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Deranged Central Bankers Blowing Up the World
DERANGED CENTRAL BANKERS BLOWING UP THE WORLD
It is now self-evident to any sentient being (excludes CNBC shills, Wall Street shyster economists, and Keynesian loving politicians) the mountainous level of unpayable global debt is about to crash down like an avalanche upon hundreds of millions of willfully ignorant citizens who trusted their politician leaders and the central bankers who created the debt out of thin air. McKinsey produced a report last year showing the world had added $57 trillion of debt between 2008 and the 2nd quarter of 2014, with global debt to GDP reaching 286%.
The global economy has only deteriorated since mid-2014, with politicians and central bankers accelerating the issuance of debt. These deranged psychopaths have added in excess of $70 trillion of debt in the last eight years, a 50% increase. With $142 trillion of global debt enough to collapse the global economy in 2008, only a lunatic would implement a “solution” that increased global debt to $212 trillion over the next seven years thinking that would solve a problem created by too much debt.
The truth is, these central bankers and captured politicians knew this massive issuance of more unpayable debt wouldn’t solve anything. Their goal was to keep the global economy afloat so their banker owners and corporate masters would not have to accept the consequences of their criminal actions and could keep their pillaging of global wealth going unabated.
The issuance of debt and easy money policies of the Fed and their foreign central banker co-conspirators functioned to drive equity prices to all-time highs in 2015, but the debt issuance and money printing needs to increase exponentially in order keep stock markets rising. Once the QE spigot was shut off markets have flattened and are now falling hard. You can sense the desperation among the financial elite. The desperation is borne out by the frantic reckless measures taken by central bankers and politicians since 2008.
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Drones, IBM, and the Big Data of Death
Drones, IBM, and the Big Data of Death
LAST WEEK The Intercept published a package of stories on the U.S. drone program, drawing on a cache of secret government documents leaked by an intelligence community whistleblower. The available evidence suggests that one of the documents, a study titled “ISR Support to Small Footprint CT Operations — Somalia/Yemen,” was produced for the Defense Department in 2013 by consultants from IBM. If you look at just one classified PowerPoint presentation this year, I recommend you make it this one.
Like a good poem, the ISR study has multiple meanings, and rewards careful attention and repeated reading. On its surface, it’s simply an analysis by the Defense Department’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Task Force of the “performance and requirements” of the U.S. military’s counterterrorism kill/capture operations, including drone strikes, in Somalia and Yemen. However, it’s also what a former senior special operations officer characterized as a “bitch brief” — that is, a study designed to be a weapon in a bureaucratic turf war with the CIA to win the Pentagon more money and a bigger mandate. The study was also presumably an opportunity for IBM to demonstrate that it can produce snappy “analysis” tailored to the desires of its Defense Department clients, as well as for current Defense employees to network with a potential future employer.
But the presentation’s most compelling meaning is much deeper: It’s a rare, peculiar cultural artifact that opens a window into the deep guts of the military-industrial complex, where the technologies of assassination and corporate sales converge, all described in language as dead as the target of an ISR platform kinetic engagement.
Edge Methods
In 2010, IBM employees delivered a talk at IBM’s Analytics Solution Center in Washington, D.C., titled “An Introduction to Edge Methods: Business Analytics and Optimization for Intelligence.” The audience was “the Defense and Intelligence communities,” and IBM’s goal was to explain to them how the company could help them with “managing large volumes of data” to derive “invaluable” insights. Among its already-existing governmental customers, IBM explained, was the ISR Task Force.
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World Trade Drops Most Since Financial Crisis
World Trade Drops Most Since Financial Crisis
Maybe we shouldn’t take our daily corporate samples too seriously. Maybe they don’t adequately represent the global economy. So IBM’s revenues last quarter plunged 13% from a year ago. It blamed China and the dollar, among other culprits. But IBM’s revenues have dropped for 13 quarters in a row. It’s a normal IBM condition and not a reflection of the global economy.
A whole slew of other tech companies chimed in with either disappointing revenues or disappointing outlooks, or both, each blaming a variety of issues, among them China and the dollar. Chip maker Qualcomm just reported a 14% plunge in its quarterly revenues. It’s having trouble in the smartphone market and will lay off a bunch of people. But maybe they’re just running into tougher competitors, rather than a lousy global economy. And the PC business, which is cratering, is dragging down all those involved. That’s structural and has little to do with the state of the global economy.
Then there’s industrial giant United Technology which reported that its revenues last quarter dropped 5%. Today Caterpillar reported that global machine sales plunged 15% in June compared to a year ago, after having dropped 12% in May and 11% in April, In Asia, machine sales plunged 19%, in Latin America 50%. And in booming North America? Down 5%, after having been up for the prior two months.
So CAT is facing Japanese, Chinese, and German competitors. It’s having to slug it out with them in China precisely when China is slowing. So it may be just CAT that’s having a hard time.
But don’t look at energy. Energy is getting clobbered….
So maybe we’re cherry-picking negative data. There are companies with actual revenue increases and positive outlooks, like Equifax, the credit bureau, which just reported a 10% jump in revenues (14% “in local currency,” as it says). Consumer borrowing is king, and Equifax expedites the process.
So what the heck is going on?
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From the Very Creation of the Internet, U.S. Spy Agencies Fought to Block Encryption
From the Very Creation of the Internet, U.S. Spy Agencies Fought to Block Encryption
American spy agencies have intentionally weakened digital security for many decades. This breaks the functionality of our computers and of the Internet. It reduces functionality and reduces security by – for example – creating backdoors that malicious hackers can get through.
The spy agencies have treated patriotic Americans who want to use encryption to protect their privacy as extremists … or even terrorists.
As Gizmodo’s Matt Novak points out, this attack started at the very birth of the internet:
In the 1970s, civilian researchers at places like IBM, Stanford and MIT were developing encryption to ensure that digital data sent between businesses, academics and private citizens couldn’t be intercepted and understood by a third party. This concerned folks inthe U.S. intelligence community who didn’t want to get locked out of potentially eavesdropping on anyone, regardless of their preferred communications method. Despite their most valiant efforts, agencies like the NSA ultimately lost out to commercial interests. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
***
When the NSA got wind of the research developments at IBM, Stanford and MIT in the 1970s they scrambled to block publication of their early studies. When that didn’t work, the NSA sought to work with the civilian research community to develop the encryption. As Stowsky writes, “the agency struck a deal with IBM to develop a data encryption standard (DES) for commercial applications in return for full pre-publication review and right to regulate the length, and therefore the strength of the crypto algorithm.”
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RED ALERT – IBM Moves to Create a Centralized, Central Bank Controlled Blockchain for Currency Control
RED ALERT – IBM Moves to Create a Centralized, Central Bank Controlled Blockchain for Currency Control
International Business Machines Corp is considering adopting the underlying technology behind bitcoin, known as the “blockchain,” to create a digital cash and payment system for major currencies, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Unlike bitcoin, where the network is decentralized and there is no overseer, the proposed digital currency system would be controlled by central banks.
– From the Reuters article: IBM Looking at Adopting Bitcoin Technology for Major Currencies
Many activists and thinkers in the anti-status quo world were understandably very suspicious of Bitcoin when it first entered mainstream consciousness during its run-up from $10 to $260 in spring 2013. I myself had heard of Bitcoin years before I publicly expressed my interest and support of the technology. With no tech background, I was immediately overwhelmed with the concept, and so I initially dismissed it and forgot about it. It was only in 2012, that I started asking questions of tech experts who I had become friends with it about it in order to calm my concerns. Considering these people have similar political leanings and are even more paranoid than I am about the corporate-gulag state, I felt somewhat reassured. Then, when I recognized the powerful political implications of the technology, I wrote my first public thoughts on it. The post was titled, Bitcoin: A Way to Fight Back Against the Financial Terrorists?
Here’s a key excerpt from the post, and what really got me interested in Bitcoin:
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