Democrats should be panicking at the latest fundraising totals — here’s why
The Democratic Party has hit a historic number in fundraising, but they shouldn’t be celebrating: They have raised the lowest amount for the month of July in a decade.
According to the Hill, the Democratic National Committee raised only $3.8 million in July, the lowest amount for that month since 2007, when they raised $3.4 million.
Not only that, but Republican Party fundraising has exploded and far surpassed the ailing Democrats, even as President Donald Trump’s agenda has hit stumbling block after stumbling block.
The Republican National Committee raised nearly three times as much in the same month — $10.2 million.
David Weigel of the Washington Post taunted those who were proclaiming Trump’s presidency over by posting the fundraising totals on his social media account.
“Extremely smart pundits: Ha ha, Trump is finished!” he tweeted sarcastically. “RNC: We are getting so many donations we don’t know what to do with them.”
The Hill reported that the GOP ended up with zero debt after July, while the Democrats have $3.4 million in debt. Republicans also have a ridiculously enormous advantage over Democrats in cash on hand, with $47.1 million in reserves compared to a mere $6.9 million for Democrats.
How the U.S. Military Planned to Crush Russia if World War III Happened: Nuclear ‘Big Guns’
Despite modernized communication systems, the Pentomic division also posed command-and-control problems. The colonel in charge of a battle group had to direct five to nine companies at a time once typical supporting units were accounted for, rather than the three to five a battalion commander would normally have to deal with. This was more than most officers could efficiently keep track of. The lack of a regimental organization also distorted the Army’s rank structure. The armies of Australia, Spain, Turkey and West Germany all considered adopting the Pentomic structure—and all gave up on it within a few years.
Today the use of nuclear weapons is a near-unthinkable military option of last resort. But back in the 1950s, that norm had yet to be established. The U.S. Army believed then that in the event of war with the Soviet Union, tactical nukes would be landing left and right across the battlefield. It therefore fielded the “Pentomic” division to fight on the anticipated nuclear hellscape. It even gave battalion-level commanders access to short-range nuclear shells, which risked blasting the units that fired them.
The motive behind the Pentomic divisions may have been more political than military. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration believed nuclear weapons were so powerful that conventional ground troops would be rendered irrelevant. The doctrine of “massive retaliation” dictated that the United States would respond to any Soviet attack with full-scale nuclear attack. Indeed, Eisenhower even considered going nuclear to prevent Vietnamese and Chinese Communist forces from securing battlefield victories that were hardly direct threats to U.S. national security.
Because the U.S. Air Force and Navy had the majority of nuclear-weapons systems, they received the lion’s share of military funding. Under the “New Look” defense budget of 1955, the Army was considered a mere garrison force to protect nuclear-weapons facilities. The infantry branch in particular fell from a height of 250,000 personnel during the Korean War to around 130,000.
Eager to get a bigger cut, the U.S. Army decided it needed to field a force fit for the nuclear age. At the time, U.S. infantry divisions still had the “triangular” force structure used in World War II, with units organized in threes: three companies in a battalion, three battalions in a regiment, three regiments in a division, and so forth. The battalions in each regiment were supposed to stick close together for tactical, logistical and communications support. However, military theorists worried that large regiments would be make ideal targets for nuclear attacks. To their thinking, numerous smaller, independent units would be more survivable.
Thus the Army coined the Pentomic division, so named because it was based around five battalions—renamed “battle groups”—each composed of five infantry companies. A sixth support company in the battle group included radars, a battery of 4.2-inch mortars, 106-millimeter antitank recoilless rifles and eventually the U.S. Army’s first antitank missiles, the French-made SS-10. The infantry squads were increased to eleven men each and issued squad-level radios for the first time, as well as new M14 semiautomatic rifles with twenty-round magazines that could be switched to (inaccurate) automatic fire.
The Pentomic divisions possessed no regimental level of organization. Instead, armor, artillery and logistical elements were detached from the division to reinforce each 1,400-man battle group. By 1960, the Pentomic divisions had five direct support artillery battalions, with one battery apiece of 105- and 155-millimeter howitzers, as well as a five-company tank battalion. These would be split up to support battle groups on the frontline, allowing the infantry units to remain self-sufficient even if they were cut off from support by radiation and advancing Soviet tanks.
The three Airborne Divisions then active were the first to convert to the Pentomic organizational structure in 1957, and all the active Infantry Divisions followed in 1958. The armored branch did not undergo conversion, as it already had a smaller and more flexible organization. In general, there was not much enthusiasm for the Pentomic system, as each division became smaller and lost much of the historical identity invested in the absent regimental units.
The Army’s first nuclear weapon system, the M65 280-millimeter cannon, lacked mobility. But soon rockets and lighter nuclear artillery shells made nuclear firepower available to divisional commanders in the Pentomic division’s general support battalion. World War II–era eight-inch M115 howitzers were issued W33 nuclear-tipped shells with a yield of up to forty kilotons. These could be lobbed up to ten miles away. Meanwhile, truck-mounted MGR-1 Honest John rocket systems could strike targets fifteen to thirty miles distant, depending on the model. The unguided 760-millimeter rockets were prone to scattering the length of a couple football fields off target, but a high level of precision wasn’t a priority when delivering thirty-kiloton nuclear warheads.
The ultimate upgrade to the Pentomic division came in 1961, when battle groups received the M28 and M29 Davy Crockett towed recoilless guns. These fired W54 .01-kiloton nuclear warheads that weighed seventy-six pounds. The miniature nukes emitted enough radiation to immediately kill everyone within five hundred feet of the point of detonation, and cause blindness or slow death in a much wider radius. But the 120-millimeter M28 had a maximum range of just slightly over a mile, which meant the crew of three could easily be affected by the radiation from their own weapon. The 155-millimeter M29 variant had double the range, making it somewhat more practical. Placing so many nuclear weapons in the hands of frontline battle groups multiplied the chance of unauthorized use, and the more than two thousand rounds produced increased the likelihood of the man-portable warheads being lost or stolen.
In battle, a Pentomic division was supposed to keep its battle groups spread out in defensive islands, so that no more than one could be wiped out by a single nuclear strike. Pre-sighted Davy Crocketts deployed in Europe would irradiate key chokepoints, killing Soviet tank crews inside their vehicles and preventing other units from advancing through the area. When the division went on the attack, nuclear artillery would be used to blast holes through enemy lines which Pentomic battle groups could exploit.
Eventually, the Army evaluated the performance of the new divisions—and realized they were terrible. Five reinforced battalions simply weren’t as effective as three full regiments, especially in conventional warfare. Although the Pentomic divisions theoretically had 33 percent more troops in frontline roles, they often needed to shift those troops back to logistical tasks because the support services were undermanned. The Pentomic battle groups also lacked battlefield mobility in the form of armored all-terrain transport. Eventually, divisional transport units received M113 APCs and H-34 helicopters in order to provide mechanized or airborne movement to one or two battle groups at a time—out of five.
Despite modernized communication systems, the Pentomic division also posed command-and-control problems. The colonel in charge of a battle group had to direct five to nine companies at a time once typical supporting units were accounted for, rather than the three to five a battalion commander would normally have to deal with. This was more than most officers could efficiently keep track of. The lack of a regimental organization also distorted the Army’s rank structure. The armies of Australia, Spain, Turkey and West Germany all considered adopting the Pentomic structure—and all gave up on it within a few years.
Most importantly, under President Kennedy the Pentagon switched to a doctrine of “flexible response,” which did not automatically assume escalation to nuclear warfare. This way of thinking was encouraged by improvements in Soviet nuclear capabilities. American military planners were horrified to discover from war games that even “limited” use of nuclear weapons would cause massive devastation to Europe, and so the Army reoriented itself towards winning conventional conflicts, as well as counterinsurgency in developing countries.
The Pentomic divisions fortunately never saw combat, though they came close to doing so in the Cuban Missile Crisis. After only five years, the Army began transitioning in 1962 to the ROAD division, which largely reverted to a triangular organization. The Davy Crocketts were withdrawn from operational units by 1968. While the Army retained nuclear artillery shells for several more decades, the passing of the Pentomic division marked the turning point when the Pentagon realized modern war wouldn’t necessarily involve a liberal sprinkling of little mushroom clouds—an epiphany we should all be thankful for.
Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.
This first appeared last year.
Is a U.S.-Russia Reset Possible?
Why Trump’s potential reset will almost certainly fail.
Note: this article is part of a symposium on U.S.-Russia relations included in the September/October 2017 issue of the National Interest.
Since the end of World War II, virtually every president has attempted to reset U.S.-Russia relations. Harry S. Truman confided in his diary that he was tired of “babying” the Soviets when they didn’t carry out the obligations they had undertaken at Yalta. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Spirit of Geneva” sought to make a new start with Stalin’s successors. John F. Kennedy sought to recalibrate relations with his disastrous Vienna summit, in June 1961, which paved the way for the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile CrISIS. Richard Nixon sought détente with the increasingly sclerotic Brezhnevite leadership. Jimmy Carter also tried to change the terms of U.S.-Soviet relations early in his term, as did Ronald Reagan, who famously proposed a new strategy—“We win, they lose.” Some of these resets were based on the need to get tougher with Russia and some were based on a desire to find common ground. But after the Cold War, all of the efforts went unrequited. The specific irritants in each case were different, but at the end of the day, all of them failed because the Russian reform project faltered in the late 1990s. As a result, rather than joining the liberal international order, Russia became a revisionist state whose fundamental orientation limited the scope for successful engagement with Moscow. That is why Trump’s reset will almost certainly fail—and a good thing, too, since accommodating Moscow’s current demands would almost certainly mean sacrificing traditional U.S. interests.
As in the past, resetting U.S.-Russia relations begins with the assessment by each side of the nation’s interests as understood by the political leadership. During the Soviet era, that largely meant managing the bipolar U.S.-Soviet competition to prevent miscalculation that could lead to a nuclear confrontation and, potentially, to a devastating war that, waged with thermonuclear weapons, would have made the level of destruction unthinkable. In the post–Cold War era, the concerns have been more prosaic, and have largely consisted of maintaining and enlarging the normative, rules-based liberal international order that constitutes what Robert Kagan calls “the world America made.” This initially meant trying to recruit Russia into the institutional structures of the order. More recently, it has entailed trying to limit Russian efforts to challenge the order.
The main obstacle to these efforts has been Putin’s personalized system of government, undergirded by a political and strategic culture that stresses deep-seated fears of disorder, foreign encirclement and surprise attack, and has been almost exclusively focused on regime survival and maintenance of the crony-capitalist kleptocracy that emerged from the chaos of the Boris Yeltsin years. The legitimacy of this edifice—what opposition leader Aleksei Navalny calls the “party of crooks and thieves”—rests on a shaky underpinning. It owes its success to the perceptions of stabilization and normalcy purchased by the post-9/11 surge in global oil prices, which benefited well-connected oligarchs as state-owned properties were reallocated by the ruler, in the same patrimonial style of the czars and the Communist Party. As Max Weber’s notion of “patrimonialism” has been described, it was a “regime where the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of becoming indistinguishable, and political power is exercised in the same manner as economic power.”
The color revolutions on Russia’s periphery, starting with Ukraine in 2004, remain the most serious challenge to Moscow’s perceptions of national interest. Shoring up the system required the domination of the national media, the burnishing of Putin’s image as a strong leader who has made Russia great again, and stoking public fears that Russia is surrounded by enemies (the United States and NATO) intent on denying the country its rightful place in the world. This does not mean that Putin is totally cynical about this (although he is one of the world’s biggest cynics)—as Eliot A. Cohen likes to say, it is not so much that statesmen say things they don’t believe, but rather that they believe the things they say.
Resolving the problems of Syria and Ukraine—the two biggest bones of contention between the United States and Russia before the blatant effort to interfere in the U.S. election—would have been a daunting challenge for any president, particularly since Putin sees both in the context of “color revolutions” whose ultimate goal is regime change in Russia. Any reset that satisfied Putin would require U.S. concessions on Ukraine and European security in exchange for dubious Russian promises. For a president whose son apparently sought damaging kompromat on his opponent during the election campaign, it is simply beyond reach.
Since alleviating Russian anxieties would likely embolden the destabilizing behavior we have seen in Syria and eastern Ukraine, that is probably a good thing.
Eric Edelman is counselor at CSBA and the Hertog Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at SAIS.
Image: Reuters
NYT Falsely Claims the US Opposed a Coup in Honduras That It Actually Supported
(FAIR) — The August 14 New York Times reported that the threat by Donald Trump to use the US military against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has brought together Latin American leaders, divided on other things, in opposition to US intervention. Along the way, reporter Nicholas Casey cites a regional expert who says, “An often ugly history of US interventions is vividly remembered in Latin America — even as we in the US have forgotten.”
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Which the Times followed thus:
Under President Barack Obama, however, Washington aimed to get past the conflicts by building wider consensus over regional disputes. In 2009, after the Honduran military removed the leftist president Manuel Zelaya from power in a midnight coup, the United States joined other countries in trying to broker—albeit unsuccessfully—a deal for his return.
There’s a word for that kind of statement, and the word is “lie.”
Zelaya was indeed overthrown in a military coup, kidnapped and flown out of the country via the joint US/Honduran military base at Palmerola.
Now, the US is supposed to cut off aid to a country that has a military coup—and “there is no doubt” that Zelaya’s ouster “constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup,” according to a secret report sent by the US ambassador to Honduras on July 24, 2009, and later exposed by WikiLeaks. But the US continued most aid to Honduras, carefully avoiding the magic words “military coup” that would have necessitated withdrawing support from the coup regime.
Internal emails reveal that the State Department pressured the OAS not to support the country’s constitutional government. In her memoir Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton recalled how as secretary of State she worked behind the scenes to legitimate the new regime.
In the days following the coup, her book relates:
I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras, and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.
Let’s add, for the record, that with a corrupt, drug-linked regime in place—thanks in large part to US intervention—the murder rate in Honduras soared, rising to fully 50 percent above the pre-coup level. Many of the murders involved criminal gangs, but a great deal was political, with resuscitated death squads targeting journalists, opposition figures, labor activists and environmentalists—of whom indigenous leader Berta Cáceres was only the most famous.
So is it really that we in the US have forgotten what happened in Honduras? Or is that many of us believe falsehoods about that history brought to us by media like the New York Times? The paper may run a correction or a letter to the editor; we’re providing contact information below for readers to contact the Times to encourage them to set the record straight.
But really, how can you see such an outright inversion of reality as a slip-up? “Oops, did we say the US opposed the coup? What we meant to say is that the US, virtually alone in the world, supported it.” The real lesson is, when the US government declares a country an enemy, keep in mind that for corporate press, that basically means—anything goes.
ACTION: Please contact the New York Times and ask it to correct the false claim that the United States tried to restore the democratically elected president of Honduras.
Watch Abby Martin Expose the Absurdity of Capitalism with the Zeitgeist Founder
(MR) — Abby Martin sits down with Peter Joseph, the founder of the Zeitgeist Movement, to discuss his most recent book, ‘The New Human Rights Movement’ and his urgent call for global activists to replace the violent oppression that defines our economic order.
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Founded in 2008, the Zeitgeist Movement is “a global sustainability activist movement presenting the case for the needed transition out of our current unsustainable economic model and into a new sustainable socioeconomic paradigm based on using the best that science and technology have to offer to maximize human, animal and environmental well being in accordance with the natural world.” The movement utilizes a network of regional chapters, teams, events, charity work and media to conduct community based activism and increase awareness.
Having a background in advertising and equity trading has lent to an informed and unique perspective on capitalism in the United States. According to Peter, without advertising, a necessary piece to our consumption based economy, “you wouldn’t have people aspiring to things that are highly irrational.” Our susceptibility to advertising is written into our biology, it is a matter of social inclusion. We identify by how others see us and therefore desire things that others have and desire, causing this need for material things to spread like a virus. Advertising thus manipulates this primal biological human desire to belong, in order to make a profit.
A false sense of progress has emerged from our hypercapitalistic society— an abundance of production and ownership is perceived as a sign of progress despite it being at the detriment of human psychology and the environment. The term “cultural violence” applies directly to this manipulation of human psychology for the benefit of the economy. Cultural violence helps justify structural violence so that it feels “right” and acceptable.
Capitalism supports the destruction of the environment and promotes significant structural violence, creating an ingroup-outgroup of those that can afford desired goods and those that cannot. We see this magnified in today’s culture with a sitting U.S. President immersed in a lavish lifestyle that has been paraded through and praised by the media for years, a President that profits off the primal desire of humans to need and want material goods in order to belong. Advertising and the flaunting of material goods can barely be ignored in U.S. culture today.
This ingroup-outgroup phenomenon of material desire has been magnified to the extent of normalizing control of the economy by the wealthy and elite when, in reality, the economy should function to benefit and provide for all Americans. However, a system controlled by the rich lacks the sympathy to function in this way as profits remain the sole focus without a critical eye questioning why the have nots are unable to have.
Abby and Peter go on to discuss the purpose and current state of the stock market, a system that creates profit for the rich and absolutely no material goods or other benefits to society at large, the concept of debt throughout the world, Wall Street’s covert control over U.S. politics, the ability for automation to free humans from labor, what he advocates to save the planet from catastrophe and more.
A Robot Army Just Made The Biggest Gold Discovery Of The Century
James Burgess
Prospectors have mined 20 million ounces of gold from the Yukon’s famous Klondike since the Gold Rush. But they haven’t been able to find the original source—the multi-billion-dollar bedrock.
Until now.
A famous geologist armed with the latest in drone tech and robo-drills is certain he’s just found it.
This is the Mother Lode of Klondike gold that countless prospectors have been trying to get at for over a century.
It makes the 20 million ounces that have been collected on the surface of the seem like gold dust. A mere flash in the pan.
This is no longer a story of men with pick axes trying in vain to find the mega source that’s it’s all come from…
Now it’s a story of amazing technology that’s enraptured everyone on the Discovery Channel, a Canadian billionaire whose touch turns everything to gold, and a legendary geologist of gold-discovery fame.
The famous geologist is Peter Tallman. The company is Klondike Gold (TSX:KG.V; OTC:KDKGF), and their latest gold discoveries are the stuff of legend.
Not only are they sitting on massive acreage in one of the Gold Rush’s most pre-eminent venues, but they are also positioned in an area that has geology similar to the California Motherlode Belt, where 220 million ounces was discovered.
And the timing is urgent.
What Tallman has already discovered could be enough to make Klondike Gold a prime takeover target.
Here are 5 reasons to look at Klondike Gold (TSX:KG.V; OTC:KDKGF) right now:
#1 The Gold Discovery of the Century
Tallman believes he’s sitting on one of the sources of the historic Klondike gold fields, and he’s got plenty to prove it.
He’s tested the gold-bearing structure for 2 kilometers, and the gold is there, a source which he believes runs for 8 kilometers. He’s also identified three other gold-bearing structures—each 8 kilometers long.
What does that mean, exactly? It means they’ve got 30 kilometers of gold-bearing structure to test further.
By the end of last year, Klondike’s best drill holes showed 5 g/t over 14 meters and 76 g/t over 3 meters, keeping in mind that the industry average is 1.18 g/t.
These are phenomenal results, and Tallman is far from finished.
Right now, Klondike has three primary targets in its namesake Gold Rush venue:
- Lone Star is a 70-hole drill program, with results so far showing 2.4 g/t
- Gold Run is following up on visible gold bedrock samples from last year, with a 10-hole drill program
- Quartz Creek is continuing exploration, with 2,000 soil samples
Tallman is looking at Lone Star directly above Bonanza Creek—one of the most prolific creeks in the Klondike. Last year alone, they drilled 14 holes here, and all of them hit disseminated gold mineralization. This is unusual even in the Klondike Gold Rush territory.
The ultimate target here is a multi-million-ounce play.
#2 Crazy Cheap Exploration, 100% Ownership & Takeover Potential
All told, with Klondike Gold (TSX:KG.V; OTC:KDKGF) we’re looking at 2,780 contiguous claims covering 524 square kilometers, and … this is where it gets really good: 100% ownership, which means 100% of the score on these incredible finds.
The numbers look even better when you consider that they’re paying only $75 per meter for each drill hole.
That makes this the cheapest drill program in the entire Yukon, and one of the cheapest in Canada.
The Klondike is full of gold – it is known for its gold. It is all sitting at the surface so an average drill completed a hole each day.
The brilliant infrastructure helps, as well. Their project is just 20 kilometers south of Dawson. Their compound is only 20 minutes from the drilling area. They can even order a pizza from the town (of Dawson) for delivery at the drill.
That’s why four out of five of the biggest miners in the world are gathered in the Yukon. Of the $1 billion invested in this region so far, 90% of it has been in gold.
The supermajors are all over the Yukon, and Barrick gold was the fourth to hit up this Gold Rush territory in the last 12 months.
- Barrick Gold (TSE:ABX) (NYSE:ABX) is investing $8.3 million in junior ATAC Resources’ Rackla Gold property, in a prime example of how high-potential junior gold rush property is attracting major miner attention (and money).
- Newmont Mining (NYSE:NEM) (TSE:NMC) will invest up to $53 million in Goldstrike Resources’ Plateau project.
- Kinross Gold Corporation (TSX:K; NYSE:KGC) will acquire a 19.9% interest in White Gold Corp. (TSX.V:WGO).
And the list of Yukon deals goes on …
What makes this story even better is that even if we don’t get to the Motherlode of the Gold Rush today, the discovery of any mineable deposit would send share prices soaring.
#3 The Motherlode of Technology
Why hasn’t the Klondike Motherlode of gold been found after 40 long years of searching? That’s easy: technology.
It all started in 1896, when George Washington Carmack and two Indian friends found a large gold nugget when they were fishing in what is the Yukon’s Bonanza Creek—Klondike Gold Corp’s (TSX:KG.V; OTC:KDKGF) primary target area. This gold nugget launched a massive gold rush, but the 20 million ounces scooped up wasn’t ‘mined’—it was placer gold, recovered at the surface.
The men that gathered here en masse to get rich, were armed only with pick axes. They couldn’t get to the hard rock source of the gold, and they wouldn’t have known where, or how, to look.
Tallman does.
And he’s covering every square inch of ground, and underground, here, with a systematic approach and the most advanced technology.
That includes drones, portable ground imaging, robo-drills, Field X-rays and 3D mapping.
What came after the pick axes was invasive heavy equipment, digging huge trenches—all coming up empty-handed.
Modern tech is fast, revealing the age-old secrets of this difficult terrain.
Advanced drones fly out over the entire territory, collecting key geological data. Once the sweet spots are determined by the drone flyovers, it’s time to see what’s under the soil. This advanced geophysical survey technology allows for the 3D imaging of slices of the subsurface in great detail by running electrical currents into the ground. This tells operators whether to drill or not to drill.
If the geophysical survey shows the gold signature, the robo-drill is ushered in. It’s fully mobile on pretty much any terrain—it doesn’t even need a road. The robo-drill brings up samples that are then analyzed on site with advanced, mobile x-ray technology.
The drone images, the geophysical survey results and the analysis are all channeled directly to Tallman’s computer at Klondike’s compound.
And gold eventually gives itself up to modern technology …
#4 Reborn into a Legend
Klondike Gold (TSX:KG.V; OTC:KDKGF) wasn’t always the stuff of legend.
At least not until Canadian billionaire and mining finance legend Frank Giustra decided, in 2014, that it was time to revive the Klondike Gold Rush. So he brought in a famous geologist to make waves where waters had grown stagnant.
Giustra, who owns 22% of the company, turned to Tallman, a technology genius with 35 years of experience and a string of phenomenal discoveries behind him.
Giustra tasked Tallman with finding out where the money went under Klondike’s previous mismanagement; and finding out whether its vast properties are profitable.
In record time, Tallman had paid off the company’s debt, cleaned house, and made a beeline for the geology—finding visible gold in bedrock right away.
The verdict: Not only was Klondike’s property ‘good’, it was exceptional: It’s sitting on channel gravels that have given up 20 million ounces of placer gold (worth $25 billion USD today).
Fast forward to less than three years later – Tallman is convinced that a fault system he’s identified along with a series of fractures extending from Bonanza Creek down to Eldorado Creek were the source bedrock of all that Gold Rush gold.
Giustra didn’t pick Tallman at random. The mining finance legend is known not only for being in the right place, at the right time, but for putting together dream teams to make things happen—fast.
And the ‘things’ he makes happen always include a great deal of shareholder value—tens of billions of dollars:
He built up giant Goldcorp (NYSE:GG) in 2000 and today it trades at a market cap of nearly $11 billion, and is one of the largest gold-mining companies in the world. He was also behind Silver Wheaton, which is now Wheaton Precious Metals Corp. (NYSE:WPM), the biggest silver and gold streaming company in the world.
Giustra’s 20-oscar-winning entertainment behemoth, Lion’s Gate, also took in $2.4 billion in revenue in 2015. And these are just a few of his multi-billion-dollar companies.
But back to Tallman, who owns 3.6% of outstanding shares in Klondike himself …
Tallman, the CEO and President of Klondike Gold Corp. since 2014, is not just a genius geologist, he’s a master businessman – a rare combination in the industry. So rare, in fact, that legendary businessman Murray ‘The Pez’ Pezim hired him to oversee around 80 companies in his portfolio. ‘The Pez’ put two of Canada’s premier gold deposits (Hemlo and Eskay Creek) on the world map.
In the world of geology—and gold—Tallman is a larger than life figure. And Giustra’s counting on him to continue his record of superstar discoveries with Klondike.
He’s already discovered three deposits, two of which have been mined.
But he also put his business acumen to work—with a passion. By late 2014, he had optioned one of the company’s properties off to The Discovery Channel’s ‘Gold Rush’ program, earning the Klondike C$750,000 in return and also garnering it massive exposure.
Under Tallman, the company has no debt, a tightly-held share structure and money in the bank. It’s reborn, flush, and ready to break out with the next major Gold Rush story.
#5 New Drilling Results SOON
Based on Tallman’s geology, and the rapid flow of news for Klondike (TSX:KG.V; OTC:KDKGF), we expect significant momentum on shares in the coming weeks and months.
The 2.4 g/t results from 2 holes at Lone Star on 11 July, was just the beginning of what promises to be a massive barrage of great news.
While the Lone Star project focuses full throttle on exploration, 30 holes have already been drilled this year alone, and the results will start coming in any day.
In fact, we expect major news from Klondike every week or two from now until November.
And they’re fully funded to drill 80 holes, so that’s 50 more to go and they’ll finish drilling in late October.
A recent private placement also gave them more money to spend on drilling.
The drilling results themselves are bound to attract the majors who have already shown a hearty appetite for swooping in on the juniors making waves in the Yukon Gold Rush territory.
The Klondike is the largest remaining unsourced chemical anomaly on the planet, and Tallman has parachuted in with a singular objective—to find the original source of all that gold in the bedrock.
And he’s watching what’s happening around him like a hawk. Klondike’s neighbor, Kaminak, was already bought for half a billion by giant Goldcorp. Another neighbor, Underworld, was bought by Kinross for $140 million. Both of their mining roads pass right through the middle of Klondike’s.
Bottom Line?
- Superstar team, with geology genius, advanced technology and billionaire backing
- Potential bulk gold tonnage identified
- Possible motherlode source of historical Gold Rush gold
- Fully financed and funded to drill another 50 holes
- High-speed news flow, with results expected every week from now until year-end
- Fantastic shareholder structure, with management and insiders holding over half of the company and believing in it
- If Klondike’s exceptional results prove continuity, we’ll be looking at a prime takeover target and a potentially significant shift in share prices heading into the third quarter of this year and the first quarter of 2018.
You can find more information on Klondike Gold Corp here: (TSX:KG.V; OTC:KDKGF)
By. James Burgess
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Is Google Working with Liberal Groups to Snuff Out Conservative Websites?
See below for an important update.
Google revealed in a blog post that it is now using machine learning to document “hate crimes and events” in America. They’ve partnered with liberal groups like ProPublica, BuzzFeed News, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to make information about “hate events” easily accessible to journalists. And now, there are troubling signs that this tool could be used to ferret out writers and websites that run afoul of the progressive orthodoxy.
In the announcement, Simon Rogers, data editor of Google News Labs, wrote:
Now, with ProPublica, we are launching a new machine learning tool to help journalists covering hate news leverage this data in their reporting.
The Documenting Hate News Index — built by the Google News Lab, data visualization studio Pitch Interactive and ProPublica — takes a raw feed of Google News articles from the past six months and uses the Google Cloud Natural Language API to create a visual tool to help reporters find news happening across the country. It’s a constantly-updating snapshot of data from this year, one which is valuable as a starting point to reporting on this area of news.
The Documenting Hate project launched in response to the lack of national data on hate crimes. While the FBI is required by law to collect data about hate crimes, the data is incomplete because local jurisdictions aren’t required to report incidents up to the federal government.
All of which underlines the value of the Documenting Hate Project, which is powered by a number of different news organisations and journalists who collect and verify reports of hate crimes and events. Documenting Hate is informed by both reports from members of the public and raw Google News data of stories from across the nation.
On the surface, this looks rather innocuous. It’s presented by Google as an attempt to create a database of hate crimes — information that should be available with a quick Google search, it should be noted. But a quick glance at the list of partners for this project should raise some red flags:
The ProPublica-led coalition includes The Google News Lab, Univision News, the New York Times, WNYC, BuzzFeed News, First Draft, Meedan, New America Media, The Root, Latino USA, The Advocate, 100 Days in Appalachia and Ushahidi. The coalition is also working with civil-rights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, and schools such as the University of Miami School of Communications.
ProPublica poses as a middle-of-the-road non-profit journalistic operation, but in reality, it’s funded by a stable of uber-liberal donors, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and Herb and Marion Sandler, billionaire former mortgage bankers whose Golden West Financial Corp. allegedly targeted subprime borrowers with “pick-a-pay” mortgages that led to toxic assets that were blamed for the collapse of Wachovia. The Southern Poverty Law Center, of course, is infamous for targeting legitimate conservatives groups, branding them as “hate groups” because they refuse to walk in lockstep with the progressive agenda. And it goes with out saying that The New York Times and BuzzFeed News lean left.
A perusal of the raw data that’s been compiled thus far on hate stories shows articles from a wide array of center-right sites, including The Daily Caller, Breitbart News, The Washington Times, National Review, and the Washington Examiner. It also includes many articles from liberal sites like BuzzFeed News and The New York Times. One story from PJ Media’s Bridget Johnson is included in the list. It’s a report about a Sikh ad campaign aimed at reducing hate crimes against members of their faith community. Many of the articles are simply reports about alleged hate crimes from sources running the gamut of the political spectrum.
ProPublica vows to diligently track “hate incidents” in the coming months. “Everyday people — not just avowed ‘white nationalists’ — intimidate, harass, humiliate and even harm their fellow Americans because of the color of their skin, how they worship or who they love.” [Emphasis added] Note that they’re not just focusing on hate “crimes.”
It’s easy enough to figure out the direction of this project by taking it for a test drive. A search for “Scalise” returned four results, one of which didn’t even mention Steve Scalise, the congressman who was shot by a crazed leftist in June. A search for “Trump” during the same time period yielded more than 200 results. A search of the raw data resulted in 1178 hits for Trump and not a single mention of Scalise.
Note that Google, which recently fired an employee for expressing his counter-progressive opinions, thinks this information could be used to “help journalists covering hate news leverage this data in their reporting.” What do they mean by “leverage this data”? They don’t say, but an email sent to several conservative writers by a ProPublica reporter may give us some indication. Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer along with some others received this from ProPublica “reporter” Lauren Kirchner:
I am a reporter at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in New York. I am contacting you to let you know that we are including your website in a list of sites that have been designated as hate or extremist by the American Defamation League or the Southern Poverty Law Center. We have identified all the tech platforms that are supporting websites on the ADL and SPLC lists.
We would like to ask you a few questions:
1) Do you disagree with the designation of your website as hate or extremist? Why?
2) We identified several tech companies on your website: PayPal, Amazon, Newsmax, and Revcontent. Can you confirm that you receive funds from your relationship with those tech companies? How would the loss of those funds affect your operations, and how would you be able to replace them?
3) Have you been shut down by other tech companies for being an alleged hate or extremist web site? Which companies?
4) Many people opposed to sites like yours are currently pressuring tech companies to cease their relationships with them – what is your view of this campaign? Why?
In other words, nice website you’ve got there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.
To summarize: Liberal ProPublica, working with the smear merchants at SPLC — powered by Google — sent a reporter out to issue not so veiled threats against conservative websites. It’s blatantly obvious that the goal here is to tank websites they disagree with by mounting a campaign to pressure their advertisers and tech providers to drop them as clients. This comes on the heels of Google, GoDaddy, CloudFlare, Apple, and others singling out alt-right sites for destruction in the wake of the Charlottesville riots.
Robert Spencer (who also writes for PJ Media) responded to the threat on his Jihad Watch blog:
The intent of your questions, and no doubt of your forthcoming article, will be to try to compel these sites to cut off any connection with us based on our opposition to jihad terror. Are you comfortable with what you’re enabling? Not only are you inhibiting honest analysis of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, but you’re aiding the attempt to deny people a platform based on their political views. This could come back to bite you if your own views ever fall out of favor. Have you ever lived in a totalitarian state, where the powerful determine the parameters of the public discourse and cut off all voice from the powerless? Do you really want to live in one now? You might find, once you get there, that it isn’t as wonderful as you thought it would be.
Spencer has recently criticized Google and the SPLC here at PJ Media for their attempts to squelch dissent, so it’s not surprising that they’ve decided to target him. Only instead of fighting Spencer’s words with words of their own, they’re lashing out with actions designed to silence him.
William A. Jacobson, writing at Legal Insurrection, explained the seriousness of this recent spate of blacklistings:
Companies like Cloudfare and others who provide internet infrastrucure will come under increasing pressure, and it won’t be limited to the Storm Fronts of the world. We know from history that the “hate” label is broadly applied for political purposes, and will be used only against right-of-center websites.
Being cut off from domain registrars and other aspects of the internet backbone is something we expect from totalitarian governments. Now that power is in the control of almost-uniformly left-wing corporate managers.
He went on to warn that the threats he highlights have gone way beyond mere politics. “They are about our liberty — on the street exercising our free speech rights, accessing the internet to communicate our ideas, and preserving the protections of the First Amendment and free speech,” he writes. “It’s a dangerous time.”
Robert Spencer wrote, “Authoritarianism in service of any cause leads to a slave society despite the best intentions of those who helped usher it in.”
We’re on a very slippery slope. Be assured that the left won’t stop at taking down alt-right sites. They’ve tasted blood with their recent successes and they won’t quit until we are all silenced.
UPDATE August 19 5:43 p.m.: ProPublica came out today with the expected hit piece on Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch, and others they disagree with, repeating the Southern Poverty Law Center’s smears and legitimizing the dishonest group’s hate list. In the article titled “Despite Disavowals, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist Sites Monetize Hate,” Lauren Kirchner along with two fellow journalists activists documented the recent blacklisting of “hate websites” by tech companies and, although they didn’t come right out and say it, strongly implied that this should be the norm. They accept without question the hate designations bestowed by the SPCL and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The article leaves no doubt that ProPublica — which is working with Google, remember — wants to see more blacklisting. They will not rest until every one of the names on SPLC’s dubious 900-member hate list is purged from the Internet. Make no mistake. They are marshaling forces to pressure advertisers and tech providers to take conservative sites down. Just take a look at this list of Christian groups that made the list because they haven’t jumped on the LGBTQ bandwagon.
ProPublica explained what they’re doing with excruciating duplicity under the guise of “journalism”:
We supplemented the SPLC list with a list of top extremist websites provided to us by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL does not publish this list and supplied it to us for research purposes. [Wasn’t that super helpful of the ADL?]
See the list of websites we investigated. Download the data.
We located websites associated with the SPLC hate groups and combined it with the ADL’s list of hate sites. [Because 917 isn’t enought — they want more scalps.] We then compared the combined SPLC/ADL lists with the Alexa’s Top Million websites and filtered our list to use only websites that had enough traffic to appear in the top million sites worldwide.
We then wrote software to automatically browse to each website and collect a list of external domains contacted by each website. In the wake of Charlottesville, some popular white nationalist websites, such as The Daily Stormer, were shut down and we removed them from our list. Others, such as Richard Spencer’s National Policy Initiative, were shut down after we finished collecting data and so we included them in our results.
In order to identify which domains loaded advertisements or provided payment forms for the hate sites, and to eliminate domains that only provided basic functionality, we checked the external domains we found on those sites against the AdBlock Easylist. This crowdsourced list is used by ad blocking software to hide ads when users are browsing the internet.
[…]
In order to verify our results, we visited every website and clicked on the payment links to determine if a working credit card form was loaded, and we visually inspected each site to ensure that the ad networks were actually delivering ads when we loaded the page.
Note what they didn’t do? They didn’t actually read the sites to verify they were “hate sites.” It continues:
We then contacted all the websites and the tech companies and asked them to verify whether our results were correct. In some cases, such as Google Custom Search, the company clarified for us that although some websites were using the technology, none were being paid for its use.
If the SPLC and ADL, with their (growing) list of “hate groups” are going to be the arbiter for approved online speech, we have reached a very scary place in this country. It will be the end of the Internet as we know it and America will be no better than totalitarian China and N. Korea.
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