http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52294.htm
A Careless Bully At The KFC At The End Of Empire
Will Trump go to war with the Iranians or the homeless? Or both?
Trump is a coward. The nation of Iran has the means and the will to fight. Do you recall the will displayed by Iranians when repelling foreign invaders when Iraq attempted to invade Iran as a de facto US proxy force? Conversely, the homeless do not possess any defence against assault by the agents of the US police state.
Regardless of his image among credulous true believers, Trump, character-wise, is the diametric opposite of the image he conveys as a titan of supreme self-confidence. The pose is ego-based compensation for inner feelings of inferiority and abject weakness. Only those who are terrified of their own feelings of weakness and vulnerability fixate on the weakness, real or perceived, of others. If you desire to suss out a person ridden with self-doubt, no matter how outwardly confident and bestowed with worldly success, notice if they possess a proclivity to bandy the ultimate designation of capitalist derision, “loser.” Trump is prone to inflict a Heinrich Himmler-like evil towards the homeless because, as was the case with the chinless cipher “toy soldier” Himmler, Trump is contemptuous of his inner feelings of inadequacy. To avoid a crippling spiral into shame and self-doubt, feelings of doubt and concomitant animus must be displaced.
The US, in a collective sense, cannot address the societal sin of allowing homelessness, due to a fear that even regarding the crisis might lead to feelings of vulnerability…that some form of contact loseritude might overwhelm and decimate their will. The inherent weakness in the structure of late US empire compels contempt for the homeless. Trump’s self doubt is the source of his compulsion to humiliate those he perceives as weak and shunt them from sight. Only then can he separate himself from self-hatred.
The reason the mode of mind is lethally dangerous: The psychical trope cannot be sustained in a viable sense. The sense of weakness remains, compelling the sufferer to double down on the perpetration of force. There can be no end to the depth of cruelty inflicted because the pathos rages in the interior life of the totalitarian bully — not those on whom he projects his feelings of weakness and vulnerability. The fires of Auschwitz were lit by fires of self-hatred. When tyrants attempt to cage their self-contempt, hell is unloosed upon the world.
There is much back and forth about Trump’s level of intellect. Is he the cluelessly imbecilic, Dunning-Kruger effect-ridden, ambulatory head wound that he appears to be? Does he fake being a gibbering idiot so that his foes will underestimate him?
Carl Jung stated, Adolf Hitler did not possess originality nor intelligence but possessed a "low animal cunning” — a description that fits Donald Trump as well. A business failure, he got his start — bestowed with epic advantage — in business with multimillions of dollars from his wealthy, crooked father thus Trump was able to impersonate a canny mogul within the make-believe precincts of reality television, preening for the noxiously credulous citizenry of the United States of Dumbfuckistan, while accruing revenue for the benefit of a cabal of cretinous, short-sighted-by-cupidity, mass media oligarchs.
Moreover, Trump was able to become President due to the epic stupidity of the elite of the Democratic Party who rigged their primary and nomination process for a candidate whose sense of entitlement to power was only exceeded by her ineptitude as a campaigner and her inability to turn in a plausible impression of an actual human being. In short, the bar of US intelligence is set so low even someone as toxically stupid as Trump can outwit the militantly obtuse elite of late US imperium.
Yet John Bolton, The Moustache Of The Apocalypse, was banished from the sight of the Tangerine Tsunami Of Viciousness. Yet the (bi-partisan) blood-sustained empire has not seen the last of the former's blood-intoxicated breed and the latter’s brand of racist demagogic jerk-rocketry. Trump and Bolton were made by the system; they did not make the system. An empire sustains itself on militarist plunder and its leaders retail in sleight-of-hand, xenophobic tropes. What else would its political class be populated by other than a nest of vipers? What else would Trump bear, on a psychical level, but a head full of snakes? There has not been a reckoning of common sense and basic decency in the precincts of US power. Bolton simply blundered into the snake pit of Trump’s vanity.
Rich thus born-with-obscene-advantage man-boys such as Trump — and again in the news, due to newly unearthed allegations of creepopthatic transgressions against women trapped in vulnerable circumstances, Blubbering Brett Kavanaugh — are raised with the (careless and vile) ethos:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Worse: When called out for their transgressions against people born without money, power, and privilege, man-babies such as Trump and Kavanaugh flush with indignation and insist they are the victim and their accusers should be subjected to pillory and rebuke. Hence, we arrive at the origin of this vicious clutch of hideous man-boys: Capitalism is, what it always has been, a hierarchy of bullies.
Post prancing down my Facebook newsfeed by a Trump rah-rah: “Trump has kept his promises. The economy is great. America is getting great again.”
Dispatch from a realm closer to reality:
The US economy is an over-heated, inflated bubble which is merely serving to bloat the already obscenely bloated coffers of the economic elite; Trump is gutting environmental regulations and laws that help to preserve endangered wildlife; he has withdrawn from crucial nuclear treaties; his wrong-headed tariffs are proving economically devastating to farming regions; he is caging children in concentration camp-like conditions; he is obsessed with building a money-sucking wall on the southern border and his xenophobic, racist demagoguery provoke violent reactions in a nation where xenophobia and racial resentment, perpetually, simmer beneath the surface.
It comes down to this: Donald Trump embodies U.S. America, its origins and zeitgeist, as is the case with the prevaricating, High Dollar owned and controlled tools of the Democratic Party. Why and how have these circumstances been allowed to prevail, unfettered by common sense and common decency? The US was founded on a principle in which the moneyed elite would have the means to monetise all things that their cupidity-seized minds surveyed, including the life and labor of human beings. Moreover, addressing the query in advance, there is not a “solution” to late empire…other than the terrible redemption that arrives with The Second Law Of Thermodynamics. Empires overextend themselves abroad and collapse into their corrupt core at home.
Do you desire to catch a glimpse of the Second Law Of Thermodynamics in play? Gaze upon the junk food bloated body of Donald Trump, denizen of the KFC at the end of empire, or note the carnage his (or the Great White Lifeguard Of Hope, Joe Biden’s) increasingly senile dementia-ridden mind inflicts upon syntax and cohesive narrative structure.
Trump’s collapsing linguistic function mirrors the decay of US infrastructure. His proposed remedy also mirrors his psychical derangement: A manic compensation, analogous to a junk food binge, involves the full-spectrum exploitation of all available fossil fuel resources, without regard to the damage inflicted on the body of the earth and the soul of the world.
Although the intrinsic foulness of the US did not arrive with Donald Trump. He is a reflection of the racist, genocidal, perpetually exploitative, money-lusting, humanity-loathing construction of the US — a hideousness that has been in play since the origin of the sham republic. Donald Trump simply reveals what exists at the rotten root and makes visible the murderous spores carried on the insidious winds of US empire.
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Friday, September 20, 2019
SC197-11
https://www.globalresearch.ca/houthi-rebels-overturned-the-middle-east-geopolitical-chessboard/5689631
Houthi Rebels Overturned the Middle East Geopolitical Chessboard
The Yemeni Shiite group’s spectacular attack on Abqaiq raises the distinct possibility of a push to drive the House of Saud from power
We are the Houthis and we’re coming to town. With the spectacular attack on Abqaiq, Yemen’s Houthis have overturned the geopolitical chessboard in Southwest Asia – going as far as introducing a whole new dimension: the distinct possibility of investing in a push to drive the House of Saud out of power.
Blowback is a bitch. Houthis – Zaidi Shiites from northern Yemen – and Wahhabis have been at each other’s throats for ages. This book is absolutely essential to understand the mind-boggling complexity of Houthi tribes; as a bonus, it places the turmoil in southern Arabian lands way beyond a mere Iran-Saudi proxy war.
Still, it’s always important to consider that Arab Shiites in the Eastern province – working in Saudi oil installations – have got to be natural allies of the Houthis fighting against Riyadh.
Houthi striking capability – from drone swarms to ballistic missile attacks – has been improving remarkably for the past year or so. It’s not by accident that the UAE saw which way the geopolitical and geoeconomic winds were blowing: Abu Dhabi withdrew from Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s vicious war against Yemen and now is engaged in what it describes as a “peace-first” strategy.
Even before Abqaiq, the Houthis had already engineered quite a few attacks against Saudi oil installations as well as Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports. In early July, Yemen’s Operations Command Center staged an exhibition in full regalia in Sana’a featuring their whole range of ballistic and winged missiles and drones.
The Saudi Ministry of Defense displays drones and parts from missiles used in the refinery attack.
The situation has now reached a point where there’s plenty of chatter across the Persian Gulf about a spectacular scenario: the Houthis investing in a mad dash across the Arabian desert to capture Mecca and Medina in conjunction with a mass Shiite uprising in the Eastern oil belt. That’s not far-fetched anymore. Stranger things have happened in the Middle East. After all, the Saudis can’t even win a bar brawl – that’s why they rely on mercenaries.
Orientalism strikes again
The US intel refrain that the Houthis are incapable of such a sophisticated attack betrays the worst strands of orientalism and white man’s burden/superiority complex.
The only missile parts shown by the Saudis so far come from a Yemeni Quds 1 cruise missile. According to Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesman for the Sana’a-based Yemeni Armed Forces,
“the Quds system proved its great ability to hit its targets and to bypass enemy interceptor systems.”
This satellite overview handout image from the US government shows damage to oil/gas infrastructure from weekend drone attacks at Abqaiq.
Houthi armed forces duly claimed responsibility for Abqaiq:
“This operation is one of the largest operations carried out by our forces in the depth of Saudi Arabia, and came after an accurate intelligence operation and advance monitoring and cooperation of honorable and free men within the Kingdom.”
Notice the key concept: “cooperation” from inside Saudi Arabia – which could include the whole spectrum from Yemenis to that Eastern province Shiites.
Even more relevant is the fact that massive American hardware deployed in Saudi Arabia inside out and outside in – satellites, AWACS, Patriot missiles, drones, battleships, jet fighters – didn’t see a thing, or certainly not in time. The sighting of three “loitering” drones by a Kuwaiti bird hunter arguably heading towards Saudi Arabia is being invoked as “evidence”. Cue to the embarrassing picture of a drone swarm – wherever it came from – flying undisturbed for hours over Saudi territory.
UN officials openly admit that now everything that matters is within the 1,500 km range of the Houthis’ new UAV-X drone: oil fields in Saudi Arabia, a still-under-construction nuclear power plant in the Emirates and Dubai’s mega-airport.
My conversations with sources in Tehran over the past two years have ascertained that the Houthis’ new drones and missiles are essentially copies of Iranian designs assembled in Yemen itself with crucial help from Hezbollah engineers.
US intel insists that 17 drones and cruise missiles were launched in combination from southern Iran. In theory, Patriot radar would have picked that up and knocked the drones/missiles from the sky. So far, absolutely no record of this trajectory has been revealed. Military experts generally agree that the radar on the Patriot missile is good, but its success rate is “disputed” – to say the least. What’s important, once again, is that the Houthis do have advanced offensive missiles. And their pinpoint accuracy at Abqaiq was uncanny.
This satellite overview handout image shows damage to oil/gas infrastructure from weekend drone attacks at Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia. Courtesy of Planet Labs Inc
For now, it appears that the winner of the US/UK-supported House of One Saudi war on the civilian Yemeni population, which started in March 2015 and generated a humanitarian crisis the UN regards as having been of biblical proportions, is certainly not the crown prince, widely known as MBS.
Listen to the general
Crude oil stabilization towers – several of them – at Abqaiq were specifically targeted, along with natural gas storage tanks. Persian Gulf energy sources have been telling me repairs and/or rebuilding could last months. Even Riyadh admitted as much.
Blindly blaming Iran, with no evidence, does not cut it. Tehran can count on swarms of top strategic thinkers. They do not need or want to blow up Southwest Asia, which is something they could do, by the way: Revolutionary Guards generals have already said many times on the record that they are ready for war.
Professor Mohammad Marandi from the University of Tehran, who has very close relations with the Foreign Ministry, is adamant: “It didn’t come from Iran. If it did, it would be very embarrassing for the Americans, showing they are unable to detect a large number of Iranian drones and missiles. That doesn’t make sense.”
Marandi additionally stresses, “Saudi air defenses are not equipped to defend the country from Yemen but from Iran. The Yemenis have been striking against the Saudis, they are getting better and better, developing drone and missile technology for four and a half years, and this was a very soft target.”
A soft – and unprotected – target: the US PAC-2 and PAC-3 systems in place are all oriented towards the east, in the direction of Iran. Neither Washington nor Riyadh knows for sure where the drone swarm/missiles really came from.
Readers should pay close attention to this groundbreaking interview with General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force. The interview, in Farsi (with English subtitles), was conducted by US-sanctioned Iranian intellectual Nader Talebzadeh and includes questions forwarded by my US analyst friends Phil Giraldi and Michael Maloof and myself.
Explaining Iranian self-sufficiency in its defense capabilities, Hajizadeh sounds like a very rational actor. The bottom line: “Our view is that neither American politicians nor our officials want a war. If an incident like the one with the drone [the RQ-4N shot down by Iran in June] happens or a misunderstanding happens, and that develops into a larger war, that’s a different matter. Therefore we are always ready for a big war.”
In response to one of my questions, on what message the Revolutionary Guards want to convey, especially to the US, Hajizadeh does not mince his words: “In addition to the US bases in various regions like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Emirates and Qatar, we have targeted all naval vessels up to a distance of 2,000 kilometers and we are constantly monitoring them. They think that if they go to a distance of 400 km, they are out of our firing range. Wherever they are, it only takes one spark, we hit their vessels, their airbases, their troops.”
Get your S-400s or else
On the energy front, Tehran has been playing a very precise game under pressure – selling loads of oil by turning off the transponders of their tankers as they leave Iran and transferring the oil at sea, tanker to tanker, at night, and relabeling their cargo as originating at other producers for a price. I have been checking this for weeks with my trusted Persian Gulf traders – and they all confirm it. Iran could go on doing it forever.
Of course, the Trump administration knows it. But the fact is they are looking the other way. To state it as concisely as possible: they are caught in a trap by the absolute folly of ditching the JCPOA, and they are looking for a face-saving way out. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned the administration in so many words: the US should return to the agreement it reneged on before it’s too late.
And now for the really hair-raising part.
The strike at Abqaiq shows that the entire Middle East production of over 18 million barrels of oil a day – including Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – can be easily knocked out. There is zero adequate defense against these drones and missiles.
Well, there’s always Russia.
Here’s what happened at the press conference after the Ankara summit this week on Syria, uniting Presidents Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan.
Question: Will Russia provide Saudi Arabia with any help or support in restoring its infrastructure?
President Putin: As for assisting Saudi Arabia, it is also written in the Quran that violence of any kind is illegitimate except when protecting one’s people. In order to protect them and the country, we are ready to provide the necessary assistance to Saudi Arabia. All the political leaders of Saudi Arabia have to do is take a wise decision, as Iran did by buying the S-300 missile system, and as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did when he bought Russia’s latest S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft system. They would offer reliable protection for any Saudi infrastructure facilities.
President Hassan Rouhani: So do they need to buy the S-300 or the S-400?
President Vladimir Putin: It is up to them to decide [laughs].
In The Transformation of War, Martin van Creveld actually predicted that the whole industrial-military-security complex would come crumbling down when it was exposed that most of its weapons are useless against fourth-generation asymmetrical opponents. There’s no question the whole Global South is watching – and will have gotten the message.
Hybrid war, reloaded
Now we are entering a whole new dimension in asymmetric hybrid war.
In the – horrendous – event that Washington would decide to attack Iran, egged on by the usual neocon suspects, the Pentagon could never hope to hit and disable all the Iranian and/or Yemeni drones. The US could expect, for sure, all-out war. And then no ships would sail through the Strait of Hormuz. We all know the consequences of that.
Which brings us to The Big Surprise. The real reason there would be no ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz is that there would be no oil in the Gulf left to pump. The oil fields, having been bombed, would be burning.
So we’re back to the realistic bottom line, which has been stressed by not only Moscow and Beijing but also Paris and Berlin: US President Donald Trump gambled big time, and he lost. Now he must find a face-saving way out. If the War Party allows it.
Houthi Rebels Overturned the Middle East Geopolitical Chessboard
The Yemeni Shiite group’s spectacular attack on Abqaiq raises the distinct possibility of a push to drive the House of Saud from power
We are the Houthis and we’re coming to town. With the spectacular attack on Abqaiq, Yemen’s Houthis have overturned the geopolitical chessboard in Southwest Asia – going as far as introducing a whole new dimension: the distinct possibility of investing in a push to drive the House of Saud out of power.
Blowback is a bitch. Houthis – Zaidi Shiites from northern Yemen – and Wahhabis have been at each other’s throats for ages. This book is absolutely essential to understand the mind-boggling complexity of Houthi tribes; as a bonus, it places the turmoil in southern Arabian lands way beyond a mere Iran-Saudi proxy war.
Still, it’s always important to consider that Arab Shiites in the Eastern province – working in Saudi oil installations – have got to be natural allies of the Houthis fighting against Riyadh.
Houthi striking capability – from drone swarms to ballistic missile attacks – has been improving remarkably for the past year or so. It’s not by accident that the UAE saw which way the geopolitical and geoeconomic winds were blowing: Abu Dhabi withdrew from Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s vicious war against Yemen and now is engaged in what it describes as a “peace-first” strategy.
Even before Abqaiq, the Houthis had already engineered quite a few attacks against Saudi oil installations as well as Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports. In early July, Yemen’s Operations Command Center staged an exhibition in full regalia in Sana’a featuring their whole range of ballistic and winged missiles and drones.
The Saudi Ministry of Defense displays drones and parts from missiles used in the refinery attack.
The situation has now reached a point where there’s plenty of chatter across the Persian Gulf about a spectacular scenario: the Houthis investing in a mad dash across the Arabian desert to capture Mecca and Medina in conjunction with a mass Shiite uprising in the Eastern oil belt. That’s not far-fetched anymore. Stranger things have happened in the Middle East. After all, the Saudis can’t even win a bar brawl – that’s why they rely on mercenaries.
Orientalism strikes again
The US intel refrain that the Houthis are incapable of such a sophisticated attack betrays the worst strands of orientalism and white man’s burden/superiority complex.
The only missile parts shown by the Saudis so far come from a Yemeni Quds 1 cruise missile. According to Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesman for the Sana’a-based Yemeni Armed Forces,
“the Quds system proved its great ability to hit its targets and to bypass enemy interceptor systems.”
This satellite overview handout image from the US government shows damage to oil/gas infrastructure from weekend drone attacks at Abqaiq.
Houthi armed forces duly claimed responsibility for Abqaiq:
“This operation is one of the largest operations carried out by our forces in the depth of Saudi Arabia, and came after an accurate intelligence operation and advance monitoring and cooperation of honorable and free men within the Kingdom.”
Notice the key concept: “cooperation” from inside Saudi Arabia – which could include the whole spectrum from Yemenis to that Eastern province Shiites.
Even more relevant is the fact that massive American hardware deployed in Saudi Arabia inside out and outside in – satellites, AWACS, Patriot missiles, drones, battleships, jet fighters – didn’t see a thing, or certainly not in time. The sighting of three “loitering” drones by a Kuwaiti bird hunter arguably heading towards Saudi Arabia is being invoked as “evidence”. Cue to the embarrassing picture of a drone swarm – wherever it came from – flying undisturbed for hours over Saudi territory.
UN officials openly admit that now everything that matters is within the 1,500 km range of the Houthis’ new UAV-X drone: oil fields in Saudi Arabia, a still-under-construction nuclear power plant in the Emirates and Dubai’s mega-airport.
My conversations with sources in Tehran over the past two years have ascertained that the Houthis’ new drones and missiles are essentially copies of Iranian designs assembled in Yemen itself with crucial help from Hezbollah engineers.
US intel insists that 17 drones and cruise missiles were launched in combination from southern Iran. In theory, Patriot radar would have picked that up and knocked the drones/missiles from the sky. So far, absolutely no record of this trajectory has been revealed. Military experts generally agree that the radar on the Patriot missile is good, but its success rate is “disputed” – to say the least. What’s important, once again, is that the Houthis do have advanced offensive missiles. And their pinpoint accuracy at Abqaiq was uncanny.
This satellite overview handout image shows damage to oil/gas infrastructure from weekend drone attacks at Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia. Courtesy of Planet Labs Inc
For now, it appears that the winner of the US/UK-supported House of One Saudi war on the civilian Yemeni population, which started in March 2015 and generated a humanitarian crisis the UN regards as having been of biblical proportions, is certainly not the crown prince, widely known as MBS.
Listen to the general
Crude oil stabilization towers – several of them – at Abqaiq were specifically targeted, along with natural gas storage tanks. Persian Gulf energy sources have been telling me repairs and/or rebuilding could last months. Even Riyadh admitted as much.
Blindly blaming Iran, with no evidence, does not cut it. Tehran can count on swarms of top strategic thinkers. They do not need or want to blow up Southwest Asia, which is something they could do, by the way: Revolutionary Guards generals have already said many times on the record that they are ready for war.
Professor Mohammad Marandi from the University of Tehran, who has very close relations with the Foreign Ministry, is adamant: “It didn’t come from Iran. If it did, it would be very embarrassing for the Americans, showing they are unable to detect a large number of Iranian drones and missiles. That doesn’t make sense.”
Marandi additionally stresses, “Saudi air defenses are not equipped to defend the country from Yemen but from Iran. The Yemenis have been striking against the Saudis, they are getting better and better, developing drone and missile technology for four and a half years, and this was a very soft target.”
A soft – and unprotected – target: the US PAC-2 and PAC-3 systems in place are all oriented towards the east, in the direction of Iran. Neither Washington nor Riyadh knows for sure where the drone swarm/missiles really came from.
Readers should pay close attention to this groundbreaking interview with General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force. The interview, in Farsi (with English subtitles), was conducted by US-sanctioned Iranian intellectual Nader Talebzadeh and includes questions forwarded by my US analyst friends Phil Giraldi and Michael Maloof and myself.
Explaining Iranian self-sufficiency in its defense capabilities, Hajizadeh sounds like a very rational actor. The bottom line: “Our view is that neither American politicians nor our officials want a war. If an incident like the one with the drone [the RQ-4N shot down by Iran in June] happens or a misunderstanding happens, and that develops into a larger war, that’s a different matter. Therefore we are always ready for a big war.”
In response to one of my questions, on what message the Revolutionary Guards want to convey, especially to the US, Hajizadeh does not mince his words: “In addition to the US bases in various regions like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Emirates and Qatar, we have targeted all naval vessels up to a distance of 2,000 kilometers and we are constantly monitoring them. They think that if they go to a distance of 400 km, they are out of our firing range. Wherever they are, it only takes one spark, we hit their vessels, their airbases, their troops.”
Get your S-400s or else
On the energy front, Tehran has been playing a very precise game under pressure – selling loads of oil by turning off the transponders of their tankers as they leave Iran and transferring the oil at sea, tanker to tanker, at night, and relabeling their cargo as originating at other producers for a price. I have been checking this for weeks with my trusted Persian Gulf traders – and they all confirm it. Iran could go on doing it forever.
Of course, the Trump administration knows it. But the fact is they are looking the other way. To state it as concisely as possible: they are caught in a trap by the absolute folly of ditching the JCPOA, and they are looking for a face-saving way out. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned the administration in so many words: the US should return to the agreement it reneged on before it’s too late.
And now for the really hair-raising part.
The strike at Abqaiq shows that the entire Middle East production of over 18 million barrels of oil a day – including Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – can be easily knocked out. There is zero adequate defense against these drones and missiles.
Well, there’s always Russia.
Here’s what happened at the press conference after the Ankara summit this week on Syria, uniting Presidents Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan.
Question: Will Russia provide Saudi Arabia with any help or support in restoring its infrastructure?
President Putin: As for assisting Saudi Arabia, it is also written in the Quran that violence of any kind is illegitimate except when protecting one’s people. In order to protect them and the country, we are ready to provide the necessary assistance to Saudi Arabia. All the political leaders of Saudi Arabia have to do is take a wise decision, as Iran did by buying the S-300 missile system, and as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did when he bought Russia’s latest S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft system. They would offer reliable protection for any Saudi infrastructure facilities.
President Hassan Rouhani: So do they need to buy the S-300 or the S-400?
President Vladimir Putin: It is up to them to decide [laughs].
In The Transformation of War, Martin van Creveld actually predicted that the whole industrial-military-security complex would come crumbling down when it was exposed that most of its weapons are useless against fourth-generation asymmetrical opponents. There’s no question the whole Global South is watching – and will have gotten the message.
Hybrid war, reloaded
Now we are entering a whole new dimension in asymmetric hybrid war.
In the – horrendous – event that Washington would decide to attack Iran, egged on by the usual neocon suspects, the Pentagon could never hope to hit and disable all the Iranian and/or Yemeni drones. The US could expect, for sure, all-out war. And then no ships would sail through the Strait of Hormuz. We all know the consequences of that.
Which brings us to The Big Surprise. The real reason there would be no ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz is that there would be no oil in the Gulf left to pump. The oil fields, having been bombed, would be burning.
So we’re back to the realistic bottom line, which has been stressed by not only Moscow and Beijing but also Paris and Berlin: US President Donald Trump gambled big time, and he lost. Now he must find a face-saving way out. If the War Party allows it.
Thursday, September 19, 2019
SC197-10
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept19/market-Fed9-19.html
Markets That Live by the Fed, Die by the Fed
All eyes are again on the Federal Reserve, as everyone understands that the Fed is the market-- the stock market, the bond market, the art market, the housing market, etc. All markets have been driven higher by one force: central bank money creation and distribution to the financial sector of financiers and corporations, the richest of the rich.
What few seem to grasp (because they're paid not to?) is the Fed is powerless over what actually matters in a healthy economy:
1. The Fed is powerless to create productive, profitable ventures for capital to invest in. Productivity has gone nowhere in the Fed's reign while speculative profits leveraged by the Fed's free money for financiers have soared.
2. The Fed is powerless to raise wages. Despite ginned-up claims that wages are finally rising 3% a year after a decade of stagnation, wages are still losing purchasing power once real-world inflation is factored in.
3. The Fed cannot force creditworthy households and enterprises to borrow more money, nor can they stop banks from lending to the only people who want to borrow more money, those who are credit risks, i.e. borrowers who will default at the first spot of bother.
4. The Fed is powerless to stop the New Gilded Age consequences of their policies via The Cantillon Effect: it's not just how the money is created, but how it's distributed. Those who get the Fed's nearly free money can use it to buy productive assets and pursue speculations such as stock buy-backs, while everyone else who didn't get a single dollar of the Fed's trillions experiences a loss of purchasing power as the Fed's new money expands the money supply without actually expanding the real economy.
The only power the Fed has is to incentivize profiteering via stock buy-backs and speculations of the super-wealthy--the power, in other words, to create a New Gilded Age of obscene wealth inequality.
The Fed's New Gilded Age is generating political blowback, and eventually the masses will awaken to the fact that the Fed is the enemy of the people because it is the sole enabler of the unproductive, parasitic, predatory corporate/insider class that's skimmed something like 87% of all the "wealth" "created" by the Fed's policies.
The Fed has created an economy in which capital has been stripped of low-risk yield. All capital must become gambling chips in the casino to earn a return, but gambling is intrinsically risky, and the asymmetry between the risk--rising--and the return--increasingly paltry--is setting the markets up for a fall the Fed is powerless to stop, and a political blowback to the Fed's New Gilded Age that is it equally powerless to stop.
Markets that live by the Fed also die by the Fed. The Fed's abject, pathetic powerlessness over what actually matters will be revealed in the years ahead, and everyone will look back on the decades in which the Fed was viewed as god-like as a form of mass delusion.
The "everything bubble" is not permanent. Gambling is risky, and the Fed has rigged the world's larget casino to benefit its banking / financier / corporate cronies. But bubbles burst for reasons outside the control of the Fed, a reality that's about to become undeniable.
Markets That Live by the Fed, Die by the Fed
All eyes are again on the Federal Reserve, as everyone understands that the Fed is the market-- the stock market, the bond market, the art market, the housing market, etc. All markets have been driven higher by one force: central bank money creation and distribution to the financial sector of financiers and corporations, the richest of the rich.
What few seem to grasp (because they're paid not to?) is the Fed is powerless over what actually matters in a healthy economy:
1. The Fed is powerless to create productive, profitable ventures for capital to invest in. Productivity has gone nowhere in the Fed's reign while speculative profits leveraged by the Fed's free money for financiers have soared.
2. The Fed is powerless to raise wages. Despite ginned-up claims that wages are finally rising 3% a year after a decade of stagnation, wages are still losing purchasing power once real-world inflation is factored in.
3. The Fed cannot force creditworthy households and enterprises to borrow more money, nor can they stop banks from lending to the only people who want to borrow more money, those who are credit risks, i.e. borrowers who will default at the first spot of bother.
4. The Fed is powerless to stop the New Gilded Age consequences of their policies via The Cantillon Effect: it's not just how the money is created, but how it's distributed. Those who get the Fed's nearly free money can use it to buy productive assets and pursue speculations such as stock buy-backs, while everyone else who didn't get a single dollar of the Fed's trillions experiences a loss of purchasing power as the Fed's new money expands the money supply without actually expanding the real economy.
The only power the Fed has is to incentivize profiteering via stock buy-backs and speculations of the super-wealthy--the power, in other words, to create a New Gilded Age of obscene wealth inequality.
The Fed's New Gilded Age is generating political blowback, and eventually the masses will awaken to the fact that the Fed is the enemy of the people because it is the sole enabler of the unproductive, parasitic, predatory corporate/insider class that's skimmed something like 87% of all the "wealth" "created" by the Fed's policies.
The Fed has created an economy in which capital has been stripped of low-risk yield. All capital must become gambling chips in the casino to earn a return, but gambling is intrinsically risky, and the asymmetry between the risk--rising--and the return--increasingly paltry--is setting the markets up for a fall the Fed is powerless to stop, and a political blowback to the Fed's New Gilded Age that is it equally powerless to stop.
Markets that live by the Fed also die by the Fed. The Fed's abject, pathetic powerlessness over what actually matters will be revealed in the years ahead, and everyone will look back on the decades in which the Fed was viewed as god-like as a form of mass delusion.
The "everything bubble" is not permanent. Gambling is risky, and the Fed has rigged the world's larget casino to benefit its banking / financier / corporate cronies. But bubbles burst for reasons outside the control of the Fed, a reality that's about to become undeniable.
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
SC197-9
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/our-invisible-government/
Our Invisible Government
There are two forms of government in the United States. There is the visible government—the White House, Congress, the courts, state legislatures and governorships—and the invisible government, or deep state, where anonymous technocrats, intelligence operatives, generals, bankers, corporations and lobbyists manage foreign and domestic policy regardless of which political party holds a majority.
The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government are the nation’s bloated and unaccountable intelligence agencies. They are the vanguard of the invisible government. They oversee a vast “black world,” tasked with maintaining the invisible government’s lock on power. They spy on and smear domestic and foreign critics, fix elections, bribe, extort, torture, assassinate and flood the airwaves with “black propaganda.” They are impervious to the chaos and human destruction they leave in their wake. Disasters, social upheavals, economic collapses, massive suffering, death and rabid anti-American blowback have grown out of the invisible government’s overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile and the wars it fostered in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. The United States and the rest of the globe would be far safer if our self-styled shadow warriors—who failed to foresee the Iranian revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9/11 attacks or the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and whose widespread use of torture makes them the most potent recruiters for radical jihadism—were made accountable to the public and the rule of law.
There are periodic glimpses of the moral squalor and ineptitude that define this shadow world, such as those provided by the 1970s hearings led by Sen. Frank Church and the leaking of photographs of prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. But those who attempt to defy or expose the pernicious inner workings, including Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, are usually discredited, persecuted, silenced and sometimes “disappeared.” The invisible government justifies its secrecy and criminality as necessary in the face of existential threats, posed first by communism and later by Islamic terrorism. The ends always justify the means. Anything, no matter how immoral or criminal, is permissible.
The best window we have into this shadow world comes with historical accounts of its crimes, including those in Stephen Kinzer’s new book, “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.” The black sites and torture techniques pioneered by the Central Intelligence Agency in the decades after World War II—developments that saw people kidnapped, tortured and often executed—were “an indispensable link in this grim chain,” he writes.
The medical experiments carried out by the Nazis in concentration camps and the Japanese in the occupied Chinese region of Manchuria elicited two responses after World War II. There were some in the visible government who sought to hold the war criminals accountable. But there were many in the invisible government who wanted to obtain and exploit the results of these experiments and recruit the war criminals who had overseen them to work for U.S. intelligence services and the military.
The backgrounds of the Nazi scientists who had directed chemical and biological warfare projects, murdering thousands of helpless victims, including children, with agents such as the gas sarin, were sanitized by the invisible government in what became known as Operation Paperclip. No criminal, including Kurt Blome, who had overseen the Nazis’ research into biological warfare, was too heinous or sadistic for the United States to welcome and use.
“Whenever a scientist they coveted turned out to have a blemish on his record, they rewrote his biography,” Kinzer writes. “They systematically expunged references to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo, abuse of slave laborers, and experiments on human subjects. Applicants who had been rated by interrogators as ‘ardent Nazi’ were re-categorized as ‘not an ardent Nazi.’ References to their exemplary family lives were added. Once they had been thus ‘bleached,’ they became suitable candidates for Paperclip contracts.”
Shiro Ishii, who between 1936 and 1942 killed as many as 12,000 captured Chinese soldiers, anti-Japanese partisans, Koreans, Mongolians, prisoners, mental patients and, by some accounts, American prisoners of war in medical experiments on behalf of the Japanese government, was a highly valued asset to the invisible government.
Ishii oversaw a four-square-mile complex, called Unit 731, that housed 3,000 scientists and other employees. Kinzer writes that victims “were exposed to poison gas so that their lungs could later be removed and studied; slowly roasted by electricity to determine voltages needed to produce death; hung upside down to study the progress of natural choking; locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out; spun in centrifuges; infected with anthrax, syphilis, plague, cholera, and other diseases; forcibly impregnated to provide infants for vivisection; bound to stakes to be incinerated by soldiers testing flamethrowers; and slowly frozen to observe the progress of hypothermia. Air was injected into victims’ veins to provoke embolisms; animal blood was injected to see what effect it would have. Some were dissected alive, or had limbs amputated so attendants could monitor their slow deaths by bleeding and gangrene. According to a U.S. Army report that was later declassified, groups of men, women, and children were tied to stakes so that ‘their legs and buttocks were bared and exposed to shrapnel from anthrax bombs exploded yards away,’ then monitored to see how long they lived—which was never more than a week. Ishii required a constant flow of human organs, meaning a steady need for ‘logs’ [the euphemism for victims].”
After each experiment, “Ishii’s microbiologists would meticulously remove tissue samples and mount them on slides for study,” Kinzer writes. “Technicians used their research to prepare poisoned chocolate and chewing gum, as well as hairpins and fountain pens rigged with toxin-coated needles for use in close-quarters killing. In industrial-scale laboratories they bred plague-infested fleas and manufactured tons of anthrax that were placed in bomb casings and used to kill thousands of Chinese civilians.”
America’s invisible government went to great lengths to recruit Ishii and obtain the extensive records and slides from his gruesome experiments. These types of experiments would soon be replicated by the CIA in a top-secret program, MK-ULTRA, with the assistance of Ishii and an assortment of ex-Nazis.
Kinzer builds his book around Sidney Gottlieb, an elusive, quirky and powerful operative in the CIA who in his quest for mind control—something he and others in the CIA had convinced themselves the Soviets had mastered—oversaw medical experiments that had been originated by his German and Japanese collaborators. These experiments were coded-named Bluebird and later Artichoke, which Kinzer calls “one of the most violently abusive projects ever sponsored by an agency of the United States government.” The torture sessions often permanently shattered the minds of his subjects. Victims were kidnapped (later this would be called “extraordinary rendition”) and sent to clandestine centers around the globe—now known as “black sites”—or were picked from the prison population abroad and at home. Those forced into taking part in these experiments included impoverished African Americans at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky. Many of the victims were labeled “expendables,” meaning they could be murdered after the experiments and disappeared. The corpses were usually burned. Anyone who was powerless, or could be made powerless, was a potential target. Mentally handicapped children at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, for example, were fed cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium and their induced sicknesses were monitored. Gottlieb oversaw the administering of LSD and other drugs to induce psychotic states at the federal prison in Atlanta and a youth correctional facility in Bordentown, N.J. None of his subjects consented to being a human guinea pig, and many ended up psychologically impaired for life. The Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bolger, being held in the Atlanta penitentiary, was told he would be part of an experiment on curing schizophrenia but then was surreptitiously given LSD nearly every day for 15 months. CIA scientists also conducted experiments on terminally ill patients at an annex of Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Gottlieb searched for years for a cocktail of drugs that, in Kinzer’s words, would draw “prisoners away from their identities, induce them to reveal secrets, and perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will.” It was a vain quest. But with each failure he and the CIA became ever more zealous, working closely with former German Gen. Walter Schreiber, the onetime surgeon general of the Nazi army who had “approved experiments at the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Dachau concentration camps in which inmates were frozen, injected with mescaline and other drugs, and cut open so the progress of gangrene on their bones could be monitored.” Kinzer adds that according to one American researcher, the experiments “usually resulted in a slow and agonizing death.”
Gottlieb had a habit of secretly lacing the drinks of colleagues with LSD to see their reaction. Some never recovered. One of his victims was Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who was appalled by the brutal interrogations he witnessed and planned to resign from the CIA. Gottlieb and his secretive group of torturers and assassins were terrified Olson would go public. Olson was found dead in 1953 on a sidewalk in Manhattan after allegedly diving through a hotel window. His son Eric had his father’s body exhumed in 1994 and turned over to James Starrs, a forensic pathologist at George Washington University in the District of Columbia. “Starrs had found no glass shards on the victim’s head or neck, as might be expected if he had dived through a window,” Kinzer writes. “Most intriguingly, although Olson had reportedly landed on his back, the skull above his left eye was disfigured.”
“I would venture to say that this hematoma is singular evidence of the possibility that Dr. Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of room 1018A,” Starrs concluded.
Starrs was later more emphatic: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window.”
Gottlieb also oversaw the production of an array of poisons intended to be used on leaders and others deemed hostile to the United States, including Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro. He and the CIA pursued bizarre schemes, including finding a chemical that would make Castro’s beard fall out, leaving the Cuban leader, in the minds of CIA operatives, open to ridicule that would result in his overthrow.
The CIA also experimented with implanting electrodes in brains to control behavior. “ ‘An Agency team flew to Saigon in July 1968; among them were a neurosurgeon and a neurologist … ,’ ” Kinzer says in quoting a study of American intelligence. “ ‘In a closed-off compound at Bien Hoa Hospital, the Agency team set to work. Three Vietcong prisoners had been selected by the local station. How or why they were chosen would remain uncertain. In turn each man was anaesthetized and, after he had a hinged back a flap in their skulls, the neurosurgeon implanted tiny electrodes in each brain. When the prisoners regained consciousness, the behaviorists set to work. … The prisoners were placed in a room and given knives. Pressing the control buttons on their handsets, the behaviorists tried to arouse their subjects to violence. Nothing happened. For a whole week the doctors tried to make the men attack each other. Baffled at their lack of success, the team flew back to Washington. As previously arranged in case of failure, while the physicians were still in the air the prisoners were shot by Green Beret troopers and their bodies burned.’ ”
The depth of moral squalor and criminality that can be reached by those given unlimited resources, no oversight or public accountability and total secrecy is breathtaking. Gottlieb and the CIA lured clueless victims in New York City to a “safe house” on Bedford Street and gave them drinks laced with LSD. CIA operatives directed by the thuggish George Hunter White monitored the effects.
“[White] regularly used illegal drugs, keeping for himself a share of whatever he confiscated,” Kinzer writes. “His consumption of alcohol—often a full bottle of gin with dinner—was legendary. His other appetite was sexual fetish, especially sadomasochism and high heels. He bought his second wife a closet full of boots, and patronized prostitutes who bound and whipped him. One of his few emotional bonds was with his pet canary. He loved to hold and stroke it. When the bird died, he was deeply pained. ‘Poor little bastard just couldn’t make it,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever get another bird or pet. It’s tough on everyone when they die.’ ”
White, who as a narcotics officer had hounded and often framed jazz musicians including Billie Holiday, was later moved to a safe house in San Francisco that functioned as a CIA brothel. Gottlieb, Kinzer writes, “wanted to systematize the study of how sex, especially in combination with drugs, could loosen men’s tongues.” The prostituted women were hired by the CIA to lure clients to bedrooms, decorated with photos of manacled women in black stockings and studded leather collars, and lace their drinks with LSD and other drugs.
“While his prostitutes and their clients had sex, White would watch through a one-way mirror, sitting on his portable toilet,” Kinzer writes. Gottlieb, on visits to the safe house, demanded the women have sex with him as if they were part of his personal harem.
White was given a second safe house in Marin County outside San Francisco where he used his prostituted women not only to drug men but test an array of Little-Shop-of-Horrors gadgets on his victims including stink bombs, itching powder, sneezing powder, diarrhea inducers, drug-laced swizzle sticks and aerosol cans filled with LSD.
After the long quest for a mind-control drug was abandoned, the CIA destroyed most of the records of its experiments. White, in a letter to Gottlieb thanking him for hiring him, wrote: “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty good stuff, Brudder!” That would make a far more honest motto for the CIA than the biblical passage from John 8:32 carved on the walls of its original headquarters at Langley, Va.: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
Prisoners, the CIA eventually concluded, were best broken through extreme isolation and sensory deprivation. These techniques, pioneered by CIA-funded research at McGill University in Canada, were laid out in a 1964 manual titled “KUBARK Counter-Intelligence Interrogation.” KUBARK is the CIA’s cryptonym for itself. The 128-page manual was not fully declassified until 2014. It was the primary resource used by CIA interrogators in the 1960s, including in Vietnam, where at least 20,000 captured Vietnamese were killed, often after being tortured. An updated version of the manual called “Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual” came out in 1983. These forms of torture, which include shackling, sleep deprivation, electroshock, sexual and physical humiliation, prolonged cramped confinement, and hooding for disorientation and sensory deprivation, became routine after 9/11 in American intelligence black sites at home and abroad. CIA psychologists, like Gottlieb’s earlier stable of mad scientists and torturers, monitor and perfect these techniques to ensure complete psychological collapse and a childlike dependence on the interrogator.
It would be naive to relegate the behavior of Gottlieb and the CIA to the past, especially since the invisible government has once again shrouded the activities of intelligence agencies from congressional oversight or public scrutiny and installed a proponent of torture, Gina Haspel, as the head of the agency.
When an intelligence service resorts to torture, it has failed. When it relies on sadists and thugs, it has failed. When it treats human beings, including its own citizens, as unwitting pawns to be experimented upon and murdered, it has failed. When it uses dirty tricks, provides billions of dollars in weapons to renegade militias and Islamic radicals, overthrows governments and assassinates leaders, leaving in its wake mayhem and disasters it did not foresee, it has failed.
Intelligence gathering, like investigative reporting, is a process that requires immense patience, trusted sources cultivated over long periods and a cultural, historical and linguistic literacy that is the result of years of study. It is not a summer camp for creeps who revel in human degradation, dirty tricks and murder. All countries need good intelligence officials and agents, not the buffoons, gangsters, sadists and killers who, in the name of national security, do us so much damage.
Our Invisible Government
There are two forms of government in the United States. There is the visible government—the White House, Congress, the courts, state legislatures and governorships—and the invisible government, or deep state, where anonymous technocrats, intelligence operatives, generals, bankers, corporations and lobbyists manage foreign and domestic policy regardless of which political party holds a majority.
The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government are the nation’s bloated and unaccountable intelligence agencies. They are the vanguard of the invisible government. They oversee a vast “black world,” tasked with maintaining the invisible government’s lock on power. They spy on and smear domestic and foreign critics, fix elections, bribe, extort, torture, assassinate and flood the airwaves with “black propaganda.” They are impervious to the chaos and human destruction they leave in their wake. Disasters, social upheavals, economic collapses, massive suffering, death and rabid anti-American blowback have grown out of the invisible government’s overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile and the wars it fostered in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. The United States and the rest of the globe would be far safer if our self-styled shadow warriors—who failed to foresee the Iranian revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9/11 attacks or the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and whose widespread use of torture makes them the most potent recruiters for radical jihadism—were made accountable to the public and the rule of law.
There are periodic glimpses of the moral squalor and ineptitude that define this shadow world, such as those provided by the 1970s hearings led by Sen. Frank Church and the leaking of photographs of prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. But those who attempt to defy or expose the pernicious inner workings, including Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, are usually discredited, persecuted, silenced and sometimes “disappeared.” The invisible government justifies its secrecy and criminality as necessary in the face of existential threats, posed first by communism and later by Islamic terrorism. The ends always justify the means. Anything, no matter how immoral or criminal, is permissible.
The best window we have into this shadow world comes with historical accounts of its crimes, including those in Stephen Kinzer’s new book, “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.” The black sites and torture techniques pioneered by the Central Intelligence Agency in the decades after World War II—developments that saw people kidnapped, tortured and often executed—were “an indispensable link in this grim chain,” he writes.
The medical experiments carried out by the Nazis in concentration camps and the Japanese in the occupied Chinese region of Manchuria elicited two responses after World War II. There were some in the visible government who sought to hold the war criminals accountable. But there were many in the invisible government who wanted to obtain and exploit the results of these experiments and recruit the war criminals who had overseen them to work for U.S. intelligence services and the military.
The backgrounds of the Nazi scientists who had directed chemical and biological warfare projects, murdering thousands of helpless victims, including children, with agents such as the gas sarin, were sanitized by the invisible government in what became known as Operation Paperclip. No criminal, including Kurt Blome, who had overseen the Nazis’ research into biological warfare, was too heinous or sadistic for the United States to welcome and use.
“Whenever a scientist they coveted turned out to have a blemish on his record, they rewrote his biography,” Kinzer writes. “They systematically expunged references to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo, abuse of slave laborers, and experiments on human subjects. Applicants who had been rated by interrogators as ‘ardent Nazi’ were re-categorized as ‘not an ardent Nazi.’ References to their exemplary family lives were added. Once they had been thus ‘bleached,’ they became suitable candidates for Paperclip contracts.”
Shiro Ishii, who between 1936 and 1942 killed as many as 12,000 captured Chinese soldiers, anti-Japanese partisans, Koreans, Mongolians, prisoners, mental patients and, by some accounts, American prisoners of war in medical experiments on behalf of the Japanese government, was a highly valued asset to the invisible government.
Ishii oversaw a four-square-mile complex, called Unit 731, that housed 3,000 scientists and other employees. Kinzer writes that victims “were exposed to poison gas so that their lungs could later be removed and studied; slowly roasted by electricity to determine voltages needed to produce death; hung upside down to study the progress of natural choking; locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out; spun in centrifuges; infected with anthrax, syphilis, plague, cholera, and other diseases; forcibly impregnated to provide infants for vivisection; bound to stakes to be incinerated by soldiers testing flamethrowers; and slowly frozen to observe the progress of hypothermia. Air was injected into victims’ veins to provoke embolisms; animal blood was injected to see what effect it would have. Some were dissected alive, or had limbs amputated so attendants could monitor their slow deaths by bleeding and gangrene. According to a U.S. Army report that was later declassified, groups of men, women, and children were tied to stakes so that ‘their legs and buttocks were bared and exposed to shrapnel from anthrax bombs exploded yards away,’ then monitored to see how long they lived—which was never more than a week. Ishii required a constant flow of human organs, meaning a steady need for ‘logs’ [the euphemism for victims].”
After each experiment, “Ishii’s microbiologists would meticulously remove tissue samples and mount them on slides for study,” Kinzer writes. “Technicians used their research to prepare poisoned chocolate and chewing gum, as well as hairpins and fountain pens rigged with toxin-coated needles for use in close-quarters killing. In industrial-scale laboratories they bred plague-infested fleas and manufactured tons of anthrax that were placed in bomb casings and used to kill thousands of Chinese civilians.”
America’s invisible government went to great lengths to recruit Ishii and obtain the extensive records and slides from his gruesome experiments. These types of experiments would soon be replicated by the CIA in a top-secret program, MK-ULTRA, with the assistance of Ishii and an assortment of ex-Nazis.
Kinzer builds his book around Sidney Gottlieb, an elusive, quirky and powerful operative in the CIA who in his quest for mind control—something he and others in the CIA had convinced themselves the Soviets had mastered—oversaw medical experiments that had been originated by his German and Japanese collaborators. These experiments were coded-named Bluebird and later Artichoke, which Kinzer calls “one of the most violently abusive projects ever sponsored by an agency of the United States government.” The torture sessions often permanently shattered the minds of his subjects. Victims were kidnapped (later this would be called “extraordinary rendition”) and sent to clandestine centers around the globe—now known as “black sites”—or were picked from the prison population abroad and at home. Those forced into taking part in these experiments included impoverished African Americans at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky. Many of the victims were labeled “expendables,” meaning they could be murdered after the experiments and disappeared. The corpses were usually burned. Anyone who was powerless, or could be made powerless, was a potential target. Mentally handicapped children at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, for example, were fed cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium and their induced sicknesses were monitored. Gottlieb oversaw the administering of LSD and other drugs to induce psychotic states at the federal prison in Atlanta and a youth correctional facility in Bordentown, N.J. None of his subjects consented to being a human guinea pig, and many ended up psychologically impaired for life. The Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bolger, being held in the Atlanta penitentiary, was told he would be part of an experiment on curing schizophrenia but then was surreptitiously given LSD nearly every day for 15 months. CIA scientists also conducted experiments on terminally ill patients at an annex of Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Gottlieb searched for years for a cocktail of drugs that, in Kinzer’s words, would draw “prisoners away from their identities, induce them to reveal secrets, and perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will.” It was a vain quest. But with each failure he and the CIA became ever more zealous, working closely with former German Gen. Walter Schreiber, the onetime surgeon general of the Nazi army who had “approved experiments at the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Dachau concentration camps in which inmates were frozen, injected with mescaline and other drugs, and cut open so the progress of gangrene on their bones could be monitored.” Kinzer adds that according to one American researcher, the experiments “usually resulted in a slow and agonizing death.”
Gottlieb had a habit of secretly lacing the drinks of colleagues with LSD to see their reaction. Some never recovered. One of his victims was Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who was appalled by the brutal interrogations he witnessed and planned to resign from the CIA. Gottlieb and his secretive group of torturers and assassins were terrified Olson would go public. Olson was found dead in 1953 on a sidewalk in Manhattan after allegedly diving through a hotel window. His son Eric had his father’s body exhumed in 1994 and turned over to James Starrs, a forensic pathologist at George Washington University in the District of Columbia. “Starrs had found no glass shards on the victim’s head or neck, as might be expected if he had dived through a window,” Kinzer writes. “Most intriguingly, although Olson had reportedly landed on his back, the skull above his left eye was disfigured.”
“I would venture to say that this hematoma is singular evidence of the possibility that Dr. Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of room 1018A,” Starrs concluded.
Starrs was later more emphatic: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window.”
Gottlieb also oversaw the production of an array of poisons intended to be used on leaders and others deemed hostile to the United States, including Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro. He and the CIA pursued bizarre schemes, including finding a chemical that would make Castro’s beard fall out, leaving the Cuban leader, in the minds of CIA operatives, open to ridicule that would result in his overthrow.
The CIA also experimented with implanting electrodes in brains to control behavior. “ ‘An Agency team flew to Saigon in July 1968; among them were a neurosurgeon and a neurologist … ,’ ” Kinzer says in quoting a study of American intelligence. “ ‘In a closed-off compound at Bien Hoa Hospital, the Agency team set to work. Three Vietcong prisoners had been selected by the local station. How or why they were chosen would remain uncertain. In turn each man was anaesthetized and, after he had a hinged back a flap in their skulls, the neurosurgeon implanted tiny electrodes in each brain. When the prisoners regained consciousness, the behaviorists set to work. … The prisoners were placed in a room and given knives. Pressing the control buttons on their handsets, the behaviorists tried to arouse their subjects to violence. Nothing happened. For a whole week the doctors tried to make the men attack each other. Baffled at their lack of success, the team flew back to Washington. As previously arranged in case of failure, while the physicians were still in the air the prisoners were shot by Green Beret troopers and their bodies burned.’ ”
The depth of moral squalor and criminality that can be reached by those given unlimited resources, no oversight or public accountability and total secrecy is breathtaking. Gottlieb and the CIA lured clueless victims in New York City to a “safe house” on Bedford Street and gave them drinks laced with LSD. CIA operatives directed by the thuggish George Hunter White monitored the effects.
“[White] regularly used illegal drugs, keeping for himself a share of whatever he confiscated,” Kinzer writes. “His consumption of alcohol—often a full bottle of gin with dinner—was legendary. His other appetite was sexual fetish, especially sadomasochism and high heels. He bought his second wife a closet full of boots, and patronized prostitutes who bound and whipped him. One of his few emotional bonds was with his pet canary. He loved to hold and stroke it. When the bird died, he was deeply pained. ‘Poor little bastard just couldn’t make it,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever get another bird or pet. It’s tough on everyone when they die.’ ”
White, who as a narcotics officer had hounded and often framed jazz musicians including Billie Holiday, was later moved to a safe house in San Francisco that functioned as a CIA brothel. Gottlieb, Kinzer writes, “wanted to systematize the study of how sex, especially in combination with drugs, could loosen men’s tongues.” The prostituted women were hired by the CIA to lure clients to bedrooms, decorated with photos of manacled women in black stockings and studded leather collars, and lace their drinks with LSD and other drugs.
“While his prostitutes and their clients had sex, White would watch through a one-way mirror, sitting on his portable toilet,” Kinzer writes. Gottlieb, on visits to the safe house, demanded the women have sex with him as if they were part of his personal harem.
White was given a second safe house in Marin County outside San Francisco where he used his prostituted women not only to drug men but test an array of Little-Shop-of-Horrors gadgets on his victims including stink bombs, itching powder, sneezing powder, diarrhea inducers, drug-laced swizzle sticks and aerosol cans filled with LSD.
After the long quest for a mind-control drug was abandoned, the CIA destroyed most of the records of its experiments. White, in a letter to Gottlieb thanking him for hiring him, wrote: “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty good stuff, Brudder!” That would make a far more honest motto for the CIA than the biblical passage from John 8:32 carved on the walls of its original headquarters at Langley, Va.: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
Prisoners, the CIA eventually concluded, were best broken through extreme isolation and sensory deprivation. These techniques, pioneered by CIA-funded research at McGill University in Canada, were laid out in a 1964 manual titled “KUBARK Counter-Intelligence Interrogation.” KUBARK is the CIA’s cryptonym for itself. The 128-page manual was not fully declassified until 2014. It was the primary resource used by CIA interrogators in the 1960s, including in Vietnam, where at least 20,000 captured Vietnamese were killed, often after being tortured. An updated version of the manual called “Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual” came out in 1983. These forms of torture, which include shackling, sleep deprivation, electroshock, sexual and physical humiliation, prolonged cramped confinement, and hooding for disorientation and sensory deprivation, became routine after 9/11 in American intelligence black sites at home and abroad. CIA psychologists, like Gottlieb’s earlier stable of mad scientists and torturers, monitor and perfect these techniques to ensure complete psychological collapse and a childlike dependence on the interrogator.
It would be naive to relegate the behavior of Gottlieb and the CIA to the past, especially since the invisible government has once again shrouded the activities of intelligence agencies from congressional oversight or public scrutiny and installed a proponent of torture, Gina Haspel, as the head of the agency.
When an intelligence service resorts to torture, it has failed. When it relies on sadists and thugs, it has failed. When it treats human beings, including its own citizens, as unwitting pawns to be experimented upon and murdered, it has failed. When it uses dirty tricks, provides billions of dollars in weapons to renegade militias and Islamic radicals, overthrows governments and assassinates leaders, leaving in its wake mayhem and disasters it did not foresee, it has failed.
Intelligence gathering, like investigative reporting, is a process that requires immense patience, trusted sources cultivated over long periods and a cultural, historical and linguistic literacy that is the result of years of study. It is not a summer camp for creeps who revel in human degradation, dirty tricks and murder. All countries need good intelligence officials and agents, not the buffoons, gangsters, sadists and killers who, in the name of national security, do us so much damage.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
SC197-8
https://srsroccoreport.com/u-s-shale-oil-in-trouble-as-production-stalls-after-two-years-of-significant-growth/
U.S. Shale Oil In Trouble As Production Stalls After Two Years Of Significant Growth
Has U.S. shale oil production stalled? Well, it seems so. After experiencing significant growth in 2017 and 2018, U.S. shale production in the first five months of this year has remained flat. This is terrible news for the shale industry which has counted on production growth to increase cash flows so it can pay down debt.
And, along with not being able to increase production in the first five months of the year, the shale industry continues to receive an onslaught of negative press as recent articles reveal the disaster beginning to take shape. For example, here are a few articles indicating BIG TROUBLE ahead for the U.S. Shale Oil Industry:
Shale Bleeds Cash Despite Best Quarter In Years
U.S. Drillers Reduce Staff And Budgets As Oil Prices Stay Low
Weakening Shale Productivity “VERY Bullish” For Oil Prices
Shale’s Dark Side: Methane Emissions Are Soaring
Energy: The Worst Performing Sector Of The Decade
Job Losses Hit As Shale Slows Down
What Caused The Recent Surge In Oil & Gas Bankruptcies?
These articles are only from the past month. If I would go back and search for six months, I could fill the entire page with negative articles.
While it’s true that the U.S. shale oil industry has increased production by nearly 7 million barrels per day over the past decade, it has come at a terrific cost. I have to say, I underestimated the degree at which the shale industry could ramp up production. However, I have not underestimated the disaster that is coming when the U.S. shale oil industry finally disintegrates. It will have a tremendous impact on the U.S. and global economy.
According to the data published (by Enno Peters) at ShaleProfile.com, U.S. shale oil production has remained virtually flat since December 2018:
The prices in the chart represent the average annual WTIC oil price for each year. WTIC oil refers to the U.S. oil benchmark called West Texas Intermediate Crude price. Even though the WTIC oil price in 2019 is lower versus 2018, it is higher than in 2017 when production surged by more than 1.3 million barrels per day from Jan-Dec 2017. So, after two years of significant shale oil production growth, 2019 has turned out to be a real DUD.
Moreover, if we look at the U.S. shale oil production increase from Dec-May for the past three years, we can see plainly see how hard the BRAKES came on this year:
Again, according to the detailed well data from ShaleProfile.com, which I highly recommend checking out, the increase of U.S. shale oil production of 453,000 barrels per day (bd) Dec-May 2017, and then 526,000 bd during Dec-May 2018 was quite substantial compared to the decline of 30,000 bd Dec-May 2019.
The plateau in shale oil production seems to be a result of some majors, such as ExxonMobil increasing production while other smaller players are remaining flat or declining. But, there is no doubt that U.S. shale production in the first five months of 2019 is a much different trend than what took place over the past two years during the same period.
So, what does this all mean?? If oil prices continue to remain in the low $50s or even fall into the $40s as recessionary economic forces increase, we could see the optimistic shale oil production forecasts GUTTED even more in 2019 and 2020. Which, we are already experiencing even with oil prices in the mid to high $50s.
Unfortunately, Americans aren’t prepared for what’s coming. Why? Because, there still seems to be a lot of HOPIUM in the Mainstream press that the United States will become energy independent and lead the world as the largest oil producer. If we look at the following chart of total U.S. oil production since 1920, we can spot the TRENDS:
U.S. oil production from 1930 to 1970 went up in the same trend as it came down from 1980 to 2010 (approximately). Not only has U.S. oil production jumped by 7 million barrels per day IN ONE DECADE (2009-2019) versus 7.5 million barrels per day IN FOUR DECADES (1930-1970), the inevitable decline will likely mirror the same trend, shown by the RED ARROW. Thus, the wildly optimistic forecasts of U.S. shale oil production to peak in 2025-2030 and then slowly decline over the next two decades… ARE PURE RUBBISH.
Lastly, the U.S. oil and gas industry has $137 billion worth of debt due by 2022. While this wasn’t a problem before for shale companies as they were able to use PONZI FINANCE to issue new debt to pay existing debt, it doesn’t seem as if they have this GET OUT OF JAIL free card the next time around. So, the pied piper is likely to come asking for the return of investors’ funds. But, will these shale companies be able to pay back this $137 billion in debt? Or how many will be able to roll it over?? These are all excellent questions which I plan to watch and write about over the next two years.
Make sure you stay tuned and bring your POPCORN.
U.S. Shale Oil In Trouble As Production Stalls After Two Years Of Significant Growth
Has U.S. shale oil production stalled? Well, it seems so. After experiencing significant growth in 2017 and 2018, U.S. shale production in the first five months of this year has remained flat. This is terrible news for the shale industry which has counted on production growth to increase cash flows so it can pay down debt.
And, along with not being able to increase production in the first five months of the year, the shale industry continues to receive an onslaught of negative press as recent articles reveal the disaster beginning to take shape. For example, here are a few articles indicating BIG TROUBLE ahead for the U.S. Shale Oil Industry:
Shale Bleeds Cash Despite Best Quarter In Years
U.S. Drillers Reduce Staff And Budgets As Oil Prices Stay Low
Weakening Shale Productivity “VERY Bullish” For Oil Prices
Shale’s Dark Side: Methane Emissions Are Soaring
Energy: The Worst Performing Sector Of The Decade
Job Losses Hit As Shale Slows Down
What Caused The Recent Surge In Oil & Gas Bankruptcies?
These articles are only from the past month. If I would go back and search for six months, I could fill the entire page with negative articles.
While it’s true that the U.S. shale oil industry has increased production by nearly 7 million barrels per day over the past decade, it has come at a terrific cost. I have to say, I underestimated the degree at which the shale industry could ramp up production. However, I have not underestimated the disaster that is coming when the U.S. shale oil industry finally disintegrates. It will have a tremendous impact on the U.S. and global economy.
According to the data published (by Enno Peters) at ShaleProfile.com, U.S. shale oil production has remained virtually flat since December 2018:
The prices in the chart represent the average annual WTIC oil price for each year. WTIC oil refers to the U.S. oil benchmark called West Texas Intermediate Crude price. Even though the WTIC oil price in 2019 is lower versus 2018, it is higher than in 2017 when production surged by more than 1.3 million barrels per day from Jan-Dec 2017. So, after two years of significant shale oil production growth, 2019 has turned out to be a real DUD.
Moreover, if we look at the U.S. shale oil production increase from Dec-May for the past three years, we can see plainly see how hard the BRAKES came on this year:
Again, according to the detailed well data from ShaleProfile.com, which I highly recommend checking out, the increase of U.S. shale oil production of 453,000 barrels per day (bd) Dec-May 2017, and then 526,000 bd during Dec-May 2018 was quite substantial compared to the decline of 30,000 bd Dec-May 2019.
The plateau in shale oil production seems to be a result of some majors, such as ExxonMobil increasing production while other smaller players are remaining flat or declining. But, there is no doubt that U.S. shale production in the first five months of 2019 is a much different trend than what took place over the past two years during the same period.
So, what does this all mean?? If oil prices continue to remain in the low $50s or even fall into the $40s as recessionary economic forces increase, we could see the optimistic shale oil production forecasts GUTTED even more in 2019 and 2020. Which, we are already experiencing even with oil prices in the mid to high $50s.
Unfortunately, Americans aren’t prepared for what’s coming. Why? Because, there still seems to be a lot of HOPIUM in the Mainstream press that the United States will become energy independent and lead the world as the largest oil producer. If we look at the following chart of total U.S. oil production since 1920, we can spot the TRENDS:
U.S. oil production from 1930 to 1970 went up in the same trend as it came down from 1980 to 2010 (approximately). Not only has U.S. oil production jumped by 7 million barrels per day IN ONE DECADE (2009-2019) versus 7.5 million barrels per day IN FOUR DECADES (1930-1970), the inevitable decline will likely mirror the same trend, shown by the RED ARROW. Thus, the wildly optimistic forecasts of U.S. shale oil production to peak in 2025-2030 and then slowly decline over the next two decades… ARE PURE RUBBISH.
Lastly, the U.S. oil and gas industry has $137 billion worth of debt due by 2022. While this wasn’t a problem before for shale companies as they were able to use PONZI FINANCE to issue new debt to pay existing debt, it doesn’t seem as if they have this GET OUT OF JAIL free card the next time around. So, the pied piper is likely to come asking for the return of investors’ funds. But, will these shale companies be able to pay back this $137 billion in debt? Or how many will be able to roll it over?? These are all excellent questions which I plan to watch and write about over the next two years.
Make sure you stay tuned and bring your POPCORN.
SC197-7
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept19/black-swan-drone9-19.html
The Black Swan Is a Drone
Predictably, the mainstream media is serving up heaping portions of reassurances that the drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities are no big deal and full production will resume shortly. The obvious goal is to placate global markets fearful of an energy disruption that could tip a precarious global economy into recession.
The real impact isn't on short-term oil prices, it's on asymmetric warfare: the coordinated drone attack on Saudi oil facilities is a Black Swan event that is reverberating around the world, awakening copycats and exposing the impossibility of defending against low-cost drones of the sort anyone can buy.
(Some published estimates place the total cost of the 10 drones deployed in the strike at $15,000. Highly capable commercially available drones cost around $1,200 each.)
The attack's success should be a wake-up call to everyone tasked with defending highly flammable critical infrastructure: there really isn't any reliable defense against a coordinated drone attack, nor is there any reliable way to distinguish between an Amazon drone delivering a package and a drone delivering a bomb.
Whatever authentication protocol that could be required of drones in the future--an ID beacon or equivalent--can be spoofed. For example: bring down an authenticated drone (using nets, etc.), swap out the guidance and payload, and away it goes. Or steal authentication beacons from suppliers, or hack an authenticated drone in flight, land it, swap out the payload--the list of spoofing workaround options is extensive.
This is asymmetric warfare on a new scale: $20,000 of drones can wreak $20 million in damage and financial losses of $200 million--or $2 billion or $20 billion, if global markets are upended.
If it's impossible to defend against coordinated drone attacks, and impossible to differentiate "good" drones from "bad" drones, then the only reliable defense is to ban drones entirely from wide swaths of territory.
So much for the lightly regulated commercialization of drones.
What sort of light bulbs are going off in the minds of copycats? It doesn't take much imagination to see the potential for mayhem--and without sacrificing your own life. I won't elaborate on the possibilities here, but they're obvious to us all.
The range and payload of low-cost drones is limited. The big drones can fly hundreds of miles and carry hundreds of pounds of weaponry, but these can be targeted by radar and conventional ground-to-air missiles. So-called hobby drones skimming over the rooftops (or deserts or forests) are difficult to shoot down, especially if the attack is coordinated to arrive from multiple directions.
Small hobby drones may only carry 3 KG (roughly 6 pounds), but how much damage can 3 KG of high explosives cause? The answer is "considerable" if the target is flammable, or lightly shielded electronics.
Larger commercially available drones can carry up to 20 KG or 40 pounds--more than enough explosive capacity to take out any number of targets.
Defense and intelligence agencies have no doubt war-gamed the potential for coordinated drone attacks, and the world's advanced militaries are already exploring the potential for self-organizing "drone hordes" of hundreds or even thousands of drones overwhelming defenders with sheer numbers. The success of the oil facilities attack proves the effectiveness of much smaller scale drone attacks.
Put yourself in the shoes of those tasked with securing hundreds of miles of pipelines carrying oil and natural gas around the world. What's your defense against drone attacks? A.I.-controlled or remote-operated gun towers every few hundred yards, along thousands of miles of pipelines? Human patrols covering the entire pipeline 24/7? The cost of such defenses would burden the defenders with enormous costs without providing 100% reliable security. (Guards can be bribed, remotely operated guns can be overwhelmed by an initial wave of cheap unarmed hobby drones, etc.)
It's obvious there are no low-cost, effective defenses of thousands of miles of pipelines. (Recall that the Saudis depend on seawater being piped hundreds of kilometers into the desert to inject into oil wells to maintain production. Taking out these water lines and pumps would cripple production, too.)
The only effective way to limit drone attacks is to ban all drones and institute a shoot-on-sight policy in restricted areas. But that will not negate the potential for coordinated drone strikes or drone attacks on remote facilities.
The mainstream media will be under permanent pressure to downplay the consequences of this attack, but the cat is out of the bag: the Black Swan is a drone. What was "possible" yesterday is now a low-cost proven capability, and the consequences are far from predictable.
This unpredictability alone should unsettle markets, as the risk of future asymmetric warfare drone strikes just increased to a degree that is difficult to measure or hedge.
The Black Swan Is a Drone
Predictably, the mainstream media is serving up heaping portions of reassurances that the drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities are no big deal and full production will resume shortly. The obvious goal is to placate global markets fearful of an energy disruption that could tip a precarious global economy into recession.
The real impact isn't on short-term oil prices, it's on asymmetric warfare: the coordinated drone attack on Saudi oil facilities is a Black Swan event that is reverberating around the world, awakening copycats and exposing the impossibility of defending against low-cost drones of the sort anyone can buy.
(Some published estimates place the total cost of the 10 drones deployed in the strike at $15,000. Highly capable commercially available drones cost around $1,200 each.)
The attack's success should be a wake-up call to everyone tasked with defending highly flammable critical infrastructure: there really isn't any reliable defense against a coordinated drone attack, nor is there any reliable way to distinguish between an Amazon drone delivering a package and a drone delivering a bomb.
Whatever authentication protocol that could be required of drones in the future--an ID beacon or equivalent--can be spoofed. For example: bring down an authenticated drone (using nets, etc.), swap out the guidance and payload, and away it goes. Or steal authentication beacons from suppliers, or hack an authenticated drone in flight, land it, swap out the payload--the list of spoofing workaround options is extensive.
This is asymmetric warfare on a new scale: $20,000 of drones can wreak $20 million in damage and financial losses of $200 million--or $2 billion or $20 billion, if global markets are upended.
If it's impossible to defend against coordinated drone attacks, and impossible to differentiate "good" drones from "bad" drones, then the only reliable defense is to ban drones entirely from wide swaths of territory.
So much for the lightly regulated commercialization of drones.
What sort of light bulbs are going off in the minds of copycats? It doesn't take much imagination to see the potential for mayhem--and without sacrificing your own life. I won't elaborate on the possibilities here, but they're obvious to us all.
The range and payload of low-cost drones is limited. The big drones can fly hundreds of miles and carry hundreds of pounds of weaponry, but these can be targeted by radar and conventional ground-to-air missiles. So-called hobby drones skimming over the rooftops (or deserts or forests) are difficult to shoot down, especially if the attack is coordinated to arrive from multiple directions.
Small hobby drones may only carry 3 KG (roughly 6 pounds), but how much damage can 3 KG of high explosives cause? The answer is "considerable" if the target is flammable, or lightly shielded electronics.
Larger commercially available drones can carry up to 20 KG or 40 pounds--more than enough explosive capacity to take out any number of targets.
Defense and intelligence agencies have no doubt war-gamed the potential for coordinated drone attacks, and the world's advanced militaries are already exploring the potential for self-organizing "drone hordes" of hundreds or even thousands of drones overwhelming defenders with sheer numbers. The success of the oil facilities attack proves the effectiveness of much smaller scale drone attacks.
Put yourself in the shoes of those tasked with securing hundreds of miles of pipelines carrying oil and natural gas around the world. What's your defense against drone attacks? A.I.-controlled or remote-operated gun towers every few hundred yards, along thousands of miles of pipelines? Human patrols covering the entire pipeline 24/7? The cost of such defenses would burden the defenders with enormous costs without providing 100% reliable security. (Guards can be bribed, remotely operated guns can be overwhelmed by an initial wave of cheap unarmed hobby drones, etc.)
It's obvious there are no low-cost, effective defenses of thousands of miles of pipelines. (Recall that the Saudis depend on seawater being piped hundreds of kilometers into the desert to inject into oil wells to maintain production. Taking out these water lines and pumps would cripple production, too.)
The only effective way to limit drone attacks is to ban all drones and institute a shoot-on-sight policy in restricted areas. But that will not negate the potential for coordinated drone strikes or drone attacks on remote facilities.
The mainstream media will be under permanent pressure to downplay the consequences of this attack, but the cat is out of the bag: the Black Swan is a drone. What was "possible" yesterday is now a low-cost proven capability, and the consequences are far from predictable.
This unpredictability alone should unsettle markets, as the risk of future asymmetric warfare drone strikes just increased to a degree that is difficult to measure or hedge.
Monday, September 16, 2019
SC197-6
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/09/16/incentives-rule-the-world/
Incentives Rule the World
Ryan Murphy, an economist at Southern Methodist University, recently published a working paper in which he ranked each of the states by the predominance of—there’s no nice way to put it—psychopaths. The winner? Washington in a walk. In fact, the capital scored higher on Murphy’s scale than the next two runners-up combined.
“I had previously written on politicians and psychopathy, but I had no expectation D.C. would stand out as much as it does,” Murphy wrote in an email…
On a national level, it raises the troubling question as to what it means to live in a country whose institutions are set up to reward some very dubious human traits. Like it or not, we’re more likely than not to wind up with some alarming personalities in positions of power.
– From last year’s Politico article, Washington, D.C.: the Psychopath Capital of America
One of the most frustrating aspects of modern American politics — and the culture in general — is our all encompassing fixation on the superficial. It’s also one of the main reasons I have very little interest in presidential politics, which basically consists of a bunch of billionaire friendly puppets auditioning to become the next public face of imperial oligarchy. Though I understand the desire for quick fixes, our focus on highlighting and mitigating only the symptoms of societal decay as opposed to the root causes, ensures we’ll never achieve the sort of positive paradigm-level shift necessary to bring humankind forward.
The truth of the matter is incentives rule the world, and if we look at some of the most pernicious and predatory areas of our socio-economic reality, including (but not limited to) the financial sector, the defense industry, intelligence agencies and healthcare, we find a slew of incentives that handsomely reward sociopathic behavior, while penalizing ethical, conscious action beneficial to society at large. Notice it’s always the whistleblowers who end up imprisoned or hunted down.
In the economic realm, if we think about the idea of a competitive free market, the primary reason the profit incentive exists and is widely accepted is the implicit understanding that people should be incentivized to create a product or service that benefits the public at large. While we still have remnants of this at play within the modern U.S. economy, much of the “wealth” attained these days is a direct consequence of rent-seeking, parasitic behavior and corruption of one kind or another. The reason is pretty simple. It’s incentivized.
When you have a financial fraud crime spree like the one witnessed earlier this century and your response is to bail out the criminals and ensure no executives go to jail, it’s essentially a gigantic bell ringing in the ears of every scoundrel on the planet. It’s open season on the general pubic for sociopaths. The Obamas weren’t super wealthy when Barack became President, yet they’re now worth an estimated $40 million (likely more given the size of their real estate purchases). The same thing happened to the Clintons. They’ve reportedly earned $240 million since Lolita express frequent flier Bill left office.
The most surefire way to succeed in America today is to be a high-functioning sociopath who scratches the backs of other high-functioning sociopaths. As such, the most pressing problem at a root level is that our economy and society incentivizes sociopathic behavior by systematically funneling sociopaths into positions of unaccountable power. If this sounds insane it’s because it is. The very structure of how our society functions is in fact insane.
These are the people running the show. They infect every country, every industry, every government. All the halls of power. Until we figure out a way to marginalize humanity’s sociopaths rather than hand them the reins of power globally, we’ll continue to repeat the current pointless, destructive cycle.
I’m certain the current mainstream political discussion in the U.S. isn’t serious because so few people are focused on the structure of society itself. There’s very little focus on incentives, on the fact that our entire economy functions as a promotion mechanism for sociopaths. No amount of tinkering around the edges is going to dramatically transform the human experience into something more positive until we figure out a way to make society itself resistant to sociopath takeover.
Significantly, one of the most in your face examples of sociopath dominance relates to imperial military policy, which has nothing to do with national defense and everything to do with national offense. It’s simply about utilizing state murder to advance power and profit for a few. The incentives are completely backwards, which is why it never gets better.
There are few things a human being can do more evil and depraved than lying a nation into war, yet that’s precisely what the proponents of the Iraq war did. More significantly, what consequences have befallen the proponents of that war? Increased fame and fortune in most cases. In fact, one of them is currently the leading contender for the Democratic Party nomination for President.
When you incentivize murderous behavior, you get more of it. Those who stand to benefit most from war should also have the most to lose, but our current system functions in the exact opposite way.
All that said, perhaps the most concerning instance of perverse incentives in society today can be found in the relationship between the national security state and average citizens. The way it works, and it’s rapidly getting worse, is you the individual have zero right to privacy while the national security state can classify what the CIA director ate for lunch. Those with the most power are subject to the least transparency, while the powerless masses are subject to mass surveillance. This unaccountable, authoritarian structure will continue to ensure the worst people alive end up in the highest echelons of power. What self-respecting sociopath wouldn’t be attracted to a system where you get to exercise total dominance over hundreds of millions of people with zero accountability? It’s like bees to honey.
If you build a house with a bad foundation you’re going to have problems. The same thing can be said about civilizations. We need to admit we live a world that incentivizes the worst amongst us to attain all meaningful positions of power.
Begging a sociopath for scraps of food might help you survive another day, but it won’t result in sustainable long-term progress. We need to see sociopaths for the societal cancer they are and completely reorient our incentive structure in order to reward conscious, cooperative behavior as opposed to ruthless parasitism. Change the incentives and you’ll change the outcome.
Incentives Rule the World
Ryan Murphy, an economist at Southern Methodist University, recently published a working paper in which he ranked each of the states by the predominance of—there’s no nice way to put it—psychopaths. The winner? Washington in a walk. In fact, the capital scored higher on Murphy’s scale than the next two runners-up combined.
“I had previously written on politicians and psychopathy, but I had no expectation D.C. would stand out as much as it does,” Murphy wrote in an email…
On a national level, it raises the troubling question as to what it means to live in a country whose institutions are set up to reward some very dubious human traits. Like it or not, we’re more likely than not to wind up with some alarming personalities in positions of power.
– From last year’s Politico article, Washington, D.C.: the Psychopath Capital of America
One of the most frustrating aspects of modern American politics — and the culture in general — is our all encompassing fixation on the superficial. It’s also one of the main reasons I have very little interest in presidential politics, which basically consists of a bunch of billionaire friendly puppets auditioning to become the next public face of imperial oligarchy. Though I understand the desire for quick fixes, our focus on highlighting and mitigating only the symptoms of societal decay as opposed to the root causes, ensures we’ll never achieve the sort of positive paradigm-level shift necessary to bring humankind forward.
The truth of the matter is incentives rule the world, and if we look at some of the most pernicious and predatory areas of our socio-economic reality, including (but not limited to) the financial sector, the defense industry, intelligence agencies and healthcare, we find a slew of incentives that handsomely reward sociopathic behavior, while penalizing ethical, conscious action beneficial to society at large. Notice it’s always the whistleblowers who end up imprisoned or hunted down.
In the economic realm, if we think about the idea of a competitive free market, the primary reason the profit incentive exists and is widely accepted is the implicit understanding that people should be incentivized to create a product or service that benefits the public at large. While we still have remnants of this at play within the modern U.S. economy, much of the “wealth” attained these days is a direct consequence of rent-seeking, parasitic behavior and corruption of one kind or another. The reason is pretty simple. It’s incentivized.
When you have a financial fraud crime spree like the one witnessed earlier this century and your response is to bail out the criminals and ensure no executives go to jail, it’s essentially a gigantic bell ringing in the ears of every scoundrel on the planet. It’s open season on the general pubic for sociopaths. The Obamas weren’t super wealthy when Barack became President, yet they’re now worth an estimated $40 million (likely more given the size of their real estate purchases). The same thing happened to the Clintons. They’ve reportedly earned $240 million since Lolita express frequent flier Bill left office.
The most surefire way to succeed in America today is to be a high-functioning sociopath who scratches the backs of other high-functioning sociopaths. As such, the most pressing problem at a root level is that our economy and society incentivizes sociopathic behavior by systematically funneling sociopaths into positions of unaccountable power. If this sounds insane it’s because it is. The very structure of how our society functions is in fact insane.
These are the people running the show. They infect every country, every industry, every government. All the halls of power. Until we figure out a way to marginalize humanity’s sociopaths rather than hand them the reins of power globally, we’ll continue to repeat the current pointless, destructive cycle.
I’m certain the current mainstream political discussion in the U.S. isn’t serious because so few people are focused on the structure of society itself. There’s very little focus on incentives, on the fact that our entire economy functions as a promotion mechanism for sociopaths. No amount of tinkering around the edges is going to dramatically transform the human experience into something more positive until we figure out a way to make society itself resistant to sociopath takeover.
Significantly, one of the most in your face examples of sociopath dominance relates to imperial military policy, which has nothing to do with national defense and everything to do with national offense. It’s simply about utilizing state murder to advance power and profit for a few. The incentives are completely backwards, which is why it never gets better.
There are few things a human being can do more evil and depraved than lying a nation into war, yet that’s precisely what the proponents of the Iraq war did. More significantly, what consequences have befallen the proponents of that war? Increased fame and fortune in most cases. In fact, one of them is currently the leading contender for the Democratic Party nomination for President.
When you incentivize murderous behavior, you get more of it. Those who stand to benefit most from war should also have the most to lose, but our current system functions in the exact opposite way.
All that said, perhaps the most concerning instance of perverse incentives in society today can be found in the relationship between the national security state and average citizens. The way it works, and it’s rapidly getting worse, is you the individual have zero right to privacy while the national security state can classify what the CIA director ate for lunch. Those with the most power are subject to the least transparency, while the powerless masses are subject to mass surveillance. This unaccountable, authoritarian structure will continue to ensure the worst people alive end up in the highest echelons of power. What self-respecting sociopath wouldn’t be attracted to a system where you get to exercise total dominance over hundreds of millions of people with zero accountability? It’s like bees to honey.
If you build a house with a bad foundation you’re going to have problems. The same thing can be said about civilizations. We need to admit we live a world that incentivizes the worst amongst us to attain all meaningful positions of power.
Begging a sociopath for scraps of food might help you survive another day, but it won’t result in sustainable long-term progress. We need to see sociopaths for the societal cancer they are and completely reorient our incentive structure in order to reward conscious, cooperative behavior as opposed to ruthless parasitism. Change the incentives and you’ll change the outcome.
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