New Yorkers Fear ‘Alien Invasion’ After Mysterious Blue Light Floods City Skyline

A mysterious blue light rising over Queens Thursday night sowed mass confusion in the metropolis of nearly 9 million people as thousands of city dwellers took to their social media feeds to express fears that the aliens might have finally arrived…only to learn that the source of the light was quite pedestrian.

Adding to the effect, power in nearby homes flickered, the 7 train experienced major service disruptions, Riker’s Island was forced to rely on backup generators and La Guardia airport was plunged into darkness.

According to the NYPD and Con Edison, a few transformers at the Con Ed substation on 20th Avenue and 32nd Street in Astoria tripped and caused a fire at a power, which was described as the source of the eerie blue light. The fire was quickly brought under control, but not before thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets (or social media) to wonder what the hell was going on, NBC News reported.

And for 20 minutes before the NYPD revealed the cause, residents commenting on social media appeared to come to a unanimous conclusion: Aliens.

Haunting blue-tinged photos and videos flooded social media:

Fire

Fire

Three

Five

Seven

The NYPD and ConEd are still investigating the cause of the fire.

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Wag The Dog… British Media Watchdog Accuses Russia Of Bias

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Irony is dead when British state media controllers accuse Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik of “imbalance” over their reporting on the Skripal alleged poisoning affair.

In the past week, Ofcom, the British media watchdog, condemned seven programs aired during March and April this year following the apparent poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. The Russian outlets may be fined or denied future broadcasting rights in Britain. The latter suggests what the real, ulterior agenda is all about.

It remains a mystery as to what happened exactly to Skripal and his daughter when they reportedly fell ill on March 4 in the famous south of England cathedral town. Neither Sergei nor Julia have been seen in public since, apart from a brief and carefully controlled interview given by Julia to Reuters a few months ago, apparently having recovered from her stricken condition. Russian consular services have been denied access to Julia by the British authorities, despite her being a Russian citizen.

The murkiness of the affair, the flagrant obfuscation by the British authorities and their violation of diplomatic norms speaks of a British state intrigue aimed at provoking international recriminations against Russia. Such is the outrageous apparent skullduggery by the British state, it is arguably very appropriate therefore for critical media coverage of the incident and the subsequent prevarication by London.

However, in a staggering inversion of reality, British media regulators complain that Russian news outlets have broken “impartiality rules” in their reporting on what is a bizarre de facto disappearance of a Russian citizen and her father while in the custody of British authorities. The protagonists are off-limits from criticism; their ropey claims must be treated as the sane version of events.

Within days of the Salisbury incident, senior British officials, including Prime Minister Theresa May, were accusing Russia of an assassination attempt against the Skripals, allegedly with a Soviet-era nerve poison.

London’s narrative inculpating the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin continues, despite Russia’s vehement denial of involvement and despite the lack of independently verifiable evidence.

This week, in her Christmas speech to the nation, premier May again repeated her condemnation of the “nerve agent attack in Salisbury” and she praised British armed forces for “protecting the country’s waters and skies from Russian intrusion”.

So, Russian media are castigated for “bias”, but British media are evidently permitted to report and broadcast official British assertions that are unproven and wildly sensational, if not tantamount to inciting international conflict. Just who is breaking journalistic standards?

Among the news outlets reporting May’s words were the BBC. The government-owned British broadcaster routinely and snidely refers to Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik as “Kremlin-backed”. As if the state-backed BBC is somehow immune from disseminating British government propaganda.

May’s assertions in her Christmas speech about Russia carrying out an alleged assassination and threatening Britain with invasion went unchallenged by the BBC. Nor were her other claims about chemical weapons being used by Syrian government forces against civilians.

On Syria, May was referring to an incident near Damascus in April this year when toxic chlorine was purportedly used in an assault on civilians. Back then, the British prime minister joined with US President Trump and France’s President Macron to order air strikes on Syria, supposedly in retaliation for the Syrian army’s use of chemical weapons. But it soon transpired that the incident was a provocation staged by jihadist militants and their media operatives, the so-called White Helmets. In other words, the British, American and French carried out a criminal act of aggression against Syria under false pretenses.

Yet May in her solemn set-piece nationwide Christmas speech this week was allowed by British media to repeat blatant lies against Syria, and brazenly avoid the issue of justice facing her government over illegal air strikes on Syria, as well as to continue smearing Russia over the murky Skripal affair.

The arrogant hypocrisy of British media and the state regulator is astounding. British citizens are compelled by law to pay an annual license fee of £150 ($190) per household for possessing a television set. Failure to pay can result in a jail sentence. The TV license fee collected by the British state is handed over to the BBC. So, here we have a state-owned media channel that is funded through a compulsory tax on citizens, and yet this same channel willingly broadcasts British government propaganda claims denigrating Russia and covering up for British war crimes in Syria. If that sounds Orwellian, that’s because it is.

The BBC’s corporate advertising claims to be the “world’s leader in breaking global news”. It also assures its listeners and readers that it produces “news you can trust”.

There are countless cases where the BBC’s pompous self-importance can be exposed, revealing an altogether more malevolent purpose. One of the most notorious cases was its complicity in orchestrating the 1953 coup in Iran carried out by the American CIA and Britain’s MI6. In his book, Web of Deceit, British historian Mark Curtis details the crucial role played by the BBC and its Persian service in helping to foment the coup against the elected premier Mohammad Mosaddegh.

More recently, BBC coverage of the war in Syria over the past eight years has been a relentless propaganda assault on the government of President Bashar al Assad. It is not merely about omission or biased distortion. The BBC has been caught out actually fabricating fake news in Syria, such as the case when it accused the Syrian army of using napalm on civilians near Aleppo in 2013. Those reports were later exposed as deliberate fabrications.

More generally on Syria, the BBC, as with other Western news media, are serving as facilitators of the criminal regime-change objective of their governments. May’s grotesque falsehoods reiterated this week – in a Christmas speech of all things! – about chemical weapons are afforded respectability and apparent credibility by the way the BBC and other British outlets dutifully report her words without any qualification, let alone criticism.

It is a measure of how distorted the British media landscape is when alternative news channels which do raise critical viewpoints and insights on propaganda narratives are then accused of being “imbalanced” and “in breach of broadcasting rules”.

In response to Britain’s Ofcom regulator condemning Russia’s RT and Sputnik, Moscow is now saying that its own state regulator is considering filing a case against the BBC and how it operates in Russia. Given how the BBC tried to tie Russia to instigating the Yellow Vest protests in France and how it recently ran an article accusing the Kremlin of “weaponizing satire”, there seems much more credibility to Russian claims that the “British state-backed outlet” is in breach of journalistic standards.

The broader background of how the BBC serves British state propaganda is panoramic in its scope. But such is official British hypocrisy, the authorities attack critical news outlets that happen to expose their propaganda service posing as “news you can trust”.

Free speech in Britain? Yes, as long as you freely speak in the service of British state propaganda.

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UK Suffers Slump In Wages Over The Past Decade

A study by the Trades Union Congress has found that an average worker in the UK has lost £11,800 since 2008.

As Statista’s Niall McCarthy points out, the TUC said that among leading economies, the UK has suffered the worst real wage slump.

The impact has been more pronounced in different parts of the country with the capital worst hit.

Infographic: UK suffers slump in wages over the past decade | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

Over the past decade, London workers have seen their real wages fall by £20,000.

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Brickbat: Forget What We Said

medical marijuanaAfter Abigail Peck was offered a job at Connecticut’s B.W. Tinker Elementary School, she told them she used medical marijuana for ulcerative colitis. She had a valid Florida medical marijuana card, but the school system’s human resources office pushed back her start date so she could get a Connecticut card. However, when Peck got the card and tried to start her job, the school fired her. In a statement, the school system’s attorney said marijuana use violates the school’s drug-free policy. She has filed a lawsuit.

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A European Spring?

Authored by Brendan O’Neill via Spiked-Online.com,

Europeans are in revolt against the political and moral order and it’s wonderful…

The emptiest, dumbest platitude of our time, uttered both by establishment stiffs like the Archbishop of Canterbury and by self-styled radical leftists, is that the 1930s have made a comeback. Treating that dark decade as if it were a sentient force, a still-extant thing, observers from both the worried bourgeoisie and the edgy left insist the Thirties have staggered back to life and have much of the West in their reanimated deathly grip. Looking at Brexit, the European turn against social democracy, the rise of populist parties, and the spread of ‘yellow vest’ revolts, the opinion-forming set sees fascism everywhere, rising zombie-like from its grave, laying to waste the progressive gains of recent decades.

This analysis is about as wrong as an analysis can be. Comparing contemporary political life to events of the past is always an imperfect way of understanding where politics is at. But if we really must search for echoes of today in the past, then it isn’t the 1930s that our era looks and feels like – it’s the 1840s. In particular 1848. That is the year when peoples across Europe revolted for radical political change, starting in France and spreading to Sweden, Denmark, the German states, the Italian states, the Habsburg Empire, and elsewhere. They were democratic revolutions, demanding the establishment or improvement of parliamentary democracy, freedom of the press, the removal of old monarchical structures and their replacement by independent nation states or republics. 1848 is often referred to as the Spring of Nations.

Sound familiar? Of course 2018 has not been as tumultuous as 1848 was. There have been ballot-box protests and street-based revolts but no attempts at actual revolutions. And yet our era also feels like a Spring of Nations. In Europe especially. There are now millions of people across Europe who want to re-establish the ideals of nationhood, of national sovereignty and popular democracy, against what we might view as the neo-monarchical structures of 21st-century technocracy. The sustained gilets jaunes revolts in France capture this well. Here we have an increasingly monarchical ruler – the aloof, self-styled Jupiterian presidency of Emmanuel Macron – being challenged week in, week out by people who want greater say and greater national independence. ‘Macron = Louis 16’, said graffiti in the gilets jaunes-ruled streets during one of their revolts. And we know what happened to him (though in 1793, of course, not 1848).

France’s February Revolution of 1848 – which brought to an end the constitutional monarchy that had been established in 1830 and led to the creation of the Second Republic – was one of the key igniters of the people’s spring that spread through Europe in 1848. Today, likewise, the gilets jaunes revolts have spread. In recent weeks yellow-vest protesters in Belgium have tried to storm the European Commission – an unprecedented event, which got strikingly little media coverage – while yellow vests in the Netherlands have called for a referendum on EU membership and in Italy they have gathered to express support for their Eurosceptic government. That election in Italy was a key event of 2018. Coming in March, it brought to power the League and the Five Star Movement, parties loathed by the EU establishment, and in the process it shattered the delusions that had gripped many European observers following the election of Macron last year – that Macron’s victory represented the fading-away of the populist moment. Italy disproved that, French revolters confirmed it, and local and national elections everywhere from Germany to Sweden added further weight to the fact that the populist revolt is not going away anytime soon.

When you’re in the thick of something, when you’re reading daily reports about the elite’s war on Brexit and seeing tweeted photos of Paris burning and watching as the EU declares political war on the elected government of Italy, it can be hard to appreciate the historic nature of what is going on. Or just the magnitude of it. We all get so bogged down in the ins and outs of the Brexit ‘negotiations’ (in truth there is no real negotiation, but rather mild disagreements between the UK and EU establishments over how Brexit might be most smoothly killed off). We pore over graphs showing the collapse in public support for the old mainstream parties, especially social-democratic ones. We express surprise at the corrosion of consensus politics even in Sweden, that traditionally most consensual of countries. But it can be hard to piece things together and create a bigger picture. We should try to, though, because then we might see that ours really is an era of revolt, of chaos even – but welcome, good, fruitful chaos.

What we have, across Europe, is people calling into question the prevailing political, moral and cultural order. These are not mere economic revolts, even in France, where economic issues have certainly been in the mix. Leftist observers, when they can bring themselves to confront the revolting moment, have tried to reduce the populist uprising to a cry for help by the ‘left behind’ or the ‘economically vulnerable’. The vote for Brexit was really caused by people’s sense of economic insecurity, they claim. Such analysis demeans the populist revolt; it empties it of its genuinely radical character, of its conscious challenge not only to the neoliberalism that is central to the EU project but far more importantly to the cultural norms and political practices of the new elites in 21st-century Europe. To say ‘These people are poor and that’s why they’re angry’ is to rob these people of their radical agency.

In a sense, 2018 is less like 1848 itself and more like the decades that preceded that tumultuous year. These were, in the words of Trygve Tholfsen in his 1977 study of working-class radicalism in the run-up to 1848, ‘hungry decades’ – decades in which disgruntlement and radicalism bristled and grew before exploding in firm demands for change. And though many people were alarmingly poor in these ‘hungry decades’, it wasn’t their ‘immediate deprivation’ that drove them to organise and take action, says Tholfsen; rather, their instinct for revolt was built on ‘solid intellectual foundations’ and it expressed a ‘denial of the legitimacy of the social and political order’. We have something similar today. Yes, Macron’s fuel tax hit people’s pockets; yes, many Brexit voters are less well-off than the Remainer elites; yes, Eurosceptic Italian youths struggle to find work. But their revolts, whether at the ballot box or on the streets, are energised by more than ‘immediate deprivation’ – they are built upon a denial of the legitimacy of the existing political and cultural order.

Brexit captured this: a mass vote in defiance of the political and expert classes who insisted that Euro-technocracy was the onlyrealistic way to organise a continent as large and complicated as Europe. We said no to that. We called into question the legitimacy of this political orthodoxy. France captures it, too. There we have the emergence of a new countercultural movement, though the culture being countered by the gilets jaunes is the culture of the new elites, of the post-1968 generation itself, in fact. The new culture of ideological multiculturalism, technocratic governance, anti-nation-state elitism, environmental diktats – that is what is being countered now, and consciously so, by French revolters. Some even carried placards calling for the creation of a Sixth Republic: an explicit confrontation of the highly centralised, parliament-weakening style of governance of the Fifth Republic, and of the EU too, of course.

So we live, again, in ‘hungry decades’. People are hungering for change, for the alternative that we have been told for 40 years does not exist (‘There is no alternative’, in Thatcher’s infamous words). These hungry years, of which 2018 has been the hungriest yet, should be welcomed, and celebrated, and built upon. It is an open question as to who, if anyone, will shape and lead this hunger. The left cannot, for it has either thrown its lot in with the elitism of the decaying technocracy that sees our populist hunger as a new form of fascism, or it tries to reduce populism to an economic cry, which has the terrible effect of downplaying and even killing off its far more historic and revolting cultural nature. New voices are needed. This hungry revolt is really people searching for a voice; a political, moral voice. In 2019, voices will, we should hope, emerge from this neo-spring of nations.

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German Military Could Recruit EU Residents To Meet NATO Commitments

French President Emmanuel Macron’s vision for a pan-European army might finally become a reality…in Germany.

According to the BBC, seven years after Germany abandoned conscription, the military of Europe’s largest economy is struggling to fill senior roles, and might need to start hiring non-German soldiers to occupy specialized positions in its armed forces like doctors and IT specialists, said Army general inspector Eberhard Zorn, who noted that Germany is being forced to “look in all directions” as it struggles to fulfill a promise to President Trump to raise its defense spending closer to the NATO-mandated target of 2% of GDP.

Germany

The country’s military has been beset by under-investment for years and is presently struggling to expand its armed fighting force by 21,000 people by 2025 and increase its defense budget from 1.2% to to 1.5% of its gross domestic product by 2024. Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said in an interview on Thursday that Germany now has 182,000 uniformed soldiers, an increase of 6,500 in two years. Within seven years, that number should reach 203,000. Of these, 12% of army recruits are women, and one in three applicants to officer positions are women.

Zorn was careful to point out that non-Germans would only be considered for “specialist” positions.

Gen Zorn told the Funke newspaper group that “of course the Bundeswehr needs personnel” and the army had to “push hard for a suitable new generation”, although EU citizens in uniform were “an option” to be examined only in specialist fields.

The media group said the government had already consulted EU partners and that most had reacted cautiously, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Of course, there’s one slight complication that could create problems for the German military: After World War II, Germany passed a law mandating that soldiers in the German army must be Germans. Suggestions that an exception might be made have been met with scepticism, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Though Hans-Peter Bartels, the member of Parliament responsible with overseeing the German armed services, noted that recruiting EU citizens was already a “kind of normality” as many members of the German army are immigrants or hold dual EU citizenship. Because of these exceptions, more than 900 foreign citizens are already employed by the German military in civilian roles.

And Germany isn’t the only European power hoping to add more non-citizens to the ranks of its military. Last month, the UK said more foreign nationals would be able to join its armed forces to meet a shortfall of 8,200 soldiers, sailors and “air personnel.”

Germany is hoping to have roughly 70% of its military ready for combat at any given time due to the perceived threat from Russia in the Baltics, which recently provoked the largest NATO exercise since the Cold War. Meanwhile, some academics see a 70% chance of a “hot war” erupting between NATO and Russia.

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Turkey And EU: Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Authored by Burak Bekdil via The Gatestone Institute,

  • In Freedom House’s democracy index, Turkey belongs to the group of “not free” countries, performing worse than “partly free” countries including Mali, Nicaragua and Kenya.

  • Just as there cannot be a “not free” member of the EU, there cannot be a member that blatantly ignores rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.

  • “I think that, in the long term, it would be more honest for Turkey and the EU to go down new roads and end the accession talks … Turkish membership in the European Union is not realistic in the foreseeable future.” – Johannes Kahn, EU Enlargement Commissioner; interview in Die Welt.

In September 2017, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she will seek an end to talks for Turkish membership in the European Union. Pictured: Merkel and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan meet in Berlin, September 28, 2018. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

When Turkey first applied for full membership in the European Union in 1987, the world was an entirely different place — even the rich club had a different name: the European Economic Community. U.S. President Ronald Reagan had undergone minor surgery; British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been re-elected for a third term; Macau and Hong Kong were, respectively, Portuguese and British territory; the Berlin Wall was up and running; the demonstrations at the Tiananmen Square were a couple of years away; the Iran-Contra affair was in the headlines; the First Intifada had just begun; and what are today Czech Republic and Slovakia were Czechoslovakia.

In March 2003, just a few months after he was elected Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Turkey was “very much ready to be part of the European Union family.”

In October 2005, formal accession negotiations between Turkey and the EU began.

Today, 31 years after the first date, the alliance seems to be broken, with no signs in the foreseeable future of a marriage between two perfectly unsuitable adults. Knowing that, both sides in the past decade have played an unpleasant diplomatic game of pretension: not be the one that throws away the ring. This boring opera buffa is no longer sustainable.

Turkey’s democratic deficit has grown just too bitterly huge to make it compatible with Europe’s democratic culture. According to the advocacy group Freedom House:

“In addition to its dire consequences for detained Turkish citizens, shuttered media outlets, and seized businesses, the chaotic purge has become intertwined with an offensive against the Kurdish minority, which in turn has fueled Turkey’s diplomatic and military interventions in neighboring Syria and Iraq.”

In Freedom House’s democracy index, Turkey belongs to the group of “not free” countries, performing worse than “partly free” countries including Mali, Nicaragua and Kenya. The EU is certainly not a club of the “not free.”

Most recently, a legal dispute between Turkey and the EU highlighted, once again, the huge disparity between the understanding of the rule of law in Turkish and European democratic cultures. This time, Turkey and the EU clashed over the rights of a prominent Kurdish politician who has been in jail on flimsy charges of terror. In a November verdict, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), to which Turkey is a signatory, ruled that Turkey should swiftly process Selahattin Demirtaş’s case; the court said his pre-trial detention had gone on longer than could be justified. A Turkish court, however, ignoring the ECHR’s verdict, ruled against Demirtaş’s release from prison. The Turkish court’s decision was a clear violation of the Article 90 of the Turkish Constitution:

“In the case of a conflict between international agreements in the area of fundamental rights and freedoms duly put into effect and the domestic laws due to differences in provisions on the same matter, the provisions of international agreements shall prevail.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavuşoğlu described the ECHR ruling as motivated by politics, not the law, and asserted that the case would be determined by Turkey’s courts.

Just as there cannot be a “not free” member of the EU, there cannot be a member that blatantly ignores ECHR’s rulings.

Fortunately, there have been signs from Brussels that the “show must not go on.” In April 2017, the European Parliament called for a formal suspension of Turkey’s EU membership bid, which was already effectively frozen. In September 2017, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she will seek an end to Turkey’s membership talks.

More recently, in November, the official overseeing the EU’s future enlargement said that, in the long term, it would be “more honest” for the bloc to give up talks on membership for Turkey. EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Kahn toldGerman daily Die Welt, “I think that, in the long term, it would be more honest for Turkey and the EU to go down new roads and end the accession talks … Turkish membership in the European Union is not realistic in the foreseeable future.” Kahn’s was honest talk, calling a cat a cat.

In fact, a month earlier than Kahn’s comments, President Erdoğan proposed a most realistic solution – although not for reasons of honesty, but merely for pre-election bluffing. Evidently he is signalling exasperation with the election process. Erdogan seems to be trying to appeal to the EU-weary, nationalistic voters ahead of Turkey’s municipal elections on March 31, 2019 that Europe’s reluctance to let Turkey into the EU is based, supposedly, on “Islamophobla”. In an October speech, Erdoğan said he would consider putting Turkey’s long-stalled bid to join the EU to a referendum.

Good idea, assuming that Turkey’s most popular ever leader should campaign for Leave (the negotiations). All the same, as always, Erdoğan was bluffing, in a seeming effort to remind EU’s leaders of Turkey’s “strategic value” for Europe. At the same time, he was playing the tough man to his usually xenophobic, conservative voter base that has grown weary of being humiliated by ‘infidel Europe.’

This author believes that there should be simultaneous EU and Turkish referenda asking the Europeans if they endorse an eventual Turkish membership, and at the same time asking the Turks whether they want to drop their bid to join. A “No” vote triumphing in either referendum should suffice formally to end Turkey’s membership process; two “Yes” votes would mean the show must go on, that the audience is happy with the opera buffa.

The unconvincing pretention that Turkey should be “kept at bay” for strategic reasons is dishonest.

“Pulling the plug” is honest but probably not practical one: no one will wish to take that historic responsibility. In addition, polling numbers suggest a decline in Turkish public opinion for membership. On the other side, in the EU, the sympathy for Turkish membership is dramatically lower than in previous years. Support for Turkey’s entrance, for instance, is at 8% in France, 5% in Germany, 8% in the UK, 5% in Denmark, 7% in Sweden and 5% in Finland. There is no way the EU average could surpass the 50% threshold.

So, let the club members and the applicant decide on a membership bid for a marriage that will never work.

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Brandon Smith: The Fed Is A Suicide Bomber With A Deeper Agenda

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

Central bankers are sociopathic in nature and sociopathic people tend to behave like robots. When one understands the motivations of central bankers, or at the very least what their goals are, their actions become rather predictable. The question is, what truly motivates these people?

I believe according to the evidence that the central banks are motivated by ideological zealotry with the core purpose of total global centralization of economic and political power into the hands of a select group of elitists. This agenda is really just a modern “reboot” of feudalism or totalitarianism. They sometimes refer to the plan in public as the “new world order,” or the “global economic reset.” I often refer to the encompassing ideology as “globalism” for the sake of expediency.

To attain this goal, central bankers must influence mass psychology using traumatic events. Fear opens doors to centralization of power. This is simply a fact of social behavior and history. The more afraid a population is, the more willing they will be to give up freedoms in exchange for safety and security. Therefore, the most effective weapon at the disposal of the globalists and their central banking counterparts is engineered economic crisis — a weapon that can, if allowed, destroy entire civilizations almost as fast as a nuclear war, while still keeping most of the expensive infrastructure intact.

Beyond that, economic crisis is also a weapon that can influence a population to embrace even greater enslavement while viewing their slave masters as saviors rather than villains.

Despite what many people assume, central bankers are not driven by a desire for profit. They print their own capital, they hardly need to make a profit. Central bankers are also not driven by a desire to keep the current system afloat. They have demonstrated time and time again their habit of deliberately sabotaging the system through the use of inflationary bubbles followed by fiscal tightening into weak economic conditions. The U.S. economy today is just as expendable as any other economy the banks have destroyed in the past. It is not special.

This fact is becoming extremely clear lately as the Federal Reserve initiates policy tightening measures into obvious economic weakness; an action which is crashing stock markets as well as destabilizing other sectors of the economy including housing markets, auto markets and credit markets.

As noted, this was highly predictable. In September of 2015 I published an article titled ‘The Real Reasons Why The Fed Will Hike Interest Rates‘, predicting that the strategy the banks would use to bring about the next crisis would be interest rate hikes in the midst of financial instability. This was the same strategy they used to initiate the Great Depression. And as mentioned earlier, sociopaths act like robots — they tend to use similar tactics over and over again because these tactics have worked in the past.

At the time, the vast majority of analysts were predicting that the central banks would move towards negative interest rates. But if the goal of the banking elites is total centralization of the global economy, then keeping the U.S. system alive for another decade or longer makes little sense. They had already created the perfect financial bubble using QE and near zero interest rates to encourage debt accumulation at historic levels. It’s a veritable economic atomic bomb, why not use it?

At the beginning of this year, I published an article titled ‘New Fed Chairman Will Trigger A Historic Stock Market Crash In 2018‘. In that article, I predicted that Jerome Powell would push forward with interest rate hikes and balance sheet cuts. This would put extreme pressure on highly indebted corporations and they would be forced to stop spending capital on stock buybacks, which have been propping up equities for several years.

I would point out that not only has Powell in fact done exactly what I predicted, but that he has done it consciously, knowing what the results would be. In 2012, Powell outlined the exact consequences of policy tightening in the Fed October minutes. These minutes were not made public until recently. They PROVE that the Fed is fully aware of what it is doing, not acting blindly.

In September of this year, in my article ‘The Everything Bubble: When Will It Finally Crash?‘, I predicted that stock markets would begin crashing in December of 2018, despite many skeptics arguing that a “Santa Claus rally” was guaranteed. From the article:

“The Fed’s tightening policies have resulted in a severe reaction by emerging markets which are already crashing and have diverged greatly from U.S. markets. American stocks will not escape the same fate.

The Fed’s neutral rate efforts suggest a turning point in late 2018 to early 2019. Balance sheet cuts are expected to increase at this time, which would also expedite a crash in existing market assets. The only question is how long can corporations sustain stock buybacks until their own debt burdens crush their efforts? With such companies highly leveraged, interest rates will determine the length of their resolve. I believe two more hikes will be their limit.

If the Fed continues on its current path the next stock crash would begin around December 2018 into the first quarter of 2019. After that, other sectors of the economy, already highly unstable, will break down through 2019 and 2020.”

Though stock buybacks had saved markets from the plunge in February, they are long gone in the final quarter as the cost of corporate debt expands. Stocks are now in near free fall in December. The crash of the “everything bubble” has begun.  So far, intermittent bounces have been brief, lasting in some cases mere hours to a couple of days, then plunging into complete retraction.  The trend line indicates far more pain to come.

I was able to calculate this outcome because I am willing as an analyst to accept certain realities. The most important being that at this stage the Fed DOES NOT CARE about propping up the U.S. economy, and ultimately, the Fed does not even care what happens to itself as an institution. The truth is that the Fed is working towards an ideological end game of global centralization; this means one economy, one currency and eventually one world government (a plan which has been openly admitted to by globalists in the past). It has no loyalty to the U.S. system, and it will destroy the U.S. system if it must to achieve this prize.

The concept of the “plunge protection team” has become widespread in recent years, and for good reason.  It was the central banks in tandem with government agencies that have hidden honest economic data from the mainstream public as well as artificially inflated asset valuations to obscure the truth – that the US and much of the world has been suffering from systemic decline, a collapse that has been ongoing since at least 2008.

However, things change, and the plans of central banks evolve.  It took a decade to create the ‘Everything Bubble’; an unprecedented bubble encompassing every facet of our economy including Treasury bonds and even the dollar.  The true purpose of most financial bubbles is to engineer a crash.  The “plunge protection team” is no longer a guaranteed element of US markets anymore.  If they are intervening, it has only been as a steam valve to slow the current crash to more manageable levels.  In other words, it’s a controlled demolition.

I don’t call them the “PPT” anymore – instead I think I’ll call them the PAC (Plunge Acceleration Commission).  The PAC-men are devouring the economy piece by piece and digesting it as they go.  They want a crash.  In fact, they need one.

Far too many people wrongly assume that the Fed is the apex of globalist power. The Fed is nothing more than a single tentacle of a larger vampire squid. It is the branch of a franchise, not the top of the pyramid.

I would liken the Fed to a saboteur and a suicide bomber. It was sent here to America with the explicit goal of undermining the U.S. economy and the U.S. currency over the period of a century in preparation for a final destructive act which would open the path to global centralization. It was sent here in disguise, to get close to the target, to explode our economy. Its job is to do as much damage as possible, even to the point of sacrificing itself. When the dust settles, other globalist institutions plan to move in to pick up the pieces and offer the desperate citizenry a pre-designed solution.

At this time, ending the Fed is still useful as a symbolic act, but strategically it would be pointless in saving the economy. The Fed has already accomplished its mission.

This is why I don’t take the ongoing WWF wrestling match between Donald Trump and the Fed very seriously.  Trump’s continued associations with banking and think tank elites suggest to me that his battle with the Fed is staged theater.  Consider this:  If the Fed is designed to blow up our economy and possibly itself, blame needs to be redirected away from the central banks.  What better way to do this than to let conservatives think they are “winning” by pursuing a shutdown of the Fed?  It’s an entity that the globalists were planning on sacrificing anyway.

Trump campaigned on the argument that the Fed was creating an artificial bubble in stocks through low interest rates.  Then he took full credit for the stock market rally for the past two years.  Now he is attacking the Fed for raising interest rates and causing markets to fall.  It seems to me that the future mainstream narrative will read that a spoiled Trump caused the crash, blamed the “innocent” central bank that was only attempting to “normalize” the economy, and in the process made the situation even worse.

I am already seeing a stream of articles defending Jerome Powell as some kind of heroic rebel willing to raise rates in the face of establishment opposition.  This idea is laughable when you consider the Fed’s long history of inflating and then imploding bubbles while banking elites siphon up hard assets and push the citizenry into further poverty and servitude.  Powell isn’t a “rebel”, he’s a middle manager carrying out the same old strategy that globalists have always used:  Problem – Reaction – Solution.  Debt bubble, debt crisis, financial collapse, public desperation, asset absorption, centralization.

I will be elaborating on Trump’s participation in the global economic reset scheme in my next article.  Needless to say, the false Trump vs. Fed paradigm was also predictable.  Read my article ‘In A Battle Between Trump And The Fed, Who Really Wins?’, published in February of 2017, as well as my article ‘Trump vs The Fed: America Sacrificed At the NWO Altar’, published in July 2018, for an in-depth analysis.

Ultimately, the Fed is a proxy threat.  A shadow of the greater monster that must be defeated.

Our focus now must be to determine who rebuilds the system after the crash runs its course. This means preventing global central bank hubs like the IMF or the BIS from becoming the dominant economic force in the world. It means a long and arduous struggle. It means defiant structures — localized economies and production, self reliant people providing their own necessities and engaging in trade, and communities formed around mutual aid and security. It means a fight is coming that goes beyond the information war.

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The 10 Most Expensive Manhattan Apartments Sold For $500 Million In 2018

A sudden and sharp drop in luxury home valuations in Manhattan has baffled brokers and alarmed analysts who have begun warning about the possibility that softness in the high end of the market could soon spread throughout the market or portend a broader downturn nationwide, according to Bloomberg.

And in the latest sign that the softness isn’t just a temporary phenomenon, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that the ten biggest Manhattan apartment sales this year brought in an aggregate $500 million, a sum that is significantly lower than the past three years.

Homes

The highest sales price of the year was a $73.8 million duplex penthouse in a new tower designed by Robert Stern. While still high, relatively speaking, that sum is down 26% from its high in 2014 of $100 million. In the last 12 months, eight out of the top 10 sales were heavily discounted – one apartment at 157 West 57th street took a $17 million price cut before it found a buyer. Meanwhile, in most neighborhoods across the city – but particularly in luxury buildings – rents are also falling as middle class New Yorkers increasingly struggle with a shortage of housing exaggerated in part by developers fixating on the luxury market.

Without further ado, here are the ten most expensive apartments sold in NYC this year (courtesy of BBG):

1. $73.8 Million for 520 Park Avenue (Unit DPPH60):

Square feet: 9,138
Beds: 6
Baths: 7.5
Initial asking price: N/A

2. $62 Million for 520 Park Avenue (Unit PH52):

Square feet: 9,256
Beds: 6
Baths: 8
Initial asking price: $73 million

Park

3. $59 Million for 503 West 24th Street’s Penthouse:

Square feet: 10,000 (plus 2,700 outdoors)
Beds: 6
Baths: 7
Initial asking Price: N/A

Building

4. $56 Million for 70 Vestry Street’s PHS:

Square feet: 7,808 (plus 3,687 outdoors)
Beds: 5
Baths: 6.5
Initial asking price: $65 million

Building

5. $54 Million for 157 West 57th Street’s Unit 85:

Square feet: 6,240
Beds: 3
Baths: 4
Initial asking price: $70 million

Three

6. $50 Million for 15 Central Park West’s Unit 16/17B:

Square feet: 5,417 (plus 400 outdoors)
Beds: 4
Baths: 5.5
Initial asking price: $56 million

Building

7. $43.8 million for 443 Greenwich Street’s Unit PHA:

Square feet: 8,569
Beds: 5
Baths: 6.5
Initial asking price: $58 million

Five

8. $43.5 Million for 160 Leroy Street’s Unit PHN:

Square feet: 7,750
Beds: 5
Baths: 5.5
Initial asking price: $51 million

Six

9. $42 Million for 157 West 57th Street’s Unit 77:

Square feet: 6,240
Beds: 4
Baths: 4.5
Initial asking price: $52 million

Seven

10. $42 Million for 432 Park Avenue’s Unit 77B:

Square feet: 5,421
Beds: 4
Baths: 6.5
Initial asking price: $45 million

Eight

Of course, New York City isn’t the only luxury real-estate market that’s struggling: New York suburbs like Greenwich as well as tony Hamptons hamlets are suffering as buyers focus on smaller homes closer to urban centers (“small is the new big”).

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The Calm Before The Storm

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

Undoubtedly most of you know about some of the things that have happened this past week. The ban on “bump-fire” or “slide-fire” stocks came as a shocker to most. Many have tried to downplay it, but there is a point to be considered: when one thing is banned, it sets the stage for more to be banned. Each time this happens, the liberties we have left (not much, by the way) shrink just a bit further. I have written recently about how there is a concerted effort to destroy the United States internally, while the rest of the world moves toward globalism/socialism/communism.

The President is a “slight hiatus,” a pause in the march toward the destruction of the United States… and merely a hiatus, as the elections themselves are illusory and are predetermined long before the phony tally of ballots occurs.

The United States would not have tolerated Hillary Clinton as president in 2016. The paradigm shift is occurring as we speak, and what was not tolerated then will be embraced in 2020. In the meantime, look at what has been accomplished thus far within the first two years of the administration. Next to nothing is the answer.

The best thing that the President accomplished was to strike down the individual mandate for Obamacare by executive order, and that is the only thing that has been truly accomplished.

One by one, the President’s staff is either being replaced, or they are exiting stage left. Mattis leaves. No big deal, right? Wrong. It has created a tremendous vacuum and contributes greatly to disorganization within the administration. We are on the brink of a nuclear war. We are pulling out of the INF treaty, and Putin has announced his country’s intentions of restarting the nuclear arms race by equipping heretofore conventionally-armed missiles with warheads. Ukraine is a powder keg getting ready to blow up in our faces with Petroshenko and the Kiev government pushing for a war between NATO and Russia that they will instigate.

The departure of Mattis is a big deal, because when vacuums such as this one are created at a sensitive level as his former position, the effects can be crippling or at least temporarily paralyzing: the vacuum presents the opportunity for an enemy to strike.

This departure from Syria is much more complex than it appears on the surface. Forget the politics, and that we’re an “evil empire,” and all of that.  We’re discussing particulars and what is in place now, as we speak. In Northeastern Syria, Special Forces teams as well as CIA and other clandestine service operatives have been deeply embedded since the Obama years. Now the plug has been pulled, and all of the intricate networks that have been obtained in the area are to be curtailed. Whether a shadow-presence will be left there is likely, although conjecture at this point, but Mattis’ reaction and resignation is, most likely at a minimum, twofold:

  1. In consideration of what I just wrote, no Commander-in-Chief is privy to every motion that transpires within a given theater…and tactically, Mattis probably does not agree with the rapidity of the curtailment, from both an operational perspective.

  2. Perhaps more importantly, it may give the Russians and Iranians the perception of weakness on our part…a perception that can lead to military action on their part. At the very least, it may present a haphazard picture of the President…calling in airstrikes on Syria at the onset of his presidency where there were no real targets or objectives…and now destroying an embedded network by a spontaneous withdrawal.

I believe there is a third reason that is not as obvious. All of the signs indicate that a war…a major war…is approaching, and Mattis doesn’t have the stomach for it, because he either believes he would not be allowed to win it…or that he cannot win it. Vladimir Putin reported at a conference packed with journalists that he believes the U.S. and Russia are headed toward a nuclear war. While he said he didn’t wish it, he reiterated that Russia will fight if it has to.

I have written over and over again that it is not as simple as two men who are unable to resolve their differences as needing to fight. This is not UFC-6 (done in 1994), although the analogy is appropriate. David “Tank” [of lard] Abbott rolled around with Oleg Tartakov for about 17 minutes, before Tartakov made him tap out (before he passed out) with the choke hold. But then: even as Tartakov’s hand was being raised in victory, it was when he was supine…almost unconscious.

Both men had been at it hard and heavy and suffered from oxygen depletion (it was in Wyoming). In the end, both the victor and the vanquished were lying on the ground, and the former even needed oxygen before regaining his feet and taking the championship belt…unable to give an interview.

That is how it will be if we go to war with them or vice versa. This isn’t about nationalism or patriotism: I’m not running away to any other country, and I’m going to stay and fight when the time comes. The problem is that our country is akin to Janus…with two faces. The first face is the remnant, the remaining citizenry with heart, understanding, and compassion for the nation: decent,god-fearing citizenry who still cherish a system founded on principles of freedom and rights…rights given by God, and then recognized and written down for us by the Founding Fathers.

The second face, however, is a part of our citizens who are evil, and follow only after evil, and a government that is no longer of, by, or for the people…whose only concerns are self-preservation, promulgation and continuity of power, and the surveillance, subjugation, repression, and domination of its people.

It is this side, this evil second face that will propel us into a world war while it sips glass-bottled kombucha tea a mile underground in a bunker with their families and the other rulers while We the People burn up above…in the ultimate end run to depopulate the planet…and reemerge into a whole new world.

If you doubt it, let me reiterate it is not only possible…it is probable. Please refer to the article that I wrote recently with an excerpt from the last installment of the “Resident Evil” series…or watch the movie, and listen to the clip I excerpted. These men and women at the heights of power have no moral compass, and no compassion for the average person. In their eyes, those who follow after evil or after good can be sacrificed equally. The only ones they will allow to remain? It is not “good” or “evil” that  concerns the rulers: it is a question of their “rating” that concerns the powers that be: what do they bring to the table, and will they be obedient, subservient, and useful?

People are winding down their business and getting ready for Christmas, and all, and this, too, is a hiatus… from the reality that surrounds us… that same reality that will be there when we return. Make no mistake: this calm is temporary. The domestic economy, the world political situation, the shifting economic balance in the world, and the threats arising in different areas will still be the same. It is the calm before the storm. A storm is coming: prepare for it now while there’s still a little time, as no one else will do it for you…especially not those in power…who are the cause of the coming storm.

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