Month: March 2018

Nearly 200 US Marines gathered at Southern California’s Camp Pendleton to test out an array of the military’s most advanced new weaponry – including several devices to disable or destroy Unarmed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and combat exoskeleton designed by Lockheed Martin which allows soldiers to carry loads of up to 200 lbs. over long distances.

Other weapons include “bomb-bearing and swarm-capable drones” already deployed against Russian military bases in Syria in January.

(DoD demonstration video, Oct. 2016)

“103 Perdix micro-drones launched from three U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets. It demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing. “Due to the complex nature of combat, Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” said Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) Director William Roper. “Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no leader and can gracefully adapt to drones entering or exiting the team.” 

Captain Ben Brewster’s rifle company would fight and operate under a “protective bubble” created by layering offensive and defensive UAVs – both “organic to the company” and from the larger Marine air-ground task force which would include systems and equipment designed to kill or neutralize enemy drones – reports U.S. Naval Institute News.

“I’ve never had to deal with IEDs that can attack me…from quadcopters,” said Brewster, commander of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines.

Three drones flitted overhead at the Range 131 Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) facility here, and an “enemy” drone – a bat-wing-shaped UAS – sliced through the air as Third Platoon moved among buildings around a town square.

“Anyone of these could have a two-pound IED (improvised explosive device)” or act as a spotter or command-and-control for an enemy force, he said.

“I need the ability for my Marines to be able to jam these drones,” he added. –USNI

And with the expected crowded urban skies, he noted, Marines will need systems to help sort friend from foe in the air, along with counter-UAS technology with directional jamming capabilities. “Trying to figure out that part is what we’re experimenting” during U5G, he added.

Several naval warfare centers and military laboratories joined 48 companies for U5G, showcasing 79 technologies that included sensors that see through walls, facial recognition software, “smart” networked radio, micro drones and an enhanced thermal imager with displayed information, as well as vehicles, weapons and munitions.

The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, Test and Evaluation are hosting U5G, the latest in a series of Advanced Naval Technology Exercises (ANTX) where military research and development organizations join with industry to demonstrate rapidly-emerging technologies and concepts. It follows on last year’s Ship-to-Shore Maneuver Exploration and Experimentation Advanced Naval Technology Exercise at Camp Pendleton that solicited and examined dozens of concepts like drones, mobile networks and unmanned boats to support Marines operating at sea and landing ashore. –USNI.org

 Read more here

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Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

It hasn’t been a great month for America’s electric car fantasy.

Elon Musk’s Tesla company — the symbolic beating heart of the fantasy — is whirling around the drain with its share price plummeting 22 percent, its bonds downgraded by Moody’s to junk status, a failure to produce its “affordable” ($36,000 — Ha!) Model 3 at commercial scale, a massive recall of earlier S Model sedans for a steering defect, and the spectacular fiery crash in Silicon Valley last week of an X model that may have been operating in automatic mode (the authorities can’t determine that based on what’s left), and which killed the driver.

Oh, and an experimental self-driving Uber car (Volvo brand) ran over and killed a lady crossing the street with her bicycle in Tempe, Arizona, two weeks ago.

Don’t blame Elon for that.

There’s a lot to like about electric cars, of course, if, say, you’re a Google executive floating through life in a techno-narcissism bubble, or a Hollywood actor with wooly grandiose notions of saving the planet while simultaneously signaling your wealth and your “green” virtue cred.

Teslas supposedly handle beautifully, ride very quietly, have great low-end power, and decent range of over 200 miles. The engine has something like twenty moving parts, is very long-lasting, and is easy to repair or change out if necessary.

Are they actually “green and clean?” Bwaahaaaaa….! Are you kidding?

First, there’s the energy embedded in producing the car: mining and smelting the ores, manufacturing the plastics, running the assembly line, etc. That embedded energy amounts to about 22 percent of the energy consumed by the car over a ten-year lifetime. Then there’s the cost of actually powering the car day-by-day. The electricity around the USA is produced mostly by burning coal, natural gas, or by nuclear fission, all of which produce harmful emissions or byproducts. But the illusion that the power just comes out of a plug in the wall (for just pennies a day!) is a powerful one for the credulous public. The cherry-on-top is the fantasy that before much longer all that electric power will come from “renewables,” solar and wind, and we can leave the whole fossil fuel mess behind us. We say that to ourselves as a sort of prayer, and it has exactly that value.

There are at least a couple of other holes in story, big-picture wise.

One is that electric mass motoring — switching out the whole liquid fuel fleet for an all-electric fleet — won’t pencil out economically. We probably started the project forty years too late to even be able to test it at scale, because economic events are now moving so quickly in the direction of global austerity that the putative middle-class customer base for electric cars will barely exist in the near future. Americans especially nowadays are so financially stressed that they can’t qualify for car loans — and that is mainly how cars are bought in this land. The industry has strained mightily to bend the rules so that these days it’s even possible to get a seven-year loan for a used car whose collateral value will dissipate long before the loan is paid back. Hard to see how they can take that much further.

The usual answer for that is that you won’t need to own a car because the nation will be served by self-driving electric Uber-style cars-on-demand, which will supposedly require far fewer cars in all. That really doesn’t answer some big questions, such as: how might commuting work in our big metroplex cities? Even if you posit multiple occupancy vehicles, it still represents a whole lot of car trips. Oh, you say, everybody will just work from home. Really? I don’t think so — though I wouldn’t rule out an end to corporate organization of work as we’ve known it, and if that happens, we will be a nation of farmers and artisans again, that is, a World Made By Hand. Also consider, if the car companies only need to make and sell a fraction of the vehicles they sell now, the whole industry will collapse.

Another hole in the story is the universal assumption that the USA must remain a land of mandatory car dependency, hostage to the fiasco of our suburban infrastructure. I understand why we’re attached to it. We spent most of the 20th century building all that shit, and squandered most our wealth on it. It’s comfortably familiar, even if it’s actually a miserable environment for everyday life. But none of those monetary and psychological investments negate the fact that suburbia has outlived its limited and rather perverse usefulness.

We’re so far from having any intelligent public debate about these issues that the events now spooling out will completely blindside the nation.

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On Tuesday, just days after Gartman made what he called a “watershed call“, in which he confidently declared that “equity markets have hit a multi-year top”, Gartman’s confidence was suddenly crushed, or as he put it “shaken” after the recent spike in volatility which in addition to the sharp down moves, saw one of the biggest point surges in the Dow in history.

We note then that the CNN Fear & Greed Index has fallen back to ‘single digits” and  that is as good a measure as we can find to show how enormously over-sold the market had become. But even still, weakness is not to be bought and strength is still to be sold into. Again, we trust we are clear.

Just as clearly, however, we were wrong; the seriousness of the market’s over-sold condition and the change in psychology as the trade protection/tariff talks moderated over the weekend and into yesterday morning with Mr. Mnuchin’s comments to that effect was such that a massive “relief” rally was unleased [sic].

Still, despite the occasional eruptions in the US equity markets, Gartman – for once – did not flip flop immediately in response to a market that proved far more volatile, and was reluctant to instantly go Gartman’s way, even though, according to Gartman’s “watershed” read of events, it was all downhill from here, save the occasional sharp bear-market short squeeze:

To that end, we are remaining short of the equity market here in the US with stops on our positions drawn down materially to make certain that our once material profits are not turned into losses, but we are otherwise holding to our thesis that stocks have entered into a global bear market; that the high made by our International Index on January 29th shall not be violated and that the proper course of action by those who are long of equities is certainly to avail themselves of this opportunity to reduce the exposure one more time before that opportunity is lost.

… And yet, as we reported last week, Gartman left himself a loophole: a short-covering stop once the S&P hits 2710.

The futures closed last evening at $2660. We shall hold our stop at $2710 on a closing basis here in North America… hopefully protecting a once material profit from becoming a loss.

Well, scratch all of that, because the stoic patience which we applauded Gartman for just a few days ago was dead and buried overnight, when – even though the S&P was far below his stop-out level – the “world-renowned commodities guru” decided to close out his short anyway… and yes, despite his so-called “watershed” market top call, in which he clearly no longer has any confidence. Here’s what happened, allegedly, in Gartman’s infamous “retirement account:”

THE S&P: Well, It Does Appear that the Trend Line’s Held, Doesn’t It? The “hedgers” are long and the “specs”… both large and small… are net short while history tells us that betting with the Hedgers is the better cousre of action. Having been short we are heading for the sidelines… at least for a short while anyway.

And the explanation:

We are, and we have been, short of equities for the past several weeks and we are nicely ahead on the trade for even with Thursday’s strength we are still ahead by a bit more than 3%; however, in the very short term perhaps stocks are oversold enough to warrant a material bounce. We note, for example, that the CNN Fear & Greed Index is… and has been… mired in “single digits” for the past several weeks and was 8 on Thursday compared to 7 on
Wednesday. Drawing attention then to the longer-term chart of CNN’s index we note the apparent similarity between what is happening now and what was happening back in mid-to-late 2015 when the S&P rallied from approximately 1810 to 2100, having fallen earlier in the year from 2100 to 1810!

We are still convinced that a bear market of some long-term consequence is upon us, and therefore we are to have one of three possible positions: Very short; modestly short and neutral. We cannot be long of shares for as stated we are convinced that the highs of late January are inviolate, but perhaps for a short while as the usual vicious, short term short covering rally obtains it might be better to be demonstrably less short, covering in all of that which we are short of and hiving off to the sidelines for a short while.

On Friday we did very little in our retirement account, but we shall be covering in a goodly portion of our short derivatives position on Monday, barring some unforeseen geopolitical problem that might evolve over the long weekend that might serve to change our analysis. As we cover in our short derivatives position we shall be adding to long positions sufficient to tip our position as quickly as we are able to neutrality.

And with that, Gartman’s “watershed call”, not to mention his “reputation” have once again been jettisoned into the flip-flopper’s ether where momentum chasing “experts” are a dime a dozen.

Naturally, all of this is great news for the bears.

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Over 1,500 Central Americans are on a crusade across Mexico in the hopes of being granted asylum at the U.S. border – a move which is set to pose an enormous challenge to the Trump administration’s much campaigned about immigration policies, while reminding Trump’s base that they still don’t have the wall they elected him to build 14 months into his presidency. 

“We want to become one, supporting us shoulder to shoulder and show that together we can break down borders,” say the caravan’s organizers.

Setting out six days ago and marching under the slogan “Migrantes en la lucha” (“Migrants in the Fight”) during holy week, the caravan comprised mostly of Hondurans was organized roughly a month ago by the mysterious group Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders) – which solicited donations via Facebook and encouraged volunteers to contact them. 

”Our mission is to provide shelter and safety to migrants and refugees in transit, accompany them in their journey, and together demand respect for our human rights,” reads the group’s mission statement.

The Central American migrants, mostly Hondurans and Guatemalans, flee their countries because of insecurity and because they are threatened by gang members, also because of the economic and political situation in the region. –proceso.hn (translated)

“The crime rate is horrible, you can’t live there,” a migrant named “Karen” told BuzzFeed News on the side of a highway near the Southern Mexico town of Huixtla. “After the president [was sworn in] it got worse. There were deaths, mobs, robbed homes, adults and kids were beaten up.”

“They want to reach the border and ask for asylum, the majority flee from gang violence, extortion and police abuses,” says one of the organizers named Garibo.

Before setting out on the journey, the migrants were organized into groups of 10 to 15 people, and a leader was designated for each group. Five groups were then banded together in what organizers call a sector. While there are organizers from Pueblos Sin Fronteras leading the way, much of the effort to get to the US border is in the hands of the migrants themselves. –BuzzFeed

Migrants gathered for the march in the southern Mexico border town of Tapachula in advance of the march – where Pueblo Sin Fronteras conducted introductory workshops to help the Central Americans best navigate the United States once they arrive – including security drills in which male refugees are to form a wall around any threats to the women and children.

Help along the way

Despite a majority of the Hondurans being in Mexico illegally – which Mexican authorities have historically been stringent about, the caravan has not been stopped on its journey, and people from Mexican towns along the way have been helping the migrants. 

The group is also planning to take “the Train of Death” in Arriaga in order to expedite the journey north, and several towns have provided buses to help the migrants along.

…children, women, and men, most of them from Honduras — have boldly crossed immigration checkpoints, military bases, and police in a desperate, sometimes chaotic march toward the United States. Despite their being in Mexico without authorization, no one has made any effort to stop them. –BuzzFeed

The municipality we’re at now is offering buses to get us to the next town. It’s been happening at several stops, I imagine they’re more interested in getting people out of their public squares. pic.twitter.com/6ay7Rn8fzI

— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) March 30, 2018

A local at the town the caravan is arriving brought bread and ham for people. pic.twitter.com/xEybmayAT0

— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) March 27, 2018

Here the migrants are seen boarding covered hopper freight railcars.

A video shows the migrants marching on the tracks and preparing to board the train in Arriaga.

In the train boarding video, a DJI Mavic Pro drone worth $1,000 to $1,300 USD was spotted. The march is depicted as a grassroots effort, but perhaps, there is some big money behind the movement.

BuzzFeed reporter Adolfo Flores has been embedded with the caravan, providing updates over Twitter:

On the move again. pic.twitter.com/JLhgTShshm

— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) March 28, 2018

Everyone is in for the night. pic.twitter.com/9CA6NOTnNa

— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) March 28, 2018

The caravan is on day five of its trek and finally made it to Oaxaca. pic.twitter.com/x7rqWrJh4z

— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) March 29, 2018

This morning the caravan, anticipating a long day walk, got up at 4am to beat the sun. pic.twitter.com/Pk8URSSHP4

— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) March 30, 2018

The caravan of Central Americans is getting ready to settle in for the day and make dinner. pic.twitter.com/BuSSJ9AiYL

— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) March 30, 2018

About 80% of them are from Honduras. Many said they are fleeing poverty, but also political unrest and violence that followed the swearing in of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández after a highly contested election last year. The group often breaks into chants of “out with JOH.” They also chant “we aren’t immigrants, we’re international workers” and “the people united will never be defeated.”

Still, there are no guarantees on the route or assurances that once they reach the US border they’ll be able to cross undetected or be allowed to stay under some type of protection like asylum.

Alex Mensing, another organizer with Pueblos Sin Fronteras, made that point clear to the migrants before the group started out. He also stressed that everyone is responsible for their own food, water, and payment for vans or buses. Still, it’s far cheaper than being assaulted or falling into the hands of unscrupulous smugglers. –BuzzFeed

Here they come! 

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Authored by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,

The FAANG stocks have ruled the technology sector the last few years and have had a heavy influence on the entire stock market. Apple is the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization, with Amazon and Google not far behind. So anyone indexing US large-cap equities—which means almost anyone with investment capital—simply must own them.

Here’s a chart that Dave Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff shared at SIC 2018. It shows 2017 price returns for some selected asset classes. Last year, pretty much everything went up, but FAANG stocks did most.

Source: Gluskin Sheff

The FAANG stocks outperformed other stock benchmarks as well as gold’s price, oil, and bonds. And not just by a little. If you are an equity portfolio manager who didn’t own the FAANGs last year, you probably had some explaining to do. But at SIC 2018, Dave went on to demonstrate why 2018 or 2019 could be quite different.

Extreme Overvaluation

Dave Rosenberg used four different S&P 500 valuation metrics:

• Forward Price to Earnings Ratio
• Price to Sales Ratio
• Price to Book Value Ratio
• Enterprise Value to EBITDA Ratio

He then calculated the percentage of time that each of these had been at its present level or below. Here’s the result for P/E ratio.

Source: Gluskin Sheff

The S&P 500 forward P/E ratio has been below its present level 83% of the time since 1990. Repeating that exercise for the other three metrics and then averaging them, Dave found the index is presently at a 92ndpercentile valuation event.

Here’s Dave, from the transcript, with my bold added:

In other words, only 8% of the time in the past has the stock market in the United States been as richly priced as it is today. And if you want to come up with reasons why that’s the case, that’s fine. But just understand that we are extremely pricey. We’re more than just a one standard deviation event versus the historical average.

Dave then showed this surprising table, comparing historic bull markets with GDP change during the same period.

Source: Gluskin Sheff

The 2009–2018 bull market from trough to peak averaged 17.3% annually. Nominal GDP rose 3.6% annually during that time, and real GDP rose 2.1%. Go up the table to the 1982–1990 bull run. It reached a similar magnitude at 17.5%, but nominal GDP rose 7.6% and real GDP 4.2%.

Yes, GDP has its flaws. Today’s economy isn’t like the 1980s. Nonetheless, how is it that stocks rose the same amount on half as much economic growth? Dave said that if the stock-GDP ratio today had remained what it was back then, the S&P 500 would be around 1,550 today.

That’s how excessive valuations are now.

The Net Worth/Income Ratio at Pre-Crisis Levels

Here’s another way Dave looked at it: household net worth as a percentage of disposable income. The higher that ratio, the more wealthy and confident you probably feel if you are anywhere near average (and many aren’t, of course).

In 1999–2000 and again in 2006–2007, the ratio was near a peak, and people felt good. The good feelings didn’t last. Both times the ratio corrected back below its long-term average.

Source: Gluskin Sheff

And now? The net worth/income ratio is above where it was at those last two cyclical peaks. It could go even higher, too—but not by much, I suspect—and the move down probably won’t be fun.

Whenever it happens, the next downturn will be something new: the first socially networked recession and bear market. It’s hard to believe now, but Facebook and Twitter were both just infants in 2007. Smartphones were still a high-end luxury item, too.

We are now tied together in ways we were not back then. Those connections will make the experience quite different, so it’s worth talking about networks.

* * *

Since 2001, investors have turned to his Thoughts from the Frontline to be informed about what’s really going on in the economy. Join thousands of readers, and get it free in your inbox every week.

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Just as tensions between the US and North Korea are finally beginning to cool (while animosity between the US and Russia intensifies), a recent industry report argues the US government isn’t doing nearly enough to safeguard the US electric grid from a potentially devastating attack.

In its report, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) revealed that much of the US electricity grid is vulnerable to attack – and neither the industry or the government are doing anything about it. NERC is the organization responsible for overseeing the US’s massive electric grid, which is subdivided into eight regional entities.

Though the report didn’t include a “comprehensive” assessment of the myriad physical threats to the US’s energy infrastructure, worries that North Korean could execute a massive electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) attack have been intensifying as the prospect of a nuclear showdown with the restive communist state looms large (Kim Jong Un’s recent actions aside). The research was also inspired by a series of gun attacks on transformers, including a rifle attack on a transformer in Utah that occurred in September 2016, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Many organizations, including recently the National Academy of Sciences, have warned of the catastrophic consequences should a malicious actor – be it a state or a terrorist organization – manage to take down the US energy grid.

“There is widespread belief that bulk power critical assets are vulnerable to physical attack, that such an attack potentially could have catastrophic consequences, and that the risks of such attacks are growing,” according to the report. “But the exact nature of such potential attacks and the capability of perpetrators to successfully execute them are uncertain.”
…

“Although the electric power sector seems to be moving in the overall direction of greater physical security for critical assets, many measures have yet to be implemented and the process of corporate realignment around physical security is still underway,” according to the report, which omitted a comprehensive overview of all the pressing threats due to national security concerns.

“The September 2016 rifle attack on a 69 kV transformer substation in Utah—which reportedly left 13,000 rural customers without power for up to eight hours—showed that similar incidents could occur almost anywhere on the grid,” the report warns.

To be sure, the Edison Electric Institute has highlighted the fact that it would be nearly impossible to completely secure the grid (the costs would be immeasurable). However, the US could be doing a lot more than it’s doing.

A massive attack on the US energy grid could leave large swaths of the country without power without weeks or months. The end result would resemble Puerto Rico following last year’s devastating hurricane season – but on a much larger and deadlier scale.

In this scenario, hundreds of thousands – if not millions of Americans – could die.

“While to date there have been only minor attacks on the power system in the United States, large-scale physical destruction of key parts of the power system by terrorists is a real danger,” the academy warned. “Some physical attacks could cause disruption in system operations that last for weeks or months.”

But unfortunately for the US citizens whose security is predicated on a functioning power grid, the power industry and US government have failed to organize a cohesive response to these threats. Because of the industry’s utter lack of preparation, even crude attacks could have devastating consequences.

And while this month’s volatility in equity markets was deeply unsettling for millions of Americans, imagine what would happen to markets if the entire Atlantic seaboard lost power in an instant.

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While it is well known that ‘space’ in Tokyo is hard to come by, with locals resorting to coffin-like capsules to sleep, it seems the ever-efficient Japanese have managed to combine two of life’s more important factors – boobs and business.

As SoraNews24 reports, one of Tokyo’s better known ‘Hooters’ bars now offers rental workspaces for mobile workers (and they’re free for students).

Walk into just about any Starbucks in the Tokyo area on a weekday afternoon, and you’re likely to see at least one mobile professional with a laptop who’s simultaneously hard at work and sipping on a relaxing cup of coffee. But what if you don’t like coffee, or even delicious Japan-exclusive Frappuccinos? What if you prefer, say, breasts?

Then you’ll be happy to know that as of this month, you can also telecommute from the Hooters branch in Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood. The restaurant chain, which professedly chaste regulars insist serves really tasty chicken wings, has teamed up with Spacee, a Japanese company which partners with Tokyo eateries to offer rentable work areas during the restaurants’ downtime.

In touting the service, Spacee boasts that “Working in a different environment from an ordinary office can boost productivity, and well as promote the development of new ideas.” Several of those ideas are likely to be breast-related, but that might not really be a problem, considering that breasts are practically their own subsector of the Japanese economy.

Spacee users under the age of 18 must be accompanied by a guardian, though, so we might see some Tokyo fathers suddenly taking an active interest in their children’s education by volunteering to take them to Hooters to cram for upcoming tests.

Sadly, with Japan’s wedding and birth rates plunging, young people stopping having sex, and many men turning to robots for ‘companionship’, we wonder if the idea of breasts at the board meeting will catch on… still the next time we are in Japan, we are willing to give it a try.

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Submitted by The Duran

Russia’s embassy in London has sent a list of questions, 14 to be specific, to the British Foreign Ministry on the poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal – which include a demand to clarify whether samples of the nerve agent “Novichok” have ever been developed in the UK.

The Russian embassy’s statement calls the incident that started the recent diplomatic row a “fabricated case against Russia.”

The questions published by the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official website have been translated below:

1. Why has Russia been denied the right of consular access to the two Russian citizens, who came to harm on British territory?
2. What specific antidotes and in what form were the victims injected with? How did such antidotes come into the possession of British doctors at the scene of the incident?
3. On what grounds was France involved in technical cooperation in the investigation of the incident, in which Russian citizens were injured?
4. Did the UK notify the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) of France’s involvement in the investigation of the Salisbury incident?
5. What does France have to do with the incident, involving two Russian citizens in the UK?
6. What rules of UK procedural legislation allow for the involvement of a foreign state in an internal investigation?
7. What evidence was handed over to France to be studied and for the investigation to be conducted?
8. Were the French experts present during the sampling of biomaterial from Sergey and Yulia Skripal?
9. Was the study of biomaterials from Sergey and Yulia Skripal conducted by the French experts and, if so, in which specific laboratories?
10. Does the UK have the materials involved in the investigation carried out by France?
11. Have the results of the French investigation been presented to the OPCW Technical Secretariat?
12. Based on what attributes was the alleged “Russian origin” of the substance used in Salisbury established?
13. Does the UK have control samples of the chemical warfare agent, which British representatives refer to as “Novichok”?
14. Have the samples of a chemical warfare agent of the same type as “Novichok” (in accordance to British terminology) or its analogues been developed in the UK?

The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris added some necessary points to the growing mystery and confusion of the Skripal poisoning:

These theories have included claims that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were (1) sprayed with the supposedly deadly chemical by a passer-by; (2) sprayed with the supposedly deadly chemical by an aerial drone; (3) contaminated by the supposedly deadly chemical which was brought from Russia in Yulia Skripal’s suitcase where it had been hidden by some third party; and (4) were poisoned by having the supposedly deadly chemical somehow inserted into Sergey Skripal’s car.

The British and other critics of Russia have recently taken to citing as ‘proof’ of Russian guilt the fact that the Russians have supposedly been proposing various theories about who might have poisoned Sergey and Yulia Skripal.

The British – who unlike the Russians have control of the crime scene and samples of the poison – have however been at least as busy proposing various theories about how Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned.

In both cases the fact that the Russian media and the British media – though not it should be stressed the Russian or British governments – have been busy engaging in their respective speculations about who who and how Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned is not proof of guilt.

Rather it suggests ignorance, which if anything (especially in Russia’s case) is an indicator of innocence.

As I have said on many occasions, it is the guilty who so far from engaging in a variety of different speculations tend to come up with a single alternative narrative to explain away the facts, which they then pass off as the truth in order to provide themselves with an alibi.

As to the present theory – that Sergey and Yulia Skripal came into contact with the chemical agent on their front door – note the following:

(1) The British police have not said whether the chemical agent was smeared on the outside of the door or on the inside of the door.

If it was smeared on the outside of the door, then it was an extremely reckless act which might have easily poisoned a delivery person to the house such as a postman.

If it was smeared on the inside of the door, then whilst it might have been placed there by a burglar, the greater probability must be that it was placed there by a visitor.

If so then it is likely that either Sergey or Yulia Skripal or possibly both of them have some knowledge of the identity of this person.  That might make the fact that Yulia Skripal is said to be recovering and is now conscious a matter of great importance for the solution of this mystery.

(2) If Sergey and Yulia Skripal really were poisoned with the chemical agent by coming into contact with it because it was smeared on their front door, then that would mean that the chemical agent took 7 hours to take effect.

Russian ambassador to Britain Alexander Yakovenko has claimed that the British authorities have told him that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by nerve agent A-234, a Novichok type agent which is supposedly “as toxic as VX, as resistant to treatment as soman, and more difficult to detect and easier to manufacture than VX”.

I am not a chemist or a chemical weapons expert, but such a slow acting poison seems at variance with the descriptions of A-234 and VX which I have read.

(3) The suggestion that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by coming into contact with the chemical agent on their front door must for the moment be treated as no more than a theory.  It does however appear to confirm the presence of the chemical agent in the house.

If the latest theory that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by coming into contact with a chemical agent smeared on their front door begs many questions, then the news that Yulia Skripal is apparently recovering well from the effect of her poisoning, and is now conscious and speaking and is no longer in intensive care, though extremely welcome, in some ways adds further to the mystery.

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