One of the largest supervolcanoes in the world sits underneath California, lying dormant for the past 100,000 years. Now, researchers have gotten a clearer glimpse into what lies below the Long Valley supervolcano, uncovering 240 cubic miles of magma sitting beneath California.
It’s important to start off by saying this absolutely doesn’t mean there is any imminent danger. Experts at the United States Geological Society (USGS) are actively monitoring the supervolcano, and while there has been an uptick in activity over the past four decades, there are no signs of an eruption.
What Is the Long Valley supervolcano?
While you may have heard quite a bit about the supervolcano sitting beneath Yellowstone National Park, you may be unfamiliar with another major supervolcano in the United States, the Long Valley Caldera. The Long Valley Caldera sits in eastern California adjacent to Mammoth Mountain and measures 20 miles long by 11 miles wide.
A caldera is basically a depression formed after the eruption of magma to the surface. As magma fills up the magma chamber below a volcano it expands the crust and the volcano grows. After an eruption, there is a tremendous amount of volume that has suddenly been displaced, which causes the ground above to sink into a bowl-shaped depression, which we call a caldera
The Long Valley Caldera is the depression formed from the supervolcano eruption 760,000 years ago, which ejected hot ash, lava and toxic gas. The eruption 760,000 years ago erupted 140 cubic miles of material from the supervolcano. To put this into perspective, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens erupted 0.29 cubic miles of material, meaning the Long Valley eruption ejected nearly 500 times that amount of material.
If all of the 240 cubic miles of magma found beneath the Long Valley supervolcano were ever to erupt, it would eject over 800 times the volume of material as the 1980 Mount St. Helen’s eruption. This is the reason geologists with the USGS continuously monitor the supervolcanoes that lie dormant beneath America. If and when one does erupt, it will trigger catastrophic destruction and loss of life. Fortunately, there is an extremely low likelihood of any supervolcano eruption occurring in any of our lifetimes. These eruptions happen very infrequently, but when they do happen, the world notices.
Discovering What Lies Beneath the Long Valley supervolcano
Scientists began noting that the Long Valley caldera began growing around 1978 and has been doing so ever since. This gradual growing likely represents the influx of magma into the magma chamber below the supervolcano, essentially filling the tank in preparation for the next eruption.
While the supervolcano has been studied for decades, it has been difficult to determine the amount of magma that lies beneath Long Valley. A recent study, published in the journal Geology, lays out new data in our understanding of the magma reservoir…
The Mueller report, which had no choice as there was no evidence, but to clear Donald Trump of conspiring with Russian President Putin to steal the last US presidential election from Hillary Clinton, nevertheless managed to keep an aspect of the manufactured hoax known as “Russiagate” alive by indicting some Russian intelligence officers and a Russian Internet clickbait operation for attempting to discredit Hillary with Internet postings.
At the time I noticed that Muller’s indictments were based only on his assertion and not on any evidence.As there was no prospect whatsoever of the fake indictments coming to trial, I did not comment on them. I focused instead on Mueller’s statement that Trump might have obstructed justice although he lacked evidence to support the charge. I noted how corrupt American law has become when it is possible to obstruct justice in the absence of a crime.
Democrats and presstitutes were determined to get Trump by any means and remain uninterested in how justice is obstructed when there is no crime.
In retrospect, not picking up on Mueller’s indictment-by-hearsay of Russians was a mistake.Not only have the Democrats continued their Russiagate campaign on the basis of the unsubstantiated indictments, but, more importantly, the indictments-by-assertion-alone show Mueller’s total lack of moral character.A prosecutor, indeed a former Director of the FBI, who confuses his unsubstantiated allegation with evidence, is not only a person devoid of any respect for law, but also an extremely dangerous person to have been vetted for the high government positions that he has held.
How did a person as corrupt as Robert Mueller get confirmed in his appointments as US Attorney, US Assistant Attorney General, US Deputy Attorney General, and Director of the FBI?That a person as ethically-challenged as Robert Mueller could breeze through so many confirmations by the US Senate proves how utterly corrupt the US government is…
That Mueller’s indictment of Russians for attempting to throw the presidential election to Trump is unsubstantiated has been highlighted by US Federal District Judge Dabney Friedrich.The judge just ruled that Mueller’s assertion of Russian “sweeping and systematic” interference in the presidential election does not constitute proof of the charge. It is nothing but an unsubstantiated indictment based on nothing but an assertion by the special prosecutor. Mueller provides no evidence in his report to support his claim. Mueller is so corrupt that he uses his unsubstantiated indictment as evidence for the indictment! https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/07/no_author/another-nail-in-russiagate-coffin/
In other words, the Federal Judge has ruled that Mueller has made a false indictment.
If that is not a felony, it should be.
The corrupt Mueller covers up his absence of evidence for his indictments by using language such as “widely reported,” “confirmed,” “established.”He is referring to the words used by his stable of presstitutes, media whores who paved the way for his false accusation.
A country without a media is a Police State.The only media the West has is the English language Russian media and the alternative media on Internet sites, such as this site, Information Clearing House, Global Research, Lew Rockwell, Unz Review.
The Russian media was banned from the conference on press freedom, because the Russian media is free and the UK and US media are not.The People Really In Charge—PRICs—are at work shutting down the rest of us as fast as they can.
Before long, the only words you will hear willl be those used to control you.The word freedom will be redefined as per George Orwell’s 1984 or be prohibited.It will die as a word whose meaning is unknown…
If there was a dunce’s cap awarded to the most gullible – or worse, complicit – news outfit in the whole ‘Russiagate’ affair, it would surely go to CNN.
The small consolation is that its ratings have plummeted in direct proportion to its fake news agenda. Unless trapped in a hotel room in Ulan Bator and having already read the Gideon’s Bible, nobody in their right mind goes looking for CNN.
However, other media do, of course, amplify their prevailing narrative. This is that the Democratic Party didn’t lose because they chose the only person in America who could possibly lose to Donald Trump, but because a bearded man with snow on his boots smelling of vodka and speaking with a thick Russian accent fooled everyone into voting for the GOP. And where no such man can be identified, then a Western cipher can be demonized as his proxy.
Because, dear readers, in a now-forgotten coincidence, it was CNN that in a way brought Julian Assange into the public limelight. They interviewed him a number of times, including once in 2010, when they sent their team to showcase the then-pale-blonde ascetic wonderkid of the whistleblowing business. That was way before RT had aired Assange’s show ‘The World Tomorrow’ – because that suited CNN’s agenda then, in the way that burying him does now.
Full disclosure: Julian Assange is a friend of mine and so opportunists seeking his crucifixion to serve an anti-Trump agenda cut no ice with me. Furthermore, I work for RT, and know personally the fine broadcasting professionals traduced in a disgraceful way by the CNN “Special.”
Julian Assange was hiding in plain sight by having his own show on RT. That’s how espionage works nowadays in the fevered minds of CNN. And he appeared on news shows throughout the world – any one of which could have “passed him a USB drive” when they went into the Ecuador Embassy to film him. He even appeared on my show on TalkRadio, whose proprietor could of course be a (deep) undercover Russian agent.
The fatal flaw in all of this, of course, is that the DNC computers were never hacked in the first place, not by a “master-hacker” or even a schoolboy in his bedroom. That’s why their servers were never examined by the FBI, Mueller or anybody else wearing any kind of official badge.
The scandalous behavior – including CNN’s own (now Fox) contributor Donna Brazile – through which the Democratic Party rigged their own Primary process to defeat Bernie Sanders and procure the coronation of the aforementioned Mrs Clinton was not hacked but leaked. Not by Russians but by Americans. Not by RT but by Democratic Party insiders, disgusted as they should have been at the shameless Tammany Hall shenanigans going on in their party.
The real target of fading, failing, flailing CNN was not Julian Assange but Donald Trump. His administration is currently trying to incarcerate Assange in the gulags of the US injustice system for the crime of publishing the truth. That’s the real scandal.
The Libra is just the upshot of an entrepreneurial attempt to profit from the global market for payment services (and later perhaps also from the credit markets), and, of course, to collect as much precious transaction data as possible.
Starting in 2020, Facebook wants to offer its customers a global high-tech currency and infrastructure. The US IT giant says that this will provide many people around the world with easy and cost-effective access to the monetary and financial system. The new blockchain-based money is called “Libra.” Technically, it is something akin to a crypto-money-banknote covered by a basket of official fiat currencies (such as US dollars, euros, and the like). The heart of the Libra project is the “Libra Association” (LA). The non-governmental association, based in Geneva, Switzerland, is supported by founding members such as eBay, Facebook, Mastercard, PayPal, Spotify, Uber, Visa, as well as other renowned firms, and will be responsible for the operation and further development of Libra.
Libra will be created by participants depositing fiat currencies such as US dollars or euros with the LA, and the LA will then grant the depositors a corresponding Libra amount in a digital wallet, which can be used for payments via the Internet, smartphone, credit card or WhatsApp and messengers, i.e., Facebook’s chat services. The chances of success seem to be pretty good for the Libra: Electronic payment is a world-wide mega-trend. People seem to have become increasingly open to new technological ways of making payments. And if money can be sent to and fro via social media, many potential customers will presumably like it very much.
Traditional banks have good reasons to worry. The Libra is about to siphon transactions out of bank accounts and put them into the LA’s hands. Not banks, but the LA will collect the fees and will receive precious data on who pays what, when, and where. The banks will be left even more in the cold should customers begin to use the Libra for savings purposes as well. Because then they would also lose the time and savings deposits with which they refinance their balance sheets at low costs. Or think of the credit business: The LA may at some point also provide its customers with short-term consumer loans.
In any case, from a customers’ perspective it is a good thing if and when the competitive pressure in the banking business gains momentum; as is well known, competition stimulates the search for better products and lower prices, which benefits the customers. The now heightened competition from the fin-tech industry is undoubtedly quite a challenge for many banks. Not least because for decades state regulation has kept unwelcome outside competition from their backs, thereby, however, weakening their innovative strength. But our sympathies have to be first and foremost with the people demanding banking and financial services, not with the banks delivering them.
The critical question, however, is this: Is the Librareally good— or sound — money? Unfortunately, this question cannot be answered in the affirmative. Read the rest of this entry »
You know something is wrong when people consider it prejudiced and hateful to state a basic scientific fact like, “sex is determined by XY or XX chromosomes.”
They have successfully blurred the lines between sex and gender, male and female, science and feelings.
I have no fear of or hatred for transgender people. I’ll even call them by their preferred pronoun since that’s the polite thing to do. It is not my place to tell others how to live their lives.
But it seems like the powers that be want to destroy the meaning of words and ignore science in favor of political correctness. But this has real-world consequences.
One example is professional sports.
Since men and women are biologically different, they have different muscle composition, hormones, and therefore athletic abilities. And when you allow anyone who was born a male to play women’s sports, they have a distinct advantage, even if they have “transitioned.”
So if we deny science, and pretend a “gender reassignment surgery” can actually change a person’s biological sex, say goodbye to women’s sports.
At this point in scientific advancement, a person is stuck with the chromosomes they were born with.
Another example of the problems created by destroying the meaning of words is exemplified in an article called Blurred lines: A pregnant man’s tragedy tests gender notions.
The author criticizes hospital staff for treating a transgender man like a man.
You would think that’s what they are supposed to do, right? Go along with the new make-believe definition of male and female, just like the headlines does (because just a reminder, in the real world, men can’t be pregnant).
But now hospital staff are being blamed for failing to realize that this “man” was pregnant…
“He was rightly classified as a man” in the medical records and appears masculine, Stroumsa [lead author of a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine] said. “But that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs.”
Sadly, the “man” ended up losing the baby.
A woman showing up with similar symptoms “would almost surely have been triaged and evaluated more urgently for pregnancy-related problems,” the authors wrote.
You don’t say… Good thing we have these scholarly medical journals to provide these insights.
The real blurred line is the definition of gender versus sex…
These people have to do mental gymnastics to keep up the charade. Healthcare professionals are not responsible for failing to understand these deliberately blurred definitions.
If you want people to believe a lie, you can’t get mad when they act accordingly.
Be seeing you
Citizen: “What are you protesting against” Johnny: “What have you got?” The Wild One
The fundamental issue of the 2020 presidential campaign is rapidly becoming whether or not America’s whites, as exemplified in the person of Donald Trump, have the right to block the world’s blacks and Muslims, as exemplified in the person of Somalia-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), from immigrating en masse to the United States.
Or is the entire notion of white citizens democratically voting to keep out nonwhites too racistly triggering for more enlightened entities, such as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, to allow?
The United Nations’ publication last month of its World Population Prospects 2019 adds important perspective to this question.
For example, in 1991, when Omar’s family fled Somalia due to their complicity in the genocidal regime of the dictator Siad Barre, the population of Somalia was only 7 million.
Today, 28 chaotic years later, Somalia has more than doubled in size to 15 million despite immense outflows of emigrants. The U.N. forecasts that Somalia’s population will reach 35 million in 2050 and 76 million in 2100.
Alternatively, millions of Somalis (or, quite possibly, tens of millions of Somalis) might prefer to follow Rep. Omar to the Magic Dirt of the first world. According to a Gallup poll, at present one-third of the population of sub-Saharan African wants to migrate, and it’s unlikely that additional population growth will make Africa more attractive.
Here’s my latest update of what I call The Most Important Graph in the World:
The U.N. forecasts that the population of sub-Saharan Africa, which was 504,000,000 in 1991 and is 1,066,000,000 today, will grow to 2,118,000,000 in 2050 and all the way to 3,775,000,000 in 2100.
Do American and European white voters have the right to say no to the hundreds of millions of blacks and Muslims who will want to flee the messes they’ve made of their own countries?…
When you stop and think about it, it’s kind of nuts that Americans sacralize foreign elites like Omar (her family was high-enough ranking in the old dictatorship that when it fell, her fellow Somalis wanted to kill them as vengeance) from the worst-run countries on Earth and pay them to lecture us on how the only thing that will save us is letting in more of them.
For example, I recently reviewedThis Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by the white-hating Calcutta-born NYU professor Suketu Mehta:
I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny…. It’s our country now.
After all, it’s a terrible burden that people from Somalia and India take on to move to deplorable America, but our sacred newcomers just happen to have a lot more cousins back home who are willing to redeem us with their vibrant diversity. Their relatives are so much more moral than you racists Americans that they will sacrifice themselves by moving here for the good of our souls…
Five of the 24 men sentenced last week by an Italian court to life in prison for their roles in a brutal and bloody US-backed Cold War campaign against South American dissidents graduated from a notorious US Army school once known for teaching torture, assassination and democracy suppression.
On July 8 judges in Rome’s Court of Appeals sentenced the former Bolivian, Chilean, Peruvian and Uruguayan government and military officials after they were found guilty of kidnapping and murdering 23 Italian nationals in the 1970s and 1980s during Operation Condor, a coordinated effort by right-wing military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil and, later, Peru and Ecuador, against perceived leftist threats. The campaign, which was characterized by kidnappings, torture, disappearances and murder, claimed an estimated 60,000 lives, according to human rights groups. Victims included leftists and other dissidents, clergy, intellectuals, academics, students, peasant and trade union leaders and indigenous peoples.
The United States government, military and intelligence agencies supported Operation Condor with military aid, planning and technical support, as well as surveillance and torture training during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations. Much of this support, which the US attempted to justify within the context of the global Cold War struggle against communism, was based at US military installations in Panama. It was there that the US Army opened the School of the Americas in 1946, which would graduate 11 Latin American heads of state over the following decades. None of them became their country’s leader by democratic means, leading critics to dub the SOA “School of Assassins” and “School of Coups” because it produced so many of both.
SOA’s most notorious graduates include narco-trafficking Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the genocidal Guatemalan military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, Bolivian despot Hugo Banzer (known for sheltering Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie), Haitian death squad commander and military dictator Raoul Cédras and Argentine strongman Leopoldo Galtieri, who presided during a period of his country’s “Dirty War” in which tens of thousands of innocent men and women were disappeared. Countless other war criminals have studied at the SOA, sometimes using US manuals that taught kidnapping, torture, assassination and democracy suppression techniques.
Some of the worst massacres and other atrocities perpetrated by US-backed forces during the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1980s, including the slaughter of 900 villagers – mostly women and children – at El Mozote, the assassination of Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero and the rape and murder of four US churchwomen who worked with him, were planned, committed or covered up by SOA graduates. So were a series of chainsaw massacres in Colombia, the murder of four Dutch journalists in El Salvador, the assassination of a former Chilean official and his US aide in a 1976 car bombing in Washington, DC and many other atrocities.
It can now be revealed that several men sentenced to life in prison in Rome last week are also SOA graduates…
CNN has published an unbelievably brazen and dishonest smear piece on Julian Assange, easily the most egregious article of its kind since the notoriously bogus Assange-Manafort report by The Guardian last year. It contains none of the “exclusive” documents which it claims substantiate its smears, relying solely on vague unsubstantiated assertions and easily debunked lies to paint the WikiLeaks founder in a negative light.
And let’s be clear right off the bat, it is most certainly a smear piece. The article, titled “Exclusive: Security reports reveal how Assange turned an embassy into a command post for election meddling”, admits that it exists for the sole purpose of tarnishing Assange’s reputation when it reports, with no evidence whatsoever, that while at the Ecuadorian embassy Assange once “smeared feces on the walls out of anger.” Not “reportedly”. Not “the Ecuadorian government claims.” CNN reported it as a fact, as an event that is known to have happened. This is journalistic malpractice, and it isn’t an accident.
Whenever you see any “news” report citing this claim, you are witnessing a standard smear tactic of the plutocratic media. Whenever you see them citing this claim as a concrete, verified fact, you are witnessing an especially aggressive and deliberate psyop. The Ecuadorian embassy was easily the most-surveilled building in the world during Assange’s stay there, and the Ecuadorian government has leaked photos of Assange’s living quarters to the media in an attempt to paint him as a messy houseguest in need of eviction, so if the “feces on the walls” event had ever transpired you would have seen photos of it, whether you wanted to or not. It never happened.
SCOOP: New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. w/ @kguerrerocnnhttps://t.co/OqC9GBsIKl
“New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,” the article begins.
In its very first sentence the article invalidates all the claims which follow it, because its use of the word “potentially” means that none of the documents CNN purports to have contain any actual evidence. It’s worth noting at this time that there is to this day not one shred of publicly available evidence that any of the Democratic Party emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016 were in fact “hacked” at all, and could very well have been the result of a leak as asserted by former British ambassador Craig Murray, who claims to have inside knowledge on the matter.
The glaring plot holes in the Mueller report’s assertions about Russia being the source of the 2016 WikiLeaks drops have already been ripped wide open by journalist Aaron Maté’s meticulous analysis of the report’s timeline in an article accurately titled “CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims“. The CNN smear piece, which claims to “add a new dimension to the Mueller report”, is entirely relying on this porous timeline for its reporting. Plot holes include the fact that Mueller claims (and CNN repeats) that the Russians transferred the emails to WikiLeaks on or around July 14, which Maté notes is “a full month after Assange publicly announced that he had them.”
CNN kicks off its smear piece with the inflammatory claim that “Assange met with Russians and world-class hackers at critical moments”, mentioning both “Russians” and “hackers” in the same breath in an attempt to give the impression that the two are related. It’s not until paragraph 43 and 46, long after most people have stopped reading, that the articles authors bother to inform their readers that the “hackers” in question are German and have no established connection to the Russian government whatsoever. The “Russians” counted among Assange’s scores of visitors consist of RT staff, who have always consistently reported on WikiLeaks, and a “Russian national” about whom almost nothing is known.
The article falsely labels Assange a “hacker”, a defamatory claim the mass media circulates whenever it wants to tarnish Assange’s reputation. Assange, of course, is a publisher. WikiLeaks publishes materials which are given to it, it doesn’t “hack” them.
That is a LIE that’s been debunked over and over. We published ONE article about the emails that were RELEASED already, just not TWEETED about yet, because WikiLeaks had been releasing them like clockwork and we paid attention. It’s called journalism, they should try it sometime.
CNN also repeats the long-debunked lie that RT “published articles detailing the new batches of emails before WikiLeaks officially released them” during the 2016 election, citing no evidence because this never happened. RT reported on a WikiLeaks release in October 2016 after it had been published by WikiLeaks but before the WikiLeaks Twitter account had tweeted about it, and western propagandists willfully conflated WikiLeaks publications with tweets from the WikiLeaks Twitter account in order to make it look like RT had insider knowledge about the publications.
In reality, RT was simply watching the WikiLeaks site closely for new releases in order to get an early scoop before other outlets, because Podesta email leaks had been dropping regularly.
“That is a LIE that’s been debunked over and over,” tweeted RT America editor Nebojša Malić in response to the smear. “We published ONE article about the emails that were RELEASED already, just not TWEETED about yet, because WikiLeaks had been releasing them like clockwork and we paid attention. It’s called journalism, they should try it sometime.”
“Yes that is fake news,” tweeted RT’s Ivor Crotty. “I was the editor on the team that monitored wikileaks and by Podesta 6 we knew they tweeted at 9am EST each day (1pm Dublin) – so we checked the database by reverse searching and discovered a new dump, tweeted about it, and the conspiracy theorists jumped.”
“RT already addressed this in 2016, convincingly if you read the sequence of events they lay out: the Podesta emails appeared on the WikiLeaks website before WikiLeaks sent a tweet about it,” Maté tweeted at CNN’s Marshall Cohen. “Ignoring that allows for the conspiracy theory you propose. It’s ridiculous to suggest that RT-Wikileaks ‘were coordinating behind the scenes’ based on the fact that RT tweeted about the Podesta emails AFTER they appeared on WL’s site, but BEFORE WL tweeted about them. You’re implicating RT in a conspiracy… for doing journalism.”
It’s not possible to research the “RT had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks drops” conspiracy theory without running across articles which debunked it at the time, so the article’s authors were likely either knowingly lying or taking dictation from someone who was.
“Spanish newspaper El Pais on July 9: ‘Spanish security company spied on Julian Assange’s meetings with lawyers‘. Add little security state propaganda and 6 days later you get from CNN: ‘How Julian Assange turned an embassy into command post for election meddling’,” notedShadowproof managing editor Kevin Gosztola in response to the CNN smear, a reminder of how a little narrative tweaking can turn a story on its head in support of the powerful.
This would be the same CNN who told its viewers that it’s against the law to read WikiLeaks, with Democratic Party prince Chris Cuomo lying “Remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents; it’s different for the media, so everything you learn about this you’re learning from us.” The same CNN which falsely reported that Assange is a pedophile not once, but twice. The same CNN which has been caught blatantly lying in its Russiagate coverage, which has had to fire journalists for misreporting Russiagate in a media environment where that almost never happens with Russia stories, which has deleted evidence of its journalistic malpractice regarding Russiagate from the internet without retraction or apology.
So this latest attempt to tarnish Julian Assange’s reputation from CNN is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that the article contains exactly zero of the “exclusive documents” which it says validate its claims and insinuations. Nor is it surprising that CNN is using invisible evidence which almost certainly came into its hands through a government agency to give weight to its smear. But the sheer volume of disinformation and deceit they were able to pack into one single article this time around was just jaw-dropping. Even for CNN.
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Turkey’s Erdogan has been trying to suck US into a full blown war in Syria. Instigating poison gas attacks for example which we know about thanks to Seymour Hersh.
Turkey is wooing Russia. Erdogan rightly fears regime change. He knows what happens when you don’t do as the US says.
That is why he is buying the Russian defense system.
Moon of Alabama published an article recently on Turkey’s purchase of the Russia S-400 system and included a tweet from “government controlled Turkish news agency Anadolu made it abundantly clear what the system is supposed to target. When it announced the news of the arrival it attached the picture below to its tweet” and here’s a screen capture of the Tweet:
Moon of Alabama posted the entire image and I couldn’t help laughing. All that’s missing from the potential targets is the F-35. But you’ll note all of them are American systems. It’s easy to guess that Turkey is defending itself from any bombing campaign instigated by Washington to initiate “regime change.”
As I’ve written on LewRockwell.com, backed by experts, VLO or stealth is essentially marketing hype. Russian historian and military analyst Andrei Martyanov discussed the S-400 deal on his blog:
I want to clear the air from the very start: Turkey knows what [the] F-35 is and that is why she will “survive” cancellation of F-35 deliveries. F-35 for Turkey, who produced a number of parts for this aircraft, was primarily of industrial interest. So, all this contrived BS about security issues is just that, BS. Modern Air Defense complexes, such as S-400, even in their export version, can detect, track and shoot down all those VLO (Very Low Observability) targets such as F-35. The only “security issue” here for the United States was the fact that having “live” F-35 and S-400 simultaneously by the key member of NATO would have revealed publicly (in professional circles it is known well already) all [the] massive faults with F-35 in general and ONLY-VLO-centric combat aircraft concept in particular.
Martyanov wrote an entire short piece on “Radiophotonics” here, entitled, “Radiophotonics, Again” and this is a relevant excerpt, since I have no engineering or technical background:
This morning, however, some interesting news—it does exist, it is in the process of trials and addressing its inevitable issues (in Russian), and that means the end radio VLO as such in a very near future. Not that VLO is that much useful now in high end peer-to-peer warfare but ramifications of radiophotonics radar being deployed in the modern battle-field are immense and have strategic implications. This also explains Russia’s rather calm and confident reaction in the last 20+ years to US radio VLO (Stealth) developments since modern signal processing and sensor fusion techniques allow for a very effective countering of “stealth” targets.
In fact, at this stage any further investment into VLO technologies seems to be just a waste of time and money or, as Commanders Gattuso and Tanner wrote 17 years ago (in relation to CVN(X)), it is:
like polishing cannonballs so they will fly a little farther
An article on the “massive faults” of the F-35 posted on Defensenews.com entitled, “The Pentagon is Battling the Clock to Fix Serious, Unreported F-35 Problems.” No doubt the taxpayer will be on the hook to fix these problems—more billions, at the least. I lack the expertise to determine whether the F-35 will be viable but an informed source in private communication opined:
My personal guesstimate is that the F-35 will eventually become a capable command post and a capable ground strike platform. It is stealthy enough to be used against primitive enemies but has absolutely NO chance against Russia [and China] and her integrated air defense network (including ground stations, AWACS and the typical mix of MiG-31BM, Su-34, Su-30SM, Su-35S and Su-57).
In terms of air-to-air, the F-35 (all versions) suffers from bad aerodynamics, poor thrust-to-weight ratio, poor range, poor speed, poor armament and an inadequate (under-powered) radar. One US specialist said that a first-generation F-16 could beat the F-35 in a one-on-one air-to-air combat. So they will be used under the protection of F-22s and only in theaters where the opposing forces has poor to medium air defenses (Syria and Iran are both in that category, with the exception of some better protected locations).
Bottom line: the US is screwed. There are BILLIONS riding on the F-35 program and no alternatives in the foreseeable future.
What the US should have done is modernize its fleet of F-16, F-15 and F-18 aircraft like the Russians did with the Su-27 or Tu-22M3…
A century later, 3 million were employed on farms, while the USDA employed 105,000 workers. This increase in agency size represents the Federal government’s increasingly regulatory stance in the US economy.
For decades, politicians and pundits in political media alike have said that the American farming and ranching industries are vital to our nation and must be protected from “unfair” competition and the threat of going out of business. This belief often materializes in the form of legislative or executive action undertaken by the government.
The federal government has long sought to promote the health of these industries, employing pro-farming policies since the days of FDR’s New Deal. These programs survive to this day, being expanded from their initial scope or their original sentiments reimposed through new acts of Congress. Strangely enough, this bureaucratic expansion occurs despite American agriculture output declining over the course of America’s existence.
Output Declines, Government Grows
Since 1900, the number of American farms in operation has fallen 63 percent. In 1930, agricultural GDP as a share of total GDP sat at a sizeable 7.7 percent — by 2002, agricultural GDP as a share of total GDP was a mere 0.7 percent. This 7 percent decrease signals the adoption of a new role in the world economy by the US.
The US now imports a large percentage of the fresh vegetables and produce it sells — while in 1975 the proportion of fresh fruit sold in the United States that was imported was 23 percent, it reached 51.3 percent in 2016.
Domestic vegetable and fruit producers are being supplanted in the market by producers from countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. The City University of New York’s Urban Food Policy Institute reports: “…since the NAFTA Trade Agreement in 1994, U.S. consumption of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, limes, berries, avocados and mangos imported from Mexico is way up and still rising.”
Clearly, increased trade is impacting America’s agriculture sector. Surely then, the government’s relationship with the industry must be changing as well. Logic would suggest that the USDA and its subordinate agencies are laying off employees and reducing their size and scope in response to the decline of America’s beloved industry.
In reality, this is not the case. In 1900, 11 million Americans were employed on farms and 2,900 employed by the USDA. A century later, 3 million were employed on farms, while the USDA employed 105,000 workers. This increase in agency size represents the Federal government’s increasingly regulatory stance in the US economy.
Agriculture’s Death is Good News
How could an industry’s death spell prosperity for a nation? While the number of people employed in farming and similar occupations dwindled from 11 million in 1900 to 2.6 million in 2017, employment in STEM (science, technology, engineer, and math) occupations has grown 79 percent between 1990 and 2016 — increasing from 9.7 million to 17.3 million. The US economy is transitioning away from producing in primary and secondary level industries like agriculture and related enterprises such as food processing and packaging.
The reduction in the number of people employed in agriculture and related jobs shows that America is actually abandoning low paying jobs. Compared to STEM jobs, occupations in the primary or secondary sectors of the economy tend to pay a very low wage. Farm hands and field laborers, who are often poor immigrants, are paid below minimum wage to perform tasks that take a significant toll on their bodies. Difficult manual labor poses both short-term and long-term risks to workers’ health, compared to the almost complete lack of health detriments presented by jobs in STEM fields. These agricultural jobs tend also to be seasonal. Workers will only have a secure source of income for between 3 and 6 months per year, depending on where they work, due to the fact that crops cannot be grown year round.
As the economy sheds the last remnants of its agricultural-centric past, new jobs are being created in new industries at a rapid pace. Occupations in the tertiary and quaternary sectors are far more beneficial to society and individuals, as they provide higher wages, a more stable source of income, and employment year round. In a bid to attract workers to fill positions, companies often offer benefits such as childcare and healthcare plans as part of an offer of employment. It is very obvious that we should seek to employ as many people as possible in tertiary and quaternary sector industries.
Primary and secondary products will never lose value. Humans will always have a need to consume agricultural products and build devices and structures from raw materials that are finished through secondary sector activities. As the US economy begins to be largely constructed of tertiary and quaternary economic activities, these lower-level processes will simply be outsourced to less developed countries.
Outsourcing: Oppression or Opportunity?
Since their ideology became a force in the mainstream a decade ago, the rallying cry of political leftists has been to stand for those being oppressed, exploited, or victimized by the status quo. The advancement of technology has meant that industrialization, combined with other factors, has left certain nations behind. Third world economies are not nearly as developed as their first world counterparts, with a bulk of their economic activity taking place in the primary and secondary sectors. These leftists take an anti-trade stance, positing that the outsourcing of production to less developed nations is capitalistic exploitation.
“Exploitation” Actually Benefits All Parties Involved
While it is true that a business owner may outsource simple manufacturing processes to countries where they may hire workers at cheaper wages, it is also true that the workers hired benefit from this self-interested move. The reason workers choose to work in these plants and industries is that they provide the best possible way to make money to the worker. If a corporation goes to a less developed nation and is able to hire 5,000 workers to work for them, it means that the firm is now offering the best employment opportunity in the country to 5,000 workers. Prior to the company’s arrival, laborers were likely making less money than they now do and working in worse conditions. Otherwise, why would they choose to work for the new company? Their condition has obviously been improved by the opening of a plant by a foreign capitalist…
