Today’s News 16th December 2021

• You Will Never Be "Fully Vaccinated"
  You Will Never Be “Fully Vaccinated”

  Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

  Earlier this week, in a statement to Parliament on the UK’s planned “vaccine passport”, Health Secretary Sajid Javid admitted the NHS Pass would require three shots for you to be considered “fully vaccinated”.

  “Once all adults have had a reasonable chance to get their booster jab, we intend to change this exemption to require a booster dose,”

  While many of us predicted this would be the case, it is the first time any British politician has actually said it out loud, and in front of parliament too.

  

  The infinite vaccine loop (source: The Telegraph)

  This incredibly cynical “evolving definition” of “fully vaccinated” is not a new phenomenon, and is not isolated to the UK either.

  Israel changed their definition of “fully vaccinated” to include the booster months ago. New Zealand’s ministry of health is “considering” doing the same, as is Australia.

  The EU isn’t far behind either, with proposals in place to make travel dependent on having a third dose.

  The US hasn’t formally adopted a new definition yet, but you’d have to be blind not to see the signs. Just yesterday the LA Times headlined:

  Should the definition of ‘fully vaccinated’ be changed to include a booster shot?

  An article on Kaiser Health News asks the same thing.

  Tony Fauci is quoted in the Independent as saying it’s only a matter of time before the definition is updated:

  “It’s going to be a matter of when, not if” getting a booster shot will be considered being “fully vaccinated,” Dr Fauci said.

  Opinion pieces are already appearing asking “is it safe to hangout with the unboosted”? (This headline was so unpopular, the Atlantic changed it only a couple of hours after it was published).

  All in all it seems pretty clear that, by the time 2022 rolls around, most of the Western world will require three shots in order to qualify as “fully vaccinated”.

  It’s also clear that this won’t stop at three. Already, just last week, Pfizer were claiming they may need to “move up the timeline” for a fourth vaccine dose.

  This change is being blamed on Omicron, with articles warning the “new variant” can “hit” the vaccinated. Fortune reports:

  Omicron is making scientists redefine what it means to be ‘fully vaccinated’ against COVID

  So, the third (and maybe fourth) doses are (allegedly) for Omicron…but that model can extend to perpetuity. In order to go to five, six or seven they’ll only need to “discover” more “new variants”.

  It will just keep going and going.

  But there is good news in all this, every time the powers-that-shouldn’t-be change the rules in the middle of the game, it’s a chance to knock people out of their media-induced hypnosis.

  There are promising signs that millions of already-vaccinated will reject the booster. We can build on that.

  So tell your single and double jabbed friends, try to open their eyes to the path they are starting down.

  They may consider themselves “fully vaccinated”, but the government doesn’t, and never will.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 23:40

• TSA Is Allowing Illegal Migrants To Board Commercial Flights Without Proper Identification, Texas Rep. Alleges
  TSA Is Allowing Illegal Migrants To Board Commercial Flights Without Proper Identification, Texas Rep. Alleges

  It looks as though President Biden’s immigration crisis isn’t just on the ground anymore. 

  That’s because it was reported this week that the Biden administration is allowing illegal migrants to board commercial flights across the United States without ID – all in the name of not being “racist”.

  Rep. Lance Gooden from Texas, who has been in the midst of investigation the TSA, made the relevation. His investigation was prompted by “whistleblower documents alleging an operation to move migrants across the country without standard documentation.”

  Gooden’s correspondence with the TSA was reported by PJ Media this week. 

  Gooden wrote to TSA Administrator David Pekoske this week, stating:  “We request clarification on the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) policies and procedures to protect the nation’s transportation systems and mitigate national security risks. I have serious concerns TSA is actively assisting illegal immigrants without proper identification travel throughout the country. Therefore, we are requesting TSA provide assistance in identifying and preventing the unprecedented flow of illegal immigrants into and throughout the United States and the role TSA has played in facilitating this influx of migrants.”

  He then asked the TSA: “What policies and procedures are in place to identify and screen Non-US/Canadian citizens who do not have documents issued by the U.S. government or passports?”

  

  Gooden’s office has only received an email response from the TSA so far, which reportedly states that  “it accepts alternate forms of identification including a Notice to Appear (NTA) in court” as documentation. 

  An NTA is reportedly only issued after agents have “processed a migrant’s biometrics, taken photos of them, and run their fingerprints through immigration and the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) databases,” the PJ Media report says. 

  But Gooden says agents inform him that an NTA isn’t adequate ID, writing: “When I asked a border patrol officer about TSA allowing migrants to fly with no identification, they told me a Notice to Appear is not sufficient identification and they often have to take migrants at their word that they are who they say they are. TSA and non-profit groups are putting millions of Americans travelling for Christmas at risk by allowing these unknown and unvetted migrants to board planes and fly across the country.”

  The TSA fired back, saying that: “in coordination with its DHS counterparts, TSA has also identified alternate forms of ID for use in special circumstances at the checkpoint, circumstances such as non-U.S. citizens or non-nationals who do not have an acceptable form of ID. For travelers in normal circumstances who lack acceptable or alternate forms of ID, TSA calls the National Transportation Vetting Center (NTVC), which attempts to verify a traveler’s identity by using the individual’s information along with information from various government and commercial databases.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 23:20

• US Drug Agents Ramp Up Fentanyl Counterattack On Chinese Mainland (As DEA Faces Its Own Troubles At Home)
  US Drug Agents Ramp Up Fentanyl Counterattack On Chinese Mainland (As DEA Faces Its Own Troubles At Home)

  Authored by Vince Bielski via RealClearInvestigations.com,

  U.S. drug agents are expanding operations in China – six years after America’s largest trading partner and global rival emerged as the main source of chemicals used to make highly lethal fentanyl. It’s now claiming 65,000 American lives a year.

  The small crew of about a dozen Drug Enforcement Administration agents, including those in new outposts in Shanghai and Guangzhou, is nearly double the number in 2018. They face what seems like mission impossible: collaborating with Chinese agents to try to bust traffickers hidden somewhere in a sprawling export supply chain that’s linked to 160,000 companies. 

  “It’s such a massive chemical industry, and then there are layer upon layer of traders, brokers and freight forwarders,” says Russ Holske, the DEA’s director for the Far East, who set up the new offices in China before he retired. “It’s a daunting challenge.”

  

  A 2020 Drug Enforcement Administration report maps the flow of fentanyl to the U.S., DEA

  The DEA’s predicament in China is part of a larger one at the beleaguered agency, whose mission is to break up major drug trafficking rings worldwide. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that’s mostly made in Mexico with Chinese chemicals, is the deadliest illicit drug ever sold. It’s behind the record number of overdose deaths that keeps growing each year. But the DEA is facing this menace after suffering a series of blows that has left it a smaller and less aggressive and effective outfit, according to several former special agents, high-ranking officials and agency documents.

  Some of the damage has been self-inflicted. An embarrassing sex scandal involving agents in Colombia and a botched operation that took four civilian lives in Honduras have made Congress wary of the agency. It was left to drift without a Senate-confirmed leader for half a decade, and retreated from some foreign operations, as fentanyl was beginning to leave its lethal mark on the streets.

  The DEA also has been swept up in the country’s turn against law enforcement as a force for good, leading to morale problems that afflict police departments as well as the Border Patrol. Hundreds of DEA agents left and weren’t replaced, sapping it of its crime-fighting prowess. Some academics, along with the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for decriminalization, are even calling for the group to be eliminated.

  “Yes, the DEA should be disbanded,” says sociologist Alex Vitale, author of “The End of Policing.”

  “They have two strategies, interdiction and criminalization, and neither is working.”

  The agency declined to comment for this story.

  Restoring DEA’s Urgency

  Critics such as Vitale blame the agency for the easy availability of narcotics like heroin in every part of the country. But that’s not entirely the DEA’s fault. With a force of 4,700 agents – a third the number of FBI agents – the DEA is up against sophisticated transnational criminal organizations. Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel alone rakes in several billions of dollars in revenue a year, according to estimates. That’s about the size of the entire DEA $3 billion budget.

  With DEA offices in 69 countries, its ability to crack down on cartels depends on the cooperation of foreign leaders. The agency has apparently found a willing partner in China, which banned a half-dozen fentanyl substances that traffickers were shipping to the states. As clandestine chemists circumvented the restrictions by tweaking the molecules of the substances to create new ones, China got tougher, outlawing the entire class of fentanyl drugs in 2019. This win for the DEA reflected a collaboration with China not enjoyed by other U.S. agencies. 

  “China, to its credit, helped us quite a bit,” says Holske, the former DEA director.

  “The controls tightened the pipeline of fentanyl that was coming directly to the U.S. and killing Americans.”

  But Chinese traffickers quickly found another workaround by selling the chemicals to make fentanyl to cartels in Mexico, which put up roadblocks to DEA agents. In the past year alone, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has delayed visas for agents and restricted intelligence sharing in protest of the DEA arrest of a former defense minister on drug-related charges.

  U.S. officials recently pressured Mexico to restore some cooperation with DEA agents in pursuit of the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels – the biggest producers of fentanyl powder and counterfeit pharmaceutical pills laced with it. The cartels smuggle the contraband into the states at official ports of entry and along open patches of the border left unguarded as Border Patrol agents are diverted to deal with another crisis – the surge of migrants.

  Still, the DEA’s interdiction efforts may have saved thousands of lives. In August, a two-month domestic enforcement surge nabbed 850 dealers and added to the total of more than 15 million fake pills seized in the past year. Some 40% of those pills contained a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin.

  The agency could be more effective, some former agents say, if it revived its aggressive pursuit of international cartels and replenished its ranks. President Biden did appoint a permanent DEA chief, Anne Milgram, who has a record as a law enforcement reformer who gets results. But the administration’s fentanyl strategy focuses heavily on increasing drug prevention and treatment – a long-term approach that can curb overdose deaths only if the drug supply on the streets is also reduced by law enforcement agents, according to treatment experts. 

  “I cut my teeth as an agent on the street. We were risk-takers and aggressive in everything we did to put bad guys in jail,” said Jack Riley, who was the DEA’s second-in-command before retiring in 2017.

  “But we have lost that sense of urgency. We need to get that back to be more effective.”

  Taking Down Medellin

  Riley, who helped put Sinaloa’s most notorious leader – Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman – in prison, says the agency has proved its mettle over the years. Consider the dismantling of Colombia’s Medellin and Cali cartels in the 1990s. Medellin’s leader, Pablo Escobar, led a murderous campaign against government officials and became a threat to the country’s democracy. Although new cartels grew out of the ashes of Medellin and Cali – showing that law enforcement alone won’t end drug trafficking – the killing of Escobar was itself a win, says David Gaddis, a former DEA agent in Colombia and high-ranking official.

  “Escobar tried to take over the Colombian government and he was almost successful,” Gaddis says.

  “The new cartels do not have the same influence over the government as Medellin did. That’s a success for DEA.”

  The DEA bagged several other drug kingpins before the agency lost some of its luster. Agency veterans date the DEA’s decline to 2015 after revelations that 10 agents had participated in “sex parties” in Colombia with prostitutes paid for by the cartels.

  The uproar in Congress led to the departure of DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart, a former agent who embodied the agency’s boldness. Leonhart’s 2015 exit was followed by a parade of five acting administrators over five years.

  Putting a Rein on Agents

  First up was Chuck Rosenberg, a prosecutor who aimed to rein in what some saw as a cowboy mentality. Edicts from headquarters instructed agents to be more careful in carrying out operations. Leaders feared a questionable shooting could derail the DEA in the wake of the 2014 police killing in Ferguson, Mo., says Jeffrey Higgins, a former special agent for two decades.

  The biggest pullback was overseas. DEA had built a large special forces operation of about 125 personnel to battle narco-terrorists in Afghanistan. The operation paid off with the conviction of Haji Bagcho, the world’s biggest heroin trafficker. But after the killing of Americans in Benghazi in 2012, the Obama administration reduced the DEA’s presence in Kabul to only a handful of agents, says Riley.

  Rosenberg then disbanded the DEA’s FAST units, a paramilitary force that assisted local officers in high-risk operations. A 2017 inspector general report found that FAST agents were involved in an operation in Honduras in which four likely bystanders were killed. The end of FAST marked a shift in DEA strategy to focus more on domestic smugglers and street gangs. Some agents opposed it.

  “It makes no sense,” says Higgins, who worked in about 50 countries.

  “It’s far more effective to put resources into dismantling a major global exportation organization than to go downstream and take out one of 30 U.S. distribution groups that get the drugs from that criminal organization.”

  Citing differences over policing with new president Donald Trump, Rosenberg resigned after two years and became an MSNBC commentator. His replacement at DEA found that the “acting administrator” title was worthless and walked after eight months. Next up was Uttam Dhillon, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles then on Trump’s White House staff. He didn’t understand the DEA’s organizational issues and lost the support of agents, Riley says. He was replaced in 2020 by another short-lived acting head.

  The churn at the top produced disillusionment in the ranks. Many agents retired early or just quit the agency, leaving the DEA down 700 agents  compared to a decade ago. Foreign offices shrunk by a quarter. Predictably, the number of crime organizations that agents disrupted or dismantled worldwide plummeted by one-third – from 2,735 to 1,869 – between 2016 and 2020, according to DEA’s recent report to Congress.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse. The DEA was losing muscle just as Chinese traffickers were increasing shipments of illicit fentanyl to the U.S. The agency had finally gotten a handle on the oversupply of prescription opioids like OxyContin that were killing an alarming number of Americans. But now fentanyl, a more deadly synthetic opioid, was filling the void.

  A Conundrum in China

  The DEA led a full-court press to get China to ban fentanyl, an array of spinoffs and the chemicals to make them. Starting in 2014, acting DEA chiefs, Justice Department officials and chemical experts began holding regular meetings with their Chinese counterparts in Washington and Beijing to press for the restrictions.

  China has long taken a hard line against drug traffickers, which created some common ground for the rival superpowers to cooperate despite tensions about trade and human rights. The secretive courts in China have handed out death sentences to those convicted of major drug offenses. Recent cases involving Canadian and Australian nationals have sparked protests from Amnesty International and pleas for leniency from foreign officials. But China’s harsh punishments weren’t an issue in the successful bilateral talks over the criminalization of fentanyl, perhaps because no Americans were facing the death penalty. 

  The fentanyl bans don’t mean much, however, if they’re not enforced. While Chinese authorities have curtailed shipments directly to the U.S., the DEA says, traffickers are supplying Mexican cartels with enough of the precursor chemicals – some of them also outlawed – to flood the states with deadly pills and powder. U.S. border agents seized 10,600 pounds of fentanyl in fiscal 2021, more than twice the prior year. That’s a small fraction of the amount that reaches cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

  The biggest case in China to date was kicked off by U.S. agents who shared intelligence about the “Diana” criminal group with the Chinese Narcotics Control Bureau. The joint investigation led to the conviction of nine Chinese citizens for fentanyl smuggling in 2019. One defendant received a suspended death sentence and a few were sent to prison for life. Officials from both countries hailed the investigation, which continues today, as a sign of their expanding cooperation.

  But while China has made several more fentanyl-related arrests, it doesn’t appear to have convicted any major traffickers in the two years since the Diana case. Some former DEA agents question how far China is willing to go in enforcing its bans since the U.S. would be the main beneficiary. While DEA agents in countries such as Indonesia join police in raids and debriefing defendants, in China they are unarmed and play a more limited role. Agents exchange intelligence and discuss cases with local officers but only occasionally work in the field.   

  At times agents also run into resistance from Chinese authorities, according to an August report by a congressional group that examines U.S.-China economic and security issues. “Chinese regulatory authorities continue to delay requests for access to inspect and investigate potential sites of illegal chemical production where precursors are made,” the report said. “Requests are often delayed for days, allowing any illegal operation to vacate or clean up the premises.”

  The Chinese Embassy in Washington issued a strongly worded rebuttal in September, showing the tenuous nature of China’s cooperation with the DEA. The embassy called the assessment that Chinese precursors are flowing to Mexico and that authorities obstruct the work of U.S. agents “utterly false.”

  “It is disappointing that for all the goodwill and sincerity of the Chinese side,” the embassy said, “some American politicians and media are still hyping up such disinformation.”

  

  A strong impression on agents: DEA’s Milgram speaks movingly at slain agent Michael Garbo’s service. DEA/YouTube

  New Leaders Take Charge

  Milgram, the new DEA chief, has an advantage that eluded her predecessors in the global war on fentanyl. She won Senate confirmation in June, giving her the authority to reshape the troubled agency at a pivotal time.

  Milgram has a record of bringing innovative, data-driven approaches to law enforcement agencies that still tend to operate on gut instinct and perform poorly. After New Jersey took control of the Camden police because of the city’s alarmingly high crime rate, Milgram, who was the state’s attorney general, used data analysis to shake up the department. In 2009 murders fell by 38% from the prior year by making cops walk the streets and confiscate guns.

  At DEA, she is preparing to make changes too. In August the administrator began a top-to-bottom review of foreign operations supervised by a team of outsiders, saying she’s looking for “areas of improvement” as well as “controls to ensure integrity and accountability.” She also tapped the politically savvy Jon DeLena, an associate special agent in charge, to examine how the agency can repair relations with Congress, which is crucial to funding and hiring agents, says Riley, the former deputy.

  In another move in August, Milgram brought back Lou Milione as her deputy. Riley says the veteran of special operations was known for his “kick ass” leadership against cartel bosses. Milione’s return may signal a revival of a more aggressive approach to the kind of global crime groups that run the fentanyl trade.

  “He’s a smart guy and he really understands the good results you get from targeting the international cartels,” says Higgins, the former FAST agent who helped take down Haji Bagcho.

  In October, Milgram for the first time faced the killing of one of her agents. The shooting death of group supervisor Mike Garbo in Arizona rocked the DEA – a reminder of the added dangers when there are fewer agents in the field. The administrator spoke at the memorial service. Her detailed account of Garbo’s talents made a strong impression on agents, whose support she needs in her efforts to revive the DEA, Riley says.

  “Milgram will make changes,” he says. “But she has a huge challenge with fentanyl. China and Mexico have to do much more to stop it. The DEA can only do so much on its own.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 23:00

• The Most Commonly Spoken Language In Every US State (Besides English & Spanish)
  The Most Commonly Spoken Language In Every US State (Besides English & Spanish)

  We typically operate under the assumption that most Americans speak either English or Spanish. Though this is true in the broadest sense, as Visual Capitalist’s Anshool Deshmukh details below, the U.S. is a culturally diverse country, home to a plethora of languages.

  The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) annually asks more than 1 million Americans questions about their lives, families, and backgrounds. One question asks respondents what language they mainly speak in their homes.

  Migration Policy has used this data (while excluding English and Spanish) to leave us with the next-most-frequently spoken languages at home in each state.

  

  Non-English Languages in the U.S.

  In 2019, approximately 78% (241 million) of all 308.8 million people ages five and older reported speaking only English at home regardless of their nativity. The remaining 22% (67.8 million) reported speaking a language other than English at home.

  Based on this data, Mandarin and Cantonese were the most common non-English, non-Spanish languages spoken in the U.S., with more than 3.4 million speakers across the country.

  Here is a list of the most common languages spoken at home in the U.S., outside of English:

  

  Tagalog is the second most commonly spoken language in American households (after English/Spanish) with 1.7 million speakers, even though it only reaches top spot in Nevada. Unsurprisingly, Louisiana and states bordering eastern Canada have a healthy number of French speakers.

  Further analysis of these common languages reveals a fascinating story. Here’s a breakdown of the top 5 most commonly spoken second languages (excluding English and Spanish), and the states where they’re spoken.

  1. Cantonese and Mandarin

  Estimated number of speakers nationally: 3,495,000

  Number of states where it’s the most common: 17

  States that most commonly speak the language: California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Alabama, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland.

  Chinese immigrants have been coming to America in large numbers since the mid-19th century, when the California Gold Rush compelled them to cross the Pacific Ocean. Today, there are over 5 million Chinese Americans across the country.

  2. Tagalog

  Estimated number of speakers nationally: 1,764,000

  Number of states where it’s the most common: 1

  States that most commonly speak the language: Nevada

  Immigrants from the Philippines started coming to America in large numbers by the turn of the 19th century, but it wasn’t until 1965 that both skilled and educated workers came by the thousands. Today, there are over 4 million Filipino Americans.

  3. Vietnamese

  Estimated number of speakers nationally: 1,571,000

  Number of states where it’s the most common: 5

  States that most commonly speak the language: Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi and Georgia.

  South Vietnamese immigration to the U.S. began right after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, and more Vietnamese people have been arriving ever since. Today, over half of all Vietnamese-Americans live in either California or Texas.

  4. Arabic

  Estimated number of speakers nationally: 1,260,000

  Number of states where it’s the most common: 2

  States that most commonly speak the language: Michigan and Tennessee

  Michigan alone has over 140,000 Arabic speakers. California has over 190,000 speakers. Pew Research Center noted that Arabic is the fastest-growing language in the U.S., with speakers growing by 29% from 2010 to 2014.

  5. French

  Estimated number of speakers nationally: 1,172,000

  Number of states where it’s the most common: 4

  States that most commonly speak the language: Louisiana, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire.

  After the Louisiana Purchase, French evolved from its original form, creating Louisiana French which also borrows words from English, Spanish, Native American, and African languages. To this day, it’s still spoken by around 175,000 people in Louisiana and Texas.

  The United States: A Multilingual Country

  Although English, in all its diversity, is unquestionably the country’s dominant national language, the U.S. has always had a complex multilingual history. Long before European settlers colonized North and South America, thousands of indigenous languages thrived from coast to coast. Today, some Indigenous languages are making a comeback as many states acknowledge their importance in the history and culture of the country.

  With each new wave of immigrants residing in the country from every part of the globe, the linguistic and cultural diversity of the United States is growing.

  The U.S. has one of the largest Chinese populations outside China, a demographic shift that may increase in the coming years. Spanish is now the most popular second language of the country.

  America is home to the largest population of English speakers in the world, but bilingualism has been on the rise in the country for decades – a trend that shows no signs of letting up.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 22:40

• Elite US Military Unit Named 'Talon Anvil' "Bombed Civilians At Will" In Syria
  Elite US Military Unit Named ‘Talon Anvil’ “Bombed Civilians At Will” In Syria

  Authored by Brett Wilkins via Common Dreams,

  This week peace advocates responded to a report about a US military unit that killed Syrian civilians at 10 times the rate of similar operations in other theaters of the so-called War on Terror by accusing the United States of hypocritically sanctioning countries while committing atrocities of its own, and by reminding people that there is no such thing as a “humane” war.

  On Sunday, The New York Times reported the existence of Talon Anvil, a “shadowy force” that “sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly killed civilians” in aerial bombardments targeting militants in Syria. The unit “worked in three shifts around the clock between 2014 and 2019, pinpointing targets for the United States’ formidable air power to hit: convoys, car bombs, command centers, and squads of enemy fighters.”

  

  “But people who worked with the strike cell say in the rush to destroy enemies, it circumvented rules imposed to protect noncombatants, and alarmed its partners in the military and the CIA by killing people who had no role in the conflict,” the paper reported, including “farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings.”

  Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink, told Common Dreams Monday that “it is stomach-wrenching to read how secret US teams in Syria run by low-level officers made life-and-death decisions about when and where to drop 500-pound bombs.”

  “Years later, we hear about all the civilians obliterated but are left with a fait accompli and no accountability,” she added. “This, let’s remember, is coming from the nation that just hosted a ‘Summit for Democracy’ where we droned on and on about human rights.”

  Larry Lewis, a former Pentagon and State Department adviser who co-authored a 2018 Defense Department report on civilian harm, told the Times that Talon Anvil’s civilian casualty rate was 10 times higher than in operations he tracked in Afghanistan.

  One former Air Force intelligence officer who worked on hundreds of Talon Anvil missions said those who ordered the strikes “were ruthlessly efficient and good at their jobs, but they also made a lot of bad strikes.”

  In one of the deadliest of those “bad strikes,” scores of civilians were killed in a March 18, 2019 airstrike on a crowd of mostly women and children in Baghuz. It was a so-called “double-tap” strike—first, an F-15E fighter jet dropped a 500-pound bomb; then another warplane dropped a 2,000-pound bomb to kill most of the survivors. US military officials then attempted to cover up the apparent war crime.

  Strike decisions were often overseen by a low-ranking Delta Force operator…

  Secret US strike cell responsible for untold number of civilian deaths in #Syria. Between 2014 and 2019, the US army’s Talon Anvil strike-cell played an “outsize role” in dropping over 100,000 bombs across Syria. https://t.co/cEwfyQZGx4 via @TheCradleMedia

  — Sharmine Narwani (@snarwani) December 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The Times said there were attempts by Talon Anvil members to “blunt criticism and undercut potential investigations,” with personnel “directing drone cameras away from targets shortly before a strike hit, preventing collection of video evidence.” As errant strikes and civilian casualties mounted, so did internal protests. According to the Times:

  Pilots over Syria at times refused to drop bombs because Talon Anvil wanted to hit questionable targets in densely populated areas. Senior CIA officers complained to Special Operations leaders about the disturbing pattern of strikes. Air Force teams doing intelligence work argued with Talon Anvil over a secure phone known as the red line. And even within Talon Anvil, some members at times refused to participate in strikes targeting people who did not seem to be in the fight.

  Talon Anvil began during former President Barack Obama’s war against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and continued through much of the Trump administration, which escalated airstrikes against ISIS—with devastating consequences for noncombatants.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 22:20

• US Rejects Israeli Request For Expedited Tanker Aircraft Amid Iran Threat
  US Rejects Israeli Request For Expedited Tanker Aircraft Amid Iran Threat

  The Biden administration has rejected an urgent Israeli request to accelerate the delivery fuel tanker aircraft that are considered vital to Israel’s strategic preparations to attack Iran, according to a report in The New York Times. The White House has instead indicated that the first aircraft won’t be ready until at least 2024.

  The request was conveyed during last week’s Israeli delegation trip led by Defense Minister Benny Gantz, wherein they pressed US admin officials to get on board in implementing joint strike plans against Iran should nuclear talks in Vienna fail to advance. Gantz conveyed the request for faster tanker delivery directly to his American counterpart Lloyd Austin. The US side was seen as putting the brakes on Israel’s desire to go straight to a military option.

  

  Gantz was informed that the planes, which total eight Boeing-made KC-46 tankers worth an estimated $2.4 billion, are currently on back-order. But the NY Times report noted the Pentagon is looking into speeding up the process.

  Currently Israel’s Boeing 707 tankers are over 50 years old, but the new fleet of KC-46’s would provide its air force much greater range. As the Times underscores, “The ability to refuel is critical — otherwise Israeli planes would have to depend on the aging tankers or land in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia. Both countries are rivals of Iran, but neither wants to be implicated in assisting an attack.”

  The White House’s reluctance to speed up delivery is being perceived as part of overall resistance to Israel’s current urgings to initiate joint strike preparations targeting Iranian sites. While Tel Aviv has lately pressed that the US abandon the Vienna dialogue altogether, Biden is still holding out for a restored JCPOA nuclear deal. The US has reportedly also warned Iran against ‘acting alone’ in a military strike. 

  The NY Times report detailed that “Mr. Bennett, Israeli officials say, created a substantial budget for exercises to rehearse an aerial attack and argued that any effort to restore the nuclear agreement would lead to a flawed deal that would allow Iran to speed ahead toward making a bomb.”

  On Wednesday an Iranian state-linked newspaper published a “target list” of Israeli sites (though it apparently included locations in the West Bank and south Lebanon as well)…

  Iranian daily Tehran Times has published a map detailing the ‘bank of targets’ of a potential attack by the Islamic Republic on the occupying state of Israel.

  Over the past week, Iranian and Israeli officials have exchanged threats of attacks and counter attacks. pic.twitter.com/QJm05CuEey

  — Quds News Network (@QudsNen) December 15, 2021

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  The report also emphasizes that it’s the American taxpayer that will foot the bill, as the tankers will be paid for by the US annual military aid package to Israel. As it stands, the United States gives Israel a whipping $3.8 billion in military aid each year.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 22:00

• LA District Postpones Vaccine Mandate As Thousands Of Students Remain Unvaxx'd
  LA District Postpones Vaccine Mandate As Thousands Of Students Remain Unvaxx’d

  Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times,

  The Los Angeles school board on Tuesday agreed not to require children to be vaccinated against COVID-19 until next fall, pushing back a Jan. 10 deadline as thousands of students remain unvaccinated.

  

  The Los Angeles Unified School District vaccine mandate was postponed after board members raised concerns that students in California’s largest school district could be pushed into independent study, the Los Angeles Times reported.

  The decision follows a proposal on Friday announced by Interim Los Angeles Superintendent Megan K. Reilly. She couched the move as an example of the vaccination program’s success, saying that nearly 87 percent of students aged 12 and older were in compliance with the policy. The extension would give others an opportunity to also become inoculated, she said.

  “This is a major milestone, and there’s still more time to get vaccinated,” Reilly said on Friday.

  The district will now continue to require weekly testing of all students through the month of January. After that it will only test students who don’t have proof of vaccination.

  Some 28,000 students remain unvaccinated, according to the Los Angeles Times.

  “I felt like we were ending up with a situation in which those who complied would be the most negatively affected,” school board member Jackie Goldberg said, the Los Angeles Times reported. “I think we have no choice.”

  “I want to tell those of you who come and … think you pushed us back. No, you didn’t. The mandate remains,” she added.

  Incoming Superintendent Alberto Carvalho called the move “the right decision” during a news conference on Tuesday.

  “The conditions that the board is facing today, and the policy adjustments are not, in my opinion, a reversal of decisions made,” he said.

  Carvalho described the move as “an evolution of the previous board position” that recognizes what is best for students in the district.

  California in October became the first state to mandate statewide COVID-19 vaccinations for schoolchildren.

  “What we are announcing here today, a statewide requirement for in-person instruction for all of our children to add to a well-established list that currently includes ten vaccinations and well-established rules and regulations that have been advanced by the legislator for decades. To add to that list, the vaccination for COVID-19, we intend to do that once the FDA has fully approved the vaccine which will give us time to work with districts,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said during a press briefing on Oct. 1.

  The move drew criticism from some.

  Mari Barke, chair of the Orange County Board of Education, said that it should be up to parents to decide what is best for children.

  “I’m certainly not proud that California is the first state to mandate this. I think parents are the best to make these types of decisions for their children, so I’m very disappointed,” Barke told The Epoch Times.

  “I believe strongly in parental rights and parents knowing what’s best for their children. This vaccine has had the least testing of any vaccine. It’s not a virus that is killing lots of children unless they have severe comorbidities, and I think it’s government overreach.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 21:40

• 'Closer Than Allies': Xi & Putin Hail China-Russia Cooperation To Counter US "Interference"
  ‘Closer Than Allies’: Xi & Putin Hail China-Russia Cooperation To Counter US “Interference”

  Just before Wednesday’s Putin-Xi virtual summit, the Kremlin described that the meeting among allies is essential as at this moment “We see very, very aggressive rhetoric on the NATO and US side, and this requires discussion between us and the Chinese.” China’s Foreign Ministry had said the meeting would “further enhance the high-level mutual trust between the two sides.”

  As expected, both leaders emphasized the need to resist “interference” in their countries’ internal affairs from the West and in particular the United States. “A new model of cooperation has been formed between our countries, based among other things on such principles as not interfering in internal affairs [of each other], respect for each other’s interests, determination to turn the shared border into a belt of eternal peace and good neighborliness,” Putin told his Chinese counterpart.

  In the discussion which lasted from 4:07 p.m. to 5:21 p.m. Beijing time, Xi responded by affirming that the Russian president “strongly supported China’s efforts to protect key national interests and firmly opposed attempts to drive a wedge between our countries.” Bloomberg characterized the tone of the meeting as between two leaders that are ‘closer than allies’: “Chinese President Xi Jinping hailed relations with Russia as better than an alliance in a video call with President Vladimir Putin, according to the Kremlin, as the two leaders made a show of solidarity amid rising tensions with the West.”

  

  Calling Putin “an old friend,” Xi described relations with Russia as going beyond that of traditional allies and partners, saying, “Such a figurative expression very accurately reflects the essence of what is happening now in relations between our two countries.” He said the Russian president had “firmly supported China in defending its core interests and opposed attempts to divide China and Russia,” according to state broadcaster CCTV.

  The summit comes a week after the Biden-Putin virtual summit, wherein the Russian leader pressed for dialogue to put in place a plan for legal guarantees that NATO would not expand further eastward near Russia’s border. On Wednesday China’s Xi declared formal support for this central security concern of Russia’s: 

  Putin won support from Xi for his push to obtain binding security guarantees for Russia from the West, a Kremlin official said, according to Reuters.

  Russia wants the United States and NATO to guarantee the military alliance will not expand further eastward or deploy weapons systems in Ukraine and other countries on Russia’s border.

  Just the day prior to what were previously unannounced talks, the Kremlin cited increasingly hostile and aggressive rhetoric coming from the West over the Ukraine issue. Washington has accused Russia of a threatening build-up of forces near Ukraine’s eastern border and the restive Donbass region, while Moscow has charged Kiev with sending its army to the region with the tacit approval of Western allies.

  Also on the agenda included growing US action and alliances in the Asia-Pacific region, for example the Taiwan issue, as well as “the formation of the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the UK” which Xi described as a threat which “undermines the foundations of nuclear non-proliferation in the region,” as related by Bloomberg.

  Vladimir Putin held online talks with Chinese President Xi.
  They said:

  – Putin looks forward to a personal meeting with the Chinese leader in Beijing next year.

  – Relations between the Russian Federation & China are an example of interstate cooperation in the 21st century. pic.twitter.com/wv8GYTtXYm

  — Brijesh Singh (@Brijeshbsingh) December 15, 2021

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  Xi further hailed China-Russia relations as “a true model of interstate cooperation for the 21st century” – describing that “The close coordination between Russia and China on the international arena, the responsible joint approach to solving urgent global issues, have become a stabilizing factor in international affairs.”

  Once rivals and enemies in the 20th century, then ‘frenemies’, and now increasingly cooperative and strategic allies – Russia and China over time seem to have forged an unlikely alliance on the mere basis being target of Washington sanctions and human rights rhetoric. Presidents Xi and Putin have met well over 30 times since 2013.

  The two leaders will next meet in person as they participate in the the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics. Amid the US diplomatic boycott of the games hosted in Beijing, TASS wrote that “Putin also stressed that Moscow and Beijing have consistently supported each other over international sports cooperation, including the non-acceptance of any attempts to politicize sports or the Olympic movement.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 21:20

• Progressive District Attorneys Radically Change Rule Of Law In California Cities
  Progressive District Attorneys Radically Change Rule Of Law In California Cities

  By Brad Jones of Epoch Times

  

  Amid a wave of “smash-and-grab” robberies and other crimes, a former prosecutor is claiming that more than 50 prosecutors, support, and victim services staff have quit their jobs over San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s progressive criminal justice reform policies.

  “The office is imploding,” said the former prosecutor, who produced the list of those who’ve left their jobs since Boudin was sworn into office on Jan. 10, 2020.

  “Not all of them quit, but most of them quit. Some were fired,” said the individual, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. “The list isn’t up to date. I think more have left.”

  Boudin fired seven prosecutors during his second day on the job.

  Another former investigative supervisor sued Boudin for wrongful termination last month, claiming retaliation for calling out “improper and unlawful actions” by two prosecutors.

  Boudin’s office hasn’t responded to inquiries by The Epoch Times.

  The individual also cited a Sept. 24 court proceeding during which Superior Court Judge Bruce Chan raised concerns about actions taken in the District Attorney’s Office.

  “For what it’s worth, let me say a few things, maybe with the forlorn hope that someone in the DA’s office might pay attention,” Chan said.

  Court transcripts cite Chan as saying he “wholeheartedly” supports Boudin’s efforts to reform the criminal justice system, but he said: “I cannot express in any more certain terms my disapproval of the manner in which the Office of the District Attorney is being managed.

  

  “We simply cannot have the current levels of inadvertence, disorganization, and expect there to be any public confidence in what we do here collectively.”

  Chan criticized the “constant turnover” in the office, saying, “I hope that people in the District Attorney’s Office will shift their focus from some of the bigger issues and concern themselves with the unglamorous yet necessary work of public prosecution.”

  The former prosecutor agreed with Chan’s comments in the hearing and accused Boudin of trying to downplay increased crime statistics.

  “That’s the thing that’s really frustrating is that they know it’s worse. They know it, and they’re lying.”

  While progressive prosecutors contend that “the reason why there’s so many criminals is because our justice system turns them into criminals, it’s a backward argument,” the person said. “They argue that people keep getting arrested because cops keep arresting them and that’s the problem.”

  Some believe that if the police would just leave people alone, they wouldn’t commit crimes, the person said.

  Crimes, especially property offenses, are vastly underreported because the public has lost faith in the justice system, the former prosecutor said.

  “They think that no one cares. They think that nothing is going to happen,” the person said.

  When police sometimes tell victims of property crimes there’s no point in reporting these incidents because district attorneys likely won’t do anything, “unfortunately, they’re right,” the person said.

  “People blame the cops for not wanting to take reports. That’s a symptom. The actual problem is that there’s no prosecution. If you start charging cases, the cops will step up and do their jobs.”

  

  Crime Rates Rise

  The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office said recently that charges were filed against nine suspects in connection with organized retail theft at a Louis Vuitton store in Union Square.

  “These brazen acts will not be tolerated in San Francisco,” Boudin said in the statement.

  However, critics say the rising crime rates put Boudin at risk of being ousted in a June recall election.

  Police reported that vehicle break-ins have increased 100 to 750 percent in parts of the city compared to last year, with the number of reported vehicle thefts reaching 1,891 in May 2021—more than double the 923 reported in May 2020.

  San Francisco also recorded one of the largest increases in burglaries among major cities last year, with a jump of 47 percent—a trend that has continued this year. Fatal and nonfatal shootings in the first six months of this year were up more than 100 percent from the year-earlier period, increasing to 119 from 58, the city’s police chief said at a July press conference.

  More than 700 people died of drug overdoses last year in the city, a record that is likely to be surpassed this year, according to the chief medical examiner.

  Zack Smith, a legal fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, has co-authored a series of reports on progressive prosecutors. He claims that the recent rise in organized thefts and other problems in San Francisco and Los Angeles are the result of extreme progressive policies.

  “I think you can draw a direct line to it,” Smith told The Epoch Times. “What do you expect to happen? It’s going to lead to a breakdown in law and order. It’s going to embolden criminals to commit these brazen types of thefts that we’ve seen.”

  In recent election cycles, several progressive candidates won their races against independent, traditional prosecutors, many of whom are from the same political party as these challengers.

  

  Progressive District Attorney Policies

  Boudin isn’t alone in his views on criminal justice reform, and like other progressive district attorneys—including George Gascón in Los Angeles, Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, Rachael Rollins in Boston, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and Steve Descano in Fairfax County, Virginia—he’s found himself at the center of controversy.

  In line with the progressive policies of restorative justice, Boudin campaigned on a platform to end mass incarceration, eliminate cash bail, and vowed to create a panel to review sentencing and potential wrongful convictions. Following his election in November 2019, Boudin announced he would deemphasize the prosecution of drug cases, so-called quality-of-life cases, and property offenses.

  Boudin has indicated he wants to shift the focus to more serious offenses and take on corporations. He has also suggested hiring public defenders as prosecutors.

  He has refused to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and has threatened to prosecute ICE officers whom he accused of breaking sanctuary laws.

  “The people of San Francisco have sent a powerful and clear message: It’s time for radical change to how we envision justice,” Boudin said in 2019.

  Boudin and the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office claim they “develop and implement data-driven policies and practices that promote justice, protect crime survivors, and that address the root causes of crime.”

  “The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office also strives to create policies that promote racial justice; end the criminalization of poverty; and combat mass incarceration by relying on incarceration as a last—and not first—resort,” according to the DA’s website. “Many of these policies involve innovative approaches designed to remedy systemic problems. The Office gathers and relies upon data-backed evidence in making policy decisions.”

  One of Boudin’s first actions was to scrap the cash bail system.

  The DA’s office states Boudin doesn’t believe anyone should be held in jail because they’re too poor to post bail. Under his policies, if someone poses a serious public safety risk, the DA’s office will ask that the person remain in jail while their case is pending in the courts, according to the office’s website.

  Everyone who doesn’t pose a serious public safety risk is released while their case is pending, although sometimes with conditions of “electronic monitoring, GPS, or drug testing.”

  “DA Boudin’s policy on ending cash bail in San Francisco was widely heralded as the most progressive bail policy in the nation. It plays an important step towards ending the criminalization of poverty and stopping mass incarceration,” the website states.

  

  Los Angeles District Attorney

  Since Gascón took office as Los Angeles district attorney in December 2020, the city has seen a 49 percent increase in homicides, recording 325 in the first 10 months this year, and a 16 percent jump in aggravated assaults. Auto thefts are also up 50 percent, accompanying a recent wave in “follow-home” robberies, according to police.

  Multiple veteran prosecutors have sued Gascón, alleging retaliation for voicing criticism of the district attorney’s policies.

  Neither Gascón nor his office have responded to inquiries by The Epoch Times

  Progressives worked hard to oust former Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey, a registered Democrat and the first female and first black American to head the District Attorney’s Office.

  “It is political,” Smith said, “but this is a battle, not so much that all breaks down along Republican or Democratic lines, but between traditional understandings of law and order and hard-left ideologues.”

  Lacey was “relatively left-leaning, but by no means radical,” Smith said. “She understood her job was to enforce the laws to prosecute crimes and to protect the safety of her community. But her policies were not radical enough for George Soros or George Gascón, and so because of that, Gascón challenged her and unfortunately ultimately defeated her.”

  Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who had backed Lacey for years, suddenly shifted their support to Gascón.

  Progressive candidates are challenging other Democrats who aren’t necessarily “hard-left ideologues like these individuals,” Smith said.

  Former Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, who held the office for three terms from 2000 to 2012, told The Epoch Times that as Gascón continues to “double down on his ill-conceived, soft-on-crime” policies, crime will not only get worse in LA, but spread to neighboring areas as well.

  “What you’re seeing now is a lot of these very, very horrible crimes being committed in the suburbs in multimillion-dollar homes in Beverly Hills, Hancock Park, on the street, you know, that’s a very high-end area in Los Angeles.

  “They are going to the suburbs. They’re going to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills,” he said. “This is going to spread out and everyone in Los Angeles County is going to be experiencing this crime wave.”

  

  Gascón wants to reduce incarceration and opposes enhanced sentences that impose additional jail time for people with long criminal histories, or who inflict great bodily injuries, use a gun, or are involved in gangs, Cooley said.

  “He wants to eliminate enhancements. He wants to reduce incarceration to the lowest possible point, and he’s able to do that through his charging policies,” he said. “If you don’t charge great bodily injury when someone is injured in a shooting, then they’re not going to get the extra time for great bodily injury.”

  Many of the suspects in armed follow-home robberies and “these shoot-’em-ups at the restaurants and the flash-smash-bash-dash robberies” are juvenile gang members, Cooley said. “They all know that juveniles, even if they commit multiple murders, will never ever be tried in adult court, even though they’re age 16 or age 17. They know this and they take advantage of it.

  “That’s why in Beverly Hills, they’ve had a spate of robberies by juveniles—at gunpoint, armed robberies—and the juveniles are put out there by adults, because they’re not going to suffer any punishment. They will not even be charged with an armed robbery under Gascón’s policies. They commit an armed robbery, they stick a gun in someone’s face, they take their purse, they will not be charged with armed robbery,” he said.

  Kathleen Cady, a retired Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, said that when Gascón was sworn into office on Dec. 7 last year, he “almost simultaneously” issued nine new policies.

  “There were 61 pages of policies … and they all negatively impact public safety and victims,” she said.

  Some of those policies prohibit sentence enhancements and transferring minors to adult court for serious crimes such as murder and rape, as well as preventing prosecutors from the District Attorney’s Office from attending parole hearings.

  “I’ve represented well over 20 murder victims’ families where the murderer was a 16- or 17-year-olds, and in each and every one of those cases, the prosecutor is not allowed to ask the judge if the minor can go up to adult court, and the minor stays in juvenile court,” Cady said.

  Minors can only be held in custody until they’re 25 years old.

  Cady, who represents crime victims of all political stripes, agrees the “so-called reform movement” behind Gascón’s campaign is “very political,” but said the response to his policies isn’t.

  Opponents aren’t banding together based on politics, she said.

  “It’s not a right-versus-left issue at all. It’s absolutely a public safety issue. It really has nothing to do with politics, it has to do with common sense and keeping the public safe,” Cady said. “I would call myself a liberal Democrat, but I am completely opposed to this particular reform movement, because reform means to make better. Nothing is better since he has come into office.”

  Cady said she isn’t opposed to justice reform, but contends that Gascón’s vision of reform isn’t working.

  “I’m certainly not opposed to making things better. Most of us are not opposed to making things better. The problem is that his vision of what criminal justice reform is, is wrong. It’s very mistaken,” she said. “He is using false statistics and what he claims to be data to inform his policies, which are blanket policies [that] do not allow for looking at individual cases, circumstances, [and] criminal histories.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 21:00

• Twitter To Punish Users Who Correctly Claim That Vaccinated Individuals Can Still Spread COVID-19
  Twitter To Punish Users Who Correctly Claim That Vaccinated Individuals Can Still Spread COVID-19

  Twitter, which dubs itself the arbiter of medical misinformation through its constellation of conflicted ‘fact-checkers,’ will start imposing penalties on users who claim that vaccinated people can spread Covid-19…

  …a claim made by none other than the US CDC Director, the NIH, Facui, and countless other officials.

  CDC director Rochelle Walensky says that the vaccine *cannot* prevent transmission. So why are all these Pro-Vaxxers saying that it can? pic.twitter.com/8aaDTh8N3T

  — Anthony Brian Logan (ABL) 🇺🇸 (@ANTHONYBLOGAN) October 2, 2021

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  In other words, Twitter will penalize people for spreading common medical knowledge about Covid-19.

  Guess that means Twitter is banning the CDC, NIH, Fauci, Wallensky & Gates.

  — Kip Herriage (@KHerriage) December 15, 2021

  “When tweets include misleading information about Covid-19, we may place a label on those tweets that includes corrective information about that claim,” reads a quietly updated section of its rules governing Covid-19 misinformation reported by Mediaite.

  “We may apply labels to tweets that contain, for example… false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus (or symptoms, or immunity) to unvaccinated people.”

  

  The change was made on Dec. 2, according to Wayback Machine archives retrieved by Reclaim the Net. The policy contradicts the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, which notes the “risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in fully vaccinated people cannot be completely eliminated as long as there is continued community transmission of the virus.”

  …

  Penalties range from a 12-hour account lock after the second strike, and a permanent suspension — or ban — on the fifth strike. -Mediaite

  Sorry Rochelle, Twitter’s health experts are coming for ya…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 20:45

• Amnesty Uncovers "Repeated War Crimes" By Both Taliban & US Forces During Afghan Collapse
  Amnesty Uncovers “Repeated War Crimes” By Both Taliban & US Forces During Afghan Collapse

  An explosive new report has been released by the prominent human rights watchdog group Amnesty International on Wednesday alleging widespread war crimes committed by various parties during the final stages of the Afghan conflict just before the US initiated its hasty and chaotic withdrawal from Kabul in August.

  The report documents “extensive civilian suffering” just prior to the government of President Ashraf Ghani collapsing, citing “repeated war crimes” committed by the Taliban, and also US and Afghan national forces against civilians. “Homes, hospitals, schools and shops were turned into crime scenes as people were repeatedly killed and injured,” it said.

  

  “The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported that 1,659 civilians were killed and another 3,524 injured in the first six months of 2021, an increase of 47% from the prior year,” Amnesty documented. “Our new evidence shows that, far from the seamless transition of power that the Taliban claimed happened, the people of Afghanistan have once again paid with their lives.”

  During the summer-long Taliban offensive across rural parts of the country, and as the hardline Islamist group began capturing larger and larger districts as they made their way to Kabul, mass casualty crimes were reported committed against ethnic and religious minorities, including against those perceived as national government sympathizers. 

  According to one of the eyewitness accounts gathered by Amnesty in Bazarak town of Panjshir province:

  “They kept us underground. When we were asking for medical treatment of the wounded, the Taliban were saying, ‘Let them die’… There was no food and water, and no support to the wounded. They had brutal relations with us. When we were asking for water, they were saying, ‘Die of thirst’.” Torture and cruel and inhuman treatment of captives constitute war crimes.

  While the Taliban’s better known record of human rights abuses has long been scrutinized, Amnesty focuses much of its reporting on US and its allied national Afghan army partners’ war crimes. The allegations come the same week the Pentagon exonerated itself from any wrongdoing over the Kabul drone strike in August which killed ten civilians, including seven children, which US officials initially lied about – claiming it was against a carefully vetted ISIS-K target. No US personnel will be punished or so much as demoted or reprimanded, after an internal Defense Department review of the deadly attack.

  Despite the narrative in some media, this war ended with no easy overnight takeover or clean sweep of the country. For months the Taliban executed and tortured as they seized districts, and civilians died by the hundreds as mortars and bombs fell on densely populated towns. 2/ pic.twitter.com/YHJy7NBUIm

  — Brian Castner (@Brian_Castner) December 15, 2021

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  Amnesty documents other instances of “mistaken” US aerial attacks on civilians:

  The report documents four air strikes – three most likely carried out by US forces, and one by the Afghan Air Force – in recent years. The strikes killed a total of 28 civilians (15 men, five women, and eight children), and injured another six.

  The strikes generally resulted in civilian deaths because the US dropped explosive weapons in densely populated areas. Amnesty International has previously documented similar impacts of explosive weapons in numerous other conflicts, and supports a political declaration to curb their use.  

  Ground combat deaths involving US and Afghan national forces were also detailed, however, are believed to be less common than casualties from airstrikes.

  The rights watchdog group is calling for International Criminal Court (ICC) probe into the war crimes. In the last year of the Trump administration the US was successful in quashing an ICC probe into widespread allegations of US troop misconduct in the country. Across administrations, the US has consistently maintained it alone is immune from prosecution or even investigation by the The Hague-based court. 

  The US-trained ANDSF lost legitimacy in the eyes of Afghan people by indiscriminately killing them through negligent and reckless attacks. “The only thing we want is for this bombing of civilians to stop,” one man told me. This should be a lesson for future US/NATO actions. 7/

  — Brian Castner (@Brian_Castner) December 15, 2021

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  “The International Criminal Court must reverse its misguided decision to deprioritize investigations into US and Afghan military operations, and instead follow the evidence on all possible war crimes, no matter where it leads,” Amnesty is urging.

  Of deaths at the hands of the Taliban, the report says, “The full scale of the killings nationwide still remains unknown, as the Taliban cut mobile phone service, or severely restricted internet access, in many rural areas. “

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 20:40

• Vaccine Mandates & 'The Great Resignation': The Media Pretends There's No Connection
  Vaccine Mandates & ‘The Great Resignation’: The Media Pretends There’s No Connection

  Authored by Liam Cosgrove via The Mises Institute,

  Let me be clear from the start: I do not know the degree to which vaccine mandates have played a role in the massive voluntary exodus from the workforce. 

  

  I do, however, know that any true journalist would at least entertain the possibility that the two are correlated. Finding such a journalist proved to be a difficult task: ABC, CNN, CBS, the Washington Post, Reuters, CNBC, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Hill, Business Insider, Fortune, FT, Vox, Market Watch, and even right-wing publishers like the New York Post and Fox Business have all covered the mass resignations without so much as a mention of vaccine mandates. The WaPo, citing a single anecdote, went so far as to suggest that unvaccinated workers are causing others to quit by making them feel unsafe:

  

  Time magazine, to their credit, at least addressed the possible relation and tried to provide a counterpoint, citing employee vaccination numbers in the high 90 percents ahead of mandates, like Washington, where University of Washington hospitals employees are 97 percent vaccinated—sounds great! They just forgot to do a follow-up piece after the mandate went into effect … when Washington lost 3 percent of its sixty-three thousand state employees in a single day. That’s a sizeable percentage when you consider that monthly separations (terminations and quits) are typically 3–4 percent in the US and this drop occurred in one day. Not to mention these separations are added to routine employment frictions.

  Now, let’s discuss the awfully interesting correlations between the announcements of vaccine mandates and the “Great Resignation”:

  

  The US has clocked two consecutive all-time highs for the percentage of workers quitting within a single month, 2.9 percent for August and 3.0 percent for September (data released on a two-month delay). This coincided precisely with an onset of highly prominent vaccine mandate announcements within the private and public sectors, one of the earliest being Google on July 28, which inspired a tsunami of corporate signaling throughout the month of August. In a similar fashion, California set the trend for a series of state-level mandates, most of which were announced in August, with enforcement to begin in late September and October. August was indeed the first month in which this topic seeped into mainstream public discourse, the buzz increasing in September as Joe Biden announced the mandate for federal employees.

  Right off the bat this seems like a coincidence worth mentioning, yet none of the outlets listed above did. But there’s more. Historically upswings in resignations have correlated with commensurate upswings in hiring (see chart below). As businesses hire more, workers have freedom to shop around. However, we are not seeing that this time around, with total hires increasing by 7.5 percent between March and September 2021 and quits increasing by 24.3 percent during that same period, a threefold margin.

  

  Now, let’s pivot to look at two states that are handling mandates very differently—Colorado enacted one of the strictest vaccine mandates while Arizona became the first state to enact a private sector ban on vaccine mandates. Colorado subsequently broke its all-time record for highest quit rate ever recorded with 3.4 percent. To quote the Denver Post:

  What is unusual about the new record high is that it coincides with a still relatively high 5.9 percent unemployment rate in Colorado in August. Normally, elevated unemployment and people voluntarily jumping ship don’t go hand in hand.

  For example, when Colorado’s unemployment rate was at 5.9 percent in January 2003, the quit rate was 2.6 percent and it was 2.7 percent in January 2014, another month with 5.9 percent unemployment.

  In September, Colorado shattered this record with an adjusted quit rate of 4.3 percent (raw rate of 4.7 percent)! Meanwhile, Arizona was one of only four states to experience a decline in their raw quit rate moving from July to August, and it did so by the greatest margin. The raw rate continued to decline in September. So, out of fifty states, Arizona is demonstrating some of the strongest data contrary to the Great Resignation trend.

  Lastly, let’s shift our focus to what the unvaccinated holdouts are saying. According to a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 72 percent of workers vow to quit if they are not given the option to test weekly and 37 percent say they will quit even with testing:

  

  Surely some of these vows will prove stronger than others, but we should note this poll was conducted between October 14 and 24. These folks are not included in the resignation data we saw in August and September. Remember, most mandates were not officially in effect during those months, with the largest mandate of all, Biden’s private sector mandate, still to come. If these poll respondents stay true to their word, this could equate to a 5–9 percent exodus from the workforce, on top of what we have already seen. This will only get worse if religious exemptions are removed, as is becoming increasingly mainstream.

  Again, this is not proof that vaccine mandates are the primary cause of the Great Resignation, just evidence that they are likely playing a role. This is an important message to the publishers at big corporate media outlets. Conveniently leaving these discussions out of your articles will not persuade readers these topics are unrelated. Instead, it will cause them to question how a “journalist” could publish such negligent reporting. This type of behavior will only foster more distrust in mainstream institutions.

  There’s another, more sinister, symptom of this cognitive dissonance—it absolves political leaders of accountability. Given unemployment is a major bipartisan issue, average citizens might oppose mandates if they thought it would impede reaching full employment. Take New York, for example, where they revoked religious exemptions to the vaccine for healthcare workers on November 22, while recently, New York nurses publicly complained about staffing shortages, calling them a “dire nursing shortage.” You would think the governor might adjust her course of action upon hearing this, but in the made-up world where vaccine mandates have zero impact on employment, our leaders can get away with callous policy decisions like this.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 20:20

• Retailers Fed Up With 'Smash And Grabs' Send Urgent Letter To Congress
  Retailers Fed Up With ‘Smash And Grabs’ Send Urgent Letter To Congress

  Liberal socialist utopias such as California and Illinois are a blessing for criminal gangs thanks to the states’ lack of prosecution of shoplifting. Retailers are fed up with smash and grabs and have sent an urgent message to Congress urging lawmakers to do more to prevent thieves from reselling stolen goods online. 

  In a letter sent to Congressional leadership, 20 retailer CEOs — including Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc., Petco Animal Supplies, Inc., CVS Health, AutoZone, Inc., Nordstrom, Inc., and Foot Locker, Inc., among others, urged lawmakers to pass legislation that would make it harder for thieves to resell stolen goods on online marketplaces that do very little to verify the identity of sellers.

  “As millions of Americans have undoubtedly seen on the news in recent weeks and months, retail establishments of all kinds have seen a significant uptick in organized crime in communities across the nation,” the CEOs said. 

  

  “This trend has made retail businesses a target for increasing theft, hurt legitimate businesses who are forced to compete against unscrupulous sellers, and has greatly increased consumer exposure to unsafe and dangerous counterfeit products,” they said. 

  The CEOs said there’s no easy way to stop the wave of smash and grabs. Still, they offered new legislation for lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle to support the Notification and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces (INFORM) for Consumers Act. 

  The proposed measure would “increase transparency online for all marketplaces, making it easier for consumers to identify exactly who they are buying from, and make it harder for criminal elements to hide behind fake screen names and false business information to fence illicit products while evading law enforcement.”

  The retail industry has been decimated by the wave of smash and grabs in liberal cities where progressives have downgraded retail theft from a felony to a misdemeanor. Retailers, such as electronic store Best Buy saw its margins slide in its latest quarterly report to do thefts. 

  Major retail chains across the country are on alert this holiday season for criminal gangs. Some stores have even redesigned their front entrances to prevent robberies. 

  Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot blamed stores for not taking adequate steps to prevent the thefts. 

  Progressive leadership needs to wake up before it’s too late and they’re voted out of office. 

  For the full letter to Congress, read here.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 20:00

• The Markets Love The FOMC, For Now
  The Markets Love The FOMC, For Now

  By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

  What The Fed Did

  • The Fed sped up their taper and should be done with bond buying by mid-March at this pace. More or less priced in.

  • The Fed signaled three rate hikes, which the market seems to be absorbing well for now.

  • The press conference seemed a bit stilted to me, but Powell did seem to straddle the line between fighting inflation and wanting growth. To me, and I’m biased, I found him addressing the nation rather than financial markets in a way he hasn’t done in the past. Maybe he is trying to appease D.C., while sticking to his guns? Plausible, and I’d appreciate that, but not sure that is how it played out.

  • I think the most powerful thing he said was his view that you need very long growth cycles to really drive unemployment lower (with increased labor participation).

  What the Market Did

  After jockeying back and forth, risk assets started to perform extremely well during the press conference and are surging now that it is over (presumably because he cannot say anything negative at this point).

  • Bitcoin rallied from a low of $46,650, to back to over $49,000. I mention this, because I find this one particularly confusing since if the Fed was hawkish, and I argue that they were hawkish, Bitcoin is responding somewhat weirdly.

  • I’ve heard that “everyone” was short or hedged coming into this. Metrics like the Put/Call ratio and VIX support that argument, at least somewhat, as VIX has already dropped from last week’s highs.

  • Separately, hearing that 80% of Fed days wind up being positive and year-end is generally positive, so chasing those technicals could make sense.

  • The bond market’s placid behavior is likely helping as well. The 2-year yield spiked from 66 bps to 71 bps after the announcement and has drifted back to 68 bps, indicating the announcement is priced in, or we still live in an era of disbelief. The 10-year yield dropped initially (maybe hinting at policy mistake as curves flattened) but it is now up to 1.47% from 1.45% and the curve is experiencing more of a parallel shift (rather than big flattening/steepening).

  • How much is positioning? That, as mentioned earlier, seems to make a lot of sense, away from crypto, where I find it hard to believe there were a lot of shorts?

  • How much is complacency? This concerns me the most. We had a failed liftoff by Powell in 2018, and we’ve all gotten used to talk hawkish, but walk dovish.  

  I want to be extremely bullish on risk across the board. In fact, the reaction we are getting is what I hoped for and expected, but I thought it would require a more dovish Fed.

  So

  • Either I’m blinded to what the Fed did by my pre-existing views and they are dovish.

  • Positioning was so bearish that what the Fed did, doesn’t matter (and I struggle with this one).

  • Deep down everyone “knows” the Fed won’t be hawkish even if they say they are going in that direction.

  In the end, rather than cajoling investors to buy the dip, and arguing that the Powell Put is alive and well, I think we are left with the powell put, which isn’t as good and we have to deal with a variety of issues, one of which I highlighted in an earlier note.

  • Did the consumer pull forward spending to avoid supply issues and is going to slow down their spending in the coming weeks and months?

  • Have companies built up inventories (and put in orders to their suppliers) at a rate that outpaces consumer demand? (inventories are rising)

  I think that the “bulls” escaped and I would be taking off risk here (even in the cyclicals, industrials, small caps, etc., that I’ve liked being overweight in), rather than adding to risk.  

  Credit should be ok, and the bond market probably has it about right given the tone of the Fed today (some hikes likely and that will dampen growth).

  While the Fed is still adding to their balance sheet, that is almost over and while the Fed seems in no rush to actually shrink the balance sheet (Powell did assuage markets by stating that the balance sheet would remain supportive), that will be a topic of conversation. Finally, on the balance sheet, I think it is all about flow (the amount being added or reduced) rather than stock (the size of the balance sheet), though there are many at the Fed who will disagree.

  So, I just can’t get comfortable that we are done with our recent volatility and I look for risk assets to give back some of today’s gains, possibly as early as tonight as the algos get shut down for a few hours and people can digest what was actually said and done today.

  Good luck in what should continue be an interesting week!

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 19:40

• Air Freight Rates Soar To Record High Amid California Port Crisis
  Air Freight Rates Soar To Record High Amid California Port Crisis

  President Biden’s plan to save Christmas by declogging Los Angeles and Long Beach ports has failed. The number of container ships anchored off the coast remains near record highs, and wait times to unload cargo is around three weeks. Some importers have opted out of the usual containerized shipping via ocean vessels for air freighters to ensure their goods make it to store shelves in time for the holidays.

  Over the past three months, air freight rates on major shipping routes to and from China have doubled. 

  FT reports air freight rates between Shanghai to North America hit a record high of $14 per kilogram last week, up from $8 at the end of August. It even surpassed COVID highs of $12 when the entire world was using air freighters to ship medical goods worldwide during the early months of the pandemic. Similar routes such as Hong Kong to Europe and the US and transatlantic routes between the Europe and North America have experienced dramatic increases. 

  

  “Everyone knows if they want something on to the shelves before Christmas, they have to use air freight,” said Yngve Ruud, head of global airfreight at Kuehne+Nagel, one of the world’s largest freight forwarders.

  Biden’s effort to reduce dwell times is not working, even after he announced a new directive for the twin ports in mid-October to operate on a 24/7 basis. We noted at the time, in a piece titled “Here’s The Truth Behind Biden’s 24/7 Port Operations Pledge,” that the move would not save Christmas. It now takes 21 days, or three weeks, for a vessel to enter the twin ports, that’s up from seven in August. 

  

  Widespread supply-chain disruptions on major ocean shipping lanes have been a boon for air freighters. Top US importers have switched to air freight for high-value items. The extra shipping costs via air are being passed onto the consumer through inflation. 

  Some airlines have converted their planes into air-freighters to take advantage of the heightened demand for the expedient but costly service. 

  The cost of air freight will make some goods much more expensive this holiday season, as the relief for snarled supply chains might not be seen until the second half of 2022. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 19:20

• Taiwanese Lab Leak Sharpens Debate On Pandemic Origin
  Taiwanese Lab Leak Sharpens Debate On Pandemic Origin

  Authored by Hans Mahncke and Jeff Carlson via The Epoch Times,

  On Dec 9, 2021, Taiwan announced that a researcher working in a Biosafety-level 3 (BSL-3) laboratory in Taipei had tested positive for the Delta variant of COVID-19 “while experimenting on the virus in the lab.” Chen Shih-chung, the head of Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) confirmed that the female researcher had tested positive for COVID-19 after being “exposed to the pathogen” during research that was conducted in mid-November at the Academia Sinica’s Genomics Research Center in Taipei.

  

  Notably, Taiwan has not experienced any recent cases of COVID-19, a fact noted by Chen who said, “We believe the possibility of infection from the workplace is higher because we have zero confirmed infections in the community.”

  It was later reported that the researcher had been bitten by a mouse during two separate incidents. Taipei’s deputy mayor Huang Shan-shan, who described the woman as a “research assistant,” said that she had been bitten by a laboratory mouse carrying the Gamma strain of the virus on Oct. 15, but subsequently tested negative for infection.

  

  Taiwan’s Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung arrives at a press conference at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control in Taipei on March 11, 2020. (Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images)

  However, a little more than a month later on Nov. 19, she was again bitten by a mouse in the lab. This time, for reasons that remain unknown, the researcher did not undergo testing after the second bite until well after she had developed physical symptoms. According to Taiwan News, the woman developed a cough in late November, which intensified during the first week of December, but she did not seek out testing until Dec. 8.

  James Liao, the president of Academia Sinica, cited six separate failures that contributed to the infection incident. These included the “failure to duly report a scientist being bitten by lab mice; not working with lab mice in a biosafety cabinet; not following protocols in removing hazmat suits; new personnel not receiving adequate training; lack of supervision and monitoring during experiments; and lax management in lab practices.”

  

  Academia Sinica’s Genomics Research Center in Taipei, Taiwan, on Feb. 6, 2018. (Lysimachi/CC BY-SA 4.0)

  Taiwan Leak Occurred Despite Use of High Security Lab

  Taiwan’s lab leak of COVID-19 took place at a BSL-3 lab, which mandates the use of personal protective equipment, biosafety cabinet​s, sustained directional airflow without recirculation, as well as self-closing and interlocked doors. By contrast, the gain-of-function experiments being conducted on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were done at much less secure BSL-2 labs.

  As context, Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright has stated: “BSL-2 is the biosafety level of a US dentist’s office (i.e., lockable door, screened windows, sterilizer, gown, and gloves).” Ebright told the Financial Times: “If [coronavirus] work was happening, it should definitely not have been happening at BSL-2, that is roughly equivalent to a standard dentist office.”

  The use of BSL-2 labs for gain-of-function experiments by the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been heavily criticized by many scientists. Michael Lin, a bioengineer at Stanford University, told MIT Technology Review that allowing work on potentially dangerous bat viruses at BSL-2 is “an actual scandal.”

  And a prominent and early supporter of the natural origins narrative, Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, changed his mind about the virus’s origin after the Wuhan Institute admitted it conducted its coronavirus experiments at a BSL-2 lab.

  “It shouldn’t have happened,” Lipkin stated. “People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs.”

  Lipkin said that he now considers a lab leak to be a viable theory, saying that his “view has changed.”

  Taiwan Leak Response Stands in Stark Contrast to CCP’s Wuhan Response

  Additionally, the open and immediate manner in which the Taiwanese government handled its lab leak incident contrasts sharply with China’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials refused to acknowledge the outbreak until Taiwan notified international authorities on Dec. 31, 2019. But despite the CCP’s refusal to acknowledge an outbreak, there were earlier warnings from those stationed in Wuhan.

  According to the U.S. Consul General in Wuhan, the city was hit by an unusually vicious flu-like outbreak in October 2019. And a November 2019 intelligence report by the U.S. military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence reportedly warned of a contagion and stated that “it could be a cataclysmic event.” Chinese authorities have reportedly traced early cases of COVID-19 to mid-November.

  

  A man wears a mask while walking in the street in Wuhan, China on Jan. 22, 2020. (Getty Images)

  Notably, at the same time that the outbreak in Wuhan appeared to be reaching a critical juncture, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, which was conducting coronavirus research alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, suddenly moved its lab’s location on Dec. 2, 2019, to a spot just a few hundred yards from the Huanan Seafood market—which would initially be cited as the origin of the early COVID-19 cases. The CDC’s new location for its lab was also directly adjacent to another hotspot of later COVID-19 cases, the Union Hospital, where a group of doctors first became infected.

  The genomic sequence of COVID-19 was discovered no later than Dec. 27, 2019. Both Chinese and Western scientists obtained copies at that time. But, under pressure from the CCP, neither Chinese nor Western scientists shared the information publicly. When a Chinese scientist from Shanghai finally released the sequence on Jan. 11, 2020, the CCP shut down his lab.

  The CCP’s cover-up and the capitulation by scientists allowed the virus to continue to spread at a critical time. It also gave the CCP additional time to obfuscate the virus’s origins and create a Natural Origins narrative centered around the Huanan Seafood Market.

  Additionally, although the World Health Organization’s (WHO) initial report on the origins of the outbreak stated that a lab leak was extremely unlikely, the lead investigator of that report, Peter Ben Embarek, told a Danish documentary team that the lab leak theory was probable, and suggested that a Chinese researcher could have been infected by a bat while taking samples in connection with research at a Wuhan lab.

  

  A sign of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 24, 2020. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)

  Embarek also admitted that a deal had been struck between the WHO’s investigative team and their Chinese counterparts. The lab leak theory could be mentioned in the WHO’s final report, but only on the condition the report didn’t recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis.

  China’s censorship has taken many forms. Recently, Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth, the body through which Dr. Anthony Fauci funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, told the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that he was unable to hand over requested genetic sequence data from his gain-of-function experiments to the NIH because the data was going through an approval process by CCP authorities.

  

  WHO team member Peter Daszak leaves his hotel after the World Health Organization (WHO) team wrapped up its investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on February 10, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

  This arrangement with the CCP is a breach of the terms and conditions of Daszak’s NIH grant, which specifically required that all genetic sequence data be made publicly available. CCP oversight and control was not part of Daszak’s agreement.

  The fact that genetic sequence data that may relate directly to the origin of the pandemic remains under the control of the CCP also raises questions about the claims of both Daszak and NIH that their Wuhan experiments could not have caused the pandemic.

  Lab Leaks Common

  The incident in Taiwan has renewed the debate over the origin of the pandemic. According to Yanzhong Huang, a Chinese public health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, “if the lab worker is confirmed to have been infected at her workplace, then this will add credibility to the lab leak theory.”

  Although this case is raising new questions about the likelihood of a lab as the origin of the pandemic, lab leaks are not as rare as the media would have the public believe.

  The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic marked the first appearance of the H1N1 virus. Although the initial outbreak was natural, the virus’s sudden reappearance in the late 1970s was actually due to a laboratory leak of a stored strain of the H1N1 virus. We know this because the genetic sequence of the virus in the 1970s outbreak was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains. Put another way, the virus was not evolving during this time, it was sitting in a lab. Indeed, the NIH notes that a “biosafety lapse in a research laboratory is now most often cited as the cause of the 1977-1978 reemergence of the H1N1 influenza virus strain.”

  

  Seattle policemen wear white cloth face masks during the Spanish flu pandemic, Dec. 1918. (Public Domain)

  In 1979, spores of anthrax leaked from a lab in the Soviet Union, killing scores of people. At the time Soviet authorities covered up the origins of the outbreak, claiming that it came from contaminated meat. In a twist eerily reminiscent of the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 origins investigation, a molecular biologist from Harvard University, Matthew Meselson, was allowed to travel to the Soviet Union to investigate the outbreak.

  Upon his return, he issued a report that backed the Soviet version of events, claiming that the outbreak started at a contaminated meat processing plant. Meselson stated that that explanation was “plausible and consistent with what is known from medical literature and recorded human experiences with anthrax.” In another parallel to the natural origins narrative for COVID-19, where illegal wildlife markets were initially blamed for the pandemic, Meselson claimed that the outbreak was caused by “the illegal sale of meat.”

  After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was finally revealed in 1992 that the outbreak had in fact originated at a military research facility.

  The original Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003 made headlines across the world. However, a lesser known fact is that the SARS virus has subsequently leaked out of various labs at least six times. The first incident occurred in Singapore—a country known for its meticulousness and attention to detail—shortly after the initial outbreak ended. There were subsequent SARS lab leaks in Beijing as well as in Taiwan in 2003 and 2004.

  The years 2013 and 2014 were particularly bad for lab accidents. Notably, many of the accidents that happened during this period took place at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where lab mice escaped the university’s lab on at least eight occasions, including mice that were infected with SARS and H1N1 viruses. In response, the NIH stated that “it appears the measures taken by the University of North Carolina to reduce the likelihood of these events have not been effective.”

  Poor biosafety at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is all the more notable in light of the fact that the university houses Ralph Baric’s lab. In 2015, Baric, who is a pioneer of gain-of-function experiments, famously collaborated with the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, to create a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease.

  

  Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli is seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, capital of China’s Hubei Province, on Feb. 23, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

  Richard Ebright, who warned in 2015 that the only impact of gain-of-function work was “the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” has stated that these prior leaks underscore the fact that it “is eminently plausible that a Wuhan laboratory worker handling Sars-related coronaviruses was infected and then transmitted the infection to the general public, sparking the pandemic.” Notably, Ebright’s 2015 warning was in response to the experiments carried out by Baric and Shi Zhengli.

  Incidents of lab leaks in just the last 10 years have involved notably dangerous pathogens, including Dengue, Anthrax, H5N1, smallpox, Ebola and Zika.

  Although there are far too many incidents of lab leaks to list here, one event is particularly relevant—the November 2019 lab accident in China when nearly 200 staff at the Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute became infected with brucellosis, also known as Mediterranean Fever. Subsequently, thousands of residents of Lanzhou reportedly also fell ill. CCP authorities have denied that the Veterinary Research Institute was responsible, blaming the outbreak on polluted waste gas from a pharmaceutical facility which was allegedly carried by wind to the research institute. Ironically, even if the CCP’s version of events is accurate, it would still have been a lab accident.

  Taiwan’s Leak Refocuses Debate on COVID-19 Origin

  The Lanzhou outbreak, which happened at almost exactly the same time as the Wuhan outbreak, should have served as an immediate red flag for anyone looking into the origins of COVID-19. But the Lanzhou Outbreak has been largely ignored by the media. The incident underscored not only that laboratory accidents happen with disturbing regularity but also that the CCP has a history of covering them up.

  In 2019, Yuan Zhiming, the vice-director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, wrote a review of the many safety deficiencies within China’s many laboratories. He noted that “several high-level BSLs have insufficient operational funds for routine yet vital processes,” noting that many of China’s BSL-3 laboratories “run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”

  Just one year earlier, in 2018, U.S. Embassy officials visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology and warned the State Department that there was “inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.” They also reported that there was a lack of trained staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

  

  FDA Commissioner-designate Scott Gottlieb testifies during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 5, 2017. (Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

  Former U.S. Food and Drug Administration head Scott Gottlieb has stated that “lab leaks happen all the time.” During a May 2021 interview on Face the Nation, Gottlieb noted, “In China, the last six known outbreaks of SARS-1 have been out of labs, including the last known outbreak, which was a pretty extensive outbreak that China initially wouldn’t disclose that it came out of a lab.” Gottlieb said that “It was only disclosed finally by some journalists who were able to trace that outbreak back to a laboratory.”

  The transparency and responsiveness with which Taiwan handled its recent biosafety lapse contrasts sharply with China’s ongoing efforts to impede any investigation into the origins of the pandemic. China’s efforts to thwart any true investigation of the virus’s origin also raise questions as to why the United States was providing technology and funding for gain-of-function experiments to a communist regime that is known for its lack of transparency.

  Former-MI6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove recently summed up China’s approach to the pandemic when he told the Australian, “I’m pretty sure that the Chinese after the outbreak in Wuhan, and they’re very good at doing this, sat down and developed their own information campaign and this was almost certainly driven by the Ministry of State Security and run out of the PRC leadership to make sure that there was suppression of any suggestion that their narrative was not the correct one.”

  Dearlove echoed the concerns of many when he ominously noted that ”what concerns me and what worries me is the extent to which the West went along with this.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 19:00

• IBM And Samsung Jointly Announce "Breakthrough" Semiconductor That Uses 85% Less Energy
  IBM And Samsung Jointly Announce “Breakthrough” Semiconductor That Uses 85% Less Energy

  If you’re like us, you’ve been wondering what the hell IBM has been doing for the last few years. Today, it looks like we may have part of an answer.

  Big Blue revealed this morning in a press release that it had been working jointly with Samsung and had achieved a “breakthrough” in semiconductor design that could reduce energy usage by 85%.

  The two companies announced jointly a “breakthrough in semiconductor design utilizing a new vertical transistor architecture that demonstrates a path to scaling beyond nanosheet, and has the potential to reduce energy usage by 85 percent compared to a scaled fin field-effect transistor”.

  The announcement comes in the midst of a global semiconductor shortage which many believe may not end fully until 2023. 

  “The two companies’ semiconductor innovation was produced at the Albany Nanotech Complex in Albany, NY, where research scientists work in close collaboration with public and private sector partners to push the boundaries of logic scaling and semiconductor capabilities,” the press release said. 

  

  The release listed some potential benefits for the breakthrough, including: 

  • Potential device architecture that enables semiconductor device scaling to continue beyond nanosheet.
  • Cell phone batteries that could go over a week without being charged, instead of days.
  • Energy intensive processes, such as cryptomining operations and data encryption, could require significantly less energy and have a smaller carbon footprint.
  • Continued expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge devices with lower energy needs, allowing them to operate in more diverse environments like ocean buoys, autonomous vehicles, and spacecraft.

  Dr. Mukesh Khare, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and Systems, IBM Research, commented: “Today’s technology announcement is about challenging convention and rethinking how we continue to advance society and deliver new innovations that improve life, business and reduce our environmental impact.”

  He continued: “Given the constraints the industry is currently facing along multiple fronts, IBM and Samsung are demonstrating our commitment to joint innovation in semiconductor design and a shared pursuit of what we call ‘hard tech.'”

  You can read the full release here.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 18:40

• Bitcoin Unbound: When Freedom Money Is Used For Hate
  Bitcoin Unbound: When Freedom Money Is Used For Hate

  Authored by Tony Cross via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  Bitcoin’s technological innovation is available for anyone to use, even bigots; but this shouldn’t sully the entire network’s reputation…

  

  The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) issued a new report on the use of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by white supremacists and far-right extremists. In the report, Megan Squire, senior fellow for data analytics, and senior investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden, link 600 addresses to white supremacists, estimating they hold “tens of millions of dollars” worth of value. Kevin Collier and Brandy Zadrozny, writing for NBC News, then picked up the story, running with the headline, “Bitcoin Surge Was A Windfall For White Supremacists, Research Finds.”

  Bitcoiners know what to do: take a deep breath. Let the FUD flow through you. Maintain stoic equanimity. For more than a decade, the media has tarred this open-source protocol, and those of us who use it, by association with all manner of evil: money laundering, tax evasion, terrorist financing, ponzi scamming, and my personal favorite, the boiling of oceans. Such poorly-argued and ill-informed attacks can be calmly dispatched or simply ignored. We stack sats. We stay humble. It’s just another day in the life of a bitcoiner.

  But this one hits differently. White supremacism is real, and it is repugnant. For those of us in Portland, Oregon, hate groups regularly march into our town and demonstrate, seeking out violent encounters on the streets. For targeted individuals — which I am not — these groups represent not only an attack on their personhood and dignity but a threat to their safety and bodily integrity. So it’s hard to let this particular story simply pass by without comment.

  Neither the original report nor the subsequent NBC story provide context for their findings.

  Their point is simply that fringe political groups control 600 addresses and potentially tens of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. What they fail to mention, however, is that there are more than 200 million non-empty bitcoin addresses worldwide and nearly a trillion dollars of value in bitcoin.

  That means these hate groups hold .0003% of addresses and at least 0.0001% of bitcoin’s value, a far less compelling headline.

  Imagine Amazon stock ownership could be tracked on a public ledger and some white supremacists were relatively early investors, now constituting .0003% of shareholders. Would it taint the entire company and all other shareholders? Would it merit a news story that made no qualifications and provided no context? I think we know the answers.

  Neither the original report nor the NBC story observes that the same censorship resistance that makes bitcoin useful to hate groups in the U.S. is also what allows it to support dissidents and oppressed minorities from Palestine to Cuba to Nigeria to Belarus. Readers of Bitcoin Magazine who follow the work of human rights activist Alex Gladstein will be familiar with dozens of such examples. The SPLC researchers do not track wallets of women in Afghanistan — nor should they!— who were paid in bitcoin as far back as 2013. Their windfalls allowed one to start a new life in Germany, another to pay her college tuition in the U.S. The researchers do not track — nor should they! — the wallets of the Feminist Coalition in Nigeria, whose bank accounts were frozen, and who turned to bitcoin instead. The researchers do not track — nor should they! — the wallets of Cuban bitcoiners, whose peso has lost two thirds of its value since the end of 2020, and who, without bitcoin, may have been unable to afford basic necessities. Yet, without such tracking, the mere fact that 600 wallets are controlled by white supremacists tells us nothing about who is benefiting from bitcoin on the whole.

  These researchers also seem unaware that bitcoin’s international usage correlates with low national ratings of democracy, government integrity, investment freedom, monetary freedom, and property rights. Bitcoin thrives wherever money and good governance is failing. Turning to the domestic scene, these researchers seem unaware that while only 11% of white Americans own cryptocurrencies, 23% of Black Americans and 17% of Hispanic Americans do.

  In sum, the “windfall” accruing to a handful of white supremacists in the U.S. also lifted millions worldwide. But instead of any attempt to see how bitcoin is being used more broadly, the identities behind 600 wallets are used to besmirch bitcoin itself – and others who’d use it – while the remaining 199,999,400 wallets are ignored.

  The NBC story does, at least, frankly acknowledge how easy it is to track payments simply by pairing social-media-posted addresses with on-chain transactions: “The list of 600 addresses we analyzed is just a big list that I made of who owns what, and the way that we get those is just watching these guys tell each other where to send the money,” Squire said. “It’s just literally just looking this stuff up on this public ledger.” And isn’t that kind of transparency novel and refreshing? Especially when compared with the by-design opacity of offshore shell companies and cold hard cash, neither of which lends itself to this kind of investigative journalism? But the stories make no mention of these alternatives.

  The most glaring omission from a progressive Bitcoiner perspective is any consideration of the actual currency with the closest ties to white supremacism, namely, the U.S. dollar itself. The dollar’s value accrued to whites first through violent conquest, then literal enslavement, and thereafter, by Jim Crow segregation, financial redlining, and mass incarceration. To focus on the use of 600 bitcoin addresses by white supremacists while ignoring this shameful, systemic legacy of racism betrays a disturbing lack of perspective.

  Neither the racist history of the dollar nor the revolutionary potential of bitcoin is, of course, lost on Black Bitcoiners. Dawdu M. Amantanah, in “Closing The Wealth Gap: Black America And Bitcoin Adoption,” highlights Bitcoin’s decentralization, which means the monetary network, unlike traditional banking, offers financial inclusion, and the promise of financial freedom, to all. As Twitter persona Lawrence Douglas, aka @AxeCapYa, who publishes a newsletter called “Black And Bullish,” explains, “Bitcoin is the first asset that allows the average citizen to participate in a global financial system on equal footing. Its low barrier of entry allows bitcoin to transform the financial lives of those that choose to adopt it as a long-term store of value.”

  Black bitcoin is its own universe with books like “Bitcoin And Black America” by Isaiah Jackson, “Bitcoin And Black Powernomics,” by Will Hobdy, and “From Bars to Bitcoin” by Justin Rhedrick, as well as websites, Twitter spaces, Clubhouse chat rooms, podcasts, clubs, newsletters, fin-tech apps, and conferences. This burgeoning world, created entirely by and for Black investors is aimed at financial education and entrepreneurship, encouraging Black ownership through bitcoin and cryptocurrency. SPLC and NBC fail to acknowledge its existence.

  It must be said that certain corners of the Bitcoin community are, in fact, bigoted in a variety of ways. I have witnessed instances of it myself. And we must all, always condemn such bigotry when encountered, simply as a matter of decency and humanity. Something similar was true in the early days of the internet, when neo-Nazis recruited on online bulletin boards. As a percentage, white supremacy groups probably marred the internet to a greater degree then, than they pollute the Bitcoin blockchain now, and in fact, such online recruiting is still a problem. YouTube and Facebook algorithms have probably done as much as anything to radicalize segments of our society. Yet few are calling for a shutdown of the internet or shaming all its users because it is a neo-Nazi recruiting tool. Instead, we recognize the issue’s inherent difficulty: there are unavoidable tradeoffs between freedom of expression, utility, and safety, and we recognize, too, the perils of designating and empowering authorities on the matter of what speech should and should not be permitted by global networks of communication.

  Perhaps it is too much to ask for subtlety, for complexity, in an era of clicks. But the real issue here is whether, on balance, the benefits of bitcoin’s censorship resistance outweigh the negative consequences of bitcoin being spent in odious ways and accrued by nefarious characters. Here lies a deep philosophical question about the proper reach and limits of our rights to property and exchange, as well as an empirical question about what positive and negative outcomes are enabled by Bitcoin’s technology. Absent proper comparisons, absent context about the network as a whole, absent imagination about the possibilities for bitcoin ranging across the whole moral spectrum, we’re left with an icky feeling, but nothing of substance. Maybe that was the point.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 18:20

• California's Top Prosecutor Says 'Smash And Grab' Robberies Organized On Social Media
  California’s Top Prosecutor Says ‘Smash And Grab’ Robberies Organized On Social Media

  This holiday season, organized retail crime is an epidemic in liberal-socialist utopias, such as California. Criminals have terrorized San Francisco’s Union Square to Walnut Creek retailers in so-called ‘smash and grabs.’ Now the state’s top prosecutor is shedding light on how these criminal gangs orchestrate such thefts. 

  California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta told the LA Times that groups of people smashing windows or loading up shopping carts with stolen merchandise and running out of the store are mostly foot soldiers of organized crime gangs.

  He said foot soldiers are directed on social media, text, and other messaging apps of what businesses to hit and guide them to where the most valuable merchandise resides.

  Smash And Grab at Louis Vuitton in San Francisco’s Union Square

  

  Bonta said the stolen merchandise is then sold online for a large profit. 

  “You know, the crime we are seeing is organized crime, and it is going to take an organized strategy to put a stop to it,” Bonta said.

  “These are these folks that have put thought into it, have a strategy, have a plan, focused on certain places at certain times and communicate and work in concert,” he added. 

  His comments come as big-box retailers, online marketplaces, and law enforcement held a meeting on Tuesday to discuss the wave of smash and grabs in the state. They are expected to develop a plan to combat thefts and people who resell the stolen merchandise online. 

  This comes as the 20 retailer CEOs — including Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc., Petco Animal Supplies, Inc., CVS Health, AutoZone, Inc., Nordstrom, Inc., and Foot Locker, Inc., among others, sent a letter to Congressional leadership to make it harder for thieves to resell stolen goods on online marketplaces that do very little to verify the identity of sellers.

  “As millions of Americans have undoubtedly seen on the news in recent weeks and months, retail establishments of all kinds have seen a significant uptick in organized crime in communities across the nation,” the CEOs said. 

  “This trend has made retail businesses a target for increasing theft, hurt legitimate businesses who are forced to compete against unscrupulous sellers, and has greatly increased consumer exposure to unsafe and dangerous counterfeit products,” they said. 

  The CEOs said there’s no easy way to stop the wave of smash and grabs. Still, they offered new legislation for lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle to support the Notification and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces (INFORM) for Consumers Act. 

  “Large retailers can help … making sure that they’re reporting the theft, communicating with law enforcement, reporting it early and making certain types of security,” Bonta said

  The retail industry has been decimated by the wave of smash and grabs in liberal cities where progressive lawmakers have downgraded retail theft from a felony to a misdemeanor. Retailers, such as electronic store Best Buy saw its margins slide in its latest quarterly report to do robberies. 

  Bonta said some of the people that stormed retail stores have been armed with “guns and pepper spray and other weapons.”

  He said the smash and grabs were driven by greed, not a necessity.

  “It’s an organized criminal activity to make a profit, and they have secondary marketplaces who take the stolen goods and resell them,” Bonta said. “And they can resell them in the state, in other states and even internationally.”

  He said his next target is to go up the chain of command and target the people at the top who are calling the shots. 

  “When folks know that there are consequences … there will be accountability,” Bonta said. “And that’s how we prevent it.”

  The wave of smash and grabs is a byproduct of criminal justice reform by progressives and their move to defund the police. People are getting tired of liberals transforming cities into hotbeds of violent crime. Is it only a matter of time before they get voted out of office and law and order is restored? And when will the social media giants be ordered to deplatform these ‘mobs’ planning smash-and-grabs?

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 12/15/2021 – 18:00

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