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Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Nigel Farage has thrown down the gauntlet to Boris Johnson over the election strategy. Johnson has refused.

Of course he did. Farage made an offer Johnson couldn’t accept, ditch the Withdrawal Treaty he just negotiated with the EU and truly campaign on a far harder Brexit than Johnson has ever advocated for.

If he doesn’t do that about-face, Farage’s Brexit Party standing candidates in more than 500 seats and potentially split the Leave vote.

Mike Shedlock thinks Farage’s deal is “Preposterous.” Mike is wrong. It is the only offer Farage could offer the Tories and stay in any way relevant in a time of electoral chaos and party fluidity.

It is the kind of ‘big ask’ that his friend Donald Trump would make. It may be an opening bid in a complex negotiation that ends with them making a pact towards the end of the campaign.

Frankly that only happens if the polls shift considerably from where they are.

Politics is not a game for the timid or the weak. If Farage is to be a big player in British politics he needs to act like he is a big player in British politics.

And that means sticking to his core message, a real Brexit where the U.K. regains sovereignty over itself in a timely manner. 2022 is not timely for the U.K.

It is, however, timely for the EU, given the realities of its continent-wide political uprisings against its rule.

Farage is smartly not just saying that Brexit is his party’s raison d’etre, he’s using Brexit as the means to change the post-Brexit political environment, something the Tories are absolutely dead set against.

Farage has positioned the Brexit Party on a “Change Politics for Good” platform that proposes sweeping changes to the system from proportional representation to a written constitution and reforming the House of Lords.

This is, as Monty Python would say, something completely different.

The statement itself cuts to what’s fundamentally wrong. It’s aspirational and tells the voters they still have the real power after three years of parliamentary shenanigans designed to marginalize them while being insufferably condescending.

We’ll find out in the next couple of weeks as to whether Farage et.al. can make the case to British voters that these changes go hand in hand with Brexit. Are these people not only tired of the endless Brexit wrangling but now truly awake to the depth of the betrayal of their political representatives?

If they are then Boris Johnson will have a real problem come December 12th.

Because that is a platform, beyond Brexit, that cuts across all party lines.

The Tories are rallying around their common message now that they have an election. There are serious misgivings within in the party on Johnson’s deal and the strategy. But fear of losing Brexit has motivated the strongest Brexiteers to cave to what Mike rightly points out has been the political reality.

But that was before the election was secured.

Hard core Leavers like Marc Francois and Steven Baker, prominent members of the ERG — European Research Group — are on board with the deal and have called out Farage as lying about it.

But, arguing that these guys being on board with Boris’ treaty means it’s a good deal is simply appeal to authority while missing the much larger point.

The Tories are the main mechanism by which the British Deep State and political elite maintain control over not only British policy, but also that of the U.S. and much of Europe. Don’t for a second think that these ERG guys are any less compromised in the end than the outright Remainers like Ken Clarke, Dominik Grieve or Philip Hammond.

They will always put party before country in the end. Most of them proved it during Theresa May’s multiple rounds of blackmail last spring by eventually voting for that deal because, ultimately, they are spineless.

Fear of losing Brexit is what motivates them. Fear of Farage upsetting the apple cart in Westminster is also very real.

Farage may be overstating the threats within the political declaration to the U.K.’s bargaining position during Free Trade Agreement talks, but he also knows the EU side of the ledger far better than any of the newly-promoted back-benchers in the ERG.

So, if I’m going to resort to appealing to an authority on the subject I’m going with the guy who put the world in this situation in the first place, Nigel Farage.

That said, however, Farage’s strategy is a risky one. There’s no doubt about that. With the most recently published polls putting Johnson at his peak of popularity and the Brexit Party languishing around 10% Farage has a lot of ground to gain in six weeks.

There are real worries that Farage’s support in the Labour heartland of the Midlands and the Northeast isn’t as strong as he thinks it is. But, given how fundamentally split the Remain vote is between the Liberal Democrats and Labour, I don’t see how Farage hurts Johnson unless Farage’s numbers rise.

And Johnson will absolutely try to duck any head-to-head meetings between them just like Theresa May did.

But you don’t change things by being timid. Farage doesn’t win loyalty by going up to Boris Johnson, bowl in hand, and asking for another ladle of gruel. You act like the big dog and you challenge the alpha who, to this point, doesn’t even know what he signed the U.K. up for.

I maintain that Johnson is a fake Leaver and none of his behavior has contravened that, including duping the ERG into backing a now unnecessary Withdrawal Treaty which served its purpose to get a general election to get rid of a rotten Parliament.

Johnson and the ERG know this, and yet, they will persist in putting party first, betraying Northern Ireland, keeping the U.K. as close to the failing EU as possible and all the while calling it Brexit.

Given those circumstances would you expect Nigel Farage to offer Boris Johnson anything more?

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Authored by Germinal G.Van via The Mises Institute,

It has been widely, vividly, but nonetheless wrongly believed that socialism is the appropriate system to improve the living standards of Africans. Worse yet, it has been misleadingly claimed that socialism is compatible with African culture because African culture is fundamentally a collectivist culture.

However, one fact remains undisputable: socialism has failed wherever it was tried, and the African countries that have experimented with socialism were not exempted from its failure.

The undeniable fact remains that Africa has the lowest living standard of all continents after Antarctica. The reason why the living standard of the majority of African countries is so low compared to the rest of the world, is because socialism has impoverished the African continent.

At the outset of the post-colonial era in the 1960s many African countries — such as Tanzania, Angola, Mali, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Egypt, Senegal, Guinea, Congo and many more — have embraced socialism as their economic and political system. These countries that have embraced socialism became significantly worse off by the 1980s. For example, Tanzania was one of the fast-growing economies in East Africa until Julius Nyerere implemented the “Ujamaa,” which means socialism and brotherhood in the Swahili language. Before the implementation of the Ujamaa; Tanzania had a GDP similar to South Korea . Subsequently to the implementation of Ujamaa, economic growth became unsurprisingly stagnant. The policy of collectivization impoverished the Tanzanian people. Food production fell, and the country’s economy suffered . This decline in productivity has made Tanzania one of the poorest countries on the continent. In Ghana, under the rule of Kwame Nkrumah, one of the foremost African political leaders of the post-colonial era; socialism was also implemented as the economic system of the country. 

Socialism, as a domestic policy in Nkrumah’s seven-year development plan, was to be pursued toward “a complete ownership of the economy by the state.” A bewildering slate of legislative controls and regulations were imposed on imports, capital transfers, industry, minimum wages, the rights and powers of trade unions, prices, rents and interest rates. Private businesses were taken away and nationalized by the Nkrumah government. The result has also been unsurprising. Resources were mismanaged, inflation rose, and economic stagnation occurred in Ghana. Zimbabwe has also suffered from the myths of African socialism under Mugabe’s rule. Mugabe collectivized the means of production in the late 1980s when he became Zimbabwe’s strongman. 

Rampant corruption, huge budget deficits, and mismanagement of resources have dragged the economy, hyperinflation, 60 percent unemployment, and a desperate shortage of hard currency. These examples clearly demonstrate how socialism had utterly stagnated the economies of these countries until a market economy was once again reinstated.

But the question remains as to why Africans deeply believed in socialism and embraced it in the 1960s. In Africa, socialism was presented as an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist ideology while capitalism was perceived as the ideology of the oppressor, the colonizer, and of profit. Africans strongly believe in socialism because they think that socialism is compatible with African culture since African culture is a collectivist culture. African culture values the group over the individual. It values the concept of sharing, solidarity, and altruism. Of course, all these moral virtues are well-intended, but they play no substantial role in the improvement of the living standard of people. What improves the living standard of people is the ability to retain private property, to voluntarily exchange with one another what we own in order to create capital. Some African countries in the post-colonial era resisted the socialist temptation; notably countries like Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and South Africa.

For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, Côte d’Ivoire was the most economically advanced country in West Africa. While its neighbors were embracing socialism, Côte d’Ivoire opted for a market economy. Despite having an authoritarian political regime, like all African countries during that time; the Ivorian people were, nonetheless, economically free. They had the freedom to create businesses, and to expand private property. From 1960 to 1979, the GDP in Côte d’Ivoire grew at 8.1 percent per year, which means that in real terms capita, it increased from $595 to $1,114. Cote d’Ivoire’s economic expansion during that period was called “The Ivorian Miracle” because the country was exporting agricultural goods to the neighboring countries have had a shortage of food production due to their socialistic policies.

The Ivorian Miracle made Côte d’Ivoire the most prosperous nation in West Africa between 1960 and 1980.

What Africans have failed to grasp about capitalism and the free market is that, it is not a system intrinsic to Western culture. It is a system intrinsic to human nature regardless of race, ethnicity, or the local culture. Socialism has failed in Africa as it has failed in Eastern Europe, India, China and in South America. Even if Africa is culturally collectivist, it is important to comprehend that a group is a collectivity of individuals whereby each individual within the group is stimulated by the pursuit of his own interests. The pursuit of one’s self-interests is an intrinsic factor of human nature that no central authority can change regardless of the goal of the common good.

Despite the collectivist nature of African culture, African culture is not exempted from that natural law of human nature. Coercing human nature to do something that is not in harmony with the nature of human understanding, will result in failure. That is why socialism, wherever it is tried, will always fail.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,

Compare US pillaging with Russia-Iran-Turkey’s active involvement in a political solution to normalize Syria…

What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant: the first session of the Syrian Constitutional Committee.

The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called the Syrian National Dialogue Congress.

The 150-strong committee breaks down as 50 members of the Syrian opposition, 50 representing the government in Damascus and 50 representatives of civil society. Each group named 15 experts for the meetings in Geneva, held behind closed doors.

This development is a direct consequence of the laborious Astana process – articulated by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Essential initial input came from former UN Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura. Now UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen is working as a sort of mediator.

The committee started its deliberations in Geneva in early 2019.

Crucially, there are no senior members of the administration in Damascus nor from the opposition – apart from Ahmed Farouk Arnus, who is a low-ranking diplomat with the Syrian Foreign Ministry.

Among the opposition, predictably, there are no former leaders of weaponized factions. And no “moderate rebels.” The delegates include several former and current parliament members, university rectors and journalists.

After this first round, significantly, the committee’s co-chair, Ahmad Kuzbari, said:

“We hope that our next meeting could take place in our native land, in our beloved Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited capital in history.”

Even the opposition, which is part of the committee, hopes that a political deal will be clinched next year. According to co-chair Hadi al-Bahra:

“I hope that the 75th anniversary of the United Nations next year will be an opportunity to celebrate another achievement by the universal organization, namely the success of efforts under the auspices of a special envoy for political process, who will bring peace and justice to all Syrians.”

Join the patrol

The committee’s work in Geneva proceeds in parallel to ever-changing facts on the ground. These will certainly force more face-to-face negotiations between Presidents Putin and Erdogan, as Erdogan himself confirmed: “A conversation with Putin can take place any time. Everything depends on the course of events.”

“Events” seem not to be that incandescent, so far, even as Erdogan, predictably, releases the whiff of a threat in the air: “We reserve the right to resume military operation in Syria if terrorists approach at the distance of 30km to Turkey’s borders or continue attacks from any other Syrian area.”

Erdogan also said the de facto safe zone along the Turkish-Syrian border could be “expanded,” something that he would have to clear in minute detail with Moscow.

Those threats have already manifested on the ground. On Wednesday, Turkey and allied Islamist factions launched an attack against Tal Tamr, a historic Assyrian Christian enclave 50km deep inside Syrian territory – far beyond the scope of the 10km patrol zone or the 30km “safe” zone.

Poorly-armed Syrian troops pulled out under fierce attack, and with no apparent Russian cover. The Syrian military on the same day issued a public statement calling on the Syrian Democratic Forces to reintegrate under its command. The SDF has said a compromise must be reached first over semi-autonomy for the northeastern region. Thousands of residents in the meantime fled farther south to the more protected city of Hasakeh.

Two facts are absolutely crucial. The Syrian Kurds have completed their pull out ahead of schedule, as confirmed by Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. And, this Friday, Russia and Turkey start their joint military patrols to the depth of 7km away from the border, part of the de facto safe zone in northeast Syria.

The devil in the immense details is how Ankara is going to manage the territories that it now actually controls, and to which it plans to relocate as many as 2 million Syrian refugees.

Your oil? Mine

Then there’s the nagging issue that simply won’t go away: the American drive to “secure the oil” (Trump) and “protect” Syrian oilfields (the Pentagon), for all practical purposes from Syria.

In Geneva, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – alongside Iran’s Javad Zarif and Turkey’s Mevlut Cavusoglu – could not have been more scathing. Lavrov said Washington’s plan is “arrogant,” and violates international law. The very American presence on Syrian soil is “illegal,” he said.

All across the Global South, especially among countries in the Non-Aligned Movement, this is being interpreted, stripped to the bone, for what it is: the United States government illegally taking possession of natural resources of a third country via a military occupation.

And the Pentagon is warning that anyone attempting to contest it will be shot on sight. It remains to be seen whether the US Deep State would be willing to engage in a hot war with Russia over a few Syrian oilfields.

Under international law, the whole “securing the oil” scam is a euphemism for pillaging, pure and simple. Every single takfiri or jihadi outfit operating across the “Greater Middle East” will converge, perversely, to the same conclusion: US “efforts” across the lands of Islam are all about the oil.

Now compare that with Russia-Iran-Turkey’s active involvement in a political solution and normalization of Syria – not to mention, behind the scenes, China, which quietly donates rice and aims for widespread investment in a pacified Syria positioned as a key Eastern Mediterranean node of the New Silk Roads.

It’s long been said that millennials have the power to disrupt and reshape entire industries.

Most recently, as Visual Capitalist’s Katie Jones points out, this effect has been seen in the retail landscape, where millennial spending habits are setting the tone for the market’s future.

Not only does the millennial generation demand the convenience of making instant purchases – but they can now rent almost anything they want, anytime, and anywhere.

Visualizing the Growth of the Rental Economy

Today’s infographic from Adweek takes a deeper look at the consumer goods rental economy, and the potential long-term impact of this shift in buyer behavior.

Although the current market for rentals is still in its early stages, the sheer momentum that the industry has gained in the last year is enough to threaten even the largest retailers—forcing them to reconsider their own business models.

The data for the visualization above comes from market research company Lab 42. In a survey of 500 people, they found that 94% of the U.S. population has participated in the sharing economy in one way or another.

While the sharing economy spotlight typically shines on global behemoths like Airbnb and Uber, the research used to populate this infographic focuses on renting consumer goods for a short period of time, as a sub-segment of the sharing economy.

The Renting Revolution

Offerings within the rental sector have exploded over the last decade, with furniture being the number one category that consumers rent.

According to the infographic, reasons for renting furniture include:

• Temporary housing: 45%

• Expensive upfront costs: 43%

• Testing products before committing: 41%

• Hosting events at home: 35%

• Moving into a new home: 29%

• Redesigning a house: 27%

Other products that consumers rent include gaming systems, clothes, tools, and technology. Female renters are more likely to rent furniture, clothes, and jewelry, while male renters are more likely to rent tools and gaming systems.

Renting goods is predominantly done on an as-needed basis. The Lab 42 report states that for clothing, 77% of respondents indicate that they either rent, or would rent for a formal event.

The End of Ownership?

Despite the common misconception that millennials are driven by emotional needs, the reasons behind why they rent consumer goods are much more pragmatic.

• Test things before purchasing: 57%

• Need a temporary solution: 55%

• Need an item or a service for a short time-frame : 52%

• Less expensive than buying: 43%

• More convenient than buying: 42%

Further, only 6% said that they rent because they do not like owning things. This tells us that the rental economy does not indicate the end of ownership, but rather, provides a strategy for consumers to try before they buy.

Attitudes Towards Sustainability

According to the research, very few millennials choose to rent consumer goods because it is better for the environment. However, Nielsen claim that 73% of millennials are willing to pay more money for sustainable offerings—impacting both retail and rental industries.

As evidence of this, Ikea will test a range of subscription-based leasing offers in all 30 of its markets by 2020 in a bid to appeal to environmentally conscious consumers and boost its sustainability credentials. If Ikea’s evolving business model is a success, it could open the floodgates for others to follow suit.

A Promising Market

In the clothing rental space, brands like Rent the Runway pave the way, but there has also been an explosion of startups entering the market in the last year.

One example is the monthly subscription service Nuuly. The company offers consumers access to over 100 third-party brands and vintage items. Consumers can borrow up to six items a month for $88. Similarly, American Eagle’s Style Drop program rents out the latest collections for a flat monthly fee of $49.95.

As more companies incorporate short-term rental services into their offerings, more millennials will shift their behavior from buying to renting—disrupting the traditional retail business model as we know it. With that being said, the impact of millennials having it all, and owning none of it, is yet to be determined.

Authored by Mike Adams via NaturalNews.com,

Today we’ve published a powerful new video on Brighteon.com that explains how you are a “slave wage worker” owned by a globalist corporation known as the United States of America.

The video explains how the ability of the Federal Reserve to create new debt (i.e. print new wealth for the elite political criminals who run everything) hinges on the ability of the government to confiscate wealth from workers who are tracked with “social security” numbers.

The term “social security” doesn’t mean security for you. It means that you are being securitized as a guarantee of future confiscated income to support the creation of new debt. You are the security for the Treasury / Fed scam of creating new money, in other words.

It’s not about providing security for you; it’s about exploiting you to provide security for new debt.

That’s why the social security trust fund is already tapped out. The criminal bureaucrats who run the corrupt government have already spent the money they’ve stolen from you, and the only way you’ll ever get it back is if they continue stealing more money from the next generation of workers.

It’s all a Ponzi scheme, in other words. And like every Ponzi scheme, it will eventually run out of new victims to exploit, causing it to catastrophically implode.

Watch the full video to learn more.

Brighteon.com, by the way, has just rolled out a major upgrade, including new video categories on the home page, video channel subscribers and video like buttons. (Many glitches were just resolved today, and the full feature set is now active.)

Any hopes that the replacement of Mario Draghi, who on Halloween left the ECB more polarized than ever, as the core European nations revolted against the Italian’s profligately loose monetary policy in an unprecedented public demonstration of discord within the European Central Bank…

… with the ECB’s new head, former IMF Director and convicted criminal, Christine Lagarde would result in some easing of tensions, were promptly crushed when Lagarde picked up where Draghi left off, calling on Germany and the Netherlands to use their budget surpluses to fund investments that would help stimulate the economy, in a sharp rebuke that will not win the former French finance minister any friends in fiscally conservative Germany.

In an appeal to Germany’s sense of solidarity, and in hopes that Germany’s memory of hyperinflation has faded enough, Lagarde said that there “isn’t enough solidarity” in the single currency area, adding: “We share a currency, but we don’t share much budgetary policy for now.”

“Those that have the room for manoeuvre, those that have a budget surplus, that’s to say Germany, the Netherlands, why not use that budget surplus and invest in infrastructure? Why not invest in education? Why not invest in innovation, to allow for a better rebalancing?” asked Lagarde, blaming Germany and the Netherlands for living within their means, and demanding they should no longer do so, just because most other Europeans decided to pull a page out of the American playbook, and live exorbitantly outside of their means.

Lagarde’s direct attempt at shaming Europe’s fiscal conservatives was nothing short of shocking: normally ECB officials avoid naming individual countries in public statements, because their mandate is to act in the interests of the eurozone as a whole. But when Lagarde made her speech she had not yet officially taken over at the Frankfurt-based institution — she succeeds Mario Draghi on Friday.

We somehow doubt this “explanation” will fly with the German population, which sees itself as funding peripheral Europe’s profligate ways for the past decade, even as it benefited from the weak euro to supercharge the German export machine.

And just to guarantee she is as resented by Germany as was Mario Draghi, she said that the German and Dutch governments, which last year had budget surpluses of 2% and 1.5% respectively, “have not really made the necessary efforts,” she added, referring to establishment’s increasing desperation to force anyone with an even remotely normal balance sheet to sink to the same level as their insolvent peers.

As for the punchline, Lagarde defended the negative interest rates introduced by her predecessor Draghi, arguing that people should be happier to have a job than a higher savings rate. This, as a reminder, comes at a time when virtually everyone who is not named “Draghi” or “Lagarde” thinks that negative rates are catastrophic, and assure doom for the Eurozone.

When asked about the impact of negative rates on savers, Ms Lagarde said on Thursday that they should think about how much worse the situation would be if the ECB had not cut rates as much as it had.

“Would we not be in a situation today with much higher unemployment and a far lower growth rate, and isn’t it true that ultimately we have done the right thing to act in favor of jobs and of growth rather than the protection of savers?” she asked.

The unemployment rate in the 19-country eurozone has fallen from 12 per cent in 2013 to 8.2 per cent last year. GDP growth in the single currency zone was 1.8 per cent last year and the ECB expects it to slow to 1.1 per cent this year.

Finally, for those curious if the authorities will stop at anything to destroy the currency and send rates to even more negative levels if it means kicking the can on a global, populist uprising, by just a few months, weeks or days, here is the answer: “We should be happier to have a job than to have our savings protected,” said Lagarde.

“I think that it is in this spirit that monetary policy has been decided by my predecessors and I think they made quite a beneficial choice.”

Let’s check back on that statement in a year, shall we?

Of course, there is no magic solution here: all the ECB has done is kick the can, and ensure that the next crisis will be even worse than if some semblance of a price-clearing reality had been allowed under Draghi’s 8 years. Instead, the ECB’s balance sheet exploded to €4.7 trillion euros, as the world’s largest central bank-cum-hedge fund bought every bond in sight in hopes of keeping asset prices artificially elevated.

In October, the ECB, less than a year after it ended QE in a failed attempt to “renormalize” monetary policy, announced it would cut rates to a record -0.5% and unveiled open-ended plans to start buying €20bn of bonds starting in November.

Needless to say, the comments by the former French finance minister confirm market expectations that she is likely to pursue similar monetary policy strategy to Draghi who flooded the financial system with cheap money to fight slowing growth and inflation while calling on governments to do more through fiscal policy to take the burden off the central bank.

In the end, the consequences of Draghi’s monetary policy, as we explained before, will be catastrophic, but the former Goldman partner was wise enough to get off the European Titanic before it hit the iceberg. It will now be Lagarde’s task to save as many people as possible once the ship starts sinking, and judging by her remarks, she is perfectly fine of not only going down with the ship, but also being blamed for the collision.

Authored by Congressman Jim Banks, op-ed via RealClearPolitics.com,

Reddit administrators’ decision to “quarantine” r/The_Donald, a subreddit forum for fans of President Trump and Reddit’s largest conservative community, is a recent and egregious example of social media sites meddling in political affairs. 

It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly left wing. For every $1 that employees at the world’s biggest technology companies donated to Donald Trump, they gave $60 to Hillary Clinton. 

But tech CEOs assure conservatives that their company’s overwhelming partisanship somehow has no effect on the content they publish. They claim that because their sites are run by algorithms, not people, they’ve managed to uphold a Spockian political impartiality. What a bunch of baloney! Many of tech companies’ editorial decisions are made by people, and ultimately their algorithms were created by a group 99% opposed Donald Trump’s election. Tech CEOs may imitate Spock’s empty gaze, but they’ve strayed far from his actual disposition.  

The original r/The_Donald “quarantine” was put in place for what site administrators described as “repeated rule breaking behavior.” Some of r/The_Donald’s 770,000 users commented “encouragements to violence” after Oregon Gov. Kate Brown called on state police to corral Republican representatives back to the statehouse following a skipped global warming vote. 

The comments in question were reprehensible and clearly violated Reddit’s rules. The problem is that Reddit, with its 330 million users, was and is rife with similarly disgusting rhetoric. After the controversy in Oregon, a commenter in the liberal subreddit r/Politics had the following to say about Republican legislators: “Shoot these f*ckers. In the knees. For running like pieces of sh*t.” I’m not going to belabor my point and list the thousands of unaddressed, rule-breaking comments on left-wing subreddits. The point is, when such comments are posted in apolitical or left-wing subreddits, nothing happens. Reddit has a responsibility to ensure that it applies its rules equally to all political content.

Reddit’s decision to quarantine r/The_Donald is not just unfair — Reddit’s size ensures that it will have far-reaching political effects. Although CEO Steve Huffman touted his small staff during a recent House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing, the truth is that Reddit is an online behemoth. It is the third biggest social media site in the U.S. based on overall web page visits, with a larger reach than Facebook. Reddit’s political forums are important hubs of discussion, debate and organization. 

An obvious instance of real-world political effect is the July 27, 2016 question-and-answer session then-candidate Trump held with his supporters on r/The_Donald. Conversely, before the 2016 election Trump’s staff closely monitored the subreddit’s political temperature. Reddit has now intentionally blocked off an avenue of communication between the president and his supporters ahead of the 2020 election. 

Other political subreddits, such as r/SandersForPresident, have seen their political efforts uninterrupted. Sen. Sanders hosted a Q&A session there this past June. During the 2016 campaign, in addition to rallying support for Sanders, the subreddit served as a place to coordinate campaign activity. In 2016, a moderator of r/SandersForPresident posted that he had “just got off a conference call with the Bernie 2016 national staff” and relayed instructions for effective political volunteering. 

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated that the Internet Research Agency (IRA) played a central role in the “most aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process” that he’d ever seen.

Evidently, this was before Reddit quarantined r/The_Donald. 

According to a Senate Intelligence Committee report, over a year-long period the 3,900 IRA-connected Twitter accounts posted 600,000 tweets regarding Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Well, researchers from the University of Alabama calculated that from July 2016 to February 2017 r/The_Donald was responsible for an estimated 2,771,030 tweets linking to news stories. 

To recap, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is set to influence conversation about the 2020 election on Twitter 4.5 times as much as Vladimir Putin influenced the 2016 electoral conversation. This doesn’t account for the much larger effect of the quarantine on Reddit’s own political discussion, which is comparable in scope to Twitter’s. I look forward to the Intelligence Community’s soon-to-be-announced special investigation.  

During a 2018 interview with Andrew Marantz of the New Yorker, Reddit’s CEO said, “I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections,” followed by “we wouldn’t do it, of course.” Of course, that wasn’t true. 

Republicans need to start speaking out about the treatment we’ve received from technology companies. We need to understand that nobody else will stand up for us. It’s time to start exploring legislative solutions to big tech’s bias. The alternative is accepting a status quo where enormous corporations use their publishing power to favor Democratic presidential candidates.

Having already created 12 free trade zones (with 6 more coming soon) in and around major Chinese metro areas…

… Beijing’s next project to boost commerce is more ambitious than anything seen on earth before. Literally.

According to the Global Times, China plans to establish an Earth-moon space economic zone by 2050, which is expected to generate $10 trillion worth of services per year. The zone will cover areas of space near Earth, the moon and in between.

Bao Weimin, director of the Science and Technology Commission of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, revealed the ambitious plan at a seminar last week on the space economy, Chinese media reported Friday. CAST is a state-owned company focused on researching, making and launching carrier rockets, satellites, spacecraft and space stations. 

Perhaps because by 2050 all of China will be one giant free trade zone (even though the US Trade war will still not be over), the proposed zone will cover areas of space near Earth, the moon and in between, Weimin said, adding that companies involved in basic industries, application exploration and development will feature at the zone, which will focus on three key fields: interspace transport, space resource detection and space-based infrastructure.

In a report on developing earth and moon space, Bao shared his thoughts on the economic potential in this field and pledged that the country would study its reliability, cost and flight-style transportation system between the Earth and moon, The Science and Technology Daily reported Friday.

He pledged to complete basic research and make a breakthrough on key technologies before 2030 and establish the transportation system by 2040.  By 2050, China could successfully establish an earth-moon space economic zone, he said.

In other words, while the US contemplates a Green New Deal, China is set to counter with a “Space New Deal”, which would likely cost tens of trillions too.

As the Global Times notes, many Chinese netizens were “thrilled” by the news, with some saying that “if I can catch a flight to the moon during the rest of my life, I would die without any regrets.”

An aerospace scholar told the Global Times that by exploring earth-moon space, China can gain a lot, such as developing the space travel industry or conducting experiments on the moon.

As early as 2016, Zhang Yulin, then deputy commander-in-chief of China’s manned space program, told media that they had plans to explore Earth-moon space.

In May 2018, China launched a relay satellite to set up a communications link between the Earth and the then planned Chang’e-4 lunar probe, which accomplished the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon in January. Chinese scientists and engineers hope the Queqiao satellite will form a communications bridge between controllers on Earth and the far side of the moon.

Aerospace fans predicted that the plan will accelerate many important projects, including the Long March-5 carrier rocket, China’s largest launch vehicle, which is expected to be used to send the Chang’e-5 probe in 2020 to bring moon samples back to Earth, and China’s heavy-lift carrier rocket, the Long March-9, which is expected to make its first flight around 2030 and will support manned lunar exploration, deep space exploration and construction of a space-based solar power plant.

According to Yicai Globa, China will strive to complete its basic research in these fields by 2020, make breakthroughs in key technologies by 2030, and have a robust, low-cost space transport system in place by 2040 in order to make the zone a reality.

Needless to say, between the US “Green New Deal”, and China’s “Space new Deal”, US and Chinese money printers will be on overdrive for the next several decades, working dilligently to inflate away the world’s record debt load and in the process destroy the world’s two most important fiat currencies.

Authored by Edward Curtin via Off-Guardian.org,

It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news. There’s something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of “conspiracy theorists” is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor. But with a twisted twist.

The “Deep State” has been redefined as career bureaucrats doing their patriotic duty

It was two years ago, early in the Trump administration, when The New Yorker and Salon, among many others, were asserting in no uncertain terms that there was no deep state in the United States, and so Trump had nothing to fear from that quarter since it was a figment of his paranoia.

Kit Knightly, writing in the Off-Guardian, brilliantly demolished this spurious propaganda at the time in a must read reminder of how tricksters play their games.

The corporate mass-media has recently discovered a “deep state” that they claim to be not some evil group of assassins who work for the super-rich owners of the country and murder their own president (JFK) and other unpatriotic dissidents (Malcom X, MLK, RK, among others) and undermine democracy home and abroad, but are now said to be just fine upstanding American citizens who work within the government bureaucracies and are patriotic believers in democracy intent on doing the right thing.

This redefinition has been in the works for a few years, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that this tricky treat was being prepared for our consumption a few years ago by The Council on Foreign Relations.

In its September/October 2017 edition of its journal Foreign Affairs, Jon D. Michaels, in “Trump and the Deep State: The Government Strikes Back,” writes:

Furious at what they consider treachery by internal saboteurs, the president and his surrogates have responded by borrowing a bit of political science jargon, claiming to be victims of the “deep state,” a conspiracy of powerful, unelected bureaucrats secretly pursuing their own agenda.

The concept of a deep state is valuable in its original context, the study of developing countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where shadowy elites in the military and government ministries have been known to countermand or simply defy democratic directives. Yet it has little relevance to the United States, where governmental power structures are almost entirely transparent, egalitarian, and rule-bound.

The White House is correct to perceive widespread resistance inside the government to many of its endeavors. But the same way the administration’s media problems come not from “fake news” but simply from news, so its bureaucratic problems come not from an insidious, undemocratic “deep state” but simply from the state—the large, complex hive of people and procedures that constitute the U.S. federal government.

Notice how in these comical passages about U.S. government transparency and egalitarianism, Michaels slyly and falsely attributes to Trump the very definition – “unelected bureaucrats” – that in the next paragraph he claims to be the real deep state, which is just the state power structures.

Pseudo-innocence conquers all here as there is no mention of the Democratic party, Russiagate, etc., and all the machinations led by the intelligence services and Democratic forces to oust Trump from the day he was elected.

State power structures just move so quickly, as anyone knows who has studied the speed with which bureaucracies operate. Ask Max Weber.

Drip by drip over the past few years, this “state bureaucracy” meme has been introduced by the mainstream media propagandists as they have gradually revealed that the government deep-staters are just doing their patriotic duty in trying openly to oust an elected president.

Many writers have commented on the recent New York Times article, “Trump’s War on the ‘Deep State’ Turns Against Him” asserting that the Times has finally admitted to the existence of the deep state, which is true as far as it goes, which is not too far. But in this game of deceptive revelations – going shallower to go deeper – what is missing is a focus on the linguistic mind control involved in the changed definition.

Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m convinced.

In a recent article by Robert W. Merry, whose intentions I am not questioning – “New York Times Confirms: It’s Trump Versus the Deep State” – originally published at The American Conservative and widely reprinted, the lead-in to the article proper reads:

Even the Gray Lady admits the president is up against a powerful bureaucracy that wants him sunk.”

So the “powerful bureaucracy” redefinition, this immovable force of government bureaucrats, is slipped into public consciousness as what the deep state supposedly is. Gone are CIA conspirators and evil doers. In their place we find career civil servants doing their patriotic duty.

Then there is The New York Times’ columnist James Stewart who, appearing on the Today Show recently, where he was promoting his new book, told Savannah Guthrie that:

Well, you meet these characters in my book, and the fact is, in a sense, he’s [Trump] right. There is a deep state…there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law. They do not work for the President. They work for the American people.

And, as Comey told me in my book, ‘thank goodness for that,’ because they are protecting the Constitution and the people when individuals – we don’t have a monarch, we don’t have a dictator – they restrain them from crossing the boundaries of law.

What Trump calls the deep state in the United States is protecting the American people and protecting the Constitution. It’s a positive thing in this sense.

So again we are told that the deep-state bureaucracy is defending the Constitution and protecting the American people, as James Comey told Stewart, “in my book, ‘thank goodness for that,’” as he put it so eloquently.

These guys talk in books, of course, not person to person, but that is the level not just of English grammar and general stupidity, but of the brazen bullshit these guys are capable of.

This new and shallow deep state definition has buried the old meaning of the deep state as evil conspirators carrying out coup d’états, assassinations, and massive media propaganda campaigns at home and abroad, and who, by implication and direct declaration, never existed in the good old U.S.A. but only in countries such as Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan where shadowy elites killed and deposed leaders and opponents in an endless series of coup d’états.

No mention in Foreign Affairs, of course, of the American support for the ruthless leaders of these countries who have always been our dear allies when they obey our every order and serve as our servile proxies in murder and mayhem.

Even Edward Snowden, the courageous whistleblower in exile in Russia, in a recent interview with Joe Rogan, repeats this nonsense when he says the deep state is just “career government officials” who want to keep their jobs and who outlast presidents. From his own experience, he should know better. Much better.

Interestingly, he suggests that he does when he tells Rogan that “every president since Kennedy” has been successfully “feared up” by the intelligence agencies so they will do their bidding.

He doesn’t need to add that JFK, for fearlessly refusing the bait, was shot in the head in broad daylight to send a message to those who would follow.

Linguistic mind-control is insidious like the slow drip of a water faucet. After a while you don’t hear it and just go about your business, even as your mind, like a rotting rubber washer, keeps disintegrating under propaganda’s endless reiterations.

To think that the deep state is government employees just doing their patriotic duty is plain idiocy and plainer propaganda.

It is a trick, not the treat it is made to seem.

A team of academics from Swinburne University and VicHealth studied 1,520 Victorians aged 12 to 25, and examined their experience of loneliness, asking questions about their symptoms of depression and social anxiety. The study confirmed that loneliness – the biggest driver behind symptoms of depression – has become a global epidemic tied to the rise of social media.

Here’s what they found: One in four young people – aged 12 to 25 – reported feeling lonely for three or more days within the last week. Among 18 to 25 year olds, one in three – 35% – reported feeling lonely three or more times a week. We also found that higher levels of loneliness increases a young adult’s risk of developing depression by 12% and social anxiety by 10%, according to the WEF.

Adolescents aged 12 to 17 reported better outcomes, with one in seven (13%) feeling lonely three or more times a week. Participants in this age group were also less likely to report symptoms of depression and social anxiety than the 18 to 25 year olds.

There is some evidence that those who are lonely are more likely to use the internet for social interactions, while spending less time on legitimate interactions.

However, some argue that social media can be used to replace offline relationships with online ones, citing one new study. Another recent study found that the relationship between social media use and psychological distress simply isn’t all that clear. Over a six-month period, people who are lonely are more likely to experience higher rates of depression, social anxiety and paranoia. Being socially anxious can also lead to more loneliness at a later time. the study said.

But when lonely people do get out there and socialize, they are more likely to engage in self-defeating actions, such as being less cooperative, while also showing more negative emotions and body language. This is done in an (often unconscious) attempt to disengage and protect themselves from rejection.

Now, doctors are increasingly challenging young people to identify their strengths and learn how they’re important in forging strong, meaningful relationships. Meanwhile, challenging unhelpful thinking and negative views about others is helping more young people learn how to use humor as a strength.

These tools could help young people learn skills to develop and maintain meaningful relationships. And because lonely people are more likely to avoid others, digital tools could also be used as one way to help young people build social confidence and practice new skills within a safe space.

Ultimately, a cornerstone of any solution to the rise in loneliness-fueled depression, will be to normalize feelings of loneliness, so feeling lonely is seen not as a weakness but rather as an innate human need to connect.

When it is ignored, loneliness can have a seriously negatively impact on an individual’s health, especially when it is allowed to persist.