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Authored by Elijah Magnier, Middle East based chief international war correspondent for Al Rai Media

“Trump will pull out US forces in 30 days”… “Trump won’t withdraw now”… “Trump will pull out from Syria in four months”… “The US forces began withdrawing military equipment but not the personnel”… “Trump will maintain a 20 mile buffer zone in Syria”…All these contradictory announcements have come from the White House in the last month or so, indicating some combination of the current occupant of the White House’s lack of experience in foreign policy, or lack of control of his own administration.

Nobody in the Middle East believes Trump. Only President Erdogan confirmed the serious intention of the US to withdraw from Syria but was knocked down by Trump’s threat to “cripple the Turkish economy if Turkey attacks the Kurds”. But soon after Trump’s threat to Erdogan, he again changed his mind and suddenly announced a new plan for a buffer zone “to protect the Kurds”, Turkey’s worse enemies in the Levant. Trump is signaling a high degree of confusion about his intention to stay or leave Syria.

It doesn’t matter if the world doesn’t understand what Trump’s plan is. There is no point in trying to analyse and predict the next step because Trump himself doesn’t seem to know what to do next. He wakes up with one decision and seems to change it hours later or the following day.

Nevertheless, Trump’s continuously changing plans are not preventing his adversary the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani — the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in the al Quds Brigade which perceives itself responsible for supporting all movements of the oppressed peoples in the world, mainly the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi, Palestinian and Afghan groups, but others as well — from making plans to counter Trump in Syria and Iraq.

Well informed sources say “Soleimani is holding meetings with various of his allies’ groups in the Middle East to stand against US forces and push them away from Iraq and Syria”. According to these sources, neither Iran nor Russia believe in Trump’s declared intention to withdraw and both are convinced that at least some US forces will remain in the Levant.

Soleimani is planning to move more aggressively with his allies once the last ISIS stronghold east of the Euphrates is reconquered. ISIS maintains an area of around 15 sq km with several villages on the Euphrates and is currently under attack by Kurdish forces supported by the coalition.

President Bashar al-Assad agreed with the Iraqi National Security Advisor Faleh al-Fayyad to reactivate coordination of tribal groups in northeast Syria with Iraqi forces. “Assad gave the green light to Iraq to coordinate with the Arab tribes in Syria and to push Iraqi security forces into Syria when and if needed to end ISIS control if the US is not willing to finishing the job quickly”.

Such an arrangement has potential disadvantages Syria and Iraq are aware of. The US forces occupying Northeast Syria could attack Iraqi-Syrian forces attacking ISIS controlled areas as they did in the past. Last year, Israeli jets bombed the Hashd al-Shaabi command and control headquarters on the borders with Syria and US jets twice destroyed Syrian forces trying to attack ISIS, one group crossing the Euphrates, and other advancing towards al-Tanf.

“If and when the US attack Iraqi forces, such an act of aggression will put pressure on the Iraqi government to ask for the total withdrawal of the US forces from Iraq. If this doesn’t happen, another source of leverage will be to make sure US forces in Iraq are under continuous threat. There are many groups in Mesopotamia unfriendly to the US, determined to see their country free from any foreign troops, particularly the US forces, considered the source of all the troubles the Middle East suffers from”, say the sources.

Thus, the “Axis of the Resistance” is planning to face down US hegemony in the Levant and Mesopotamia. Iraq and Syria are not friends of Washington and will never act like the Gulf monarchies propped up by US protection. If the US establishment decides to stay in Syria and continue its occupation of the country or establish a “buffer zone”, the cards will be reshuffled again.

If this happens, Turkey, considered to date a friend of Russia, may become an enemy by occupying northeast Syria and deploying forces in the buffer zone suggested by Trump. If and when Turkey does that, it will pass into the hostile camp by opposing Russia’s plan to protect the integrity of Syria. Such an accommodation with the US might help Turkey fulfill its dream of occupying part of Syria. In this case, Turkey will be considered an enemy and will suffer attacks from the Syrians, supported by Damascus. Local Arab tribes and Kurds will be armed, enough to defend themselves and to counter attack Turkish forces or their allies in al-Hasaka. 

The Kurds and Damascus will then have the same objective, i.e. the return of northeast Syria to Syrian army control rather than subject to Turkish control or a US-Turkish understanding. And Iran will fight the US through its allies in the Middle East, including Iraq.

What is unclear is why the Syrian Democratic Front (SDF – led by Kurds) announced its readiness to support the creation of a safe-zone, a zone Turkey is gathering for it over 80,000 men and is hoping to control around 420 km wide and 32 km deep (bigger than the seize of Lebanon) in Kurdish controlled provinces of Raqqa and al-Hasaka. 

The US establishment has asked the Iranians to mediate with the Taliban to spare US forces from lethal attacks. The US establishment also asked Iran to refrain from attacking its troops in Iraq. Assent to these requests will be forthcoming if the US responds to one important request from Iran: total withdrawal from Syria.

If Trump cannot do it, the US president may be sweating through a hot summer this year.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2U33XUT Tyler Durden

Authored by Craig Murray,

A Cabinet Office source tells me today No. 10 is considering agreeing a second referendum with three choices: No Deal Brexit, May’s Deal or No Brexit. It would be by alternative vote, ie you rate your preferences 1, 2. The thinking is that the first round might go No Deal 23, May’s Deal 37, No Brexit 40. The second round would then go May’s Deal 60, No Brexit 40.

They claim there is opinion poll evidence to support this. But I see a flaw. It is predicated on the current situation, where a lot of Remainers are prepared to support Brexit, to respect the referendum result. But surely a second referendum would release that psychological constraint and the overwhelming majority of Remainers would seize the opportunity to try and ditch Brexit?

The advantage of the ploy from May’s viewpoint is that it presents her “deal” as the only alternative to No Deal or No Brexit, and in an AV vote the compromise position is always boosted. What is more it keeps the numerous other options for deals outwith her red lines – eg EFTA, Single Market, Customs Union, EEA – all off the ballot paper. This limited choice referendum thus appeals to May as “out-maneuvering” the opposition parties. The idea is to sucker them in to talk on a second referendum, then produce this slanted one.

This has not been adopted as policy yet, but No.10 and the Cabinet Office are working on the practicalities of this option.

There will almost certainly be a vote on a second referendum amendment in the government motion debate now starting on 29 January. One very close adviser to Jeremy Corbyn is suggesting to him that he gives a free vote, in order to prevent the row that the convoluted Conference motion tried to put off by focusing on process not substance, but on which time is running out. The adviser’s take is that the Tories will whip against the “People’s Vote” and a Labour free vote will lead to the second referendum being defeated. He was not however aware of the possibility the Tories will push their version of a second referendum, and I was able to brief him on that.

Today I walked down to Tesco to get my milk and, as every day, I passed the huddle of homeless people who sleep in the close. It illustrated vividly how disconnected Westminster is from the very real problems of desperate poverty that exist in our society. Observing the UK in the last phases of decline of a once great Empire, with its entirely dysfunctional political system and its fractured society, I cannot shake the impression of how small and sordid it all is.

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Europe’s most conservative parties – some of which are still relatively young, have been rapidly gaining support over the last several years as nationalists across the continent speak out in opposition to mass migration, high taxes and the open-border policies espoused by globalist leadership. 

Ahead of the upcoming European Parliament elections in May, many have been wondering what the various nationalist parties think of the EU. Answering that question is Germany’s public international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. 

***

AfD (Germany) — 1 MEP

Post-war Germany’s most successful far-right political party finally set out its position on the EU at a party conference on Sunday.

The new AfD European election manifesto says Germany should abandon the euro currency. That position that can be traced to the party’s euroskeptic origins in 2013, when the AfD was founded as a direct protest against Brussels’ plans to bail out Greece in the aftermath of the European financial crisis.

But despite a concerted effort from the party’s hardliners, the AfD has stopped short of demanding that Germany leave the EU altogether. “Whoever toys with the idea of a Dexit also needs to ask themselves if this is not a utopia and should we be more realistic,” party leader Alexander Gauland told delegates at the party conference in Riesa, Saxony.

That compromise means the AfD supports restricting the EU to economic cooperation and opposing a joint EU defense and foreign policy.

National Rally (France) — 15 MEPs

As one of the oldest far-right parties on this list, France’s National Rally (known as the National Front until last summer) has held a number of different positions in its past. A basically a pro-European party intially, the FN u-turned in the early 2000s, when leader Jean-Marie Le Pen called for France to leave the EU and re-introduce the franc.

Le Pen’s FN was also perhaps the first major party to link the EU to the idea of a shadowy “world government” or even a “New World Order,” planting suspicions about Brussels as a globalist, anti-democratic conspiracy.

His daughter and successor Marine Le Pen, who has successfully shifted the party to the mainstream (it took 25 percent of the vote in France’s European election in 2014), does not want the EU abolished, but she does want an end to one of its guiding freedoms. She has called for Europe’s border checks to be reinstated and the Schengen free movement area to be ditched. Last year she also denounced the EU’s “arrogant tyranny” and the “European oligarchy barricaded in Brussels.”

Lega Nord (Italy) — 6 MEPs

Lega Nord (or just Lega, as it was rebranded ahead of last year’s Italian election) has slowly crept from its regional roots to establishing its appeal across Italy — it is now part of the government in Rome, with its leader, Matteo Salvini, serving as both deputy prime minister and interior minister.

Salvini is also a fierce critic of the EU and the euro, which he once described as a “crime against humanity.” Indeed, Salvini’s leadership has dragged Lega Nord closer to euroskepticism. While Lega Nord voted in favor of the Treaty of Lisbon, the constitutional basis of the EU, signed in 2007, Salvini and other major Lega figures have called for Italy to leave the bloc. That is not the official party position, however, and is a marked change from positions expressed by Salvini’s predecessor, Roberto Maroni, who advocated the direct election of the European Commission president and the acceleration of European integration.

UK Independence Party (UK) — 7 MEPs

UKIP was founded in 1991 with the sole purpose of opposing the EU and all it stood for, eventually spearheading a movement under long-term leader Nigel Farage that led to the Brexit referendum in 2016. The party continues to insist that the EU is fundamentally undemocratic, and has emphasized its opposition to the bloc (especially its perception that the EU is responsible for allowing migrants into the UK) much more strongly than any other party in Europe. Though it has widened its focus to other issues in the past few years, UKIP’s policies are still often framed in terms of how they relate to the EU.

Fidesz (Hungary) — 11 MEPs

The party of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has also radically shifted its position on Europe since its foundation in 1988, when it began as a student movement that favored closer European integration, and when it campaigned for Hungary’s accession to the EU in 2004. Since then, Orban’s party has become more and more conservative, and his rhetoric increasingly anti-EU.

But despite this, and the fact that the EU has instituted dozens of procedures against Hungary for violating its membership criteria, Orban’s increasingly authoritarian government has made no move towards leaving the bloc.

Law and Justice (Poland) – 16 MEPs

Poland’s conservative ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has taken a broadly anti-Brussels position, favoring closer ties with the United States and opposing closer integration in the EU. The PiS’ nationalist tendencies have led it to more and more anti-EU rhetoric — especially in the wake of the influx of refugees into Europe in 2015, when both Poland and Hungary vehemently resisted Brussels’ attempts to introduce a migrant quota. Indeed, PiS leader and former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has publicly declared his party’s alliance with Orban in Hungary.

Party for Freedom (Netherlands) — 4 MEPs

Perhaps closest in spirit to UKIP, the second-largest party in the Dutch parliament has always favored withdrawal from the EU. Like UKIP, the Party for Freedom (PVV) has consistently held the EU responsible for the influx of migrants to Central European members states such as Poland and Romania.

Its other positions include abandoning the euro, abolishing the European Parliament and no cooperation in any EU activity.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2Cv0mrG Tyler Durden

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via The Unz Review,

“Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.”

So said President Charles De Gaulle, who in 1966 ordered NATO to vacate its Paris headquarters and get out of France.

NATO this year celebrates a major birthday. The young girl of 1966 is no longer young. The alliance is 70 years old.

And under this aging NATO today, the U.S. is committed to treat an attack on any one of 28 nations from Estonia to Montenegro to Romania to Albania as an attack on the United States.

The time is ripe for a strategic review of these war guarantees to fight a nuclear-armed Russia in defense of countries across the length of Europe that few could find on a map.

Apparently, President Donald Trump, on trips to Europe, raised questions as to whether these war guarantees comport with vital U.S. interests and whether they could pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.

The shock of our establishment that Trump even raised this issue in front of Europeans suggests that the establishment, frozen in the realities of yesterday, ought to be made to justify these sweeping war guarantees.

Celebrated as “the most successful alliance in history,” NATO has had two histories. Some of us can yet recall its beginnings.

In 1948, Soviet troops, occupying eastern Germany all the way to the Elbe and surrounding Berlin, imposed a blockade on the city.

The regime in Prague was overthrown in a Communist coup. Foreign minister Jan Masaryk fell, or was thrown, from a third-story window to his death. In 1949, Stalin exploded an atomic bomb.

As the U.S. Army had gone home after V-E Day, the U.S. formed a new alliance to protect the crucial European powers — West Germany, France, Britain, Italy. Twelve nations agreed that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on them all.

Cross the Elbe and you are at war with us, including the U.S. with its nuclear arsenal, Stalin was, in effect, told. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops returned to Europe to send the message that America was serious.

Crucial to the alliance was the Yalta line dividing Europe agreed to by Stalin, FDR and Churchill at the 1945 Crimean summit on the Black Sea.

U.S. presidents, even when monstrous outrages were committed in Soviet-occupied Europe, did not cross this line into the Soviet sphere.

Truman did not send armored units up the highway to Berlin. He launched an airlift to break the Berlin blockade. Ike did not intervene to save the Hungarian rebels in 1956. JFK confined his rage at the building of the Berlin Wall to the rhetorical: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

LBJ did nothing to help the Czechs when, before the Democratic convention in 1968, Leonid Brezhnev sent Warsaw Pact tank armies to crush the Prague Spring.

When the Solidarity movement of Lech Walesa was crushed in Gdansk, Reagan sent copy and printing machines. At the Berlin Wall in 1988, he called on Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

Reagan never threatened to tear it down himself.

But beginning in 1989, the Wall was torn down, Germany was united, the Red Army went home, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the USSR broke apart into 15 nations, and Leninism expired in its birthplace.

As the threat that had led to NATO disappeared, many argued that the alliance created to deal with that threat should be allowed to fade away, and a free and prosperous Europe should now provide for its own defense.

It was not to be. The architect of Cold War containment, Dr. George Kennan, warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics would prove a “fateful error.”

This, said Kennan, would “inflame the nationalistic and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion” and “restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations.” Kennan was proven right.

America is now burdened with the duty to defend Europe from the Atlantic to the Baltic, even as we face a far greater threat in China, with an economy and population 10 times that of Russia.

And we must do this with a defense budget that is not half the share of the federal budget or the GDP that Eisenhower and Kennedy had.

Trump is president today because the American people concluded that our foreign policy elite, with their endless interventions where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, had bled and virtually bankrupted us, while kicking away all of the fruits of our Cold War victory.

Halfway into Trump’s term, the question is whether he is going to just talk about halting Cold War II with Russia, about demanding that Europe pay for its own defense, and about bringing the troops home — or whether he is going to act upon his convictions.

Our foreign policy establishment is determined to prevent Trump from carrying out his mandate. And if he means to carry out his agenda, he had best get on with it.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2RBSoHQ Tyler Durden

Authored by Umair Haque via Eudaimonia & Co,

Why America and Britain Are Self-Destructing (And What the World Can Learn From it)

It’s a striking fact of today’s world that the two rich societies in shocking, swift, sharp decline are America and Britain. Nowhere else in the world, for example, are real income, life expectancy, happiness, and trust all plummeting, apart from maybe Venezuela (No, “but at least we’re not Venezuela!” is not the bar to aim for, my friends.) 

Their downfall is, of course, a self-inflicted catastrophe. But the interesting question is: why? And what does it tell us about what it takes to prosper and thrive in the 21st century, which is something that America and Britain clearly aren’t doing, and maybe aren’t capable of doing?

Here’s an equally curious observation. America and Britain aren’t just any countries. They are the former hegemons of the world’s most powerful empires. Britain, until the first half of the 20th century, and America, picking up where Britain left off. Is this just a strange cosmic coincidence — that it is the two greatest empires of the most recent past who are the ones seemingly most incapable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century? There aren’t coincidences that great, my friends. Such tides of history always whisper lessons to be learned. What is this one trying to urgently teach us?

That there is a price to empire. A grave and ruinous one. And that price has grown over the centuries  –  so high that now, it is not worth paying anymore.

Let me explain what I mean — because it is not just about spending too much money and grasping too high. Not at all. It is about the kind of a place and people such a country ends up limited to being — and perhaps can then never really easily outgrow.

To be a great empire, you must also be a certain kind of culture, society, place— a people with a certain set of values, a certain kind of attitudes. You must cherish control and prize possession over humanity and empathy and wisdom. You must value brutal competition above all else — and train your children to be little warriors, basically, whether tossing them into seas, like Spartans, or making them do “active shooter drills.” You must be domineering and controlling and vengeful, feared, not loved — you must come to prize anger and rage as the only true or worthy emotions in life, not, say, intelligence gentleness, kindness, or happiness. The primary objective of your institutions, the aspiration of your best and brightest, must be subjugating others, instead of lifting them up — after all, empires are made of subjects, not equals. You must instill in people an admiration for violence — since empires are run with bullets, whether fired from drones or armies. Your science and art and so forth must be dedicated, fundamentally, to the proposition that somehow, you are the natural masters of the world which is your dominion — no matter how they claim to admire freedom and equality and truth. You cannot plan for any kind of long term good — your primary motive is simply to acquire, colonize, plunder, take the next possession.

In other words, to be an empire, you must cultivate the qualities of cruelty, of selfishness, of greed, of tribalism, socially. Of materialism and acquisitiveness and conformity to greed and selfishness, mentally. You must encourage the rise of supremacy and triumphalism and bigotry and misogyny, culturally. You must attach to all human life just one purpose: not happiness, or belonging, or the growth of meaning and purpose, but material gain, whether it’s measured in colonies, protectorates, slaves, bodies, or GDP. Thus, the overarching organizing principle of your entire empire must be just this: the strong survive, and the weak perish. Everyone — even the weak — must come to buy into this principle, treasure it, cheer it, applaud it — even when they themselves are the ones being destroyed. Just think of how Donald Trump embodies all those values to a comical, disgusting degree.

How else are you to run an empire? How else are you to convince people to go out there and conquer the world for you — instead of happily tilling their fields and loving their children, taking fields and children from others? You can’t do it without accomplishing most or all of the above. Every empire from Rome to Egypt to America to Britain has needed to build these ramparts and beams of the human mind and spirit to be an empire. Empires are Darwinian things, little pecking orders of humanity — what they are not is democracies, really, though they might be so in name, they cannot be in spirit, in intellect, in sentiment, in truth.

Now. Let’s observe the state of America and Britain today — and then connect the dots. What’s really curious about them? Just think of Trumpism and Brexit as you read the next paragraph.

These are societies which cannot brook the idea of being equals with any other. Isn’t that Trumpism and Brexit are really about — we must be number one? They are societies which cannot cooperate with any other — or even cooperate amongst themselves. They are societies which cannot plan for the long term. Societies which seem to revel in both their cruelty and their ignorance, while the world looks on, aghast. They prefer being Darwinian places to being humane ones. They would rather build walls than build schools and hospitals, minds and bodies. They are societies which cannot tolerate the idea that they do not still reign supreme — and the moment their supremacy is threatened, bang! They lash out even at their closest neighbours, allies, friends, and partners.

Don’t these two lists seem weirdly, eerily, strikingly similar to you — the list of the qualities it takes to be an empire, and the list of savage, intractable problems afflicting Britain and America, which have caused them to crater into extreme ruin? That’s not a coincidence either. It is cause and effect. Let me put that more clearly.

America and Britain built the world’s two biggest, most powerful empires — ever, period. Sure, America didn’t call countries it’s colonies — it said (LOL) that it “liberated” them. What that means is that they effectively became colonies of American style predatory capitalism (take a look at Puerto Rico — or Iraq.) Just a century ago, half the world was a British colony — I don’t need to tell you that story.

Now, the problem with a colonial mentality, attitude, society, way of life is this. What happens when you run out of stuff to colonize? After all, sooner or later, you’re going to run out of tempting frontiers, helpless savages, Manhattans to trade for beads, fish in the ocean, and so on, right? That day might seem a long way away — but it has to come, after all. Well, then, my friends, you are screwed — if you can’t give up the colonial mindset, then you will have to colonize yourself. What do I mean by this curious phrase, “colonize yourself”? I mean that you will have to exploit your own people the very same way that you exploited others before. You will have to teach them to exploit each other, just the same way that they once exploited poorer people of different “colors” and creeds, when there are no more of those strangers in new frontiers left to conquer, no more fresh mountains left to plunder.

And that is exactly what happened in America and Britain. It’s most obvious in America. When there was no one else left to exploit — first it was slaves, then it was subhuman blacks kept segregated, then it was various countries who were “liberated” by war for their oil and cheap labour — bang! Americans were told to turn on themselves. They obeyed. What else did they know? That is what they’d been told all their lives — that this mindset of exploitation and violence is good. So off the American went to work as a manager at an HMO, where his job was to deny people healthcare, or as a minor-league corporate droid, where his job was to find cleverer ways to jack up profits he never even saw a larger share of.

(It happened in Britain, too — only in a roundabout way. Though Britain tried to overcome empire’s hangover, by building great public institutions, like the NHS, in the end, the values of greed and selfishness and hate, the need to be supreme, won out. But all that meant was that Brits began to exploit each other. That is not just what Brexit clearly shows — but its root causes, Brits getting poorer for a decade or two, as they turned on each other.)

The lesson is as simple as it is crystal clear. Empires require colonial mindsets. Attitudes of materialism, selfishness, greed, cruelty, domination. But what happens an empire runs out of things to colonize? Do you see any countries in the world left to colonize easily? I don’t. What happens when a country that used to be an empire runs out of things to colonize is this: it colonizes itself. Bang! That is the story of American collapse and Britain’s stunning decline in one sentence.

You see, giving up something like a colonial mindset is not easy. It is addictive, just like any easy pleasure. It’s much easier to suppose that my prosperity comes from taking yours, at the point of a gun — whether or not I call it “liberation” — than it does from recognizing you as a human being, doing the hard work of lifting you up.

But the truth is that is precisely where prosperity comes from: me lifting you up. Not me colonizing you. That is the greatest lesson of the 20th century. How do we know? From the nations which truly turned their backs on empire. Many other nations had empires, too — just not ones as great and strong. So perhaps they were easier to let go of. Or perhaps it was the great war and its horrors which taught them the lesson better. Still, nations like France, Germany, and Spain did a better job of letting the colonialist mindset go. After the war, Europe tried hard to build a new continent on a new attitude — wealth would not come from seizing it from others anymore, but from cooperating to lift one another up. What had the road of seizing wealth, life, prosperity from others ended in after all — but horror and ruin?

But English speaking societies, it seems, never learned this lesson. There are days I wonder if they can. They are too wedded to their colonial mindset — attitudes of supremacy, of being-number-one, of not being able to treat anyone else as an equal, of an inability to cooperate, of anger as the primary emotion in life — to make any progress now, it seems to me. The English speaking countries probably won’t lead the world in the 21st century. That shouldn’t be controversial. They can barely manage themselves at this point. But the lesson, I think, cuts deep and true.

The price of empire is that maturity, psychologically, socially, economically, culturally, becomes harder and harder, every day. Maturity beyond what, exactly? Beyond violence. Beyond stupidity. Beyond greed and selfishness and cruelty. You see, the Anglos of the world have never given up their strange love of and lust for all these things — whether it comes in the form of suddenly insulting their neighbours, building walls, starting needless wars, whether wars of trade or wars fought with missiles, drone-bombing children to death, or the subtler violence and greed of people taking their neighbours’ healthcare and jobs and savings away.

But violence and greed and cruelty cannot lead anyone anymore to prosperity in the 21st century. There is nobody left to colonize and exploit left but yourself, your very own society, in a world which is out of easy frontiers and helpless peoples. Nobody’s trading Manhattans for beads anymore, are they? And so violence and greed is only left in one form: self-destruction. Funnily, ironically, foolishly, tragically, the only choice that English speaking world seem able to make anymore is self-destruction — because the problem is that empire’s price is an addiction to ruin in the first place, but in the end, there is no one to ruin but yourself.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2U1dMCO Tyler Durden

Army recruiters are having a challenging time convincing Americans born between 1995 and 2005 to sign up and serve. The situation is so dire that Army Recruiting Command has turned to e-Sports video game tournaments.

“It is incredible, the amount of coverage that you get and the amount of the Z Gens that are watching these games,” Gen. Frank Muth, the head of Army Recruiting Command, told NPR.

Sponsoring video game tournaments is an effort to boost recruitment after the Army fell short of its 76,500 recruitment goal by 6,500 people last year.

“Calling the Z generation on the phone doesn’t work anymore,” Gen. Muth told NPR. “We’re really giving the power back to our recruiters to go on Twitter, to go on Twitch, to go on Instagram, and use that as a venue to start a dialogue with the Z generation.”

NPR noted that a recent e-Sports tournament featured an Army recruiter as an announcer and went viral with more than 2 million views, adding that “Half [the views] were from people aged 17 to 24.”

To further implement the strategy, the Army is now screening more than 4,000 applications from soldiers who want to play video games.

Army Recruiting Command will select 30 of the service’s top gamers to be on the new Army e-Sports Team to compete in national gaming tournaments.

Generation Z soldiers are part of this subculture, according to Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Jones, a noncommissioned officer overseeing the Army e-sports Team.

“Soldiers are showing a want and desire to not only play gaming … but also be in competitive gaming, and we understand that is a really good connection to our target market,” he said.

“These soldiers will actually be hand-selected, so what we are doing is grouping them together and — based upon the title and platform that they wish to compete in — having them scrimmage within those groups to find out who are the best we have.”

Part of the screening process will include ensuring that candidates also meet Army physical fitness, height, and weight standards.

“Those soldiers will be screened from there to make sure that not only can they compete, but [they] are the top-quality soldier that we are looking for in order to move here to Knox to compete,” Sgt. Jones said.

“We want those soldiers, when they go to these events, to be able to articulate to the public.”

The team of Army gamers will serve on 36-month rotations at Fort Knox and travel to tournaments around the country, supporting the Army’s recruitment efforts at gaming events.

Gen. Muth is not sure that the Army can hit its recruitment goals for 2019. He told NPR, the e-Sports strategy could be the key to unlocking a new wave of future soldiers. 

However, there is a problem: “Health-Risk Correlates of Video-Game Playing Among Adults” study shows that video gamers in America are overweight and depressed. It seems that the Army’s strategy in recruiting the younger generation at gaming events could backfire. 

via RSS http://bit.ly/2Hm1MKV Tyler Durden

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

Last Monday, there was a striking headline in the Daily Telegraph: “Russia looks to bitcoin to soften effects of US Sanctions”. The immediate impact on bitcoin’s price was minimal, though it did rise 4.2% later in the day, after Zerohedge picked up the story.

The Telegraph’s source seemed credible. Vladislav Ginko is an economist at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, which is the training ground for Russia’s political and administrative elite, a Russian equivalent of France’s École Nationale d’Adminstration.Professor Ginko appears to be a firm believer in bitcoin and its technology, and he seems well-connected. But it is not a brand-new story. Earlier this month he tweeted the following:

However, Professor Ginko perhaps should not be taken too seriously, being either a conspiracy theorist or perhaps a joker, as the following more recent tweet reveals:

Putting this bizarre allegation to one side, he has reminded us that President Putin has expressed an interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. The point missed in Professor Ginko’s tweets is that one way to destabilise the dollar would be to encourage a new bull market in cryptocurrencies, which could be the strategic logic behind a Russian move. It is not, as implied by Professor Ginko, that bitcoin is about to take its place alongside Western currencies in Russia’s currency reserves. Furthermore, the idea that Russia is seriously considering adding $10bn of bitcoin to reserves does not ring true, given it would be more likely to quietly accumulate them first instead of boasting about an intention and paying higher prices.

It may be just coincidence, but bitcoin’s vicious bear market broadly coincided with the US dollar’s recovery, which commenced only a month after bitcoin’s peak in December 2017. Recently, the dollar has shown signs of entering a new bear phase, in which case a negative correlation suggests bitcoin might begin to recover, and with other credible cryptocurrencies become to be seen as an alternative to the king of fiat.

Cryptocurrencies have disappeared from most people’s radar screens. While public attention has drifted elsewhere, it is clear that professionals are still working on solutions to identify and control risks at a time of market quietness. These are the generic market conditions usually identified with the prospect of a renewed bull phase.

Crypto criminal cleansing continues

For the moment, it might too early to expect cryptocurrencies to be ready for a lasting revival. The 2017 bull market blow-off exposed excessive greed, signalling the start of a probable multi-year bear market, or even the end of the entire phenomenon. Over a thousand cryptocurrencies were in existence by early 2018, issued mostly by wannabe Satoshis. Today it is estimated there are over 1,600.

In recent years exchanges and other service providers have been closed amid accusations of fraud and money-laundering. Freedom from national boundaries and the laws that go with them have undoubtedly contributed to criminal activity both real and imagined. On Monday this week, SlowMist, a Chinese-based blockchain security firm, reported suspected money-laundering in ethereum classic (ETC), in its newsfeed  reproduced below:

ETC Network Is Abnormal, Large Transactions Suspected of Money Laundering 0735

Monitored by China-based blockchain security firm SlowMist, there was a large amount of abnormal miners’ rewards on the ETC public chain in the early morning of Jan 14 (UTC+8). Further analysis revealed that the abnormal rewards resulted from the address starting with 0xb71ee622 that holds approximately 72,383 ETC. The address paid a huge transaction fee for a large number of transactions, and the large amount of high fees were taken by the miner’s address starting with 0x00473. The miner transferred out the mining revenue in real time, which is suspected of money laundering.

The previous week, SlowMist got to the bottom of a rollback attack on ETC. Hackers deploy a rollback attack by resetting protocols to an earlier point in time, so they can alter a blockchain’s transaction history to clone cryptocurrency. SlowMist identified the exchanges involved and all of them have now returned the extra ETC, as declared in the following tweet on Wednesday, 16 January:

It is worth noting that the detectives in this story are China-based, which illustrates how markets left to their own devices lead to responsible cooperative behaviour, irrespective of nationality and national boundaries. You won’t hear this from governments, for whom this invisible hand of market forces is inexplicable and not to be trusted.

As well as rollbacks, there are other attack categories against which service providers have to be vigilant. And even though they continue, developers and service providers are getting better at recognising and preventing them. Clearly, it is a process that still has some way to go, but it appears that the cryptocurrency community is beginning to regulate itself effectively.

Consequently, there is likely to be growing institutional confidence in both cryptocurrency technology and in the leading cryptocurrencies themselves. We can therefore expect renewed attempts to package cryptocurrencies into regulated investment vehicles, pressure regulators will find increasingly difficult to resist, so that investing institutions can invest.

Defining cryptocurrencies and their role as currency

There is a continuing debate about whether cryptocurrencies are a form of money, so it is important to put them in their financial context and establish their function.

Money and the currency which represents it are mediums of payment that allow a business and people to turn their production output into the goods and services they need and desire. A common money or form of currency has to be accepted by everyone with whom the individual is likely to transact directly and indirectly. It must be stable in value, so that decisions on prices paid and received are confined to changes from the goods and services side of a transaction. In other words, money must have a common objective value which goes unquestioned between transacting parties, so that all else in a price is subjective.

The choice of currency is down to transacting individuals, whether it be crypto or fiat. Fiat currencies are accepted by us in our relevant jurisdictions because we are commanded to use it by our governments. We comply because of the convenience a state currency offers, but ultimately the decision to use it and the exchange value we put on it is a collective choice. Cryptocurrencies share this theoretical standing as fiat currencies, except that they do not have government backing and are not normally used to settle transactions in goods and services. It is on these two points that many dismiss the status of cryptocurrencies as a representation of money, as well as being too volatile to have that important objective value. But before dismissing it on these grounds we should note that there can be as much volatility in fiat, as users of Turkish rials, Indonesian rupiahs and others will attest; it just happens the volatility in fiat tends to be in a negative direction.

These considerations apply only to settling transactions in goods and services. A different case is the use of fiat currency as a counterpart to financial investment, where the objective is not to use it to facilitate consumption, but to convert the investment back to the original currency at a later date. This has led some investors to argue that cash should be regarded as a portfolio asset, having strategic value just like any investment allocation. In this respect, we can see both crypto and fiat can be regarded as ranking assets for investment purposes. All that is required for this to materialise is a loss of confidence in fiat relative to crypto for investors to accept crypto as a money-substitute for fiat.

We can take the comparison of cryptocurrencies with the status of fiat currency even further. As investors, we look at foreign-issued fiat money as a potential investment. Selling dollars for Swiss francs is with a profit in mind, a transaction to be valued in dollars and reversed at a later date, unless you intend to go to Switzerland to spend your francs. For the purpose of currency speculation, in this context a cryptocurrency is obviously an alternative that ranks with fiat.

The limitations on the future issue of a cryptocurrency that requires to be mined contrasts with the open-ended expansion of fiat currencies, and so purely on the difference in their individual rates of expansion they have the potential to drive cryptocurrencies priced in fiat relatively higher over time. The caveat which must not be neglected is that it assumes there is no change in relative confidence, because both state-issued currencies and cryptocurrencies are backed by nothing else.

Lastly, the rapid increase in the number of cryptocurrencies might at first sight constitute supply. This has not turned out to be the case, because confidence in future values has been restricted to those with an established history. There can be ten thousand different cryptocurrencies, but public acceptability will remain confined to very few.

Fundamentally, there is much in common between fiat and crypto, and to the extent that the central bankers issuing fiat currency understand it, they should be alarmed at the potential consequences. So far, most central banks have ducked this issue. The only governments that are interested in crypto are either ones that have destroyed their own monetary credibility, such as Venezuela, or those who might consider strategic benefits, such as Russia. And this is why Professor Ginko’s tweets are thought-provoking.

Could it be that President Putin thinks he has found a way to destroy the dollar? If so, he must be taking an iconoclastic view, because it will also need a systemic crisis to undermine faith in the dollar in order to trigger a widespread flight out it into cryptocurrencies.

Gold makes more sense for Russia

President Putin seems unlikely to indulge in cryptocurrency fairy tales. Instead, through Russia’s central bank he is building gold reserves in partnership with a number of important Asian governments. The geopolitical sense in this strategy is that Russia wants to replace the dollar and the currencies tied to it and instead accept hard, incorruptible money for its energy exports. Gold has been suppressed by the US Government’s long-standing denials that it is money, preferring to promote their fiat dollar instead. Gold priced in dollars is therefore cheap and an opportunity for Russia.

Gold’s durability as a medium of exchange establishes it as true money, whereas crypto and fiat are mere currency, that is to say they only pretend to be true money. Early cryptocurrency enthusiasts claimed that bitcoin and others were a modern replacement for gold, based on similar supply characteristics and the requirement to be “mined”. What they omitted to tell us was that without demand for cryptocurrencies, they are valueless, whereas if gold for the first time in the history of money became universally rejected as money, it still retains value for other uses.

It is those other uses, coupled with its incorruptible characteristics that marks out gold from all forms of ethereal currency. But in this confusing world of what constitutes money and currencies, few Westerners seem to understand that gold is the money. Instead, they regard it as an investment, offering protection in uncertain times.

This is a mistake. The purpose of an investment is profit. Investment is undertaken in anticipation of final values and their realisation in the underlying units of account. That is what a buyer of shares in gold mines and gold derivatives does. A buyer of physical gold buys it because he or she is disposing of inferior currency as a store of value.

This is why gold has remained the true money for millennia. Fiat currencies are probably on the path that ends in their final oblivion, a journey that has lasted only a century. Cryptocurrencies in the context of time are ephemera which will enjoy only a brief existence before oblivion.

For those of us that have taken the trouble to understand money, we can see that cryptocurrencies have the potential to evolve into the biggest bubble of all time and on a global scale, fuelled by the excesses of fiat issuance, past and future. Only time will tell if it happens, but if a cryptocurrency bubble really gets going, it could accelerate a move out of fiat currencies, undermining the public’s relative preferences that give fiat its credibility. Logically, cryptocurrencies have the alarming potential to kill fiat currencies stone dead.

Does President Putin understand this, and does he have a plan to demolish the dollar by triggering a cryptocurrency bubble? Clever though he is, probably not.

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The battle for new delivery business spurred by the significant rise in large products ordered online is officially on.

And as consumers get more comfortable buying larger items like appliances, grills, treadmills and even furniture online, trucking companies like JB Hunt Transport Services Inc. are knee-deep in the fray to secure the ensuing delivery business that comes with it.

JB Hunt, for instance, announced Wednesday that it has agreed to pay $100 million for a company in New Jersey that specializes in delivering large items to consumers. This is the second such purchase made by JB Hunt in the delivery space in less than two years.

Similarly, XPO logistics has made four acquisitions of this nature to try and implement what it is calling a “white glove service”. Ryder System Inc. also spent $120 million last year to purchase a company that would bring in an additional 109 e-commerce fulfillment facilities and 72 third-party centers.

And the M&A should continue. Nick Hobbs, of J.B. Hunt told Bloomberg:

 “You’ll see more consolidation come along because there’s a lot of interest out there.”

The market for these types of deliveries is up about 10% from last year, according to SJ Consulting Group. The total market is valued at about $8.9 billion. This is a significantly faster rate of growth than regular freight and it is anticipated that it will continue to grow rapidly, as younger people start to age and take on bigger purchases.

John Hill, president and chief commercial officer Pilot Freight Services said: 

“Millennials buy everything online. They’re very comfortable making those purchases sight unseen.” 

The need for the delivery niche also arises from online merchants who want pricing and tracking options similar to FedEx and UPS, who are not efficient in delivering the larger items.

One merchant recently profiled in a Bloomberg writeup, BBQGuys.com, ships its items from Louisiana all over the country and gets more than 70% of its $115 million in annual sales from larger items. The company has tried to offer delivery with installation but inconsistencies among the industry have made it difficult for them.

Corey Tisdale, the VP of the company, stated:

“We know there’s a demand for it. We’ve been limited by the networks that we found, being able to have the same consistency in terms of delivery experience across the U.S.”

This need for consistent delivery is what has created the opportunity for these trucking companies.

Hobbs of JB Hunt continued:

 “Each consumer wants something different and each retailer wants something different. So we have to be very agile in how we put together a good solution.”

At Ryder, the company tries to provide consistent nationwide coverage with their partners, while using volume to offset high delivery costs. The technology it has recently bought allows customers to pick their own delivery times, one of several capabilities that aren’t available with traditional shippers or small independent truckers.

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