Alibaba, the massive Chinese e-commerce company that is the functional equivalent of Amazon, EBay, Uber, PayPal and a bunch of other companies combined, made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange this morning. It was the largest initial public offering in U.S. history, raising over $21.8 billion.

It was also a powerful example of how Wall Street, oftentimes, is a rigged game.

Before the bell rang, Alibaba sold its shares at $68 to a variety of hedge funds, mutual funds and other well-connected investors. By the time ordinary investors had a chance to buy the stock, it was trading at $92.70. The privileged few were able to turn an immediate profit of 36 percent, if they so chose.

When companies issue an I.P.O., they partner with one or more "underwriters" - often investment banks - that go out and find investors for the company. These underwriters get paid a fee from the company for their service. In the case of Alibaba, the fee totaled more than $200 million. But underwriters are also able to use that position to provide access to the I.P.O. to favored clients, securing their business and generating more fees.

The underwriters' dual loyalties - to the company offering the I.P.O., and to their investor clients - is an inherent conflict that is rife for abuse. Writing in the New York Times in 2013, Joe Nocera detailed the case of eToys, which launch its I.P.O. on May 20, 1999. The initial price was set at $20 by Goldman Sachs and ended the day at $77. eToys, which later went bankrupt, sued Goldman Sachs alleging "Goldman purposely set an artificially low price, so that its real clients, the institutional investors clamoring for the stock, could pocket that first-day run-up." Then, "Goldman then demanded that some of those easy profits be kicked back to the firm."

Voting for independence? From inside the corrupt system you want independence from? What could possibly go wrong?

It isn't as if leading up to this the Queen didn't get all freaked out (the official term is "bajiggity"), Cameron didn't make ridiculous teary-eyed speeches about how he would be heartbroken if they left and begging the Scots to stay, the banks and IMF didn't panic or threaten Scotland repeatedly, Neocon think tanks didn't preposterously claim a Yes vote would cause Putin to annex Eastern Ukraine, the media didn't continually tell the Scottish people over and over that the No vote was leading the whole time before even going into it, and the whole idea of Scotland's independence definitely wasn't painted as a cheap socialist movement or anything... and all just to gloss over the real threat to the bankers and elites, which might be that Scotland would've been able to keep 90% of the revenues from its huge oil reserves had it voted itself independent (if such a thing is even truly possible in the oligarchical world order we currently find ourselves living under).

Nah. It was nothing like all that. God save the queen! Long live the NWO! Let the Hunger Games begin! And may the odds be ever in your favor...

Russia is counting on increasing its bilateral trade with Argentina to $2.5 billion - $3 billion in 2015, the head of Russian agricultural watchdog Rosselkhoznadzor, Sergei Dankvert, said Tuesday.

"In 2013, trade turnover between our two countries amounted to about $1.9 billion and traditionally it remains at this level. We hope that in the future this figure will grow to $2.5 billion - $3 billion in 2015," Dankvert said following a meeting of the Russian-Argentinian intergovernmental commission.

According to Dankvert, bilateral trade will increase with enhancing trade connectivity, especially in the energy sector, food trade and construction.

I know, it is nauseating, but still, please do watch it. What Poroshenko is saying is that which the US deep state is thinking and, as such, it deserves our utmost attention (even if that means grabbing a psychological barf bag).

And for those of you who might get seriously distressed by this sickening and hate-filled ceremony, I have included a short video showing that this nothing new: senates have always been brothels for oligarchs and spineless hypocrites.

And remember - the fact that they say so does not make it so :-)

Kind regards,

The Saker

The militarization of American police forces hasn't been paid for by just the federal government. Pro-Israel groups in the U.S. have also played a role by financing trips for hundreds of law enforcement officers to travel to the Middle East for counterterrorism training, according to Ali Winston, a contributor to the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR).

Monies provided by such groups as the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee's Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have made it possible for "at least 300 high-ranking sheriffs and police from agencies large and small - from New York and Maine to Orange County and Oakland, California" to attend privately funded seminars in Israel since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Winston discovered.

There, they have learned how Israeli security forces deal with demonstrators and armed threats by terrorists. The seminars include field trips to such sites as military installations, surveillance outposts, and checkpoints at the West Bank and the Israeli-Egyptian border. The training includes spending time observing operations conducted by Israel's Border Patrol, Defense Forces, national police and intelligence services.

The following post-referendum poll from Lord Ashcroft does a good summary of who voted how and why. However, the most telling distinction is the following:

• Voters aged 16-17: YES: 71%; NO: 29%
• Voters aged 65+: YES: 27%; NO: 73%

How will last night's vote look like in 5, 10 or 15 years when today's 17 year olds are Scotland's prime demographic?

The world is in the midst of a global crackdown on Islamic State and its ideas. European, American and Australian mass arrests were carried out amid frightening intelligence reports, as the US continues efforts at building an anti-IS coalition.


The effort to clamp down on any affiliation to the terrorist group has reached as far as France, the US, Spain and other countries - even the partially-recognized Kosovo.

Six potential recruits have been arrested in France, a judicial source said on Wednesday, with the number of French nationals traveling to sections of Syria and Iraq partly-controlled by the IS (formerly ISIS or ISIL) continuing to rise.


Two of the detained on Tuesday are minors, while another pair is a brother and sister; one other suspect is believed to be linked to Forsane Alizza (Knight of Pride), an organization calling for France to become an Islamic caliphate. It was banned in 2012.

The CIA's European Division has halted its operations in Europe in response to several spying scandals in Germany and the continent's negative reaction to the revelations of spying by the National Security Agency on European leaders and citizens.

The stand-down order has been in effect for two months. It was designed to give CIA officers time to examine whether they were being careful enough and to evaluate whether spying on allies is worth running the risk of discovery, a US official who has been briefed on the situation told the Associated Press.

Case officers in Europe have largely forbidden from undertaking "unilateral operations" such as meeting with sources they have recruited within allied governments. The continent's countries have long been used as safe venues to conduct meetings between CIA officers and sources from the Middle East and other high priority areas; those encounters have been rerouted to other locales.

The spying stand-down comes at an inopportune time, AP reported, citing worries over Western extremists heading to Syria and Iraq to join with the Islamic State, as well as the standoff with Russia over influence on Ukraine and the independence movement in the eastern part of the country. Tensions have grown between the US and its European allies since Edward Snowden's NSA revelations in June 2013.

It is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of the divine plan. Russia's cunning plan in Ukraine belongs to the same category. In analyzing the statements made by Sergei Lavrov in his interview with Russia Beyond the Headlines on September 17, 2014, some commentators have added a third concept - that of diplomatic theatre - to this duality. While it is generally bad form to overanalyze religious beliefs, let us apply some simple mathematics to understand the play behind the curtains of diplomatic theatre.

The concept of diplomatic theatre is understood differently by commentators. Many of the definitions are clearly wrong. Diplomatic theatre is not magic, mysticism, or sleight of hand. The language of diplomacy is far more akin to mathematics than commonly understood. As in mathematics, every word has its place, and no phrase is spoken out of context or frivolously.

The product of a diplomatic equation is directly dependent on the placement of definitions in a string of calculated statements. Like legal language, diplomatic language can be deciphered, broken down into components, and analyzed with precision. To a keen observer, there is nothing mysterious in what diplomats say. Bad diplomacy, on the other hand, is the opposite of this approach. And Lavrov is an excellent diplomat. Accordingly, let us parse out the meaning of Lavrov's interview without resorting to magic or belief in the guiding hand that can do no wrong.

Setting Out the Equation

Lavrov's interview contains a wealth of statements with respect to the crisis in Ukraine. Many of them have been made before - Russia's steadfast commitment to investigating the Odessa massacre, the crash of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing MH17, and the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by the Ukrainian troops in Donbass. All of these remarks are laudable, praiseworthy and notable in and of themselves.

However, the immediate, short and medium term future of Novorossiya no longer depends on what happened in Odessa, Mariupol and Slavyansk. Far more important to the existence of the Donetsk and the Lugansk People's Republics (respectively, "DRP" and "LPR") is the document executed following consultations in Minsk on September 5, 2014 - the Protocol of the Trilateral Contact Group, more commonly known as the Minsk Protocol. Perhaps even more important to the continued existence of the DPR and the LPR is Russia's commitment to the Minsk Protocol, which Russia signed along with the other participants, and the forms such commitment takes.

Is it morning in America again, or is the bubble that is the American economy about to pop (again), this time perhaps tipping it into full-blown collapse in five stages with symphonic accompaniment and fireworks?

A country blowing itself up is quite a sight to behold, and it makes us wonder about lots of things. For instance, it makes us wonder whether the people who are doing the blowing up happen to be criminals. (Sure, they may be in a manner of speaking - as a moral judgment passed on the powerful by the powerless - but since none of them are likely to see the inside of a jail cell or even a courtroom any time soon, the point is moot. Let's be sure to hunt them down once they try to run and hide, though.) But at a much more basic and fundamental level, a better question to ask is this one:

"Why are we being so fucking stupid?"

What do I mean when I use the term "fucking stupid"? I do not mean it as a term of abuse but as a precise, if unflattering, diagnosis. Here is as good a definition as any, excerpted from American Eulogy by Jim Quinn:

If you had told someone on September 10, 2001 that ten years later America would be running $1.5 trillion annual deficits, fighting two wars of choice in countries that despise our presence, and had not only not addressed the $100 [trillion] of unfunded welfare liabilities but added billions more with Medicare D and Obamacare, they would have thought you were a crazy doomster predicting the end of the world. They would have put you away in a padded cell if you had further predicted that politicians would cut taxes three separate times, that the Wall Street banks that leveraged themselves 40 to 1 and destroyed the financial system [would be] handed $2 trillion of taxpayer funds so they could pay themselves multi-million dollar bonuses, and that the Federal Reserve would triple its balance sheet to $2.45 trillion by running its printing presses at hyper-speed and handing the money to those same Wall Street Mega-Banks.