The Gini coefficient, also called the Gini index or Gini ratio, is the most commonly used measure of income distribution—simply put, the higher the Gini coefficient, the greater the gap between the incomes of a country's richest and poorest people. A country's Gini coefficient is important because it helps identify high levels of income inequality, which can have several undesirable political and economic impacts. These include slower GDP growth, reduced income mobility, greater household debt, political polarization, and higher poverty rates.
Explaining the Gini coefficient
Developed by Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912, the Gini coefficient ranges from 0 to 1, but is often written as a percentage. To offer two hypothetical examples, if a nation were to have absolute income equality, with every person earning the same amount, its Gini score would be 0 (0%). On the other hand, if one person earned all the income in a nation and the rest earned zero, the Gini coefficient would be 1 (100%). Mathematically, the Gini coefficient is defined based on the Lorenz curve. The Lorenz curve plots the percentiles of the population on the graph's horizontal axis according to income or wealth, whichever is being measured. The cumulative income or wealth of the population is plotted on the vertical axis.
Limitations of the Gini coefficient
While the Gini coefficient is a useful tool for analyzing the wealth or income distribution in a country, it does not indicate that country's overall wealth or income. Some of the world's poorest countries, such as the Central African Republic, have some of the highest Gini coefficients (61.3 in this case). A high-income country and a low-income country can have the same Gini coefficients. Additionally, due to limitations such as reliable GDP and income data, the Gini index may overstate income inequality and be inaccurate.
Countries with the highest and lowest Gini coefficients
South Africa ranks as the country with the lowest level of income equality in the world, thanks to a Gini coefficient of 63.0 when last measured in 2014. That said, in 2005, the Gini coefficient was even higher, at 65.0. In South Africa, the richest 10% hold 71% of the wealth, while the poorest 60% hold just 7% of the wealth. Additionally, more than half of South Africa's population lives in poverty.
Top 10 Countries with the Highest Gini Coefficients (%) - World Bank:
unz |Out
of 195 countries, only 30 have honored the US sanctions on Russia. That
means about 165 countries in the world have refused to join the
sanctions. Those countries represent by far the majority of the world’s
population. Most of Africa, Latin America (including Mexico and Brazil),
East Asia (excepting Japan, South Korea, both occupied by U.S. troops
and hence not sovereign, Singapore and the renegade Chinese Province of
Taiwan) have refused. (India and China alone represent 35% of humanity.)
Add
to that fact that 40 different countries are now the targets of US
sanctions and there is a powerful constituency to oppose the thuggish
economic tactics of the U.S.
Finally,
at the recent G-20 Summit a walkout led by the US when the Russia
delegate spoke was joined by the representatives of only 3 other G-20
countries, with 80% of these leading financial nations refusing to join!
Similarly, a US attempt to bar a Russian delegate from a G-20 meeting
later in the year in Bali was rebuffed by Indonesia which currently
holds the G-20 Presidency.
Nations Taking Russia’s side are no longer poor as in Cold War 1.0.
These
dissenting countries of the Global South are no longer as poor as they
were during the Cold War. Of the top 10 countries in PPP-GDP, 5 do not
support the sanctions. And these include China (number one) and India
(number 3). So the first and third most powerful economies stand against
the US on this matter. (Russia is number 6 on that list about equal to
Germany, number 5, the two being close to equal, belying the idea that
Russia’s economy is negligible.)
These
stands are vastly more significant than any UN vote. Such votes can be
coerced by a great power and little attention is paid to them in the
world. But the economic interests of a nation and its view of the main
danger in the world are important determinants of how it reacts
economically – for example to sanctions. A “no” to US sanctions is
putting one’s money where one’s mouth is.
We
in the West hear that Russia is “isolated in the world” as a result of
the crisis in Ukraine. If one is speaking about the Eurovassal states
and the Anglosphere, that is true. But considering humanity as a whole
and among the rising economies of the world, it is the US that stands
isolated. And even in Europe, cracks are emerging. Hungary and Serbia
have not joined the sanctions regime and of course most European
countries will not and indeed cannot turn away from Russian energy
imports crucial to their economies. It appears that the grand scheme of
U.S. global hegemony to be brought about by the US move to WWII Redux, both Cold and Hot, has hit a mighty snag.
For
those who look forward to a multipolar world, this is a welcome turn of
events emerging out of the cruel tragedy of the U.S. proxy war in
Ukraine. The possibility of a saner, more prosperous multipolar world
lies ahead – if we can get there.
dailymail | Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova slammed Pentagon press secretary John Kirby and said he's 'losing his nerve' in his comments over Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Kirby delivered an emotional condemnation of Vladimir Putin's 'depravity' in Ukraine on Friday, and came close to tears as he described the horror of looking at images coming from the war-torn country.
Zakharova,
who has served as Moscow's foreign ministry spokesperson since
2015, called Kirby's statement 'rude, insulting and troublesome' in a
post on Telegram.
She added that Kirby 'said some nonsense' about Russian President Putin.
'Among
other gibberish, he said it was 'hard to look at what Russian forces
are doing in Ukraine.' Really? How hard can it be for an American rear
admiral to look at anything?' she asked.
The Pentagon press secretary has won rave
reviews for his unflappable manner and dry sense of humor during
briefings, delivering grim news with the minimum of fuss.
But
on Friday, the toll of 65 days of war in Ukraine caught up with him
when he was asked about President Putin's state of mind.
'I'm not going to go into the psychology of Vladimir Putin,' he began.
'It's
hard to look at what he's doing in Ukraine, what his forces are doing
in Ukraine and think that any ethical, moral individual could justify
that.
'It's difficult to look at the...'
He tailed off, apparently choking up and battling to regain his composure.
After
a few seconds, he resumed his train of thought and delivered one of his
most powerful condemnations yet of the Russian president.
'Sorry,' he said.
'It's difficult to look at some of the images and imagine that any well-thinking, serious mature leader would do that.
'So I can't talk to his psychology. But I think we can all speak to his depravity.'
dailycaller | President Joe Biden’s new head of the Department of Homeland
Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz, appeared to
sing a parody song about who to “fuck” in order to be “famous and
powerful” in a resurfaced video.
“I want to be rich, famous, and powerful! Step on all my enemies and never do a thing,” Jankowicz sang to the tune of a piano, according to Breitbart.
“Who do I fuck to be famous and powerful? I’ve done everything I can and now the rest is up to you,” she appeared to add.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said
Friday Jankowicz is an “expert on online disinformation” and was
“formerly a disinformation fellow at the Wilson center,” as well as an
adviser to the Ukrainian foreign minister, among other positions.
“This is a person with extensive qualifications,” Psaki added.
“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud,” according to Orwell. In which case we’ve been totalitarian since at least 2001
TAE | I’ve been wondering for a long time why Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin
as his successor in 1999, and I can’t find much information on it.
Yeltsin was a US asset, and sold out his country to the CIA and a bunch
of CIA-asset homegrown oligarchs. I’ve always suspected that when
Yeltsin left, he felt a lot of regret for what he had done to Russia,
and that maybe appointing Putin was his way to try and make up for that.
I see people saying that Yeltsin thought Putin was pliable, but I think
perhaps he knew exactly how Putin thought.
A “detail”: remember that after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
male life expectancy for a period of time feel from a very steep cliff.
And nothing Yeltsin did provided a solution to that crisis. Then, in
August 1999, he appointed Putin as his prime minister, and didn’t leave a
year later as planned, but 4 months later, in December. His chief of
staff, Valentin Yumashev , who had hired Putin as his deputy in 1997, wrote his resignation speech:
Mr Yumashev was entrusted with writing Yeltsin’s
resignation speech. “It was a hard speech to write. It was clear the
text would go down in history. The message was important. That’s why I
wrote the famous line ‘Forgive me’. “Russians had suffered such shock and stress during the 1990s. Yeltsin had to speak about this.”
Back to today. All economic -and other- sanctions against Russia
since Putin first became president have led to one thing only: the
country has dramatically increased its self-sufficiency. And in the
process has upgraded its weapons arsenal to a level that no western
country even comes close to, including the US, for maybe 10% of what the
same US has spent on its own arsenal.
Russia’s latest generation of hypersonic missiles, against which no
country has any defense, are far superior to what anybody else
possesses. When they said recently they could take out a specific
building in Kyiv if they wanted, they were not exaggerating. So yeah,
look for Biden and Blinken and NATO et al to soon start using that
superiority as a reason to incite more war vs Moscow.
A war they could never win, but that’s not the point any longer. One
might argue of course that it never was after the advent of nuclear
weapons. The whole point of NATO today, its raison d’être, is that it
can create chaos wherever it goes and looks. It’s no longer capable of
defending anyone from the Russian threat, but then that threat hasn’t
been there for many years.
And NATO wants to continue existing, as does the Pentagon, and Boeing
and Raytheon, it’s all about money, so they have to make up a threat,
aided by their media brethren. That‘s why you see, from time to time,
reports about Putin having yet another person “poisoned”, why
governments in countries like the UK and Germany go along with the
narrative, and why media in all other vassal states parrot these
stories.
Russia only sprung into action when the west tried to take away their
sole warm water port, Sevastopol in Crimea. An election was held, and
97% of mostly Russians voted to be part of Russia. Yeah, that upset NATO
and the other usual suspects, but that doesn’t make Russia an
aggressor.
Russia has no reason to “invade” Ukraine. They don’t need even more
territory, they’re already by far the largest nation on earth. Moreover,
they don’t have the military to occupy large swaths of land. They only
have the capacity to protect their own.
Thing is, they really got that down. So the only thing NATO can do,
in its quest to prove it has reason to exist, is to create chaos, as I
said before. But there is a problem with consciously creating chaos
between nuclear powers, instead of maintaining communication channels,
as the US and USSR always did during the Cold War. Do we all understand
this means we are in a worse situation today than back then?
And that some fool could actually fire a nuclear missile because of
that? Me, I’m not so sure anymore. Between the Covid virus and the US
cancel culture, there are not that many western people paying attention
to warmongers and NATO aka warheads. Not a good idea.
jonathanturley | Many politicians and pundits are in full panic over Elon Musk’s threat to restore free speech values to Twitter. While Hillary Clinton has called upon Europeans to step in
to maintain such censorship and Barack Obama has called for U.S.
regulations, the Biden Administration has created a new Disinformation
Governance Board in the Department of Homeland Security. It appointed an
executive director, Nina Jankowicz, who is literally pitch perfect as
an advocate for both corporate and state censorship.
I don't know the exact percentage but I know the vast majority of self-proclaimed "anti-disinformation" agents peddled:
-- The Steele Dossier -- The fairy tale that Russia seized control of the US with blackmail -- The CIA fabrication of "Russian bounties" in Afghanistan.
It would have been hard to come up with
a more Orwellian name short of the Ministry of Truth. However, the DGB
needed a true believer to carry out the monitoring of political speech
in the United States. It found that person in Jankowicz, who has long
been an outspoken anti-free speech advocate.
Jankowicz was selected by the Biden Administration after years of
pushing disinformation on the left while calling for censorship of the
right.
Jankowicz previously argued that Congress should create new laws to
block mockery of women online by reauthorizing the Violence Against
Women Act (VAWA) and including “provisions against online gender-based
harassment.”
Jankowicz testified
before British House of Parliament last year about “gender
misinformation” being a “national security concern” and a threat to
democracy requiring government censorship.
She has demanded that both tech companies and government should work
together using “creativity and technological prowess to make a pariah of
online misogyny.”
On the Hunter Biden laptop, Jankowicz pushed the false narrative that
it was a false story and that “we should view it as a Trump campaign
product.” She continued to spread that disinformation, including tweeting a link to a news article that she said cast “yet more doubt on the provenance of the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story.” In another tweet,
she added “not to mention that the emails don’t need to be altered to
be part of an influence campaign. Voters deserve that context, not a
[fairy] tale about a laptop repair shop.”
She even cites the author of the Steele Dossier as a guide for how to
deal with disinformation. In August 2020, Jankowicz tweeted “Listened
to this last night – Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some
great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a
listen.”
She also joined the panic over the Musk threat to reintroduce free
speech values to Twitter. In an interview on NPR, she stated “I shudder
to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more
platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities.”
wikipedia | The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda; RMVP), also known simply as the Ministry of Propaganda (Propagandaministerium), was responsible for controlling the content of the press, literature, visual arts, film, theater, music and radio in Nazi Germany.
The ministry was created as the central institution of Nazi
propaganda shortly after the party's national seizure of power in
January 1933. In the Hitler cabinet it was headed by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who exercised control over all German mass media and creative artists through his ministry and the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), which was established in the fall of 1933.
Shortly after the March 1933 Reichstag elections, Adolf Hitler
presented his cabinet with a draft resolution to establish the
ministry. Despite the skepticism of some non-National Socialist
ministers, Hitler pushed the resolution through.[1] On 13 March 1933 Reich PresidentPaul von Hindenburg issued a decree ordering the establishment of a Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.[2]
It is important to note that at the time the German word ‘Propaganda’
was value neutral. In today's terms, the ministry could be understood to
have had a name that meant roughly ‘ministry for culture, media and
public relations’.[3]
The ministry moved into the 18th-century Ordenspalais building across from the Reich Chancellery in Berlin,[4] then used by the United Press Department of the Reich Government (Vereinigten Presseabteilung der Reichsregierung). It had been responsible for coordinating the Weimar Republic’s
official press releases but by then had been incorporated into the Nazi
state. On 25 March 1933 Goebbels explained the future function of the
Ministry of Propaganda to broadcasting company directors: "The Ministry
has the task of carrying out an intellectual mobilization in Germany. In
the field of the spirit it is thus the same as the Ministry of Defense
in the field of security. [...] Spiritual mobilization [is] just as
necessary, perhaps even more necessary, than making the people
materially able to defend themselves."[5]
The ministry was tailored for Joseph Goebbels, who had been the Reich propaganda leader of the Nazi Party
since April 1930. By a decree of 30 June 1933, numerous functions of
other ministries were transferred under the responsibility of the new
ministry. The role of the new ministry was to centralise Nazi control of
all aspects of German cultural, mass media and intellectual life for
the country.[4][6]
WSJ | The
Federal Bureau of Investigation performed potentially millions of
searches of American electronic data last year without a warrant, U.S.
intelligence officials said Friday, a revelation likely to stoke longstanding concerns in Congress about government surveillance and privacy.
An
annual report published Friday by the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence disclosed that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4
million searches of U.S. data that had been previously collected by the
National Security Agency.
Senior
Biden administration officials said the actual number of searches is
likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign
data from U.S. data. It couldn’t be learned from the report how many
Americans’ data was examined by the FBI under the program, though
officials said it was also almost certainly a much smaller number.
The report doesn’t allege the FBI was routinely searching American data improperly or illegally.
The
disclosure of the searches marks the first time a U.S. intelligence
agency has published an accounting, however imprecise, of the FBI’s
grabs of American data through a section of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that governs some foreign intelligence
gathering. The section of FISA that authorizes the FBI’s activity, known
as Section 702, is due to expire next year.
While
the ODNI report doesn’t suggest systemic problems with the searches,
judges have previously reprimanded the bureau for failing to comply with
privacy rules. Officials said the FBI’s searches were vital to its
mission to protect the U.S. from national-security threats. The
frequency of other forms of national-security surveillance detailed in
the annual report generally fell year over year, in some cases
continuing a multiyear trend.
The
3.4 million figure “is certainly a large number,” a senior FBI official
said in a press briefing Friday on the report. “I am not going to
pretend that it isn’t.”
More
than half of the reported searches—nearly two million—were related to
an investigation into a national-security threat involving attempts by
alleged Russian hackers to break into critical infrastructure in the
U.S. Those searches included efforts to identify and protect potential
victims of the alleged Russian campaign, senior U.S. officials said.
Officials
declined to give more details on the alleged Russian threat, including
whether it was linked to the Russian government or a criminal hacking
group. Russia has historically denied accusations of hacking the U.S. or other nations.
scheerpost | Since 2016, a number of other measures have been taken to bring
social media under the wing of the national security state. This was
foreseen by Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who wrote in
2013, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology
and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.” Since then,
Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM have become integral parts of the
state apparatus, signing multibillion-dollar
contracts with the CIA and other organizations to provide them with
intelligence, logistics and computing services. Schmidt himself was
chairman of both the National Security Commission on Artificial
Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, bodies created
to help Silicon Valley assist the U.S. military with cyberweapons,
further blurring the lines between big tech and big government.
Google’s current Global Head of Developer Product Policy, Ben Renda,
has an even closer relationship with the national security state. From
being a strategic planner and information management officer for NATO,
he then moved to Google in 2008. In 2013, he began working for U.S.
Cybercommand and in 2015 for the Defense Innovation Unit (both divisions
of the Department of Defense). At the same time, he became a YouTube
executive, rising to the rank of Director of Operations.
Other platforms have similar relationships with Washington. In 2018,
Facebook announced that it had entered a partnership with The Atlantic
Council whereby the latter would help curate the news feeds of billions
of users worldwide, deciding what was credible, trustworthy information,
and what was fake news. As noted previously, The Atlantic Council is
NATO’s brain-trust and is directly funded by the military alliance. Last
year, Facebook also hired Atlantic
Council senior fellow and former NATO spokesperson Ben Nimmo as its
head of intelligence, thereby giving an enormous amount of control over
its empire to current and former national security state officials.
The Atlantic Council has also worked its way into Reddit’s management. Jessica Ashooh went straight
from being Deputy Director of Middle East Strategy at The Atlantic
Council to Director of Policy at the popular news aggregation service – a
surprising career move that drew few remarks at the time.
Also eliciting little comment was the unmasking of
a senior Twitter executive as an active-duty officer in the British
Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and
psychological operations. Twitter has since partnered with
the U.S. government and weapons manufacturer-sponsored think tank ASPI
to help police its platform. On ASPI’s orders, the social media platform
has purged hundreds of thousands of accounts based out of China, Russia, and other countries that draw Washington’s ire.
Last year, Twitter also announced that
it had deleted hundreds of user accounts for “undermining faith in the
NATO alliance and its stability” – a statement that drew widespread
incredulity from those not closely following the company’s progression
from one that championed open discussion to one closely controlled by
the government.
The First Casualty
Those in the halls of power well understand how important a weapon
big-tech is in a global information war. This can be seen in a letter published
last Monday written by a host of national security state officials,
including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former
CIA directors Michael Morell and Leon Panetta, and former director of
the NSA Admiral Michael Rogers.
Together, they warn that regulating or breaking up the big-tech
monopolies would “inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology
platforms to … push back on the Kremlin.” “The United States will need
to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure” that “the
narrative of events” globally is shaped by the U.S. and “not by foreign
adversaries,” they explain, concluding that Google, Facebook, Twitter
are “increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national security
efforts.”
Commenting on the letter, journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote:
[B]y maintaining all power in the
hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet
and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state,
the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed
propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.”
The U.S. has frequently leaned on social media in order to control
the message and promote regime change in target countries. Just days
before the Nicaraguan presidential election in November, Facebook deleted the
accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and
activists, all of whom supported the left-wing Sandinista government.
When those figures poured onto Twitter to protest the ban, recording
videos of themselves and proving that they were not bots or
“inauthentic” accounts, as Facebook Intelligence Chief Nimmo had
claimed, their Twitter accounts were systematically banned as well, in
what observers coined as a “double-tap strike.”
Meanwhile, in 2009, Twitter acquiesced to
a U.S. request to delay scheduled maintenance of its app (which would
have required taking it offline) because pro-U.S. activists in Iran were
using the platform to foment anti-government demonstrations.
More than 10 years later, Facebook announced that it would be
deleting all praise of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani from its many
platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Soleimani – the most popular political
figure in Iran – had recently been assassinated in a U.S. drone strike.
The event sparked uproar and massive protests across the region. Yet
because the Trump administration had declared Soleimani and his military
group to be terrorists, Facebook explained,
“We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the
U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
and its leadership.” This meant that Iranians could not share a majority
viewpoint inside their own country – even in their own language –
because of a decision made in Washington by a hostile government.
In a nutshell, Edward Snowden disclosed that the US government, and multiple allied governments had the ability to eavesdrop on everyone's phone calls, read their text messages, emails, internet searches, track their locations (via GPS in phones) and also remotely activate people's cell phone cameras and microphones to listen and see what people are doing in real time.
Based on these disclosures, it is estimated that the US and its allies have visibility into roughly 80% of all digital communications in the US.
None of these federal agencies should have been doing this to U.S. citizens, on US soil and that the mechanism exploited to achieve this panoptic surveillance capability was cooperation by the Level 3 Internet carriers. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint etc, were providing the "keys" to their networks to the government to provide this access.
The government is not supposed to take your data wothout a warrant but a private company can give it to them in circumvention of the 4th amendment. The real issue here is NOT whether a company will give your data to the govt with or without a warrant.
One thing you should be aware of is that this framing of the debate is pushed by the government because it favors their position. However, the real fight we should be focused on is not whether a warrant has been served, rather, it should be focused on WHO the warrant is being served upon.
Consider the mail as an example. If I send you a package that the governmentt wants to snoop on, they cannot serve a warrant on the mail carrier in possession of the package to get access to it (even if it's a private company like UPS, FedEx, etc). That's because the laws about mail were passed long before the Patriot Act when the government still respected the rights of citizens. US mail actually can be subject to search warrant. It appears that the warrant is served on the mail facility and not the sender or recipient (see page 31), HOWEVER, it must be a federal warrant.
Second, it seems pretty clear that these cases are almost entirely restricted to investigations of cases involving the mail itself, such as mail fraud ... this means that this pertains the sender abusing the mail, not the recipient. One's digital data should be treated more like the recipient of mail since the analogy of your digital data is more like you storing things in a lock box in your house. (Recipients of mail generally cannot be prosecuted until they take possession of the mail, obviating this entire issue.)
It should work the same way with your data. If the government wants my info from Twitter, they should be compelled to serve warrants on BOTH Twitter AND me. We should BOTH have the opportunity to inspect the warrant, fight it, etc.
The reason is that the amount of leverage the government has over companies is very high because like Joe Nacchio learned in 2009 - a company has a huge attack surface across a huge array of different facets while the cost of caving to government surveillance demands is relatively small.
For you, though, if your freedom is at risk, there's nothing else exposed for the government to leverage to get you to do what they want. They're already going after everything. So even companies like Google that vigorously defend warrants would have a tough time fighting the government on something the government really wanted to get because there's so much the government can do to strong arm them.
And then of course, most companies don't have the resources to mount a defense like Google could on your behalf, even if they wanted to. There are vanishingly few civically-minded companies that even want to. No one has an interest in protecting your data more than you do, so you should get a warrant just like the mail.
Cauley, citing sources familiar with events, reported the NSA
asserted that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which oversees NSA snooping) — to provide the data.
"They
told (Qwest) they didn't want to [run the proposal by the FISA court]
because FISA might not agree with them," one NSA insider told USA Today.
There is a record of the NSA running afoul of FISA: In July the FISA court ruled that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion."
Furthermore,
Nacchio felt that it was unclear who would have access to Qwest
customers' information and how that information might be used. Sources
told Cauley that the NSA said government agencies including the FBI, CIA, and DEA might have access to its massive database.
BAR |The U.S. talks about "rule based order" because international law
is not on its side. The 1999 OSCE Charter explains why the Biden
administration would rather make up a new phrase out of whole cloth than
live up to agreements it signed.
In 1999, the United States and the 56 other participating states of
the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) signed a charter in Instanbul that is another intentionally ignored key to understanding the war in Ukraine.
The OSCE is the world’s largest regional security organization.
It claims to engage in political dialogue - that is, a forum for
political dialogue on a wide range of security issues. There are 57 OSCE
member states that cover three continents - North America, Europe and
Asia. The policies the OSCE deliberates over include security issues
such as arms control, terrorism, good governance, energy security, human
trafficking, democratization, media freedom, and the rights of national
minorities that affect more than a billion people. This is what they
say they do, anyway.
But the 1999 Instanbul Charter signed by all the member states says
that countries should be free to choose their own security arrangements
and alliances but specifies that, in doing so, countries "will not
strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other
states."
This charter was raised as the rationale for Russia mobilizing troops
inside its border in response to US and it western allies expanding
NATO eastward since the Cold War and refusing to rule out granting
membership to Ukraine. NATO says it is a defensive alliance that is open
to new members, but can we be honest - because we always are - and
point out that Russia was not doing anything in Ukraine or anywhere else
to put NATO on the defensive. This issue of the charter being violated
was raised by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in February 2022 when he
had a phone conversation with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
"Our western colleagues are simply trying not even to ignore but to
consign to oblivion this key principle of international law agreed in
the Euro-Atlantic space," Lavrov said at the time. "We will insist on an
honest conversation and an honest explanation of why the West doesn't
want to fulfill its obligations or wants to meet them only selectively
to its own advantage."
Lavrov had written to the United States, Canada, and a number of
governments on January 28, 2022, to ask them urgently to explain how
they intended to fulfill this commitment to the principle of
"indivisible security" that they all agreed to in the 1999 OSCE Istanbul
Charter. What Russia received, instead of answers to its questions or
discussions about the West holding up its end of the charter agreement,
were US and NATO demands that Russia pull back troops from inside its
own borders.
This happened in February 2022, right around the same time that Biden
started claiming that Russia was going to invade Ukraine “ANY DAY
NOW!!!” The whole time, however, Russia was trying to get the US to
adhere to the OSCE charter. But it seems that the US was really just
pushing for this war.
pjmedia | According to financial records, Joe Biden has $5.2 million in
“unexplained income” that (by pure coincidence, of course) was acquired
around the same time Hunter Biden was raking in big bucks from foreign
business deals and earmarking “10 percent for the Big Guy.”
“The revelation ties the president even closer to Hunter’s overseas
business dealings – and makes his previous claims that he never
discussed them with his son, even less plausible,” the Daily Mailreports.
“Joe was able to pay the bills after earning millions of dollars
through his and his wife’s companies after he left office as vice
president.”
While some of the Bidens’ income came from book deals and speaking
engagements (imagine people paying to watch Biden speak!), there is a $7
million discrepancy between the income declared on his tax returns and
the income he declared on government transparency reports.
“Some of that difference can be accounted
for with salaries earned by First Lady Jill Biden and other sums not
required on his reports – but still leaves $5.2million earned by Joe’s
company and not listed on his transparency reports,” the Daily Mail‘s
investigation concludes. “The ‘missing millions’ – combined with emails
on Hunter’s abandoned laptop suggesting Joe would have a 10% share in
Hunter’s blockbuster deal with the Chinese – raise a troubling question:
did Joe Biden receive money from the foreign venture?”
Hm … a $5.2 million discrepancy? That’s not small potatoes. What
exactly was Biden trying to hide? Was it his cut of Hunter Biden’s shady
foreign business deals? There are a lot of unanswered questions here.
journal-neo |In what is clearly
becoming a US Administration war on food, the situation is being
dramatically aggravated by USDA demands for chicken farmers to kill off
millions of chickens in now 27 states, allegedly for signs of Bird Flu
infection. The H5N1 Bird Flu “virus” was exposed in 2015 as a complete
hoax. The tests used by the US government inspectors to determine bird
flu now are the same unreliable PCR tests used for COVID in humans. The
test is worthless for that. US Government officials estimate that since
first cases were “tested” positive in February, at least 23 million
chickens and turkeys have been culled to allegedly contain the spread of
a disease whose cause could be the incredibly unsanitary cage
confinement of mass industrial chicken CAFOs. The
upshot is sharp rises in prices of egg by some 300% since November and
severe loss of chicken protein sources for American consumers at a time
when overall cost of living inflation is at a 40-year high.
To make matters
worse, California and Oregon are again declaring water emergency amid a
multi-year drought and are sharply reducing irrigation water to farmers
in California, who produce the major share of US fresh vegetables and
fruits. That drought has since spread to cover most agriculture land
west of the Mississippi River, meaning much of US farmland.
US food security is
under threat as never before since the 1930s Dust Bowl, and the Biden
Administration “Green Agenda” is doing everything to make the impact
worse for its citizens.
In recent comments US
President Biden remarked without elaborating that the US food shortages
are “going to be real.” His administration also is deaf to pleas of
farmer organizations to allow cultivation of some 4 million acres of
farmland ordered left out of cultivation for “environmental reasons.
However this is not the only part of the world where crisis in food is
developing.
Global Disaster
These deliberate Washington actions are taking
place at a time a global series of food disasters create the worst food
supply situation in decades, perhaps since the World War II end.
In the EU, which is
significantly dependent on Russia, Belarus and Ukraine for feed grains,
fertilizers and energy, sanctions are making the covid-induced food
shortages dramatically worse. The EU uses its foolish Green Agenda as an
excuse to forbid the Italian government from ignoring EU rules limiting
state aid to farmers. In Germany, the new Green Party Agriculture
Minister Cem Özdemir, who wants to phase out traditional agriculture
allegedly for its “greenhouse gas” emissions, has given farmers who want
to grow more food a cold response. The EU faces many of the same
disastrous threats to food security as the USA and even more dependence
on Russian energy which is about to be suicidally sanctioned by the EU.
The major food
producing countries in South America, especially Argentina and Paraguay,
are in the midst of a severe drought attributed to a periodic La Niña
Pacific anomaly that has crippled crops there. Sanctions on Belarus and
Russia fertilizers are threatening Brazil crops, aggravated with
bottlenecks in ocean transport.
China just announced
that owing to severe rains in 2021, this year’s winter wheat crop could
be the worst in its history. The CCP also has instituted severe measures
to get farmers to expand cultivation to non-farm lands with little
reported effect. According to a report by China watcher Erik Mertz, “In
China’s Jilin, Heilongjiang, and Liaoning provinces, officials have
reported one in three farmers lack sufficient seed and fertilizer
supplies to begin planting for the optimum spring window…According
to sources within these areas, they are stuck waiting on seed and
fertilizer which have been imported to China from overseas – and which
are stuck in the cargo ships sitting off the coast of Shanghai.”
Shanghai, the world’s largest container port, has been under a bizarre
“Zero Covid” total quarantine for more than four weeks with no end in
sight. In a desperate bid by the CCP “ordering” increased food
production, local CP officials throughout China have begun transforming
basketball courts and even roads into cropland. The
food situation in China is forcing the country to import far more at a
time of global shortages, driving world grain and food prices even
higher.
Africa is also
severely impacted by the US-imposed sanctions and war ending food and
fertilizer exports from Russia and Ukraine. Thirty five African
countries get food from Russia and Ukraine. Twenty two African countries
import fertilizer from there. Alternatives are seriously lacking as
prices soar and supply collapses. Famine is predicted.
David M. Beasley,
executive director of the UN World Food Program, declared recently on
the global food outlook, “There is no precedent even close to this since
World War II.”
moonofalabama | The Americans are now crying ‘uncle’ about Russia’s hypersonic
weapons. After the most recent flight test of the scramjet-powered
Zircon cruise missile, the Washington Post on July 11 carried a Nato statement of complaint:
"Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are highly destabilizing
and pose significant risks to security and stability across the
Euro-Atlantic area," the statement said.
At the same time, talks have begun on the ‘strategic dialog’
between the US and Russia, as agreed at the June 16 Geneva Summit of
the two presidents. The two sides had already agreed to extend the START
treaty on strategic weapons that has been in effect for a decade, but,
notably, it was the US side that initiated the summit—perhaps spurred by
the deployment of the hypersonic, intercontinental-range Avangard
missile back in 2019, when US weapons inspectors were present, as per
START, to inspect the Avangard as it was lowered into its missile silos.
But what exactly is a hypersonic missile—and why is it suddenly such a big deal?
We all remember when Vladimir Putin announced these wonder weapons
in his March 2018 address to his nation [and the world]. The response
from the US media was loud guffaws about ‘CGI’ cartoons and Russian
‘wishcasting.’ Well, neither Nato nor the Biden team are guffawing now.
Like the five stages of grief, the initial denial phase has slowly given
way to acceptance of reality—as Russia continues deploying already
operational missiles, like the Avangard and the air-launched Kinzhal,
now in Syria, as well as finishing up successful state trials of the
Zircon, which is to be operationally deployed aboard surface ships and
submarines, starting in early 2022. And in fact, there are a whole slew
of new Russian hypersonic missiles in the pipeline, some of them much
smaller and able to be carried by ordinary fighter jets, like the Gremlin aka GZUR.
The word hypersonic itself means a flight regime above the speed of Mach 5. That is simple enough, but it is not only about speed.
More important is the ability to MANEUVER at those high speeds, in
order to avoid being shot down by the opponent’s air defenses. A
ballistic missile can go much faster—an ICBM flies at about 6 to 7
km/s, which is about 15,000 mph, about M 25 high in the atmosphere.
[Mach number varies with temperature, so it is not an absolute
measure of speed. The same 15,000 mph would only equal M 20 at sea
level, where the temperature is higher and the speed of sound is also
higher.]
But a ballistic missile flies on a straightforward
trajectory, just like a bullet fired from a barrel of a gun—it cannot
change direction at all, hence the word ballistic.
This means that ballistic missiles can, in theory, be
tracked by radar and shot down with an interceptor missile. It should be
noted here that even this is a very tough task, despite the
straight-line ballistic trajectory. Such an interception has never been
demonstrated in combat, not even with intermediate-range ballistic
missiles [IRBMs], of the kind that the DPRK fired off numerous times,
sailing above the heads of the US Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan,
consisting of over a dozen Aegis-class Ballistic Missile Defense ships, designed specifically for the very purpose of shooting down IRBMs.
Such an interception would have been a historic demonstration
of military technology—on the level of the shock and awe of Hiroshima!
But no interception was ever attempted by those ‘ballistic missile
defense’ ships, spectating as they were, right under the flight paths of
the North Korean rockets!
The bottom line is that hitting even a straight-line ballistic
missile has never been successfully demonstrated in actual practice. It
is a very hard thing to do.
But let’s lower our sights a little from ICBMs and IRBMs [and even
subsonic cruise missiles] to a quite ancient missile technology, the
Soviet-era Scud, first introduced into service in 1957! A recent case
with a Houthi Scud missile fired at Saudi Arabia in December 2017 shows
just how difficult missile interception really is:
At around 9 p.m…a loud bang shook the domestic terminal at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport.
‘There was an explosion at the airport,’ a man said in a video taken
moments after the bang. He and others rushed to the windows as emergency
vehicles streamed onto the runway.
Another video, taken from the tarmac, shows the emergency vehicles at
the end of the runway. Just beyond them is a plume of smoke, confirming the blast and indicating a likely point of impact.
The Houthi missile, identified as an Iranian-made Burqan-2 [a copy of
a North Korean Scud, itself a copy of a Chinese copy of the original
Russian Scud from the 1960s], flew over 600 miles before hitting the Riyadh international airport. The US-made Patriot missile defense system fired FIVE interceptor shots at the missile—all of them missed!
Laura Grego, a missile expert at the Union of Concerned
Scientists, expressed alarm that Saudi defense batteries had fired five
times at the incoming missile.
‘You shoot five times at this missile and they all miss?
That's shocking,’ she said. ‘That's shocking because this system is
supposed to work.’
Ms Grego knows what she’s talking about—she holds a physics doctorate
from Caltech and has worked in missile technology for many years. Not
surprisingly, American officials first claimed the Patriot missiles had
done their job and shot the Scud down. This was convincingly debunked in
the extensive expert analysis that ran in the NYT: Did American Missile Defense Fail in Saudi Arabia?
This was not the first time that Patriot ‘missile defense’ against this supposedly obsolete missile failed spectacularly:
On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi Scud hit the barracks in
Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 14’th
Quartermaster Detachment.
A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at
Dhahran had been caused by a software error in the system's handling of
timestamps. The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation
for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by
one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent
to a miss distance of 600 meters.
Whether this explanation is factual or not, the Americans’ initial
claims of wild success in downing nearly all of the 80 Iraqi Scuds
launched, was debunked by MIT physicist Theodore Postol, who concluded that no missiles were in fact intercepted!
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