arstechnica | One-shot cures for diseases are not great for business—more
specifically, they’re bad for longterm profits—Goldman Sachs analysts
noted in an April 10 report for biotech clients, first reported by CNBC.
The investment banks’ report, titled “The Genome Revolution,” asks
clients the touchy question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business
model?” The answer may be “no,” according to follow-up information
provided.
Analyst Salveen Richter and colleagues laid it out:
The potential to deliver “one shot cures” is one of the
most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically engineered cell
therapy, and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very
different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic
therapies... While this proposition carries tremendous value for
patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine
developers looking for sustained cash flow.
For a real-world example, they pointed to Gilead Sciences, which
markets treatments for hepatitis C that have cure rates exceeding 90
percent. In 2015, the company’s hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at
$12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer
infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish.
Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that the treatments will bring in less
than $4 billion this year.
“[Gilead]’s rapid rise and fall of its hepatitis C franchise
highlights one of the dynamics of an effective drug that permanently
cures a disease, resulting in a gradual exhaustion of the prevalent pool
of patients,” the analysts wrote. The report noted that diseases such
as common cancers—where the “incident pool remains stable”—are less
risky for business.
To get around the sustainability issue overall, the report suggests
that biotech companies focus on diseases or conditions that seem to be
becoming more common and/or are already high-incidence. It also suggests
that companies be innovative and constantly expanding their portfolio
of treatments. This can “offset the declining revenue trajectory of
prior assets." Lastly, it hints that, as such cures come to fruition,
they could open up more investment opportunities in treatments for
“disease of aging.” Fist tap Dale
theconservativetreehouse | If you look at Robert Mueller from the position of trying to protect
his cherished Deep State institutions from horrible Trump swamp
draining…. things begin to take a more accurate context. The only way
for Mueller to protect his Swamp Allies and Institutions, was to
generate leverage against Trump.
Having established only political leverage, nothing factually
unlawful or illegal, the Mueller investigation begins to dry up.
Leverage diminishes.
Without direct leverage against President Trump, Team Mueller moved
to position leverage against those Trump cares about… that’s a secondary
approach; but the secondary leverage approach is fraught with public
noting Mueller is on a “witch hunt”… the investigation into outlying
Trump allies becomes transparent in motive. Support for Mueller erodes
amid independent-minded people.
Enter Rudy Giuliani, a political and legal Subject Matter Expert – with direct knowledge of evidence held
by NYPD and NY FBI field office of gross criminal conduct by Hillary
Clinton. (Weiner Laptop etc) Buried by SDNY Clinton Allies.
With Special Counsel Mueller having exhausted most of his
investigative leverage, Giuliani enters to negotiate Mueller’s exit and
discuss his team’s path of retreat and image face-saving.
The discussion from Mueller’s perspective will not center around
Trump, but rather center around how much risk to Hillary Clinton, and by
extension political allies within FBI and DOJ – including Obama White
House, Mueller will permit.
Mueller will be looking to protect the interests of Obama, Clinton,
Lynch, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, etc. and negotiating degrees of risk to
the institutions each represents. This is the political horsetrading
phase. The leverage cards held by each participant are laid on the table
for discussion. Low leverage officials will be sacrificed by Mueller to
protect those holding more leverage.
Giuliani is a well qualified person to present the Trump
administration position within these negotiations. They are essentially
negotiating who faces criminal prosecution and who doesn’t.
Ultimately protecting Obama and Clinton will be of higher importance
to Mueller. If Mueller doesn’t protect Clinton, he knows her team will
destroy everyone if she goes down. That scorched earth approach is a
historic part of Team Clinton’s leverage. The stronger the evidence is
against Clinton the more people Mueller will have to give up to protect
her. The stronger the evidence against the corrupt institutions, the
bigger the officials Mueller will have to sacrifice to save them.
Negotiating all this with Robert Mueller will likely be Rudy Giuliani’s primary job.
Likely the general public will never know the ultimate deal
decisions. We will only be able to gauge the scale of corruption by the
officials Mueller agrees to sacrifice.
bloomberg | Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told President Donald Trump
last week that he isn’t a target of any part of Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s investigation or the probe into his longtime lawyer, Michael
Cohen, according to several people familiar with the matter.
Rosenstein,
who brought up the investigations himself, offered the assurance during
a meeting with Trump at the White House last Thursday, a development
that helped tamp down the president’s desire to remove Rosenstein or
Mueller, the people said.
After the meeting, Trump told some of his closest advisers that it’s
not the right time to remove either man since he’s not a target of the
probes. One person said Trump doesn’t want to take any action that would
drag out the investigation.
The change in attitude by the president comes after weeks of
attacks on the special counsel and the Justice Department, raising
questions about whether he might take drastic steps to shut down the
probes.
The
shift gives some breathing room for Mueller, as well as Rosenstein, who
has been criticized strongly by House Republicans for being slow to
comply with requests for classified documents. Last week’s meeting was
set up in part to allow Rosenstein to assuage Trump’s frustration with
his decisions.
U.S. stocks pared their decline on the news. The
S&P 500 Index closed down 0.6 percent in New York trading after an
earlier slump of as much as 1 percent.
Rosenstein’s message may
have been based on a technicality. Trump may not officially be a target,
but Mueller hasn’t ruled out making him one at some point in the
future, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the unfolding
investigation.
NYTimes | High in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain, an international team of researchers set out four buckets to gather a shower of viruses falling from the sky.
Scientists have surmised there is a stream of viruses circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel. Very little is known about this realm, and that’s why the number of deposited viruses stunned the team in Spain. Each day, they calculated, some 800 million viruses cascade onto every square meter of the planet.
Most of the globe-trotting viruses are swept into the air by sea spray, and lesser numbers arrive in dust storms.
“Unimpeded by friction with the surface of the Earth, you can travel great distances, and so intercontinental travel is quite easy” for viruses, said Curtis Suttle, a marine virologist at the University of British Columbia. “It wouldn’t be unusual to find things swept up in Africa being deposited in North America.”
The study by Dr. Suttle and his colleagues, published earlier this year in the International Society of Microbial Ecology Journal, was the first to count the number of viruses falling onto the planet. The research, though, is not designed to study influenza or other illnesses, but to get a better sense of the “virosphere,” the world of viruses on the planet.
Generally it’s assumed these viruses originate on the planet and are swept upward, but some researchers theorize that viruses actually may originate in the atmosphere. (There is a small group of researchers who believe viruses may even have come here from outer space, an idea known as panspermia.)
Whatever the case, viruses are the most abundant entities on the planet by far. While Dr. Suttle’s team found hundreds of millions of viruses in a square meter, they counted tens of millions of bacteria in the same space.
Mostly thought of as infectious agents, viruses are much more than that. It’s hard to overstate the central role that viruses play in the world: They’re essential to everything from our immune system to our gut microbiome, to the ecosystems on land and sea, to climate regulation and the evolution of all species. Viruses contain a vast diverse array of unknown genes — and spread them to other species.
Last year, three experts called for a new initiative to better understand viral ecology, especially as the planet changes. “Viruses modulate the function and evolution of all living things,” wrote Matthew B. Sullivan of Ohio State, Joshua Weitz of Georgia Tech, and Steven W. Wilhelm of the University of Tennessee. “But to what extent remains a mystery.”
theguardian | Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic
drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the
global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full
recycling of bottles.
The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug.
The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had
evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even
better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic
used for soft drink bottles. “What actually turned out was we improved
the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at the
University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. “It’s great and a
real finding.”
The mutant enzyme takes a few days to start breaking down the plastic
– far faster than the centuries it takes in the oceans. But the
researchers are optimistic this can be speeded up even further and
become a viable large-scale process.
“What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic
back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back
to plastic,” said McGeehan. “It means we won’t need to dig up any more
oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the
environment.”
About 1m plastic bottles are sold each minute around the globe and, with just 14% recycled, many end up in the oceans where they have polluted even the remotest parts,
harming marine life and potentially people who eat seafood. “It is
incredibly resistant to degradation. Some of those images are horrific,”
said McGeehan. “It is one of these wonder materials that has been made a
little bit too well.”
However, currently even those bottles that are recycled can only be
turned into opaque fibres for clothing or carpets. The new enzyme
indicates a way to recycle clear plastic bottles back into clear plastic
bottles, which could slash the need to produce new plastic.
“You are always up against the fact that oil is cheap, so virgin PET
is cheap,” said McGeehan. “It is so easy for manufacturers to generate
more of that stuff, rather than even try to recycle. But I believe there
is a public driver here: perception is changing so much that companies
are starting to look at how they can properly recycle these.”
APNews | For more than two years, a U.S. agency secretly infiltrated Cuba’s
underground hip-hop movement, recruiting unwitting rappers to spark a
youth movement against the government, according to documents obtained
by The Associated Press.
The idea was to use Cuban musicians “to
break the information blockade” and build a network of young people
seeking “social change,” documents show. But the operation was
amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful.
On at least six occasions,
Cuban authorities detained or interrogated people involved in the
program; they also confiscated computer hardware, and in some cases it
contained information that jeopardized Cubans who likely had no idea
they were caught up in a clandestine U.S. operation. Still, contractors
working for the U.S. Agency for International Development kept putting
themselves and their targets at risk, the AP investigation found.
They
also ended up compromising Cuba’s vibrant hip-hop culture — which has
produced some of the hardest-hitting grassroots criticism since Fidel
Castro came to power in 1959. Artists that USAID contractors tried to
promote left the country or stopped performing after pressure from the
Cuban government, and one of the island’s most popular independent music
festivals was taken over after officials linked it to USAID.
The
program is laid out in documents involving Creative Associates
International, a Washington, D.C., contractor paid millions of dollars
to undermine Cuba’s communist government. The thousands of pages include
contracts, emails, preserved chats, budgets, expense reports, power
points, photographs and passports.
The work included the creation
of a “Cuban Twitter” social network and the dispatch of inexperienced
Latin American youth to recruit activists, operations that were the
focus of previous AP stories.
“Any assertions that our work is
secret or covert are simply false,” USAID said in a statement Wednesday.
Its programs were aimed at strengthening civil society “often in places
where civic engagement is suppressed and where people are harassed,
arrested, subjected to physical harm or worse.”
Creative Associates did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
strategic-culture | When
it comes to creating bogus news stories and advancing false narratives,
the British intelligence services have few peers. In fact, the Secret
Intelligence Service (MI-6) has led the way for its American “cousins”
and Britain’s Commonwealth partners – from Canada and Australia to India
and Malaysia – in the dark art of spreading falsehoods as truths.
Recently, the world has witnessed such MI-6 subterfuge in news stories
alleging that Russia carried out a novichok nerve agent attack against a
Russian émigré and his daughter in Salisbury, England. This propaganda
barrage was quickly followed by yet another – the latest in a series of
similar fabrications – alleging the Syrian government attacked civilians
in Douma, outside of Damascus, with chemical weapons.
It
should come as no surprise that American news networks rely on British
correspondents stationed in northern Syria and Beirut as their primary
sources. MI-6 has historically relied on non-official cover (NOC) agents
masquerading primarily as journalists, but also humanitarian aid
workers, Church of England clerics, international bankers, and hotel
managers, to carry out propaganda tasks. These NOCs are situated in
positions where they can promulgate British government disinformation to
unsuspecting actual journalists and diplomats.
For
decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office – the
Information Research Department (IRD) – carried out propaganda campaigns
using the international media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years
before Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Muammar
Qaddafi, and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western
destabilization and “regime change.” IRD and its associates at the
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and
editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets, tabloids, wire services,
and magazines, particularly “The Daily Telegraph,” “The Times,”
“Financial Times,” Reuters, “The Guardian,” and “The Economist,” ran
media smear campaigns against a number of leaders considered to be
leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow travelers).
These
leaders included Indonesia’s President Sukarno, North Korean leader
(and grandfather of Pyongyang’s present leader) Kim Il-Sung, Egypt’s
Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cyprus’s Archbishop Makarios, Cuba’s Fidel Castro,
Chile’s Salvador Allende, British Guiana’s Cheddi Jagan, Grenada’s
Maurice Bishop, Jamaica’s Michael Manley, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega,
Guinea’s Sekou Toure, Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara, Australia’s Gough
Whitlam, New Zealand’s David Lange, Cambodia’s Norodom Sihanouk, Malta’s
Dom Mintoff, Vanuatu’s Father Walter Lini, and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.
After
the Cold War, this same propaganda operation took aim at Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Venezuela’s
Hugo Chavez, Somalia’s Mohamad Farrah Aidid, and Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand
Aristide. Today, it is Assad’s, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s,
and Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont’s turn to be in
the Anglo-American state propaganda gunsights. Even Myanmar leader Aung
San Suu Kyi, long a darling of the Western media and such propaganda
moguls as George Soros, is now being targeted for Western visa bans and
sanctions over the situation with Muslim Rohingya insurgents in Rakhine
State.
FrontPage |In the Western world, knowledge
of history is poor -- and the awareness of history is frequently
poorer. For example, people often argue today as if the kind of
political order that prevails in Iraq is part of the immemorial Arab and
Islamic tradition. This is totally untrue. The kind of regime
represented by Saddam Hussein has no roots in either the Arab or Islamic
past. Rather, it is an ideological importation from Europe -- the only
one that worked and succeeded (at least in the sense of being able to
survive).
In 1940, the French government
accepted defeat and signed a separate peace with the Third Reich. The
French colonies in Syria and Lebanon remained under Vichy control, and
were therefore open to the Nazis to do what they wished. They became
major bases for Nazi propaganda and activity in the Middle East. The
Nazis extended their operations from Syria and Lebanon, with some
success, to Iraq and other places. That was the time when the Baath
Party was founded, as a kind of clone of the Nazi and Fascist parties,
using very similar methods and adapting a very similar ideology, and
operating in the same way -- as part of an apparatus of surveillance
that exists under a one-party state, where a party is not a party in the
Western democratic sense, but part of the apparatus of a government.
That was the origin of the Baath Party.
When the Third Reich collapsed,
and after an interval was replaced by the Soviet Union as the patron of
all anti-Western forces, the adjustment from the Nazi model to the
Communist model was not very difficult and was carried throughout
without problems. That is where the present Iraqi type of government
comes from. As I said before, it has no roots in the authentic Arabic or
Islamic past. It is, instead, part of the most successful and most
harmful process of Westernization to have occurred in the Middle East. When Westernization failed in
the Middle East, this failure was followed by a redefinition and return
to older, more deep-rooted perceptions of self and other. I mean, of
course, religion.
Religion had several
advantages. It was more familiar. It was more readily intelligible. It
could be understood immediately by Muslims. Nationalist and socialist
slogans, by contrast, needed explanation. Religion was less impeded.
What I mean is that even the most ruthless of dictatorships cannot
totally suppress religiously defined opposition. In the mosques, people
can meet and speak. In most fascist-style states, openly meeting and
speaking are rigidly controlled and repressed. This is not possible in
dealing with Islam. Islamic opposition movements can use a language
familiar to all, and, through mosques, can tap into a network of
communication and organization.
HuffPo | During the final months of World War II, Hitler saw his dreams for a
Third Reich crumble as Allied Forces turned the tides of war. Hitler
became increasingly desperate for results and for propaganda wins to
maintain morale. He sought counsel from Otto Skorzeny, the leader of Operation Greif,
which used German soldiers to infiltrate their opponents by adapting
enemy languages, uniforms and customs. Skorzeny was the twisted genius
who had dressed Nazi soldiers in American uniforms in an effort to
spread rumors of Eisenhower’s assassination and demoralize the Allies.
In 1943, Skorzeny led the rescue mission that freed Benito Mussolini
from prison. In 1944, he organized a secret unit of German suicide
bombers.
As the Nazi war effort failed, Hitler designated Skorzeny to create a
new secret underground resistance movement—a terrorist unit calledWerwolf.
The Werewolves’ sole purpose would be to attack the Allies after the
war was over. They were to perform random acts of violence around
Europe, sabotage rebuilding efforts, and destabilize governments in a
guerrilla effort to build the Third Reich.
Many of the Werewolves were captured by the Allied Forces or
abandoned their posts before unleashing much terror on Europe, but some
fled to the Middle East.
Skorzeny Sets Up Shop In The Middle East
In Infield’s 1981 biography, Skorzeny: Hitler’s Commando,
Infield describes how Skorzeny went to Egypt, where he recruited a
staff of former SS officers to mask themselves as converted Muslims and
train elite young Mujahideen and the Egyptian Army in terrorist tactics.
Infield knew and interviewed Skorzeny, and uncovered a great deal of
information relevant to the terrorism we are fighting today.
It was Skorzeny who trained Arab volunteers in guerrilla warfare
tactics to use against the British troops stationed in the Suez Canal
zone. Palestinian refugees also received commando training, and Skorzeny
planned their initial strikes into Israel via the Gaza Strip in
1953-1954.
One of these young Palestinians was Yasser Arafat, who went on to
become the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The
PLO was formed by Palestinian refugees seeking to claim land rights. It
was their terrorist arm, Black September, that carried out the horrific
kidnapping and murder of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972
Olympics in Munich.
The Nazi link to Islamic extremism and terrorist tactics is clear. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
also explores the Nazi political influence on radical Islamic political
organisations, including the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in Egypt in
1928) and the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party of Syria founded in 1947.
Former Nazis not only trained Islamic extremists in terror tactics, they
also encouraged a nationalistic, socialist and genocidal political
agenda in them.
scotsman | In Arabic, baath means renaissance or resurrection. The Baath Arab
Socialist Party, to give the organisation its formal title, is the
original secular Arab nationalist movement, founded in Damascus in the
1940s to combat Western colonial rule. But since then, the Baath Party
has undergone many chameleon-like twists in belief and purpose. Even the
young men in Iraq who today claim its discredited banner might be
surprised at the party’s real origins.
Those beginnings lie thousands of miles to the
west, in the leafy streets and pavement cafes of the left bank of the
Seine in Paris.
Here, in the 1930s, the two founders of the Baath
Party were educated at the Sorbonne University. They were middle-class
Arabs from the then French colony of Syria.
Michael Aflaq was a Greek Orthodox Christian and would become
the main ideologue of Baathism, preaching freedom from Western
colonialism, Arab unity and socialism. And Salah al-Din Bitar, born of a
Muslim family in Damascus, would be the practical politician, later
becoming prime minister of an independent Syria.
Back home in
French Syria, they became teachers by day and political intriguers by
night. Early Baathist ideas were strongly fringed with fascism, as you
might expect from a group of men whose ideas were formed in France in
the turbulent Thirties.
The movement was based on classless
racial unity, hence the strong anti-Marxism, and on national socialism
in the scientific sense of the word, such as nationalised industry and
an autarkic economy serving the needs of the nation. Hence, the
antipathy towards Western capitalism.
But the rise of German
fascism also played a role. Many in the Arab world saw Hitler as an
ally. In 1941, the Arab world was electrified by a pro-Axis coup in
Baghdad. At that time, Iraq was nominally independent but Britain
maintained a strong military presence. An Arab nationalist by the name
of Rashid Ali al-Kailani organised an army coup against the pro-British
Iraqi monarchy and requested help from Nazi Germany. In Damascus, then a
Vichy French colony, the Baath Party founders immediately organised
public demonstrations in support of Rashid Ali.
After the Second World War, the Baathists emerged
as the leadership of Arab nationalism for two reasons. First, they were
the only force with a coherent ideology. Second, the existing Arab
political elites were blamed for the establishment of the state of
Israel in 1948. Nor was Islam a competitor. For the Western-educated
founders of Baathism, Islam smacked of backwardness. For the nascent
Islamic fundamentalists, the Baathists were substituting Arabism for the
much wider historic conquests of Muslim civilisation. But it was that
pan-Arab nationalism that appealed to discontented Arab youth in the
Fifties and Sixties.
Baathism had something else to offer these
youths: its tight, disciplined internal organisation which - at any
rate, before the party became corrupt - stood in sharp contrast to the
ramshackle nature of many Arab civil institutions.
Like the Nazi
and Communist parties, the Baath is organised through small cells in a
rigid hierarchy. Members are expected to devote their life to the party.
In Iraq, would-be members pass through four stages even before becoming
a full member: supporter, sympathiser, nominee and trainee. Currently,
there are about two million Iraqis in these categories. The system
requires passing successfully a series of tests, so full members of
Saddam’s Baathist organisation are the most hardened and fanatical of
his supporters.
With war looming, Saddam has extended this
principle with the establishment of Fedayeen Saddam, many of whom have
been in action against allied troops. The Fedayeen consists of teenage
level members or novices eager to move up in the Baath hierarchy ladder.
In this respect, they are very reminiscent of the Hitler Youth.
It is estimated that there are about 40,000 full
members of the Baath Party in Iraq. Each is assigned to an autonomous
cell. A cell consists of three to five members, only one of whom would
have a link to the next level of operation. This limits the ability to
penetrate the organisation from without. This structure was born of the
original clandestine and illegal life of the Baathists before they came
to power.
wikipedia | In speeches, Hitler made apparently warm references towards Muslim
culture such as: "The peoples of Islam will always be closer to us than,
for example, France".[1]
A famous anecdote about Adolf Hitler's perspectives towards Islam and the Arabs is recounted by Albert Speer in his best-selling memoir, Inside the Third Reich.
Speer reports that "Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of
history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs."[2] The delegation had speculated that the world would have become "Mohammedan" if the Berbers and Arabs had won the Battle of Tours
in the 8th Century AD, and that the Germans would have become heirs to
"a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and in
subjugating all nations to that faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited
to the German temperament."[3] Speer then presents Hitler's claims on this subject:
Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial
inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the
harsher climate of the country. They could not have kept down the more
vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans
could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.[4]
Similarly, Hitler was transcribed as saying: "Had Charles Martel
not been victorious at Poitiers [...] then we should in all probability
have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the
heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone.
Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world."[5]
According to Speer, Hitler usually concluded his historical
speculation by remarking, "You see, it's been our misfortune to have the
wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who
regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan
religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"[6]
Hitler's views on the Arab world
This "exchange" occurred when Hitler received Saudi Arabian ruler Ibn Saud’s special envoy, Khalid al-Hud al-Gargani.[7] Earlier in this meeting Hitler noted that one of the three reasons why Nazi Germany had warm sympathies for the Arabs was:
… because we were jointly fighting the Jews. This led him to discuss Palestine
and the conditions there, and he then stated that he himself would not
rest until the last Jew had left Germany. Kalid al Hud observed that the
Prophet Mohammed … had acted the same way. He had driven the Jews out of Arabia ….[8]
Gilbert Achcar wryly observes that the Führer
did not point out to his Arab visitors at that meeting that until then
he had incited German Jews to emigrate to Palestine, and the Reich
actively helped Zionist organizations get around alleged British-imposed
restrictions on Jewish immigration.[9]
Hitler had told his military commanders in 1939, shortly before the start of the war:
We shall continue to make disturbances in the Far East
and in Arabia. Let us think as men and let us see in these peoples at
best lacquered half-apes who are anxious to experience the lash.[10][11]
Prior to the Second World War, all of North Africa
and the Middle East were under the control of European powers. Despite
the Nazi racial theories which denigrated Arabs as members of an
inferior race, individual Arabs who assisted the Reich in fighting the
British for possession of the Middle East were treated with honor and respect. Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, for example, "was granted honorary Aryan" status by the Nazis for his close collaboration with Hitler and the Third Reich.[12][13][page needed]
The German government developed a cordial association and cooperated
with some Arab nationalist leaders based on their common anti-colonial
and anti-Zionist interests. The most notable examples of these
common-cause fights were the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine and other actions led by Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the Anglo-Iraqi War, when the Golden Square (four generals led by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani) overthrew the pro-British 'Abd al-Ilah regency in Iraq and installed a pro-Axis government.[14][15][16]
In response to the Rashid Ali coup, Hitler issued Führer Directive No. 30 on 23 May 1941 to support their cause. This order began: "The Arab Freedom Movement in the Middle East is our natural ally against England."[16]
wikipedia | The integral association of the Free India Legion with Nazi Germany
and the other Axis powers means its legacy is seen from two viewpoints,
similarly to other nationalist movements that were aligned with Germany
during the war, such as the Russian Vlasov movement.
One viewpoint sees it as a collaborationist unit of the Third Reich;
the other views it as the realisation of a liberation army to fight
against the British Raj.[31]
Unlike the Indian National Army, conceived with the same doctrine,[13]
it has found little exposure since the end of the war even in
independent India. This is because it was far removed from India, unlike
Burma, and because the Legion was so much smaller than the INA and was
not engaged in its originally conceived role.[31]
Bose's plans for the Legion, and even the INA, were too grandiose for
their military capability and their fate was too strongly tied to that
of the Axis powers.[32]
Looking at the legacy of Azad Hind, however, historians consider both
movements' military and political actions (of which the Legion was one
of the earliest elements, and an integral part of Bose's plans) and the
indirect effect they had on the era's events.
In German histories of the Second World War, the Legion is noted less than other foreign volunteer units. Filmmaker and author Merle Kröger, however, made the 2003 mystery novel Cut!
about soldiers from the Legion in France. She said she found them an
excellent topic for a mystery because scarcely any Germans had heard of
the Indians who volunteered for the German Army.[31] The only Indian film to mention the Legion is the 2011 Bollywood production Dear Friend Hitler, which portrays the Legion's attempted escape to Switzerland and its aftermath.
Perceptions as collaborators
In
considering the history of the Free India Legion, the most
controversial aspect is its integral link to the Nazi Germany, with a
widespread perception that they were collaborators with Nazi Germany
by the virtue of their uniform, oath and field of operation. The views
of the founder and leader of the Azad Hind movement, Subhas Chandra
Bose, were somewhat more nuanced than straightforward support for the
Axis. During the 1930s Bose had organised and led protest marches
against Japanese imperialism, and wrote an article attacking Japanese
imperialism, although expressing admiration for other aspects of the
Japanese regime.[33]
Bose's correspondence prior to 1939 also showed his deep disapproval of
the racist practices and annulment of democratic institutions by the
Nazis.[34]
He nonetheless expressed admiration for the authoritarian methods which
he saw in Italy and Germany during the 1930s, and thought they could be
used in building an independent India.[35]
Bose's view was not necessarily shared by the men of the Free India
Legion, and they were not wholly party to Nazi ideology or in
collaboration with the Nazi machinery. The Legion's volunteers were not
merely motivated by the chance to escape imprisonment and earn money.
Indeed, when the first POWs were brought to Annaburg and met with Subhas
Chandra Bose, there was marked and open hostility towards him as a Nazi
propaganda puppet.[36]
Once Bose's efforts and views had gained more sympathy, a persistent
query among the POWs was 'How would the legionary stand in relation to
the German soldier?'.[36]
The Indians were not prepared to simply fight for Germany's interests,
after abandoning their oath to the King-Emperor. The Free India
Centre—in charge of the legion after the departure of Bose—faced a
number of grievances from legionaries. The foremost were that Bose had
abandoned them left them entirely in German hands, and a perception that
the Wehrmacht was now going to use them in the Western Front instead of sending them to fight for independence.[37]
The attitude of the Legion's soldiers was similar to that of the Italian Battaglione Azad Hindoustan, which had been of dubious loyalty to the Axis cause—it was disbanded after a mutiny.[7][8]
In one instance, immediately prior to the first deployment of the
Legion in the Netherlands in April 1943, after the departure of the 1st
Battalion from Königsbrück, two companies within the 2nd Battalion
refused to move until convinced by Indian leaders.[37]
Even in Asia, where the Indian National Army was much larger and fought
the British directly, Bose faced similar obstacles at first. All of
this goes to show that many of the men never possessed loyalty to the
Nazi cause or ideology; the motivation of the Legion's men was to fight
for India's independence.[37] The unit did allegedly participate in atrocities, especially in the Médoc region in July 1944,[38] and in the region of Ruffec[28] and the department of Indre during their retreat,[39] and in addition, some elements of the unit undertook anti-partisan operations in Italy.
Role in Indian independence
However, in political terms Bose may have been successful, owing to events that occurred within India after the war.[7][8]
After the war, the soldiers and officers of the Free India Legion were
brought as prisoners to India, where they were to be brought to trial in
courts-martial
along with Indians who were in the INA. Their stories were seen as so
inflammatory that, fearing mass revolts and uprisings across the empire,
the British government forbade the BBC from broadcasting about them after the war.[28] Not much is known of any charges made against Free India Legion soldiers, but the Indian National Army trials
that were initiated had the sentences they issued commuted or charges
dropped, after widespread protest and several mutinies. As a condition
of independence readily agreed to by the INC, members of the Free India
Legion and INA were not allowed to serve in the post-independence Indian
military, but they were all released before independence. Once the
stories reached the public, there was a turnaround in perception of the
Azad Hind movement from traitors and collaborators to patriots. Although
the authorities expected to improve the morale of their troops by
prosecuting the Azad Hind volunteers, they only contributed to the
sentiment among many members of the military that they had been on the
wrong side during the war.[40][41]
According to historian Michael Edwardes, the "INA and Free India Legion
thus overshadowed the conference that was to lead to independence, held
in the same Red Fort as the trials".[40]
Inspired to a large extent by the stories of the soldiers at trial, mutiny broke out in the Royal Indian Navy,
and received widespread public support. While the troops who fought for
the Allies were being demobilised, the Navy mutiny was followed up by
smaller mutinies in the Royal Indian Air Force, and a mutiny in the
Indian Army that was suppressed by force. In the aftermath of the
mutinies, the weekly intelligence summary issued on 25 March 1946
admitted that the Indian military was no longer trustworthy, and for the
Army, "only day to day estimates of steadiness could be made".[42][8]
The armed forces could not be relied upon to suppress unrest as they
had been before, and drawing from experiences of the Free India Legion
and INA, their actions could not be predicted from their oath to the
King-Emperor.[43][44] Reflecting on the factors that guided the British decision to relinquish their rule in India, Clement Attlee,
then the British Prime Minister, cited as the most important reason the
realisation that the Indian armed forces might not prop up the Raj.[45] Although the British government had promised to grant dominion status to India at the end of the war,[46][47] the views held by British officials after the war show[citation needed]
that although militarily a failure the Indians who fought for the Axis
likely accelerated Indian independence. This is contrary to the usual
narrative of India's independence struggle, which focuses only on the
INC and Mahatma Gandhi.[citation needed]
T.H. Tetens’ Germany Plots with the Kremlin (1953) treats
the pivotally important German “Ostpolitik,” which German power
structure has traditionally exploited in order expand and develop its
influence. The German threat to either remain neutral during the Cold
War, or to ally with the USSR, was a significant factor in persuading
conservative American power brokers to go along with the reinstatement
in Germany of the Nazi elements that prosecuted World War II. Under the
circumstances, some of these conservatives felt that permitting Nazi
elements to return to power behind a democratic façade was the lesser of
two evils, although many would have preferred a more traditionally
conservative German political establishment. This German “Ostpolitik,”
in turn, is characteristic of the geopolitical foresight and cynicism
with which pan-Germanists have successfully pursued their goal of world
domination through the centuries.
An authority on pan-Germanism employed by the U.S. government during
World War II, Tetens analyzes German Ostpolitik in the aftermath of the
war in the context of centuries of German policy toward Russia and the
former Soviet Union. Tracing the roots of Ostpolitik, Tetens begins with
Frederick the Great’s secret pact of 1762 with Czar Peter III, which
disrupted the European coalition that almost crushed Prussia in the
Seven Years War. This pact saved Prussia from total defeat and led to
the first partition of Poland. In 1867, German chancellor Otto von
Bismarck made a secret pact (called a “re-insurance treaty”) with
Russia, which secured Germany’s Eastern frontier, helping to make
Germany the strongest military power on the continent. Following in the
footsteps of their predecessors, General Hans von Seeckt (head of the
German general staff) created a new army after the German defeat in
World War I. That army trained and armed in Soviet Russia after the
Rapallo Treaty between Germany and the USSR in 1922. While German
Chancellor Gustav Stresemann feigned neutrality, von Seeckt contemplated
“war against the West in alliance with the East.” Perhaps the
best-known example of Ostpolitik was the Hitler Stalin pact of 1939,
which secured Germany’s Eastern border on the eve of World War II.
After World War II, the German geopoliticians (acting at the
direction of the leaders of the Underground Reich under Martin Bormann)
pursued a similar tack. Threatening neutrality, or even an alliance with
the Soviets, the Germans were able to manipulate the U.S. into wooing
Germany as an ally- –granting it renewed economic and military power and
re-installing Nazis in positions of great influence. Kevin Coogan’s
remarkable text Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker and the Postwar Fascist International
contains an excellent contemporary account of this phenomenon.
Listeners are emphatically encouraged to read the Coogan text as a
supplement to the Tetens book (which was published in 1953.)
In 1950, the Madrid Geo-political Center (a Nazi think tank operating
in exile under the friendly auspices of fascist dictator Franco)
discussed the successful realization of the Reich’s plan to go
underground. (These plans were described by Curt Reiss in The Nazis Go Underground.
The Nazi grooming and installation of Franco, whose country was an
important base for the postwar Reich activities, is discussed in Falange
by Alan Chase.) The following passage appears on page 73 of the Tetens
text: “According to the Madrid Circular Letter, referred to above, the
German planners have never ceased their political warfare against the
Allies. They admit that they had ‘blueprinted the bold plan and created a
flexible and smoothly working organization,’ in order to safeguard
Germany from defeat and to bring Allied post-war planning to nought.
They boast that they were able to create total confusion in Washington,
and that they saved German heavy industry from destruction: ‘By no means
did the political and military leadership of the Third Reich skid into
the catastrophe in an irrational manner as so many blockheads and
ignoramuses often tell us. The various phases and consequences of the
so-called ‘collapse’ . . . were thoroughly studied and planned by the
most capable experts . . . Nothing occurred by chance; everything was
carefully planned. The result of this planning was that, already a few
months after Potsdam, the coalition of the victors went on the rocks.’. .
.”
The Madrid Circular Letter goes on to set forth the course to be
pursued by Germany, more startlingly relevant from the vantage point of
early 2006 than in it was in 1950. The following is from page 52 of
Tetens’ book:
“ ‘In view of the present political situation . . . the policy of
orientation towards the West has lost all meaning or sense. . . . We
must not forget that Germany has always considered orientation towards
the West as a policy of expedience, or one to be pursued only under
pressure of circumstances. Such was the case in Napoleon’s time, after
1918, and also after 1945. All of our great national leaders have
constantly counseled the long-range policy of close cooperation with the
East . . . .’” Fear of this dynamic drove the U.S. to accede to all of
Germany’s demands for renewed power. “Anti-Communism Uber Alles!”
A stunning measure of the success of the Underground Reich and German
Ostpolitik can be obtained by reading Dorothy Thompson’s analysis of
Germany’s plans for world dominance by a centralized European economic
union. (In this, we can see the plans of pan-German theoretician
Friedrich List, as realized by the European Monetary Union.) Ms.
Thompson was writing in The New York Herald Tribune on May 31, 1940! Her comments are reproduced by Tetens on page 92.
“The Germans have a clear plan of what they intend to do
in case of victory. I believe that I know the essential details of that
plan. I have heard it from a sufficient number of important Germans to
credit its authenticity . . . Germany’s plan is to make a customs union
of Europe, with complete financial and economic control centered in
Berlin. This will create at once the largest free trade area and the
largest planned economy in the world. In Western Europe alone . . .
there will be an economic unity of 400 million persons . . . To these
will be added the resources of the British, French, Dutch and Belgian
empires. These will be pooled in the name of Europa Germanica . . .”
“The Germans count upon political power following economic power, and
not vice versa. Territorial changes do not concern them, because there
will be no ‘France’ or ‘England,’ except as language groups. Little
immediate concern is felt regarding political organizations . . . . No
nation will have the control of its own financial or economic system or
of its customs. The Nazification of all countries will be accomplished
by economic pressure. In all countries, contacts have been established
long ago with sympathetic businessmen and industrialists . . . . As far
as the United States is concerned, the planners of the World Germanica
laugh off the idea of any armed invasion. They say that it will be
completely unnecessary to take military action against the United States
to force it to play ball with this system. . . . Here, as in every
other country, they have established relations with numerous industries
and commercial organizations, to whom they will offer advantages in
co-operation with Germany. . . .”
Again, check out the current European Monetary Union and the
“borderless” EU against the background of what Ms. Thompson forecast in
1940 and Mr. Tetens reproduced in 1953.
It turns the clock back to April 2, 1917---the date when the Woodrow
Wilson foolishly declared war on Germany and led America into a bloody
cauldron on the Western Front that had absolutely no bearing on its
national security; and thereafter into a destructive "peace" at
Versailles that guaranteed perpetual war.
America First, when followed to its logical and correct conclusion,
would put the War Capital of the world out of business; it would result
in a massive slashing of the hideously bloated national security budget;
it would ash-can the endless complex of think-tanks, NGOs, intelligence
contractors and lobbyists for foreign interests.
We refer, of course, to the likes of the Podesta brothers, Paul
Manafort and 20,000 more like and similar operators and racketeers.
Indeed, having it way with the Warfare State, America First would bring a
hair-curling recession to the Imperial City which would make Youngstown
Ohio look like a model of prosperity.
To be sure, we seriously doubt that the Donald had any idea of where
American First was leading him when he stumbled upon the slogan; and we
are afraid that his xenophobic fear-mongering about the Mexican border
would have distracted him, anyway.
But the Deep State was taking no chances. That's why the partisan
shills who ran the CIA and FBI under Obama were able to launch their
insidious anti-Trump witchunt as an "insurance policy" in July 2016; and
it's also why the Obama Administration pulled out all the stops in its
waning days in office to insure that the verdict of November 8 would be
re-litigated on the back of the Russian Meddling story.
In Part 3 we intend to summarize the ludicrously threadbare nature of
the whole Mueller investigation, but suffice it here to note the
Smoking Bunker Buster that puts the lie to the whole scam.
To wit, it is absolutely the fact that neither Donald Trump, nor his
sons, nor his daughter and son-in-law went to Russia at any time after
the Donald's unlikely campaign was launched in June 2015. At that time
no one including Vlad Putin gave him a snowball's chance of ending up in
the Oval Office; and since then Trump has proven that no one matters in
his comings and goings except the Donald and his family.
So if there was any collusion after the announcement, it had to be by
email or phone between the Trumps and high state officials in the
Kremlin. That is to say, every word of such conversations would be
stored in the vast NSA (national security agency) server farms where
everything which crosses the worldwide web gets snatched and stored.
Needless to say, if Robert Mueller were truly doing god's work in
behalf of the rule of law and American democracy, he would have
ordered-up the NSA taps on day one, and resolved the matter of
"collusion" with the Russians within one week's time.
That he didn't do because no such taps exist and no such
conversations between the Trumps and the Russian state ever happened.
Period. Full stop.
To the contrary, the entire prolonged, ballyhooed, ever-expanding,
leak-ridden, media-fueling Mueller investigation is designed to mortally
wound Donald Trump and drive him from office. That is, to crush America
First in its infancy and to obliterate even the crude and half-baked
form in which its emerged from the modest gray matter nested under the
Orange Comb-Over. The Deep State Closes In On The Donald Part 1
Tonight all I ask you to follow the advice I gave in this article:
EVERYBODY WAIT! DO NOT JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS!
We have no facts. What US politicians (including generals – US generals are all politicians) say does not matter and is not “fact”.
The truth is that we won’t know for sure for at least 24 hours what
took place. The aggressors will present the attack as a huge success.
Don’t believe it! The last time around it took several days to find out
what really happened.
This is still my best advice to you: wait for the facts and don’t listen to the Ziocon propaganda machine!
None of the above should distract us from what is by far the biggest
danger currently facing us all – the risks of a US-Russian war in Syria.
In fact, this reality seems to be slowly dawning even on the most
obtuse of presstitutes who are now worrying about a spill-over effect. No, not in Europe or the USA, but on Israel, of course.
Still, the fact that there are folks who understand that Israel might
not survive a superpower clash on its doorstep is a good thing. Maybe
the Israel lobby in the USA, or a least the part of it which cares for
Israel (many/most only pretend to), will be more vocal than all the
silent Anglo shabbos-goyim who don’t seem to be able to muster even a
minimal amount of self-preservation instinct? Bibi Netanyahu felt the
need to call Putin after the Israeli ambassador to Russia was read the
riot act by Russian officials following the (admittedly rather lame)
Israeli airstrike on the T-4 Syrian air force base. Not much of a hope, I
admit..
This is not about good guys versus bad guys anymore. It’s about sane
versus insane. I think that we can safely place Trump, Bolton, Haley and
the rest of them in the “terminally delusional” camp. But what about
the top US generals? I asked two well-informed friends, and they both
told me that there is probably nobody above the rank of Colonel with
enough courage left to object to the Neocon’s insanity, even if that
means WWIII. Again, not much hope here either…
There is a sura (Al-Anfal 8:30) of the Qur’an which Sheikh Imran Hosein often mentions which I want to quote here: And
[remember, O Muhammad], when those who disbelieved plotted against you
to restrain you or kill you or evict you [from Makkah]. But they plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners.
And since we are talking about Syria where Iran and Hezbollah are
targets as much (or more) as the Russians, it is also fitting here to
quote a very popular Shia slogan which calls to remember that the battle
against oppression must be fought ceaselessly and everywhere: “Every Day Is Ashura and Every Land Is Karbala”. And, of course, there are the words of Christ Himself: “And
fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul:
but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matt 10:28).
Such religious references will, no doubt, irritate the many
“enlightened” westerners for whom such language reeks of obscurantism,
fanaticism, and bigotry. But in Russia or the Middle-East, such
references are very much part of the national or religious ethos. To
illustrate my point I want to quote from Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s “Divine Victory Speech”
spoken in 2006 following the crushing victory by a relatively small
Hezbollah force of the combined might of the Israeli ground, air and
naval forces:
We are today celebrating a big strategic, historic,
and divine victory. How can the human mind imagine that a few thousand
of your Lebanese resistance sons – if I wanted, I would give the exact
number – held out for 23 days in a land exposed to the skies against the
strongest air force in the Middle East, which had an air bridge
transporting smart bombs from America, through Britain, to Israel;
against 40,000 officers and soldiers – four brigades of elite forces,
three reserve army divisions; against the strongest tank in the world;
and against the strongest army in the region? How could only a few
thousand people hold out and fight under such harsh conditions, and [how
could] their fighting force the naval warships out of our territorial
waters? By the way, the army and the resistance are capable of
protecting the territorial waters from being desecrated by any Zionist.
[Applause] [And how could their fighting] also lead to the destruction
of the Mirkava tanks, which are an object of pride for the Israeli
industry; damage Israeli helicopters day and night; and turn the elite
brigades – I am not exaggerating, and you can watch and read the Israeli
media – into rats frightened by your sons? [How did this happen] while
you were relinquished by the Arabs and the world and in light of the
political (human solidarity was profound though) division around you?
How could this group of mujahidin defeat this army without the support
and assistance of Almighty God? This resistance experience, which should
be conveyed to the world, depends – on the moral and spiritual level –
on faith, certainty, reliance [on God], and readiness to make
sacrifices. It also depends on reason, planning, organization, armament,
and, as is said, on taking all possible protective procedures. We are
neither a disorganized and sophistic resistance, nor a resistance pulled
to the ground that sees before it nothing but soil, nor a resistance of
chaos. The pious, God-reliant, loving, and knowledgeable resistance is
also the conscious, wise, trained, and equipped resistance that has
plans. This is the secret of the victory we are today celebrating,
brothers and sisters.
These words could also be used to describe the relatively small
Russian task force in Syria. In fact, there are numerous parallels which
could be made between Hezbollah’s role and position in the Middle-East
and Russia’s role and position in the world. And while both are
well-trained, well-armed and well-commanded, it is their spiritual power
which will decide the outcome of the wars waged against them by the
Hegemony. AngloZionist secularists will never understand that – they
just can’t – and that will bring their inevitable downfall. The only
question is the price mankind will have to pay to have that last Empire
finally bite the dust.
foreignaffairs | Today, more people are living healthy, productive lives than ever
before. This good news may come as a surprise, but there is plenty of
evidence for it. Since the early 1990s, global child mortality has been cut in half. There have been massive reductions in cases of tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS.
The incidence of polio has decreased by 99 percent, bringing the world
to the verge of eradicating a major infectious disease, a feat humanity
has accomplished only once before, with smallpox. The proportion of the
world’s population in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as
living on less than $1.90 per day, has fallen from 35 percent to about
11 percent.
Continued progress is not inevitable,
however, and a great deal of unnecessary suffering and inequity remains.
By the end of this year, five million children under the age of five
will have died—mostly in poor countries and mostly from preventable
causes. Hundreds of millions of other children will continue to suffer
needlessly from diseases and malnutrition that can cause lifelong
cognitive and physical disabilities. And more than 750 million
people—mostly rural farm families in sub-Saharan Africa and South
Asia—still live in extreme poverty, according to World Bank estimates. The women and girls among them, in particular, are denied economic opportunity.
Some
of the remaining suffering can be eased by continuing to fund the
development assistance programs and multilateral partnerships that are
known to work. These efforts can help sustain progress, especially as
the world gets better at using data to help guide the allocation of
resources. But ultimately, eliminating the most persistent diseases and
causes of poverty will require scientific discovery and technological
innovations.
That includes CRISPR and other
technologies for targeted gene editing. Over the next decade, gene
editing could help humanity overcome some of the biggest and most
persistent challenges in global health
and development. The technology is making it much easier for scientists
to discover better diagnostics, treatments, and other tools to fight
diseases that still kill and disable millions of people every year,
primarily the poor. It is also accelerating research that could help end
extreme poverty by enabling millions of farmers in the developing world
to grow crops and raise livestock that are more productive, more
nutritious, and hardier. New technologies are often met with skepticism.
But if the world is to continue the remarkable progress of the past few
decades, it is vital that scientists, subject to safety and ethics
guidelines, be encouraged to continue taking advantage of such promising
tools as CRISPR.
medium |Blockchain
is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its
failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust,
norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of
no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s
permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in
the wrong direction.
Let’s start with this: Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free. Yet after I wrote an article last December saying bitcoin had no use, someone responded that Venmo and Paypal are raking in consumers’ money and people should switch to bitcoin.
What
a surreal contrast between blockchain’s non-usefulness/non-adoption and
the conviction of its believers! It’s so entirely evident that this
person didn’t become a bitcoin enthusiast because they were looking for a
convenient, free way to transfer money from one person to another and
discovered bitcoin. In fact, I would assert that there is no single person in existence
who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available
blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a
blockchain enthusiast.
There is no single person in existence
who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available
blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a
blockchain enthusiast.
The number of retailers accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment is declining, and its biggest corporate boosters like IBM, NASDAQ, Fidelity, Swift and Walmart have gone long on press but short on actual rollout. Even the most prominent blockchain company, Ripple, doesn’t use blockchain in its product. You read that right: the company Ripple decided the best way to move money across international borders was to not use Ripples.
A blockchain is a literal technology, not a metaphor
Why all the enthusiasm for something so useless in practice?
People have made a number of implausible claims about the future of blockchain—like that you should use it for AI
in place of the type of behavior-tracking that google and facebook do,
for example. This is based on a misunderstanding of what a blockchain
is. A blockchain isn’t an ethereal thing out there in the universe that
you can “put” things into, it’s a specific data structure: a linear
transaction log, typically replicated by computers whose owners (called
miners) are rewarded for logging new transactions.
themaven | I completely agree with much of what you wrote here. I’d like to point out a couple things:
First, in regards
to “There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted
to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best
way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.” There
is in fact at least one such person: me. In 2010 I was looking for a
payment system which did not have any possibility for chargebacks. It
turns out that bitcoin is GREAT for that, and I became a blockchain
enthusiast as a result.
The ugly truth
about blockchain is that it is immensely useful, but only when you are
in some way trying to circumvent an authority of some sort. In my case, I
wanted to take payments for digital goods without losing any to
chargebacks. It’s also great for sending money to Venezuela
(circumventing the authority of the government of Venezuela, which would
really rather you not). It’s great for raising money for projects (ICOs
are really about circumventing various regulatory authorities who make
that difficult). It’s great for buying drugs, taking payment for
ransomware, and any number of terrible illegal things related to human
trafficking, money laundering, etc.
Frankly, the day
that significant trading of derivatives (gold futures, oil futures,
options, etc) starts happening on blockchain, I expect a bubble that
will make previous crypto bubbles look tiny in comparison. This is not
because blockchain is an easier way to trade these contracts! It is
because some percentage of rich traders would like to do anonymous
trading and avoid pesky laws about paying taxes on trading profits and
not doing insider trading.
I sum it up like
this: are you trying to do something with money that requires avoiding
an authority somewhere? If not, there is a better technical solution
than blockchain. That does NOT mean that what you are doing is illegal
for you (it’s perfectly legal for me to send money to Venezuela). It
just means that some authority somewhere doesn’t like what you are
doing.
Blockchain is
inherently in opposition to governmental control of the world of
finance. The only reason governments aren’t more antagonistic towards
blockchain is that they don’t truly understand how dangerous it is. I
wrote at length about this back in 2013 in an article called “Bitcoin’s
Dystopian Future”:
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