- Mass Protests Erupt Across Greece As Government Bans Unvaccinated From Public Spaces
Mass Protests Erupt Across Greece As Government Bans Unvaccinated From Public Spaces
A few days ago, French President Emmanuel Macron riled up vaccine skeptics across Europe when he made vaccinations mandatory for all health-care workers (many of whom had previously refused) while tightening COVID rules to pressure French citizens to get vaccinated. As other governments ponder whether to follow suit, thousands took to the streets of Athens in protest on Thursday to oppose vaccination programs.
The biggest transgression, in the eyes of the protesters, was the government’s decision to bar the unvaccinated from certain public spaces. They’re also opposed to plans to immunize teenagers. The policy barring unvaccinated from bars, restaurants, theaters and other entertainment venues will take effect Friday and remain in place at least until August. Teens will be able to receive the vaccine starting Thursday.
Massive protests all over Greece today after the prime minister issued what is essentially medical apartheid. The media is trying to spin it as an “anti vaccine” protest instead of what it’s really about : freedom of choice and bodily autonomy. https://t.co/tR2SoRlOc6
— Ève (@EviEvakii) July 14, 2021
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According to Reuters, more than 5K anti-vax protesters, some waving Greek flags and wooden crosses, gathered in the Greek capital, shouting “take your vacines and get out of here!” while calling on Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to resign.
NEW 🚨 Plan to vaccinate teenagers in Greece sparks huge protests today in Athens and Thessaloniki. pic.twitter.com/I8WWfBBHPp
— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) July 14, 2021
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With a heavy police presence to oversee them, protesters gathered outside parliament, taking their protest directly to lawmakers.
Wednesday’s protest was the biggest demonstration of opposition to the inoculation drive. A recent poll by Pulse for Skai TV found most Greeks say they will get the vaccine when available, with the majority in favor of some form of mandatory vaccination for certain jobs or segments of the population. Already, 41% of Greeks have been fully vaccinated.
“Every person has the right to choose. We’re choosing that the government does not choose for us,” said Faidon Vovolis, a cardiologist, who has questioned the scientific research around face masks and the vaccine and heads the “Free Again” movement, which called the protest. Vovolis said he started the group in response to the government’s “tough measures” to contain the virus.
In addition to the massive crowd in Athens, thousands also appeared in Thessaloniki, the Greek Second City. Similar demonstrations also took place in France (in response to Macron’s latest edicts).
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/16/2021 – 02:45 - EU: New Political Alliance To Fight Creation Of European Superstate
EU: New Political Alliance To Fight Creation Of European Superstate
Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,
The leaders of 16 political parties from across Europe have announced an unprecedented alliance to defend the sovereignty of European nation states, protect the nuclear family and preserve traditional Judeo-Christian values.
The July 2 “Joint Declaration on the Future of the European Union” represents the first significant endeavor by euroskeptic parties to jointly oppose efforts by European federalists to transform the European Union into a godless multicultural superstate.
Signatories include Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. The document, penned by former Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who leads the powerful Law and Justice (PiS) party, has also been signed by conservative parties in Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain.
The document states that the European Union requires “profound reform” because, “instead of protecting Europe,” it has itself become “a source of problems, anxiety and uncertainty.” The signatories say that the EU has become a tool of “radical forces” that are determined to carry out a civilizational transformation of Europe. Their objective, they say, is to create a European superstate void of European traditions, social institutions or moral principles.
The signatories say that conservative establishment parties in Europe have abandoned traditional Judeo-Christian values and have aligned themselves with leftist positions for political gain. They are especially critical of mass migration policies that have allowed millions of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to settle in Europe even though many newcomers reject European values.
Following is an English-language translation of the joint declaration, which can be found here in French and Spanish:
“The recently launched debate on the future of Europe should include the voice of the parties committed to the freedom of nations and the traditions of European peoples, the parties representing citizens devoted to the European tradition.
“The turbulent history of Europe, especially during the last century, brought many misfortunes. Nations that defended sovereignty and territorial integrity against aggressors suffered beyond human imagination. After World War II, some European countries had to fight the domination of Soviet totalitarianism for decades before regaining their independence.
“This independence, the Atlantic link between the EU and NATO, as well as peace between cooperating nations, are great achievements for many Europeans, giving them a permanent sense of security and creating optimal conditions for development. The integration process has contributed greatly to creating lasting cooperation structures and to maintaining peace, mutual understanding, and good relations between states. This work must be maintained as an epoch-making value.
“However, the series of crises that have shaken Europe over the past ten years have shown that European cooperation efforts are faltering, above all because nations feel that they are slowly being stripped of their right to exercise their legitimate sovereign powers.
“The European Union needs profound reform because today, instead of protecting Europe and its heritage, instead of enabling the free development of European nations, it is itself becoming a source of problems, anxiety and uncertainty.
“The EU is increasingly becoming a tool of radical forces that would like to carry out a cultural and religious transformation of Europe — and ultimately a construction of a Europe without nations. Their aim is to create a European superstate by destroying or cancelling European tradition and transforming basic social institutions and moral principles.
“The use of political and legal structures to create a European superstate and new forms of social structuring is a manifestation of the dangerous and invasive social engineering of the past, which must elicit legitimate resistance. The moralistic overactivity that we have seen in recent years in the EU institutions has led to a dangerous tendency to impose an ideological monopoly.
“We are convinced that the cooperation of European nations must be based on tradition, on respect for the culture and history of European States, on respect for the Judeo-Christian heritage of Europe and on the common values that unite our nations — and not in their destruction. We reaffirm our belief that the family is the basic unit of our nations. At a time when Europe is facing a severe demographic crisis with low birth rates and an aging population, pro-family policymaking should be the response rather than mass immigration.
“We are convinced that the sovereigns of Europe are and will continue to be the nations of Europe. The European Union has been created by these nations to achieve objectives that can be achieved more effectively by the Union than by individual member states. However, the limits of the Union’s competences are set by the principle of conferral: all competences not conferred upon the Union belong to the Member States, respecting the principle of subsidiarity.
“Through a constant reinterpretation of EU Treaties by the institutions of the European Union in recent decades, these limits have shifted significantly to the detriment of the member states. This is incompatible with the fundamental values of the Union and leads to a decline in the confidence of European nations and their citizens in these institutions.
“To stop and reverse this trend, it is necessary to create, in addition to the existing principle of conferral, a set of inviolable powers of the EU’s member states and an adequate mechanism for their protection with the participation of national constitutional courts or equivalent bodies.
“All attempts to transform European institutions into bodies that take precedence over national constitutional institutions create chaos, undermine the sense of the treaties and call into question the fundamental role of the constitutions of EU member states. The resulting disputes over competences, in effect, settled by the brutal imposition of the will of the politically stronger entities on the weaker ones. This destroys the basis for the functioning of the European Community as a community of free nations.
“We believe that consensus must remain the basic means of reaching a common position in the Union. Recent attempts to circumvent this procedure or the ideas of its abolition threaten to exclude some countries from influence in decision-making and to transform the Union into a special form of oligarchy. This could lead to the de facto incapacitation of national constitutional bodies, including governments and parliaments, reduced to the function of approving decisions already taken by others.
“In the member countries there continues to be an overwhelming desire to cooperate, and a spirit of community and friendship permeates the nations and societies of our continent. It is our great capital. A reformed Union will make use of this capital, while a Union that rejects reform will squander it.
“That is why today we present this document to all parties and groups that share our points of view as the basis for a common cultural and political work, respecting the role of current political groups.
“Let’s reform the Union together for the future of Europe!”
Europe’s ‘Civilizationalist’ Parties
The document is a response to French President Emmanuel Macron, who, in March 2019, called for a “European renewal” based on more, not less, federalism. In the wake of an impending Brexit, he demanded a “common border force,” a “European asylum office,” a “treaty on defense and security,” and a “European Climate Bank” to “finance the ecological transition.” Macron further called for the creation of a “Conference for Europe” to counter “nationalists” who, he claimed, “exploit the people’s anger.”
Since then, the Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare many failures of the European Union, including the disintegration of Europe’s open border system; the looming collapse of Europe’s single currency; the breakdown of Europe’s much-vaunted healthcare systems; and the “epochal failure” of the EU’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign.
In April 2021, the 27 EU member states, after two years of bickering, grudgingly announced a plan to launch a “Conference on the Future of Europe” that will “invite” EU citizens “to contribute to shaping their own future and that of Europe as a whole.” Presumably, only ideas that promote further multicultural federalism will be welcome.
Not everyone is convinced that more “Europe” is what is needed. Writing for Politico, Maïa de La Baume observed:
“Some EU officials are doubtful that an additional layer of bureaucracy — the conference will have a ‘Joint Presidency,’ an ‘Executive Board,’ a ‘Conference Plenary’ and a ‘Common Secretariat’ — will solve the EU’s already confusing bureaucratic ills….
“As the only institution that EU citizens directly elect, the Parliament positioned itself as the lead institution and main architect on the matter.
“Yet while the European Council took many of the Parliament’s proposals on board in its declaration, the joint presidency will take away much of the power the Parliament had hoped to wield. And the final declaration also removed any mention of treaty change, another significant blow to the Parliament’s initial proposal.”
European federalists spitefully have branded critics of a European superstate as “far right,” “neo-fascist,” and “radical right wing.” In fact, they could best be described as “civilizationalists,” a term coined by the American historian Daniel Pipes. In a November 2018 essay, “Europe’s Civilizationalist Parties,” he wrote:
“Better to call them ‘civilizationist,’ focusing on their cultural priority, because they feel intense frustration at watching their way of life disappear. They cherish Europe’s and the West’s traditional culture and want to defend it from assault by immigrants aided by the left. (The term civilizationist has the additional benefit of excluding those parties that loathe Western civilization, such as Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn.)
“Civilizationalist parties are populist, anti-immigration, and anti-Islamization. Populist means nursing grievances against the system and a suspicion of an elite that ignores or denigrates those concerns….
“At the height of the migrant tsunami in 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to a voter worried about uncontrolled migration with… condescending advice about attending church services more often.
“Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for migration, flatly announced that Europe ‘cannot and will never be able to stop migration’ and proceeded to lecture his fellow citizens: ‘It is naive to think that our societies will remain homogenous and migration-free if one erects fences. … We all need to be ready to accept migration, mobility, and diversity as the new norm.’
“Former Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt argued for more migrants: ‘I often fly over the Swedish countryside and I would advise others to do. There are endless fields and forests. There’s more space than you might imagine.’…. Their contemptuous dismissal of anti-immigration sentiments created an opportunity for civilizationist parties through much of Europe….
“Civilizationist parties, led by Italy’s League, are anti-immigration, seeking to control, reduce, and even reverse the immigration of recent decades, especially that of Muslims and Africans. These two groups stand out not because of prejudice (“Islamophobia” or racism) but due to their being the least assimilable of foreigners, an array of problems associated with them, such as not working and criminal activity, and a fear that they will impose their ways on Europe.
“Finally, the parties are anti-Islamization. As Europeans learn about Islamic law (Sharia), they increasingly focus on its role concerning women’s issues, such as niqabs and burqas, polygamy, taharrush (sexual assault), honor killings, and female genital mutilation. Other concerns deal with Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims, including Christophobia and Judeophobia, jihadi violence, and the insistence that Islam enjoy a privileged status vis-à-vis other religions.”
Additional Comments by Signatories
The author of the document, former Polish President Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said that the EU is “preparing to carry out a cultural revolution that will destroy social structures, starting with the family and traditions, and create a new man.” He added: “We don’t want this revolution, which we believe will bring unhappiness and a drastic decline in the freedoms of individuals and countries.”
Estonian MEP Jaak Madison, the deputy chairman of the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE), added that the declaration is the first step toward the consolidation of European national conservative parties:
“With this joint declaration, a foundation has been laid for the creation of a potential new group in the European Parliament. This would be one of the biggest groups in the European Parliament, which would bring together Poles, Hungarians, Estonians, the French, Austrians, Danes, Finns, Italians and representatives of several more states in the European Parliament.”
Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s conservative party Vox, said that the EU’s “Conference on the Future of Europe” demonstrates, once again, the disconnect between European institutions and European citizens:
“The EU’s ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ has already written its conclusions. It seeks the forced federalization of the EU against the true will of European nations and apart from the national parliaments.
“This initiative directly threatens the original European project and seeks to impose a model of society increasingly distant from the principles and values that make up the Christian roots and history of Europe.
“We do not want a federal Europe in which all decisions are made in Brussels. We have to show that millions of Europeans respect, value and want to preserve as something good, and that we are willing to defend the sovereignty of our nations and parliaments, our governments and our judges, the plurality and variety of our nations; that borders must be an insurmountable wall for those who enter illegally or do not have the will to respect Western civilization; that there can be no freedom without security and without justice; and that we firmly believe in the person, in life, in the family and in ideological freedom and thinking.”
Marine Le Pen, leader of the French opposition party Rassemblement National (National Rally), said:
“The European Union continues to pursue the federalist path which inexorably distances it from the peoples who are the beating heart of our civilization.
“The ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ is just yet another smokescreen that will allow the EU to dispossess states of the capacity to control their destiny.
“Armed with this observation, the most influential patriotic parties on the continent have understood the importance of joining forces to have more influence in the debates and reform the European Union….
“This founding text brings together parties and political leaders who, in their respective countries, are the dominant or ascending forces. Carried by the popular will, these groups will soon be in the majority.
“The signatories of the declaration plead for a Europe that is respectful of free peoples and nations. They cannot accept that the peoples are subjected to the bureaucratic and technocratic ideology of Brussels which imposes its standards in all aspects of daily life.
“This in no way means that it is necessary to act in an isolated or reclusive manner: on the contrary, it is by combining the know-how and talents specific to each nation — and not by merging them into a whole without identity and therefore without flavor — that we will make our civilization shine.
“At a time when the globalists and Europeanists, of whom Emmanuel Macron is the main representative in France, are launching the ‘Conference on the Future of Europe,’ which aims to increase the power of European bodies, today’s agreement is the first step towards the constitution of a great alliance in the European Parliament.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/16/2021 – 02:00 - Biden's Vaccine "Strike Force" Plan Stinks Of Desperation
Biden’s Vaccine “Strike Force” Plan Stinks Of Desperation
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,
If there is one rule liberty minded people need to remember, it is that the establishment does not like losing control of the narrative. And when they do, noticeably weird things start to happen. For example, it is becoming painfully obvious that the narrative on the experimental mRNA “vaccines” has slipped right through the fingers of the Biden Administration, and as a consequence they are now in a scramble to get millions of vaccines injected into as many skeptical arms as possible before the public organizes for a full push-back against the agenda. It seems to me that they are in a bit of a panic.
The issue became more evident since January when various government entities and the media began to openly complain about the number of vaccine doses that were being thrown in the garbage because of expiration. Why were the vaccines expiring before use? The media spin suggests that it was due to “government mismanagement”, while officials at the state level have admitted that it has been due to a significant drop in demand.
In the meantime, Biden has shipped over 500 million covid vaccine doses overseas in June while at the same time claiming that the US was on track to meet his 70% vaccination goal by July 4th. Needless to say this never happened. The Biden admin now claims that the US population is now 67% vaccinated, and if this was actually true then it would be very close to meeting Anthony Fauci’s original guidelines for herd immunity. So why all the frantic hype about unvaccinated people?
Firstly, Fauci has continually moved the goal posts for herd immunity to the point that he is now telling the public to ignore herd immunity altogether and that the only option is to get EVERYONE vaccinated. Many of us in the liberty media said this is exactly what he would do, and he has proven to be incredibly predictable. Secondly, the CDC vaccination numbers seem to be inflated in order to create a manufactured consensus.
While claiming an overall vaccination rate of 67%, CDC stats indicate a maximum of around 184 million Americans with at least one dose, then indicate 160 million people with a double dose. Yet, according to the Mayo Clinic data map, only four states have a vaccination rate of 67% or more, all in the Northeast. Even California and New York are well under 67%, and the vast majority of states are sitting at around 50% or less.
Frankly, I don’t believe the CDC vaccine numbers at all. New dosage numbers are plunging across the US according to state officials; anyone who hasn’t been jabbed by now is not going to get jabbed unless they are forced to. There are no long lines for vaccines. No wait times. The CDC has even removed the wait time between doses. And still, CVS and Walgreens have been throwing away expired doses by the hundreds of thousands.
If we look at the CDC stats for full vaccination we are closer to 51% of the total US population, which matches more accurately with the Mayo Clinic state statistics. There is no indication that this percentage will be growing beyond the 51% mark anytime soon, if the stats are accurate at all.
This means that at least half the US population is in defiance of the program. This is probably why Fauci and Biden have become more aggressive in their vaccination agenda the past month. If they were getting the nearly 70% vax rates they claim, then they would not be stomping their feet indignantly over unvacinated people. The stats show a HUGE number of Americans are refusing to take the jab – There’s a vast army of us out there, and this is a good thing.
Why? Because there is simply no reason to take the experimental mRNA vaccine.
FACT: Covid-19 has a median IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) of 0.26% or less.
Why take an experimental vaccine over a virus that 99.7% of the population outside of nursing homes will easily survive? In my home county, only 17 people died from covid in 16 months time, many of them in nursing homes. The majority of the population also stopped wearing masks and ended the lockdowns about three months after the initial outbreak when it became clear that covid was a nothing-burger. The so-called “Delta variant is also prominent here, and neither deaths nor infections have increased in a noticeable way.
Most people here have already had the virus, and it was essentially like a bad flu with an extra kick or extra brain fog. After around a week people recovered. Easy. I perfectly understand people’s concerns when the pandemic first started; we had no idea what we were dealing with. However, after a few months the reality was evident. The continued delusional fear and terror over Covid is just self indulgent paranoia at this point.
FACT: Covid infections and deaths started collapsing LONG before the vaccines were widespread.
The mainstream media continually suggests that the vaccines are the reason for the fall in infections, but this is a lie. Covid cases peaked in January of 2021 and then plunged precipitously. In February of 2021 only 5.9% of the US population had received at least one dose of the mRNA cocktail. In conservative states where mandates were lifted far ahead of blue states and vaccinations are lower, infections and deaths fell even faster. Vaccines have NOTHING to do with the lower infections. Nothing.
FACT: At least 81% of people who have had covid are unlikely to be reinfected.
Fauci continues to ignore the science on herd immunity and completely dismisses people who have had covid as being immune. Yet, this is the reality. If we count the large numbers of people that have had covid, then the US hit herd immunity many months ago. This is why infections and deaths dropped off a cliff, not because of vaccinations.
FACT: The mRNA vaccines have NO long term testing data supporting them or proving their safety.
Initial testing for the average experimental vaccine is 2-4 years, and then another several years of observation and further testing is required before approval. Overall, vaccines are supposed to be tested and retested for 10-15 YEARS before being released to the public. The covid mRNA vaccines were released to the public in a matter of months with no official FDA approval and no long term data, at least none that has been revealed openly. The bottom line is that we have no idea what the long term side-effects of these vaccines will be. Though, there are some experts that are sounding the alarm…
FACT: Multiple vaccine experts are warning about potentially dangerous autoimmune disorders and infertility caused by experimental mRNA vaccines, including the doctor that invented mRNA technology.
We have received numerous warnings by virology and vaccine experts calling for caution when it comes to the covid vaccines. Former VP of Pfizer Michael Yeadon and many of his medical associates have published a call for vaccinations to stop until more testing can be pursued. Yeadon specifically warned of possible autoimmune disorders as well as infertility side effects. He has since been attacked relentlessly by the media.
MRNA vaccine inventor Dr. Robert Malone spoke out on the dangers of mRNA gene therapy, specifically noting that the spike protein which the covid vaccine instructs your cells to manufacture could pose long term health risks, including blood clots and infertility in women. Malone’s interview has since been erased from YouTube and his accomplishments have been quietly removed from websites like Wikipedia. He is slowly being non-personed.
Finally, in hospitals across the country 30% of medical professionals have refused to take the vaccines. Some have only taken the jab because their jobs were threatened.
The controlled media argument against warnings like these from experts in the field is that they are “crazy” and should be dismissed. So, only the medical professionals that get a government paycheck and agree with the government mandates are somehow “sane”? Interesting…
When gaslighting doesn’t work, the spin doctors (no pun intended) pull out some classic fuzzy logic, claiming that there is “no evidence that the vaccines will cause any damage”. Well, that’s verifiably false as anyone doing a rudimentary search will see many people around the world have died or suffered health side effects right after taking the vaccine. But, of course, vaccine apologists then argue that this is not 100% “proof” that the vaccines are dangerous overall.
Well, there’s also NO EVIDENCE that the vaccines are safe. There is no long term safety data. And in medical science the rule is to err on the side of caution, not take reckless risks over a virus that is a non-threat to 99.7% of the population.
So let me make this perfectly clear to the covid cult which does not understand basic medical science – The burden of proof is ON YOU, on the government and on the pharmaceutical companies, not on on us. YOU must prove that the vaccines are safe, through long term testing. It is not for us to simply take the jab and become guinea pigs in the world’s largest medical experiment based on blind faith and empty opinions backed by zero data.
Biden’s “Vaccine Strike Forces”
These facts and more are being digested by the American public and the results are clear – Millions upon millions of us will not be taking the jab. It’s not going to happen. We will fight rather than comply, and eventually we will win. The globalist Reset agenda demands total vaccination, vaccine passports and complete compliance. They aren’t getting it, so, the natural outcome will be an attempt to force unvaccinated people to accept the jab.
Recently, Biden announced a plan to field “survey teams” across America which would go door-to-door, like census agents, to determine who specifically has taken the vaccines and who hasn’t. These teams would also “encourage” people who are not vaccinated to take the jab at a nearby location.
These surveys are, in my opinion, a ruse more than anything else. They could not possibly collect accurate counts because they have no way of knowing if people are telling the truth or not. The likely purpose of the surveys is to locate homes that refuse to talk to the teams on principle and mark them as “problematic”.
Biden’s press secretary let slip some interesting language on these teams, perhaps revealing their true intent when she called them “strike teams”. Is this to say that the initial goal will be to force people to take the jab on their own doorsteps? No, not right away. However, I believe the survey teams are the next step towards that very policy in the future.
For now, the covid cult is using corporations to enforce medical mandates by demanding employees and even customers get vaccinated before they can have access to employment or services. This is unacceptable, as many of these corporations have enjoyed endless stimulus injections from the government and are therefor beholden to taxpayers. Their private property rights do not extend to control over our personal medical decisions or histories.
Any corporation or business that demands proof of vaccination on behalf of the government or the globalists should be picketed and run into the ground. Any competing businesses that refuse to ask for vaccine passports should be supported by the public and protected from government retribution. My home state of Montana has made it illegal for companies to ask for vaccine passports, but many states have not. It is up to regular Americans at the local level to let businesses know you will not be tolerating medical tyranny.
By extension, Biden’s survey teams are a no-go. They are a precursor to door-to-door forced vaccinations and invasive pressure from the federal government on any number of other issues. This is called “incrementalism”, and they think we are too distracted to notice it. As the agenda continues to fall apart in the US, the establishment will get desperate. When the vaccine passport mandates by corporations fail (and they will), they will have to take violent action in the near term to get what they want.
These teams should be kicked out of any community they show up in. They should not be allowed to go door-to-door. The liberty movement is gaining incredible ground in this fight, but this means that the elites will become more unhinged and more dangerous in their rhetoric and actions. When control freaks and psychopaths do not get what they want, they tend to throw epic temper tantrums.
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/16/2021 – 00:00 - Ontario's Grade 9 Will Be Taught That "Mathematics Has Been Used To Normalize Racism"
Ontario’s Grade 9 Will Be Taught That “Mathematics Has Been Used To Normalize Racism”
It looks like the post-modern lot has finally reached what many would think to be a sacred science that usurps the boundaries of racism, equality or wokeness: mathematics.
In Ontario, students in Grade 9 are now being taught about the “subjective” nature of math, including the historical use of math to “normalize racism”, according to the Toronto Sun.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced last year that changes in Ontario’s curriculum are inclusive of a ‘subjective’ and ‘decolonial’ approach to mathematics, the report says.
The Ontario Ministry’s website says “an equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective”. The post goes on to state:
“Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline. However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective.”
The curriculum continues: “Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges, and a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions.”
Lecce “The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education,” it says.
As part of the curriculum, teachers are going to be “required to promote cross-curricular learning and human rights to create ‘anti-racist, anti-discriminatory learning environments’,” the Sun reports.
Caitlin Clark, spokesperson for Minister Lecce’s office concluded: “The world has changed, the economy has changed and so should the curriculum that inspires and informs our students and leaders of tomorrow. That’s why our government was proud to launch a new curriculum that is focused on the job market, gives young people skills they can apply to their lives, to their households, to their personal budgeting, with an emphasis on financial literacy.”
“We are taking action to ensure all children, especially those facing barriers to success, have meaningful pathways to quality learning, graduation, access to post-secondary education and good-paying jobs.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 23:40 - Here's What Happened At Cyber Polygon… And You're Not Going To Like It
Here’s What Happened At Cyber Polygon… And You’re Not Going To Like It
Authored by Jeff Thompson via The Organic Prepper blog,
Cyber Polygon 2020 – a simulation about a “cyber pandemic” – took place July 9, 2021. Many Americans felt widespread concern prior to the event.
Why is this? In short, because past simulations ended up becoming a reality. Could the Cyber Polygon simulation become a reality? Many Americans thought so. Derick Broze points out in his article that the world has experienced many simulations that came to fruition only a short time later.
For example, on October 18, 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, and the John Hopkins Center for Health Security conducted Event 201. Event 201 was a simulation of how the world would react if a coronavirus pandemic swept across the planet. Less than six months later, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic.
Interestingly, just as Cyber Polygon was about to start, a real attack occurred. From NBC News:
One of the most prolific ransomware gangs, REvil, conducted its boldest attacks yet over the Fourth of July weekend, on Kaseya, which services customers who in turn contract with thousands of businesses. Though the dust has yet to settle, researchers say the hack allowed REvil to infect more than 1,500 different organizations. The gang seems to have bitten off more than it can chew and has asked for a $70 million lump sum to unlock all infected computers.
Cyber Polygon 2020 Digital Pandemic is Now Complete
Many may wonder just what in the world happened there. The convention was kind enough to publish the findings for the rest of us to peruse at our leisure.
As noted by the official website, “The central theme of the event was a ‘digital pandemic.’ No surprise to those of us who paid attention. It’s because of this moniker that so many people have been concerned in the first place.
Videos published by the World Economic Forum set mental alarms off for Americans nationwide. According to this video, a cyber attack could be 10x more prevalent than what we’ve experienced with COVID-19. The narrator within the video states, “Fortunately, at least until now, cyber-attacks have not impacted our health the way pandemics have. At least until now.”
The video goes on to state, “The only way to stop the exponential propagation of a COVID-like cyber threat is to fully disconnect the millions of vulnerable devices from one another and from the internet.”
How Would a Full Disconnect Be Implemented and What Would the Effects Be?
One possible way would involve the use of an internet kill switch. Not only do those exist, but the US government has access to one. Theoretically, if you can turn off the internet, large segments of the population will be disconnected from one another. Meaning, what happens in one geographic region will go utterly unrecognized by citizens everywhere else.
Think about the practical implications of such. Think about the potential for further human rights violations. Perhaps a world where all news sources disappear overnight, with your favorite collectivist news agency being the only website still on the air?
Just Take a Look at Egypt in 2011
Protests by citizens fed up with the constant human rights violations they experienced under the current administration spread throughout the entire nation of Egypt in 2011. In an attempt to disband the protesters and keep them from organizing, Egypt hit its internet kill switch.
Egyptians responded by resorting to mesh networks such as Firechat (which is sadly now gone) to communicate with one another. Still, there’s no doubt that the internet shutdown was a significant blow to both the people and their businesses.
Though the internet was “dead” for only five days, it cost the Egyptian economy approximately $90 million US.
Approximately 5 million People From 57 Nations Tuned in to the Live Stream
The Cyberpolygon 2020 live stream “featured global leaders and experts, including Mikhail Mishustin, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, and Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum, as well as top officials from INTERPOL, ICANN, Visa, IBM, Sberbank, MTS and other organizations.”
These leaders and experts spoke on the subject of cyber threats and cyber pandemics. But that wasn’t all.
From the official website: The experts addressed the latest trends and technological threats, shared their experience in creating cybersecurity ecosystems, talked about the transforming threat landscape, and discussed the problem of fake news and how to discern misinformation on the Web
Coincidentally, one of the end goals of Cyber Polygon was to determine how to do a more thorough job of silencing all criticism that goes against the mainstream narrative.
If One Can Shut Down All Alternative Viewpoints, One Can Become the Sole Provider of “Truth”
If you’re a regular reader of The Organic Prepper, you’ve already seen this up close and personal. We were defunded roughly just one month ago. Why? For being a ‘misinformation site.’
It doesn’t matter how many scientists a person has to back up what they say. It doesn’t matter how many links to scientific journals a person adds. If anyone dares go against what the politicians and their ‘fact checkers’ deem to be correct, they will be silenced.
I believe “alternative” news sites are the only trustworthy source of news at the moment. Sites such as Zero Hedge, Children’s Health Defense, Daily Expose, Activist Post, The Last American Vagabond, Technocracy News, Survival Blog (and of course The Organic Prepper) are the only sites I trust to give me accurate information.
As far as I’m concerned, all else is misinformation. It’s propaganda.
However, these sources are just a fraction of the size of the major players (and you know who they are). If they are successfully stamped out, we will quickly end up in the type of situation warned of by FA Hayek in his excellent book The Road to Serfdom.
From Hayek: “If all the sources of current information are effectively under one single control, it is no longer a question of merely persuading the people of this or that. The skillful propagandist then has the power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses, and even the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated from all other sources of information.”
(Hayek has much else to say about our current situation within the chapter ‘The End of Truth.’ It virtually reads as a play-by-play of the last year and a half.)
Technical Training Followed the Live Stream
Here, a collection of some of the best cybersecurity workers in the world gathered together into two teams to simulate a cyberattack of massive scope in real-time. This simulation involved 120 teams from 29 countries, and “the event was joined by state and law enforcement agencies, financial, educational and healthcare institutions, organizations from the IT, telecom, energy, metal, chemical, aerospace engineering and other industries.”
The good guys were the Blue Team, which protected their little chunks of infrastructure from the cyber-attack. The bad guys who conducted the attack were the Red Team. This simulation split into two halves: the real-time threat and the post-attack investigation. Throughout the real-time simulation, the Blue Team had to contain the cyberattack as best they could.
The banking industry and companies within the realm of IT “demonstrated the highest resilience.” However, it was also discovered that, as a whole, “technical specialists are better prepared for investigation than for defense.” The entire investigation process involved regular forensics as well as a concept known as Cyber Threat Hunting.
Cyber Threat Hunting is looking for cyber attacks that haven’t set off your early alert system. You may have anti-virus software, but it only alerts you to what it sees. If it doesn’t see it, no alarm is raised. With Threat Hunting, you seek to discover the hiding places where a cyber attack is lurking – or has already taken place – outside of the realm of where your traditional alarm systems would have guarded.
Cyber Polygon 2020 May Be Over, But it’s Not the End
If you’re a regular reader of this site, you’re likely familiar with the concept of situational awareness. I’m of the mind that a thorough understanding of current events is a critical part of this. If you don’t know what’s going on around you, you’re going to get blindsided by reality. A working understanding of what is happening out there in the world – to me – is well worth the time. I believe an understanding of Cyber Polygon is a part of this.
So continue to monitor the waters. Pay attention to what’s happening out there. In the past year alone, ransomware gangs have launched several high-profile attacks, including on a major pipeline and a meat supplier. If you’re looking for actionable steps you can take to mitigate your disaster risk, we have a host of articles detailing what you can do.
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 23:20 - China's Mars Rover Travels 450 Meters, Spots Own Parachute From Lander
China’s Mars Rover Travels 450 Meters, Spots Own Parachute From Lander
Besides Sino-US tension spiraling lower and civil unrest in Cuba, Haiti, and South Africa flaring up, the battle for Mars continues with China’s Mars rover Zhurong traveling across the Red Planet.
Zhurong landed on Mars on May 14 after orbiting around the fourth rock from the sun for three months. Since landing, the rover has traveled 450 meters (or a little more than a quarter-mile) on an “exploration and inspection” mission, according to state-run press agency Xinhua News.
The rover, which is part of the Tianwen-1 mission to Mars conducted by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), has captured images of the Martian landscape.
The latest picture CNSA shows is the cover of the lander and parachute.
Readers may recall CNSA experienced “nine minutes of terror” as the lander descended toward the planet’s surface at a high rate of speed through the thin atmosphere in May.
Once the lander touched down, the rover was able to roll down a specially made ramp.
Meanwhile, NASA landed the Mars Perseverance rover in February and is conducting a mission for signs of ancient life. The rover also launched a helicopter called Ingenuity, which has flown a series of times.
The US and China have taken an interest in Mars because it’s packed with rare metals, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, niobium, molybdenum, lanthanum, europium, tungsten, and gold, essential minerals that will hopefully one day power the green economy of tomorrow.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 23:00 - Kyle Bass: US Should Ban China's Central Bank Digital Currency
Kyle Bass: US Should Ban China’s Central Bank Digital Currency
Authored by Frank Fang and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,
The communist regime in China is going to use its new state-controlled digital currency as a Trojan horse to project its authoritarianism all over the world, warns hedge fund manager Kyle Bass, and it could become a “cancer” plaguing the United States if it isn’t banned.
“Imagine a currency that almost has a mind of its own,” Bass said in a recent interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
“It knows your account data, it knows your birthday, your Social Security number, where you live. It actually knows your spending proclivities and how you spend it.
“[Beijing’s] hope is to have a massive influence around the world to really leapfrog where they are today into a much stronger position economically and also giving them more control.”
Bass, founder and chief investment officer of Dallas-based Hayman Capital Management, was referring to the digital yuan, a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that Beijing began researching in 2014 and rolled out pilot tests for in four cities in 2020.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ambitions of being the first in the race between governments to roll out a digital currency. On July 8, China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, announced an expansion of its tests, saying that the digital yuan will be tested during the 2022 Winter Olympics Games in Beijing.
The Chinese regime hasn’t been hesitant to speak of its motives behind its digital currency. On June 30, China’s hawkish state-run outlet Global Times reported that the digital yuan “could weaken the U.S. dollar’s role in global currency settlements.”
Bass warned that once individuals predominately use the digital yuan, they could become targets of Chinese influence and coercion.
“So imagine if you and I were sitting here in this interview, and I said something negative about the Chinese Communist Party and I had accepted the digital yuan as payment, they could just turn it off or they could restrict my ability to buy a plane ticket to China,” Bass said.
“They could influence me the same way they influence their own people if they had their hooks into me enough, if I had enough digital yuan.”
Bass said he doesn’t foresee digital yuan being a global reserve currency anytime soon, but its increased use in settling cross-border transactions would be worrisome.
Currently, the Chinese currency, renminbi, only makes up a small fraction of cross-border payments, according to data from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), which is a cross-border payment messaging network for more than 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries and regions.
As of January, the U.S. dollar accounted for more than 38 percent of global payments, followed by the euro with more than 36 percent, according to SWIFT (pdf). Meanwhile, China stood at 2.42 percent, an increase from 1.88 percent as of December 2020.
China could force companies to adopt the use of the Chinese yuan if they wanted to invest in China, Bass said. Meanwhile, countries could also be forced to make a switch, particularly those that have signed up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
BRI is the Chinese regime’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure scheme launched in 2013 to expand its trade and political influence throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe. Critics have argued that BRI has put developing countries into “debt traps.”
“They can force its use, and imagine what kind of stranglehold they will have over the world if they hold all of our capital that way,” Bass said.
Fundamentally, it’s the nature of the CCP that makes the digital yuan a threat, according to Bass.
“The Chinese Communist Party is the largest existential threat to the rules-based order that’s ever existed,” he said.
The regime “is so good at exploiting every crack, every nook, every cranny of opportunity and openness that our society affords them.”
“I think that we should ban the [Chinese digital] currency and not allow any of it to be handled in the United States. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but if you just think all the way through this, you can’t have a little bit of cancer. You either have cancer, or you don’t have cancer. And I believe we can’t allow U.S. corporations or individuals to transact in the [Chinese] CBDC.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 22:40 - "Stunning Numbers" – Record Number Of Americans Died From Drug Overdoses During Pandemic, Driven By Fentanyl
“Stunning Numbers” – Record Number Of Americans Died From Drug Overdoses During Pandemic, Driven By Fentanyl
The CDC released data on drug overdose deaths Wednesday, and the organization found that the total for 2020 soared 30% to a record 93,331 in the virus pandemic year of 2020 than the prior year.
About 93,331 Americans died from drug overdoses last year, per the CDC data. That’s compared with 72,000 from 2019, the previous record high, the CDC reports.
Source: Bloomberg “That is a stunning number even for those of us who have tracked this issue,” Brendan Saloner, associate professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Wall Street Journal. “Our public health tools have not kept pace with the urgency of the crisis.”
Soaring overdose and COVID deaths helped drag down the average US life expectancy to 77.8 years in 2020, down from 78.8 years in 2019 to levels not seen since 2006.
Even before the pandemic, the country struggled with its worst drug crisis ever as Mexican cartels continued to push synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, over the southern borders and into American metro areas.
Compound the opioid crisis with lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions, and drug addictions spiraled out of control as millions of people were left in despair.
The main driver of overdoses was synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl. Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, said 57,550 people died of overdoses from synthetics, a jump of more than 54% over 2019.
“Definitely, fentanyl is the driving factor,” Anderson said. Overdose deaths from opioids overall rose almost 37%, according to the CDC data.
Here’s how the number of drug deaths changed across the country. Every state except for South Dakota and New Hamshire saw drug deaths surge.
CDC data showed 2020 drug overdose deaths translated to an average of 250 deaths each day, or approximately 11 every hour.
Deaths from drug overdoses and COVID has formed a twin public health crisis.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 22:20 - Is The FBI Trying To Create A New Generation Of "Hitler Youth"?
Is The FBI Trying To Create A New Generation Of “Hitler Youth”?
Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
Check out this Tweet.
Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence. Help prevent homegrown violent extremism. Visit https://t.co/bql36iSbig to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the #FBI. #NatSec pic.twitter.com/ZwJp5h5bWD
— FBI (@FBI) July 11, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Welcome to the new Reich, I guess? Let’s take a look at the parallels.
Who are these “Hitler Youth” of whom I write?
If you snoozed through this history class in high school, during World War II, Adolf Hitler wanted to begin indoctrinating children into Nazi ideology at an early age. So, two groups were created: Hitler Youth for boys and for girls, The League of German Girls.
The US Holocaust Museum website raises these key points about the groups.
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Over the course of the 1930s, the Nazi state abolished all other youth groups in Germany.
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In 1939, more than 82% of eligible youth (age 10-18) belonged to the Hitler Youth or its female equivalent, the League of German Girls.
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While girls prepared for their futures as wives and mothers, boys participated in military training. In the last desperate months of the war, boys in their early teens were drawn into serving in the German civil defense and in the defensive militia called the Volkssturm (Home Guard).
A combination of peer pressure and coercion caused the groups to grow rapidly. Hitler Youth was modeled after its counterpart for grown-ups, the so-called Brown Shirts. By 1939, a new law required every German between the ages of 10 and 18 to join the group so they could Nazi-fy even more kids.
Beginning in 1933, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls had an important role to play in the new Nazi regime. Through these organizations, the Nazi regime planned to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology. This was part of the process of Nazifying German society. The aim of this process was to dismantle existing social structures and traditions. The Nazi youth groups were about imposing conformity. Youth throughout Germany wore the same uniforms, sang the same Nazi songs, and participated in similar activities.
One way the groups did this was to use the Hitler Youth movement to dominate the lives of Germany’s youth. Belonging to the organization was a significant time commitment. Hitler Youth members had to attend regular meetings and events. These interfered with other priorities, such as church and school.
This time commitment and regular exposure to Nazi ideology weakened the influence of parents, teachers, religious figures, and other voices of authority. (source)
You’ll probably be unsurprised to hear that the young people were encouraged to snitch on family members, churches, and teachers that were not supportive of Nazi ideology.
Huh.
Meanwhile, ratting out your family members is praised on social media.
After the events at the Capitol on January 6th, people proudly announced they had snitched on family members and coworkers who they recognized from videos and photos of the event.
Teen Vogue praised Helena Duke, 18, for outing her own mother on Twitter during the investigations. Helena told the interviewer how awesome the response to her viral tweet was.
Overall, it has been really heartwarming, the support I’ve gotten from people all over the nation opening up their homes and telling me they’re welcoming me into their families. Obviously, there has been backlash from Trump supporters, but it’s been very minimal. The number of people who have been able to relate to this situation is insane. It’s just crazy to think so many of them are like, ‘You’ve inspired me’…because I’m just an 18-year-old girl. (source)
It’s certainly heartwarming to open your own mother up to potential criminal charges on Twitter. Way to go, Helena!
It’s also financially rewarding.
She’s not alone. Jackson Reffitt is another example of a teen who snitched on a family member. He contacted the FBI about his father before the event on January 6th but it’s unclear what the FBI did with that information.
Jackson Reffitt told investigators that his father returned home on January 8 and said he stormed the Capitol, then threatened his son and daughter not to turn him in.
Jackson Reffitt said his father told them, “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor, and you know what happens to traitors … traitors get shot.”
Guy Reffitt’s wife told investigators that he was a member of the Three Percenters, a far-right extremist group.
Jackson Reffitt told The Times he wasn’t staying at his family’s home but didn’t say where he was staying out of fear for his safety. He said his family learned from his CNN interview over the weekend that he had reported his father weeks before his arrest.
He also started a GoFundMe to help with his college fees. It had raised over $76,000 as of Sunday night. (source)
If Guy Reffitt threatened to shoot his kids, that’s obviously not cool and does not qualify him for father of the year. But Jackson has been rewarded with more than $150K at the time I wrote this article, which should pay for not only college, but therapy, too. Outing your own family apparently pays really freaking well. So it seems that now, snitches don’t get stitches, they get hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And who did Hitler Youth grow up to be?
So let’s go back in history again. What was the future of the Hitler Youth? Historically, the boys grew up to be “Brown Shirts” and the girls married them and raised Nazi babies, indoctrinated from the cradle.
Who were the Brown Shirts?
The SA — Sturmabteilung, meaning ‘assault division’ — also known as the Brownshirts or Storm Troopers, was a violent paramilitary group attached to the Nazi Party in pre-World War Two Germany.
The SA was instrumental in the Nazi’s rise to power yet played a diminished role during the Second World War. The Brownshirts are infamous for their operation outside of the law and their violent intimidation of Germany’s leftists and Jewish population…
…Hitler formed the SA in Munich in 1921, drawing membership from violent anti-leftist and anti-democratic former soldiers (including the Freikorps) in order to lend muscle to the young Nazi Party, using them like a private army to intimidate opponents. According to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, the SA was ‘a group composed in large part of ruffians and bullies’…
…Speaking politics in public was potentially a dangerous matter at the time. Recognisable by their brown uniforms, similar to those of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the SA functioned as a ‘security’ force at Nazi rallies and meetings, using threats and outright violence to secure votes and overcome Hitler’s political enemies. They also marched in Nazi rallies and intimidated political opponents by breaking up their meetings. (source)
Gee…that sounds sorta familiar. Kind of like Antifa. Who incidentally, calls the rest of us Nazis, has violent and destructive rallies, and strives to intimidate those with other opinions.
But what do I know? I’m just a humble libertarian blogger.
We are watching history repeat itself.
We all know that saying, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Well, it seems that some (cough – current administration – cough) know history and they’re taking notes so they can repeat it. Am I saying this is comparable to the Holocaust? Of course not. Not yet. But we’re on a very slippery slope right now and picking up speed to a place rife with suspicion, fear, and hatred. It’s like Selco said about the Balkans – as a lead-up to the war, people were manipulated, turned against one another, and bombarded with hate and fear.
It’s a dangerous time to be opinionated. You risk losing your income, your family (if they’ve been indoctrinated), and potentially your freedom. Holding an opposite political opinion is now considered domestic extremism. We’re encouraged to snitch on each other about darn near everything. We are threatened, blacklisted, and canceled.
Our country was born out of a revolution and a system of checks and balances. We’re witnessing what happens when those checks and balances are no longer working.
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 22:00 -
- "Everything Will Go To Zero" – Macquarie Strategist Envisions Era Of Tech-Driven Deflation
“Everything Will Go To Zero” – Macquarie Strategist Envisions Era Of Tech-Driven Deflation
With the latest CPI numbers stoking interest in the “transitory” vs. “not-so-transitory” inflation debate, it’s perhaps fitting that the latest MacroVoices interview featured Macquarie global equities strategist Viktor Shvets, who explained why he believes the world is entering a new era where the deflationary pressures produced by technology-induced improvements in productivity will create a “race to zero” that will see prices continue to fall.
However, Shvets believes that over the next 10 to 20 years, inflation and deflation will act more like opposite sides of a pendulum that occasionally swings back and forth.
On the inflationary side, one new development is the dominance of fiscal policy over monetary policy in terms of their impact on the market. An innovation inspired by COVID-19 that Shvetz expects will increasingly become the norm in the US. As the younger generation embraces “socialism”, the US government will likely increasingly pay for medicine and even a universal basic income for those who don’t work (and perhaps even for those who do).
Just this week, the Biden Administration introduced new handouts for families with young children.
And the third element is a deglobalization and localization that’s going to continue to strengthen. So what you have in the next 10 to 20 years, two very powerful forces are going to struggle. One is very strong, long term disinflationary force, which ultimately is going to win. And the other one is more inflation created from various things we’re going to do over the next 10 to 20 years. Now, the interesting question, Erik is who is going to decide whether inflation or disinflation wins at any given point in time? Now, my personal view for quite some time has been that private sector will never walk again on this system.
While Shvetz doesn’t believe in systematic inflation, he believes in systematic disinflation.
The reason is that technology has turbocharged the spirit of competition. And the same deflationary forces that gave us free music, free equity trades and free digital news will soon get to work on other aspects of the economy, until prices are falling on nearly all goods and services.
So if one agrees with me, that cost of capital must fall forever, then it’s like pouring a kerosene on a bonfire of technological age. And what technology does incredibly well is reducing marginal pricing power of both labor and capital, and corporates, and brands. And so what happens over time, those reduction in marginal pricing power converges into average pricing power, which also declines. And eventually, almost everything becomes free. There is no prices, just like information today is almost entirely free. Just like publications today, almost entirely free, just like trading on the New York Stock Exchange quite, not quite, but almost entirely free. Just like a lot of music is almost entirely free. So we already have massively reduced marginal pricing power in a lot of industries. We’ve already reduced marginal pricing power of labor.
Shvetz even cited research from McKinsey and others to justify his “everything goes to zero” thesis about long-term price deflation.
That’s why McKinsey in their review, was estimating that the impact of information age could be 3000 times the impact of industrial age. In other words, much broader and much faster, 300 times broader, 10 times faster. And so when I say everything goes to zero, eventually, the productivity growth rates will be so high, that there will be no need to value any of that stuff. And the economists are not going to function the same way as I’ve done over the last two or 300 years.
Moving on to a discussion of contemporary markets, Townsend asked Shvetz for his view on interest rates. Is the only rational direction for Treasury yields higher? To this, Shvetz offered a detail answer grounded in history. As government debt burdens have soared, the only way forward for central banks is to follow the BoJ and artificially repress yields as central banks buy up the entire market.
Well, it reminds me what people were saying about Japan. Remember in 1990s and early 2000. The view was that if God forbid Japan ever ignites inflation, they immediately go bankrupt because the government will be spending 50, 60, 70% of their budget just servicing the debt. Now, how much do you think Japanese Government today is spending on servicing debt 4%. Not 50, not 40, not 80, 4%. And the debt burden is much, much larger than what it used to be. Now a lot of people say, well, you know, Japan is unique.
Okay, let’s look at Eurozone. How unique is Eurozone? Look at the UK? How unique is the United Kingdom? And if you think of the US. One of the things that is becoming very clear, is that what happened in Japan since early 90s. What happened in Eurozone since global financial crisis over the last five or six years started to happen in the US as well. And a basic sort of signal that the US is sending now, just like the other economies do, it’s not about supply of money. It’s about demand for money. It’s not about supply of credit.
It’s about demand for credit. And increasingly, the more we leverage, the more we financialize, the more we erode marginal demand for credit. Now, what that implies is that interest rates not only they cannot go up, but they will not go up. And by the way, if they do, remember, we always have perpetuals, which have no value at all, because they’re never redeemable.
On the horizon, we have MMT or modern monetary theory. We already have BoJ. Remember the has been monetizing more debt that the Government of Japan has been issuing. That’s why they’re sitting on 50 to 53% of JGB market. Eventually, you don’t need the JGB market at some point in time.
Echoing a point made by Jeffrey Gundlach, Shvetz points to the fact that on top of its burgeoning debt, the US also has hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities.
Readers can listen to the entire interview below courtesy of MacroVoices:
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 21:40 - The Increasing Aggressiveness Of Petty Tyrants
The Increasing Aggressiveness Of Petty Tyrants
Authored by Mark Hendrickson via The Epoch Times,
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have come to the point here in the United States where it’s all politics all of the time. That’s not literally true, of course, but it seems as if political tensions and conflicts obtrude on daily life with increasing frequency. It’s hard to get away from it.
Having written in the past about Americans’ traditional love for the simple joy of being left alone, today we’re overrun with zealots who aggressively push their agenda every chance they get. They relish getting into our faces and going out of their way to exceed the normal boundaries of the offices and positions they occupy.
Who’s to blame? That’s largely a matter of one’s political perspective.
Conservatives like myself see in progressives an overwhelming sense of self-righteousness that breeds a sense that they’re justified, even entitled, to try to compel the rest of us to think like they do and support the same policy objectives. From sweeping messianic goals like saving the world from an (imaginary) imminent climate catastrophe down through every lesser goal of progressive utopia and conformity, the left’s actions are nothing, if not heavy-handed.
Progressives, on the other hand, view Americans who don’t share their world view and aren’t on board with their agenda as some combination of ignorant, unenlightened, retrograde, immoral, selfish creeps who need to be bludgeoned into cooperation since they so pathetically lack the good sense to conform to progressive orthodoxy.
Following are some of the ways in which progressives are going overboard to steamroll their opponents. Let’s start with several cases in which progressive office-holders are so eager to assert their rightness and the other side’s wrongness that they egregiously exceed the proper limits of their official powers.
Exhibit A
The California state legislature has acted to refuse reimbursement for travel to states with whose policies California legislators disagree.
The primary objection of the California politicos appears to be differences of policy on LGBTQ issues—for example, North Carolina is in their doghouse for holding to a traditional policy whereby individuals born male are expected to use bathrooms and locker rooms designated for males, and the same for females. I understand the need to accommodate individuals who may identify their gender differently than the traditional way, but I don’t think that North Carolinians who want to preserve modesty are creeps. Nor do I think it right to judge and condemn the state of North Carolina for trying to find a modus operandi that doesn’t disrespect and discomfit a large number of their citizens.
Just as the California legislators would want others to respect their jurisdiction, so they should respect their counterparts in other states as they seek for policies that work for them and the people they represent.
Just for curiosity: Does the California legislature also refuse to reimburse those who travel to communist China? There you have a government that may or may not accommodate LGBTQ concerns, but is well known for suppressing self-determination in Hong Kong, placing Uyghurs in concentration camps, and harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience. In addition, I would suspect that there are more cases of Chinese businesses stealing intellectual property from Californians than there are of, say, Floridians doing the same. With its peculiarly selective travel bans, the California legislature seems to be straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
Exhibit B
A few U.S. senators, most particularly Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), have openly mocked the constitutional separation of powers by trying to intimidate Supreme Court justices into rubber-stamping progressive policy goals. Whitehouse and his cronies have made bald threats to pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices if the current court doesn’t issue liberal rulings.
In a similar vein, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) went so far as to openly threaten Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, using such intemperate language as, “You will pay the price,” and “You won’t know what hit you …” This is thug talk, gangster stuff, not a dignified, reasoned discussion about the proper role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional order.
The fact that such tactics don’t embarrass Democrats is revealing and worrisome. Ask yourself: If Senate progressives are this thuggish now, how unrestrained will they be if they attain clear-cut ideological majorities in all three branches of the federal government?
Exhibit C
Two months ago, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, in her zeal to redirect the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels to “renewable energy,” exceeded her authority as governor in a spectacularly flagrant way: She ignored the rule of law and attempted to usurp the prerogative of the federal government when she unilaterally ordered Enbridge, Inc. (a Canadian company) to summarily cease transporting fossil fuels under the Great Lakes, even though Enbridge has been doing so safely for decades under the terms of a formal treaty between Canada and the United States.
The over-zealous governor is the poster child for members of the self-righteousness political class who add insult to the injury of their over-reaching by living their own personal lives as if they are above the laws they impose on “the little people” under their jurisdiction.
Whitmer has shown such contempt for representative government repeatedly. Three examples: She ignored her own COVID-19 guidelines on a trip to Florida, took a family trip to northern Michigan after publicly saying that people who don’t live there should not travel there for a holiday, and did not wear a mask at a large restaurant gathering despite her own edict to that effect. You would think that progressives would disavow Whitmer’s double standard, but apparently, they’re so sure that they’re close to achieving permanent power that they aren’t bothering to try to improve the optics.
The aggressiveness of progressives—their willingness to arrogate power to themselves and run roughshod over the half of Americans who disagree with them—is, of course, not confined to those holding political office. Whether it’s high-tech censoring dissident viewpoints; teachers’ unions making explicit their intention to cram critical race theory down our children’s throats and support the communist-oriented Howard Zinn slant on American history; woke activists trying to end the careers of people who worked with or for President Donald Trump; or cowardly mobs lawlessly defacing, desecrating, and destroying statues, these and numerous other incidents indicate that many on the left have no interest in dialog, no tolerance for the perspectives and values of others, no respect for democratic processes, and no desire to keep our civil discourse cordial and free. Their actions demonstrate that they want power to tell us what to do and think, and that many would rather grind our faces in it than reason with us.
I hope cooler heads will prevail. We really don’t want to go down the road of fanaticism where people are flirting with such awful ideas as putting Republicans’ children in “enlightenment camps” (a former PBS attorney) or sending the rich to the guillotine (as one of Bernie Sanders’ groupies has fulminated).
Those of you in the progressive camp who approve, whether tacitly or openly, of the aggressive tactics mentioned in this article should consider two points:
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First, by repeatedly ratcheting up the temperature, you run the risk of things getting out of control and making daily life miserable, not just for partisans on both sides, but for the many Americans who just want to get on with their lives.
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Second, if you manage to achieve the political hegemony that you crave so intensely, don’t assume that those at the top will do what you want them to do and that they care about you.
Those are the two most common (and lethal) mistakes made by those who support radical movements. You assume that the leaders share your values, but you’ll find out, much to your dismay, that the daily reality is a far cry from the promised utopia.
A prediction: If the petty tyrants in our midst don’t rein in their aggressive tactics, pressures will build until there’s a violent reaction. That’s exactly the outcome that the hardcore sociopathic revolutionaries out there want. Don’t let them dupe you. It won’t be worth it.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 21:20 -
- Paging Greta: China To Release 10 Million Tonnes Of Highly Polluting Coal From Reserves
Paging Greta: China To Release 10 Million Tonnes Of Highly Polluting Coal From Reserves
In a time when Western superpowers are furiously pushing for a multi-trillion spending bonanza under the cover of global warming as a virtue-signaling justification, and holding lengthy G20 boondoggles in Venice (which miraculously still isn’t under 30 feet of water) to demonstrate just how serious they are, China – the world’s biggest polluter – is doing its thing.
On Thursday, the state-planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said that China will release more than 10 million tonnes of coal from its state reserves, with the potential for further releases in line with market demand. The biggest release of highly-polluting coal from China’s state reserves this year is aimed at steadying surging prices on the back of strong industrial activity the SCMP reported, although the move is unlikely to lead to a significant increase in imports, analysts said.
Coal has been released from Chinese state reserves four times so far this year, amounting to 5 million tonnes in total, although these figures are tiny in comparison to China’s raw coal production which was estimated to be around 320 million tonnes in June, according to S&P Global Platts Analytics. It’s also why a recent study found that almost all of the world’s 25 most polluted cities are in China.
Source: “Keeping Track of Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction Progress and Targets in 167 Cities Worldwide“ The nation now has about 40 million tonnes of coal in its reserve bases.
Power loads in several eastern and southern regions, including the business hub of Shanghai, hit historic highs this week as hot weather boosted use of air-conditioning and analysts expect that average coal inventories at six coal-fired power plants in eastern China have fallen to less than 15 days worth of consumption.
“The NDRC has announced plans to try and reduce domestic coal prices, so the release of additional volumes could be in response to this and to potentially ease the rise in domestic coal prices,” said Matthew Boyle, head of coal and Asia power at S&P Global Platts Analytics.
“Chinese domestic coal production for the January to June 2021 period is up 6.9 per cent year on year and 9.9 per cent higher on 2019 production.”
Just spitballing here, but it sure doesn’t look like all the hot air spewed by the Blackrocks and Paris Treaties of the world have had any impact on China’s actions.
The latest move by NDRC follows record coal imports in June, which rose 35% from a month earlier, although China’s total coal imports in the first half of 2021 are still down year on year. This could partly be attributed to China’s unofficial import restrictions which have been in place on various Australian products, including coal, since March 2020 amid souring relations between Beijing and Canberra.
China’s thermal coal imports used for energy generation, for which Australia has traditionally been a significant supplier, hit 115 million tonnes between January to June, down around 21 million tonnes year on year, according to S&P Global Platts Analytics.
Dennis Ip, the regional head of power, utilities, renewables and environment research at Daiwa Capital Markets, said the NDRC’s release of its coal reserves will partially relieve the shortage issue in the summer peak season, given that the inventory at China’s main Qinhuangdao coal transshipment port remains low in July.
“We expect China to continue increasing coal imports from Mongolia, Russia and Indonesia instead of Australia, as China has yet to lift the ban on Australia coal,” said Ip.
Going forward, Platts Analytics believes China is likely to rely on domestic coal supply rather than boosting seaborne coal imports, forecasting China’s thermal coal imports will fall by 68 million tonnes to around 164 million tonnes in 2021. In April, the NDRC urged power plants, mines and major transport hubs to boost coal reserves, while it also pledged to build stockpiles to more than 120 million tonnes in 2021.
Translation: brace for a tsunami of pollution out of China, only this time Beijing can’t blame it on bitcoin mining, which at best accounts for a a tiny fraction of total Chinese greenhouse gas emissions, and now that China has effectively kicked out its bitcoin miners, there is virtually nothing left.
Meanwhile, even as Beijing has banished domestic bitcoin miners, China’s June electricity consumption “mysteriously” rose 9.8% from a year earlier to 703.3 billion kilowatt hours as first-half consumption jumped by 16.2%. A research institute affiliated to China’s State Grid estimated electricity consumption in July will be up about 12% from the same month last year.
We are confident that the patron saint of climate crusaders everywhere, Greta Thunberg, will very soon take her clean air fight straight to Beijing. After all, anything less and some may suggest that she is nothing more than a virtue-signaling fraud.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 21:00 - 41 Percent Of Baltimore High School Students Earn Below 1.0 GPA: Analysis
41 Percent Of Baltimore High School Students Earn Below 1.0 GPA: Analysis
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
An analysis found that a significant number of Baltimore high school students earned below a “D” grade point average during the first three quarters of the 2020–2021 school year.
WBFF’s Project Baltimore’s analysis found that during that time period, 41 percent earned a 1.0-grade point average (GPA) or below. That means more than 8,400 students out of Baltimore City Schools’ 20,500 total population are getting grades below a “D” overall.
The analysis found that 21 percent of city high school students obtained a 3.0 or better GPA—or a “B” average.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the City of Baltimore and Baltimore City Schools for comment.
The school district appeared to blame the COVID-19 pandemic on the reason for the poor student performance.
“Consistent with the experience of many school districts across the country, the COVID-19 pandemic created significant disruptions to student learning. As early as the summer of 2020, City Schools identified large numbers of students with decreases in their grade point averages and classroom performance when compared to past performances,” Baltimore City Schools said in a statement to Fox News and other outlets.
The statement added that “city Schools is providing students with a variety of opportunities to acquire the unfinished learning they lost” and “each student’s progress will be assessed, and an action plan will be developed to complete any unfinished learning,” which will “guide families and teachers in helping students get back on track.”
Across the United States, a number of public schools struggled to implement online learning for students during COVID-19-related lockdowns. Some districts saw an increased rate of failure and an increase in absences from classes.
During the previous year, nearby Anne Arundel County in Maryland saw failure rates more than double from 3 percent to 7 percent, according to data obtained by the Baltimore Sun.
But Jovani Patterson, who ran for City Council president last year, said that the school district absorbs a considerable amount of funding but doesn’t deliver results.
“We don’t see much change. Our schools outspend 97 percent of other major school districts,” he told the station.
“They don’t care, man. They come from the same environment,” Patterson said of city officials and what he described as an inability to deliver positive results for students. The Baltimore City Council Leader, Nick Mosby, and other officials are “a product of Baltimore City schools,” he added. “But then when you bring this [analysis] to them, they don’t care. They don’t care at all. You have to raise the standard … Everyone should be speaking out about this.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 20:40 - Nuclear-Powered Crypto-Mining To Begin In Pennsylvania Next Year
Nuclear-Powered Crypto-Mining To Begin In Pennsylvania Next Year
Amid the heated debate over Bitcoin’s environmental impact in the mining space, nuclear power could be the perfect renewable energy source to power mining operations.
It’s no secret that bitcoin mining takes a massive amount of electricity. It’s estimated that energy consumption exceeds the power consumption of countries like the Netherlands and the UAE.
With the push towards ESG-Friendly bitcoin mining operations, US power company Talen Energy has been given the green light to mine cryptocurrencies using nuclear power from Susquehanna Steam Electric Station based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, according to Datacenter Dynamics.
A spokesperson for Talen said Cumulus, a subsidiary of Talen Energy, has two separate businesses: Cumulus Data, focused on hyperscale data center; and Cumulus Coin, focused on digital currency mining.
“As the demand for energy increases among data center and cryptocurrency processing clients, so does the call for decarbonizing these energy sources. Talen Energy is constructing a hyperscale data center campus adjacent to its Susquehanna nuclear generation facility,” read a company presentation. “It will provide low-cost, reliable, carbon-free power to the data center clients on campus. This allows clients to benefit from carbon-free, 24/7 power being supplied directly to the campus, without the intermittency that renewable energy can experience, or requiring fossil fuels.”
Here’s the layout of the nuclear-powered cryptomining facility adjacent to the power plant. The mining facility could be open as early as the first half of 2022.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been at the forefront of pushing mining operations into using “renewable energy” instead of fossil fuels. The issue behind crypto space is that computational power available to mine requires an enormous amount of energy.
Days ago, a historic hydroelectric plant near Albany, New York, decided to begin cryptomining than selling its power to the grid because it could make more money.
El Salvador has pitched miners of the world to flood the Central American country to embrace “cheap 100% clean, 100% renewable, 0 emissions” energy from a state-owned geothermal electric company that is powered by a volcano.
The “greening” of Bitcoin also comes amid China’s crackdown on miners, resulting in the hash rate —the computational power available to mine the cryptocurrency, reflecting the efficiency of the bitcoin blockchain network, plunging since mid-May.
Nuclear-powered cryptomining could be the top “ESG-friendly” energy source that the crypto community and tech billionaires have been searching for. This could be a positive for uranium stocks.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 20:20 - 60 Dead, Dozens Missing In Western Germany Flooding
60 Dead, Dozens Missing In Western Germany Flooding
Update (2003ET): The death toll rose to more than 60 people, and dozens were unaccounted for as severe floods ripped through western Germany, according to AP News.
During a visit to Washington, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “I grieve for those who have lost their lives in this disaster.” She said her thoughts were with the families who lost loved ones.
Merkel also said the worse is yet to come as water levels recede and the true extent of the tragedy unfolds in the coming days.
Unbelievable footage from earlier today.
NEW 🚨 About 60 dead, dozens missing, thousands out of power after devastating floods in Germany
— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) July 15, 2021
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* * *
What will be blamed on climate change and pressure lawmakers in the EU to enforce more carbon-reducing measures is a terrible flooding incident in western Europe.
BBC News reports at least 33 people have died, and more than 70 are unaccounted for after torrential rains sparked flash floods in western states of Germany, including Rhineland-Palatinate and North-Rhine Westphalia.
“It’s a disaster! There are dead, missing and many who are still in danger,” said Malu Dreyer, premier of the Rhineland-Palatinate. “All emergency services are on duty around the clock and risk their own lives,” she added.
Reuters confirms at least 70 people were missing across the region of Ahrweiler.
Video footage from western Germany is shocking. Entire towns, vehicles, and businesses have been submerged.
Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, a town in the German Bundesland of Rhineland-Palatinate, is completely underwater.
Drone footage shows the extent of the damage in western Germany.
Drone footage shows the extent of damage in western Germany after heavy rain triggered severe floods.
Dozens of people are still missing.
Latest on this story here: https://t.co/tDlDebAN8h pic.twitter.com/dyW5i5TKne
— Sky News (@SkyNews) July 15, 2021
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Before And After
More insane footage.
🔴At least 19 people have now died after freak storms triggered flash floods which have swept away homes and devastated parts of western Germany and Belgium pic.twitter.com/p0LFJvlB7w
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) July 15, 2021
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#BREAKING Flood in Germany#洪水 #flut #Deutschland #Flood #Germany pic.twitter.com/VmaGGhpGGF
— Chaudhary Parvez (@ChaudharyParvez) July 15, 2021
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“There are people dead, there are people missing, there are many who are still in danger,” the governor of Rhineland-Palatinate state, Malu Dreyer, told the regional parliament. “We have never seen such a disaster. It’s really devastating.”
During German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s trip to Washington on Thursday, she told reporters the news of the flooding is absolutely horrible. “My sympathy goes to the relatives and of the dead and missing,” she said.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pledged full support to help those affected by this freak weather incident.
“My thoughts are with the families of the victims of the devastating floods in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and those who have lost their homes,” she tweeted. “The EU is ready to help.”
No official figures have been released on the estimated damage, with floodwaters only starting to recede. It could take days, if not weeks, to survey the destruction.
What caused the wild weather was a low-pressure system that stalled out and dumped unprecedented amounts of rain in the region, overflowing streams and rivers.
Rainfall is expected to subside late Thursday, though the threat of localized storms and water levels on the Rhine could continue to rise.
Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted that “we’re at the very beginning of a climate and ecological emergency,” adding that volatile weather shouldn’t be “the new normal.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 20:03 - "China Senses Weakness": Pence Urges Biden To Take Tougher Stance On CCP
“China Senses Weakness”: Pence Urges Biden To Take Tougher Stance On CCP
Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times,
Former Vice President Mike Pence in a foreign policy speech on Wednesday called on the Biden administration to toughen its stance on China, saying that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “senses weakness in the new administration.”
Speaking at the Heritage Foundation headquarters in Washington, D.C., Pence urged that President Joe Biden delist Chinese firms that fail meet U.S. accounting standards, end all public and private funding of scientific research in China, and demand transparency from Beijing on the origins of the CCP virus, among other actions to address China’s abuses of the international rules-based order.
Millions of Americans are “awake to the fact that the Chinese Communist Party aspires not merely to join the community of economically developed nations, but to sit atop a new global order created in its own image,” the former vice president said.
“A world in which freedom is constrained, but Beijing’s power is not.”
Biden must take a harder line amid “the emerging cold war with China,” Pence said of the threat posed by the CCP.
“Our elected leaders must build on the progress of the Trump-Pence administration, and use the economic and military power of the United States to check the ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party in ways that put the American people and American values first,” he continued. “Only a proud, confident and united America can meet the challenge of China.”
His remarks come as the theory that the virus was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has gained wider coverage as a likely possibility in the legacy media as a growing number of scientists and officials discuss the evidence supporting the hypothesis.
President Joe Biden on May 26 ordered the intelligence community to produce a report in 90 days on the origins of the virus, saying that intelligence agencies are looking at different theories, including the possibility of a laboratory accident in China.
Among other demands, Pence called on the Biden administration to ban Beijing-backed Confucius Institutes on American college campuses, and to demand that the 2022 Olympics be moved from Beijing unless the CCP “comes clean on the coronavirus” and ends its persecution of Uyghurs.
The former vice president’s remarks come just weeks after a survey conducted by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center found that negative views of China among the world’s most advanced economies hover at near-record highs amid concerns about Beijing’s human rights record.
A Pew report released on June 30 detailing the results of the survey of 17 advanced economies in Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region shows that a large majority—eight in 10 respondents—hold unfavorable views of the Chinese regime and believe it “does not respect the personal freedoms of its people.”
Beijing is facing increasing scrutiny over its human rights abuses, including its suppression of religious and ethnic minorities and the implementation of its draconian national security law in Hong Kong in July 2020, which has criminalized any speech or political action seen as against the ruling regime as acts of subversion and secession with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
In China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, authorities have been accused of committing genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, including the detention of at least 1 million people in secretive “political reeducation” camps.
“Now more than ever, our leaders must get serious about the immediate and deadly threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party,” James Carafano, Heritage vice president for national security and foreign policy, said in a statement following Pence’s speech.
“Vice President Pence not only clearly articulated the threat we face, but numerous concrete policy steps the Biden administration and Congress can, and should, take in defense of American interests and values,” he said.
“We cannot afford to go back to ‘business as usual’ on China. It’s time to continue what the Trump administration started and secure our future against the Chinese Communist Party’s global advances.”
The Epoch Times has contacted the White House for comment.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 20:00 - Taiwan Semiconductor Sets Sights Expansion Into Japan After Record Q2 Sales
Taiwan Semiconductor Sets Sights Expansion Into Japan After Record Q2 Sales
It isn’t just the U.S. where Taiwan Semiconductor is looking to expand its footprint. Not only has TSMC made headlines for proposing to expand production into the United States, as we have documented numerous times, but now it is making headlines for how it has become the center of the semiconductor world – and how that can leave the world vulnerable.
Now, the semi giant, in the midst of a global semi shortage, is looking to deploy new infrastructure in Japan for the first time in the company’s history, according to Nikkei. The plans are not included in TSMC’s already-disclosed three year, $100 billion capex budget for expansion.
The announcement comes after the company posted record quarterly sales and forecasted higher revenue for the current quarter, according to Reuters. Its Q2 profit rose 11% and revenue was up 28% in U.S. dollar terms. The company announced its Q3 revenue would be up 21-23%.
TSMC Chief Executive Officer C.C. Wei said that the company was in the midst of researching whether or not a plant in Japan would make sense for the company. They are reported to be looking to build in the “western prefecture of Kumamoto to address growing demand from Sony”.
TSMC Chairman Mark Liu said: “We are in the due diligence process now to have a specialty technology fab in Japan. It is still early to disclose the decision, because it will be based on our customer needs, operating efficiency evaluation and cost economics.”
Expansion into the U.S. and China also remain on the table for the company. Liu continued: “As the need for semiconductor infrastructure security has increased in recent years, we are expanding our global manufacturing footprint to sustain and enhance our competitive advantages, and to better serve our customers in the new geopolitical environment.”
He concluded: “We will continue to compress our schedule [for the project] as much as we can.”
Recall, we noted in late June that TSMC was going to be hiking prices by up to 20% next year.
Earlier this year we reported that semi prices were expected to rise through all of 2021, but recent reports have suggested that production was picking up again. In fact, car chip vendors are now able to “ramp up output” thanks to more foundry house support coming online, Digitimes Asia reported late last month.
But that isn’t stopping TSMC from hiking prices, as was telegraphed earlier this year. For example, back in April, suppliers like Japan’s top silicone producer, Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. Ltd. marked up prices between 10% and 20%, according to Caixin, who reported that growing input costs and supply disruptions could be tide that continues to push up prices. Shin-Etsu blamed their price hikes on the rising cost of silicon metal, which they said was a result of demand out of China
Names like Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), United Microelectronics Corp., and Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. had all announced intentions to raise prices in similar fashion. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. has also said prices are coming in the form of suspending wafer price reductions beginning December 31 this year.
One Jiangsu diode manufacturer said it’s suppliers had raised prices five times since the second half of 2020. The hikes represented a total markup of between 30% and 40%, including a new 10% hike that came into effect last week. The same firm’s inventory was at “half their normal level”, Caixin reported.
One semiconductor salesman said: “The whole industry is scrambling for (chips), and it’s hard for us to make a purchase.”
We called TSMC the “one chipmaker the entire world is depending on” in a piece we published in June that highlighted the world’s reliance on their production.
TSMC’s chips are in “billion of products”, including iPhones, computers and cars, the Wall Street Journal writes in a new profile of the company. The company has slowly become the world’s 11th most valuable company, with a market cap of about $550 billion. The company reported $17.6 billion in profits last year on revenues of about $45.5 billion. TSMC makes “around 92% of the world’s most sophisticated chips,” the report says.
This has led to the U.S., Europe and China looking to cut their reliance on chips out of the Taiwanese company. But that’s a tough task given its contribution globally. The U.S., for example, only accounts for 12% of the world’s chip manufacturing, down from 37% in 1990.
Analysts aren’t confident of there being a more diversified semiconductor supply chain “anytime soon”. They attribute this to TSMC’s “hard driving culture” and “deep pockets”. The industry has become so complex that once one producer falls behind, it becomes tough to catch up.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 19:40 - Intel To Buy Chip Fabricator GlobalFoundaries For $30 Billion In Biggest Deal Yet: WSJ
Intel To Buy Chip Fabricator GlobalFoundaries For $30 Billion In Biggest Deal Yet: WSJ
Thursday was another rough day for the semiconductor space as most of the biggest US-traded chipmakers traded in the red as the global chip shortage overshadowed what ended up being a solid earnings report from TSMC (which also affirmed plans to expand its production capacity in the US and Japan).
But even bigger news concerning the troubled semis space broke Thursday evening when WSJ reported that Intel has agreed to the biggest acquisition in its half-a-century existence.
According to the American business broadsheet of record, Intel has agreed to buy chip fabricator GlobalFoundaries for $30 billion. Most importantly, the deal marks the company’s biggest move yet into the foundry segment, a segment currently dominated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing – or TSMC – the world’s most important chipmaker. Put another way, the deal is the biggest volley yet in new Intel chief Pat Gelsinger’s “war” on TSMC. As we noted above, news of the deal is breaking shortly after Taiwan Semi announced its plans to expand production in the US, which is Intel’s “turf” (Intel is also investing $20 billion into expanding its production facilities in the American West).
Wowzers:
Intel is exploring a deal to buy GlobalFoundries, according to people familiar with the matter, in a move that would turbocharge the semiconductor giant’s plans to make more chips for other tech companies and rate as its largest acquisition ever. https://t.co/WaGqo3hgEX
— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) July 15, 2021
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As for GlobalFoundaries, those who aren’t semiconductor experts can be forgiven for having never heard of the company. It’s presently wholly owned by Mubadala Investment Co (the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund made infamous by its association with 1MDB, the Malaysian sovereign political slush fund that was pillaged by members of the former PM’s inner circle after being seeded with money raised by Goldman Sachs. The company was looking to go public, but instead of going public, or merging with a SPAC, Intel is going to buy it for $30MM).
Per WSJ, GlobalFoundaries itself doesn’t appear to be in direct talks with Intel – the deal is being negotiated by Mubadala, which clearly sees an exit opportunity in the fact that Intel and its biggest Western rivals are now going toe-to-toe with TSMC.
For all we know, one of these rivals could come through with a higher bid, stealing the deal from Intel, or sparking a bidding war.
WSJ describes GlobalFoundaries as “GlobalFoundries is one of the largest specialist chip-production companies. It was created when Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices in 2008 decided to spin off its chip-production operations.”
Interestingly, Intel rival AMD “remains a big customer for GlobalFoundries—agreeing to a multiyear, roughly $1.6 billion chip-component supply deal this year—and that could complicate a takeover by Intel. GlobalFoundries is relocating its corporate headquarters to Malta, N.Y. from Santa Clara, Calif.”
Tech analyst Patrick Moorhead tweeted following news of the deal that if it’s consumated, it would transform Intel into a “full-stack provider” with chips for critical technologies like 5G, IoT and much more. However, he expects the regulatory hurdles to be “immense” (keep in mind, President Biden is pushing sweeping antitrust policy changes by executive fiat).
On Intel acquiring GlobalFoundries: I can see why it would want to as it would make Intel a full stack provider with specialty tech for 5G, IoT and automotive. But the regulatory hurdles would be immense.
— Patrick Moorhead at #MSInspire (@PatrickMoorhead) July 15, 2021
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One of the contributing factors behind the current global semiconductor shortage is that many chip designers like Nvidia and Qualcomm now prefer to outsource the fabrication of their chips to companies like TSMC and GlobalFoundaries. Just last month, GlobalFoundaries announced plans to build a new production site in Singapore for $4 billion.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 19:18 - Chinese Communist Party Officials Share Viral Video Urging Nuclear Strikes On Japan
Chinese Communist Party Officials Share Viral Video Urging Nuclear Strikes On Japan
Relations between China and Japan have seen a rapid deterioration over the past months as Tokyo has firmly declared itself in Washington’s corner on its willingness to defend Taiwan in the future event of a Chinese invasion of the island.
This week a social media video has been widely shared in China after it was originally posted to the official social media account of a local municipal authority run by Communist officials after being created by a Chinese military channel with over two million followers. The now viral video bluntly calls for “continuously” striking Japan with nuclear weapons should it continue supporting Taiwan’s independence aspirations. The original upload has since been taken down from Xigua – the Chinese social media site which has a similar appearance to YouTube – after garnering international media attention. Watch the reposted video with subtitles below…
“If Japan intervenes in military affairs to reunify Taiwan, I must recommend the ‘exceptional theory of nuclear strikes on Japan,'” the video’s title reads.
The narrator then declares Japan “has not learned its lesson from history” which means China must “continuously using nuclear bombs until Japan announces its unconditional surrender for the second time” – in reference to WWII.
It was posted Sunday by the city council of Baoji in northwestern Shaanxi province. The “exceptional theory” is the controversial view held by many Chinese officials that China’s ‘self-defense only’ use of atomic bombs doesn’t apply in the case of Japan, thus an “exception” can be made.
“Our country is undergoing major changes unlike any in the last century… In order to ensure the peaceful rise of our country, it is necessary to take measures,” the narration continues.
It urges citizens and government leaders to “combine the new and old hatred” for Japan, including from Japan’s World War II invasion of China and the Nanjing Massacre – which it says viewers should think of in relation to Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso’s earlier this month surprising statements saying that any future Chinese invasion of Taiwan would likely be interpreted in Tokyo as a “threat to Japan’s survival” – allowing the government to deploy its Self-Defense Forces for collective self-defense.
China irked by Japan deputy PM’s comments on ‘protecting’ Taiwan
China lodged a diplomatic protest with Japan after Japanese deputy prime minister Taro Aso said Tokyo and Washington should combine to protect Taiwan from Chinese military if it is attacked. https://t.co/0AwrqrhnMX
— Amrita Bhinder 🇮🇳 (@amritabhinder) July 10, 2021
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“If a major incident happened [in Taiwan], it would not be strange at all if it touches on a situation threatening survival,” Aso said on July 5. “If that is the case, Japan and the US must defend Taiwan together.” The number two highest Japanese official further noted “the situation over Taiwan is becoming extremely intense“.
This came after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s visit to the White House in April, wherein he reiterated “objections to China’s unlawful maritime claims and activities in the South China Sea” and outraged China by signing onto a joint statement which included the following line:
“The United States restated its unwavering support for Japan’s defense under the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, using its full range of capabilities, including nuclear.”
The Chinese Embassy in the US had condemned the words as “completely beyond the scope” of healthy bilateral relations, saying Japan will only “harm” itself in such declarations with the US.
Often Beijing’s most bellicose threats to external enemies are issued through state media channels, in order to be made indirectly. Given how quickly this latest threatening social media video went viral, and its origins on a popular Chinese military channel, it’s likely it had “official” approval for release somewhere within the top echelons of the CCP.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/15/2021 – 19:00
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