After all, what is society but a collective of individuals?
As the adage goes, we are only as strong as our weakest link. If the link is damaged beyond repair, then it will be necessary to replace it in order to preserve the whole.
Regrettably fear, greed, and resulting tyranny is part of human nature, the desire to control everything outside of ourselves without examining our true nature. Therefore it is necessary to be diligent, awake and wise.
While I agree that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, we must temper that idealism with reality. Pushing for a system wide collapse without a contingency plan doesn’t serve anyone, we have to be smart about it.
The elite controllers sense their time is up, so they are scheming everything to divide and conquer, create a problem (false flags) and offer solution. We have to be aware not to fall into their traps.
Superbowl, Madonna and the eye of Sauron
The ultimate solution will unfold before us, abide by the timeline. Trump, Putin and many positive forces are working behind the scenes for the reset. At the right time, we’ll all do our part with clarity and resoluteness. Just stay the course.
Olive oil production has been put under the radar recently, since it was revealed that the 7 biggest olive oil makers in America actually use cheap tricks to sell non-genuine oil.
That being said, one of the most appreciated olive oil brands has been highly distorted in terms of quality and effectiveness.
Now, it has come to our attention that almost 70% of olive oil on the American market is somewhat non-genuine. This happens because the production usually uses other oils to cheapen the process and make great profits.
The oils mainly used in the production process include canola and sunflower oil!
The same issue occurred in Italy as well, and resulted with 85 oil farms being shut down due to their sneaky methods of using chlorophyll with sunflower and canola oil in order to sell olive oil on the market.
Due to a change in color, taste and thickness, Australia was also alarmed in regards to the problem, and shockingly, none of their olive oil brands scored the 2012 certificate of approval.
The University of California studied around 124 imported brands of extra virgin olive oil, and over 70% of these didn’t score positive on the test.
Here are the brands that sold fake products to people across the globe:
Carapelli
Mezzetta
Pompeian
Mazola
Primadonna
Colavita
Sasso
Antica Badia
Star
Whole Foods
Felippo Berio
Safeway
Coricelli
Bertolli
And then you have the brands you can trust:
Lucero
McEvoy Ranch Organic
Corto Olive
Omaggio
Bariani Olive Oil
California Olive Ranch
Lucini
Ottavio
Cobram Estate
Olea Estates
Kirkland Organic
You can do several things about this problem, by testing the quality of the oil you use. F or starters, use the olive oil bottle you have at home and place it in the fridge for half an hour. If it hardens and solidifies, this indicates you’re good to go. This happens with olive oil because it contains large amounts of monounsaturated fat.
In case this doesn’t happen, it means the olive oil is fake. To be even surer of this, look for labels and recognition stamps, such as “Australian Extra Virgin Certified” and “California Olive Oil Council Certified Extra Virgin.”
Nothing is more important than health, so go for it!
You meet a person who talks about elites’ war on the population, and this person, you realize, is doing two things: he’s speaking the truth; but he’s also canceling out his own life. It’s strange. It’s as if, in all his truth telling, he’s left a hole, and that hole is himself. The balance is gone. But it’s more than that. The decay and the disintegration of society is his excuse for his own absence. His own absence, even to himself.
You try to imagine what would happen if 100,000 people like him joined together in a great cause, and won. What would they do? It occurs to you that they wouldn’t suddenly reconstitute their own lives. They wouldn’t know how.
They wouldn’t be able to assert the value of the individual. They’d laid that aside and lost it along the way.
Societies and civilizations, if they have vitality, would be dedicated to the freedom and power and independence of the individual—and restoring THAT would be a noble cause.
When, in 1776, the American colonists declared independence, what was it for? What was the central core idea, the very best idea? And later, when the Constitution was written and ratified, what was the bottom line?
Liberation?
If so, for whom would that liberation be confirmed, for whom would it be acknowledged and protected?
Everyone, as a group? Or every individual?
As the decades after 1776 rolled on, and as more and more corruption set in, it became easier to think about the group than about the individual. It became easier for the individual to think about the group, rather than himself—in any profound way.
We are now living in the Time of the Blob. The Great Cheese Melt. Humans are perceived as groups. It’s a cultural imperative. Which group is preferred over which other group? Is the Cheddar Blob better than the Mozzarella Blob? Which side should one fight on?
From 1982-2001, I worked as a freelance reporter. When my articles were published, they appeared under the banner of a media organization. I gave it little thought, except when I couldn’t publish a piece because it was too controversial for the tastes and biases of editors. But once I broke away from that system and started my own site, I quickly realized that I was absolutely doing my own work, and I was the ultimate decision maker. And then I began to coalesce my ideas about The Individual.
Where is he? What are his best dreams?
Why is the culture trying to grind up the life-force of the individual?
Who will stand against THAT?
If so-called liberal institutions of higher learning suddenly dispensed with every shred of propaganda about groups and favored groups, what would they be left with? How many professors would be able to teach even an hour of coherent substance?
When you boil down the collectivist view of existence, it is a massive fraud. Persons pass, from mind to mind, empty ideas about The Group. The absence of these ideas’ true content is not a problem to them, because the sole action of passing and transmitting and “sharing” is the key feature. If that is culture, a donkey is a space ship pilot.
It always seemed to me that a person’s unique character and talent and desire were the foundation of a life. It always seemed to me that surrendering this foundation was a terrible mistake.
In a real culture, whatever can be done, voluntarily, to empower individuals to build and invent on that foundation is the central premise.
In the process of advancing such a culture, the individual would never lose sight of himself and the future he envisions. He would never lose sight of his deepest dreams. How could he? That is what he stands for, for himself and others.
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Have you lost your spot in the middle class yet? For years I have been documenting all of the numbers that show that the middle class in America has been steadily shrinking, and we just got another one. According to a report that was produced by researchers at Harvard University, the number of Americans that spend more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing has more than doubled. In 2001, nearly 16 million Americans couldn’t afford the homes that they were currently living in, but by 2015 that figure had jumped to 38 million.When I write about “economic collapse”, I am writing about a process that has been unfolding for decades in this country. Back in the early 1970s, well over 60 percent of all Americans were considered to be “middle class”, but now that number has fallen below 50 percent. Never before in our history has the middle class been a minority of the population, but that is where we are at now, and the middle class continues to get even smaller with each passing day.
So these new numbers saddened me, but they didn’t exactly surprise me. The following comes from NBC News…
Over 38 million American households can’t afford their housing, an increase of 146 percent in the past 16 years, according to a recent Harvard housing report.
Under federal guidelines, households that spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs are considered “cost burdened” and will have difficulty affording basic necessities like food, clothing, transportation and medical care.
But the number of Americans struggling with their housing costs has risen from almost 16 million in 2001 to 38 million in 2015, according to the Census data crunched in the report. That’s more than double.
Sometimes people try to convince me that the economy is doing “well”, but when I ask them how they are doing personally the news is almost always dreary. I know so many people that are working for close to minimum wage that used to be solidly in the middle class.
One of the biggest reasons why the middle class is shrinking is because paychecks are staying about the same while the cost of living continues to rise steadily. Of course one of the biggest factors in the rise of the cost of living is health insurance.
There are many people out there that have seen their health insurance premiums double since Obamacare went into effect. And one health insurance company actually tried to do this to me and my family too, and so at that time I immediately switched carriers.
But even though virtually every single Republican in Congress campaigned on repealing Obamacare, it doesn’t look like it is going to happen. In fact, on Sunday Senator John McCain told Face the Nation that the effort to repeal Obamacare is “probably going to be dead”…
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Sunday the Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare is “probably going to be dead.”
“My view is that it’s probably going to be dead,” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
Support for the bill has been eroding over the July 4th recess, and McCain said he believes Republicans should work with Democrats to craft health care legislation.
As a voter, this greatly frustrates me. The Republicans got a bill to repeal Obamacare through the House and through the Senate and on to Barack Obama’s desk in early 2016. So why can’t they get that exact same bill to Donald Trump’s desk now?
We worked really hard to give the Republicans control of the White House, the Senate and the House, and now they are stabbing us in the back once again.
This is just one example of why I intend to be a “wrecking ball” if I get the chance to go to Washington.
We have got to lower health care costs on the middle class. There is no other option. Millions of families all over the country are being absolutely suffocated by rising health insurance premiums. Sometimes I get so frustrated with these RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) that I want to scream.
So many families are living on the edge right now. Various surveys have discovered that somewhere around two-thirds of the entire nation is living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time, and one study found that 69 percent of all Americans do not have an adequate emergency fund.
But when you are living on the edge, there is always a danger that you could go over.
Every month, more Americans fall out of the middle class and into poverty. Even during this so-called “economic recovery”, we are seeing alarming spikes in poverty all over the nation. For example, the number of homeless people living on the street in New York City has increased by 39 percent over the past year…
Street homelessness in New York increased by 39 percent in 2017, according to the latest annual survey by the Department of Homeless Services.
There were 3,892 homeless and unsheltered people on the night of February 6, 2017, up from 2,794 people at the same time last year, said the report, which is conducted on one night of the year. This is the highest increase since 2005, when Michael Bloomberg was mayor.
And bankruptcies continue to rise as well. Consumer bankruptcies were up once again last month, and commercial bankruptcies continue their very disturbing climb…
Commercial Chapter 11 bankruptcies – an effort to restructure the business, rather than liquidating it – jumped 16% year-over-year in June to 581 filings across the US. Total commercial bankruptcies of all types, by large corporations to tiny sole proprietorships, rose 2% year-over-year to 3,385 filings, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. This was up 39% from June 2015 and up 18% from June 2014.
Since the end of the last recession, the middle class has continued to get smaller and smaller in this country, and now it appears that another economic downturn is upon us.
Are we just going to stand aside and do nothing as the middle class in America dies?
The Democrats don’t seem to care.
The Republicans don’t seem to care.
If we continue to do the same things that we have been doing, we are going to continue to get the same results.
In other words, unless we start doing things differently the middle class in America is going to continue to be systematically eviscerated.
Wake up America. The middle class is dying and if we want to save it we have to take action now.
A man accused of raping and killing an eight-year-old girl in a village in India has reportedly been beaten to death.
Video of a group of Indian women beating a child rapist with sticks has gone viral.
Showing absolutely no regard for the country’s criminal justice system – an example of justice delayed, justice denied – a group of mothers tied the rapist’s hands behind his back, dragged him across the ground with a long rope, and used long sticks to hit him and seek instant justice for raping and killing an eight-year-old girl near the city of Dumka in the eastern state of Jharkhand.
The man, identified as 30-year-old Mithun Hansda, didn’t fight the whipping even as dozens of women and children looked on as the group of women took turns to thrash him. Hansda died on the spot.
As per reports, the victim was playing at the bank of a river in Jalwe village where she had gone to attend a wedding. It is speculated that an intoxicated Hansada abducted the girl, raped her and killed her before leaving her body among the trees by the bank of the river.
According to Prabhat Khabar, Hansda went back to the village and joined the wedding party. When they couldn’t find her, the girl’s family began to search for her and eventually found her body. Enraged locals caught hold of Hansda, tied him, and beat him mercilessly till he died. Police later arrived and took both bodies into custody, before releasing them to their respective families, following a postmortem.
Sexual assault continues to be a national issue in India. At least 34,000 cases of rape were reported across the country in 2015. Victims ranged from female children younger than six years to women over 60 years. Those aged between 18 and 30 reported the largest number of rape attacks – nearly 17,000. The number of cases registered for child abuse raised from 8,904 in 2014 to 14,913 in 2015.
“The fact that the opposition is planning to boycott the election shows clearly, they are not interested in democracy. They have one goal only, to oust President Maduro and take power, privatize state assets, especially hydrocarbons (petroleum and gas) to hand them to international mainly US corporations to be exploited at no benefits for the Venezuelan people. This was precisely the case before President Chavez took the reins of the country. Foreign corporations, almost all North Americans, left not a dollar in tax revenues in Venezuela.”
The Venezuelan Economic Crisis: it’s easy to blame socialism or corruption, but find out what the real cause is – and how Venezuela is being subverted.
You may have heard that Venezuelan economic crisis
is being caused by the evils of socialism. Many articles in both the Alternative and Mainstream Media are quick to judge the Venezuelan economic crisis without a deeper investigation. Yes, here at The Freedom Articles we are opposed to socialism since it is a form of collectivism which places more value on the needs of the abstract group than the needs of the individual, and carries out the forced redistribution of wealth through taxation (which basically equates to the systemized theft of one part of society to, in theory, help another). However, many systems of government (not just socialism) do exactly the same thing, no matter whether they are “left” or “right”. Besides, the chief cause of Venezuela’s ills has little do with its economic system, which is not purely socialist but rather a mixture of 3 aspects (communal, state and private). The problem is that it continues to be targeted from the outside – by the USA, who is taking active steps on many fronts to subvert the existing government and install US-friendly puppets instead. It’s the same old game of regime change which the US has been orchestrating literally all over the world since the end of WWII.
Venezuela Sits Atop the Largest Oil Supply in the World – And the US Wants a Cut
Venezuela has over 298 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the largest recognized volume in the world. According to the 2016 figures from the US EIA (Energy Information Administration), the US imports 800,000 barrels of oil per day from Venezuela. Getting oil from a South or Central American nation is less risky and much faster for the US than transporting it from the dangerous and war-stricken Middle East. However, it does not sit well with the US that a nation in South America (the backyard of its Empire) like Venezuela can prosper as a sovereign socialist republic. The US and its multinational corporations want a big slice of the pie of the gasoline profits, which Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro have refused to give. As self-confessed economic hitman John Perkins described decades ago in books, presentations and interviews, when a “recalcitrant” nation fails to play ball with the US, it activates its various branches to rein them in – the intelligence agencies, the NGOs, the “jackals” (assassins) and, if all else fails, then the US military itself.
Funding the Venezuelan Opposition
I have covered in previous articles (such as NGOs: Choice Tool of Subversion for the New World Order) the dangers of the soft power complex of US NGOs, also called the non-profit industrial complex. Guess what? The NGO network is at it again when it comes to the Venezuelan economic crisis. This time, they are actively subverting the Maduro government by funding and arming the opposition. Peter Koenig writes the following in his article Why is Venezuela in the White House’s Crosshairs? Confronting The Neoliberal Propaganda Media Machine. Koenig actually heard firsthand the Venezuelan Ambassador to Switzerland speak to an audience:
“On 8 of June, I had the privilege to attend a press conference hosted by the Venezuelan Ambassador in Bern, Switzerland. The purpose of the press conference was to clarify the current highly misrepresented situation in Venezuela … The facts explained and demonstrated by the Ambassador showed clearly who was responsible for most of the 67 deaths and more than 1,200 injured within the last couple of months … This point of opposition violence, blackmail and more, is clearly demonstrated by a recent US journalist covering the riots for the pan-Latin American TeleSur TV. Ms. Abby Martin, the host of the Empire Files, an investigative program, told RT (Russia Today) that she received numerous death threats from opposition fighters during her work on the ground in Venezuela. She says protesters threatened to lynch and burn her alive if she tried to contradict their narrative.
…
The fact that the opposition is planning to boycott the election shows clearly, they are not interested in democracy. They have one goal only, to oust President Maduro and take power, privatize state assets, especially hydrocarbons (petroleum and gas) to hand them to international mainly US corporations to be exploited at no benefits for the Venezuelan people. This was precisely the case before President Chavez took the reins of the country. Foreign corporations, almost all North Americans, left not a dollar in tax revenues in Venezuela.”
Venezuelan Economic Crisis and Regime Change: Foretold by Brookings (NWO Think Tank) and Orchestrated by NED (Soros NGO)
The clues are there if you look with care. The Venezuelan economic crisis has been basically predicted and advocated by the Brookings Institute. As Tony Cartalucci points out in his article US Policymakers Openly Plot Against Venezuela, the Brookings website features an article Venezuela: A path out of crisis which recommends a 5-point destabilization plan:
“The United States could increase monetary assistance to credible civil society organizations and nongovernmental organizations able to deliver food and medicines to Venezuelans … The United States could support efforts by the opposition in Venezuela to build an “off-ramp” that would split moderate elements of the government away from hardliners, encouraging the former to acquiesce to a transition to democracy …”
If you run this through the Orwellian translation unit, it means use the soft power complex of NGOs to overthrow Maduro and orchestrate regime change.
“The United States could coordinate with international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to offer financial incentives for holding free and fair elections in 2018, and for the opposition to unify and compete in those elections. Such coordination would also involve developing and publicizing a credible plan to restart Venezuela’s economy.”
Enter the IMF – the institutional loan shark that economic hitman John Perkins exposed.
Also unsurprisingly, the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), a notorious George Soros-funded NGO, has been involved. The so-called Venezuelan opposition is made up of “US-backed political parties and US-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) many of which are listed on the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) website“ as Cartalucci writes.
Formerly on RT, and current Empire Files host Abby Martin, returned from Venezuela in June 2017. She gave a firsthand account of how the Venezuelan opposition were attempting to intimidate reporters so as to control the narrative and give a false impression of what was happening.
Cyber and Currency Manipulation out of Miami Also a Factor in the Venezuelan Economic Crisis
Another aspect to the US attack on Venezuela is coming out of Miami, Florida, in the form of a website called DolarToday which, according to Venezuelan President Maduro, is an attempt to sabotage the Venezuelan bolivar:
“The DolarToday website has been denounced by the Venezuelan State for setting a parallel dollar artificial price marker (black market). It has also been the target of a lawsuit by the Central Bank of Venezuela for falsifying the country’s exchange rates. In 2013, President Maduro accused the website of “fueling an economic war against his government, and manipulating the exchange rate.”
“DolarToday is also promoting opposition protests in Venezuela. Its tweets are being boosted by automated accounts that exhibit repetitive, bot-like characteristics and are using a social media management tool called IFTTT (If This Then That) to automate their tweets”, says Erin Gallagher.
“What immediately caught my attention in the #TeamHDP hashtag data were the shared networks between the influencers (real persons of high credibility),” explained the specialist.”
In the video embedded above, Abby interviewed the Venezuelan Minister of Economic Planning, Ricardo Menéndez. He elaborates on the deliberate US attack on the Venezuelan currency:
“We are the victims of an attack to the Bolivar, the national currency. This charge against our currency has become evident on certain websites based outside Venezuela, where fictitiously, without any rationale or economic proof to back it up, they determine a political value of our currency. With this political value, they pretend to generate the cost structure … 70% of the inflation in Venezuela is related to the American dollar rating being effectively made both in Miami and Cucuta. Afterwards, the extraction of paperer currency. This means, actually taking Bolivars out of the borders of Venezuela, in order to generate a drought, affecting the ability of Venezuelans to pay in cash.”
He later remarks how food supplies and the state of the economy are used as a political weapon to disturb the Venezuelan psyche and unseat the government.
Knock knock Venezuela: guess who’s coming?
Conclusion: Venezuelan Economic Crisis is About Seeding Regime Change
The truth is that the Venezuelan economic crisis is all about regime change, which itself is all about the Anglo-American-Zionist New World Order expanding its economic and military empire to turn all other nations into vassal states. The most recent bill in Congress earmarks $9,500,000 for (cough cough) “democracy promoting activities” for Venezuela. If you don’t realize what that means by now, take a look at the US-installed Neo-Nazis in Ukraine who were brought into power with NGOs in line with the regime change agenda. Funny how this regime change agenda is always window dressed with the rhetoric of human rights and democracy promotion.
The US has a long history of regime change in South America, a famous example of which is the 1973 CIA coup in Chile which brought military dictator Pinochet to power. As Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers note, “there is a long-term ongoing coup campaign in Venezuela, with its most recent episode last week in which a helicopter attack on the Supreme Court was tied to the US DEA and CIA. The US has allied with oligarchs, supported violent protests and provided funds for the opposition, which has also worked to undermine the Venezuelan economy …”.
It’s time we went beyond blaming Venezuelan socialism or corruption for what is going on, and realized that US sanctions, economic sabotage and political subversion are the real reason for the Venezuelan economic crisis.
*****
Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news siteThe Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com, writing on many aspects of truth and freedom, from exposing aspects of the worldwide conspiracy to suggesting solutions for how humanity can create a new system of peace and abundance.
A future history of the G20 in Hamburg might start with a question posed by President Donald Trump – actually his speechwriter – a few days earlier in Warsaw:
“The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.”
What initially amounted to a juvenile/reductionist clash of civilizations tirade written by Stephen Miller – the same one who penned the “American carnage” epic on Trump’s inauguration as well as the original Muslim travel ban – might actually have founded some answers in Hamburg.
The G20 as a whole was a noxious military dystopia disguised as a global summit. “Welcome to Hell” and other assorted protests, on multiple levels, were sort of answering another Trump-in-Warsaw question; “Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”While leaders worked the cosseted rooms, gossiped, listened to the Ode to Joy and indulged in the proverbial banquet, outside there was burning and looting; a sort of vicious, street-level commentary not only about their concept of “civilization” but also about Trump-in-Warsaw conveniently forgetting to say that it’s US and NATO’s “policies” which end up generating the terror blowback that threaten “civilization”, “our values” and our “will to survive”.
It will get worse. Starting next year, a Bundeswehr/NATO joint production, a ghost town built in a military training camp in Sachsen-Anhalt – incidentally, not far from Hamburg — will become a prime site teaching urban warfare. Austerity is far from over, and euro-peasants are bound to continue rebelling en masse.
Multilateral or bust
The temptation is sweet to identify the emerging new order as a Putin-Xi-Trump-Merkel world. Not yet – and not yet as multilateral. What we’re seeing is the trappings of multilateralism, but not yet the real deal — resisted by Washington on myriad levels.
Frau Merkel wanted “her” summit to focus on three crucial issues; climate change, free trade and management of mass global migration – none of them particularly appealing to Trump, a believer in a Darwinian approach to global politics. So what the world got was an unexciting muddle through – inbuilt contradictions included.
The Boss, once again, was Chinese President Xi Jinping, calling on G-20 members to privilege an open global economy; strengthen economic policy coordination; and be aware of the enormous risks inherent in financial turbo-capitalism. He duly called for a “multilateral trade regime”.
To back it up, China deftly applied giant panda diplomacy – offering two of them, Meng Meng and Jiao Qing, to the Berlin zoo as a friendship gesture. Merkel’s commentary was not so cuddly; “Beijing views Europe as an Asian peninsula. We see it differently.”
Well, for all practical purposes what Chinese and German business interests do see further on down the road is Eurasia integration – with the 21st century New Silk Roads, a.k.a. Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) starting in eastern China and ending in the Ruhr valley. Now that’s a practical definition of how a “multilateral trade regime” should work. Add to it the just-clinched, massive trade deal between the EU and Japan. For all practical purposes, geopolitically and geoeconomically, Germany is moving East.
The BRICs nations – China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa – met on the sidelines and, what else, called for a “rules-based, transparent, non-discriminatory, open and inclusive multilateral trading system.”President Putin went one up – stressing financial sanctions under political pretexts hurt mutual confidence and damage the global economy. Everyone knows it, everyone agrees, but that element of Washington’s “our way or the highway” geoeconomic policy won’t vanish anytime soon.
And then we had the anti-globalization group Attac criticizing Merkel for staging a “cynical production”; as much as the chancellor was positioning herself as “leader of the free world”, the German government “is actually pursuing an aggressive export surplus strategy”. And here we had left/progressive Attac totally aligned with Donald Trump.
We’ll always have Paris
The sherpas in Hamburg were involved in their own brand of “Welcome to Hell”. Merkel’s euphemism — “tense discussions” – masked a de facto mutiny against the US sherpas on both climate change and trade, bitterly fighting to the last minute a US clause on Washington “helping” countries access clean fossil fuels.
In the end we got the proverbial muddle through. Here’s the paragraph in the final communiqué that singles out the Trump administration’s decision to abandon the Paris agreement:“We take note of the decision of the United States of America to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The United States of America announced it will immediately cease the implementation of its current nationally-determined contribution and affirms its strong commitment to an approach that lowers emissions while supporting economic growth and improving energy security needs. The United States of America states it will endeavor to work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently and help deploy renewable and other clean energy sources, given the importance of energy access and security in their nationally determined contributions.”
Directly following that paragraph is this one, concerning the G-19:
“The Leaders of the other G20 members state that the Paris Agreement is irreversible. We reiterate the importance of fulfilling the UNFCCC commitment by developed countries in providing means of implementation including financial resources to assist developing countries with respect to both mitigation and adaptation actions in line with Paris outcomes and note the OECD’s report “Investing in Climate, Investing in Growth”. We reaffirm our strong commitment to the Paris Agreement, moving swiftly towards its full implementation in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances and, to this end, we agree to the G20 Hamburg Climate and Energy Action Plan for Growth as set out in the Annex.”
In Hamburg, the Trump Organization was all over the place. First Daughter Ivanka even took Daddy’s chair at the forum for fleeting moments while he was away on bilaterals. Yet she did perform on substance, unveiling a $300 million program at the World Bank providing loans, mentoring and access to the financial markets for women-led start-ups in the developing world. Both the White House and the World Bank credited Ivanka for the idea.
Away from hellish issues, under a sunnier perspective, wind and solar power are set to become the cheapest form of power generation across the G20 by 2030. Already in 2017, over a third of German electricity has come from wind, solar, biomass and hydro, at 35% (in the US is only 15%). So Germany is not green, yet – but it’s getting there fast.
In Hamburg, Merkel collected a win on climate change; a relative win on trade (with the US self-excluded); but a miserable loss on mass migration. No NATO power at the G-20 would have had the balls to publicly connect the dots between ghastly US/NATO wars in Afghanistan, Libya, the Syrian proxy war generating millions of refugees for whom the only hope is Europe.
Geopolitically, Washington is de facto cutting off Germany while England has zero power left. The Trump administration considers both Germany and Japan as enemies who are destroying US industry through currency rigging. In the medium term, it’s fair to expect Germany to slowly but surely re-approach Russia. As much as Washington’s unipolar moment may be fading fast, the Game of Thrones in the G-20 realm is just beginning.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
“Our study has provided evidence that your career may well change the way you think. There’s already extensive research into how culture changes cognition, but here we’ve found that even within the same culture, people of different professions differ in how they appreciate the world,” said Dr Spiers.
When asked to talk about images of places, painters are more likely to describe the depicted space as a two-dimensional image, while architects are more likely to focus on paths and the boundaries of the space.
“We found that painters, sculptors and architects consistently showed signs of their profession when talking about the spaces we showed them, and all three groups had more elaborate, detailed descriptions than people in unrelated professions,” said senior author Dr Hugo Spiers (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences).
Artists’ portraits predominantly present subjects’ in a specific profile which aligns with their expectations and profession.
F or the study, published in Cognitive Science, the researchers brought in 16 people from each of the three professions — they all had at least eight years of experience and included Sir Anthony Gormley — alongside 16 participants without any relevant background, who acted as controls. The participants were presented with a Google Street View image, a painting of St. Peter’s Basilica, and a computer-generated surreal scene. They had to describe the environment, explain how they would explore the space, and suggest changes to the environment in the image.
The researchers categorised elements of the responses for both qualitative and quantitative analyses using a novel technique called Cognitive Discourse Analysis, developed by one of the co-authors, Dr Thora Tenbrink (Bangor University), designed to highlight aspects of thought that underlie linguistic choices, beyond what speakers are consciously aware of.
“By looking at language systematically we found some consistent patterns, which turned out to be quite revealing,” Dr Tenbrink said.
The painters tended to shift between describing the scene as a 3D space or as a 2D image. Architects were more likely to describe barriers and boundaries of the space, and used more dynamic terms, while sculptors’ responses were between the two. Painters and architects also differed in how they described the furthest point of the space, as painters called it the ‘back’ and architects called it the ‘end.’ The control participants gave less elaborate responses, which the authors say went beyond just a lack of expert terminology.
“Our study has provided evidence that your career may well change the way you think. There’s already extensive research into how culture changes cognition, but here we’ve found that even within the same culture, people of different professions differ in how they appreciate the world,” said Dr Spiers.
“Our findings also raise the possibility that people who are already inclined to see the world as a 2D image, or who focus on the borders of a space, may be more inclined to pursue painting or architecture,” he said.
“In their day-to-day work, artists and architects have a heightened awareness of their surroundings, which seems to have a deep influence on the way they conceive of space,” said the study’s first author, Claudia Cialone (now based at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University). “We hope our research will lead to further studies into the spatial cognition of other professionals, which could help devise new ways of understanding, representing and communicating space for ourselves.”
Elon Musk’s Tesla will build what the maverick entrepreneur claims is the world’s largest lithium ion battery within 100 days, making good on a Twitter promise to ease South Australia’s energy woes.
Billionaire Musk tweeted an offer to help build a battery farm in March after South Australia was hit with a total blackout when an “unprecedented” storm wrecked power transmission towers in 2016.
“This system will be three times more powerful than any system on Earth,” Musk told reporters in the state capital Adelaide.
Tesla has built the world’s current largest battery, which came online in California in December, Musk said, adding that the South Australian battery would be 100 megawatts—enough to power 30,000 homes.
“This is not a minor foray into the frontier… I’m pretty darn impressed with South Australia willing to do a project of this magnitude that is beyond anything else in the world,” Musk said.
“That takes a lot of gumption… I do see this as something that the world will look at as an example.”
The battery will be built in Jamestown, 230 kilometres (143 miles) north of Adelaide and will be paired with a nearby wind farm run by Neoen, a French renewable energy company, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill said.
Death still remains a mystery to mankind. In the natural world, scientists and researchers have been trying to understand what happens after death—whether indeed there is life after death, as claim by believers of the supernatural world.
The topic is increasingly becoming controversial among the scientific community. But despite the controversy, research on life after death is still ongoing.
The doctors observed a patient in intensive care and found out that the patient’s brain continued to work after the patient had been declared clinically dead. They reported observing the same kind of brain waves in the dead patient [whose pulse had stopped and whose pupils were nonreactive] as it occurs during deep sleep in healthy people.
The doctors reported observing seeing “single delta wave bursts” in the brain of the patient after the cessation of cardiac rhythm and arterial blood pressure. Only one of the four people studied exhibited the long-lasting and mysterious brain activity, the doctors pointed out.
The doctors have published their study in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, warning their finding raises ethical problems as to when it is appropriate to remove donor organs in patients who appear to have died.
The doctors admitted their research sample is too small, urging people not to draw conclusions from the study. But they also said nobody should think what they observed was a mistake, given that all of the equipment they used to confirm death in the hospital were working fine.
The study has shed new light on what happens to the human brain after death.
Researchers had previously reported that almost all brain activity ended in one huge mysterious surge about a minute after death. But those studies were based on rats – and the research found no comparable effect in humans. “We did not observe a delta wave within 1 minute following cardiac arrest in any of our four patients,” they write in the new study.
Despite the new finding, scientists say what happens to the human body and mind after death is still a mystery. Two studies conducted in 2016 on what happens to the human body after death found the humans genes to be functioning more energetically days after the research subjects had died.
The state that was the first to decriminalize small amounts of cannabis, is now moving to decriminalize small amounts of cocaine, heroin, meth and ecstasy.
In an unprecedented move, Oregon is on its way to becoming the first state to decriminalize small amounts of hard drugs such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and ecstasy, while also lowering the penalty from a felony to a misdemeanor in some drug-related cases.
Two groundbreaking bills were passed by the Oregon legislature this week, and will go to the state’s Democratic governor, Kate Brown, for approval. House Bill 3078 reduces drug-related property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. It passed in the state House with a vote of 33-26, and in the Senate with a vote of 18-11.
House Bill 2355 seeks to decriminalize at least six hard drugs, as long as the user does not have any prior felonies or more than two prior drug convictions. It passed in the state House with a vote of 36-23, and in the Senate with a vote of 20-9.
Rep. Mitch Greenlick (D-Portland) told the Lund Report that he sees the criminalization of drugs as a major public policy failure, because it ignores the fact that addiction to certain drugs changes the physical structure of the brain, and should be treated as a health problem—as opposed to the current system, which labels users as felons, and sentences them to a life of rebounding in and out of the criminal justice system.
“We’ve got to treat people, not put them in prison,” Greenlick said. “It would be like putting them in the state penitentiary for having diabetes. … This is a chronic brain disorder and it needs to be treated this way.”
Both bills were supported by Sen. Jackie Winters (R-Salem), the longest-serving African-American woman in Oregon Senate history. During the Senate hearing, she silenced critics by referring to the current War on Drugs as “institutional racism.” The Lund Report noted that in addition to pushing for decriminalization, Winters has been fighting to decrease the prison population since 2011.
“There is empirical evidence that there are certain things that follow race. … We don’t like to look at the disparity in our prison system,” Winters said. “It is institutional racism. … We can pretend it doesn’t exist, but it does.”
HR 2355 also seeks to cut down on racial profiling among police. As the Portland Tribunereported, police would be required “to collect data on race and other demographic information during law enforcement stops,” and the Criminal Justice Commission would then “have the responsibility to analyze the data to identify any trends showing officers have singled out people with specific qualities such as the color of their skin.”
While law enforcement has worked to derail attempts to reform prison sentencing in the past, HR 3078 includes a provision that tasks the Criminal Justice Commission with providing local jurisdictions with $7 million for diversion programs. The bill would also reduce some mandatory minimum sentences for property crimes, and increase the number of prior convictions necessary for a felony offense.
Rep. Jodi Hack (R-Salem) was one of the few Republicans to support HR 3078, and she told the Lund Report that she has received threats as a result. However, she noted that the opportunity to keep families together, and to send drug users to a diversion program for help, instead of prison, was what anchored her support.
“We are putting addicts and nonviolent offenders into prison,” Hack said. “We in the U.S. are 5 percent of the world’s population, but 20 percent of the prison population.”
Oregon became the first state to decriminalize small amounts of cannabis in 1973, before becoming one of the first states to legalize it for medicinal use in 1998, and then finally legalizing recreational use in 2015. This raises the question—if Oregon decriminalizes small amounts of drugs such as heroin, cocaine and ecstasy, will other states follow suit?
The push for ending the failed “War on Drugs” appears to be gaining traction, as the most popular medical journal in the United Kingdom, the British Medical Journal, argued in November 2016 that “laws against drug use have harmed people across the world, while stressing that drug addiction should be viewed as a health problem and police involvement must end.”
As The Free Thought Project reported last week, the United Nations is now calling for the worldwide decriminalization of drug use and possession. A statement from the World Health Organization called for “ending discrimination in health care settings,” as well as various “marginalized and stigmatized populations.”
An example of the power of decriminalization can be found in Portugal, a country that decriminalized all drugs in 2001. As a result, drugs usage rates have declined, and there are now approximately three drug overdose deaths for every 1 million citizens.
Rachel Blevins is a Texas-based journalist who aspires to break the left/right paradigm in media and politics by pursuing truth and questioning existing narratives. This article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.
Israeli soldiers gather next to their tanks near the Syrian border in the occupied Golan Heights, November 28, 2016. (Photo by AP)
Israel has refused to abide by a ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia which went into force in southwestern Syria on Sunday, saying it would act to protect its interests.
“Israel reserves its complete freedom of action, regardless of any understandings or developments,” minister of military affairs Avigdor Liberman said on Sunday.
Russia, the US and Jordan have agreed to back a ceasefire in southwestern Syria and to establish a de-escalation zone in Syrian provinces of Dara’a, Suwayda and Quneitra, which borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
The truce came into force at noon Damascus time (0900 GMT) on Sunday.
The trilateral agreement on cessation of hostilities was announced on Friday after a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart, Donald Trump, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the German city of Hamburg.
Liberman said Tel Aviv is mulling the understandings reached between Trump and Putin regarding the truce.
Israel has cited errant fire to launch several attacks on the Syrian territory, targeting civilians and military positions. Many observers believe militants backed by Israel are behind the fire, giving a pretext to Tel Aviv to attack Syrian military positions.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also commented on the ceasefire on Sunday, saying Israel will carefully monitor the developments in Syria, “while strongly upholding our red lines.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (C) attends a weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem al-Quds on June 25, 2017. (Photo by AFP)
He cited alleged fears of Iranian or Hezbollah presence in Syria, particularly in the Golan Heights. Netanyahu said the truce must not “enable the establishment of a military presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria in general and in southern Syria in particular.”
Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says Tel Aviv and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri militant groups wreaking havoc in the country.
Israel regularly hits positions held by the Syrian army in the Golan Heights, describing the attacks as retaliatory. Syria says the raids aim to help Takfiri militants fighting against government forces.
On several occasions, the Syrian army has confiscated Israeli-made arms and military equipment from terrorists fighting the government forces. There are also reports that Israel has been providing medical treatment to the extremists wounded in Syria.
Last month, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres expressed concerns about a spike in contacts between Israeli armed forces and Syria militants in recent months, saying it could lead to escalation and cause harm to UN observers deployed to the Golan Heights.
The Wall Street Journal recently said Israel has been providing Takfiri terrorists in Syria’s Golan Heights with a steady flow of funds and medical supplies.
In fifty years, when our country and the rest of the world is being fueled by renewable energy, citizens of West Virginia will look back at the glut of natural gas pipelines and ask — why?
Why did we give out-of-state fossil fuel corporations the power of eminent domain to take the land of farmers so that the corporations could make a cheap dollar on transporting fossil fuels that will be phased out over the next fifty years?
And the answer will be — corporate money and power.
Out of state fossil fuel corporations are throwing around cash and flexing their political muscle in West Virginia to overpower flesh and blood citizens.
Five years ago, a member of the Sierra Club in West Virginia called and asked me to look into why Sierra Club was supporting natural gas expansion in West Virginia.
I looked into it and eventually wrote a story for the Corporate Crime Reporter titled “Sierra Club Tells Members — We Don’t Take Money from Chesapeake Energy — When in Fact They Took $25 Million.”
The story of corporate money and power is once again hitting close to home with the proposed Potomac River Pipeline.
TransCanada is pushing a pipeline that will deliver fracked gas from Pennsylvania. The proposed natural gas pipeline will cut through farmland in Maryland just west of Hancock, under the C&O Canal and the Potomac River and into Morgan County, where the gas will flow into a proposed pipeline owned by Mountaineer Gas (a subsidiary of the Oklahoma fossil fuel holding company IGS Utilities) that will cut west through prime Morgan County farmland, and into Berkeley County.
The corporate boosters in the area keep saying that this pipeline will deliver much needed natural gas to the people of the eastern panhandle.
But a 2015 feasibility study commissioned by Jefferson County Commission, Berkeley County Council and IGS Mountain Gas undermines this claim.
The study makes it clear that “most existing homeowners whose homes used other energy sources besides natural gas — propane or electric — would likely not switch to natural gas even if it was available.”
“The primary reason is that the cost to switch from one energy source to another and the related cost of retrofitting or replacing existing appliances would be prohibitive,” the study found. “Also, new infrastructure would need to be installed in existing neighborhoods, which is costly and time consuming.”
After the study came out, the study’s recommended option of coming up from the south was rejected for a plan to ship in the gas via TransCanada from the north and into Morgan County and then east.
In May 2016, then Morgan County Commissioner Brad Close sent a letter “on behalf of the Morgan County Commission” to the West Virginia Public Service Commission “to offer our full support of Mountaineer Gas Company’s plan to expand capacity of its existing natural gas distribution system in the Eastern Panhandle.”
Morgan County Commissioner Joel Tuttle says that “though I support the idea of bringing natural gas to Morgan County, I never saw or signed a letter of support for the plan.”
Commissioner Bob Ford, says that the idea of a letter was discussed in a Commission meeting, but he never saw the letter before it went out.
“I don’t see the necessity for the pipeline,” Ford said. “I have never had anyone come before me and demonstrate it was necessary. Why not a public discussion about this?”
The letter was sent to the Public Service Commission — which ruled, despite more than 70 letters of protest — many of them from Morgan County residents — that there was a public necessity for the project and IGS Mountaineer Gas could use eminent domain to take parts of the 500 acre Kesecker farm in Morgan County and other properties along the way for their pipeline.
With the ruling in their back pocket, IGS Mountaineer Gas sued the Keseckers under eminent domain in an effort to take the land. The Keseckers have hired a lawyer and are fighting back. Mountaineer Gas has threatened eminent domain lawsuits against many other landowners.
In 2015, our state Senator, Charles Trump, shepherded into law a bill — S 390 — written by the natural gas industry.
The bill made the Potomac River pipeline possible because it fast tracked natural gas pipelines in the state.
The law delivers corporate welfare to a powerful industry that is pushing similar legislation in states around the country. But only West Virginia and a handful of other states have passed it. The law effectively shifts the burden of paying for construction of new natural gas pipelines from the corporation to existing ratepayers in the state.
The bill was ramrodded through the legislature and signed by the Governor with little notice.
Senator Trump likes to repeat industry talking points that solar and other renewable energies can’t compete with fossil fuels without “subsidies” from the government.
But governments give far more in corporate welfare to the fossil fuel industry than they give to the renewable energy industry — by about 100 to 1.
And Senator Trump, like Sierra Club when it was pushing natural gas in West Virginia five years ago, does not come to the issue with clean hands.
Trump has taken thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies — including natural gas companies.
The corporate boosters of the pipeline downplay safety concerns.
But there are about two pipeline incidents in the United States every day.
According to the Pipeline Safety Trust, half of those are significant incidents — incidents that kill someone, send someone to the hospital, cause $50,000 in property damage, or spill a large amount of fuel into the environment.
And the number of pipeline incidents has been increasing in recent years.
In December 11, 2012, a Columbia Gas Transmission natural gas pipeline exploded near Sissonville, West Virginia and destroyed several homes. The resulting fire melted an 800 foot section of Interstate 77.
Federal inspectors found that the gas pipeline was corroded and hadn’t been inspected since 1988. They said that Columbia Gas Transmission officials should have realized the gas pipeline was at risk of failure, because gas company inspectors had found corrosion in two other lines in the same system. (Columbia Gas Transmission was purchased in 2016 by TransCanada.)
West Virginians are rising up against this pipeline. In February, more than 100 citizens, mostly from West Virginia, confronted TransCanada at a company sponsored open house in Hancock.
And on July 11, there will be a public hearing before the Shepherdstown Town Council to discuss the matter.
“We are calling on the Town Council to reject this pipeline,”said Tracy Cannon, an organizer with Eastern Panhandle Protectors. “The gas company has used bullying tactics to secure the land needed to build the pipeline. The gas would come from hydraulic fracturing, which is harmful to the people’s health and the environment.”
Republican Maryland Governor Larry Hogan recently signed into law a ban on fracking in Maryland. Hogan has the power to stop the TransCanada fracked gas pipeline from cutting through Maryland. There is a petition campaign urging Hogan to do just that because the pipeline would “threaten the health of the millions of people who source their drinking water from the Potomac.”
In the meantime, IGS Mountaineer Gas and the corporate politicians in West Virginia refuse to publicly debate the issue. And yet, now more than ever, we need a public debate.
We’ve spent a fair amount of time discussing Canada’s housing market over the past several months as Chinese money laundering operations have sprouted up bubbles all over the place. Here’s a modest sampling of our recent work:
But, as the Globe and Mail notes today, there could very well be a “perfect storm” brewing in several Canadian housing markets as the result of extreme pricing bubbles, over-indebted consumers, a major tightening of mortgage rules and the prospect of rising rates.
On the regulatory front, Canada’s Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), is considering new rules that would require lenders to effectively “stress-test” borrowers to confirm they would be in compliance with credit metrics even if rates were to rise 200 bps. From a practical standpoint, such a move would immediately remove roughly 20% of the average Canadian’s home buying power.
Canada’s banking regulator (OSFI) is proposing that anyone who gets a mortgage at a bank or bank-funded lender prove they can afford a rate that is at least 200-basis-points higher than their actual rate.
A similar debt-ratio “stress test” is already in place for folks getting a default insured mortgage, as well as most variable-rate and short-term borrowers.
If OSFI’s change goes through as planned, otherwise credit-worthy borrowers would qualify for roughly 18 per cent less mortgage, other things equal. This one change would have more of an impact to mortgage shoppers than any Bank of Canada rate hike in history.
Of course, with mortgage rates at multi-decade lows, they likely only have one direction to go. Moreover, as rates rise, it will only serve to amplify the impacts of the proposed OSFI regulations noted above.
If you believe the Bank of Canada’s hints and bond market probabilities, there’s a real chance we’ll see higher floating rates as soon as next week’s rate meeting, or at its meeting in September. (Albeit, Thursday’s OSFI news could limit the BoC’s rate hike plans.)
As for fixed mortgage rates, they’ve already shot up on the back of a 50-basis-point surge in bond yields since June 6. RBC, Canada’s de facto leader in setting mortgage rates, hiked most of its advertised fixed rates by 20 basis points on Thursday morning. Most other lenders have done the same and it may be only the first of multiple moves.
All of which leads the Globe & Mail to ask ‘what should Canadian consumers do now?’
Well, luckily for our northern neighbors, we would point out that the U.S. had a similar housing bubble issue a few years back…here’s a hint on what you should do next…
There’s more to the G20 summit than the words exchanged between world leaders, according to body language expert Robert Phipps, who examined the participants’ non-verbal gestures and shared his findings with RT.
A video of the gathering shows a much-anticipated handshake between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The way Trump conducted himself during that handshake can mean one of two things, according to Phipps.
“Trump extends his hand for the handshake first, and as Putin reciprocates, you then see the left hand of Trump come underneath the forearm of Putin,” he told RT.
“It’s either an emotional connection or it’s an attempt at a controlling gesture,” he added.
As for Putin’s behavior, Phipps noted that the Russian leader pointed his finger at Trump.
“A finger point is generally quite an aggressive signal,” he said.
Trump may not have viewed it that way, however, as he is later seen patting Putin on the back with his left hand.
“Again, this can be seen as either affectionate or controlling,” Phipps said.
Putin’s decision of where to stand – behind a table – during his meeting with foreign counterparts was also notable, according to Phipps.
“That can be seen as a barrier to the other leaders.”
As for the family photo of G20 leaders, Phipps said the placement of each person was worth noting.
“Merkel is hosting the event so she’s front and center, which is where you would expect her to be. And generally speaking, the power disseminates the further away from the center of power that you get.”
That statement is interesting, considering Trump was almost at the very end of the front row, with only French President Emmanuel Macron standing between the US president and empty space.
Phipps said although it is assumed the leaders are placed in their positions rather than freely choosing him, he said Macron appeared to have chosen his spot.
“That seemed to be a choice from what I can see from the video, because he goes along and deliberately sort of moves to the outside of Trump, which puts Trump not on the outside… so Macron is reaching out to Trump.”
Phipps went on to observe a conversation – and a chest punch – between Macron and Trump after the photo was taken.
“Macron actually starts talking to Trump and he punches him in the chest, just very gently, which I thought was very interesting, because that again can be seen as a slight bullying, but with an affectionate part to it as well.”
“But he’s basically saying – whatever he’s talking about I don’t know – but what he’s saying is, ‘Come on, you’ve got to do this…’ because otherwise there’s no reason for the punch in the chest.”
When asked by RT if there was a leader whose behavior on the world stage is particularly interesting, Phipps responded by saying: “Trump is the exception because he uses a lot of controlling gestures” when meeting world leaders, noting that “in reality they should all meet on equal terms.”
Another body language expert, Darren Stanton, also commented on the world leader’s gestures during G20 Summit in Hamburg, noting “dominance and power gestures” by both Putin and Trump.
“The thing about president Trump is classic when shaking hands, very much into dominance and power,” Stanton told RT. “The thing about this particular photograph is an open palm gesture as ‘I mean you no harm’, or the old meaning as ‘I have no weapons.’ And there was a hesitance from president Putin almost like ‘Is this a new strategy that I am aware of?’ I think there was a little bit of a thought there of ‘what should I do.’”
Stanton noted that he saw some footage when both men were side by side and “President Trump got this what is called reverse Steeple gesture with the hands and that is again confidence and dominance.”
“And then we also see president Putin with his legs sort of quite spread apart and that is a very classic dominance gesture,” Stanton said.
So in Stanton’s opinion, “although the men have the mutual respect for each other… president Trump still want to be seen as the top man.”
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone