Last Call For Brazil Nuts, Con't

And on his first day on the job, Brazil's new leader Jair Bolsonaro goes straight to step seven on the Genocide Watch chart and begins singling out Brazil's indigenous, Afro-Brazilians, and the LGBTQ community for persecution.

Newly installed President Jair Bolsonaro issued executive orders targeting Brazil’s indigenous groups, descendants of slaves and the LGBT community in the first hours of his administration, moving quickly after a campaign in which the far-right leader said he would radically overhaul many aspects of life in Latin America’s largest nation.

One of the orders issued late Tuesday, hours after his inauguration, likely will make it all but impossible for new lands to be identified and demarcated for indigenous communities. Areas set aside for “Quilombolas,” as descendants of former slaves are known, are also affected by the decision.

Another order removed the concerns of the LGBT community from consideration by the new human rights ministry.

In a move favorable to his allies in agribusiness, which have criticized giving large swaths of lands to the indigenous, Bolsonaro transferred the responsibilities for delineating indigenous territories from the Justice Ministry to the Agriculture Ministry. The new agriculture minister, Tereza Cristina, is part of the agribusiness caucus in Brazil’s lower house and has opposed requests from native communities.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain and longtime congressman, said during his presidential campaign that he would stop making what he calls concessions to native Brazilians and quilombolas.

“Less than one million people live in those places isolated from the real Brazil,” Bolsonaro tweeted Wednesday. “They are explored and manipulated by nonprofits. Together we will integrate those citizens and give value to all Brazilians.”

The Justice Ministry previously handled demarcation of indigenous lands through the FUNAI agency, which also oversees other initiatives for indigenous communities such as health care, housing and language preservation. Bolsonaro’s order is raising uncertainties about FUNAI by shifting it to a new ministry for family, women and human rights that is headed by an ultraconservative evangelical pastor.

Observatorio do Clima, a network of 45 Brazilian civil society groups, said in a statement to The Associated Press that the executive orders “are only the first step on meeting Bolsonaro’s campaign promises of dismantling environmental governance, stripping indigenous peoples of their rights and opening up indigenous lands for business.”

“The attack on FUNAI goes beyond the wildest dreams of the rural caucus, who had tried for years to pass a constitutional amendment transferring the demarcation of indigenous lands from the president to Congress,” the nonprofit said. “Bolsonaro solved the problem by transferring them directly to farmers. Not even the military dictatorship, whose treatment of indigenous peoples was ghastly, went that far.”

So these groups are about to lose their rights and their lands, and the next step, history tells us, will be losing their lives.  It's something Donald Trump will be paying very close attention to.

Made In Taiwan

Since wolrd powers are back to using threats and force now, there's no reason why China should be any different.  President Xi Jinping made it very clear today in his response to Taiwan's recent overtures on peaceful reunification that the "lost province" should prepare to rejoin Mother China or else.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, warned Taiwan that unification must be the ultimate goal of any talks over its future and that efforts to assert full independence could be met by armed force, laying out an unyielding position on Wednesday in his first major speech about the contested island democracy.

Mr. Xi outlined his stance one day after Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, urged China to peacefully settle disputes over the island, whose 23 million people, she said, want to preserve their self-rule. But Beijing treats Taiwan as an illegitimate breakaway from Chinese rule, and Mr. Xi said unification was unstoppable as China rose.

“The country is growing strong, the nation is rejuvenating and unification between the two sides of the strait is the great trend of history,” Mr. Xi told officials, military officers and guests in the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing.

China would respect the Taiwanese people’s religious and legal freedoms in a unified “one country, two systems” framework, Mr. Xi said. But he warned that the profound political differences between Taiwan, a vibrant democracy, and China, a highly authoritarian government, were no excuse to reject unification.

“Different systems are not an obstacle to unification, and even less are they an excuse for separatism,” Mr. Xi said. “The private property, religious beliefs and legitimate rights and interests of Taiwanese compatriots will be fully assured.”

Mr. Xi also accompanied his offer of talks with a warning — one implicitly also aimed at the United States, which provides Taiwan with military equipment and the possibility of support in a crisis.

“We make no promise to abandon the use of force, and retain the option of taking all necessary measures,” Mr. Xi said in a section of the speech that drew rousing applause. Those options, he said, could be used against “intervention by external forces.”

The diverging positions staked out by Mr. Xi and Ms. Tsai have brought into focus how the disputed future of Taiwan remains a volatile question that could erupt into crisis, especially if either side misjudges the intentions of the other — or of the United States, a key ally that has strengthened support for Taiwan.

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, which handles relations with China, said it did not have an immediate comment on Mr. Xi’s speech.

Since misjudgement is the key feature of the Trump regime, should Washington get involved in this dispute, I almost guarantee it's going to get ugly.  It may get ugly anyway, as Xi has been playing hardball in the China Sea and in Africa during his term and there's no reason to believe that he'll settle for anything less than "reunification".

Add this to the world's potential hotspots in an era of America's influence in freefall.

Introducing The New Romney 3.0

America's favorite failed Uncanny Valley experiment and Trumpian punching bag Mitt Romney will be Utah's junior Republican senator in a few days, and by gum he has a newspaper opinion involving Donald Trump, beep boop.

The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December. The departures of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, the appointment of senior persons of lesser experience, the abandonment of allies who fight beside us, and the president’s thoughtless claim that America has long been a “sucker” in world affairs all defined his presidency down.

It is well known that Donald Trump was not my choice for the Republican presidential nomination. After he became the nominee, I hoped his campaign would refrain from resentment and name-calling. It did not. When he won the election, I hoped he would rise to the occasion. His early appointments of Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Nikki Haley, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, Kelly and Mattis were encouraging. But, on balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions thismonth, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.

It is not that all of the president’s policies have been misguided. He was right to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges. These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.

The world is also watching. America has long been looked to for leadership. Our economic and military strength was part of that, of course, but our enduring commitment to principled conduct in foreign relations, and to the rights of all people to freedom and equal justice, was even more esteemed. Trump’s words and actions have caused dismay around the world. In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 84 percent of people in Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Sweden believed the American president would “do the right thing in world affairs.” One year later, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

This comes at a very unfortunate time. Several allies in Europe are experiencing political upheaval. Several former Soviet satellite states are rethinking their commitment to democracy. Some Asian nations, such as the Philippines, lean increasingly toward China, which advances to rival our economy and our military. The alternative to U.S. world leadership offered by China and Russia is autocratic, corrupt and brutal.

The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it. A world led by authoritarian regimes is a world — and an America — with less prosperity, less freedom, less peace.

To reassume our leadership in world politics, we must repair failings in our politics at home. That project begins, of course, with the highest office once again acting to inspire and unite us. It includes political parties promoting policies that strengthen us rather than promote tribalism by exploiting fear and resentment. Our leaders must defend our vital institutions despite their inevitable failings: a free press, the rule of law, strong churches, and responsible corporations and unions.

Welcome to early 2017, I guess, Mitt.  Meanwhile, remember this?

Mitt's soul left his body several years ago anyway.  Oh, and he apparently still wants a balanced budget.

Good luck with that.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump has invited congressional leaders from both parties to the White House to discuss the current partial government shutdown today.
• Four people were injured in the German town of Bothhrop when a German man drove his car into a group of Syrian citizens, police believe race may have been a motive.
• House Democrats are expected to vote Thursday on a spending bill that does not include money for Donald Trump's wall, an identical bill passed the Senate in December.
• Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has now assumed duties from fired Gen. James Mattis, Shanahan's first order of business was to praise Donald Trump.
• An Australian mining company says its fully autonomous train system has now logged one million kilometers and is "the largest robot in the world".

Brazil Nuts, Con't

If you want to know where Trump's America is headed, pay close attention to where Brazil's new President Jair Bolsonaro is going as he takes office today.

Brazilians signaled a desire for a radical shift in the country’s course when they elected the far-right lawmaker Jair Bolsonaro as their next president in October.

It didn’t take long for profound changes to start taking hold.

In the weeks leading up to Mr. Bolsonaro’s swearing-in on Tuesday, his embrace of a conservative movement that rejects discussion of gender or sexual orientation in schools thrust classrooms to the front lines of culture wars.

Under his direction, Brazil pulled out of hosting the 2019 United Nations summit meeting on climate change and began backtracking from its role as a global exemplar of environmentally sustainable development.

And on the foreign policy front, Mr. Bolsonaro courted the United States and picked a fight with Cuba, which responded by rescinding a program that had sent Cuban doctors to remote corners of Brazil since 2013.

There is considerable uncertainty about how closely President Bolsonaro will resemble the gruff, indignant and uncompromising candidate who ran as a political outsider and pulled off a long-shot victory by promising to dismantle a culture of corruption and use draconian means to restore security.

All of this should sound very familiar.

“I would rather they murder 200,000 thugs,” the future president is seen saying about the police in a clip that is part of the expletive-laden video.

Over the weekend, Mr. Bolsonaro announced he would issue an executive order allowing civilians without a criminal record to purchase weapons to keep at home or work for self-protection.

The policy would mark a significant departure from Brazil’s onerous rules for gun ownership, and experts said it would probably exacerbate carnage in the country, which last year had a record 63,880 killings. A poll released on Sunday by the research firm Datafolha found that 61 percent of Brazilians were opposed to relaxing gun ownership rules.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s promises to ease weapons regulations have already meant brisk business for gun ranges as aficionados sign up for practice. They also boosted the stock price of Taurus Armas, Brazil’s main gun manufacturer.

Very familiar.

The image captured the high hopes Mr. Bolsonaro and his team have for closer ties with the United States: After Mr. Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo Bolsonaro wrapped up meetings at the White House during a November trip designed to lay the groundwork for a relationship, the president’s son wore a “Trump 2020” campaign hat.

The Trump administration has returned the praise, calling Mr. Bolsonaro a “like-minded” leader on whom Washington hopes to rely as it tries to curb China’s growing influence in the region and put more pressure on Venezuela’s authoritarian government.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will lead the American delegation at Mr. Bolsonaro’s swearing-in ceremony in Brasília.

That should tell you everything you need to know right there.  Trump showed Bolsonaro how to get to the top, now Bolsonaro will show Trump how to bring his enemies to the bottom.   Fascism is on the rise across the world, and America is on the wrong side of history.

So is Brazil.

Blackmail At The Speed Of Light

Companies still refuse to take cybersecurity seriously heading into 2019, and the results are exactly what you'd expect to happen.

On Monday, New Year’s Eve, a hacker group announced it had breached a law firm handling cases related to the September 11 attacks, and threatened to publicly release a large cache of related internal files unless their ransom demands were met.

The news is the latest public extortion attempt from the group known as The Dark Overlord, which has previously targeted a production studio working for Netflix, as well as a host of medical centres and private businessesacross the United States. The announcement also signals a slight evolution in The Dark Overlord’s strategy, which has expanded on leveraging the mediato exert pressure on victims, to now distributing its threats and stolen data in a wider fashion.

In its announcement published on Pastebin, The Dark Overlord points to several different insurers and legal firms, claiming specifically that it hacked Hiscox Syndicates Ltd, Lloyds of London, and Silverstein Properties.

“Hiscox Syndicates Ltd and Lloyds of London are some of the biggest insurers on the planet insuring everything from the smallest policies to some of the largest policies on the planet, and who even insured structures such as the World Trade Centers,” the announcement reads.

It is unclear what exact files the group has stolen, but it is trying to capitalize on conspiracy theories around the 9/11 attacks.

“We'll be providing many answers about 9.11 conspiracies through our 18.000 secret documents leak,” the group tweeted on Monday.

If there's one thing the Trump era has taught us, it's that the lawyers know everything, so if you need blackmail material, they're always a good place to start.

The hacking group published a small set of letters, emails and other documents that mention various law firms, as well as the Transport Security Administration (TSA) and Federal Aviation Administration (The TSA could not provide a statement in time for publication, and the FAA told Motherboard in an email it was investigating.) Those documents themselves appear to be fairly innocuous, but the group says it may release more.

In its extortion note, The Dark Overlord included a link for a 10GB archive of files it allegedly stole. The group also provided a link to this archive to Motherboard before publishing its announcement. The cache is encrypted, but the hackers are threatening to release the relevant decryption keys, unlocking different sets of files at a time, unless the victims pay the hackers an undisclosed ransom fee in Bitcoin.

“Pay the fuck up, or we're going to bury you with this. If you continue to fail us, we'll escalate these releases by releasing the keys, each time a Layer is opened, a new wave of liability will fall upon you,” the extortion note reads.

The Dark Overlord is also claiming to be offering to sell the data on a dark web hacking forum, and is attempting to blackmail individuals who may be included in the documents themselves.

“If you're one of the dozens of solicitor firms who was involved in the litigation, a politician who was involved in the case, a law enforcement agency who was involved in the investigations, a property management firm, an investment bank, a client of a client, a reference of a reference, a global insurer, or whoever else, you're welcome to contact our e-mail below and make a request to formally have your documents and materials withdrawn from any eventual public release of the materials. However, you'll be paying us,” the group’s post reads.

Good luck catching them, too.   Nothing has made internet crime more viable than the rise of cryptocurrency over the last five years.  Frankly, anyone enabling the spread of it basically deserves what will happen next.

A New Year Dawns, The Same Old Problems

And here we are in 2019.

This, my friends, is where things get bad.

The last two years of Trumpism has been neatly summed up by Adam Serwer in The Cruelty Is The Point.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant childrenseparated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

We've seen that daily cruelty so far.

Now imagine America deep in the throes of another 2008-style Great Recession, and the Trump brain trust in charge of trying to fix it. 

The cruelty has been breathtaking up until this point, I agree.

Now I fear it will become exponentially worse.  Someone will have to "pay" when things start going very badly wrong in the lives of Trump supporters, when they feel the effects of the cruel reality that for the last two years have only been reserved for those people.

When the farms and ranches go under due to tariffs, and healthcare becomes completely unaffordable, and even the low-paying jobs start going away, then things get dangerous.

The rampaging id of the Trump voter has been largely contained.  But in an economic recession that we're heading into, all bets are off.

2019 is going to be the Year of Living Dangerously.

Zandar's 2019 Predictions

As promised, another year, another set of ten predictions, and it shouldn't surprise any of you that I'm going to reuse my first two from last year.  Here we go:

1) Robert Muller recommends impeachable offenses for Donald Trump.  I know, this is a huge bet: that Trump won't fire Mueller, that Mueller will complete his investigation this year, and that he will find something that warrants an official recommendation to Congress that articles of impeachment be voted on.  But I see it happening.  There's just too much self-reinforcing evidence at this point to ignore, unless you're a Republican in Congress, in which case...

2) Trump will wait until after Mueller's report is delivered in order to issue pardons.  More indictments in 2019 by Mueller are as close to a guarantee as you can get at this point.  There are so many targets, too.  But Trump will wait until the investigation ends in order to start dishing out pardons. That leads me to...

3) Trump will not be impeached in 2019.  I understand people want this to happen, but the Senate was never going to have the 67 votes needed to remove him from office.  There won't be a Senate trial without impeachment by Pelosi and the Democratic House, but I don't see Pelosi allowing impeachment to happen without an assured Senate conviction and removal, and that won't occur.

4) The Roberts Court will get a major decision on executive power related to the Mueller probe.  I think this is a given, but in a 5-4 world I don't know which side will prevail.  The state cases against Trump will continue regardless I would think, but I think it will be "Can a sitting President be indicted" and it will be answered.

5) The Roberts Court will effectively side with Trump in Gamble vs. United States.  The Gamble case is whether or not a person being tried for a state crime can also be tried for the same federal crime, and vice versa.  In a Trump world, this could mean a decision removing that sovereignty exception to double jeopardy means that Trump could pardon federal crimes for Cohen and Manafort and even himself and then not be tried for identical state ones, depending on the ruling.  I desperately want to be wrong about this one.

6) Hillary Clinton won't enter the 2020 race in 2019.  This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but she's not going to be a factor, and I don't think she'll endorse anyone.  She'll say she's not running, Republicans will say she's running, some people on the left will say she's running, op-ed pieces will be written saying she needs to run or that she needs to make it clear she won't, irrelevant because nobody will believe her either way, but she's not running.

7) Bernie Sanders will enter the 2020 race in 2019.  This is as much of a no-brainer as Clinton not running.  Sanders will run, and he will lose badly, but this time Clinton won't be around for him to use as a lightning rod.  The primaries will effectively be decided in March 2020 with California moving up to Super Tuesday, and the Bernie camp got many of the reforms they wanted in the process in 2018, so when Bernie gets crushed, there won't be a damn thing he can do about it.

8) Dow Jones Average will be under 20,000 on December 31, 2019.  Trump's tariff war and a global slowdown thanks to Brexit, European Union issues, and the TPP passing the US by means we're heading full steam into recessionary waters.

9) Marvel movies will continue to rule the box office.  I do love seeing my Marvel predictions come true year after year, so this year, let's stretch it out.  Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home will all top $500 million domestically, each will top $1 billion worldwide, and Avengers will top $2 billion worldwide.

10) And of course, ZVTS will make it through year 11.  It'll be thanks to all of you who have stuck with me since the 2008 primary race.

We'll see what the future brings!

A Hat Lands In The Ring

As widely expected, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced she's entering the 2020 presidential contest.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren jumped into the 2020 presidential campaign Monday, offering a message of economic populism as she became the best-known Democratic candidate yet to enter what is expected to be a crowded race.

Warren’s announcement that she was establishing an exploratory committee — the legal precursor to a run — came as other candidates, including several of her fellow senators, made final preparations for their own announcements, some of which are expected in days.

“America’s middle class is under attack,” the Massachusetts Democrat said in a four-minute, 30-second video emailed to supporters Monday. “How did we get here? Billionaires and big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie. And they enlisted politicians to cut them a bigger slice.”

The video is part biographical, showing her hardscrabble Oklahoma upbringing; part economics lesson, replete with charts illustrating how the middle class is losing economic ground; and part red meat for the Democratic base, with images of President Trump and others disliked by liberals: presidential aides Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller and former adviser Stephen K. Bannon.

It made no mention of a recent Warren stumble: her October decision to release results of a DNA test that said she probably had a distant Native American ancestor. The move had been meant to stifle Trump’s criticism of her but only engendered more mockery from him while also angering Democrats, particularly minorities who objected to her defining ethnicity via a test.

While the race for the Democratic nomination is only starting, even Warren’s supporters acknowledge that she has lost ground in the last few months, both by her own hand and because the November midterm elections redefined Democratic success with candidates who were in many cases a generation younger.

Still, the 69-year-old former law professor enters the race as a formidable candidate — a prodigious small-dollar fundraiser with a knack for creating the kind of viral moments that attract attention in a crowded field. In one such episode, she turned an insult from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — “nevertheless, she persisted” — into a liberal rallying cry. 

It's a marathon, not a sprint, as they say.  Would I vote for Liz Warren over Trump? In a heartbeat and without hesitation.  Would I vote for her in the primaries?

That's a much tougher question. Do I think she's the best Democrat for the job?

I don't honestly know, it depends on who is running.

I'm hoping that 2019 manages to decrease the number of Democratic candidates, not increase them.  It's good I think that the Democratic candidate will be decided by Super Tuesday in March 2020, with California moving its primary up into supreme relevance, and Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina all in February.

But I don't see Liz Warren as a favorite in this scenario.  Far from it.

Zandar's 2018 Scorecard

It's New Year's Eve, which means it's time to see how my ten predictions for the year went.

1) Robert Muller recommends impeachable offenses for Donald Trump.  I know, this is a huge bet: that Trump won't fire Mueller, that Mueller will complete his investigation this year, and that he will find something that warrants an official recommendation to Congress that articles of impeachment be voted on.  But I see it happening.  There's just too much self-reinforcing evidence at this point to ignore, unless you're a Republican in Congress, in which case...

2) Trump will wait until after Mueller's report is delivered in order to issue pardons.  More indictments in 2018 by Mueller are as close to a guarantee as you can get at this point.  There are so many targets, too.  But Trump will wait until the investigation ends in order to start dishing out pardons.  Furthermore...

3) The GOP-led Congress will take no action on Mueller's recommendations.  Not in 2018, at least.  They will wait for midterm elections, hoping that either Mueller spares them by continuing the investigation into 2019, or that Trump ends it for them.  But Paul Ryan, as Speaker of the House, will never let impeachment articles come to a floor vote, which leads me to...

On the first three predictions, the jury is still out.  Mueller has not delivered his final report yet, so these are stuck in limbo for now.

4) Democrats will take control of the House in 2018 midterms.  Yes, I know all this is dependent on a media that is already attacking Democrats for their sure-to-be failures on getting anything signed into law by Trump and the Senate remains a tough road...but I think it will happen. I'll even go one step further, because I need a serious goal to help shoot for...

Thankfully I was right here.

5)  Dems will take the Senate back in 2018 too.  They would have to hold their Trump state incumbents and win Nevada and Arizona, but it's not impossible.  And if it's truly a 2018 blue wave year, I think there are a lot fewer safe red states than the GOP is willing to even think about.

Sadly, the Dems came up well short here, even losing a few seats.

6) A Trump miscalculation leads to a military incident with North Korea.  I don't mean war, but I do mean a US ship or airplane is destroyed, or US soldiers captured, something along those lines.  I don't believe it will lead to a larger exchange yet, otherwise all bets are off for everyone.  Trump needs something he can rally his base around ahead of midterm elections, especially as Mueller closes in.

Blessedly, I was wrong about this one.  North Korea even freed a few American detainees.  It wasn't war that Trump rallied around in 2018, but immigration and racism.

7) America will fall victim to a significant cyber-attack.  I don't want to be right about this one either, because I don't know how Trump would react to it.  But I'm betting that something along the lines of a major computer virus or infrastructure blackout will affect a major portion of the US for some time.  Frankly, we're long overdue for this one.

An entire American city was held for ransom when Atlanta's city system was scrambled for two weeks, the Port of Long Beach was knocked out for a while, and just in the last few days Tribune Publishing was hit, knocking out distribution of print editions across the country.  These will only get worse.

8)  Trump's complete failure in Puerto Rico helps turn Florida blue.  I think Rick Scott will be succeeded by a Democrat in November 2018 at the minimum.  I don't know how feasible it is for the state's heave GOP majority in Tallahassee to flip, but the Dems will at least make major gains. In lighter news...

Nope.  Racism won the day in Florida. The one good thing: Florida voters restored voting rights to felons, but Gov. DeSantis will never allow them to vote, and it'll be tied up in the courts for years.  The Supreme Court will almost assuredly punt anything arising from this back to the appellate courts as they traditionally have over questions of individual states and voting rights, and Trump certainly won't sign any expansion of the Voting Rights Act, so I don't expect this to have an impact in 2020 at all.

9)  Marvel's 2018 films will make $250 million at the US box office.  Black Panther, Avengers 3, Ant-Man and The Wasp and Deadpool 2 are easily going to hit that, and there's a good chance that Venom will too, but I'll put a marker down on the first four, no contest.

Technically Ant-Man and the Wasp made a bit less than $250 million domestically, but all five films broke the $500 million mark worldwide, with Black Panther making $1.3 billion and Avengers 3 making over $2 billion.  I'll take the 95% here.

and finally 10) ZVTS will make it through its tenth year and into 2019.  Here's hoping.  I've basically spent my entire 30's blogging, so we'll see how it works out now that I'm older and wiser.

Yep, still here thanks to you guys!

Final tally, 4 right, 3 wrong, 3 the jury is still out.  Not my best year, but 2018 was very unpredictable.

I'll have my 2019 predictions up shortly.

Stop The Presses

A major ransomware cyber-attack hit the Tribune Publishing company over the weekend, causing issues with the print editions of the LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune and NY Daily News, among other Tribune papers.

A cyberattack that appears to have originated from outside the United States caused major printing and delivery disruptions at several newspapers across the country on Saturday including the Los Angeles Times, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.

The attack led to distribution delays in the Saturday edition of The Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and several other major newspapers that operate on a shared production platform. It also stymied distribution of the West Coast editions of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, which are all printed at the Los Angeles Times’ Olympic printing plant in downtown Los Angeles.

“We believe the intention of the attack was to disable infrastructure, more specifically servers, as opposed to looking to steal information,” said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly.

No other details about the origin of the attack were immediately available, including the motive. The source identified the attacker only as a “foreign entity.”

All papers within The Times’ former parent company, Tribune Publishing,experienced glitches with the production of papers. Tribune Publishing sold The Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune to Los Angeles businessman Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong in June, but the companies continue to share various systems, including software.

“Every market across the company was impacted,” said Marisa Kollias, spokeswoman for Tribune Publishing. She declined to provide specifics on the disruptions, but the company properties include the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Annapolis Capital-Gazette, Hartford Courant, New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Tribune Publishing said in a statement Saturday that “the personal data of our subscribers, online users, and advertising clients has not been compromised. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank our readers and advertising partners for their patience as we investigate the situation. News and all of our regular features are available online.”

The Times said the problem was first detected Friday. Technology teams made significant progress in fixing it, but were unable to clear all systems before press time.

Several individuals with knowledge of the Tribune situation said the attack appeared to be in the form of “Ryuk” ransomware. One company insider, who was not authorized to comment publicly, said the corrupted Tribune Publishing computer files contained the extension “.ryk,” which is believed to be a signature of a “Ryuk” attack.

Cybersecurity experts have known about “Ryuk” ransomware for months. This particular variant, which is distributed by “malicious spam” is “not like common ransomware,” according to an August advisory issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Ryuk” attacks are “highly targeted, well-resourced and planned,” according to the August advisory. Victims are deliberately targeted and “only crucial assets and resources are infected in each targeted network,” the government’s advisory said. “Infection and distribution carried out manually by the attackers.”

In September, the Port of San Diego was hit by a similar attack. That attack came two months after a strike at the Port of Long Beach. It is unclear whether the attacks were related or if the culprits demanded ransom in any of the incidents.

The attack seemed to have begun late Thursday night and by Friday had spread to crucial areas needed to publish the paper.

The computer problem shut down a number of crucial software systems that store news stories, photographs and administrative information, and made it difficult to create the plates used to print the papers at The Times’ downtown plant.

“We are trying to do work-arounds so we can get pages out. It’s all in production. We need the plates to start the presses. That’s the bottleneck.” Director of Distribution Joe Robidoux said.

This seems like a pretty significant escalation in cyber-warfare against US companies.  It's one thing to hit the City of Atlanta's systems or the Port of Long Beach, but knocking out a national newspaper chain is a hefty deal and a definite step up.

I also think going after a newspaper chain is a purposeful message for Donald Trump.  If anything, he's going to cheer this attack on, and that's amazingly dangerous.  His followers and voters certainly will think this is great.

Still, expect a lot more of these attacks in the months and years ahead.  Trump certainly doesn't seem to care about protecting America from them, after all.

Sunday Long Read: The Red Road From El Dorado

Our year-end Sunday Long Read is actually a story from January that I had in the hopper and forgot about, so here it is in case you didn't see it then.  The Miami Herald did an amazing piece on the other big multi-billion dollar smuggling operation from Latin America: blood gold.

When Juan Granda ventured into Peru’s Amazon rainforest to score another illicit load of gold, he boasted that he felt like legendary Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

“I’m like Pablo coming ... to get the coke,” he told two co-workers in a text message in 2014.

A 36-year-old Florida State University graduate who once sold subprime loans, Granda was no cartel kingpin. But his offhand comparison was apt: Gold has become the secret ingredient in the criminal alchemy of Latin American narco-traffickers who make billions turning cocaine into clean cash by exporting the metal to Miami.

The previous year, Granda’s employer, NTR Metals, a South Florida precious-metals trading company, had bought nearly $1 billion worth of Peruvian gold supplied by narcos — and Granda and NTR needed more.

The United States depends on Latin American gold to feed ravenous demand from its jewelry, bullion and electronics industries. The amount of gold going through Miami every year is equal to roughly 2 percent of the market value of the vast U.S. stockpile in Fort Knox.

But much of that gold comes from outlaw mines deep in the jungle where dangerous chemicals are poisoning rainforests and laborers who toil for scraps of metal, according to human rights watchdogs and industry executives. The environmental damage and human misery mirror the scale of Africa’s “blood diamonds,” experts say.

“A large part of the gold that’s commercialized in the world comes stained by blood and human rights abuses,” said Julián Bernardo González, vice president of sustainability for Continental Gold, a Canadian mining company with operations in Colombia that holds legal titles and pays taxes, unlike many smaller mining operations.

Pope Francis condemned the horrors of illegal mining during a visit to the Peruvian Amazon on Friday. The region’s gold boom, the pope said, has become a “false god that demands human sacrifice.”

In Latin America, criminals see mining and trading precious metals as a lucrative growth business, carefully hidden from U.S. consumers who flaunt gold around their necks and fingers but have no idea where it comes from — or who gets hurt. The narcos know their market is strong: America’s addiction to the metal burns as insatiably as its craving for cocaine. NTR, for instance, was the subsidiary of a major U.S. gold refinery that supplied Apple and 67 other Fortune 500 companies, as well as Tiffany & Co., according to a Miami Herald analysis of corporate disclosures.

Last March, federal prosecutors in Miami charged Granda, his boss, Samer Barrage, and another NTR trader, Renato Rodriguez, with money laundering, saying the three men bought $3.6 billion of illegal gold from criminal groups in Latin America. They claimed the gold traders, who eventually pleaded guilty, fueled “illegal gold mining, foreign bribery [and] narcotics trafficking.”

Now, those prosecutors are investigating other U.S. precious-metals dealers suspected of buying tainted gold from drug traffickers, law enforcement sources say. Their goal is not just to take out crooked gold firms like NTR — they also want to kneecap the drug cartels.

Here’s why: Over the past two decades, as the U.S. war on drugs undercut the cash flow of narco-traffickers, kingpins diversified into Latin America’s gold industry. By using drug profits to mine and sell gold to American and multinational companies, criminal organizations can launder “staggering amounts of money,” said John Cassara, a retired U.S. Treasury special agent. The end result: The gold in American jewelry, coins and smartphones is helping finance shipments of narcotics to the United States, as well as illegal mining in Latin America, current and former law enforcement officials say.

Mining regions in the rainforest have become epicenters of human trafficking, disease and environmental destruction, according to government officials and human rights investigators. Miners are forced into slavery. Prostitutes set up camps near the miners, fueling the spread of sexually transmitted infections. One human rights group found that 2,000 sex workers, 60 percent of them children, were employed in a single mining area in Peru.

Meanwhile, strip mining and the indiscriminate use of mercury to ferret out gold are turning swaths of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems into a nightmarish moonscape. In 2016, Peru declared a temporary state of emergency over widespread mercury poisoning in Madre de Dios, a jungle province rife with illegal mining. Nearly four in five adults in the area’s capital city tested positive for dangerous levels of mercury, according to the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

Even criminal outfits from Russia and China are investing in gold mining, observers say, abandoning heavy machinery in the jungle once they’ve extracted the metal. Soaring prices over the last two decades have driven the modern-day gold rush. In January, gold traded at roughly $1,300 per ounce on the open market, compared to less than $300 in 2001.

The human rights abuses and deforestation are a “bleeding sore that affects millions of people and their future livelihoods,” said Douglas Farah, a national security consultant and visiting fellow at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

“It’s become an enormously damaging industry that very few people are looking at seriously,” Farah said. “Just as with ‘blood diamonds,’ the gold issue ... brings together money laundering, forced prostitution, drug traffickers, human trafficking and child slavery.”

Gold has always been, well, the gold standard in illegal trade: its worth to people has been unparalleled over the centuries of human existence. Where there's gold, there's misery.  Just because we live in the 21st century doesn't mean that's changed one bit.

Red to yellow to green.

The Pendejo Beanfield War, Con't

It took less than six months for Trump's Chinese tariff idiocy to obliterate US soybean exports, as November brought the amount of American soybeans bought by Beijing to a whopping total of zero.

China's soybean imports from the United States plunged to zero in November, marking the first time since the trade war between the world's two largest economies started that China, the world's largest soybean buyer, has imported no U.S. supplies.

Instead, China has leaned on Brazilian imports to replace the U.S. cargoes, customs data showed on Monday.

China brought in 5.07 million metric tons of soybeans from Brazil in November, up more than 80 percent from 2.76 million metric tons a year ago, data from the General Administration of Customs showed.

Meanwhile, U.S. imports plunged from 4.7 million metric tons in November 2017 and were down from 67,000 metric tons in October.

China, the world's top soybean buyer, usually gets most of its oilseed imports from the United States in last quarter of the year as the U.S. harvest comes to market. The U.S. was the second-largest supplier of soybeans to China and the trade was worth $12 billion in 2017.

But, purchases have plunged since Beijing placed an additional 25 percent tariff on U.S. imports on July 6, in response to tariffs enacted by the U.S. on Chinese goods. The country has stepped up its Brazilian purchases to fill the gap.

So game over for US soybean farmers.  They have no market now, and Brazil is reaping the awards.  Meanwhile, Trump killed America's involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and that trade deal goes into effect this weekend, meaning US farmers are about to get shut out of dozens of other markets too.

American farmers are facing the "imminent collapse" of key markets and fear uneven trade playing fields as Australian, Canadian and other rival nations take advantage of the soon-to-be implemented Trans-Pacific Partnership.

After President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the TPP on just his third day in the White House in 2017, the States will be left on the sidelines when the re-shaped TPP-11 comes into effect 12am on Sunday AEDT.

Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Singapore were the first nations to ratify the agreement, formally titled the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement. Vietnam, Chile, Brunei, Peru and Malaysia are set to follow in coming months

US farmers, already hit hard by Trump's tariff battle with China and the lack of a free trade agreement with Japan, are bracing to immediately lose market share.

American wheat and beef producers have been particularly vocal.

They expect Australian farmers to use their TPP advantage to sell more to Japan.

"Japan is generally a market where we seek to maintain our strong 53 per cent market share, but today we face an imminent collapse," US Wheat Associates President Vince Peterson told a public hearing held by the US Trade Representative earlier this month.

"Frankly, this is because of provisions negotiated by (former US president Barack Obama's administration) for our benefit under the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

"Our competitors in Australia and Canada will now benefit from those provisions, as US farmers watch helplessly."

2019 is going to be a dismal year for the US farmer, for the US economy...and for the GOP.

But this is what you voted for, rural America.

Never forget that.

House Of Pain

NY Times DC reporter Carl Hulse helpfully notes that the vast majority of returning House Republicans have never been the minority party, and that they're in for some wacky good times.

About two-thirds of Republicans returning to the House for the 116th Congress this week have never experienced the exquisite pain of being on the outs in an institution where the party in charge is totally in charge. Majority control runs the gamut from determining the floor agenda to determining access to the prime meeting space. It will be a rude awakening for many who have known only their exalted majority status.

“They say you will have a lot more time on your hands and will vote ‘no’ a lot more often,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who was elected in the 2010 wave that handed control of the House to Republicans in President Barack Obama’s first midterm election.

The reign lasted eight years before the November midterms and the Democratic gain of 40 seats, a thorough beating that many Republicans did not anticipate. Mr. Kinzinger said the culture shift might be hardest on those colleagues who, unlike himself, believed the election was going to turn out quite differently.

“We have come to grips with the shock of the election,” he said, “but the shock of governing will still be a wake-up call for some people.”

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and a veteran of stints in both the minority and the majority, groaned when asked what advice he had for his House brethren who had tasted only life on top.

“Oh. Sheesh,” Mr. Cole said, hemming and hawing before advising, only half-jokingly, “Smoke a lot; drink a lot.”

“You are going to get some real disappointment,” he said of his colleagues. “They are going to find out how good they had it in the majority, particularly when we had a Republican Senate, as frustrating as that could be.”

Unlike the Senate, where individual members can exert some influence whether they are in the majority or not, those on the sidelines in the House have few options. After years of being in the know about the House agenda and majority strategy, Republican lawmakers will now struggle to even ascertain what the schedule is.

“You control nothing,” said Representative Peter T. King, the New York Republican who will be experiencing his fourth transition in House power — 1995 to Republican control, 2007 to Democratic supremacy, back to Republicans in 2011 and now another reassertion of Democratic might. “As far as calling the shots, we have nothing like the Senate where one guy can filibuster. You have no recourse.”

Mr. King, a former chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, remembers being shut out of conference rooms when Democrats regained the majority in 2007. Republicans anticipate finding the convenient meeting rooms they took for granted will be off limits.

It's petty, yes.  But it's also a metaphor for what Republicans are discovering is happening to their party of casual white supremacy.  When you decide that only white men matter, and you're outnumbered...

Well, you lose.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

According to TIME Magazine's major story this weekend, everything about Paul Manafort owing the Russian mob $20 million and then using his position as Trump's campaign chairman to cut a deal with them to pay back the debt is true.

When the U.S. government put out its latest sanctions list on Dec. 19, the man named at the top did not seem especially important. Described in the document as a former Russian intelligence officer, he was accused of handling money and negotiations on behalf of a powerful Russian oligarch. The document did not mention that the man, Victor Boyarkin, had links to the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump.

A months-long investigation by TIME, however, found that Boyarkin, a former arms dealer with a high forehead and a very low profile, was a key link between a senior member of the Trump campaign and a powerful ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his only interview with the media about those connections, Boyarkin told TIME this fall that he was in touch with Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in the heat of the presidential race on behalf of the Russian oligarch. “He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin says. “And he was offering ways to pay it back.”

The former Russian intelligence officer says he has been approached by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Boyarkin’s response to those investigators? “I told them to go dig a ditch,” he says. Peter Carr, the spokesman for the Special Counsel’s Office, declined to comment. Through his spokesman, Manafort likewise declined to comment on his alleged connections with Boyarkin.

But those connections could be potentially important to the Special Counsel’s inquiry. They would mark some of the clearest evidence of the leverage that powerful Russians had over Trump’s campaign chairman. And they may shed light on why Manafort discussed going right back to work for pro-Russian interests in Eastern Europe after he crashed out of the Trump campaign in August 2016, according to numerous sources in the TIME investigation. 

Then of course after getting canned from the Trump campaign, Manafort went on to try to help Russia replace Montenegro's government with a pro-Russian cabal, only that went completely south when the Montenegin government arrested the coup leaders.

And then Manafort got arrested.

The funny part is Boyarkin basically acknowledged the entire story to TIME.

When he joined the campaign in the spring of 2016, Manafort was nearly broke. The veteran political consultant had racked up bills worth millions of dollars in luxury real estate, clothing, cars and antiques. According to allegations contained in court records filed in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands, he was also deeply in debt to Boyarkin’s boss, the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who was demanding money from Manafort over a failed business deal in Ukraine and other ventures.

Boyarkin says it fell to him to collect the debt from Manafort. “I came down on him hard,” he says. But the American proved elusive. In a petition filed in the Cayman Islands in 2014, lawyers for Deripaska, a metals tycoon with close ties to the Kremlin, complain that Manafort and his then-partner had “simply disappeared” with around $19 million of the Russian’s money.

When he reappeared in the headlines around April 2016, Manafort was serving as an unpaid adviser to the Trump campaign. He wanted his long-time patron in Moscow to know all about it.

In a series of emails sent that spring and summer, Manafort tried to offer “private briefings” about the presidential race to Deripaska, apparently, as one of the emails puts it, to “get whole.” Reports in The Atlantic and the Washington Post revealed those emails in the fall of 2017. Among the questions that remained unanswered was the identity of Manafort’s contact in Moscow, the one referred to in one of the emails as “our friend V.”

Even after TIME learned his full name in April, he proved a difficult man to find. His online presence amounted to digital scraps: one photo of him at a conference in Moscow, a few benign quotes in the Russian media from his years selling arms for state-linked companies, and some vague references in U.S. government archives to someone by that name, “Commander Viktor A. Boyarkin,” serving in the 1990s as an assistant naval attaché at the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. – a job sometimes used as cover for intelligence agents.

Only in early October was a TIME reporter able to track Boyarkin down. In the company of a senior Russian diplomat and two young assistants from Moscow, he attended a conference in Greece that was organized by one of Putin’s oldest friends, the former KGB agent and state railway boss Vladimir Yakunin. “How did you find me here,” was the question Boyarkin asked, repeatedly, when confronted about his ties to Manafort during a coffee break at that conference.

Once he agreed to discuss their relationship, it was mostly to confirm the basic facts, often with a curt, “Yes, so what.” (He did not respond to numerous requests for comment after his name appeared on the U.S sanctions list on Dec. 19.)

So, yeah.  Trump's campaign chairman was compromised and owed the Russian mob millions.  Yet he was hired anyway.  In fact, the man who suggested him to Trump was Mike Pence.

Probably worth keeping in mind.