- Dystopia Disguised As Democracy: All The Ways In Which Freedom Is An Illusion
Dystopia Disguised As Democracy: All The Ways In Which Freedom Is An Illusion
Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
– Frank Zappa
We are no longer free.
We are living in a world carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy, but it’s an illusion.
We think we have the freedom to elect our leaders, but we’re only allowed to participate in the reassurance ritual of voting. There can be no true electoral choice or real representation when we’re limited in our options to one of two candidates culled from two parties that both march in lockstep with the Deep State and answer to an oligarchic elite.
We think we have freedom of speech, but we’re only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners allow.
We think we have the right to freely exercise our religious beliefs, but those rights are quickly overruled if and when they conflict with the government’s priorities, whether it’s COVID-19 mandates or societal values about gender equality, sex and marriage.
We think we have the freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. Punitive programs strip citizens of their passports and right to travel over unpaid taxes.
We think we have property interests in our homes and our bodies, but there can be no such freedom when the government can seize your property, raid your home, and dictate what you do with your bodies.
We think we have the freedom to defend ourselves against outside threats, but there is no right to self-defense against militarized police who are authorized to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, and granted immunity from accountability with the general blessing of the courts. Certainly, there can be no right to gun ownership in the face of red flag gun laws which allow the police to remove guns from people merely suspected of being threats.
We think we have the right to an assumption of innocence until we are proven guilty, but that burden of proof has been turned on its head by a surveillance state that renders us all suspects and overcriminalization which renders us all lawbreakers. Police-run facial recognition software that mistakenly labels law-abiding citizens as criminals. A social credit system (similar to China’s) that rewards behavior deemed “acceptable” and punishes behavior the government and its corporate allies find offensive, illegal or inappropriate.
We think we have the right to due process, but that assurance of justice has been stripped of its power by a judicial system hardwired to act as judge, jury and jailer, leaving us with little recourse for appeal. A perfect example of this rush to judgment can be found in the proliferation of profit-driven speed and red light cameras that do little for safety while padding the pockets of government agencies.
We have been saddled with a government that pays lip service to the nation’s freedom principles while working overtime to shred the Constitution.
By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect the constitutional rights of the citizenry while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants.
We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth—in terms of profit and resale value—to our “owners.”
Under the new terms of this revised, one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and “we the people” have none.
Only in our case, sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, we’ve allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.
The problem with these devil’s bargains, however, is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.
We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all: the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.” In exchange for the promise of safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, lower taxes, lower crime rates, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, overcriminalization and government corruption.
In the end, such bargains always turn sour.
We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.
We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.
We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”
We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red-light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in hefty fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.
We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, “we the people” are being reminded that we possess no rights except for that which the government grants on an as-needed basis.
Indeed, there are chilling parallels between the authoritarian prison that is life in the American police state and The Prisoner, a dystopian television series that first broadcast in Great Britain more than 50 years ago.
The series centers around a British secret agent (played by Patrick McGoohan) who finds himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic retirement community known only as The Village. While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.
Much like the American Police State, The Prisoner’s Village gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.
Described as “an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia,” The Prisoner is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy.
Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of mankind to meekly accept his lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of his own making.
The Prisoner is an operations manual for how you condition a populace to life as prisoners in a police state: by brainwashing them into believing they are free so that they will march in lockstep with the state and be incapable of recognizing the prison walls that surround them.
We can no longer maintain the illusion of freedom.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have become “we the prisoners.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 23:40 - The Countries Where COVID-19 Vaccination Is Mandatory
The Countries Where COVID-19 Vaccination Is Mandatory
Some European countries have recently barged ahead by introducing wide-ranging Covid-19 vaccine mandates, but, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, such major vaccination obligations also exist in Latin America and Asia.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Austria’s new law that mandates all adults to be vaccinated against the coronavirus went into effect last week amid controversy, while neighboring Germany is mulling a similar move. Aging societies Italy, Greece and Czechia meanwhile opted for mandatory vaccines among at-risk age groups. These are defined as those over the age of 60 in Greece and the Czech Republic and those over the age of 50 in Italy.
As our map shows, the obligation to be vaccinated against Covid-19 also exists for all adults in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vatican City, which were the first countries to introduce these mandates. Indonesia and Micronesia followed later, as well as Ecuador, which mandates coronavirus vaccinations for everyone above the age of five. In Costa Rica, it is eligible minors for whom coronavirus vaccines are mandatory.
Elsewhere, obligatory vaccinations are in place for healthcare workers or certain other professions requiring a high level of human contact. Some countries also opt not to issue mandates but enact tight regulations surrounding unvaccinated individuals that amount to a de-fact vaccine mandate.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 23:20 - The Mystery Of The Migrant Kids The Feds Are Spiriting Into The U.S. Interior
The Mystery Of The Migrant Kids The Feds Are Spiriting Into The U.S. Interior
Authored by James Varney via RealClearInvestigations (emphasis ours),
After months of delay, the Department of Homeland Security replied late last month to a Congressional demand for information about the number of illegal migrants the department has flown from border towns to communities around the country. In 2021, it said, 71,617 were dropped off in nearly 20 cities including locales as far from the Mexican border as Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.
Immigration experts critical of the Biden administration’s permissive immigration policies believe those numbers are incomplete, especially regarding the most vulnerable migrants, those under 18, whom DHS classifies as “unaccompanied children.” The agency says some 40,000 of the total transported are such minors, but that number is only a fraction of the 147,000 “encounters” the agency reports having with unaccompanied migrant children at the southern border between January and October 2021.
Paramount among the questions raised by the transports is what happens to the unaccompanied children once they leave the airport? The major cities DHS lists, the experts say, are probably simply way stations rather than final destinations.
“Everyone wants to know where they’re going, but nobody knows,” said Todd Bensman, a national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “Well, somebody knows,” he adds. “The government knows. But they are being as opaque and ‘darkened-windows’ as they can be about the entire matter.”
Todd Bensman: “The government knows. But they are being as opaque and ‘darkened-windows’ as they can be about the entire matter.”
Center for Immigration Studies🚨 🚨🚨Gov’t contractor talking about the secret midnight flights from southern border into Westchester (NY) Airport:
“If it gets out… the government is betraying the American people.”
Stop lying to us.
Secure the border.
Uphold rule of law.https://t.co/Gd7UmTz7Ct pic.twitter.com/vAyGO1GvkQ— Rob Astorino (@RobAstorino) January 27, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The lack of information raises a host of questions regarding the health and welfare of the children, and more:
- What security checks are being performed — and background checks to ensure these minors are going to safe homes? How can checks be conducted on family members in the U.S. illegally who wind up taking custody of the children (a problem highlighted in a 2019 study)?
- What processes are in place to ensure that these children have enough to eat, are receiving any necessary medical care, or are enrolled in school?
- What traumas or crimes have they suffered along the way, at the hands of human traffickers, for example, and how are the cases being handled? (Through a public records request, Judicial Watch last year obtained a list of 33 incidents of alleged sexual abuse in a one-month period in 2021.)
- What pandemic precautions have been taken, beyond masks seen in some furtively taken images of the transportees, by an administration that professes to be aggressively dedicated to eradicating COVID-19? (Illegal immigrants dispersed on commercial flights in 2021 were not tested for covid, and agencies did not follow preventive procedures, according to preliminary findings of a DHS Inspector General’s report reviewed by RealClearInvestigations.)
- Who is responsible for making sure the migrants, children in particular, check in with the government and show up for court immigration hearings?
The difficulty of getting answers from the Biden administration is frustrating many state and local officials who say that tracking the thousands of illegal immigrants apparently melting into their communities is a maddening endeavor.
“The Biden administration is running a clandestine, covert, middle-of-the-night, special ops mission using the same tradecraft the military does in operations against foreign enemies,” said Larry Keefe, a senior policy adviser to Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. “We don’t know what’s going on because the states are not designed to mount intelligence-gathering operations against our own government.”
The situation is complicated by the layers of groups involved. After a gumbo of federal agencies – CBP, DHS, DHHS, ICE, ORR – the government largely relies on nonprofit contractors to handle unaccompanied minors. While those groups present a rosy picture on their websites, it is unclear how they can handle what has proved a massive increase.
In 2021, DHS shelters near the border and further inland took in 122,000 unaccompanied children, according to its figures, which shattered the previous record 69,000 in 2019. The unaccompanied children are but a portion of the illegal immigrants who flooded across the southern border in 2021. For the fiscal year ending last October, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 1.6 million “encounters” — an all-time record and four times the figure the previous year. Although the number of encounters does not equal the number of people who crossed, given that some are repeat offenders, the actual figures are even higher, because CBP does not release the number of “got-aways” it records.
Neither Homeland Security nor Health and Human Services nor the Office of Refugee Resettlement would answer questions about the resettlement process from RealClearInvestigations.
But the huge increase in numbers means the organizations dealing with them are swamped. In many cases, responsibilities for placing unaccompanied children with families or sponsors are subcontracted through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR. In 2020, the most recent year for which figures were available, under the far more restrictive immigration policies of the Trump administration, taxpayers spent more than $1.5 billion among 42 various non-profit and religious groups that offer help with housing, educational, medical, legal and other services.
More than $1 billion of that 2020 total was paid to six groups. The major recipient, Southwest Key Programs, received $400 million and a global nonprofit called BCFS received at least $253.1 million, according to tracking of ORR contracts by Maya Pagni Barak, a professor of criminology and criminal studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
None of the six groups would answer questions from RealClearInvestigations, instead referring them back to federal agencies in the kind of loop that has bedeviled others seeking information.
“This is all being done under the cover of darkness and no one really knows what is happening,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA, a group that favors immigration limits. “Plus, there’s so much confusion over who has custody over which groups.”
The groups handling unaccompanied children have sites scattered across the U.S., according to their websites. Southwest Key, for example, says it runs such shelters in 18 states, while BCFS lists shelters in a dozen states, from California and New York, to Colorado, Illinois, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee and elsewhere. A fact sheet from ICE notes that altogether there are sites for unaccompanied children in 22 states.
Regarding shelter conditions, the operators’ blanket silence beyond rosy website depictions is not a new development. In 2018, when the Trump administration’s border policies were under scrutiny, Southwest Key barred Democratic Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley from inspecting its Casa Padre facility in a former Walmart in Brownsville, Texas. At that time, Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi declared the system “barbaric.”
In an effort to shed some light on the situation in Florida, Gov. DeSantis issued an executive order in September that told state law enforcement and other officials to begin gathering information on the number of illegal immigrants federal agencies were bringing to Florida and where they wind up.
DeSantis took that step after accusing President Biden of abandoning any pretense of protecting the southern border.
In the face of what Keefe and other Florida officials described as continued intransigence on the part of federal agencies flying and busing illegal immigrants into the Sunshine State, DeSantis has proposed a package of laws now pending before the legislature in Tallahassee that would codify the steps laid out in his executive order. The proposed measures would also “prohibit state and local agencies from doing business with any private entities that facilitate the resettlement of illegal aliens in the state of Florida from the southern border.”
Florida’s Department of Children and Families published an emergency rule in December that directly addresses the various non-profits and religious groups that contract with the federal government. The rule “prohibits the issuance or renewal of any license to provide services to UAC who seek to be resettled in Florida,” unless the state and the federal agencies can craft some “cooperative agreement.”
Keefe said the governor’s moves will also put a crimp in human smuggling. Because the children lack documentation to board international flights from Central American airports and others, someone is paying to have them brought from their country of origin to the U.S. border. These are often criminal organizations that are most likely paid by family members – with whom the children may be eventually reunited – or human trafficking syndicates posing as legitimate sponsors that might exploit them for nefarious purposes.
“We don’t have laws in place to investigate the federal government,” Keefe said. “We’re being kept in the dark by our own country on something that’s definitely contributing to human smuggling because this is about bringing their kids here. Somebody drops the kids off at the border and then HHS is handing off to taxpayers the cost of flying them to illegal immigrant parents.”
Pennsylvania lawmakers are facing a similar situation. Keystone state senators remain dissatisfied with answers they have sought on flights packed with immigrants from the southern border that landed in the middle of the night in Scranton and other Pennsylvania airfields.
In December, there were at least two so-called “ghost” flights into the Lehigh Valley, a tiny fraction of the more than 900 such domestic or “lateral” flights ICE’s air arm flew around the U.S. in 2021.
Republican State Sen. Doug Mastriano and others sought answers from Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Attorney General Josh Shapiro, both Democrats. While Wolf said Scranton was simply a transit point, he offered no information on passengers that landed in the early morning darkness in Scranton. In a familiar refrain, the state lawmakers were told to direct their questions to the feds.
Mastriano has now filed a series of FOIA requests of DHS and ICE, but he remains perplexed and angered at the reluctance of those involved in the system to provide clear answers.
“On two flights from El Paso to Scranton there were 120 passengers, many of which were minors,” Mastriano said. “Imagine that. I don’t know who pays for their schooling or the impact on our community, and there is something fishy going on with all of it.”
The scant information that has been provided is unlikely to offer a complete picture, Mastriano told RCI.
“I think these findings are just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “We need to further examine the total number of illegal immigrants being sent [here] by plane and bus. It’s not just minors they are sending to Pennsylvania, its adults, too.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 23:00 - Guac Shock: Avocado Prices Have Never Been This High For A Super Bowl
Guac Shock: Avocado Prices Have Never Been This High For A Super Bowl
Countdown to Super Bowl 56 is four days away (as of Thursday morning). The annual playoff championship game of the National Football League (NFL) will feature the Los Angeles Rams versus Cincinnati Bengals. There are estimates that 117 million viewers will watch the game, increasing 21% compared to the 2021 Super Bowl. It’s a US tradition that many households host Super Bowl parties, an excuse to drink beer and eat game-day finger foods with friends, family, and even co-workers.
For the millions of Americans hosting SuperBowl parties, they’re likely to pay some of the highest food costs on record as global food prices surge to near-record highs. We want to concentrate on everyone’s favorite game-day finger foods besides chicken wings, that is, guacamole and chips.
According to Bloomberg data, the price of a 20-pound box of avocados from the state of Michoacan, Mexico (the central hub of Mexican avocado production) is around $26.89, the highest ever for this time of year with data going back to 1998.
This year alone, avocado prices are up 31%.
There are many reasons for rising avocado prices, including widespread supply-chain bottlenecks, increased freight costs, labor shortages, and higher commodity costs to operate farms, among many other variables.
One sure thing is higher food costs for SuperBowl parties will impact the pocketbooks of Americans. On Thursday morning, the consumer price index came in like a smoking hot tamale, +7.3% YoY (Core +5.9% YoY), but was underestimated as the headline printed a shocking +7.5% YoY – the highest since March 1982.
Below shows how food prices are soaring and becoming significant drivers drivers of overall inflation.
Let’s not stop at avocado. Americans will also be paying exorbitantly high prices for chicken.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 22:40 - China Was Never On Path to Meet "Phase 1" Purchase Commitments: Report
China Was Never On Path to Meet “Phase 1” Purchase Commitments: Report
By Michael Washburn of The Epoch Times
China’s failure to meet the import targets agreed to under the “phase one” trade agreement with the United States signed in January 2020 can’t be blamed wholly on the global COVID-19 pandemic and supply-chain disruptions, according to a new report issued by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE).
The failure reflects unrealistic import targets that China was never actually on track to meet, while some degree of bad faith on both sides of the deal also came into play, the report states.
Under the “phase one” trade agreement, Beijing committed to increasing its purchase of U.S. products across the agricultural, energy, and manufacturing sectors in 2020 and 2021 by at least $200 billion beyond what China had purchased in 2017. The targets were at least $227.9 billion worth of U.S. products in 2020 and at least $274.5 billion in 2021, totaling $502.4 billion for the two years in question.
Besides the import targets, the deal contained provisions about opening up China’s financial services sector and better protecting the intellectual property of Western businesses that engage with China. Then-President Donald Trump hailed the deal as a breakthrough, calling Chinese leader Xi Jinping his “very, very good friend.”
In particular, Trump hoped to turn the United States from a minor supplier of energy to China to a major one and incorporated especially high targets for coal, crude oil, liquefied natural gas, and refined energy products in the agreement. It was expected that the deal would help put an end to the escalating trade war between Washington and Beijing, during which hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tariffs were put in place by both sides.
But the final figures tell a different story. In the end, China ended up purchasing only 57 percent of the U.S. exports it had agreed to buy, achieving a total of only $288.8 billion worth of imports. Energy was a particular area of failure, with imports in only one area, liquefied natural gas, reaching its target number, coming in at 129 percent of the targeted figure. Imports of crude oil reached only 33 percent of the target, coal only 73 percent of the target, and refined energy products only 22 percent of the target.
The PIIE report set out to analyze all of the factors behind this failure.
The Role of the Pandemic
The report makes no attempt to discount the disruptive effects of COVID-19, which spread throughout the world in 2020. For all the optimism, the agreement had the misfortune of being signed just two months before the global pandemic really took hold, causing lockdowns and staff shortages worldwide.
“The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic undermined any chance of success. Public health-related lockdowns and a short economic recession were accompanied by a temporary collapse in goods trade globally, even if China’s imports were mostly spared. Restrictions on mobility also decimated U.S. services exports like tourism and business travel,” the report reads.
The economic recession that beset the United States in April 2020 and May 2020 hurt gross domestic product growth for the year, and in the first of those two months, global trade briefly broke down, according to the report. Companies struggled to adjust to new remote work arrangements and to find their way in the uncertain environment.
Having said all of that, the report shows abundant data that militate against trying to blame China’s import shortfall on the pandemic.
“Global goods trade rebounded in the second half of 2020 and boomed in 2021, in part because COVID-19 shifted consumer demand toward goods and away from services,” the report reads.
While this did put stress on supply chains, especially on the U.S.–China route, some price inflation might actually have helped China meet purchase goals, given that the “phase one” agreement’s targets are stated in value (a dollar amount) rather than volume of goods, the report states.
Hence, the failure to meet “phase one” targets can’t simply be dismissed as an expected and perhaps inevitable consequence of the pandemic.
Warning Signs
It should have been clear as far back as 2020 that China wouldn’t reach the import targets established under the deal, given the rate of its imports of U.S. goods, according to the report.
“The Biden administration was not to blame, as China was never on pace to meet its purchase commitments,” the report reads.
After the deal’s signing on Jan. 15, 2020, it should have been clear from prorated import goals and totals that the rate and total value of imports were falling short, the report states. At the end of June 2020, China had taken in 54 percent of the prorated target for that juncture. When the end of 2020 rolled around, China had realized only 59 percent of the year-end commitment. It wasn’t possible to catch up from that point given the rate of imports.
By this point, the trade deal took on a “back-loaded” character, according to the report. Further commitments for 2021 were more than 60 percent higher than commitments for 2020.
It should have been clear to CCP officials that China wasn’t taking in enough goods to meet the “phase one” pledge and that a net shortfall at the time of the deal’s expiration was inevitable, absent a marked shift in trade policy and a vastly accelerated intake of goods.
“China ended up buying none of that extra $200 billion of U.S. exports it had promised to purchase,” the report reads.
Dennis Shea, a former deputy U.S. trade representative and U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization (WTO), told NTD Television, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times, that structural problems within the Chinese economy account for the import shortfall.
“There are state enterprises that are funded by state-owned banks and are pursuing state-created industrial policies and are benefiting, frankly, from state cyber-espionage and industrial theft. These structural problems within the Chinese economy are massive,” Shea said.
In light of China’s deal-breaking, Shea urged the Biden administration to “show strength,” and be willing to “impose costs” on the regime.
“China has just not lived up to its commitments. Its non-market economic system is completely incompatible with WTO norms of transparency, openness, and market orientation grounded in the rule of law,” he said. “These are the norms and values that are supposed to underpin the multinational trading system and the WTO. And clearly, China’s economic system is incompatible with those sets of norms.”
Myron Brilliant, head of international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told Reuters on Feb. 9 that closer collaboration between the United States and allies, with a view to presenting a strong united front against Beijing over its failure to follow fair and transparent trade practices, is one of a number of options on the table for the Biden administration.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 22:20 - World's Largest iPhone Assembler Says Congested Supply Chains Are About To Ease
World’s Largest iPhone Assembler Says Congested Supply Chains Are About To Ease
Global supply chains have faced severe disruptions for almost two years, including port congestion and vessel bottlenecks that have resulted in soaring shipping rates and longer delivery times, adding to some of the hidest consumer inflation in four decades. Electronic component shortages have also been a significant issue and have led some manufacturing facilities to limit and or even halt production of finished goods. Now there are emerging signs and growing speculation that supply chains could ease in the second half of this year.
Bloomberg reports not any consumer electronics assembler but the world’s largest one, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., otherwise known as Foxconn Technology Group (too many of us in the West), the assembler of BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Kindle, Nokia devices, PlayStation 4, Wii U, and Xbox One, among many another popular consumer electronics, is expecting significant improvement in sourcing semiconductors in the first quarter and an overall improvement in their supply chain by summer.
James Wu, a spokesman for Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, was quoted at a company event in Taipei on Thursday, who said parts shortages are easing now and “overall supply constraints” will ease in the second half of this year.
Wu said the Hon Hai purchases upwards of $55 billion in semiconductor chips every year and aims to minimize disruptions later this year. The company forecasts first-quarter revenue to be the same (or little changed) compared to a year ago.
In the last two years, a shortage of semiconductor components has crippled parts of the complex global supply chain as pandemic-related shutdowns and soaring demand for electronics due to fiscal stimulus checks induced shortages. Severe disruptions led some automakers in the US to shut down manufacturing facilities due to the lack of critical chips, forcing the Biden administration to address the alarming issue by producing more chips domestically.
Even though Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and other peers have said chip supply will remain tight this year, there are emerging signs that supply chains are easing.
On Wednesday, AP Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipper, suggested the climax of global supply-chains snarls has passed, and bottlenecks will alleviate in the second half of the year. A leading indicator of this would be major transpacific shipping freight rates likely topping out.
And it’s not just Maersk. JP Morgan recently told clients that global supply chain constraints would begin to ease later this year.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 22:00 - San Francisco's Slow-Motion Suicide
San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide
Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Substack,
The city is carrying out a bizarre medical experiment in which they are helping homeless drug addicts use drugs… “It’s handing a loaded gun to a suicidal person”…
Homeless men sleep on Larkin Street in June 2019. (Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
At this point all I can say is: go and see it.
Over the past two years, more than 1,360 people have died from drug overdoses in San Francisco. That is more than double the number who have died from Covid.
But you don’t need more stats. You don’t need more numbers about how the tent encampments are exploding. Or about the amount of money that the city is paying for each person doing drugs on the sidewalks. You need to see it.
I’m serious. Everyone in San Francisco should make a trip downtown.
Walk around. And do not avert your eyes to the people dying slowly on the streets.
The politicians that run my hometown are relying on you not noticing what’s going on because it’s been bad for so long and who cares if it gets a little worse.
Don’t let them. Go see it.
The city is using intimidation. They used it on me when I went to see what was going on at a new addict-services facility, which they’d set up in a public plaza.
And they tried to intimidate my friend Michael Shellenberger, as you’ll read below.
The people in charge of homelessness and addiction want to bully people into giving up public streets and parks. They want to take your tax money and let your suffering neighbors die gentle, stoned deaths while they watch and call it justice. They think the mothers who want to get their sons out of the jaws of death are suspect. (It’s conservative to want your kid to live, don’t you know?) The city would like a little privacy please. Fentanyl use is an intimate moment between our officials and our addicts.
Do not listen to the propaganda. Skip Golden Gate Park. Bring your friends downtown instead. Stand in UN Plaza and just watch. Use your eyes, those great weapons.
— Nellie Bowles
When San Francisco Mayor London Breed promised last month that she would “put an end to all the bullshit destroying our city,” everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Over the past decade, the city had come to resemble “Night of the Living Dead,” with Covid accelerating its decline. At last, someone was promising to take charge. Finally we would see a crackdown on the open-air drug use and drug dealing that is fueling an epidemic of slow-motion death by the bay.
I praised Breed and defended her from skeptics who claimed hers was an empty promise. I was wrong to be so naive.
Right now, in the heart of downtown San Francisco, “the bullshit” the mayor spoke about is worsening by the day. The city is running a supervised drug consumption site in United Nations Plaza—just blocks away from city hall and the opera house—in flagrant violation of state and federal law. (Two weeks ago, my colleagues and I brokethe story. The San Francisco Chronicle confirmed our reporting.) There, city-funded service providers supervise people smoking fentanyl and meth they buy from drug dealers across the street.
A sanctioned and fenced-in homeless encampment across from City Hall in May 2020. (Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)
The police do nothing. Indeed, the mayor, through the Department of Emergency Management and the Department of Public Health, is running the site.
Tom Wolf, a recovering homeless addict who served on the city’s drug-dealing task force, compared the department to “the mafia.” Everyone sees that the situation is untenable, he added, but “nobody wants to go on record” because “everyone is afraid of the backlash.”
Let me say off the bat that I am not a drug prude. I support the decriminalization of marijuana and psychedelics for medical and spiritual purposes. I have favored needle exchanges since the late 1990s, and I have always strongly supported using Narcan to reverse overdoses, and methadone or Suboxone as opioid replacement.
I am also not completely opposed to supervised drug consumption sites. In my new book, San Fransicko, I praise Portugal, which has decriminalized drug use, and the Netherlands, where there are 28 drug consumption rooms. (In some, addicts are even given heroin.)
But both of those countries condemn hard drug use and intervene when addicts break laws, including laws against public drug use and public camping. “There’s a clear sign of disapproval in our society to the use of drugs,” the head of Portugal’s drug program, João Goulão, told me.
They are also not opposed to coercion. In Portugal, someone caught using heroin in public is arrested, brought to the police station, and either prosecuted for drug dealing or forced to appear before something called a Commission for the Dissuasion of Addiction comprised of a combination of social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and family members who confront addicts in a formal intervention.
Something very different is happening in San Francisco. The city is carrying out a bizarre medical experiment whereby addicts are given everything they need to maintain their addiction—cash, hot meals, shelter—in exchange for . . . almost nothing. Voters have found themselves in the strange position of paying for fentanyl, meth and crack use on public property.
You can go and witness all of this if you simply walk down Market Street and peek your head over a newly erected fence in the southwest corner of United Nations Plaza. You will see that the city is permitting people to openly use and even deal drugs in a cordoned-off area of the public square.
The city denies that they are operating a supervised drug consumption site.
“This site is about getting people connected with immediate support, as well as long-term services and treatment,” a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Emergency Management told the Chronicle.
The official line is that they are running what they call a “Linkage Center” in a building next to the open drug market in the plaza. The idea is that the center is supposed to link addicts to services, including housing and rehab. When Mayor London Breed announced it, she promised it would get people into treatment so they could stop using drugs, not simply hide their use.
But city officials have told me that in the 19 days that the site has been open, just two people total went to detox so far. And they serve some 220 people per day.
“In that tent on Market Street everyone is shooting dope,” complained a senior employee of a major city service provider, speaking of the scene at the plaza.
“It’s insane. All the staff standing around watching them. It’s fucking ridiculous. I don’t know how anybody thinks that helping a drug addict use drugs is helping them.”
“What’s happening is that everyone that comes in gets a meal, can use the bathroom, gets drug supplies (needles, foil, pipes) and signs up for a ‘housing assessment,” a person with firsthand information about the operation told me over text message. “But there’s no housing. So nothing happens. They just get added to a list.”
The parents whose children live on the streets are adamant that the status quo is broken. “I agree with the Linkage Center,” Gina McDonald told me. Her 24-year-old daughter Samantha is a heroin and fentanyl addict who has been on and off the streets for the last two years. “But allowing open drug use does not help. It’s handing a loaded gun to a suicidal person.”
Last Thursday I returned to the Linkage Center to find out what, if anything, had changed since I first visited. I saw (and video recorded) much more drug use within the supervised drug consumption site, and much more drug dealing around it, than I had two weeks ago.
I counted at least 30 drug users crowded together and sitting on a cement stoop or on outdoor tables. Many were gaunt, stooped over, and had open wounds consistent with substance use disorder, from meth, fentanyl, or a combination of the two, which has become increasingly common. There were also more employees on site than when I had first visited; they were watching as people smoked fentanyl and meth.
The security guards at the site work for a new, fast-growing nonprofit contractor called Urban Alchemy. Urban Alchemy is composed of ex-cons and “lifers” released early, many of whom have gone through recovery from addiction themselves. Their first contract was to clean and police the public toilets that, without security guards, are used for drug consumption and prostitution.
I admire the organization’s ethos, which emphasizes self-control, discipline, and turning past mistakes into something positive. One morning in early December I shadowed Urban Alchemy employees, known as “practitioners,” as they told street addicts in the Tenderloin to pack up their tents and cleaned up after them.
But the practitioners did not appreciate my presence in the consumption area and asked me to leave. After I pointed out that the site was public property, and therefore open to the public, they said I could stay if I registered at the front desk. Within seconds they changed their mind and threw me out of the site.
My last visit to the site had frightened me, so I was wearing a body camera clipped to my jacket. They grabbed my body camera and another camera from my hand and rushed me outside of the facility. Eventually the police came and returned my property to me.
Urban Alchemy is not just paid by the city to provide security for the Linkage Center. It also oversees a city-sponsored homeless tent village, which the city has dubbed a “Safe Sleeping Site,” just one block away. There, late-stage addicts living in tents spend their days smoking fentanyl and meth. Meantime, Urban Alchemy practitioners bring them three hot meals a day, provide them with clean clothes, and even clean their toilets.
The Safe Sleeping Site, which was created in 2020, is one of six similar sitesthroughout the city with about 250 tents between them. The city’s taxpayers spend about $57,000 per tent per year—or twice the median cost of a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.
Addiction experts—and I spoke to dozens for my book, including senior officials in Europe— are appalled by San Francisco’s radical drug experiment.
“If you’re coming into a place that’s supposed to guide you toward the end of seeking treatment and recovery, and there are people using drugs around you, that becomes an incentive to keep going,” said Stanford University School of Medicine addiction expert, Keith Humphreys.
“It’s like trying to have an AA meeting in a bar.”
Wolf, the recovering addict who is the founder of The Recovery Education Coalition, told me that “some service providers are refusing to go to the [supervised drug consumption] site because they don’t feel safe.” He added that “a lot of workers for these nonprofit service providers are in recovery and they don’t want to be around the drug use.”
In obeisance to woke ideology, the official position of the Department of Public Health and progressives on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is that police should not be involved except perhaps to revive people with Narcan after they overdose. Many on the Board of Supervisors and the District Attorney believe that drug dealers—who the latter refers to as victims—should not be prosecuted.
The result is that the city is spending roughly $100,000 per year per homeless person, or over $1 billion annually, to maintain a large, unemployed, and very sick addict population in San Francisco’s public squares at the cost of human life and the loss of peace, walkability and livability—the very qualities that have long attracted so many to San Francisco.
People blame the pandemic for increasing crime & homelessness but Sheriff Villanueva of Los Angeles, a Democrat, says two of the biggest causes were letting 28,000 people out of prison and Gov. @GavinNewsom inviting homeless to come to California from out-of-state pic.twitter.com/yvg4WUDA3E
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) February 6, 2022
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For decades, San Franciscans have been fed the line that people are not on the street primarily because they are addicts, but because of high rent and lack of housing. The most powerful proponent of this view is Jennifer Friedenbach of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. She blocks the closure of open drug scenes, calls people who disagree with her fascists and racists, and organizes protests at the homes of politicians. “They’re screaming for housing,” she has said of the city’s homeless population.
But that is not what addicts on the street tell me. On Saturday, I talked to a 37-year-old heroin addict originally from Alabama who has been living on San Francisco’s streets for seven years. He told me that for the majority of homeless people “addiction is the main driving force.”
People say high rent causes homelessness but Ben, who has been homeless in San Francisco for 7 years, says the “vast majority” are homeless due to addiction. Just 6-7% are from SF. Ben says he “boosts” (shoplifts) and breaks into cars to pay for his $60/day heroin habit. pic.twitter.com/uewKTtBuOS
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) February 6, 2022
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It makes good sense. Homeless shelters have rules, like no drug use. The streets do not.
And simply giving addicts and the mentally ill their own apartment units—the so-called “Housing First” approach pioneered in San Francisco—doesn’t even keep people housed long-term. In the spring of 2021, a team of Harvard medical experts found that after 10 years, just 12 percent of the previously homeless remained housed.
In 2018, a National Academies of Sciences review of the scientific literature of Housing First concluded that there was “no substantial evidence” that the policy of Housing First “contributes to improved health outcomes.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise given that it doesn’t deal with addiction.
But in the name of Housing First, San Francisco’s elected leaders have deliberately chosen to leave a significant portion of the homeless unsheltered on the logic that anything short of a permanent apartment, no strings attached, for any addict who wants one is immoral.
People say lack of housing forces local residents into the streets, but James says he came from Texas to San Francisco for the drugs, the non-enforcement of anti-camping laws, and the $820/month in welfare & food stamps. James says he sold fentanyl, 2 weeks ago, to a 15-year-old. pic.twitter.com/5qMr6tmlWs
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) February 9, 2022
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It didn’t have to be this way. “New York has made the decision that everyone should have an exit from the street,” noted Rafael Mandelman, one of the city’s 11 supervisors. “San Francisco has consciously chosen not to make that commitment. And the conditions on New York’s streets versus San Francisco streets are somewhat reflective of what that means.”
It seems like it cannot get worse. But it can.
In Canada, taxpayer-funded service providers have been delivering fentanyl directly to addicts living in homeless drug encampments. This is where many fear the San Francisco program is headed.
The backlash is building, though. It is made up of fed-up city residents, addiction experts, and the relatives of addicts.
On Saturday morning, mothers of homeless addicts and mothers of kids killed by drugs gathered to protest the supervised drug site in front of the Linkage Center. They call themselves Mothers Against Drug Deaths, and they are part of the California Peace Coalition, which I co-founded last May.
Gina McDonald, Samantha’s mother, was there. She opened up to me about her own past addiction. She was an alcoholic, then turned to opioids, then to meth.
“Within six months I was in a psychiatric ward with meth-induced psychosis.”
In May, she will have been sober for 10 years.
“I don’t want to know what she has to do to survive out there,” McDonald said of her daughter.
“I know because I was an addict. But I don’t want to hear it from her. Can you imagine what those girls have to do out there to not be dope sick?”
I no longer believe that change in the city will come from Mayor Breed. If it comes, it will come from mothers like Gina McDonald. When she took the microphone on Saturday she didn’t hold back. “Mayor Breed,” she said, “I’m tired of the bullshit, too.”
* * *
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,”Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress. He is author of just launched book San Fransicko (Harper Collins) and the best-selling book, Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins June 30, 2020).
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 21:40 - Watch: DARPA Flies 'Smart' Black Hawk Helicopter With No Pilot On Board
Watch: DARPA Flies ‘Smart’ Black Hawk Helicopter With No Pilot On Board
For the first time the famed Black Hawk helicopter has flown entirely unmanned as part of an experimental project by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Lockheed Martin.
The project, which has been in development for six years, is called ALIAS – or the “Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System” – and proved successful after days ago a UH-60 Alpha-model Black Hawk helicopter performed its first flight with no human pilot on board.
Image via Lockheed Martin: Sikorsky UH-60A Blackhawk Optionally Piloted Aircraft leaves the tarmac on its first fully unmanned flight. The maiden flight included the helicopter taking off and landing successfully with no human pilot. It also navigated simulated aerial obstacles in between.
Lockheed Martin published footage of the historic flight to its website this week, describing… “Sitting on the runway in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, one of Sikorsky’s pilots in an S-70 Black Hawk helicopter flips the optionally piloted cockpit switch from two to zero, exits the aircraft and walks across the runway.”
The helicopter is seen completing “a pre-flight check list, starts its engines, spins up its rotors and takes off with no crew onboard,” according to the press release. “All of it happens fully autonomously.”
So far it’s completed two test flights over Fort Campbell, Kentucky with no person inside the cockpit. The aircraft is monitored at a remote station from on the ground.
The helicopter literally has a simple switch that enables autonomous flying, as Defense News described:
There’s a switch in the helicopter called the “210 switch,” Igor Cherepinsky, director of Sikorsky Innovation, told reporters during a Feb. 8 virtual press briefing. The switch indicates how many pilots are present in the aircraft; for the first time before the flight, it was turned to zero.
For 30 minutes, the ALIAS Black Hawk flew without anyone inside over Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on Feb. 5 and then again on a shorter flight on Feb. 7.
The ALIAS technology has cost some $160 million so far, with Lockheed touting that “This unique combination of autonomy software and hardware will make flying both smarter and safer.”
As AI becomes more advanced, we can imagine that in the not-so-distant future ALIAS will be combined with instant AI-driven battlefield decision-making, in a worrisome ‘Skynet’ type scenario which skeptics of DARPA and its creepy AI-robot projects are frequently warning about.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 21:20 - Time For Conservatives To Crack Down On The Postal Service
Time For Conservatives To Crack Down On The Postal Service
Authored by Cesar Ybarra via RealClear Policy (emphasis ours),
A bipartisan group of federal lawmakers are considering giving the politically-troubled and financially-insolvent United States Postal Service (USPS) a $58 billion taxpayer and Medicare bailout, unless House and Senate conservatives step in and stop this from happening.
For those who haven’t been keeping tabs on the Postal Service, the agency has recently focused on politically-motivated activity instead of adhering to its mission of delivering mail to the American people in a cost-effective, efficient, and timely manner.
One report uncovered a Postal Service effort to produce a mobile voting system by secretly testing it on a blockchain-based system. The USPS conducted this test without involving the federal agencies tasked with overseeing the security of our elections infrastructure and then buried the results that showed how easy it was for hackers to penetrate the mobile system.
Another troubling report sheds light on the Postal Service’s Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP), a surveillance campaign that aimed to track “inflammatory” content on social media sites and flag it for relevant government agencies–ultimately, adding yet another layer to our federal surveillance state.
From unwinding its politically-charged operations to addressing its financial shortfalls, the Postal Service is in serious need of reform. Members of Congress have responded to the necessity for reform; but, in typical congressional fashion, their legislative proposal exacerbates the problems rather than solves them.
Enter the Postal Service Reform Act (PSRA), a bill spearheaded by House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney and Ranking Member James Comer. This legislation was introduced to ostensibly “put the USPS on the path towards fiscal sustainability and efficiency.” However, the text of the legislation indicates otherwise.
Current law requires the Postal Service to prefund payments for future retirees’ health care benefits. But because the USPS has been unable to meet these obligations for years, postal union bosses are now strongly advocating for the repeal of this requirement and looking to shift the financial burden to taxpayers and Medicare funds. The Postal Service Reform Act will create a $58 billion bailout for an agency that cannot get its finances under control.
Simply erasing debts doesn’t mean that the red ink will stop flowing or that the nefarious accounting of the USPS will change in the least. Fiscally damaging practices, like underpricing USPS packages by $1.46, are sure to continue in perpetuity unless something is done. The fiscal relief that the Postal Service seeks would do nothing more than force everyone else to pay for the collateral damage.
More specifically, the PSRA further burdens the Medicare program with new debt by integrating USPS retirees into the soon-to-be insolvent program. Not only would this cause Medicare to hemorrhage further, but it would also hurt retirees by raising costs and reducing benefits. That’s why the National Active and Retired Federal Employees expressed concerns about Medicare integration, saying that integration “could raise premiums for federal employees and retirees.”
Proponents of the PSRA also falsely claim that the bill is needed to restore service quality. In reality, the bill would actually make postal service quality worse by allowing USPS to unilaterally hurt delivery times and “relax service standards.”
Buried within the proposal lies another damaging provision, which states, in part: “The Postal Service shall maintain an integrated network for the delivery of market-dominant and competitive products.” This proposed integrated network mandate would make it impossible for the USPS to know where it makes money and where it does not as it gives the USPS the authority to bundle expenses and earnings of its package business alongside its letter mail service. The last thing Congress should be considering is the creation of shady accounting mechanisms that let the USPS off the hook for their troubled financial and accounting shortfalls.
Unfortunately, there is a bipartisan group of lawmakers willing to let the USPS off the hook for its unaccountable finances and deeply hurt Medicare in the process. House conservatives must demand answers from the USPS on their politically-charged operations and work towards thorough fiscal transparency and better legislative solutions than those offered in the Postal Service Reform Act.
Cesar Ybarra is the Vice President of Legislative Affairs at FreedomWorks.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 21:00 - Soaring Cooking Oil Prices Could Push Global Food Prices To Record
Soaring Cooking Oil Prices Could Push Global Food Prices To Record
Just days ago, the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) Food Price Index (FFPI), a measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities, printed near a record high, a level not seen in more than a decade. We theorized last week that food prices were “set to hit a record high soon. “
We now expect the Rome-based FAO index could be heading for a record high sometime this quarter and or as early as this month due to a rise in cooking oil prices. Malaysian palm oil futures powered to another all-time high late last week.
“This matters because palm oil is the world’s most-consumed edible oil and is used in everything from cooking to chocolate, lipstick, and fuel,” according to Bloomberg. Higher palm oil prices could increase global food inflation to a record high when the next FFPI is released.
Bloomberg explains the dynamics behind soaring edible oil prices.
Supplies of soybean oil are under threat because heat and drought have cut soybean production in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. That followed a canola crop disaster in top producer Canada last summer. So little relief is in sight for consumers until the U.S. and Canadian oilseed harvests later this year. Concerns are also rising about sunflower oil because any potential conflict between top producers Russia and Ukraine could reduce supplies from the Black Sea.
All this means is that the only way for food prices is up. The United Nations index climbed close to a record in January driven by more expensive vegetable oil and dairy prices. A further rise this month could potentially push prices beyond that mark to a fresh all-time high. -Bloomberg
The threat of record-high food prices isn’t hitting everyone equally. Lowest income households are crushed the most worldwide. More than a year ago, everyone’s favorite permabear, SocGen’s Albert Edwards, explained soaring food inflation has the risk of triggering social upheavals, especially in emerging market countries first.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 20:40 - Rep. Roy Introduces Bill To Reinstate Troops Discharged For Refusing COVID-19 Vaccine
Rep. Roy Introduces Bill To Reinstate Troops Discharged For Refusing COVID-19 Vaccine
Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A group of Republican lawmakers led by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) unveiled a bill on Feb. 8 that would reinstate troops fired for not complying with the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), joined by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), speaks at a news conference about the National Defense Authorization Bill at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Sept. 22, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) The Service Restoration Act (pdf) would “ensure that American servicemen and women in uniform are not fired for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine and that those already fired can return to military service,” a release from the Republican’s office said.
Roy’s office noted that hundreds of “battle-ready service members” have been separated from the Armed Forces as a result of the mandate, which was announced by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in August 2021.
“Worse, the Department of Defense (DOD) has denied many medical and religious exemptions, which has resulted in forcing service members to choose either their faith or livelihoods,” it said.
The bill would prohibit federal funds from being used to require a member of the Armed Forces to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and would require Austin to reinstate members of the Armed Forces who wish to return to duty at the same rank.
It would also ensure that Austin counts the service members’ time separated from the military toward their retirement benefits, and expunge from the service members’ record any adverse action due to refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
Co-sponsors to the bill include Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Van Taylor (R-Texas), Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), and Bob Good (R-Va.).
“Because of President [Joe] Biden’s power-hungry, anti-science COVID-19 vaccine mandate, hundreds of valuable American service members are being forced out of our military, taking with them years of subject-matter expertise, careers of selfless sacrifice, and lifelong dreams of military service. This is strategically foolish, profoundly unamerican, and completely unacceptable,” Roy said in a statement on the legislation.
The lawmaker added, “I introduced the Service Restoration Act to ensure that the brave men and women of our armed forces are not fired over this wrong-headed mandate—whether it be for a medical, religious, conscientious or any reason—and that those already dismissed are able to get back to honorably serving their country with their time of service and their records rightfully restored.”
The measure came as the Air Force on Tuesday became the second U.S. military branch to approve religious exemptions to the mandatory COVID-19 vaccine, although the nine approved so far represent just a fraction of the more than 6,400 requested by Air Force troops.
The Marine Corps is the only other military service to grant any religious accommodations, allowing three so far. On Jan. 13, it granted religious exemptions to the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, nearly two months after the vaccination deadline for active-duty Marines.
The Army and Navy have not approved any religious exemptions. As of Jan. 26, the Army had rejected 266 requests for permanent religious exemptions.
The Navy in its latest release on Feb. 2 noted that there have been 118 “separations” so far for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. Court documents dated Feb. 3 note out of 4,095 total initial requests, the Navy has denied 3,278 and 285 are under review.
As of Feb. 3, a total of 3,458 requests for religious accommodation out of 3,539 initial requests have been rejected by the U.S. Marine Corps, while 81 requests are pending review, court papers show.
The U.S. Coast Guard has denied 578 of 1,308 initial requests for religious exemption from the vaccine mandate, and 715 requests are under review.
The military services have come under criticism for their failure to grant religious exemptions, with members of Congress, the military, and the public questioning if the review processes have been fair. Altogether, the services have received more than 14,000 requests for religious exemptions.
Austin and military leaders have argued that the vaccine is critical to maintaining military readiness and the health of the force. And all of the services have now either discharged personnel for refusing the vaccine or put a system in place to do so.
Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 20:20 - Hertz Customers, Suing For Being Falsely Arrested For Auto Theft, Are Making Progress In Delaware Court
Hertz Customers, Suing For Being Falsely Arrested For Auto Theft, Are Making Progress In Delaware Court
Hundreds of customers who are suing Hertz, claiming they were “falsely arrested for auto theft after renting cars”, are making headway against the company in court.
Hertz was ordered by a federal judge this week “to disclose how many renters it accuses every year,” according to Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance. The decision was made by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Mary Walrath.
Suing the company are advocates for 220 people who have been trying to make Hertz’s internal anti-theft program details public.
Hertz has been arguing against releasing the data in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware, on the grounds that rivals could then have access to the information, which could then be used to tarnish the company’s reputation. The U.S. Trustee has argued the opposite: that the information should be made public.
Some people who rented Hertz vehicles were jailed – and in one case held at gunpoint – just hours after paying for their rental cars, the report says.
“Some 165 Hertz Car Rental customers have filed claims in bankruptcy court saying they were stopped, detained, and even spent months in jail because the car rental company filed stolen car reports on vehicles they had rented and paid for,” Inc. had reported back in late 2021, detailing the practice.
The company’s statement at the time was:
Hertz cares deeply about our customers, and we successfully provide rental vehicles for tens of millions of travelers each year. Unfortunately, in the legal matters being discussed, the attorneys have a track record of making baseless claims that blatantly misrepresent the facts. The vast majority of these cases involve renters who were many weeks or even months overdue returning vehicles and who stopped communicating with us well beyond the scheduled due date. Situations where vehicles are reported to the authorities are very rare and happen only after exhaustive attempts to reach the customer.
Now it looks as though we may get a peek at what the company was saying internally about the practice. We’ll continue to monitor this story for developments.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 20:00 - Supreme Court May End Affirmative Action In College Admissions, Experts Say
Supreme Court May End Affirmative Action In College Admissions, Experts Say
By Matthew Vadum of Epoch Times
The Supreme Court may end the use of race-based so-called affirmative action in college admissions in cases later this year, legal experts told The Epoch Times.
Although left-wing activists such as advocates of Marxist-derived critical race theory say race-conscious government policies are essential to dismantle the systemic racism they say pervades the American experience, critics say using race in the college admissions process is both anachronistic and wrong.
Critics quote then-Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who believed the policy was a necessary evil. In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), she wrote: “We expect that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
Making race-focused admissions decisions is “dangerous,” O’Connor wrote, calling it a “deviation from the norm of equal treatment.” Such programs must “be limited in time,” she stated, adding that “all governmental use of race must have a logical end point.”
Although 2028, the year O’Connor said the policy might no longer be needed, is still six years away, two lawyers interviewed by The Epoch Times said the use of race in admissions may come to an end sooner–if enough conservative justices on the nine-member Supreme Court are willing to show the courage needed to make history.
Some speculate that liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced Jan. 27 he would retire at the end of the court’s current term, might have voted with a majority against affirmative action in the upcoming cases, but he almost certainly will not be a member of the court when the cases are heard, probably in the fall or winter.
Breyer voted with the 6-3 majority in Grutter’s companion case, Gratz v. Bollinger, to strike down the University of Michigan’s system, in which points were automatically distributed to every applicant from an underrepresented minority. That system ignored the individualized consideration requirement from Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the court found. In Bakke, the court struck down racial quotas, but found that a narrower use of race to bring in more minority students could be constitutional in some circumstances.
Justice Clarence Thomas was also on the court for the Michigan case. He, too, voted to find the system was unconstitutional.
President Joe Biden is under pressure from the base of the Democratic Party to replace Breyer with a justice who is significantly to his left, and who would presumably favor affirmative action.
Background
On Jan. 24, the court agreed to hear Students for Fair Admissions Inc. (SFFA) v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, court file 20-1199, and SFFA v. University of North Carolina (UNC), court file 21-707. The cases were consolidated and will be heard together. Both of the federal judges who heard the cases at the trial court level were appointed by then-President Barack Obama.
Considered a conservative group, SFFA calls itself “a nonprofit membership group of more than 20,000 students, parents, and others, who believe that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.”
Harvard and UNC are, respectively, the oldest private college and the oldest public college in the United States.
In the Harvard case, U.S. District Judge Allison Dale Burroughs found after a 15-day non-jury trial for Harvard, ruling its admission policy that was said to discriminate against Asian American applicants was not motivated by “racial animus … or intentional discrimination” and was “narrowly tailored to achieve diversity and the academic benefits that flow from diversity.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision, ruling against SFFA.
The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) weighed in, siding with SFFA in an appeals court brief that stated the evidence at trial showed “Harvard actively engages in racial balancing that Supreme Court precedent flatly forbids.”
But the Biden administration is siding with the college.
In a brief (pdf) filed Dec. 8, 2021, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar urged the Supreme Court to reject the case, arguing that overturning Grutter and “other precedents authorizing consideration of race in university admissions,” would cause upheaval among “colleges and universities around the Nation” that rely on those precedents.
In the North Carolina case, U.S. District Judge Loretta Copeland Biggs held an eight-day non-jury trial to determine if UNC was complying with existing precedent.
The court approved the school’s admissions policy because it uses race “flexibly as a ‘plus’ factor” and only as “one among many factors.” The court found UNC had no viable race-neutral alternatives to help it “achieve the educational benefits of diversity about as well as its current race-conscious policies and practices.”
The court stated that providing admissions preferences based on socioeconomic status instead of race would not work because “the majority of low-income students are white,” so the schools would just “be choosing more white students.” Race should be used by UNC indefinitely because it is “interwoven in every aspect of the lived experience.” Until the U.S. one day resolves its “struggle with racial inequality,” minority students would continue to be “less likely to be admitted in meaningful numbers on [race-neutral] criteria.”
SFFA promptly filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, but before that court could rule on the case, also sought review from the Supreme Court, which was granted.
SSFA President Edward Blum said in a statement that his group hopes “the justices will end the use of race as an admissions factor at Harvard, UNC, and all colleges and universities.”
Surveys from both Pew Research Center and Gallup show nearly 75 percent of Americans of all races “do not believe race or ethnicity should be a factor in college admissions.”
“The cornerstone of our nation’s civil rights laws is the principle that an individual’s race should not be used to help or harm them in their life’s endeavors.”
Blum said his group hopes the court “will use these cases to begin the restoration of the colorblind legal covenant that holds together Americans of all races and ethnicities.”
Legal Experts
Curt Levey is president of the Committee for Justice, a nonprofit that describes itself as “devoted to restoring the Founders’ vision of a federal judiciary governed by the rule of law and anchored by the Constitution.” Levey said he was part of the legal team for the plaintiffs who challenged affirmative action policies in the Grutter and Gratz cases.
Unlike in the past, the five votes needed on the nine-member Supreme Court to abolish affirmative action may finally be there, Levey told The Epoch Times in an interview.
Although Chief Justice John Roberts may be “a squish” on many issues important to conservatives, he has been “quite clear” on this issue, Levey said.
Levey was referring to Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), which Roberts wrote. Roberts said the court was rightly concerned “that racial balancing has no logical stopping point.”
“Racial balancing,” he wrote, “is not transformed from patently unconstitutional to a compelling state interest simply by relabeling it racial diversity.”
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts concluded.
Given the presence of the six-member conservative bloc, there appears to be majority support for ending the diversity rationale for racial preferences, Levey said.
“The question is, do they have the guts to do it?”
If they go against establishment thinking on affirmative action and banish race-based admissions, the justices will face “the ire of the elites” and minority enrollment at institutions of higher learning “would probably significantly fall,” Levey said.
This would prove “very embarrassing to all of these progressive university presidents,” he said. The justices are “under as much pressure to save affirmative action as they are to save the constitutional right to abortion, and only time will tell whether they have the courage to stick up for their principles.”
Levey said he was “hopeful” but also “a realist.”
Roberts is “very concerned with the legacy of the Roberts court and [Justice Brett] Kavanaugh is obviously worried about his reputation and [Justice Amy Coney] Barrett — we just don’t know.”
Striking down affirmative action “would be bold, [but] it would be the right thing to do.”
Wen Fa is an attorney at the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation, a national public interest law firm that filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the upcoming SFFA cases.
University admissions have been “plagued with racial preferences” since the Grutter ruling, Fa told The Epoch Times in an interview.
The decision, which “allowed for the use of racial preferences to further an amorphous interest in diversity,” was “wrongly decided.”
“We think that the principle of equality before the law prohibits racial discrimination, and just as the principle of equal protection prohibits the use of racial discrimination elsewhere, it should also prohibit racial discrimination in the context of college admissions,” Fa said.
“We hope that the Supreme Court took both of these cases to overrule the Grutter decision, and to say–once and for all–that racial preferences have no place in the context of university admissions,” he said.
“Schools should treat individuals as individuals and judge them based on their own individual abilities, achievements, and aspirations and not on the basis of their membership in a broad arbitrary racial group.”
Race-based discrimination hurts people and can lead to stereotyping, Fa said.
For example, college guidebooks counsel Asian American students “not to say that they want to be a doctor, or they want to major in math and sciences, because that would be a negative on their application.”
Asian American applicants generally have higher academic scores and higher extracurricular scores, so “to suppress the number of Asian American students at Harvard, and to get at Harvard’s desired racial balance, the admissions officers score Asian American applicants lower on these personal ratings, which is a subjective metric that purportedly judges students by likability, courage, kindness, [and] things like that.”
Fa said this leads to Asian American applicants being “stereotyped as unkind, cowardly, unfriendly, even though the alumni interviewers who actually meet these students routinely disagree, and that’s just one example of the type of pernicious stereotypes that racial preferences can lead to.”
Liberal Resignation
Meanwhile, liberal supporters of affirmative action have considered the ideological inclinations of the justices and seem resigned to the fact that the Supreme Court is not going to do what they want. Some are already writing affirmative action’s epitaph.
Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, expressed alarm.
The court’s decision to hear the cases “seriously threatens the nation’s ideals of equality,” she said, and “comes amidst the backdrop of widespread efforts to erase and deny the experiences of people of color.”
“As our country experiences a resurgence of white supremacy, it is as important now as ever before that our future leaders be educated in a learning environment that exposes them to the rich diversity that our country has to offer, so they may be fully prepared for the many challenges ahead.”
Opting to hear the cases is in itself “a very, very significant threat to the continued constitutionality of affirmative action,” Tanya Washington, a law professor at Georgia State University, told ABC News.
“This is not just going to impact the elite,” she said.
“What we are going to see, what I predict, is a cataclysmic drop in the numbers of Latino, black and indigenous students attending institutions of higher ed.”
William Spriggs, a professor of economics at Howard University, lamented that the court will probably “by hook or by crook, find our way back to 1950. Whatever it takes. And that would be really unfortunate.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 19:40 - Trump Says National Archives Documents Return "No Big Deal"
Trump Says National Archives Documents Return “No Big Deal”
Former President Trump on Thursday called reports of his handling of White House records “no big deal,” after questions were raised over the recent transfer of documents to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) from his Florida resort.
“The media’s characterization of my relationship with NARA is Fake News. It was exactly the opposite! It was a great honor to work with NARA to help formally preserve the Trump Legacy,” said Trump in a Thursday statement, in which he says he arranged for boxes containing “letters, records, newspapers, magazines, and various articles” to be transported to NARA after “collaborative and respectful discussions.”
According to the Washington Post, 15 boxes of White House records were recovered from Mar-a-Lago – which the New York Times added may have contained classified documents.
“The papers were given easily and without conflict and on a very friendly basis, which is different from the accounts being drawn up by the Fake News Media,” said Trump. “In fact, it was viewed as routine and ‘no big deal.’ In actuality, I have been told I was under no obligation to give this material based on various legal rulings that have been made over the years.”
Trump added that reports he flushed papers down the toilet was fake news, calling it “categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book,” referring to Times correspondent Maggie Haberman’s new book, “Confidence Man.”
Last month, the National Archives transferred more than 700 pages of presidential documents that Trump had sought to block to the House elect committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
In a lawsuit filed against the committee, Trump called the request a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition openly endorsed by Biden and designed to unconstitutionally investigate President Trump and his administration.”
However, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision to allow the documents to be transferred, saying in its decision that Trump’s “status as a former President necessarily made no difference to the court’s decision.” –The Hill
Perhaps Democrats will launch another impeachment?
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 19:20 - Maryland State Senator Pushes For Right To Carry As Baltimore Spirals Out Of Control
Maryland State Senator Pushes For Right To Carry As Baltimore Spirals Out Of Control
Submitted by The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN).,
Even if you don’t live in Maryland, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about how dangerous Baltimore City is. Often making the national news about violence, Baltimore stands as a testament to failed liberal policies, especially on the subject of gun control.
We often use Baltimore as a great example of how gun control has little to no effect on violent crime in the firearms world. This is ironic because Maryland law is a gun control advocate’s paradise, receiving an “A-“from Giffords on their annual “Gun Law Scorecard.” Giffords also ranks Maryland 6th for “strong” gun laws in the country. Here in Maryland, we have the whole package; an assault weapons ban, licensing requirements, training requirements, a registry for handguns, and to cap it all off; Maryland is a “May Issue” state.
For those living in Free America, a “May Issue” state is where the burden is on the citizen to prove why they should be allowed to have a concealed handgun permit. You’d need to provide a good and substantial reason why you should be “allowed” to exercise your right. Often, “self-defense” is not an acceptable reason for the permit because these licensing schemes exist only as a gatekeeping method for the elite to keep firearms out of the hands of the average citizens that need them.
On the other side, in free states, the burden is on the state. Shall Issue makes better legal sense because, just like in the court system where your innocence is assumed, you can carry a firearm if you pass a background check.
So with Baltimore having just gotten through one of its most violent months on record State Senator Justin Ready has proposed SB327, a bill clarifying that self-defense is a “good and substantial reason” and qualifies an individual to carry a handgun.
It’s simple logic that crime would decrease after allowing citizens to arm themselves responsibly. But it’s also backed by data. After Florida changed their laws in the 90s, it saw its murder rate fall from 36% above the national average to 4%. The safest states statistically in the country (According to actual data, not Giffords) are constitutional carry, where a permit to carry isn’t even required!
It’s also a fact that when times are tough, people want to take their defense into their own hands. Concealed Carry Permits skyrocketed in 2020/2021 along with gun sales due to the pandemic and civil unrest. It’s no wonder that Baltimore’s violent crime rate is so high when the populace can’t defend themselves due to the state’s unconstitutional policies. Maryland should be empowering its citizens to have agency over their lives and their self-defense.
If Sen. Ready manages to pass this bill, we’d fully expect violent crime in Baltimore to decrease drastically.
Listen to the full interview with Sen. Ready, who said, “criminals don’t like when people can shoot back.” He also said something that would spark liberal outrage, that if law-abiding citizens of Baltimore were able to conceal, you would see a reduction in violent crime.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 19:00 - US State Dept Issues Highest-Level "Do Not Travel" Warning For Ukraine
US State Dept Issues Highest-Level “Do Not Travel” Warning For Ukraine
Despite Ukraine and NATO agreeing that the threat of a Russian invasion is “low”, the US State Department has cranked up the propaganda dial to ’11’ on the amplifier of fearmongering by issuing a “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory for US citizens in, or considering traveling to, Ukraine.
As a reminder, on Sunday Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged his fellow citizens to ignore “apocalyptic predictions” that a Russian invasion is imminent. Kuleba sought to calm his country by further saying, “Different capitals have different scenarios, but Ukraine is ready for any development.” It reaffirms President Volodymyr Zelensky’s words from a week ago saying there are “no tanks in the streets” and that foreign media must stop stoking unnecessary panic.
NATO’s most senior military officer said Monday that in his assessment, Russia has yet to place enough of a troop force near Ukraine at this point for any kind of large-scale invasion…
Admiral Rob Bauer, NATO’s most senior military officer, said that Russia will have assembled enough military forces to potentially stage an operation against Ukraine at the end of February. But he added that officials cannot determine Putin’s intention or plans regarding Kyiv and that NATO doesn’t currently envision a direct threat to alliance members.
“Up until now, we don’t see an intent, we don’t expect an attack on NATO soil by Russia -– either directly or via Belarus,” he said Monday at a news conference in Vilnius.
But, none of that matters to the US State Department:
Do not travel to Ukraine due to the increased threats of Russian military action and COVID-19; those in Ukraine should depart now via commercial or private means. If remaining in Ukraine, exercise increased caution due to crime, civil unrest, and potential combat operations should Russia take military action. Some areas have increased risk. Read the entire Travel Advisory.
On January 23, 2022, the Department of State authorized the voluntary departure of U.S. direct hire employees (USDH) and ordered the departure of eligible family members (EFM) from Embassy Kyiv due to the continued threat of Russian military action. U.S. citizens should not travel to Ukraine, and those in Ukraine should depart now using commercial or other privately available transportation options.
There are continued reports of a Russian military build-up on the border with Ukraine, indicating potential for significant military action against Ukraine. The security conditions, particularly along Ukraine’s borders, in Russia-occupied Crimea, and in Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine, are unpredictable and can deteriorate with little notice. Demonstrations, which have turned violent at times, regularly occur throughout Ukraine, including in Kyiv.
U.S. citizens in Ukraine should be aware that the U.S. government will not be able to evacuate U.S. citizens in the event of Russian military action anywhere in Ukraine. Military action may commence at any time and without warning and would also severely impact the U.S. Embassy’s ability to provide consular services, including assistance to U.S. citizens in departing Ukraine. For more information, please review what the U.S. government can and cannot do to assist you in a crisis overseas.
The Department asks all U.S. citizens in Ukraine to complete an online form so that we may better communicate with you. This is especially important if you plan to remain in Ukraine.
Crimea – Do Not Travel
Russia occupies and has attempted to annex Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, and there is extensive Russian Federation military presence in Crimea. Occupation authorities continue to abuse and arbitrarily imprison foreigners and the local population, particularly individuals who are seen as opposing Russia’s occupation of the peninsula. The U.S. government prohibits its employees from traveling to Crimea and is unable to provide emergency services to U.S. citizens in Crimea.
Donetsk and Luhansk – Do Not Travel
Russia-led forces control areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, where the ongoing armed conflict has resulted in more than 14,000 deaths. Individuals, including U.S. citizens, have been threatened, detained, or kidnapped for hours or days after being stopped at checkpoints controlled by Russia-led forces. The U.S. government restricts USDH from traveling to the eastern parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and adjacent regions, which limits the ability to provide emergency services to U.S. citizens in these regions.
Crime targeting foreigners and property is common. Politically targeted assassinations and bombings have also occurred. There are reports of violent attacks on minority groups and police by radical groups.
So, after seeing inflation hit a 40 year high (after saying he would control it) and various establishment types starting to flip-flop on the most draconian and anti-science COVID containment policies, President Biden needs something, anything, to get his approval rating back above 40 (a record low for him)… and it appears that ‘fear’ is the unifier of choice. in this case of Russia.
Biden followed this warning up with an interview with NBC News’ anchor Lester Holt, saying that “American citizens should leave now.”
“It’s not like we’re dealing with a terrorist organization. We’re dealing with one of the largest armies in the world. It’s a very different situation and things could go crazy quickly.”
Holt asked Biden what scenario could prompt him to send troops to rescue Americans fleeing the country. Biden replied:
“There’s not. That’s a world war when Americans and Russia start shooting at one another.”
“We’re in a very different world than we’ve ever been,” he added.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 18:40 - Ontario Premier Orders GiveSendGo To Freeze Funds For Anti-Mandate Protesters
Ontario Premier Orders GiveSendGo To Freeze Funds For Anti-Mandate Protesters
Less than a week after GoFundMe, at the behest of the Mayor of Ottawa and Justin Trudeau, summarily closed their fundraiser which had exceeded $10 million, Ontario’s Premier, Doug Ford, has issued an order that essentially freezes any funds that have been raised thus far from the alternate crowdsourcing site ‘GiveSendGo’.
Freezing money from gofundme and givesendgo does not happen in a democratic country.
That is a full blow communism move.
Canadians are not allowed to do what they want with their own money.
If this is allowed with no recourse, it will eventually be much worse.
— Alexander Roberto (@alexrnicholas) February 10, 2022
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As April McAbee reports via CitizenStringer.com, the order specifically states that the fundraising platform Give Send Go is prohibited from doing anything with the funds.
Statement from the Office of the Premier of Ontario
“Today, the Attorney General brought an application in the Superior Court of Justice for an order pursuant to section 490.8 of the Criminal Code prohibiting any person from disposing of, or otherwise dealing with, in any manner whatsoever, any and all monetary donations made through the Freedom Convoy 2022 and Adopt-a-Trucker campaign pages on the GiveSendGo online fundraising platform.
This afternoon, the order was issued. It binds any and all parties with possession or control over these donations.”
Ivana Yelich
Executive Director of Media Relations Office of the Premier of Ontario
According to Katie Simpson, a CBC correspondent, “a spokesperson for the Premier’s office says this essentially means the funds are frozen for now.”
And the Americans are coming…
NEW – a White House official says members of the Biden administration held a series of high level calls with their Canadian counterparts, urging them to use their federal powers to end the blockades, offering the full support of the Department of Homeland Security.
— Katie Simpson (@CBCKatie) February 10, 2022
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Give Send Go has yet to make a statement on the order.
In a statement on Twitter, GiveSendGo wrote in an apparent response to the court order:
“Know this! Canada has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here at GiveSendGo.”
It adds:
“All funds for EVERY campaign on GiveSendGo flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.”
John Carpay, president of the legal group Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which is providing legal help to the Freedom Convoy organizers, told The Epoch Times that their lawyers are looking into the issue.
In a statement on Monday when the company agreed to host the fundraiser, the platform stated, “GiveSendGo stands for hope and freedom. We recognize the freedoms we have are God-given, not authorized by governments, but rather freedoms that ought to be protected by our governments.”
The GiveSendGo fundraiser had raised almost 8.5 million dollars at the time the order was issued.
Just as Mark Jeftovic exclaimed last week, this proves bitcoin’s use-case, and just as we anticipated, it looks like a crypto-based crowd-funding platform Tallycoin remains as a method for Canadian truckers re-route their donations to help support the people on the front lines of the protest.
Anybody interested in the new platform can donate as little as a single Satoshi (presently, about 2,400 satoshis make up $1), and the fundraiser has a target of 2,100,000,000, and has raise 1.594 billion Sats so far (around $700,000).
The fundraiser on Tallycoin has the following message affixed to it:
“The Canadian Bitcoin community would like to have a second financial access point for #FreedomConvoy2022. Legacy financial infrastructure can sometimes be politicized and clamped down upon, whereas Bitcoin is a truly censorship resistant method of communicating value. Don’t allow your voices to be silenced, and don’t allow your financial sovereignty to be trampled upon.
Love, unity and freedom – let’s raise some hard money for hard workers!”
As Jeftovic explained, needless to say Bitcoin fixes this.
Today it is GoFundMe. In the future, when central banks roll out Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), it’ll be all economic activity that falls within the purview of national and Supra-national government and bureaucracy.
When those days arrive, everybody who will be reliant on government economic entitlements will be enduring a type of neo-Fuedalism: veritably digital slavery.
…Donating to #FreedomConvoy? Listening to Joe Rogan Experience? Those aren’t approved activities. That’ll cost you some demerits.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 18:20 - "Slash The Tires, Arrest The Drivers": Harvard Professor And CNN Analyst Calls For Violence Against Freedom Convoy
“Slash The Tires, Arrest The Drivers”: Harvard Professor And CNN Analyst Calls For Violence Against Freedom Convoy
Harvard professor, CNN analyst and former Obama admin undersecretary of Homeland Security Juliette Kayyem has called for violence and vandalism against Freedom Convoy protesters who have amassed on the bridge that connects Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario.
“The Ambassador Bridge link constitutes 28% of annual trade movement between US and Canada,” tweeted Kayyem. “Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks.”
In addition to a monumentally stupid idea considering the logistics of moving trucks with no fuel and slashed tires, one has to wonder if Kayyem is saying the quiet part out loud when it comes to how Democrats respond to non-BLM protests.
Can you elaborate on your brilliant plan to “move” trucks with no tires and no gas off of a bridge?
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 10, 2022
You’re a “professor,” right? You’re advocating violence and property damage for peaceful protestors? Were you this outspoken when BLM and Antifa were torching businesses and killing people? That was an economic and security issue, too.
— Buzz Patterson (@BuzzPatterson) February 10, 2022
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The blockade, now in its fourth day, has drawn the attention of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who called on Canadian authorities to reopen the bridge, according to the Epoch Times.
“The blockade is having a significant impact on Michigan’s working families who are just trying to do their jobs. Our communities and automotive, manufacturing, and agriculture businesses are feeling the effects. It’s hitting paychecks and production lines. That is unacceptable,” the Democratic governor said in a Thursday statement.
“It is imperative that Canadian local, provincial, and national governments de-escalate this economic blockade,” she added, without suggesting how. “They must take all necessary and appropriate steps to immediately and safely reopen traffic so we can continue growing our economy, supporting good-paying jobs, and lowering costs for families.”
According to Kayyem, slashing tires, stealing gas, arresting the protesters, and somehow moving all the trucks is the way to go.
That’s the point of worker’s strikes, Herr Professor.
— Kyle Becker 🚚🚜🐎 (@kylenabecker) February 10, 2022
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This is the most brilliant plan to be hatched at Harvard since the Vietnam War
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 10, 2022
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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/aZGunm9crr
— they call me bruce (@ringtrick) February 10, 2022
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— Mark E D’s House Parties (@ffresh_batch) February 10, 2022
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 18:00 - Police Beating Of Unconscious Trump Supporter Was "Objectively Reasonable," Department Rules
Police Beating Of Unconscious Trump Supporter Was “Objectively Reasonable,” Department Rules
By Joseph M. Hanneman of The Epoch Times
The beating of an unconscious Trump supporter by a DC Metropolitan Police Department officer on January 6 was deemed to be “objectively reasonable” after an investigation by the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, The Epoch Times has learned.
Justin Winchell (in the teal jacket at right) reacts to a Metropolitan Police Department officer striking his unconscious friend, Rosanne Boyland. (Body cam/U.S. Department of Justice) The Internal Affairs investigation was opened in September 2021 based on a complaint filed by a Texas man who assembled video evidence of the officer striking an unconscious Rosanne Boyland with a steel baton and a large wooden stick at the entrance to the West Terrace tunnel at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Boyland, 34, of Kennesaw, Ga., was pinned under a pile of protesters who fled the tunnel when police deployed a crowd-control gas. After several minutes of being crushed by the weight of other fallen protesters, Boyland lost consciousness and stopped breathing, witnesses have said.
Boyland traveled to Washington D.C. that day to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally and hear then-President Donald Trump speak at the Ellipse. She became trapped in a crowd that sought entry to the Capitol through the West Terrace tunnel.
As Boyland lay unconscious on the ground DC Metro Police Officer Lila Morris repeatedly struck her with a steel baton and what appeared to be a wooden walking stick, according to a video recording.
Protesters spill out of the West Terrace tunnel like a waterfall on Jan. 6, 2021. The crowd started a stampede out of the tunnel after police deployed gas on the crowd, witnesses said. (Video Still/Gary McBride) The sudden attack horrified Boyland’s friend and traveling companion, Justin Winchell, who pleaded with police and protesters to provide first aid to Boyland. Police bodycam video shows Winchell’s shock when he saw Morris strike Boyland in the head.
“She’s gonna die! She’s gonna die! …I need somebody! She’s dead!” Winchell cried.
Boyland was not pronounced dead until more than 90 minutes later, although she appeared lifeless when police dragged her body from the West Terrace tunnel entrance into the Capitol at 4:31 p.m.
During the 11 minutes after Boyland fell, protesters made repeated attempts at CPR—efforts that were frustrated in part by the beating and police spraying pepper spray into the faces of those trying to help Boyland, video shows.
There is confusion about what lifesaving efforts were made by police after Boyland was moved into the Capitol. Testimony before a Congressional committee suggested police attempted CPR at 4:26 p.m., which wasn’t possible since at that time Boyland still lay on the concrete outside, being given CPR by protesters Jake Lang and Ronald McAbee.
The DC medical examiner said Boyland died of an accidental overdose of Adderall, a prescription medication used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. That ruling has drawn skepticism and outrage from Boyland’s friends and family. Her father, Bret Boyland, said Rosanne had been taking Adderall for about 10 years.
Bret Boyland with his wife Cheryl and daughter Rosanne (at right), during a family vacation. (Courtesy of the Boyland Family) The attack on Boyland troubled Gary McBride of Decatur, Texas so much, he filed a police brutality complaint with the Metropolitan Police Department on Sept. 14, 2021.
Citizen Complaint Filed in September 2021
McBride assembled a library of videos recorded at the Capitol on Jan. 6. McBride, who spent most of his career in the oil and gas industry, has turned into a professional video sleuth after studying thousands of hours of Jan. 6 footage.
McBride went back and forth with various Metropolitan Police Department officials over more than two months, before being told via email on Nov. 15 that Morris had been cleared of any wrongdoing.
“The use of force within this investigation was determined to be objectively reasonable,” wrote Capt. David K. Augustine, director of the Risk Management Division of the MPD Internal Affairs Bureau. “Officer Morris is still employed with the MPD and not facing criminal charges related to the use of force on January 6.”
McBride said he found the reasoning and conclusion shocking.
“It told me right there that it’s OK for them to do what they do. They are doing exactly what they want to do. They don’t care if you know or see,” McBride said.
“They just showed me that they’re going to go beat somebody and kill them, but they have the power to say, ‘That was objectively reasonable.’ And we’re supposed to accept that and say, ‘Okay.’ ”
Officer Morris, who had just reached the front line in the West Terrace tunnel, is seen on bodycam video picking up what appears to be a walking stick or a tree branch. She raised the weapon over her head with both hands and struck Boyland at least four times in rapid succession. The stick broke at one point. Morris continued to strike at Boyland until other officers pulled her back.
Morris was hailed as a hero after Jan. 6. She was feted as a guest of honor at Super Bowl LIV in Tampa.
Philip Anderson of Mesquite, Texas, who was at the bottom of the same pile that crushed Boyland, called MPD’s use-of-force ruling “absolute bullsh*t.”
Rosanne Boyland and Philip Anderson entered the West Terrace tunnel of the U.S. Capitol at 4:18 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021. A stampede started at 4:20 when police deployed gas against the protesters. (Video Stills/Epoch Times Photo Illustration) “There is nothing reasonable about hitting a non-responsive woman lying on the ground over the head with a baton,” Anderson, 26, told The Epoch Times. “They say it’s reasonable because she (Boyland) was a Trump supporter.”
Anderson said there was cause from the beginning for an independent investigation by a special prosecutor or a grand jury.
“The fact that they have been lying from the beginning is reason enough for investigation,” Anderson said. “The only reason why anyone even knows this is because I barely survived and am here to now call out their blatant lies (about) the woman that they killed.”
McBride sent two videos as evidence along with his police-brutality complaint. One of the videos was removed from YouTube but is available on Rumble. The other video is still accessible on YouTube.
Bret Boyland asked the Metropolitan Police Department for copies of bodycam video from various police officers in the terrace tunnel. That request was denied.
“Wednesday was nine months from our daughter’s passing and we still have many unanswered questions to what happened to her that day,” Boyland wrote in a Freedom of Information Act request in fall 2021.
On Oct. 12, Shania Hughes, a Freedom of Information Act specialist with the Metropolitan Police Department, told Boyland MPD would not release any bodycam footage.
“It has been determined that the information you are seeking is part of an ongoing investigation and criminal proceeding,” Hughes wrote. “With exception of the portions of the video that has been shown publicly, MPD cannot fulfill your request. The release of this information could interfere with the enforcement proceedings by revealing the direction and pace of the investigation.”
The Epoch Times also made a FOIA request for Officer Morris’ bodycam footage for her entire shift on Jan. 6, 2021. That request was denied, but for different reasons than those given to Bret Boyland. The department cited privacy grounds for denying the newspaper’s request.
Officers Attempted CPR After Boyland was Moved Inside Capitol
Bret Boyland said the family was initially denied a copy of Rosanne’s full autopsy report, but since has obtained the document.
“Through our lawyer and additional FOIA requests, we have obtained the full autopsy report, which has been forwarded to the pathologist,” Bret Boyland told The Epoch Times.
The family contracted with its own forensic pathologist to review the DC medical examiner’s report on Boyland’s death.
Bret Boyland said heavily redacted bodycam footage he obtained shows that police did attempt CPR on Rosanne after she was moved into the Capitol.
“There were two BWC (body-worn camera) videos that started with the officers pulling Rosanne into the building past the police line,” Boyland said, “and it did show multiple officers attempting to revive Rosanne and gave CPR for about 10 – 12 (minutes) straight; then they appeared to load her on some kind of mail-room cart and moved her somewhere else.”
McBride said one thing he found especially troubling on one of the videos is that despite being unconscious during the attack, it appeared Boyland could feel the blows to the head.
“When she takes that second hit to the head, watch her left arm, her left arm straightens up and lifts off the ground,” McBride said.
Winchell told an Atlanta television station in 2021 that when Rosanne was struck by Officer Morris for the final time, Rosanne’s nose started bleeding. “In our mind, she was still alive at that point,” Bret Boyland said.
Rosanne also suffered 3-4 broken ribs on each side of her chest, her father said. Those injuries could have come from repeated CPR attempts, the pressure of being under the large pile of bodies, or from the baton blows from Officer Morris, he said.
Augustine said a report on Morris’ use of force has not been released to the public. He said the factors involved in police use of force are outlined in MPD’s online policy (pdf), updated in January 2021.
“Members of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) shall value and preserve the sanctity of human life at all times, especially when lawfully exercising the use of force,” the policy states. “In situations where the use of force is justified, the utmost restraint should be exercised.”
Bret Boyland said the family wants to know why Morris attacked Rosanne.
“She had a choice; that officer had a choice,” Boyland said. “She could have helped her right there at that point in time. But she chose to grab the stick and start hitting her.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/10/2022 – 17:40
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