Steve Bull's Blog, page 1357
June 23, 2017
Certain U.S. Airlines Are Testing Mandatory Facial Recognition Scans on Americans Flying Abroad
Just when you thought air travel couldn’t get any more invasive, authoritarian and downright miserable, the Department of Homeland Security and two U.S. carriers are determined to prove you wrong.
Yesterday, Harrison Rudolph, a law fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, wrote a very troubling article at Slatetitled, DHS Is Starting to Scan Americans’ Faces Before They Get on International Flights. Here’s some of what we learned:
Decades ago, Congress mandated that federal authorities keep track of foreign nationals as they enter and leave the United States. If the government could record when every visitor stepped on and off of U.S. soil, so the thinking went, it could easily see whether a foreign national had overstayed a visa.
But in June of last year, without congressional authorization, and without consulting the public, the Department of Homeland Security started scanning the faces of Americans leaving the country, too.
You may have heard about new JetBlue or Delta programs that let passengers board their flights by submitting to a face recognition scan. Few realize, however, that these systems are actually the first phase of DHS’s “Biometric Exit” program.
For certain international flights from Atlanta and New York, DHS has partnered with Delta to bring mandatory face recognition scans to the boarding gate. The Delta system checks a passenger is supposed to be on the plane by comparing her face, captured by a kiosk at the boarding gate, to passenger manifest photos from State Department databases. It also checks passengers’ citizenship or immigration status. Meanwhile, in Boston, DHS has partnered with JetBlue to roll out a voluntary face recognition system for travelers flying to Aruba. In JetBlue’s case, you can actually get your face scanned instead of using a physical ticket.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Saudi Arabia top non-U.S. destination for Canadian arms exports: federal report
LAVs (light armoured vehicles) and components similar to the one pictured above are among the top military exports Canada sends to Saudi Arabia. (Bill Graveland/Canadian Press)
Saudi Arabia has regained its title as Canada’s top non-U.S. destination for exporting military goods after having been narrowly bumped last year by the United Kingdom, according to a federal report on arms sales.
The report, prepared by Global Affairs Canada and tabled in Parliament on Tuesday, reveals that the Saudi government purchased over $142 million worth of Canadian arms in 2016. That accounted for nearly 20 per cent of all Canadian munitions exports reported in the annual filing.
The report does not factor in arms exports to the United States, due to a long-standing exemption agreement. However, as stated in the report, as a general rule shipments to the U.S. account for nearly 50 per cent of all military good exports from Canada.
The total value of military goods sold abroad to countries other than the U.S. last year nearly reached $718 million. Canada’s NATO partners and traditional allies made up the bulk of the export market, including Australia, which purchased $115.8 million of Canadian-made equipment — second behind Saudi Arabia.
The sales to Saudi Arabia, however, will likely the draw the most attention and potential criticism from human rights groups, which have fought a protracted battle to halt the $14.8-billion sale of light armoured vehicles by General Dynamics Land Systems Canada — a deal approved by the former Conservative government, but green-lit by the Liberals.
The executive director for the anti-armament group Project Ploughshares says the most recent report once again signals an unwillingness on the part of the government to change its stance on Saudi Arabia.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
BofA: “Central Banks Are Now In A Desperate Dilemma”…”Start Buying Volatility”
One week after the second biggest weekly inflow to Wall Street on record, the “risk on” rotation ended abruptly in the ensuing five days, when as Bank of America writes overnight, it observed “Inflows to structural “deflation”, outflows from cyclical “inflation”; with oil the “poster child” for this trend.”
Half a year after central bankers around the globe rejoiced that the Trump victory may finally spur the long-delayed period of global reflation, that hope is now dead and buried (even as the Fed keeps hiking into some imaginary inflation wave) which BofA’s Michael Hartnett observes not only in asset prices, but also in fund flows.
As the BofA strategist writes in a note aptly titled “Bubble, bubble, oil & trouble”, the big flow message “is structural “deflation” dominating cyclical “inflation” (oil price is the “poster child” for victory of deflation): outflows from TIPS; first outflows from bank loans in 32 weeks; outflows from US value funds in 8 of past the 9 weeks; 1st inflows to REITS in 11 weeks; biggest inflows to utilities in 51 weeks.”
More importantly the tsunami of recent inflows, mostly into US equities, appears to finally be slowing: following sizable inflows to equities & bonds last week ($33.5bn in aggregate), a week of modest flows: $5.0bn into bonds, $0.5bn into equities, $0.8bn outflows from gold. Additionally, after the recent “tech wreck”, flows show confirm that contrarians – or simply stopped out algos – have flirted with sector rotation as inflows to energy ($0.4bn) were offset by outflows from tech ($0.2bn) & growth funds ($2.1bn);
Looking at BofA’s client base, Harnett notes that private clients were also sellers of tech past 4 weeks; and adds that despite the 20% YTD decline in oil price, energy funds ($2.8bn) and MLPs ($2.6bn) see inflows in 2017.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Twilight of Anthropolatry
During the last three months, while on hiatus from blogging, I’ve looked back over the eleven-year run of The Archdruid Report. As my regular readers know, the point of that prolonged experiment in online prose was my attempt to explore the primary historical fact of our time—the accelerating decline and impending fall of industrial civilization—from every angle I could think of, including some I never imagined addressing at all when I started blogging back in 2006.
Those changes of angle happened partly because it gets boring to talk about the same thing in the same way over and over again, of course, but there was a deeper factor as well. I started off discussing what I thought was the straightforward point that you can’t fuel infinite economic growth by drawing down a finite resource base. Sounds like basic common sense, doesn’t it? It did to me, too, but it nonetheless fielded a remarkable amount of pushback. A great many people seemed to be unable to get their minds around the fact that each ton of coal, barrel of petroleum, or cubic foot of natural gas burned to fuel their lifestyles really does go away forever.
So I began discussing that issue from different angles of approach, and over time the blog gathered an online community of people who found one or more of those angles interesting. We talked about systems ecology, economics, history and the cycles by which civilizations rise and fall; we hauled the appropriate-technology movement of the Seventies out of the memory hole to which it’s been consigned for the last thirty years, and unpacked some of the things it had to offer, now that we’re experiencing the future that the movement’s spokespeople warned about.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Four Reasons Central Banks are Wrong to Fight Deflation
The word “deflation” can be defined in various ways. According to the most widely accepted definition today, deflation is a sustained decrease of the price level. Older authors have often used the expression “deflation” to denote a decreasing money supply, and some contemporary authors use it to characterize a decrease of the inflation rate. All of these definitions are acceptable, depending on the purpose of the analysis. None of them, however, lends itself to justifying an artificial increase of the money supply.
The harmful character of deflation is today one of the sacred dogmas of monetary policy. The champions of the fight against deflation usually present six arguments to make their case.1 One, in their eyes it is a matter of historical experience that deflation has negative repercussions on aggregate production and, therefore, on the standard of living. To explain this presumed historical record, they hold, two, that deflation incites the market participants to postpone buying because they speculate on ever lower prices. Furthermore, they consider, three, that a declining price level makes it more difficult to service debts contracted at a higher price level in the past. These difficulties threaten to entail, four, a crisis within the banking industry and thus a dramatic curtailment of credit. Five, they claim that deflation in conjunction with “sticky prices” results in unemployment. And finally, six, they consider that deflation might reduce nominal interest rates to such an extent that a monetary policy of “cheap money,” to stimulate employment and production, would no longer be possible, because the interest rate cannot be decreased below zero.
However, theoretical and empirical evidence substantiating these claims is either weak or lacking altogether.2 First, in historical fact, deflation has had no clear negative impact on aggregate production.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Real Purpose Behind The Russian/Trump Conspiracy Propaganda
Just after the US presidential election in 2016 I published an article titled ‘Order Out Of Chaos: Defeat Of The Left Comes With A Cost’, covering a rather difficult subject matter, namely the concept of “4th Generation Warfare” and how it is used by establishment elitists to defeat popular resistance to their agenda of centralization and globalization. 4th Gen tactics are confusing to many because most people think in terms of single movements and direct correlations; they think that a punch thrown is a punch intended to strike, rather than intended as a feint or misdirection.
I’ll put it another way – some people play chess and they only see the attack in front of them. Others play chess and they see the attack three moves ahead. 4th gen warfare is a “three steps ahead” style of fighting that focuses on a very specific goal: Tricking the enemy into destroying himself, or enslaving himself, so that you don’t have to take any risks by moving against him directly. That is to say, 4th gen warfare is first and foremost about psychology. That which you see with your eyes is usually not what is actually happening.
For example, when predicting the election win of Donald Trump and the passage of Brexit, I based my conclusions on a 4th gen strategy. According to the behavior and rhetoric of globalists and their organizations at the time, it seemed to me that they were allowing sovereignty and conservative movements to gain a foothold in the political arena. They were letting us THINK that we were winning.
This accomplishes a few things – it takes conservatives off their guard and convinces them to think in terms of defending government rather than overthrowing government.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
June 21, 2017
Owning Gold Is the First Step to “Freedom Insurance”
It’s predictable…
A government in need of cash will turn to destructive “solutions.”
Money printing, higher taxes, and more regulations often come first. Unfortunately, these are just the hors d’oeuvres before a 10-course meal.
As they become increasingly desperate, governments implement increasingly destructive policies. This might include capital controls, price controls, people controls, official currency devaluations, wealth confiscations, retirement account nationalizations, and more.
The same pattern has played out again and again around the world and throughout history. The worse a government’s fiscal health gets, the more destructive its policies become.
This is the root of political risk.
But no matter where you live, international diversification can greatly reduce the threat your home government poses to your personal and financial wellbeing.
You know the benefits of diversifying your investment portfolio. If you put all of your asset eggs in one basket, you could lose your entire portfolio if that basket breaks.
The same idea applies to political risk. If your home country “breaks”—and turns to the destructive policies I just mentioned—you could lose everything.
Most people have medical, life, fire, and car insurance. You hope you never have to use these policies, but you have them anyway. They give you peace of mind and protect you if and when the worst does happen.
It’s no secret that political risk is snowballing in many parts of the world. This is especially true in the US and Europe, where welfare and warfare spending continues unabated. It doesn’t matter which party is in power.
But no matter where you live, international diversification can greatly reduce the threat your home government poses to your personal and financial wellbeing.
You know the benefits of diversifying your investment portfolio. If you put all of your asset eggs in one basket, you could lose your entire portfolio if that basket breaks.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Former White House Sr Advisor: “The Cult of Credibility” Will Take Us “Further Up The Escalation Ladder in Syria”
Colin Kahl: he was Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President from October 2014 to January 2017; image via FlickrRussia will not back down, and neither will its Syrian and Iranian allies on the ground, says a former White House insider.
After the dramatic downing of a Syrian Air Force jet over Raqqa province by a US Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet on Monday, a former senior national security advisor to the Obama administration, Colin Kahl, warns that the Washington “cult of credibility” will lead the United States into “quagmire” and “further up the escalation ladder in Syria.”
Kahl’s statement on the incident, issued via Twitter, gives rare confirmation of a hawkish Washington national security culture which dangerously places credibility and political careerism over genuine US interests and defense.
As former Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President specializing in the Levant and Persian Gulf region, Kahl was directly involved in formulating Syria and regional policy in the Obama White House.
Here is Kahl’s statement as published through a Twitter thread [emphasis mine]:
The cult of credibility is as popular in DC as it is dangerous. Watch Syria. The risk of sliding into a big war is rising. For years, hawks have argued that Assad & Iran (& Russia after 2015) were essentially paper tigers in Syria. The Axis of Assad could be backed down & easily deterred if the US just showed some muscle. A few threats, strikes, no-fly zones. Voila! Obama was often criticized for being too cautious & concerned about escalation & quagmire risks in Syria. But consider Team Trump has now: Retaliated vs Assad for CW, Bombed Iranian-backed militia 3 times, Shot down an Iranian-made drone, Downed Syria jet. Yet the regime/Iran/Russia haven’t backed down.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
June 20, 2017
What’s Wrong With The U.S. Oil Export Boom
The lead editorial in Friday’s Wall Street Journal was pure energy nonsense.’
“Lessons of the Energy Export Boom” proclaimed that the United States is becoming the oil and gas superpower of the world. This despite the uncomfortable fact that it is also the world’s biggest importer of crude oil.
The Journal uses statistical sleight-of-hand to argue that the U.S. only imports 25% of its oil but the average is 47% for 2017. Saudi Arabia and Russia–the real oil superpowers–import no oil.
The piece includes the standard claptrap about how the fracking revolution has pushed break-even prices to absurdly low levels. But another article in the same newspaper on the same day described how producers are losing $0.33 on every dollar in the red hot Permian basin shale plays. Oops.
The main point of the editorial, however, is to celebrate a surge in U.S. oil exports to almost 1 million barrels per day in recent weeks. The Journal calls lifting the crude oil export ban that made this possible “a policy triumph.” What the editorial fails to mention is that exports actually fell after the ban was lifted, and only increased because of Nigerian production outages (Figure 1).
(Click to enlarge)
Figure 1. U.S. Oil Exports Have Increased As Nigerian Production Has Fallen. Source: EIA and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Tight oil is ultra-light and can only be used in special refineries, most of which are in the U.S. It must be deeply discounted in order to be processed overseas in the relatively few niche refineries designed for light oil. That’s why Brent price is higher than WTI.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Illinois Comptroller: “The State Can No Longer Function”
With just 10 days to go until Illinois enters its third year without a budget, resulting in the state’s imminent downgrade to junk status and potentially culminating in a default for the state whose unpaid bills now surpass $15 billion, Democratic Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza issued a warning to Illinois Gov. Rauner and other elected officials on Tuesday, saying in a letter that her office has “very serious concerns” it may no longer be able to guarantee “timely and predictable payments” for some core services.
In the letter posted on her website, Mendoza who over the weekend warned that Illinois is “in massive crisis mode” and that “this is not a false alarm” said the state is “effectively hemorrhaging money” due to various court orders and laws that have left government spending roughly $600 million more a month than it’s taking in. Mendoza said her office will continue to make debt payments as required, but indicated that services most likely to be affected include long-term care, hospice and supportive living centers for seniors. She added that managed care organizations that serve Medicaid recipients are owed more than $2.8 billion in overdue bills as of June 15.
“The state can no longer function without a responsible and complete budget without severely impacting our core obligations and decimating services to the state’s most in-need citizens,” Mendoza wrote. “We must put our fiscal house in order. It is already too late. Action is needed now.”
Unveiling the most dire langage yet, in her letter Mendoza said “we are now reaching a new phase of crisis” perhaps in an attempt to prompt the Democrats and Republicans to sit down and come up with a comrpomise:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
