- T Is For Tyranny: How Freedom Dies From A To Z
T Is For Tyranny: How Freedom Dies From A To Z
Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”
– French philosopher Etienne de La Boétie
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to be a convenient, traumatic, devastating distraction.
The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State.
Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton: they have all been complicit in carrying out the Deep State’s agenda.
Frankly, it really doesn’t matter who occupies the White House, because it is a profit-driven, unelected bureaucracy—call it whatever you will: the Deep State, the Controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the corporate elite, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—that is actually calling the shots
Our losses are mounting with every passing day, part of a calculated siege intended to ensure our defeat at the hands of a totalitarian regime.
Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, media, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more are casualties in the government’s war on the American people.
Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized federal police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms are being steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.
As a result, the American people continue to be treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.
None of these dangers have dissipated in any way.
They have merely disappeared from our televised news streams.
Thus, in the interest of liberty and truth, here’s an A-to-Z primer that spells out the grim realities of life in the American Police State that no one seems to be talking about anymore.
A is for the AMERICAN POLICE STATE. A police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”
B is for our battered BILL OF RIGHTS. In the militarized police culture that is America today, where you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is rarely held accountable for violating your rights, the Bill of Rights doesn’t amount to much.
C is for CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE. This governmental scheme to deprive Americans of their liberties—namely, the right to property—is being carried out under the guise of civil asset forfeiture, a government practice wherein government agents (usually the police and now TSA agents) seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then, whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property and it’s virtually impossible to get it back.
D is for DRONES. It was estimated that at least 30,000 drones are now airborne in American airspace, part of an $80 billion industry. Although some drones may be used for benevolent purposes, many are also being equipped with lasers, tasers and scanning devices, among other weapons—all aimed at “we the people.”
E is for EMERGENCY STATE. From 9/11 to COVID-19, we have been the subjected to an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security. The government’s ongoing attempts to declare so-called national emergencies in order to circumvent the Constitution’s system of checks and balances constitutes yet another expansion of presidential power that exposes the nation to further constitutional peril.
F is for FASCISM. A study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere economic units or databits.
G is for GRENADE LAUNCHERS and GLOBAL POLICE. The federal government has distributed more than $18 billion worth of battlefield-appropriate military weapons, vehicles and equipment such as drones, tanks, and grenade launchers to domestic police departments across the country. As a result, most small-town police forces now have enough firepower to render any citizen resistance futile. Now take those small-town police forces, train them to look and act like the military, and then enlist them to be part of the United Nations’ Strong Cities Network program, and you not only have a standing army that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution but one that is part of a global police force.
H is for HOLLOW-POINT BULLETS. The government’s efforts to militarize and weaponize its agencies and employees is reaching epic proportions, with federal agencies as varied as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration stockpiling millions of lethal hollow-point bullets, which violate international law. Ironically, while the government continues to push for stricter gun laws for the general populace, the U.S. military’s arsenal of weapons makes the average American’s handgun look like a Tinker Toy.
I is for the INTERNET OF THINGS, in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free. The key word here, however, is control. This “connected” industry propels us closer to a future where police agencies apprehend virtually anyone if the government “thinks” they may commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.
J is for JAILING FOR PROFIT. Having outsourced their inmate population to private prisons run by private corporations, this profit-driven form of mass punishment has given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep their privately run prisons full by jailing large numbers of Americans for petty crimes.
K is for KENTUCKY V. KING. In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers can break into homes, without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home as long as they think they may have a reason to do so. Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between the citizenry and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by law enforcement officials.
L is for LICENSE PLATE READERS, which enable law enforcement and private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants, all across the country. This data collected on tens of thousands of innocent people is also being shared between police agencies, as well as with government fusion centers and private companies. This puts Big Brother in the driver’s seat.
M is for MAIN CORE. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation. As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. There are at least 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.
N is for NO-KNOCK RAIDS. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for routine police matters. In fact, more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and all in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually possession of some small amount of drugs.
O is for OVERCRIMINALIZATION and OVERREGULATION. Thanks to an overabundance of 4500-plus federal crimes and 400,000 plus rules and regulations, it’s estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. As a result of this overcriminalization, we’re seeing an uptick in Americans being arrested and jailed for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room.
P is for PATHOCRACY and PRECRIME. When our own government treats us as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police and other government agents, mistreated, and then jailed in profit-driven private prisons if we dare step out of line, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.” Couple that with the government’s burgeoning precrime programs, which will use fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics in order to identify and deter so-called potential “extremists,” dissidents or rabble-rousers. Bear in mind that anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is now viewed as an extremist.
Q is for QUALIFIED IMMUNITY. Qualified immunity allows police officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing. Conveniently, those deciding whether a cop should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all cronies with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.
R is for ROADSIDE STRIP SEARCHES and BLOOD DRAWS. The courts have increasingly erred on the side of giving government officials—especially the police—vast discretion in carrying out strip searches, blood draws and even anal and vaginal probes for a broad range of violations, no matter how minor the offense. In the past, strip searches were resorted to only in exceptional circumstances where police were confident that a serious crime was in progress. In recent years, however, strip searches have become routine operating procedures in which everyone is rendered a suspect and, as such, is subjected to treatment once reserved for only the most serious of criminals.
S is for the SURVEILLANCE STATE. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of the electronic concentration camp in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.
T is for TASERS. Nonlethal weapons such as tasers, stun guns, rubber pellets and the like have been used by police as weapons of compliance more often and with less restraint—even against women and children—and in some instances, even causing death. These “nonlethal” weapons also enable police to aggress with the push of a button, making the potential for overblown confrontations over minor incidents that much more likely. A Taser Shockwave, for instance, can electrocute a crowd of people at the touch of a button.
U is for UNARMED CITIZENS SHOT BY POLICE. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, often attributed to a fear for their safety. Yet the fatality rate of on-duty patrol officers is reportedly far lower than many other professions, including construction, logging, fishing, truck driving, and even trash collection.
V is for VIRUSES and VACCINE PASSPORTS. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including the U.S.) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. The road we are traveling is paved with lockdowns, SWAT team raids, mass surveillance, forced vaccinations, contact tracing, vaccine passports, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dare to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.
W is for WHOLE-BODY SCANNERS. Using either x-ray radiation or radio waves, scanning devices and government mobile units are being used not only to “see” through your clothes but to spy on you within the privacy of your home. While these mobile scanners are being sold to the American public as necessary security and safety measures, we can ill afford to forget that such systems are rife with the potential for abuse, not only by government bureaucrats but by the technicians employed to operate them.
X is for X-KEYSCORE, one of the many spying programs carried out by the National Security Agency that targets every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. This top-secret program “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”
Y is for YOU-NESS. Using your face, mannerisms, social media and “you-ness” against you, you are now be tracked based on what you buy, where you go, what you do in public, and how you do what you do. Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country.
Z is for ZERO TOLERANCE. We have moved into a new paradigm in which young people are increasingly viewed as suspects and treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, often for engaging in little more than childish behavior or for saying the “wrong” word. In some jurisdictions, students have also been penalized under school zero tolerance policies for such inane “crimes” as carrying cough drops, wearing black lipstick, bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades. The lesson being taught to our youngest—and most impressionable—citizens is this: in the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (politician, police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the reality we must come to terms with is that in the post-9/11 America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.
We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age.
You can call it the age of authoritarianism. Or fascism. Or oligarchy. Or the American police state.
Whatever label you want to put on it, the end result is the same: tyranny.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 23:50 - Mexican Demand For California Cannabis "Explodes"
Mexican Demand For California Cannabis "Explodes"
The demand for U.S.-grown marijuana has exploded across Mexico. Wealthy Mexicans want to be smoking the best stuff so they can post it on their Instagram.
Traditionally, weed has been illegally smuggled into the U.S. through speedboats, planes, drones, tunnels, and even slingshot devices. But the days of drug “mules” crossing the U.S.-Mexico border could be over and soon reversing.
Cannabis grown in California is some of the best in the world. Mexicans are demanding California grown weed that drug dealers have been forced to source from the States, according to WaPo. They’re labeling the weed “IMPORTADO” and charging a hefty markup.
Just like Cuban cigars in the U.S., people are willing to pay a markup to purchase one because they can brag to their friends or post images on social media.
Traffickers from California are packing suitcases and stuffing cars with flower and other cannabis products, heading southbound as their contraband instantly doubles or triples in value as it enters Mexico.
“The demand here for American weed has exploded,” said a drug dealer in Mexico city, who estimates 60% of the weed he sells comes from California. The dealer spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of arrest because cannabis is illegal in Mexico. “It’s aspirational for many of my clients. They want to be seen smoking the best stuff, the stuff rappers brag about smoking.”
U.S.-grown marijuana with high amounts of THC can cost upwards of $500 per ounce in Mexico, dealers said. The same ounce may only cost $150 in San Diego.
“Mexicans want to try what they see in music video, in movies, in media, and that’s usually American,” said another dealer in Mexico City. “We still have this idea that the best products come from the U.S.”
At Urban Leaf, a marijuana dispensary in San Ysidro, California., near the Tijuana border, owner Josh Bubeck estimates about half his customers are Mexican nationals.
“Nobody is going to grow cannabis better than California probably ever,” Bubeck said.
He said the appeal is clear: “You’re showing ‘This is what I’m about. I’m a bad ass. I got this from America.'”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 23:30 - India's Ivermectin Blackout
India's Ivermectin Blackout
Authored by Justus R Hope, MD. via TheDesertReview.com,
Ivermectin Wins in India
News of India’s defeat of the Delta variant should be common knowledge. It is just about as obvious as the nose on one’s face. It is so clear when one looks at the graphs that no one can deny it.
Yet, for some reason, we are not allowed to talk about it. Thus, for example, Wikipedia cannot mention the peer-reviewed meta-analyses by Dr. Tess Lawrie or Dr. Pierre Kory published in the American Journal of Therapeutics.
Wikipedia is not allowed to publish the recent meta-analysis on Ivermectin authored by Dr. Andrew Hill.
Furthermore, it is not allowed to say anything concerning www.ivmmeta.com showing the 61 studies comprising 23,000 patients which reveal up to a 96% reduction in death [prophylaxis] with Ivermectin.
One can see the bias in Wikipedia by going on the “talk” pages for each subject and reading about the fierce attempts of editors to add these facts and the stone wall refusals by the “senior” editors who have an agenda. And that agenda is not loyalty to your health.
The easy way to read the “talk” page on any Wikipedia subject is to click the top left “talk” button. Anyone can then review the editors’ discussions.
There is a blackout on any conversation about how Ivermectin beat COVID-19 in India. When I discussed the dire straits that India found itself in early this year with 414,000 cases per day, and over 4,000 deaths per day, and how that evaporated within five weeks of the addition of Ivermectin, I am often asked, “But why is there no mention of that in the news?”
Yes, exactly. Ask yourself why India’s success against the Delta variant with Ivermectin is such a closely guarded secret by the NIH and CDC. Second, ask yourself why no major media outlets reported this fact, but instead, tried to confuse you with false information by saying the deaths in India are 10 times greater than official reports.
Perhaps NPR is trying so hard because NPR is essentially a government mouthpiece. The US government is “all-in” with vaccines with the enthusiasm of a 17th century Catholic Church “all-in” with a Geocentric Model of the Universe disputing Galileo. Claiming that India’s numbers are inaccurate might distract from the overwhelming success of Ivermectin.
But in the end, the truth matters. It mattered in 1616, and it matters in 2021.
The graphs and data from the Johns Hopkins University CSSE database do not lie.
On the contrary, they provide a compelling trail of truth that no one can dispute, not even the NIH, CDC, FDA, and WHO.
Just as Galileo proved with his telescope that the earth was NOT the center of the Universe in 1616; today, the data from India shows that Ivermectin is effective, much more so than the vaccines. It not only prevents death, but it also prevents COVID infections, and it also is effective against the Delta Variant.
In 1616, you could not make up the telescopic images of Jupiter and its orbiting moons, nor could you falsify the crescent-shaped images of Venus and Mercury. These proved that the earth was NOT the center of the Universe – a truth the Catholic Church could not allow.
Likewise, the massive drop in cases and deaths in India to almost nothing after the addition of Ivermectin proved the drug’s effectiveness. This is a truth that the NIH, CDC, and FDA cannot allow because it would endanger the vaccine policy.
Never mind that Ivermectin would save more lives with much less risk, much less cost, and it would end the pandemic quickly.
Let us look at the burgundy-colored graph of Uttar Pradesh. First, allow me to thank Juan Chamie, a highly-respected Cambridge-based data analyst, who created this graph from the JHU CSSE data. Uttar Pradesh is a state in India that contains 241 million people. The United States’ population is 331 million people. Therefore, Uttar Pradesh can be compared to the United States, with 2/3 of our population size.
This data shows how Ivermectin knocked their COVID-19 cases and deaths – which we know were Delta Variant – down to almost zero within weeks. A population comparable to the US went from about 35,000 cases and 350 deaths per day to nearly ZERO within weeks of adding Ivermectin to their protocol.
By comparison, the United States is the lower graph. On August 5, here in the good ol’ USA, blessed with the glorious vaccines, we have 127,108 new cases per day and 574 new deaths.
Let us look at the August 5 numbers from Uttar Pradesh with 2/3 of our population. Uttar Pradesh, using Ivermectin, had a total of 26 new cases and exactly THREE deaths. The US without Ivermectin has precisely 4889 times as many daily cases and 191 times as many deaths as Uttar Pradesh with Ivermectin.
It is not even close. Countries do orders of magnitude better WITH Ivermectin. It might be comparable to the difference in travel between using an automobile versus a horse and buggy.
Uttar Pradesh on Ivermectin: Population 240 Million [4.9% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 26
COVID Daily Deaths: 3
The United States off Ivermectin: Population 331 Million [50.5% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 127,108
COVID Daily Deaths: 574
Let us look at other Ivermectin using areas of India with numbers from August 5, 2021, compiled by the JHU CSSE:
Delhi on Ivermectin: Population 31 Million [15% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 61
COVID Daily Deaths: 2
Uttarakhand on Ivermectin: Population 11.4 Million [15% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 24
COVID Daily Deaths: 0
Now let us look at an area of India that rejected Ivermectin.
Tamil Nadu announced they would reject Ivermectin and instead follow the dubious USA-style guidance of using Remdesivir. Knowing this, you might expect their numbers to be closer to the US, with more cases and more deaths. You would be correct. Tamil Nadu went on to lead India in COVID-19 cases.
Tamil Nadu continues to suffer for its choice to reject Ivermectin. As a result, the Delta variant continues to ravage their citizens while it was virtually wiped out in the Ivermectin-using states. Likewise, in the United States, without Ivermectin, both the vaccinated and unvaccinated continue to spread the Delta variant like wildfire.
Tamil Nadu off Ivermectin: Population 78.8 Million [6.9% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 1,997
COVID Daily Deaths: 33
Like the JHU CSSE data, Galileo’s telescope did not lie either, and the truth can usually be found in plain sight. Ivermectin works, and it works exceedingly well. Harvard-trained virologist Dr. George Fareed and his associate, Dr. Brian Tyson of California’s Imperial Valley, have saved 99.9% of their patients with a COVID Cocktail that includes Ivermectin. They have released versions of their new book published in the Desert Review that everyone should read.
I could talk about how every one of my patients who used Ivermectin recovered rapidly, about my most recent case who felt 90% better within 48 hours of adding the drug, but I won’t. I could write about how Wikipedia censors more than Pravda, about how you should always read the “talk” section of EVERY Wikipedia article to go behind the scenes and understand what the editors DO NOT want you to read, but I will refrain.
I could write about VAERS and how it is so much easier to navigate by following Open VAERS or how Wikipedia has unfairly portrayed Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the world’s sharpest and most credible doctors. But I will hold back.
I could recite the history of early outpatient treatment of COVID-19 with repurposed drugs, including Ivermectin, with all the specifics, and EXACTLY WHY this lifesaving information has been censored, but instead, I will leave researching these topics to each of you readers as individuals.
Because you already know what will happen if you simply sit back and swallow what the media are feeding you. You MUST question what the government tells you, and always DO YOUR OWN research.
Following the 1616 Inquisition of Galileo, the Pope banned all books and letters that argued the sun was the center of the Universe instead of the Earth.
Similarly, today, the FDA and WHO have banned any use of Ivermectin for COVID outside of a clinical trial.
YouTube and Wikipedia both consider Ivermectin for COVID as heresy.
“YouTube doesn’t allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19… Treatment misinformation: claims that Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19.”
Wikipedia defines heresy as:
“any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, in particular the accepted beliefs of a church or religious organization. The term is usually used in reference to violations of important religious teachings, but is also used of views strongly opposed to any generally accepted ideas. A heretic is a proponent of heresy.”
Heresy is disagreeing with the government, or their health authority, even if they are all wrong and even if their policies harm people. Today we no longer call it heresy; it is labeled as misinformation.
Galileo was found guilty of heresy and sentenced on June 22, 1633, to formal imprisonment, although this was commuted to house arrest, under which he remained for the rest of his life.
On August 7, 2021 Medpage Today published a new quiz, “Can COVID Misinformation Cost You Your Medical License?”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 23:10 - Visualizing US Oil Production By State
Visualizing US Oil Production By State
In 2018, the United States became the world’s top crude oil producer, and as Visual Capitalist’s Anshool Deshmukh notes, It has strongly held this position ever since.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the country accounted for nearly 15% of the world’s total oil production in 2020, churning out close to 13 million barrels of crude oil per day—more than Russia or Saudi Arabia.
Although total U.S. oil production declined between 1985 and 2008, annual production increased nearly every year from 2009 through 2019, reaching the highest amount on record in 2019.
The Dominant Oil Producing States
Impressively, 71% of total U.S. oil production came from just five states. An additional 14.6% came from the Gulf of Mexico, which is a federal jurisdiction.
Here are the five states that produce the largest amount of crude oil:
Rounding the top 10 are states like Alaska, California, Wyoming, Louisiana, and Utah.
Texas is undoubtedly the largest oil-producing state in the United States. In 2020, Texas produced a total of 1.78 billion barrels of oil. Texas is home to the most productive U.S. oil basin, the Permian, routinely accounting for at least 50% of total onshore production. A distant second is North Dakota, which produced about 431.2 million barrels of oil in 2020.
Regional Distribution of U.S. Oil Production
A total of 32 of the 50 U.S. states produce oil. They are divided among five regional divisions for oil production in the U.S., known as the Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts (PADD).
These five regional divisions of the allocation of fuels were established in the U.S. during the Second World War and are still used today for data collection purposes.
Given that Texas is the largest U.S. oil-producing state, PADD 3 (Gulf Coast) is also the largest oil-producing PADD. PADD 3 also includes the federal offshore region in the Gulf of Mexico. There are around 400 operational oil and gas rigs in the country.
Impact of U.S. Oil Production on Employment
Rapid growth in oil production using advanced drilling methods has created high-paying jobs in states like North Dakota and Texas.
Thanks to the rapid development in the Bakken Shale formation, North Dakota boasts the nation’s lowest unemployment rate. The state has also grown personal income and state economic output at a fast rate, due to oil and gas industry growth.
Oil production from the Eagle Ford Shale has transformed a relatively poor region of South Texas into one of the nation’s most significant economic development zones. In fact, due largely to the oil and natural gas industry, the Texas Comptroller estimates that Texas has recovered 100% of the jobs lost during the Great Recession.
Looking to the Future
The U.S. slashed its oil production forecast through next year just as OPEC and its allies begin to roll back their production cuts in the coming months.
U.S. oil output will drop to 11.04 million barrels a day this year, down from a forecasted 11.15 million. This was a result of the deep freeze that shut down the oil industry in Texas. The EIA also lowered its output forecast for 2022 by 100,000 barrels a day.
Despite its forecast for a rise in supply from outside the cartel this year, OPEC said in its report that it is uncertain about the levels of investment expected to determine the non-OPEC supply outlook for the years to come.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 22:50 - Gender Reassignment Surgery Is Child Abuse, Says Texas Commissioner
Gender Reassignment Surgery Is Child Abuse, Says Texas Commissioner
Authored by Allan Stein via The Epoch Times,
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Wednesday he received a letter from the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services determining that genital mutilation of a child through gender transitioning surgery constitutes child abuse.
Abbott had directed DFPS to issue a determination on the matter last week and the department’s commissioner Jaime Masters replied with his findings.
“Genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery is child abuse,” Masters wrote.
“This surgical procedure physically alters a child’s genitalia for non-medical purposes potentially inflicting irreversible harm to children’s bodies,” he wrote.
“Generally, children in the care and custody of a parent lack the legal capacity to consent to surgical treatments, making them more vulnerable.”
In the letter, Masters said that allegations involving genital mutilation of a child would be promptly investigated.
Failure to report abuse is a class misdemeanor and is punishable by up to one year in jail, a $4,000 fine, or both.
At present, the transgender population in Texas counts as the second highest in the United States with 125,350 adults (.66 percent of the population) who identify as transgender. California ranks number one with 218,400 transgender residents.
There are currently an estimated 1.4 million transgender people in the U.S. according to a study put out by the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 22:30 - Vaccine Expert Vanden Bossche Calls For "Immediate Halt" To Vaccinations, Says They Encourage "Escape Mutant" Variants
Vaccine Expert Vanden Bossche Calls For "Immediate Halt" To Vaccinations, Says They Encourage "Escape Mutant" Variants
Of all those who have been critical of our vaccination efforts related to Covid-19, vaccine expert Geert Vanden Bossche stands out as one of the loudest voices in the crowd.
Having been featured on Dr. Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity and Bret Weinstein’s Dark Horse podcast, Vanden Bossche has been outspoken – yet measured and reasoned – in his critiquing of mass vaccinations during the midst of the Covid pandemic. One of his main gripes with vaccination efforts is that vaccinating during the middle of a pandemic could potentially lead to a long runway of variants, some of which may evolve to be far more difficult to deal with than the original Covid virus.
And Vanden Bossche is an expert in the space with an extensive resume. He received his DVM from the University of Ghent, Belgium, and his PhD degree in Virology from the University of Hohenheim, Germany. He has worked for several vaccine companies (GSK Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Solvay Biologicals) to serve various roles in vaccine R&D as well as in late vaccine development.
He also joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Discovery team in Seattle (USA) as Senior Program Officer before working with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) in Geneva as Senior Ebola Program Manager. At GAVI he tracked efforts to develop an Ebola vaccine. He also represented GAVI in fora with other partners, including WHO, to review progress on the fight against Ebola and to build plans for global pandemic preparedness.
He then joined the German Center for Infection Research in Cologne as Head of the Vaccine Development Office.
In a new blog post published yesterday, Vanden Bossche continued to raise questions about our mass vaccination program to fight Covid.
In a summary of his findings, he writes: “As of the early days of the mass vaccination campaigns, at least a few experts have been warning against the catastrophic impact such a program could have on global and individual health. Mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic is prone to promoting selection and adaptation of immune escape variants that are featured by increasing infectiousness and resistance to spike protein (S)-directed antibodies (Abs), thereby diminishing protection in vaccinees and threatening the unvaccinated.“
“This already explains why the WHO’s mass vaccination program is not only unable to generate herd immunity (HI) but even leads to substantial erosion of the population’s immune protective capacity,” he continues. “As the ongoing universal mass vaccination program will soon promote dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants (i.e., so-called ‘S Ab-resistant variants’), naturally acquired, or vaccinal neutralizing Abs, will, indeed, no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals whereas high infectious pressure will continue to suppress the innate immune defense system of the nonvaccinated.”
“This is to say that every further increase in vaccine coverage rates will further contribute to forcing the virus into resistance to neutralizing, S-specific Abs. Increased viral infectivity, combined with evasion from antiviral immunity, will inevitably result in an additional toll taken on human health and human lives.”
He then urges “immediate action”, writing: “Immediate action needs, therefore, to be taken in order to dramatically reduce viral infectivity rates and to prevent selected immune escape variants from rapidly spreading through the entire population, whether vaccinated or not. This first critical step can only be achieved by calling an immediate halt to the mass vaccination program and replacing it by widespread use of antiviral chemoprophylactics while dedicating massive public health resources to scaling early multidrug treatments of Covid-19 disease.”
You can read his full, comprehensive findings at his blog here.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 22:10 - Whopping 2.8 Tons Of Meth, Fentanyl Seized In California
Whopping 2.8 Tons Of Meth, Fentanyl Seized In California
Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Tuesday announced the seizure of some 2.8 tons’ worth of methamphetamine and fentanyl powder in California.
Border Patrol officers at the Otay Mesa Commercial Facility found the massive load on Aug. 5 in what the agency described as “the largest methamphetamine drug smuggling seizure along the southwest border, to date.”
Altogether, the massive haul comprises 5,528 pounds of methamphetamine and 127 pounds of fentanyl powder, and is worth an estimated $12,990,749.
“This amount of fentanyl and methamphetamine is enough to ruin countless lives and fund transnational criminal organizations,” CBP Director of Field Operations in San Diego Pete Flores said in a statement.
“I’m proud of our officers’ efforts at all Ports of Entry within the San Diego Field Office to intercept this and all smuggling attempts.”
Border officers found the drugs “hidden within a shipment of plastic household articles” in an intensive inspection of a tractor and trailer, by using the port of entry’s imaging system that is similar to an X-ray scan. “Anomalies” were detected in the trailer.
“Further examination was required at the inspectional dock, a CBP canine team screened and received indication there were narcotics inside of the trailer,” according to a CBP statement.
“CBP officers searched the cargo and discovered a combination of 414 packages consisting of methamphetamine and fentanyl concealed within boxes.”
The seizure exceeds the entire amount of meth the U.S. Border Patrol has seized since the beginning of fiscal year 2021, which began in October 2020.
Border officers seized the tractor, trailer, and narcotics.
San Diego border officers seized 2.8 tons of meth and fentanyl at Otay Mesa Commercial Facility in California, on Aug. 5, 2021. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection)
The driver, a 53-year-old Mexican male, was arrested and now faces federal charges over the alleged smuggling of the narcotics. He was sent to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego.
Earlier this year, the same port of entry found and seized more than 1,100 pounds of methamphetamine hidden inside a shipment of watermelons, worth an estimated $2.5 million.
Methamphetamine remains readily available throughout the United States, most of which is “clandestinely produced” in Mexico and smuggled across the southwest border, according to a 2020 report (pdf) by the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 21:50 - CIA Mulls New China Mission Center To "Out-Spy Beijing"
CIA Mulls New China Mission Center To "Out-Spy Beijing"
The CIA is considering establishing a new China-focused mission center, Bloomberg is reporting, at a moment tensions have steadily escalated over months of continued Biden-ordered sail throughs of the Taiwan Strait and other provocative ‘freedom of navigation’ warship maneuvers in the South China Sea. It comes amid criticisms that China is ultimately “out-spying” the United States, also amid tit-for-tat cyber intrusion accusations which have gone on for years.
CIA Director Bill Burns has ordered a broad review of the agency’s China capabilities. Currently China-related missions fall under the aegis of the much larger “Mission Center for East Asia and Pacific,” but officials are turning their sights to a specialized internal unit with its own mandate of a narrower China focus which would include vaster resources.
“Mission center are stand-alone entities that utilize resources from across the CIA in line with agency priorities,” notes Bloomberg. Apparently an entire mission center for China has for years been under discussion, but with no director or prior administration willing to order its establishment, likely on fears it would trigger Cold War-style escalation and tit-for-tat covert ops.
Getty Images A CIA statement confirmed the current review of capabilities underway: “As director Burns has said, China is one of his priorities, and CIA is in the process of determining how best to position ourselves to reflect the significance of this priority,” CIA Public Affairs said.
The last major mission center to be established, the Korea Mission Center, was under Trump in 2017 at a moment the White House was trying to assess the north’s nuclear capabilities and how to confront Pyongyang.
Chinese leaders are sure to see this is as a major escalation, and will likely mirror US intelligence efforts, particularly given just last month China charged the CIA specifically with hacking Beijing for over a decade.
NPR at the time detailed the accusations, writing that “China has accused the United States of mounting cyberattacks against Chinese government, scientific, aviation and other technical institutions for the past 11 years.” Further the report noted “The finger-pointing comes the day after the U.S. mounted similar accusations against China, an exchange of blame which threatens to make cybersecurity another rift in an already-fractious U.S.-China relationship.”
CIA mulls a Special China Unit, in effort to OUT-SPY Beijing
LOL – Too little! Too late! https://t.co/2jJ1rNL7oR
— Amrita Bhinder 🇮🇳 (@amritabhinder) August 13, 2021
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Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian had at the time said the US is the world’s greatest aggressor in terms of cyber attacks and cyber espionage, warning Washington to “stop pouring dirty water” in terms of its hypocritical allegations against other nations.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 21:30 - China: The Regime's Managed Economy Is Stagnating
China: The Regime's Managed Economy Is Stagnating
Despite high domestic economic growth and solid global recovery, the Chinese market is down on the year. At the close of this article, the Shanghai CSI 300 is down 5% vs the S&P 500’s +18%, and in the past five years, it has risen 51%, a decent but modest figure compared to the S&P 500’s +103%.
Additionally, the Chinese stock market looks optically cheap. At 12.7x estimated Price to Earnings 2021, according to Bloomberg, it is significantly cheaper than most developed economies and many emerging ones. So why do I say “optically”? Because the Chinese stock market valuation includes important discounts that any investor must consider. Political risk and government intervention is a relevant discount factor that cannot be ignored, and the recent crackdown on technology and education is proof of that.
Political and government intervention risks are not exclusive to Chinese stocks but explain a large proportion of the discount in valuation terms. These risks are also evident in the stocks of countries like Russia, but also in the Spanish or Italian market. It is not just regulatory risk, which may exist in numerous sectors globally, but the risk of random, politically driven, and destructive intervention. When politicians want to take control of private entities, their earnings growth and margins are irrelevant considering the possibility of flowing management with politicians that use the balance sheet of private companies for political purposes. The recent crackdown in China is not about inequality, it is about control. If the government wanted to reduce inequality it would have implemented fiscal measures that would have been more effective than crippling its stock market.
The Chinese economy’s high growth is not reflected in valuations for two main reasons, in my view.
First, most of that growth is centrally planned and driven by massive indebtedness.
Second, the risk of random changes in management and strategy of companies due to political motives has risen in the past ten years.
The Chinese economy has not been opening since Xi Jinping’s tenure was extended indefinitely, it has been gradually closing, and one of the main objectives of a more interventionist government is to assault the corporate sector and take control of private companies even if that means weakening their financial situation, limits their access to capital markets and raises investor concerns.
Therefore, political risk is a larger drag on valuations because investors know that politicians will not consider shareholder and stakeholder interests and will likely use the balance sheet of the company to advance political control.
Our readers may say that the government has good intentions and that politicians in companies do not necessarily mean value destruction, but those naïve thoughts are wrong. If politicians had the best intentions and the goodwill of citizens in their minds, they would strengthen the independence of regulators instead of taking political control of private companies. A politician that has the best interest of its people in mind lets independent professionals make the decisions in business and regulation precisely to avoid politically charged decisions. However, when politicians weaken the independence of regulators and strengthen their grip on the management of businesses there is no benefit for citizens or shareholders. It is just interventionism to push forward a political agenda. Cash flow is squandered, debt balloons and inequality rises because merit disappears in favor of political adherence.
If the government of China was worried about inequality and market power, why did they not create independent and transparent regulators instead of making them even more dependent on the government?
The Chinese stock market discount is also a function of past interventionism and a “grow at any cost” rule. A country with such high growth and potential shows an index with very weak financials. Net debt to EBITDA exceeds 6.9x, driven mostly by the state-owned enterprises which have been piling on debt while showing very poor profitability. Return On Assets of the Shanghai Index, according to Bloomberg, is a weak 1.18% and profit margin is a mere 7.9% after a massive gross margin of 16%!
Does the Chinese market have potential? Absolutely, and it is enormous. However, in order to achieve the revaluation potential it deserves, the Chinese government should promote transparency, independent board members, audits, and regulation as well as clear corporate governance rules that protect investors and stakeholders. All measures that go against the independence of regulators and corporate managers and open and transparent capital markets end up backfiring because they do not help citizens in any way and weaken the business and investment fabric.
Filling businesses with politically designated managers means less innovation, lack of questioning of bad decisions and massive malinvestments, traits that China could rapidly reduce if it opened, instead of closing, its economy.
This is a lesson for those in the West that see China’s rising interventionism as a good idea.
Political interventionism means bad capital allocation, worse job creation, and the worst type of inequality, the one that is politically driven.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 21:10 - Baidu Says Its Robotaxis Will Be Cheaper Than Human Drivers By 2025
Baidu Says Its Robotaxis Will Be Cheaper Than Human Drivers By 2025
Unlike some other companies that have made bold promises about robotaxis <cough> Elon Musk <cough> Tesla <cough> one million robotaxis <cough>, it looks as though the rubber is literally hitting the road for Baidu’s autonomous driving segment.
Baidu held its Q2 2021 conference call on Thursday morning at 8AM and much of the focus was on autonomous driving and the company’s progress and plans for rolling out robotaxis.
“Earlier this year, Baidu’s autonomous driving unit Apollo launched paid robotaxi services, that operate without a driver behind the steering wheel, in Beijing and Guangzhou,” Yahoo noted about the company’s progress thus far. Baidu has said it wants to target robotaxi services to 3 million users by 2023, the report continued.
The biggest headline from the call was that Baidu expected the cost of its robotaxi services to be less than human drivers by 2025.
CEO Robin Li said on the company’s conference call: “Based on our current projection, I think by the year 2025, we will cross the line, which means that the total cost of Robotaxi ride-hailing will be lower than manned-vehicle ride-hailing. And after that, I think that the scale will be able to grow much larger than it is today. And I think around that time, we should be able to report in a separate line.”
CFO Herman Yu followed up, emphasizing that the economics of robotaxis would continue to improve: “And if you look at what Robin just said, throughout to 2025, what we’re seeing in the economics is that in a ride-hailing with after drivers, look the concept of a person — labor costs only goes up, it doesn’t go down over time, but you’re competing with technology. You’re competing with the fact that the more miles that we have, the more data that we have, our operation experience that this thing will continue to go down.”
Li also went into further detail on how the economics were starting to favor the company: “As pointed out earlier, our fifth-generation robotaxi vehicles saw another 60% drop in cost per mile compared to an average decrease of 62% in the first 4 generations of AV vehicles. We plan to roll out Apollo Go ride-hailing across 30 cities over the next 2 to 3 years.”
Yu also noted that the company already had robotaxis on the road – a far cry from certain U.S.-based competitors: “If you look at today in Shougang Park in Beijing, we believe we’re the only second autonomous driving car company in the world, where you actually have a car driving without someone at the driver’s seat.”
He continued: “So I think that shows the number of years of experience that we’ve been doing in autonomous driving. It also just shows the fact that we’ve been doing operations for autonomous driving for a while. That’s why we can get the permit and actually start testing that. So it’s open to the public. You guys are free to come and look at how autonomous driving is being done without someone at the driver’s seat.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 20:50 - Coercing People To Get COVID-19 Vaccines Is Damaging Trust In Public Health: Harvard Professor
Coercing People To Get COVID-19 Vaccines Is Damaging Trust In Public Health: Harvard Professor
Authored by Zachary Stieber and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,
The rapidly escalating pressure on many Americans to get a COVID-19 vaccine is undermining trust in public health, according to Martin Kulldorf, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
New York City became the first major metropolitan area in the United States this month to require proof of vaccination to enter numerous businesses, including gyms and restaurants. Other cities and states are imposing vaccine requirements on workers, including police officers and nurses.
“At best, it’s sort of a very coercive way to get people to vaccinate, and I think that’s very bad for public health,” Kulldorf, also a professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders.”
“One reason is that, why do you coerce people who are immune, or people who are young, who have very small risk, when the vaccines are much more needed for older people in other places? So that’s an ethical aspect to it. I think it’s very unethical to do so,” he added.
“The other aspect is that if you force something on people, if you coerce somebody to do something, that can backfire. So public health has to be based on trust. And if [a] public health official wants the public to trust them, public health officials also have to trust the public.”
Kulldorf has long worked on vaccines, including messaging surrounding the shots. A key aspect is maintaining confidence in vaccines so many people get them, achieving herd immunity.
“There’s a small group of people who are against vaccines but they haven’t really been influential. They’re very vocal, but they haven’t been influential because most people trust the vaccines and have confidence in them.
What the vaccine, I would call them vaccine fanatics who are demanding vaccine passports and vaccine mandates, pushing for that—they have done more damage to the confidence in vaccines than these so-called anti-vaxxers have ever been able to do,” Kulldorf said.
Proponents of the vaccine verification requirements, colloquially known as vaccine passports, say the mandates increase uptake of the vaccines, helping protect the wider society, including populations who cannot at present get a jab. They also argue that people who don’t want to get a vaccine don’t have to. If they’re fired, the line of thinking goes, then they can just get a new job.
But the push to vaccinate is backfiring among some Americans, who question why there is such a strong crackdown on those who don’t get a vaccine. The mandates also by and large don’t address a key issue: natural immunity, or the protection people who recover from COVID-19 enjoy against the virus that causes it.
“Why do you have to force somebody to take the vaccine if it’s so beneficial to you? That’s sort of one rationale,” Kulldorf said.
Even if people are coerced into getting a jab, “it will turn them off from public health, it will make them distrust public health and turn off from other vaccines that are not mandatory,” he added.
“So it has sort of ripple effects on other aspects of public health that are very unfortunate.”
The Sweden native noted that confidence in vaccines remains high in his homeland, where no mandates are in place.
“It’s completely voluntary, and I think if you want to have high confidence in vaccines, it has to be voluntary. There shouldn’t be any mandates,” he said.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 20:30 - Robin "Comes Out" As Bisexual In New Batman Comic
Robin "Comes Out" As Bisexual In New Batman Comic
Remember your old Batman comics? The thread was always centered around fighting crime in Gotham; a true superhero story.
Today, Batman is about coming out as bisexual.
At least that was the topic of the latest issue of the monthly anthology comic series “Batman: Urban Legends,” where Batman’s sidekick Robin “comes out”, according to Variety.
The sixth issue of the series came out on Tuesday and show the character Tim Drake agreeing to go on a date with a man after having a “lightbulb moment”.
Drake goes to an male friend’s house for dinner and winds up questioning his sexuality before going out to fight crime.
“I’m really glad you got home okay. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, about that night, and I — I don’t know what it meant to me. Not yet. But I’d like to figure it out,” the character says about his dinner with his friend.
The friend then asks: “I was hoping you would. Tim Drake…do you want to go on a date with me?”
“Yeah… Yeah, I think I want that,” Drake says.
Tim Drake finally coming out is so inspiring, DC never wanted a queer Robin but after years and years of campaigning from writers and fans it finally happened
A big thank you to Meghan Fitzmartin, Belén Ortega and Alejandro Sánchez for making this moment so beautiful ❤️ pic.twitter.com/xb5YugEYd9
— Neb | 🏳️🌈 (@NebsGoodTakes) August 10, 2021
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Robin joins Kate Kane’s Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, Renee Montoya and Alan Scott the Green Lantern in the canon of LGBTQ+ characters in the DC Comics universe.
Writer Meghan Fitzmartin said her “goal in writing has been and will always be to show just how much God loves you.”
My goal in writing has been and will always be to show just how much God loves you. You are so incredibly loved and important and seen. Forever grateful to be trusted with Tim Drake and his story and honored to work with the amazingly talented @BelenOrtega_ and @loquesunalex 💗 pic.twitter.com/h2BMotX0Iq
— Meghan Fitzmartin (@megfitz89) August 10, 2021
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 20:10 - Yet Again, The Media's COVID Narrative Doesn't Add Up
Yet Again, The Media's COVID Narrative Doesn't Add Up
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
If one were to go only on what one reads or sees in the media, one would think it’s the spring of 2020 all over again. The headlines are filled with stories of overcrowded hospitals, overwhelmed medical personnel, and predictions of people dying in parking lots waiting for medical care. The news articles generally quote a staffer of some kind at various hospitals and then leave it at that.
It’s difficult to know what to make of these stories. After all, we heard very much the same thing during March, April, and May of 2020. Local governments were building makeshift hospitals in convention centers—yet they went unused. Memphis’s overflow hospital was closed down after an entire year of never housing a single patient. In late 2020, after months of media reports that New York hospitals were utterly overwhelmed, Andrew Cuomo announced New York hospitals “were never overwhelmed.” Colorado built a twenty-two hundred–patient overflow hospital. It was never used. Last spring, a $17 million overflow facility in Houston was dismantled without ever being used.
Now we’re being told that this time, they really mean it and hospitals are on the verge of overflowing.
Yet according to data from Johns Hopkins, most of these cases may be overstated. In Texas, for example, whose hospitals have been the subject of countless recent stories about overflowing ICUs, the state is a long way from reaching its earlier peaks of 2020. Moreover, Texas is now staffing fewer ICU beds overall. The story is the same in Georgia, that supposed home of an “experiment in human sacrifice,” where officials were among the first to end stay-at-home orders in 2020. Indeed, it’s clear most of the country—regardless of the state’s use of mask mandates or stay-at-home orders—remains well behind previous peak levels.
One outlier in terms of hospitalizations, however, is the state of Florida. Numbers in Florida do appear to be closer to previous peaks than in most other states, and ICU usage is now larger than what it was during the summer of 2020.
Why is this?
According to many reports from the corporate media, this must be because the state’s governor is Ron DeSantis. Because of his connection to the Trump movement, the media has predictably focused on DeSantis and his policies as alleged drivers of rising covid cases in Florida. The preponderance of media articles about Florida are careful to mention that the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has opposed mask mandates, vaccine passports, and stay-at-home orders.
The implication, of course, is that DeSantis’s opposition to these measures has somehow caused today’s rising number of hospitalizations.
This connection is so tenuous, however, that even Philip Bump at the Washington Post—who clearly is no fan of DeSantis—admits it’s unclear what’s behind Florida’s rising numbers. Florida may be an outlier in terms of new hospitalizations, but it’s not an outlier in terms of policy. States that have been relatively laissez-faire on covid, like Georgia, Texas, South Dakota, and Nebraska have not seen trends similar to Florida’s.
Moreover, Bump notes that Florida has higher vaccination rates than many states with both fewer hospitalizations and fewer new covid deaths. Florida isn’t an outlier in terms of vaccinations. Nearly 50 percent of the population is fully vaccinated in Florida—California is at 53 percent. Floridians are vaccinated at higher rates than is the case in Utah, Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and South Dakota. Yet these other states all have fewer cases of new deaths and hospitalizations, per capita:
Something makes Florida exceptional here: These numbers are hazy enough (thanks to reporting periods and the lags in case and death counts) that one can certainly cobble together a case that there’s some other factor at play than indifference from state leadership. And, in fact, something else may be the problem. It’s hard to say.
Moreover, even with the current surge in hospitalization in Florida, the state may still never catch up with states like New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts in terms of total covid deaths per million. As of August 11, Florida is still twenty-sixth in the nation in terms of total deaths per million, at 1,870. New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts still top the list, with 3,003, 2,797, and 2,629 deaths per million, respectively. There is also evidence that the current increase in covid cases—and the “delta surge” in general—has already peaked.
So here we go again—the narrative doesn’t lend itself to easy explanations. States with long-lasting lockdowns, covid restrictions, and even mounting vaccine “incentives” have still been hit harder than more laissez-faire states in many cases, even after the virus has had eighteen months to spread well beyond the borders of the initial hot spots.
But for anyone who can remember the media narrative eighteen months ago, the current story will seem quite familiar. Hospitals are overflowing. But if we heed the diktats of the regime’s technocrats, we’re told, things will markedly improve. Those places that refuse to take orders from Washington will have many times more death, illness, and economic destruction.
The facts never backed up this story in 2020. Twenty twenty-one isn’t shaping up to be much different.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 19:50 - Lawyers Expect Lawsuits As Employers Navigate "Touchy" Subject Of Religious Objections To Vaccines
Lawyers Expect Lawsuits As Employers Navigate "Touchy" Subject Of Religious Objections To Vaccines
Now that the Biden Administration has outsourced the responsibility for enforcing America’s vaccine mandate to individual employers (who for millions of Americans control access to health-care, income, and a sense of self-worth), legal experts expect companies to struggle with “touchy” subjects like workers with legitimate religious objections to vaccination, especially as workers increasingly demand to continue working from home.
Recently, the band the Offspring made headlines when it announced that its drummer, who had decided not to get the vaccine for legitimate medical issues, wouldn’t be joining the rest of the band during an upcoming tour. The drummer explained in a statement that he had Guillain Barre syndrome when he was a child, and didn’t want to risk trigger rare blood clots which are a documented side effect of the vaccine, making it unsuitable for certain high risk patients.
And has large tech companies like Google and Microsoft are joined by banks, airlines (or at least one airline), Tyson Foods and others, many managers are finding it difficult to navigate an area where Americans have traditionally enjoyed many liberties: their religious preferences.
Reuters reports that while the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission made an exemption in its vaccine rules for religious exemptions, it’s likely this right too will be steamrolled in practice.
And given the obvious conflict, it’s almost guaranteed that unlawful termination and discrimination lawsuits will emerge in the coming months as those who refuse to get the vaccine face every conceivable means of coercion.
As one lawyer put it, “it’s a touchy subject.”
“It’s such a touchy subject for both sides,” said Erin McLaughlin, a Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney lawyer who advises large employers.
“This issue has moved to the forefront as we see more and more mandatory vaccination policies,” she said. She said there had been more regulator guidance on exemptions for disabilities than religious beliefs, adding to the challenge as companies draft vaccine policies.
In the past, US courts ruled that veganism counted as a religious belief so far as it justified one nurse’s decision to refuse a flu shot, which led to her termination back in 2010.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center fired customer service representative Sakile Chenzira in 2010 for refusing a flu vaccine because she was a vegan. Chenzira sued and the hospital wanted the case dismissed, arguing she was mistaking a dietary habit for a religious belief. The federal judge ruled in her favor based on the sincerity of her views. The parties settled privately.
“As an employer, you can inquire whether an employee has a sincerely held religious belief. It’s just kind of a fraught investigation,” said Brian Dean Abramson, an author and specialist in vaccine law.
But the vegan loophole likely won’t be tolerated this time around, despite the EEOC’s broad definition of religion.
The standard of “undue burden” means businesses must accommodate religious beliefs unless it poses an “undue burden”, either financially or in terms of safety.
In other words, those who refuse the vaccine will need to submit to weekly testing and constant masking. Should they fail to keep up with either, they could be at risk for termination.
Burgo said businesses should assume that employees seeking an exemption sincerely hold their beliefs. She said the bigger challenge can be accommodating those exemptions which the employer can refuse if it results in an “undue burden” on workplace safety and efficiency.
Brett Horvath cited religious beliefs when he refused a tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis vaccine in 2016 that was required by the City of Leander Fire Department in Texas where he worked as a driver and pump operator.
The department gave him a choice. Instead of being vaccinated, he could wear a mask and submit to testing or switch to a job in code enforcement with hours that were less convenient. He refused and was fired.
He sued and last year the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal, finding the face mask requirement accommodated his religion while allowing him to perform his job.
Employees who push to work from home to better accommodate their situation will simply force a reluctant employer to come up with a reason why the employees’ presence at the office is essential.
But employees may also demand to work from home, creating a challenge for reluctant employers to explain why mandatory in-person attendance is essential after months of remote work.
“There will be a few employers who get it wrong before we get through the process to get pretty good established guidance on how to handle this, especially with vaccines,” said McLaughlin, the lawyer for large employers.
As more cities follow NYC’s lead of requiring proof of vaccination to dine in restaurants and go to the gym, those with religious exemptions to the vaccine shouldn’t expect any special treatment, which is of course by design.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 19:30 - The Shadow State: NeuralHash & Apple's Post-Privacy World
The Shadow State: NeuralHash & Apple's Post-Privacy World
In the last week, Apple unveiled “NeuralHash,” a tool that will hasten our move toward a dystopian post-privacy world. The company informed the world this week that it would be adding the NeuralHash to its network of over a billion iPhones, storage platforms, and other resources. The NeuralHash will allow it to scan images before they are uploaded to iCloud for child pornography. The user will then be disabled and reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
As with Facebook’s campaign for people to embrace censorship by calling it “content modification”, Apple has repackaged perpetual monitoring as “perceptual hashing.” Not surprising, these pitches for eroding expectations of speech or privacy are presented as as harmless, even reassuring. After all, the only people who need to worry are those with images constituting child porn. Of course, that determination will be made by a bot who will present people for review using algorithms looking for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). Microsoft, Google, Facebook and others are already sharing digital fingerprints of known child sexual abuse images.
The controversy over Apple’s new system raises not just privacy concerns but broader concerns over the shifting of power from the government to corporate figures. In critical areas, United States is moving from a democracy to a corporatocracy where critical rights and privileges are effectively controlled by a small number of CEOs. The founding fathers of that corporatocracy are figures like Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Tim Cook (Apple), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). It is an alternative government created by acclamation rather than any constitution. From free speech to Covid mandates, many on the left, including the Biden Administration, have called for policies to be carried out by corporations like a type of shadow state. At the same time, companies like Facebook have been running commercials for months to try to convince people to embrace corporate censorship over their own speech. Yet, in this brave new world of corporate governance, nothing quite prepared many of us for
Apple will now use its phones to actively spy on over a billion users to see if any have photos that may be CSAM in order to report them. Imagine the post-privacy world unfolding literally before us. People will have no choice if they have an iPhone in allowing a corporation to monitor their photos. Then, when they use their phones on social media, Twitter and Facebook will censor any views that they object to on subject ranging from Covid to gender identification to Hunter Biden’s laptop to election fraud to even criticism of governments.
At the same time, the Biden White House has decided that it does not want to deal with the legal or political challenges of seeking to impose a national vaccine mandate.
Instead, President Biden has called on corporations to carry out the mandate.
The Democratic embracing of corporate governance is a matter of simple convenience. Corporations now overwhelmingly support the left on key political issues, and some seem to have virtually written off roughly half of the country that voted for Donald Trump. More importantly, Democrats cannot limit speech, impose national vaccine mandates, or deny privacy through the government. However, surrogate corporations can since the First Amendment and other constitutional provisions address government not corporate abuses. Much of the Constitution then becomes largely relevant – your rights are entirely protected except from the main source of their denial.
What is really maddening is that companies like Facebook and Apple do not simply want us to yield core rights to them but to love them for it. After all, the cheerful hip figures on the Facebook censorship commercial like “Joshan” only want you to “change” to allow your “blending of the real world and the internet world.” Then there is Apple which simply tells you to “Think Different” with all of the other worthy netizens at the “Genius bar.”
In this new world, free speech itself is a danger rather than the very thing that defines us. Privacy is a shield used by those who want to harm children. “Changing” with Joshan means learning to love corporate monitoring and “modifications.”
Carrying around your own personal surveillance device is not the only thing that you will lose in Apple’s Orwellian NeuralHash. In the end, the powers of both corporations and the government will be enhanced by our modified selves. Under the controlling standard of the “Katz” test, our privacy is protected from warrantless surveillance by our “expectations of privacy.” When such expectations exist, the government generally must obtain a warrant after showing probable cause that a crime is or has been committed. However, as our expectations fall, the government can engage in more warrantless surveillance. As it engages in more warrantless surveillance, our expectation fall further. Well, you get the idea.
We are increasingly living in a fishbowl society where monitoring (that would have once outraged Americans) is treated as part of life. When we leave our homes were are monitored on the road or at the 7-11 buying coffee. We are monitored on the streets and in our workplaces. We are monitored all the way home in the evening. Now, once at home our images will be monitored and our communications are “modified” according to what corporations want us to see and say.
The response from the left today is that none of this is a problem because corporations are not controlled by the Constitution. After all, if you want a phone that does not spy on you, invent one and compete with Apple with your own global network. Simple.
The current limited function of the NeuralHash is simply the decision of Apple. However, it is a new technology that can be expanded to other images and could potentially be used by the government. I recently testified in Congress about the rapid loss of privacy due to the government’s use of national security letters and other devices to search the iCloud and to obtain “metadata.” This includes the use of secret orders to corporations to spy on journalists during the Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations. We already have ample powers to investigate and prosecute child pornography but this function will now be taken up by the corporatocracy which is not directly controlled any more than by Fourth Amendment than the First Amendment.
Like authoritarian governments, authoritarian corporations always have an appealing reason for limiting freedoms. Fighting terrorism or child porn or “misinformation” often leave free speech or privacy as mere abstractions. After all, the idea is to “Think Different” about privacy. Indeed, you have to think differently from the original Apple when many of us bought its first computer. Back then Apple was portrayed in its famous “1984” Mac commercial as literally smashing the authoritarian conformity of Big Brother. Now, conformity is good. After all, as Orwell himself wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 19:10 - Treasury To Calm Crypto Nerves With Clarification On Broker-Only IRS Reporting Requirements
Treasury To Calm Crypto Nerves With Clarification On Broker-Only IRS Reporting Requirements
The US Treasury Department is set to clarify that only bonafide cryptocurrency brokers – not developers, equipment providers, or miners – will need to comply with proposed IRS reporting requirements contained in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, as long as they don’t act as brokers.
In a statement to Bloomberg, an unnamed Treasury official said that the guidance won’t grant blanket exemptions based on how firms identify – but would rather focus on the IRS‘s opinion of whether a firm’s activities constitute brokerage activity under the tax code.
The guidance, which could be made public as soon as next week, is an attempt to address concerns in the cryptocurrency industry that the $550 billion infrastructure bill would require a host of companies with ties to digital assets to report data to the Internal Revenue Service that they don’t have. The tax provision, estimated to raise $28 billion over a decade, was included in the legislation as a way to help pay for new investments in roads and bridges.
The Treasury’s directive is crucial because lawmakers who want to revise the bill’s language in the House are unlikely to succeed, since altering the crypto section could open up the whole legislation to additional revisions. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she’ll bring up the bill for a vote when President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion social spending and tax plan is also ready for consideration, which could be months from now. -Bloomberg
Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman, who drafted the cryptocurrency portion of the bill passed earlier this week by the Senate, said that he thinks the legislation is clear – and that miners, transaction validators, and software developers for digital wallets should be exempt from the new tax rules.
Crypto traders who rode out the last several weeks may beg to differ with Portman, as industry players and advocates slammed the legislation for overly-broad language that could subject anyone “regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets” to reporting requirements.
In an 11th hour attempt to provide clarity, a bipartisan group of senators brought an ill-fated amendment to the bill, but it was blocked via procedural moves. According to the Treasury official, some of the concerns over the broad language were valid, however much of the lobbying was aimed at limiting the Treasury’s collection of legitimate tax information. Instead, the IRS isn’t going to pursue businesses that don’t actually transact cryptos.
According to the report, the upcoming guidance will clarify how the definition of ‘broker’ applies to entities which transfer digital assets on behalf of another person, which – along with however aggressive the IRS is on enforcement – will ultimately determine the number of companies required to comply with the new requirements.
The effort is also part of a broader push by the Treasury Department to crack down on tax cheats. IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig has said tax evasion through the use of virtual currency is a key contributor to the growing gap between what’s owed in taxes and what the IRS actually collects.
In addition, more regulation is likely coming for the cryptocurrency community with prominent lawmakers, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, and regulators like Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler both eager to address the emerging technology. –Bloomberg
“I don’t think people will notice much. Did everything die in crypto in the U.S. when Coinbase began 1099s a few years ago?” said William Quigley, the co-founder of stablecoin Tether and blockchain platform WAX. “Those worries, though, I think have started to settle down a bit,” he added.
“I think the IRS is going to take note of what the intent was that was expressed by these senators.”
Assuming the infrastructure bill is finally passed and signed into law, the new reporting rules won’t go into effect until 2023, which will give ample time for crypto companies to adapt to the new requirements.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 18:50 - Woke Nonsense Is Warping Everyday Life
Woke Nonsense Is Warping Everyday Life
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,
Americans are growing angrier by the day, but in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or the Tea Party movement over a decade ago.
The rage this time is not just fueled by conservatives.
For the first time in their lives, Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their family’s safety and the American way of life.
The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is arguably nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year, according to reports — with complete impunity. There is zero effort to stop them. Officials hector Americans daily to get vaccinated and tested for COVID-19. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them no doubt infected with the virus.
Have we ever had a president who made no pretense about destroying federal immigration law and asking of Americans what he does not ask of those entering the country illegally?
Joe Biden has also conceded that his moratorium on housing evictions defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably didn’t have the legal authority to ignore the court but didn’t really care.
As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.
America has also never before seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism.
At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment and record worker shortages, Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords — even after a prior year of free housing.
In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed.
Such insanity not only means that labor-short employers can’t provide goods and services to American consumers; the new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and be idle than to get a job and be productive.
Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back.
No one seems to acknowledge that both students and the universities that lured them to borrow knew the risks they were taking. Meanwhile, millions of American youth, the working classes who choose not to attend college, and those who paid off their loans or whose parents saved enough over the years to cover their tuition obligations will subsidize the debt evaders by paying higher taxes.
Inflation is roaring back. Soaring prices are a direct result of incentivizing the unemployed not to work, while discouraging manufacturers and producers of food, gas, oil, timber, mineral and metals.
Rising crime rates are likewise not accidental. Increasing crime is the logical result of releasing thousands of criminals from prison, defunding and defaming the police, and empowering woke mayors and prosecutors to contextualize crime as the fault of society, not the criminal.
In response, millions of Americans now simply avoid the mayhem of big cities in blue states.
Race relations have regressed 50 years. Under the fad of critical race theory, the color of our skin is now deemed essential to who we are.
Most Americans still integrate and assimilate, and many intermarry. But the current woke revolution is an elite, top-down effort to smear a self-critical and always improving nation as some sort of contemporary racist hellhole.
George Orwell would say of these cultural Marxists that they grab power in the present to reinvent the past in order to control our futures.
All this multifaceted chaos is not just faculty lounge stuff. We are beginning to see the collective craziness filter down to disruptions in our everyday lives.
Airliners cannot take off due to fuel shortages. Automobiles, houses, gas and lumber are in short supply.
Consumers can’t get their roofs fixed, their houses painted or their trees trimmed, as employers plead with their idle, government-subsidized employees to come back to work.
Many Americans have lost faith in the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the CDC and most of the other federal bureaucracies, which are as politicized as they are incompetent.
What started out as elite woke nonsense now warps daily life. If we don’t wake up from wokeness, we will continue on our sure trajectory to self-inflicted, systemic paralysis — followed by civilizational collapse.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 18:30 - Even In Their "High Earning Years", Millennials Saddled With Debt Aren't Making Enough
Even In Their "High Earning Years", Millennials Saddled With Debt Aren't Making Enough
While many millennials are heading into the chapter of their lives where they are expected to earn the most, the drag of high debt-to-income ratios and the lingering effects of two recessions and a pandemic are all but ensuring the generation’s earnings “prime” isn’t as meaningful as it has been for past generations.
Lowell R. Ricketts, a data scientist for the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, recently told the Wall Street Journal: “In perspective, you can kind of understand how the millennial generation is a microcosm of the K-shaped recovery that we’re seeing and also just the divergence in wealth overall. I think you have to factor in the labor market changes over time as well, but there’s a kind of more of a sense of insecurity, even though you might be now earning a high salary or wage, that might not be guaranteed tomorrow.”
The Journal points out that workers generally hit their peak median weekly earnings between the ages of 35 and 54, before earnings plateau or start to fade lower. Workers now see a median 22% increase in income when moving from the 25-to-34 to 35-to-44 age bracket. This compares to increases of 20% in 2005 and 16% in 1986.
But despite the increased bump up in earnings, millennials are dealing with significantly more debt than past generations. And they’re also getting started accruing assets, like homes, later in life. As of 2020, the median age of a first time home buyer is up to 33 years old, from 30 years old in 2010.
Millennials are also having babies later in life. The CDC notes that the mean age of mothers was 27 in 2019, a record high.
A 2020 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research notes that millennials are still working to recover lost ground from the 2008 financial crisis. William Gale, one of the authors of the study, told the Journal: “You carry that with you for a long time, maybe your whole career.”
The study revealed that the 2007 to 2009 recession “significantly reduced” wealth for all age groups. Millennial households held 12% less wealth in 2016 than in 1989.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found in 2019 that debt-to-income ratios for millennials were 23% higher than expected.
And overall real wages in 2018 had the same purchasing power as 40 years ago, meaning that millennials aren’t necessarily seeing more flexibility in their budgets, despite wage gains and the current recovery boom.
Andrea Pica, a 39-year-old from Neptune City, NJ, told the Journal: “The extra money I make every year just gets funneled into something new, in the necessary things in our life.”
Tim Eng, a 35-year-old product manager from Connecticut, says he takes on longer hours and more stress to meet his personal salary goals. “You’re not going to make more income without drastically uprooting your life. It’s about making the most of what they have,” he said.
Ricketts concluded: “Gen X can’t move up to senior positions currently held by boomers, and then millennials can’t move up to their positions. The broad numbers point to a challenge in that narrative that ‘baby boomers are done and setting sail on their boats to go fishing.’ This is really a story of folks still working.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 18:10 - Buchanan: Who Lost America's Longest War?
Buchanan: Who Lost America's Longest War?
In April, President Joe Biden told the nation he would have all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack ever on the continental United States.
Given the turn of events of the past week, that 20th anniversary may be celebrated by a triumphant Taliban, now on the cusp of victory over the Americans and their Afghan allies, with gruesome public executions of their surrendered and captured enemies.
Sept. 11, 2021, could see U.S. Marines and diplomats fleeing Kabul to escape the retribution of the Taliban whom we ousted in 2001.
Consider. From Friday, a week ago, to today, the Taliban have overrun 10 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals.
Mazar-e-Sharif in the north is now surrounded. Kandahar and Herat, second and third largest cities, are under siege. The Kandahar-Kabul road has been cut. The defense minister escaped assassination in the capital. The government’s media director did not. The Taliban now control half of the 400 regions of Afghanistan and two-thirds of its territory.
Some Afghan soldiers have fought bravely. Others have retreated into their bases, surrendered, or fled into neighboring countries such as Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan. An entire Afghan army corps with its U.S. weapons, equipment and vehicles was surrendered in Kunduz city.
U.S. military say the fall of Kabul could come within 90 days, with some saying privately the regime could fall to the Taliban within a month.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has summarized the situation:
“The complete, utter failure of the Afghan national army, absent our hand-holding, to defend their country is a blistering indictment of a failed 20-year strategy predicated on the belief that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars could create an effective democratic central government in a nation that has never had one.”
The reality of that grim assessment raises many questions.
Who is responsible for the colossal U.S. failure in Afghanistan? Who is responsible for America’s impending defeat in her longest war?
Over the last 20 years, the U.S. lost 2,500 troops with 20,000 wounded and invested $1 trillion to create an Afghan army, only to see that army crumble and disintegrate as soon as we departed.
Wednesday, Biden conceded that truth:
“Look, we spent over $1 trillion over 20 years; we trained and equipped … over 300,000 Afghan forces. Afghan leaders have to come together. They’ve got to fight for themselves.”
We are facing in Afghanistan a wipeout of the investment of a generation to convert Afghanistan into a democracy with the ability to hold the allegiance of its people and to defend itself.
Why did we fail?
Did the U.S. generals, statesmen, politicians and journalists who went to Afghanistan during these last two decades, and came back to testify to our steady progress, delude themselves? Or did they deceive us?
How many U.S. generals knew what was going on but declined to risk their careers by telling Congress or the country that the Afghan army and regime we had stood up would likely collapse like a house of cards once the Americans departed and they had to face the Taliban alone?
Today, the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, is in Qatar threatening the Taliban that if they overrun the country and impose a victor’s peace, they risk being denied diplomatic recognition by the U.S. and its Western allies and a forfeiture of future foreign aid.
But to brand the Taliban terrorists and pariahs is not new to them. What they seek is something for which they have proven they are willing to die.
What is critical for them is to restore the Taliban to their previous dominance; to create an Islamic Emirate; to make themselves the moral, social and political arbiters of a more purely Islamic Afghanistan.
And to be rid of the outsiders and their alien values.
They want to be able to stand up and say to the Muslim world: “We have shown you how to do it. We fought America, the world superpower, for 20 years until we forced the Americans, tails between their legs, to get out of our land, and then put their puppets up against a wall.”
While our strategic defeat will leave Americans reluctant to attempt any such future imperial interventions, there needs to be an accounting.
The questions that need answering:
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Was not the attempt to transplant Madisonian democracy into the soil of the Middle and Near East a fool’s errand from the beginning?
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How many other U.S. allies field paper armies, which will collapse, if they do not have the Americans there to do the heavy lifting?
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Is what we have on offer — one man-one vote democracy — truly appealing in a part of the world where democracy seems to have trouble, from the Maghreb to the Middle East to Central Asia, putting down any deep roots?
The Taliban’s God is Allah. The golden calf we had on offer was democracy.
In the Hindu Kush, their god has proven stronger.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/13/2021 – 17:50 -
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