- Anti-Lockdown Protesters Decry Government Restrictions In Berlin As Virus Cases Surge
Anti-Lockdown Protesters Decry Government Restrictions In Berlin As Virus Cases Surge
Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/12/2020 – 02:45Germany recorded a spike in COVID-19 cases last week, promoting Berlin and Frankfurt’s authorities to issue new restrictions to contain the virus spread. The introduction of the restrictions angered residents, as thousands of them were seen protesting across central Berlin Saturday.
Last week, the number of new coronavirus infections had significantly increased, as new measures were announced by the government on Tuesday to limit gatherings and close bars and restaurants early.
“This is not the time to party,” Berlin’s Mayor Michael Muller said on Saturday. “We can and we want to prevent another more severe confinement.”
Several thousand anti-lockdown protesters were seen marching on Saturday. Many said the emergence of new restrictions violated their “human rights.”
“We are a colorful mix of… people from various ethnic and income level groups, who left all their political affiliations behind and who disagree with the politicization of the coronavirus [pandemic] resulting in restriction of our human rights,” the organizers of “Silent March” said.
“A loose column of demonstrators stretched along several major streets of the German capital as they slowly walked from Konrad Adenauer Square in the western part of the city to the Victory Column in the central Tiergarten Park and near the iconic Brandenburg Gate,” RT News said.
Die Polizei bestätigt gegenüber dem @Tagesspiegel „mehrere tausend Teilnehmer“ beim „Schweigemarsch“. Diese Einschätzung teile ich. Mehr Menschen als ich erwartet habe ziehen gerade durch den Tiergarten. Die ersten sind am Endpunkt an der Siegessäule angelangt. #b1010 pic.twitter.com/5jsYR2Hdgh
— julius geiler (@glr_berlin) October 10, 2020
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Protesters said the pandemic warrants a broader public discussion and end to the “permanent fear campaigns” they say the government has waged on citizens.
Organizers initially estimated 20,000 would attend Saturday’s march, though local police said “several thousand” turned out.
RT notes, the march was mostly “peaceful” and there were “no reports of incidents during the demonstration.
From today’s protest in Berlin… with social distancing and masks a silent demo.. pic.twitter.com/z2RbdN9VJC
— Anna Brees (@BreesAnna) October 10, 2020
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As Germany becomes a coronavirus hotspot, many protesters were seen socially distancing while marching down the street. The turnout was much smaller to the tens of thousands seen in August across the German capital city.
COVID-19 cases in Germany rose last week and forced the government to impose new restrictions. The country recorded 4,721 new cases on Saturday, the third day of +4,000 cases in a row.
Cases are also jumping in France, Spain, and the UK, along with new cases rising in at least eight US states.
- International Students Quit: "This Isn't Sweden"
International Students Quit: “This Isn’t Sweden”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/12/2020 – 02:00International students at the Dalarna University in Borlänge do not want to live in the student residence which is offered to them in the immigrant suburb Tjärna Ängar, also known as “Little Mogadishu”.
That is what a representative for Dalarna’s student union wrote in a letter to the university’s board.
In 2005 the community housing company Tunabyggen in Borlänge converted two multiple-family homes in the Somali-dense Tjärna Ängar into a student complex with a gym, study spaces, and 126 student apartments, in order to remedy the shortage of student residences in the city.
A second student housing area with another 59 student apartments lies in an adjacent building. The residence is marketed by Tunabyggen’s communal home page as a “multicultural residential area”. Together they make up more than two-thirds of the city’s student housing.
But the students don’t want to live in them, Swedish daily Fria Tider reported.
The university’s rector contacted the municipality four years ago, in connection with a woman being raped, and demanded that they arrange other student housing in the municipality not located in Tjärna Ängar, especially because female students felt unsafe in the immigrant-dense suburb.
“This is unacceptable. Students must be offered a residence when they are accepted, or at least at the beginning of instruction. The housing’s general standard must be reviewed, and above all, students must be able to feel safe and not worry about their personal security. It is not debatable,” said the rector, Marita Hilliges, at that time.
Somalis have not been integrated into Swedish society. The Somali community associations are generally based on clan affiliation. According to an interview study done by Malmö University in 2013, Somalis express strong concerns about losing their culture and Islamic religion. Adult Somalis stated their greatest worry was to ensure a Somali identity among their children, which led to endless conflicts with daycare institutions and schools who “ignore their cultural preferences and teach children things which are the exact opposite of what their parents preach”. Photo: Yasin Yusuf
But the student housing has remained. And now, international students who are placed in the residences are protesting against being forced to live there. After experiencing shootings outside the student residences on several occasions, the students write that they “experience a glimpse of war-torn countries” in Tjärna Ängar with arson and firefights between criminals and police.
There are many horrific examples in the letter. Several female students have been followed and harassed by “unknown men” and feel that they are unsafe when they are outside the house. Two people were recently stabbed right outside the complex.
One student awoke in the morning when robbers climbed up the face of the building and into the room. They stole his phone, money, and other valuables. A female student was similarly awakened in the same way by a thief in the room, according to the letter.
“The general perception of the students is that they don’t feel they are living in Sweden, they don’t hear the language, and can’t experience the culture or traditions, which makes them feel they live in a segregated environment,” reads the letter in which the students demand to be allowed to live somewhere else.
Many international students, who began university during the autumn, have already dropped out of instruction and left Sweden.
“Little Mogadishu” boasts a high proportion of immigrants from Somalia, which in the period 2017-18 accounted for 36,8 percent of the area’s inhabitants. Nine out of ten in the area are foreign-born.
Only between 14 and 17 percent of the population have a high school education and only 36-37 percent of the population aged 25-64 have a job. Some 16,2 percent are unemployed and 39,8 percent of the population receive social benefits.
The official population was 3 500 in 2018, but unofficially, analyses of waste volumes and water consumption indicate that the actual number may be closer to 10 000.
The district has been classified by the Swedish police’s National Operational Department (NOA) as a risk area where “the situation is considered alarming” with 83 percent of the inhabitants under 45 years old and 54 percent under 25.
Drug trafficking is the main economic activity in the area and it has a parallel legal system used by at least parts of Tjärna Ängar’s population.
- 'Adjustment Day' Looms As America's Headed For Violent Civil War
‘Adjustment Day’ Looms As America’s Headed For Violent Civil War
Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/12/2020 – 00:00Authored by Jef Costello via Counter-Currents.com,
On October 1st, with little fanfare, Politico published an extraordinary opinion piece that may be the most important thing I’ve read all year. Titled “Americans Increasingly Believe Violence is Justified if the Other Side Wins,” the essay was penned by three “senior fellows” at the Hoover Institution, New America, and the Hudson Institute, as well as a professor of “political communication” at Louisiana State University and a professor of government at the University of Maryland (that’s five authors, in case you lost count).
The major takeaway is presented in the graph that appears below:
Way back in November of 2017 (my, how long ago that seems . . . ) a mere 8% of both Democrats and Republicans held that it is legitimate to use violence to advance their political goals. Actually, there’s nothing “mere” about it. It ought to surprise us that such a sizeable percentage of both parties could hold such a radical view. Also surprising is Republicans running neck and neck with Democrats. Contrary to how they are perceived by Leftists, conservatives are slow to embrace the idea of violence, or any sort of punitive measures against their opponents. Their Achilles heel, in fact, is commitment to “fair play.”
We must remember that when these numbers were compiled it had been a year since the 2016 election. A year of unhinged rhetoric by the Left, and repeated calls for Trump to be assassinated. Madonna spoke about her fantasies of blowing up the White House, and “comedian” Kathy Griffin held up an effigy of Trump’s severed head. Of course, those were the unserious, tongue-in-cheek threats. Countless other people made similar threats, quite openly, and seemed to be pretty serious about it. To my knowledge, none of them was charged with a crime.
As Trump Derangement Syndrome continued to spread, it was actually a healthy sign that more Republicans began to entertain the idea of using violence as a political tool. Leftists presented themselves as having no boundaries. There was no low to which they would not stoop, no trick too dirty. They were threatening to attack and kill not only the President, but his supporters, and, in fact, the entire white race. They made it quite clear that they could not be reasoned with. Faced with an enemy like this, violence was bound to become more attractive, or at least more justifiable, in the eyes of even the most mild-mannered Republican voter.
Almost a year later, in October 2018, the percentage of Democrats condoning violence had jumped to 13. It had become obvious to them, at this point, that the results of the 2016 election were not going to be reversed, though many still held out the hope that Robert Mueller would uncover some dirt that would prove Trump’s undoing. True to form, conservatives lagged behind (see what nice people we are?), with a mere 11% condoning violence. Still, the number had risen. At least part of this has to be attributed to the Kavanaugh hearings (of September-October), which were a wakeup call for many Republicans, including Lindsay Graham, who seems to have sort of lost his innocence as a result. The hearings proved once and for all, if any more proof had been needed, that liberals have no principles whatever, and that attempts to play fair with them will only backfire. One can’t really blame Republicans for that 11%. Please pass the ammo.
By December 2019, things had gotten genuinely scary. The trend had continued. And how. This was the month that the House approved articles of impeachment against Trump. Earlier in the year, in April, the Mueller report was made public, revealing that we had been subjected to two solid years of hysteria about “Russia collusion” for absolutely no reason whatever. The libs were frustrated, to put it mildly. 16% of them now condoned violence. Republicans were behind the curve again, but not by much, with 15% of them thinking the same way.
But we hadn’t seen anything yet. That was before COVID and BLM. By June of the current year, these percentages had doubled, and Dems and Republicans were now equally in favor of breaking heads: 30% of both groups now condoned violence to advance political goals. Let us pause to consider this number once more: 30%. Let us also pause to consider that this poll was conducted at the beginning of June, when the George Floyd riots had just gotten going.
By September 1st, the percentage of liberals condoning violence had risen by just three points. Still, at 33% this constitutes one third of all Dems. The more interesting result came from the Republicans, however. The percentage in question had risen to 36%, and for the first time, Republicans rated as more violence-approving than Dems. If you will read the fine print, you will find that the September poll’s margin of error is 2.0 percentage points. Thus, the three percentage points separating Republicans from Democrats are statistically significant; conservatives are now demonstrably more in favor of violence than liberals.
Has the sleeping giant awakened?
We were slow to consider violence an option. Unlike liberals, after all, we really do have principles, and we did not want to be like them. But they have pushed us to this point, and it’s difficult to see how there can be any debate about that. Months of watching our cities burn. Months of our history being torn down. Months of draconian lockdowns and arbitrary rules imposed by Democrat governors and mayors. Months of being told that we had to shelter in place, while BLM was given free rein to loot and burn. Months of being told we have no right to defend ourselves; that if you are white, you are automatically guilty. Countless lives and businesses destroyed. Given all of this, and more, it’s surprising that the number isn’t 56% — or 76% or 86%. But since many conservatives are probably afraid to say they might condone violence, I think we can round that 36% up a bit. Quite a bit.
The other day I spoke with a friend who lives in New York. He told me that he recently drove to his local rifle range, which he has visited many times in the past. He had not been there for several months, however, and when he arrived he was shocked to find a line stretching out the door (made up entirely of white people) and what wound up being a 45-minute wait. When he finally got inside, he asked the proprietor about the large turnout and was told that it had been like this every weekend since the BLM riots began, and that the numbers were increasing. I hope all those folks brought their own ammo, because my friend also told me the store was completely sold out. And this was New York, not South Carolina.
Two weeks prior to the Politico essay, The Hill published an opinion piece by a former federal prosecutor titled “Why Democrats Must Confront Extreme Left-wing Incitement to Violence.” It’s a weak and cowardly piece of writing but is nevertheless interesting on multiple levels. The author begins by asserting that Right-wing groups “by far pose the greatest threat of violence.” He bases this on a study by something called the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). This group looked at 900 cases of politically motivated plots or attacks since 1994, and concluded that Right-wing extremists had claimed the lives of 329 people, whereas “Antifa members haven’t killed any.”
This is like somebody saying, in January of 2020, “Over the last 25 years, seasonal flu has claimed the lives of 890,000 Americans, but COVID-19 hasn’t killed any Americans. Therefore, the flu is the real threat.” This would have been a ridiculous position, because COVID was something new and entirely unknown. We had no way of knowing, in January, how dangerous COVID was going to be. And, since then, it has, in fact, claimed far more American lives than the flu ever takes in a given year.
Similarly, since May we have seen Left-wing violence the likes of which this country has not seen since the 1960s. And this phenomenon is fundamentally new because it has been condoned and encouraged by state and local officials, prominent Democrats in Congress, and establishment journalists and pundits. The authors of the CSIS study warn of the dangers posed by groups like the “boogaloos,” a group of “Right-wing, anti-government extremists” bent on “creating a civil war in the United States.” Oddly enough, I’d never heard of the boogaloos until reading this article, and I think I’m pretty “plugged in.”
I know nothing about this group, but I do know one thing for certain: if the boogaloos, or any other “Right-wing extremists” took to the streets and behaved as BLM and Antifa have behaved — looting, burning, assaulting, threatening, or even just blocking traffic — they would have been crushed within twenty-four hours. All the might of state and local police forces and federal law enforcement would have been unleashed against them, and the cops would not have played nice. Many “Right-wingers” would have wound up dead or injured, and the survivors would have faced extensive criminal charges.
This, gentle reader, is why “Right-wing violence” is not the greater threat. Left-wing violence is taking place with the approval and support, financial and otherwise, of the establishment. It is a threat to all ordinary Americans, especially white Americans. Right-wing violence only poses a threat (so far, a very mild one) to the establishment.
The author of The Hill piece, while claiming that Right-wingers pose the greatest threat, wishes nonetheless to warn liberals that their own people are becoming far more violent and that they need to address this problem. This is after referring to the riots we’ve seen since May as “overwhelmingly peaceful social justice protests.” But he fears Democrats aren’t listening:
Perhaps Democrats are afraid of leaving the impression of a false equivalency between extreme right- and left-wing violence. Perhaps they are fearful that acknowledging the threat posed by extreme left-wing incitement gives credibility to Trump’s false narrative that Democrat-run cities are burning because of left-wing violence (they are not burning) and his promotion of outlandish conspiracy theories, such as that people in “the dark shadows” allegedly control Joe Biden.
In other words, the author, a Leftist in deep denial about the threat posed by the Left, wonders why the Left is in such deep denial about the threat posed by itself. You can’t make this stuff up.
In August, Joe Biden asked “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?” This was widely interpreted by conservatives as a threat. The truth is that the violence will continue regardless of who wins the election. Trump’s reelection will guarantee further violence by the Left. But since Democrats have encouraged the violence and done nothing to contain it, there is every reason to believe that it will continue if Biden wins. Indeed, the “hands off” attitude the establishment has taken to Left-wing violence makes it almost inevitable that the violence will escalate, meaning that it will become more deadly. The Far Left has been emboldened.
If Biden does win, and if the Democrats manage to gain complete control of Congress, we can look forward to an assault on the first and second amendment rights of Americans, in the form of hate speech legislation and gun control. Further, Biden and Harris have signaled that they will pack the Supreme Court — simply by repeatedly refusing to answer the question of whether they will. Democrats are also likely to grant statehood to the District of Columbia (thus increasing their numbers in Congress), amnesty millions of illegals and put them on a fast track to citizenship, and abolish the Electoral College.
This is, quite simply, a recipe for civil war — of some kind or other. It is certainly a recipe for the further fragmentation of the country. 62% of white men voted for Trump in 2016, and none of them wants what I have just indicated the Democrats have to offer. The elimination of the Electoral College, if it happens, could be the country’s tipping point toward dissolution. It would mean that millions of Americans in the heartland of the country (most of them white) would be politically disenfranchised. The situation in the US is already volatile; the disenfranchisement of large numbers of citizens would make it much worse. This is particularly true given that those citizens are the backbone of the country: their decency, hard work, and tax money keep it afloat. It is unlikely that those people would readily accept living at the mercy of a combination of urban elites and non-white freeloaders.
Of course, the same situation would be created if demographic projections are borne out, and whites become a minority by 2044, regardless of what happens to the Electoral College. And the re-election of the hapless Trump would not even slow this process. Given demographics, our long-term prospect is a Democratic takeover. So that even if Democrats lose in 2020 — even if they lose big — everything I projected above about what the Democrats will do when they take power is still going to happen, it just may take a little longer.
My own prediction for what will happen to the US is that it will eventually split up along racial and political lines. Already, there is hardly any “union” to assess the state of. Further, all signs now indicate that this is not going to be a peaceful process. The Left began the violence, and they have now succeeded in pushing a whopping 36% of conservatives to approve of answering violence with violence.
Some of my readers will greet these claims with skepticism. Average Americans find it impossible to imagine their country disintegrating in violent conflict. This is the result of years of propaganda about the “stability” of our Republic, the “miracle” of our peaceful transfer of power every four years, yada yada. Average Americans are bizarrely oblivious to just how violent this country really is and always has been (something that has not escaped the notice of the rest of the world): sky-high rates of murder, rape, and assault; urban riots every few years; the assassination of political figures; regular “spree killings”; and a civil war that claimed the lives of around 700 thousand people. Average folks may not want to think about it, but a second civil war is quite plausible.
My readers on the Right, who are far more discerning than average folks, may be skeptical for different reasons. According to some of them, the chances of violent civil war or revolution are zero, since the establishment has far greater firepower. As I said above, if the Right took to the streets like BLM, they would be mercilessly crushed. But suppose they did it again. And again. And suppose the anger that sent them out into the streets did not diminish, but increased. It is naïve to think that determined individuals, through persistent guerilla warfare and other forms of resistance, cannot destabilize a government — especially when the government is run by decadent, out-of-touch elites who inhabit an ideological and social bubble. It has happened before, and can happen again.
Of course, the goal should not be “revolution.” There is no reason to want to “take over” the United States, because it is not desirable that the United States should continue to exist. We don’t want to live with these people anymore, even if we are the ones “in charge.” Instead, what we should aim for is independence — in other words, the partitioning of the country; carving our own country out of this country and saying goodbye to those other people. Folks, it’s either that or persuade the Europeans that we have the right of return. But that’s not going to happen.
So here are my predictions for the near future:
Left-wing violence will continue, indeed it will escalate. However, white conservatives will be increasingly willing to challenge Leftists in the streets. The Politico numbers persuasively suggest that this is likely, and we already see signs of it (notably, the Kyle Rittenhouse episode).
A Trump loss will further radicalize many white conservatives. A Trump win will also radicalize white conservatives, because the response will be even more violence from Leftists. The continued anti-white rhetoric, which shows no signs of abating, will also do the work of radicalization. I predict that we will see more acts of domestic terrorism perpetrated by Right-wing groups, and that many new such groups will spring up in the next several years. These acts will be heavily condemned by all the usual suspects, but this will have little effect, since the double standard is now too obvious. Even Mom and Dad, drinking Snapple and watching Hannity, will now approve of Right-wing violence.
Unlikely? Look at that chart above and think again. How likely is it that the trend has peaked at 36%?
I also predict that we will see cases of mini-secessions, in which towns, cities, and counties that are largely white and Republican will begin resisting the power of state and federal governments (e.g., not enforcing certain laws). This will make parts of the country hard to govern. These areas will become a mecca for white conservatives. They will grow in population and geographic reach, as new arrivals take residence just over county or city lines. Tired of the dirty looks they get, many non-whites and liberals will go elsewhere. In short, there will be de facto secession before secession is ever made official.
By the way, had I made prognostications about “civil war” as little as a year ago, I would have done so with the caveat “probably not in our lifetime.” Now I am definitely not so sure. It’s hard to believe, but the scenario envisioned by Chuck Palahniuk in Adjustment Day is becoming more plausible with each passing week.
* * *
You can buy Jef Costello’s “The Importance of James Bond” here
- US Army To Receive "Astonishingly Powerful" Electric Robot Tank
US Army To Receive “Astonishingly Powerful” Electric Robot Tank
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 23:30According to Military.com, Textron Systems, via its subsidiary Howe & Howe, is set to deliver two versions of a new robotic tank to the US Army.
Textron will deliver up to four 10-ton Ripsaw M5 Robotic Combat Vehicle prototypes by the end of this year; each of the tanks will be outfitted with a diesel-hybrid powertrain. An all-electric version of the M5 will be delivered in the first half of 2021 for pilot testing.
Ripsaw M5
Textron Systems’ Ripsaw M5 unmanned vehicle at the 2019 Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting. h/t Textron “The RIPSAW® M5 is mission-ready,” Textron tweeted earlier this month.
The RIPSAW® M5 is mission ready. Visit our virtual booth at #AUSAnow to learn more about M5 and our wide range of products. Register today!https://t.co/4erbcL32Fw#AUSA2020 #TeamRipsaw #WeBuildCoolStuff pic.twitter.com/nKpDHCfjNE
— Textron Systems (@TXTSystems) October 3, 2020
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Flushed with cash, the Army has been on a modernization spree during President Trump’s first term in office.
“We’ve spent $2.5 trillion over the term in office, my term,” Trump recently said. “That’s over three and a half years — think of that $2.5 trillion. I took over a depleted military, old equipment, broken equipment.”
During this time, the Army has been searching for a light, medium, and heavy version of fully autonomous tanks to give infantry commanders the option of sending robots into harm’s way before human troops. The use of autonomous systems on the modern battlefield could save lives during the next war, if that is against Iran, China, and or Russia.
Sara Willett, program director for ground robotics at Textron, told reporters Thursday that the all-electric M5 will not have a cannon mounted on the turret like the standard M5.
“It’s a flat deck variant that we will be delivering for the all-electric version,” Willett said.
Michael Howe, senior vice president from Howe & Howe, said, “one of the most exciting points of going all-electric is the performance that we see.”
Howe said the M5 is “astonishingly powerful” with two 900-horsepower hybrid electric motors and a diesel range extender.
“This range extender is just a generator, so it goes into the vehicle itself and allows the vehicle to go … to an extended range of out to 300 to 400 miles,” he explained.
In September, Army Futures Command directed the Maneuver Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate at Fort Benning, Georgia, to develop new requirements for electric combat ground vehicles.
- Escobar: Will Confucius Marry Marx In China?
Escobar: Will Confucius Marry Marx In China?
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 23:00Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog, originally posted at The Asia Times,
Modern China’s deviation from traditional Confucian values has seriously damaged its ‘Mandate of Heaven’…
Chinese scholar Lanxin Xiang has written a book, The Quest for Legitimacy in Chinese Politics, that is arguably the most extraordinary effort in decades trying to bridge the East-West politico-historical divide.
It’s impossible in a brief column to do justice to the relevance of the discussions this book inspires. Here we will highlight some of the key issues – hoping they will appeal to an informed readership especially across the Beltway, now convulsed by varying degrees of Sinophobia.
Xiang delves right into the fundamental contradiction: China is widely accused by the West of lack of democratic legitimacy exactly as it enjoys a four-decade, sustainable, history-making economic boom.
He identifies two key sources for the Chinese problem:
“On the one hand, there is the project of cultural restoration through which Chinese leader Xi Jinping attempts to restore ‘Confucian legitimacy’ or the traditional ‘Mandate of Heaven’;
on the other hand, Xi refuses to start any political reforms, because it is his top priority to preserve the existing political system, i.e., a ruling system derived mainly from an alien source, Bolshevik Russia.”
Ay, there’s the rub:
“The two objectives are totally incompatible”.
Xiang contends that for the majority of Chinese – the apparatus and the population at large – this “alien system” cannot be preserved forever, especially now that a cultural revival focuses on the Chinese Dream.
Needless to add, scholarship in the West is missing the plot completely – because of the insistence on interpreting China under Western political science and “Eurocentric historiography”. What Xiang attempts in his book is to “navigate carefully the conceptual and logical traps created by post-Enlightenment terminologies”.
Thus his emphasis on deconstructing “master keywords” – a wonderful concept straight out of ideography. The four master keywords are legitimacy, republic, economy and foreign policy. This volume concentrates on legitimacy (hefa, in Chinese).
When law is about morality
It’s a joy to follow how Xiang debunks Max Weber – “the original thinker of the question of political legitimacy”. Weber is blasted for his “rather perfunctory study of the Confucian system”. He insisted that Confucianism – emphasizing only equality, harmony, decency, virtue and pacifism – could not possibly develop a competitive capitalist spirit.
Xiang shows how since the beginning of the Greco-Roman tradition, politics was always about a spatial conception – as reflected in polis (a city or city-state). The Confucian concept of politics, on the other hand, is “entirely temporal, based on the dynamic idea that legitimacy is determined by a ruler’s daily moral behavior.”
Xiang shows how hefa contains in fact two concepts: “fit” and “law” – with “law” giving priority to morality.
In China, the legitimacy of a ruler is derived from a Mandate of Heaven (Tian Ming). Unjust rulers inevitably lose the mandate – and the right to rule. This, argues Xiang, is “a dynamic ‘deeds-based’ rather than ‘procedure-based’ argument.”
Essentially, the Mandate of Heaven is “an ancient Chinese belief that tian [ heaven, but not the Christian heaven, complete with an omniscient God] grants the emperor the right to rule based on their moral quality and ability to govern well and fairly.”
The beauty of it is that the mandate does not require a divine connection or noble bloodline, and has no time limit. Chinese scholars have always interpreted the mandate as a way to fight abuse of power.
The overall crucial point is that, unlike in the West, the Chinese view of history is cyclical, not linear: “Legitimacy is in fact a never-ending process of moral self-adjustment.”
Xiang then compares it with the Western understanding of legitimacy. He refers to Locke, for whom political legitimacy derives from explicit and implicit popular consent of the governed. The difference is that without institutionalized religion, as in Christianity, the Chinese created “a dynamic conception of legitimacy through the secular authority of general will of the populace, arriving at this idea without the help of any fictional political theory such as divine rights of humanity and ‘social contract’’.
Xiang cannot but remind us that Leibniz described it as “Chinese natal theology”, which happened not to clash with the basic tenets of Christianity.
Xiang also explains how the Mandate of Heaven has nothing to do with Empire: “Acquiring overseas territories for population resettlement never occurred in Chinese history, and it does little to enhance legitimacy of the ruler.”
In the end it was the Enlightenment, mostly because of Montesquieu, that started to dismiss the Mandate of Heaven as “nothing but apology for ‘Oriental Despotism’”. Xiang notes how “pre-modern Europe’s rich interactions with the non-Western world” were “deliberately ignored by post-Enlightenment historians.”
Which brings us to a bitter irony: “While modern ‘democratic legitimacy’ as a concept can only work with the act of delegitimizing other types of political system, the Mandate of Heaven never contains an element of disparaging other models of governance.” So much for “the end of history.”
Why no Industrial Revolution?
Xiang asks a fundamental question: “Is China’s success indebted more to the West-led world economic system or to its own cultural resources?”
And then he proceeds to meticulously debunk the myth that economic growth is only possible under Western liberal democracy – a heritage, once again, of the Enlightenment, which ruled that Confucianism was not up to the task.
We already had an inkling that was not the case with the ascension of the East Asian tigers – Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea – in the 1980s and 1990s. That even moved a bunch of social scientists and historians to admit that Confucianism could be a stimulus to economic growth.
Yet they only focused on the surface, the alleged “core” Confucian values of hard work and thrift, argues Xiang: “The real ‘core’ value, the Confucian vision of state and its relations to economy, is often neglected.”
Virtually everyone in the West, apart from a few non-Eurocentric scholars, completely ignores that China was the world’s dominant economic superpower from the 12th century to the second decade of the 19th century.
Xiang reminds us that a market economy – including private ownership, free land transactions, and highly specialized mobile labor – was established in China as early as in 300 B.C. Moreover, “as early as in the Ming dynasty, China had acquired all the major elements that were essential for the British Industrial Revolution in the 18th century.”
Which brings us to a persistent historical enigma: why the Industrial Revolution did not start in China?
Xiang turns the question upside down: “Why traditional China needed an industrial revolution at all?”
Once again, Xiang reminds us that the “Chinese economic model was very influential during the early period of the Enlightenment. Confucian economic thinking was introduced by the Jesuits to Europe, and some Chinese ideas such as the laisser-faire principle led to free-trade philosophy.”
Xiang shows not only how external economic relations were not important for Chinese politics and economy but also that “the traditional Chinese view of state is against the basic rationale of the industrial revolution, for its mass production method is aimed at conquering not just the domestic market but outside territories.”
Xiang also shows how the ideological foundation for Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations began to veer towards individualist liberalism while “Confucius never wavered from a position against individualism, for the role of the economy is to ‘enrich people’ as a whole, not specific individuals.”
All that leads to the fact that “in modern economics, the genuine conversation between the West and China hardly exists from the outset, since the post-Enlightenment West has been absolutely confident about its sole possession of the ‘universal truth’ and secret in economic development, which allegedly has been denied to the rest of the world.”
An extra clue can be found when we see what ‘economy” (jingji) means in China: Jingji is “an abbreviate term of two characters describing neither pure economic nor even commercial activities. It simply means ‘managing everyday life of the society and providing sufficient resources for the state”. In this conception, politics and economy can never be separated into two mechanical spheres. The body politic and the body economic are organically connected.”
And that’s why external trade, even when China was very active in the Ancient Silk Road, “was never considered capable of playing a key role for the health of the overall economy and the well-being of the people.”
Wu Wei and the invisible hand
Xiang needs to go back to the basics: the West did not invent the free market. The laisser-faire principle was first conceptualized by Francois Quesnay, the forerunner of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. Quesnay, curiously, was known at the time as the “European Confucius”.
In Le Despotisme de la Chine (1767), written 9 years before The Wealth of Nations, Quesnay was frankly in favor of the meritocratic concept of giving political power to scholars and praised the “enlightened” Chinese imperial system.
An extra delicious historical irony is that laisser-faire, as Xiang reminds us, was directly inspired by the Taoist concept of wu wei – which we may loosely translate as “non-action”.
Xiang notes how “Adam Smith, deeply influenced by Quesnay whom he had met in Paris for learning this laisser-faire philosophy, may have got right the meaning of wu wei with his invention of “invisible hand”, suggesting a proactive rather than passive economic system, and keeping the Christian theological dimension aside.”
Xiang reviews everyone from Locke and Montesquieu to Stuart Mill, Hegel and Wallerstein’s “world system” theory to arrive at a startling conclusion: “The conception of China as a typical ‘backward’ economic model was a 20th century invention built upon the imagination of Western cultural and racial superiority, rather than historical reality.”
Moreover, the idea of ‘backward-looking’ was actually not established in Europe until the French revolution: “Before that, the concept of ‘revolution’ had always retained a dimension of cyclical, rather than ‘progressive’ – i.e., linear, historical perspective. The original meaning of revolution (from the Latin word revolutio, a “turn-around”) contains no element of social progress, for it refers to a fundamental change in political power or organizational structures that takes place when the population rises up in revolt against the current authorities.”
Will Confucius marry Marx?
And that brings us to post-modern China. Xiang stress how a popular consensus in China is that the Communist Party is “neither Marxist nor capitalist, and its moral standard has little to do with the Confucian value system”. Consequently, the Mandate of Heaven is “seriously damaged”.
The problem is that “marrying Marxism and Confucianism is too dangerous”.
Xiang identifies the fundamental flaw of the Chinese wealth distribution “in a system that guarantees a structural process of unfair (and illegal) wealth transfer, from the people who contribute labor to the production of wealth to the people who do not.”
He argues that, “deviation from Confucian traditional values explains the roots of the income distribution problem in China better than the Weberian theories which tried to establish a clear linkage between democracy and fair income distribution”.
So what is to be done?
Xiang is extremely critical of how the West approached China in the 19th century, “through the path of Westphalian power politics and the show of violence and Western military superiority.”
Well, we all know how it backfired. It led to a genuine modern revolution – and Maoism. The problem, as Xiang interprets it, is that the revolution “transformed the traditional Confucian society of peace and harmony into a virulent Westphalian state.”
So only through a social revolution inspired by October 1917 the Chinese state “begun the real process of approaching the West” and what we all define as “modernization”. What would Deng say?
Xiang argues that the current Chinese hybrid system, “dominated by a cancerous alien organ of Russian Bolshevism, is not sustainable without drastic reforms to create a pluralist republican system. Yet these reforms should not be conditioned upon eliminating traditional political values.”
So is the CCP capable of successfully merging Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism? Forging a unique, Chinese, Third Way? That’s not only the major theme for Xiang’s subsequent books: that’s a question for the ages.
- SpaceX Joins Pentagon Developing 7,500 MPH Weapons Delivery Rocket That Can Reach Anywhere On Earth In An Hour
SpaceX Joins Pentagon Developing 7,500 MPH Weapons Delivery Rocket That Can Reach Anywhere On Earth In An Hour
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 22:30Given Elon Musk’s deepening ties to China, it’s no wonder the Pentagon thought it a great time to sign a contract with SpaceX to “jointly develop a rocket” that can “deliver up to 80 tons of cargo and weaponry anywhere in the world” in just an hour’s time.
Tests on this rocket are expected to begin next year, according to Futurism. The rocket is expected to move weapons around the world 15 times faster than existing aircraft already do.
General Stephen Lyons, head of US Transportation Command said: “Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour.”
He continued: “I can tell you SpaceX is moving very, very rapidly in this area. I’m really excited about the team that’s working with SpaceX.”
A trip from Florida to Afghanistan, which is 7,652 miles, could be done “within about an hour” with the 7,500 MPH rocket, according to The Times. It takes conventional aircraft about 15 hours to make the same trip.
The project indicates that SpaceX is leaning on military partnerships – and also indicates that the U.S. military clearly doesn’t see Elon Musk as a security threats, despite his deepening ties to China (which we have detailed here). SpaceX also landed a contract last week to manufacture four missile-tracking satellites, Futurism notes.
The army has also previously approached Musk’s company about converting its Starlink satellites into a military navigation network. The Space Force has also said they are working closely with SpaceX after they awarded the company a contract in August.
If this program has the resounding success of the Hyperloop line Elon Musk was supposed to install in Chicago, we can’t wait to see these promises come to fruition!
- Who Survives? …It's A New Morning In Hell
Who Survives? …It’s A New Morning In Hell
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 22:00Authored by John Steppling via Off-Guardian.org,
“it’s the proper morning to fly into Hell.”
– Arthur Miller (The Crucible)
“One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death’s prisoner.”
– Emil Cioran (On the Heights of Despair)
Increasingly, I think, the American public operates in a mild dissociative state. I wrote about it here. It is almost as if people are afflicted with a kind of PTSD – only one where the trauma is generalized, relatively low grade, but ongoing.
Any of us who have questioned the Covid narrative have had to put up with an inordinate amount of hectoring, name-calling, ridicule, and ostracism. I remember when I signed on the artist appeal as part of the Milosevic Defense Committee, and the abuse and anger I faced whenever this topic came up. People who had no history with the region, knew little of the political landscape, would nonetheless wax irate, furious and near tears that I would hold such outrageous positions.
Now, over a decade later, two members of that committee have won Nobel Prizes (Harold Pinter and Peter Handke). You would think that might cause people to take a moment, reflect, recalibrate their thinking on the topic. But alas, it rarely does.
The Covid narrative has generated the same near-hysterical indignation. The narrative, as it has been constructed by the WHO, CDC, and more likely a dozen or so billionaires (including Bill Gates) is so rife with contradiction and illogic that one might think cracks would begin to show.
That many who accept the word of authority in general, might at this point start to question why none of this story makes sense. But no. Not in America anyway. (or rather, to be more precise, there is a pushback, but it keeps to a low profile lest the little Cotton Mathers of the haute bourgeoisie put one in the stocks).
Leave it to America to make the flu into a morality play. However there are clear signs of people waking up. In Europe certainly.
And not only Germany, doctors and health care professionals in Belgium, too. But the governments are sticking to the story they were handed.
In Norway here I still cannot drive to Sweden. Why? Who knows, there is no reason provided. The PM uttered something about better safe than sorry, and staying the course. Everything is discussed this way, in infantile baby talk, gibberish and slogans. Anti-democratic edicts delivered as if by a kindergarten teacher.
Someone wrote to me on social media the other day and said “Not everyone gets to live in Norway. Here we are surrounded by death”. Now he lives in Los Angeles. In a nice westside area. He is not surrounded by death. Or rather only in his hallucinatory inner theatre of the mind is death present, surrounding him.
But this language has a quality I associate with Hollywood. Its kitsch image-making. Never mind it’s literally not remotely true. But this is a version of something that I think happens all the time now. This man is in his own private movie.
It is a movie made of diverse parts; there is something from all the various post-apocalyptic zombie films (and TV, think Walking Dead), there is something of Norman Rockwell in there, or even Thomas Kincaid, there is Dr Phil and Oprah and the cheapening of emotion. The snarky pedestrian thoughts of a Bill Maher, too.
This is what has come to pass for public intellectuals and intellectual discourse. All are almost impossibly banal. There are parts from a dozen disaster movies, too. I mean literally all the way back to Towering Inferno. And there is, perhaps most significantly, a quality that is harder to define or outline, but which I associate with JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon.
It is a quality of comforting superficiality, of controlled threat in worlds of generic cheeriness. Interestingly both were born in NY and are only a year apart in age (mid fifties). Both have a background in animation and computer generated affects. Both came out of a comic book sensibility and have, more than anyone else in contemporary media, helped to shape the manufactured nostalgia for a fantasy of America.
It is the creation of a longing for a past that never was. But both have established a universe of whiteness and equilibrium where the threat is from without.
For it cannot be from within because there is no ‘within’.
In that sense these are the anti Psychoanalytic purveyors of a youth culture for adults. A comic or cartoon world view in which the sentimental plays an enormous role. It is a world without tragedy or real suffering. And just beneath the surface but always implied, is a respect for authority. It is also a world where one is encouraged NOT to grow up.
The Covid story takes place in a universe of Whedon and Abrams, with parts of The Hunger Games, Breaking Bad, and the films of John Hughes. (Hughes was really the precursor for both Whedon and Abrams). Covid is taking place on the streets where Breakfast Club was filmed. In people’s heads anyway.
Covid the virus is an overdetermined symbol — and one that only makes even a tiny bit of sense if it is located in these personal streaming sites in your brain. (and I recommend Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production).
There is a tendency toward fetishization, too, and hence the ubiquitous appearance and opinion of celebrities. Its bordering on surreal much of the time: Hip Hop moguls are asked about climate change, Silicon Valley billionaires voice opinion on overpopulation or vaccinations, soap opera stars offer thoughts on stem cell research.
Nothing is investigated, really. It is all driven by whatever is most lurid or sensationalized. The ruling class has clearly encouraged, if not mandated, a certain line of thinking on the pandemic. The ruling class has profited enormously from the lockdown, and is quite happy with a semi-permanent state of crisis.
In fact it is likely that this was at least partly all planned. I mean what does one think those billionaires at the Bilderberg meeting talk about? Or at DAVOS or the like? The ruling elite anticipated crises in Capitalism, and the lockdown certainly provides cover for massive plunder or pensions, real estate, and really, most everything.
But the system, to some extent, does the work for the ruling class without instruction at this point. For revenue is generated by blood and violence, and secondly by sex. The template has already been put in place. (If it bleeds it leads). Although something has happened to the ‘sex sells’ dimension of the Spectacle. People seem less and less in the throws of passion or lust.
The societies of the west are declining into some form of neurasthenic bloodless onanism. The consumption of porn is up, but I’m pretty sure sex acts are actually down. And the allegorical dimension of the Covid narrative serves as both substitute gratification and as a symbolic purification ritual.
This week Trump announced he had “tested positive”. He had been campaigning for the previous week and felt fine. Then he tested positive and is described as having flu-like symptoms. That this is part of a strategy I have no doubt, but I also could not begin to describe that strategy. But the magical appearance of symptoms the minute he tested positive echoes the overall magical thinking involved in this entire narrative.
There is a veritable mania, now, concerning testing. And yet even the NYTimes admits the tests are virtually meaningless. But no matter. We must test more!
Magical thinking permeates the climate discourse, as well. Never in history, or never since the Enlightenment, have so many people pretended to know so much. For the educated thirty percent (white and reasonably affluent) it is the era of the TED talk. Nothing dare last longer or be more demanding than a quick (and entertaining) ten minutes. The fires in California have come primarily from downed power lines (badly out of date and rarely serviced), but exacerbated by homeless encampments (rarely mentioned) and fireworks — and of course the drought that has extended backward a decade.
California has always burnt. It was part of the ecosystem to rid the hills and forests of dead of dead shrub and trees. Climate is clearly a part — snowpack is down, and summer heat has dried out shrubbery. But much of what is dried out is shrub not native to California (stuff like cheatgrass, a native of Asia and parts of Africa, and notoriously invasive) whose forests are overstocked anyway.
Infrastructure in America is rotting, and per California, the wild areas have been neglected for almost a hundred years. But that is not a part of the narrative. The narrative must be about the rebellion of Earth itself and population. And population matters only in terms of who can afford to over consume. The problem is that the most obvious pollution issues (militarism and the packaging industry) are never addressed.
US imperialism is the cause of most of the suffering in the world. Most of the instability. But the infantile anthropomorphizing of much green discourse is just more baby talk. I often hear “we are waging war against ourselves”. This is a dangerous bit of mystification. [note that this riff goes all the way back to the Pogo comic strip in the 1960s].
Its more simplistic sloganeering and like most such chestnuts, class analysis is absent. I have written a good deal on the psychological appeal of certain hi-tech fantasies, the seductive aspect of AI, and yet the world is more proletarianized than ever.
Yes people, in a very general sense, can be seen as self-destructive. It’s one of the most troubling byproducts of the habituation to screens, the loss of literacy and numeracy and the loss, really, of an ability to think critically. But this cultic hysteria is driven by the increasing precarity and desperation in contemporary life.
The loss of unions plays a part, the absence of a real left party, a radical Marxist party. For all the terrific work activist groups do (Prison abolishment groups, criminal justice reform, and stuff like the Innocence Project) there remains a vacuum in terms of electoral politics. Perhaps that is just going to be the way this goes.
Maybe the entire electoral apparatus is dead. And maybe that is a good thing.
There is a quality of suffocating sameness and emptiness that permeates daily life. People don’t look at each other on the street, they look at their phones. One is walking, all the time, among the pod people. America’s mental health is in a dire state. The U.S. and really this is increasingly true in Europe, too, but not nearly to the same extent, is an excruciatingly lonely country. People have lost the ability to make, and more, to sustain friendships. And how the role of social media plays into that is an open question. Or media in general.
So while yes, the marketing of technology serves to manufacture an appeal, on one level there are troubling numbers of people who seem, all by themselves, to *want*, to desire, ravishment by our robot overlords. Android sex is a thing, and its growing.
And it’s not just men who want “pleasure model” androids (ok, for now they have to settle for dolls), but many want to not just fuck androids – but to get fucked *by* androids.
The engine is capitalism.
A number of world leaders have contracted Covid. Much as many get the flu. There is something curiously similar in nearly everyone of these cases. Boris Johnson, Bolsanaro, the fascist interim President of post-coup Bolivia Jeanine Anez, Mikhail Mishustin of Russia, French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, and India’s Amit Shah (the #2 strongman behind Modi), and also in India, Pranab Mukherjee, former President, who subsequently died (age 84) from the virus (no, actually he died from a blood clot on his brain).
I only mention this because I experience an unsettling vertigo when trying to parse all this and make it into something comprehensible. The way Covid tests work one might well think everyone on the planet has the virus.
Already there has been significant psychological harm done to children. The clear lesson is to fear the other. That humans are contagious and potentially lethal. Intimacy is officially discouraged.
I cannot imagine that message were I fourteen or sixteen. Growing up in the sixties the idea was to promote intimacy, feelings, and to exactly *not* fear emotional openness. The English speaking west has gone from Paul Goodman to Theresa Tam.
The resurgent Puritanism is not restricted to odd ducks like Tam. Even bourgeois pundits are noticing. This is Zoe Williams in The Guardian:
There remains, in public life, a rich seam of puritanism that you notice only when times are so bleak that you could really do without it. A sense that frivolity is immoral, even if it is 95% of your economy; a feeling that they had it coming, all those people dedicating their lives to the generation of fun. Puritans tend not to announce their disapproval except in the most roundabout ways, so you can rarely pin it on them. But standing on the precipice of a year that ends without dancing, bears, dancing bears, playhouses, ale houses, music or Christmas, all I can think of is how happy Oliver Cromwell would have been. It is like all his cancelled Christmases come at once. He would be dancing (not dancing) in his grave.”
This is a lament from the privileged class, but perhaps that’s actually a good sign.
The ruling class don’t wear masks or have travel restrictions imposed on them.
There is no longer even a pretense. The rich are entitled to special treatment. The rich deserve a clean depopulated world where they can cavort on the green, frolic in elysian fields by murmuring brooks, and to not be troubled by darkies and riff-raff. Remember it was a mere hundred years ago that Belgium brought Congolese from their African home, to be paraded in human zoos. Those they hadn’t already murdered.
Covid is the final act in the transference of wealth to the top 1%. And culture is being destroyed along with everything else. Cinemas are closing, permanently, theatres, too, permanently, and museums. Galleries and other art spaces are shuttered, likely to never reopen. Something like 30 million jobs have been lost. There is an acute desperation across America.
Who survives? Amazon, Netflix, Google, Comcast, Facebook, et al. Those who control the screens control the world. It is a new morning in hell.
- These Are The US Cities Where Workers Make The Most Relative To Their Cost-Of-Living
These Are The US Cities Where Workers Make The Most Relative To Their Cost-Of-Living
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 21:30With Microsoft becoming the latest major tech company to signal to employees that they can apply to make “WFH” a permanent element of their schedule, millions of Americans are contemplating moving away from densely packed cities – indeed, many have already made the move. According to data released Friday, the apartment vacancy rate in Manhattan has hit 6%, more than double the average at this time of year.
According to Pew Research, 22% of American adults have relocated during the pandemic, or know somebody who did. It’s a sudden reversal to a yearslong trend of Americans largely staying put.
Anybody who’s thinking about “pulling a geographic” might want to take a look at a report published this week by Smartest Dollar, which digs into the cost of living in different cities across the US. The general theme should be familiar by now: workers from expensive cities like NYC could potentially maximize their earning power by moving to a sleepy Midwestern city where the cost of living can be significantly lower.
Here’s more from Smartest Dollar:
The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a surge in geographic mobility. According to Pew Research Center, 22 percent of adults in the U.S. have relocated during the pandemic or know someone who did. Interestingly, this reverses a longstanding trend in which Americans were staying put.
Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that prior to COVID-19, Americans were moving a lot less. In 1981, 3.4 percent of Americans moved to a different county within the same state while only 2.8 percent moved to a different state entirely. By 2019, those percentages dropped to 2.1 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. The share of Americans moving across county lines has remained at a relatively flat, low level since 2010.
As people think about where to move during COVID-19 and beyond, job prospects and earning potential will be top of mind. Median earnings for full-time workers in the U.S. was $50,078 in 2019, a 20.6 percent increase since 2010 in nominal dollars. However, the relative cost of living in a given area impacts purchasing power and should be an important factor when weighing employment opportunities. There is significant regional variation in cost-of-living adjusted earnings across the U.S., with residents in the Northeast and Midwest generally faring better than those in the South or West. For example, median adjusted earnings range from a low of $41,063 in Florida to a high of $58,029 in Massachusetts.
To find which metropolitan areas offer the greatest purchasing power, researchers at Smartest Dollar calculated cost-of-living adjusted earnings using data for full-time workers from the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. To improve relevance, metros were grouped into the following categories based on population: small (100,000–349,999), midsize (350,000–999,999), and large (1,000,000 or more).
Similar to the statewide trends, the small and midsize metros offering the highest adjusted earnings are concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast. Unlike the state-level trends, the large metros with the best pay are scattered throughout the country, with similar levels of representation in the Northeast, West, and Midwest. Here are the metropolitan areas with the highest cost-of-living adjusted earnings.
Meanwhile, here’s a list of large metros with the highest salaries adjusted for the cost of living (which is already notably high in many of these places).
1. San Jose- Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CA
2. Hartford-East Hartford-Middletown CT
3. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria DC-VA-MD-WV
4. Boston-Cambridge-Newton MA-NH
5. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA
6. Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington MN-WI
7. San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley CA
8. Baltimore-Columbia-Towson
9. Cincinnati OH-KY-IN
10. Raleigh-Cary NC
11. St. Louis MO-IL
12. Denver-Aurora-Lakewood
13. Cleveland-Elyria OH
14. Pittsburgh
15. Columbus OH
Look up your city’s stats here:
* * *
Source: Smartest Dollar
- 7 Predictions: How 2020 Comes To An End
7 Predictions: How 2020 Comes To An End
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 21:00Authored by Daniel Bobinksi via UncoveredDC.com,
America is at a crossroads with revolution on our doorstep. On one side are the Patriots; those who seek to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. On the other side are Marxist insurrectionists; those who believe that America is evil and the cause of so many problems in world.
The Marxist-friendly side is pulling for Joe Biden to be ushered into the White House. They don’t call themselves Marxists, but as the saying goes, if it talks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s a duck.
I’ve been writing since January that the Globalists don’t care if there’s bloodshed in America, and in March I wrote that the Left is waging a scorched-earth war against Trump.
At the risk of sounding like I’m saying, “I told you so,” I told you so.
If you’ve been reading tea leaves from the news lately, you may have already figured out what’s coming at us in the next few months. If so, the following may simply affirm your observations. But I wanted to put this out there so everyone knows what to expect and therefore won’t be surprised.
My seven predictions for how 2020 comes to an end:
Prediction 1: Trump will win the election in a landslide. I know, the media is telling you the polls are tight, but just look around. Trump rallies are packed to the gills while Biden can’t fill the bleachers at a high school football field. Trump supporters hold huge boat parades while we see NONE for Biden. Trump supporters hold freeway caravans around that country that take up all lanes of a freeway, while an attempted caravan for Biden in Las Vegas drew only 30 people. Just like in 2016, pollsters today are making it look like it’s a close race. This is gaslighting – they’re telling you something that runs directly opposite of what your own eyes are telling you, but they’re expecting you to believe what they say.
Prediction 2: On the evening of November 3, Joe Biden will not concede the election, even though the vote will clearly be for Trump. Hillary Clinton has publicly stated that Joe should not concede, so the seed has been planted in our minds to expect this. And, because we’re expecting it, we won’t be shocked by it.
Prediction 3: Massive mail voter fraud will create confusion and Marxists (e.g. Democrats) will insist that “every vote counts.” They know Americans want to be fair so Marxists will play on that. They will cry and wail and plead that every vote needs to get counted, so they’ll ask for sympathy for voters who didn’t follow confusing new election rules about how to cast their mail-in ballots. That will be their story, but many votes will be fraudulent. As they’ve demonstrated on America’s streets, Marxists don’t care about following laws; they care about power.
Prediction 4: Because of massive mail fraud ballots showing up late, election results WILL be delayed. The deceptive Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and the clearly biased Jack Dorsey at Twitter have already announced they will flag any posts or tweets that claim a victory for Trump. They KNOW Trump will have more than enough votes to win, but as Zuckerberg already told us, we should expect results to take “DAYS OR EVEN WEEKS.” In other words, Facebook and Twitter are well-aware of the planned mail-in voter fraud, and they’re already providing cover for it. The planned vote count confusion will be dragged out as long as possible. The Marxists’ intention is to keep confusion swirling at least until December 14 in hopes that the electoral college won’t be able to identify a winner. Expect ballots to keep showing up out of nowhere.
Prediction 5: If Marxists cannot keep up the façade until December 14, some states will obfuscate the electoral process by choosing not to follow the rules laid out in the 12th Amendment. In fact, both may happen. Either way, by attempting to throw the electoral college into confusion, Marxists (again, the Democrats) will make a push for the electoral college to be eliminated. Believe me when I say you don’t want this. Students of the Constitution know that if the electoral college is eliminated, the Republic will be gone.
Prediction 6: Expect Nancy Pelosi to be acting all patriotic and concerned about the Constitution during the chaos, but rest assured, it’s a passive-aggressive act. She is among the Marxist vanguard in both houses of Congress orchestrating the whole mess. You will also see some Marxist-friendly governors making a lot of noise.
Prediction 7: While Marxists in Congress are messing with the electoral process, Marxists on the streets (Antifa and BLM) will intensify their violence by burning, looting, and murdering even more than what we’ve seen to this point. There’s already a movement that seeks to lay siege to the White House. Not only do the puppet masters want all the street chaos to distract our attention from what’s going on in the electoral process, the street Marxists see this election as their only chance to either grab power or put up with Trump for four more years. The protestors have been trained to instigate violence, and copy-cat wannabes will want to join in. Street Marxists will view these riots as the fight of their lives: it will get intense.
To perpetuate the riots, puppet masters like George Soros will continue pouring money into organizations that fund them. Also remember that Antifa and BLM have threatened to go into the suburbs. Their purpose for doing so is to trigger the Soccer Moms who wants peace at all costs. Marxists will hope that these suburban moms will apply pressure on their elected representatives to give in to the Marxists so the violence will end. Life on American streets will be unpredictable and dangerous.
How does it end?
The Marxists are desperate, so the fighting will be like nothing the country has ever seen before. I predict we’ll see horrific things happening in our cities and on our streets, and traditional media (read: Marxist-friendly media) will be spewing twisted truths and lies about everything listed above. And we can’t forget that social media giants favor the Marxists in this revolution, so they will be squelching debate in whatever ways they can.
The final months of 2020 will be an emotional roller coaster, but in the end, I predict Trump prevails. It’s not going to be pretty, and many who are now thinking life will return to normal after November 3 will be sadly mistaken. They will be wondering what happened to the country they once knew.
Whether the Democrats implode or not after all this happens remains to be seen, but it is my prayer that when the dust settles, all the Marxists plotters and schemers be exposed and truth will be recognized as truth. And then … maybe then … Trump can get on with his promise to drain the entire swamp.
- Is The Next "October Surprise" An Unexpected Moment Of Clarity?
Is The Next “October Surprise” An Unexpected Moment Of Clarity?
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 20:30Last weekend, in its Sunday Start note, Morgan Stanley raised some eyebrows across Wall Street when it global strategist Andrew Sheets suggested that the 2020 market cycle was actually quite “normal”, with economic data leading risk assets, and that the recovery would continue in a “normal” way, with inflation expectations rising, yield curves steepening further, small caps continuing to outperform and defensive stocks have lagging (even as yields have remained range-bound). This is what Sheets concluded:
Twists and turns as the US election nears, the uncertainty regarding additional US fiscal stimulus, a rise in global COVID-19 cases and a still-unresolved Brexit saga all create significant uncertainty, and should keep markets volatile and range-bound over the next month. But amid that volatility, we maintain our central tendency – this cycle is more normal than appreciated, and should be treated as such until proven otherwise.’
Today, in yet another provocative piece this time from Morgan Stanley’s head of US Public Policy, Michael Zezas, the bank makes another contrarian argument, namely that for all the confusion and anticipated turbulence over the upcoming election, traders – whipsawed by months of pandemics, trade conflicts, legislation, and elections – may instead be rewarded with a “brief moment of policy clarity giving investors a reprieve from the chaos of 2020” and offer them “some unexpected, and underpriced clarity.”
To be sure, Morgan Stanley is not the first to suggest that the market is overly obsessing over the potential vol surge around the election as a result of it getting drawn out into a contested election: two weeks ago, Nomura‘s x-asset strategist Charlie McElligott recommended selling the “kink” in the Nov-Oct VIX spread…
… saying the market had priced in more than a fair amount of election risk, and said that “some brave vol traders will try to take advantage as a perceived “generational” opportunity to sell this POST-NOV election “richness” (Dec / Jan)” which “could be a career “maker or breaker,” with the potential to see monster returns if the event were to pass and all that crash is puked back into the ether” although as he also hedges, conversely returns could “be turned to dust into a God-forbid realization of chaos, with civil disorder, dual claims to the throne etc.”
Well, the Morgan Stanley strategist is even more sanguine than McElligott as the bank only focuses on the bullish scenario, one where clarity over fiscal stimulus – either before or after the election – emerges in the coming days, while at the same time, Zezas also looks at the outcome of the actual Nov 3 election, and contrary to expectations of a long, drawn-out process which culminated with a SCOTUS decision, sees a quick resolution to the election with little “risk that it would take more than a few days beyond election day for investors to reliably know a result.”
He explains why in The Next ‘October Surprise’: A Moment of Clarity?
Investors crave precision in quantifying risk. Yet that level of precision is wanting when it comes to sizing up risk from events like pandemics, trade conflicts, legislation, and elections. Like it or not, we see investors being pressed into this style of analytical action as the new normal. Geopolitical trends towards multipolarity, fiscal expansion, and ‘slowbalization’ are not going away and will have lasting ramifications for market strategy.
But what if a brief moment of policy clarity is about to emerge, giving investors a reprieve from the chaos of 2020? Some emerging information could quickly turn into trends on two key US policy debates. This would give investors some unexpected, and underpriced, clarity.
- Fiscal stimulus: There appear likely paths to stimulus in the medium term, even if near-term paths dead-end: The market debate on the next US fiscal stimulus has been framed for months in terms of whether or not such action would come in the short term. Last week’s developments effectively answered ‘no’ to that question. Yet, it’s possible that a stimulus delay wouldn’t fully develop into the economic challenge it has the potential to be. Our economists now see evidence that US consumption can carry on for longer without fiscal support, given built-up excess household savings. This is good news as there are many viable political paths towards stimulus over the next three months. We see three out of the four most likely post-election party configurations delivering stimulus by early 2021. The biggest potential stimulus could come in a Democratic sweep, a result that may appear increasingly probable to investors, given a body of polling data that shows Joe Biden with a sizeable and stable lead in sufficient battleground states, and Democrats competitive in key Senate races. In this scenario, in addition to an upsized COVID-19 relief package, we believe that the ‘plausible policy path’ is further fiscal expansion as Democrats enjoy legislative consensus regarding their spending agenda but not regarding sufficient tax increases to fund it.
- Voters appear to be returning mail-in ballots quickly, limiting the risk that investors must wait beyond ‘election week’ to reliably know results: Voters did not lie in our surveys about their intent to increasingly vote by mail (VBM). State data show VBM requests shattering records. But voters also appear to be returning those ballots much quicker than anticipated. Consider the swing state of North Carolina (NC). VBM requests are already nearly five times their 2016 total. But over 30% of them have already been returned. Of those, over 50% are from registered Democrats. While these numbers don’t put to rest concerns about a delayed result (unreturned VBMs in NC remain nearly 20% of the 2016 vote), this would change if the trend continues. Consider that in NC, VBMs can be counted before election day. Hence, their rapid return could have two key effects: 1) Quickening the pace of the overall count; and 2) Reducing the risk that vote count progression sews uncertainty by initially showing large Republican leads that erode slowly on VBM counting. This would reduce the risk that it would take more than a few days beyond election day for investors to reliably know a result. Exhibit 1 shows a similar trend emerging in other swing states. Hence, the skew now appears away from not reliably knowing the result beyond a few days post-election, and we’re adjusting our scenario probabilities accordingly. Our base case remains ‘Election Week’ (70%), but we’re increasing the chances of ‘Silent Night’ (20%) and reducing for ‘Election Month’ (10%).
The conclusion:
In our view, key markets are not geared for such a moment of policy clarity should it emerge before year-end, presenting opportunities for some proactive and reactive tactics: We detail these dynamics in our most recent collaboration with Morgan Stanley’s cross-asset strategy team. One proactive idea that stands out for its asymmetrical response is being short duration in USD fixed income, the 30-year in particular. Despite its strong move last week, it should still be a bellwether for clearer expectations on deficit expansion and a continued V-shaped recovery in the US. A more reactive idea is in US equities, where a dip-buying opportunity could emerge. For example, if a Democratic sweep outcome in the election becomes known quickly, markets could initially reflect concerns about rising taxes before giving way to the benefits of fiscal expansion and, perhaps more importantly, an economy that remains in the recovery phase of the cycle.
There is just one problem with Morgan Stanley’s reco to short the 30Y: everyone and their grandmother is already in it, and in fact, one can argue that the entire Morgan Stanley line of thought is not contrarian at all, with markets now appearing to fully price in a reflation trade.
In fact, for those betting on outcomes, the best upside/downside risk-adjusted trade is to fade the reflation trade which in the past 3 weeks has allowed Russell stocks to strongly outperform their Nasdaq-based deflationary proxies. In further fact, for those cynics among us, one could almost argue that Morgan Stanley is merely hoping to take the other side of the trade that it is pitching to its clients. The next few days of trading should reveal the answer if the unprecedented 30Y short and heavy positioning into further curve steepening can continue, or will punish the momentum-chasing macrotourists.
- As War Danger Mounts In The Arctic, Peace Hinges On Revival Of The Wallace Doctrine
As War Danger Mounts In The Arctic, Peace Hinges On Revival Of The Wallace Doctrine
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 20:00Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
According to the Department of Defense’s dismally short sighted vision for the Arctic, U.S. strategic interests were best maintained not by cooperation with Arctic partners, by rather by belligerent sabre rattling under the guise of “competition” with nations who have continuously professed a desire to work with the west as allies.
In recent weeks, this belligerence has taken the form of a new forward posture of 150 advanced U.S. fighter jets to be housed at the Eielson Airforce Base in Alaska including a mix of F22 Raptors and F35 Lighting II jets only 600 miles away from the Russia border. Each fighter plane carries the ability to launch strikes onto Russia after a brief flight across the 100 mile Bering Strait gap. Considering the entire American air force only has 187 F22s and 250 F35s, the proportions of this absurd build up can best be appreciated.
In the most recent DOD Arctic Strategy Report which has shaped this suicidal battle plan, Russia and China are defined as nothing but existential threats to the world order which must he stopped at all costs with the report’s authors stating:
“In different ways, Russia and China are challenging the rules-based order in the Arctic. U.S. interests include limiting the ability of China and Russia to leverage the region as a corridor for competition that advances their strategic objectives through malign or coercive behavior.”
Describing this aggressive display that folds into the renewed threats of attack faced by dangerous NATO maneuvers across Europe in recent months, Russian Major General Vladimir Popov told Sputnik News:
“Alaska is remote from the U.S. mainland, but is an outpost in relation to Russia—we are separated only by a strait, and the border is literally within the line of sight. This is a strategic region for the U.S. Adding 150 more fighters would at least double the combat potential of the existing forces there.”
Continuity of Government and NORAD
What makes this dire situation ever more precarious is the fact that President Trump has found himself stuck in a COVID-19 quarantine.
What should be a mere hiccup in governmental procedures is quickly being turned into something much greater as renewed calls for enacting Continuity of Government procedures secretively written into law this past March 2020 arising by various leading figures of the deep state such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When MSNBC asked Pelosi (now second in line to take the mantle of presidency) if anyone reached out to her from the White House regarding Continuity of Government, Pelosi said: “No, they haven’t. But that is an ongoing, not with the White House but with the military, quite frankly, in terms of the — some officials in the government.”
That these calls are occurring amidst a heightened clamor for military coup to unseat the President, the general threat of civil war and the looming danger of economic meltdown, statements like those uttered by Pelosi to CNN and MSNBC this week should not be taken lightly.
In the updated March 2020 Continuity of Government protocols, General Terrance O’Shaunessy (head of both NORAD and NORTHCOM) would take the “temporary” reins of the presidency under crisis conditions of ungovernability which are not too difficult to imagine amidst the storms currently sweeping America. Military staff who would take up a parallel chain of command continue to be stationed 650 meters below Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado where they have been deployed since March 2020 following Mark Espers’ orders to NORTHCOM to “prepare to deploy”.
O’Shawnessy has repeatedly echoed the views of the Washington/NATO establishment that the greatest threats to the world stem from Russia and China directly referencing their supposedly nefarious intentions in the Arctic.
The Polar Silk Road: A Healthier Paradigm for the Arctic
Rather than bring the forces of war to the Arctic, Russia and China have together been demonstrating a far more efficient and moral approach which certain patriotic forces within North America tend to be in alignment with, including the current President.
Since January 2018, the Arctic has increasingly become dominated by the positive extension of the New Silk Road northward in the form of the maritime and land based “Polar Silk Road” which has united brilliantly with President Putin’s Far East development program. This program aims to increase arctic shipping five fold by 2024 and begin a bold program of infrastructure, rail, road, pipeline, mining and port building in order to begin accessing the vital raw materials desperately needed for the coming centuries of multipolar development.
On September 26, President Trump working alongside political allies in Alaska, Alberta and the private sector alike streamlined a project which taps into this spirit of genuine economic cooperation and long term thinking unseen in decades in the form of the Alaska-Canada Rail connection. Looking at the business models guiding this emerging project, it is important to note that the destructive thinking of globalization and zero sum logic are not to be found at all as the entire program is vectored on tying North America economic interests into China’s Belt and Road and growing Asian markets.
The Wallace Doctrine for the Arctic Must Be Revived
As I wrote in my recent report Trump’s A Revival of the Wallace Doctrine for the Post-War World, the last serious pro-development strategy to arise from a leading American politician took the form of President Franklin Roosevelt’s ardent anti-imperial Vice President Henry Wallace, who spent years with his Russian counterparts during WWII arranging the conditions of mutual development of both nations during the post-War age with a strong focus on the long awaited Bering Strait Rail connection and obvious Alaska-Canada transport corridors. In his Two Peoples One Friendship, Wallace described his discussions with Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 saying:
“Of all nations, Russia has the most powerful combination of a rapidly increasing population, great natural resources and immediate expansion in technological skills. Siberia and China will furnish the greatest frontier of tomorrow… When Molotov [Russia’s Foreign Minister] was in Washington in the spring of 1942 I spoke to him about the combined highway and airway which I hope someday will link Chicago and Moscow via Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Molotov, after observing that no one nation could do this job by itself, said that he and I would live to see the day of its accomplishment. It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”
The Molotov/Wallace vision wasn’t something entirely new.
Earlier programs for building the Bering Strait rail connection were advanced by Russian Prime Minister Sergei Witte and Czar Nicholas II who in 1906 sponsored teams of American engineers to conduct feasibility studies of the project, then estimated to costs $200 million.
On the American side of the project, Lincoln’s trusted bodyguard William Gilpin (a man who was known as a leading spirit of America’s own Trans Continental Railway) and later Governor of Colorado promoted the work throughout his life saying of the Alaska Canada rail connection:
“It is sufficiently apparent that the building of a railroad by way of Alaska, Bering Strait and northeastern Siberia, connecting with the Canadian Pacific in British Columbia and in Siberia with the Russian line now being pushed forward to Vladivostok, is by no means an unpracticable undertaking”.
Gilpin’s global program was outlined thoroughly in his 1890 book the Cosmopolitan Railway.
Exhibiting the stark raving fear of the renewal of this latent spirit of U.S.-Russian friendship in the build up to the November elections, Thomas Wright (senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute) wrote a panicky op ed in the Atlantic on September 30 called “What a Second Trump Term Would Mean for the World”. In this article, Wright echoes the broader fears of the deep state of a revival of the Henry Wallace doctrine which the author laments would have been just terrible had it not fortunately been sabotaged by the “great” figure of Harry Truman in January 1945. Wright says:
“Looking back on U.S. diplomatic history, one of the great counterfactuals is what would have happened if Franklin D. Roosevelt had not replaced his vice president Henry Wallace with Harry Truman in 1944. Wallace was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and became an ardent opponent of the Cold War. If he had become president when FDR died, in April 1945, the next half century could have gone very differently—likely no NATO, no Marshall Plan, no alliance with Japan, no overseas troop presence, and no European Union… The U.S. is now teetering on another historically important moment. With Trump, we would not only be deprived of our Truman. We would be saddled with our Wallace—a leader whose instincts and actions are diametrically opposed to what the moment requires. With few remaining constraints and a vulnerable world, a re-elected Trump could set the trajectory of world affairs for decades to come.”
It should be clear to all that the renewal of the Wallace-Gilpin spirit of development into North America’s Arctic is not only good business but also serves as a vital precondition to re-establishing a world order founded upon trust, win-win cooperation, and non-zero sum thinking. While it is fairly clear that Trump’s political instincts are vectored in this direction (giving rise to such frightful diatribes by emissaries of the Cold War at Brookings and the CFR), it still remains to be seen if sufficient political influence can be exerted to rein in the swamp before a hot war and military coup are unleashed.
- "Player Protests/Politics" Cited As Driving NBA Finals Ratings Collapse
“Player Protests/Politics” Cited As Driving NBA Finals Ratings Collapse
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 19:30Ratings for the NBA Finals continue to see a historic collapse. Game 3 of the finals averaged just a 3.1 rating and 5.94 million viewers, making it “the least watched and lowest rated NBA Finals game on record,” according to Yahoo Sports.
It is the latest chapter in an NBA Finals that has continued to set the bar lower and lower for itself in terms of ratings:
“Game 3 of the #NBAFinals was the least watched @NBA Finals game on record.
The previous record? Game 2 ..”
The previous record before that? Game 1.
(via @RenderAnalytics) pic.twitter.com/WSm6id5fWy
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) October 10, 2020
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In a poll on Yahoo Sports with 22,266 responses, people were asked why they thought the NBA’s ratings had dropped off. Player protests/politics was the overwhelming favorite, at 61%, as to why people are turning away from the NBA.
Although we may not see those in the industry brave enough to admit that the politics are causing a problem just yet:
NBA Finals ratings being at an all-time low is due to the fact that an NBA Finals game without a crowd is not a great product. Combine that with increased chord cutting and even more options. The NBA’s position on politics and race has very little to do with it.
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) October 5, 2020
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Recall, just days ago we noted that Game 2 also saw a ratings collapse of 68% to all time lows.
It appears that viewers are no longer interested in the political and social justice messages of the NBA but rather were tuning in for (believe it or not) actual basketball. As the balance of the league has tipped from less sport to more activism, viewers are tuning out.
Game 2 of the NBA Finals saw a major collapse in viewers, with just 4.5 million people tuning in. This is down 68% from last year’s game two, we noted. In fact, the ratings made Game 2 the least watched NBA Finals game on record, dropping below the 7.41 Game 1, which was the lowest viewed finals opener in history.
There really doesn’t seem to be much of a spin that the NBA can put on the terrible ratings, other than the league has simply lost the interest of many who would have once tuned in. In fact, one of the league’s most “outspoken” voices on oppression and racism, LeBron James, should have been the feature draw for this year’s finals.
Instead, it appears he could be exactly what is turning viewers away.
We have also been documenting the recent ratings collapse that the NFL has suffered in the midst of turning its league into a political movement over the last few months.
In early October the NFL reached out to players, telling them “not to worry” about the decline in ratings. Also in denial, they blamed the Presidential race for the drop in ratings, telling players: “The 2020 presidential election and other national news events are driving substantial consumption of cable news, taking meaningful share of audience from all other programming. Historically, NFL viewership has declined in each of the past six presidential elections.”
- China's Leninist Climate Pledge
China’s Leninist Climate Pledge
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 19:00Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearPolitics.com,
“In whichever way others hit us, we will hit, we will give tit for tat, and defeat them by surprise moves,” China’s leader Xi Jinping said in August 2013 at a conference on national propaganda and ideology, a year after becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.
“We cannot hold up the larger strategic picture because of tactical rigidity. This means that ‘Even if we are right, we will not use this at times; even if we are wrong, we must go ahead sometimes.’”
Xi’s remarks would have come as no surprise to Ronald Reagan, who famously said of the Soviet leadership that the only morality it recognized was “what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.”
Writing in the London Times last month, Edward Lucas observed that while Communism itself is dead, those same Leninist doctrines of political warfare to gain and exercise power, what became known as “active measures,” are still alive in the Chinese Communist Party.
Last week, Lord Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, reminded us how badly wrong China watchers had gotten their assessment of the Beijing leadership. The Chinese Communists might be thuggish dictators, these experts said, but they were men of their word and could be trusted to do what they promised.
Patten busts that myth, citing four chilling examples of the Chinese Communist Party’s duplicity:
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its denial of the existence of some 380 internment camps to imprison over 1 million Muslim Uighurs;
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its breaking of World Health Organization rules by not notifying the body within 24 hours of the COVID-19 pandemic;
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Xi’s breaking his word to President Obama that he would refrain from militarizing the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea;
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and Xi’s tearing up the promise China made to Hong Kong and the international community that the city would enjoy its liberties until 2047.
“The last thing the world should do is trust the Communist Party of China,” Patten concludes.
Yet that is exactly what the international community wants to do when it comes to climate change, by taking at face value Xi’s U.N. address, in which he said that China would aim to achieve “carbon neutrality” before 2060. It’s not hard to see Xi’s motives. Five years on from the Paris climate accord, it’s time for the second round of five-year climate pledges. Western leaders – with the exception of Donald Trump – are competing with one another to make climate promises that will effectively sunset much of their economies. Xi wants to help them. As Lucas points out, in a 1920 tract, Lenin accused left-wing Communists of suffering from an infantile disorder for focusing too heavily on ideology rather than agitating to pull apart the seams of the capitalist world.
Lenin’s successors play the environment card because they know it works. In 1975, the Soviet Union used the environment as a strategic propaganda tool when Leonid Brezhnev claimed the environment as something on which East and West shared a common purpose. It was a transparent attempt to deflect Western pressure on the Soviet Union’s brutal human rights record.
The Kremlin’s most daring use of environmental “active measures” was the nuclear winter scare of the early 1980s. In a bid to split the Atlantic Alliance and win the Cold War, the Soviet Union deployed medium-range nuclear missiles. The West responded with a nuclear arms build-up of its own. In June 1982, the Swedish Academy of Sciences published a paper predicting a nuclear winter across the northern hemisphere in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.
The paper was picked up by the Rockefeller Family Fund and amplified by Carl Sagan and many American scientists. An October 1982 nuclear-winter conference in Washington called for a nuclear arms freeze. Conference attendees represented a roll call of progressive groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund, Planned Parenthood, Common Cause, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, all of which would later stand at the forefront of the climate wars.
It was obvious, or should have been obvious, which side would benefit from an arms freeze. The conference even had a TV satellite link-up with the Kremlin, funded by Tides, another progressive group. Wittingly or not, the scientists, foundations, and NGOs were acting as mouthpieces of the Kremlin in its aim of defeating the West in the Cold War. In fact, the nuclear winter scare had been concocted by the KGB to cause terror in the West and promote the nuclear freeze. If the scientists, NGOs, and foundations behind the nuclear winter scare had succeeded in halting Ronald Reagan’s arms build-up, the West could not have won the Cold War without a shot being fired.
Western politicians who denounce the Chinese Communist Party for its genocide of the Uighurs and its tearing up of international commitments on Hong Kong want us to believe that China is somehow an angel when it comes to climate change. The reason for this suspension of disbelief is simple. If the word of the Chinese Communist Party is not believed, the rationale for climate action evaporates.
Lenin’s heirs in Beijing have a far better understanding of Western leaders than Western leaders have of them. China’s expansionism will continue unchecked until the West has leaders with the moral clarity that it was blessed with in the 1980s, who called out the Soviet empire for what it was. For the time being, history is moving China’s way.
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- California COVID-19 Outbreak Accelerates; Dr. Fauci Says Trump Ad Took Comments Out Of Context: Live Updates
California COVID-19 Outbreak Accelerates; Dr. Fauci Says Trump Ad Took Comments Out Of Context: Live Updates
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 18:49Summary:
- California new cases climb, Texas cases slow
- Dr. Fauci says Trump took him out of context
- France sees outbreak slow
- Ontario cases decline
- Italy reported 5k plus cases again on Sunday
- NY reports another 1,143 cases
- California researchers build 5 minute test
- US adds 55k new cases Saturday
- India total cases top 7 million
- Monday’s Patriots-Broncos game cancelled
- New research shows COVID survives on surfaces longer in colder temps
* * *
Update (1835ET): The US added 50k+ new cases for a fourth straight day on Saturday, and it looks like the US is on track to top that number for a 5th day on Sunday.
In the US, California reported 3,803 new cases, a 0.5% increase from the previous day, to 846,579, a number that was higher than the previous week’s daily average. Deaths increased by 64 to 16,564. Texas meanwhile reported 31 deaths bringing the a total to 16,557. The number of new cases increased by 2,262, the lowest number in six days, to 792,478.
Anthony Fauci said Sunday that a new ad released by the Trump campaign takes him out of context, where a quote from a press briefing earlier this year says “I can’t imagine anybody doing more”.
“In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate,” Dr. Fauci told CNN.
In other news, Italy reported 5,456 new cases on Sunday, its second highest tally since late March, despite falling numbers of people being tested per day. The positivity rate, which has almost doubled in the last 10 days, jumped to 5.2%.
More local authorities in different parts of Spain are tightening restrictions: Officials in Navarra said they plan to reduce capacity to 30% in restaurants and bars, which must now close by 2200 local time, and limit social gatherings to no more than six people, according to El Mundo. Though unlike in Madrid, the Navarra government said it won’t forbid people from leaving the region.
France reported just 16,101 new cases Sunday after reporting a staggering 26k+ on Saturday. The number was the lowest in five days.
Ontario’s new cases declined to 649 cases Saturday from 809 on Friday and a record 939 registered a day earlier, according to the public health agency.
NY Gov Andrew Cuomo said Sunday the state is doing “very well” overall; it has a 0.84% positive test rate when excluding the hot spots. The rate in the state’s hot spots where COVID-19 is elevated is 5.7%, on average, he said during a phone briefing with reporters.
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Update (1520ET): NY has just reported another 1,143 new cases, bringing the statewide total to 474,286.
Today’s update on the numbers:
Of the 118,254 tests reported yesterday, 1,143 were positive (0.96% of total)
Total hospitalizations are at 820.
Sadly, there were 5 COVID fatalities yesterday. pic.twitter.com/GPNGBhfvqi
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) October 11, 2020
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‘Don’t be afraid of COVID? No! Be afraid of COVID. It can kill you.’ — Gov. Cuomo called out Pres. Trump pic.twitter.com/Q54cWoHYtE
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 11, 2020
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Here’s a map and chart showcasing the recent acceleration.
In other news, the Washington Post on Sunday published a lengthy report documenting the lives of college students who got caught up in the unprecedented money grab for tuition dollars that led many colleges to launch, then abruptly cancel, in-person classes. At times, campuses resembled petri dishes, and students described precarious seeming lockdown and quarantine situations,
* * *
Nobel Prize winner Dr. Jennifer Doudna and a team of researchers in California have developed a rapid COVID-19 test that can detect the virus in just five minutes using gene-editing technology, SCMP reports.
The innovation, which must still be peer reviewed, could help lower the average turnaround time for COVID-19 tests, which in the US is currently 4.1 days, making it difficult for officials to get a real-time picture of how the virus is spreading.
The news comes as the US reported nearly 55,000 new positive COVID-19 cases on Saturday, down slightly from Friday’s number.
The US also reported 618 deaths, bringing its total to 214,379.
Amazingly, the test can detect the presence of the virus in a sample using a smartphone camera: The researchers have manufactured a portable device, outfitted with low-cost laser illumination and collection optics. Not only can the technology deliver a result within minutes, instead of hours, but it avoids bulky lab technology. In developing countries, a test like this could be a god-send, making a huge difference in the responsiveness of public health officials as they direct a community’s efforts to contain the virus.
“The choice of a mobile phone as the basis for our detection device was motivated by the high sensitivity of current mobile phone cameras, the simplicity of integrating a mobile phone for detection, their robustness and cost-effectiveness, and the fact that they are widely available today,” the researchers said.
What’s more: unlike every other rapid test that’s been produced so far, including the Abbott Labs rapid test being used at the White House, the test developed by Doudna and her team is sensitive enough to quantify the amount of viral matter in a sample.
“None of the current rapid testing options provide quantitative results, which could help evaluate an individual’s level of infection and progression of disease,” the paper said.
Here’s some other coronavirus news from Sunday morning and overnight:
The NFL has indefinitely postponed the Denver-New England game originally scheduled for Sunday after another positive coronavirus test with the Patriots. That game had already been moved to Monday night, before the latest positive test involving a Patriots player was confirmed. The Patriots announced that they had losed their practice facility again after the latest positive test, while the Tennessee Titans have also closed their facility as of Sunday morning after yet another staff member tested positive. The decision also endangers the Titans’ planned game against Buffalo for Tuesday (Source: AP).
India’s confirmed COVID-19 cases topped 7 million on Sunday when the health ministry reported 74,383 new infections in the prior 24 hours to Sunday, as a spike in southern states offset a drop in western regions. Meanwhile, deaths from COVID-19 rose by just 918 in the last 24 hours to 108,334, the ministry said. India added a million cases in just 13 days, according to a Reuters tally, and it has the second-highest number of infections in the world behind only the US, which had 7,720,591 cases as of Sunday morning. The southern state of Kerala – a state that had been widely praised for its early virus-suppression efforts – contributed 11,755 of Sunday’s cases, the highest tally in the country (Source: Nikkei).
Maybe President Trump was right? New research shows that COVID-19 survival declined to less than a day at 40 degrees Celsius on some surfaces, according to the study, published Monday in Virology Journal. The findings add to evidence that the virus survives more easily in colder weather, adding to fears about a difficult-to-control wintertime outbreak (Source: Virology Journal).
- The US Economy Is "Booming", One Bank Finds As It Warns Of What Comes Next
The US Economy Is “Booming”, One Bank Finds As It Warns Of What Comes Next
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 18:30According to the latest data from the Bank of America “machine-learning based US business cycle indicators through August
2020″, both the full-sample indicator, which uses data from November 1962 onwards, and the short-sample indicator, which starts in January 1985, remained in the strongest “boom” regime for the third consecutive month.According to BofA global economist Aditya Bhave, the bank’s indicators reflect the stronger-than-expected US recovery:
Fiscal stimulus has supported consumer spending, particularly on goods. In turn, inventories have stabilized. Housing has benefited from 150bp of Fed cuts and pandemic-induced moves from cities to suburbs. Perhaps most importantly, the June/July surge in virus cases did not significantly derail the recovery.
As Bhave further explains, moderate targeted restrictions across the US instead of shotgun shutdowns, which even the WHO admits were a mistake to the great embarrassment and humiliation of “scientists” everywhere – or what the bank calls “learned immunity” – proved sufficient to bend the cases curve. And in part, people and policymakers have become tolerant of case counts that would have led to broad lockdowns in the spring. Incidentally, this is a point which Goldman Sachs made last week, when the bank found that the pandemic recession was actually not that bad.
That said, a day of reckoning is coming and as BofA admits, “once the quick gains from reopening have been exhausted, the recovery will inevitably slow”:
Growth was already slowing in August, with the first principal component (i.e., the common trend) of our short-sample dataset dropping slightly from its all-time high in July (Chart 2). But it remains elevated, and as a result the economy will have to dig itself out of a smaller hole when reopening has run its course.
Furthermore, as we cautioned two weeks ago and as BofA agrees, the bad news is that risks are accumulating to the downside.
Consumers are facing an income cliff as another round of fiscal stimulus now looks very unlikely before the elections. Personal income fell by 2.7% in August, and additional declines are likely as the Lost Wage Assistance Program’s supplemental unemployment insurance benefits have expired in some states and are due to expire soon in others. Spending actually increased in August, but the divergence from income is not sustainable.
Naturally, the other key concern is a major surge in the virus in the fall or winter that prompts much stricter, economically costly restrictions. In this regard the US’ “tolerance” for elevated case counts is a worry because a higher baseline level of cases increases the risks of a large outbreak. The outcome here would be political: if Trump wins on Nov 3, we expect Democratic governors to promptly shutdown their states in hopes of obliterating any hope for a recovery. Alternatively, under a Biden administration, expect the media to completely forget all about the covid pandemic within hours of Trump conceding, and to declare the coronavirus crisis over just days after the election.
In conclusion, BofA has raised our 3Q growth forecast to 33% Q/Q saar, which would leave GDP about 3.5% below its 4Q 2019 level: “so the good news is that the base case for the economy has improved significantly” while “the speed of the recovery is offsetting some of the pain from the depth of the downturn” even as a much more difficult phase in the cycle is about to be unleashed.
- Our Social Dilemma
Our Social Dilemma
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 18:00Authored by Bill Hansmann via AmericanThinker.com,
I watched an extremely troubling movie the other night on the recommendation of my friend Rich. It was on Netflix but is also available on YouTube and is called The Social Dilemma.
We wonder why partisan rancor and political division are at an unprecedented level in our country. This film suggests a likely answer.
We spend a lot of time on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others, but not nearly as much time as they spend on us. It seems that these platforms are populated and are indeed driven by algorithms that are individually calibrated to give each user what the platform decides that person wants to see, demonstrated by his pushing the “LIKE” buttons. Liberals get items with a liberal slant. Conservatives receive stories and items that match their previous likes. Those individuals who exhibit a liking of conspiracies get more of the same, as well as ads designed to sell black helicopters.
In other words, every time we “LIKE” an item on Facebook, our individual settings are fine-tuned. Our news feeds, as well as our comments, are monitored and used to even more precisely shape what we see on our screens. No two individuals get the same variety of items on their Facebook pages or on any other platform.
More and more when considering the opinions of people I know, I ask myself, How can they think that way? How can they believe that? They are, in fact, being programmed to feel that way by their interactions with their social media. And unfortunately, I am receiving the same treatment, with different modalities resulting in a different mindset.
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, taught us that if you tell a lie enough times, it will be accepted as the truth. It is obviously also true that different spins on facts and stories can be individually tailored to each individual’s demonstrated tastes. Paul Simon penned the lyric “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” We watch and listen to news feeds that tell us what we want to hear. We never tune in to the others.
I’m not suggesting that Facebook, et al. possess Goebbels’s evil intent. I do suggest that they, in their driven purpose of monetizing our likes and dislikes, have inadvertently helped to drive a wedge in our population that quite possibly could lead to civil war.
I recall a social experiment from a few years back. In one, people looked at a picture of a woman in a dress. Half the people looking at the picture saw a blue dress, and half saw silver.
Two individuals standing side by side and seeing the opposite of each other in this experiment often questioned the sanity or truthfulness of the other. In this instance, there was nothing designed to cause the differing results. It would seem that in some ways, we are hardwired to interpret certain things differently. But when you add the tactic of designing individual inputs to reinforce a belief system in the way the social platform algorithms perform, the often seen results are ironclad sets of conflicting beliefs that become woven into our population. It is undeniably dividing our house, and we know what Lincoln told us about that.
What is the answer to these troubling circumstances? I wish I knew. But I find it quite telling that many of the executives of the large social platforms stated in the movie that they did not allow their children any time on the very platforms that they are selling to the rest of us. That is certainly food for thought.
- Rich Americans Scramble To Change Estate Plans To Avoid Biden Tax Hikes
Rich Americans Scramble To Change Estate Plans To Avoid Biden Tax Hikes
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 17:30Wealthy Americans are flocking to their estate planning attorneys out of fear that Joe Biden will win the election and raise taxes, according to Reuters.
Of most concern to the affluent would be a “Blue Wave,” in which Democrats win both the White House, control of the Senate and hold the House – which could mean that an exemption allowing individuals to leave up to $11.58 million tax-free to heirs would be cut before it’s set to expire in 2025.
Democrats want to raise estate taxes to the “historical norm,” according to the party’s platform. That could mean slashing the exemption to $5.49 million, the figure in place before Republican President Donald Trump signed a sweeping tax bill that included benefits for corporations and wealthy Americans in 2017, advisers said.
It is unclear how the election will go or what, if any, tax reform will pass. But as Biden has climbed in the polls, rich people are rushing to set up trusts and revise existing ones before year-end to avoid 2021 tax consequences, advisers said. –Reuters
“The $11.58 million question is, ‘What is going to happen to the gift and estate tax exclusion?’” according to Toni Ann Kruse, a NY estate planning attorney who serves ultra-high net worth clients. “We don’t know who will win the election or control the House or Senate – and all of those factors will play into what could happen.”
According to Biden’s campaign website, he would “return the estate tax to 2009 levels” in order to fund paid family and medical leave. He would also raise taxes on long-term capital gains, while those making above $1 million per year would pay a 39.6% income tax on profit, vs. the current tiered approach which maxes out at 20% for those making $441,450 or more.
“Joe Biden is running to rebuild the backbone of this nation – the American middle class – by ensuring that our economy rewards work and not just wealth,” said campaign spokesman Andrew Bates.
According to the report, estate planning attorneys began seeing an uptick in client activity when Biden pulled ahead of Trump in the polls, with several firms reporting an overwhelming volume of requests.
“We are flooded with requests for gift and estate tax appraisals right now,” said Jonathan Miller, CEO at New York-based real estate appraisal firm, Miller Samuel, Inc.
New York estate and tax planning lawyer Philip Michaels has added around 15 high net worth clients during the last several months who are revising estate plans.
Rockefeller Capital Management, a family office in New York, is holding virtual events for customers while working with legal and tax advisers to sort through nuances of possible legislation, said Joe Roberts, Senior Wealth Strategist. –Reuters
“It’s a lot of money to give away,” said Indianapolis estate planning attorney, John Olivieri. “People are struggling with, ‘Do I really want to give this away?’”
- Michigan Officials Warn Of Another "Scary" Virus That People Should Worry About
Michigan Officials Warn Of Another “Scary” Virus That People Should Worry About
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 17:00Authored by Brandon Turbeville via The Organic Prepper blog,
While Michiganders focus on the COVID-19 issue as well as attempting to get their state’s economy back on track, Michigan public health officials are now warning of another potential breakout of a new virus, Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE).
EEE is spread by mosquitoes and MI officials claim they are doing everything they can to stop the spread as COVID fatigue sets in with citizens across the country.
One of the methods officials have devised is strikingly similar to what they are suggesting for COVID – i.e. urging residents to stay indoors after dark and protect themselves against mosquitoes when they are out. All this comes after a resident in Barry County was suspected of contracting EEE.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services announced the case last week.
“This suspected EEE case in a Michigan resident shows this is an ongoing threat to the health and safety of Michiganders and calls for continued actions to prevent exposure, including aerial treatment,” Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, chief medical executive and chief deputy for health at MDHHS, said in a statement. “MDHHS continues to encourage local officials in the affected counties to consider postponing, rescheduling or cancelling outdoor activities occurring at or after dusk, particularly those involving children to reduce the potential for people to be bitten by mosquitoes.”
22 horses located across ten counties have been confirmed to have EEE, a number that is allegedly twice that of the previous year.
The state is now engaging in aerial spraying to reduce the number of mosquitoes.
Nationwide, 5 cases of humans contracting EEE have been reported to the CDC – three in Massachusetts and two in Wisconsin. Generally speaking, there are only 5 to 9 cases of EEE in the US every year with 30% of those cases resulting in death.
The incubation period of EEE is usually around 4 to ten days, and symptoms can be mild including fever, chills, aches, and general discomfort. Severe cases can involve swelling of the brain and meningitis.
While everyone should agree that caution must be exercised when dealing with communicable diseases, canceling town events, social gatherings, and staying indoors seems a bit ridiculous. Especially when the disease is one suspected case of a virus that kills a maximum of ten people on a yearly average across the country.
But that is where we are.
It is possible that MDHHS is truly concerned about the spread of the virus. However, it is once again, at best, engaging in extraordinary levels of hysteria and restrictions to deal with what is essentially an ordinary virus. Keep in mind, Michigan has no confirmed human cases of EEE in the state as of yet and only one suspected case.
Health agencies have lost credibility in the eyes of all but the far left public.
Health agencies across the entire country as well as across the entirety of the world have essentially destroyed their own credibility with the unprecedented hype and hysteria over COVID and the subsequent rights-crushing “recommendations,” “guidelines,” proclamations, and Executive Orders. So many things have not added up since the beginning and they’ve even admitted they lied about masks early in the outbreak. These agencies have led the charge against the American economy, individual rights, and the mental and physical health of every single American. All over a virus that has yet to be isolated properly in a lab and has not come anywhere close to killing the number of people we were told it had, much less predicted it would.
This is where the danger comes in. Hysteria and a self-imposed apocalypse over COVID. Hysteria over EEE. What virus will cause hysteria next? How many times will this continue until everyone simply ignores everything the CDC and other health agencies have to say? If, or more likely when, there is a real and deadly pandemic, will the general population simply respond to their health agencies with sneers and memes?
Let’s face it, we’ve reached the point where half of the population is doing that already.
We see the same irresponsibility from MSM and government regarding weather.
Anyone who lives on a southern coastal state can tell you that there is a seasonal panic set in by local and national media when hurricane season arrives. Not in the last 20 years has there been a beginning of a hurricane season where predictions were anything other than “deadly” and “unusually busy.” National media predicts every storm will be a major hurricane and every hurricane will be devastating and bring “imminent death.” Some general hurricane preparedness steps are usually sufficient.
Of course, most of these storms are just storms.
Some even bring badly needed rain to drought areas. People who listen to the Weather Channel and state governments often look completely foolish when they realize they ran away from a summer shower. People who ignored those agencies often are rewarded with some peace and quiet and a few more pounds due to overeating their hurricane snacks.
But, every once in a while, the hysteria is justified. Every once in a while, a Cat 5 hits land and lays complete waste to cities and towns. By this time, people have been burned over and over with repetitive claims of imminent death and other nonsense. They ignore the reports. They ignore the warnings and they don’t prepare. This is when the death toll is the highest.
The moral of the story is not that the government should do nothing and it certainly isn’t that it should do everything.
The media and government have way too much power.
By allowing media and government to maintain so much power, we have allowed a situation to be created where hysteria and dependency justify their existence and more fear and hysteria ensure its continuation.
The moral of the story is to think for yourself and to prepare for all eventualities while still allowing yourself to live your life and not just spend it trying to avoid death.
Lastly, maybe health “authorities” shouldn’t have so much “authority” after all.
- ANTIFA Is Compiling Lists Of "Fascist" Businesses For Yelp's New "Racist Behavior Alerts"
ANTIFA Is Compiling Lists Of “Fascist” Businesses For Yelp’s New “Racist Behavior Alerts”
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/11/2020 – 16:35It was less than 48 hours ago that we pointed out that “review” website Yelp was getting into the business of social justice by saying it would append a “Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert” to any businesses page where a company had been accused of racism.
“The bullshit never ends,” said Donald Trump Jr., in response to the idea. “What are the odds this isn’t insanely abused?” he followed up asking on Friday:
The bullshit never ends.
What are the odds that this isn’t insanely abused? https://t.co/lqgwxdKynt— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 9, 2020
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Well, Don, we think we have an answer for you: the odds look pretty long. That’s because just 2 days after Yelp’s announcement, ANTIFA has already starting compiling the names of businesses that it wants to submit to Yelp and put out of business.
As if throwing rocks through their windows and stealing from them wasn’t enough.
The list is being prepared by the same ANTIFA group is that “responsible for organizing the violent Portland riots,” according to the Post Millennial. In fact, Tweets from the group compiling the data suggests that ANTIFA members submit “non-friendly” businesses, “AKA any company that’s hanging blue lives garbage in their store or anything else that’s anti the BLM movement”.
So, in essence, Black Lives Matter is now being granted the power to shut down whatever businesses it doesn’t like. And remember, this is supposed to be the anti-fascist group.
In the replies to the @SafePDXProtest tweet asking for names (the account is locked) one user reported Brothers Cannabis Dispensary for “pro-cop sh*t in the windows.” The dispensary hilariously replied to the user, telling them they were a minority owned business and that the “pro-cop” stuff in the windows was nothing more than a Portland Police Alarm permit.
My Dawg, We’re one of the few minority owned business with mostly minority employees. What Pro-cop thing are you talking about? Are you referring to this portland police alarm permit we are required to display since day one? pic.twitter.com/BHRPgcYFUm
— Brothers Cannabis (@broscannabis) October 9, 2020
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Small Pharaoh’s Falafel was also targeted for having a sign hanging up that said – among many other things – “Trump 2020”.
“F**k the racism, f**k the media, f**k the press,” the rest of the sign says. “If we are looking for peace and justice, we should have some respect and morals.”
Small Pharoah’s pic.twitter.com/tifNeQehhm
— hauntifa haunt dog 👻🌭 (@666hotdogs666) October 8, 2020
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Hollywood Beverage and Liquor was also targeted by the group. The “oldest liquor store” in all of Oregon, which has been around since 1934, drew the ire of ANTIFA when a Trump flag was spotted hanging in the office of its owner. Its owner, Dan Miner, had posted on social media over the summer: “The sole redeeming aspect of the oppressive mandate to wear a mask is the great number of times a day I pull it off and appreciate the smell of freedom.”
Conservative columnist Rita Panahi pointed out what we suggested in our first article about Yelp’s practices – that they would essentially be used for extortion (a business model Yelp is allegedly familiar with already). She wrote: “Businesses are going to be coerced into supporting certain groups to avoid being targeted. It’s tantamount to extortion.”
Meanwhile, Yelp has already openly admitted that the new feature is being implemented to appease the Black Lives Matter movement: “The new Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert is an extension of our Public Attention Alert that we introduced in response to a rise in social activism surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Great work in saving the world, Yelp.
Meanwhile, anyone else in the mood for falafel?
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