Tag: news

In a worrying sign that Trump’s progress to “normalize” relations with Kim Jong Un may be on the verge of collapse, North Korea lashed out at the US for its “extremely troubling” attitude just hours after it held the latest round of discussions with Mike Pompeo, warning that it its “firm, steadfast” resolve to give up its nuclear programs may falter. 

North Korea’s state-run KCNA news agency said the result of talks with the delegation headed by the US Secretary of State was “regrettable”, as a result of the US insisting on complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation, which however should hardly come as a surprise at this stage in negotiations, after Kim explicitly agreed to just that four weeks ago.

In the statement released hours after Pompeo departed Tokyo after meeting with Kim Yong Chol, a senior aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman accused the US is trying to unilaterally pressure Pyongyang into abandoning its nuclear weapons by insisting on unilateral complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation (CVID), and said trust between countries is in a “dangerous stage”, while adding that North Korea still trusts President Donald Trump.

Suggesting that something may have been lost in translation, and that a broad disagreement between the US and North Korea remains, as Pompeo departed Pyongyang he said he had made progress “on almost all of the central issues” in the talks, including on setting a timeline for its denuclearisation, though more work remained to be done.

According to Reuters, Pompeo said that U.S. negotiators and their North Korean counterparts discussed the idea of Pyongyang making a full declaration of its weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and setting a timeline for giving them up. Pompeo added that he spent “a good deal of time” discussing a denuclearisation timeline and the declaration of the North’s nuclear and missile facilities.

“These are complicated issues but we made progress on almost all of the central issues,’’ Pompeo told reporters on the airport tarmac before leaving Pyongyang, following his third visit to North Korea. “We had productive, good-faith negotiations.” – BBG

Pompeo also said that North Korea, in the “many hours of talks’’ at a walled-off guesthouse outside downtown Pyongyang, reiterated its commitment to denuclearization. The North Korean delegation was led by Kim Yong Chol, a senior aide to the country’s leader. Kim ended Pompeo’s visit on a positive note, telling the top U.S. diplomat just before he boarded his plane, “We will produce an outcome, results.

North Korea did not see things this way.

“We had anticipated the U.S. side would come with a constructive idea, thinking we would take something in return,” the North Korean spokesperson said.

“But through the high-level talks, the trust between the DPRK and the United States is facing a dangerous situation where our resolve for denuclearisation, which has been firm and steadfast, may falter.”

He added that the “fastest way” to achieve a nuclear-free Korean peninsula was through a phased approach under which both sides took steps at the same time, a position which is largely a non-starter for the Trump administration.

As a result of the unexpected divergence in views, Pompeo, who did not meet with Kim on this trip, could point to no concrete achievement from the talks aside from an agreement for the two sides to meet around July 12 in Panmunjom, the border village between the two Koreas, to discuss returning the remains of U.S. soldiers from the 1950-1953 Korean War, Bloomberg added.

Renewed tensions over North Korea’s nuclear program emerged following recent intelligence reports showed that North Korea is continuing work at a key rocket-engine facility. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that the U.S. has also stopped using the catchphrase of “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization’’ of North Korea that it had insisted upon happening before North Korea gets any relief from a crippling sanctions regime.

That change raised suspicion that the U.S. was softening its demands for the country, an argument that State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert had insisted on Friday wasn’t true.

Meanwhile, disagreements have emerged not only in discussions between the US and North Korea, but within Trump’s administration itself: last week, Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton said North Korea could be expected to carry out the “bulk’’ of denuclearization within a year. Yet Pompeo himself had earlier said he envisioned that occurring in about two and a half years, by the end of Trump’s term, and Nauert later said the U.S. wasn’t putting a timeline on the process.

Pompeo’s visit was the highest level meeting between U.S. and North Korean officials since Trump and Kim Jong Un held their historic summit in Singapore on June 12. Pompeo has been under pressure to deliver a more concrete disarmament plan after the two leaders signed a vague 1-1/2 page document that didn’t provide a timetable for dismantling North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.

For now, any firm denuclearization plan will have to wait even as the risk that all progress achieved so far in bilateral negotiations collapses.

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In a tweet comparing the New York Times and Washington Post with the “Russian bots” and other “fake accounts”  being purged by Twitter, President Trump asked on Saturday morning if the social media company’s crackdown – it is already deleting accounts at the rate of roughly 1 million a day, amounting to a total of 70 million and rising – would include accounts belonging to the New York Times and Washington Post, news organizations that “constantly quote anonymous sources”, and that “will be out of business in seven years” (around the time Trump would be leaving office should he win a second term in 2020).

“Twitter is getting rid of fake accounts at a record pace. Will that include the Failing New York Times and propaganda machine for Amazon, the Washington Post, who constantly quote anonymous sources that, in my opinion, don’t exist – They will both be out of business in 7 years!.”

Twitter is getting rid of fake accounts at a record pace. Will that include the Failing New York Times and propaganda machine for Amazon, the Washington Post, who constantly quote anonymous sources that, in my opinion, don’t exist – They will both be out of business in 7 years!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 7, 2018

Twitter has been stepping up its efforts to ban fake accounts, with the rate of suspensions having doubled since October.

The company has faced increasing scrutiny over allegations that Russian bots used it to spread “fake news” meant to “destabilize” the American electorate and democracy. However, as Facebook’s VP of advertising, Rob Goldman, said back in February following Bob Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals accused of operating a “bot farm” the majority of the advertising purchased by suspicious Russian bots happened after the election.

That has not stopped the left from demanding that Twitter do more to sanction these – and pretty much any other accounts it disagrees with, to which Twitter’s response has been to periodically (shadow)ban countless conservative accounts resulting in angry blowback from much of Twitter’s non-liberal user base.

As for the one-word answer to Trump’s question whether Twitter will ban the NYT and WaPo, here it is: no.

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Now that the great Chinese money-laundering M&A wave of 2015-2016 is long forgotten, in some cases with tragic consequences such as Wednesday’s freak death of HNA chairman Wang Jian, and the Chinese conglomerates and oligarchs who spent billions to fund acquisitionsin the US and  around the globe…

…are on the verge of bankruptcy or defaulting outright, it’s time for their first-lien lenders to party as they are about to take over countless now-worthless equity tranches.

The latest such example is none other than infamous distressed investor, Elliott Management, whose founder Paul Singer famously seized an Argentinian frigate, the ARA Libertad, in 2012 as part of his long-running debt dispute with the recently insolvent Latin American nation (which then went on to troll bond investors by selling 100 year bonds just 5 years later).

And now, according to Bloomberg Paul Singer is set to take full control of legendary Italian soccer club, AC Milan, after its Chinese owner, businessman Li Yonghong, failed to repay debt owed to Singer’s Elliott Management by a Friday deadline, just one year after Li acquired the club.

What is perhaps most striking, is how modest the amount of money in dispute was: Li Yonghong was due to repay only €32 million of the more than €400 million ($469 million) of debt accumulated by the hedge fund.

As Bloomberg reminds us, Paul Singer’s hedge fund played a key role in allowing Li to conclude the €740 million purchase of Italy’s most successful football club at the international level, sold by Silvio Berlusconi’s investment company Fininvest in 2017, by providing last-minute financing. Elliott then lent Li €303 million to complete the purchase of the team and provided a further €32 million to help the club resolve a dispute with soccer’s European governing body UEFA.

Meanwhile, Milan’s troubles – now that it was owned by a shady Chinese investor whose investment in turn was sourced by the world’s biggest “vulture hedge fund” only grew, and in May, UEFA said that the team “breached financial fair-play rules because of uncertainties about the team’s effort to refinance the loan provided by Elliott.”  Because of this, AC Milan was banned from European competition.

But what we find most surprising is that Li was unable to kick the can indefinitely by coughing up a relatively modest €32MM, a fraction of the total purchase price, and an indication that behind every Chinese oligarch there is a financial black hole where money enters but never leaves.

That may also explain why the sale of AC Milan to Li was complicated until the very end:

The original investment group changed several times, and in September 2017 Bloomberg reported that it filed a false bank report during negotiations with Berlusconi’s company. Li denied the allegations.

But the biggest problem came to what has emerged as China’s Achiles heel: cross border fund transfers, i.e. money laundering, which China cracked down in 2016 and 2017, following the unprecedented capital outflow surge that started in 2015 and drained China of billions in US Treasurys as it scrambled to defend the yuan:

the deal, originally scheduled to close in December 2016, also was delayed because the investment group lacked authorization to export funds from China. Regulators in China have been ramping up their scrutiny of outbound investments, with a particular focus on sports and entertainment.

Sensing the end was near, AC Milan hired Bank of America earlier in this year to refinance the team’s debt and according to Bloomberg, in recent weeks the club has attracted investors willing to buy controlling stakes, though no deals were secured.

Possible buyers included Italian-American media magnate Rocco Commisso and the Ricketts family, which owns the Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball team.

But how did Li emerge as the latest Chinese financial paper tiger: it turns out his plans were foiled by the Chinese market turmoil. His original plan included IPOing the club on a Chinese stock exchange, and in a draft of the original fundraising materials, the Chinese investor group indicated the team’s value could multiply several times in the long term to reach €2.9 billion euros, rivaling Real Madrid and Manchester United, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg.

For now the plans have been indefinitely put on hold, and instead Li, who became chairman of the soccer club last year, had to use his personal wealth to help complete the deal and also pledged the team as a guarantee to secure financing from Elliott last year.

And now that Li has decided to stop payment to Elliott, his equity stake is worthless which means that Paul Singer is now the proud equity holder of Italy’s most legendary football club. One wonders how long until Elliott at least gets some free marketing out of the deal and its logo (and hopefully quarterly investor letters) grace the shirts of Milan’s players alongside that of the Emirates.

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The world-famous San Fermín bull-running festival began yesterday in the northern Spanish city of Pamplona (despite calls for the event to be cancelled this year over sexual violence after a woman was sexually abused by five men at the festival in 2016).

However, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, thrillseekers continue to flock to Pamplona from all corners of the world to seek an adrenaline-filled morning running with the bulls.

In total, 15 people have been killed by bulls at the festival since 1922 with the most recent death occurring in 2009. Even though deaths are infrequent, injuries are far more common.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Last year, 17,126 people took their chances running with the bulls, of which the overwhelming majority were men.

In terms of nationality, 40 percent are Spanish (excluding the region of Navarra where San Fermín takes place).

There is also a sizeable U.S. contingent with 20 percent of runners American.

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Authored by Neema Parvini via The Mises Institute,

This article will demonstrate how the United Kingdom has steadily become a police state over the past twenty years, weaponizing its institutions against the people and employing Orwellian techniques to stop the public from seeing the truth. It will demonstrate, contrary to official narratives, that both overall levels of crime and violent crime have been increasing, not decreasing, as the size of the state in the UK has gotten bigger. It will also expose how the Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 1997 to 2010, deliberately obscured real crime data with estimated crime rates based on survey data as opposed to the real numbers. I will demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion perpetuated by progressive myths, life was much safer in Britain during the era of classical laissez-faire from the 1850s to 1911.

In his 10 years in power from 1997 to 2007, Tony Blair passed an astonishing 26,849 laws in total, an average of 2,663 per year or 7.5 a day. The Labour Party continued this madness under Gordon Brown who broke the record in 2008 by passing 2,823 new laws, a 6% increase on even his megalomaniac predecessor. In 2010, Labour’s last year in power before handing over the reigns to the Blairite social radical, David Cameron, there was a 54% surge in privacy cases brought against public bodies, and the Cabinet were refusing freedom of information requests at a rate of 51%. The vast number of new laws under Labour does not count the 2,100 new regulations the EU passed in 2006 alone, which apparently is average for them.

Many of these vast changes under Blair and Brown were in the area of criminal law. By 2008, Labour had created more than 3,600 new offences. Many of these, naturally, were red-tape regulations. To give you an idea:

• Creating a nuclear explosion

• Selling types of flora and fauna not native to the UK, such as the grey squirrel, ruddy duck or Japanese knotweed

• To wilfully pretend to be a barrister or a traffic warden

• Disturbing a pack of eggs when instructed not to by an authorised officer

• Obstructing workers from carrying out repairs to the Dockland Light Railway

• Offering for sale a game bird killed on a Sunday or Christmas Day

• Allowing an unlicensed concert in a church hall or community centre

• A ship’s captain may end up in court if he or she carries grain without a copy of the International Grain Code on board

• Scallop fishing without the correct boat

• Breaking regulation number 10 of the 1998 Apple and Pear Grubbing Up Regulations

• Selling Polish Potatoes

There are many more. However, there were also some more serious breaches of civil liberty.

One common tactic of the Blair government was to use a moral panic to pass radical new legislation. For example, in 2006, he passed the Terrorism Act that overturned habeas corpus and gave the British police the right to detain anyone for any reason for 90 days. At the time, this got widespread public support because of the recent 7/7 bombings in London. This means that, in the UK, the police can arrest you without you necessarily having committed a crime if they can brand your activities as “terrorist” or “extremist.” Although these laws were ostensibly brought about to combat Islamic terrorism, the ever-expanding definitions of “far right” and “extremist” demonstrate how they can be weaponised against the British people.

Another area in which the Labour government used moral panic cynically to overturn longstanding common law principles was the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which they used to eliminate the double jeopardy rule and, as per the MacPherson report, to put an end to colour-blind policing.

Recently there have been an increased number of cases in which the British state has encroached on civil liberties in a near-openly tyrannical way. The Count Dankula case, for example, in which a man was arrested for “hate speech,” then tried and made to pay a fine for telling off-colour jokes about the Nazis on Youtube. Then there was the young woman who was found guilty of being “grossly offensive” for posting Snoop Dogg lyrics on her Instagram account. And, most recently, the political activist Tommy Robinson was arrested and tried in mere hours for recording outside a courtroom. In each of these cases, despite some protests against the legal rulings, the media broadly sided with the courts, citing the technicalities of the law – in the former two cases section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 (another Blair special) – and brand anyone who would protest “far right” or “extremist.”

“Gaslighting” is a word from the world of psychology; it is a technique of manipulation to achieve power. Here are eleven warning signs:

1. They tell blatant lies.

2. They deny they ever said something, even though you have proof.

3. They use what is near and dear to you as ammunition.

4. They wear you down over time.

5. Their actions do not match their words.

6. They throw in positive reinforcement to confuse you.

7. They know confusion weakens people.

8. They project.

9. They try to align people against you.

10. They tell you or others that you are crazy.

11. They tell you everyone else is a liar.

The British state has become increasingly Orwellian in its gaslighting of the British public since at least 1997 with near-total complicity from the media. In a recent article for Quillette, I argued that this has been the case in both Britain and the USA for years.

This has especially been the case in the area of crime. During a period in which both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party have become increasingly statist and interventionist on both an economic and civil level, we have been continually told that one of the positive effects of ever-increasing government control is that society is becoming more peaceful. This is the narrative, for example, of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In 2005, The Guardian told us that since 1995 overall crime had decreased by 44%. Almost a decade later the same publication wondered out loud what could be causing the continued decline in crime rates in the UK. And just a few years after that, they had changed their tune completely decrying sudden increases in violent crime and blaming this on cuts in police numbers. In the first few months of 2018, the shocking increases in instances of violent crime in Sadiq Khan’s London, which in the past year has seen rises of 31.3% in knife crime, 78% in acid attacks, 70% in youth homicides, 33.4% in robberies, 18.7% in burglaries, 33.9% in theft and 30% in child sex crime.  But this story told by The Guardian – of a general trend down in crime over the past twenty years followed by a sudden and inexplicable spike – is simply not true, as I will demonstrate in this paper.

In 1997, Tony Blair famously ran on a platform of being ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. Unfortunately for him, the reality of empirical crime data had stubbornly refused to comply with his anointed vision through his first years in power. “New Labour” were famous for the efficiency of their propaganda machine. American readers will no doubt be aware of Mr. Blair’s complicity in making exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” in the run up to the war in Iraq, but few readers – British, American, or otherwise – will know that the Blair government was also lying about the extent of crime in Britain. The Labour Party, who were so much about media perceptions and political spin, needed to find a way to show on paper that their “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” agenda was making good on its promise. So, in 2003, Tony Blair permanently changed the way crime is reported in the UK by introducing the National Crime Recording Standard’ (NCRS). Up until that point, crime in the UK was reported using hard data drawn from actual arrests and convictions from the police. However, from that point onwards, the official statistics were to be drawn from the British Crime Survey which estimates crime based on a survey of 50,000 people aged 16 or over. This works much like how television companies produce estimates for their show ratings. So that means that the statistics you see quoted in newspapers like The Guardian are not hard figures, but estimates drawn from surveys. Whatever the merits of this method, it produced a graph for the Blair government that looked like this:

This change ostensibly came about because – as part of the “tough on the causes of crime” part of their pledge, Labour wanted to count victims as opposed to the total number of offenders. Of course, this takes a huge number of crimes out of the data. For example, as it was introduced in 2003, because only over 16-year olds could be interviewed, crimes against minors were not registered in the official statistics. Also, because interviews had to take place in private properties, street crime habitually would not show up in these numbers. Of course, so-called “victimless” crimes – fraud or online crime – do not show up in this data either. Once you start to account for some of these caveats, it becomes more obvious why this extraordinary change in methodology would produce a downwards trend in the data. In fact, it was explicitly designed so that, because of these changes, it could not be compared with numbers before 2002.

In 2007, Ken Pease and Graham Farrell estimated that the survey data could be underestimating violent crime by as much as 82%, with the real number of victims closer to 4.4 million than 2.4 million. This massive margin of error means that the real crime rate becomes a matter for debate as opposed to a question of hard evidence. It seems to me that this was a deliberate choice by the Blair government. Hence, we now find the BBC wondering about what the real crime rate might be.   And this is where the true extent of the Orwellian nightmare of the Blair and Gordon Brown years dawns: by making the crime rate an estimate neither political party can reliably point to the facts, and it always becomes a question of one difficult to substantiate narrative against another. “Post-truth” did not start with Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump – Tony Blair was doing it from the minute he stepped into office.

However, real numbers of convicted offenders are still recorded and kept, although they are somewhat difficult to obtain. In the run-up to the 2010 British election, Conservative MP and Shadow Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, requested the real numbers from the House of Commons library which duly produced a series of independent reports. Incidentally, once the leader of the Tories, David Cameron, became prime minister in 2010, Chris Grayling became the Secretary for Justice and, to my knowledge, was happy to let this little detail slide and continue with the survey-based methodology. It is funny how power can change the incentives for action.

In any case, the numbers that Grayling requested are damning for anyone who claims that either overall crime or violent crime decreased in the UK between 1997 and 2010.

The population of the UK was about 58 million people in 1997. In 2008, that had increased to 62 million, an increase of 6.87%. In that same period male violent crime convictions in England and Wales increased by around 63.92% from 49,153 in 1997 to 80,574 in 2008. So violent crime convictions increased by more than ten times the growth of the population.

Increases like this can been seen across virtually every category of crime. Convictions for persons under 18, for example, increased by 60.18% from 12,806 in 1997 to 20,513 in 2008, in keeping with the average increase in violent crime, this is ten times the rate of population growth in the same period. Knife crime practically doubled during the Blair years, from 3,360 offenders in 1997 to 6,368 in 2008. In 1998 there were 5,542 robberies, in 2008 there were 8,475. From the year 2000 to 2008, the total number of arrests for any offence went up from 1.2 million to 1.4 million, an increase of about 17%.

For the claim to be true that violent crime went down 44% during the 00s in the UK, it would have to be at a time when violent crime convictions went up 64%. For the claim to be true that overall crime went down in from 1997 to 2008, it would have to be at a time when overall convictions for crime went up by 17%. Both claims seem extraordinary: how could there be a rise in convictions without a corresponding increase in crime? The methodology that measures victims through estimates from survey data clearly is not getting this correct.

If we use recorded convictions in this way, as opposed to estimates, we can make meaningful comparisons to the past as Peter Hitchens does in The Abolition of Liberty. As we have seen, the total number of convictions in England and Wales for 2008 was around 1.47 million for a population of 62 million people, around 2.25% of the population. According to Hitchens the comparable number in 1861 at the height of laissez-faire was 88,000 for a population of 20,066,224, or around 0.44% of the population. In 1911, before Leviathan and the welfare state had really had a chance to grow, the number was 97,000 for a population of 36,075,269, or around 0.27% of the population. The claim that crime has risen because of government cuts to the numbers of police also cannot stand since in 1911 there were 51,203 officers whereas by 2009 there were 144,353 officers. The increase in police officers from 1911 to 2009 therefore is 181.92% compared with an increase of 71.86% in total population. So the size of the repressive apparatuses of the state have increased greatly, and with it the total number of criminals.

It is clear that with less personal freedom and a bigger and more invasive state comes less personal responsibility and greater lawlessness. It is also clear that as the British state has become more top-down in orientation than in its common-law past, it has levied increased coercive legislative power against the British people it supposedly serves. The state is now behaving in an openly Orwellian manner with near-explicit contempt for the public.

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Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

I’ve been noticing videos going viral the last few days, some with millions of views, about Muslim women bravely fighting to free themselves from oppression in the Middle East. The videos, curiously, are being shared enthusiastically by many Republicans and pro-Israel hawks, who aren’t traditionally the sort of crowd you see rallying to support the civil rights of Muslims. What’s up with that?

Well, you may want to sit down for this shocker, but it turns out that they happen to be women from a nation that the US war machine is currently escalating operations against. They are Iranian.

Whenever you see the sudden emergence of an attractive media campaign that is sympathetic to the plight of civilians in a resource-rich nation unaligned with the western empire, you are seeing propaganda. When that nation is surrounded by other nations with similar human rights transgressions and yet those transgressions are ignored by that same media campaign, you are most certainly seeing propaganda. When that nation just so happens to already be the target of starvation sanctions and escalated covert CIA ops, you can bet the farm that you are seeing propaganda.

Back in December a memo was leaked from inside the Trump administration showing how then-Secretary of State, DC neophyte Rex Tillerson, was coached on how the US empire uses human rights as a pretense on which to attack and undermine noncompliant governments. Politico reports:

The May 17 memo reads like a crash course for a businessman-turned-diplomat, and its conclusion offers a starkly realist vision: that the U.S. should use human rights as a club against its adversaries, like Iran, China and North Korea, while giving a pass to repressive allies like the Philippines, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

“Allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies,” argued the memo, written by Tillerson’s influential policy aide, Brian Hook.

The propaganda machine doesn’t operate any differently from the State Department, since they serve the same establishment. US ally Saudi Arabia is celebrated by the mass media for “liberal reform” in allowing women to drive despite hard evidence that those “reforms” are barely surface-level cosmetics to present a pretty face to the western world, but Iranian women, who have been able to drive for years, are painted as uniquely oppressed. Iran is condemned by establishment war whores for the flaws in its democratic process, while Saudi Arabia, an actual monarchy, goes completely unscrutinized.

This is because the US-centralized power establishment, which has never at any point in its history cared about human rights, plans on effecting regime change in Iran by any means necessary. Should those means necessitate a potentially controversial degree of direct military engagement, the empire needs to make sure it retains control of the narrative.

Women in Iran are recording the abuse they suffer at the hands of men for not wearing religious clothing. May the good people of Iran free themselves from the shackles of the tyrannical mullah theocracy. pic.twitter.com/QWcPI5wylR

— Julie Lenarz (@MsJulieLenarz) July 4, 2018

This is what war propaganda looks like in the era of social media. It will never look ugly. It will never directly show you its real intentions. If it did, it wouldn’t work. It can’t just come right out and say “Hey we need to do horrible, evil things to the people in this country on the other side of the world in your name using your resources, please play along without making a fuss.” It will necessarily look fresh and fun and rebellious. It will look appealing. It will look sexy.

And it’s working. I am currently getting tagged in these videos multiple times a day by Trump supporters who are eager to show me proof that I’m on the wrong side of the Iran issue; the psyop is so well-lubricated with a combination of sleek presentation and confirmation bias that it slides right past their skepticism and becomes accepted as fact, even the one with the Now This pussyhat propaganda logo in the corner.

Be less trusting of these monsters, please. The people of Afghanistan haven’t benefitted from the interminable military quagmire that has cost tens of thousands of their lives. The invaders of Iraq were never “greeted as liberators” by an oppressed population. The humanitarian intervention in Libya left a humanitarian catastrophe in its wake far more horrific than anything it claimed to be trying to prevent. Saving the children of Syria with western interventionism has left half a million Syrians dead.

If the Iranians do in fact wish to change their government, it should happen without crippling sanctions, collaboration with extremist terror cults, or the rapey tentacles of the CIA manipulating the situation. There has never been a US-led regime change in the Middle East that wasn’t disastrous. People should be screaming at the US and its allies to cease these interventions, not applauding propaganda that is clearly being manufactured by that same empire.

*  *  *

Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing the stuff I publish is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my bookWoke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

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As we saw with Friday’s jobs report, the booming US economy has continued to draw in workers from “the sidelines” – ie people who weren’t actively looking for work and were considered to be “out” of the workforce – as the participation rate has ticked higher in recent months (though it remains well below its pre-crisis levels). Still, economists have been largely unable to explain how wages have remained stagnant in a supposedly “tight” labor market. But a recent story in the Washington Post might hold a few clues…

According to Census data analyzed by WaPo, the number of Americans aged 85 and older who are still working has risen to record highs in recent years.

Meanwhile, the number of workers between the ages of 18 and 30 who are out of the workforce hasn’t been this high since the 1970s, before large numbers of women entered the workforce.

At last count, there were 255,000 Americans aged 85 and older who had been working or looking for work in the past 12 months. That’s approximately 4.4% of Americans that age – up from 2.6% in 2006. Indeed, it appears Ruth Bader Ginsburg (85) and Warren Buffett (87) are not alone.

Overall, 255,000 Americans, 85-years-old and over, were working over the past 12 months. That’s 4.4 percent of Americans that age, up from 2.6 percent in 2006, before the recession. It’s the highest number on record.

They’re doing all sorts of jobs – crossing guards, farmers and ranchers, even truckers, as my colleague Heather Long revealed in a front-page story last week. Indeed, there are between 1,000 and 3,000 U.S. truckers age 85 or older, based on 2016 Census Bureau figures. Their ranks have roughly doubled since the Great Recession.

America’s aging workforce has defined the post-Great Recession labor market. Baby boomers and their parents are working longer as life expectancies grow, retirement plans shrink, education levels rise and work becomes less physically demanding. Labor Department figures show that at every year of age above 55, U.S. residents are working or looking for work at the highest rates on record.

The oldest workers in the workforce, many of whom have been forced out of retirement for financial reasons, have clustered in 26 of the 455 occupations tracked by the Census Bureau data.

As one might expect, these are industries like sales or management, which don’t require physically demanding labor. Farmers and ranchers has perhaps the largest percentage of elderly workers compared with younger ones, according to WaPo.

Crossing guards are relatively likely to be age 85 or above. The same goes for musicians, anyone who works in a funeral home, and product demonstrators like those you might find at a warehouse club store.

But that chart only tells half the story. Few people of any age get the opportunity to work as crossing guards, funeral directors or musicians. So, while they may be elder-friendly jobs, they’re not the top jobs for older people.

By sheer numbers, the top job among the 85-plus-year-olds is farmers and ranchers. It’s also the one in which the distribution of older workers is most different from the distribution of the rest of the population. That category, which is distinct from farm laborers, houses 3.5 percent of the oldest workers – but just 0.5 percent of the rest of the population.

Generational shifts drive much of the split. When today’s oldest workers were entering the labor force, farmers and ranchers had far more options than computer scientists did, and that’s shaped their professional choices today, seven decades down the line.

Perhaps the bizarre phenomenon that older workers are entering the workforce at levels never seen before, while a growing number of young people have been sidelined from the workforce for whatever reason (be it because of drugs, illness or simply because they don’t want to work), has something to do with the fact that wages are stagnant. According to WaPo, at every age above 55, US residents are working or looking for work at the highest rates on record. Workers who are coming out of retirement, or just trying to hang on in the face of ageism in the workforce, aren’t exactly in the best position to negotiate for higher wages.

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