Steve Bull's Blog, page 1170
March 8, 2018
False Alarms and Exaggerated Threats
Photo by Anthony Quintano | CC BY 2.0
Three days after the January 13 false alarm of a North Korean nuclear attack on Hawaii, Japan’s public TV broadcaster NHK issued its own false alarm around 7 p.m., warning in error that North Korea had launched a missile at Japan. As reported by CNN, Jan. 17, and by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and Reuters Jan. 16, the shocking message was received by Japanese smart phone users and by NHK TV website viewers.
Like in Hawaii, the Japanese public was amazed to read, according to a translation from Reuters: “NORTH KOREA APPEARS TO HAVE LAUNCHED A MISSILE. THE GOVERNMENT URGES PEOPLE TO TAKE SHELTER INSIDE BUILDINGS OR UNDERGROUND.”
Unlike Hawaii’s scare, which threw the state’s population of 1.4 million into a panic, NHK Japan’s fake news was broadcast nation-wide to about 127 million people. The TV network blamed the terror alert on a “switching error” and corrected it in less than 10 minutes. “We are deeply sorry,” NHK announced on its 9:00 p.m. news Jan. 16.
In Arsenals of Folly, author Richard Rhodes documents how US government “officials frequently and deliberately inflated their estimates of military threats facing the United States, beginning with … exaggerated Soviet military capabilities.” A review in the Feb. 7, 2008 New York Review of Books said, “The exaggeration of foreign threats, however pernicious, is a tactic,” and quotes Rhodes’ study: “Threat inflation was crucial to maintaining the defense budgets… Fear was part of the program …”
The New York Review also noted that in 1998, the US Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States “warned that Iran and North Korea could hit the US with missiles within five years.” Twenty years later, neither country can do so.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Stalinist Purge In America?
This year could turn out to be a defining year for the United States. It is clear that the US military/security complex and the Democratic Party aided by their media vassals intend to purge Donald Trump from the presidency. One of the open conspirators declared the other day that we have to get rid of Trump now before he wins re-election in a landslide.
It is now a known fact that Russiagate is a conspiracy of the military/security complex, Obama regime, Democratic National Committee, and presstitute media to destroy President Trump. However, the presstitutes never present this fact to the American public. Nevertheless, a majority of Americans do not believe the Democrats and the presstitutes that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election.
One question before us is: Will Mueller and the Democrats succeed in purging Donald Trump, as Joseph Stalin succeed in purging Lenin’s Bolsheviks, including Nikolai Bukharin, who Lenin called “the golden boy of the revolution,” or will the Democratic Party and the presstitutes discredit themselves such that the country moves far to the right.
Stalin didn’t need facts and could frame-up people at will as he had absolute power. In the US the presstitute media, like Stalin, does not concern itself with facts, but the presstitutes do not have absolute power. Indeed, few people trust the presstitutes, and even fewer trust Mueller.
Many are puzzled that President Trump has not moved against his enemies as they have no evidence for their charges. Indeed, Mueller’s indictments have nothing whatsoever to do with the Russiagate accusations. Why are not Mueller, Comey, Rosenstein, and all the rest indicted for their clear and obvious crimes?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
March 7, 2018
Home Prices Sink, Sales Plunge in Toronto
Homeowners who bought a year ago are down C$110,000 on average.
Home sales in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada’s largest housing market, plunged 35% in February compared to a year ago, to 5,175 homes. The plunge in volume was spread across all types of homes. Even the previously white-hot condo sector froze over:
Detached houses -41.2%
Semi-detached houses -28.7%
Townhouses -26.8%
Condos -30.8%.
New listings of homes for sale rose 7% year-over-year to 10,520, according to the report by the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB). The total number of active listings of homes for sale – which includes the new listings and the listings from prior months that hadn’t sold – skyrocketed 147% year-over-year to 13,362 homes.
At the current sales rate, total listings signify a supply of 2.5 months, which indicates that the housing market isn’t exactly drowning in listings, but the heat has burned out.
This is confirmed by the average days on the market before the home is sold or the listing is pulled: at 25 days, it was still relatively low, but it had nearly doubled from 13 days in February a year ago when the market was approaching its April apogee.
The plunge in sales volume, which has been going on for months, and the surge in listings signify that the market is in the process of changing direction. Housing markets move very slowly, over years, and not minutes. But prices are now following the decline in volume.
The average price for the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) plunged 12.4% overall to C$767,818. This represents a drop of about C$110,000 in the average home price over the 12-month period.
It split up this way:
City of Toronto: -6.1% to C$806,494.
Rest of the GTA without Toronto: -16.1% to C$743,196.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Leaked Files Show How NSA Tracks Other Countries’ Hackers
AP
LEAKED FILES SHOW HOW NSA TRACKS OTHER COUNTRIES’ HACKERS
WHEN THE MYSTERIOUS entity known as “Shadow Brokers” released a tranche of stolen NSA hacking tools to the internet a year ago, most experts who studied the material honed in on the most potent tools, so-called “zero-day” exploits that could be used to install malware and take over machines. But a group of Hungarian security researchers spotted something else in the data, a collection of scripts and scanning tools the NSA uses to detect other nation-state hackers on the machines it infects.
It turns out those scripts and tools are just as interesting as the exploits. They show that in 2013 — the year the NSA tools were believed to have been stolen by Shadow Brokers — the agency was tracking at least 45 different nation-state operations, known in the security community as Advanced Persistent Threats, or APTs. Some of these appear to be operations known by the broader security community — but some may be threat actors and operations currently unknown to researchers.
The scripts and scanning tools dumped by Shadow Brokers and studied by the Hungarians were created by an NSA team known as Territorial Dispute, or TeDi. Intelligence sources told The Intercept the NSA established the team after hackers, believed to be from China, stole designs for the military’s Joint Strike Fighter plane, along with other sensitive data, from U.S. defense contractors in 2007; the team was supposed to detect and counter sophisticated nation-state attackers more quickly, when they first began to emerge online.
“As opposed to the U.S. only finding out in five years that everything was stolen, their goal was to try to figure out when it was being stolen in real time,” one intelligence source told The Intercept.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Trump Trade Wars A Perfect Smokescreen For A Market Crash
First, I would like to say that the timing of Donald Trump’s announcement on expansive trade tariffs is unusual if not impeccable. I say this only IF Trump’s plan was to benefit establishment globalists by giving them perfect cover for their continued demolition of the market bubbles that they have engineered since the crash of 2008.
If this was not his plan, then I am a bit bewildered by what he hopes to accomplish. It is certainly not the end of trade deficits and the return of American industry. But let’s explore the situation for a moment…
Trump is in my view a modern day Herbert Hoover. One of Hoover’s first actions as president in response to the crash of 1929 was to support increased tax cuts, primarily for corporations (this was then followed in 1932 by extensive tax increases in the midst of the depression, so let’s see what Trump does in the next couple of years). Then, he instituted tariffs through the Smoot-Hawley Act. His hyperfocus on massive infrastructure spending resulted in U.S. debt expansion and did nothing to dig the U.S. out of its unemployment abyss. In fact, infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam, which were launched in 1931, were not paid off for over 50 years. Hoover oversaw the beginning of the Great Depression and ended up as a single-term Republican president who paved the way socially for Franklin D. Roosevelt, an essential communist and perhaps the worst president in American history.
This is not to say Hoover was responsible for the Great Depression. That distinction goes to the Federal Reserve, which had artificially lowered interest rates and then suddenly raised them going into the economic downturn causing an aggressive bubble implosion (just like the central bank is doing right now).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Social Transformation Through ‘The Commons’ (w/ David Bollier)
David Bollier joins us this week to discuss “the commons” and what such a concept means for social transformation. You can read more about David’s ideas in his paper for the NewSystems: Possibilities and Proposals series, and also read more of his work at www.Bollier.org.
Subscribe to the Next System Podcast via iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, Stitcher Radio, or RSS.
Adam Simpson: Welcome back to The Next System Podcast. I’m your host, Adam Simpson, joined today by self-described commons activist and rirector of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, David Bollier. David is the author of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. He’s also the editor of From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond with John Clippinger, as well as Patterns of Commoning, and The Wealth of the Commons with Silke Helfrich.
Wouldn’t you know it, David is here to talk to me today about the concept of the commons. David, welcome to The Next System Podcast.
David Bollier: It’s great to be here.
Adam Simpson: Great. Well, before we get into the concept of the commons, David, I wanted to ask you: How did you first come to learn about this concept, what made you embrace it, what really drew you to this kind of work that you do?
David Bollier: Well, in the 1970s and 80s when I was working for Ralph Nader, all of my friends were fighting what I would now call enclosures of the commons, meaning privatization and commodification of things like federally funded research, public lands and the air waves, which are used by broadcasters for free and so forth. All these were being taken private, but we really didn’t have a language for talking about this.nm
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Can we cure the global eating disorder?
We stayed overnight in Dodson, Montana in a charming Bed and Breakfast owned and managed by Sandra Calk. At breakfast we got a peep view into her fridge. There were fruit and vegetables, cheeses, juices, marmalade, honey pickles, condiments and everlasting tortillas. There were eggs and rhubarb from a neighbor but nothing else was from close by, the regular milk came from Texas, and the vanilla scented one from Idaho. Even most of the meat products did not come from Montana, despite the state having millions of cattle grazing its green rolling hills; Montana has more cows than people. Montana cattle are finished in huge feed lot operations in Colorado, Nebraska or Texas where they are fed on maize from the fertile Corn Belt of the United States.
This snapshot of Sandra’s fridge is a mirror of the global food and agriculture system. The example is in no way extreme. In most parts of the industrial and urbanized world, people hardly eat anything that comes from close by. Consumption has no direct link to local agriculture which is organized in the same way as modern assembly lines, with parts being delivered from all over the globe to be assembled as a Gorby’s pizza, a McDonald’s hamburger or a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Indonesian consumers munched a stunning 14 billion packages of instant wheat noodles in 2012.[i] What is strange about that? Indonesia produces no wheat at all – what has become a national dish is based on a raw material that is completely imported.[ii]
When anthropologists describe some preliterate society, the conditions of food production and its role in society usually forms a central part of the narrative. Taboos, gender roles, power, ownership are all linked to food.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Sarah Woods on imagination and “the crisis of what comes next”.
Sarah Woods on imagination and “the crisis of what comes next”.
If it is true that we are living through a time in which our collective imagination is increasingly devalued and undernourished, what might be the role of story in that, and how might story be part of the remedy? There are few better people to discuss this with than Sarah Woods. Sarah is a writer across all media and her work has been produced by many companies including the RSC, Hampstead and the BBC.
Her opera ‘Wake’, composed by Giorgio Battistelli, opens in March, as does her play ‘Primary’, about the UK state education system. Alongside many other projects, she is currently writing the musical of the play she co-wrote with the late Heathcote Williams ‘The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency’, about squatting and DIY culture. Her play ‘Borderland’ just won the Tinniswood Award for best radio drama script of 2017.
Sarah is a Wales Green Hero, and her work is about, as she told me, “story wherever it’s most useful, across the board”. I started by asking her the question I always ask in these interviews, but never as the first question. If you had been elected as the Prime Minister at the next election and you had run on a programme of ‘Make Britain Imaginative Again’, what might be some of the things that you would announce in your first 100 days?
“I would want for everybody to start looking at society and their lives as systems, which is about three things isn’t it? Elements and interconnections and then the things that come out of that. I suppose at the moment I feel that we’ve got a problem with the way that we’re relating to each other. There’s a lot of division so that we’re in little boxes.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is The Sky The Limit For U.S. Shale?
The IEA’s forecast that U.S. shale will dominate the oil market over the next three years because of skyrocketing shale production made global headlines on Monday, but the conclusions should not be taken as gospel. The industry could run into a series of headwinds that could slow production growth, starting with demands from investors to see higher returns.
“Last year, it was drill, baby, drill,” John Hess, CEO Hess Corp., told the audience at the CERAWeek Conference in Houston on Monday. “This year, it’s show me the money.” He argued that shale drillers are feeling pressure from investors to post profits, which could slow the pace of development.
Yet, so far, while the newfound and highly-touted capital discipline mantra is being talked about quite a lot, it has not translated into a slower pace of drilling. The U.S. is breaking production records every week, and output is growing at a blistering rate.
However, that doesn’t mean that the growth rate will continue, or that U.S. shale will add nearly 4 million barrels per day over the next five years, as the IEA predicts.
There are a variety of bottlenecks that could constrain output and slow growth. For instance, with so much drilling concentrated in a relatively small area in West Texas, there are shortages of oilfield services, fracking crews, labor, and frac sand.
Last year, the backlog of drilled but uncompleted wells (DUCs) mushroomed as shale E&Ps drilled more wells than they could complete. The completion rate is now on the upswing, up 79 percent from a year ago, according to Reuters. But the number of DUCs is also rising, illustrating a persistent bottleneck in completion services. There are other holdups, including takeaway capacity for natural gas and limits on gas flaring, which could hamper oil production.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Shale Pioneer Issues Warning To US Drillers
U.S. shale has effectively upended the oil industry, with predictions that total U.S. oil production will surpass Saudi Arabia’s output this year, in turn rivalling Russia’s to become the preeminent global producer. From its position of being dependent on, and subordinate to OPEC, the U.S. has seemingly become the big bad wolf. Through a catalogue of tactical errors and misplaced belief in its own muscle, the mighty brick edifice of OPEC has begun to look more like a bundle of sticks.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that the U.S. will become a net energy exporter by the late 2020s, but how accurate is that forecast, and to what extent is it mere hyperbole? In October last year there were already caveats about the nature of U.S. shale, with some warning that aggressive expansion was leading to rapid initial growth that would ultimately peak too soon. Mark Papa, former head of EOG Resources (NYSE: EOG) raised the question of flatlining output in the face of the doubling of the oil rig count, “(h)ow can a rig count be double and yet production be stagnant?”
Figures have also been influenced by the rapid pace of technological development, a pace which has itself plateaued. Robert Clarke, WoodMac research director for Lower 48 upstream, said that “(i)f future wells … are not offset by continued technology evolution, the Permian may peak in 2021”. IEA forecasts then, may be based on rapid growth and technological development that simply isn’t sustainable.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
