Sep 122020
 
 September 12, 2020  Posted by at 8:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Claude Monet O Rio 1881

 

Was COVID19 Spreading Freely Worldwide Before Last Christmas? (RT)
Fauci Warns US Needs To ‘Hunker Down’ For Fall, Winter (Hill)
Trump Campaign Sends Cease-and-Desist To Biden Campaign Over Atlantic Ad (JTN)
MSM Attempts To Spin Trump’s Attacks On Senseless Wars Distort Reality (RT)
Ex-Judge Reviewing Flynn Cases Urges Guilty Plea Be Upheld (JTN)
Beijing To Impose Restrictions On All US Diplomats In China (AlJ)
Fortnite Maker: Apple and Google Monopolies Need To Be Stopped (NPR)
Left, Right Mock Pelosi For Saying Angry Mother Earth Caused Wildfires (RT)
Earth Barreling Toward ‘Hothouse’ State Not Seen In 50 Million Years (LS)
How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled (NPR)
Nobel Peace Prize Committee Tells Trump To Launch More Drone Strikes (B. Bee)

 

 

Setting new rcords. Winning!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bless Tucker Carlson for providing the platform.

Bless Glenn Greenwald for his eloquent statement. Don’t miss this.

#FreeAssange

Tucker Greenwald Assange

 

 

George Galloway Assange

 

 

“How far back does this story go? We will probably never know.”

Was COVID19 Spreading Freely Worldwide Before Last Christmas? (RT)

A new study from America indicates that people were falling ill with coronavirus-like symptoms in December 2019, but doctors at the time dismissed it as ordinary flu. A team of doctors from Los Angeles scouring the hospital records from last winter has discovered a series of smoking gun clues which almost guarantee that Covid-19 was present in America well before Christmas. Scientists from UCLA have been analysing over 10 million hospital records from December 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020. Comparing that winter to previous ones, they noticed a 50-percent increase in ‘coughing’ as a symptom on admission forms. In addition, 18 more people than would ordinarily be expected were hospitalised with acute respiratory failure.

In fact, the scientists estimate that there may have been 1,000 or more Covid sufferers in LA alone last winter – and presumably those are just the symptomatic minority. At the time, of course, all of this was put down to a moderately bad flu season. Officially, Covid did not turn up in LA until January 22, when a traveller in LAX airport fell ill. He was from Wuhan, and was identified as Covid-positive four days later. This bombshell fits an emerging body of evidence on an earlier coronavirus timeline. Many people may remember the reports of a strange vaping-related illness that ravaged Americans towards the end of last year. There was a good deal of study on it. Scientists at first thought it was the oils in the e-cigs congealing in people’s lungs, but soon debunked that hypothesis.

In hindsight, it is difficult to look past Covid as the real culprit. Pneumonia-like symptoms, ordinarily fit people falling severely ill… it was Covid all over. These revelations come hot on the heels of a very different story from England, which nonetheless points to the same conclusion. Peter Attwood died at the age of 84 on January 30, having been sick for over a month. But in recent weeks, an autopsy has confirmed that he died of Covid, which he probably was infected with in 2019. Underlining this, Attwood’s daughter was sick with similar symptoms two weeks earlier still. All of this happened in Kent, England. But according to the government there, the first Covid death in the UK did not happen until March.

Now, Attwood’s family want answers from the Chinese government on why they did not tell the WHO earlier about the coronavirus, which we know from leaked memos was identified in mid-November at the latest. If coronavirus burned a track through the US and the UK towards the end of last year, is there any reason to suspect it wasn’t doing the same everywhere else? In July, reports came in of coronavirus DNA being found in Spain, Italy and South America as long ago as the spring of 2019. How far back does this story go? We will probably never know.

Read more …

How about we replace Fauci?

Fauci Warns US Needs To ‘Hunker Down’ For Fall, Winter (Hill)

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, warned Thursday that the U.S. should prepare for a difficult few months in the fight against COVID-19 as flu season approaches. “We need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter because it’s not going to be easy,” Fauci said during a panel discussion with doctors from Harvard Medical School. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases went on to warn against underestimating the pandemic’s potential to cause continued destruction. Fauci, who was one of the world’s leading AIDS researchers in the 1980s, compared the coronavirus pandemic to the early days of HIV when the epidemic started with a few gay men to decades later with millions of deaths and infections. “We’ve been through this before,” he said. “Don’t ever, ever underestimate the potential of the pandemic. And don’t try and look at the rosy side of things.”


His comments come after tapes released Wednesday by journalist Bob Woodward revealed that President Trump admitted in an interview to purposely downplaying the pandemic in the early months of the virus because he didn’t want to “create a panic.” During Thursday’s panel, Fauci added that vaccine trials are “progressing very well” and repeated his prediction that one will likely be available by the end of the year or by early 2021. Fauci also reiterated that different U.S. cities should expect to see post-Labor Day surges, with the expert saying last week that the country was heading into the fall with an “unacceptably high” level of COVID-19 cases. “We’re right around 40,000 new cases, that’s an unacceptably high baseline,” Fauci said at the time. “We’ve got to get it down, I’d like to see it 10,000 or less, hopefully less.”

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Well, you can try.

Trump Campaign Sends Cease-and-Desist To Biden Campaign Over Atlantic Ad (JTN)

The Trump campaign issued a cease-and-desist letter to the Biden campaign this week, directing Biden’s camp to stop airing an advertisement that a lawyer for Trump’s team called “false and misleading.” Trump Campaign Senior Legal Adviser Jenna Ellis wrote in the letter that the Biden campaign had shared a digital advertisement on the Democratic candidate’s Twitter feed that incorporated claims from a viral Atlantic article alleging Trump had made derogatory remarks about fallen American military servicemembers. “The Atlantic article and the False and Misleading Ad both rely upon statements allegedly made by anonymous sources who were directly contradicted on the record by twenty-one individuals present with President Trump that day,” Ellis writes.


“Additionally, the contemporary facts in the Secret Service record totally debunk this fake story.” Ellis was referring to the nearly-two dozen individuals who have publicly disputed the story’s claims since its publication last week. Nobody has yet gone on-the-record confirming the story. Ellis in the letter “demand[s] that Joe Biden and the Biden Campaign immediately cease and desist using the False and Misleading Ad.” “We also ask Twitter and Facebook to review and apply their community standards equally and fairly and remove entirely the False and Misleading Ad from their platforms,” she added. Facebook and Twitter CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey were copied on the letter.

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For some people, war/not war is the most important issue of all. Like soldiers.

MSM Attempts To Spin Trump’s Attacks On Senseless Wars Distort Reality (RT)

The New York Times and CNN are desperate to paint Donald Trump as an enemy of the military, due to his desire not to get involved in pointless wars. But this is simply not true, and Trump has the backing of many soldiers. Someone should tell the New York Times, CNN and other mainstream media outlets that soldiers don’t actually like getting killed or maimed for no good reason. Nor do they like generals and presidents who spill their blood in vain. Alas, ignorance of these obvious truths probably isn’t the issue. This is likely just another case of the biggest names in news pretending to not get the point so they can take the rest of us along for a ride in their confidence game of alternative reality.

The latest example is the New York Times spinning President Donald Trump’s critique this week of Pentagon leadership and the military industrial complex as disrespect for the military at large. “Trump has lost the right and authority to be commander in chief,”the Times quoted retired US Marines General Anthony Zinni as saying. Zinni cited Trump’s alleged “despicable comments” about the nation’s war dead – reported last week by The Atlantic, citing anonymous sources – as one of the reasons Trump “must go.” Never mind that Trump and all on-the-record administration sources denied The Atlantic’s report. The Times couldn’t resist when the pieces seemed to fit so well together for the military’s latest propaganda campaign against Trump.

First the president disses the troops, calling them “losers” and “suckers,” then he has the temerity to say Pentagon leaders want to fight wars to keep defense contractors happy. Except the pieces don’t fit. The many people who occupy so-called boots on the ground don’t have the same interests as the few people who send them to war. In fact, combat troops are given reason to hate the generals who send them to die when there’s not a legitimate national security reason for the war they’re fighting. And the US has fought a long line of wars that didn’t serve the nation’s national security interests. Even when a war is justified, the interests of top brass and front-line soldiers often clash.

[..] Trump has managed to keep the US out of new wars and has drawn down deployments to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan – despite Pentagon opposition. His rival, Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, can be expected to rev up the war machine if he takes charge. His foreign policy adviser, Antony Blinken, lamented in a May interview with CBS News that Trump had given up US “leverage” in Syria. Trump also has turned around the VA hospital system, ending decades of neglect that left many veterans to die on waiting lists.

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Is it November yet? They’re not going to stop this before then.

Ex-Judge Reviewing Flynn Cases Urges Guilty Plea Be Upheld (JTN)

A retired judge named to review Michael Flynn’s case recommended Friday the former national security adviser’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI be upheld, suggesting the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the charge was caused by pressure from President Trump. “In the United States, Presidents do not orchestrate pressure campaigns to get the Justice Department to drop charges against defendants who have pleaded guilty — twice, before two different judges — and whose guilt is obvious,” the former jurist John Gleeson wrote in a report to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is overseeing the case. “The government’s attempt to dress up a politically motivated dismissal that smacks of impropriety as a ‘policy judgment,’ should be rejected,” added Gleason, now a lawyer in private practice who used to be a federal judge in New York.


Gleeson’s views on the case were known before Sullivan even appointed him to write an independent report. Both Flynn’s lawyers and DOJ have argued the charge and guilty plea should be dismissed because of evidence of FBI and prosecutorial wrongdoing, including the withholding of exculpatory evidence of innocence that U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen uncovered during a review of the case. Sidney Powell, Flynn’s lawyer, on Friday lambasted Gleeson’s recommendation. “Gleeson’s filing was predictable and meaningless,” she tweeted. “It’s the irrelevant and wrong smear he intended it to be–ignoring the mountain of exculpatory evidence Mr. Jensen unearthed and produced that shows the investigation and prosecution of General Flynn was corrupt from its inception.”

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Both sides are spying and “influencing” like there’s no tomorrow.

Beijing To Impose Restrictions On All US Diplomats In China (AlJ)

Beijing will impose “reciprocal restrictions” on all American diplomats in China in response to earlier curbs on the activities of its embassy staff in the United States, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said. The unspecified countermeasures will apply to all US embassy and consulate staff, as well as the consulate-general in Hong Kong, a ministry statement said on Friday. “To urge the US to repeal its wrong decisions as soon as possible, the Chinese side has recently sent a diplomatic note announcing reciprocal restrictions on US embassy and consulates, the consulate-general in Hong Kong included,” it added.


The announcement comes days after China threatened to respond to a new raft of US restrictions on Chinese diplomats, such as a requirement to seek approval for university visits, holding cultural events with more than 50 people outside embassy grounds, or meetings with local officials. Last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said those measures were a response to long-established controls on American diplomats in China, drawing an angry rebuke from Beijing. It comes as part of a Trump administration campaign against alleged Chinese influence operations and espionage activity. The State Department had said it would also take action to help ensure all Chinese embassy and consular social media accounts were “properly identified”.

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No idea what the odds are he can win. But he’s rich enough to fight this fight, while most others are not.

Fortnite Maker: Apple and Google Monopolies Need To Be Stopped (NPR)

From his perch in Cary, North Carolina, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has launched a war against Silicon Valley powerhouses Apple and Google. The billionaire maker of video game phenomenon Fortnite dragged the tech giants to court last month over the 30% fee they charge on purchases made in their mobile app stores. Since then, Sweeney, an iconoclastic executive who owns enormous farms and dabbles in fast cars, has not talked publicly about his decision. He broke his silence to NPR, insisting he had the backing of countless other app developers who also believe the tech titans are taking advantage of them. “It’s not just Epic being exploited by Apple, but it’s every developer who goes along with that scheme colluding with Apple and Google to further their monopoly,” Sweeney said in the interview.

“These stores are making a lot more money from creative works than the creators.” In some ways, Sweeney said, being far away from the orbit of Silicon Valley, a culture he has long accused of “groupthink,” has made his gamble easier. He said many companies either rely too much on the tech giants to help them distribute their products and reach consumers, or dream of becoming the next Apple or Google themselves. “Everybody doesn’t have a great incentive to challenge Apple and Google’s 30% because they want to be the next bastard to charge 30%,” Sweeney said. To be clear, Apple and Google object to Sweeney’s characterization. They have long charged the 30% fee for in-app purchases. The companies say the commission supports technical staff who make sure apps on iPhones and Androids are safe and secure.

In response, Sweeney, a veteran computer programmer, says that justification is offensive. “Every Apple engineer who works on these services and ensures that iPhone is the most secure platform in the world has got to deeply resent the business guys for taking credit and claiming that their store monopoly is the reason why the platform is secure,” Sweeney said. “It’s just not true.” In its latest legal filing, Apple says Sweeney is positioning his company as a “modern corporate Robin Hood, in reality, it is a multi-billion dollar enterprise that simply wants to pay nothing.”

Apple readily points out that Sweeney chose to break the rules that govern the app store — rules that clearly state developers cannot make users pay in-app purchases. Before Sweeney did that, leading to Apple’s tossing Fortnite out of its store, he wrote an email at 2 a.m. to tech executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook. He detailed what Epic was about to do, according to court documents. “We choose to follow this path in the firm belief that history and law are on our side,” he wrote in the email.

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Starting a religion?

Left, Right Mock Pelosi For Saying Angry Mother Earth Caused Wildfires (RT)

Top US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was bombarded with online mockery after saying that massive ongoing wildfires raging in California were the result of “Mother Earth” and her displeasure with humans. The house speaker addressed the blazing wildfires that have engulfed her home state on Friday in an interview with MSNBC. “Mother Earth is angry,” Pelosi said. “She’s telling us … with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the west, whatever it is … the climate crisis is real and has an impact.” Her colorful rhetoric did not sit well with either the political left or right, as both factions took to social media to air their various grievances with the politician and her figure of speech.

Some on the left recalled that the speaker publicly dismissed the ‘Green New Deal’, an anti-climate change proposal drafted by progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Pelosi famously called it “green dream or whatever,” which some noted was in stark contrast to her latest “Mother Earth” language. “Didn’t Pelosi mock the idea of a green new deal? Spare us your crocodile tears,” one person wrote. Conservatives, on the other hand, made light of what they perceived as hyperbole, mocking Pelosi for presuming to speak for the forces of nature and calling into question the Democrats’ definition of themselves as the “party of science.” Some users had other simpler theories, saying that California has “horribly mismanaged its forests” and that might be responsible for the wildfires’ scale.

Then there were those who didn’t take any issue with Pelosi’s comment, saying she was “so right.” The 2020 California wildfires have become an inescapable political topic as they tinted the state’s skies orange due to their sheer scale. Cal Fire confirmed this week that one of the fires was sparked by a “smoke-generating pyrotechnic device” used at a ‘gender reveal’ party in San Bernardino County.

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There is a huge communication problem here. IPCC projections for 2300 are utterly meaningless for people living today. You MUST change your message.

Earth Barreling Toward ‘Hothouse’ State Not Seen In 50 Million Years (LS)

Sixty-six million years ago, after a massive asteroid hit Earth with the explosive energy of roughly 1 billion nuclear bombs, a shroud of ash, dust and vaporized rock covered the sky and slowly rained down on the planet. As plant and animal species died en masse, tiny undersea amoebas called forams continued to reproduce, building sturdy shells out of calcium and other deep-sea minerals, just as they had for hundreds of millions of years. When each foram inevitably died — pulverized into seabed sediment — they kept a little piece of Earth’s ancient history alive in their fossilized shells. For decades, scientists have studied those shells, finding clues about the ancient Earth’s ocean temperatures, its carbon budget and the composition of minerals spilling through the air and seas.


Now, in a new study published today (Sept. 10) in the journal Science, researchers have analyzed the chemical elements in thousands of foram samples to build the most detailed climate record of Earth ever — and it reveals just how dire our current climate situation is. The new paper, which comprises decades of deep-ocean drilling missions into a single record, details Earth’s climate swings across the entire Cenozoic era — the 66 million-year period that began with the death of the dinosaurs and extends to the present epoch of human-induced climate change. The results show how Earth transitioned through four distinct climate states — dubbed the Warmhouse, Hothouse, Coolhouse and Icehouse states — in response to changes in the planet’s orbit, greenhouse gas levels and the extent of polar ice sheets.

The zig-zagging chart (shown above) ends with a sobering peak. According to the researchers, the current pace of anthropogenic global warming far exceeds the natural climate fluctuations seen at any other point in the Cenozoic era, and has the potential to hyper-drive our planet out of a long icehouse phase into a searing hothouse state. “Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that,” study co-author James Zachos, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections for 2300 in the ‘business-as-usual’ scenario will potentially bring global temperature to a level the planet has not seen in 50 million years.”

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The only thing I think these days when seeinng people dragging take-out coffees down the street is: 500 YEARS. That’s how long it will take for that cup you use for 10 minutes to dissolve.

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled (NPR)

Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups. None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried. “To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust,” she said. “I had been lying to people … unwittingly.” Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state. But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn’t want to hear it.

“I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage,” she says, “and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You’re lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It’s gold. This is valuable.” But it’s not valuable, and it never has been. And what’s more, the makers of plastic — the nation’s largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite. NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn’t work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.

The industry’s awareness that recycling wouldn’t keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program’s earliest days, we found. “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,” one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech. Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn’t true. “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry’s most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.

[..] Here’s the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can’t be reused more than once or twice. On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It’s made from oil and gas, and it’s almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh. All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled.

Read more …

Babylon Bee.

Nobel Peace Prize Committee Tells Trump To Launch More Drone Strikes (B. Bee)

The Norwegian Nobel Committee was reportedly considering President Trump as a recipient of its prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, as the president had submitted his name for consideration to them over 67 times. But after reviewing his credentials, the committee concluded that he had not launched enough drone strikes against foreigners to qualify. “Yeah, you’ve dabbled in attacks, but what we’re really looking for is someone who’s really committed to a secret drone war,” said a spokesperson for the committee. “Look at previous winners like Barack Obama: now there’s a shining example of someone who achieved world peace not through lame diplomacy but by blowing up foreigners with impunity.”


Obama also criticized Trump’s drone strike count, saying they were “rookie numbers” and he needs to “pump those numbers up.” “My fellow Americans, it represents a danger to democracy when we have a president who’s either unwilling or unable to bomb as many foreigners as I did,” Obama said, reading off a teleprompter. “During my scandal-free presidency, I was able to drop over 26,000 bombs some years.” “Those were the days,” he added, going off-script as his eyes glazed over and he recalled the feeling of dark, evil power that coursed through his veins when he ordered drone strikes on foreign nations we were not at war with, innocent civilians, and the occasional American citizen. The Nobel Prize committee said they would consider Trump again next year, provided he starts a war with Iran.

Read more …

 

 

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Aug 152018
 
 August 15, 2018  Posted by at 9:11 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  10 Responses »


Paul Signac Maison de Van Gogh Arles 1933

 

Two Greek Soldiers Released From Turkish Jail Return Home (K.)
Turkey Shows Damage Of Fading World Order (R.)
Turkey Hikes Tariffs On Imports Of Selected US Products (AFP)
US Household Debt Rises To $13.3 Trillion In Second Quarter (R.)
Has Bezos Become More Powerful In DC Than Trump? (VF)
Trump Criticizes Some Russia Provisions Of Defense Bill (USAT)
Tonga PM Calls On China To Write Off Pacific Debt (AFP)
“Hothouse Earth” And Neoliberal Economics (IC)
We’re In A New Age Of Obesity. How Did It Happen? (Monbiot)
More Recycling Won’t Solve Plastic Pollution (SciAm)
Glyphosate Is Here To Stay In EU – At Least For Now (Pol.eu)
Help Me, My Prince: Guernsey Resident Halts Roadworks With Ancient Plea (G.)

 

 

Here’s what interesting about this: the two soldiers, who had been in detention for almost half a year for accidentally stepping across the border, were released by a provincial court, and get back home on a Greek national holiday (August 15). On that same day, another court decides that an appeal for pastor Brunson is denied. Ergo, Erdogan can claim the latter’s fate is out of his hands: it’s the court system that decides. That victory over Trump is worth more to him than the defeat of not exchanging the soldiers for the 8 Turkish servicemen who have aylum in Greece.

Two Greek Soldiers Released From Turkish Jail Return Home (K.)

Two Greek soldiers freed after months in a Turkish prison returned to Greece by government jet early Wednesday after their unexpected release by a provincial court. Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said he phoned his Turkish counterpart to express his satisfaction with the soldiers’ release and invite him to visit Greece. “This is a great day for our motherland, the day of Our Lady, the day of Tinos in 1940,” Kammenos told reporters, referring to the Feast of the Dormation, which falls on August 15 and to the Italian torpedoing on a Greek warship on this day in 1940. “I hope that their release … will herald a new day in Greek-Turkish relations. We can live together peacefully, for the benefit of both our peoples.”

The soldiers – 2nd Lieutenant Angelos Mitretodis and Sergeant Dimitris Kouklatzis – were met by Kammenos, the army chief of staff and an honor guard after their arrival at 3 a.m. at the airport in the northern city of Thessaloniki. “All I want to say is thank you,” Mitretodis told reporters. The men were arrested on March 1 for illegally entering Turkey after crossing the heavily militarized land border. Greece strongly protested their long detention in the western town of Edirne, arguing that they had strayed across during a patrol of a trail of suspected illegal immigration amid poor visibility due to bad weather.

[..] The men’s arrest had considerably strained Greek-Turkish relations. Kammenos had claimed that they were being held “hostage” by Turkey, which is trying to secure the extradition of eight Turkish servicemen who fled to Greece after the 2016 failed military coup in Turkey. Ankara accuses its servicemen of involvement in the coup, but Greek courts have refused to extradite them, arguing they would not get a fair trial in Turkey and their lives would be in danger there.

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The world order does too much damage. Just look at the IMF.

Turkey Shows Damage Of Fading World Order (R.)

Turkey’s currency crisis was easy to predict. What is more surprising is how weak the global response has been. The old world financial order is badly missed. A big mess was almost certain to arrive in a country that continually relied on short-term loans to finance a large current account deficit. That was not the only invitation to disaster. Heavy domestic borrowing denominated in foreign currencies and high inflation added to the strains. So did a government that spurned the counsel of the foreign financiers who help keep the economy afloat. President Tayyip Erdogan was lucky to avoid serious trouble so far. Now, though, he faces a disaster. The Turkish lira has fallen 42% against the dollar since the beginning of May. It will take a miracle or an international rescue to avoid a domestic banking crisis.

Much has changed since 2009 when the government, then led by Prime Minister Erdogan, announced that it no longer needed advice from the IMF. The country would “move forward without a walking stick”. Turkey had leaned heavily on the IMF crutch over preceding decades. The country had a standby arrangement with the global lender for more than half the period between 1970 and 2009. The IMF promised support if the government kept working on economic reforms. This time, however, the IMF is still waiting for a phone call from Ankara. The Washington-based institution has the expertise and probably the money needed to stabilise the lira, but Erdogan has cast it in the role of enemy of the Turkish people.

The antipathy fits with the president’s nationalist and authoritarian agenda, but it is also part of a distressing pattern. The traditional authority figures in global financial matters are crippled. The IMF’s reputation has been damaged by what was widely perceived as its blind allegiance to the doctrines of free trade, free capital movements and free markets. Though the multilateral institution’s approach has softened under Christine Lagarde, managing director since 2011, Turkey’s intransigence suggests the IMF lacks its former moral authority.

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And the lira is gaining.

Turkey Hikes Tariffs On Imports Of Selected US Products (AFP)

Turkey is hiking tariffs on imports of certain US products in response to American sanctions on Ankara that caused the value of the lira to plunge, a decree published Wednesday said. Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said that the rises were ordered “within the framework of reciprocity in retaliation for the conscious attacks on our economy by the US administration”. The hikes were published in Turkey’s Official Gazette in a decree signed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The move comes after US President Donald Trump announced that the United States was doubling steel and aluminium tariffs on Turkey, as the two NATO allies row over the detention by Turkish authorities of American pastor Andrew Brunson.

The tensions and the tariff hike by the United States have caused the Turkish lira to bleed value, fanning fears the country is on the verge of an economic crisis that could spillover into Europe. Erdogan has repeatedly described the crisis as an “economic war” that Turkey will win. The tariff increases amount to a doubling of the existing rate, the state-run Anadolu news agency said, in an apparent parallel response to Trump’s move. The decree said the move brought tariffs to 50% on imports of US rice to 140% on hard alcoholic drinks like spirits, 60% in leaf tobacco and 60% on cosmetics. The tariffs on auto imports are now up to 120% depending on the type of vehicle.

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The rising debt is linked to a ‘solid labor market’. Well, if it were all that solid (as in higher wages etc.), people wouldn’t need to get into debt.

US Household Debt Rises To $13.3 Trillion In Second Quarter (R.)

Americans’ borrowing reached $13.29 trillion in the second quarter, up $454 billion from a year ago, marking a 16th consecutive quarter of increases, a New York Federal Reserve report released on Tuesday showed. The level of U.S. consumer debt was $618 billion higher than the previous peak of $12.68 trillion in the third quarter of 2008. It was 19.2% above a post global credit crisis low set in the second quarter of 2013, the New York Fed said. The ongoing growth in home, auto, student and credit loans has been linked with a solid labor market. The rise in indebtedness did not make it more difficult for borrowers to meet their monthly payments last quarter.

The rate on seriously delinquent loans, or those that are 90 days or more past due, was 2.3% in the second quarter, unchanged from the prior quarter. Notably, the pace of student loans turning seriously delinquent slowed to 8.6% from 8.9%, the N.Y. Fed survey showed. “While overall delinquency rates have remained stable at relatively low levels, transition rates into delinquency have fallen noticeably for student loan over the past year, reflecting an improved labor market and increased participation in various income-driven repayment plans,” Wilbert van der Klaauw, senior vice president at the New York Fed, said in a statement.

Read more …

The Big Tech mix with intelligence and military takes on scary forms.

Has Bezos Become More Powerful In DC Than Trump? (VF)

There’s a new scandal quietly unfolding in Washington. It’s far bigger than Housing Secretary Ben Carson buying a $31,000 dinette set for his office, or former EPA chief Scott Pruitt deploying an aide to hunt for a deal on a used mattress. It involves the world’s richest man, President Trump’s favorite general, and a $10 billion defense contract. And it may be a sign of how tech giants and Silicon Valley tycoons will dominate Washington for generations to come. The controversy involves a plan to move all of the Defense Department’s data—classified and unclassified—on to the cloud. The information is currently strewn across some 400 centers, and the Pentagon’s top brass believes that consolidating it into one cloud-based system, the way the CIA did in 2013, will make it more secure and accessible.

That’s why, on July 26, the Defense Department issued a request for proposals called JEDI, short for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. Whoever winds up landing the winner-take-all contract will be awarded $10 billion—instantly becoming one of America’s biggest federal contractors. But when JEDI was issued, on the day Congress recessed for the summer, the deal appeared to be rigged in favor of a single provider: Amazon. According to insiders familiar with the 1,375-page request for proposal, the language contains a host of technical stipulations that only Amazon can meet, making it hard for other leading cloud-services providers to win—or even apply for—the contract. One provision, for instance, stipulates that bidders must already generate more than $2 billion a year in commercial cloud revenues—a “bigger is better” requirement that rules out all but a few of Amazon’s rivals.

What’s more, the process of crafting JEDI bears all the hallmarks of the swamp that Trump has vowed to drain. Though there has long been talk about the Defense Department joining the cloud, the current call for bids was put together only after Defense Secretary James Mattis hired a D.C. lobbyist who had previously consulted for Amazon. The lobbyist, Sally Donnelly, served as a top advisor to Mattis while the details of JEDI were being hammered out. During her tenure, Mattis flew to Seattle to tour Amazon’s headquarters and meet with Jeff Bezos. Then, as the cloud-computing contract was being finalized, Donnelly’s former lobbying firm, SBD Advisors, was bought by an investment fund with ties to Amazon’s cloud-computing unit.

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Not enough. He should have refused to sign.

Trump Criticizes Some Russia Provisions Of Defense Bill (USAT)

At a bill signing ceremony in New York on Monday, President Donald Trump took credit for a $716 billion defense policy bill that he said would strengthen America’s military. “I am very proud to be a big, big part of it,” he said. “It was not very hard.” In a written statement hours later, Trump raised objections to 52 provisions of the law – including four of the eight provisions dealing specifically with Russia. The signing statement suggests he may not enforce provisions that he said raise constitutional concerns. As passed by Congress, the defense bill attempts to tie the president’s hands on Russia in a number of ways. It forbids him from using federal funds to recognize Russian control over Crimea and bans military cooperation with Russia until Russia pulls out of Ukraine.

It requires him to report back to Congress on steps he has taken to address Russian violations of the Open Skies Treaty, which allows reconnaissance flights over Russian territory, and the New START Treaty on nuclear weapons. Trump said those provisions undermine the president’s role “as the sole representative of the nation in foreign affairs.” Trump objected to a section requiring him to send to Congress a strategy to combat “malign foreign influence operations and campaigns.” That strategy, he said, is covered by executive privilege. Though presidential objections in signing statements are not uncommon, Trump’s pushback on Russia-related provisions is notable given his attempts to forge closer relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin [..]

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“If we fail to pay, the Chinese may come and take our assets, which are our buildings.”

Tonga PM Calls On China To Write Off Pacific Debt (AFP)

Tonga Prime Minister Akalisi Pohiva has called for China to write-off debts owed by Pacific island countries, warning that repayments impose a huge burden on the impoverished nations. Chinese aid in the Pacific has ballooned in recent years with much of the funds coming in the form of loans from Beijing’s state-run Exim Bank. Tonga has run-up enormous debts to China, estimated at more than US$100 million by Australia’s Lowy Institute think tank, and Pohiva said his country would struggle to repay them. He said the situation was common in the Oceania region and needed to be addressed at next month’s Pacific Island Forum summit in Nauru. “We need to discuss the issue,” he told the Samoa Observer in an interview published on Tuesday.

“All the Pacific Island countries should sign this submission asking the Chinese government to forgive their debts. “To me, that is the only way we can all move forward, if we just can’t pay off our debts.” Tonga took out the Chinese loans to rebuild in the wake of deadly 2006 riots that razed the centre of the capital Nuku’alofa. Beijing has previously refused to write-off the loans by turning them into aid grants but did give Tonga an amnesty on repayments. Pohiva said China now wanted the debts repaid. “By September 2018, we anticipate to pay $14 million, which cuts away a huge part of our budget,” he said. Tonga’s ability to pay has been further dented this year by another massive rebuilding effort in Nuku’alofa, this time after a category five cyclone slammed into the capital in February.

“If we fail to pay, the Chinese may come and take our assets, which are our buildings.” “That is why the only option is to sign a submission asking the Chinese government to forgive our debts.” His comments come as Australia and New Zealand ramp up aid efforts in the Pacific to counter China’s growing presence in the region. Australia has raised fears in recent months Pacific nations’ debts to China leaves them susceptible to Beijing’s influence.

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Not sure climate scientisis talking economics will be taken seriously.

“Hothouse Earth” And Neoliberal Economics (IC)

[..] embedded within the paper is a finding that’s just as stunning: that none of this is inevitable, and one of the main barriers between us and a stable planet — one that isn’t actively hostile to human civilization over the long term — is our economic system. Asked what could be done to prevent a hothouse earth scenario, co-author Will Steffen told The Intercept that the “obvious thing we have to do is to get greenhouse gas emissions down as fast as we can. That means that has to be the primary target of policy and economics. You have got to get away from the so-called neoliberal economics.” Instead, he suggests something “more like wartime footing” to roll out renewable energy and dramatically reimagine sectors like transportation and agriculture “at very fast rates.”

That “wartime footing” Steffen describes is a novel concept in 2018, but hasn’t been throughout American history when the nation has faced other existential threats. In the lead-up to World War II, the government played a heavy hand in industry, essentially shifting the U.S. to a centrally planned economy, rather than leaving things like prices and procurement of key resources up to market forces. By the end of World War II, about a quarter of all manufacturing in the United States had been nationalized. And while governments around the world continue to intervene heavily in the private sector — including in the U.S. — those interventions tend now to be on behalf of corporations, be it through subsidies to fossil fuel companies or zoning laws that favor luxury real estate developers.

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Who are you educating? A kindergarten?

We’re In A New Age Of Obesity. How Did It Happen? (Monbiot)

The light begins to dawn when you look at the nutrition figures in more detail. Yes, we ate more in 1976, but differently. Today, we buy half as much fresh milk per person, but five times more yoghurt, three times more ice cream and – wait for it – 39 times as many dairy desserts. We buy half as many eggs as in 1976, but a third more breakfast cereals and twice the cereal snacks; half the total potatoes, but three times the crisps. While our direct purchases of sugar have sharply declined, the sugar we consume in drinks and confectionery is likely to have rocketed (there are purchase numbers only from 1992, at which point they were rising rapidly. Perhaps, as we consumed just 9kcal a day in the form of drinks in 1976, no one thought the numbers were worth collecting.) In other words, the opportunities to load our food with sugar have boomed.

As some experts have long proposed, this seems to be the issue. The shift has not happened by accident. As Jacques Peretti argued in his film The Men Who Made Us Fat, food companies have invested heavily in designing products that use sugar to bypass our natural appetite control mechanisms, and in packaging and promoting these products to break down what remains of our defences, including through the use of subliminal scents. They employ an army of food scientists and psychologists to trick us into eating more than we need, while their advertisers use the latest findings in neuroscience to overcome our resistance.

They hire biddable scientists and thinktanks to confuse us about the causes of obesity. Above all, just as the tobacco companies did with smoking, they promote the idea that weight is a question of “personal responsibility”. After spending billions on overriding our willpower, they blame us for failing to exercise it.

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Stop making the stuff.

More Recycling Won’t Solve Plastic Pollution (SciAm)

The real problem is that single-use plastic—the very idea of producing plastic items like grocery bags, which we use for an average of 12 minutes but can persist in the environment for half a millennium—is an incredibly reckless abuse of technology. Encouraging individuals to recycle more will never solve the problem of a massive production of single-use plastic that should have been avoided in the first place. Beginning in the 1950s, big beverage companies like Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch, along with Phillip Morris and others, formed a non-profit called Keep America Beautiful. Its mission is/was to educate and encourage environmental stewardship in the public. Joining forces with the Ad Council (the public service announcement geniuses behind Smokey the Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog), one of their first and most lasting impacts was bringing “litterbug” into the American lexicon through their marketing campaigns against thoughtless individuals.

Two decades later, their “Crying Indian” PSA, would become hugely influential for the U.S. environmental movement. In the ad, a Native American man canoes up to a highway, where a motorist tosses a bag of trash. The camera pans up to show a tear rolling down the man’s cheek. By tapping into a shared national guilt for the history of mistreatment of Native Americans and the sins of a throwaway society, the PSA became a powerful symbol to motivate behavioral change. More recently, the Ad Council and Keep America Beautiful teams produced the “I Want to Be Recycled” campaign, which urges consumers to imagine the reincarnation of shampoo bottles and boxes, following the collection and processing of materials to the remolding of the next generation of products.

At face value, these efforts seem benevolent, but they obscure the real problem, which is the role that corporate polluters play in the plastic problem. This clever misdirection has led journalist and author Heather Rogers to describe Keep America Beautiful as the first corporate greenwashing front, as it has helped shift the public focus to consumer recycling behavior and actively thwarted legislation that would increase extended producer responsibility for waste management.

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EU inertia.

Glyphosate Is Here To Stay In EU – At Least For Now (Pol.eu)

Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weedkiller will be used in Europe for years to come, legal experts and campaigners say, despite a U.S. court ruling the company should pay $289 million in damages for causing cancer. The EU last year renewed use of the controversial weedkiller for another five years after a yearslong political debate over its safety and impact on the environment. That means Europe will have to wait until the end of 2022 at the earliest before making any attempt to ban the substance outright. Campaigners also say the mounting legal pressure Monsanto faces in the U.S. from thousands of other plaintiffs filing suits against the company is unlikely to be replicated in Europe, namely because Europe doesn’t have the same legal mechanism of a class action lawsuit as the U.S.

“I’m not very confident that the decision in the U.S. will expedite a ban in Europe as it’s a complicated legal process that takes time,” said Arnaud Apoteker, managing director of the NGO Justice Pesticides. “Countries could go back to the Commission to say that the proposal [to renew glyphosate] could be re-tabled, but this is a very lengthy process.” Apoteker has compiled all lawsuits involving pesticides into a single database and has so far only discovered two made against Monsanto in the EU. One dates back to 2007 and was filed by a farmer named Paul François, who alleged Monsanto’s Lasso herbicide caused his chronic illness and that the product was inadequately labeled. The other was filed at a court in Lyon last year by Sabine Grataloup, who accuses Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller of causing severe malformations in her 11-year-old son Théo.

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What’s not to love?

Help Me, My Prince: Guernsey Resident Halts Roadworks With Ancient Plea (G.)

A woman has activated the ancient Norman rite of Clameur de Haro to protest against the narrowing of a road which she claims would endanger pedestrians and motorists. Rosie Henderson, from Guernsey, raised the clameur by kneeling and calling for help and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Norman French. Fully enforceable in Guernsey and Jersey law, it means the construction work in St Peter Port must stop until a court decides the case. Henderson, a parish councillor, raised the clameur on Tuesday by the roads of Les Échelons and South Esplanade, near the construction site. The clameur states: “Haro! Haro! Haro! A l’aide, mon prince, on me fait tort”, translated as “Come to my aid, my prince, for someone does me wrong”.

Whoever calls the clameur has 24 hours to register it in court, but whoever it is called against must stop all work immediately. Legend says the raising of a clameur stretches back to the early Norman period in the Channel Islands and is thought to have been a plea to Rollo, the first Duke of Normandy. The feudal law dates back to the 10th century as a form of self-policing when there was no law enforcement. In 2016, plans to overhaul St Peter Port’s sunken gardens, by levelling the site with the street and moving the war memorial, were withdrawn after protesters pledged to use the Clameur de Haro to block the proposals.

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Aug 072018
 


Eugène-Louis Boudin Beach at Étretat 1890

 

Petition To Trump: Pardon Julian Assange (Infowars)
Corporate Censorship Is State Censorship (CJ)
The Myths Of Stocks For The Long Run – Part X (Roberts)
Germany’s Huge Trade Surpluses Are A Burden On Its EU Partners (CNBC)
EU Acts To Protect Firms From Donald Trump’s Sanctions Against Iran (G.)
Mattress Firm Considers Bankruptcy to Get Out of its Real Estate Scams
UK To Run Out Of Food A Year From Now With No-Deal Brexit – Farmers (G.)
Record Number Of UK Police Officers Forced To Take Second Job (Ind.)
Chinese Newspaper: Trump’s Claim Of Winning Trade War ‘Wishful Thinking’ (R.)
China Bans Winnie The Pooh Film After Comparisons To President Xi (G.)
US Coalition Cooperates With Al-Qaeda In Yemen, AP Confirms (ZH)
Brazil Closes, Then Reopens Border To Venezuelan Migrants (AFP)
Humans Are About to Unleash an Irreversible “Hothouse Earth” (Science Alert)

 

 

Yes, Infowars, and I know. But this is about Julian Assange, and about Alex Jones getting thrown out of social media the moment he launched this petition. Please go to Infowars for once and sign!

Petition To Trump: Pardon Julian Assange (Infowars)

Whereas Journalist Julian Assange and his media organization, Wikileaks has, in the respected tradition of American journalism obtained and published information that is classified and newsworthy, a practice shared with the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others and

Whereas in the eleven years of its existence the authenticity and accuracy of materials published by Wikileaks has ever been questioned or in dispute and

Whereas the material regarding Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee published by Wikileaks served the national interest by exposing the corruption of the Clintons, the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton campaign and the Obama Justice Department and

Whereas assertion by the American Intelligence Services that Julian Assange is the agent of a ‘Hostile Foreign State” or the Russian government are politically suspect and completely unproven and denied by Assange and

Whereas Julian Assange has consistently denied that material obtained from the Democratic National Committee and published by Wikileaks came from the Russian State and has repeatedly offered to prove this for US authorities and

Whereas Assange, now in failing health, has been a veritable prisoner in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for six years, with the media now reporting Equador is preparing to hand Assange over to British authorities who will presumably extradite Assange to the United States for trial and

Whereas Julian Assange is an impeccably-honest, incredibly-brave, humanitarian journalist, who provides an invaluable platform for whistleblowers exposing corruption and criminality infesting governments, nullifying democracy and obliterating human rights, around the world and

Whereas there are absolutely no legitimate legal grounds to prosecute Assange and, as the U.S. DOJ admitted in 2013, that doing so would expose ALL U.S. journalistic and news outlets to similar criminal jeopardy.

Therefore- we the undersigned urge President Donald J. Trump to issue a full and unconditional pardon to the journalist Julian Assange in the interests of both justice and mercy.

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“Assange’s mother also reports that this mass removal of Infowars’ audience occurred less than 48 hours after she was approached to do an interview by an Infowars producer.”

Corporate Censorship Is State Censorship (CJ)

Last year, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.” “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.” Yes, this really happened.

Today Twitter has silenced three important anti-war voices on its platform: it has suspended Daniel McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute, suspended Scott Horton of the Scott Horton Show, and completely removed the account of prominent Antiwar.com writer Peter Van Buren. I’m about to talk about the censorship of Alex Jones and Infowars now, so let me get the “blah blah I don’t like Alex Jones” thing out of the way so that my social media notifications aren’t inundated with people saying “Caitlin didn’t say the ‘blah blah I don’t like Alex Jones’ thing!” I shouldn’t have to, because this isn’t actually about Alex Jones, but here it is:

I don’t like Alex Jones. He’s made millions saying the things disgruntled right-wingers want to hear instead of telling the truth; he throws in disinfo with his info, which is the same as lying all the time. He’s made countless false predictions and his sudden sycophantic support for a US president has helped lull the populist right into complacency when they should be holding Trump to his non-interventionist campaign pledges, making him even more worthless than he was prior to 2016. But this isn’t about defending Alex Jones. He just happens to be the thinnest edge of the wedge.

As of this writing, Infowars has been censored from Facebook, Youtube (which is part of Google), Apple, Spotify, and now even Pinterest, all within hours of each other. This happens to have occurred at the same time Infowars was circulating a petition with tens of thousands of signatures calling on President Trump to pardon WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, who poses a much greater threat to establishment narratives than Alex Jones ever has. Assange’s mother also reports that this mass removal of Infowars’ audience occurred less than 48 hours after she was approached to do an interview by an Infowars producer.

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At some point we’ll have to acknowledge that there is no market.

The Myths Of Stocks For The Long Run – Part X (Roberts)

In early 2017, Byron Wien was asked the question of where we are in terms of the economy and the market to a group of high-end investors. To wit: “The one issue that dominated the discussion at all four of the lunches was whether or not we were in the late stages of the business cycle as well as the bull market. This recovery began in June 2009 and the bull market began in March of that year. So we are more than 100 months into the period of equity appreciation and close to that in terms of economic expansion.“ His point is that markets rotate between bullish and bearish phases. When he made that statement he was simply saying the current economic recovery and the bull market are very long in the tooth. As shown below why shouldn’t we expect a market decline to follow, it has every other time?

[..] There are two problems facing investor outcomes. First, you don’t have 100+ years to invest in the market to get the “average” long-term returns. Second, your “long-term” investment horizon is simply the time you have between today and when you retire. As I stated above, for most people that is about 15 years. So, for argument sake, let’s be generous and assume you have 20-years from today until retirement. As we discussed previously, we know that based on current valuations in the market, forward real total returns in the market will likely be, on average, fairly low to negative.

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Germany and Holland live off the labor of their neighbors. There is no bigger threat to the EU.

Germany’s Huge Trade Surpluses Are A Burden On Its EU Partners (CNBC)

While few European states can pretend to share Germany’s distinction of being a “country of poets and thinkers,” none can rival German abilities to extract so much wealth from the rest of the European Union. Last year, Germany posted a 159.3 billion euro surplus on its goods trade with other countries in the EU — one of the world’s largest free-trade areas and a region with privileged access to German goods and services. That’s the way it’s been since 1958, when Europe’s common market opened up. Germany’s enormous EU bounty consistently accounts for two-thirds of its net foreign trade income in a market structure where Berlin remains an undisputed leader and a principal regulator.

This year looks set to mark another record-high EU trade income for Germany. The surplus during the January-April period was running at an annual rate of 175 billion euro — a 10 percent increase on the country’s EU trades in 2017 — according to statistics from Germany’s Bundesbank. A country representing 28 percent of the monetary union’s economy and living so grandly off the rest of its partners is a structurally destabilizing factor. To this day, economists pointing out that fundamental problem have been ridiculed as hopelessly naive because, as the mantra goes, the European project has always been, and always will be, a political construct to keep the Europeans off each other’s throats.

That charge is not only false, but it also bears the seeds of its own destruction. Taking hundreds of billions of euros of purchasing power out of the monetary union, Germany makes it virtually impossible for other euro area economies to grow and create jobs as they struggle to bring down their public debts and deficits. Instead of accumulating enormous wealth on the back of its euro partners, Germany should stimulate its domestic spending to buy more goods and services from them. [..] Recycling some of last year’s roughly $300 billion trade surplus — through direct investments in the rest of the EU — Germany would boost economic growth and employment in other countries in the bloc, solve the problem of its shrinking manpower and adjust its overflowing external accounts.

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The only choice firms have is who they want to be sanctioned by.

EU Acts To Protect Firms From Donald Trump’s Sanctions Against Iran (G.)

The EU has launched an attempt to protect European businesses from Donald Trump’s sanctions against Iran as the US administration voiced its intent to apply maximum pressure on Tehran by vigorously applying its punitive measures. The sanctions are to enter into force at midnight (US east coast time). At the same time, a blocking statute – last used to protect EU firms from US sanctions against Cuba – will be brought into force in an attempt to insulate firms and keep alive a deal designed to limit the Iranian government’s nuclear aspirations. European firms have been instructed that they should not comply with demands from the White House for them to drop all business with Iran.

Those who decide to pull out because of US sanctions will need to be granted authorisation from the European commission, without which they face the risk of being sued by EU member states. A mechanism has also been opened to allow EU businesses affected by the sanctions to sue the US administration in the national courts of member states. Trump announced his intention to hit firms doing business with Iran when he reneged on a deal struck in 2015 designed to help curtail Tehran’s nuclear ambitions in return for limited sanctions relief.

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Sharing a laugh with Wolf Richter.

Mattress Firm Considers Bankruptcy to Get Out of its Real Estate Scams

This is so thick it’s hard to believe. It’s far beyond just a Brick & Mortar Meltdown. “I recently sold a small strip center with my last Mattress Firm,” a relieved real estate developer told me earlier this year. “It traded at a 7.1% cap rate, which is just astonishing to me. During due diligence, the buyer’s lawyers focused on every minute risk and mentioned nothing about their parent company once. So crazy.” Mattress Firm’s parent company is Steinhoff, now a familiar name in the Enron lexicon. “Mattress Firm’s strategy is to have multiple stores on the same intersection in every town,” this developer had told me last fall.

“This was accomplished by design and not just mergers. As a developer, I was literally asked to find sites across the street from existing stores in almost every town. Mattress Firm was able to get these sites because they would overpay market rent by up to $10 per square foot in every market that I was focused in, but it is the same all over,” he said. To get out of these leases, and for other reasons, Mattress Firm, the largest mattress retailer in the US, is now considering a bankruptcy filing, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Restructuring in bankruptcy court would allow Mattress Firm to shut down unprofitable and excess stores and get out from under their over-priced leases. Mattress Firm, which was founded in 1986, is a classic example of a private-equity pump-and-dump that has turned into an alleged real estate scam by insiders. Here is the turn of events:

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Better plant some more tomatoes in your gardens.

UK To Run Out Of Food A Year From Now With No-Deal Brexit – Farmers (G.)

Britain would run out of food on this date next year if it cannot continue to easily import from the EU and elsewhere after Brexit, the National Farmers’ Union has warned. Minette Batters, the NFU president, urged the government to put food security at the top of the political agenda after the prospect of a no-deal Brexit was talked up this week. “The UK farming sector has the potential to be one of the most impacted sectors from a bad Brexit – a frictionless free trade deal with the EU and access to a reliable and competent workforce for farm businesses is critical to the future of the sector,” she said. Batters’ warning comes a fortnight after the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, said Britain would have “adequate food supplies” after Brexit.

While Downing Street has insisted it is confident an agreement can be made in time, the international trade secretary, Liam Fox, warned over the weekend that the prospect of a no-deal Brexit was now at “60-40”, fuelling fears at the NFU and among food importers. Food security in Britain is in long-term decline, with the country producing 60% of what it needs to feed itself, compared with 74% 30 years ago, according to figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). In a statement issued by the NFU, Batters expressed concern that Britain would not be able to meet its food needs if Brexit was mismanaged. Research showed 7 August 2019 would be the nominal day that Britain would run out of food if it were asked to be wholly self-sufficient based on seasonal growth, the NFU said.

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The blessings of austerity.

Record Number Of UK Police Officers Forced To Take Second Job (Ind.)

A record number of police officers are being forced to take on second jobs because they cannot afford essentials on their wages, a survey has found amid warnings the service is “in crisis”. The Police Federation said some officers were resorting to food vouchers and welfare schemes, while dealing with “unprecedented” demand, rising violent crime and terrorism. Almost 8 per cent of the 27,000 members who responded to the association’s annual pay and morale survey said they had taken up a second job, compared with 6 per cent the previous year. The roles included becoming driving instructors, personal trainers or leasing properties.

A further 45 per cent of officers said they worry about finances on a daily basis, 12 per cent said they do not have enough money to cover essentials and 88 per cent do not feel fairly paid. John Apter, the new chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales, warned that some officers were in “dire straits”. “Our members are under immense pressure to deliver, with dwindling resources and rising crime, particularly violent crime, leading to a demand for our services that has never been higher,” he said. “All they want is to be adequately paid for the job that they do. “We know officers are struggling and some have had to resort to food vouchers and other welfare schemes. This clearly cannot be right or acceptable that those employed to keep the public safe cannot make ends meet or put food on tables for their families.

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These kinds of things show that China is nervous.

Chinese Newspaper: Trump’s Claim Of Winning Trade War ‘Wishful Thinking’ (R.)

Chinese state media kept up their criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade policies, with a newspaper on Tuesday describing as “wishful thinking” Trump’s belief that a fall in Chinese stocks was a sign of his winning the trade war. As the world’s two biggest economies remained locked in a heated tariff dispute, Beijing and Washington have kept up a blistering rhetoric with threats and counter-threats of more punitive trade measures. The editorial in the official China Daily underscored an increasingly aggressive stance adopted by Chinese state media against Trump, a shift from their previous approach of tempering any direct criticism against the U.S. president.

On Monday, the overseas edition of the Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper singled out Trump, saying he was starring in his own “street fighter-style deceitful drama of extortion and intimidation”. [..] The China Daily referred to a Saturday Tweet by Trump which said “Tariffs are working far better than anyone anticipated. China market has dropped 27 percent in last four months.” China’s stock market was performing poorly before the U.S. administration imposed tariffs, said the English-language newspaper, asserting that the downturn was partly due to Beijing’s attempts to cut corporate debt. The paper said Trump’s claim that “tariffs are working big time” was undermined by data showing the U.S. trade deficit climbed $3 billion to $46.3 billion in June, the first increase in four months.

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Catchy, but not too likely. So you get the whole build-up and then towards the end: “China only allows 34 foreign films to be released in cinemas each year..”

China Bans Winnie The Pooh Film After Comparisons To President Xi (G.)

Who’s afraid of Winnie the Pooh? The Chinese government, apparently. Chinese censors have banned the release of Christopher Robin, a new film adaptation of AA Milne’s beloved story about Winnie the Pooh, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The Winnie the Pooh character has become a lighthearted way for people across China to mock their president, Xi Jinping, but it seems the government doesn’t find the joke very funny. It started when Xi visited the US in 2013, and an image of Xi and then president Barack Obama walking together spurred comparisons to Winnie – a portly Xi – walking with Tigger, a lanky Obama. Xi was again compared to the fictional bear in 2014 during a meeting with Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who took on the part of the pessimistic, gloomy donkey, Eeyore.

As comparisons grew and the meme spread online, censors began erasing the images which mocked Xi. The website of US television station HBO was blocked last month after comedian John Oliver repeatedly made fun of the Chinese president’s apparent sensitivity over comparisons of his figure with that of Winnie. The segment also focused on China’s dismal human rights record. Another comparison between Xi and Winnie during a military parade in 2015 became that year’s most censored image, according to Global Risk Insights. The firm said the Chinese government viewed the meme as “a serious effort to undermine the dignity of the presidential office and Xi himself”.

[..] Another reason for the film’s rejection by the authorities may be that China only allows 34 foreign films to be released in cinemas each year. That leaves Hollywood summer blockbusters, family films and contenders from across the world jockeying for a tiny number of spots.

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Like we didn’t know already.

US Coalition Cooperates With Al-Qaeda In Yemen, AP Confirms (ZH)

Perhaps we could simply shrug our shoulders and say it’s better late than never for the mainstream media. A new Associated Press report confirms what was long ago detailed by a number of independent investigative journalists, and even in some instances buried deep within sporadic mainstream reports of past years: the US-coalition in Yemen is actually cooperating with al-Qaeda terrorists in the campaign to dislodge Shia Houthi militants. The AP report begins dramatically as follows:

“Again and again over the past two years, a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States has claimed it won decisive victories that drove al-Qaida militants from their strongholds across Yemen and shattered their ability to attack the West. Here’s what the victors did not disclose: many of their conquests came without firing a shot. That’s because the coalition cut secret deals with al-Qaida fighters, paying some to leave key cities and towns and letting others retreat with weapons, equipment and wads of looted cash, an investigation by The Associated Press has found. Hundreds more were recruited to join the coalition itself.”

And contrary to the normative response of US officials to such allegations, which as in the case of US support to jihadists in Syria typically runs something like “we didn’t know” while hiding behind a system of ‘plausible deniability’ — in the case of Yemen officials involved have now admitted to the AP that coalition allies knowingly allowed al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to survive and flourish. Somewhat surprising for the AP, its report underscores this with zero ambiguity, even illustrating for the reader the terrorists’ linkage to 9/11:

“These compromises and alliances have allowed al-Qaida militants to survive to fight another day — and risk strengthening the most dangerous branch of the terror network that carried out the 9/11 attacks. Key participants in the pacts said the U.S. was aware of the arrangements and held off on any drone strikes.” Similar to the US role in Syria, American officials are now apparently quite comfortable admitting they are willing to utilize designated terrorist groups ultimately as a weapon against pro-Iran interests.

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“It is not justified to take the easy path to ‘close the doors’ because of difficulties in hosting refugees,” Supreme Court justice Rosa Weber said..”

Brazil Closes, Then Reopens Border To Venezuelan Migrants (AFP)

Brazil briefly closed then reopened its northern border to Venezuelans on Monday as it struggled to contain mass migration from the South American country saddled with a crippling political and economic crisis, police said. A Supreme Court justice overturned a lower court judge’s decision that had suspended for a few hours the entry of more Venezuelans until other immigrants from the country were transferred elsewhere in Brazil. “It is not justified to take the easy path to ‘close the doors’ because of difficulties in hosting refugees,” Supreme Court justice Rosa Weber said in her ruling issued shortly before midnight.

The border had remained open to Brazilians and other nationalities, as well as to Venezuelans seeking to return to their home country. It’s a main crossing point for tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants, an influx that has increased dramatically over the past two years. President Michel Temer was opposed in a “non-negotiable” way to the border closure, Human Rights Minister Gustavo Rocha was quoted as saying by state-run Agencia Brasil. Roraima state’s capital Boa Vista has hosted the largest number of Venezuelan immigrants in the country — around 25,000 out of a total of 330,000 city dwellers. An estimated 500 Venezuelans cross the land border into Brazil each day.

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Feedback loops. Methane is becoming a bigger factor all the time.

Humans Are About to Unleash an Irreversible “Hothouse Earth” (Science Alert)

The coasts are gone. The waves crash high into what were once mountains. Many have perished, for food is scarce, and the deadly heat is inescapable. This bleak future scenario – called a “Hothouse Earth” – could be realised sooner than we think, scientists warn, if the planet breaches a pivotal climate threshold from which there may ultimately be no coming back. The worst part? Scientists say we could exceed this threshold even if we meet the carbon emission reductions called for in the Paris Agreement – and manage to keep global temperatures to 2°C above pre-Industrial levels. Achieving that goal would be a global success story. But it might not be the end of the story.

“Human emissions of greenhouse gas are not the sole determinant of temperature on Earth,” says Earth system scientist Will Steffen from the Australian National University. “Our study suggests that human-induced global warming of 2°C may trigger other Earth system processes, often called ‘feedbacks’, that can drive further warming – even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases.” In a new perspective study, Steffen and an international team of researchers outline a number of these ‘positive feedback’ systems that exist on Earth and can “amplify a perturbation and drive a transition to a different state”. One example is permafrost thaw. As the world gets hotter due to heat-trapping carbon emissions, there’s worrying evidence that melting permafrost soils are releasing even more carbon into the atmosphere – making a bad situation potentially catastrophic.

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