- LA Deputies Shot In Compton Ambush, Suspect At Large
LA Deputies Shot In Compton Ambush, Suspect At Large
Tyler Durden
Sun, 09/13/2020 – 02:51Two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies are fighting for their lives after a Saturday night ambush at a train station in Compton, California.
The officers, a man and a woman, were both shot multiple times after a suspect walked up to their parked patrol car and fired at close range, according to the LA County Sheriffs Department, which tweeted “The gunman walked up on the deputies and opened fire without warning or provocation.”
Update: The gunman walked up on the deputies and opened fire without warning or provocation. pic.twitter.com/cBQjyKkoxJ
— LA County Sheriffs (@LASDHQ) September 13, 2020
In a Saturday night news conference, Sheriff Alex Villanueva said that the two had graduated from the sheriff’s training academy approximately 14 months ago. The female officer, 31, is the mother of a six-year-old boy, while the other officer is 24-years-old. At least one of them was able to radio for help, after which they were taken to nearby St. Francis Medical Center where they underwent surgery, according to NBC News.
Deputy Morgan Arteaga said the attack was reported about 7 p.m. at a train station in the city of Compton. The sheriff’s department has a unit that patrols Los Angeles Metro trains; it’s also contracted to police that city.
“They are still alive,” Arteaga said.
The Metro Blue Line train station where Deputy Eric Ortiz said the attack took place is near the sheriff’s Compton Station.
The department also tweeted: “They are both still fighting for their lives, so please keep them in your thoughts and prayers.” –NBC News
According to the report, the FBI offered to assist the sheriff’s department in the manhunt for the suspect.
“This is just a sober reminder it’s a dangerous job,” said Villanueva. “Actions, words have consequence. And our job does not get any easier because people don’t like law enforcement.”
President Trump weighed in following the shooting, tweeting “Animals that must be hit hard!”
Animals that must be hit hard! https://t.co/zrOd9ZUl8o
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2020
- Paul Craig Roberts: The US & Its Constitution Have 2 Months Left
Paul Craig Roberts: The US & Its Constitution Have 2 Months Left
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 23:30Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Bob Woodward writes that Trump’s Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, and Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, spoke together about taking “collective action” to remove President Trump from office. General Mattis said Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.”
This is the same thing that the Generals and the CIA said about President John F. Kennedy.
When Generals and the CIA say that a president is unfit and dangerous, they mean he is dangerous to their budget. By “unfit” they mean he is not a reliable cold warrior who will keep hyping America’s enemies so that money keeps pouring into the military/security budget. By serving defense contractors instead of their country, generals end up very wealthy.
Both Kennedy and Trump wanted to normalize relations with Russia and to bring home US troops involved in make-war operations overseas that boost the profits of defense contractors.
To stop Kennedy they assassinated him.
To stop Trump they concocted Russiagate, Impeachgate, and a variety of wild and unsubstantiated accusations. The presstitutes repeat the various accusations as if they are absolute proven truth.
The presstitutes never investigated a single one of the false accusations.
These efforts to remove Trump did not succeed. Having pulled off numerous color revolutions in which the US has overthrown foreign governments, the tactics are now being employed against Trump. The November presidential election will not be an election. It will be a color revolution.
See, for example, here and here.
We have reached the point in the demise of our country that a simple statement of obvious truth is not believable.
As a number of carefully researched and documented books, some written by insiders, have proved conclusively, the CIA has controlled the prestige American media since 1950. The American media does not provide news. It provides the Deep State’s explanations of events. This ensures that real news does not interfere with the agenda.
The German journalst, Udo Ulfkotte, wrote a book, Bought Journalism, in which he showed that the CIA also controls the European press.
To be clear, there are two CIA organizations. One is an agency that monitors world events and endeavors to provide more or less accurate information to policymakers. The other is a covert operations agency. This agency assassinates people, including an American president, and overthrows uncooperative governments. President Truman publicly stated after he was out of office that he made a serious mistake in permitting the covert operations branch of the CIA. He said that it was an unaccountable government in inself.
President Eisehnower agreed and in his last address to the American people warned of the growing unaccountable power of the military/security complex.
President Kennedy realized the threat and said he was going “to break the CIA into a thousand pieces,” but they killed him first.
It would be easy for the CIA to kill Trump, but the “lone assassin” has been used too many times to be believable. It is easier to overthrow Trump’s reelection with false accusations as the CIA controlls the American and European media and has many Internet sites pretending to be dissident, a claim that fools insouciant Americans. Indeed, it is the leftwing that the CIA owns. The rightwing goes along because they think it is patriotic to support the military/security complex.
After the CIA overthrows Trump, they will use Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and their presstitutes to foment race war. Then the CIA will ride in on the Pale Horse, and the population will submit.
The scenario is unfolding as I write.
Very few will believe it until it happens. Even then the CIA’s ability to control explanations will keep the population in hand.
In America today, liars have more credibility than truth tellers.
- DHS Proposes Massive Expansion Of "Biometric Modality" Collection
DHS Proposes Massive Expansion Of “Biometric Modality” Collection
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 23:00Does anyone really believe America is still the land of the free?
What first seemed like a gradual slide in the federal government’s use of biometrics is quickly becoming supercharged in a post-pandemic world.
Readers may recall since 9/11, DHS, the FBI, the CIA, and other alphabet soup agencies have transformed America into a surveillance state that could be on par with China in the coming years.
Activity in DNA and biometric-gathering by the federal government is set to surge. The DHS recently announced a “notice of proposed rulemaking” that outlines the agency could enlarge its collection of biometrics data by at least 2 million submissions annually.
The 328-page draft of the new rule (found here) proposes to amend existing DHS regulations “concerning the use and collection of biometrics in the enforcement and administration of immigration laws by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”
The National Law Review highlights the key points in the forthcoming rule:
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Unless waived by DHS, any applicant, petitioner, sponsor, beneficiary, or individual filing or associated with an immigration benefit or request, including U.S. citizens, must appear for biometrics collection – regardless of age.
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There will be new biometrics modalities, including iris scans, palm prints, and voiceprints.
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DHS may require DNA results to prove the existence of a claimed genetic relationship.
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Foreign nationals who are granted immigration benefits will be subject to continued and subsequent vetting and biometric evaluation until granted U.S. citizenship.
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New forms will be produced, including the new biometrics requirements.
The DHS proposes to change the definition of the word “biometrics” to “the measurable biological (anatomical and physiological) or behavioral characteristics used for identification of an individual.”
Noted in the highlight section above, the DHS wants to add palm prints, photographs for facial recognition, voiceprints, iris images, and DNA to determine genetic similarities to its pre-existing biometric database, which include collecting fingerprints and signatures of immigrants.
The rule estimates the number of annual biometrics screenings will soar from 3.9 million to 6.07 million. The collection rate will rise from 46% to over 70%
The agency is interested in expanding its biometrics capabilities for family-based benefit requests, mostly for citizenship, immigration, refugee, and asylee relative forms.
“The rule will allow immediately for DHS, in its discretion, to request, require, or accept DNA or DNA test results, which include a partial DNA profile, for individual benefit requests requiring proof of a genetic relationship,” the notice read.
The cost of the biometrics rule over the decade could range from $3.2 billion to nearly $5 billion, all dependent on how many collections are submitted.
Could DHS’ proposed biometrics expansion prelude the agencies eventual grab of “259 million people in its biometrics database by 2022“?
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- Trump & The Global Geopolitical 'Gordian Knot'
Trump & The Global Geopolitical ‘Gordian Knot’
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 22:30Authored by Patrick Armstrong via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
I suggested that the cutting of this “Gordian Knot of entanglements” was difficult, even impossible, to accomplish from his end and that he understood that the cutting could only come from the other side. I followed up with another look the next March. I now look at my hypothesis as Trump’s first term comes to an end.
While we are no closer to knowing whether this is indeed Trump’s strategy or an unintended consequence of his behaviour, it is clear that the “Gordian knot of U.S. imperial entanglements” is under great strain.
German-American relations provide an observation point.
There are four demands the Trump Administration makes of its allies – Huawei, Iran, Nord Stream 2 and defence spending – and all four converge on Germany. Germany is one of the most important American allies; it is probably the second-most important NATO member; it is the economic engine of the European Union. Should it truly defy Washington on these issues, there would be fundamental damage to the U.S. imperium. (And, if George Friedman is correct in stating that preventing a Germany-Russia coalition is the “primordial interest” of the USA, the damage could be greater still.) And yet that is what we are looking at: on several issues Berlin is defying Washington.
Washington is determined to knock Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company, out of the running for 5G networks even though, by most accounts, it is the clear technological leader. In March Berlin was told that Washington “wouldn’t be able to keep intelligence and other information sharing at their current level” if Chinese companies participated in the country’s 5G network. As of now, Berlin has not decided one way or the other (September is apparently the decision point). London, on the other hand, which had agreed to let Huawei in, reversed its decision, it is reported, when Trump threatened to cut intelligence and trade. So one can imagine what pressures are being brought on Berlin.
Berlin was very involved in negotiating the nuclear agreement with Tehran – the JCPOA – and was rather stunned when Washington pulled out of it. German Chancellor Merkel acknowledged that there wasn’t much Europe could do about it: but added that it “must strengthen them [its capabilities] for the future“. When Washington forced the SWIFT system to disconnect from Iran, thereby blocking bank-to-bank transactions, Berlin, Paris and London devised an alternate system called INSTEX. But, despite big intentions, it has apparently been used only once – in a small medical supplies transaction in March.
Thus far, Berlin’s resistance to Washington’s diktats has not amounted to much but on the third case it has been defiant from the start. Germany has been buying hydrocarbons from the east for some time and it is significant that, throughout the Cold War, when the USSR and Germany were enemies, the supply never faltered. And the reason is not hard to understand: Berlin wants the energy and Moscow wants the money; it’s a mutual dependence. The dependence can be exaggerated: a BBC piece calculated two years ago that Germany got about 60% of its gas from Russia but that only about 20% of Germany’s energy came from gas: a total of 12%. But it is very likely that that 12% will grow in the future and Russian supply will become more important to Germany. On the other hand, while it is happy to get the business, given the limitless demand from China, Russia could give up the European market if it had to. But, at present, it remains a mutually beneficial trade.
Given the problems of gas transit through Ukraine, the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic was built and began operation in 2011. As demand and the unreliability of Ukrainian politics grew, a second undersea pipeline, Nord Stream 2, began to be constructed. It was nearing completion when Washington imposed sanctions and the Swiss company that was laying the pipe quit the job. A Russian pipe-laying ship appeared and the work continues. Meanwhile Washington redoubles its efforts to force a stop. Ostensibly Washington argues security concerns – making the not-unreasonable argument that while Germany talks about the “Russian threat” it nevertheless buys energy from Russia: which is it? dangerous or reliable? Many people, on the other hand, believe that the true motive is to compel Germany to buy LNG from the USA; or “freedom gas” as they like to call it. This passage deserves to be pondered.
LNG is significantly more expensive than pipeline gas from Russia and Norway, which are currently the two main exporters of gas to Europe. But some EU countries – chiefly Poland and the Baltic states – are ready to pay a premium in order to diversify their supplies. Bulgaria, which is currently 100% reliant on Russian gas, said it was ready to import LNG from the U.S. if the price was competitive, suggesting a $1 billion U.S. fund could be used to bring the price down. But Perry dismissed any suggestion that the U.S. government would interfere on pricing, saying it was up to the companies involved to sign export and import deals.
Freedom isn’t free, as they say.
In July the U.S. Congress added to the military funding bill an amendment expanding sanctions in connection with Nord Stream 2 to include any entity that assists the completion of the pipeline. Which brings us to the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. This extremely open-ended bill arrogates to Washington the right to 1) declare this or that country an “adversary” 2) sanction anyone or anything that deals with it, or deals with those who deal with it and so on. Eventually, virtually every entity on the planet could be subject to sanctions (except, of course, the USA itself which permits itself to buy rocket engines or oil from “adversary” Russia). In short, if you don’t freely choose to buy our “freedom gas”, we’ll force you to. The latest from U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo is: “We will do everything we can to make sure that that pipeline doesn’t threaten Europe” (the pretext of security again). Berlin has re-stated its determination to continue with it. 24 EU countries have issued a démarche to Washington protesting this attempt at extraterritorial sanctions. The convenient “poisoning” of Navalniy is being boomed as reason for Berlin to obey Washington’s diktat. This far Merkel says the two should not be linked. But the pressure will only grow.
Another of Trump’s oft-stated themes is that the U.S. is paying to defend countries that are rich enough to defend themselves. NATO agreed some years ago that its members should commit 2% of governmental spending to defence. Few have achieved this and Germany least of all – 2019’s spending was about 1.2%; the undertaking to raise it to 1.5% by 2024 will probably not be fulfilled. Presumably as a consequence, or because he imagines he’s punishing Germany for its contumacy, Trump has ordered 12,000 troops to be removed from Germany. It is significant that most Germans are pretty comfortable with that reduction; about a quarter want them all gone. Which suggests that Germans are not as enthusiastic about their connection with the USA as their governments have been and so one may speculate that a post-Merkel Chancellor might be prepared to act on this indifference and cut the ties.
Iran is on Washington’s “adversary list” and Washington is determined to break it. Having walked out of the JCPOA, Washington is now trying to get the other signatories to impose sanctions on it for allegedly breaking the deal. This ukase is proving to be another point of disagreement and Paris, London and Berlin have refused to join in this effort stating that they remain committed to the agreement; in Pompeo’s chiaroscuric universe this was “aligning themselves with the Ayatollahs“. This failure followed another at the UNSC a week earlier. Again, the knot is not severed but it is weakened as the U.S. Secretary of State comes ever closer to accusing Washington’s principal allies of being “adversaries” and they refuse obedience.
And so we can see that the Trump Administration is stamping around the room, smashing the furniture, brusquely ordering its allies to do as they’re told or else. One could hardly find a better exponent of this in-your-face style than “we lied, we cheated, we stole” Mike Pompeo. If your object were to outrage allies so much that they quit themselves, he’s ideal. Washington’s demands, stripped of the highfalutin accompanying rhetoric of freedom, are: join its sanctions against China and Iran; buy its gas; buy its weapons; if not, risk being declared “adversaries” in a sanctions war. Germany is defiant on Huawei, Iran, Nord Stream and weaponry; much of Europe is as well and Berlin’s example will have much effect on the others.
Point-blank demands to instantly fall in with Washington’s latest scheme is certainly no way to treat allies. But is this part of a clever strategy to get them to cut the “Gordian Knot of entanglements” themselves or just America-firstism stripped of politesse? Some see an intention here:
Even The Economist, that reliable indicator of the mean sea level of conventional opinion, wonders:
But it is only under President Donald Trump that America has used its powers routinely and to their full extent, by engaging in financial warfare. The results have been awe-inspiring and shocking. They have in turn prompted other countries to seek to break free of American financial hegemony.
A year ago French President Macron said Europe could no longer count on American defence. German Chancellor Merkel at first disagreed, but as Berlin’s struggles with Washington intensify, now sounds closer to Macron’s position. Just words to be sure, but evolving words.
If Trump gets a second term (the better bet at this moment, I believe) these words may become actions. At least one calculation assesses that the sanction wars have cost the EU more than Russia and very much more than the USA which has carefully exempted itself. Many Europeans must be coming to appreciate that there is more cost than gain in the relationship. (Which, of course, explains the rolling sequence of anti-Russian and anti-Chinese stories calculated to frighten them back into line.)
As the slang phrase has it, the Trump Administration is saying “my way or the highway”. The Europeans are certainly big enough to set off on the highway by themselves.
- Drunk Idiots Fly Down Highway In Tesla On Autopilot With No One In Driver's Seat
Drunk Idiots Fly Down Highway In Tesla On Autopilot With No One In Driver’s Seat
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 22:00Stunning, but sadly no longer surprising video was posted on Tik Tok this week of what appears to be three 20 something guys, indulging in alcoholic beverages while their Tesla – with no one in the driver’s seat – barrels down the highway.
It is the latest thumbing of the nose to the NHSTA, who has repeatedly failed to meaningfully address how Tesla’s Autopilot has played a role in several fatal crashes across the nation.
Video shows the three passengers flying down a highway while Tesla’s Autopilot does the driving. In the interim, they are singing along to the radio drunkenly while sipping on various kinds of alcoholic beverages. In other words, they made Tesla’s Autopilot their designated drive. According to TMZ, who posted the video, the car was moving at 60 mph.
They then took video of the incident and posted it to TikTok.
Recall, just days ago we documented the horrifying aftermath of a Tesla that veered out of control in Nanchong City, China, leaving mangled bodies strewn behind it. The video painted a disturbing scene, showing what appear to be lifeless bodies on the street in the aftermath of the event.
And back in July, a Tesla on Autopilot smashed into the back of a patrol vehicle on the side of the road near Benson, Arizona.
You can watch video of the geniuses at work here:
- Chinese Government Combines "Track & Trace" COVID-System With Social Credit Score
Chinese Government Combines “Track & Trace” COVID-System With Social Credit Score
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 21:30Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
The Communist government of China has combined its coronavirus ‘track and trace’ system with the country’s notorious social credit score.
As the Epoch Times’ Joshua Philipp explains, fears that the new COVID surveillance system would be used for “totalitarian social monitoring” are being realized in China.
“The local government of China’s Jiangsu province has launched a new social control system that combines the CCP’s health code program with the regime’s social credit system to create what they’re calling a civilization code,” Philipp reported.
The new system ranks each citizen via a “civilization score” and then places them in a category which determines whether they get priority access to services or are punished and restricted.
The new system represents an expansion of the social credit score and is being initially rolled out in the city of Suzhou and will apply to everyone over the age of 18.
CCP has launched a new #SocialControl system called “civilization code,” that combines China’s coronavirus #HealthCode app with the “social credit system” which allows the #CCP to track and trace citizens with a tighter grip.
WATCH HERE 👉 https://t.co/AtA8xajdWM pic.twitter.com/OBuM5gHD5g
— crossroads (@crossroads_josh) September 9, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Last year, we also highlighted how Chinese citizens would need to pass a facial recognition test to access the Internet in another expansion of the social credit score system.
In August 2019, the Communist state bragged about how it had prevented 2.5 million “discredited entities” from purchasing plane tickets and 90,000 people from buying high speed train tickets in the month of July alone.
As we document in the video below, the onerous social credit score system is literally designed to punish and socially ostracize dissidents who express controversial opinions.
In the age of social media deplatforming, an identical system is gradually being introduced in the west, where people who have been banned by social media networks for ‘offensive’ views are then also deplatformed by companies and banks.
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In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.
- New System In Gulf Could "Strengthen" Into Hurricane Sally; New Orleans In Crosshairs
New System In Gulf Could “Strengthen” Into Hurricane Sally; New Orleans In Crosshairs
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 21:00Days ago, we outlined the National Hurricane Center (NHC) is tracking seven systems in the Atlantic basin. At least one of those systems, now called Tropical Depression 19, is dumping heavy rain and producing gusty winds for parts of South Florida Saturday. The system is set to intensify early next week as it will traverse the Gulf of Mexico.
As soon as Saturday evening, Tropical Depression 19 could be a named storm, likely called “Sally.”
“The depression is forecast to strengthen to a hurricane early next week as it moves across the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, and there is an increasing risk of life-threatening storm surge and dangerous hurricane-force winds from southeastern Louisiana to the Alabama coast,” according to the NHC.
NHC Tropical Depression 19 1100 ET Update:
Several spaghetti models suggest the system will move into the northern Gulf Coast region and make landfall somewhere between Lousiana and the Florida Panhandle around Tuesday-Wednesday. Models are not exact and could change in the coming days.
CNN forecasts widespread rainfall could be seen from New Orleans to Panama City by Thursday of next week.
Readers may recall the 2020 hurricane season has already seen 17 named storms. The average for this time of year is around 12. The reason for a super active hurricane season is due to La Nina, which formed in August.
Four other systems are currently swirling in the Atlantic basin.
As Democrats and liberal mainstream media blame climate change for the latest string of volatile weather across the U.S. – maybe the finger should be pointed at La Nina.
- Physicist: The Entire Universe Might Be A Neural Network (Not A 'Simulation')
Physicist: The Entire Universe Might Be A Neural Network (Not A ‘Simulation’)
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 20:30Authored by Victor Tangermann via Futurism.com,
It’s not every day that we come across a paper that attempts to redefine reality.
But in a provocative preprint uploaded to arXiv this summer, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth named Vitaly Vanchurin attempts to reframe reality in a particularly eye-opening way – suggesting that we’re living inside a massive neural network that governs everything around us.
In other words, he wrote in the paper, it’s a “possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network.”
For years, physicists have attempted to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. The first posits that time is universal and absolute, while the latter argues that time is relative, linked to the fabric of space-time.
In his paper, Vanchurin argues that artificial neural networks can “exhibit approximate behaviors” of both universal theories.
Since quantum mechanics “is a remarkably successful paradigm for modeling physical phenomena on a wide range of scales,” he writes, “it is widely believed that on the most fundamental level the entire universe is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics and even gravity should somehow emerge from it.”
“We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works,” reads the paper’s discussion. “With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong.”
The concept is so bold that most physicists and machine learning experts we reached out to declined to comment on the record, citing skepticism about the paper’s conclusions. But in a Q&A with Futurism, Vanchurin leaned into the controversy — and told us more about his idea.
Futurism: Your paper argues that the universe might fundamentally be a neural network. How would you explain your reasoning to someone who didn’t know very much about neural networks or physics?
Vitaly Vanchurin: There are two ways to answer your question.
The first way is to start with a precise model of neural networks and then to study the behavior of the network in the limit of a large number of neurons. What I have shown is that equations of quantum mechanics describe pretty well the behavior of the system near equilibrium and equations of classical mechanics describes pretty well how the system further away from the equilibrium. Coincidence? May be, but as far as we know quantum and classical mechanics is exactly how the physical world works.
The second way is to start from physics. We know that quantum mechanics works pretty well on small scales and general relativity works pretty well on large scales, but so far we were not able to reconcile the two theories in a unified framework. This is known as the problem of quantum gravity. Clearly, we are missing something big, but to make matters worse we do not even know how to handle observers. This is known as the measurement problem in context of quantum mechanics and the measure problem in context of cosmology.
Then one might argue that there are not two, but three phenomena that need to be unified: quantum mechanics, general relativity and observers. 99% of physicists would tell you that quantum mechanics is the main one and everything else should somehow emerge from it, but nobody knows exactly how that can be done. In this paper I consider another possibility that a microscopic neural network is the fundamental structure and everything else, i.e. quantum mechanics, general relativity and macroscopic observers, emerges from it. So far things look rather promising.
What first gave you this idea?
First I just wanted to better understand how deep learning works and so I wrote a paper entitled “Towards a theory of machine learning”. The initial idea was to apply the methods of statistical mechanics to study the behavior of neural networks, but it turned out that in certain limits the learning (or training) dynamics of neural networks is very similar to the quantum dynamics we see in physics. At that time I was (and still is) on a sabbatical leave and decided to explore the idea that the physical world is actually a neural network. The idea is definitely crazy, but if it is crazy enough to be true? That remains to be seen.
In the paper you wrote that to prove the theory was wrong, “all that is needed is to find a physical phenomenon which cannot be described by neural networks.” What do you mean by that? Why is such a thing “easier said than done?”
Well, there are many “theories of everything” and most of them must be wrong. In my theory, everything you see around you is a neural network and so to prove it wrong all that is needed is to find a phenomenon which cannot be modeled with a neural network. But if you think about it it is a very difficult task mainly because we know so little about how the neural networks behave and how the machine learning actually works. That was why I tried to develop a theory of machine learning on the first place.
How does your research relate to quantum mechanics, and does it address the observer effect?
There are two main lines of thought the Everett’s (or many-world’s) interpretation of quantum mechanics and Bohm’s (or hidden variables) interpretation. I have nothing new to say about the many-worlds interpretation, but I think I can contribute something to the hidden variables theories. In the emergent quantum mechanics which I considered, the hidden variables are the states of the individual neurons and the trainable variables (such as bias vector and weight matrix) are quantum variables. Note that the hidden variables can be very non-local and so the Bell’s inequalities are violated. An approximated space-time locality is expected to emerge, but strictly speaking every neuron can be connected to every other neuron and so the system need not be local.
Do you mind expanding on the way this theory relates to natural selection? How does natural selection factor into the evolution of complex structures/biological cells?
What I am saying is very simple. There are structures (or subnetworks) of the microscopic neural network which are more stable and there are other structures which are less stable. The more stable structures would survive the evolution, and the less stable structure would be exterminated. On the smallest scales I expect that the natural selection should produce some very low complexity structures such as chains of neurons, but on larger scales the structures would be more complicated. I see no reason why this process should be confined to a particular length scale and so the claim is that everything that we see around us (e.g. particles, atoms, cells, observers, etc.) is the outcome of natural selection.
I was intrigued by your first email when you said you might not understand everything yourself. What did you mean by that? Were you referring to the complexity of the neural network itself, or to something more philosophical?
Yes, I only refer to the complexity of neural networks. I did not even have time to think about what could be philosophical implications of the results.
I need to ask: would this theory mean we’re living in a simulation?
No, we live in a neural network, but we might never know the difference.
- The Millennials Are Coming For The Boomers' Money: One Bank Sees Generational Conflict Breaking Out This Decade
The Millennials Are Coming For The Boomers’ Money: One Bank Sees Generational Conflict Breaking Out This Decade
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 20:00Late last week, we published the executive summary from Jim Ried’s latest must read long-term asset return study titled “Age of Disorder” in which the author makes the case that Economic cycles come and go, “but sitting above them are the wider structural super-cycles that shape everything from economies to asset prices, politics, and our general way of life” Having identified five such cycles over the last 160 years…
- The first era of globalisation (1860-1914)
- The Great Wars and the Depression (1914-1945)
- Bretton Woods and the return to a gold-based monetary system (1945-1971)
- The start of fiat money and the high-inflation era of the 1970s (1971-1980)
- The second era of globalisation (1980-2020?)
- The Age of Disorder (2020?-????)
… Reid thinks the world is on the cusp of a new era – “one that will be characterised initially by disorder.”
While there are extensive socio-economic and political implications as this new “Age of Dirsorder” replaces the current outgoing second era of globalization (touched upon here), one key aspect Reid focused on was the market (after all he is a banker), and specifically how current record high global valuations are threatened by the coming “new age”, which according to the Deutsche Bank strategist would have tremendous implications for eight major global themes from deteriorating US-China relations, to exploding global debt levels, to the coming runaway inflation and even worse wealth and income inequality, but perhaps most importantly to the coming generational conflict between the young (“poor” Milennials and Gen-Zers) and the old (i.e. rich).
Since the generational divide in not only the US but across the developed world has the potential to be even more disruptive than the record wealth gap, we will take a closer look at Reid’s observations on why the intergenerational gap has been widening in recent years and looks set to be even more of an issue in the immediate future.
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The intergenerational divide to end this decade?
Inequality is a multifaceted area, and one sub-area of disorder to emerge out of it could well be the intergenerational divide. This has been widening in recent years and looks set to be even more of an issue in the immediate future.
For now the generational divide is at relatively extreme levels. Those who’ve graduated into the labor market over the last decade have already experienced the twin shocks of the Global Financial Crisis and now the Coronavirus pandemic – the two worst economic shocks since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Young people have therefore lost out economically relative to their predecessors and are behind previous generations on issues from home ownership to student debt levels. Meanwhile, there is an increasing divide on other issues, for example in how young people have been among the most forceful in calling for action on climate change. And this is before we consider how young people will inherit the large national debt burdens that have been accumulated.a
These age divides have manifested themselves increasingly in political preferences, with more and more elections around the world taking place along generational lines.
We think this intergenerational conflict will likely come to a head over the next decade. Ageing populations across the West are exacerbating many of these existing trends. High house prices and lagging income growth for Millennials and Generation Z in a number of countries continue to create anger and resentment. And the young have every right to be aggrieved. Figure 49 shows that in the US, real median net worth by age of head (of household) has diverged markedly since the 1980s.
In the UK, the median household incomes of those born in the 1980s and 1990s aren’t doing much better than those born in the 1970s at a similar age. That’s a big difference from previous cohorts, where each tended to be noticeably better off ata given age than its predecessor.
Meanwhile, thanks to the GFC and the Covid shock, youth unemployment has already spiked up once over the last decade and looks likely to do so again, especially relative to the rest of the population.
After the GFC and the subsequent sovereign debt crisis, youth unemployment peaked above 25% in France and above 50% in Spain and Greece. In the US and UK, it hit just below and just above 20%, respectively. Though these rates fell back in the following years, the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic has thrown away this progress, and young people have once again found their career prospects harmed by circumstances out of their control. Indeed, in America, the ranks of the jobless youths are greater now than they were at their peak after the financial crisis.
This legacy is likely to be a long-lasting one, even as the economy returns to growth. The evidence shows that for those who graduate in a recession, as many college and university graduates will be doing right now, not only is it harder to get a job initially, but wages suffer for years afterwards as well. Intuitively, this is because young people will be far less picky when it comes to accepting job offers and be more likely to accept a lower-paying role than they might have done in a stronger labour market.
So young people today have had the unfortunate luck to have experienced the two largest economic crises since the Great Depression. It is clear that young people today stand some distance from where previous generations were at the same age.
In general terms, today’s young are finding themselves priced out of the housing market, living with their parents for longer, and having to defer important life stages such as marriage and children. It is little wonder that many feel as though they’ve lost out relative to previous generations at the same point.
More recently, the generational divide has manifested itself in political preferences, with the young generally on the losing side, especially in binary referendums or two-party controlled systems. Although it has long been the case that young people have tended to lean leftward, this divide along age lines has become increasingly prevalent in recent years.
Just look at two of the biggest political decisions on either side of the Atlantic, the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Both saw such a divide along age lines, to the point that a large majority of young people faced an outcome they hadn’t voted for. The graphs show that the millennial generation (around 40 today) were the pivot to whether you were more or less likely to vote for Brexit or Trump.
Of course, democracy always has a losing side. Yet it is a newer phenomenon that entire generations would conceive of themselves as the losers, and there is decisive evidence that this has widened over time. For example, look at the 25-34 year-old group in the UK and compare its support for the Conservative Party with the nationwide level. We’ve seen this in the US as well. The proportion of voters who identify as Republican or Republican-leaning has notably widened by generation over the last decade.
There is evidence that the backlash has started even if the Millennials haven’t quite had the weight of numbers. In the last couple of UK elections, the strongest support for the opposition Labour Party has been from younger voters, supporting a manifesto that included measures directly targeted at them, such as the abolition of tuition fees, or preventing rents from rising by more than inflation. Indeed, despite their defeat in the December 2019 general election – where the elder generations’ support of Brexit held sway – they did unexpectedly well back in the 2017 contest, winning 40% of the vote. Similarly in the US, Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, was propelled in part by enthusiasm among younger voters towards his left-wing policies, and in both 2016 and 2020 he was the runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination and was a favourite for a period late in the race in the latter bid.
This isn’t just a US or UK phenomenon. In continental Europe, the most popular candidate in France’s 2017 presidential election among 18-24 year olds was neither President Macron nor Marine Le Pen, but the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In Ireland’s election earlier this year, Sinn Fein received the most first-preference votes, partly because of discontent at the lack of affordable housing, thanks to strong support from younger voters. Again, getting over the line has been tough in most places as their demographic doesn’t have a majority – but returning to the French election of 2017, a small % swing in the first round easily could have led to the second-round run-off being between two extreme candidates: Le Pen and Mélenchon.
Looking forward, if this younger generation is unable to achieve its economic aspirations – particularly now, given the effects of the pandemic – why should its views on these economic issues change as the members age, as many assume? Indeed, this young demographic could soon mobilise itself into an electoral majority.
A potential disruptive reversal in power
The general assumption is that the intergenerational divide will worsen as the population ages and that this group will ensure that the self-interest of the status quo continues. However, this misses the key point that the age where the intergenerational divide begins is not static. It is likely that this age will increase over time as the average age of those left behind will continue to increase as a gap has opened up in income and wealth that is very hard to bridge naturally. As such, at some point the younger left-behind generation will exceed those that have benefited from the favourable financial conditions that have been cemented in successive recent elections. When this happens, the possibility of seismic change in policy at elections becomes more likely. We think that over the next decade, the left-behind younger population will become an increasingly powerful electoral force, especially if it continues to be left behind due to the impact of the pandemic.
Figure 56 looks at the Millennial, Generation Z and younger cohorts relative to those born prior to the Millennials in G7 countries on an unweighted aggregated population basis. We have only included those of a voting age in each year past and future. Given the UN data base works in five-year buckets, we’ve assumed those aged in the middle of the 15-20 year-old bucket as being eligible to vote.
The generations prior to the Millennials have held the upper hand, and by a sizeable majority, in recent decades. As recently as 2005 the elder group held a 497,000 vs 69,000 electoral advantage in G7 countries. By 2015 (around the time of Brexit and Trump votes) this was a still strong 442,000 vs. 167,000 advantage. However, as we approach 2030, this gap will narrow towards zero, and after that all those born after 1980 will start to dominate elections.
Assuming there won’t be a large number of Millennials that find economic life much more economically favourable as they age, this could be a turning point for society and start to change election results and thus move policy. In the US, where we can use the census to get even more granularity, 2020 looks set to be the last election where the Millennials and younger have a distinct disadvantage. The Census compilers have slightly more aggressive estimates than the UN and believe that by around 2028 they will reach voting parity in terms of numbers. It will be relatively close in 2024. For context in 2016, the advantage was 156,000 voters to 92,000 voters in favour of the elder group
Interestingly of the G7, Italy and Japan see the crossover between the two groups occurring as late as 2035-2040, which reflects their poorer relative and absolute demographics going forward. This may help explain why Japan continues to be dominated by the elderly interest groups as population growth from the Millennial generation onwards has simply not been enough to threaten the pre-1980s cohort’s dominance. It also suggests that countries like the US and the UK, where the young vs old voter dominance happens much sooner (between 2025 and 2030), won’t necessarily see the same economic trends as what Japan has seen in recent years and is likely to see going forward. The crossover in Germany and France likely occurs in the early 2030s, so even here the themes of younger voters will increasingly be felt as we move through the upcoming decade.
So the 2020s looks set to be the decade where the Millennials and those that follow them make large numerical inroads into the electoral base of the older generation. Although the intergenerational divide is likely to get worse first as they continue to be outnumbered and are left with the Covid-19 shock, it is increasingly feasible that they could usher in a seismic change in a major election within the next decade. As such, we suspect that the electoral dominance of the pre-Millennial coalition is drawing to a close, and when it turns it could have a dramatic impact on the intergenerational divide and the self-reinforcing policies and economic outcomes of the “Globalisation era”.
As a caveat, we should say that this analysis assumes equal voter turnout, which history suggests is notably lower for the young. However, this isn’t set in stone and if a movement develops that the young feel strongly about and think they can win, then voter turnout could change. Also, this analysis assumes that Millennials don’t simply inherit the attitudes and wealth of the older generation as they age and become part of the vested interest group of the older generation. Given the generational gap in home ownership, income and debt, it will be difficult for different age groups to naturally bridge the financial divide that has opened up. We should stress that many in the elder generation support alternative politics vs the majority of their own age group – so as we get closer to a 50/50 split, a change in the political direction of travel can occur anytime, with a coalition of voters.
An electoral victory for the post-Millennial generation would likely usher in a reversal of policies that have favoured those born before, say, 1980. These could include a harsher inheritance tax regime, less income protection for pensioners, more property taxes, higher top-end income taxes, higher corporate taxes and more all-round redistributive policies. The “new” generation might also be more tolerant of inflation insofar as it will erode the debt burden it is inheriting and put the pain on bond holders, which tend to have a bias towards the pensioner generation.
Even without an extreme electoral shift, as the left-behind post-Millennial generation becomes more electorally powerful, it is likely to increasingly shape the policies of more mainstream parties. So even without a seismic shift, we still may be in the process of shifting from an era where boomer-type policies were in the ascendancy to one where Millennial preferences start to have a serious impact on politics. In terms of asset prices, most assets are simply transferred from one generation to another at a market-clearing price. Unless the post-Millennial generation has a sudden income boost, the price it will be prepared or able to pay for the assets of the pre-Millennial population – as the latter wants or needs to sell – will likely be under some pressure relative to past growth, especially the stunning growth of the “Globalisation Era”.
- How To Protect Your Children From Indoctrination
How To Protect Your Children From Indoctrination
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 19:30Authored by Linnea Johnson via The Organic Prepper blog,
Do you look on with astonishment at Antifa and other extreme groups rioting and shouting “death to America?” How could all this happen? Where did all these young people come from who hate the US?
Chances are they caught this belief from our public school systems. If you live in California, it’s right in your face. Some are calling it out.
We’ve talked about why homeschooling is an excellent choice from an academic, independence, and character-building standpoint in previous articles. In this discussion, we’ll talk about protecting your children from indoctrination.
Distance learning is starting to show some of the cracks with schooling.
Reports are starting to surface of parents uncomfortable with the political patina of their children’s online classrooms. Police visited one family because a boy’s BB gun was visible behind him in an online classroom session, and the teacher reported the “gun” to the police.
Another teacher caught a glimpse of a 12-year old’s Nerf gun, and instead of asking him or the parents about it, she reported it to the sheriff. The child was accidentally suspended for a week for having a toy gun at home during a Zoom class!
One teacher expressed that he has to be more careful with his words now that parents can listen to online class sessions. Some school districts have gone so far as to ask parents to sign a disclaimer that they will not watch class sessions with their children to protect other children’s privacy in the online classroom.
Could it be that teachers, their unions, and school administrations are concerned about being exposed as rhetoric spreaders in the classroom?
Have we forgotten our children are our responsibility?
Rearing them, teaching them, caring for them, and loving them is our responsibility. In this country, it seems we have abdicated that responsibility and ceded it over to the state. We believe the government owes our children free education, free medical care, and even free meals. I don’t know about you, but I suspect there is a string attached when I hear something is free. That string is the ability to mold our children’s minds.
I’m not comfortable with people I don’t know taking full responsibility for my children’s care, their thoughts, and their beliefs. Don’t we suspect that this current civil unrest was born in the classroom some years ago? While “it takes a village” has a nice familial ring to it, do we want the state to be that village?
Do we want our children to have our values or someone else’s?
Infuse into your home education a worldview rooted in critical thinking and morality, whether it be the Principle Approach, or an education rich in the study of the US constitution and western philosophy, or Socratic reasoning, or a faith-based curriculum.
If you’re a person of faith, you will undoubtedly want your children to share your faith and not that of a secular system. Teach your children how to think and help them to develop good character.
I know many teachers who take their jobs seriously, who go to work faithfully every day and try to do a good job. The best of them end up being frustrated by a system that doesn’t support them and is heavily influenced by the teacher’s unions and political correctness. They don’t want to be responsible for both their children and yours. They want to educate your children in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Still, their latitude in teaching has been severely limited by common core standards, teaching to the test, and political correctness.
Their job performance is now dependent upon how much your children learn from the required curriculum and how well they can perform on a standardized test. Children spend countless hours preparing for these tests that show only memorized information regurgitated onto the bubble-filled page. Do we want children who can memorize or do we want critical thinkers?
Students are encouraged, “get a good night’s sleep, and eat a good breakfast” on test days, as if this is not important on every other school day.
The teacher’s ability to advance to the next performance level or pay grade depends on your child’s test performance. That’s a lot of pressure for both the teacher and your child. Don’t we want our kids to be able to read, write, and do the math, and when they’ve learned that, to be able to think critically?
As a parent, you have tremendous influence and responsibility
You create an atmosphere of helping your children understand and make sense of the world around them by just listening and having a conversation. Could you do that over breakfast? How about around the dinner table?
If you don’t have a meal together as a family, start now. It’s a time to reconnect with each other, discuss the day’s events, or sort out difficulties someone is having. Mealtime is a time when the family knows everyone will listen to each other.
I’ve seen variations on the family meal. Some families discuss the events of the day. Others will pose a question and ask everyone’s opinion before the parent gives his/her view. Others recite memorized poetry or Bible verses, and others use the time to pray. Mealtime can become a sacred time – a time for the family to lift one another, work through difficulties, and talk about what was essential to each one.
We didn’t realize how important mealtime was until my son had a group of friends over. When it was dinnertime, my son called them to the table. They said they’d come in to eat later. My son explained that we all eat together in our house. Reluctantly, they all came in to eat. At the end of the meal, my son’s friends said they enjoyed eating together. The only time they did that in their homes was during the holidays. I think they wished their own families did the same.
You have the power to create a safe and comforting place in your home at mealtime, not just for your children but also for their friends. Even if the food is simple, or God forbid, scarce, don’t discard the opportunity to reconnect.
What about homeschooling?
The decision of whether to homeschool – or even if they’re qualified to do so – has been a difficult one for many parents. I’ve read that parents are concerned about the cost of homeschooling, hiring a tutor or a teacher for their micro-school or learning pod of children. They are desperate to keep working and earning to pay someone else to educate their children and maintain their same lifestyle.
If you can afford to hire a teacher, even part-time, to educate your and your friend’s kids in a one-room schoolhouse in your converted garage, more power to you. Many don’t have that financial flexibility to hire someone else to teach.
My advice to you would be to join forces with other parents, share the load, learn to teach your children, and teach them to learn from you. Here are some tips to help you do so.
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Be flexible. Some parents may be able to teach during part of the day, and some may be available for tutoring at night. Another parent may teach archery, bushcraft skills, gardening, food preservation, or backpacking on the weekend.
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Be creative. Pull together something that works for you and the other families. A kitchen table is all you need.
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Divide the work fairly. I belonged to a babysitting co-op, and we created laminated cards to exchange babysitting services. One card for one hour of babysitting for up to two children was the baseline. We all started with the same number of cards and exchanged and received them as we used and provided babysitting to the other co-op members. Parent educators could design a similar system—one card per adult for two hours of teaching for up to four children.
Using an established system, you could help one another in other ways. Perhaps one family gardens, another knows how to do car maintenance, another has an abundance of chicken eggs, and another has skills in the medical field.
Could you exchange what you have or know for what another family has or knows? Could you save money by exchanging for needs?
Think about it because this kind of system could help you navigate not only homeschooling, but also a collapse in the supply chain, rapid inflationary pressures on food or medicine, or securing neighborhoods from civil unrest.
Why do I push homeschooling?
Homeschooling can form the baseline for all other thought processes. Homeschooling creates solid values in your children, supporting one another through thick and thin, and finding others who are like-minded. Homeschooling can be your lifeline, not just for your children, but also for your entire family. It’s also the best way I know to have a stable and fulfilling relationship with your grown children.
Homeschooling is just part of a mindset that is undergirded by a belief in self-sufficiency. And by self-sufficiency, I don’t necessarily mean going it all alone. I mean figuring out a way to make it a win-win for others with a similar mindset to you and getting what both you and they need. Some people find a group of like-minded people in a church, within your own family, and others find them on a blog like this. Find your people and figure out a way to help one another, not just in homeschooling, but also in doing life together.
I used to say it was time to leave this country if homeschooling was outlawed because I believed that was the final step in indoctrination and in limiting our freedom. While it is not outlawed, it may become more and more regulated. I urge you to take this time to explore your options, to understand what you want for your family’s future, and to take action now to achieve that.
I believe we have a window of opportunity that may close in the years ahead. Learn to protect your children from the indoctrination of others who don’t have their best interests in mind.
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- Former Thiel Macro Head Warns "China Is A Legitimate Threat" To Dollar's Reserve Status
Former Thiel Macro Head Warns “China Is A Legitimate Threat” To Dollar’s Reserve Status
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 19:00Featured in this week’s episode of MacroVoices is Mike Green, portfolio manager at Logica Capital, which he joined in January 2020 after serving as portfolio manager for Thiel Capital, the investment firm that manages the Peter Thiel’s private equity, which is currently led by managing director Eric Weinstein.
Fresh off an appearance with Grant Williams and Bill Fleckenstein in a series of podcasts discussing the US equity market “Endgame”, Green spent a solid slice of the interview with MV’s Erik Townsend discussing the long-term ramifications of the Fed’s historically accommodative monetary policy, and what’s starting to seem like to an inexorable slide into MMT.
But Green’s research doesn’t focus so much on the actions of the central bank, but on investors’ reaction to central banks’ money printing. There’s still a mechanism for how capital filters into the financial markets. What is it?
As Green explains early in the interview, passive investing has transformed the thought process behind investing decisions to one where fund managers running these passive funds aren’t basing their buying on fundamentals, or anything, really, other than the net flow of capital into, or out of, the fund.
When you move to a passive framework it becomes rules literally as simple as: Did you give me cash? If so then buy; and in reverse, did you ask for cash? If so then sell, with no consideration for the underlying fundamentals or the economic backdrop in which the events are occurring. That change and the reduction in cash that those funds hold versus traditional vehicles in our analysis is actually responsible for the vast majority of the price increase that we’ve seen relative to the fundamentals. Absolutely, there was an improvement after 2009 as the global financial crisis came to an end that supported recovery in asset prices and certainly activities like corporate share buybacks have contributed as others have noted. But by far the dominant feature appears to be this dynamic of passive investing.
Robinhood traders and their growing sway in the market (as their trades are front-rum and amplified by HFT firms that pay Robinhood, Schwab etc for order flow (an entirely new business model for a discount electronic brokerage)have been a hallmark of investing in 2020. Green acknowledges that corporate buybacks also play an important role.
One of the most important questions on investors minds, now that we know that much of this summer’s wild rally in the Nasdaq was driven by SoftBank’s call buying scheme, is what do we have to look forward to in the coming months? Will we see more tumult heading into the election.
It’s important to remember, since we’re talking about the impact of flows on asset prices, that we’re 40+ days into a fiscal cliff. One of the issues that Green discusses in the interview is whether the Fed’s post-coronavirus corporate bond buying, and other aspects of its stimulus program, impacted the real economy. Green says his research shows the impact was minimal.
Mike: Well, so in simple terms, there’s nobody who’s right or wrong until history tells us what’s the right answer. So, we have our view on that, there is obviously an impact from QE, there is a when the Fed goes out and expands its balance sheet in particular if it is using the expansion of that balance sheet to purchase assets from the private sector. It’s doing two things, one is it’s raising the price of those assets because they become protected to the downside effectively or abrogating the left tail, you’re also in some situations forcing people to find alternate uses of that capital.
So if I buy a corporate bond from a hedge fund they now have cash that they have to deploy and potentially have more cash than it was marked on their book or the way they were treating it, if they had had to sell it to third party into an illiquid market, right? So those dynamics, absolutely create stimulus and absolutely support asset prices. The question is, does that actually flow through in any meaningful way into economic activity? And we’re not seeing any meaningful evidence of that.
Among other things if we look at the pace of growth associated with those dynamics; we don’t see an awful lot of evidence of it. We’re we see market based measures, like inflation expectations as proxied by TIPs, those tend to show the sort of recovery that people would refer to, but there’s an alternate explanation for that that’s embedded in terms of how those are calculated tips themselves have a premium associated with volatility in one form or another.
So, I’m skeptical that it does what people think it does on the MMT front, I completely agree that is growing in importance and credibility, we have not yet meaningfully seen the impact of that. The supports that we’ve seen in terms of a variant of universal basic income for those who are on unemployment was a very brief and fleeting experience that we’ve seen for give or take four months in the United States and in some other geographies to a lesser measure. But we’re a long way away from a world in which everybody is receiving a significant guaranteed income from the government and the government has almost no considerations for how that actually plays through. So, if that MMT world were actually in place, I would expect that we would have seen a much more aggressive expansion of corporate profits of household incomes, etc., and the evidence is weak at this stage that’s in play.
With many newly minted traders pulling money from their brokerage accounts, following Green’s logic, could help exacerbate a selloff in markets if there’s no new money coming in. And with more than 800,000 Americans still filing for unemployment benefits every week, without more federal money, it’s fair to suspect that we could see a reversal.
Green and Erik Townsend, his interviewer, traversed several other topics, including the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, and whether it’s status is being threatened. Like Green points out, the US’s decision to increasingly use the dollar’s status as a cudgel against geopolitical rivals is ratcheting up the incentive for the world to find an alternative.
Mike: So, I think your observation that there is no alternative is probably the right one and there are always risks to the replacement of the reserve currency. But again, it tends to be the function of a violent shift and so the transition from the British Pound to the US Dollar was a result of the aftermath of World War One where the British were forced to borrow in large size from the Americans and ultimately, that meant that the supply of Pounds to the global regime was far greater than could be maintained.
And simultaneously, the UK tried to move back to the gold standard levels which created inappropriately tight monetary policy, etc. That type of transition of course can occur if there’s an event of that type of magnitude that changes the US status in the world but that’s hard to achieve. I mean, it would require a legitimate repudiation of the dynamics of the Pax Americana where it became clear that the US was no longer able to enforce property rights or claims in regions around the world. We still are a long way away from that, while there are potential rivals in the form of a unified Europe, which took its strongest form and under the Euro has created its own challenges.
Also, you have to consider China as a somewhat legitimate threat to that dynamic, they’re just far from clear replacements. And if anything, while people talk about the loss of reserve currency status, the US share of global trade when properly measured by looking across regions, not necessarily states has continued to rise, it’s become more dominant, not less dominant. Now, in terms of the incentive structure that you refer to the US has also become much more aggressive in terms of using or weaponizing the Dollar, and that does create incentives for people to respond. But it’s very difficult to openly mount a challenge to the global hegemon, it would require an overt act that would have significantly negative impacts on most of the countries that are talking about this, which by and large are running current account surpluses which means that they are beholden to the US to buy their goods and services. That’s just it’s gonna be really, really hard to replace that.
Listen to the interview in its entirety below:
- A Guide To Avoiding 'The Road To Serfdom': David Goggins Versus FA Hayek
A Guide To Avoiding ‘The Road To Serfdom’: David Goggins Versus FA Hayek
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 18:30Authored by J.Kim via The SK Wealth Academy,
As far as the provision of a much better narrative to understand what is happening all around the world today, I always thought that FA Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom provided much more insight into conditions of human behavior that have allowed the parasitic ruling class to instill their New World Order so easily versus George Orwell’s (Eric Blair) much more well-known novel, 1984. To that end I am going to review what I feel to be the most enlightening passages in The Road to Serfdom and how it applies so clearly to today’s economic lockdowns and advancements on the road to financial slavery deployed by the parasitic ruling class, even though Hayek published this book in 1944.
Though many people that have read The Road to Serfdom, may not at first, see the comparison, there are definite parallels in the way of thinking between FA Hayek and modern day warrior, David Goggins.
For those of you that do not know who David Goggins is, he is an ex-Navy SEAL that once weighed more than 300 pounds and is now an extreme endurance athlete. Many are put off by Goggins’s incessant cussing in his messages, but one should not allow the raw blunt impact of his message to distract from the importance of the message itself, which is acceptance of accountability and personal responsibility for one’s life and the type of world we create.
“It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative programme, on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task…It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses.”
– FA Hayek
“There’s great power in adversity. If you’re a victim of any kind, make sure you use that sh*t to become successful. Don’t look for revenge. Look for the f**king reckoning.”
– David Goggins
This is such a transparent ploy that has been used for centuries by the ruling parasitic class, but given the dumbing down of generations through schooling designed to strip young adults of self-reliance, independent, original thought, and any modicum of critical thinking skills, it is unfortunately still necessary to review this favorite tactic of the parasitic class. It is by deployment of this tactic that they have been able to program human transformation into uncritical shells of human flesh and bone with nary any frontal lobe functioning and nearly pure amygdala functioning. In addition, thanks to the meteoric rise of the daily adoption and use of dumbing-down social media apps, the parasitic ruling class has been able to recruit the common citizen into vessels of the State, driven by hatred and fear, that police one another and have become nannies on behalf of the State, but nannies of the worst possible kind – the ones that serve as eyes and ears for the State to help it enforce draconian, liberty-stripping laws. These non-cerebrum exercising excuses for human beings that scream at everyone that does not comply with non-scientific State mandated martial law like orders mandated by politicians during covid19 lockdowns, for example, would be much more effective in increasing the collective health of their communities if they tunneled their screaming behaviors, David Goggin’s style, at every obese person to stop eating sugar-laden and non-nutritious food, immediately go on a high-nutrition diet instead, and to encourage lazy people to start a daily fitness regimen.
“Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.”
– FA Hayek
“My biggest fear was f**king dying that 300 pound man, never knowing that I could be who I am today. A lot of us are wasteful. We’re wasteful of who we are in life.”
– David Goggins
I don’t believe this to be a new development, even over the course of the last seventy-seven years between the time Hayek wrote this statement and today. Hayek references the need of every individual to experience as many things as possible, to take accountability for self-reliance and for self-discovery to gain adequate empirical evidence before making life changing decisions. This conclusion has been true since the beginning of humanity. Unfortunately, the number of human beings engaging in such behavior in the modern world has greatly eroded over the last century as the ruling class has been very diligent to move everyone towards a hive-like mentality that was clearly evident to me, even many years ago at the alleged upper echelons of US academia at Ivy League universities during the time I was a student. Today, rare is the enlightened human being that displays an intellectual process of using independent criteria to arrive at independent conclusions not swayed by consensual public thought that came to such conclusions via a rigorous process of exposition.
Rare is the human being that holds a dissenting opinion that cannot be intimidated and swayed into adopting the pre-determined conclusions of the ruling class decision makers that they have injected into the hive mind of society regarding a multitude of issues including finance and money, education, nutrition, exercise, science and politics. Rare is the human being that has a belief system that has been formed through empirical experiences and not as a result of ruling class dictates and mandates (we simply need to only observe the beliefs of citizens in nations that have deployed methodologies of covid19 eradication that exist on opposite sides of the spectrum and observe the belief held by 99% of the citizens in these differing nations, regardless of who is right and who is wrong, that their beliefs are right and everyone else’s beliefs are wrong, to understand the lack of independent thought and State narratives that control most people’s minds).
“Few people ever have an abundance of choice of occupation. But what matters is that we have some choice, that we are not absolutely tied to a job which has been chosen for us, and that if one position becomes intolerable, or if we set our heart on another, there is always a way for the able, at some sacrifice, to achieve his goal.”
– FA Hayek
“That internal voice been talking to me. Talking about, Oh man, you’re tired. Looking at my shoes about thirty minutes before I put the muthaf**kers on. Pushing back the time that I go out to go run. So I decided to tape record myself. That internal voice I put on tape sounded like a straight bitch when I listened to that muthaf**ker. So if you have a hard time out there, tape yourself. Listen to what kind of bitch you’re being.”
– David Goggins
This is probably the passage from The Road to Serfdom that is the most dated since Hayek published this passage in 1944. The idea of high school kids in America and South Korea aspiring to become social media influencers as their top career choice, even if one explained social media to Hayek back then, would still likely have resulted in expressed incomprehension regarding why anyone would ever want to perform such a job as his or her major source of income. Because of technological advancement between 1944 and 2020, nearly everyone in society today that is of the middle class sector has unlimited occupational choices from engineer, architect, coder, internet security consultant, cryptocurrency developer and physicist if scientifically and mathematically inclined, to farmer, plumber, and online import/export entrepreneur if not, and to a multitude of occupations that fall somewhere between these two areas on the spectrum of choices. Today, young adults, due to a completely broken academic system, are rarely taught to consider the social impact of a career but almost exclusively trained to only consider the highest paying occupations, regardless if they have a net negative impact on society (i.e. many banking and finance jobs) and regardless of the person’s aptitude or even fondness for a job. Consequently, the unhappiness of society from confined career options is often completely largely self-imposed.
“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable…it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked.”
– FA Hayek
“As human beings, it is still our responsibility to hold ourselves accountable regardless of what is going on in the world around us. When times are hard and you are mentally or physically exhausted and feel like you have nothing left and all you want to do is quit, that’s when you find out who you are.”
– David Goggins
In these musings, Hayek summed up the role of private corporations that have superseded the power of State governments in today’s world. The authorities whom Hayek references, that “direct the whole economic system of the country” that prevent anyone from living a life of freedom, of course, are Central Bankers. In fact, a study conducted by complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich to determine the top 50 global companies with the highest level of influence over the global economy identified every one of these top fifty companies as banking corporations or financial services companies with the exception of two, one a pharmaceutical company and the other, an oil company. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology systems theorists conclusions would suggest that our global economy is extremely concentrated, non-competitive, and very monopolistic with little freedom of choice.
“The great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.”
– FA Hayek
Never has this statement been more apropos. Though there is nearly an inverse relationship between covid virus mortality rates and populations all around the world in which wearing facemasks is mandated, even among different cities within the same nations that enforce different facemask wearing policies, citizens and police officers with a horrifyingly inadequate understanding of science have ignorantly screamed at and physically assaulted people that have exercised their right not to wear a mask because their understanding of science is far superior to their understanding. Of course, no scientific evidence yet exists that the reason mortality rates are much lower from covid19 in cities and nations in which the majority of citizens have not worn face masks is because mask wearing increases vulnerability to adverse reactions to the virus, even though common sense tells us that face masking increases anxiety and lessens physical exercise, both of which weaken immune systems. However, more easily provable explanations are that viruses cross mucus barriers like the eyes and that people that wear masks touch their face masks often, so consequently mask wearing is only fractionally as effective in stopping viral transmission as most people believe, and likely only slows transmission rates down which only delays infections but never prevents them. In other words, nature finds a way and mask wearing has been scientifically proven to have very low efficacy, if any at all, in stopping the spread of the virus, other than slowing the rate at which it spreads, and because of this, mandating mask wearing to stop viral spread has zero basis in scientific evidence that is readily acknowledgeable by comparing rates of viral infection and death in cities and nations that have mandated mask wearing and those that have not.
However, the ruling class wants everyone to bow down to them as if they are not kings and queens but as if they are gods, and due to the dumbing down of billions in classrooms of institutional academics, we no longer realize that 12M, 80M, or 330M citizens collectively (depending upon your city’s or nation’s population) can easily overpower the mandates of a few dozen people in every single nation in the world and can easily force such sinister people that never act in the best interests of their citizens, but only out of a bloodthirst for power, out of their positions of power. However, I definitely disagree with Hayek’s statement that “In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority”. Freedom of thought is of the utmost experience to every single person in every society and is a direct determinant of whether one lives a life worth living or a completely forgettable life.
We are all born into pre-constructed paradigms, including our monetary, educational and vocational platforms that because they are the constructs to which we are introduced from our very first day of life, the vast majority of us fail to ever question as to whether they are the constructs by which we should live our lives. Therefore, in the absence of freedom of thought, we automatically close off 99% of life’s options to ourselves, as I discussed in great detail here (if you enjoyed the show Mr. Robot, you will enjoy this podcast).
“To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behaviour as individuals within the group.”
– FA Hayek
“Life is about improvise, adapt and overcoming every situation that is in front of you. A lot of people hate that message…Continue finding your best self. If you don’t like that message this is not the place to be. I’m about people trying to find the best they have. Not making excuses. Overcoming any and all obstacles.”
– David Goggins
This is a particularly insightful statement regarding the endless politicizing of numerous issues today that keep our behaviors and thoughts aligned with a group instead of aligned with truth and our own personal ethics and morality. This is a particularly interesting observation, provided in 1944, given that the politicizing of information among different regions of the world became readily apparent to me after I left the United States and lived in multiple nations. For example, with the subject of sound money, if a person was born, raised and attended school in North America, most people from this subset of global citizens will likely dismiss the need to ever own a single ounce of physical gold and silver as a wealth preservation strategy against deliberate Central Banker destruction of the US dollar and all other global fiat currencies. In fact, not only is it near impossible to convince someone that attended school in America of the necessity to buy physical gold and silver, it is near impossible to even convince them of the self-evident truth of the latter part of my statement, as they will incessantly and quite wrongly argue that without Central Bankers possessing a monopoly on monetary creation in a nation, that there would be no stability in the economy and there would be pure chaos, an argument that is the exact opposite of reality.
Trust me, I’ve spoken to literally dozens of American expats that live in Asia that have laughed when I’ve told them that this single decision will save their financial lives. Their response that the US dollar will remain king as long as they are alive is extremely revealing, as many of these expats have even been living in Asia for a long time, and even exposure to Asian culture in which gold has always been viewed as money for centuries of time is insufficient to convince these expats to reconsider any belief that was hard wired into their system from their time spent in America. In addition, to address a very relevant topic today, beliefs about the severity of the covid19 virus have been completely severed from reality, science and facts in America and completely bifurcated based upon political leanings.
Republicans that support US President Donald Trump will stated that massive destruction of the US economy is not a consequence of the virus itself, but the direct consequence of economic lockdowns enforced as a response to the virus that were completely unnecessary. All scientific evidence, from states in the US that never locked down like South Dakota, to nations overseas that either only imposed minimal restraints on freedom that were abolished quickly or never locked down at all, in comparison to the US, like Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland, heavily suggest that this is the truth. However, Democrats that hate President Trump will blame the entire economic mess, ushered in by economic lockdowns and enforced by State governors and city mayors in America not on the lockdown mandates that brought businesses in many cities and States to a complete halt, but on the inaction of US President Trump to act quickly enough in enforcing draconian nationwide lockdowns in all fifty states that mirrored China’s actions, even though the vast majority of all scientific and factual evidence points to economic lockdowns as an unnecessary and critical over-reaction to the virus that only made the economic plight and suffering of citizens unnecessarily tragic.
Again, on this point, living in Asia, since there is no politicizing of the issue, people only argue propaganda versus facts, and though the divisions and herd mentality are quite strong across these lines, there is no herd mentality of adopting and defending propaganda due to defense of a political party. Thus, hive minds still develop in Asian nations, but for different reasons. To drive this point home, let me provide a hypothetical scenario that very closely mirrors the comparable process by which well over 99% of people that defend State enforced lockdowns arrived at their heavily vocalized positions. Imagine a hypothetical nation in which State leaders made a citizen test mandatory and required all citizens to adequately explain the relationship between gas pressure and volume at constant temperature. All State leaders, from mayors to governors to heads of police then engaged in a campaign and informed all people that gas pressure rises as volume expands at constant temperature, using mass media and shouting such information over megaphones perched atop vans driven throughout cities 24 hours a day. Just to ensure that there would be constant uniformity in this incorrect belief among all citizens, the State heads hired prominent scientists to spread this lie, because after all, they knew their citizens would be too dumb to realize that some scientists will lie and that wearing a white lab coat shouldn’t make them infallible in the eyes of their citizens. Then, 99% of people in society, with zero knowledge of physics and no initiative to discover on their own that all scientific evidence disputes the widely distributed information, answered that gas pressure decreases at constant temperature as container volume expands, despite the fact that the exact opposite is true – gas pressure decreases as container volume increases at constant temperature, and vice versa. However, the truth has no consequence on citizen belief, as all citizens have been mandated to believe this lie in order to remain a citizen, and all citizens comply and yell at anyone that informs them that their belief is not true. This is basically the exact process that people all over the world have adopted in their beliefs about the necessity of economic lockdowns, the effectiveness of mask wearing in lowering mortality rates of the virus, and the danger of covid19. Congratulations humanity on being the dumbest, most uneducated generation in human history that consistently quarrel with others regarding topics about which you know absolutely nothing.
“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now – independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperate with one’s neighbors – are essentially those on which the ideals of an individualist society rests. Collectivism…has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.”
– FA Hayek
“Many of the trials in my life ended in failure/ Ended in self-doubt and self-pity and led me absolutely nowhere. It is important to assess the situation that you are currently in and figure out how you can overcome. In these unprecedented times, it is easy to run that bath and soak in self-pity. Once you get going down that path, it is hard to return to reality. Make sure the conversation you are having with yourself is a positive one. One that keeps you focused and disciplined.”
– David Goggins
Again, Hayek’s writings on this subject more than three-quarters of a century ago show remarkable insight for how the development of technology would lead to the spread of collectivism into every corner of planet Earth and the unwillingness of large majorities of civilians in every nation to speak out against what they know is propaganda. I’ve met dozens of people over the years that approached me, introduced themselves to me, and told me that they viewed and listened to the videos I’ve posted on my YouTube channels since 2008. When I’ve met strangers that told me this, because I immediately know that they liked the content they’ve viewed, I’ve asked nearly every single one, “Have you liked and commented on my videos?” To a person, almost every single one answered, “No.” When I probed further and asked why they had not commented or even “liked” any of my videos, they all provided some iteration of the same answer that they didn’t want their government tracking them as they felt that any type of footprint they left on my videos, even just “liking” it, would have perhaps put them on a government black list for future monitoring. To begin, I doubt these beliefs were true, and I was shocked to have literally met more than a dozen people that all stated these same beliefs. Number two, even if they were true, living one’s life in a constant state of fear is not the way to live life. These anecdotal findings unfortunately support the fact that the parasitic ruling class is winning their psychological war against us, as it aptly illustrated Hayek’s conclusion that “the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority” is all too rapidly disappearing from society. If behaving morally and courageously will endanger one’s own personal interests, most people today are likely to bend to the wishes of the authorities, even if they are morally opposed to them. We need more people like David Goggins in this world that are not only willing to stand up for their convictions, but that have the courage to perpetually yell them from the top of mountains.
“Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people. The basis of unfavorable comparisons with elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions–all will be suppressed. There is consequently no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced.”
– FA Hayek
Given that F.A. Hayek made these observations about members of society in 1944, he likely would be horrified about how much greater State control over the minds of humanity has become in 2020 versus the era in which he lived, as it undoubtedly has risen at an exponential rate since he was alive. In 2019, Pew Research surveys revealed that 55% of U.S. adults sourced their news from social media either “often” or “sometimes”. In the UK, an Ofcom study backed the Pew survey results and determined that about half of all news sourced in the UK came from social media platforms. Of course, different studies deliver slightly different results, but all within the same ballpark. For example, a study conducted by Statista of a more general nature that merely asked for a “yes” or “no” response to whether or not individuals used social media as a source of news revealed a 48% affirmative response among Americans. However, for some nations in South America, Africa and Asia, this percentage soared to 70% and higher, illustrating the potential influence of social media to shape people’s beliefs, whether right or wrong.
Consequently, it’s no wonder in the US, that the ruling class uses social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to shape beliefs and manufacture consent about polarizing issues while they work with the largest internet search engine in the world, Google, to develop their algorithms to return search results with the intent on also engineering beliefs that benefit their continued rule. Incredibly, many people still exist today that are so naïve that their first response when they want to find an answer to a question is “Google it”, as if such behavior will always produce a truthful answer to their questions when in fact, depending upon the political nature of the question being asked, may provide answers that are the opposite of the truth. Interestingly enough, to physical gold owners I’ve spoken to about this topic, nearly all of them are aware that Google’s search engine cannot be trusted to return truthful answers about many subjects, especially topics about politics, war, money and finance. On the opposite side of the spectrum, for every person that sources Google as their “Bible” of truth for all questions, I have yet to find one that owns a single ounce of physical gold and silver. I’m sure many more factors produce this distinct anecdotal demarcation between Google and non-Google users, but this is an interesting observation nonetheless.
“It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced….Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken public support….When the doubt or fear expressed concerns not the success of a particular enterprise but of the whole social plan, it must be treated even more as sabotage.”
– FA Hayek
“One thing you have to learn early in life…You can’t care what anybody thinks about you. If I cared what people thought about me, you think I’d be yelling out here, doing 105-pound ruck, talking sh*t…Don’t ever worry about anybody and what the f**k they think about you. You do that, I guarantee you, your life will be in shambles. You will become the biggest bitch of all time.”
– David Goggins
Since no social media existed in 1944, FA Hayek could not have foreseen, even in his wildest visions, censure of independent thought by mechanisms of demonetization, shadow banning, and blatant censorship of all posted social media thought that dissents with the narratives of the ruling class.
Conclusion
There is a way out of this conundrum and it does not involve violence. However it involves us utilizing the power of the collective. Of course, the whole purpose of the unnecessary economic lockdowns enforced by the parasitic class upon us worldwide is to distance us from one another, to destroy our humanity and raise our anxiety levels as we shelter at home alone, and to divide us and turn us against one another. However, for those that recognize this parasitic mission and have not succumbed to it by yelling at people on the streets that are not wearing a face mask or in grocery stores, the power of the collective is readily apparent by observing the much different outcomes in Australia and Spain to police attempting to arrest a peaceful citizen for not wearing a face mask. In Australia, people stood idly by and watched a cop choke a young woman and throw here violently to the ground for not wearing a mask, whereas in Spain, not only did people unite and surround cops that tried to arrest a woman for not wearing a mask and demanded that they let her go, they also took off their own masks in solidarity with her and forced the cops to consider the inhumanity and stupidity of their ignorant, unconstitutional behavior. And in doing so, there was no violence, no one was hurt, and the citizens won their battle against tyranny as the cops walked away without arresting the woman the crowd united to protect. The peaceful way to win our war against tyranny is to start winning small battles against tyranny as the good citizens of Spain recently accomplished, and to educate every single person you know and encounter – friends, neighbors, work colleagues, families – about the topics in this article. In one of my recent podcasts, I spoke about the necessity of all of us to exhibit courage during these dark times and to stop acting like snowflakes that melt at the slightest signs of pressure and adversity but to be willing to make sacrifices in our lives to support one another and to hunker down for the long war against tyranny. For those of us already engaged in the struggle, since we are not all born with the blood of revolutionaries coursing through our veins, some of us are better equipped to handle this struggle versus others. However, the one thing we can 100% control is how heavy this burden is and will be for everyone involved in this struggle. There is zero doubt that every person that unites with this struggle for the betterment of humanity will ease the current burden of every single person involved in the struggle right now.
Furthermore, because institutional schooling and mass media advertising falsely teaches us to be selfish, narcissistic and define our success and self-worth solely based upon our accumulation of material wealth, this false goal also divides us and destroys our humanity. The number one reason people are not willing to take up a struggle that will provide a better world is because they worry about how openly embracing the struggle against the 1% will cause them to suffer losses in their financial life. The reason they view this struggle so wrongly is because they only view the struggle through the lens of material loss and not through spiritual gain. When I first started publicly speaking about the manipulation of gold prices by bankers in the New York gold futures markets in and around 2008, no gold analysts except the good people at Gata.org stood in solidarity, very likely because they were afraid that by speaking power to truth, they would lose business and revenues. And while this is true, they don’t look at the spiritual gain that enhances their lives that comes from choosing what is right over what is financially convenient but morally wrong. While it is true that speaking power to truth eventually cost me everything, business wise, because my actions caused a series of attacks against my business that eventually permanently shut it down, had this not happened and I only viewed these events through the singular lens of money, which is the perspective adopted by most people, I would not have seen the opportunity of other doors that opened that allowed me to build something much bigger that gave me a much greater purpose in life, my soon-to-be launched venture of a complete 20-course online academy, skwealthacademy. Furthermore, building this new venture also put me in touch with a solid community of patrons, including honorable new people (big up to TJ), reconnected me with honorable former clients (big up to SG) and put me back in touch with great old friends (CC) with whom I should have never lost touch. Building a community of solid people that I can count on in the difficult times ahead and that I can lend my support to as well is worth a thousand times the price I surrendered of losing my old business.
As I stated, participation in the struggle will require sacrifices, even potential sacrifices that may not be realized. By standing together instead of falling apart against an exhibition of tyranny in Spain, the people won. But this would not have happened if many among the crowd were not willing to go to jail themselves to show support for the woman being unjustly arrested by the police. They were willing to make this sacrifice, even though they ultimately did not have to pay this price. So we must all be willing to make such sacrifices and make that mental commitment today if we are to regain our freedom and derail the parasitic ruling class’s creation of the road to serfdom.
Send everyone you know to this site to read this article or if they don’t like reading, to watch the video that will soon be posted on my YouTube channel about this same topic. Ask them to discuss this topic with everyone they know. The peaceful way out is through education. The more people that become aware of and can easily recognize the methods used by the ruling class to separate us through fear and compliance, the easier it will be for all of us to neutralize their fear-mongering, humanity-stripping mandates through cooperation, unity and love. Rulers that say I would rather have people fear me than love me state this because (1) fear gives them more control over people than love; and (2) they are inherently cowardly in every fiber and bone in their body. However, the way for us to defeat this tactic, is to unite and to spread love because ultimately the power of love is stronger than the power of fear. If you are tired of people in your community fighting you can no longer be a bystander, an onlooker, someone that is afraid to speak up or post comments online. You must always stand up and speak out for what is right and you must always assume your responsibility to educate others in your community about these matters. If you don’t assume any of these responsibilities then you must acknowledge the role you play in the downfall of your community.
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- Fighter Pilot Who Chased UFO Said Object Committed "Act Of War"
Fighter Pilot Who Chased UFO Said Object Committed “Act Of War”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 18:00Readers may recall, a trove of classified footage, filmed from a U.S. fighter jet, captured one of the most infamous UFO incidents of our time. The strange encounter dated back to 2004, off the coast of California, when a “Tic Tac” shaped UFO committed an “act of war,” said one of the former pilots, in a recent interview, hosted by MIT researcher Lex Fridman, reported RT News.
Commander David Fravor said the unidentified phenomena, maneuvering at extraordinary speeds, was unlike anything he has ever seen before.
Fridman, the host of the podcast, also published on Youtube, said Fravor is “one of the most credible witnesses” in the history of UFO research. In total, Fravor said his encounter lasted a few minutes as the UFO maneuvered in ways that no Earth-based aircraft could preform, even with fifth-generation stealth technology and upgraded engine thrust vectors.
“This is not like, ‘we saw it and it was gone’, or ‘I saw lights in the sky and it’s gone’ – we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers,” Fravor said.
Fravor said he was dispatched to the area after “radar anomalies were detected.” He said once his fighter jet’s radar system locked onto the UFO – he noticed the craft had “no propulsion” nor “wings;” its speed was rapid as it accelerated and decelerated. He called the UFO: “Weirdest thing I have ever seen in my life.”
At one point during the encounter, he conducted air combat maneuvers that enabled him to get a “few hundred meters” to the UFO, and with a blink of an eye, the craft disappeared
“I remember telling the guy in my back seat, ‘Dude, I dunno about you but I’m pretty weirded out'”.
According to Fravor, the radar system on his jet alerted him that the UFO was jamming his plane.
“You can tell it’s being jammed. When you actively jam another platform, that’s technically an act of war”, he said.
Fravor believes the craft is unlikely from Earth, as it could do things no fighter jet with today’s technology could do.
“I don’t like to get into little green men, but I don’t think we’ve developed it. I think you can hide things for a while. This is a giant leap in technology.”
For the full interview, here’s Fravor describing the infamous UFO encounter.
- How To Steal An Election, Part 2: The Right's Response
How To Steal An Election, Part 2: The Right’s Response
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 17:35Authored by Chris Farrell via The Gatestone Institute,
Having established the Left’s documented plan to disrupt the 2020 presidential election, let’s examine further some of the information operations techniques now being deployed against the American public to persuade and influence the election “season” ahead.
The very publication of the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) report and the subsequent news media reporting about it are components of psychological warfare within the broader information warfare campaign aimed at spreading demoralizing rumors to Trump supporters. The goal is to break down and weaken support before, during and after election day. Demoralized and unmotivated supporters do not make their support for their candidate public. They do not campaign in neighborhoods or post yard signs. They do not vote. They do not volunteer at polling places. They become convinced their hopes are lost, and highly controversial cause. They do not wish to be called a racist, or a hater, or identified with other fringe elements. They stay at home and watch TV.
Having been psychologically conditioned (through the COVID-19 pandemic) to withdraw, isolate, and lock-down — on largely fiat orders of various government officials — many Americans will react to the “irregular” and extra-legal tactics of the Left. The Left relies on this reaction to suppress voter turnout and use varying forms of terror, such as reprisals and the threats of reprisals, against those who do not cooperate or who challenge the projected accusations detailed in the TIP report.
The TIP report is careful not to engage in sedition. They are a whisper away from advocating violence – but these are very sharp political operatives that are all lawyered-up, so they speak in code. Here are some examples for you to read between the lines:
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“If there is a crisis, events will unfold quickly, and sleep-deprived leaders will be asked to make consequential decisions quickly. Thinking through options now will help to ensure better decisions”
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“Planners need to take seriously the notion that this may well be a street fight, not a legal battle; technocratic solutions, courts, and a reliance on elites observing norms are not the answer here.”
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“Groups, coalitions, and networks should be preparing now to establish the necessary communications and organizing infrastructure to support mass mobilization.”
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“Military and law enforcement leaders need to be particularly attuned to the possibility that partisan actors will seek to manipulate or misuse their coercive powers for inappropriate political ends.”
No single statement or particular recommendation is completely outrageous, except that, in the context of the report, they support and amplify dubious premises: Leftist protestors are non-violent while Trump supporters are agents provocateurs; Trump will misuse the military and law enforcement to hold on to power; universal mail-in voting poses no risk of fraud; finding new ballots weeks after the election is completely normal; news critical of Biden is misinformation; a Trump victory will be evidence of foreign interference, etc.
The voter psychological conditioning campaign, wherein suppression and reprisal become a self-fulfilling prophesy, will not receive news media or social media scrutiny. Those who raise the threats of violence and reprisals will be termed conspiracy theorists, marginalized and dismissed. Once again, who wants to be called a racist, a hater, or identified with some other fringe elements?
Through the release of the TIP report, the American Left has established itself and its dishonest storyline as the official narrative of the 2020 presidential election. They have alerted the militant wing of their movement to seize control of the lead-up to election day, to election day itself, and all the way out past inauguration day. This is a campaign unto itself — not an event. Now you understand how the Left intends to disrupt and steal the 2020 presidential election. You understand the psychological warfare techniques being used right now to convince you (wrongly) of being demoralized and weakened. You have been warned. The question for you and others in opposition to the TIP plan is: What are you going to do?
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- 'Rogue' Chinese Virologist Claims She Has "Evidence" COVID-19 Was Created In A Lab
‘Rogue’ Chinese Virologist Claims She Has “Evidence” COVID-19 Was Created In A Lab
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 17:10Once again, the claims of a rogue Chinese scientist with a lot to say, and at least some evidence to back up her claims, has been ignored by the mainstream media. Intead, Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who was among the first to study the virus at a prestigious university in Hong Kong, where she worked before fleeing China, appeared on the British interview show ‘Loose Women’ late last week. During the interview, she answered questions about her claims, and reiterated that the CCP didn’t just deliberately cover up COVID-19 in a manner that led to thousands of unnecessary deaths, the party also knew that SARS-CoV-2 was created by Chinese scientists.
Asked about the origins of the virus, the doctor said “it comes from a lab,” again rejecting reports from last year that the virus originated from a Wuhan wet market, claiming they were a “smokescreen”.
Dr. Li also commented on her claims that Beijing deliberately tried to cover up the outbreak when it first learned of the killer virus, effectively allowing it to escape China and infect the world. When she sounded the alarm about human-to-human transmission in December last year, her former supervisors at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, a reference laboratory for the World Health Organization, silenced her. After a while, she “could not keep silent”, and decided to flee.
In April, Yan reportedly fled Hong Kong and escaped to America in an effort to evade persecution and to ‘spread the truth’ about the pandemic.
“From the beginning, I decided to get this message out in the world and it was very scary in the world because I’m a doctor and I knew if I don’t tell the truth to the world I will regret it myself in the future.”
“I never thought this would happen when I did the secret investigation, I [thought] I would speak to my supervisor and they would do the right thing on behalf of the government.”
“But what I saw was nobody responding to that. People are scared of the government but this was something urgent, and Chinese New Year time, [I knew] this was a dangerous virus and all these things meant I could not keep silent, there are human beings and global health [at risk].”
China’s national health commission has denied that the outbreak started in the lab, insisting there is “no evidence” the new coronavirus was created in a laboratory. Beiing has already scapegoated a large group of local party officials for the errors.
But Dr. Li’s testimony remains extremely compelling.
- France Suffers New Record Surge In COVID-19 Cases As Locals Complain About Testing Delays: Live Updates
France Suffers New Record Surge In COVID-19 Cases As Locals Complain About Testing Delays: Live Updates
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 16:45Summary:
- US cases climb 47,643 on Friday
- France suffers another daily record in new cases, moves to speed up testing
- UK reports most new cases since mid-May
- AstraZeneca gets permission to restart trials
- Czech Republic, Slovakia also seeing record numbers
* * *
Europe’s coronavirus revival has worsened late this week after surpassing the US in the daily count for the first time on Thursday. Though new cases in the US surged back into the lead on Friday, with 47,643 new cases, bringing the countrywide total to 6,466,012. As we wait for the latest round of data for Saturday, France just reported 10,561 new cases, setting yet another record daily tally since the start of the pandemic, and establishing France as the leader in Western Europe’s renewed outbreak.
Excluding several daily tallies that included cases from prior days, it’s the first time France has seen the number of cases reported in a single day top 10k. The new record was reported Saturday, and covers all cases confirmed during the prior 24 hours.
The previous record, 9,843, was reported Thursday.
Officials have become increasingly concerned about France’s outbreak as hospitalizations have started to climb, though deaths remain surprisingly subdued. France’s death toll has reached 30,910, with 17 deaths recorded in the past 24 hours.
Yesterday, French Prime Minister Jean Castex outlined plans to speed up testing as French citizens complain about long lines. Among other strategies, the government is opening up testing centers in hotspots that will offer priority testing to those with symptoms. Meanwhile, France has reduced the amount of mandatory isolation time to 7 days from 14 for those who have had contact with the sickened. The new number more accurately reflects the time during which patients are contagious, Castex said, himself having only recently finished a quarantine stint after coming into contact with another infected person.
The French government is seeking to avoid a repeat of a nationwide lockdown, though Castex acknowledges the situation is “obviously worsening”.
While France is leading in the EU, the UK on Saturday reported 3,497 new cases of COVID-19, the highest daily tally since mid-May, compared with 3,539 a day earlier. The UK also reported nine new deaths as well. The UK is preparing for a new ban on social gatherings that’s set to take affect on Monday.
Elsewhere in Europe, The Czech Republic and Slovakia also reported record numbers of new cases late this past week as an outbreak in Central Europe worsens.
Finally, as we noted earlier, British clinical trials for the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID vaccine have officially resumed following confirmation Saturday by the Medicines Health Regulatory Authority that it’s ‘safe to do so’. AZ released a statement celebrating the victory:
“The standard review process triggered a voluntary pause to vaccination across all global trials to allow review of safety data by independent committees, and international regulators,” AstraZeneca said. “The UK committee has concluded its investigations and recommended to the MHRA that trials in the UK are safe to resume.”
Hopes for a COVID-19 vaccine to be approved before the election took a hit last week when AZ stopped trials after one participant showed symptoms of an “adverse” reaction.
In the end, the delay to AZ’s global Phase 3 trials wasn’t very long. But China’s projects still managed to make some important strides in the meantime.
- Popular Wrestler Executed In Iran Despite Plea From Trump & Olympic Committee
Popular Wrestler Executed In Iran Despite Plea From Trump & Olympic Committee
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 16:20Despite a months-long global outcry, Iran has executed a nationally famous champion wrestler on Saturday. 27-year old Navid Afkari had been convicted of the 2018 stabbing and murder of a security guard during a wave of anti-government unrest, which he and his family have long said he’s innocent of. Though he initially confessed on video, he later recanted while insisting that authorities had tortured him into making a false confession.
Multiple international organizations, world leaders, athletic associations, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC) appealed to Iranian leaders to halt the execution, which has been carried out by hanging in the southern city of Shiraz.
Trump himself tried to appeal to Tehran, tweeting earlier this month, “Hearing that Iran is looking to execute a great and popular wrestling star, 27-year-old Navid Afkarai, whose sole act was an anti-government demonstration on the streets.” The president added, “They were protesting the ‘country’s worsening economic situation and inflation.'” Trump said, “I would greatly appreciate if you would spare this young man’s life.”
The IOC said of its attempts to intervene: “It is deeply upsetting that the pleas of athletes from around the world and all the behind-the-scenes work of the IOC… did not achieve our goal,” according to their statement.
Amnesty International released a recording by Afkari which said, “If I am executed, I want you to know that an innocent person, even though he tried and fought with all his strength to be heard, was executed.”
And UFC President Dana White had also made a video urging Iran to spare the young man’s life.
It’s widely believed that Iran’s security services are trying to make an example out of someone who is prominent and in the public eye, underscoring what will happen if people engage in street protests against the regime.
…To the leaders of Iran, I would greatly appreciate if you would spare this young man’s life, and not execute him. Thank you! @UFC @DanaWhite @FoxNews https://t.co/NkJb4IsQpt
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2020
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The judiciary had gone so far as to impose a rare double death penalty sentence on him, and his two brothers were issued a combined 81 year prison sentence.
There are now growing calls for the IOC to kick the Islamic Republic out of the Olympics altogether, or to pursue some level of punitive action.
Days prior to the Saturday morning execution, an op-ed in The Telegraph urged: “If Iran will not listen to Trump, who has imposed a series of biting sanctions as well as sanctioning the assassination of its military leader Qasem Soleimani, then it may yet listen to the IOC. The Olympics is one of the very few global platforms from which Iran has not been ostracised. That leverage is considerable.”
But this would present other difficulties, such as the fact that the IOC recently awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics to China, which is also under international scrutiny following mass human rights violations, especially against its Muslim Uighur population.
- 'The Atlantic' Escalates Its TDS-Tantrum, Urges End To Nobel Peace Prize After Second Trump Nomination
‘The Atlantic’ Escalates Its TDS-Tantrum, Urges End To Nobel Peace Prize After Second Trump Nomination
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 15:55Authored by Stephen Kruiser via PJMedia.com,
Trump Derangement Syndrome at ‘The Atlantic’ Reaches a Fever Pitch
The poor dears.
The Atlantic is a magazine that will be 163 years old two days before the presidential election this year and, lemme tell ya, it’s not aging well right now.
Unlike many venerable publications, The Atlantic transitioned rather well to new media. There was always some very good stuff on the site, which helped offset the usual knee-jerk liberal fare.
Those days appear to be gone.
After its almost universally debunked hit piece about Trump and the military last week, the site has taken extreme umbrage at the fact the President Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize… twice in one week. Staff writer Graeme Wood wrote a lengthy piece calling for an end to the prize because of this.
Trolls are a Scandinavian invention, straight from the frigid sagas of Norse mythology, but Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a Norwegian parliamentarian, swears that he is not one. Observers of his antics this week could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. On Wednesday, he announced that he had nominated Donald J. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
He’s got issues. As many with the man who nominated Trump for the UAE/Israel agreement as with Trump himself, it would seem.
Tybring-Gjedde is from Norway’s Progress Party, a right-wing populist answer to the established parties of the right and left. (National parliamentarians are entitled to nominate candidates for the prize. So are professors, past laureates, and various other bigwigs from international organizations.) His nomination of Trump strikes me as preposterous. “Other politicians don’t pick up the phone to talk,” Tybring-Gjedde said.
“He has the ability to be down-to-earth and talk to people at all levels.” Tybring-Gjedde notes that Alfred Nobel listed as one of the criteria for the winners that they encourage “peace congresses”—and what is a peace congress but a conversation between people who are not at peace?
In my view the deal between the Emirates and Israel is good for the region, but a deal between Israel and the absolute monarchs of a small Gulf state is not a deal between Israel and the people of the Emirates, let alone between Israelis and Palestinians.
Trump’s main diplomatic maneuver is to adopt a lickspittle posture toward authoritarians, promising them decades in power in return for a smile and a condo development. Peace does not mean a web of personal agreements between rich psychopaths.
Wood seeks to delegitimize the nomination because he doesn’t like the person doing the nominating, the person being nominated, or the reason for the nomination.
Oops.
As we like to say in the world of stand-up comedy, timing is everything.
Wood’s timing was awful here.
He published his diaper-soiling ORANGE MAN BAD screed just hours before it was announced that President Trump had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for a second time this week, this time by a member of the Swedish Parliament, and for the Serbia/Kosovo agreement he brokered. I wrote about that here yesterday.
I have nominated the US Gov. and the governments of Kosovo and Serbia for the Nobel Peace Prize for their joint work for peace and economic development, through the cooperation agreement signed in the White House. Trade and communications are important building blocks for peace. pic.twitter.com/XuhkLbHZAV
— Magnus Jacobsson (@magnusjacobsson) September 11, 2020
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Just like that, two of Wood’s “nuke the Nobel” arguments unraveled. He probably spent most of the day curled up in the fetal position with juice boxes strewn all about the place after learning of the second nomination.
The recent descent by The Atlantic into Stage Five ORANGE MAN BAD dementia has been, as one friend of mine who used to be an Atlantic fan said, “Sad.” I agree. The Atlantic was one of the few publications that I could still respect, despite its obvious liberal bent.
The place has turned into BuzzFeed overnight.
When that same friend wondered why The Atlantic had gotten so bad so fast I replied, “The internal polling by the DNC must be awful right now.”
This has been a very good week for President Trump, as evidenced by desperate hot takes like this one in The Atlantic.
We’re all on the same flight but I think they may be feeling a little more turbulence where they’re sitting.
- Google 'Geofence' Warrants Keep Locking Up Innocent People Who Were In Proximity Of A Crime Scene
Google ‘Geofence’ Warrants Keep Locking Up Innocent People Who Were In Proximity Of A Crime Scene
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/12/2020 – 15:30Months ago we detailed an incredibly scary and Orwellian tool in the local police arsenal known as a “geofence warrant”. As described at the time it’s essentially a virtual dragnet over crime scenes where police request to sweep up Google location data drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular connections from everyone who happened to be near a crime scene. From this blanket of surveillance law enforcement then try to figure out which phones may be tied to suspects or possible witnesses.
Already this type of blanket surveillance warrant, which works as a kind of ‘guilt by proximity’ at the time a crime occurred, has been used by police to arrest what turned out to be innocent bystanders who were suddenly surprised to find themselves prime suspects. It’s perhaps been used only dozens of times in some states, but will likely only increase alongside similar “pre-crime” algorithm technologies. In one instance earlier this year, a Gainesville, Florida man was caught up in a legal nightmare because he merely rode his bicycle unbeknownst near a home burglary at around the same time it happened.
And it was in 2018 that for the first time a man had been falsely accused and arrested based on a controversial geofence warrant for the crime of murder.
Geotracking file image via Boing Boing The details of that prior alarming case are presented by Wired as follows:
IN 2018, 23-YEAR-OLD Jorge Molina was arrested and jailed for six days on suspicion of killing another man. Police in Avondale, Arizona, about 20 miles from Phoenix, held Molina for questioning. According to a police report, officers told him they knew “one hundred percent, without a doubt” his phone was at the scene of the crime, based on data from Google.
In fact, Molina wasn’t there. He’d simply lent an old phone to the man police later arrested. The phone was still signed into his Google account. The information about Molina’s phone came from a geofence warrant, a relatively new and increasingly popular investigative technique police use to track suspects’ locations. Traditionally, police identify a suspect, then issue a warrant to search the person’s home or belongings.
So much for that supposed 100% police certainty.
It’s but one example illustrating the likely hundreds of ways geofence warrants could be abused or flat out link completely innocent individuals to a crime. It also strongly suggests old fashioned detective work is increasingly being replaced by dubious technological means.
Here’s more from local reporting at the time on just how police came to arrest the wrong man, all while ensuring him they “knew” he did it:
“I told Jorge that we knew, one hundred percent, without a doubt, that his phone was at the shooting scene,” the police report on Knight’s murder states. “Jorge gasped and said, ‘What! This feels like a fricking nightmare!’” Molina began to cry, saying, “Oh my God, this is insane.”
As it turns out, police did not know “one hundred percent, without a doubt, that his phone was at the shooting scene.”
He had lost his job, his car, and his reputation suffered irreparable damage as a result of the publicity that followed – not to mention having to rot six days in jail when the only “evidence” was Google data.
The case later fell apart and police finally caught the real killer.
In early 2020 Molina sued the city police, specific officers that arrested him, as well as the chief of police. He’s also reportedly now suing Google for $1.5 million dollars.
According the the latest reporting in Wired, a couple of recent breakthroughs may help in both Molina’s efforts, and privacy advocates to hope to see the practice end:
Federal magistrate judges echoed these criticisms in July in denying requests from the US Attorney’s Office in Chicago for geofence warrants to help investigate stolen pharmaceuticals. The office said it used a three-step protocol that protected user privacy. First, it limited the request to a specific time and location; then, it looked for corroborating information about the phones identified as being in the area. Only after that did it ask Google for specific information about a small number of device owners.
Two judges have now denied requests for geofence warrants, citing Fourth Amendment protections and lack of evidence, which privacy groups are hailing as a huge step toward banning geofence warrants altogether.
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