganda, on their part, and it would be more appropriate in an editorial or op-ed from them than in an alleged news-article, such as here. However, the actual news-value in that article is real. They quoted from “a piece in the conservative Washington Examiner saying that the Pentagon would pay for weapons and other military equipment for Ukraine, bringing American security aid to the country to $1.5 billion since 2014.” This was an anti-Democrat, pro-Republican, newspaper and article, saying:
Kurt Volker, the US special representative for Ukraine, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a Tuesday hearing. “I think it’s also important that Ukraine reciprocate with foreign military purchases from us as well, and I know that they intend to do so.” The assistance comes at a pivotal moment for Ukraine’s newly minted president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a popular comedian who won a landslide victory in April. Zelensky has made ending the Russian-backed insurrection in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region his top political priority.
The Times, in order to appear nonpartisan, was there citing, as authority, the anti-Trump appointee by Trump, Kurt Volker, who said “it’s also important that Ukraine reciprocate with foreign military purchases from us as well, and I know that they intend to do so.” In other words: Volker was saying that Ukraine’s Government would follow through with America’s war against Russia, next door to Ukraine, and that therefore, US taxpayers should pay for Ukraine’s purchases of US-made weapons, such as from Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. He was saying that milking US taxpayers to boost those US corporations’ profits is good, not bad. He was saying that Ukraine is on US taxpayers’ dole, as if the Obama-installed, rabidly anti-Russian, Ukrainian Government is a charity-case which is the US Government’s business (and not merely those private stockholders’ business), and that therefore, Trump should continue Obama’s policy toward Ukraine, of using Ukraine in order ultimately to place on Ukraine’s border with Russia, missiles against Moscow, right across that border. This is what the New York Times is presenting in a favorable light.
Then, the New York Times ‘news’-report said:
For a full month, the fact that Mr. Trump wanted to halt the aid remained confined primarily to a small group of officials.
That ended on July 18, when a group of top administration officials meeting on Ukraine policy — including some calling in from Kyiv — learned from a midlevel budget office official that the president had ordered the aid frozen.
“I and the others on the call sat in astonishment,” William B. Taylor Jr., the top United States diplomat in Ukraine, testified to House investigators. “In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened.”
In other words: the Times’s further attack against Trump’s intention not to provide this US taxpayer boondoggle to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, United Technologies, and other US weapons-making corporations — a boondoggle so as to continue free supply to the Obama-installed Ukrainian regime of US-made weapons against Russia — is that career US national-security personnel support and want to continue Obama’s war against Russia.
Then, the Times reported further:
“This is in America’s interest,” Mr. Bolton argued, according to one official briefed on the gathering.
“This defense relationship, we have gotten some really good benefits from it,” Mr. Esper added, noting that most of the money was being spent on military equipment made in the United States.
America’s war against Russia is designed to enrich investors in US ‘Defense’-contractors.
Isn’t it clear, then, what was actually behind 9/11, and behind America’s invasion of (instead of merely Special-Forces operation regarding) Afghanistan in 2001, and invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Libya in 2011, and of Syria in 2012-now, etc., and coup against Ukraine in 2014?
The Times article closes with this impeach-Trump line:
But then, just as suddenly as the hold was imposed, it was lifted. Mr. Trump, apparently unwilling to wage a public battle, told Mr. Portman he would let the money go.
White House aides rushed to notify their counterparts at the Pentagon and elsewhere. The freeze had been lifted. The money could be spent. Get it out the door, they were told.
The debate would now begin as to why the hold was lifted, with Democrats confident they knew the answer.
“I have no doubt about why the president allowed the assistance to go forward,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “He got caught.”
In other words: Trump yielded to the threat of being impeached. Trump, the sales-person who had sold the Saud family hundreds of billions of dollars worth of US weaponry, recognized that unless Russia is going to be the main target of US weaponry, Trump’s own Presidency will be in jeopardy.
US foreign policies are a vast sales-promotion scheme, for America’s billionaires, who crave to control Russia, above all. Trump won’t buck them. Instead, he’s continuing Obama’s policy on Ukraine.
This Is The Top Job For Americans Hoping To Make Six Figures With No Experience
Given the insane cost of college in the US, who can blame prospective students for trying to game out which career paths have the highest short-term payouts immediately after graduation?
To that end, the two men behind the website theinterviewguys.com (h/t to MarketWatch’s Quentin Fottrell) analyzed some data from the BLS’s Occupational Requirements Survey to glean some insights on which jobs offer the highest salaries to those who are just starting their careers post-graduation.
They found that in 2019, the highest-paying job for college graduates that required no previous work experience was being a pharmacist.
Roughly 64% of pharmacist job postings required no previous work experience in the field, while also carrying a median starting salary of $126,000 a year, more than twice the average wage in the US. Next up was another position in the health-care field: Nurse practitioner. 60% of job postings for nurse practitioners required no prior work experience, while advertising a median salary of $114,000.
Of course, the high median salaries in these fields aren’t an accident, or some kind of happy coincidence. Rather, students face a difficult curriculum during their undergrad years, plus at least some grad school. Pharmacy students must obtain a doctoral degree in pharmacy just to be eligible to enter the workforce, and they must also pass the Pharmacy College Admission Test.
Looking further down the income distribution, the pair found that high school teachers and special education teachers most often required no previous work experience (According to their research, the interview guys found that more than 91% of postings in those fields stipulated that no prior experience in the field was necessary).
However, median salaries for these teaching jobs came in at just over $60,000. Police patrol officers also ranked high on the list of jobs requiring no prior experience in the field (something that the SJWs will surely latch on to as an example of the rank injustices permeating the law-enforcement community). The median salary for patrol officer jobs came in at just over $65,400.
For college graduates, jobs offering high starting salaries with little required experience fall into a category that the study’s authors have dubbed “the sweet spot.” After all, one of the most infuriating struggles that recent grads face is surmounting the ‘experience’ barrier. Every year, hundreds of thousands of American students embark on unpaid or for-credit internships in the hopes of gaining precious work experience.
Some employers, in turn, have been castigated for taking advantage of this situation by relying on unpaid interns or “perma-interns” who receive pay, but no other benefits, for their work.
In many professional-class fields, jobs with low starting wages often lead to higher-paying positions after three or four years in the workforce.
And more often than not, jobs with a low barrier to entry pay much less than other positions. But with unemployment at 50-year lows, some jobs that were traditionally seen as menial or blue-collar labor are seeing upward pressure on wages as jobs like long-haul trucker and fast-food cook become increasingly difficult to fill.
“Quantum” may possibly have been one of the most common words we’ve been reading, listening to, and even writing about last year – and there is a big reason for that… quantum is no longer the future, quantum is now.
Physicists have been able to demonstrate quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time.
A few years ago, we were just beginning to understand the main aspects of quantum physics. Even Albert Einstein died not agreeing with a lot of the theories enclosing this new world for physics because in some aspects it was not “matching” the special relativity theory (that’s one of the reasons why the “theory of everything,” explaining how everything was created in a physical perspective hasn’t been published yet).
But not understanding everything about quantum physics doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of its amazing properties, one of them being entanglement. Entanglement describes how when a pair or group of particles is generated, interact, or share spatial proximity and the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently, this is one of the fundamental contrasts between classical and quantum physics.
Scientists from the University of Bristol, in collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), have successfully developed chip-scale devices that are able to exploit the application of quantum physics by generating and manipulating single particles of light within programmable nano-scale circuits.
These chips encode quantum information in light generated inside the circuits and can process information with high efficiency and extremely low noise. This could be translated into an ability to create more complex quantum circuits that nowadays are required in quantum computing and communications, that in the present, are the most powerful supercomputers that exist.
Quantum teleportation offers quantum state transfer of a quantum particle from one place to another by utilizing entanglement. Establishing this entangled communication in the lab was not easy stuff.
“We were able to demonstrate a high-quality entanglement link across two chips in the lab, where photons on either chip share a single quantum state,” Bristol Co-author Dan Llewellyn said.
“Each chip was then fully programmed to perform a range of demonstrations which utilize the entanglement… the flagship demonstration was a two-chip teleportation experiment, whereby the individual quantum state of a particle is transmitted across the two chips after a quantum measurement is performed. This measurement utilizes the strange behavior of quantum physics, which simultaneously collapses the entanglement link and transfers the particle state to another particle already on the receiver chip.”
“Based on our previous result of on-chip high-quality single-photon sources, we have built an even more complex circuit containing four sources… all of these sources are tested and found to be nearly identical emitting nearly identical photons, which is an essential criterion for the set of experiments we had performed, such as entanglement swapping.”
The results showed efficiency in the quantum teleportation of 91 percent and other important features such as entanglement swapping used for quantum repeaters and networks and four-photon GHZ states, required in quantum computing and quantum internet.
These developments are predicted to have immense impacts on modern society, quantum physics is here to stay.
Worse still, at least 25 percent of 12th grade students have tried nicotine vaping products, according to a poll conducted by New England Journal of Medicine, cited by the New York Times.
But now, the Trump administration on Thursday announced plans to bar sales of flavored e-cigarette cartridges, except for menthol and tobacco flavors.
“The United States has never seen an epidemic of substance use arise as quickly as our current epidemic of youth use of e-cigarettes,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement about the change, which goes into effect in 30 days.
The FDA released its statement announcing the new policy on Thursday, saying the move was not a “ban” but an announcement prioritizing the agency’s law enforcement powers against tobacco products. The agency “has attempted to balance the public health concerns,” the statement said.
Will this ‘ban’ push smokers back to ‘real’ cigarettes?
While lighting up a cigarette was once considered a sign of class and sophistication or, at the very least, an act of coolness, smoking seems to have lost some of its spark in recent years. According to a new report published by the Federal Trade Commission, cigarette sales in the United States dropped to 216.9 billion in 2018, the lowest level since the FTC started tracking cigarette sales in 1967.
Over the same period, cigarette advertising and promotional spending increased from $1.2 billion in 1980 to $8.4 billion in 2018, most of which came in the form of price discounts for retailers and wholesalers.
Interestingly, the number of cigarette smokers in the United States, while also declining, has not dropped at a similar rate as cigarette sales over the past four decades. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 34.2 million adults in the U.S. were smoking cigarettes in 2018, down 34 percent from 51.6 million in 1980.
When I wrote that the coup against President Trump had morphed into a Civil War, I wasn’t kidding. The sham impeachment created the perfect environment for the Democrats and Republicans to get something definitive from him by playing the House and the Senate off each other.
With the Senate Neocon Occupied Territory the escalation of belligerence since Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through the impeachment vote has been serious.
First, there was the rider to the NDAA which upped the sanctions on everyone willing to work on Nordstream 2. Then Lindsey Graham pushed the frankly insane DASKA bill through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
It is under these circumstances we should view the events in Iraq over the last week, especially the killing of IRGC Quds Forces Commander Qassem Solemaini.
Because I’ve warned from the beginning of this impeachment, Trump was just 17 votes in the Senate away from conviction. And failure on his part to respond to an attack on our troops now or our soil, the embassy in Baghdad, would have been enough to turn that many against him and install Mike Pence.
At the end of the day we are held captive by a minority of power-mad Trotskyites without any capacity for forgiveness or humility. They believe in societal order through the whip and the sword.
Truly Maoist in their thinking, the only political power that exists comes from the barrel of a gun. This is why there has been zero opportunities for diplomacy with Iran.
Iran is to be destroyed. If not today, tomorrow. If not then then the day after. It will not end.
And any potential diplomacy was sabotaged at every turn. Peace can only happen through subjugation. Demands placed on Iran after Trump’s disastrous decision to exit the JCPOA were nothing short of regime change, arch neocon Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saw to that.
A man like Solemaini would never submit to this. And yet, fighting a war against the Empire is always reduced to terrorism to sell it to the public.
Like it or not Trump executed the man most responsible for the systemic destruction of ISIS and neutering of Al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq. He’s also a man, over the years, who has fought the U.S. to a standstill across the Middle East.
Those were his pertinent crimes.
The results of these fights were to empower Israel’s enemies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Russia and China supported this in their own interests. Turkey came to realize it was being used.
There was no way around that. It was a direct consequence of winning the battle to preserve Syria from becoming a failed state.
And that is a goal any rational person should wish for.
This is the most dangerous escalation of Trump’s administration. Nothing he’s done to this point compares with killing Solemaini and taking immediate credit for it.
Nothing he’s done is more tone deaf or disproportionate to whatever crimes were the proximate cause. And nothing he could have done would be more galvanizing of resistance to U.S. occupation of Iraq and Syria.
Trump, to his credit, held back the neocons at critical junctures over the past couple of years. After the Russian ELINT plane was shot down, Putin negotiated a truce which would have seen Iranian forces in Syria pulled back from the Golan Heights as a start to changing the dynamic there.
Benjamin Netanyahu said no all Iranians out of Syria. The war between Israel and the Shia forces backed by Iran continued. The path to peace could have begun then if Trump had the moral courage to force that outcome.
But the neocons at home had him under suspicion of treason. His National Security staff wouldn’t allow that to happen. If he hadn’t pulled out of the JCPOA and left room to negotiate we wouldn’t be here today.
But he did. And we are downstream of this bad decision. It’s been one escalation after another and a series of increasingly dangerous confrontations. This doesn’t end with Iran going meekly to bed, folks.
They aren’t disobedient children but they aren’t animals either.
Killing Solemaini was presaged months ago with the U.S. designating the Quds Force a terrorist organization, which gives the U.S. unilateral legal cover to summary execution of anyone affiliated with them, especially if they are not on home soil.
But, at the same time, Trump assassinated (note the difference) members of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces in the raid as well, since these are considered members of the Iraqi military and the attack occurred on Iraqi soil.
So, in simplistic and, I believe, legal terms Trump committed an Act of War against Iraq. Iran obviously considers killing Solemaini, legal definitions aside, such as well.
This is an act Trump cannot walk back. He can’t ask Iran to come to the negotiating table now or ever. It’s an act of overt war. Whether it leads directly to forces facing off in high level combat is debatable. It will certainly continue escalating from here.
Israel has been itching for the U.S. to attack and destroy Iran’s nuclear R&D facilities. The only way to achieve that was to get Trump to pull out of the JCPOA, forcing Iran back into enrichment and then using that as the casus belli.
Welcome to 2020.
And the sad truth is that it means more killing, more murder and more of everything bad. There is no Just War rationalization for this. While no one rational wants to see Iran with nuclear weapons the end result of the policy led us to that potential outcome.
No rational person should want anyone with nuclear weapons and yet Netanyahu sits on hundreds of warheads.
Beating people into submission doesn’t work. The neocons told Trump to smack Iran in the mouth, that’s the only lesson these animals understand.
By the way, they say that about everyone.
Solemaini may have been responsible for hundreds of American deaths, but Iran and the U.S. have been at war for forty years. At some point that has to be processed honestly.
Americans supporting this refuse to comprehend that we’re as much to blame as Iran is for the violence. We’re not the good guys and they aren’t the bad guys. Everyone sucks here. For every Iranian that shouts “Death to America” there are Americans who sing “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Bomb, Bomb Iran.”
Trump was elected to end this belligerence but he’s incapable of separating strength from weakness. A mafiosi-type who uses violence indiscriminately, Trump is a weak man. This was indiscriminate in that Trump believes the political calculus is in his favor, so he can get away with it. He shores up his support in the Senate just long enough to beat the impeachment and can sail to re-election.
But, who he is was written on the bombs he threw at the Al Shairat airbase and the MOAB he dropped in Afghanistan in April 2017 to prove a point to Putin and Xi he wasn’t a wimp.
But he is a wimp. And a coward. And neither man was impressed by this. He hasn’t won a single negotiation of note in three years. Killing Solemaini was the result of having no capacity for diplomacy.
China’s won the trade war. Russia gets their pipelines. Syria will be returned to Syrians and Iraq will reject U.S. presence there. Venezuela won’t fall and North Korea has nukes. Nothing has changed and yet everything has.
A strong man admits his mistakes and makes concessions to those he’s harmed. He doesn’t hide behind how unfair it is the political machine is arrayed against him.
And, now, he’s a failed president no different than Obama who he despises.
The only thing more pathetic than Trump right now is the gaggle of jackals running against him. Weep for the future.
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“Dire Circumstances”: Aussie Wildfires Intensify After Killing Half A Billion Animals; Record Numbers Evacuate
The brushfires raging across Australia which have killed an estimated 480 million animals have intensified over the last 12 hours, according to NASA, causing a record number of residents evacuate as forecasters predict worsening conditions.
Authorities on Friday urged evacuations for Australians living in parts of New South Wales and Victoria to avoid brushfires which are expected to rage out of control over the weekend. Temperatures in the area topped 104 F across much of the state, and no end to the destruction is currently in sight. According to NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance, this is “the largest evacuation of people out of the region ever.”
I would love some big creators to help raise awareness for our beautiful country. AUSTRALIA is on fire, and we need all the help we can get. 500m animals dead. Thousands stranded on beaches. Pls RT with link to @RedCrossAUpic.twitter.com/2CwHp4CqRi
“Conditions are set to mirror or even deteriorate beyond what we saw on New Year’s Eve,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s Jonathan How, adding that strong and dry winds would pick up over the weekend.
Over 1,300 homes have been destroyed, while 17 deaths have been reported.
In a harbinger of the searing conditions expected, a number of fires burnt out of control in South Australia as temperatures topped 40 degrees C (104 F) across much of the state and strong winds fanned flames.
Victoria declared a state of disaster across areas home to about 100,000 people, with authorities urging people to evacuate before a deterioration expected on Saturday. –Reuters
“If they value their safety they must leave,” said police emergency responder Michael Grainger. “I’d suggest personal belongings are of very, very little value in these circumstances,” adding “These are dire circumstances, there is no doubt.“
In the southern seaside resort town of Mallacoota, over 4,000 people were forced to take refuge on the beach and in boats as an “apocalyptic” scene unfolded amid a dark orange sky.
The evacuation operation is now in full swing in Mallacoota. These people are being taken out on LARC-V army vessels @theheraldsun pic.twitter.com/ebvMF038tA
