Month: June 2020

The Media’s Role in Concealing Stalin’s Evils Exposed in Mr. Jones

mrjones_1161x653

Mr. Jones. Available now from Amazon Prime.

The scene is Moscow, the year is 1932, and two reporters are in a venomous argument. One has just admitted to filing false stories attributing miraculous economic achievements to Joseph Stalin while ignoring the fact that he’s systematically starving peasants by the millions. Hitler, she declares, is on the march in Germany and, soon, the rest of the world, and without Stalin’s help, he’ll never be stopped.

“You sound like you work for Stalin!” the other reporter declares in horror.

“I don’t work for Stalin,” the first reporter haughtily insists. “I believe in a movement that’s bigger than any one person.”

Shuffle some names, faces and insert the phrase “moral clarity” in there somewhere, and this could be a right-this-minute conversation between American journalists. And as the remarkable and riveting Mr. Jones makes appallingly clear, the first one didn’t end well.

Mr. Jones is a 2019 Polish-Ukrainian-British film that’s been kicking around European film festivals for the past year but is getting its first real exposure this month on Amazon Prime. Directed by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland (known for a series of movies about the Holocaust, including the Oscar-nominated Angry Harvest) from a first-time script by Ukrainan-American journalist Andrea Chalupa, it resurrects two little-remembered tales of the 1930s. One is Stalin’s deliberate infliction of a famine on the peasants of the Ukraine that killed between four million and seven million of them. The other is how Western journalists, particularly those of The New York Times, deliberately covered up the mass murder.

At the forefront of Mr. Jones are two reporters. One, Gareth Jones (British television actor James Norton), an ambitious rookie freelancer for what was then called the Manchester Guardian, is so inexperienced he forgot to bring his typewriter on the trip. The other, Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard, Wormwood), The New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief, is fresh off a Pulitzer prize for his fawning coverage of Stalin’s command-and-control economic policies.

Jones has been told Duranty is the man to see to arrange an interview with Stalin. He explains what he wants to ask: “So how are the Soviets suddenly on a spending spree? Who’s providing the finance?” Duranty is noncommittal about the interview, but does have an answer about where the money is coming from: agricultural exports. “Grain is Stalin’s gold.” He also offers some bad news—a German reporter who’s a friend of Jones and had promised to show him around Moscow has been murdered, apparently during a mugging—almost unknown in the stringently locked-down Moscow of the 1930s, particularly in the area where journalists and other necessary foreign evils lived.

Nosing around while he waits to see what will happen with his Stalin interview, Jones learns that his German friend thought something fishy was going on in the Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s breadbasket region, which had recently been placed off-limits to foreigners, and was planning to sneak in. Jones decides to do the same, arranging a tour of a German-built factory on the other side of the Ukraine from Moscow, then ditching his Soviet minder to spend a couple of days wandering alone on foot.

Even before he leaves the train, Jones has clues that something has gone deeply wrong. When he offers to buy an overcoat from a Ukrainian passenger, the man begs to be paid in bread rather than currency. When Jones pitches a gnawed apple core into a wastebasket, another man dives into the trash to retrieve it.

But nothing can prepare him for what he sees when he gets off: Stiffened corpses scattered around the train station. Corpses in empty, deserted farmhouses. Corpses stacked on carts moving along village streets. Corpses being chewed on by starving children, who afterward trill a mournful ballad: “Hunger and cold are in our house, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep and our neighbor has lost his mind and eaten his children… .”

Jones is eventually picked up by Soviet security forces and returned to Moscow, where he’s warned never to tell anybody what he’s seen. The “or else” will be the life imprisonment of half-a-dozen British phone company engineers who’ve been arrested on trumped-up spying charges. As he prepares to leave, he’s ostracized by other reporters, including the sneering Duranty. “There comes a time in every man’s life when he must choose a cause greater than himself,” Duranty lectures him with, yes, moral clarity.

Back in London, Jones discovers Duranty has filed a New York Times story dismissing him as a credulous amateur. There may be a bit of hunger in the Ukraine, Duranty writes, but absolutely no famine. And anyway, what if there was? “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”

Director Holland tells this story in masterful style, playing tricks with light and shading to give Moscow a haunted and threatening look. It’s most noticeable when the scene shifts to the Ukraine and the film fades to pure black and white, painting the desiccated landscape as if she were Ansel Adams in Hell. Watching reporters hold conversations in their rooms and offices on typewriters lower their voices when a stranger approaches and flinch at any sign of interest from their omnipresent minders gives a grim and dreadfully accurate depiction of what it’s like trying to practice journalism under totalitarian rule.

Chalupa’s script is effective—she frames the issues efficiently and her characters are compelling—but less accurate. She tells a story that is absolutely true in its essentials but much less so in its more-cinematic-than-life detail. The OGPU, as the KGB was called in the early 1930s, didn’t murder reporters who got off their leashes; it simply expelled them, forcing them to leave their posh Moscow habitat for the mean streets of the Depression back home. (The name of the murdered-reporter character, Paul Kleb, suggests he was intended as an homage to Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov, a Forbes staffer who was gunned down in Moscow in 2004).

Jones didn’t pull any James Bond razzmatazz to reach the Ukraine; he simply bought a ticket to Kharkov, a city much further down the line, and got off early. He wasn’t arrested and he wasn’t threatened; he finished his reporting trip and didn’t say anything about what he’d seen until he got back to London. None of this contradicts Mr. Jones‘ central thesis—that the mainstream pack of foreign correspondents in Moscow in the 1930s were a pack of mewling Stalinist whores, and that the novice Jones was a better journalist and a braver man than any of them—but it’s an unnecessary distraction.

If anything, though, Mr. Jones‘ depiction of the vicious way he was treated by his colleagues is understated. The first person to reveal the mainstream journalism cabal against Jones was Eugene Lyons, the Moscow correspondent for the United Press wire service at the time Jones was there. In his 1937 book Assignment in Utopia, Lyons recounts how after Jones began writing and giving speeches about the famine, all the foreign correspondents went to a meeting with the chief Soviet censor, who ordered them to denounce the young reporter as a liar.

Lyons admits that all the correspondents knew that Jones’ stories were absolutely accurate, even though none of them had reported the famine in their own newspapers, due to “the compelling need to remain on friendly terms with the censors.” (Some of them had even discussed the details of the famine with Jones before he went on his reporting trip.) Nonetheless, Lyons wrote, they all complied, “unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. … Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstaking garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.” After the deal was done, they broke out the vodka and partied well into the night.

Lyons may have been hyping his report a bit (though it scarcely did him any credit, either as a reporter or a human being) but the deliberate slander of Jones and his stories has subsequently been investigated and verified by several historians (including S.J. Taylor in Stalin’s Apologist, her scathing biography of Duranty; Anne Applebaum in her history of Ukrainian starvation, Red Famine; and Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin).

And Duranty (who is played with a stunningly lustrous menace by Sarsgaard) was indeed the most bloodthirsty of the bunch. The line in his story about breaking eggs to make utopian socialist omelettes is dead accurate. And it apparently became a guide post for future generations of Times reporters. Herbert Matthews, whose mistaken or mendacious—take your pick—stories on Fidel Castro helped plunge Cuba into seven decades (and counting!) of miserable tyranny, would later blithely observe of Castro’s sanguinary appetite for executions, “A revolution is not a tea party.”

Whether Duranty’s affection for Stalin was the result of ideological leanings, as Mr. Jones suggests, or just personal convenience (he had a son by a Russian mistress who would not have been allowed to accompany him if he were expelled) is impossible to say. But it was devastatingly effective. His coverage of Stalin in general and his categorical denial of any famine in the Ukraine played a key role in Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1933. Duranty accompanied the first batch of Soviet diplomats to Washington and got a standing ovation from the crowd at a dinner honoring them.

While Duranty lived, the Times continued to support him professionally and personally. As late as 1957, just a few months before Duranty’s death, Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger wrote him a personal check for $2,500 when he complained his funds were low. In recent years, the paper has been increasingly uneasy about its old reporter, even hiring a historian to evaluate his Soviet coverage. But when the historian suggested Duranty’s Pulitzer price be revoked, the Times turned self-righteous. “The notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time.

I thought of that last week when the Times editorialized in favor of pulling down Confederate statues. The editorial approvingly quoted Nancy Pelosi: “There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.” Honoring lies in support of the violence and grotesquerie of Joseph Stalin is apparently another matter.

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The Media’s Role in Concealing Stalin’s Evils Exposed in Mr. Jones

mrjones_1161x653

Mr. Jones. Available now from Amazon Prime.

The scene is Moscow, the year is 1932, and two reporters are in a venomous argument. One has just admitted to filing false stories attributing miraculous economic achievements to Joseph Stalin while ignoring the fact that he’s systematically starving peasants by the millions. Hitler, she declares, is on the march in Germany and, soon, the rest of the world, and without Stalin’s help, he’ll never be stopped.

“You sound like you work for Stalin!” the other reporter declares in horror.

“I don’t work for Stalin,” the first reporter haughtily insists. “I believe in a movement that’s bigger than any one person.”

Shuffle some names, faces and insert the phrase “moral clarity” in there somewhere, and this could be a right-this-minute conversation between American journalists. And as the remarkable and riveting Mr. Jones makes appallingly clear, the first one didn’t end well.

Mr. Jones is a 2019 Polish-Ukrainian-British film that’s been kicking around European film festivals for the past year but is getting its first real exposure this month on Amazon Prime. Directed by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland (known for a series of movies about the Holocaust, including the Oscar-nominated Angry Harvest) from a first-time script by Ukrainan-American journalist Andrea Chalupa, it resurrects two little-remembered tales of the 1930s. One is Stalin’s deliberate infliction of a famine on the peasants of the Ukraine that killed between four million and seven million of them. The other is how Western journalists, particularly those of The New York Times, deliberately covered up the mass murder.

At the forefront of Mr. Jones are two reporters. One, Gareth Jones (British television actor James Norton), an ambitious rookie freelancer for what was then called the Manchester Guardian, is so inexperienced he forgot to bring his typewriter on the trip. The other, Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard, Wormwood), The New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief, is fresh off a Pulitzer prize for his fawning coverage of Stalin’s command-and-control economic policies.

Jones has been told Duranty is the man to see to arrange an interview with Stalin. He explains what he wants to ask: “So how are the Soviets suddenly on a spending spree? Who’s providing the finance?” Duranty is noncommittal about the interview, but does have an answer about where the money is coming from: agricultural exports. “Grain is Stalin’s gold.” He also offers some bad news—a German reporter who’s a friend of Jones and had promised to show him around Moscow has been murdered, apparently during a mugging—almost unknown in the stringently locked-down Moscow of the 1930s, particularly in the area where journalists and other necessary foreign evils lived.

Nosing around while he waits to see what will happen with his Stalin interview, Jones learns that his German friend thought something fishy was going on in the Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s breadbasket region, which had recently been placed off-limits to foreigners, and was planning to sneak in. Jones decides to do the same, arranging a tour of a German-built factory on the other side of the Ukraine from Moscow, then ditching his Soviet minder to spend a couple of days wandering alone on foot.

Even before he leaves the train, Jones has clues that something has gone deeply wrong. When he offers to buy an overcoat from a Ukrainian passenger, the man begs to be paid in bread rather than currency. When Jones pitches a gnawed apple core into a wastebasket, another man dives into the trash to retrieve it.

But nothing can prepare him for what he sees when he gets off: Stiffened corpses scattered around the train station. Corpses in empty, deserted farmhouses. Corpses stacked on carts moving along village streets. Corpses being chewed on by starving children, who afterward trill a mournful ballad: “Hunger and cold are in our house, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep and our neighbor has lost his mind and eaten his children… .”

Jones is eventually picked up by Soviet security forces and returned to Moscow, where he’s warned never to tell anybody what he’s seen. The “or else” will be the life imprisonment of half-a-dozen British phone company engineers who’ve been arrested on trumped-up spying charges. As he prepares to leave, he’s ostracized by other reporters, including the sneering Duranty. “There comes a time in every man’s life when he must choose a cause greater than himself,” Duranty lectures him with, yes, moral clarity.

Back in London, Jones discovers Duranty has filed a New York Times story dismissing him as a credulous amateur. There may be a bit of hunger in the Ukraine, Duranty writes, but absolutely no famine. And anyway, what if there was? “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”

Director Holland tells this story in masterful style, playing tricks with light and shading to give Moscow a haunted and threatening look. It’s most noticeable when the scene shifts to the Ukraine and the film fades to pure black and white, painting the desiccated landscape as if she were Ansel Adams in Hell. Watching reporters hold conversations in their rooms and offices on typewriters lower their voices when a stranger approaches and flinch at any sign of interest from their omnipresent minders gives a grim and dreadfully accurate depiction of what it’s like trying to practice journalism under totalitarian rule.

Chalupa’s script is effective—she frames the issues efficiently and her characters are compelling—but less accurate. She tells a story that is absolutely true in its essentials but much less so in its more-cinematic-than-life detail. The OGPU, as the KGB was called in the early 1930s, didn’t murder reporters who got off their leashes; it simply expelled them, forcing them to leave their posh Moscow habitat for the mean streets of the Depression back home. (The name of the murdered-reporter character, Paul Kleb, suggests he was intended as an homage to Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov, a Forbes staffer who was gunned down in Moscow in 2004).

Jones didn’t pull any James Bond razzmatazz to reach the Ukraine; he simply bought a ticket to Kharkov, a city much further down the line, and got off early. He wasn’t arrested and he wasn’t threatened; he finished his reporting trip and didn’t say anything about what he’d seen until he got back to London. None of this contradicts Mr. Jones‘ central thesis—that the mainstream pack of foreign correspondents in Moscow in the 1930s were a pack of mewling Stalinist whores, and that the novice Jones was a better journalist and a braver man than any of them—but it’s an unnecessary distraction.

If anything, though, Mr. Jones‘ depiction of the vicious way he was treated by his colleagues is understated. The first person to reveal the mainstream journalism cabal against Jones was Eugene Lyons, the Moscow correspondent for the United Press wire service at the time Jones was there. In his 1937 book Assignment in Utopia, Lyons recounts how after Jones began writing and giving speeches about the famine, all the foreign correspondents went to a meeting with the chief Soviet censor, who ordered them to denounce the young reporter as a liar.

Lyons admits that all the correspondents knew that Jones’ stories were absolutely accurate, even though none of them had reported the famine in their own newspapers, due to “the compelling need to remain on friendly terms with the censors.” (Some of them had even discussed the details of the famine with Jones before he went on his reporting trip.) Nonetheless, Lyons wrote, they all complied, “unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. … Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstaking garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.” After the deal was done, they broke out the vodka and partied well into the night.

Lyons may have been hyping his report a bit (though it scarcely did him any credit, either as a reporter or a human being) but the deliberate slander of Jones and his stories has subsequently been investigated and verified by several historians (including S.J. Taylor in Stalin’s Apologist, her scathing biography of Duranty; Anne Applebaum in her history of Ukrainian starvation, Red Famine; and Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin).

And Duranty (who is played with a stunningly lustrous menace by Sarsgaard) was indeed the most bloodthirsty of the bunch. The line in his story about breaking eggs to make utopian socialist omelettes is dead accurate. And it apparently became a guide post for future generations of Times reporters. Herbert Matthews, whose mistaken or mendacious—take your pick—stories on Fidel Castro helped plunge Cuba into seven decades (and counting!) of miserable tyranny, would later blithely observe of Castro’s sanguinary appetite for executions, “A revolution is not a tea party.”

Whether Duranty’s affection for Stalin was the result of ideological leanings, as Mr. Jones suggests, or just personal convenience (he had a son by a Russian mistress who would not have been allowed to accompany him if he were expelled) is impossible to say. But it was devastatingly effective. His coverage of Stalin in general and his categorical denial of any famine in the Ukraine played a key role in Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1933. Duranty accompanied the first batch of Soviet diplomats to Washington and got a standing ovation from the crowd at a dinner honoring them.

While Duranty lived, the Times continued to support him professionally and personally. As late as 1957, just a few months before Duranty’s death, Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger wrote him a personal check for $2,500 when he complained his funds were low. In recent years, the paper has been increasingly uneasy about its old reporter, even hiring a historian to evaluate his Soviet coverage. But when the historian suggested Duranty’s Pulitzer price be revoked, the Times turned self-righteous. “The notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time.

I thought of that last week when the Times editorialized in favor of pulling down Confederate statues. The editorial approvingly quoted Nancy Pelosi: “There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.” Honoring lies in support of the violence and grotesquerie of Joseph Stalin is apparently another matter.

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How We Arrived At The Globalist Calls For A “Great Reset”

How We Arrived At The Globalist Calls For A “Great Reset”

Tyler Durden

Sat, 06/27/2020 – 07:00

Authored by Steven Guinness,

The unveiling on June 3rd by the World Economic Forum of ‘The Great Reset‘ agenda appears on the surface to be a newly devised concept created directly in response to Covid-19. As it turns out the first soundings of a ‘reset‘ were actually made as far back as 2014.

To appreciate the significance of the WEF’s intervention, it is important first to recognise the years leading up to 2020 and how they laid the foundations for where we are today.

2014

Each January the WEF host their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In 2014, Christine Lagarde, who was then the managing director of the IMF, called for a ‘reset‘ of monetary policy, the financial sector regulatory environment and structural reforms of global economies.

Lagarde was adamant that a reset was required ‘in the way in which the economy grows around the world‘.  Fleshing this out, Lagarde cited the dangers to financial stability due to ‘bubbles developing here and there‘, the over 200 million globally who were unemployed and economic growth being too slow.

Despite these concerns, Lagarde’s view was that fiscal consolidation within national economies was still necessary in order to control spending and ensure the post 2008 ‘recovery‘.

In January 2019 I posted an article that went into detail about the monetary policy aspect of the ‘reset‘ promoted by Lagarde (Monetary Policy ‘Reset’: From Rhetoric to Actuality). I raised how at the time of Lagarde’s intervention the Federal Reserve were tapering their asset purchasing scheme (quantitative easing), introduced in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers that triggered the 2008 financial crisis.

Come the end of 2014, the Fed had called a halt entirely to QE. A year later in December 2015, they began to raise interest rates for the first time in over a decade and would later go on to introduce an asset reduction programme where the central bank began to roll off assets from its balance sheet.

For Lagarde, international cooperation would be essential for a reset to succeed. Without nations cooperating, it would likely be fraught with instability and market turbulence. In an interview with Bloomberg at the time of the WEF meeting, Lagarde stressed the importance of the ‘medium term‘ when it came to achieving the reset:

The short term collides with the medium term but the question is to bring the medium term into the personal, political and corporate equation. And that’s the job of the IMF.

2015

Looking back, 2015 was a highly significant year that saw global planners state quite openly their ambitions for a New World Order to be implemented over the next decade and a half.

First came the unveiling of the United Nation’s derived Agenda 2030 in September, and with it seventeen main objectives known as the Sustainable Development Goals. Agenda 2030 was adopted by the 193 members of the UN, with adoption coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the institution’s existence.

Chief amongst the seventeen goals were to end poverty by 2030 and for there to be zero hunger. Action on climate change was also needed, as was the creation of sustainable cities and communities and good health and wellbeing (which the UN directly associate with vaccinating families).

Agenda 2030 replaced the Millennium Development Goals, which were introduced in 2000 and encompassed a series of targets to be completed by 2015. According to the UN, ‘enormous progress‘ had been made ‘but more needs to be done‘.

To get a sense of what the UN means by ‘more‘, when the Sustainable Development Goals were signed off Claire Melamed, who in 2015 was Director of the global think tank Overseas Development Institute, told the BBC:

If they’re going to be met we’re going to have to see huge amounts of money. We’re going to have see governments behaving in a completely different way. We’re going to have to see companies totally changing their business practices. It can be done, but the real question is whether we want to do it enough.

Melamed is now the Chief Executive Officer of Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. Amongst the organisation’s funding partner’s are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a prominent organisation in the drive for a vaccine to immunise people against Covid-19.

In December 2015, three months after the announcement of Agenda 2030, came the founding of the Paris Climate Agreement at the COP21 conference. The agreement ties directly into the United Nations and operates within the bounds of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, and was the first ever universal and legally binding agreement adopted on the subject.

To achieve the goals of the agreement, one of which is limiting global warming to below two degrees, ‘appropriate financial flows, a new technology framework and an enhanced capacity building framework will be put in place, thus supporting action by developing countries and the most vulnerable countries, in line with their own national objectives.’

So far, 189 countries have ratified the agreement out of 197 that were present at the Paris conference. In October 2016, the required threshold was reached for the accord to enter into force.

2016

With Agenda 2030 and the Paris Climate Agreement now set in motion, the World Economic Forum (which fully endorses the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals) ran with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) as the theme for it’s annual meeting. I wrote about this in 2018 (Fourth Industrial Revolution: Mission Creep towards a New World Order – Part One) and picked up on how the executive chairman of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, described the impact that the Fourth Industrial Revolution would have on the world.

First, it would be all encompassing and involve all stakeholders of the global polity, meaning full engagement with the public and private sectors, academia and civil society. Some aspects to the revolution include disruption to jobs and skills, business disruption, innovation and productivity, agile governance and security and conflict.

Second, connecting through these areas are a whole raft of concerns which comprise the rise of blockchain technology, global governance, the future of enterprise, workforce and employment, the future of government, the future of production, sustainable development and social protection systems.

The revolution is dubbed as a digital revolution, one where the ‘fusion of technologies‘ embodying the physical, digital and biological spheres come together. Artificial intelligence, robotics, nano and bio technology are all part of the vision for 4IR.

Schwab made it very plain that the world can expect the revolution to be a ‘symbiosis between micro-organisms, the human body, the products people consume and the buildings we inhabit.’  One consequence of this is that human beings will no longer just be users of technology, rather they will start to converge with both the digital and biological worlds to become part of it. A second consequence is that every industry on the planet will be subjected to a degree of ‘disruption‘ as the 4IR advances, resulting in the systems of production, management and governance being transformed.

It does not stop there. Outside of jobs, human identity, privacy, notions of ownership, consumption patterns, the time devoted to work and leisure, how we develop as individuals and how we meet people and nurture relationships will all have to change to accommodate 4IR. Since the onset of Covid-19, many of these things have already undergone significant ‘disruption‘

Soon after the 2016 WEF meeting, the world experienced substantial geopolitical ructions with the UK voting to leave the European Union and Donald Trump being elected as the United States’ 45th President.

2019

Three years after they signalled major technological, political and societal change was coming, the World Economic Forum were back with a new theme – ‘Globalization 4.0: Shaping a New Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution‘. It was a subject I covered in an article published around the time (Why Dismissing Globalist Warnings as ‘Project Fear’ May Prove a Mistake).

Executive chairman Klaus Schwab was at it again, reiterating that ‘our systems of health, transportation, communication, production, distribution, and energy – just to name a few – will be completely transformed.’ Included in the breadth of transformation would be blockchain and distributed ledger technology, two fundamental components in the drive towards a global digital currency network.

In talking about ‘Globalization 4.0‘, Schwab described the present day as an ‘era of widespread insecurity and frustration‘, and went on to blame this environment for a rise in populism.

What Schwab did not make direct mention of is how a resurgence of protectionist tendencies was assisting the WEF in being able to push the argument for 4IR. The greater the level of global disunity, the more opportunity that groups like the WEF have in being able to cultivate the concept of a New World Order and convince people of its necessity. Globalization 4.0 is a facet of 4IR, a vision that Schwab is unreservedly committed to:

Globalization 4.0 has only just begun, but we are already vastly underprepared for it. Clinging to an outdated mindset and tinkering with our existing processes and institutions will not do. Rather, we need to redesign them from the ground up, so that we can capitalize on the new opportunities that await us, while avoiding the kind of disruptions that we are witnessing today. 

‘Ready or not‘, Schwab warned, ‘a new world is upon us‘.

Five months on from the WEF meeting, the Bank for International Settlements introduced a new concept called the ‘BIS Innovation Hub‘, also known as ‘Innovation BIS 2025‘. This is a topic I have also written about previously (Innovation BIS 2025: A Stepping Stone Towards an Economic ‘New World Order’).

The BIS described the Hub as a medium term strategy consisting of three main elements:

  • Identify and develop in-depth insights into critical trends in technology affecting central banking

  • Develop public goods in the technology space geared towards improving the functioning of the global financial system

  • Serve as a focal point for a network of central bank experts on innovation

When launching the hub, BIS General Manager Agustin Carstens spoke of ‘reshaping the financial landscape‘ following ‘the scars left by the financial crisis‘. According to Carstens, now was the time to set about reforming the way that the central banking community operates.

When digging down into the BIS Innovation Hub, it becomes clear that at the core of the project is the creation of central bank digital currency (CBDC). In practice, this would mean the abolition of tangible assets such as banknotes and coins and see the creation of a new form of digital money issued by central banks.

Global payment systems are in the process of being reformed to accommodate the use of blockchain and distributed ledger technology, and central banks are now beginning to disseminate technological detail for how a CBDC could be issued.

As it stands, a volatile geopolitical climate, exacerbated by Covid-19 and the unproven fear that handling physical money could transmit the virus, is assisting the BIS in their ambitions for completely resetting how the general public will interact with central bank money over the coming years.

In a follow up article we will look specifically at what the World Economic Forum have termed ‘The Great Reset‘ and what exactly global planners are seeking to achieve.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2A9D8ub Tyler Durden

Drugs and Ammo

book2

Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs, by Peter Andreas, Oxford University Press, 338 pages, $29.95

The military use of performance-enhancing drugs hasn’t evolved much since Vikings rushed into battle high on hallucinogenic mushrooms. Throughout history, armies have fought under the influence of one psychoactive chemical or another, sometimes with their commanders’ sanction and sometimes not: from the plant-based pharmacological highs of Zulu warriors to the vodka-numbed Cossacks in Crimea and from the coked-up British Tommies of World War I to the speeding American G.I.s of World War II. U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been routinely administered psychostimulants, steroids, and antidepressants to enhance combat performance. As long as there are wars to fight, governments will forever be trying to turn regular grunts into a more sophisticated version of that old Scandinavian berserker.

Indeed, after reading Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs, you might start to suspect that a warring nation’s troops are only as good as the performance-enhancing substances they ingest. Was it just a coincidence that the U.S. Civil War was won by the Union, which had limitless coffee stores, while the South had to fight uncaffeinated? Does it surprise anyone that the two world wars, frequently fought under the influence of uppers, lasted a combined total of 10 years, while Vietnam—a conflict marked by less energizing chemicals, such as cannabis, alcohol, and heroin—took a laggardly 12 years? And if you want grand tales of “liquid courage,” look no further than the Russian army, shitfaced on cheap vodka since at least the early 18th century.

In Killer High, the Brown University political scientist Peter Andreas makes a persuasive case that you can’t separate the history of war from the history of drugs. The sextet of famously addictive stimulants and depressants at the center of Killer High—caffeine, tobacco, opium, alcohol, cocaine, and amphetamines—have, Andreas writes, “fueled imperial expansion, provoked revolution and rebellion, built up states, and helped to create not only addicted armies but also nations of addicts.”

Killer High is neither the first nor the most comprehensive study of the synergistic relationship between drugs and warfare, but it carves a niche for itself by including the less studied (but no less consequential) wartime role of caffeine and tobacco. Lukasz Kamienski’s anecdotally driven Shooting Up: A History of Drugs in Warfare (2012) covered more historical ground in detailing the effects that cocaine, opiates, and amphetamines had on soldiers through centuries of conflict. Although Andreas’ book is similarly concerned with the physical effects of mind-altering drugs on the combatants themselves, he adds a much wider geopolitical angle. In addition to what he calls the “war while on drugs,” Andreas covers the “war through drugs,” the “war for drugs,” and the “war against drugs.” His book traces the centuries-old hypocrisy of global powers that sometimes took an anti-drug stance domestically while plying their fighting forces with psychoactive substances.

Killer High also examines how drugs have been used for propagandistic purposes over the centuries. Drugs have been associated with the “evils” of both capitalism and communism, and they have been painted as the scourge of both Western and Eastern ways of life.

Andreas gets decent narrative mileage out of less controversial drugs—tobacco, caffeine, and alcohol—by exploring their history in the making (and unmaking) of states. The three major revolutions of the last 300 years reached flashpoints through public backlashes against bans or excessive taxes on rum (the American Revolution), tobacco (the French Revolution), and vodka (the Russian Revolution). During the years leading up to the American Revolution, taverns themselves were associated with sedition. Even coffeehouses had their day as venues of ill repute. In 1675, Britain’s King Charles II ill-advisedly attempted to ban all coffee-dispensing establishments, prompting a huge public outcry. In 1777, Frederick the Great issued a decree against the drink, claiming the act of imbibing java was unpatriotic, yet his royal wishes fell on deaf ears among the Prussian public. Furthermore, tax revenue collected from the sale of tobacco, alcohol, coffee, and tea helped fund many an imperialist war up to the 20th century.

Still, it’s Killer High‘s intricately constructed histories of the harder stuff—speed, cocaine, and heroin—that make for the most page-turning drama. Andreas delivers these micro-narratives with a skill and panache not usually associated with academic historians. Each chapter serves as both a story about state-sanctioned military drug abuse and a compendium of failed interdiction policies. Drug criminalization is a testament to the power of moral panics, and such panics often occur in the wake of a war whose combatants have brought their habits back home.

America’s first modern drug panic followed reports from killjoy missionaries in China during the 19th century Opium Wars. The subsequent crackdown gave black marketeers an incentive to bastardize opium into more concentrated and transportable—thus more potent and addictive—forms, such as morphine and heroin. Heroin prompted another panic when the press grossly exaggerated the number of G.I. junkies returning from Vietnam. Since the 1980s, despite the best efforts of countries around the world to curtail heroin flows and discourage addiction, the worldwide opium trade has only grown; in Afghanistan alone, opium production has recently been worth in the neighborhood of $200 million per year. Andreas describes present-day southern Afghanistan as a narco-state whose corrupt officials—often with ties to U.S. intelligence and military bigwigs—compete with the Taliban for the country’s windfall opium profits.

British and German troops routinely hoovered coke on the Western Front during World War I. This eventually prompted an anti-cocaine panic in the U.K., mainly due to the drug’s association with London prostitutes (“cocaine girls”) whom drug dealers used to supply army personnel with cocaine. Britain had completely banned the drug by 1920, but it was the post–World War II United States that became the world’s most zealous anti-cocaine crusader, using its newfound international influence to push for worldwide prohibition of the drug. By the 1980s, Andreas notes, Washington’s war against coke had seen “the adoption of military technologies, training, funding, and methods by domestic law enforcement.” Yet despite these heavier and more violent suppression campaigns, traffickers always find ways to carry on their illicit trade.

Killer High stops short of advocating legalization. But the book does provide centuries of hard historical evidence that strict drug laws fail to rid society of drug-related violence and never curtail consumer demand for psychoactive substances; in fact, criminalization can often “create the very security threat it then provides protection against.” Yet governments rarely learn such lessons. “In the end,” Andreas writes, “war may be the hardest of all habits to kick.”

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Drugs and Ammo

book2

Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs, by Peter Andreas, Oxford University Press, 338 pages, $29.95

The military use of performance-enhancing drugs hasn’t evolved much since Vikings rushed into battle high on hallucinogenic mushrooms. Throughout history, armies have fought under the influence of one psychoactive chemical or another, sometimes with their commanders’ sanction and sometimes not: from the plant-based pharmacological highs of Zulu warriors to the vodka-numbed Cossacks in Crimea and from the coked-up British Tommies of World War I to the speeding American G.I.s of World War II. U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been routinely administered psychostimulants, steroids, and antidepressants to enhance combat performance. As long as there are wars to fight, governments will forever be trying to turn regular grunts into a more sophisticated version of that old Scandinavian berserker.

Indeed, after reading Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs, you might start to suspect that a warring nation’s troops are only as good as the performance-enhancing substances they ingest. Was it just a coincidence that the U.S. Civil War was won by the Union, which had limitless coffee stores, while the South had to fight uncaffeinated? Does it surprise anyone that the two world wars, frequently fought under the influence of uppers, lasted a combined total of 10 years, while Vietnam—a conflict marked by less energizing chemicals, such as cannabis, alcohol, and heroin—took a laggardly 12 years? And if you want grand tales of “liquid courage,” look no further than the Russian army, shitfaced on cheap vodka since at least the early 18th century.

In Killer High, the Brown University political scientist Peter Andreas makes a persuasive case that you can’t separate the history of war from the history of drugs. The sextet of famously addictive stimulants and depressants at the center of Killer High—caffeine, tobacco, opium, alcohol, cocaine, and amphetamines—have, Andreas writes, “fueled imperial expansion, provoked revolution and rebellion, built up states, and helped to create not only addicted armies but also nations of addicts.”

Killer High is neither the first nor the most comprehensive study of the synergistic relationship between drugs and warfare, but it carves a niche for itself by including the less studied (but no less consequential) wartime role of caffeine and tobacco. Lukasz Kamienski’s anecdotally driven Shooting Up: A History of Drugs in Warfare (2012) covered more historical ground in detailing the effects that cocaine, opiates, and amphetamines had on soldiers through centuries of conflict. Although Andreas’ book is similarly concerned with the physical effects of mind-altering drugs on the combatants themselves, he adds a much wider geopolitical angle. In addition to what he calls the “war while on drugs,” Andreas covers the “war through drugs,” the “war for drugs,” and the “war against drugs.” His book traces the centuries-old hypocrisy of global powers that sometimes took an anti-drug stance domestically while plying their fighting forces with psychoactive substances.

Killer High also examines how drugs have been used for propagandistic purposes over the centuries. Drugs have been associated with the “evils” of both capitalism and communism, and they have been painted as the scourge of both Western and Eastern ways of life.

Andreas gets decent narrative mileage out of less controversial drugs—tobacco, caffeine, and alcohol—by exploring their history in the making (and unmaking) of states. The three major revolutions of the last 300 years reached flashpoints through public backlashes against bans or excessive taxes on rum (the American Revolution), tobacco (the French Revolution), and vodka (the Russian Revolution). During the years leading up to the American Revolution, taverns themselves were associated with sedition. Even coffeehouses had their day as venues of ill repute. In 1675, Britain’s King Charles II ill-advisedly attempted to ban all coffee-dispensing establishments, prompting a huge public outcry. In 1777, Frederick the Great issued a decree against the drink, claiming the act of imbibing java was unpatriotic, yet his royal wishes fell on deaf ears among the Prussian public. Furthermore, tax revenue collected from the sale of tobacco, alcohol, coffee, and tea helped fund many an imperialist war up to the 20th century.

Still, it’s Killer High‘s intricately constructed histories of the harder stuff—speed, cocaine, and heroin—that make for the most page-turning drama. Andreas delivers these micro-narratives with a skill and panache not usually associated with academic historians. Each chapter serves as both a story about state-sanctioned military drug abuse and a compendium of failed interdiction policies. Drug criminalization is a testament to the power of moral panics, and such panics often occur in the wake of a war whose combatants have brought their habits back home.

America’s first modern drug panic followed reports from killjoy missionaries in China during the 19th century Opium Wars. The subsequent crackdown gave black marketeers an incentive to bastardize opium into more concentrated and transportable—thus more potent and addictive—forms, such as morphine and heroin. Heroin prompted another panic when the press grossly exaggerated the number of G.I. junkies returning from Vietnam. Since the 1980s, despite the best efforts of countries around the world to curtail heroin flows and discourage addiction, the worldwide opium trade has only grown; in Afghanistan alone, opium production has recently been worth in the neighborhood of $200 million per year. Andreas describes present-day southern Afghanistan as a narco-state whose corrupt officials—often with ties to U.S. intelligence and military bigwigs—compete with the Taliban for the country’s windfall opium profits.

British and German troops routinely hoovered coke on the Western Front during World War I. This eventually prompted an anti-cocaine panic in the U.K., mainly due to the drug’s association with London prostitutes (“cocaine girls”) whom drug dealers used to supply army personnel with cocaine. Britain had completely banned the drug by 1920, but it was the post–World War II United States that became the world’s most zealous anti-cocaine crusader, using its newfound international influence to push for worldwide prohibition of the drug. By the 1980s, Andreas notes, Washington’s war against coke had seen “the adoption of military technologies, training, funding, and methods by domestic law enforcement.” Yet despite these heavier and more violent suppression campaigns, traffickers always find ways to carry on their illicit trade.

Killer High stops short of advocating legalization. But the book does provide centuries of hard historical evidence that strict drug laws fail to rid society of drug-related violence and never curtail consumer demand for psychoactive substances; in fact, criminalization can often “create the very security threat it then provides protection against.” Yet governments rarely learn such lessons. “In the end,” Andreas writes, “war may be the hardest of all habits to kick.”

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Escobar: The India-China, Himalayan Puzzle

Escobar: The India-China, Himalayan Puzzle

Tyler Durden

Fri, 06/26/2020 – 23:45

Authored by Pepe Escobar via ConsortiumNews.com,

The Indo-China border is a strategic chessboard and it’s gotten way more complex…

It was straight from an Orientalist romantic thriller set in the Himalayas: soldiers fighting each other with stones and iron bars in the dead of night on a mountain ridge over 4,000 meters high, some plunging to their deaths into a nearly frozen river and dying of hypothermia.

In November 1996, China and India had agreed not to use guns along their 3,800 km-long border, known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC), which sports an occasional tendency to derail into a Line Out of Control.

Yet this was not just another Himalayan scuffle. Of course there were echoes of the 1962 Sino-Indian war – which started pretty much the same way, leading Beijing to defeat New Delhi on the battlefield. But now the strategic chessboard is way more complex, part of the evolving 21st Century New Great Game.

Indian army marching in 1962 war, during which Indian Air Force was not used. (Indian Defence Review)

The situation had to be defused. Top military commanders from China and India finally met face to face this past weekend. And on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Minister spokesman Zhao Lijian confirmed they “agreed to take necessary measures to promote a cooling of the situation.”

The Indian Army concurred: “There was mutual consensus to disengage (…) from all frictions areas in Eastern Ladakh.”

A day later, the breakthrough was confirmed at a videoconference meeting of the three foreign ministers of Russia, India and China, also known as the RICs: Sergey Lavrov, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar    and Wang Yi. President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping Xi will meet in person on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Saudi Arabia next November.

And that will follow probably another videoconference special next month, in St. Petersburg, during the combined summits of the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO.)

So How Did We Get Here?

Our Himalayan drama starts way back in October 1947, when the Maharaja of Kashmir signed an Instrument of Accession – joining the dominion of India in return for military support. As much as the Raj, Kashmir was also partitioned: West and North became Azad (“Free”) Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, under Pakistan; the state of Jammu and Kashmir was to become an autonomous part of India; and significantly Aksai Chin, historically part of Tibet, became part of China.

CIA map from 2002 showing traditional borders of Jammu and Kashmir. (CIA, Wikimedia Commons)

On a personal level, this has always been among my top “roof of the world” travel/reporting areas. Not only for the unrivalled, breathtaking  geological apotheosis, but for the people – Hunzakut, Baltistanis, Kashmiris, Tibetans.

Both Kashmirs – Pakistani and Indian – are majority Muslim. Everywhere you go you feel you’re in Central Asia, not India. Barren Aksai Chin is virtually population-free, apart from scattered military posts. Eastern Ladakh, historically and culturally, was part of the Tibetan plateau. The people are Buddhist, and speak a similar Tibetan dialect to the people of Aksai Chin.

Modi’s Move

The root of all contemporary strife is to be found less than a year ago, in August 2019. That’s when the Hindutva – Hindu nationalist, quasi-fascist – government led by Modi unilaterally revoked parts of the Indian constitution that established Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) as an autonomous region.

Narendra Modi in 2008. (Norbert Schiller,World Economic Forum, Wikimedia Commons)

Islamic J&K – heir to a long religious and cultural tradition – was deprived of a parliament and local government and de facto separated from Buddhist Ladakh and its very sensitive eastern border with China. They all fell under direct New Delhi control.

J&K’s characteristics shielded it since 1947 from mass immigration by Hindus. That’s now gone. The game now, for New Delhi, is about engineering a demographic change, turning a majority-Muslim area into majority-Hindu.

And even that might not be enough. For Home Minister Amit Shah, not only what the Hindutva describe as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) but also Aksai Chin as part of J&K. They see the whole Kashmir Valley as an integral part of India.

It’s easy to imagine how this goes down in Islamabad and Beijing.

Add to it the interlocked strategic importance of the Indus river system – Pakistan’s main source of water: it starts in the J&K mountains. So it’s no wonder that for Islamabad, the whole province should be part of Pakistan, not India.

Recently, the action across the Line of Actual Control has been breathless.

India revamped the airfield of Daulet Beg Oldie (DBO), located on an old trade route through the Karakoram pass, and crucially only 9 km away from Aksai Chin. That happens to be right on India’s physical link to Xinjiang, and not Tibet.

(PANONIAN, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)

In parallel, India built the 255 km long Darbuk-Shayok-DBO road. This is an appraisal of what is innocently described as the single lane Indo-China border road. What it means in practice is that New Delhi now has more leeway to transport troops and military equipment across the LAC. No wonder Beijing interpreted it as an extra – unwanted – pressure on Aksai Chin.

As India built a new military access road, they had no clue the Chinese had finished their own on Aksai Chin: Highway 219, which links ultra-strategic Tibet to Xinjiang. Highway 219 then links to the legendary Karakoram Highway – which starts in Kashgar, crosses the border and weaves all the way down to Islamabad.

An important stretch of the Aksai Chin was in fact ceded to China by Islamabad in 1963 in exchange for financial and logistical support.

Predictably there has been a steady patrolling/military buildup on both sides. There are as many as 225,000 Indian troops right behind the LAC. That is matched by an undisclosed number of very well-equipped Chinese troops. The Hindu showed satellite images  of Chinese movements at Galwan before the border clash. No less than three Chinese military sub-districts – subordinated to the military in Tibet and Xinjiang – were involved in the skirmishes in Galwan.

It’s All About CPEC

The China-Pakistan border at the Khunjerab pass and the area right to the south, the visually stunning Gilgit-Baltistan, happen to fall exactly into what the Indians call Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Narendra Modi, Flickr)

There’s absolutely no way Beijing would ever allow any sort of New Delhi regional adventurism. Especially because this is prime China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) territory – one of the key nodes of the New Silk Roads, all the way to Islamabad and down to the port of Gwadar in the Indian Ocean.

In the near future, Gwadar will have solidified its direct energy links to the Persian Gulf, and China may even expand them by building an oil/gas pipeline all the way to Xinjiang.

Counteracting China’s New Silk Road nodes, we find, strategically, India’s ambiguous role in both the Quad (alongside the U.S., Japan and Australia) and the U.S. “Indo-Pacific” scheme — essentially a mechanism to contain China.

In practice, and in the name of its own, self-described “strategic autonomy,” New Delhi is not a full member of the Quad. The Quad is such a fuzzy concept that even Japan and Australia are not exactly enthusiastic.

U.S.-India defense “ties” are legion – but nothing really significant, apart from a self-defeating move by New Delhi to cut off oil imports from Iran. To appease Washington, New Delhi prodigiously hurt its own investments in the port of Chabahar — only 80 km away from Gwadar — which until recently was touted as the Indian Silk Road gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Apart from that, we find – what else – threats: the Trump administration is furious that New Delhi is buying S-400 missile systems from Russia.

Self-Reliance or Containment?

China is India’s second-largest trade partner. Beijing imports around 5 percent of everything made in India, while New Delhi imports less than 1 percent of Chinese production.

Madras regiment of Indian Army. (Mannat Sharma, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Only two months ago, in an address to the nation about Covid-19, Modi insisted on “self-reliant India” and “human centric globalization,” focused on local manufacturing, local markets and local supply chains.

For all of Modi’s bluster, foreign adventurism is incompatible with India’s tradition of non-alignment – and it would divert much needed efforts towards “self-reliance.”

There was a lot of expectation that India and Pakistan, becoming full-time members of the SCO, would defuse their myriad problems. That’s not what happened. Yet the SCO – along with the BRICS – is the way to go if India wants to become a significant player in the emerging multipolar world.

Beijing is very much aware of imperial containment/encirclement strategies. There are more than 200 U.S. military bases in the Western Pacific. The New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), boast no fewer than seven connectivity corridors – including the Polar Silk Road. Five of these are overland. The only one including India is BCIM (Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar).

If India wants out, BRI will keep rolling all the way to Bangladesh. Same with the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) negotiated by 15 Asia-Pacific nations. They want India in. New Delhi is paranoid that opening up its markets will balloon the trade deficit with China. With or without India, RCEP will also keep rolling, alongside BRI and CPEC.

Quite a few among upper caste ruling class Hindus cannot see that they are being played to the hilt, full time, by the imperial masters as a war front against China.

Yet Modi will have to play realpolitik – and realize that India is not a priority for Washington: rather a pawn in a full spectrum dominance, “existential threat” battle against China, Russia and Iran, which happen to be the three key nodes of Eurasia integration.

Washington will persist in treating New Delhi as a mere pawn in the Indo-Pacific drive for China containment. India – in theory very proud of its tradition of diplomatic independence – would rather use its ties with the U.S. to counterpunch China’s power across Southeast Asia and as a form of deterrence against Pakistan.

Yet Modi cannot possibly bet the farm on the Trump administration following his lead. The only way out is to sit down and talk to his BRICS/SCO partner Xi: next month in St. Petersburg and in November in Riyadh.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2VpE8S6 Tyler Durden

Conservative Journalist Jack Posobiec Assaulted By DC Antifa

Conservative Journalist Jack Posobiec Assaulted By DC Antifa

Tyler Durden

Fri, 06/26/2020 – 23:25

One America News journalist Jack Posobiec was assaulted by a self-described member of Antifa – the violent leftist designated a terrorist organization less than one month ago.

Posobiec was filming a speech by an elderly black man trying to prevent the protesters from destroying the Emancipation Memorial to Abraham Lincoln (funded entirely by the wages of freed slaves in 1876), when he was surrounded by hostile protesters and assaulted.

As the Post Millennial reports: “The situation escalated when a black-clad Antifa insurgent wearing a pair of red ski goggles and bicycle helmet identified Posobiec and accused him of “founding the alt-lite” and of being a “literal Nazi,” drawing a larger group of Antifa to approach and surround the journalist.”

For a detailed account of the sequence of events, see here.

One of Posobiec’s assailants has been identified as 25-year-old Jason Robert Charter, an Antifa terrorist who has a history of agitating at political events.

Posobiec has filed a report with US Park Police and will be pressing charges.

Meanwhile, noted Antifa agitator Luke Kuhn was reportedly spotted at the protest.

Kuhn made headlines in 2017 when Project Veritas busted him in an undercover sting at Comet Ping Pong pizzeria – plotting to attack a DC Trump inauguration party. The sting resulted in the arrest of Kuhn – who once made several pedophilic posts to usenet internet groups. Kuhn was sentenced to probation in exchange for agreeing not to attend future Antifa events – however he was caught on camera in April, 2017 when Posobiec was assaulted by another member of Antifa.

The man who punched Posobiec, Sydney Alexander Ramsey-Laree, served 60 days in jail. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/384qSHO Tyler Durden

Why Every Person In America Needs To Become A Prepper During The Second Half Of 2020

Why Every Person In America Needs To Become A Prepper During The Second Half Of 2020

Tyler Durden

Fri, 06/26/2020 – 23:05

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

It has been on my heart to write this article for a few days, but I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to write.  2020 has already been one of the worst years in modern U.S. history, and it looks like the next six months are going to be extremely challenging as well.  But even though most Americans are expecting that things will return to “normal” in 2021 and beyond, the truth is that the “perfect storm” that we are witnessing is only in the very early stages.  All of the old cycles are ending, all of the bubbles are bursting, and we are starting to experience the consequences of decades of incredibly foolish decisions.  So even though the remaining months of 2020 will be chaotic, the truth is that things are going to get progressively worse as the years move along.  That means that you should use this period of time to prepare for what is ahead of us, because at some point the window of opportunity to prepare will be closed for good.

COVID-19 should have been a wake up call for all of us.  Lockdowns were implemented very suddenly once the virus started to spread in the U.S., and shortages of key items began to happen.  To this day, many retailers are still limiting the number of items that you can buy in certain categories.  Hopefully this has helped people to understand that if you have not stocked up in advance, you may not be able to go out and get what you need when a major crisis strikes.

During the initial stages of this pandemic, a lot of people ended up being stuck at home without enough supplies.  In the event of a truly historic emergency, you can certainly survive without toilet paper, but if you run out of food you could find yourself in big trouble quite quickly.

The good news is that COVID-19 is not going to kill us all.  About half a million people around the world have died so far, and the final death toll will be a lot lower than the tens of millions that died during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920.

But if our society was extremely ill-prepared for a pandemic of this nature, what is going to happen when a pandemic that is much more severe hits us?

Scientists assure us that it is just a matter of time before a killer plague sweeps across the planet, and the Bible tells us that there will be “pestilences” in the last days.  If you find yourself isolated at home for an extended period of time as millions of others are dying from a virus, will you be able to survive on what you have already stored up?

If not, you need to get to work.

Big economic problems are ahead as well.  So far in 2020, more than 47 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits, more than 100,000 businesses have permanently closed their doors, and it is being projected that U.S. GDP will decline by 46.6 percent on an annualized bases during the second quarter.  Those are absolutely disastrous numbers, but so far trillions of dollars of emergency government spending has helped to ease the pain.

But those emergency measures were only meant to get us through a few months, and it is now becoming clear that this new economic depression will be with us for a very long time to come.

Of course deteriorating economic conditions will fuel even more civil unrest.  We have seen rioting, looting, arson and violence in city after city, and much more civil unrest is on the horizon.

If you live in one of our major urban areas, you may want to move while you still can.  Due to a huge surge in demand, property prices in the most desirable small towns and rural areas are already starting to go through the roof.

On top of everything else, food shortages are starting to occur all over the globe.  According to the head of the UN, we are on the verge of seeing “unimaginable devastation and suffering around the world”…

The U.N. chief on Thursday warned the largest gathering of world leaders since the coronavirus pandemic began that it will cause “unimaginable devastation and suffering around the world,” with historic levels of hunger and famine and up to 1.6 billion people unable to earn a living unless action is taken now.

Giant swarms of locusts the size of major cities are devouring crops in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, African Swine Fever has already killed about one-fourth of all the pigs in the entire world, and crazy weather patterns have been playing havoc with crop production all over the planet.

And now on top of everything else COVID-19 is greatly disrupting food distribution systems all over the world.

We have never seen so many severe threats to global food production occur simultaneously, and the Bible clearly tells us that there will be “famine” in the last days.

Meanwhile, a major war could erupt in the Middle East at any moment.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he will begin the process of annexing portions of Judea and Samaria in July, and Israel’s Arab neighbors have promised a very forceful response if that actually happens.

The region has constantly been on the precipice of war for years, and this could potentially be the trigger that finally causes it to happen.

If everything that I have discussed so far wasn’t enough, the planet that we all live on is becoming increasingly unstable.  We have witnessed a number of very alarming earthquakes this week, and a truly catastrophic event could literally happen at any moment.

As my regular readers already know, I am particularly concerned about seismic activity on the west coast and about the potential for a historic earthquake along the New Madrid fault zone.

But even considering everything that I just shared with you, there is no other time in human history that I would have rather been alive than right now.

All of human history has been building up to this point, and we are so fortunate to be living during this moment.

However, it is going to be exceedingly difficult to thrive during the historic events that are ahead if you have not made any preparations for what is coming.

I realize that things may seem very chaotic now, but the truth is that this is your window of opportunity to prepare.

I would take full advantage of that opportunity, because the clock is ticking.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NwxCEL Tyler Durden