- How Soros' Secret Network Used Ukraine To Cover For Hillary, Hunter, & Target Donald Trump
How Soros’ Secret Network Used Ukraine To Cover For Hillary, Hunter, & Target Donald Trump
The following is an excerpt from Matt Palumbo’s forthcoming book The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros.
Pre-order a copy before it’s banned.
(emphasis ours)
The Soros Circle: AntAC
In 2014, Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) and its grantees were active supporters in the creation of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) of Ukraine, a powerful NGO. Through the end of 2018, 17 percent of AntAC’s funding was coming from Soros’s group.
AntAC is run by Daria Kaleniuk, an American-educated lawyer. White House logs show Kaleniuk visited on December 9, 2015, reportedly meeting with Eric Ciaramella, the CIA employee many suspect is the anonymous whistleblower that sparked Trump’s first impeachment, the source of which was a faultless phone call with Ukraine’s president.
AntAC was responsible for creating the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), a law enforcement group separate from the prosecutor general’s office that was tasked with handling the biggest corruption cases. It has investigatory powers but cannot indict suspects. Only when it passes its findings to prosecutors does a subject of its inquiry become part of a criminal case. The agency was established in 2014 at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after its predecessor, the National Anti-Corruption Committee, was deemed a failure. Western governments funded NABU, which also enjoyed the backing of the FBI. Like all the Orwellian names of groups Soros had a part in, NABU acts independently in name only.
With the Obama DOJ’s launch of the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, aimed at battling large-scale public corruption in foreign states, the State Department, DOJ, and FBI began outsourcing some of their own work to AntAC.
In February 2015, Viktor Shokin was appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine, and was soon scrutinized for helping the owner of the energy company Burisma. Shokin had helped owner Mykola Zlochevsky regain control of $23 million that was frozen by British authorities. Burisma was made famous by Hunter Biden’s involvement in the company, and Zlochevsky was the one who struck the deal to appoint Hunter to the company’s board of directors in 2014 at a reported salary of $83,333 per month.
AntAC’s stance on Shokin was made clear; it tweeted on December 2015 that “One of the major goals of #AntAC for 2016 is to force #Shokin to resign.”
Shokin attempted to begin a probe into Burisma that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
This never materialized because Joe Biden (then Vice President) threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan to Ukraine unless Skokin was removed as prosecutor general. Biden even bragged about it on video to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, stating that when he attended a meeting with Ukraine’s president and prime minister, he said, “‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
Biden insisted the U.S. wanted Shokin removed over corruption concerns shared by the European Union. But in tapes released by Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, Biden and Poroshenko reveal that the Ukrainian president admitted to doing Biden’s bidding. The quid pro quo is proven.
“Despite the fact that (Shokin) didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially asked him…to resign.”
In another recording from March 22, 2016, the two allegedly discussed who would be appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine, and then who would be their eventual replacement. Former prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko was mentioned. The White House issued a press release confirming the pair talked again on this date.
At the end of the call, Biden said, “I’m a man of my word. And now that the new prosecutor general is in place, we’re ready to move forward to signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee.”
Derkach would later be punished for allegedly exposing Biden’s call with Poroshenko.
After the audio was made public, Poroshenko’s successor Volodymyr Zelensky called for an investigation into the recordings, and the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing the audio as “unsupported information” part of a campaign to “discredit U.S. officials.” They also accused Derkach, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, of being a “Russian agent.”
The sanctions came less than a year after Derkach met with Rudy Giuliani in Kiev, which reports at the time said was to discuss possible misuse of U.S. tax dollars by Ukraine’s government.
…
A few months later, Yuriy Lutsenko was named prosecutor general and met with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Lutsenko recalls being stunned when the ambassador gave him a list of people who shouldn’t be prosecuted. The list included a founder of AntAC, and two members of Ukrainian Parliament who supported AntAC’s anticorruption agenda (while benefitting from corruption themselves).
As John Solomon puts it, the implied message to Lutsenko was clear: “Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an American presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama.”
So what was motivating George Kent and Ambassador Yovanovitch to influence investigations in Ukraine of all places?
The fact that Ukraine dealt with an organization created with the backing of the Obama administration, State Department, FBI, and George Soros.
An investigation into AntAC could expose a whole chest of secrets – the least of which being that they’re not all concerned with corruption like they claim…
…
The hunt for any information that could possibly damage President Trump or anyone connected to him was now on.
Read the rest of the excerpt here at The National Pulse…
Be sure to get the book by clicking here.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 23:40 - Ranked: The Most Prescribed Drugs In The U.S.
Ranked: The Most Prescribed Drugs In The U.S.
Every day, millions of people in the U.S. take prescribed drugs to help them live their lives.
As our understanding of medicine has evolved, we’ve been able to develop drugs to aid with some of the most common medical conditions – from pain and blood pressure drugs to asthma medication, thyroid treatments, and antidepressants.
But which drug is prescribed the most and how frequently? As VisualCapitalist’s Omri Wallach details below, sorting the annual prescribed medicines data by the total number of patients highlights how important and prevalent some drugs are in America.
This graphic uses prescribed medicines data from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, released in 2021 for the 2019 calendar year. It also uses supporting drug and health information from MedlinePlus.
The most prescribed drug, atorvastatin (sold under brand Lipitor), was prescribed to 24.5 million people in the U.S. in 2019, or 7.5% of the population. It was one of many statin medications listed, which are used to prevent cardiovascular disease and treat abnormal lipid levels.
In fact, a majority of the most prescribed drugs in the U.S. are used to treat high blood pressure or symptoms of it. That’s because 108 million or nearly half of adults in the U.S. have hypertension or high blood pressure.
Other common prescriptions include antibiotics like amoxicillin and azithromycin, used to treat bacterial infections, as well as levothyroxine, which was used by 19.7 million Americans to treat thyroid hormone deficiency.
Asthma medication albuterol (usually prescribed through an inhaler) rounded out the top five prescribed drugs with the most patients, followed closely by Type 2 diabetes medication glucophage.
The Top Medical Conditions Treated by Prescription Drugs
The prevalence of cardiovascular-related medication becomes clear when combining the total patients for each type of medication.
The total number of patients with prescribed medication for blood pressure or cholesterol combined for 33% of the U.S. population.
Compared to that, medication for pain or inflammation were the most frequent on the top 30 list with five occurrences, but were only prescribed to 13.6% of people. That includes hydrocodone (known by the brand name Vicodin) and tramadol (known by the brand name Ultram), two opioid medications.
Most of the top 30 prescribed medications for specific conditions saw patients total less than 6% of the U.S. population. They include thyroid issues, gastrointestinal conditions, and mental conditions treated by antidepressants (including panic disorder, anxiety disorders, and PTSD).
But it’s important to remember that some patients have multiple prescriptions for serious conditions with multiple symptoms, or comorbid conditions—when more than one disease or condition is present at the same time.
Drug Spending in the U.S.
A prescribed drug’s total number of patients doesn’t necessarily reflect how important it is, or how expensive it is for the end user. Levothyroxine is the fourth-most prescribed drug by total patients, but the second-most prescribed drug by total prescriptions with 102.6 million in 2019 at an average cost of $25.10 per prescription.
More specialized medication like fluticasone had significantly less total prescriptions with 27.9 million, but an average cost of $97.68 per prescription. Prices are influenced by a drug’s demand, whether or not it’s patented or available in generic form, and a country’s healthcare system. As far as OECD countries go, the U.S. ranks as the most costly almost across the board.
Since the current rankings look at the U.S. pre-COVID, next year’s prescription data will be illuminating as to the state of American health (and healthcare).
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 23:20 - BLM Leader Warns There Will Be "Bloodshed" In NYC If Mayor-Elect Toughens Police Reform
BLM Leader Warns There Will Be “Bloodshed” In NYC If Mayor-Elect Toughens Police Reform
Authored by Christopher Burroughs via The Epoch Times,
A Black Lives Matter leader has claimed there will be “bloodshed” if newly elected New York City Mayor Eric Adams stands by his plan to toughen police reforms to counter the city’s surge in violent crime.
New York City BLM co-founder Hawk Newsome discussed the issue with Adams during an event on Wednesday at Brooklyn Borough Hall that was livestreamed on Instagram.
Adams, a former NYPD captain, said during the event that he will reinstate the undercover anti-crime unit ended during police protests last year.
The new mayor won in November after a victory during a crowded June primary, running as a moderate who would be tough on crime, winning against several prominent progressives.
“There’s one thing that we do agree on, that we need to change conditions that people are living in, historical conditions. And the conditions have not changed,” Adams said during the meeting.
Newsome made his strongest comments to reporters outside of the building.
“If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing then we’re going to take to the streets again,” Newsome said to media after the meeting.
“There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed,” he added.
Adams ran in part on the campaign promise to return a revised version of the anti-crime unit that was responsible for a citywide crackdown on violent crime, illegal drugs, and firearm arrests.
The original unit was ended during the summer of 2020 when it was reported that an alleged disproportionate number of arrests involved black individuals.
The anti-crime unit was also under scrutiny due to former officer Daniel Pantaleo, who had been part of the anti-crime unit when he put Eric Garner into a chokehold leading to his death.
Garner’s reported last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a popular slogan at BLM protests.
Adams has already begun plans to address other issues in his new administration as well, including the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
The mayor-elect shared on Nov. 5 what he meant when he said he wanted to “revisit” the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for workers.
“We need to revisit how we’re going to address the vaccine mandates,” Adams said during a cable TV appearance on Wednesday.
Adams said he would encourage Mayor Bill de Blasio to talk with unions as the parties attempted to reach an agreement on how applications for exemptions and other details were handled.
“Here’s an opportunity for him to bring about a resolution and when I inherit this situation, I’m going to bring about a resolution,” he added.
The comments left some expressing optimism that Adams would ease the mandate, which is among the harshest in the nation.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 23:00 - "Cyber Marines" Will Win The War Of Tomorrow On Digital Battlefield
“Cyber Marines” Will Win The War Of Tomorrow On Digital Battlefield
As the great power competition between the US and China rages, both superpowers are rapidly modernizing their militaries. Announced this week, a high-ranking US military official has said a new type of soldier, called ‘cyber Marines,’ could soon be deployed onto the modern battlefield to gain a competitive edge against opponents, according to Defense News.
Colonel Brian Russell, the commander of the II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group (II MEFIG), told the audience at C4ISRNET’s CyberCon that “cyber Marines” could one day be deployed to the battlefield or a hybrid conflict to “adjust the software on sensors and systems in real-time.”
Russell explained the ability for military personnel to “reprogram” equipment on the frontlines would ensure operational advantages. He said cyber Marines will help reshape the battlefield, indicating these elite groups of soldiers “could influence the local population, take out enemy networks, disrupt the enemy’s kill chain, and much more.”
“Whether you like it or not, or realize it or not, all of our Marines are involved in this information environment, and we need to prepare them for that reality.
“The best thing I can do as a commander in support of retention is to give them mission: let them operate in the cyber domain, let them perform those influence functions, let them do what they came in to do,” Russell stated.
He cited a recent report by Commandant Gen. David Berger, who said new elite cyber Marines would be able to operate in forward positions and win the daily reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance battle.
Berger’s essay read:
“In a 21st-century reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance battle, an adaptive adversary will try to change signatures and adjust sensors to defeat the collection efforts of the United States and its partners, and to overcome their deception efforts.
“Marines on the front lines may have to write computer code to adjust the software on sensors and systems in real-time,” he continued. “The examples are many, but the implications are clear. Developing future Marines who will operate as SIF demands as much focused attention as any other aspect of the stand-in concept — perhaps more.”
Cyber marines will be a great addition to regular forces as the modern battlefield becomes more digitized. The emerging threat of non-kinetic weapons on the battlefield is the task cyber marines will tackle to win the war of tomorrow.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 22:40 - Fauci Warned About Coronaviruses In 2003 – But Didn't Act On It
Fauci Warned About Coronaviruses In 2003 – But Didn’t Act On It
By Kirk Allen and John Kraft of RealClearPolicy,
Few would argue the United States, or any country for that matter, was prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, even though, starting in 2003, the U.S. devoted $5.6 billion to fund Project Bioshield, running through 2013, and another $2.8 billion of funding through 2018. Project Bioshield was designed to prepare the United States against a bio attack, including provisions for the stockpiling and distribution of vaccines.
Though Covid-19 was a new virus, congressional testimony from 2003 paints a concerning picture about what we knew – and when – about the family of viruses from which it originated.
“I am particularly interested in learning how Project BioShield would assist in addressing the current public health emergency created by the epidemic known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS],” said Tom Davis, chairman of the Committee on Government Reform. “More than 2,000 suspected cases of this mysterious disease have been reported in 17 nations, including the United States, with 78 fatalities. So far, there is no effective treatment or vaccine to combat this deadly syndrome.”
Among those testifying to the committee in 2003 was Dr. Anthony Fauci, then and now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci told the committee:
SARS, standing for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, has now spread through several countries, at least 17 countries. There are over 2,200 cases, and about 80 deaths. There have now been 100 cases in the United States in 27 states. This is a new disease. It is what we refer to as an emerging microbe, an emerging infectious disease. The data from the CDC and from other laboratories indicate that the corona virus, which is an interesting group – it is a very common virus. It is what causes about 10 to 20 percent of the common colds. There are two groups of corona viruses. This is likely a member of a new third group. It has not been definitively demonstrated that this is the, or the only, cause of SARS, but the evidence is mounting every day from a variety of approaches that we are taking.
According to testimony in 2003, Fauci confirmed SARS was an emerging infectious disease of which data indicated it was tied to the coronavirus, the cause of 10-20 percent of common colds.
“It has the capability of being a very severe syndrome,” Fauci continues. “The death rate in this is 3.5 percent, which may sound small, but when you think about the possibility of infecting hundreds of millions of people, this can turn out to be a major public health threat. In fact, in parts of the world it already is leading to such draconian measures as quarantines and isolation in several countries.”
Fauci continues: “The CDC has done a magnificent job thus far,” Fauci said in 2003, “and we know that they will continue to, in not only identifying and tracking but essentially now moving ahead in collaboration with the NIH and a variety of other agencies, the FDA, in developing diagnostic therapeutics and on our way to a vaccine.”
How is it that in 2003, Fauci claimed the CDC, in collaboration with the NIH, was doing a magnificent job and would work toward therapeutics and an eventual vaccine – and yet this country was basically blindsided, with few known therapeutics and no vaccine, 17 years later? The medical advice that became the norm and remains the norm in many parts of the United States is, if you become infected with COVID-19, stay home, and wait to see if you get sicker. Looking back on Fauci’s words, it appears our health officials missed the mark on a grand scale.
Even more concerning: in 2003, it was disclosed that monoclonal antibodies have changed the way we treat everything from heart disease to cancer – yet such treatments were not being pushed like they are now.
Fauci’s words throughout the 2003 hearing are troubling in light of where we are today with COVID-19.
“So, in summary, Mr. Chairman, it is a serious threat,” Fauci said then of SARS. “We must take it very seriously. We don’t feel there is a need to panic at this point, but we must continue to do the very stringent public health measures that we are approaching, as well as the research that is going into it.”
Congressman Henry Waxman asks Fauci: “Is there a potential for dual-use where the research of biodefense may well lead us to research breakthroughs for other diseases?”
“I think it is not only a potential, Mr. Waxman, I think it is inevitable that there will be an important contribution to the research that we put into emerging and reemerging diseases to inform us about biodefense research, and it is without a doubt that the research that goes into biodefense will help us with naturally occurring,” Fauci responds. “Because as a matter of fact, as we have discussed before, as you know we feel that deliberately released microbes is just another form of emerging and reemerging disease. Instead of occurring naturally, it is done with malice and deliberately, but the end result can be the same.”
While Fauci has been extremely reluctant to admit that gain-of-function research was taking place with American tax dollars and that China was responsible for the release of the COVID-19 virus, his 2003 testimony makes clear that he felt deliberately released microbes were just another form of emerging and reemerging disease.
The bottom line: the United States was not prepared for COVID-19, and the draconian measures to handle it that have been pushed by Fauci from March 2020 on have not resulted in declining mortality numbers – in fact, the trend we are seeing is more deaths in the last 10 months than in all of 2020.
As it is clear that he has known for years the serious threat the United States and the world faced from coronaviruses, and it appears he did very little in the last 17 years to address the very concerns he raised about them in his testimony in 2003, Dr. Fauci should resign – in disgrace.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 22:20 - Watch: Sikorsky's S-97 Raider Flies 247 Knots As Flight Envelope Expands
Watch: Sikorsky’s S-97 Raider Flies 247 Knots As Flight Envelope Expands
Sikorsky S-97 Raider is a one-of-a-kind helicopter part of the US Army’s Future Vertical Lift Program.
The S-97 Raider prototype is part of Sikorsky’s entry into the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft competition for the Army to replace the aging UH-60 Black Hawk and Apache attack helicopters in the coming years.
The latest video from Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin Company, posted on Lockheed Martin’s YouTube channel, shows the S-97 Raider traveling at 247 knots, or about 284 mph. For some context, most helicopters fly at an average speed of around 160 mph.
According to Lockheed’s website, the S-97 Raider can fly “twice as far and twice as fast as the Black Hawk.” A development timeline shows the new helicopters will begin service at the end of this decade. That will be the moment when the Black Hawks are phased out.
We have documented multiple test flights of the next-generation helicopter over the last several years.
- Watch: Sikorsky-Boeing Conduct First Flight Of This Very Unusual Helicopter
- Watch Next-Gen Sikorsky-Boeing Helicopter Conduct “Rigorous Flight Test At High Speeds”
It seems like every flight. Test pilots are pushing the S-97 Raider harder and harder to understand its operational and combat limitations.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 22:00 - Medical Research Rapidly Adopts "Systemic Racism" As Truth, Risking Scientific Credibility, Part 1
Medical Research Rapidly Adopts “Systemic Racism” As Truth, Risking Scientific Credibility, Part 1
By John Murawski of RealClearInvestigations, Part 1 of 2
Rejection used to be common for medical sociologist Thomas LaVeist when he tried to get his research published on the effects of racism on the health of black people. “Now,” said the 60-year-old dean of Tulane University’s School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine, “I have those same journals asking me to write articles for them.”
LaVeist’s experience illustrates the dramatic transformation in medical research, accelerating in the past few years. While few would dispute that black Americans are more prone to chronic health problems and have shorter life expectancies than whites, the medical community generally sought answers in biology, genetics and lifestyle. Research, like LaVeist’s, that focused on racism was frowned upon as lacking rigor or relevance, an amateurish detour from serious intellectual inquiry.
Thomas LaVeist: His work focused on racism was once frowned upon as lacking rigor or relevance. Not any more. Today medical journal editors are clamoring for a racial lens and apologizing for what they call their past moral blindness. In recent years, and especially since Black Lives Matter protests erupted last year, systemic racism has been transformed from a fringe theory to a canonical truth.
Medical researchers are now able to offer a sweeping socio-political explanation for racial health disparities by citing the hundreds of peer-reviewed articles authored by LaVeist and a host of others, thus conferring upon the study of systemic racism the imprimatur of scholarly authority and even settled science.
This year, top officials at the National Institutes of Health issued an apology to all who have suffered from structural racism in biomedical research. The NIH, the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research, announced that it is dedicating $90 million to the study of health disparities and structural racism, engaging in more than 60 diversity and inclusion initiatives, and committing “every tool at our disposal to remediate the chronic problem of structural racism.”
In an August special issue dedicated to racial health disparities, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association stated that systemic racism is a scientific fact beyond dispute, and disagreeing on this point is “wrong,” “misguided” and “uninformed.” Systemic racism is a reality to be assumed in medical research rather than a sociological hypothesis to be tested by skeptical researchers.
Deemed incontestable, systemic racism provides the political rationale for “dismantling” — in the words of no less an authority than the National Institutes of Health — the social institutions and cultural standards that, according to the framework’s advocates, were constructed and are maintained to uphold white supremacy.
The consequences of ignoring this new prime directive for racially focused research were made abundantly clear this year when the top two editors of JAMA were pressured to resign after the organization ran a podcast that questioned whether systemic racism explains health disparities between blacks and other Americans.
“When JAMA sends a call for paper on structural racism, when the NIH director sends out an apology letter for racism in the NIH and when the CDC for the first time uses the term ‘racism,’ these are highest-level determinants of what research will be done in coming years in this country,” said Shervin Assari, an associate professor of family medicine and urban public health at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, one of four historically black medical schools in the nation.
Shervin Assari: Now the feds are “paying good money to the best researchers in this country who are competing to understand how structural racism works, rather than if it exists.” “This is the first time the NIH has issued a call for research on structural racism. This is the first time JAMA fires an editor who said something wrong about racism,” said Assari, who has published more than 350 papers on race, social determinants and health equity. “Now NIH is paying good money to the best researchers in this country who are competing to understand how structural racism works, rather than if it exists.”
Systemic racism, generally unseen but known by its perceived effects, doesn’t directly cause diabetes, hypertension or depression, but it purportedly creates the living conditions in which chronic conditions opportunistically thrive, advocates say. Such living conditions include unsafe neighborhoods, aggressive policing, substandard schools, discriminatory workplaces, inferior medical care and the resulting stress, despair and self-destructive behavior, the theory states.
To institutionalize its new policy, JAMA is revising its peer review standards and diversifying its ranks to advance health care equity, a term that refers to narrowing or even eliminating racial health disparities in chronic conditions and life expectancies. Similar steps are being adopted throughout the medical profession — by the cluster-hiring of minority applicants, hiring of diversity and equity officers, and training staff on “white privilege,” implicit bias, microaggressions, and allyship.
A lead editorial in the August special issue, co-signed by 15 people, including JAMA’s newly installed executive editor and executive managing editor, along with other JAMA leaders, said all medical journals are morally obligated to assume systemic racism as a fact and document this fact in their research.
“At this point in the arc of medicine and scientific publication,” JAMA stated, “it is crucial for all journals to fulfill renewed editorial and journal missions that include a heightened and appropriate emphasis on equity and publication of information that addresses structural racism with the goal of overcoming its effects in medicine and health care.”
This rapid turn of events has blindsided traditional doctors, who are put off by the intense focus on race and the strong rhetoric.
“The spectacle of the gatekeepers of medical publications announcing a political blueprint that medical authors must follow — or else — is pretty breathtaking,” Thomas Huddle, who retired this year as professor at the medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said by email.
Thomas Huddle, dissenter: “The medical gatekeepers are in the grip of a moral panic.” “The medical gatekeepers are in the grip of a moral panic,” said Huddle, who has published on medical ethics and edited several medical journals. “The JAMA convulsion over the podcast was positively Maoist in its fervor for achieving moral correctness and purging the impure.”
It’s an open secret that some find the systemic explanation to be nothing more than leftist polemic, while others are skeptical it convincingly explains everything it claims to explain. These skeptics worry about the career implications of publicly dissenting from the new orthodoxy, but it’s not inconceivable that blaming an entire national culture for racial disparities will prompt independent scholars and conservative think tanks to produce opposing research that explores black-on-black murder, racial disparities in IQ testing and other taboo subjects.
The dramatic transformation sweeping through the health care profession is not happening in a vacuum. It mirrors social justice movements committed to exposing structural racism that allegedly pervades education, criminal justice, the arts, hard sciences and other domains of U.S. society. Activists in those fields, as well as medicine, talk of dismantling white supremacy and other “structures” that operate by means of race-neutral laws and colorblind norms that cause racial and gender power imbalances and harm non-white groups.
Skeptical physicians say that medical journal editors are essentially replacing the scientific method with a political ideology, namely critical race theory, and leaving little room for alternative explanations — such as personal agency or cultural differences.
“There’s a tremendous amount of groupthink,” said Stanley Goldfarb, a former dean for curriculum who taught about kidney disease at the University of Pennsylvania medical school before retiring this summer. “If you don’t agree with all that, you’re a bad person.”
“This is an argument that you’re not allowed to have — that’s the problem here,” said Goldfarb, who has served on the editorial boards of three medical journals and was editor-in-chief of a nephrology journal.
Racial health disparities underlie the four-year gap in black-white life expectancy in the United States. The factors that contribute to this disparity include chronic conditions, unintentional injuries, suicide and homicide, which is the leading cause of death for black males aged 44 and younger. Scholars committed to the systemic racism explanation blame the disproportionately high crime rates in poor black neighborhoods on discrimination, substandard schools and other manifestations of systemic racism.
The body of research into racial health disparities has broken into the mainstream after establishing credibility through the time-honored system of academic citations and referrals. Since LaVeist began his work in the 1990s, a small stream of articles has swelled into a critical mass that now allows medical researchers to assume systemic racism as a proven fact and cite the evidence in footnotes, as established knowledge, instead of arguing the case each time.
“When the weight of the evidence becomes so overwhelming that we reach consensus, we no longer continue to question whether or not [it is true],” LaVeist said. “We don’t question gravity anymore because the consensus is that gravity is a thing.”
One of the JAMA articles in the August special issue found that the major health care spending disparity is that whites spend more on dental, pharmaceutical, and outpatient care, while blacks spend more on emergency room and inpatient hospital care, suggesting that black people are more likely to be uninsured and otherwise lack access to routine medical care.
Instead of detailing the precise reasons that may explain this gap, the authors invoke previous articles: “There are many mechanisms that have already been identified that explain how structural racism shapes health and healthcare.”
In a phone interview, the lead author, Joseph Dieleman, associate professor of health metric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said: “These are taken as a given by us. These are not to be debated, or being tested, in our analysis.”
Health Affairs, dubbed by a Washington Post columnist as “the bible of health policy,” is redoubling its focus on systemic racism, anti-racism, and equity, not only in its published content but also in attending to the racial makeup of its published authors and reviewers.
“We acknowledge that the dominant voices in our work are those with power and privilege,” Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil wrote in January. “Even as we have dramatically increased the volume of our content focused on equity, the narrative has primarily been written by those in power. We vow to change this.”
Weil, who was trained in critical legal theory, a precursor to critical race theory, as a Harvard law student in the 1980s, said in a phone interview that the concepts of merit and quality are often used to maintain power and privilege, and these structures must be examined for bias.
“We’re just talking about — forgive the language that is used by the believers — interrogating ourselves,” Weil said.
Systemic racism, a core tenet of critical race theory, doesn’t have a settled definition but it has broad applicability. One of the peculiar features of systemic racism is that the mechanism is not evident to those who are not initiated into the theory, but ubiquitous to its acolytes.
For best-selling and award-winning author Ibram X. Kendi, whose writings are considered essential reading at some medical schools, any disparity can signify racism. The concept can refer to all manner of disparate outcomes — in murder rates, arrest rates, life expectancies, education levels, school discipline, household income, standardized tests scores and grades — even in the fact that black people are nowhere to be seen in the corridor portraits of medical school dignitaries and are underrepresented in symphony orchestras.
Ibram X Kendi: Any disparity can signify racism. “There is no ‘official’ definition of structural racism,” states a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine. “All definitions make clear that racism is not simply the result of private prejudices held by individuals, but is also produced and reproduced by laws, rules, and practices, sanctioned and even implemented by various levels of government, and embedded in the economic system as well as in cultural and societal norms.”
One line of attack against the status quo is the movement to eliminate long-accepted practices to promote merit and excellence that, according to activists, operate as colorblind mechanisms to produce unequal outcomes: gifted and talented programs, gifted schools, and admissions tests for elite high schools, as well as standardized test scores for university admission. In medicine, the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination test is changing from a graded score to pass/fail to help minority students, while Northwestern University and its Feinberg School of Medicine are promoting diversity by eliminating a six-decade-old Honors Program in Medical Education.
Still, the concept provides special challenges for medicine. Unlike bacteria, for instance, systemic racism is an invisible force that can only be measured indirectly, by its perceived effects. Nevertheless, LaVeist is convinced that systemic racism is the best explanation for racial health disparities because the correlation of race and health is consistent across numerous studies for multiple chronic conditions.
“We cannot make direct causal inferences. The best we can do is look at plausible causality,” LaVeist said. “What we have is a case where once you’ve ruled out all of the plausible explanations, the only thing left is systemic racism.”
LaVeist and Weil agree that health and other disparities can have other causes than systemic racism, and good scholarship should be cognizant of other potential variables. LaVeist said that without allowing for other factors, people of color would have no free will, but it is important to note that African American culture is also shaped by white racism.
One of LaVeist’s early co-authored papers that was rejected by several journals before finding a publisher concluded that black people who experience rudeness at the hands of white people have longer life expectancies if they blame systemic racism, or some other external factor, for being treated disrespectfully.
An implication of the study: Even if the rude behavior by the white person isn’t caused by racism or an external factor, it’s strategically beneficial for black people to attribute the rudeness to someone else’s racism, boorishness or insensitivity, rather than blaming themselves.
“Yes — racism, or some other external attribution,” LaVeist said. “If you make an external attribution, that is going to be healthier than you thinking, ‘Oh they’re right, I am a bad person, I deserve to be mistreated.’”
Assari specializes in the study of “diminished returns” in quality of life and health that black people and other marginalized groups experience as they gain education and income in U.S. society. His research contends that black people reap fewer benefits — such as income and health — as they rise in education, compared to white people, which he attributes to structural racism. He has written half of the 300-some academic papers on that subject cited by the National Library of Medicine.
He makes connections that would not be self-evident to someone who lacks training in his specialty. One of his recent papers, published in the Journal of Health Economics, says that Americans are less likely to smoke as their income level rises. But that rule doesn’t hold for high-income Chinese Americans, who are more likely to smoke as they generate more income. So Assari postulates that upwardly mobile Chinese Americans resort to nicotine as a means of coping with the anti-Asian bias they encounter in this country’s elite institutions.
Yet, he also said that even though the anti-racist movement seems invincible now, overweening claims about systemic racism will eventually invite scholarly criticism, especially if equity policies and interventions now being implemented fail to deliver results.
“I think there will be a very strong backlash against critical race theory very soon,” Assari said. “I don’t think it is sustainable. And it is falsifiable. So there would be an anti-CRT movement among other group of social scientists.”
Nevertheless, Assari said systemic racism is a reliable theoretical framework because it parsimoniously explains the marginalization of many racial groups.
“This is one model which explains many of our observations,” Assari said.
“A theory is [reliable] when an observation or assumption holds regardless of the context, setting, place, population, design, sample. It is replicated many times across a diverse group of settings, age groups, resources, and outcomes.”
LaVeist said segregation, much of it rooted in historical practices such as redlining and Jim Crow, is the primary driver of disparities. Poor neighborhoods are generally more polluted, closer to highways and industrial zones, and have less access to quality restaurants, grocery stores, public schools, and green spaces. Such environments tend to breed despair, which leads to crime and an overly aggressive police response.
The constant stress of dealing with these hassles and micro-aggressions wears on the body, research into health disparities says, echoing arguments made by critical race theorists in the 1980s. One medical paper, published in The Lancet in 2017 and cited more than 1,500 times as of November, says that residential segregation is the foundation of structural racism, and notes that “growing research is linking interpersonal racism to various biomarkers of disease and well-being, including allostatic load, inflammatory markers, and hormonal dysregulation.”
There are those who say the medical establishment is not going far enough in this research direction.
The STAT News health information website reported in September that anti-racism and equity have become so trendy that “white scholars are colonizing research on health disparities.” According to the STAT investigation, white researchers are caught up in “a gold rush mentality” and “rushing to scoop up grants and publish papers.” The white scholars are replicating work done by black researchers without giving sufficient credit, a new form of exploitation practiced by “health equity tourists” and “opportunistic scientific carpetbaggers.”
One of the worst offenders: JAMA’s August special issue on health disparities. “Not one of the five research papers published in the issue included a Black lead or corresponding author, and just one lead author was Hispanic,” STAT reported.
Weil sympathizes with these concerns and said Health Affairs is creating a mentorship program to help scholars of color get their papers published in the journal. Weil, who said about 5% of submitted papers are accepted for publication at Health Affairs, is confident that dismantling power and privilege won’t necessitate compromising standards of excellence, and he considers such criticisms to be “generally false and intentionally inflammatory.”
“Equitable representation should be the outcome of an equitable process, not the jerry-rigged result of a change of standards for one group — that is not where we want to be,” Weil said. “So if the fix here is an equitable outcome by lowering standards for a certain group, our readers will notice, and that’s not the end point I’m looking for.”
Weil’s biggest concern is not that the anti-racist movement in medical research will go too far, but that the momentum and resolve will fizzle out.
“I think it’s very hard to tell where you are on a swinging pendulum when you’re in the middle of it,” he said. “I am much more concerned that this will become a rote exercise where everyone genuflects to anti-racism but does nothing about it, than I am that this is an overcorrection.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 21:40 - Biden Education Dept Forgiving $2 Billion In Student Loans For Up To 30,000 Borrowers
Biden Education Dept Forgiving $2 Billion In Student Loans For Up To 30,000 Borrowers
Up to 30,000 student loan borrowers will have a cumulative $2 billion in debt forgiven by the Biden Education Department, after a series of major changes to the troubled Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program were announced.
In a Thursday tweet, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced that “30K+ borrowers will get an estimated $3B forgiven.” Of that, “Roughly 10K have already had $715M discharged” with another 20,000 to follow.
Here are the details:
▪️ 30K+ borrowers will get an estimated $2B forgiven.
▪️ Roughly 10K have already had $715M discharged.
▪️ 20K will receive emails in the coming weeks.Check your inboxes!
— Secretary Miguel Cardona (@SecCardona) November 11, 2021
“This is fantastic news for those who will have their debts cancelled and demonstrates how the Biden administration has the power to make life better for all people with student debt,” Mike Pierce, executive director at the Student Borrower Protection Center, told Yahoo Finance. “With payments currently set to restart in less than 90 days, there is much more work to be done for our public servants and all Americans with student loan debt.”
Created by Congress in 2007, the PSLF program supplies taxpayer dollars for government and non-profit employees – including teachers, nurses, service members, first responders and other public service workers with federally-backed student loans to apply for forgiveness after providing proof of 120 monthly payments under a qualified repayment plan.
ED’s policy change in October was previously expected to result in 22,000 student loan borrowers with consolidated loans — which were previously ineligible to be counted towards loan forgiveness — becoming “immediately eligible” for $1.74 billion in forgiveness. –Yahoo Finance
“The temporary waivers announced by the Department of Education have been an actual life changing event for many of the borrowers we work with,” Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, told Yahoo Finance, adding that she’s received dozens of notes from borrowers who “woke up this week to find that their balance is finally zero.”
According to the report, citing the National Education Association, 45% of educators took out an average of $55,800 in student loans to attend college. Of them, 14% with an unpaid loan balance are carrying $105,000 or more.
When it comes to service members, the NEA found last year that while 200,000 service members hold a cumulative $3 billion in student loan debt, just 17,534 had submitted the proper paperwork to seek forgiveness – while around 40% of those applicants were actually on track for debt relief.
“As the burden of student loan debt has impacted ever larger swathes of American society, the U.S. military has seen more service members come onto active duty with student loans,” said former former director of military and consumer protection at Veterans Education Success, Mike Saunders. “This means that PSLF has become a huge factor when it comes to getting the all-volunteer force to reenlist past their initial service obligation.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 21:20 - Kyle Rittenhouse's Mother "Shocked" Biden Called Her Son A White Supremacist
Kyle Rittenhouse’s Mother “Shocked” Biden Called Her Son A White Supremacist
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
The mother of Kyle Rittenhouse on Thursday said that she was upset by President Joe Biden calling her son a white supremacist, saying the Democrat defamed the teenager.
“When I saw that I was shocked, I was angry,” Wendy Rittenhouse said during an appearance on Fox News.
“President Biden don’t know my son whatsoever. He’s not a white supremacist. He’s not a racist.”
While running for the presidency last year, Biden shared a video on social media with the caption saying that then-President Donald Trump “refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night.”
The video included a photograph of Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“He did that for the votes, and I was so angry for a while at him and what he did to my son – he defamed him,” Wendy Rittenhouse said in the new interview.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There’s been no evidence put forth in the public sphere that indicates Rittenhouse holds white supremacist views.
The teenager is on trial for shooting three white men in Kenosha amid rioting there in August 2020. Two died.
Kyle Rittenhouse speaks to his mother in Kenosha, Wis., on Nov. 3, 2021. (Mark Hertzberg/Pool/Getty Images)
Rittenhouse and his defense team say he acted in self-defense, noting the men either attacked or made to attack the teen. Prosecutors say Rittenhouse was trigger-happy and shouldn’t have fired upon the men.
Rittenhouse faces up to life in prison if convicted on the most-serious charge, first-degree homicide. Rittenhouse was also charged with illegally possessing a weapon because he was 17 at the time, and reckless endangerment.
Jurors are set to weigh whether to convict him next week following closing arguments.
Wendy Rittenhouse, who has attended the trial in-person, said she thought her son was going to die when she watched footage that showed one man moving to kick the teen and another pointing a gun at him.
She said her son has nightmares from what transpired.
The mother also said she believes Kenosha County Judge Bruce Schroeder, who is presiding over the trial, is fair.
Asked about the jury, she added, “They’ve been keeping a close eye on every evidence, every testimony, and they’re paying good attention what’s been said that’s the truth.”
Well, @JoeBiden called him a “white supremacist,” and the gutless press failed to ask @PressSec about it today https://t.co/T0m1H08No6
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) November 12, 2021
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 21:00 - Loudon County Pharmacy Accidentally Vaxxed 112 Kids With Adult COVID Dose
Loudon County Pharmacy Accidentally Vaxxed 112 Kids With Adult COVID Dose
More than 100 children in Loudoun County, Virginia, were given the wrong COVID-19 vaccine dosage. Parents of the children are furious about potential health complications.
Ted Pharmacy incorrectly administered Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to 112 children between Nov. 3-4. The children, aged 5-11, were given doses meant for people over 12.
“On Nov. 5, state and federal authorities ordered the pharmacy to discontinue administering the vaccine, and Virginia Department of Health (VDH) subsequently collected all COVID-19 vaccines at the pharmacy.
“Officials instructed the pharmacy to notify parents about next steps, including the recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding whether patients should restart the vaccine series or receive a correct second dose. VDH is also working to contact parents and ensure they understand the guidance on next steps,” VDH told Fox News in a statement.
A letter from VDH’s director, David Goodfriend, published by local news Fox 23, said that the health agency was aware of the incident and shared information with Pfizer and the CDC.
“If you are the parent/guardian of a child ages 5-11 years old who received a dose of COVID-19 at Ted Pharmacy on Nov. 3 or Nov. 4, 2021, please review the following information,” Goodfriend wrote in a letter to parents who had their kids accidentally vaxxed with adult strength vaccines.
He added Ted Pharmacy had been removed from both state and federal COVID-19 vaccination programs.
Parents of the children are outraged by the vaccine mishap. Dasha Hermosilla told News4 that a pharmacist at Ted’s vaccinated her 7yo daughter with a diluted dose of the vaccine for adults.
The pharmacist told her it was “okay” though a Google search confirmed Hermosilla’s worst nightmare: her daughter might be indanger.
“I had this pit in my stomach that, like, what did they just do to my daughter?” she said.
Vaxxing children comes after the CDC unanimously recommended a special regimen of Pfizer-BionTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 5-11 years old on Nov. 2. The Biden administration has pushed to vaccinate nearly 28 million school children in the coming months.
Health officials have asked parents to monitor their children for side effects of the vaccine.
Such a mishap will only worsen anxiety among parents about the Biden Administration’s increasingly draconian vaccination mandates.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 20:40 - Los Angeles Defunds Police, Uses Money For Guaranteed Income Experiment
Los Angeles Defunds Police, Uses Money For Guaranteed Income Experiment
Authored by James Breslo, op-ed via The Epoch Times,
When people think of the proper role of city government, they usually think police, roads, and schools. The City of Los Angeles ranks near the bottom in all three (not to mention having the worst homeless problem in the country). Perhaps this is because the city seems more intent on engaging in social experiments than fixing roads, fighting crime, and improving schools.
The latest example is its new “BIG:LEAP” basic income program, designed to “transform the role of local government.”
While defunding the police and giving free money to people are considered fringe ideas in most places, in Los Angeles it is becoming a reality.
Last week it began accepting applications for what amounts to a lottery for 3,000 lucky winners. The prize is $12,000 per year, at a total taxpayer cost of $36 million.
This is far more than the $2,000 per year Andrew Yang, who introduced the concept to Americans in his presidential race, recently proposed to New Yorkers in his mayoral race. New Yorkers rejected it, giving him just 12 percent of the vote.
About a third of the money comes from defunding the Los Angeles Police Department, another radical idea rejected in other areas. It was just roundly rejected by voters in Minneapolis despite it being the center of Black Lives Matter’s defund the police movement.
All of the money, of course, comes from Los Angeles taxpayers. While it resembles a lottery, most are not eligible to win. The city effectively takes about $20 per taxpayer and redistributes it, through what is assured to be a “random” draw, to others.
To be eligible to win this lottery, there is nothing you must do but meet the qualifications established by the city and fill out a lengthy questionnaire. You must have at least one child, thus making it yet another government program that has the effect of encouraging the poor to have children. You also must have income below the federal poverty line.
So, for instance, a single mother with two children making over $22,000 per year would not qualify. Thus, the program acts as yet another that discourages work, since merely by working less, a person can qualify to make a free $12,000.
Also, to qualify you must check a box indicating that you were adversely impacted by Covid-19. This allows the program to fit squarely within the “never let a tragedy go waste” strategy for progressives. Just like government subsidies, handouts, loan forgiveness, eviction protections, and rent forgiveness, this program disguises itself as a COVID-19 relief program when in fact it is intended to be the first step toward yet another, more radical government assistance program.
The final requirement to qualify is filling out an extensive survey replete with highly personal questions about physical and mental health, finances, and lifestyle. It asks numerous unusual questions like, “In the last month how often have you been angered by things that were outside your control?” It appears Los Angeles seeks to turn its residents into lab rats. Indeed, the program is being done in concert with the “Center of Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania” to use as a model to “reform current policies, guide future programs, and aid in the expansion of our social safety net.”
Naturally, it also asks for ethnicity, gender (i.e., male, female, “non-binary,” “agender,” or “gender fluid”), and sexual orientation. The program is clear in its objective:
“While no single program can reverse decades of economic and racial inequality that marginalize low-income people of color, BIG:LEAP can point the way towards a more equitable and prosperous future.”
Considering the application questions and the purported justification for the program, one must wonder how “random” the selection will be.
Since it’s a city program, it sits on top of the myriad of other state and federal benefit programs already in place, such as CalWORKs (aid program for adults with children), Cal Fresh (food stamps), WIC (women, infants, and children) benefits, MediCal, and the federal earned income tax credit and Medicare. The program proudly boasts however, that unlike other California programs, there are “no restrictions on how the money can be spent.” In other words, using other peoples’ money to support your alcohol, cigarette, or drug habit: totally fine.
Mayor Eric Garcetti is part of a network of “Mayors for Guaranteed Income,” a national network of mayors “interested in determining how cash—with no strings attached—can assist households in need.” Garcetti, however, will not be around to evaluate the program. He has chosen instead to leave his post midterm as mayor of America’s second largest city in favor of an ambassadorship. So, if this defund the police and redistribution experiment causes more crime in your neighborhood, you may have to address your complaints to New Delhi, India.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 20:20 - World's Largest 3D-Printed Neighborhood Coming To Austin, Texas
World’s Largest 3D-Printed Neighborhood Coming To Austin, Texas
Construction of the world’s largest community of 3D-printed homes is expected to break ground next year in Austin, Texas.
Lennar, the nation’s second-largest homebuilder, has teamed up with ICON, a technology pioneer specializing in large-scale 3D printing, to “print” 100 single-story houses using a giant 3D printer on-site to lay concrete-based building material.
Lennar Co-CEO Jon Jaffe recently stressed that the entire building industry faced shortages of materials and skyrocketing costs. To solve this problem, the company is turning to 3D printing:
“Labor and material shortages are two of the biggest factors pushing the dream of homeownership out of reach for many American families.
“Lennar has always expanded the boundaries of technological innovation to keep quality homes affordable, and 3D printing is an immensely encouraging approach,” Eric Feder, president of LenX, Lennar’s investment arm, said in a press release.
Digital renderings of the 3D-printed neighborhood were released last week.
The printers will squeeze out concrete in layers to build the frames of homes. Each home is expected to take a week to build.
ICON’s 3D printing technology can print homes up to 3,000 square feet and do it in less time with less waste than convention methods.
“Construction-scale 3D printing not only delivers higher-quality homes faster and more affordably, but fleets of printers can change the way that entire communities are built for the better. The United States faces a deficit of approximately 5 million new homes, so there is a profound need to swiftly increase supply without compromising quality, beauty, or sustainability and that is exactly the strength of our technology,” ICON co-founder and CEO Jason Ballard said.
With supply chain disruptions and soaring commodity costs, we’ve started to notice that more and more homes are being 3D printed. We told readers in May, “Screw Lumber, Just 3D-Print Your Next Home” because wood prices were at record highs and uneconomic to frame out a house. Also, we noted, homes in Florida and Virginia were printed earlier this year. Now an entire neighborhood in Austin is about to be printed.
So what’s next? Print an entire city?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 20:00 - Was COP26 Another Step Towards Disaster?
Was COP26 Another Step Towards Disaster?
Authored by Bill Blain via MorningPorridge.com,
“From Glasgow to Greenock, in towns on each side, the hammer’s ding-dong is the Song of the Clyde”
Greta Thunburg was right – there was a lot of blah, blah, blah at COP26, but also positive steps. The perception remains of rising climate risks, and that’s fuelling an increasingly de-growth extreme climate change populist agenda – which could prove even more disastrous than rising temperatures!
As the COP26 climate change conference ticks into its final day, was it a success for the planet or for institutional blah blah blah? I guess we should listen to the scientists… so this morning I’ve taken the gospel according to New Scientist Magazine as one of my texts on the conference. Nicely balanced I thought.
I am somewhat jaundiced at the prospects for a massive conference-jamboree of politicians, businesspeople and activists actually solving anything – but it does get media attention. We may quickly forget the utterly forgettable Alok Sharma (who he?), but we will remember Greta! We won’t forget the massive protest march in Glasgow. But, since the first COP1 meeting in Berlin in 1995, global CO2 levels have risen nearly 50%, temperatures are up 0.5 degrees, and the ice on the Greenland cap is melting faster. Talk is cheap – but people are listening now.
The first draft summit communique yesterday didn’t please anyone – apparently. It urged nations to revisit and strengthen 2030 plans to hold warming to 1.5 and below 2 degrees. While Boris promises us the 1.5 degree temp rise ambition is achievable, the UN warned it’s on life support. Who do you believe? Depending on who you read the outcome will be anything from a 2.4 – 2.7 degree temperature rise – which will leave climate scientists in despair. The reality is holding to the 1.5 degree target looks increasingly unlikely, even if the world has agreed to cut methane by 30% – which means teaching cows to fart less or selling MickyDee Stock. (MickeyDee? Look for them at sign of the Golden Arches..)
Funding for developing nations to ameliorate climate change and to transition from fossil fuels has already fallen well short of what was promised in Paris. While $100 bln is on offer, that’s the same sum India wants as a precondition to action its promised zero carbon plan for 2070. While there is a clearly justified case for the developed nations to pay, it’s an enormous risk. The unspoken reality (unspoken because climate conferences are all about trust, being nice and smiling for the camera, and not mentioning corruption) is the risk much of that money will simply end up making some folk incredibly rich and improving nothing.
One big issue remains corporate behaviours – more corporate jets and Sushi flown in fresh from California than you could shake a sharp pointy stick at.
Every company on the planet wants to be seen to be aligned with the new Green Mantra. Every company on the planet exists to sell stuff.
More than a few are greenwashing – from banking, to autos, to airlines. I could have screamed at BA havering on about how sustainable hydrogen planes tomorrow mean you can still go on holiday today with a clean conscience – but hydrogen plans have massive tech challenges to overcome and are decades, not weeks, away!
While some nations have banded together to outlaw fossil fuels, others are on the sidelines – while some remain absolutely deaf. Highlight moment from Glasgow has to be the perhaps apocryphal story of Scotland’s smiling first minister Nicola Sturgeon manoeuvring herself into a selfie with Greta, who snapped and asked pointedly if La Sturgeon’s economic plan remained an independent Scottish economy based on Oil… curiously, Scotland hasn’t joined the new European Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, Sturgeon realising what the loss of 100,000 jobs would do her political future.
Over the past years I’ve written about the threats of climate change and global warming many times. I accept the science, and this year’s mounting evidence of rising – potentially chaotic – climate instability. I absolutely agree we have to do something – but what? There has been nonsense in Glasgow, but equally some good and positive stuff around it… The critical thing is: COP was never going to be the magic wand climate protestors demand.
COP26 confirms World Leaders recognise the climate issue – but its left just as many questions hanging as to how we collectively solve the multiplexity of the crisis. The conference was long on pledges, promises and questions, but short on actual solutions. At the core of the coming crisis is what we perceive to be the threat: how do we transition from fossil fuels?
Pragmatists understand a complete restructuring of global energy provision can’t happen overnight. It took 200 years for the world to industrialise and destabilise the climate. With the right political push and incentives, we have the wit and wisdom, and innovative capacity to make it cleaner over the next 30-50 years. We are an inventive species, and we may actually succeed in making things better. Just not overnight.
Yet, of all the climate instability factors markets worry about, the one we might have missed is the growing consequences of green populism. The climate crisis could well manifest itself into a more immediate threat: political instability.
Being green is no longer eccentric – its mainstream. Everyone will answer yes if asked about a better environment. That has moved the goal posts.
Increasingly, extreme climate protestors are supporting “De-Growth” strategies – that it’s better to somehow switch off the world to avoid a catastrophic Malthusian disaster caused by too many people consuming to many resources and polluting our closed system spaceship earth. Malthus was wrong in the 18th Century and is no doubt still wrong today!
What COP26 protests highlights is how polarised Green politics are on collision course with the economy and growth. It’s going to take years to wean the economy off fossil fuels, but protestors will demand it happens now! Governments have politically committed themselves to a Green future, but are only just waking up to the reality of the need to transit from fossil fuels to renewables – which isn’t feasible without a long-term plan.
Much as I admire the passion of green campaigners, the current volatility of energy pricing demonstrates a massive underlying transition problem and political naivety. We can’t fundamentally change energy provision overnight. Climate protestors furious this generation have “stolen” their futures will be even less happy if they succeed in reversing economic growth. The result will be to ensure billions of children as yet unborn don’t just face rising temperatures and sea-levels, but also chronic poverty, unemployment, starvation, migration and rising conflict over the environment – water being the primary threat.
While “democratic” western nations may embrace Degrowth populism – nations like China will not.
It doesn’t need to be a frying pan vs fire choice, but that’s not the way popular politics work.
The real failure of governments wasn’t ignoring Greta et al and the evidence of global warming, but not anticipating it and working out a transition plan. In coming years, the noise between climate protests and the slow pace of the transition to clean energy will get louder and become ever more likely to dislocate politics. It sets up for a political crisis within the next few years as empowered Green campaigners garner more air time. That has massive market implications.
Pragmatists take the view we need a well thought out transition programme. I’ve warned about the dangers of over-simplification of the financial and economic aspects of the CO2 mitigation equation many times. There are consequences from doing the easy things like wind and solar renewables and lithium battery technology, rather than pursuing more difficult routes like nuclear and tidal energy, and cleaner capacitance solutions to get to long-term carbon neutrality.
I’m intrigued to see the latest iteration of the EU’s Green Taxonomy includes Gas during the transition phase and also Nuclear power – a factor that already got some nations antsy! (Ah, how well I remember my student protest days at the Torness Nuclear power construction site and my girlfriends “nein danke nuclear” sticker on her 2CV… ah happy days..)
The result of the current mishmash of competing green vs transition politics means that navigating the course to a clean global economy becomes a confusing mass of objectives such a timing carbon neutrality, realities such as population and economic growth, short and long-term solutions, and optimisations such as power vs growth. We all need to make compromises to get where we want to go. But, as is so often the case, compromise is a difficult concept for politicians. It’s even more difficult for extreme climate protestors.
By all means trade markets in line with green objectives, but be very wary of just how destabilising Green Politics may become.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 19:40 - Lawsuit Claims Subway's "100% Tuna" Actually Contains Chicken, Pork And Cattle DNA
Lawsuit Claims Subway’s “100% Tuna” Actually Contains Chicken, Pork And Cattle DNA
A new lawsuit against casual dining chain Subway is alleging that chicken, pork and cattle were all found in the company’s tuna, which is advertised as “100% Tuna”.
A proposed class action was filed this week by Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin, who claims that lab testing confirms the findings, Reuters reported.
Subway has responded that the lawsuit is “reckless and improper”, that the plaintiffs have “filed three meritless complaints, changing their story each time,” and that its tuna is “high-quality, wild-caught, 100% tuna”.
The restaurant chain says its tuna is “regulated strictly” in the U.S.
Since the initial complaint, Subway has hit back by running TV ads and launching a website dedicated to getting the message out that its tuna is, in fact, 100% tuna.
The plaintiff’s original complaint claimed that the company’s tuna salads, sandwiches and wraps were “bereft” of tuna and the amended complaint claims that the products are “not 100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna,” Reuters wrote.
The second complaint was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar, but he gave the plaintiffs a chance to amend their claims.
The latest version of the complaint is reliant on the testing of a marine biologist, who looked at 20 tuna samples from 20 different Subway restaurants.
19 of those samples allegedly had “no detectable tuna DNA sequences,” while all of the samples contained chicken DNA, the report says. 11 of the samples contained pork DNA and 7 contained cattle DNA, the report says.
Amin, who has religious restrictions limiting meat that she can eat, claims she ordered Subway’s “100% Tuna” more than 100 times in the six years between 2013 and 2019.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 19:20 - US And China: Collision Or Cooperation?
US And China: Collision Or Cooperation?
In a surprise announcement at the Glasgow summit, U.S. climate czar John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart declared that their two countries have pledged to work together to slow global warming.
Yet, the arrival a day earlier in Taiwan of a U.S. Navy plane from Clark Air Base in the Philippines, carrying a U.S. congressional delegation, set off a different reaction from Beijing:
“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army will … take all necessary measures to resolutely smash any interference by external forces and ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist plots.”
The incidents touch on one of the great questions of our time.
Are China and the U.S., the world’s preeminent powers, headed for a clash or a level of engagement that will enable us both to avoid either a hot war or a second Cold War?
In the 10 months since Joe Biden became president, the pessimists seem to have been largely proven right.
Just six weeks into the Biden presidency, the U.S., in its annual human rights report, declared:
“Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”
This U.S. equating of China’s behavior with the war crimes for which Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg set the table for what has followed.
China’s behavior toward the new Biden administration has been almost uniformly hostile and contemptuous of U.S. protests.
Through the first 10 months of the Biden presidency, China has continued its persecution of the Uyghurs and systematically crushed the remnants of the democracy protests in Hong Kong.
This past summer, China tested a hypersonic cruise missile that can reach anywhere in the United States and which U.S. forces do not possess.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said this hypersonic missile test may be the “Sputnik moment” for this generation, recalling that October day in 1957 when we awoke to learn the Soviet Union of Nikita Khrushchev had taken the lead in the space race.
Lately, we have learned that China is erecting hundreds of silos to house missiles that can put at risk U.S. cities from L.A. to D.C.
On one four-day period in October, China sent 149 fighters and bombers through the air defense identification zone of Taiwan.
Also in October, a fleet of five Russian and five Chinese warships sailed through the Tsugaru Strait between the Japanese home islands of Hokkaido and Honshu, out into the Western Pacific and then back through the Japanese archipelago into the Sea of Japan.
Message China is sending with its missile tests, warships and warplanes:
“We, also, have a Monroe Doctrine.”
“The South China Sea is ours, as are the Spratly and Paracel Islands within, and all the rocks and reefs we have occupied and fortified. The Taiwan Strait is ours, as is the island of Taiwan and its people. Any attempt by the regime in Taipei and its U.S. allies to declare independence will be regarded by China as an act of war. The nearby Senkaku Islands, though claimed and occupied by Japan, are ours also.”
Message to Japan, South Korea and the Philippines from Beijing:
“As the 20th was the American Century in the Pacific, the 21st century in East Asia and the Western Pacific will be the Chinese Century.”
What is China’s goal here?
Almost surely not a war with the United States, which could rapidly escalate into as great a disaster for us both as World War II was for many of the victors as well as the vanquished.
The strategic goal for China is the dissolution of the U.S.’s alliances with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Australia; the adoption of a neutral or pro-China stance by the nations of East Asia and the Western Pacific; expulsion of U.S. military from the region back to Guam and Hawaii; and the absorption of the region into China’s orbit, not America’s.
China aspires to become the new hegemonic power of East and South Asia and the Western Pacific, displacing the United States.
Nor is this so wild a dream.
While the Chinese navy is not today a match for the U.S. Navy with its carrier battle groups, China’s navy and army are larger than ours, the largest in the world, and in any conflict would be fighting for and from their own country, not someone else’s.
Yesterday was Veterans Day, commemorating the 11th day of the 11th month, November, of 1918, when the greatest war in modern history ended with an armistice after millions of war casualties and civilian deaths.
It had begun the way Chancellor Otto von Bismarck said it would, because of “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” — the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
If there is a great war between China and the United States, it will likely be because of some damn fool thing in the Taiwan Strait.
Avoiding that war should be the first order of business of both the Communist Party of China and the democratic capitalists of America.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 19:00 - Iran Nuke Deal Might Be Effectively Dead Without US "Guarantee" Demanded By Tehran
Iran Nuke Deal Might Be Effectively Dead Without US “Guarantee” Demanded By Tehran
Iran has recently said it will return to the nuclear negotiating table on Nov.29, however, there’s growing concern among world powers seeking a restoration of the 2015 JCPOA that talks could already be dead before they ever get restarted, given Tehran is now demanding a “guarantee” from Washington that it won’t back out of the 2015 deal again.
“We need verification, and this remains unresolved. It is one of the issues that remains not finalized. It is not enough for the ink to be put on the agreement,” Iranian chief negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, said at the end of this week.
Getty Images: Pro-Israel, anti-Iran demonstration Bloomberg notes that “The request is a major logjam to progress as U.S. officials say they can’t bind successor governments. Talks are slated to recommence in Vienna Nov. 29 after a four-month break.” Very likely any future Republican administration would indeed reverse any near-future Biden deal that restores the deal.
This is after Iran has already ramped up its uranium stockpile and enrichment purity, breaching the 2015 JCPOA deal’s caps. Tehran is now saying it will not begin a return to full compliance until this guarantee is delivered by the Biden administration.
The Iranian chief negotiator’s words come days after Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said of Washington:
“They must lift the oppressive sanctions completely and effectively,” Khatibzadeh said, according to a report from Iran’s Mehr news agency. “They must guarantee that no administration in the United States mocks the world and international law” and again unilaterally pulls out of the agreement.
“Iran will explain its position about the JCPOA talks in detail in the forthcoming trips,” Khatibzadeh said of Bagheri’s European tour. “Iran will not stop its compensatory actions until it is confident that US sanctions will be lifted in an effective and verifiable manner with the necessary and objective guarantees.”
Given all this, and the likelihood that Washington won’t acquiesce, a number of Western pundits are asking: is the Iran deal already effectively dead without the US guarantee?
Iran’s lack of trust in the US administration is understandable: “Given that Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and reimposition of sanctions have crippled the Iranian economy—with high inflation and food prices afflicting the country—it makes sense that Iranian officials prefer to codify their return to the JCPOA under a legally binding treaty, rather than as a mere political commitment,” The National Review observes.
“In fact, trust is so low that some Iranian conservatives have demanded that the United States compensate Iran for the economic harm it suffered under Trump’s sanctions even while the Islamic Republic was complying with the deal,” the commentary underscores.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 18:40 - IRS Says Tax Brackets Will Be Higher In 2022 Thanks To Faster Inflation
IRS Says Tax Brackets Will Be Higher In 2022 Thanks To Faster Inflation
Thanks to faster inflation in 2021, the IRS is raising the threshold for the top federal income-tax bracket in 2022 by nearly $20,000 for married couples – bringing the top 37% rate to income above $647,850, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing a Wednesday statement by the agency.
The roughly 3% adjustment – an automatic provision built into the tax code – brings the top tax bracket for individuals to $539,900.
The standard deduction for married couples will also rise from $25,100 to $25,900, while the maximum amount able to be placed into a healthcare flexible spending account will rise from $2,750 to $2,850. Estate and gift tax exclusion will rise from $11.7 million to $12.06 million, while the annual exclusion for gifts alone will rise from $15,000 to $16,000.
The report comes as Tuesday’s “shock” CPI report revealed the highest inflation since 1990, while wages are not keeping pace.
Due to increases in consumer prices, all of the tax bracket thresholds and other key tax-code parameters are rising faster than usual. This would be the largest increase in four years. Congress reset the brackets and changed the tax code’s inflation formulas in 2017.
The changes announced Wednesday typically will affect paycheck withholding and quarterly estimated taxes during 2022 and will be reflected on tax returns filed in early 2023. -WSJ
That said, Congress can alter the income levels and tax rates at will – with Democrats notably having discussed raising the tax rate while lowering the top-bracket threshold as part of the Biden admin social spending and climate agenda. Notably, however, current tax plans working their way through the House and Senate don’t affect tax brackets.
According to the report, the bracket changes also affect ‘dozens of other key parameters in the tax code,’ including the tax credit for adoption and rules for those who expatriate.
In October, consumer prices rose 6.2% YoY according to the Labor Department.
Things that won’t change unless Congress specifically changes them? The $3,000 deduction for capital losses against ordinary income, the $10,000 SALT cap, and the $2,000 base level for the child tax credit.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 18:00 - Victor Davis Hanson: History Will Grind Out The Truth
Victor Davis Hanson: History Will Grind Out The Truth
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,
“History will figure that out on its own.”
That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab — and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself.
Fauci offered arguments from authority by citing his own expertise, as well as that of “card-carrying” specialists.
But in truth, there is little evidence that any animal species has been found infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus or a close relative that causes COVID-19 or a similar illness.
Many federal health experts increasingly believe the virus was manmade. A number argue that it was likely a product of gain-of-function research that was funded in part by a U.S. government grant.
Others concede that Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak — who was involved in gain-of-function research, often in cooperation with the Chinese — were not candid about the full extent of their ties to the Wuhan lab.
But despite Chinese resistance to releasing pertinent data, history eventually will sort the truth out — as it does with most controversies of the moment.
* * *
Five years ago, the New York Times, the Washington Post, most of the mainstream media and the majority of the bipartisan Washington, D.C., political and government establishments insisted that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.
In support of such conspiracy theories, they fixated on the so-called Steele dossier. It was a supposedly independent research effort detailing “proof” of Trump-Russian cooperation to rob Hillary Clinton of the election.
That supposed evidence was the unspoken ground swell for a 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation of Trump conducted by former FBI head Robert Mueller.
For over 650 days, the country was consumed with “Russian collusion.” Cable news outlets, public television and radio pundits, along with high-ranking Democratic politicians, almost daily announced the impending end of the colluding Trump administration.
They peddled rumors of Trump’s supposed obscene activity in Moscow. They spun tales of mysterious meetings between Trump’s family and Russian operatives, and of Trump surrogates’ supposed trips to meet with Russian colluding officials.
Christopher Steele, the architect of the “dossier,” had not been to Russia in decades. He was a rank partisan in the pay of the Clinton campaign — and for a time the FBI itself.
Five years later, history has almost sorted out the fable that the most powerful, wealthy and influential Americans in the nation once foisted upon the public.
Special prosecutor John Durham seems to be slowly indicting the promulgators of the hoax. The earlier lengthy internal audit by Inspector General Michael Horowitz cited wrongdoing on the part of the Department of Justice and FBI.
The Mueller investigation failed to find any proof of Russian-Trump collusion. The 2018 majority report of the House Intelligence Committee came to the same conclusion.
The admission of false statements by former FBI interim director Andrew McCabe, along with the felonious altering of a court document by FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, were other elements of the warped and unprofessional behavior of the FBI.
Both Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey were unable to answer fundamental questions while under oath about the dossier and the role of its authors in spreading the collusion hoax. Mueller’s legal team and Comey himself habitually leaked rumors that fed the collusion hoax.
History, however, is slowly sorting it out – despite the approved narrative of the well-connected who misled the country to pursue their own political agendas.
* * *
Someday historians of public health will unravel the full costs of locking down most of America in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic.
What are now near-taboo topics – the vigorous natural immunity offered from prior infection, and the terrible damage done by the quarantines – earn cancel culture damnation, employment suspension and media calumny. But soon they likely will become matter-of-factly accepted as truth.
* * *
The same will be said of the hysterical myths that surround the unfortunate January 6 riot at the Capitol.
Five years from now history will show that there was no conspiracy, no pre-planned “insurrection” — as the FBI has already concluded.
The late Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick was not murdered as was alleged. Those “armed” inside the Capitol did not carry — much less use — guns. The one violent death, that of Ashli Babbitt, was of an unarmed female who was lethally shot by an officer for attempting to enter through a broken window.
The solitary confinement, indefinite incarceration and inhumane jail conditions accorded some of the accused will be shown contrary to the Constitution of the United States of America.
* * *
In other words, history eventually will sort it all out.
Or as the second-century A.D. skeptic philosopher Sextus Empricus noted, eventually the truth emerges and cosmic justice is rendered: “The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind fine.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 17:40 - Michigan AG Apologizes After Passing Out Drunk At Football Game After "Eating 2 Bloody Marys"
Michigan AG Apologizes After Passing Out Drunk At Football Game After “Eating 2 Bloody Marys”
Michigan’s Attorney General apparently has “got some splainin’ to do”...
That is, of course, only if you think passing out drunk at a football game on over the weekend is some kind of faux pas. For us, we say “what happens on the weekend, stays on the weekend”.
But that hasn’t stopped Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel from publicly apologizing after being caught on camera passed out in the stands, according to The Hill.
Nessel wrote this week: “My staff has pleaded with me to hire a crisis-management PR firm for an incident that occurred on 10/30 at the UM/MSU football game. Instead, I thought I would just share the events which transpired that fateful day.”
She said on Facebook that she went to a tailgate party and – we swear we are not making this up – thought it was a good idea to “eat 2 Bloody Marys.”
Nessel wrote on social media: “I thought it seemed like a good idea to eat 2 Bloody Mary’s, since as long as you put enough vegetables in them, it’s practically a salad. As it turned out, this was not a brilliant idea.”
She then says she started to feel sick at the game and friends encouraged her to leave “so she wouldn’t vomit on other fans”. She exited in a wheelchair, the report says.
Nessel wrote that her wife helped her through a “skull crushing hangover” the next day.
We have to give credit where it’s due, however: Nessel owned the “PR crisis”. On her Facebook, she posted a photo of herself slumped over with her hat pulled over her face.
She concluded by saying: “From now on, I pledge never to drink on an empty stomach, and definitely never to have another Bloody Mary. Cause it’s gonna take a while to get that taste out of my mouth. Sorry to all the people who have supported me for letting you down. I will try to do better.”
Godspeed, Dana. Godspeed.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/12/2021 – 17:20
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