Saturday, November 3, 2018

33 Trillion Reasons Why The New York Times Is Wrong About Russiagate

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Gareth Porter via ConsortiumNews.com,

New research shows The New York Times was even further off the mark in blaming Russian social media for Trump’s win...

Even more damning evidence has come to light undermining The New York Times‘ assertion in September that Russia used social media to steal the 2016 election for Donald Trump.

New research shows that a relatively paltry 80,000 posts from the private Russian company Internet Research Agency (IRA) were engulfed in literally trillions of posts on Facebook over a two-year period before and after the 2016 vote.

That was supposed to have thrown the election, according to the paper of record. In a 10,000-word article on Sept. 20, the Times reported that 126 million out of 137 million American voters were exposed to social media posts on Facebook from IRA that somehow had a hand in delivering Trump the presidency.

The newspaper said:

“Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone.”

But Consortium News, on Oct. 10, debunked that story, pointing out that reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti failed to report several significant caveats and disclaimers from Facebook officers themselves, whose statements make the Times’ claim that Russian election propaganda “reached” 126 million Americans an exercise in misinformation.

What Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 31, 2017 is a far cry from what the Timesclaims.

“Our best estimate is that approximately 126,000 million people may have been served one of these [IRA-generated] stories at some time during the two year period,” Stretch said.

Stretch was expressing a theoretical possibility rather than an established fact. He said an estimated 126 million Facebook members might have gotten at least one story from the IRA –- not over the ten week election period, but over 194 weeks during the two years 2015 through 2017—including a full year after the election.

That means only an estimated 29 million FB users may have gotten at least one story in their feed in two years. The 126 million figure is based only on an assumption that they shared it with others, according to Stretch.

Facebook didn’t even claim most of those 80,000 IRA posts were election–related. It offered no data on what proportion of the feeds to those 29 million people were.

In addition, Facebook’s Vice President for News Feed, Adam Moseri, acknowledged in 2016 that FB subscribers actually read only about 10 percent of the stories Facebook puts in their News Feed every day. The means that very few of the IRA stories that actually make it into a subscriber’s news feed on any given day are actually read.

And now, according to further research, the odds that Americans saw any of these IRA ads—let alone were influenced by them—are even more astronomical. In his Oct. 2017 testimony, Stretch said that from 2015 to 2017, “Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or ‘served,’ a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds.”

That 33 trillion figure is 412.5 million times larger than the total of 80,000 IRA posts in that two year period. To put that in perspective, the Russian-origin Facebook posts represented just .0000000024 of total Facebook content in that time.

Shane and Mazzetti did not report the 33 trillion number even though The New York Times’ own coverage of that 2017 Stretch testimony explicitly stated, “Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users’ News Feeds everyday.”

The Times‘ touting of the bogus 126 million out 137 million voters, while not reporting the 33 trillion figure, should vie in the annals of journalism as one of the most spectacularly misleading uses of statistics of all time.



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2nd Kavanaugh Accuser Admits She Lied; Referred For Criminal Prosecution; Kamala's Office Involved

ORIGINAL LINK

A Kentucky woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of rape has been referred to the Department of Justice after she admitted that she lied

The woman, Judy Munro-Leighton, took credit for contacting the office of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as "Jane Doe" from Oceanside, California. Jane Doe claimed - without naming a time or place - that Kavanaugh and a friend raped her "several times each" in the backseat of a car. Harris referred the letter to the committee for investigation. 

"They forced me to go into the backseat and took 2 turns raping me several times each. They dropped me off 3 two blocks from my home," wrote Munro-Leighton, claiming that the pair told her "No one will believe if you tell. Be a good girl."

Kavanaugh was questioned on September 26 about the allegation, to which he unequivocally stated: "[T]he whole thing is ridiculous. Nothing ever -- anything like that, nothing... [T]he whole thing is just a crock, farce, wrong, didn't happen, not anything close." 

The next week, Munro-Leighton sent an email to the Judiciary committee claiming to be Jane Doe from Oceanside, California - reiterating her claims of a "vicious assault" which she said she knew "will get no media attention." 

Upon investigation, the Judiciary Committee investigators found that Munro-Leighton was a left wing activist who is decades older than Judge Kavanaugh, who lives in Kentucky. When Committee investigators contacted her, she backpedaled on her claim of being the original Jane Doe - and said she emailed the committee "as a way to grab attention."

"I am not Jane Doe . . . but I did read Jane Doe’s letter. I read the transcript of the call to your Committee. . . . I saw it online. It was news.” claimed Munro-Leighton.

Grassley has also asked the DOJ to investigate Kavanaugh accuser Julie Swetnick, who claimed through her attorney, Michael Avenatti, that Kavanaguh orchestrated a date-rape gang-bang scheme in the early 1980s. 

President Trump chimed in Saturday morning, Tweeting: "A vicious accuser of Justice Kavanaugh has just admitted that she was lying, her story was totally made up, or FAKE! Can you imagine if he didn’t become a Justice of the Supreme Court because of her disgusting False Statements. What about the others? Where are the Dems on this?"

A vicious accuser of Justice Kavanaugh has just admitted that she was lying, her story was totally made up, or FAKE! Can you imagine if he didn’t become a Justice of the Supreme Court because of her disgusting False Statements. What about the others? Where are the Dems on this?

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

In a Friday letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray, Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley wrote: 

on November 1, 2018, Committee investigators connected with Ms. Munro-Leighton by phone and spoke with her about the sexual-assault allegations against Judge Kavanaugh she had made to the Committee. Under questioning by Committee investigators, Ms. Munro-Leighton admitted, contrary to her prior claims, that she had not been sexually assaulted by Judge Kavanaugh and was not the author of the original “Jane Doe” letter. When directly asked by Committee investigators if she was, as she had claimed, the “Jane Doe” from Oceanside California who had sent the letter to Senator Harris, she admitted: “No, no, no. I did that as a way to grab attention. I am not Jane Doe . . . but I did read Jane Doe’s letter. I read the transcript of the call to your Committee. . . . I saw it online. It was news.”

She further confessed to Committee investigators that (1) she “just wanted to get attention”; (2) “it was a tactic”; and (3) “that was just a ploy.” She told Committee investigators that she had called Congress multiple times during the Kavanaugh hearing process – including prior to the time Dr. Ford’s allegations surfaced – to oppose his nomination. Regarding the false sexual-assault allegation she made via her email to the Committee, she said: “I was angry, and I sent it out.” When asked by Committee investigators whether she had ever met Judge Kavanaugh, she said: “Oh Lord, no.”

Read Grassley's letter below: 



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Russia Isolated? US And Britain Excluded From Syria Summit

ORIGINAL LINK

Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

There were several takeaways from the recent Quadrilateral Summit in Istanbul on finding a peaceful settlement to the war in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin convened with his counterparts from Turkey, Germany and France for a two-day summit last weekend in a convivial and constructive atmosphere.

The four powers signed a communique emphasizing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria. It was Putin who underscored the inviolability of the Syrian government of President Assad as the internationally recognized authority in the Arab country. The communique also endorsed the right of the Syrian nation to self-determination over the future political settlement, free from external interference.

These principles have been stated before in a previous UN Security Council Resolution 2254. But it seems more than ever that the sovereignty of Syria has been widely accepted. Recall that not too long ago, Turkey and France were calling for President Assad to stand down. That demand is no longer tenable, at least as far as the four powers attending the Istanbul summit are concerned.

The upholding of Syrian self-determination bears the stamp of Russia’s long-held position. The acceptance of this position by Turkey, Germany and France is testimony to the key role Russia has established in ending the nearly eight-year war in Syria and now creating the framework for a peace settlement in the war-torn country. This framework has been made possible after Russia’s principled military intervention nearly three years ago, which prevented Syria from being destroyed by Western-backed insurgents.

Ironically, the US and Britain have been pursuing a policy of trying to isolate and delegitimize Russia in international relations. Evidently from the Quadrilateral Summit in Istanbul, Moscow is far from isolated. It is perhaps the linchpin power for the reconstruction of Syria. Furthermore, Russia has emerged as having newfound leadership on the international stage owing to its laudable contribution in salvaging Syria from a foreign-sponsored war to destroy that nation.

Another important takeaway from the Istanbul gathering was that Washington and London were not invited to attend. That speaks to the diminished role these two powers have previously claimed in international politics. Their absence also speaks to the tacit recognition that the US and Britain have played a destructive part in fomenting the war in Syria. Turkey and France have also blood on their hands from likewise sponsoring regime change. But at least, it seems, the latter two have come significantly some way to accepting that the illicit objective of regime change is now a dead-end.

It remains to be seen if the Istanbul communique can be translated into substantive results in terms of Syria’s reconstruction. Both Germany and France appeared at this stage to not commit to providing financial aid. Berlin and Paris appeared to with-hold specific aid, perhaps as a way to maintain some kind of leverage over shaping a final political settlement. That contradicts the principle of recognizing Syrian self-determination. Nevertheless, if millions of Syrian refugees are to return to their country – a paramount issue for the European Union – then the EU must do much more in financing Syria’s reconstruction.

Another glaring contradiction in the communique is that the territorial integrity of Syria is being violated by the US and Turkey. Both have troops occupying swathes of Syrian territory in what is an egregious breach of international law. For a comprehensive peace settlement, all foreign powers present in Syria without a legal mandate must be withdrawn from the country.

While the US was excluded from the Quadrilateral Summit, Washington still exerts a baleful obstacle to peace.

Days after the Istanbul conference, the US envoy to Syria, James Jeffrey, made provocative statements that do not bode well. He gloated in the fact that the US has some 2,000 troops in the country, and the State Department official warned that Washington would not permit a normalization of Syria by giving up occupied territory.

Jeffrey told media in Brussels.

“We are not going to put it [Syria] back together, and we are going to do everything we can, and that’s a lot, to ensure that nobody else does.”

It was a staggering admission of criminality by the US diplomat. It flies in the face of UN resolutions and the Istanbul communique endorsing Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

However, the threat of further destabilizing Syria by Washington illustrates that US objectives are in direct conflict with those of its European allies.

Germany, France and the rest of Europe need a peaceful reconstruction of Syria if they are to mitigate the refugee crisis that has destabilized the EU. A major political challenge to German Chancellor Angela Merkel from within her own country stems from the refugee crisis that the Syrian war has generated. The US policy of interminable interference in Syria is deeply incompatible with Europe’s interests for restoring peace to the Mediterranean and Middle East region.

Russia has helped decisively to win the war in Syria. But to win the peace, other powers must play a constructive role. Moscow has also decisively led the way to finding a peaceful settlement, from its diplomacy in previous summits in Astana and Sochi.

Far from being isolated or delegitimized, Russia has demonstrated an admirable leadership with regard to Syria. It is the US and Britain that are seen to be woefully isolated, and still pushing a destructive policy.

The Istanbul summit was a vindication of Russian policy. The coming together of Turkey, Germany and France with Russia is further vindication. What these four powers must do is insist on Washington abiding by international law and respecting Syria’s sovereignty. By getting illegal American forces out of Syria that would also go towards solving Turkey’s concerns over US-backed Kurdish separatists occupying territory in northeast Syria.

Washington is the one that is isolated over Syria, not Russia. The Europeans and Turkey are right to recognize Russia as a viable partner with regard to Syria’s future and their own security. By contrast, Washington as currently positioned, and for the foreseeable future, has nothing to offer except a dead-end.



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Friday, November 2, 2018

"An Information Apocalypse" Looms - Deepfakes And Political Manipulation

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Leonid Savin via Oriental Review,

Not a day seems to go by without the American media writing about Russia’s Internet meddling in the US elections. Major international and specialist publications headquartered in the US are routinely regurgitating the myth about “Russian trolls” and “GRU hackers” without a single shred of evidence besides unsubstantiated accusations. Actually, evidence has been provided by a private company, but this evidence points to the contrary.

As one Google project so convincingly shows, for example, for just $100 you can create the illusion that a Russian company is trying to influence public opinion within America. All you need to do is buy a mobile phone and a few SIM cards in Panama, choose a common Russian name and surname and use it to set up a Yandex account, then indicate your IP address is in Saint Petersburg using NordVPN. You can then set up an account with AdWords, pay for advertising using the details of a legally registered company, and place political content on the Internet that could be regarded as inflammatory.

This was what was done by US citizens from Google and they didn’t hesitate to report on it. So what is stopping the NSA, the CIA, or some Russophobe fanatics familiar with hacking techniques from doing exactly the same thing, regardless of whether they belong to a political party or not?

Common sense suggests that this is exactly what is being done to create the appearance of Russian interference, but no one is able to provide any real evidence, of course.

Another example of how the US can influence public opinion is the creation of fake propaganda, a technique that was developed by the US military in Iraq in the early 2000s.

According to the British non-governmental organisation The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Pentagon paid the British PR company Bell Pottinger more than $500 million to create fake videos showing various militant and terrorist activities. A group of Bell Pottinger employees was stationed alongside the US military in its Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters almost as soon as the American occupation began in 2003. A series of contracts was also issued between 2007 and 2011. The company’s former chairman, Lord Tim Bell, confirmed to journalists that Bell Pottinger did in fact carry out covert work for the Americans, the details of which cannot be disclosed for reasons of confidentiality.

It is worth mentioning that Bell Pottinger was once responsible for shaping Margaret Thatcher’s image and helped the Conservative Party win three elections.

Martin Wells, a former video editor with the company, said that his time in Camp Victory had opened his eyes and changed his life. On the US side, the project was supervised by former General David Petraeus. If he was unable to decide on a matter, then it was sent to the very highest levels in Washington for approval.

The most scandalous part of the story is the propaganda videos produced by the UK company in the name of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Once the material was ready and in the required format, the videos were copied onto CDs and given to US marines, who would then leave them in Iraqi homes during searches and raids. A code was embedded into the CDs that made it possible to track where they were played. It was subsequently discovered that the fake Al-Qaeda videos were not just being watched in Iraq, but also Iran, Syria, and even the United States. It is possible that this tracking also helped US security agencies trace the distribution of fake propaganda videos, but how many people became extremists thanks to the Pentagon’s secret project?

And since technology has come on leaps and bounds in recent years, there is now talk of possibly using artificial intelligence for projects like these – whether it is the political manipulation of elections or the spread of disinformation.

In fact, AI-based technology has already been associated with several recent scandals. One of these was Cambridge Analytica’s use of information from Facebook profiles to target voters during the US presidential elections.

Commenting on the scandal, The Washington Post noted that:

“Future campaigns will pick not just the issues and slogans a candidate should support, but also the candidate who should champion those issues. Dating apps, the aggregate output of thousands of swipes, provide the perfect physical composite, educational pedigree and professional background for recruiting attractive candidates appealing to specific voting segments across a range of demographics and regions. Even further in the future, temporal trends for different voter blocks might be compared to ancestry, genetic and medical data to understand generational and regional shifts in political leanings, thereby illuminating methods for slicing and dicing audiences in favor of or against a specified agenda.”

Artificial intelligence can also be used as a bot to substitute for a person and even to simulate a conversation. Algorithms like Quill, Wordsmith and Heliograf are used to convert tables of data into a text document and even write news articles on various subjects – Heliograf is used by The Washington Post, in fact – but bots can be used for both good and bad.

According to the US military, AI-based information operations tools can empathise with people, say something if needed, and alter the perception that controls these physical weapons. Future information operations systems will be able to individually control and influence tens of thousands of people simultaneously.

In the summer of 2018, DARPA launched a project to determine the possibilities of identifying fake video and audio generated by artificial intelligence. The analysis of such files is also done using artificial intelligence.

Videos typically have more impact on an audience because it is believed that they are harder to fake than photographs. They also look more convincing than a text read out on behalf of a politician. This is no problem for modern technologies, however. In April 2018, a video was made public called ObamaPeele after the people involved.

The video showed Barack Obama giving a rather strange speech, but the text was actually being read by an unseen actor. A special programme had processed what the actor was saying in such a way that Obama’s facial gestures were fully consistent with what was being said. Computer technology experts at Washington University conducted a similar experiment with a Barack Obama speech in 2017 and made the results publicly available with a detailed description of how it works.

YouTuber ‘derpfakes‘ trained the AI image swap tool to create a composite of Trump’s face, over Baldwin’s speech and mannerisms.

The DARPA project used so-called “deepfakes” – videos in which the face of one person has been superimposed onto the body of another. Experts note that technology like this has already been used to create several fake celebrity porno videos, but the method could also be used to create videos of politicians talking or doing something outrageous and unacceptable.

Technologists at DARPA are particularly concerned that new AI techniques for creating fake videos make it almost impossible for them to be recognised automatically. Using so-called generative adversarial networks or GAN, it is possible to create realistic artificial images. Experts at DARPA are evidently concerned that this technology may be used by someone else, since, if the US loses its monopoly on the creation, verification and distribution of fake material, it will find itself facing the same problems it has been preparing for other countries.

And while scientists in military uniforms are racking their brains over how to get ahead of other countries in such a specific information arms race, their civilian colleagues are already calling the trend “an information apocalypse” and “disinformation on steroids”.



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The Danger In Media Telling Only Half The Story On Political Violence

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Sean Malone via The Foundation for Economic Education,

When mass media displays such a clear bias, then the people who are on the losing end of that bias are not going to be happy...

In the last few months, we've seen numerous acts of politically motivated or targeted violence. Some of these cases have been plastered all over the news for days or weeks. Some others have been met with deafening silence. And which is which hasn't exactly been random.

There is clear bias in the reporting of political violence and I believe this has had some serious consequences for people's ability to trust the media and bridge a divided culture.

To understand why, we need to look at what's actually happened recently, so while what follows is far from a complete list of all the politically-motivated violence, it encompasses many of the most recent and highest-profile examples:

What You've Probably Heard

  • October 2018Trump-supporting lunatic Cesar Sayoc, Jr. attempted (but completely failed to) to deliver (non-functional) bombs to over a dozen Democratic leaders including Obama, Clinton, Maxine Waters, and Eric Holder among others. As we learn more about this story, it becomes increasingly clear that Sayoc has a long history of threats and violence going back to at least the mid-90s.

  • October 2018: Anti-semite Robert Bowers shot and killed 11 people and injured 6 others at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and although he seems to have been anti-Trump, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has already blamed Trump for creating the environment that encouraged Bowers' actions.

  • October 2018: Another man with a substantial history of mental illness and violence, Gregory Bush, entered a Kroger grocery store in Jefferstown, Kentucky and essentially executed a 67-year old  man named Maurice Stallard with a handgun for no apparent reason, after which he exited the store and shot and killed another woman, Vickie Lee Jones (67) before he was challenged by another shopper who drew a legally concealed weapon and shot back at him. Bush apparently attempted to enter a church nearby before he went to the Kroger, presumably with the intent to kill. Although there is currently no motive known, many people assume Bush was motivated by racism because he is white while his two victims were black and one witness recounts hearing him say "Don't shoot me and I won't shoot you. Whites don't kill whites," to the man who confronted him. 

  • October 2018Envelopes testing positive for Ricin (an incredibly dangerous poison for which 22 micrograms/kilogram of body weight constitutes a lethal dosage) were sent to Secretary of Defense, Gen. James Mattis.

  • April 2018Self-described "Incel" Alek Minassian drove a van into a crowd in Toronto and killed 10 people. Incels are considered "right-wing" although "Involuntary Celibacy" is mainly a reaction to feminism and has no inherent connection to right/left politics.

And of course, all this is in the context of the awful Charlottesville Riot from last year, where in...

  • August 2017: Neo-Nazi James Fields killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others with his car at the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally after he drove through a crowd of protesters. What you probably don't know is that his trial is set for November, and he was recently assaulted in prison.

Also, while this isn't actually a known example of political violence, you'll certainly recall:

  • October 2017: Stephen Paddock opens fire on a crowd of country music fans in Las Vegas from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, killing 58 people and causing injury to 851 others either directly or via the resulting panic. This was the deadliest mass shooting in US history, and yet no motive is known, little information has been released to the public, and the press coverage died out relatively quickly.

I'm including the Las Vegas shooting in this list because it sparked another national gun control debate, this time over whether or not it should be legal to own bump stocks.

You'll probably also have heard about a number of cases of street violence involving the "Proud Boys", and perhaps you might have recently learned that Facebook shut down that group's main page.

And you'll have probably heard of various racist/anti-Semitic threats and acts of vandalism against Jewish community centers, churches, and other political targets, which are often assumed to be a product of Trump's rhetoric.

What You Probably Haven't Heard

  • October 2018: Ricin envelopes were not just sent to James Mattis, but also to President Trump, along with Senator Ted Cruz and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson. The FBI arrested a suspect in Utah, William Clyde Allen, believed to have sent all the packages in a coordinated effort. Allen confessed to sending all four letters, but we also learned that—similar to the inoperable bombs allegedly sent by Cesar Sayoc, Jr.—none seemed to contain actual Ricin, but rather castor seed from which Ricin is made.

  • October 2018: In Las Vegas, a Democratic activist working for American Bridge 21st Century named Wilfred Michael Stark assaulted Kristin Davidson, campaign manager for Nevada's Republican gubernatorial candidate, Adam Laxalt. Stark had previously been arrested for similar activity at a GOP rally in Virginia.

  • October 2018: In Minnesota, Republican state-representative Sarah Anderson was chased and punched by a man ripping up GOP campaign signs, and two days earlier, Republican candidate Shane Mekeland suffered a concussion after being punched in the back of the head while having dinner at a local restaurant.

  • October 2018: The Republican Party Headquarters in Manhattan, New York was vandalized with spray-paint, smashed windows, and a threatening notethat read: "Our attack is merely a beginning. We are not passive, we are not civil, and we will not apologize."

  • October 2018: Jackson Cosko, an intern working for Democratic Senator Sheila Jackson Lee was charged by the United States Capitol Police with "doxxing" Republican Senators Mike Lee, Orrin Hatch, and Lindsey Graham. While doxxing itself isn't violence, it has frequently led to serious harassment and violence as people have access to personal information such as the home addresses, phone numbers, and email address of the victims.

  • October 2018: Florida man, Jame Royal Patrick, Jr., was arrested for making death threats to people who supported Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court.

  • October 2018Shots were fired at the Republican party campaign office in Daytona Florida, breaking the windows. Fortunately, no one was in the office.

  • October 2018: A hairdresser Jordan Hunt starts an argument with a female pro-life demonstrator in Ontario, and after a few minutes of conversation roundhouse-kicks her in the face on camera.

  • September 2018: GOP campaign offices in Laramie, Wyoming, were set on fire by arsonists. The same thing happened in Hillsborough, North Carolina, back in 2016, so this is nothing especially new.

  • September 2018: In San Francisco, a man named Farzad Fazeli attempted to stab Republican campaign worker Rudy Peters with a switchblade while he was working at an election booth at a Castro Valley town festival.

  • July 2018Martin Astrof was arrested for threatening to kill GOP campaign staffers and President Trump.

  • July 2018: Someone vandalized the Lincoln, Nebraska (my hometown) GOP headquarters by smashing its windows with a brick and spray-painting "ABOLISH ICE" on the sidewalk.

  • August 2017: Missouri lawmaker, Maria Chappelle-Nadal, said on social media that she hoped President Trump would be assassinated. She later was formally censured by the Missouri State Senate.

And of course, I'd hope you remember...

  • October 2017: In Alexandria, Virginia, James T. Hodgkinson (a Bernie Sanders fanatic angry with the results of the 2016) died with a list of Republican targets in his pocket in a shootout with police after he shot four people: lobbyist Matt Mika, legislative aid Zack Barth, Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner, and Republican Congressman Steve Scalise who nearly died. The shooting took place at a baseball diamond where several Republican Senators and Congressmen were practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity.

Another thing you might not realize is that many of the skirmishes involving the Proud Boys group were actually caused by Antifa and Democratic Socialists of America activists—though you'd hardly know it from the way most reporters frame these events—and Antifa social media pages have not been shut down.

Comparing media coverage between Antifa and conservative groups is, I believe, particularly instructive.

Almost a year ago, YouTube commentator Matt Christiansen called attention to the differences in a video he made about Dartmouth professor, Mark Bray (talk at UC Berkeley).

Bray is the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. 

Christiansen points out that although most news media routinely and uncritically report the claim that nearly all examples of modern political violence are instigated by groups like the Proud Boys, alt-right ideologues, or actual neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups like the KKK, there have been numerous examples of Antifa violence which have not had anything whatsoever to do with protesting "fascists" or any kind of right-wing activity at all. For example, the recent takeover of multiple streets in downtown Portland, Oregon, or any of numerous examples of Antifa members attacking journalists.

What's more, over the past 4-5 years there have been dozens of examples of left-wing protesters using violence to shut down mainstream conservative (or simply non-progressive) speakers like Charles Murray, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Milo Yiannopoulos and others.

Yet no organized conservative group attempted to prevent Mark Bray from speaking.

His talk—which explicitly defended Antifa's use of violence in the face of right-wing speech on the basis that allowing such speech could lead to fascism—was not silenced anywhere in the United States. Meanwhile, many people who have never called for or defended any kind of violence have been subject to aggressive "no platforming" protests which have included substantial property damage, death threats, and physical assaults.

Somehow the supposed "fascists" are generally allowing other perspectives to be heard while the "anti-fascists" are not only attempting to violently silence the most abhorrent voices but also thoughtful academics, journalists, and non-political commuters.

We rarely hear this discussed in major media, and Antifa is frequently presented as not only well-intended, but actually heroic.

It's fairly clear that this is tremendously one-sided.

So, Why Am I Talking about This?

I'm mainly talking about this because the way this stuff is reported drives me insane, and it affects us all in really important ways. Mass media essentially determines which of these examples of politically-motivated violence are important and worth talking about, and which are not.

If the news that gets reported doesn't bother to tell readers and viewers about angry left-wing lunatics who assault Republican campaign workers, set fire to GOP offices, or shoot Republican congressmen, and if reporters and pundits don't care to spend much time writing about a series of threatening letters testing positive for ricin poison or threats of and/or the actual attempted murder of Republicans over their political views, then the people who consume news will not know about those kinds of things.

And of course, this would be fine if reporters and pundits did the same thing whenever a right-wing lunatic did something insane. But that's not what happens.

Most of the mainstream media (arguably with the support of all of the major social networks and even Google) devote tremendous attention to every instance of right-wing violence while utterly ignoring comparable cases coming from left-wing perpetrators. As a result, it's difficult for the average person to know what's actually happening in the world, and they end up with a completely one-sided understanding of the current state of political violence.

We can see what people are hearing and talking about illustrated clearly by looking at Google Trends, and as you can see below, vastly more people heard about Cesar Sayoc and the pipe-bomb scare than they did William Clyde Allen's ricin letters - although, again, both were targeted towards major political figures and both should have been treated as deadly assassination attempts until the ineffectiveness was confirmed.

This bias also makes it easy for political partisans to split themselves into bubbles that each have entirely different sets of facts.

Liberals/Progressives will hear of every instance of someone who could even remotely be considered "right-wing" doing anything wrong yet remain entirely isolated from the slightest hint that people who share their ideology have ever done anything wrong at all. Conservatives are in a slightly better position—in that it's nearly impossible to avoid hearing about right-wing political violence—but the more social media dominates people's information streams, the easier it is for them to similarly wall themselves off from information that makes them uncomfortable.

Point is, there are legitimate reasons for everyone to be seriously concerned with the quality of reporting that we normally see with respect to this kind of activity.

Part of being well-informed is being able to put things into context and gain a meaningful perspective, and that can only happen when you have all the information, not just half of it as we so often get.

Only getting half the story makes it easy to blame your political opponents for everything that's going wrong in the world, but it's also a mistake. If Trump—for example—is to blame for people like Cesar Sayoc, Jr.'s failed bombing spree, is Bernie Sanders to blame for James Hodgkinson? Is Maxine Waters responsible for Farzad Fazeli? Is Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, or Eric Holder the cause of arson and vandalism in Wyoming?

If you think that Trump's rhetoric is causing right-wing violence, surely it stands to reason that the similarly heated rhetoric coming from the other side is to blame for the left-wing variants of these kinds of crimes?

Of course, if you only ever saw one side or the other, it would be extremely easy to think that the only people who are out there doing terrible things are your political opponents, and from there you can concoct a grand theory as to why based on how evil the other party is without much challenge when another possibility is simply that it's the individual criminal who is responsible for their own actions.

There's another problem here, as well.

Vanishing Trust

When mass media displays such a clear bias—and please make no mistake, whether fully intentional or not, that's exactly what this is—then the people who are on the losing end of that bias are not going to be happy. And since they're actually justified in their complaints, it's very easy for them to convince people who have less skin in the game that media isn't trustworthy as well.

All this does is push people further to the extremes, which makes it easier for the biggest lunatics to find reasons to believe even crazier conspiracy theories and find reinforcement for their belief that violence is the appropriate response.

I want this to stop, and while there's no magic bullet, I don't think that can happen until the reporting on these kinds of subjects gets a lot better and more people are more fully-informed about everything that is going on in our world—not just the parts that confirm partisan biases.



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CDC Publishes Fact Sheet Insisting “thimerosal in vaccines is not harmful” Despite Evidence That It Is – Collective Evolution

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/11/02/cdc-publishes-fact-sheet-insisting-thimerosal-in-vaccines-is-not-harmful-despite-evidence-that-it-is/

Media Ignore Government Influence on Facebook’s Plan to Fight Government Influence | FAIR

https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-government-influence-on-facebooks-plan-to-fight-government-influence/

For The Love Of Decency, Stop The Gaslighting About Inflammatory Rhetoric | Daily Wire

https://www.dailywire.com/news/37813/love-decency-stop-gaslighting-about-inflammatory-ben-shapiro

Silence of 'the lambs': The deafening quietude of the FISA court and John Roberts | TheHill

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/413854-silence-of-the-lambs-the-deafening-quietude-of-the-fisa-court-and-john

Here’s Why Trump’s Constant Criticism of the Media Resonates With Americans

ORIGINAL LINK

Americans aren’t fans of their media.

A recent poll shows that while many Americans find President Donald Trump divisive, even more find the media to be divisive.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that 56 percent of Americans think Trump has done more to divide the country, while 64 percent of Americans think the media has done more.

Only 17 percent of respondents said that they thought the national media has done more to unite the country.

There were sharp partisan divisions over whether Trump has worked to unite or divide the country, but Americans across the political spectrum gave the media low marks.

Reinforcing this poll about the media is another survey by Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog, that says media coverage of Trump and Republicans has been overwhelmingly negative and partisan.

The study found that 92 percent of the broadcast network coverage of Trump was negative, compared to only 8 percent being positive.

While much of the division in America may be natural and intractable, it is telling that the media, which has been so strongly negative toward the president, is being blamed even more for heightening conflict in this country.

If anything, the polls show that the media needs to examine themselves before labeling Trump as the cause of a climate of hate in this country. Perhaps there is much blame to go around, but it’s clear that the media has been a driver of this toxic environment.

There’s perhaps no better example of this than recent comments by CNN anchor Don Lemon to CNN host Chris Cuomo on Monday.

“We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right,” Lemon said, breathlessly. “We have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them. There is no white guy ban. So what do we do about that?”

It’s no wonder that polls show eroding confidence in the media as a whole. Some of the biggest personalities in news have revealed themselves as hopelessly partisan and vindictive toward wide swaths of ordinary Americans.

The people have noticed, and their faith in the fourth estate is waning.

As Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner wrote, this perhaps explains why Trump’s attacks on the media have been so effective. Trump’s rhetoric, Klein wrote, “not only works as a way of firing up the base, but it doesn’t really cost him much among the general public, which is sympathetic to the idea that journalists play a large role in dividing the country.”

Lack of trust in media predates the Trump administration, but as I wrote in October, it’s worse now. Polls show that Americans think the media intentionally publishes fake or misleading newsparticularly about Trump.

During the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, in which allegations of sexual assault were lobbed at the now-Supreme Court justice, the media was in rare form, publishing numerous, poorly sourced stories that seemed timed for maximum damage.

Then, as soon as the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh, the media stopped pursuing the story altogether, suggesting that it was part of an agenda rather than the pursuit of the truth.

So, despite the fact that there are still excellent journalists at the local and even national level—and despite the genuine need for a serious press to keep people in power honest—many Americans are outright hostile to what the media has become. And this lack of faith in the media will not be repaired by a media establishment that sees itself as the resistance to Trump and the sole bearer of the truth.

Perhaps the solution is to get back to listening to the American people, and to accept that some of Trump and others’ criticism of the media rings true for large swaths of the population.

--

This article has been republished with permission from The Daily Signal.

[Image credit: Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 2.0]



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When Laws Are Not Enforced, Anarchy Follows

ORIGINAL LINK

What makes citizens obey the law is not always their sterling character. Instead, fear of punishment—the shame of arrest, fines or imprisonment—more often makes us comply with laws. Law enforcement is not just a way to deal with individual violators but also a way to remind society at large that there can be no civilization without legality.

Or, as 17th-century British statesman George Savile famously put it: “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.”

In the modern world, we call such prompt, uniform and guaranteed law enforcement “deterrence,” from the Latin verb meaning “to frighten away.” One protester who disrupts a speech is not the problem. But if unpunished, he green-lights hundreds more like him.

Worse still, when one law is left unenforced, then all sorts of other laws are weakened.

The result of hundreds of “sanctuary cities” is not just to forbid full immigration enforcement in particular jurisdictions. They also signal that U.S. immigration law, and other laws by extension, can be ignored.

The presence of an estimated 12 million or more foreign nationals unlawfully living in the United States without legal consequence sends a similar message. The logical result is the current caravan of thousands of Central Americans now inching its way northward to enter the United States illegally.

If the border was secure, immigration laws enforced and illegal residence phased out, deterrence would be re-established and there would likely be no caravan.

Campus protests often turn violent. Agitators shout down and sometimes try to physically intimidate speakers with whom they disagree.

Most of the disruptors are upper-middle-class students. Many have invested up to $200,000 in their higher education, often to ensure well-paying careers upon graduation.

Protesters assume that ignoring laws about peaceful assembly poses no consequences. Usually, student disruptors are right. College administrators will typically shrug at even violent protests rather than call the police to make arrests.

Yet if a few bold disruptors were actually charged with misdemeanors or felonies and had arrests tarnishing their otherwise sterling resumes, there would likely be far fewer illegal and violent protests.

In the last two years, a number of celebrities have openly fantasized about doing physical harm to the president of the United States. Madonna, Kathy Griffin, Johnny Depp, Robert De Niro, Snoop Dogg, and other stars have expressed their wishes that Donald Trump might be beaten up, blown up, cut up or shot up.

Their shared premise is that they are too famous, influential or wealthy to expect consequences that ordinary citizens might face for making threats to the safety of the president of the United States. If the next time a Hollywood icon tweeted or voiced a threat to the president he or she was subsequently put on a no-fly list, the current assassination chic would quickly stop.

Every person assumes the freedom to eat safely in a restaurant, to walk to work without disturbance and to relax without fear of violence. Now, that is now always the case, at least not if one is deemed politically influential and conservative.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Sens. Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, and Rep. Devin Nunes must worry that when they venture out in public, protesters will scream in their face, attempt to bar their passage or disrupt their meal—and do so without legal ramifications.

There are many causes of the current legal laxity.

Trump is a polarizing president, and his critics have decided that extraordinary and sometimes extralegal measures are morally justified to stop him. Supposedly high-minded ends are seen as justifying unlawful means. Helping undocumented immigrants evade the law, stopping the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh or otherwise thwarting Trump all warrant special immunity.

The problem with ignoring laws is that it is contagious—and can boomerang.

Sanctuary cities could in theory birth conservative sanctuary zones. Would today’s protesters wish for other jurisdictions to nullify federal laws and court rulings concerning abortion, gun registration, and gay marriage?

If thousands of Hondurans in a caravan are deemed above the law, then why not exempt future mass arrivals of Chinese or South African immigrants?

If Cruz and other Republican politicos can’t eat in peace, will Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi soon face the same disruptions—the illegality justified by higher moral concerns?

If students can block a right-wing speaker or storm a diner, will they also object when anti-abortion protesters bar the passage of a pro-choice campus guest?

German philosopher Immanuel Kant noted that “anarchy is law and freedom without force.”

Translated to our current context, Kant might say that all our high-minded talk about the Bill of Rights means absolutely nothing without the cop on the beat and the local district attorney.

--

This article has been republished with permission from American Greatness.

[Image Credit: Flickr-Magaharebia CC BY 2.0]



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CIA secretly intercepted Congressional communications about whistleblowers | Sharyl Attkisson

https://sharylattkisson.com/2018/11/02/cia-secretly-intercepted-congressional-communications-about-whistleblowers/

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Roseanne Reboot Flops Without Roseanne; "The Conners" Dead Last In Ratings

ORIGINAL LINK

ABC's reboot of the Roseanne show is a total flop - coming in dead last in ratings this week, according to Showbiz 411which adds that just one more episode has been ordered

In the nightly ratings battle. the “Roseanne” spin off continues to trend downward.

Last night, “The Conners” was beaten by everything- “NCIS,” “The Voice,” etc. This was their first really objective run, no World Series, nothing to distract potential viewers.

But the key demo sank, which isn’t a good sign. And the total viewers were down by 180K, which is a lot, frankly. People are leaving and they’re not coming back

ABC has ordered 1 extra episode to the original order of 10. Sounds to me like a finale. Someone wakes up and says they dreamt Roseanne died. There’s a cackle from the next room. Fade to black. -Showbiz 411

In an addendum, Showbiz 411 notes that Variety reported the salaries of John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf and Sara Gilbert at $375,000 per episode, while the other cast members can't be cheap either. "The Conners’ has to be added to “Roseanne”‘s syndication package eventually– it will never reach 100 episodes and have its own package. So Werner TV is in trouble, with millions going out and not enough coming back. “The Conners” is doomed,Showbiz 411 added. 

The Roseanne reboot - which quickly grew to become ABC's #1 top-rated series in April, was canceled after the network suddenly fired star Roseanne Barr after she compared former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to if the "Muslim brotherhood & Planet of the Apes had a baby." Her comments were condemned as "abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values." 

Barr, 65, was fired before a single advertiser pulled out, just three months into the show's return. Her co-stars immediately turned on her, publicly shunning Roseanne, while ABC initially cancelled the show - before bringing it back as The Conners

Roseanne issued an immediate apology:

And yet, MSNBC host Joy Reid was allowed to keep her job despite making anti-gay, anti-Muslim blog posts several years ago over a sustained period - and then lying about it. 

CNN's Don Lemon, meanwhile, just called white people the "biggest terror threat" to America, with nary a peep from his network. 

We wonder if ABC still feels their kneejerk reaction was worth the tens of millions in lost revenue? According to anonymous ABC executives earlier in October, the network has had serious regrets, according to the Daily Mail

"We didn't think it through properly. What Roseanne did was wrong but we shouldn't have rushed to fire her. It was almost a knee-jerk reaction by Ben [Sherwood] and Channing [Dungey] who should have launched an investigation," said one insider, who added "This would have given them more time to listen to the public, advertisers and cast members to determine the best decision.



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Silence of 'the lambs': The deafening quietude of the FISA court and John Roberts | TheHill

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/413854-silence-of-the-lambs-the-deafening-quietude-of-the-fisa-court-and-john

Weeks after the fact, an NBC report further muddles the Kavanaugh saga

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/10/31/weeks-after-the-fact-an-nbc-report-further-muddles-the-kavanaugh-saga/

Silence of 'the lambs': The deafening quietude of the FISA court and John Roberts | TheHill

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/413854-silence-of-the-lambs-the-deafening-quietude-of-the-fisa-court-and-john

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Organic food consumption lowers overall cancer risks in large-scale study of French adults

ORIGINAL LINK

The results are in on one of the first, large-scale studies on organic food consumption and cancer risks and they are significant and encouraging.  It is widely recognized we need to do much more in preventing cancer, as opposed to treating it, and this study suggests that organic food may be an important piece of the puzzle.A team of French government scientists analyzed 68,946 citizens in the NutriNet-Santé cohort. Individuals were surveyed to determine if those who ate more organic foods had ...

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Tuesday, October 30, 2018

A Brief History Of Leftist Political Violence This Year

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Daniel Greenfield via Sultan Knish blog,

On September 9, Rudy Peters, the Republican running for Congress in the 15th District in California, was attacked by a knife-wielding man shouting, "F___ Trump".

The attacker, Farzad Fazeli, an Iranian Clinton supporter, had previously posted, “Don Trump won’t clean his own house, so he’s too dirty to know right from wrong. Impeach/incarcerate him before more children die. P.S. complacency is worse than being the shooter.”

The next month, Shane Mekeland, a Republican running for the Minnesota House of Representatives, suffered a concussion after being punched in the face at a restaurant. “You f____g people don't give a s___ about the middle class,” his assailant had shouted at him.

Mekeland is back on the campaign trail, while still recovering from the assault. “The media and the likes of Maxine Waters, Hillary, and Eric Holder as of late is driving this behavior," he warned.

"If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, at a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere," Rep. Maxine Waters had urged an angry leftist mob.

Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general and a possible 2020 candidate, had urged, “When they go low, we kick them." He had tweeted at Democrats, urging them to, “Use the rage.”

Hillary Clinton had told CNN, "You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about."

Senator Hirono had refused to condemn the harassment of Republicans, telling CNN, "This is the kind of activism that occurs and people make their own decisions. If they violate the law, then they have to account for that.”

That same month, also in Minnesota, State Rep. Sarah Anderson, a Republican, was punched by a man when she tried to stop him from vandalizing her campaign signs.

Also in October, Kristin Davison, the campaign chief for Adam Laxalt, the Republican candidate for governor in Nevada, was left with pain and bruises after a confrontation with a Democrat operative. Her alleged assailant faces a charge of misdemeanor battery.

Three violent attacks on Republican political figures in just one month alone earned almost no coverage in the media.

Instead the media egged it on. Even the country’s leading leftist papers urged greater displays of rage.

October editorials, columns and op-eds in the New York Times included headlines such as, "Get Angry, and Get Involved," "Tears, Fury or Action: How Do You Express Anger?", “Fury Is a Political Weapon And Women Need to Wield It.”

The explosion of violence against Republicans in October was the culmination of a climate of crazed hatred, which lead to death threats, and when those were unaddressed, to actual physical violence.

In the two months from May to June, 30 Republican members of Congress were attacked or threatened.

These included, Christopher Michael McGowan who warned Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s staff, "I am not making a joke. I will kill him." It included Steve Martan, a "pacifist", who threatened to shoot Rep. Martha McSally.

E. Stanley Hoff was arrested for leaving a message for Rep. Steve Stivers warning the Ohio Republican, "We're coming to get every g_____n one of you and your families. Maybe the next one taken down will be your daughter."

Messages aimed at Rep. Tom Garrett threatened, "This is how we're going to kill your wife", and "This is what I'm going to do to your daughters."

And Rep. David Kustoff was nearly run off the road.

In the middle of June, James Hodgkinson, a passionate Bernie Sanders supporter, opened fire at a Republican charity baseball practice, seriously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise, and Zack Barth, an aide to Rep. Roger Williams. Even though Hodgkinson had a hit list of conservative Republicans, Rep. Mo Brooks, South Carolina Rep. Jeff Duncan and Arizona Rep. Trent Franks, Rep. Jim Jordan, Tennessee Rep. Scott DesJarlais and Virginia Rep. Morgan Griffith, the FBI denied that it was a political assassination.

In August, Carlos Bayon was arrested for threatening House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers. “We are not going to feed them sandwiches, we are going to feed them lead,” he declared.

Law enforcement found bomb and assassination manuals in Bayon’s house.

Around the same time, DeReal Finklin, a registered Democrat, was charged for sending death threats to Rep. Christopher H. Smith. DeReal had also posted, "Anybody outside of my blood in Monmouth or Ocean County on my Facebook account, you are dead."

In June, Laurence Wayne Key, a Democratic Party of Marin County volunteer, was arrested for threatening to kill Rep. Brian Mast’s three children.

"I’m going to find the Congressman’s kids and kill them. If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids,” the Planned Parenthood supporter threatened.

In Florida, in June, Steve St. Felix was charged with threatening to kill Rep. Jose Felix Diaz.

“Ill kill your ass and you better not show up to the next rec meeting,” St. Felix, who can be seen grinning widely in his booking photo, warned.

In July, in Tennessee, Clifton Ward was indicted for threatening to kill Rep. Diane Black. In New York, Martin Astrof allegedly tried to run over one of Rep. Lee Zeldin’s campaign workers who had been recognized for feeding rescue workers at Ground Zero after 9/11.

Ian Nicholas Nix was arrested for threatening to kill South Carolina state Rep. Steven Long. Nix called Long “right-wing scum” and warned him, You’re a ____ dead man.”

Also in July, a man who threatened to chop up Senator Rand Paul and his family with an axe was arrested.

After months of this, the media did not relent. It poured more fuel on the fire. The death threats of summer then became the violent assaults of fall.

The media called this “activism”. It denounced Republicans for warning of “angry mobs”.

And now the very same media has suddenly decided that threatening and assaulting people whose politics you disagree with is wrong. As long as the political figures being assaulted are Democrats.

But it doesn’t work that way.

Democrats and their media allies have sanctioned violence against Republicans. They’ve defended harassment and even assaults as activism. They have embraced and celebrated hate groups. The mob culture they have brought forth is fundamentally changing the rules of American politics.

Once political terror is unleashed, it can’t be controlled or compartmentalized.

Leftists, who have written a bloody history of political terror from Europe to South America, from the Middle East and across Asia, and right back to America, ought to know that better than anyone else.

The Left has made it its mission to destroy America. This is what destroying a country looks like.

In academia, there is glib talk of overturning Western civilization. But without civilization, there is only savagery.

The mad toll of death threats and assaults, of shootings and harassment was unleashed by the Left. The hectoring media has made millions from it. Fortunes have poured into the war chests of radical Democrats. They can make it stop. Or they can go on feeding the beast while blaming conservatives.



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Rickards: China's Debt Bomb Is Ready To Explode

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

The great Chinese growth slowdown has been proceeding in stages for the past two years. The reason is simple. Much of China’s “growth” (about 25% of the total) has consisted of wasted infrastructure investment in ghost cities and white elephant transportation infrastructure.

That investment was financed with debt that now cannot be repaid. This was fine for creating short-term jobs and providing business to cement, glass and steel vendors, but it was not a sustainable model since the infrastructure either was not used at all or did not generate sufficient revenue.

China’s future success depends on high-value-added technology and increased consumption. But shifting to intellectual property and the consumer means slowing down on infrastructure, which will slow the economy.

In turn, that means exposing the bad debt for what it is, which risks a financial and liquidity crisis. China started to do this last year but quickly turned tail when the economy slowed. Now the economy has slowed so much that markets are collapsing.

But doesn’t China have over $1 trillion of reserves to prop up its financial system?

On paper, that’s true. But in reality, China is “short” U.S. dollars. The Chinese may have $1.4 trillion of U.S. Treasury securities in its reserve position, but they need those assets possibly to bail out their banking system or defend the yuan.

Meanwhile, the Chinese banking sector, which in many ways is an extension of the state, owes $318 billion in U.S. dollar-denominated deposits of commercial paper.

From a bank’s perspective, borrowing in dollars is going short dollars because you need dollar assets to back up those liabilities if the original lenders want their money back. For the most part, the banks don’t have those assets because they converted the dollar to yuan to prop up local real estate Ponzis and local corporations.

There’s not much left over to bail out the corporate, individual and real estate sectors.

This is all part of a global “dollar shortage” attributable to Fed tightening, both in the forms of higher rates but also a reduction in base money.

A dollar shortage seems implausible in a world where the Fed printed $4.4 trillion. But while the Fed was printing, the world borrowed over $70 trillion (on top of prior loans), so the dollar shortage is real. The math is inescapable.

So the Chinese debt bomb that has been a long time in the making is finally getting ready to explode. The economy is slowing, debt is exploding and the trade war with Trump has hurt China’s exports needed to earn dollars to pay the debts.

The defaults are beginning to pile up. Several large corporations and regional governments have defaulted recently.

China’s leaders have panicked at the slowdown and have started the credit flow again with lower interest rates, higher bank leverage and more debt-financed, government-directed infrastructure spending.

Of course, this solution is strictly temporary. All it does is postpone the day of reckoning and make the debt crisis worse when it does arrive.

With every passing day, a Chinese financial collapse draws closer. The rest of the world will not escape the consequences.

When the crisis strikes in full force, possibly in 2019, the rest of the world will not be spared.



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Flashback: Peanut oil in vaccines behind widespread peanut allergy epidemic

ORIGINAL LINK

Social-Save-Delicious.svg

According to available records, however, virtually nobody had peanut allergy prior to 1900 despite the fact that people have been eating peanuts for ages, which begs the question, why do so many people have peanut allergy today, and from where did this potentially-deadly allergic condition emerge?

In his book The Doctor Within, Dr. Tim O'Shea argues that vaccines may be largely responsible for both the advent and increased prevalence of peanut allergy, noting that many vaccines and even antibiotic drugs contain, or were made using, excipients potentially derived from peanut oil. Since it is a relatively inexpensive oil to produce, refined peanut oil apparently became widely adopted as an excipient of choice in the production of vaccines during the 1960s, according to some reports, and peanut-derived excipients are still believed to be in use today for this purpose.



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STUDY: Give Up Pot, Cognition Quickly Improves...

ORIGINAL LINK

STUDY: Give Up Pot, Cognition Quickly Improves...


(First column, 12th story, link)


DrudgeReportFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA DrudgeReportFeed?i=gIFuxaAuuQk:ZjdzzS5XD DrudgeReportFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs DrudgeReportFeed?i=gIFuxaAuuQk:ZjdzzS5XD


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Trump's Role in the Tree of Life Massacre

This outright illogical reporting comes from "a former lecturer in journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Southern California." First is the sensationalist article title, then the claim that the author is going to show how Trump's hateful speech led to this attack. The author should be embarrassed at this attempt to manipulate.

"That is why it is important now, after the slaughter in the Tree of Life Congregation, to give some thought to the speeches, tweets and random thoughts of President Donald Trump, whose words, rather than calming the nation in this trying time, are further inflaming it.

His messages in rallies and tweets spread anger and fear among his political base to increase the Republican vote in the midterm elections. At a rally in Charlotte, N.C., Friday, the night before the Pittsburgh shooting, he said, 'The Democrats want to invite caravan after caravan of illegal immigrants into our country, and they want to sign up them for free health care, welfare, and they want to sign them up for the right to vote.'”

This is hate speech that leads to murder? Are you kidding? As a comparison, look at this.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trumps-role-in-the-tree-of-life-massacre/

Monday, October 29, 2018

179 Death Threats Against President Trump Are Live On Twitter...Real Time Updated List - Big League Politics

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/179-death-threats-against-president-trump-are-live-on-twitter/

EU Court Upholds Prosecution Of Woman For Comparing Muhammad's Marriage To A Six-Year-Old Girl To Pedophilia

ORIGINAL LINK

Authord by Jonathan Turley via JonathanTurley.org,

A new decision from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) confirms the all-out assault on free speech that has taken hold of Europe.  In a chilling decision, the ECHR upheld a fine levied against an Austrian woman who called Muhammad a pedophile for his arranged marriage with a young girl while in his 50s.   The court ruled that such views are not protected by free speech because they violate “the right of others to have their religious feelings protected.” The decision confirms the near complete subjugation of free speech to religious and other views in society.  

In 2009, the defendant held two seminars entitled “Basic Information on Islam,” in which she compared Muhammad’s marriage to a six-year-old girl, Aisha, to pedophilia.

Most accounts put Aisha’s birth around  late 613 or early 614.  She was six or seven years old when she was married to Muhammad in Mecca and he consummated the marriage when she was reportedly ten. Muhammad was around 50 at the time.

For most of us in the free speech community, the differing views of this marriage is immaterial to the right of both sides to be free to state their views.  However, complainants have sought to silence critics like this woman by seeking criminal fines.

Moreover, I am not particularly interested in how the woman expressed her views since they raise core religious and political values.  The court said that she stated that Muhammad “liked to do it with children” and “… A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? … What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?”  That was found to be “disparaging religion” and lower courts upheld the conviction.

The Strasbourg-based ECHR ruled that the woman’s “right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.”

The ECHR engaged in what is now an all-too-familiar effort to deny its obvious denial of free speech by saying that freedom of religion did not protect religions from criticism but they upheld the punishment of someone for doing precisely that.  It simply declared that the woman’s comments “could only be understood as having been aimed at demonstrating that Muhammad was not worthy of worship.”

The opinion is perfectly Orwellian in saying that you cannot get away with using free speech by simply claiming the right of free speech.  The court rejected that people are entitled to free speech by simply “pack[ing] incriminating statements into the wrapping of an otherwise acceptable expression of opinion and claim that this rendered passable those statements exceeding the permissible limits of freedom of expression.”

That type of circular logic would be laughable if it were not so chilling.

We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here) and England ( here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Much of this trend is tied to the expansion of hate speech and non-discrimination laws.  These prosecutions are part of a new and dangerous attack on free speech. We previously discussed the rise of anti-blasphemy laws around the world, including the increase in prosecutions in the West and the support of the Obama Administration for the prosecution of some anti-religious speech under the controversial Brandenburg standard.  The effort by Muslim countries to establish an international blasphemy standard ran into opposition in the West so a new effort to launched to use hate crimes and discrimination law to achieve the purpose.

This new ruling shows the rapid abandonment of the European courts of fundamental values of free speech.  The ECHR has now established itself as legitimizing the criminalization of speech in Europe.



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