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Authored by Joaquin Flores via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Cutting through the media noise and outright nonsense in assessing the upcoming election is going to be a necessity for anyone who wants to know what’s truly afoot.

Back in October, Moody’s Analytics assessed their confidence that Trump will win in 2020. While yet another impeachment fiasco has been advanced by Democrats, this time going as far as a vote in the lower house, Moody’s has not issued any change in their assessment. That’s probably because this impeachment charade is being seen for what it is.

Many of the figures being discussed otherwise in the news cycle are quite irrelevant. This is because they are national polls, when only the opinions of certain cross-sections within swing states can reasonably said to be of any significance. Republicans still back Trump, Democrats still oppose him.

Here are the three real reasons why Trump will win…

With no buzz, there’s no victory.

This is the most important, and deserves the most attention. The Democrat-controlled media establishment from the NYT, MSNBC to CNN, is abusing their push-poll powers to promote boring and centrist candidates. But it’s the genuine energy and enthusiasm of precinct walkers and phone bankers that matters more than most numbers.  Enthusiasm is contagious, and a lack of enthusiasm creates a vicious cycle.

DNC strategists and pollsters make the same error that almost every single top-down managed company makes in their own sales-team policies. They wrongly imagine that no matter the product they are selling, what makes a product sell is a direct consequence of the advertising dollars and deals with media. They believe that creating energy around a product is entirely a hyper-reality based simulacrum with little-to-no basis in the real world.

To the contrary, for most products it’s the word-of-mouth enthusiasm of consumers and potentials, along with the enthusiasm of the sales team that actually pushes sales. If the enthusiasm isn’t genuine, then it isn’t there. If there’s no buzz, there can be no victory.

So when it comes to a combination of union and NGO staffers, who have to mobilize dues paying members and volunteers to get out the vote, people cannot fake enthusiasm.

Obama won despite the country trending conservative across a number of matrixes since the victory of Bush I in 2000. This was because of the tremendous energy and excitement around his campaign based in the themes of hope and change. Obama posed as a very left-wing candidate who would not only be the first African-American president of the country, but moreover bring in socialized health-care and end the war in Iraq, and reverse decades old legislation that had hampered labor’s ability to organize.

Without Obama-level energy, it’s only natural that a conservative would beat someone who appeared liberal across social and ‘pc’ matters but was flat on labor and real economic justice matters. That’s because without an invigorated candidate running an economically ‘radical’ platform, the blue collar left and idealistic leftist students who form the backbone of a genuine grass-roots campaign can’t get excited.

In the present paradigm, Democrats can only win the White House when new voters come out to vote.

Democrats will probably lose no matter what, given the immutable facts around this election and the incumbent, but the way they are running their strategy so far will guarantee it is a Trump electoral college landslide bigger than 2016. Right now Democrats might only succeed in getting more Democrats to turn out in states they were already going to win.

And so strangely, in 2020 we might expect Democrats to win even bigger on the popular vote, simply because Hillary is not going to be candidate, and given how populous states like New York and California are, but lose harder on the Electoral College.

The any given Sunday rule still applies to elections, and so taken all together, the only chance Democrats do have to win is some combination of Sanders, Yang, and Gabbard.

The Impeachment is Galvanizing Trump’s base and Independents didn’t appreciate Pelosi’s moves

This is something like the opposite of the Democrat’s lack of an exciting candidate, and really explains why no candidate but Gabbard (who played the right card with her ‘present’ vote on impeachment’), can come out of this unscathed. Many polls seem to indicate that Trump’s numbers across numerous key matrixes improved surrounding the impeachment gambit.

In reality, this election will rest on a) independents who are in b) swing states. Independents are prone to the galvanizing excitement of partisans. Since Trump’s people are galvanized, and Democrats are not exciting their base, independents will go for Trump. That was also reflected in polling over impeachment itself.

Independents are not some 5 or 10% of the voting base that might just ‘push one candidate or other’ over a notch to victory. Independents make up a whole 38% of the electorate.

Only 41% of independents supported impeachment.

Looking at Pelosi’s statements and methods, it would appear that the process left Democrats looking extremely partisan to the detriment of getting the business of the country done. That business included the USMCA, the Mexico-Canada Agreement that redefines a host of matters previously mishandled by Bill Clinton’s tremendously unpopular NAFTA. Why this seems to be the case – Trump was in the process of getting his USMCA through congress, and with high support from organized labor. As we consistently explain, Democrats rely on organized labor not only for votes, but more critically for their entire ground campaigns, especially making phone calls to other voters, and precinct walking during the campaign and on Election Day. That labor always opposed NAFTA and generally supports the USMCA is critical. The key line in Pelosi’s post impeachment charade statement, regarding why they were not actually going to send the articles to the Senate and therefore complete the process of impeaching the president, was that she said specifically that they needed instead to prioritize passing the USMCA.

Imagine that for a moment. Because of the relationship between labor and the Democrat Party, it was necessary for Democrats to appear as its champion, even that it was their idea in the first place. This means that Democrats had the practical wisdom to understand that their impeachment charade did not appeal to blue collar Democrat voters, but in fact would work against them. What they needed in part in the impeachment, apart from implementing their strategy of a thousand cuts, was to energize college educated upper middle-class boomers, which form the bulk of the Rachel Maddow, and Democrat leaning mainstream media consumer demographic. While these people control work-place politics and effectively police water-cooler talk, this back-fires. Voting in the US is secret ballot – and so with this class in control of people’s ability to remain employed, unenthusiastic, rehearsed, regurgitated, manufactured ‘orange man bad’ utterances are more commonly heard than they are truly believed. People say one thing at work to keep their job, and then vote another way on Election Day.

But the USMCA fiasco surrounding the impeachment tells us a lot. Eight years of Bill Clinton and decades of his NAFTA has been symptomatic of the Democrat’s anti-labor politics. Democrats from that time onward invested their political capital into developing socialism. However, they didn’t develop this in the US, but in China – while in the US a crony class grew up and lined their own pockets from it all. This is something which is perhaps, in a strange turn of events, quite good for China and many other developing parts of the world including Africa. But that has come at the expense not of America’s wealthy ‘bourgeoisie’, but rather its own ‘working class’. Bill Clinton was supposed to work to reverse 12 years of Reagan-Bush, whose anti-labor policies amounted to one of the single greatest austerity campaigns in US history. And yet this was only to be outdone by Clinton’s outsourcing and off-shoring of jobs, and deregulation of the financial sector.

What has shown to matter least of all, and especially where Trump is concerned, are polls. And even here too, polls – when read correctly – point to a Trump victory.

There are also reasons why left-wing Democrats like documentary film maker Michael Moore also understand that Trump is likely to win. Needless to say, his fixation therefore on an impeachment succeeding, and his blanket support for Nancy Pelosi’s absurd and failing strategy, is also why even progressive Democrats like Sanders fail to understand why Trump is unbeatable. Their placing hopes in impeachment isn’t so much that impeachment is viable or likely, but from a sober and scientific approach, it’s only more likely than an electoral defeat of Trump at the polls given that the party stubbornly  insists on promoting Biden and Buttigieg.

“It’s the economy, stupid”

Sure, it will always be argued that the improved economy under Trump was in fact either related to impersonal forces of the global economy unrelated to Trump; sun spots, the invisible hand, or Obama policies whose fruits we are now only reaping. But voters never go for this reasoning. Partisans do, but voters don’t.

Democrats at best are going to point out that while employment numbers have improved, ‘never before have so many earned so little’. And while that’s true, we are dealing with a badly bruised and insecure American working class. Things right now appear to be going in the right direction, and so being able to find work even if it’s a lower salary than they had before their several-year unemployed stint, they are literally thanking the heavens, the stars, and even Trump, that today they have any job at all. And even here, Trump’s tax cuts put a few thousand dollars back in the pockets of households where the average combined income is about $70k. His even larger, but targeted, tax cuts for the rich in certain areas, due to the economic growth these cuts in part inspired, resulted in more tax revenues overall.

And yes, we get it – old black people like Biden. At least mainstream media reports on certain polls, whose methodologies we can’t see, report as much. What did that question actually look like? We think the push-poll went something like: “In the coming election, would you support Obama’s good friend and Vice President, a gay mayor, a neurotic Jew, a Hindu veteran who may have PTSD, Pocahontas, or a Chinaman good at math? Obama’s VP was Biden. Will you vote for Biden? Y/N”.

But still this figure is misleading, and doesn’t relate to Biden’s electability, but is supposed to get past this trope that he’s a racist – a meme trending surrounding the first few debates. Older black voters won’t turn swing-states, and older black voters aren’t part of an energized or energizing electorate for new voters. This means that the media’s reportage cycle on this ‘factoid’ is about virtue signaling to the above mentioned Rachel Maddow demographic that Biden is ‘progressive since black people like him’. Oh, you don’t like Biden? Well black people like Biden. Don’t you like black people?

And our jokingly hypothetical poll question aside, the reality isn’t far off. This targeted poll of black voters relates almost entirely back to labor union activism. The DNC controls organized labor, and Biden is the DNC’s choice. Black workers are extraordinarily over-represented in the public sector, and the public sector is extraordinarily over-represented in union membership. Older people are more likely to be involved in activism in their labor union, and as a consequence, older black people trend towards Biden more than other candidates. This factoid may trend well right now in media, but will have nothing to do with the outcome of the election except that it will guarantee Trump’s victory if Biden is the Democrat nominee.

And so we have it, our three primary reasons Trump will win: the lack of enthusiasm for the DNC’s picks, the increasing enthusiasm among Trump supporters which will be contagious (again), and the economic growth which, while favoring the rich, in fact did in this case ‘trickle down’.

Indonesia better hurry up and find a new capital city before its current one sinks into the swampwater and soil.

The death toll from some of the most devastating flooding that has rocked Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta has risen to 66, with two people still missing, according to local authorities cited by CNN.

Flooding that began when Indonesia was hit by some of the most powerful monsoons the country has seen in years. Thanks to its position along the “Ring of Fire”, Indonesia is regularly rocked by devastating tsunamis, earthquakes, eruptions and floods. But the flooding that kicked off the new decade forced thousands to flee their homes, or risk being trapped by landslides.

More than 173,000 residents were seeking refuge on Friday, and it’s very likely that things are going to get worse before they get better. Heavy rain and thunderstorms are forecast to continue for the coming days.

As CNN pointed out, the rainfall is some of the worst Jakarta has seen this century:

The current inundation is some of the worst the Indonesian capital has seen this century. Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysical Agency measured 15 inches (38 centimeters) of rain at an East Jakarta airport on January 1, the highest flood reading since 1996, Reuters reported.

Jakarta and the surrounding area of central Java, Indonesia’s largest island by population, are expected to be pummeled by up to 4 inches of rain in the next few days.

As search and rescue operations continue, the Red Cross has started spraying Jakarta with disinfectant to stop the spread of dangerous waterborne diseases. Photos from Jakarta and the surrounding area (which, with about 30 million people, is one of the world’s largest cities) show people wading through chest-high water, and using inflatable rafts to navigate city streets.

Around Jakarta, rescue workers and men in orange vests clearing trash and debris could be seen.

Unfortunately, Jakarta’s latest problems are just par for the course. As we pointed out last year, Jakarta is rapidly sinking into the swamp upon which it was built (the already saturated land makes it difficult for the soil to absorb rainwater, contributing to the flooding), and Indonesia is rapidly searching for a suitable location to build a new capital city.

This latest round of deadly flooding will no doubt spur the country to speed up that search.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,

On foreign soil, as a guest nation, US has assassinated a diplomatic envoy whose mission the US had requested

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (3rd L), Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (2nd L) and Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani (L) attend the Jan. 6 funeral ceremony in Tehran of Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Forces, who was killed in a US drone airstrike in Iraq. Photo: AFP / Iranian Presidency handout / Anadolu Agency

The bombshell facts were delivered by caretaker Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, during an extraordinary, historic parliamentary session in Baghdad on Sunday.

Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani had flown into Baghdad on a normal carrier flight, carrying a diplomatic passport. He had been sent by Tehran to deliver, in person, a reply to a message from Riyadh on de-escalation across the Middle East. Those negotiations had been requested by the Trump administration.

So Baghdad was officially mediating between Tehran and Riyadh, at the behest of Trump. And Soleimani was a messenger. Adil Abdul-Mahdi was supposed to meet Soleimani at 8:30 am, Baghdad time, last Friday. But a few hours before the appointed time, Soleimani died as the object of a targeted assassination at Baghdad airport.

Let that sink in – for the annals of 21st century diplomacy. Once again: it does not matter whether the assassination order was issued by President Trump, the US Deep State or the usual suspects – or  when. After all, the Pentagon had Soleimani on its sights for a long time, but always refused to go for the final hit, fearing devastating consequences.

Now, the fact is that the United States government – on foreign soil, as a guest nation – has assassinated a diplomatic envoy who was on an official mission that had been requested by the United States government itself.

Baghdad will formally denounce this behavior to the United Nations. However, it would be idle to expect UN outrage about the US killing of a diplomatic envoy. International law was dead even before 2003’s Shock and Awe.

Mahdi Army is back

Under these circumstances, it’s no wonder the Iraqi Parliament approved a non-binding resolution asking the Iraqi government to expel foreign troops by cancelling a request for military assistance from the US.

Translation: Yankee go home.

Predictably, Yankee will refuse the demand. Trump: “If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”

US troops already are set to remain in Syria illegally – to “take care of the oil.” Iraq, with its extraordinary energy reserves, is an even more serious case. Leaving Iraq means Trump, US neocons and the Deep State lose control, directly and indirectly, of the oil for good. And, most of all, lose the possibility of endless interfering against the Axis of Resistance – Iran-Iraq-Syria-Hezbollah.

Apart from the Kurds – bought and paid for – Iraqis all across the political spectrum are tuned in to public opinion: this occupation is over. That includes Muqtada al-Sadr, who reactivated the Mahdi Army and wants the US embassy shut down for good.

As I saw it live at the time, the Mahdi Army was the Pentagon’s nemesis, especially around 2003-04. The only reason the Mahdi Army were appeased was because Washington offered Sadr Saddam Hussein, the man who killed his father, for summary execution without trial. For all his political inconsistencies, Sadr is immensely popular in Iraq.

Soleimani pysop

Hezbollah’s secretary-general Sayyed Nasrallah, in a very detailed speech, goes to the jugular on the meaning of Soleimani’s assassination.

Nasrallah tells how the US identified the strategic role of Soleimani in every battlefield – Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran. He tells how Israel saw Soleimani as an “existential threat” but “dared not to kill him. They could have killed him in Syria, where his movements were public.”

So the decision to assassinate Soleimani in public, as Nasrallah reads it, was a psyop. And the “fair retribution” is “ending the American military presence in our region.” All US military personnel will be kept on their toes, watching their backs, full time. This has nothing to do with American citizens: “I’m not talking about picking on them, and picking on them is forbidden to us.”

With a single stroke, the assassination of Soleimani has managed to unite not only Iraqis but Iranians, and in fact the whole Axis of Resistance. On myriad levels, Soleimani could be described as the 21st century Persian Che Guevara: the Americans have made sure he’s  metastasizing into the Muslim Resistance Che.

Oil war

No tsunami of pedestrian US mainstream media PR will be able to disguise a massive strategic blunder – not to mention yet another blatantly illegal targeted assassination.

Yet this might as well have been a purposeful blunder. Killing Soleimani does prove that Trump, the Deep State and the usual suspects all agree on the essentials: there can be no entente cordiale between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Divide and rule remains the norm.

Michael Hudson sheds light on what is in effect a protracted “democratic” oil war: “The assassination was intended to escalate America’s presence in Iraq to keep control of the region’s oil reserves, and to back Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi troops (Isis, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are actually America’s foreign legion) to support U.S. control of Near Eastern oil as a buttress of the US dollar. That remains the key to understanding this policy, and why it is in the process of escalating, not dying down.”

Neither Trump nor the Deep State could not fail to notice that Soleimani was the key strategic asset for Iraq to eventually assert control of its oil wealth, while progressively defeating the Wahhabi/Salafist/jihadi galaxy. So he had to go.

‘Nuclear option’

For all the rumble surrounding Iraqi commitment to expel US troops and the Iranian pledge to react to the Soleimani assassination at a time of its choosing, there’s no way to make the imperial masters listen without a financial hit.

Enter the world derivatives market, which every major player knows is a financial WMD.

The derivatives are used to drain a trillion dollars a year out of the market in manipulated profits. These profits, of course, are protected under the “too big to prosecute” doctrine.

It’s all obviously parasitic and illegal. The beauty is it can be turned into a nuclear option against the imperial masters.

I’ve written extensively about it. New York connections told me the columns all landed on Trump’s desk. Obviously he does not read anything – but the message was there, and also delivered in person.

This past Friday, two American, mid-range, traditional funds bit the dust because they were leveraging in derivatives linked to oil prices.

If Tehran ever decided to shut down the Strait of Hormuz – call it the nuclear option – that would trigger a world depression as trillions of dollars of derivatives imploded.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) counts about $600 billion in total derivatives. Not really. Swiss sources say there are at least 1.2 quadrillion with some placing it at 2.5 quadrillion. That would imply a derivatives market 28 times the world’s GDP.

On Hormuz, the shortage of 22% of the world oil supply simply could not be papered over. It would detonate a collapse and cause a market crash infinitely worse than 1933 Weimar Germany.

The Pentagon gamed every possible scenario of a war on Iran – and the results are grim. Sound generals – yes, there are some – know the US Navy would not be able to keep the Strait of Hormuz open:  it would have to leave immediately or, as sitting ducks, face total annihilation.

So Trump threatening to destroy 52 Iranian sites – including priceless cultural heritage – is a bluff. Worse: this is the stuff of bragging by an ISIS-worthy barbarian. The Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas. ISIS nearly destroyed Palmyra. Trump Bakr al-Mar-a-Lago wants to join in as the destroyer of Persian culture.

Borden Dairy Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday amid rising milk prices and what court filings described as an “unsustainable” debt pile, reported Bloomberg. 

Borden was founded in 1857, one of America’s oldest and largest dairy producers is the second major dairy company to fold in months. 

Court filings said the company would use Chapter 11 bankruptcy to “pursue a financial restructuring designed to reduce its current debt load, maximize value and position the company for long-term success.”

Dean Foods, the nation’s largest milk producer, filed for voluntary Chapter 11 in November, citing unsustainable business practices, changing consumer trends, and rising competition.

Filings showed Borden had assets and liabilities of around $100 million to $500 million. The company plans to conduct routine operations through the restructuring period.

The filing noted that its debt load and pension obligations were a significant factor that made operations unsustainable. 

The company has approximately 3,330 employees, with 22% of them covered by a collective bargaining agreement. The filing doesn’t say if layoffs or a complete liquidation is imminent

Net sales of $1.2 billion were recorded in 2018 but resulted in a net loss of $14.6 million. The company reported a net loss of $42.4 million in 2019, the filing said.

Besides too much debt, the company blamed shifting consumer trends, one where American refrigerators are being stockpiled with almond, soy, rice and nut milk, instead of traditional dairy products.  

“While milk remains a household item in the United States, people are simply drinking less of it,” CFO Jason Monaco said in court papers.

“In parallel, since the turn of the century, the number of U.S. dairy farms has rapidly declined.”

The filing also outlined an abundance of milk supply despite spot prices rising 27% in 2019, even as retail prices and margins are plunging. The mechanics behind the demise of Borden is also how Dean Foods failed. 

At the moment, Borden needs a cash infusion of $26.6 million to operate through bankruptcy – if it cannot obtain a source of liquidity – then the company might collapse under its weight of debt. 

Authored by Julianne Geiger via OilPrice.com,

Piracy in some of the world’s most critical oil chokepoints is on the rise – but now, pirates are resorting back to another method of income generation better suited to times of lower oil prices: taking human captives.

Sometimes, black market oil prices just aren’t lucrative enough. In the days of $100 oil, oil theft was a hot commodity. Today, pirates are supplementing their stolen oil income with ransomed sailors, creating a whole new set of problems for the oil industry to tackle.

Where Piracy is Hot, and Where It’s Not

Piracy is being dealt with fairly successfully in certain regions of the world. In others, efforts to shore up maritime security have failed. But the threat of pirates taking human captives is alive and well in all regions.

East Africa – Once a piracy hotspot, piracy off Somalia’s coast has fallen in recent years as the international community–including Iran–stepped up to tackle this pressing problem that disrupted the flow of goods, including oil, through the critical oil route. Somalia, too, has stepped up its ability to prosecute pirates. The East Africa area includes the Bab-el-Mandeb between Yemen and Djibouti, as well as the Gulf of Aden. Piracy incidents here hit a high of 54 in 2017, before falling back to just 9 in 2018, according to One Earth Future’s annual report The State of Maritime Piracy 2018.  

But while piracy off Somalia has toned down in recent years, the problem of using captive humans as an additional income stream has not gone away. One Iranian seafarer, for example, who was held captive by Somalia pirates was finally released after four years due to poor health. Three of his shipmates, however, are still being held to this day.

West Africa – While things appear to be cooling off in the pirate world off Africa’s east coast, the west side is seeing a disturbing rise in piracy. And not just any piracy–piracy with a human captive component. The area most subject to piracy here is off the coast of Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea in general. So much so has this alarming shift risen from oil to persons over the course of the last year in West Africa, that India–the most prolific source of maritime sailors in the region–has banned all Indian seafarers from working on vessels in Nigerian waters and in the Gulf of Guinea. On the line here for Nigeria is $10 billion annually in crude oil sales to India, who purchases more than one-third of all Nigerian oil.  

Just last month, pirates in the Gulf of Guinea hijacked two Indian oil tankers in two separate instances. But they didn’t stop with the crude oil. They also took the Indian crewmembers hostage both times. While one set of hostages have since been released, the second batch is still being held in captivity, adding to the growing unrest in the region as shippers and sailors fear for their own safety and for the safety of their crew.

Overall in 2019, there were a total of 89 crew hijacked for ransom in the Gulf of Guinea, and there is now even a special rider offered by one insurer, Beazley, called the “Gulf of Guinea Piracy Plus” that compensates vessels up to a certain maximum should they fall prey to pirates.

This area is where 82% of all kidnappings on the world seas take place, as crime syndicates in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria look to capitalize not only on the country’s sizable crude oil trade but on the ransom for the many kidnapped sailors that traverse nearby waters as well.

The rise of this oil-piracy-with-a-side-of-people has been attributed, quite lazily, on poverty in the area, but the extracurricular kidnappings and ransoms come with a special brand of gratuitous brutality that speaks less of poverty-induced desperation and more of wanton criminality and woefully insufficient prosecutorial infrastructure and corrupt governments.

Southeast Asia – There is also a rise in piracy off the Singapore Strait, Strait of Malacca, and in the Sulu and Celebes Seas. In the last month of 2019, there were six attempted piracy attacks over a string of just six days. All together for 2019, there were 30 recorded piracy incidents just in the Strait of Singapore alone. The area is another critical path for oil traveling from the Persian Gulf to the booming East Asian market.

There has not only been an overall increased risk of piracy in this area, but an increased risk of kidnapping for ransom as well. In the Sulu Sea, most of the ransom incidents were claimed by Islamist terrorist organization Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), based out of the southern Phillippines.  Its latest ransom demand for a kidnapped Indonesian national was $567,000. The group is known for beheading hostages when ransoms aren’t paid.

The Cost of Piracy

Piracy has a cost, but it’s more than just stolen oil. All of the costs associated with stolen oil, including the lost oil itself, the ransom money, insurance risk premiums, and so on will invariably be added into the cost of every barrel of oil the world over. Ransom payments, per person, can range anywhere from $18,000 to $570,000. And those ransoms are mostly being paid.

“Pirates are predominantly taking crew because that is where the money is. People are paying it,” Phil Diacon, Dryan Global chief executive told Maritime Intelligence.  

War risk premiums for ships traveling through the Gulf of Guinea, for example, incurred $18 million in extra charges in 2017. And over a third of all ships traversing the Gulf carried an additional kidnap and ransom rider at a total cost of $20 million–just for the Gulf of Guinea.

Contracted maritime security is another expense. 

All together, piracy in West Africa alone cost more than $800 million in 2017.

Then there is the human cost. Some captives are held as little as a few days while payments are arranged. Others are held for years. Case in point: The captives are often subjected to beatings, starvation, threats, and uninhabitable conditions.

The most recent incident of oil piracy came over the last days of 2019, as eight sailors were abducted from a Greek oil tanker near a port in Cameroon. 

Persistent weak maritime security in pirate-stricken oil chokepoints across the globe will continue to weigh heavily on the oil industry and chip away at oil profits.

The Chinese embassy in Washington issued a travel warning to its citizens living or on holiday in the U.S. of increasing security threats following President Trump’s airstrike that killed Iran’s top military commander major general Qassem Soleimani in Iraq on Friday.

“The Chinese embassy suggests and reminds Chinese citizens in the U.S. to closely watch the security situation, stay alert and take safety precautions, be cautious before going to public places,” the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the U.S. said in a Sunday statement, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, warned in a statement that the “criminals” responsible for Soleimani’s assassination will face “severe revenge,” and that his work fighting on behalf of the Iranian people “won’t be stopped by his martyrdom,” according to a statement published on Twitter.

China is worried that Iran-backed Hezbollah sleeper cells embedded in major US metropolitan areas could be activated in the coming days, weeks, and or months could attack soft targets that are not heavily defended, such as restaurants, sporting events, and shopping malls. 

Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf published a special bulletin Saturday via the National Terrorism Advisory System, indicating that there is no credible terrorist threat but warns of lone-wolf terrorists and cyber-attacks.

The new @DHSgov NTAS Bulletin on the threat landscape was issued to inform & reassure the American public, state/local governments & private partners that DHS is actively monitoring & preparing for any specific, credible threat, should one arise. pic.twitter.com/iNnHU1TI9A

— Acting Secretary Chad Wolf (@DHS_Wolf) January 4, 2020

China’s travel warning to the U.S. was read more than 130 million times on Weibo, as it appears this could result in lower tourism to the U.S. 

“Our fellow compatriots in the U.S., please be careful and stay safe!” one Weibo user said.

Since the airstrike, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Beijing was “highly concerned” about the threat of conflict in the Middle East.

“China advocates that all parties should earnestly abide by the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter and the basic norms of international relations,” Shuang said Friday.

“We urge all parties concerned, especially the United States, to keep calm and exercise restraint and avoid a further escalation of tensions,” he added.

The threat of a terrorist attack could lead to lower tourism figures in the months ahead as other embassies will likely warn their citizens about the travel risks associated with the US.

Authored by Manuel Garcia Aguilar via TheMindUnleashed.com,

Would you like to travel back in time and change things from your past? Well, maybe you can. Ronald Mallet, an astrophysicist and tenured University of Connecticut physics professor, thinks it is theoretically possible.

Time-traveling has been in our imaginations since we discovered what time is and how we move in it. Our comprehension so far is that we move in that  one dimension constantly, always forward, and that we don’t really have a choice—unlike in the other three dimensions in which we live our lives.

Einstein’s theory of special relativity always plays a crucial role when new theories of time traveling appear, and this is not an exception. This theory explains how time is not absolute, as we have believed, but rather, it depends on the speed at which an object is moving, and time can accelerate or decelerate depending on that.

The Twin Paradox explains how if there are two identical twins and one of them makes a journey into space in a really high-speed rocket, after he returns to Earth he will have aged less than the one that stayed on Earth. This is well accepted in the science community as a possible scenario if we ever get to reproduce this experiment. However, time travel is not possible, at least not so far.

While Mallet acknowledges that his theories and designs are unlikely to allow time travel in his lifetime, that’s not stopping him from pursuing his dream and to meet his beloved father again; therefore, he has developed some scientific equations and principles upon which he says a time machine could be created.

Mallet was age 10 when his father suddenly died from a heart attack, that event changed the track of his life forever.

“For me, the sun rose and set on him, he was just the center of things,” he told CNN Travel. “Even today, after all of these years, there’s still an unreality about it for me.”

Ron Mallett and his family at Bronx Park in the 1950s.

Mallet has spent his career investigating black holes as well as general relativity.  On his professional journey, he has also been theorizing about time travel and a complex mission to build a machine capable of visiting the past. Some of his peers would argue he’ll never get there.

“If you can bend space, there’s a possibility of you twisting space,” Mallett told CNN. “In Einstein’s theory, what we call space also involves time—that’s why it’s called space-time, whatever it is you do to space also happens to time.”

Mallet believes that it is theoretically possible to twist time into a loop that would allow for time travel into the past. He has even built a prototype showing how lasers might help him achieve this goal.

“By studying the type of gravitational field that was produced by a ring laser,” Mallett told CNN, “this could lead to a new way of looking at the possibility of a time machine based on a circulating beam of light.”

Mallet is conscious that his idea is wholly theoretical at this point and that some restrictions may apply. 

“You can send information back,” he told CNN, “but you can only send it back to the point at which you turn the machine on.”

Physics is beautiful and complicated. Some of the greatest minds across history doubted themselves when they became aware of the size of the discovery they had made and Einstein was one of them, creating the “cosmological constant” to maintain a “static universe” just after he discovered that the universe and everything inside it was expanding.

Hopefully, if Ron Mallet gets to build that machine in his lifetime, he doesn’t get too scared to actually use it.

After top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani was killed by a U.S. missile on Friday in Baghdad, Washington is awaiting retaliation from Iran. The Trump administration has said repeatedly that Soleimani’s assassination was in connection with his role in Iran’s strategy to back different militia other destabilizing armed groups throughout the Middle East. As Statista’s Niall McCarthy shows in the graphic below, data from a report from The Soufan Center sheds light on Iran’s grand strategy and “playbook” in the Middle East.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Tensions between the U.S. and Iran had already started rising in May of 2019 after several tankers were “sabotaged” off the UAE coast. The New York Times reported then that National Security Advisor John Bolton ordered a military contingency plan to be presented to senior White House security officials which involves the deployment of 120,000 U.S. troops to the Middle East. That came after Bolton announced that a U.S. carrier strike group centered around the USS Abraham Lincoln would be deployed to the region along with B-52 heavy bombers.

Iran has not developed its capabilities and regional strength in order to prevail in a conventional 21st century conflict. It has rather focused on pumping money and military hardware into regional allies, proxies and militias with the aim of spreading political prosperity and enabling them to project power in the region and beyond.

Along with training and arms shipments, soft power (financial, political, diplomatic, public relationship and other non-military mechanisms) is an important cog in Tehran’s strategy. This allows it to portray itself as strong economically as well as enabling it to build political support overseas and insulate it proxies and allies. Examples of this include its investments in a major port project in Oman as well as its substantial gas exports to neighboring Iraq. Iran has also taken advantage of the rift between Saudi Arabia, the GCC and Qatar. It has moved to increase food exports to Doha and granted Qatar Airways the use of its airspace.

Given the extent of its regional activities, how much money is it actually pumping into its neighbors? The Soufan Center’s research shows where Iranian money is flowing in the Middle East and where Iranian-backed proxies and militant groups are active. Syria receives an estimated $6 billion annually of economic aid, subsidized oil, commodity transfers and military aid. Iraq receives up to $1 billion, some of which ends up in the hands of militia organizations. Lebanon, which is of course home to Hezbollah, sees around $700 million of financial support, practically all of which goes to the militant group.