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Authored by Finian Cunningha, via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

With unseemly haste, US news media leapt on the killing of four American military personnel in Syria as a way to undermine President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from that country.

The deadly attack in the northern city of Manbij, on the west bank of the Euphrates River, was reported to have been carried out by a suicide bomber. The Islamic State (ISIS) terror group reportedly claimed responsibility, but the group routinely makes such claims which often turn out to be false.

The American military personnel were said to be on a routine patrol of Manbij where US forces have been backing Kurdish militants in a purported campaign against ISIS and other terror groups.

An explosion at a restaurant resulted in two US troops and two Pentagon civilian officials being killed, along with more than a dozen other victims. Three other US military persons were among those injured.

US media highlighted the bombing as the biggest single death toll of American forces in Syria since they began operations in the country nearly four years ago.

The US and Kurdish militia have been in control of Manbij for over two years. It is one of the main sites from where American troops are to withdraw under Trump’s exit plan, which he announced on December 19.

Following the bombing, the New York Times headlined: “ISIS Attack in Syria Kills 4 Americans, Raising Worries about Troop Withdrawal”. The report goes on, “the news prompted calls from Republicans and Democrats for President Trump to reconsider his plans to withdraw troops from the country.”

A more pointed headline in The Washington was: “Killing of 4 Americans in Syria Throws Spotlight on Trump’s Policy”.

The Post editorialized, “the bombing showed that [ISIS] is likely to be a force to be reckoned with in Syria for the foreseeable future.” It quoted politicians in Washington claiming the “bombing deaths… were a direct result of a foolish and abrupt departure announcement [by Trump], and made the case for staying.”

Democrat Senator Jack Reed, who sits on the Senate Armed Forces Committee, said: “From the beginning, I thought the president was wrong [in ordering the withdrawal]. It was a strategic mistake for the whole region.”

With macabre smugness, anti-Trump politicians and news media appeared to exploit the death of US troops in Manbij to score points against Trump.

The president’s claims made just before Christmas of having defeated ISIS were widely replayed following the Manbij attack this week by way of ridiculing Trump’s order to pullout US troops from Syria.

Nevertheless, despite the deaths, Trump and his Vice President Mike Pence stated they were still committed to bring the 2,000 or so US troops home. Some military figures also went on US media to defend Trump’s pullout plan in spite of the terror attack in Manbij.

There clearly is a serious division in Washington over Trump’s policy on Syria. For Democrats and supportive media outlets, anything Trump does is to be opposed. But there are also elements within the military and intelligence nexus which are implacably against, what they see as, his “capitulation to Russia and Iran” in Syria. That was partly why his Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned days after Trump made his announced withdrawal at the end of last month.

Having invested years and money in regime-change machinations in Syria, there is bound to be US military and intelligence cabals which are resistant to Trump’s move to pack up. Not that Trump’s move portends a peace dividend for the region. It is more a “tactical change” for how US imperialism operates in the Middle East, as his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in Cairo last week.

That is why Trump’s order to take troops out of Syria may not be a clear-cut withdrawal. His National Security adviser John Bolton on a tour of the Middle East last week has already tried to undermine Trump by attaching all sorts of vague conditions to the troop pullout. Bolton and Pompeo have talked about the need to ensure the total defeat of ISIS and of the countering of Iranian presence in Syria.

This brings up the question of who may have carried out the bombing in Manbij? Was it really a suicide bomber? Was it really ISIS? Several observers have pointed out that ISIS have not had any presence in Manbij for the past two years since the Americans and Kurds took control of the city.

As always, the key question arises: who stands to benefit from the killing of the American troops? The scale of the attack suggests it was carried out with a sharp political message intended for Trump.

One potential beneficiary are the Kurdish militants who are being abandoned by the putative US withdrawal. Without their American sponsor on the ground, the Kurds are in danger of Turkish forces launching cross-border operations to wipe them out, as Ankara has vowed to do. A Machiavellian Kurdish calculation could be to “disprove” Trump about “ISIS being defeated”, and that US forces are needed to prevent any resurgence of the terror group in Manbij and northeast Syria.

Another sinister player is the CIA or some other element of US military intelligence. It is certainly not beyond the realm of plausibility that the CIA could facilitate such an atrocity against American personnel in order to discredit Trump’s withdrawal plan.

Certainly, the way the anti-Trump media in the US reacted with such alacrity and concerted talking points suggests there was something a bit too convenient about the massacre.

It would in fact be naive to not suspect that the CIA could have pulled off such a false flag in Manbij. As in 1950s Vietnam, as told by Graham Greene in ‘The Quiet American’, the CIA have been doing such dirty tricks with bombing atrocities and assassinations for decades in order to precipitate wars in foreign countries that the agency calculates are in America’s geopolitical interests.

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Robots may soon be scooting around the aisles of your local grocery store.

Approximately 500 robots will be coming to supermarkets in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, thanks to a strategic partnership between Retail Business Services and Badger Technologies.

Retail Business Services, a subsidiary of Ahold Delhaize USA, currently provides services to six of Ahold Delhaize USA’s East Coast supermarket brands, including Food Lion, Giant Food, GIANT/MARTIN’S, Hannaford and Stop & Shop, as well as the online grocery retailer, Peapod.

Within the next six months, Ahold Delhaize USA brands will have at least one robot in nearly 500 of their stores following successful in-store pilot programs at Harrisburg and Carlisle locations.

“As part of our continued focus on technology transformation, we’re pleased to support one of the most significant deployments of robotics innovation in the grocery retail industry. 

Several companies in the grocery retail space have recently begun testing or using in-store robots – something Retail Business Services and the local brands we serve have been doing for some time. We’re pleased to support the GIANT/MARTIN’S and Stop & Shop brands as they now lead the industry from test to large-scale usage of robots and to see the benefits the technology continues to drive for their businesses,” ” said Paul Scorza, EVP and Chief Information Officer for Retail Business Services.

Dubbed “Marty,” the in-store fully autonomous robot has been designed for the grocery retail environment to address out-of-stock, planogram compliance, price integrity, and audit and compliance issues.

The robot operates safely alongside patrons and employees while scanning aisles. Advanced technologies include:

•  Rotating lidar to map and navigate the store
• High resolution and 3D depth cameras for navigation and data acquisition
• Navigation sensors • Firmware in robotics operating system (ROS)
• Modular application software architecture for custom system integration
• Autonomous base with rechargeable 12-hour battery

“We are excited to be part of this industry-leading rollout of fully autonomous robots that collect safety data while traversing retail stores,” said Frederic McCoy, SVP, Jabil Retail. “Real-time hazard alerts empower stores to resolve incidents like spills, as well as improve operations.”

Nationwide, other retailers, including Walmart and Target, have been testing or rapidly deploying robots. This is part of the great transformation, and a defined theme by Karen Harris, Managing Director of Bain & Company’s Macro Trends Group, who recently penned the piece Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality.

For more color on how automation will disrupt the business environment in the next decade, Harris discusses the collision at play.

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Authored by Kevin Anderton via Forbes.com,

I have been seeing some headlines pointing out that Earth’s magnetic field is acting up and that scientists don’t understand why, so I thought I would take the time to clear up the issue.

What is happening?

Earth’s magnetic pole is moving in the direction of Siberia and away from Canada. This is something that scientists have been tracking for a long time. It’s fairly easy to look up the location of the magnetic pole dating back to the early 1900s. The recent changes of the drifting pole are raising some concerns but the direction is not the problem. In fact, the direction of the drifting pole has been roughly the same for as long as scientists have been tracking it. The speed is the issue.

Every five years scientists recalculate the location of the magnetic pole. This is important information for global navigation, which includes GPS satellites and other technology. These changes can make a big difference in our everyday lives.

Scientists at NOAA and the British Geological Survey check how accurate the World Magnetic Model is every year and when they did their check this year they noticed some large differences. Primarily that the pole’s movement had sped up. The location data for the pole was supposed to last until 2020 before it needed to be updated but according to experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it needs to be updated now.

The movement of Earth’s magnetic field since its discovery

Why is this happening?

The movement of the pole is caused by flows of molten liquid iron in the Earth’s core. This liquid and how it moves creates the Earth’s magnetic field. Variations in the liquid flow cause the magnetic field to change over time and cause the location of magnetic north to move.

The global model was off because of a geomagnetic pulse the occurred beneath South America in 2016. This pulse just came at a bad time. The 2015 World Magnetic Model was brand new and not scheduled to be renewed until 2020. It seems that in the future we may not be able to wait as long between updates. The poles movement has sped up in recent memory from 9 miles a year in the 1990s to about 34 miles a year at present day. A new model needs to be implemented as soon as possible and even then they will have to rework the model again in 2020. Until then navigation might be affected.

What caused the geomagnetic pulse beneath South America is unknown. If you have been seeing headlines that imply the scientists are clueless or don’t understand what is happening this is what they are talking about. Anomalies like this happen from time to time and honestly, it’s nothing to be worried about.

Why is the pole moving?

In the northern hemisphere, deep within the Earth, there are two large areas of magnetic strength being generated by the liquid metal surrounding Earth’s core. One is under Canada and the other is under Siberia. What we are seeing now is the result of those two areas pulling against each other.

It’s also worth noting that the release of the new model is being delayed due to the US government shutdown. If you would like to know more about this issue please write your Senator and ask them to reopen the government.

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At CES 2019, the transport firm Continental pushed the boundaries of autonomous vehicle technology, showed how a driverless utility van could be used to stage and deploy delivery robot dogs, taking packages from the vehicle to a customer’s doorstep.

In the demonstrations, the battery-powered ANYmal robot, manufactured by Swiss robotics manufacturer ANYbotics, walked out of Continental’s CUbE (Continental Urban mobility Experience) demo vehicle, stepped over an object in its path and marched up the front steps of a model front porch. After reaching the door, the robot rings the doorbell with its paw and leans over to slide the package of its back.

ANYbotics partners with @ContiPress to show autonomous robot parcel delivery with #ANYmal at @CES! See the live demo at booth #7519. #CES2019 #robotics #robot #leggedrobotics pic.twitter.com/uCrIw6lrcb

— ANYbotics (@anybotics) January 8, 2019

“With the help of robot delivery, Continental’s vision for seamless mobility can extend right to your doorstep. Our vision of cascaded robot delivery leverages a driverless vehicle to carry delivery robots, creating an efficient transport team,” said Ralph Lauxmann, Head of Systems & Technology, Chassis & Safety division, Continental, in a statement.

“Both are electrified, both are autonomous and, in principle, both can be based on the same scalable technology portfolio. These synergies create an exciting potential for holistic delivery concepts using similar solutions for different platforms. Beyond this technology foundation, it’s reasonable to expect a whole value chain to develop in this area.”

The robot weighs 66 pounds and can carry boxes up to 22 pounds. AI navigates the Black Mirror-like dog through wide-angle cameras, sensor-studded feet, and a high-tech radar system.

Continental has focused research on the last mile, a term used in supply chain management/transportation planning to describe how goods move to their final destination.

The company wants to use robot dogs and autonomous vehicles for goods and parcel delivery to residential areas, a rapidly developing market thanks to e-commerce sales.

Continental believes that the last mile of goods delivery should be automated, it will be an integral part of future urban mobility. Driverless vehicles like the CUbE can transport multiple robot dogs that could handle the last yards of the goods and parcel delivery logistics chain.

“Industrializing the automation of goods delivery requires reliable, robust, high-performing and best-cost technology – a mix perfectly reflected in the automotive equivalent of automation. It is this very profile of expertise that has made Continental one of the industry-leading suppliers of advanced driver assistance systems and vehicle automation,” said Ralph Lauxmann, Head of Systems & Technology, Chassis & Safety division, Continental.

Automating the last mile with robot dogs and driverless vehicles represents the next big thing for smart cities in the future, and it also serves as a warning that thousands of gig-economy last mile jobs are about to be eliminated.

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Authored by Irina Slav via Oilprice.com,

Global spending on solar energy declined by almost a quarter last year to US$130.8 billion, mainly on the back of a regulatory policy overhaul in China that led to an oversupply of solar panels, driving prices down. This, in turn, resulted in an 8-percent slide in overall renewable energy investments to US$332 billion, data from a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance has shown.

China took markets by surprise in June last year by announcing that it would not issue approvals for any new solar power installations in 2018 and would also cut the feed-in tariff subsidy that has been a major driver of the solar business in the country that accounts for as much as 50 percent of capacity.

Following the June decision of the Chinese planning commission, global PV panel prices dropped by 12 percent, which benefited buyers of PV panels but served a blow to producers, and not just those in China. Yet, the investment cut was the largest in China: investments in renewable energy there fell by about 50 percent or US$40 billion last year.

This had a beneficial effect on capital costs, the BNEF analysts said. In 2018, the cost of installing a megawatt of solar generation capacity shed 12 percent. Now, this was not because of major cost reductions as much as a global PV module oversupply that was already emerging before China overhauled its solar industry regulations, but it was still substantial as far as cost cuts go.

While the news about falling panel costs is certainly good as it is making solar energy more competitive, the BNEF report was generally of the “cold shower” variety as a whole. The Bloomberg researchers warned that despite a surge in renewable energy investment since 2004, when the world spent less than US$62 billion on cleaner energy, as global energy demand grew, so did the consumption of fossil fuels. This effectively offset the gains in carbon emissions reductions achieved through the growing use of alternative energy sources.

Commenting on the report’s findings, BNEF analyst Jenny Chase, head of solar analysts, said “2018 was certainly a difficult year for many solar manufacturers, and for developers in China. However, we estimate that global PV installations increased from 99GW in 2017 to approximately 109GW in 2018, as other countries took advantage of the technology’s fiercely improved competitiveness.”

This year promises to be tough as well, at least in China. Earlier this month, the government said it will only approve new solar and wind power capacity if it matches the country’s coal benchmark on price.

One of the reasons for this move is the weight of subsidies that prompted last year’s regulatory change. Another, according to Forbes’ John Parnell, was the fact that Chinese companies are building solar projects abroad that produce electricity much more cheaply than the installations at home.

China is still the biggest spender on renewables, the BNEF report established, so it will remain key to the world’s total carbon emission reduction success, regardless of where capital costs of solar installations go.

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In Asia, the #MeToo movement hasn’t made much headway. Instead, booze and hookers still appears to do the time-honored trick of helping businessman build “relationships.”

While the #MeToo wave plays out in the United States and Europe, resulting in a revulsion against “toxic masculinity” complete with countless rape accusations, both real and fake, in places like Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing it is still standard practice for corporate executives to “bond” (and bondage) with colleagues while chugging booze and hanging out with escorts who “often illegally perform sexual favors”, according to a new Bloomberg article.

Meet Regina Yuan who works at a start up company based in Shanghai. She’s 27 years old and often “entertains” clients from out of town for several evenings in a row. Sometimes she drinks with them, sometimes she picks up the bill and she “shoulders most of the burden” when she goes out with male colleagues and clients “for her own safety”. She said that clients that visit these types of clubs include prestigious Chinese investment bankers and financial execs.

“You just have to think of yourself as a man” she told Bloomberg. “Pretty much going to hostess clubs is like a tourist destination when our clients and investors come to town. It’s like if you don’t take them there, you haven’t paid your respects to your guests.”

Younger men in Asia have often referred to the egregious alcohol consumption and trips to hostess clubs as a form of hazing. On the other hand, women like Yuan are at risk of being left out and missing important “networking” opportunities if they don’t, or can’t, attend.

Zheng Tiantian, author of “Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Post-socialist China” confirmed: “Visits to hostess clubs are an integral part of doing business in China and Japan. Interactions with hostesses are constantly performed and being evaluated by others to determine their characteristics and qualities and whether they are worthy as business partners.”

Said otherwise, don’t tell Hollywood, but if you don’t bang the ho, so to speak, you may soon be unemployed, especially since prostitution is legal in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Clearly this practice stands in “contrast” to what is acceptable in polite society in the United States and Europe, where companies  have come under fire for conducting business in gentlemen’s clubs or similar types of venues. And while these types of trips are on the decline in the US and in the United Kingdom, they remain embedded in the working culture of places like Japan, China and South Korea. For instance, Japan has more than 63,900 hostess clubs, where prices can range from a few hundred dollars to as much is $30,000 for “bottles of liquor” to share with groups of or impress females.

In South Korea, these types of hostess bars have long been considered part of the business landscape. Some of them are even built with elevators to so-called “love hotels”. The South Korean government estimates there are 13,316 sex brokers in the country with 57% of them operating in the form of hostess bars (prostitution is illegal in SK).

Meanwhile, in China not only do females have to worry about business culture, they have to worry about suppression from the government. Despite both prostitution and hostess clubs being illegal in China, high-end venues in Beijing and Shanghai can charge up to $2900 for a room, including alcohol. Escorts hired to drink with clients can cost more than $280 each.

Paradoxically, female activists who have tried to stand up to these clubs and start movements in China are often arrested.

The broad acceptance of hostess clubs on the mainland has some venture capitalists using these clubs as a way to try and gauge what type of company they’re going to invest in.  China Growth Capital’s Gong Yuan stated, without a trace of sarcasm, that “there’s no better way to understand a founder than by looking at what bonding method this person uses. The startups that emerged three years ago trying to transform traditional industries brought a lot of these questionable behaviors. Companies that have real technology just go on hikes.”

As a result, many women remain silent or simply leave these companies as the #MeToo movement has zero likelihood of becoming socially-relevant in these male-dominated societies.

Meanwhile, back to start up employee Regina Yuan who is not optimistic for the future. She concluded: “I don’t think this will ever change in China. I don’t think #MeToo has had any significant impact in China. People are too busy making money to think about these matters.”

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The Wall Street Journal continues to counter  the  liberal mainstream media’s Trump Derangement Syndrome, dropping uncomfortable truth-bombs and refusing to back off its intense pressure to get to the truth and hold those responsible, accountable (in a forum that is hard for the establishment to shrug off as ‘Alt-Right’ or ‘Nazi’ or be ‘punished’ by search- and social-media-giants).

And once again Kimberley Strassel  – who by now has become the focus of social media attacks for her truth-seeking reporting – does it again. Confirming what we detailed yesterday – that The Justice Department was fully aware that the notorious Steele Dossier was connected to Hillary Clinton and might be biased, a crucial detail which was omitted just weeks later from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant used to spy on the Trump campaign – Strassel makes the aggressive and correct statement that the Justice Department official’s testimony raises new doubts about the bureau’s honesty.

Via The Wall Street Journal,

Everybody knew.

Everybody of consequence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department understood fully in the middle of 2016 – as the FBI embarked on its counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump – that it was doing so based on disinformation provided by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

That’s the big revelation from the transcript of the testimony Justice Department official Bruce Ohr gave Congress in August. The transcripts haven’t been released, but parts were confirmed for me by congressional sources.

Mr. Ohr testified that he sat down with dossier author Christopher Steele on July 30, 2016, and received salacious information the opposition researcher had compiled on Mr. Trump. Mr. Ohr immediately took that to the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andy McCabe and lawyer Lisa Page. In August he took it to Peter Strzok, the bureau’s lead investigator. In the same month, Mr. Ohr believes, he briefed senior personnel in the Justice Department’s criminal division: Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz, lawyer Zainab Ahmad and fraud unit head Andrew Weissman. The last two now work for special counsel Robert Mueller.

More important, Mr. Ohr told this team the information came from the Clinton camp and warned that it was likely biased, certainly unproven.

“When I provided [the Steele information] to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information,” he testified.

“I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware.”

He said he told them that Mr. Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected,” and that his own wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier. He confirmed sounding all these warnings before the FBI filed its October application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page. We broke some of this in August, though the transcript provides new detail.

The FBI and Justice Department have gone to extraordinary lengths to muddy these details, with cover from Democrats and friendly journalists.

A January 2017 memo from Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, flatly (and incorrectly) insisted “the FBI’s closely-held investigative team only received Steele’s reporting in mid-September.”

A May 2018 New York Times report repeated that claim, saying Mr. Steele’s reports didn’t reach the “Crossfire Hurricane team,” which ran the counterintelligence investigation, until “mid-September.”

This line was essential for upholding the claim that the dossier played no role in the unprecedented July 31, 2016, decision to investigate a presidential campaign. Former officials have insisted they rushed to take this dramatic step on the basis of a conversation involving a low-level campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, which took place in May, before the dossier officially came into the picture. And maybe that is the case. Yet now Mr. Ohr has testified that top personnel had dossier details around the time they opened the probe.

The Ohr testimony is also further evidence that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in its Page warrant application. We already knew the bureau failed to inform the court it knew the dossier had come from a rival campaign. But the FISA application additionally claimed the FBI was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to Mr. Steele, that he was “reliable,” that his “reporting” in this case was “credible,” and that the FBI only “speculates” that Mr. Steele’s bosses “likely” wanted to “discredit” Mr. Trump.

Speculates? Likely? Mr. Ohr makes clear FBI and Justice officials knew from the earliest days that Mr. Steele was working for the Clinton campaign, which had an obvious desire to discredit Mr. Trump. And Mr. Ohr specifically told investigators that they had every reason to worry Mr. Steele’s work product was tainted.

Strassel concludes succinctly – and ominously for anyone who still believes that ‘we, the people’ have any freedom left, that the testimony has three other implications.

First, it further demonstrates the accuracy of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans’ memo of 2018 – which noted Mr. Ohr’s role and pointed out that the FBI had not been honest about its knowledge of the dossier and failed to inform the court of Mrs. Ohr’s employment at Fusion GPS.

Second, the testimony also destroys any remaining credibility of the Democratic response, in which Mr. Schiff and his colleagues claimed Mr. Ohr hadn’t met with the FBI or told them anything about his wife or about Mr. Steele’s bias until after the election.

And third, the testimony raises new concerns about Mr. Mueller’s team. Critics have noted Mr. Weissman’s donations to Mrs. Clinton and his unseemly support of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s obstruction of Trump orders. It now turns out that senior Mueller players were central to the dossier scandal. The conflicts of interest boggle the mind.

And Strassel concludes unequivocally, the Ohr testimony is evidence the FBI itself knows how seriously it erred. The FBI has been hiding and twisting facts from the start.

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A tiny Himalayan state bordering China is about to embark on the world’s largest experiment in universal basic income. 

All 610,577 citizens living in Sikkim will receive a guaranteed income, unconditionally, in lieu of cash a myriad of confusing social assistance schemes currently offered, according to the Washington Post. 

“If there is one chance of it happening anywhere, it is Sikkim,” said the state’s sole member of India’s Parliament, P.D. Rai. 

Sikkim is notably progressive – being one of the first Indian states to successfully ban plastic bags, provide housing for all its citizens, and – more recently, it became India’s first “organic state” by eliminating the use of pesticides and fertilizers. 

Its social indexes also stand out from the rest of the country, with a literacy rate of 98 percent, and it has reduced the percentage of people living below the poverty line to about 8 percent — compared with nearly 30 percent nationally. Sikkim’s small geographic area and low population density have been responsible, in part, for its success.

Rai acknowledged that there will be challenges. “It’s a matter of political will ultimately,” he said. “With the rise of global inequality, we want to ensure that we bridge the gap.” Rai declined to reveal how much the program, which was announced ahead of upcoming elections this spring, would potentially cost the state. –Washington Post

In order to pay for the program – expected to roll out by 2022, Sikkim’s tourism and power sectors will be tapped – as the Himalayan country sitting at 8,500 feet welcomes over 2.5 million visitors per year. Sikkim also generates surplus power – selling 90% of its hydropower. 

India, meanwhile, has a large existing social security system – with the central government spending 5% of GDP on 950 programs ranging from free rice, housing allowances and guaranteed employment for some living in rural parts of the country. Most of these programs are poorly implemented, while corruption is rife throughout the system. 

UBI has had limited success

While cash-rich Sikkim may be poised for a successful implementation of Universal Basic Income, similar schemes have enjoyed limited success around the world. 

In April 2017, the government of Ontario in Canada announced a pilot project involving 4,000 people that would have cost 150 million Canadian dollars ($113 million). The project ended abruptly after a year when the local government changed and the new administration described the program as expensive and unsustainable.

In Finland, an experiment with universal basic income similarly ended last year before its completion. The trial included a $630 monthly payment to 2,000 unemployed citizens.

In the United States, meanwhile, the concept has been floated in Stockton, Calif., by its young mayor. Last year, it announced that 100 residents would receive $500 a month for 18 months. –Washington Post

Opponents of UBI have suggested that simply giving money to people will encourage laziness and mismanagement of personal finances as people spend money on wasteful items.  For example: 

That said, UC Berkeley economist Branab Bardhan says that UBI in a place like Sikkim is very different from a place like Stockton, California. 

“In developed countries, the main purpose is to restructure or economize the existing welfare schemes, like unemployment benefits,” said Bardhan. “In low- or mid-income countries, like India, the rationale will be to address the minimum economic insecurity of a larger section of the population, not just the poorest, without touching the existing anti-poverty measures.“

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Authored by Eduardo Neret via Campus Reform,

University of Georgia (UGA) teaching assistant wrote Wednesday on Facebook that “some white people may have to die for black communities to be made whole in this struggle to advance to freedom.”

He added that to suggest otherwise is “ahistorical and dangerously naive.”

UGA philosophy TA Irami Osei-Frimpong made the comment during a conversation on the Overheard at UGA Facebook page. The comment has since been deleted. Osei-Frimpong claimed in May 2017 that Facebook suspended him for quoting from an article which detailed how Texas A&M professor Tommy Curry had said “in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people may have to die.”

“Killing some white people isn’t genocide; it’s killing some white people,” the UGA TA explained in a Medium post.

“We had to kill some white people to get out of slavery. Maybe if we’d killed more during the 20th century we still wouldn’t talk about racialized voter disenfranchisement and housing, education, and employment discrimination. This should not be controversial.”

Osei-Frimpong’s Wednesday comment, seemingly inspired by Curry, is far from the first racially-charged remark made by the scholar.

“Fighting white people is a skill,” the UGA TA tweeted on Jan. 12, adding that it is why he supports integrated schools.

“You have to get used to fighting White people. It takes practice.”

He then quoted American clinical psychologist Bobby Wright, saying, “Blacks kill Blacks because they have never been trained to kill Whites.”

Last semester, at a Young Democrats meeting, Frimpong compared Southern whites in America to “sociopaths” and “autistic kids.” Later on, in November, he called for Democrats to “wage war on the white electorate” and wrote that white “institutions” that “make crappy white people” such as churches, schools, and families must be “dismantled.” Facebook subsequently gave Osei-Frimpong a temporary suspension.

Despite the TA’s history with controversial racial rhetoric, UGA has chosen not to take any action. 

Regarding his latest comments, a spokesperson at UGA’s Equal Opportunities Office said in an email obtained by Campus Reform that Osei-Frimpong’s views expressed his “personal opinion,” in his “personal capacity,” on a private platform. 

The spokesperson also asked the recipient of the email to contact their office if any information was discovered that showed Osei-Frimpong made “discriminatory or harassing comments” in his capacity as a member of the UGA community. 

Some of Osei-Frimpong’s UGA colleagues have gone as far to defend his previous comments about white Americans. UGA Associate Professor of Brain and Behavioral Science Dr. Janet Frick once tweeted that the TA’s comments were not hate speech, but rather “hurt your feelings speech.”

Campus Reform reached out to Osei-Frimpong for further comment but did not receive a response in time for publication. 

Editor’s note: Campus Reform encourages civil discourse and acknowledges professors’ First Amendment right to free speech. The purpose of this article, like any other, is to present the facts and allow our readers to form their own opinions.

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A gauge of global policy uncertainty is “flashing red” according to The FT, amid anxiety on Brexit, the US government shutdown and the Sino-American trade war.

According to Deutsche Bank’s chief economist Torsten Slok, this more uncertain environment likely means “more dovishness from global central banks” lies ahead.

He may be right since the level of equity market uncertainty (VIX) implied by this record level of economic policy uncertainty is unprecedentedly high…

Economists at Deutsche argue in a separate note that “the depth and persistence of the tightening of financial conditions cannot be ignored, particularly when coupled with heightened uncertainty about trade policy and slowing growth momentum abroad.”

Critically these comments come at a time when financial markets are once again pricing in some tightening in Fed behavior in 2019…

But longer-term the die is cast for increased equity market volatility…

 

As Deutsche notes “Fed officials have also emphasised a greater sense of patience and flexibility in raising rates in response to these cross currents,” but we suspect it’s too late.

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