- Pompeo Vows US Will Never Let Iran Acquire Russian & Chinese Weapons
Pompeo Vows US Will Never Let Iran Acquire Russian & Chinese Weapons
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2020 – 02:45Weeks ago the United States lost its bid to get the UN Security Council to extend the international arms embargo on Iran, which is set to expire October 18.
And now on Tuesday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is vowing to never let Iran acquire Chinese and Russian weapons, but it remains unclear precisely how he hopes to make this happen.
Pompeo said during an interview with European radio broadcaster “France Inter” on Tuesday that “Nothing has been done so far to enable the extension of this ban, and therefore the United States assumed its responsibilities.” He’s of course referencing the fact that the Europeans have by and large sought to uphold the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, or JCPOA.
Russian anti-air defense systems, file image via Tehran Times. Pompeo added:
“We will act in this manner. We will prevent Iran from acquiring Chinese tanks and Russian air defense systems, and after that, selling weapons to Hezbollah undermines the efforts of French President Emmanuel Macron in Lebanon.”
Washington has stood isolated over its decision to enact so-called “snapback” sanctions on the Islamic Republic in late August.
Ironically the snapback option is available to participants in the JCPOA, which the US formally withdrew from in May 2018.
#Видео Расчеты С-400 Западного военного округа провели боевые пуски зенитных управляемых ракет по учебным воздушным целям на полигоне Ашулук в Астраханской области.
#Минобороны #ЗВО #ПВО #С400 #БоеваяПодготовка pic.twitter.com/fGz9K4UXpe
— Минобороны России (@mod_russia) September 15, 2020
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Meanwhile, over the past year there’s been talk of Moscow actually supplying Iran with its advanced S-400 anti-air defense system, something which the Trump administration might almost treat as an act of war.
Interestingly, on the very day Pompeo made is new statements vowing to never let Russian weapons come into Iran’s hands, the Kremlin was busy show off the S-400’s capabilities.
…caused over so many years. Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2020
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Iran has also come back into headlines this week after it was alleged leaders in Tehran are plotting to assassinate the US ambassador to South Africa in revenge for the January US drone strike on Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
In response, Trump vowed that any such aggression out of Iran would be met with an American response “1,000 times greater in magnitude!” However, Trump did not exactly confirm the alleged plot, instead he merely cited “press reports” suggesting that it may be true.
- How The British Government Is Wading Into The Swamp Of Despotism… One Muzzle At A Time
How The British Government Is Wading Into The Swamp Of Despotism… One Muzzle At A Time
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2020 – 02:00Authored by Peter Hitchens,
The Government has no legal right to impose the severe and miserable restrictions on our lives with which it has wrecked the economy, brought needless grief to the bereaved and the lonely and destroyed our personal liberty.
This is the verdict of one of the most distinguished lawyers in the country, the retired Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption.
He said last week in a podcast interview: ‘I don’t myself believe that the Act confers on the Government the powers that it has purported to exercise.’
Lord Sumption’s intervention is, of course, so huge and important that the media of this country have somehow not noticed it. So, as has been the case from the start, you have to get it from me.
He was referring to the Public Health Act of 1984, the basis for almost all the sheaves of increasingly hysterical decrees against normal life which the Health Secretary Matt Hancock has issued since March. I promise you that it is not usual for a retired senior judge to use such language in public.
This 1984 Act was drawn up mainly to give local magistrates the power to quarantine the sick.
Nothing in it remotely justifies these astonishing moves – house arrest, travel restrictions, harsh limits on visiting family members, interference with funerals and weddings, closure of churches, compulsory muzzles, bans on assembly and protest.
English law just does not allow an Act of Parliament to be stretched so far.
Lord Sumption was referring to the Public Health Act of 1984, the basis for almost all the sheaves of increasingly hysterical decrees against normal life which the Health Secretary Matt Hancock (above) has issued since March. I promise you that it is not usual for a retired senior judge to use such language in public.
Magistrates are never given such powers. It is a principle of our law that fundamental freedoms cannot be invaded or overruled unless the law specifically allows it.
As he is one of the most distinguished legal minds of our time, Jonathan Sumption’s opinions on this matter are surely important.
Let us hope that the Courts of England, which have so far been content to let the Government do what it likes, will listen to what he says when they look at the matter again later this month, in the case brought by Simon Dolan, a businessman who is seeking a judicial review of the Government’s policy on Covid-19.
It is extraordinary for such a person as Lord Sumption to go public in this fashion. And he went on to say another astonishing thing.
He pointed out that powers do exist – in the shape of the formidable Civil Contingencies Act – under which the Prime Minister could do all the things he has done. But the CCA requires regular parliamentary scrutiny and renewal.
The Government’s team of lawyers must know this. So why wasn’t the CCA used? We can only guess that the Prime Minister and his Health Secretary feared that if they had to keep coming back to Parliament, even the dim, slumbering and gullible MPs we have nowadays would eventually have spotted, and halted, the immense power grab now under way.
Lord Sumption’s intervention is, of course, so huge and important that the media of this country have somehow not noticed it.
So, as has been the case from the start, you have to get it from me. But believe me, it is an indication of just how deep into the swamp of despotism this Government has already waded.
Let us escape soon, before we are so far in we can never get out again.
Bare-faced state bullies
The most terrible warning of what lies ahead of us – if we cannot smash the Government’s lies – is in Melbourne, Australia, where a vain little despot called Daniel Andrews has locked his subjects in their homes, banned demonstrations against this policy, and unleashed heavy-handed police against protesters and dissenters.
At this rate, Melbourne will soon be twinned with Minsk, capital of Belarus. The treatment of protesters on the streets of both cities is remarkably similar. I was most struck by what happened to a young woman demonstrator at the hands of Melbourne police, after they had grabbed and restrained her, so that she was powerless.
An officer actually put a covering over her mouth. It was not the only such incident that day and it explains, to those who object, why I call these things muzzles.
They are there to humiliate, to cancel individuality and to indicate assent – forced or otherwise – to the crazy policy of trying to treat a virus with naked state power.
If US police forced handcuffed Left-wing protesters to wear Trumpoid ‘Make America Great Again’ baseball caps it would be about the same.
Humiliation: Police officers in Melbourne, Australia, restrain a protester and force her to wear a face mask
Now hiking’s a crime, but dope is fine
One of my rules is that the more political the police become, the more useless they are against actual crime. Here is a good example. Police who have over the past few months pursued sunbathers, hikers, people going into their own front gardens or showing their naked faces on trains, now plan a new extra-soft line on marijuana.
Even though this terrible drug is increasingly linked with lifelong mental illness and violence, liberal police chiefs are still lost in a Sixties-style haze of dope, believing dubious claims that it is a medicine.
Legalisers have long privately admitted these claims are a red herring to give pot a good name. How can something which makes many of its users mentally ill be a medicine?
But lo, police chiefs are backing a new ‘cannabis card’ that will provide de-facto decriminalisation of the drug for millions of people with health conditions. Officers, who have already almost given up arresting people for possession, say it will give them a new excuse for failing to enforce the law.
Too busy on granny patrol, making sure children can’t see their grandmothers, I expect.
Schoolboy Johnson’s lies keep getting bigger
Imagine a naughty schoolboy afraid to admit what started as a minor misdeed. Such a schoolboy, having broken the headmaster’s window with his catapult, and trying to evade punishment, might invent a story about a gang of yobs bursting into the school grounds.
So the police are called and he deepens the falsehood. The longer it goes on, the more embarrassing it will be to confess. Innocent people are rounded up, arrested and charged on the basis of his claims.
He gives false evidence against them. They lose their freedom, perhaps have their lives ruined.
Rather than admit he hugely overestimated the danger of Covid, he continues to insist it is a deadly plague and that it will be back soon in a terrible second wave
The lie is now even worse. He must either confess or elaborate the false story of the gang, for ever. And the worse it gets, the harder it is to own up. So he lies and keeps lying.
So it is with our Prime Minister. He panicked in March, on the basis of poor advice. He did immense damage and knows it.
But rather than admit he hugely overestimated the danger of Covid, he continues to insist it is a deadly plague and that it will be back soon in a terrible second wave.
The official Covid death and hospitalisation figures, declining ever since April 8, are now bumping along the bottom of the graph, close to zero.
Hence the false epidemic of so-called Covid ‘cases’, which the Government is trying to pretend exists. How simple-minded do you need to be not to see the great flaw in this?
On Monday, the media reported new coronavirus cases in the UK had risen to 2,988 on Sunday, the highest daily total since May. Panic! Or perhaps not.
I searched the Government’s own spreadsheets and what did I find? More than 1.1 million tests each week but fewer than 10,000 positive results. Judging by the state of the hospitals and the death rates, I think we may assume most were just fine, as most who catch this disease are.
So, for this, we propose to stop people gathering in groups of more than six? I sense even those who have, up till now, put up with this rubbish are beginning to tire of it.
Good, for until you do and demand truthful explanations of why your children’s education has been ruined, why legions of people will lose their jobs, why daily life is an intensifying misery of jobsworths and bureaucracy, and why hundreds of businesses built up with years of sweat and risk are now dying, you will just get more lies.
- Benghazi: The Forgotten "September 11th" Attack On The US Consulate In Libya
Benghazi: The Forgotten “September 11th” Attack On The US Consulate In Libya
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 23:45Authored by Sam Jacobs via Ammo.com,
If you say “September 11” most people automatically think of the attacks on the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. What they probably don’t even remember happened on September 11, were the attacks on the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
Once the Libyan Revolution began in February 2011, the CIA began placing assets in the region, attempting to make contacts within the region. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, whose name and image would soon become synonymous with the Benghazi attacks, was the first liaison between the United States and the rebels. The task before the American intelligence community at that time was securing arms in the country, most notably shoulder-fired missiles, taken from the Libyan military.
Eastern Libya and Benghazi were the primary focal points of intelligence-gathering in the country. But there was something else at work here: The CIA was using the country as a base to funnel weapons to anti-Assad forces in Syria, as well as their alleged diplomatic mission.
Early Rumblings of Disorder in Benghazi
Trouble started in April 2012. This was when two former security guards of the consulate threw an IED over the fence. No casualties were reported, but another bomb was thrown at a convoy just four days later. Soon after, in May, the office of the International Red Cross in Benghazi was attacked and the local al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility. On August 6, the Red Cross suspended operations in Libya.
This was all part of a troubling escalation of violence in the region. The British Ambassador Dominic Asquith was the victim of an assassination attempt on June 10, 2012. As a result of this and of rocket attacks on convoys, the British withdrew their entire consular staff from Libya in late June of that year.
American military and consular personnel on the scene were increasingly troubled by the situation and communicated their concerns to top brass through official channels. Two security guards in the consulate noticed a Libyan police officer (or at least someone dressed as one) taking pictures of the building, which raised alarms. Indeed, consular officials had been requesting additional security as far back as March.
On June 6, 2012, a large hole was blown in the wall of the consulate gate. It was estimated that 40 men could go through the hole in the wall. In July, the State Department informed officials on the ground that the existing security contract would not be renewed. On August 2, Ambassador Stephens requested additional security detail. The State Department responded by completely removing his security detail three days later. Three days after this, his security detail had left Libya entirely. On August 16, the regional security officer warned then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the security situation in Libya was “dire.”
The Day of the Attack on Benghazi: The Cover-Up Begins
The September 11, 2012 attack was actually two attacks by two separate militias. The first was the attack on the diplomatic mission, the second was a mortar attack on the CIA annex. But the attacks themselves were effectively watched in real time by the White House, thanks to security drones in the region. By 5:10pm ET, President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta were watching real-time footage via a drone deployed to the area.
Half an hour later, the State Department officially refused to deploy the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST). FEST exists specifically for rapid response to terrorist attacks around the world and have special training with regard to defending American embassies. Within three hours, an Islamic group in the region had claimed responsibility for the attack. Approximately six hours after the first shots were fired, two former Navy SEALs who constituted the only serious defense forces for the consulate were killed by enemy fire. The surveillance drone had been watching them fight on their own for over two hours.
At 10:30 that night, Hillary Clinton nebulously blamed “inflammatory material on the Internet” for the attack. The notion that the attack was motivated by Innocence of Muslims was absurd: On the day before the attack, the leader of al-Qaeda in the region called for vengeance due to the death of his secretary. Three days after the attack, Stephens’ personal diary was found unsecured, along with all the other sensitive intelligence information in the compound.
For days, the film was blamed despite the White House having full knowledge that it was a terrorist attack. Indeed, on September 14, Barack Obama promised the father of one of the slain Navy SEALs not that he would bring to justice those who planned the attack, but the man who made the movie.
On September 20, 2012, the White House spent $70,000 on apology videos for the film. One day later, ten days after the attack, Clinton admitted to the public what she had known for over a week: That this was a coordinated terrorist attack. However, on the 25th, President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations once again blaming the video, giving what is perhaps one of the more memorable quotes of his presidency: “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”
On September 27, 2012, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was arrested in Los Angeles for parole violations, all of which were related to his production of the film and served a year in jail. He was later sentenced to death in absentia by the Egyptian government.
Barack Obama did not attend his daily intelligence briefing for six consecutive days prior to the attacks, instead campaigning for re-election against Mitt Romney.
Susan Rice, then acting as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, made the rounds on no fewer than five major Sunday morning talk shows, a process known as “the Full Ginsburg.” On these shows, she was armed with a set of talking points from the CIA. These talking points included the false assertion that these were spontaneous protests inspired by similar protests against the American Embassy in Cairo, with no connection to institutional terrorism.
The Rice appearances and the talking points she was provided with further confirm a general pattern: The Obama Administration was fundamentally incapable of acknowledging who the real enemy was. And when things went wrong, the focus was not on setting them right to protect Americans in the future, but on protecting the image of the Obama Administration – most notably the President and the Secretary of State. Hence the blame was shifted from Islamic terrorist groups onto a YouTube video.
The (Seemingly Endless) Benghazi Investigations
There were no fewer than 10 investigations of the attack on Benghazi, none of which found evidence of wrongdoing, despite several of them having been run by Republicans.
However, the American public did get some valuable information out of these hearings, not least of all that Hillary Clinton doesn’t value the lives of American servicemen. For example, the attention of Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails first came to the State Department and the United States Congress thanks to these investigations. Indeed, approximately 30 of the “gone with the wind” emails from her private, home-brewed server related to the non-response to the attack on Benghazi. This is according to the State Department itself.
But still the question remains: Why let these men die? And why lie about it for days after the fact?
The answer lies in two political concerns: First, the re-election of Barack Obama, second the planned candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
The date of the attack is very important: This was the final weeks of a presidential election campaign. And while Obama won handily (in no small part due to the aloof, patrician image of Bain Capital principal Mitt Romney), he is nothing if not a savvy politician. An attack on the United States Consulate in Libya was not something he wanted in public consciousness during an election season, not least of all if it were the result of a terrorist attack from what had formerly been a stable nation, slowly coming into the fold of what is euphemistically called “the International Community.”
For Clinton, the situation was even more dire. She effectively “owned” the situation in Libya, as the remaking (and ultimately destruction) of North Africa was one of the signature projects of her tenure at State. What’s more, she certainly owned the security situation on the ground, which likely was never secure.
The building was given the designation of “temporary,” largely to get around a number of regulations that apply to permanent State Department buildings. The request for more security from Ambassador Stephens might have been ill advised not because it was impossible to secure the location in any kind of long-term and sustainable way. The right move might very well have been to remove American personnel entirely, but this would have gone against the official narrative that everything was going swimmingly in Libya.
Other countries and organizations (such as the Red Cross) were leaving because they could not protect their people. The Clinton State Department saw this as unthinkable, because it would represent a failure and contradict the narrative.
And while Republican-led committees did not find any wrongdoing, it’s important to note that they also complained of being stonewalled by the administration at every turn. It’s hard to uncover evidence of wrongdoing when there is an institutional campaign to prevent you from getting any evidence at all.
A number of whistleblowers and other sources show that there were additional forces ready to go in the region to defend the consulate. So why were none of them deployed? Why were four American lives lost due to inaction at the highest levels of government?
Why no one was deployed is perhaps down more to incompetence and bad policy than any kind of a conspiracy. Our article on 9/11 is instructive on this matter: sometimes the cover-up is a conspiracy to conceal idiocy and failure of the actual event. In the case of Benghazi, while there is evidence to point toward a politically motivated cover-up, the actual event, like the 9/11 attacks, seems mostly to be a result of bad policy and incompetence rather than malice.
In this case, the bad policy was the Obama Administration’s desire to avoid even the appearance of “boots on the ground” and hand wringing about getting the permission of Libya (and about 12 other countries) to deploy assistance to the consulate. This was part of the general political philosophy of appeasement of Islamic terrorists that marked the Obama Administration.
This explains the stand-down orders which official sources have denied, but which have been confirmed by a number of whistleblowers and leaked documents since the attacks.
Both the President and the Secretary of Defense issued orders to deploy forces, but none were deployed. Once the Ambassador was confirmed as missing, a two-hour meeting ensued where top men within the Obama Administration came up with a number of action items, mostly revolving around the YouTube video (fully five of ten action items were related to the video) and hand wringing regarding a lack of permission from the Libyan government to protect our own forces.
The Americans in the CIA Annex were eventually evacuated to the airport by members of a militia comprised of former Qadaffi regime loyalists, not the opposition militias that were nominally allied with the United States. Meanwhile, actual American forces spent a bunch of time putting on and taking off their uniforms and tactical gear because the instructions from Washington changed by the minute.
It was a total paralysis of action on the ground by the top brass in D.C., because they were afraid of it looking like ground forces were being deployed, both from the perspective of the political response at home and the political response in Libya. As a result, four Americans died and a massive cover-up was rolled out to protect those responsible for grossly negligent inaction.
After the fact, emails were sent out, the purpose of which was less about finding out what went wrong to prevent it from happening again and to assign responsibility, than it was about making sure everyone was on the same page with regard to talking points.
The attack on Benghazi, the deaths of four Americans and the ensuing cover-up are an insightful view into the reality lurking behind many so-called “conspiracy theories.” What began as bureaucratic bungling and ideologically driven hamfistedness became a cover-up and, in a sense, a conspiracy after the fact. None of this is meant to let Obama-Clinton off the hook. Indeed, none of the criticisms of Obama-Clinton become any less sharp when they are considered as incompetence and butt-covering.
- Trump Confesses He Wanted To Assassinate Syria's Assad But Mattis Stopped Him
Trump Confesses He Wanted To Assassinate Syria’s Assad But Mattis Stopped Him
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 23:25In an extremely rare, if not absolutely unprecedented confession from a sitting American president, Trump stunned a news panel on Tuesday morning in saying he wanted to assassinate President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
“I would’ve rather taken [Assad] out. I had it all set. Mattis didn’t want to do it,” Trump said in a wide-ranging interview with Fox & Friends.
“I would have rather taken him out” — Trump says he wanted to assassinate Bashar al-Assad, but Mattis stopped him pic.twitter.com/pUcFTSW2w9
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 15, 2020
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The question has persisted over the past years of war in Syria after Bob Woodward first reported in 2018 that Trump was pursuing it.
At the time Trump had vehemently denied it: “No, that was never even contemplated, nor would it be contemplated and it should not have been written about in the book,” he had previously stated.
But Trump casually described Tuesday that in fact he was seriously considering it, only to be stopped by his Secretary of Defense at the time, Marine general Jim Mattis, which Trump added “was a highly overrated general”.
The Fox hosts quickly followed by asking whether Trump “regretted” not taking out Assad. Trump responded:
“No, I don’t regret that. I could have lived either way with that. I considered [Assad] certainly not a good person. But I had a shot to take him out if I wanted but Mattis was against it.”
The real quote from Woodward’s book regarding #Syria ‘s Assad is that @realDonaldTrump told Mattis:
The military should “f – king kill” Assad
Trump called the above account “fiction” pic.twitter.com/Fkii7e22Yf
— EHSANI2 (@EHSANI22) September 15, 2020
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However, considering the Russian military has been deeply entrenched in Syria since 2015, and as Putin vowed not to allow the West to complete its push for regime change, we wonder how exactly Trump “had a shot to take him out”.
Recall that Trump has bombed Syria on two occasions after allegations Assad used chemical weapons, with the 2018 attack involving over 100 tomahawk cruise missiles on Damascus. During the first instance, in April 2017, his daughter Ivanka reportedly influenced the decision.
NBC reported in April 2017: Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Syria was influenced by his daughter, Ivanka, being “heartbroken and outraged” at the country’s alleged chemical weapons attack, one of the president’s sons told a British newspaper.
Interesting that Trump wanted to assassinate Assad only to be advised against it and then reach out directly to Assad a few years later to discuss Austin Tice only to be rebuffed by the Syrian leader, crazy politics.
— Danny Makki (@Dannymakkisyria) September 15, 2020
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She reportedly showed her father pictures of suffering children while making the plea. Trump’s Syria policy has since then been all over the map – on the one hand he’s consistently voiced a desire to “bring the troops home” while more recently touting that “we’re securing the oil”.
- "Tens Of Thousands" Received China Mystery Seeds In The Mail, And Many Planted Them
“Tens Of Thousands” Received China Mystery Seeds In The Mail, And Many Planted Them
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 23:05Last month we highlighted a mysterious trend that was sweeping the U.S.: citizens were receiving unsolicited packages of seeds, with return addresses from China, for apparently no reason at all.
Official word from various government agencies, including the USDA, was to not plant the seeds and instead alert their local authorities. But plant the seeds is exactly what many people did, according to a new follow up report from Vice. They found that hundreds, if not thousands of people planted the seeds.
Vice filed 52 FOIA requests to obtain the information and pored through “thousands of pages” of e-mails, spreadsheets and documents to try and figure out what, exactly, what going on. They estimate from their finding that “tens of thousands” of Americans received these seeds.
States like North Carolina had more than 1,000 people contact its Department of Agriculture about the problem. About 60 people in the state planted the seeds.
Returned from Vice’s FOIA requests One New Mexico resident left a voicemail to her local state Department of Agriculture that said: “About a month ago, I did receive seeds from China. I guess China because it looks like Chinese writing. I thought, ‘Oh cool, maybe Burgess seeds or one of the seed companies sent me some seeds.’ And, umm, like a dumbass, I planted them, not knowing there was a problem.”
It continues: “And now, I’ve been battling this for a couple weeks. Now, where I planted them, and I remember where I planted them, everything that’s in the garden where I planted them are having a hard time and are starting to die … I really don’t know what to do at this point, so could somebody call me back and give me a little bit of direction about this? I know I’m a dumbass.”
One report from North Carolina said: “Received many shipments. Planted some and clover came up. She indicated that she planted the bulbs. Planted one pack and ate the oregano that grew. Has some left.”
Returned from Vice’s FOIA requests A New Hampshire resident said: “I received this package from China. Unfortunately I through the envelope away. It said they were stud earrings. I had ordered onions from amazon and thought they got them from China. The more I looked at them they don’t even come close to onions I just figured they sent the wrong thing. No I didn’t plant or open the package. What should I do with them.”
A spokesman for the USDA’s Smuggling Interdiction and Trade Compliance said complaints were “starting to explode”.
“Look’s like it’s all across the country,” stated an Indiana resident who also received seeds in the mail unsolicited.
We had followed up on the initial report of these seeds last month, noting that the U.S. had started to identify “14 types of plants” that the seeds belonged to, revealing a “mix of ornamental, fruit and vegetable, herb and weed species,” according to the NY Times. Cabbage, hibiscus, lavender, mint, morning glory, mustard, rose, rosemary and sage have all been identified.
The Vice report confirmed that some of the seeds were found to be “noxious weeds” that exist in huge numbers in the U.S., such as oxeye daisy, and hedge bindweed.
Osama El-Lissy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said: “This is just a subset of the samples we’ve collected so far.”
Art Gover, a plant science researcher at Penn State University had previously the “risk is low” of the plants being involved in biological warfare, but that the seeds “can be troublesome because they can introduce problematic weeds and diseases”.
Lisa Delissio, a professor of biology at Salem State University in Massachusetts, said: “If any of the unidentified seeds turned out to be invasive species, they could displace native plants and compete for resources and cause harm to the environment, agriculture or human health.”
Bernd Blossey, a professor in the department of natural resources at Cornell University commented: “Obviously planting rosemary or thyme in your garden isn’t something that will endanger our environment. But there may be other things in there that have not been identified yet. Any time you gain something unknown, my suggestion is burning them, not even throwing them in the trash.”
In our initial report on the seeds, we suggested the mailings could be some sort of agricultural warfare brewing between the U.S. and China – where agriculture remains a key point of trade tensions – and where a cold war of sorts appears to be bubbling up under the surface.
After multiple reports in the U.S. media regarding the seeds, China’s Foreign Ministry responded last month by saying that China Post (the country’s state owned mail service) “has strictly followed regulations that ban the sending and receiving of seeds,” according to Bloomberg.
Further, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin says that the parcels were “forged” and “not from China”. China has supposedly requested that the U.S. mail the seeds back to China so they could investigate further.
We noted last month that the response is anything but re-assuring. We’re not postmaster generals but we find the idea of being able to forge mailing labels – and get products to their final destination – in this day and age where even the decrepit U.S. postal service is mostly digital, as a difficult one.
Amazon has also since said it is banning the sale of seeds on its platform.
Anyone who has received seeds in the mail can report them to the United States Department of Agriculture by visiting their website here. The site says:
If individuals are aware of the potential smuggling of prohibited exotic fruits, vegetables, or meat products into or through the USA, they can help APHIS by contacting the confidential Antismuggling Hotline number at 800-877-3835 or by sending an Email to SITC.Mail@aphis.usda.gov.
USDA will make every attempt to protect the confidentiality of any information sources during an investigation within the extent of the law.
- Trump Vs The Military-Industrial-Complex: Coup Concerns Escalate
Trump Vs The Military-Industrial-Complex: Coup Concerns Escalate
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 22:45Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Saker blog,
At last week’s Labor Day conference, President Trump threw down the gauntlet in opposition to the Anglo American military industrial complex when both inspired hope in many onlookers that the age of America’s “endless wars” might finally come to an end, but also fear that an emergence Military Coup danger was nigh. This danger was enunciated by State Senator Richard Black (a former Colonel and intelligence officer) during a September 5 conference.
In his powerful speech which won the ire of top Pentagon brass, Trump called for finally bringing America’s troops home, and ending the “endless wars” saying:
“I’m not saying the military is in love with me; the soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t, because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs, and make the planes, and make everything else, stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars…. Let’s bring our soldiers back home.”
For those devout Trump haters who are unwilling to accept the possibility that there has been an active coup run against the President for the past 3.5 years, or that the oncoming economic meltdown (unleashed under the cover of COVID-19) and general civil war danger within the USA might usher in a coup d’etat… think again.
The fact is that America has come closer than many think to total military dictatorship under Wall Street/London controls on more than one occasion, and unless the lessons of history are quickly internalized, then not only will this happen again, but it will accompany a new world war from which very few lives rich or poor would be spared.
The Fascist Economic Miracle Solution of 1932
1932-1934 was a period of history that saw the world torn down into a deep depression which the people of Europe and America were told by their media, could only be solved by the “economic miracle solution” of a new system of governance known as “fascism”.
This “fascist economic solution” took hold in Europe with the quick rise of Nazism, Franco and Mussolini’s Corporatism as well what later became Vichy France. In English Canada, the League for Social Reconstruction was ready to take power in 1932 and French-speaking Canada was quickly embracing the Nazi-inspired political party of Adrien Arcand. The British governing class, led by the royal family were fully backing Nazism, and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was rising faster than ever. All of these movements came in different flavors but were united under a cold utilitarian philosophy of government, a devout love for eugenics (the racist “science” of population control) and addiction to City of London/Wall Street money.
In the United States however, things weren’t going as smoothly.
The Rise of Franklin Roosevelt
Even though the financial elite of Wall Street had pulled the plug on the system four years earlier, the population had still not been broken sufficiently to accept fascism as the solution which Time magazine told them it was. Instead, the people voted for one of the few anti-fascist presidential candidates available in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected under the theme of taking the money lenders out of power and restoring the constitution.
In his March 4, 1933 inaugural address FDR stated:
“Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”
During FDR’s famous 100 Days, an all-out war was declared on the “economic royalists” that had taken over the nation. Audits and investigations were conducted on the banks in the form of the Pecora Commission, and the biggest financial houses which had spent billions on fascist parties of Europe were broken up while speculation was reined in under Glass-Steagall. Meanwhile a new form of banking was unveiled more in alignment with America’s constitutional traditions in the form of productive credit and long term public works which created real jobs and increased the national productive powers of labor.
Many people remain totally ignorant that even before his March 4, 1933 inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in Florida which saw 5 people struck by bullets and the mayor of Chicago dying of his wounds 3 weeks later. Within days of the mayor’s death, the assassin Giuseppe Zingara was speedily labelled a “lone gunman” and executed without any serious investigation into his freemasonic connections. This however was just a pre-cursor for an even greater battle which Wall Street financiers would launch in order to overthrow the presidency later that year. This effort would only be stopped by the courageous intervention of a patriotic marine named Smedley Darlington Butler.
Who was General Butler?
Born in 1881 to a family of patriotic Quakers, Smedley Butler quickly rose through the ranks of the military becoming the most decorated military figure of U.S. History- a record he holds to this day with multiple medals of honor, an Army distinguished service medal and Marine Corps Bruvet medal (to name just a few).
By the end of the British-orchestrated meat grinder known as WWI, the General had become an activist patriot giving speeches across America in denunciation of the private financiers steering America’s war-driven economy. Speaking to veterans in August 1933, the general said:
“I have spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street… In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested… I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents…”
In spite of his outspoken criticism of crony capitalism, Wall Street’s elite simply presumed all men had their price, and Butler was probably just indignant because he was never given a big enough piece of pie.
The Wall Street Putsch is Launched
These financiers needed someone like Butler to channel the rage of the striking veterans of WWI across America who had been fighting for the bonus pay promised them years earlier but which didn’t exist due to the 1929 collapse. A force of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled seasoned soldiers was exactly what was needed to overthrow Roosevelt, but leadership was sorely lacking, and General Butler was their man for the job. He was a war hero who was seen as honest and loved by the veterans. He was perfect.
Under the guiding hand of JP Morgan’s Grayson Prevost Murphy, two representatives of the American Legion (Commander Bill Doyle and bond salesman Gerald MacGuire) approached Butler in July 1933 for the job of rallying the Legion’s veterans and began dropping hints of a larger coup plot. Butler became suspicious, but continued playing along with the plan to see how far this went up the ladder of power.
Over the course of the next several months, Butler discovered that America’s financial elite centered around John Pierpont Morgan Jr., the Harrimans, the Melons, Warburgs, Rockefellers and Duponts were at the heart of the plot. These men used their agents such as Gerald MacGuire a Morgan-affiliated bond salesman, Democratic Party controllers John W. Davis and Thomas Lamont (both occupying directorships in the House of Morgan), Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune), Grayson Prevost Murphy and Harriman Family investment banker Prescott Bush. All of these characters had become well known “investors” in European fascism, owned the biggest media platforms including Fortune and Time Magazine (both of which promoted Mussolini extensively for years), and controlled the levers of industry.
Luckily, the 1932-1934 Pecora Commission exposed these forces publicly as the architects of the great depression, making their ability to acquire popular support and sympathy more than a little difficult.
Outlining his Committee’s findings Pecora had written publicly:
“Undoubtedly, this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the U.S.A.”
Butler Blows the Whistle
When the time was right, Butler blew the whistle by approaching the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the McCormack-Dickstein Committee) which began an investigation on November 20, 1934. Unlike the Committee on Un-American Activities which made its reputation destroying patriotic lives under the communist witch hunt of McCarthyism, this earlier version was aligned to FDR and dedicated solely to identifying Nazi activity in America.
At first sceptical of the general’s claims, the committee soon substantiated everything over the course of a month long investigation and made their findings public to FDR and congress on December 29, 1934. An invaluable part of the hearings were the testimonies of journalist Paul Comly French whom Butler recruited to act as the general’s intermediary with the bankers.
Butler told the committee that MacGuire stated it “wouldn’t take any constitutional change to authorize another cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office—to take them off the President’s shoulders” and that “we’d do with him what Mussolini did to the King of Italy”.
When French asked MacGuire how the coup would help solve unemployment, MacGuire responded: “We need a fascist government to save the nation from the Communists… It was the plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks—enforced labor. That would solve it overnight.”
Although the full transcripts were not made public, Butler did get the message to the population by giving his story to as many journalists as possible and recorded a message to the people in 1935 which should be listened to in full.
The Aftermath of the Exposure
This exposure, alongside the Pecora Commission findings, and earlier failed assassination attempt gave FDR the ammunition he needed to force America’s deep state into submission (at least for a while). As I outlined in my recent paper, FDR’s fight to stop a central bankers’ dictatorship started from the earliest days of his presidency to his dying breath on April 14, 1945.
Incredibly, after the sanitized and redacted 1934 report was published, the committee was disbanded (to be reformed later under a fascist mandate), and the thousands of pages of transcripts were buried for years- only officially made public in the 21st century- the contents of which can be found here with censored testimony in red.
The coup plotters lost no time forming a new organization on August 22, 1934 called the American Liberty League which spent the next decade sabotaging FDR’s New Deal. This group made every effort to promote an American alliance with Axis powers (until 1941’s Pearl Harbor attack), widely financed eugenics, and after FDR died, acted as the driving force behind the McCarthyite police state in America during the Cold War. This deep state coup in America overthrew the FDR/Wallace vision for a post-war anti colonial world order founded upon a US-Russia-China strategic alliance which I illustrated in a recent seminar:
This Anglo-American fascist organization also gave birth to such think tanks as the American Enterprise Association, Heritage Foundation and CATO institute which incrementally made Austrian school economics a part of the American right. Anyone wishing to understand what created the Frankenstein Monster called “neo-conservativism” during the last 60 years would not get very far without understanding the role of the American Liberty League and its hell spawn.
In the early years of the Cold War, certain elder statesmen of WWII still held power and rallied to educate an incoming young President Kennedy who was about to show a short but valiant resistance to this cancerous imperial growth within America.
The Deep State Plot Against JFK
The danger of World War and a military coup arose again during the short lived administration of John F. Kennedy who found himself locked in a life or death struggle not with Russia, but with the Military Industrial Complex that had become dominated by the many Dr. Strangeloves of the Joint Chief of Staff and CIA who fanatically believed that America could win a nuclear war with Russia. Kennedy’s valiant efforts to achieve dialogue with his Soviet counterparts, move towards peace in Vietnam, support of colonial liberation, promotion of space exploration and advocacy of a Nuclear Test Ban treaty made him a target of the Deep State of his time. During this period, this effort was led from the top by JFK’s two most powerful American opponents: Allan Dulles (director of the CIA) and General Lyman Lemnitzer (head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), both of whom were proponents of pre-emptive nuclear war, architects of the Bay of Pigs regime change trap and advocates of Operation Northwoods (an ultimate “inside job” precursor to 9/11 which JFK subverted).
As historian Anton Chaitkin recently reported: “Lemnitzer had displayed what his faction viewed as his qualifications for this role back in August 1960, when, as Army chief of staff, he announced that the Army was all ready to “restore order” in the United States after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union—to bring back normalcy just as the military does after a flood or a riot”
This plot was detailed in a quasi-fictional book written by investigative journalists Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey published in 1962 entitled Seven Days in May and swiftly made into a famous film with unprecedented support by JFK himself who gave the film crew and director John Frankenheimer full access to the White House, advisors and materials for the film which he believed every American should see.
In the story, a patriotic lieutenant discovers the plans for the coup which is scheduled to take place during a vast military drill whereby a President who is close to finalizing a de-armament treaty with Russia will be incapacitated in a bunker while a military regime takes over America.
Tragically, where the lieutenant is able to expose the plot and save the nation in the story, by the time of the film’s 1964 release, JFK had been deposed by other means. Now 56 years later, history has begun to repeat itself with distinctly 21st century characteristics… and a viral twist.
Today, a new systemic meltdown of a $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has similarities to the 1929 crash and other similarities to the 1923 hyperinflation of Weimar. While the coronavirus may or may not be used to trigger this new blowout, one thing is certain: a new fascist coup should be taken more seriously than ever. President Trump’s repeated calls to revive the policies of Abraham Lincoln, end regime change operations and endless wars abroad and work with other sovereign nation states in opposition to world government ideologues is more important than most people realize.
So rather than stressing about who might be on the 2020 ballot, it is wiser to ask the question: Where are the General Butlers today?
- Mask-Enforcing Humanoid Robots Set To Invade Office Spaces
Mask-Enforcing Humanoid Robots Set To Invade Office Spaces
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 22:25As some Wall Street banks have summoned traders and other employees back to offices, their ability to enforce social distancing measures will be challenging unless human-like mask-detecting robots are deployed.
Pepper, designed by SoftBank Robotics, is the world’s first social humanoid robot able to recognize faces and basic human emotions. The robot stands 120 cm (47 inches) uses optical sensors and artificial intelligence to recognize if people are wearing masks.
Pepper features voice interaction to warn people if they’re not wearing a mask, telling them: “You always have to wear a mask properly.”
The robot then identifies someone responding to the request to put on their mask – it then says: “Thank you for having put on your mask.”
The idea of having a humanoid robot patrolling office buildings, or maybe trading floors, or research departments, searching for mask violates makes a whole lot more sense compared to employing humans, which are more costly to do the same job. Plus, why have a low-level employee, looking over traders shoulders as sensitive data could be on trading terminals.
Pepper can even alert management of repeated non-mask offenders. Here’s the robot in action:
With JPMorgan and other Wall Street banks requesting employees to return back to the office, where some of these folks spent the summer partying in the Hamptons without masks, it’s going to be difficult to enforce mask-wearing, unless policing robots are deployed.
- Tunneling Under The Media's Berlin Wall Of Truth Suppression
Tunneling Under The Media’s Berlin Wall Of Truth Suppression
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 22:05Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,
You would think that with the miracle of modern technology and the insistence on transparency in government affairs, it would be possible for both the American people and the American president to share the same baseline on certain important facts.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t take account of the role of the mainstream media as the self-appointed protectors of the people. The press can promote any agenda they choose and destroy any person who gets out of line. Needless to say, Donald Trump gets “out of line” every day — he marches to the beat of his own drummer, as Thoreau said, and the press can’t stand it. So they engage in a near constant attack to destroy him and his presidency.
Jeffrey Goldberg’s reliance on unverified anonymous sources for his Atlantic hit piece accusing the president of being disdainful of slain American soldiers by calling them “losers” and “suckers” is a typical tactic. The media exploit and exacerbate public misperceptions of Trump that they themselves planted in the first place. Did Trump call John McCain a loser? Undoubtedly. Has he ridiculed the generals who have gotten us into forever wars that have cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers? Yes, frequently. But is there any evidence he said the things Goldberg alleges? Yeah, the testimony of five sources so brave they won’t go on the record with their complaints — claims that have been refuted by 19 real people with real names who were actually with the president in France when the alleged incidents occurred.
Of course, the media don’t stop with the initial hit job. Without missing a beat, they use the refuted stories by Goldberg and others to create the illusion that there is a united front of opposition to Trump. Showing interviews with random soldiers or veterans saying they are not “losers” promotes a “party line” version of the truth that is intended to shame the administration, and especially weak-kneed Republican senators, into bowing to the far-left agenda. But it is not news, and it is not fair.
The New York Times, NBC, and the rest of the major media have taken it upon themselves to adopt the role of the guardians of orthodoxy. Their goal is to create the illusion that mainstream America hates Trump just as much as the media does. That requires amplifying any story that attacks Trump and ignoring those that benefit him. This has been going on for five years now. You’ve seen the numbers. More than 90% of all news coverage about Donald Trump is negative. Satan gets more respect.
As a journalist, I have no problem condemning the repressive and manipulative tactics of the Washington press corps, but the good news is there are ways around their attempts to suppress the truth. First of all, there is social media. That’s why Trump loves Twitter. He can tell his own story, and he does, but of course the media vultures circling his Twitter feed every day eagerly pounce on any typo, misspelling, or politically incorrect pronouncement. Typically, more people will hear the media’s denunciation of the president’s tweets than will read the originals and decide for themselves. Again, it’s evidence of how news reporters see themselves as the wall between the people and the president.
The only other broad avenue for the people to get unbiased information is from a few news shows that don’t toe the liberal line — most notably “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News. Since the riots began at the end of May, Carlson has taken it upon himself to expose the corruption of not just the media but the liberal elected establishment that has implicitly endorsed violence, racism, and disorder in the name of what is perversely called social justice. I’ve called Carlson a modern-day Cassandra because his clear-eyed assessment of the danger America faces has been met with scorn, denial and derision. But name-calling, advertising boycotts, and continued threats of violence against him and his family have not deterred Carlson from his declared mission to be “the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.”
In that regard, Carlson has long used his show to ferret out information hidden in the bowels of government and get it to the people — bypassing the media guards who increasingly see it as their sworn role to restrict the free exchange of ideas. On Carlson’s Sept. 1 show, author Chris Rufo discussed his research into how critical race theory has infiltrated the federal government. I was shocked by just how bad the situation is, something we would never learn from CNN or MSNBC.
“It’s absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government,” Rufo told Carlson.
“What I have discovered is that critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.”
He gave three examples of what he called “cult indoctrination.” For instance, he told of a trainer who “told Treasury [Department] employees essentially that America was a fundamentally white supremacist country and … ‘virtually all white people uphold the system of racism and white superiority.’”
When Rufo explicitly urged Trump “to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical-race-theory training from the federal government,” I thought to myself how that was a smart move. It just might work. It’s no secret that Trump watches Fox News. So why not make a direct appeal to the president while you are on one of those shows? It’s the only way most guests would ever have a chance to get the president’s attention. And in this case it worked.
Just three quick days later, Trump did exactly what Rufo proposed — he issued an executive order through the director of the Office of Management and Budget to “cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund [the] divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions” where federal employees are told that “virtually all White people contribute to racism.”
When Trump reacted to Rufo’s revelations the same way that I and millions of people watching Tucker Carlson’s show reacted – with outrage – I realized just how dangerous Carlson is to the hegemony of the far left. His show is metaphorically the tunnel under the Berlin Wall that allows direct communication between the pro-liberty, pro-American middle class and the freedom fighters in the White House, bypassing both the bureaucracy and the stunningly dishonest media that control the flow of information in and out of the Trump administration.
In order to keep our metaphor geographically, if not politically, correct, we should think of the mainstream media as the Stasi, the East German secret police who were notoriously brutal — and effective — in suppressing free thought and dissent from the party line. They were not just the “enemy of the people,” as Trump has labeled the worst of the modern media; they were the “enemy of the truth.”
That role has never been clearer than it was last week when Bob Woodward, the legacy commander of the media’s Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, issued his report on what he found when he infiltrated the White House. Or at least what he purported to find.
According to Woodward, Trump perfidiously misled the American public about the scope and danger of the China virus because he called the virus “deadly stuff” in February before any Americans had died. Also because Trump knew “it goes through the air.” I mean you have to be notoriously stupid, or just plain incurious, not to have figured out by February that COVID-19 was a deadly peril. Does Woodward think that Trump shut down air travel from China at the end of January just because he wanted to hurt the tourist industry?
Of course the new virus was deadly, but as Trump patiently explained to the thick-headed Woodward then, and still has to explain to the rest of the White House press corps virtually every day, there is no purpose served by terrifying the public. The president told Woodward that the virus was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” That turned out to be true, but flus are also kept under control by widespread vaccination and therapeutics. Does Woodward need to be reminded that the much more deadly pandemic of 1918 was caused by the Spanish flu?
Of course he does, because it’s not helpful to the media’s narrative that Donald Trump is a dangerous buffoon who must not be reelected. How could the country survive another four years with a president who insists on doing things his own way, who won’t be cowed by the Stasi media, who considers it his duty to improve on conventional wisdom instead of surrendering to it.
Which brings us back to Chris Rufo and his pipeline — or should I say tunnel access — to the president. The obstinacy of Tucker Carlson, his unwillingness to take a knee to orthodoxy, has made him the most dangerous person in America (after Trump) to the far-left overlords. And when Trump acted on Rufo’s entreaty regarding critical race theory, it led to near hysteria as the Stasi media realized that its Berlin Wall had been breached.
As Carlson himself reported on Tuesday, Sept. 8, “To the news media, all of this was a disaster. They claim to be journalists, but they despise actual reporting like Chris Rufo’s. His coverage showed that they are complicit in an anti-American lie that is deeply unpopular with actual Americans, and they didn’t take it well.”
Among the many critics of Carlson for providing the president with accurate information about what is being done in his name in the federal bureaucracy, perhaps the loudest was CNN’s Brian Stelter, the virtual communications director for the Stasi media.
“The ‘Tucker’ show gets results,” Stelter ranted. “No more talk about white privilege. No more examination of systemic racism. The Trump administration doesn’t want it inside federal agencies — even though 2020 is being defined in part by this long overdue reckoning about race. Trump doesn’t want it to happen.”
No he doesn’t, and neither do the American people.
“Systemic racism” is a meaningless phrase that blames everyone for the despicable actions of a few. “White privilege” is a rhetorical cudgel to justify redistribution of wealth and violence against white people. “The long overdue reckoning about race” has been ongoing since before the country itself started, and it will never end, nor should it. Facts are facts. Slavery was evil. Jim Crow was evil. Racism is evil. But teaching white people to hate themselves does not resolve that evil; it just compounds it.
Blaming Tucker Carlson because President Trump found out about an inherently unacceptable and unjust practice within the federal government is in a sense the media’s confession that its main purpose today is to build a wall between the truth and the people. Just as most mainstream reporters will never ask Joe Biden about anything that doesn’t conform to their own hatred of Trump, they will never tolerate anything anywhere that exposes their own bias and anti-American agenda.
So sad.
- GW University Reports 17% Enrollment Drop As Students Opt Out Of COVID-Restricted Campus Life
GW University Reports 17% Enrollment Drop As Students Opt Out Of COVID-Restricted Campus Life
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 21:45Still within the first month of most of the nation’s universities and colleges reopening their campuses, albeit with severe restrictions and social distancing measures, administrative leaders are awaiting with bated breath just how bad the pandemic impact will be in terms of a financial hit and decline in student enrollment.
A number of campuses told students to go home a mere couple weeks after reopening, transitioning to all online classes after an immediate observed rise in COVID-19 cases. Others are struggling on, with entire ‘quarantine dorms’ that resemble prisons for those that get sick, uncertain about what the rest of the fall semester holds.
But the numbers are starting to trickle in. Bloomberg reports that one prominent campus in the nation’s capital, George Washington University, has witnessed its enrollment tumble, already down 17% from last year.
File image via George Washington University Bloomberg underscores that it’s “an early indication of the impact of Covid-19 on U.S. higher education” given that families are struggling with the combination of paying pricey tuition and fees for a college experience severely regulated by masks, coronavirus tests, plexiglass barriers, and harsh rules that prevent spending time with groups of friends.
“President Thomas LeBlanc told a faculty senate meeting that preliminary undergraduate enrollment is about 1,000 students below its target of 10,126, a spokeswoman said Monday,” Bloomberg writes of George Washington University.
Broadly, most other institutions of high learning are expected to report similar declining numbers as well as tuition revenue.
A recent poll in National Association of College and University Business Officers finds 67% of colleges expect enrollment to noticeably decrease, but are awaiting final tallies next month.
Via High Point University A separate report underscored that tuition accounts for 70% or more of revenue at the vast majority of small US colleges, which means many are in a struggle for their very survival.
Schools hosting large international programs are also expected to suffer, given also travel restrictions related to both their home countries and especially the latest US student visa measures aimed at China.
- "I Am The Target": Silenced Chinese Virologist Tells Tucker COVID-19 Intentionally Released, CCP Trying To 'Disappear' Her
“I Am The Target”: Silenced Chinese Virologist Tells Tucker COVID-19 Intentionally Released, CCP Trying To ‘Disappear’ Her
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 21:25Hours after her unceremonious Twitter ban for, we assume, presenting evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a Wuhan lab, Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” where she told the Fox News host that the virus is a “Frankenstein” which was designed to target humans which was intentionally released.
“It could never come from nature,” she Yan – an MD/PhD who worked with coronavirus at the University of Hong Kong
“There is evidence left in the genome” – which Yan detailed in a 26-page scientific paper co-written with three other Chinese scientists. “They don’t want people to know this truth. Also, that’s why I get suspended [from Twitter], I get suppression. I am the target that the Chinese Communist Party wants disappeared.”
When Carlson asked her why she believes the virus made it’s way out of the Wuhan lab, Dr. Yan said “I worked in the WHO reference lab, which is the top coronavirus lab in the world at the university of Hong Kong. And the things I got deeply into such investigation in secret from the early beginning of this outbreak – I had my intelligence through my network in China, involved in the hospitals, institutes and also government.“
“Together with my experience, I can tell you – this is created in a lab.“
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Dr. Yan fled Hong Kong on April 28 on a Cathay Pacific flight to the United States. She believes her life is in danger, and that she can never go back home.
“The reason I came to the U.S. is because I deliver the message of the truth of COVID,” Yan told Fox News in July.
As we reported at the time:
Yan said that discussion between colleagues in China about the disease took a sharp turn after “doctors and researchers who had been openly discussing the virus suddenly clammed up.” Contacts in Wuhan went completely dark and others warned not to ask them about the virus – telling Yan “We can’t talk about it, but we need to wear masks.”
“There are many, many patients who don’t get treatment on time and diagnosis on time,” said Yan, adding “Hospital doctors are scared, but they cannot talk. CDC staff are scared.“
She said she reported her findings to her supervisor again on Jan. 16 but that’s when he allegedly told her “to keep silent, and be careful.”
“As he warned me before, ‘Don’t touch the red line,'” Yan said referring to the government. “We will get in trouble and we’ll be disappeared.”
She also claims the co-director of a WHO-affiliated lab, Professor Malik Peiris, knew but didn’t do anything about it.
Peiris also did not respond to requests for comment. The WHO website lists Peiris as an “adviser” on the WHO International Health Regulations Emergency Committee for Pneumonia due to the Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV.
Yan was frustrated, but not surprised –Fox News
“I already know that would happen because I know the corruption among this kind of international organization like the WHO to China government, and to China Communist Party,” said Yan. “So basically… I accept it but I don’t want this misleading information to spread to the world.”
WHO denies that Professor Malik Peiris directly works for the organization, telling Fox in a statement “Professor Malik Peiris is an infectious disease expert who has been on WHO missions and expert groups – as are many people eminent in their fields,” adding “That does not make him a WHO staff member, nor does he represent WHO.”
Read the rest of the report here.
- America's Largest Landlord To Make $550 Million Bet On Trailer Parks
America’s Largest Landlord To Make $550 Million Bet On Trailer Parks
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 21:05A decade ago, Blackstone Group Inc. became America’s largest landlord, purchasing tens of thousands of single-family homes during the foreclosure crisis. Now the private equity firm has spotted the next big opportunity as the virus-induced recession crushes the working poor, that is, betting on mobile-home parks.
Blackstone Said to Boost Mobile-Home Bet With $550 Million Deal: BBG
Having become the biggest landlord in the world, Blackstone is now moving downmarket.
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 14, 2020
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The alternative asset manager has made a drastic shift in investment focus in the last 12 months. This time last year, Blackstone was bidding on a portfolio of luxury hotels – now they’re in talks to purchase up to 40 mobile-home parks from Summit Communities for $550 million, according to Bloomberg, who spoke with several people with direct knowledge.
Sources said Blackstone could make the purchase through a vehicle known as Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT). If the private equity firm purchases the portfolio, many of the properties will undergo upgrades.
“Though our investments in this asset class are very limited, we are proud to partner with a best in class operator and plan to invest significant capital into these communities – which are largely occupied by seasonal residents and retirees – to create high-quality housing in places where people want to live,” Blackstone said in a statement.
One source said the deal has yet to be finalized and could still fall through. Interest among Blackstone to acquire mobile-home parks comes as it acquired seven parks, worth $200 million, in Florida and Arizona, earlier this year.
Real estate company JLL said mobile-home parks have been the hottest space within commercial real estate this year. Many firms, like Blackstone, are avoiding malls, hotels, and other retail properties.
2018 marked the year when Blackstone dove headfirst with a bet on mobile-home parks, purchasing 14 communities sold by Tricon Capital Group Inc. The private equity firm owns a little less than 1% of the manufactured housing market.
Blackstone is set to capitalize on the trend of working-poor Americans downsizing into doublewide trailers.
Next stop, securitize tiny homes?
- Saudi Air Force Leveling Yemeni Capital In Response To Houthi Strikes On Riyadh
Saudi Air Force Leveling Yemeni Capital In Response To Houthi Strikes On Riyadh
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 20:45Submitted by SouthFront,
The Saudi-led coalition has been bombing Yemen with a renewed energy following the recent missile and drone strikes on the Kingdom’s capital by the Ansar Allah movement (also known as the Houthis).
According to pro-Houthi sources, Saudi warplanes conducted over 60 airstrikes on different targets across the country during the past few days. They insist that the most of the targets that were hit were objects of civilian infrastructure. At the same time, Riyadh claims that it has been precisely bombing Houthi military positions.
For example, on September 12, the Saudi-led coalition announced that it had carried out a series of airstrikes on the Military Engineering Complex in the Sa’wan Suburb, east of the Yemen capital of Sanaa. According to pro-Saudi sources, the Yemeni Armed Forces loyal to the Houthi government, which controls Sanaa, were “manufacturing and assembling” ballistic missiles and combat drones. The pro-Houthis al-Masirah TV confirmed that Saudi-led coalition warplanes had targeted the Military Engineering Complex with six airstrikes.
On the next day, the new wave of Saudi airstrikes hit the countryside of Sanaa. They allegedly targeted Four drones at Al Dailami Air Base, a military research facility in the Weapons Maintenance Camp, a number of barracks and military posts in the districts of Bani Harith and Arhab, and a headquarters in the al-Sawad Camp.
On September 14, additionally to the Yemeni capital, the Saudi Air Force also conducted raids against Houthi forces in the province of Marib, where the defense of pro-Saudi groups has been collapsing. Clashes between Saudi-led forces and the Houthis have been ongoing across the districts of al-Jubah and Rahbah. However, the main target of the Houthi advance is still the Maas base. Yemeni sources claim that as soon as the base falls, Houthi units will launch an advance on the provincial capital. The Saudi-led coalition captured it in April of 2015 and since then it has successfully kept it under its own control.
Nonetheless, in late 2019 and early 2020, the course of the conflict with no doubt turned to favor the Houthis and Saudi Arabia found itself in conflict even with the main formal ally in the intervention coalition, the UAE. So, the Houthi government now has a good chance to take back the city and the entire province.
This development will become a panful blow to the Saudi leadership and became yet another piece of smoking gun evidence showcasing the failure of its military campaign in Yemen. In response, the Saudi Air Force will likely continue its intense bombing campaign aiming to level Sanaa and other big cities in the hands of the Houthis. The problem with this approach is that this very campaign forces the Houthis to conduct more intense and regular missile and drone attacks on targets inside Saudi Arabia itself.
- California Cities Using Their Streets As Collateral To Pay Down Pension Liabilities With Debt
California Cities Using Their Streets As Collateral To Pay Down Pension Liabilities With Debt
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 20:25What happens when your state or city has massive unfunded pension liabilities, no direct access to the Fed’s money printer and can’t tax your state any further because you’re driving people out in droves?
You take on more debt, using whatever you can think of as collateral.
Such was the case in West Covina this July, where the city is paying off its $205 million debt to CalPERS by issuing bonds using its city streets as collateral, according to Forbes. The city of Torrance has done the same thing; it will issue $350 million in bonds using its streets as collateral, as well.
Both cities are using something called “lease revenue bonds” which means that:
Torrance and West Covina are each using these bonds to, in principle, lease their city streets to a special Financing Authority, which will pay the city their up-front money, and “rent” the streets back to the city for the 25 year term of the agreement, in order to pay off the bonds.
In this structure, however, the bondholders don’t actually have rights to lay claim to the streets. Rather the mechanism is described as a loophole to get around the voter approval that comes with “general obligation bonds”.
The purpose of the bonds is that they can be implemented quickly while still functioning as pension obligation bonds, the report notes. The trade-off is that lease revenue bonds are not rated as highly as a traditionally POBs.
“Depending on the legal structure, there may be added flexibility for use of proceeds to CalPERS or more strategic timing of investing in the market… These things aren’t possible under a traditional POB structure,” said Mike Meyer of NHA Advisors.
The cities are in a rush to refinance while rates are low while, at the same time, CalPERS is in a desperate push to boost its returns, most recently taking on $80 billion in leverage to do so, as we noted this summer.
As of now, the state of both cities’ pension liabilities is as follows, according to Forbes:
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The city of West Covina pension plan is 71% funded, but to pay down its underfunding and fund new accruals, must pay 44% of payroll.
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The West Covina public safety plan is 62% funded and requires a contribution of 74% of payroll to fund new accruals and pay down underfunding.
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The Torrance city pension is 79% funded with 24%-of-payroll contributions; the Torrance fire pension, 65% funded, 68%-of-payroll contributions; and the Torrance police pension, 62% funded, 78% of payroll contributions.
Hilltop Securities, who underwrote the West Covina bonds, said: “This is the fastest form which the city would be able to use and issue bonds.”
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- Facebook Plunges On Report FTC Preparing Possible Antitrust Lawsuit By Year End
Facebook Plunges On Report FTC Preparing Possible Antitrust Lawsuit By Year End
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 20:05It’s been a rough day for Facebook: first the world’s biggest social network was dumped by Kim Kardashian who called on her tens of millions of global followers to boycott Mark Zuckerberg’s cash cow, and now the WSJ reports that the FTX is preparing to file a possible antitrust suit against the company, sending its stock plunging after hours, and dragging the Nasdaq lower.
The report reveals that the FTC has spent more than a year investigating concerns that Facebook “has been using its powerful market position to stifle competition” and may file a suit before the end of the year to challenge the company’s monopoly in social media. The inquiry is part of a broader antitrust effort by authorities examining the conduct of a handful of dominant tech companies.
The WSJ reports that the probe, which is in its late stages and which was previously discloses by the company last year, included taking testimony from Mark Zuckerberg, something the commission didn’t do during a prior probe of the company’s privacy practices, and which resulted in a record-breaking $5 billion settlement. In other words, this time around either the monetary penalty will be materially higher, or the FTC may in fact pull a Standard Oil on Facebook, and split up the company.
The key FTC concerns and questions revolves around Facebook’s prior acquisitions, “as well as about issues related to how Facebook manages its platform with regard to app developers.” For its part, Facebook has countered that its acquisitions aren’t anticompetitive and have improved products and experiences for its users, although in light of today’s market moving snub by none other than Kim Kardashian that approach may be in jeopardy. One almost wonders if Kim’s tweet and the WSJ report weren’t coordinated.
Facebook has not yet held discussions with the FTC’s commissioners, which would likely happen at the very final stage of the process. At that point, the decision whether to sue Facebook will be in the hands of republicans, as a majority on the five-member FTC would need to vote in favor of any lawsuit. Currently that commission consists of three Republicans, including Chairman Joseph Simons, and two Democrats.
So far, no final decision has been made on whether to sue Facebook, and the WSJ notes that the commission doesn’t always bring cases even when it is making preparations to do so, such as when it decided against filing an antitrust complaint against Google Inc. in 2013 after a lengthy investigation.
Should the FTC sue Facebook and win, it could seek a range of remedies designed to promote competition against the company, from restrictions on how Facebook operates to breaking off pieces of its business. “The commission can’t unilaterally dictate such changes; it would first have to prove in legal proceedings that the company violated federal antitrust law, and that such changes were necessary.”
The FTC has a pair of options if it sues Facebook: It could bring a case in federal court or it could file a complaint in its in-house legal system, where the case would first go before an administrative law judge. The commission itself would then review that judge’s work and issue a decision, which Facebook then could challenge in a federal appeals court. If the commission wants to seek an interim injunction blocking certain Facebook practices before the end of litigation, it would have to go to federal court.
As part of its antitrust pursuit, the Trump administration will hardly stop with Facebook. The DOJ which shares antitrust authority with the FTC, is also planning to file an antitrust lawsuit soon against Google, the WSJ previously reported.
In any event, since a legal case against either company could likely take years to resolve, the officials who bring a lawsuit will likely not be around to see its conclusion. Furthermore, the Nov. 3 election could impact the future of any case, though both Republicans and Democrats have been critical of tech-company practices even if Facebook has been focusing its recent crackdown exclusively on posts emerging from the Trump campaign.
- Manhattan Rental Market Sees Another Record Plunge For August With 15,000 Empty Apartments
Manhattan Rental Market Sees Another Record Plunge For August With 15,000 Empty Apartments
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 19:45As expected given the new pandemic driven ‘escape from New York’, the big apple’s rental market has witnessed another record plunged for the month of August. The numbers are staggering according to new analysis featured in CNBC, with the number of apartments sitting empty in once hot and sought-after Manhattan nearly tripling compared to the same month last year.
“There were more than 15,000 empty rental apartments in Manhattan in August, up from 5,600 a year ago, according to a report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel,” CNBC writes. “The inventory of empty units is the largest ever recorded since data started being collected 14 years ago,” it emphasized.
Image via SecretNYC/Shutterstock The surge in empty apartments was widespread across the borough. Declines in new leases were seen across the board, from the high to low end segments. The plunge continues from July numbers which registered at 13,000 empty apartments, which was already a record. The average rental price of a two-bedroom apartment sits at about $4,756/month.
In April at the height of pandemic fears, we reported that New York City lease agreements had plunged 38% in March y/y, the second largest drop in 11 years. The trend clearly continued given the flood of workers telecommuting instead of vying for limited rental space downtown.
And the prior shuttering of restaurants, bars, and other once popular night venues, also given the nearly unprecedented levels of day-to-day subway service cuts as ridership plummeted — all of which has removed many of the “benefits” of living in the more expensive city (making the suburbs look increasingly more attractive as the numbers bear out) — is contributing to pandemic slump in the once booming rental market.
Via iStock Here’s more from the report, detailing it looks to get worse entering what is already a typically slower fall season:
Hopes for a rebound in the fall or the end of 2020 look increasingly unlikely. Although rental prices have come down — median rental prices fell 4% in August — the discounts are not steep enough yet to lure new renters back to the city. The average rental price for a two-bedroom in Manhattan is still $4,756 a month.
The fall is generally a slow period in the Manhattan rental market, especially before an election, Miller said.
Landlords are offering ever-larger incentives to try to entice renters, with the largest share of landlords offering concessions in history. On average, landlords were offering 1.9 months of free rent to new renters in August. The weakest segment of the rental market is the lower end, for one bedrooms and studios, partly a result of the pandemic’s greater impact on lower earners.
Last month, report author Miller Samuel warned: “This could be a difficult couple of years for landlords.”
To review here’s how things looked after merely the first two months of the pandemic, which saw NYC emerge as the early US virus epicenter:
Via Statista: New leases and sales have rapidly fallen since March, when COVID-19 restrictions in the city put a halt to one of the largest real estate markets in the world. Open houses and showings have been non-existent, and the mass exodus of wealthy New Yorkers has curbed any recovery for the months of May and June. Brokers were allowed to resume showing apartments on June 22, which has given prospective renters just two weeks to begin sales again.
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With landlord rental streams quickly evaporating, many will have trouble paying their mortgages and could result in a wave of selling over the next couple of years, sending real estate prices citywide into a possible correction.
- Twitter Suspends Account Of Chinese Scientist Who Published Paper Alleging Covid Was Created In Wuhan Lab
Twitter Suspends Account Of Chinese Scientist Who Published Paper Alleging Covid Was Created In Wuhan Lab
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 19:44On Sunday afternoon we asked how long before the twitter account of the “rogue” Chinese virologist, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who yesterday “shocked” the world of establishment scientists and other China sycophants, by publishing a “smoking gun” scientific paper demonstrating that the Covid-19 virus was manmade, is “silenced.”
How long before the @LiMengYAN119 account is silenced
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 13, 2020
We now have the answer: less than two days. A cursory check of Dr Yan’s twitter page reveals that the account has been suspended as of this moment.
The suspension took place shortly after Dr Yan had accumulated roughly 60,000 followers in less than 48 hours. The snapshot below was taken earlier in the day precisely in anticipation of this suspension.
It was not immediately clear what justification Twitter had to suspend the scientist who, to the best of our knowledge, had just 4 tweets as of Tuesday morning none of which violated any stated Twitter policies, with the only relevant tweet being a link to her scientific paper co-written with three other Chinese scientists titled “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route” which laid out why the Wuhan Institute of Virology had created the covid-19 virus.
While we appreciate that Twitter may have experienced pressure from either China, or the established scientist community, to silence Dr Yan for proposing a theory that flies in the face of everything that has been accepted as undisputed gospel – after all Twitter did just that to us – we are confident that by suspending her account, Jack Dorsey has only added more fuel to the fire of speculations that the covid virus was indeed manmade (not to mention countless other tangential conspiracy theories).
If Yan was wrong, why not just let other scientists respond in the open to the all too valid arguments presented in Dr. Yan’s paper? Isn’t that what “science” is all about? Why just shut her up?
Because if we have already crossed the tipping point when anyone who proposes an “inconvenient” explanation for an established “truth” has to be immediately censored, then there is little that can be done to salvage the disintegration of a society that once held freedom of speech as paramount.
For those who missed it, here is our post breaking down Dr. Yan’s various allegations which twitter saw fit to immediately censor instead of allowing a healthy debate to emerge.
We hope Twitter will provide a very reasonable and sensible explanation for this unprecedented censorship.
For those who missed it, her paper is below:
- So You Want To Overthrow The State: Ten Questions For Aspiring Revolutionaries
So You Want To Overthrow The State: Ten Questions For Aspiring Revolutionaries
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 19:25Authored by Art Carden via The American Institute for Economic Research,
A professor at Washington and Lee University is offering a writing seminar called “How to Overthrow the State,” which “place(s) each student at the head of a popular revolutionary movement aiming to overthrow a sitting government and forge a better society.” Students are charged with writing their own revolutionary manifesto in light of readings from revolutionaries like Che Guevara. The right-wing outrage machine, as you can imagine, is feasting on it and offering it as an example of the radical takeover of higher education.
I’m intrigued by the class because I tend toward free-market anarchism myself and think that states are neither necessary nor sufficient for prosperity. There’s a burgeoning academic literature on this with books like Peter T. Leeson’s Anarchy Unbound exploring the theory and history of statelessness and AIER’s own Edward Stringham’s Private Governance looking at how institutions and organizations that protect people and property have emerged without coercion. There’s a lively and ongoing debate in these circles about whether or not one would push a button that would allow us to wake up tomorrow morning without governments. WLU’s course represents an excellent opportunity for students to take the revolutionaries’ arguments seriously, and if they do their due diligence, to think really hard about their shortcomings. I offer, therefore, ten questions for the young leaders of these revolutionary movements.
1. Do I have the facts straight?
Karl Marx said that “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” I doubt very much that you will know which changes you need to make if you don’t have a very good idea about your starting point. In his book Factfulness and in his many excellent online presentations, the late Swedish Professor of International Health Hans Rosling identifies a lot of the ways things have gotten better, especially for the world’s poorest.
Suppose, for example, that you encounter the name “Milton Friedman,” perhaps in connection with lamented “neoliberalism” and maybe in connection with human rights abuses perpetrated by the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Friedman has been denounced as the “father of global misery,” and his reputation has taken another beating in the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of his 1970 New York Times Magazine essay “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits,” which I suspect most people haven’t read past its title. But what happened during “The Age of Milton Friedman,” as the economist Andrei Shleifer asked in a 2009 article? Shleifer points out that “Between 1980 and 2005, as the world embraced free market policies, living standards rose sharply, while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined.” Things have never been so good, and they are getting better, especially for the world’s poor.
In 2008, there was a bit of controversy over the establishment of the Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, which operates today as the Becker Friedman Institute (it is also named for Friedman’s fellow Chicago economist Gary Becker). In a blistering reply to a protest letter signed by a group of faculty members at the University of Chicago, the economist John Cochrane wrote, “If you start with the premise that the last 40 or so years, including the fall of communism, and the opening of China and India are ‘negative for much of the world’s population,’ you just don’t have any business being a social scientist. You don’t stand a chance of contributing something serious to the problems that we actually do face.” Nor, might I add, do you stand much of a chance of concocting a revolutionary program that will actually help the people you’re trying to lead.
2. What makes me so sure I won’t replace the existing regime with something far worse?
I might hesitate to push the aforementioned button because while the world we actually inhabit is far from perfect, it’s not at all clear that deleting the state overnight wouldn’t mean civilization’s wholesale and maybe even perpetual collapse. At the very least, I would want to think long and hard about it. The explicit mention of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara in the course description suggest that students will be approaching revolutionary ideas from the left. They should look at the results of populist revolutions in 20th century Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The blood of many millions starved and slaughtered in efforts to “forge a better society” cries out against socialism and communism, and macroeconomic populism in Latin America has been disastrous. As people have pointed out when told that “democratic socialists” aren’t trying to turn their countries into Venezuela, Venezuelans weren’t trying to turn their country into Venezuela when they embraced Hugo Chavez. I wonder why we should expect WLU’s aspiring revolutionaries to succeed where so many others have failed.
3. Is my revolutionary program just a bunch of platitudes with which no decent person would disagree?
In 2019, Kristian Niemietz of London’s Institute of Economic Affairs published a useful volume titled Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies, which you can download for $0 from IEA. He notes a tendency for socialists and neo-socialists to pitch their programs almost exclusively in terms of their hoped-for results rather than in terms of the operation of concrete social processes they hope to set in motion (on this I paraphrase my intellectual hero Thomas Sowell).
Apply a test proposed a long time ago by the economist William Easterly: can you imagine anyone seriously objecting to what you’re saying? If not, then you probably aren’t saying anything substantive. Can you imagine someone saying “I hate the idea of the world’s poor having better food, clothing, shelter, and medical care” or “It would be a very bad thing if more people were literate?” If not, then it’s likely that your revolutionary program is a tissue of platitudes and empty promises. That’s not to say it won’t work politically–God knows, nothing sells better on election day than platitudes and empty promises–but you shouldn’t think you’re saying anything profound if all you’re saying is something obvious like “It would be nice if more people had access to clean, drinkable water.”
4. Is my revolutionary manifesto really any better than the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan from this 1998 episode of South Park?
In 2011, I wrote that a lot of policy proposals are “‘Underpants Gnomes’ Political Economy” after an episode of South Park in which the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan had three phases. Phase 1 was “collect underpants.” Phase 2 was a question mark. Phase 3 was “profit.”
Most revolutionary proposals are like that. Phase 1 is “abolish private property” or “Build That Wall” or something. Phase 2 is a question mark. Phase 3 is “equality and superabundance” (from the left) or “America has been made Great Again” (from the Trumpist right). There are more than a few very important details missing.
5. In other words, how is this actually going to work?
I’m not a socialist not because of antipathy toward poor people or callous selfishness. I’m not a socialist because it doesn’t work in practice and doesn’t even work in theory. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, among many others, have argued that private property, market prices, and market-determined profits and losses are necessary for rational economic calculation. Marx summarized the program of the communists as “abolition of private property.” Mises countered that socialism, or abolition of private property, would mean “abolition of rational economy.” Marx (in)famously never spelled out exactly how socialism would work; he just knew it would. Vladimir Lenin didn’t appreciate the calculation problem and thought that managing an entire economy as if it was just one big factory didn’t require much more than arithmetic and receipts. He was grievously, tragically wrong. I think Mises and Hayek, ultimately, were the ones vindicated by theory and history.
6. Does my argument for how it will work rely on people discarding self-interest, becoming a lot less horrible, and/or becoming a lot smarter?
In a famous cartoon by Sidney Harris, two scientists are standing at a chalkboard. There are equations on the left and right sides of the board with “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS” between them. One scientist says to the other, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.” If you’re relying on a change in human nature to make your program work, be prepared for a very long wait. Or be prepared to spill oceans of blood like those who tried to create a “New Socialist Man” in the twentieth century. The socialists and communists wanted to run the economy as if it were one big factory. For the most part, they have also wanted to run the rest of society as if it were one big family. This brings us to a problem that vexed Friedrich Hayek his whole career. The rules, norms, traditions, and other practices that make families or very small communities work well don’t scale. Similarly, if you tried to run your life with family and friends according to a “market logic” in which you try to do everything via literal price-mediated exchanges–charging your kids to rent the TV when they want to watch a movie, for example–it’s probably going to backfire spectacularly. You can’t run your family as if it’s the Chicago Board of Trade. You also can’t run a society of millions of people as if it’s one big happy family.
7. How has it worked the other times it has been tried?
Are you considering “land reform,” whether land expropriation and redistribution, or straight up collectivization? Satellite images of the effects of land reform in Zimbabwe should make you think twice.
Years before the Russian Revolution, Eugene Richter predicted with eerie prescience what would happen in a socialist society in his short book Pictures of the Socialistic Future (which you can download for $0 here). Bryan Caplan, who wrote the foreword for that edition of Pictures and who put together the online “Museum of Communism,” points out the distressing regularity with which communists go from “bleeding heart” to “mailed fist.” It doesn’t take long for communist regimes to go from establishing a workers’ paradise to shooting people who try to leave. Consider whether or not the brutality and mass murder of communist regimes is a feature of the system rather than a bug. Hugo Chavez and Che Guevara both expressed bleeding hearts with their words but used a mailed fist in practice (I’ve written before that “irony” is denouncing Milton Friedman for the crimes of Augusto Pinochet while wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. Pinochet was a murderous thug. Guevara was, too). Caplan points to pages 105 and 106 of Four Men: Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba. On page 105, Lazaro Benedi Rodriguez’s heart is bleeding for the illiterate. On page 106, he’s “advis(ing) Fidel to have an incinerator dug about 40 or 50 meters deep, and every time one of these obstinate cases came up, to drop the culprit in the incinerator, douse him with gasoline, and set him on fire.”
8. Are people moving toward or away from the kind of society I want to establish?
We get a lot of information from how people “vote with their feet” for different policies. If you’re advocating some version of socialism, you have to deal with the fact that so many people are trying desperately to leave socialist countries. The East German government did not build the Berlin Wall to keep westerners out, and pretty much all of the traffic between Cuba and the United States moves in one direction. It isn’t toward the Castros’ workers’ paradise.
9. What will I do with people who aren’t willing to go along with my revolution?
Walter Williams once said that he doesn’t mind if communists want to be communists. He minds that they want him to be a communist, too. Would you allow people to try capitalist experiments in your socialist paradise? Or socialist experiments in your capitalist paradise (Families, incidentally, are socialist enterprises that run by the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”)? Am I willing to allow dissenters to advocate my overthrow, or do I need to crush dissent and control the minds of the masses in order for my revolution to work? Am I willing to allow people to leave, or will I need to build a wall to keep people in?
10. Am I letting myself off the hook for questions 1-9 and giving myself too much credit for passion and sincerity?
The philosopher David Schmidtz has said that if your best argument is that your heart is in the right place, then your heart is most definitely not in the right place. Consider this quote from Edmund Burke and ask whether or not it leads you to revise your revolutionary plans:
“A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood. He would feel some apprehension at being called to a tremendous account for engaging in so deep a play, without any sort of knowledge of the game. It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance, that it is directed by insolent passion. The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. But I cannot conceive any existence under heaven (which, in the depths of its wisdom, tolerates all sorts of things) that is more truly odious and disgusting, than an impotent helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any other qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion which he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others contemptible and wretched.” (Emphasis added).
A lot of colleges and universities have first-year writing seminars that try to teach students to write by exploring a particular set of issues, and as long as the course actually teaches students how to become better writers, we should welcome new experiments. A course that asks students to put themselves in the positions of aspiring revolutionaries and to prepare their own revolutionary manifestoes is extremely creative. I think it’s the kind of course from which students can benefit mightily–if, of course, they ask the right questions.
- Scientists Isolate Coronavirus Antibody In Breakthrough That Could Lead To New Treatment
Scientists Isolate Coronavirus Antibody In Breakthrough That Could Lead To New Treatment
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 19:05In the latest scientific triumph to offer new insights into the immune system’s response to the coronavirus that’s on the cusp of sickening more than 30 million people worldwide, a team at the University of Pittsburgh has successfully isolated an “antibody component” to the virus in a breakthrough that, scientists say, could be used in a new therapeutic.
The University of Pittsburgh announced in a press release that students from its medical school had isolated the smallest biological molecule yet that “completely and specifically neutralizes” SARS-CoV-2.
According to the release, the antibody component, which is 10x smaller than a full-sized antibody, has been used to construct a drug – known as Ab8 – that will potentially be use as a therapeutic and prophylactic against the virus.
Findings from the study were published Tuesday in the journal Cell. In the abstract, the scientists said that the “Bivalent V-sub-H” showed a “high affinity” to bind to the cells of hamsters, preventing them from infection with SARS-CoV-2.
The finding could help Ab8 become a powerful therapeutic for COVID-19, as the administration takes heat for its unbridled – and, as some argued, premature – support for convalescent plasma, the world is looking for the next “hot” experimental therapeutic.
“Ab8 not only has potential as therapy for COVID-19, but it also could be used to keep people from getting SARS-CoV-2 infections,” said co-author John Mellors, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Pitt and UPMC. “Antibodies of larger size have worked against other infectious diseases and have been well tolerated, giving us hope that it could be an effective treatment for patients with COVID-19 and for protection of those who have never had the infection and are not immune.”
Read the “pre-proofed” report from Cell below:
Pi is 009286742031148 x by Zerohedge on Scribd
- Are The Forever Wars Really Ending?
Are The Forever Wars Really Ending?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/15/2020 – 18:45Authored by Pat Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
“There is no… sound reason for the United States to continue sacrificing precious lives and treasure in a conflict not directly connected to our safety or other vital national interests.”
So said William Ruger about Afghanistan, our longest war.
What makes this statement significant is that President Donald Trump has ordered a drawdown by mid-October of half of the 8,600 troops still in the country. And Ruger was just named U.S. ambassador to Kabul.
The selection of Ruger to oversee the U.S. withdrawal came as Gen. Frank McKenzie of Central Command announced plans to cut the U.S. troop presence in Iraq from 5,200 to 3,000 by the end of September.
Is America, at long last, really coming home from the forever wars?
A foreign policy analyst at the libertarian Charles Koch Institute and a Naval officer decorated for his service in Afghanistan, Ruger has long championed a noninterventionist foreign policy.
His nomination tends to confirm that, should Trump win a second term, his often-declared goal of extracting America from the forever wars of the Middle East, unachieved in his first term, would become a priority.
Yet, we have been here before, bringing our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, only to send thousands back when our enemies seemed to be gaining the upper hand at the expense of the allies we left behind.
Still, this time, Trump’s withdrawals look to be irreversible. And with the U.S. deal with the Taliban producing peace negotiations between the Kabul government and the Taliban, America seems to be saying to both sides of this endless civil war:
The destiny of Afghanistan is yours. The choice of war or peace is up to you. If talks collapse and a fight to the finish ensues, we Americans are not coming back, even to prevent a Taliban victory.
Speaking in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Trump made a remarkable declaration:
“We don’t have to be in the Middle East, other than we want to protect Israel. … There was a time we needed desperately oil, we don’t need that anymore.” If Trump means what he says, U.S. forces will be out of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan early in his second term.
But how to explain the continued presence of tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Diego Garcia?
Another indication of where a Trump second term is pointing is the naming of retired Col. Douglas Macgregor as ambassador to Germany.
The winner of a Bronze Star for valor in the 1991 Gulf War, Macgregor speaks German and is steeped in that country’s history. He has been highly visible on cable TV, calling for the transfer to our allies of the primary responsibility for their own defenses, and elevating the security of America’s Southern border to a far higher national imperative.
In 2019, Macgregor was quoted:
“The only solution is martial law on the border, putting the United States Army in charge of it and closing it off would take about 30, 40,000 troops. We’re talking about the regular army. You need robust rules of engagement. That means that you can shoot people as required if your life is in danger.”
That Macgregor’s priorities may be Trump’s also became evident with the president’s announcement this summer of the withdrawal of 12,000 of the 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany.
Yet, at the same time, there is seemingly contradictory evidence to the notion that Donald Trump wants our troops home. Currently, some 2,800 U.S., British, and French troops are conducting “Noble Partner” exercises with Georgian troops in that country in the Caucasus bordering Russia.
In Trump’s first term, his commitment to extricate America from the forever wars went unrealized, due in part to the resistance of hawks Trump himself appointed to carry out his foreign policy agenda.
Clearly, with the cuts in troops in Germany, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the appointments of Ruger and Macgregor, Trump has signaled a new resolve to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy in an “America First” direction, if he wins a second term. Will he follow through?
Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has been in an extended argument with itself over America’s role, America’s mission in the world.
George H. W. Bush’s New World Order is ancient history, as are the democracy crusades his son George W. Bush was persuaded to launch.
But what will Trump’s foreign policy legacy be, should he win?
Joe Biden has signaled where he is headed — straight back to Barack Obama:
“First thing I’m going to have to do, and I’m not joking: if elected I’m going to have to get on the phone with the heads of state and say America’s back,” Biden said, saying NATO has been “worried as hell about our failure to confront Russia.”
Trump came to office pledging to establish a new relationship with the Kremlin of President Vladimir Putin.
Is that still his goal, or have the Beltway Russophobes prevailed?
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