Tag: news

In the early 1940’s some of the greatest scientific minds of all time gathered in Los Alamos, NM for an “R&D” project, infamously dubbed the ‘Manhattan Project’, that ultimately changed the course of human history forever. 

Just a few years later, on July 16th, 1945, that team of scientists detonated the world’s first nuclear weapon, code-named “Trinity”, in the desert just north of Alamogordo, NM.  Less than one month later, the only two nuclear weapons to ever be used in combat were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulting in over 100,000 immediate civilian and military deaths.

And while no nuclear weapons have been used in a combat situation since August 9, 1945, as revealed by the following animation, a staggering number of tests have been conducted all over the world and most of them in the deserts of the Southwestern United States.

Animated map shows every nuclear-bomb explosion in history http://pic.twitter.com/3Zellt9ml8

— Business Insider (@businessinsider) January 12, 2018

* * *

And while nuclear tests are somewhat more rare now than they were during the height of the Cold War, there remains a devastating number of nuclear warheads deployed and ready for launch today…a fact we recently detailed in the post below entitled “15,000 Nuclear Weapons In The World – Mapping Who Has What”:

So, how many nuclear weapons are there, and what exactly is happening right now? Let’s launch into it.

WHO HAS ACCESS TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

As VisualCapitalist’s map above demonstrates, the United States and Russia still maintain the world’s largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons, holding 92% of the world’s estimated 15,000 nuclear warheads.

While today’s arsenals seem quite excessive, they are actually quite modest compared to historical totals such as those during the Cold War. In 1986, for example, there were actually 70,300 nuclear weapons globally – but luckily for us, the number of warheads has eased down over time as countries disarm more weapons.

Will this number of warheads continue to slide down as a result of increased international cooperation? The Brookings Institution has grouped the nine countries with nuclear arsenals into categories that identify prospective entrants to the global arms control regime:

Any advancement of multilateral arms control, such as a treaty limiting limiting nuclear weapons, would likely take place between these countries.

MAPPING NUCLEAR SITES WITHIN THE UNITED STATES

Thanks to various arms reduction agreements, thousands of nuclear warheads have been retired. That said, warheads are still stored in a number of sites around the continental United States. The map below also highlights laboratories and interstate shipping routes. (Yes, nuclear weapons are apparently shipped in big rigs.)

THE WILD CARD: NORTH KOREA

The Hermit Kingdom is a relatively minor player in the nuclear weapon ecosystem, but they have been capturing the world’s attention. Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea has dramatically ramped up the frequency of missile tests, with 17 confirmed launches so far in 2017.

Here’s a look at the country’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, along with ranges of specific weapons.

More than a decade has passed since North Korea detonated its first nuclear weapon, and the country is now believed to be capable of intercontinental ballistic missile delivery. This, combined with aggressive rhetoric from North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, has forced the Trump administration to take their threats more seriously.

That said, experts suggest that recent provocations aren’t much different from previous periods of tension between the two countries, and that the risk of an actual conflict is overblown.

North Korea’s comments are clearly deterrent in nature, and the Guam ‘threat’ was exactly along those lines.

 

– David Kang, director, Korean Studies Institute, USC

Either way, while the prospect of an all-out war is unlikely – the war of words between North Korea and the United States is likely destined to continue.

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Authored by Anthony Gockowski via Campus Reform,

Yale University psychology professor Bandy Lee has deleted her Twitter account amid mounting allegations that she is not licensed in her home state of Connecticut.

 

Accusations have been circulating on Twitter that the prominent Yale professor, known for her public diagnosis of President Donald Trump as having a “mental impairment” and who recently met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to discuss the issue, isn’t actually a licensed psychiatrist.

In fact, Campus Reform discovered that according to the State of Connecticut, Lee’s “physician/surgeon” license expired in 2015, and her application for reinstatement has been “pending” ever since.

 

Additionally, her “controlled substance registration for practitioner” license has apparently “lapsed,” expiring in February 2017.

 

In response to Campus Reform’s inquiry on the matter, Lee simply stated that “I need only one license,” though she has yet to elaborate on precisely which license that is, and, according to the state in which she resides, she allegedly has none.

Without mentioning Lee specifically, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) put out a recent statement in which it condemned the diagnoses of public officials whom psychiatrists have not personally examined, invoking what is commonly referred to as the Goldwater Rule.

“We at the APA call for an end to psychiatrists providing professional opinions in the media about public figures whom they have not examined, whether it be on cable news appearances, books, or in social media,” the statement read, according to The Washington Examiner.

“Arm-chair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical,” the APA concluded.

Lee and a colleague, however, responded to criticisms in a Wednesday POLITICO piece, in which they claim that “it’s perfectly OK to question the president’s mental state,” since they are “psychiatrists.”

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According to NBC Health’s Troy Jones, who operates the website Nukepills, the demand for potassium iodide  jumped last week after President Trump tweeted that he had a “much bigger & more powerful” nuclear button than North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un.

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

“On Jan. 2, I basically got in a month’s supply of potassium iodide and I sold out in 48 hours,” said Jones, 53, who is a domestic and international distributor of emergency radiation products.

In the 48-hour period from Trump’s “nuclear button” tweet, Jones shipped about 140,000 doses of potassium iodide, which blocks the thyroid from absorbing radiation and ultimately help thwart cancer in a nuclear event. Jones further said a typical week of shipments without President Trump stoking atomic war runs about 8,400 doses to private individuals. In other words, Trump increased Jones’ sales by over 16x last week. Jones notes the sales figures do not include government agencies, hospitals, and universities.

To confirm this trend, Alan Morris, president of the Virginia-based pharmaceutical firm Anbex Inc, which specializes in radiation protection, said he’d seen an increase in demand, too.

“We are a wonderful barometer of the level of anxiety in the country,” said Morris.

Morris appears to be right: the search term “nuclear war” and “trump nuclear war” have surged since Trump entered office.

 

Jones warns that the escalating war of words between the U.S. and North Korea has contributed to widespread fear across the country. Although Jones says some of his buyers are “preppers,” many new buyers today are regular families seeking protection from nuclear war.

Such concerns were on displayed last week, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it would conduct an unprecedented briefing on January 16 concerning the “public health response to a nuclear detonation” over the skies of the United States.

While a nuclear detonation is unlikely, it would have devastating results and there would be limited time to take critical protection steps. Despite the fear surrounding such an event, planning and preparation can lessen deaths and illness. For instance, most people don’t realize that sheltering in place for at least 24 hours is crucial to saving lives and reducing exposure to radiation. While federal, state, and local agencies will lead the immediate response efforts, public health will play a key role in responding. Join us for this session of Grand Rounds to learn what public health programs have done on a federal, state, and local level to prepare for a nuclear detonation. Learn how planning and preparation efforts for a nuclear detonation are similar and different from other emergency response planning efforts.

Back in 2011, Jones saw a massive surge in demand for potassium iodide following the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactor. With minimal known radiation threats today, sales are once more exploding on the back of mass hysteria of nuclear war from President Trump’s Twitter account.

“I now follow his Twitter feed just to gauge the day’s sales and determine how much to stock and how many radiation emergency kits to prep for the coming week,” Jones said, adding: “I don’t think he intended to have this kind of effect.”

Nevertheless, President Trump has managed to make the potassium iodide industry and the world of preppers great again.

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Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

After a year in which he tested a hydrogen bomb and an ICBM, threatened to destroy the United States, and called President Trump “a dotard,” Kim Jong Un, at the gracious invitation of the president of South Korea, will be sending a skating team to the “Peace Olympics.”

An impressive year for Little Rocket Man.

Thus the most serious nuclear crisis since Nikita Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba appears to have abated. Welcome news, even if the confrontation with Pyongyang has probably only been postponed.

Still, we have been given an opportunity to reassess the 65-year-old Cold War treaty that obligates us to go to war if the North attacks Seoul, and drove us to the brink of war today.

2017 demonstrated that we need a reassessment. For the potential cost of carrying out our commitment is rising exponentially.

Two decades ago, a war on the Korean Peninsula, given the massed Northern artillery on the DMZ, meant thousands of U.S. dead.

Today, with Pyongyang’s growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, American cities could face Hiroshima-sized strikes, if war breaks out.

What vital U.S. interest is there on the Korean Peninsula that justifies accepting in perpetuity such a risk to our homeland?

We are told that Kim’s diplomacy is designed to split South Korea off from the Americans. And this is undeniably true.

For South Korean President Moon Jae-in is first and foremost responsible for his own people, half of whom are in artillery range of the DMZ. In any new Korean war, his country would suffer most.

And while he surely welcomes the U.S. commitment to fight the North on his country’s behalf as an insurance policy, Moon does not want a second Korean war, and he does not want President Trump making the decision as to whether there shall be one.

Understandably so. He is looking out for South Korea first.

Yet Moon rightly credits Trump with bringing the North Koreans to the table: “I give President Trump huge credit for bringing about the inter-Korean talks, and I’d like to thank him for that.”

But again, what are the U.S. interests there that we should be willing to put at risk of nuclear attack tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Korea and our bases in Asia, and even our great cities, in a war that would otherwise be confined to the Korean Peninsula?

China shares a border with the North, but is not treaty-bound to fight on the North’s behalf. Russia, too, has a border with North Korea, and, with China, was indispensable to saving the North in the 1950-53 war. But Russia is not committed by any treaty to fight for the North.

Why, then, are Americans obligated to be among the first to die in a second Korean War? Why is the defense of the South, with 40 times the economy and twice the population of the North, our eternal duty?

Kim’s drive for a nuclear deterrent is propelled by both fear and calculation.

The fear is that the Americans who detest him will do to him and his regime and country what they did to Saddam Hussein.

The calculation is that what Americans fear most, and the one thing that deters them, is nuclear weapons. Once Soviet Russia and Communist China acquired nukes, the Americans never attacked them.

If he can put nuclear weapons on U.S. troops in Korea, U.S. bases in Japan, and U.S. cities, Kim reasons, the Americans will not launch a war on him. Have not recent events proven him right?

Iran has no nuclear weapons and some Americans clamor daily for “regime change” in Tehran. But because Kim has nukes, the Americans appear more anxious to talk. His policy is succeeding.

What he is saying with his nuclear arsenal is: As you Americans have put my regime and country at risk of annihilation, I am going to put your cities at risk. If we go down in your nuclear “fire and fury,” so, too, will millions of Americans.

The whole world is watching how this plays out.

For the American Imperium, our system of alliances, is held together by a credible commitment: If you attack any of our scores of allies, you are at war with the United States.

From the Baltic to the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf, from the South China Sea to Korea and Japan today, the costs and the risks of maintaining the imperium are growing.

With all these promissory notes out there — guarantees to go to war for other nations — one is inevitably going to be called.

And this generation of Americans, unaware of what their grandfathers obligated them to do, will demand to know, as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan: What are we over doing there, on the other side of the world?

America First is more than a slogan.

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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s plan to order markets to slash prices of food – an attempt to combat speculation and rampant inflation of the bolivar – has apparently backfired as mobs of hungry Venezuelans have started looting supermarkets and slaughtering cattle in the open to survive, Reuters  reports.

Last week, we reported on near-riots that broke out in Caracas after the mandatory price cuts for food stoked widespread shortages as what little inventory that remained on market shelves quickly disappeared.

Venezuelans are suffering from a plethora of economic and social maladies.Four years of recession and an inflation rate approaching 4,000% by some measures have made the country’s currency practically worthless. Widespread shortages of food and medicine led to violent riots during the spring and early summer of 2017 that resulted in more than 100 deaths, including the burning alive of one suspected Maduro supporter by a crowd of citizens. Law enforcement in the capital and many of the country’s smaller cities has effectively disbanded, leading to a rise in lynchings and streets justice. Indeed, suspected thieves are sometimes killed.

Venezuela’s regime probably would’ve collapsed by now if it weren’t for the aide of Russia and China, which have lent the Maduro regime money in exchange for a discount on future oil deliveries. But now that the price of oil is finally climbing again, Maduro could find himself rescued by commodity markets. In apparent anticipation of higher oil prices, the administration announced late last year that it would finally introduce “the Petro” – a state-designed cryptocurrency that will help Venezuela’s customers pay for their goods while circumventing the petrodollar system.

In a shocking example of just how severe Venezuela’s food shortages have become, a video on social media showed roughly a dozen men running into a lush pasture, chasing a cow, and then apparently beating it to death for the meat.

 

@FernandoAmandi this the Revolution of the XXI Century of @NicolasMaduro . #TheWalkingDead is REAL in Venezuela http://pic.twitter.com/isViF16nFM

— Ivette Calderon (@ivette1331) January 11, 2018

 

“They’re hunting. The people are hungry!” says the narrator of the video, who filmed the incident from his car. Lawmaker Paparoni said some 300 animals were believed to have been killed, though this hasn’t been independently confirmed.

 

Violent lootings and hijackings – long a staple of life for Venezuela’s remaining merchants – are also growing increasingly common.

Zuley Urdaneta, a 50 year-old vet in Merida, witnessed the looting of a truck along the highway around 2 pm Thursday afternoon, she told Reuters. About two hours later, he said some 800 people converged on a food collection center and proceeded to plunder it.

“They knocked down the gates and looted flour, rice, cooking oil, cooking gas,” said Urdaneta. “The police and the National Guard tried to control the situation by giving out what was left.”

Despite the grinding poverty and widespread social unrest that has challenged the last vestiges of Chavismo, Maduro has effectively sidelined his opposition while brutally suppressing popular uprisings.

“What we’re living is barbaric,” said opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido in a tweet referencing the slaughter the cattle. “The dehumanizing regime of Nicolas Maduro is turning a blind eye to the tragedy that we Venezuelans are living.”

In a rare interview with western media published earlier this week, Maduro repeated his claim that the country’s economic collapse is the result of a conspiracy between his domestic political opponents and foreign powers like the CIA trying to foment an uprising and overturn what they perceive to be a hostile leftist regime.

The irony here, of course, is that the US and Venezuela had for years maintained a relatively peaceful and lucrative commercial relationship, evidenced by the success of Venezuela’s US subsidiary, Citgo. Even when former leader Hugo Chavez spewed anti-US rhetoric, he was behind the scenes cooperating with his purported imperialist foe.

Still, with supermarket shelves perennially empty and Treasury Department sanctions choking the regime off from the dollar-based global financial system, one can’t help but wonder how much longer Maduro can hang on before an outright rebellion erupts.

 

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Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

I don’t often comment on specific world leaders or isolated political events, choosing instead to look at the big picture as much as possible and what it may mean to the reader’s future.

However, I’ve repeatedly been asked to comment on the liberal press (worldwide, but particularly in the US) reporting false news regarding Donald Trump.

This, of course, is an ongoing trend, but the reports appear to be increasing in frequency, severity of criticism and, indeed, pettiness.

 

The image shown above is a good example. Mister Trump is seen dumping fish food to some koi in Japan. The liberal press berated him for this “crude and murderous act.” They stated that Prime Minister Shinzō Abe looked on in horror as he did this, since, as most people know, it’s easy to overfeed pet fish and kill them.

In actual fact, it was Mister Abe who first dumped his box of food to the fish. Mister Trump simply followed his lead… but that part of the video had been removed by the liberal media, in order to unfairly discredit Mister Trump.

Of course, this report in the liberal media is extremely easy to debunk, merely by showing the entire sequence of events.

As these reports on liberal television news networks are becoming increasingly frequent and yet increasingly transparent, non-liberals are increasingly stating that the liberal media is becoming so discredited as a result of “fake news” that it may soon self-destruct, as their viewers will surely abandon them in favour of honest reporting.

Nothing could be more incorrect.

The critics of the liberal media, of course, are looking at the situation from their own point of view, rather than from the point of view of liberals. If they were to do the latter, it would become apparent that the trend by the liberal media is, in fact, highly successful and sustainable.

In attempting to understand where this trend is headed, it might be helpful for those opposed to the liberal media to begin with the following assumptions:

• It doesn’t matter if the story is false

• It doesn’t matter if the conservative media is able to expose the falsification

• It doesn’t matter if liberals learn of the exposés

At present, the US may well be in a state of the greatest political polarization in its history. This has been created by both the liberal and conservative media.

The American people have been living under an economic cloud since 2008 and, from a visceral standpoint, they want someone (not themselves) to be blamed for it. The media have happily played into this need.

Half of the American public detest President Trump, and are only too happy to be fed further fuel for their hatred. For the most part, they choose to view only the television networks that support their view and, therefore, will only rarely learn that a story has been falsified.

In addition, on the occasions that they do learn that their favoured networks have falsified events, they will not care. They may well regard this as mere rumour, or, worse, false denials from the conservative media. As a result, they’ll be more determined than ever to detest the Trump Monster.

When people are angry, they must have a demon to blame. Even on those occasions in which the average citizen is directly confronted with solid reason for doubting his favoured media programmes, this is tantamount to challenging his religion. The exposé will either be derided or entirely discounted by him.

It should be borne in mind that, since the dawn of collectivist thinking, an essential premise has been that the falsification of facts is essential in controlling the proletariat. Both George Orwell and Aldous Huxley warned extensively of this in their books. And, collectivist leaders have also chimed in on this method of indoctrination, which each of them employed successfully:

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” – Vladimir Lenin

“Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.” – Joseph Stalin

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it and eventually, they will believe it.” – Joseph Goebbels

“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret in tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” – Maximilien Robespierre

To be fair, it’s not the liberal media alone that tends to practice this method. The conservative media do the same, albeit generally, to a lesser degree.

But the takeaway here should be that the liberal media are not on the verge of self-destruction. They are, in fact, satisfying their audience as never before.

So, how does this all play out?

Well, if we can rely on historically similar situations, what we’re likely to see is a country that becomes ever more divided, with left hating right and right hating left to an ever greater degree, as economic and social conditions worsen.

There can be little doubt that Mister Trump will leave office in disgrace in the view of at least half the American population. Whether he leaves forcefully or voluntarily, we cannot yet foresee, but we can be certain that the cry for him to be removed will become increasingly louder and, in the eyes of liberal media viewers, ever more justified.

In the wake of his exit, I believe that it will be easier than ever before in US history to usher in a new collectivist candidate who can be presented as the American saviour—someone who will promise “a chicken in every pot,” to be paid for by the “greedy” one percent, of which the Trump Monster is considered to be a textbook example.

When I was a boy, the cinemas ran “monster movies” every Saturday. In each such movie, the monster was always destroyed in the end. This particular movie will end the same way.

“Fake” news, however, will not end. Quite the opposite. It will thrive.

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The nebulous economic cloud Americans have been living under since 2008 is quite real. At this point, a full-blown collapse of the US economy has become inevitable. When it happens, though, it will also create unique wealth-building opportunities for investors who know where to look. Find out more in our Guide to Surviving and Thriving During an Economic Collapse. Click here to download your free PDF copy now.

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“War is not far from us. Regional situations around China are complex and unstable, and dangers are hiding under the peace. China cannot afford a military failure, so we must be fully aware of potential crisis and be prepared for battle at all times. When the country is on the brink of becoming a great military power, it’s also stepping into a period with high risks to national security,” the official People’s Liberation Army (PLA) newspaper wrote according to China’s Global Times.

The article first headlined on Tuesday in the PLA daily: “A soldier without desire for war-preparedness is not a good soldier.” The newspaper warned that Chinese soldiers are not ready for combat because many refuse to believe war is imminent.

Military experts agree that the threat of a conflict around China has increased in recent years.

“In regions like the Korea Peninsula, China-India border area and the Taiwan Straits, the PLA needs to be prepared for all possibilities. Our overseas interests in regions like Africa and the Middle East are also under threat due to local instability,” said Xu Guangyu, a retired major general and senior adviser of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association according to the Global Times.

Last week, President Xi Jinping kicked off the new year with a rare speech to the military urging soldiers to be ready for war and “don’t fear death.”

China’s soldiers should “neither fear hardship nor death,” Xi told thousands of troops during an inspection visit last Wednesday to the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Central Theater Command in northern Hebei province, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been conducting war drills at home and abroad involving most of its military branches. China’s most advanced military aircraft including the J-20 stealth fighter jet, the Y-20 transport aircraft, the H-6k bomber, and the J-16, J-11B J-10C fighter jets have been drilling since the start of the year.

More from the PLA Daily:

The J-20 is conducting air combat training with other fighter planes including the J-16. The J-20 is also practicing beyond-visual-range air combat, and other aircraft, including the Y-20 and the J-10C, are training at unspecified airports on a “plateau region” in order to improve their capability in long-range military transport and air combat

The Economic Times identifies the “plateau region” as the “Tibetan plateau which covered a long Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China.”

While North Korea continues to be a great distraction, China is gearing up for conflict with India on the LAC, according to Global Times.

Potential military conflicts in plateau regions have been on the rise since the border friction with India last year, so increasing military training in the plateau region is highly necessary, a retired PLA officer who used to serve in the air force and asked not to be named, told the Global Times.

“India’s ground force has some advantages in quantity in the border areas, so if conflict happens, China’s air force needs to seize domination of the skies and immediately create an overwhelming advantage for China,” said the officer.   

In 2018, China’s urgent caution to its armed forces to prepare for war has been a telling sign that an event is imminent. While many focus on the developments on the Korean Peninsula, the real showdown is emerging between the two nuclear superpowers divided by the Line of Actual Control. What could possibly go wrong when the world’s two most populous nations are increasing at each other’s throat.

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Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The world around us is changing at an incredible pace, and with such change come many pitfalls as well as immeasurable opportunities. At the same time, the more things change the more some things stay the same. For example, the most important issue humans will have to confront in the years ahead is the age old issue of concentrated power.

One of the most destructive side effects of the financial crisis and the corrupt official response to it, has been an even greater concentration of wealth and power in the hands of some of the most unsavory characters planet earth has to offer. If we are to evolve and create a better paradigm, we’ll need to address this forcefully and thoughtfully.

I say thoughtfully, because what history has shown is that the typical response to a small group of crooked elites seizing all money and power is to launch a violent revolt that merely empowers another small group who said all the right things during their crusade, but then act as viciously and unethically as those they replaced once in power. This situation can and should be avoided at all costs. The idea isn’t to swap one group of rulers for another. We need to think about building a world defined by networks governed by rules, but with no rulers.

Indeed, this is the greatest lesson Bitcoin has shown to the world. It is a global network/community of people who have voluntarily opted into an alternative monetary system with no one in charge. Let me repeat that again, nobody is in charge. There’s no CEO, there’s no individual empowered to come in and just make changes to the code. In contrast, there’s a sprawling community of developers, entrepreneurs, hodlers, thinkers, writers, etc, whose degree of influence within the network changes over time.

It’s no surprise then that some of the most influential and respected leaders within the community at this moment were largely unknown five years ago. Bitcoin’s governance can be best described as anarchy, and it’s precisely this structure that appeals to so many. It’s a voluntary system governed by rules, but there are no rulers. There are key influencers and people whose opinions matter to the direction of the project, but these people have no official position, and their influence can disappear as quickly as it rose. It may not be clean and pretty, but it’s the way I think governance ought to work.

Another significant and potent lesson we can learn from the success of Bitcoin is the global community that’s been built around it. This global network helps people understand how connected we are as human beings. That we have infinitely more in common with each other than the corrupt governments and sleazy oligarchs who rule our respective nation-states. It’s a very valuable lesson that “we the people” on a global level need to internalize if we’re to overcome the centralized hierarchies that dominate human affairs on earth at this time.

Humans are easily divided and conquered, both within our respective nation-states and on a global level. Here in the U.S. we’re instructed that there are two main ways of viewing the world politically (Democrats or Republicans) and that we must make a choice between one or the other. This is beyond ridiculous and we should stop playing such a stupid game immediately.

On a more global level, we’re constantly propagandized that some outside barbarian is right outside the gates and we must give up our civil liberties in order to stay safe. In my own lifetime alone, it’s gone from Russia to Iraq, to al-Qaeda, to ISIS and now back to Russia. There’s never really been a break from non-stop fear mongering, particularly since the military-industrial-surveillance complex was institutionalized after 9/11.

In contrast, the universal truth is we’re a global family of human beings and we must stand in solidarity with one another on a planetary level if we’re to overcome centralized oppression, which all of us suffer from irrespective of what our passports say. The very wealthy and powerful work together on a global basis, and we must do the same. We’re all in this together, and we have a common enemy. That enemy is concentrated power, within our communities and on a global basis.

A perfect example of what human beings are up against on a global level was outlined in a recent article by Glenn Greenwald published at The Intercept titled, First France, Now Brazil Unveils Plans to Empower the Government to Censor the Internet in the Name of Stopping “Fake News.”

Here are a few key paragraphs:

Yesterday afternoon, the official Twitter account of Brazil’s Federal Police (its FBI equivalent) posted an extraordinary announcement. The bureaucratically nonchalant tone it used belied its significance. The tweet, at its core, purports to vest in the federal police and the federal government that oversees it the power to regulate, control and outright censor political content on the internet that is assessed to be “false,” and to “punish” those who disseminate it. The new power would cover both social media posts and entire websites devoted to politics…

Tellingly, these police officials vow that they will proceed to implement the censorship program even if no new law is enacted. They insist that no new laws are necessary by pointing to a pre-internet censorship law enacted in 1983 – during the time Brazil was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that severely limited free expression and routinely imprisoned dissidents…

The move to obtain new censorship authority over the internet by Brazilian police officials would be disturbing enough standing alone given Brazil’s status as the world’s fifth most populous country and second-largest in the hemisphere. But that Brazil’s announcement closely follows very similar efforts unveiled last week by French President Emmanuel Macron strongly suggests a trend in which government are now exploiting concerns over “Fake News” to justify state control over the internet…

Both Brazil and France cited the same purported justification for obtaining censorship powers over the internet: namely, the dangers posed by alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. But no matter how significant one views Russian involvement in the U.S. election, it is extremely difficult to see how – beyond rank fear-mongering – that could justify these types of draconian censorship powers by Brasília and Paris…

All censorship efforts rest on the same tactic: generating fear over exaggerated threats posed by villains, sometime domestic ones but more often foreign villains. The Brazilian and French tactic for inducing the public to acquiesce to this censorship faithfully follows that script…

Ill-defined terms that become popularized in political discourse are, by definition, terms of propaganda rather than reliable, meaningful indicators of problems. And invariably, they wreak all kinds of predictable havoc and inevitably give rise to abuses of power. More than anything else, such terms – which, by design, mean whatever powerful groups wielding them want them to mean – so often produce arbitrary censorship in the name of combatting them. Just consider two similarly ill-defined but popular propagandistic terms – “terrorism” and “hate speech” – which have been appropriated by governments all over the world to justify the most extreme, repressive powers.

The last decade has seen multiple countries on every continent – including the world’s most repressive regimes – obliterate basic civil liberties in the name of stopping “terrorism” – by which they mean little other than “those who oppose our regime.” And then there’s “hate speech,” which can sometimes be used to silence Nazis or overt racists, but also can be and often is used to silence a wide range of left-wing views, from war opposition to advocacy of Palestinian rights. State censorship is always dangerous, but the danger is exponentially magnified when the censorship targets (terrorism, hate speech, Fake News) lack clear definition…

Then he sums up the situation perfectly in a brilliant paragraph at the end.

Ultimately, the core question here is a simple one. What is a more serious threat: the ability of people to publish false claims (which have existed since humans developed the capacity to speak or write and are subject to correction), or vesting governments around the world to censor entire websites and social media postings on the ground that they have judged them to be “false” or “Fake”?  Since the advent of the internet, the one danger regarded as most menacing was having states and corporations assume control over the political content that one can express.

As you can see, oppressive governments all over the world are using identical strategies and messaging in an attempt to stifle public dissent and further consolidate power. The corrupt interests in charge of centralized hierarchies, on a global basis, view the citizenry as enemies who need to be silenced and cowed. It really is them against us, and by us I mean 99.9999% of humanity.

It’s time we recognize the truth and come together in an embrace of our common humanity.

If we do that, nothing can stop us from realizing our true potential as a species, which has been systematically repressed for far too long.

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One day after WalMart surprised the nation when on the same day it publicly announced it is raising its starting hourly wage to $11/hour, expanding employee benefits and offering worker bonuses of up to $1000 while at the same time it quietly closed  shuttered 63 Sam’s Club stores, the WSJ reports that WalMart is preparing to hand out a thousand pink slips at its headquarters. This in addition to the thousands of part-time jobs that will be affected by the mass Sam’s Club closure.

The giant retailer, which employs more than 1.5 million people in the U.S., plans to cut more than 1,000 corporate jobs, according to the WSJ.

The job cuts are expected to be broad based, focused on workers primarily at the company’s headquarters, the people said. The cuts are expected to be completed by the end of the company’s fiscal year on Jan. 31, they added.

“We’ve been looking at our structure for some time as we explore ways to operate more effectively,” a Wal-Mart spokesman said, without confirming that job cuts are planned this month.

As we reported yesterday, according to Gordon Haskett analyst Chuck Grom, prior to today’s layoffs, Wal-Mart’s wage investment is just 15% of the tax gain. Grom said that “Wal-Mart may see tax rate of ~23% in FY19 (year ended Jan. 2019) vs current 32%, which would provide $2b windfall”. As such the “labor investment of ~$300m represents just 15% of total; assumes a similar amount will go toward investments in price.”

Well, make that under $300m after today’s layoffs.

Meanwhile, for those wondering what the company will use the rest of the money on: why higher dividend payments and accelerated buybacks of course according to Grom.

Oh, and free advertising: “with WMT being first retailer “out of the gate,” it should get some “free media.” Although a few more mass layoff announcements, and the free publicity may not be so sterling.

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