- Australia Pushes New Measure To Detain COVID "Conspiracy Theorists"
Australia Pushes New Measure To Detain COVID “Conspiracy Theorists”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/18/2020 – 02:45Weekend demonstrations have flared up in Australia over the last month, as Aussies have vented their frustrations and attempted to take back control of their communities after a surge in virus cases prompted the government to re-implement some of the world’s most draconian social-distancing measures.
And if there is one thing that terrifies increasingly tyrannical governments, it’s a loss of control of the narrative, which is why the Australian government is getting a jump start on curbing any so-called “conspiracy theorists” daring to spread information that questions the fear-mongering being used to keep Aussie citizens under lock and key.
A new bill is expected to be debated by the Victorian government in the State Parliament this week. It gives local authorities the power to detain “conspiracy theorists” and people who refuse to self-isolate, reported Caldron Pool.
If passed, the COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) allows the government to detain anyone labeled as a “high risk” or likely to spread COVID-19 negligently.
A state government spokesman told The Age that the rule could be applied to “conspiracy theorists who refuse to self-isolate or severely drug-affected or mentally impaired people who do not have the capacity to quarantine.” Those arrested under the new rule will be housed in quarantine facilities.
Attorney-General Jill Hennessy said the new bill would “allow us to continue responding to the challenges the pandemic presents, so we can keep protecting Victorians and delivering the services they rely on.”
So far, many of the anti-lockdown demonstrations have been held on the weekends. At least 200 people were fined and 74 arrested at a protest in Melbourne on Sunday. If the bill is passed, some protesters would be rounded up and arrested, and could spend time in a quarantine facility.
Clearly, the government’s intent to extend powers and detain conspiracy theorists and those who pose a risk of spreading the virus should be alarming to readers.
In a glimpse of what is ahead, authorities have already arrested a Melbourne woman for allegedly writing pro-anti lockdown posts on social media.
Notably, after widespread social media account deletions, TheConversation notes that QAnon has attracted a lot of followers in Australia, so what comes next? ‘Re-education centers’ for QAnons?
- Lord Sumption: Boris Johnson's "'Rule Of Six' Is Pointless, Arbitrary, And Unnecessary"
Lord Sumption: Boris Johnson’s “‘Rule Of Six’ Is Pointless, Arbitrary, And Unnecessary”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/18/2020 – 02:00This week former UK Supreme Court justice took to the airwaves to strongly criticise the government’s latest laws designed to tighten restrictions on social interactions which came into force on Monday.
According to Lord Jonathan Sumption, the government’s cryptic ‘Rule of Six’ law which prevents more than six people, children, from gathering socially in both indoor and outdoor settings, and homes, gardens, pubs and parks – is “pointless, arbitrary and unnecessary.”
“This one size fits all approach is deeply destructive… it’s much more efficient for everybody to make their own decisions in a responsible way,” says Lord Sumption.
On the issue of legality of the government’s policy he remarked,
“I think it’s very unlikely that the courts are going to decide whether it’s necessary because this is not only a difficult question – a technical and scientific question, but it has to be weighed against all sorts of other social considerations unrelated to health – the social damage, the collateral medical damage, the educational, and economic damage, and so on.
This is an exercise which courts are not well placed to carry out and I suspect that the courts will recognize that.”
Watch his recent segment with TalkRadio host Julia Hartley-Brewer:
- Netflix's "Cuties": It's Not The First Attempt By Hollywood To Normalize Pedophilia
Netflix’s “Cuties”: It’s Not The First Attempt By Hollywood To Normalize Pedophilia
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/18/2020 – 00:00Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
After studying and exposing the agendas of establishment elites for the past 14 years, I can say with some authority that by watching these people you quickly begin to understand the reality of evil. Anyone who dismisses the concept of evil as nothing more than a “social construct” or a matter of “perception” is suffering from either naivety or bias.
They have either been lucky enough to have avoided a run-in with the resident psychopaths in their town, or, they have certain secret tendencies they will not reveal. One thing that I have found most disturbing is the habit of evil people to quickly come to the defense of other evil people they don’t even know. That is to say, I was initially shocked to discover the extreme level of fraternity predatory people feel and display when other predatory people are being exposed. It is as if they are an unspoken brotherhood, and they don’t like it when their kinsmen are being punished for their crimes.
Yes, there are such things as ignorance, greed, jealousy, unhealthy desire, etc., and all of these frailties can lead to evil deeds. That said, in the majority of cases you will find that MOST people feel guilt, regret, empathy and remorse that prevent them from following through with their basest instincts. This is what we commonly call “conscience”, and a greater number of people have it. Without it, our species would have self-destructed and gone extinct thousands of years ago.
With psychopaths, however, it’s not only about a complete lack of empathy and conscience; they also often take JOY in the destruction, debasement and exploitation of others. Standard sociopaths harm people in the process of getting what they want because they do not have the capacity to care. Psychopaths harm people because THAT IS THEIR GOAL. Think of it as a kind of kink; they lust after control over others, they get high from it. And, their most sought after drug of choice is the violation of innocence.
In my lifetime I have met epic liars, con-men, rapists, murderers and even pedophiles, and their habits and mannerisms all tend to be the same. With every encounter you receive a crash course in evil and begin to learn how to identify them by their character ticks and broken thought processes. It gets to the point where they actually become boring and predictable.
While Hollywood loves to romanticize psychopaths as eternally interesting, in real life they are more like robots or mindless machines. Most of them are good at what they do, which is to be predatory or parasitic, but it’s their ONLY skill set – It’s the only thing that defines them. Otherwise, they have no capacity for imagination or creativity and all of their thoughts and ideas are stolen from others and recycled. In fact, you will find that if you are near a psychopath for an extended length of time, he/she will start to talk and act just like you. This is what they do; they seek to blend in.
Some people have a hard time grasping the nature of psychopathy and evil because they have lived sheltered lives and remain blissfully unaware of the danger.
It is certainly possible to bumble through life without encountering such aberrant individuals. Full blown psychopaths (also known as narcissistic sociopaths) are rare in the grand scheme of human society. They represent around 1% of the population statistically, with narcissists and people with sociopathic tendencies representing around 5% of the overall public. And it’s a good thing, because a stunning majority of violent crimes tend to be committed by pyschopathic people. They are, by far, the primary drain on criminal justice resources and the biggest threat to social stability and safety.
If someone really wanted to change humanity for the better they could NOT do it without first removing psychopaths from the equation. This means, most importantly, removing them from positions of power and cultural influence. The problem is, there is no way to accurately and easily test for psychopathic traits preemptively. Extensive psychological observation in a controlled environment is required.
Standard psychological tests can be fooled, and brain-scan tests are highly suspect (there are people who have tried to make a career out of the pyschopath brain-scan game but there is still no proof that the tests do anything to preemptively identify such traits). Ultimately, psychopaths have to be judged on their actions and behavior over time by someone who is very familiar with their universal personality traits.
That said, once these people identify themselves through action something has to be done about them. If they are allowed to continue without resistance they will follow their path to its natural conclusion, which means terror and carnage for anyone they come in contact with.
In order to protect themselves and their activities, psychopaths do indeed organize together. It has happened over and over again through history and the more intelligent or cunning members usually group together within the upper echelons of society by infiltrating institutions of power. Again, the concept of the “lone psychopath” is a Hollywood creation that does not represent real life. As long as there is mutual gain to be had and there are plenty of victims to go around, psychopaths can easily unify.
Hollywood has proven itself over the years to be a haven for evil people. Not so much in terms of the celebrities (though many of them are narcissistic and sociopathic), but more in terms of the people that control the industry. The entire edifice was designed as a haven for subhuman tendencies. They have celebrated this openly in the past, though these days they pretend as if they are cleaning house.
The machine of Hollywood is a vampire’s trap, a shining beacon luring in talented (or at least hopeful and starstruck) people, draining them of all life and then spitting them out once the feeding has finished. This is particularly true of children, and the number of cases of child abuse in the industry is staggering. If it were any other business, the media would be up in arms in terms of the number of convictions and allegations. If the fast food industry had as many pedo charges as Hollywood, the MSM would be writing thousands of articles a year admonishing the burger barn molestation epidemic. But when it comes to Hollywood, mainstream journalists rabidly defend the people at the top and attack critics as “conspiracy theorists”.
The propensity for psychopaths to value children as their most sought after targets is well known. It’s not necessarily always sexual, sometimes it’s only physical or mental abuse. But, children are a delicacy to them none-the-less. What could be more enthralling to evil than to destroy the life of a purely innocent person and take their childhood away?
It is only in recent years that pedophilia in Hollywood has been taken more seriously by the general public. The Hollywood elites that dominate high level corporate positions have been the purveyors and controllers of America’s cultural expression for almost a century, and yet they are rarely subject to scrutiny. It is their own actions that have created the recent groundswell movement to root out organized child abuse.
Psychopaths are driven by crooked and twisted desires, but they are also driven by a desperate need to “prove” that the rest of society is as evil or as disturbed as they are if given the right “push”. This is one of their greatest weaknesses, because it causes them to make mistakes and expose their true natures.
Enter the Netflix film ‘Cuties’…
I have now watched portions of this film, including dramatic story scenes to get a fair sense of the total content as well as come clips of the notorious scenes that have enraged the public. And, I can say WITHOUT A DOUBT, this film is in fact child pornagraphy according to the Department of Justice’s legal definition. A warning – I do NOT recommend watching this movie yourself, but if you do, be warned that the content is highly upsetting.
If you heard from the mainstream media that the reaction to this film was “overblown” and part of a “right wing conspiracy”; then I’m here to tell you that you were lied to. While I continue to hold to my position that Qanon is a joke and a psyop that has been wrong about almost every single prediction they have made, you don’t have to be a part of the Q-cult to see the attempt to normalize pedophilia at the foundation of Cuties.
Arguments made by the predominantly social justice media have exposed where they really stand on the issue of evil, and they are all for it! Once again, the hard political left exposes its true nature when it comes to the defense of terrible content. There have been hints of this in previous campaigns by the media, such as left-wing outlet Salon and an article they published in defense of pedophilia written by a self-professed pedophile. Their argument? That pedophilia should be treated with more empathy as long as pedophiles do not act on their impulses. Salon later took down the article, but other media outlets argued that they should have left it published.
Initially, the criticism of the Cuties movie trailer was met with jeers from media pundits, the only people who had yet seen the film in its entirety. They claimed that critics had no idea what they were talking about and that the trailer did not convey the true message of the film, which is supposedly that sexual exploitation of children is “bad”. Yet, when the film was released it became clear this was a lie.
You can wrap child porn in as many declarations of “art” and “discourse” as you like, but at the end of the day it’s still child porn. The fact that it was directed by a woman from western Africa that migrated to France is irrelevant. African women migrants can be pedophiles and psychopaths, too. And yes, anyone that would expose 11 year old girls to this kind of filmmaking is indeed a psychopath.
The cinematography methods and camera angles are what give it away, and anyone that has studied film understands how this works. Sexualized film subjects tend to lend themselves to a certain form of cinematography which is designed to glamorize and entice.
For example, watch the film ‘Dancing At The Blue Iguana’ (a disturbing movie which I actually like), a movie about the sordid lives of strippers trying to survive in Los Angeles. Take note of the camera work in that movie, and then, if you can stomach it, compare it to the dance scenes in Cuties. The camera work is THE SAME, hovering over certain body parts voyeuristically. The difference is that ‘Dancing At The Blue Iguana’ stars ADULT WOMEN, not 11 year old girls.
Cuties is often defended by the media as being a Sundance “award winning” film; meaning, if the art-house elites sign off on it, it is therefore socially and morally acceptable material. It’s just “too smart” for the plebeians to grasp, right? Well, I am a long-time film buff myself and I know when I am looking at “art” and when I am looking at exploitation, and Cuties is clear-cut exploitation.
It should also be noted that the co-founder of the Sundance Film Festival plead guilty to child sex abuse charges only a year ago. So, maybe having the Sundance award emblem on a film is not a free pass for pedophilia.
Of course, the movie Cuties is not the first time Hollywood has tried to normalize the sexualization of children. In 1932 and 1933, right at the onset of the Great Depression, producer Jack Hays and director Charles Lamont released a series of at least eight films which would be dubbed “Baby Burlesque”. The films featured extremely young actors and actresses, including Shirley Temple before she was a box office juggernaught, acting out adult stories and scenes, dressed in adult costumes. The movies contained pervasive sexual overtones, and if you are familiar with the ways Temple was viciously abused by Hollywood producers during her time as an actress the films have an added darkness to them.
The formula for Baby Burlesque movies was to portray young actors in adult situations and then label it “parody”. This included a young Temple playing a hooker dressed in revealing “street clothing” and discussing how much she costs. Temple’s later films would portray a young child, often an orphan, adopted by or spending the entire film with a rich benefactor. Parents usually do not make an appearance in the films or are killed in some tragic way, leaving the child alone and vulnerable. The dances and even songs in the movies are semi-erotic, especially for the era. The relationships between the children and the adult benefactors is bizarre, and is usually portrayed as an almost romantic interaction instead of a normal adult/child caretaker interaction.
Hollywood has been doing this for a LONG time. Cuties is nothing more than a modernized version of Baby Burlesque.
To be clear, Netflix did not make the film, they only bankrolled the distribution of it. That said, their promotional trailer for the movie directly showcased the sexual elements and not much else, which indicates to me what they REALLY cared about, and it wasn’t the story. Once the movie was released to the public it became obvious that the trailers for the film didn’t even scratch the surface of the actual pedophilic content.
The casting for the film took 6 months to complete and over 700 girls were “auditioned” for the starring roles. Director Maïmouna Doucouré continues to defend the film, calling it a “feminist” project. This is not surprising; the unhinged and mentally disturbed nature of the social justice movement lends itself to all kinds of disorders. The biggest problem is their infatuation with moral relativism and their ability to rationalize any number of crimes in the name of “diversity” or “equality” or “intersectionality”. These are hollow buzzwords made up by hollow people; they don’t excuse bad behavior.
As with Baby Burlesque, child pornography is often masked as something else. In the case of Cuties, child exploitation is masked as a loose commentary on child exploitation. Is it blind irony? No, not really. Rather, in my opinion, it was planned.
I do find it interesting that the pedophile networks in Hollywood seem to choose the most unstable moments in history as a springboard for introducing child sexualization into the public consciousness. They flooded the entertainment market with Baby Burlesque films right at the beginning of the Great Depression. Now they are pushing the envelope even further during a pandemic, riots and economic crisis today. My theory? They see the widespread weakness and uncertainty in our society and view it as an opportunity to fundamentally change our moral boundaries. The elites really want us to look at films like Cuties and say “Gee, this pedophilia thing isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be…and maybe it’s not wrong to be aroused by 11 year old children…” Some people are in fact saying this on YouTube right now as they come to the defense of the film.
Bottom line: If you are aroused by 11 year old children then you are psychologically defective and should be separated from the rest of society for the good of all. There are certain behaviors that cannot and should not ever be adopted by society as tolerable. This is one of them.
If there is anything positive to be had from the elitist establishment’s obsession with getting us to accept child abuse as “normal”, it is that they continue to expose the demons that they are. Luckily, it seems America and much of the world has rejected Cuties outright, and any interest in the film seems to be due to morbid curiosity about how such a disaster could have been produced and distributed. Hollywood is NEVER going to convince the public that child abuse is okay, but they will continue to try until we put them out of business.
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- US Air Force Deploys Robo-Hounds During Base Security Exercise
US Air Force Deploys Robo-Hounds During Base Security Exercise
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 23:40The U.S. Air Force deployed “robot dogs” during an exercise in early September at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to scout for threats before soldiers exited an aircraft.
The Ghost Robotics Vision 60 robot, a four-legged autonomous unmanned ground vehicle, with similar characteristics to Boston Dynamics’ spot robotic dog, was tested under the Advanced Battle Management System, an Air Force project designed to provide commanders with the ability to control smart military assets in real-time.
The robots were deployed from an Air Force LC-130 Hercules cargo plane that flew from Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado to Nellis, carrying airmen and the robot dogs. Once the plane landed, the robo-hounds were released to conduct inspection, surveillance, and or mapping missions of the base perimeter. The robot dogs also patrolled the perimeter of the base once the airman stabilized the area during the war exercise.
Air Force LC-130 with robot dog. h/t Air Force “Our defenders employed the robot dogs,” said Master Sgt. Lee Boston, 321st CRS loadmaster and the C.R. team chief for the exercise. “These robot dogs are a new technology that we’re testing as part of the exercise. The dogs give us visuals of the area, all while keeping our defenders closer to the aircraft.”
Robot dog conducts security mission. h/t Air Force Details are scant on Ghost Robotics’ website about Vision 60, but calls the robot “unstoppable” and says it is “highly-agile and fast,” along with “autonomous” features. Also, the dogs cannot be killed and can stealthily patrol wider areas than real dogs due to the use of optical sensors and artificial intelligence.
The company also mentions a wide range of U.S. and allied military, homeland, intel, and public safety agencies are customers that are using these robots.
So despite dystopian warnings about robot killer dogs, such as scenes featured in Black Mirror, the military’s Vision 60 is helping soldiers stay alive … but maybe that’s the case right up to the point Skynet turns on us all.
… Robot dogs were also spotted in Singapore earlier this year, enforcing social distancing.
- 'Virtual School' Dangers: The Hazards Of A Police State Education During COVID-19
‘Virtual School’ Dangers: The Hazards Of A Police State Education During COVID-19
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 23:20Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
– George Orwell, 1984
Once upon a time in America, parents breathed a sigh of relief when their kids went back to school after a summer’s hiatus, content in the knowledge that for a good portion of the day, their kids would be gainfully occupied, out of harm’s way, and out of trouble.
Back then, if you talked back to a teacher, or played a prank on a classmate, or just failed to do your homework, you might find yourself in detention or doing an extra writing assignment after school or suffering through a parent-teacher conference about your shortcomings.
Of course, that was before school shootings became a part of our national lexicon.
As a result, over the course of the past 30 years, the need to keep the schools “safe” from drugs and weapons has become a thinly disguised, profit-driven campaign to transform them into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, school resource officers, strip searches, and active shooter drills.
Suddenly, under school zero tolerance policies, students were being punished with suspension, expulsion, and even arrest for childish behavior and minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight.
Things got even worse once schools started to rely on police (school resource officers) to “deal with minor rule breaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes.”
As a result, students are being subjected to police tactics such as handcuffs, leg shackles, tasers and excessive force for “acting up,” in addition to being ticketed, fined and sent to court for behavior perceived as defiant, disruptive or disorderly such as spraying perfume and writing on a desk.
This is what constitutes a police state education these days: lessons in compliance meted out with aggressive, totalitarian tactics.
The COVID-19 pandemic has added yet another troubling layer to the ways in which students (and their families) can run afoul of a police state education now that school (virtual or in-person) is back in session.
Significant numbers of schools within the nation’s 13,000 school districts have opted to hold their classes online, in-person or a hybrid of the two, fearing further outbreaks of the virus. Yet this unprecedented foray into the virtual world carries its own unique risks.
Apart from the technological logistics of ensuring that millions of students across the country have adequate computer and internet access, consider the Fourth Amendment ramifications of having students attend school online via video classes from the privacy of their homes.
Suddenly, you’ve got government officials (in this case, teachers or anyone at the school on the other end of that virtual connection) being allowed carte blanche visual access to the inside of one’s private home without a warrant.
Anything those school officials see—anything they hear—anything they photograph or record—during that virtual visit becomes fair game for scrutiny and investigation not just by school officials but by every interconnected government agency to which that information can be relayed: the police, social services, animal control, the Department of Homeland Security, you name it.
After all, this is the age of overcriminalization, when the federal criminal code is so vast that the average American unknowingly commits about three federal felonies per day, a U.S. Attorney can find a way to charge just about anyone with violating federal law.
It’s a train wreck just waiting to happen.
In fact, we’re already seeing this play out across the country. For instance, a 12-year-old Colorado boy was suspended for flashing a toy gun across his computer screen during an online art class. Without bothering to notify or consult with the boy’s parents, police carried out a welfare check on Isaiah Elliott, who suffers from ADHD and learning disabilities.
An 11-year-old Maryland boy had police descend on his home in search of weapons after school officials spied a BB gun on the boy’s bedroom wall during a Google Meet class on his laptop. School officials reported the sighting to the school resource officer, who then called the police.
And in New York and Massachusetts, growing numbers of parents are being visited by social services after being reported to the state child neglect and abuse hotline, all because their kids failed to sign in for some of their online classes. Charges of neglect, in some instances, can lead to children being removed from their homes.
You see what this is, don’t you?
This is how a seemingly well-meaning program (virtual classrooms) becomes another means by which the government can intrude into our private lives, further normalizing the idea of constant surveillance and desensitizing us to the dangers of an existence in which we are never safe from the all-seeing eyes of Big Brother.
This is how the police sidestep the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for probable cause and a court-issued warrant in order to spy us on in the privacy of our homes: by putting school officials in a position to serve as spies and snitches via online portals and virtual classrooms, and by establishing open virtual doorways into our homes through which the police can enter uninvited and poke around.
Welfare checks. Police searches for weapons. Reports to Social Services.
It’s only a matter of time before the self-righteous Nanny State uses this COVID-19 pandemic as yet another means by which it can dictate every aspect of our lives.
At the moment, it’s America’s young people who are the guinea pigs for the police state’s experiment in virtual authoritarianism. Already, school administrators are wrestling with how to handle student discipline for in-person classes and online learning in the midst of COVID-19.
Mark my words, this will take school zero tolerance policies—and their associated harsh disciplinary penalties—to a whole new level once you have teachers empowered to act as the Thought Police.
As Kalyn Belsha reports for Chalkbeat, “In Jacksonville, Florida, students who don’t wear a mask repeatedly could be removed from school and made to learn online. In some Texas districts, intentionally coughing on someone can be classified as assault. In Memphis, minor misbehaviors could land students in an online ‘supervised study.’”
Depending on the state and the school district, failing to wear a face mask could constitute a dress code violation. In Utah, not wearing a face mask at school constitutes a criminal misdemeanor. In Texas, it’s considered an assault to intentionally spit, sneeze, or cough on someone else. Anyone removing their mask before spitting or coughing could be given a suspension from school.
Virtual learning presents its own challenges with educators warning dire consequences for students who violate school standards for dress code and work spaces, even while “learning” at home. According to Chalkbeat, “In Shelby County, Tennessee, which includes Memphis, that means no pajamas, hats, or hoods on screen, and students’ shirts must have sleeves. (The district is providing ‘flexibility’ on clothing bottoms and footwear when a student’s full body won’t be seen on video.) Other rules might be even tougher to follow: The district is also requiring students’ work stations to be clear of ‘foreign objects’ and says students shouldn’t eat or drink during virtual classes.”
See how quickly the Nanny State a.k.a. Police State takes over?
All it takes for you to cease being the master of your own home is to have a child engaged in virtual learning. Suddenly, the government gets to have a say in how you order your space and when those in your home can eat and drink and what clothes they wear.
If you think the schools won’t overreact in a virtual forum, you should think again.
These are the same schools that have been plagued by a lack of common sense when it comes to enforcing zero tolerance policies for weapons, violence and drugs.
These are the very same schools that have exposed students to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.
Zero tolerance policies that were intended to make schools safer by discouraging the use of actual drugs and weapons by students have turned students into suspects to be treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, while criminalizing childish behavior.
For instance, 9-year-old Patrick Timoney was sent to the principal’s office and threatened with suspension after school officials discovered that one of his LEGOs was holding a 2-inch toy gun. David Morales, an 8-year-old Rhode Island student, ran afoul of his school’s zero tolerance policies after he wore a hat to school decorated with an American flag and tiny plastic Army figures in honor of American troops. School officials declared the hat out of bounds because the toy soldiers were carrying miniature guns.
A high school sophomore was suspended for violating the school’s no-cell-phone policy after he took a call from his father, a master sergeant in the U.S. Army who was serving in Iraq at the time. In Houston, an 8th grader was suspended for wearing rosary beads to school in memory of her grandmother (the school has a zero tolerance policy against the rosary, which the school insists can be interpreted as a sign of gang involvement).
Even imaginary weapons (hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in detention. Equally outrageous was the case in New Jersey where several kindergartners were suspended from school for three days for playing a make-believe game of “cops and robbers” during recess and using their fingers as guns.
With the distinctions between student offenses erased, and all offenses expellable, we now find ourselves in the midst of what Time magazine described as a “national crackdown on Alka-Seltzer.” Students have actually been suspended from school for possession of the fizzy tablets in violation of zero tolerance drug policies. Students have also been penalized for such inane “crimes” as bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades.
A 13-year-old boy in Manassas, Virginia, who accepted a Certs breath mint from a classmate, was actually suspended and required to attend drug-awareness classes, while a 12-year-old boy who said he brought powdered sugar to school for a science project was charged with a felony for possessing a look-alike drug.
Acts of kindness, concern, basic manners or just engaging in childish behavior can also result in suspensions.
One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.
In South Carolina, where it’s against the law to disturb a school, more than a thousand students a year—some as young as 7 years old—“face criminal charges for not following directions, loitering, cursing, or the vague allegation of acting ‘obnoxiously.’ If charged as adults, they can be held in jail for up to 90 days.”
Things get even worse when you add police to the mix.
Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers (a.k.a. school resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting (nearly 20,000 by 2003). What this means, notes Mother Jones, is greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”
Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers (SROs) have become de facto wardens in the elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepperspray, batons and brute force.
The horror stories are legion.
One SRO is accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting in the cafeteria line. That same cop put another student in a chokehold a week later, allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury.
In Pennsylvania, a student was tased after ignoring an order to put his cell phone away.
A 12-year-old New York student was hauled out of school in handcuffs for doodling on her desk with an erasable marker. Another 12-year-old was handcuffed and jailed after he stomped in a puddle, splashing classmates.
On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”
In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids for simply failing to follow directions or throwing tantrums.
Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.
For example, a 4-year-old Virginia preschooler was handcuffed, leg shackled and transported to the sheriff’s office after reportedly throwing blocks and climbing on top of the furniture. School officials claim the restraints were necessary to protect the adults from injury.
A 6-year-old kindergarten student in a Georgia public school was handcuffed, transported to the police station, and charged with simple battery of a schoolteacher and criminal damage to property for throwing a temper tantrum at school.
This is the end product of all those so-called school “safety” policies, which run the gamut from zero tolerance policies that punish all infractions harshly to surveillance cameras, metal detectors, random searches, drug-sniffing dogs, school-wide lockdowns, active-shooter drills and militarized police officers.
Yet these police state tactics did not made the schools any safer.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, police state tactics never make anyone safer so much as they present the illusion of safety and indoctrinate the populace to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
Now with virtual learning in the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic, the stakes are even higher.
It won’t be long before you start to see police carrying out knock-and-talk investigations based on whatever speculative information is gleaned from those daily virtual classroom sessions that allow government officials entry to your homes in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
It won’t take much at all for SWAT teams to start crashing through doors based on erroneous assumptions about whatever mistaken “contraband” someone may have glimpsed in the background of a virtual classroom session: a maple leaf that looks like marijuana, a jar of sugar that looks like cocaine, a toy gun, someone playfully shouting for help in the distance.
This may sound far-fetched now, but it’s only a matter of time before this slippery slope becomes yet another mile marker on the one-way road to tyranny.
- Esper Touts China Is Too Far Behind US Navy Superiority To Ever Close The Gap
Esper Touts China Is Too Far Behind US Navy Superiority To Ever Close The Gap
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 23:00In Wednesday remarks Secretary of Defense Mark Esper touted complete US naval superiority over China, stating firmly, “I want to make clear that China cannot match the United States when it comes to naval power.”
Esper addressed a RAND Corporation event and underscored the major communist power which the US Navy is increasingly butting up against in the South China Sea is ultimately too far behind to close the gap in terms of maritime capability, despite it leading the world in simple ship numbers. He reminded his audience that numbers aren’t everything.
“Even if we stopped building new ships, it would take the [People’s Republic of China] years to close the gap when it comes to our capability on the high seas,” Esper said. “Ship numbers are important, but they don’t tell the whole story.”
The destroyer USS Chung-Hoon (foreground) and aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. Image: US Navy “They do not address the types of ships and the capabilities of the vessels being counted; the skill of the crews that operate them; the prowess of the officers that lead them; or the ways in which we fight and sustain them,” Esper added.
He further emphasized that the Department of Defense remains resolved in maintaining that clear dominance, as there are navy plans to expand its overall number of ships, saying “We must increase funding for shipbuilding and the readiness that sustains a larger force.”
On the future of unmanned military vehicles, he said: “This fleet will need to be made up of more and smaller surface combatants; optionally manned, unmanned, and autonomous surface and subsurface vehicles; unmanned carrier-based aircraft of all types; a larger and more capable submarine force; and a modern strategic deterrent.”
His comments raised eyebrows also given it’s widely acknowledged that China has the largest navy in the world, as the Pentagon’s recently issued annual China Military Power report underscored.
“China has already achieved parity with — or even exceeded — the United States in several military modernization areas,” the Pentagon report stated. “The PRC has the largest navy in the world, with an overall battle force of approximately 350 ships and submarines including over 130 major surface combatants,” the report said.
USS Carl Vinson, DoD/US Navy file image. The report said that China is “the top ship-producing nation in the world by tonnage.”
But considering aircraft carriers alone, for example, it’s easy to visualize America’s superiority.
The US Navy has 21 total aircraft carriers, among these 11 large nuclear-powered fleet carriers, while China has a mere two with a third on the way.
- 12 Steps To Create Your Own Pandemic
12 Steps To Create Your Own Pandemic
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 22:40Authored by Nils Nilsen via Off-Guardian.org,
12 Steps to Create Your Own Pandemic (Or How to Turn a Harmless Virus into Boundless Profits for You and Your Friends)
Imagine that you had the resources and influence sufficient to create a global pandemic, what would you need to do? How would you get started? And how best to turn it to your advantage and boost your profits?
We have the answers right here.
A simple 12 step plan.
1. Find some vague criteria for what constitutes the symptoms that you want people to look for. Anything subjective that a lot of people can identify with is ideal. Let us take memory problems and/or confusion + a few common ones from the Covid list. Tiredness, aches and pains are common and subjective enough. (For covid19 the symptoms are: fever, dry cough, tiredness. Less common symptoms: aches and pains, sore throat, diarrhoea, loss of taste or smell, a rash, or discolouration of fingers or toes)
It would be a good idea to take something that is very common in old people so that we can use death from old age as proof of the lethality of the new virus.
2. Then we would need something biological to test. Any RNA sequence would do, as long as it is not present in the whole population. If it were, someone might claim herd immunity very quickly. Actually it could be an RNA sequence that does not really exist in humans but something that could exist as contamination in labs, e.g. in dust or water.
That would be enough for a RT qPCR test to pick up as a false positive. Many RT PCRs have false positive rates of 3-5 % and that would be plenty to create a scare. (When it comes to Covid, the false positive rate is impossible to know for sure, since we don’t have a gold standard to check against, but for many other similar tests, the average false positive rate is over 3%. And different labs are testing for different sequences.
We can count on over-stressed labs to be more prone to contamination than labs taking part in research knowing they will be checked for accuracy, the ones that gave over 3% false positives. Maybe the error rate for the average stressed lab is as high as 8%. BMJ counts 5% as a reasonable estimate. With 8% we would have all positive tests in the US explained by false positives)
3. Then we are all set to go. We just have to claim that we have discovered a new cluster of symptoms and that is related to a new RNA sequence. It starts with memory loss, and confusion. In other words this is a neurotoxic virus, and it leads to death in all the ways old people can die, by strokes, heart attacks, pneumonia, kidney failure, sepsis, organ failure, dehydration.
It doesnt matter if the patient was close to deaths door anyway, because of existing problems. We can always claim that without our new virus, they would not have died. Who could counter that?( just like Covid; People die from all kinds of disorders that they already had before the got the Covid test).
4. By some miracle we have already discovered exactly the virus that is responsible among the millions of different viruses that exist in any cubic centimeter of air. So we already have a RT PCR test read to go. This makes us look like very competent researchers. Of course we have bought stock in the major testing labs ahead of time.
We’ve bought stocks in the biggest vaccine manufacturers also of course. That will be the biggest money maker finally, hopefully for years since it will be difficult to get antibodies to something that doesn’t really exist.
5. So now we just have to spread the news that a new deadly pandemic is spreading all over the world, and every country has to start testing. We can count on the 5% hypochondriacs in the general population to come forth to be tested first.
It will always take some time for each country to get started ramping up their testing, so the graphs are guaranteed to look exponential in the beginning.
6. All you need now is for people to bring their old and confused elderly in for testing, and with 5% false positives, we will soon have most hospital beds filled with old sick confused patients.
We can count on doctors to treat them aggressively. Most of these old people will be on a coctail of drugs already, so adding a few more drugs as “heroic treatment” will be sure to push them over the edge.
Many will have pneumonia from the seasonal flu, so we can just prolongue this by putting them on ventilators. Then they will die a month later and we can say it wasn’t the flu since the flu season should have stopped a month earlier.
7. The graphs of numbers tested positive will be exponential in the beginning, but flatten off as the testers reach their max level. After some time the lab technicians will be exhausted and tend to become sloppy, the pressure for testing will be relentless and the labs will get dirtier and dirtier, and we will get higher and higher false-positive rates.
Usually the media will be satisfied with reporting just the number of positive tests, but in case anybody should think of checking proportion of positive tests compared to total number of tests, they would get higher number each week because of overworked, error prone lab workers.
Eventually, society will run out of hypochondriacs who will come for tests voluntarily, and many will have understood that should they test positive, they will be put together with really sick people, unprotected, since they all have the same virus…So the curves will flatten and start going down.
8. If you want to destroy the economy during the pandemic, you will get some programmer to make a prediction of millions of deaths (actually 70 million die every year anyway, so that is not really difficult) if we don’t lock down society.
We just have to scare them to lock down right before the curve flattens (when we are running out of the 5% hypochondriacs) and all the politicians will think they saved their country.
9. Just for fun, to see how strangely we could make gullible people act, we could invent different strategies for protection. Social distancing can look really funny in a supermarket, and all the original ways of saluting is interesting , leg touching elbow touching (even if we cough in our elbows now).
We could make a lot of money on masks, gloves and sanitisers too.
10. In order to make money on vaccines, we will start testing antibodies. Here the false-positive error rate is even greater, so we may easily get 10% with antibodies just from false positives. But on retest, we will statistically get only one percent testing positive if we test the same people.
That means that we can claim that we will need many boosters of the vaccine. In order to maximise the profit, we may put something in the vaccine that makes people sick and then we can cure them with a very expensive drug produced by a company we have already invested in. But to be sure maximum number of countries will pay almost any price for the vaccine, we have to wait until they are really desperate.
11. We can always count on several waves of the virus since the common flu and colds will come every year and kill hundreds of thousands like every year, and 3-10% of them will test false positive for our virus every time.
So we have a fantastic moneymaker for years: Expensive tests, expensive drugs, and expensive vaccines for 7 billion people every year.
12. We can count on doctors being sure that they are right in all they do. They will counter each other in every turn, and since there is no real new disease to cure, the research will run into endless blind alleys. This will prime all doctors for accepting a vaccine.
We just have to make sure there is no cheap effective drug commonly available. If so, we can always pay some doctors to make up some numbers to publish (like the fake negative Hydroxychloroquine research in the Lancet).
- Goldman CEO David Solomon Tries For Second Time In 3 Years To Sell $25 Million Aspen Mansion
Goldman CEO David Solomon Tries For Second Time In 3 Years To Sell $25 Million Aspen Mansion
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 22:20Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon is hoping to “sell the rip” in the suburban real estate market that has taken place as wealthy families move further out of major U.S. cities.
The investment banking CEO, who doubles as a nightclub DJ, is attempting to sell his massive estate in Aspen for the second time in 3 years.
The property was built to look like a typical log cabin, but features enormous outsized windows that open up to the view of “sweeping vistas”.
The 83 acre home has an “estimated value of $25 million” according to Bloomberg. Solomon has been speaking to potential buyers over the course of the summer, according to the report.
The property is 13,000 square feet and was completed in 2009 after Solomon purchased it in 2005 for $4 million. It boasts 7 full bathrooms and two half baths.
The property’s listing in 2017 called the house both “classy” and “comfortable”. It also has a cinema, pool, sauna and hot tub.
As we noted, Solomon is having his second go at trying to sell the property – recall, he tried to sell his home for $36 million back in 2017. Perhaps he is hoping to take advantage of a real estate market that is seeing an exodus from cities and crowded areas as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
This shift seems to have lifted property values in Aspen. Bloomberg noted that the “dollar value of single-family home sales in Aspen surged 440% in August from a year earlier”.
Solomon was unable to find buyers at the $36 million listed price in 2017.
Perhaps with trillions of dollars in PPP money floating around the nation, he’ll have better luck this time.
- How Much Money Do Communications Majors Make?
How Much Money Do Communications Majors Make?
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 22:00Submitted by Priceonomics,
For those who are considering a career in communications, a key question to understand is how much money you’ll be making when you graduate. Furthermore, will that salary be sufficient to pay for the debt involved with getting your degree?
While predicting one’s future income is subject to uncertainty, especially in the current economic climate, there is luckily a lot of data out there. Along with Priceonomics customer MastersInCommunications.org, we analyzed and collected data by the US Department of Education about how much money communications majors earn.
Using data from the College Scorecard, a data resource about the earnings and debt of graduates of US colleges, we looked at which undergraduate communications programs produced the graduates with the best and worst financial prospects.
We found that communications majors from Georgia Tech and the University of Pennsylvania have the highest earnings while Shaw University has the lowest-earning graduates. Colleges like Devry and Grambling State University produce communications graduates with the highest debt while the City University of New York (CUNY) has graduated with the lowest levels of debt.
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Before beginning the analysis of colleges where communications graduates earn the most and least, let’s look at the overall data. According to the most recent data from the US Department of Education College Scorecard, the median college graduate with a communications degree earns $31,400, approximately the same as the median US worker.
Not all communications programs are created equal, however. And you have ample reason to consider an online masters in communication program. Below shows the distribution of undergraduate communications programs segmented by median annual salary:
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55.6% of graduates from college communications programs earn between $30K and $40K per year. In total, nearly 95% of communications majors earn under $40K per year. No undergraduate institution reported communications majors earning above $60K per year. Which colleges produce communications majors that earn the most and least? The following chart shows the schools reporting the highest median earnings among their undergraduates who studied communication:
Communications majors from Georgia Institute of Technology earn the most in the country with a median salary of $57,600 per year. In second place is the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school where graduates earn just under $50,000 per year. In third place is the Mitchell Technical Institute, a technical college in South Dakota.
Communication graduates from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina earn just $14,900 per year, the lowest in the country. SUNY Broome and Technical Career Institute graduates earn the second and third lowest salaries respectively.
When it comes to debt, which schools communication graduates emerge with the highest and lowest burdens?
Communications majors from Devry University emerge with $42,430 in debt, the highest in the country. Grambling State and Lane College communications majors also graduate with more than $40,000 in debt. On the other hand, a number of community colleges graduate communications majors with less than $10,000 in debt.
Having high levels of debt can be a problem, but that can be made up for with having a high income. Which colleges produce communications majors with high debt to income ratios and which ones come out with high incomes relative to their debt? The chart below shows the schools with the best and worst debt to income ratios (Total Debt / Annual Income):
Some of the schools whose students graduate with debt also have the least favorable debt to income ratios. Grambling State University and Shaw University produce communications graduates with the highest debt to income ratios by a considerable margin. On the other hand, schools that produce graduates with low debt relative to their income are a mix of community colleges (CUNY), lower-priced private schools (Brigham Young), higher-priced private schools (Cornell), and state schools (University of California). For a communication major who looks to graduate with a strong income relative to debt, all types of schools may fit the bill.
- Soybean Futures Hit 27-Month High On Increased Chinese Demand
Soybean Futures Hit 27-Month High On Increased Chinese Demand
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 21:40CBoT soybean futures entered a new bull market in September, soaring 21% in the last five months, with most of the gains (+18%) over the previous 23 sessions as strong demand from China comes online.
According to Reuters, there’s a lot to be excited about in soybean fundamentals as the demand outlook story brightens with China increasing soybean purchases:
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed private sales of 327,000 tonnes of U.S. soybeans to China. The USDA has announced U.S. soy sales to China in each of the last nine business days.
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A Farm Futures producers’ survey conducted in late July and released on Wednesday projected a 4.9% rise in U.S. 2021 soybean seedings and a 0.3% drop in corn acres.
Agriculture leaders, including Jim Sutter, CEO of the U.S. Soybean Export Council, told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Sept. 10 that “outlook demand for the next six months or so is pretty good.”
Sutter said, “U.S. farmers are feeling much more optimistic than they said, a year or even six months ago,” adding that China has been buying U.S. soybeans as part of the phase one trade deal signed between both countries in January.
“Now, as we get into the time of the year, when China is more typically purchasing soybeans from the northern hemisphere — the United States in particular — we are seeing them make significant purchases … we have a record amount of new crop sales open to China at this time, so we are thinking that it is a successful trade deal,” Sutter said.
China is committed to buying $12.5 billion of U.S. farm products under phase one agreement, with another $19.5 billion in 2021.
“I continue to believe that the phase one agreement is very important and is being executed well,” said Sutter.
We noted, in late August, the “prospects of strong Chinese demand pushed Chicago soybean futures prices to a seven-month high this week.”
“China has been stepping up purchases of American agricultural goods since the end of April, with soybean sales for delivery next season currently running at their highest level for this time of year since 2013.”
And of particular note is the fact that this surge in prices – on apparent demand – is against the typical seasonal pattern in soybean price action…
While China’s demand for U.S. soybeans appears to be increasing, partly because the country’s hog herd numbers are recovering from the African swine fever outbreak, overall trade deal commitments under the phase one deal will likely not be met this year.
China’s increased soybean purchases is good news for President Trump ahead of the presidential elections on Nov. 03.
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- Biden's Gun Control Claims At Odds With Crime Stats
Biden’s Gun Control Claims At Odds With Crime Stats
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 21:20Authored by John Lott Jr. via RealClearPolitics.com,
After two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies were shot and critically wounded on Saturday, Joe Biden warned, “Weapons of war have no place in our communities.” And within just hours of the attack, Biden tweeted in praise of the original bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, which lasted from 1994 to 2004. “These bans saved lives, and Congress should never have let them expire,” he wrote.
A handgun, not an assault rifle, was used to shoot the deputies. But it seems that Biden never misses an opportunity to deceptively complain about “weapons of war.”
In the past, Biden and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris have applied this label to AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. But these guns function exactly as small-game, semi-automatic hunting rifles. Though it looks like the M16 machine gun made famous in the Vietnam War, no military in the world uses the AR-15.
Gun control advocates commonly pose the question:
“Why do people need a semi-automatic AR-15 to go out and kill deer?”
The answer is simple: It is a hunting rifle. It has just been made to look like a military weapon. Semi-automatic weapons are also used to protect people and save lives. Single-shot rifles that require you to physically reload the gun may not do people a lot of good when their first shot misses or fails to stop an attacker. Or, for that matter, if they are facing multiple assailants.
What about Biden’s claims that the assault weapons ban saved lives?
Since the ban expired in September 2004, murder and overall violent crime rates have fallen. In 2003, the last full year before the law expired, the U.S. murder rate was 5.7 per 100,000 people. The murder rate never returned to that level, and fell to 5.0 per 100,000 people by 2018.
If the ban had any effect, one would think that it would reduce the number of murders committed with rifles. But the percentage of firearm murders that were committed with rifles was at 4.8% prior to the ban starting in September 1994, and averaged 4.9% from 1995 to 2004. In the 10 years after the ban, the figure averaged just 3.9%. This pattern is the opposite of what gun control advocates predicted.
Many academic studies have examined the original federal assault weapons ban.
They consistently found no statistically significant impact on mass public shootings or any other type of crime. Clinton administration-funded research by criminology professors Chris Koper and Jeff Roth confirmed as much in a 1997 report for the National Institute of Justice.
“The evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect (i.e., that the effect was different from zero),” they wrote.
Koper and Roth suggested at the time that it might be possible to find a benefit after the ban had been in effect for more years. In 2004, they published a follow-up NIJ study with fellow criminologist Dan Woods.
“We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” they concluded.
“And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”
Gun control advocates often cite work by Louis Klarevas, but his non-peer-reviewed methodologies are highly flawed. For one thing, Klarevas looks only at the total number of mass public shootings, whether they were committed with assault weapons or with other types of guns. While the share of mass public shootings that utilized assault weapons fell during the ban, it fell even more sharply in the 10 years after the ban ended in 2004. And any reduction that the ban caused in attacks with assault weapons may simply have meant more attacks with other types of guns.
Biden’s tweet also touted large-capacity ammunition magazine bans. Contrary to common perception, ordinary hunting rifles can hold just as large a magazine as “assault weapons.” Any gun that can hold a magazine can hold one of any size. That is true for handguns as well as rifles. Magazines are basically metal boxes with springs, and are easy to make and virtually impossible to stop criminals from obtaining. The 1994 legislation banned magazines that could hold more than 10 bullets, yet had no effect on crime rates.
Biden is making it clear that gun control is near the top of his agenda. So it’s little wonder that gun control zealot Michael Bloomberg just pledged to spend at least $100 million in Florida alone on behalf of the Biden campaign. But no matter how much Biden wishes it were true, guns bans won’t make American’s safer. With Democrats promising to eliminate the Senate filibuster if they win, gun bans will be an integral part of the radical agenda that they will quickly enact. To his credit, Biden is not hiding it.
- World Bank Warns Recovery Could Take "Five Years"
World Bank Warns Recovery Could Take “Five Years”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 21:00Global economic activity around the world has stabilized in mid-September, though far below pre-COVID-19 levels as recoveries risk reversing if monetary and fiscal stimulus is not continued at rates seen in the first half of 2020. We noted Wednesday, a new OECD report offered some hope the global downturn is not as severe as previously thought but is still viewed as an “unprecedented” decline.
We also noted the OECD report is problematic for policy-makers who have unleashed easy-money policies during the pandemic to artificially inflate economies and boost risk assets, as policy support in the second half of the year might not be as great as what was seen earlier in the year (as is currently playing out in Washington with the prospect of a slimmed-down stimulus bill getting slimmer).
So with waning support from central banks and fiscal stimulus from governments, the quick rebound seen in the global economy has likely stalled, and the shape of the recovery will no longer resemble a “V” but more of a “W” or “U” or “L.”
For more color on the shape of the global recovery, or rather perhaps how long the recovery will last, chief economist of the World Bank, Carmen Reinhart, warned Thursday, a full recovery could take upwards of five years, reported El País.
“There will probably be a quick rebound as all the restriction measures linked to lockdowns are lifted, but a full recovery will take as much as five years,” Reinhart said, while speaking at a conference in Madrid, Spain.
Carmen Reinhardt, Chief Economist at the World Bank Reinhart said (as quoted by Reuters), “the pandemic-caused recession will last longer in some countries than in others and will increase inequalities as the poorest will be harder hit by the crisis in rich countries and the poorest countries will be harder hit than richer countries.”
“Central banks have tried to provide liquidity to avoid affecting more households. But as much as central banks give support, there are businesses that will not return, there are closed restaurants or stores that will not reopen, there are homes that will take a long time to find employment, there are airlines or hotels that will not survive a long period without normal mobility. There are going to be a lot of bankruptcies: if you look at the credit rating agencies, S&P, Moody’s, Fitch, the amount of reduction in credit quality that has been seen since the beginning of the year, both at the corporate and sovereign levels, has been a record. And central banks are not all-powerful either: no matter how much credit support is given, at some point you have to face the deterioration in the financial system, and that is not a criticism: it is inevitable because of the deep drop in the economy. Under these conditions, we have to think about cuts that allow new credits for recovery,” she said.
She added, “this crisis did not start as a financial crisis. But given the depth of this decline we are experiencing, it is turning into a financial crisis. For very obvious reasons: many households have lost a job that they will not get back, they have difficulties in paying their debts, many businesses have closed their doors and will not reopen them, the shopping centers are paralyzed and half empty.”
This comes as 29.7 million people around the world have been infected with COVID-19 and 938,820 have died, according to the latest Johns Hopkins University figures. High frequency data (via Bloomberg) is showing the recovery around the world has stabilized but risks a reversal if more policy support, if that is from central banks or governments is not seen.
Readers should be asking: What happens when Wall Street misreads the shape of the recovery?
To answer that, Gary Shilling, the president of A. Gary Shilling & Co., told CNBC’s Elizabeth Schulze in a July interview that once investors realize the shape of the recovery is an “L” rather than the overhyped “V,” it would trigger a 1930s stock market decline.
- "Everyone Involved Should Face Jail Time": Trump Jr. Slams Nashville Officials For Concealing Low COVID-19 Numbers
“Everyone Involved Should Face Jail Time”: Trump Jr. Slams Nashville Officials For Concealing Low COVID-19 Numbers
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 20:44Donald Trump Jr. has weighed in over Nashville officials concealing the low number of COVID-19 cases in bars and restaurants.
In a Thursday tweet, the president’s son said “The Dem Mayor of Nashville KNOWINGLY LIED ABOUT COVID DATA to justify shutting down bars & restaurants, killing countless jobs & small businesses in the process,” adding “Everyone involved should face jail time. How many other Dem run cities is this happening in?”
The Dem Mayor of Nashville KNOWINGLY LIED ABOUT COVID DATA to justify shutting down bars & restaurants, killing countless jobs & small businesses in the process.
Everyone involved should face jail time. How many other Dem run cities is this happening in?https://t.co/8anzs5Jgba
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 17, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
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Leaked emails between the senior adviser to Nashville’s Mayor and a health department official reveal a disturbing effort to conceal extremely low coronavirus cases emanating from bars and restaurants, while the lion’s share of infections occurred in nursing homes and construction workers, according to WZTV Nashville.
On June 30th, contact tracing was giving a small view of coronavirus clusters. Construction and nursing homes causing problems more than a thousand cases traced to each category, but bars and restaurants reported just 22 cases.
Leslie Waller from the health department asks “This isn’t going to be publicly released, right? Just info for Mayor’s Office?“
“Correct, not for public consumption.” Writes senior advisor Benjamin Eagles. –WZTV
Four weeks later, Tennessean reporter Nate Rau asked the health department: “the figure you gave of “more than 80” does lead to a natural question: If there have been over 20,000 positive cases of COVID-19 in Davidson and only 80 or so are traced to restaurants and bars, doesn’t that mean restaurants and bars aren’t a very big problem?“
To which health department official Brian Todd scrambled for an answer – asking five health department officials: “Please advise how you respond. BT.”
The response – from an official whose name was omitted from the leaked email: “My two cents. We have certainly refused to give counts per bar because those numbers are low per site,” adding “We could still release the total though, and then a response to the over 80 could be “because that number is increasing all the time and we don’t want to say a specific number.””
According to a metro staff attorney asked by city councilmember Steve Glover to verify the authenticity of the emails, “I was able to get verification from the Mayor’s Office and the Department of Health that these emails are real.”
Glover told WZTV: “They are fabricating information. They’ve blown there entire credibility Dennis. Its gone i don’t trust a thing they say going forward …nothing.”
Glover says he has been contacted by an endless stream of downtown bartenders, waitresses, and restaurant owners. Why would they not release these numbers?
“We raised taxes 34 percent and put hundreds literally thousands of people out of work that are now worried about losing their homes their apartments etcetera and we did it on bogus data. That should be illegal!” he says.
Again, we weren’t told by the mayor’s office this wasn’t true. We were told to file a freedom of information act request. –WZTV
- Doug Casey: Six Reasons Why The Wrong Party Will Win The Most Important US Election Since 1860
Doug Casey: Six Reasons Why The Wrong Party Will Win The Most Important US Election Since 1860
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 20:40Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,
The upcoming election may be the most important in US history. At least as important as that of 1860, which led directly to the War Between the States.
In 2016 I believed Trump would win and placed a money bet on him.
This time I’m not so sure, despite Trump’s “incumbent advantage” and the fact the Democrats could hardly have picked two worse candidates.
I see at least six reasons why this is true, namely:
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The Virus
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The economy
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Demographics
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Moral collapse of the old order
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The Deep State
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Cheating
The consequences of a Democrat victory will be momentous.
Let’s look at why it’s likely.
1. The Virus
Despite the fact COVID is only marginally more deadly than the annual flu, and the fact it’s only a danger to the very old (median death age 80), the hysteria around it is changing the nature of life itself. It’s proven much less serious than the Asian flu of the late ’60s or the Hong Kong flu of the late ’50s. And not even remotely comparable to the Spanish flu of 1918-19. None of those had any discernable effect on the economy or politics. COVID is a trivial medical event but has created a gigantic psychological hysteria.
The virus hysteria is, however, a disaster from Trump’s point of view for several reasons. None of them have anything to do with his “handling” of the virus—apart from the fact that medical issues should be a matter between a patient and his doctor, not bureaucrats and politicians.
First, the virus hysteria is severely limiting the number and size of Trump’s rallies, which he relies on to keep enthusiasm up.
Second, more people are staying at home and watching television than ever before. However, unless they glue their dial to Fox, they’ll gravitate towards the mainstream media, which is stridently anti-Trump. People who are on the fence (and most voters are always in the wishy-washy middle) will mostly hear authoritative-sounding anti-Trump talking heads on television, and they’ll be influenced away from Trump.
Third, older people have by far the heaviest voter turnout, but roughly 80% of the casualties of the virus are elderly. And over 90% of those deaths are related to some other condition. Be that as it may, fear will make older people less likely to vote in this election. The COVID hysteria will still be with us in November. Older people tend to be culturally conservative and are most likely Trumpers.
Fourth, in today’s highly politicized world, the government is supposed to be in charge of everything. Despite the fact there are thousands of viruses, and they’ve been with us thousands of years, this one is blamed on the current government. Boobus americanus will tend to vote accordingly.
2. The Economy
Keeping his voters at home is one thing. But the effects the hysteria is having on the economy are even more important. The effect of COVID on the economy should be trivial since only a small fraction of the relatively few Covid deaths are among people who are economically active.
Presidents always take credit when the economy is good and are berated when it’s bad on their watch, regardless of whether they had anything to do with it. If the economy is still bad in November—and I’ll wager it’s going to be much worse, despite the Fed creating trillions of new dollars, and the government handouts—many people will reflexively vote against Trump.
In February, before the lockdown, there were about 3.2 million people collecting unemployment. Now, there are about 30 million. So it seems we have over 30 million working-age people who are . . . displaced. That doesn’t count part-time workers, who aren’t eligible for unemployment but are no longer working.
The supplementary benefits have ended. If they return, it will be at lower levels. The artificial good times brought on by free money will end too. It will be blamed on the Republicans.
Worse, the public has come to the conclusion that a guaranteed annual income works. This virus hysteria has provided a kind of test for both Universal Basic Income and Modern Monetary Theory—helicopter money. So far, anyway, it seems you really can get something for nothing.
An important note here: Trump—whatever his virtues—is an economic ignoramus. He’s supported both helicopter money and artificially low-interest rates since he’s been in office. But especially now, because he knows it’s all over if today’s financial house of cards collapses on his watch.
I’ll wager that, out of the 160 million work-force Americans, 30 million will still be out of work by voting day. The recognition that the country is in a depression will sink in. The virus hysteria was just the pin—or sledgehammer, perhaps—that broke the bubble. But that’s another story. What’s for sure is that the average American will look for somebody to blame. As things get seriously bad, people will want to change the system itself, as was true in the 1930s.
The only economic bright spot for Trump is the stock market. But it’s at bubble levels. Not because the economy is doing well, but because of the avalanche of money being printed. Where it is in November is a question of how much more money the Fed will print, and how much of it flows into the stock market. Even then, there’s an excellent chance it could collapse between now and the election.
For reasons I’ve detailed in the past, the economy is now entering the trailing edge of a gigantic financial and economic hurricane. The Greater Depression will be much different, longer-lasting, and nastier than the unpleasantness of 1929-1946. And people vote their pocketbook. Bill Clinton was right when he said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” If stocks fall, it will compound this effect. A high stock market just gives the illusion of prosperity. And, at least while stocks are up, contributes to the atmosphere of class warfare. Poor people don’t own stocks.
3. Demographics
Since the gigantic political, economic, and social crisis we’re in will be even more obvious come November, people will want a radical change. Since that—plus lots of free stuff—is what the Democrats are promising, they’re likely to win. But there are other factors.
The last election was close enough, but now, four years later, there are four more cohorts of kids that have gone through high school and college and have been indoctrinated by their uniformly left-wing teachers. They’re going to vote Democrat overwhelmingly.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and people like her, are both the current reality and the future of the Democratic Party—and of the US itself. She knows how to capitalize on envy and resentment. The Black Lives Matter and Antifa movements have added the flavor of a race war to the mix. Racial antagonism will become more pronounced as whites lose their majority status over the next 30 years.
Nobody, except for a few libertarians and conservatives, is countering the purposefully destructive ideas AOC represents. But they have a very limited audience and not much of a platform. Arguing for sound money and limited government makes them seem like Old Testament prophets to Millenials. Collectivism and statism are overwhelming the values of individualism and liberty.
It’s exactly the type of thing the Founders tried to guard against by restricting the vote to property owners over 21, going through the Electoral College. Now, welfare recipients who are only 18 can vote, and the Electoral College is toothless.
For the last couple of generations, everybody who’s gone to college has been indoctrinated with leftist ideas. Almost all of the professors hold these ideas—as well as high school and grade school instructors. They place an intellectual patina on top of emotional, fantasy-driven leftist ideas.
When the economy collapses in earnest, everybody will blame capitalism. Because Trump is rich, he’s incorrectly associated with capitalism. The country—especially the young, the poor, and the non-white—will look to the government to “do something.” They see the government as a cornucopia.
A majority of Millennials are in favor of socialism, as are so-called People of Color. By 2050, whites will be a minority in the US. A straw in the wind is that a large majority of the people who commit suicide each year are middle-class white males—essentially, Trump supporters. The demographic handwriting is on the wall. Trump’s election in 2016 was an anomaly. No more than a Last Hurrah.
4. Moral Collapse
There’s now a lot of antagonism toward both free minds and free markets. A majority of Americans appear to actually support BLM, an openly Marxist movement. Forget about free minds—someone might be offended, and you’ll be pilloried by the mob. Forget about free markets—they’re blamed for all the economic problems, even though it’s the lack of them that caused the problem. The idea of capitalism is now considered undefendable.
Widespread dissatisfaction with the system is obviously bad for the Republicans and good for the Democrats, who promote themselves as the party of change.
It used to be pretty simple—the Republicans and the Democrats were just two sides of the same coin, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Traditionally, one promoted the warfare state more, the other the welfare state. But it was mostly rhetoric; they were pretty collegial. Now, both the welfare and the warfare state have been accepted as part of the cosmic firmament by both parties. The difference between them is now about cultural issues. Except that polite disagreement has turned into visceral hatred.
The Dems at least stand for some ideas—although they’re all bad ideas. The Republicans have never stood for any principles; they just said the Dems wanted too much socialism, too fast, which is why they were always perceived—correctly—as hypocrites. Antagonism between the right and the left is no longer political or economic—it’s cultural. That’s much more serious.
Look at the 20 Democratic candidates that were in the primary debates last summer. They were all radical collectivists, dedicated statists. The Republicans were all—with one exception—mealy-mouthed nonentities.
Unlike Trump and the Reps, the Dems actually have a core of philosophical beliefs—and that counts during chaos. It doesn’t matter that they’re irrational or evil. People want to believe in something. The Dems give them a secular religion that promises a better world. The Reps only represent the withering status quo—which is not very appealing.
There’s no political salvation coming from the Republican party. Like Trump himself, it doesn’t have any core principles. It just reacts to the Dems and proposes similar, but less radical alternatives to their ideas. It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s only capable of putting forward empty suits, pure establishment figures like Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, or Bush. Or a nobody like Pence. That’s a formula for disaster in today’s demographic and cultural environment.
Incidentally, I’m not a fan of Trump, per se. He’s an opportunist who flies by the seat of his pants. He’s essentially an American Peron, whose economic policies are disjointed and inconsistent. His foreign policies are dangerous, provoking the Iranians and the Russians and starting a cold war with China that could easily spin out of control and turn into a major hot war.
But on the bright side, he’s a cultural conservative. And that’s why people support him. He wants to see the US return to the golden days of yesteryear, the world of Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie, and Harriet, and Father Knows Best. We’d all like to see domestic tranquility and rising prosperity. But that’s not the world we’re going to be living in, not just for 2020, but the whole decade.
For years, I’ve joked that I planned on watching riots on my widescreen from a secure location, not out my front window. Things have now become so predictable that when I turn on the news, I kill the audio and just put the Stone’s “Street Fighting Man” on a continuous loop.
Anyway, conservatives are completely demoralized. They’re grasping at cultural and moral straws from a bygone era. It’s impossible to defend being a white person anymore; propaganda has made it shameful to be white. If you object to the race-baiters, you’ll be shouted down in the media—especially by white “liberals.” Everything you grew up with and thought was part of the cosmic firmament is being washed away as unworthy.
As an example, recently, in Stone Mountain, Georgia, 1,000 uniformed, armed black men went out of their way to say that they were looking for a fight. “Where are the rednecks that want to fight with us?”
It would have been out of the question at any time in the past, but no rednecks showed up to the party. That’s partially because they’ve been psychologically cowed, and partially because they recognize that if they did when law enforcement arrived, they’d be the ones that were prosecuted, not the black men.
It’s a complete inversion of what would have been the case only a generation ago. Then the blacks would have been too psychologically cowed to turn up for a fight, and the legal system would have railroaded them.
Just to be clear, I’m opposed to any kind of identity politics, regardless of the group. The point is that there’s been a sea change in mass psychology.
The demoralization of the ancien regime is why the destroyers of scores of statues of national heroes, from Columbus on down, are not being prosecuted. Nor do any citizens come out to oppose them. It’s a matter of psychology. Whites and conservatives no longer believe in themselves. When that’s true, it’s game over. Yes, I know it’s not true of all of them—but I believe it’s a fair generalization.
This was spelled out very presciently by late Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent who fled to Canada in 1970. Bezmenov stated in the mid-1980s that there were four stages of collapse: Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, and Normalization. Demoralization takes decades. Bezemov said in 1985 that the process of demoralization—an undermining of a target nation’s values that makes it ripe for revolutionary takeover—was “basically completed already” in the United States. Destabilization, which we’ve seen, especially since the crisis of 2008, is now reaching a climax. I believe a Crisis that changes everything is coming in November.
5. The Deep State
The president is important. But the fact of the matter is that the Deep State—which is to say the top senators and congressmen, heads of the Praetorian agencies, generals, top corporate guys, top academic guys, top media people—really runs the country.
Since the Deep State supports Biden and despises Trump, they’ll do everything in their power to defeat him. You’ve seen this with numerous commercials that don’t sell products so much as promote Woke and SJW ideology. Almost all corporations, universities, sports franchises, and media now make diversity hiring and social activism high priorities.
The 2016 election took them by surprise; they didn’t think it was possible. This time they’re going to be organized, and the Deep State is going to be working actively against Trump’s reelection. Whether it’s through active “de-platforming” by Google, Twitter, and Facebook, or the more subtle influence of how they present things, this time, they’re going all out to derail Trump. They have immense power and can use it in many ways.
They didn’t do much in 2016 because it hardly seemed worth the trouble; the election was thought to be in the bag for Hillary. This time it’s going to be different.
6. Cheating
The first five factors are important; they represent megatrends, tidal size influences. But let’s be candid. This election is going to hinge on who cheats the best. And the Democrats have, over the years, developed far greater expertise in cheating than the Republicans. I grew up in Chicago, and it was a joke even then. Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” wasn’t written for the kind of people who vote Republican.
For one thing, there’s now an emphasis on mail-in votes, which makes it easier to cheat. You can register dead people as voters. You can register your dog as a voter. You could probably register 50 million Nigerian princes and get away with it. If the fraud is ever even discovered, it won’t be until long after the election. Which means it’s likely to be a contested election long after Nov 3rd.
That’s only part of it, though. A high percentage of voting machines are computerized. Fraud by hacking voting machines is apparently easy to do—and it’s pretty untraceable. It’s just a matter of planning and boldness.
One of the consequences of these widely acknowledged dysfunctions is to delegitimize the whole idea of voting. That’s possibly not a bad thing. Mass democracy inevitably degrades into a system where the poorer citizens vote themselves benefits at the expense of the middle class. Basically, mass democracy is mob rule dressed in a coat and tie. But if the populace loses faith in “democracy” during a serious economic crisis—like this one—they’re going to look for a strong man to straighten things out. The US will look more and more like Argentina. Or worse.
Remember what Stalin said: “Who votes doesn’t count. What counts is who counts the votes.”
But what about the idea of democracy itself? What does it matter the US starts to resemble a Third World country if that’s the will of the people? I’ve got to say that I don’t believe in democracy as a method of government. I understand how shocking that is to hear. Let me explain.
There’s something to be said for a few people who share traditions and culture and generally agree on how the world works, voting on who will speak for them when it’s appropriate. That’s one thing—and it can make sense. But it’s very different from a gigantic agglomeration of very different, even antagonistic, people fighting for control and power.
Winston Churchill said two things about democracy that are apposite.
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One is that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” I would argue that’s simply not true. The alternatives are worth discussing.
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The other thing that he said was, “The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” He’s absolutely right in that quip.
Getting back to cheating: Will foreign interference in US elections be part of the cheating? Kind of. There already are millions of foreign citizens—illegal aliens orchestrated by the left—interfering directly in the outcome by voting. That’s much more of a change than some random Russians making political comments on Facebook allegedly during 2016. Although the Russian thing isn’t even a tempest in a toilet bowl. So what if some Russian kids played around on their computers to see what they could do? It was totally trivial and meaningless.
In a way, it just proves the old saying, turnabout is fair play. For many years, the US government has cultivated regime change in foreign countries by interfering very overtly in their elections.
Why should Americans act surprised if it happens in the US?
A Counter Argument
What are the chances Trump could win, despite the six points I’ve just mentioned? There are two factors I can think of.
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One is that the Dems may have overplayed their hand by first supporting, and now not denouncing the “mostly peaceful protest” (aka, riots), Defund the Police, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the like. People can approve or not—but they don’t want to be scared or have their lives disrupted. It may send the silent majority to the Republicans.
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Second is the immense enthusiasm of Trump’s supporters. When he goes somewhere, they disrupt their lives and line-up, waiting for hours to get into the venue. It seems Biden and Harris can barely fill a coffee shop. Millions of middle Americans support Trump as if their lives depended on it. And in a way, they do.
If Trump loses the election—or more exactly, if the Democrats win—it is, in fact, going to change the nature of the US drastically and permanently. Unfortunately, that’s going to be the case even if Trump wins.
Next week I’ll follow up with what’s going to happen after the election. Stay tuned.
* * *
Disturbing economic, political, and social trends are already in motion and now accelerating at breathtaking speed. The risks that lie ahead are too big and dangerous to ignore. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive an economic collapse. It will help you understand what is unfolding right before our eyes and what you should do so you don’t get caught in the crosshairs. Click here to download the PDF now.
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- Black Lives Matter Protesters In Pittsburgh Charged After Harassing, Cursing Out Diners
Black Lives Matter Protesters In Pittsburgh Charged After Harassing, Cursing Out Diners
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 20:20Three Black Lives Matter protesters in Pittsburgh are now facing charges from police after they were identified as people involved in viral videos that showed them cursing out diners at an outdoor restaurant. One protester even chugged a person’s beer, according to Fox News.
Pittsburgh police brought the charges on Monday against Shawn Green, Kenneth McDowell and Monique Craft for the incident that took place at a restaurant called Sienna Mercato.
“Activist” Monique Craft shown chugging someone’s beer In video of the incident, Craft can be seen wearing a shirt that says “Nazi Lives Don’t Matter”, walking up to an older white couple, grabbing their beer off the table, and chugging it. That should help move along race relations in the country! Great thinking, Monique.
For his/her efforts (Craft is non-binary), Monique was issued a summons for theft, conspiracy and simple trespass. Craft told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the video “only shows one side of the story”.
McDowell – who screamed obscenities at diners using a megaphone – was charged with possessing instruments of a crime, conspiracy, harassment and two counts of disorderly conduct. A complaint against McDowell says he swore at diners and gave them the middle finger.
You can watch video of the “protest” from CBS here:
- How COVID-19 Is Transforming The World's Sovereign Wealth Funds
How COVID-19 Is Transforming The World’s Sovereign Wealth Funds
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 20:00Authored by Oxford Business Group via SafeHaven.com,
The IMF predicts that the global economy will contract by 4.9% this year, down from growth of 2.9% in 2019, while the World Bank has forecast a fall of 5.2%, the worst contraction since the Second World War.
With national economies suffering from revenue shortages, and populations in need of additional government support to mitigate the impacts of the crisis, SWFs have in many cases seen their roles transformed.
As a result of reduced income, many governments have been tapping SWFs to help balance budgets and provide stimulus to businesses or households.
This development has changed the conventional wisdom surrounding SWFs, which have combined assets estimated of around $6trn globally.
Before the pandemic the funds were seen as having limited – or a total lack of – liabilities. However, Covid-19 has seen SWFs called on to meet the implicit liabilities associated with economic shocks.
Among some SWFs, there is a growing realisation that they are no longer standalone institutions, but rather fiscal policy tools that are fully integrated into the macroeconomic management of their respective countries.
This shift has also brought about significant challenges for SWFs as they adapt to the new economic environment.
For commodity-based funds, many of which are underpinned by significant hydrocarbons exposure, the reduction in economic activity associated with Covid-19 has combined with persistently low oil prices to create twin challenges.
Meanwhile, for funds primarily based on trade surpluses, the deceleration in global trade and subsequent logistical and transport challenges have created similar hurdles.
Asset sell-off
Covid-19 has forced many of the less liquid SWFs to offload assets to generate cash.
The trend is expected to be particularly prevalent in countries with a heavy reliance on oil revenue.
For example, in Norway, where the government expects net cash flows from petroleum activities to fall by 62% this year to the lowest level since 1999, the country is expected to withdraw some $37bn in assets from its SWF, more than four times the previous record of $9.7bn in 2016.
This development is also expected to affect the Middle East, where funds will be called on to bridge fiscal deficits, which international credit ratings agency Fitch expects to constitute between 10% and 20% of GDP this year.
In Abu Dhabi, where the deficit is forecast to total 12% of GDP, the agency expects a $20bn drawdown on sovereign savings, while in Oman, tipped for a 19% fiscal deficit, analysts say as much as $8bn could be withdrawn from its SWFs.
In light of this, JP Morgan estimates that SWFs in the MENA region could dump up to $225bn in equities this year.
In addition to selling off assets to pay for budgetary spending, some SWFs have been called on to make other forms of investment.
In June Temasek, Singapore’s SWF, recapitalised domestic shipbuilding and repair conglomerate Sembcorp Marine with $1.5bn. This came after the fund channelled $13bn into flag carrier Singapore Airlines.
Such investment is a prime example of the increasing attention SWFs are paying to their home markets since the outbreak of the pandemic. While most investments remain international, domestic deals are increasing in size and frequency.
According to the International Forum of SWFs (IFSWF), domestic deals accounted for 21% of the total value of SWF investment in 2019, with this trend increasing over the past six months.
Opportunities amid disruption
While some funds have sought to offload assets, others are looking to take advantage of lower share prices during the pandemic.
Among them is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which – despite the downturn in the global hydrocarbons industry and its stated goal of spurring diversification – has recently made investments in international energy giants.
In April the PIF acquired around $1bn worth of stakes in European energy majors Royal Dutch Shell, Eni and Total, which was followed by a $200m investment in Norway’s Equinor.
The fund also acquired stakes in other sectors affected by the pandemic, including an 8.2% stake, valued at $369m, in US cruise ship operator Carnival, and a $300m investment in events company Live Nation.
The PIF is not the only active investor among SWFs in this difficult environment. According to data from capital markets data company PitchBook, SWFs poured $17bn into venture capital companies in the first half of the year, exceeding the 2019 full-year levels.
Chinese tech companies Tencent and Kuaishou were both significant beneficiaries, while Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company put $3bn into Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving technology arm.
Among some funds, there has been a broader shift towards tackling issues related to the pandemic.
“We reshuffled our priorities based on Covid-19,” Ayman Soliman, CEO of the Sovereign Fund of Egypt, told OBG.
“We looked at the issues that were emerging in the region – food security, medical security and medical supplies – and realised that these should be our top priority.”
Looking ahead
Although it can be difficult to assess the losses accrued by SWF portfolios since the outbreak of the pandemic given the opaque nature of their investments, in April JP Morgan estimated that funds would suffer total equity losses of around $1trn.
However, this recent contraction seems to be accelerating a pre-existing trend that has seen the amount of equity invested by SWFs fall from $54.3bn in 2017 to $35bn in 2019, according to the IFSWF.
In a report released in August, Bernardo Bortolotti and Veljko Fotak from the Sovereign Investment Lab, along with Chloe Hogg from the London School of Economics, wrote that “the golden age of SWFs is over”.
“Declining oil prices, mounting protectionism and increasing barriers to international capital flows have halted the spectacular rise of SWFs of the last two decades. The double whammy of the Covid-19 shock and of the new macroeconomic reality represents a quintessential challenge for an industry,” the trio wrote.
“Yet, with $6trn under management, SWFs remain major players in global finance and have the potential to mitigate some of the worst financial consequences of the current crisis.”
As countries recover from the economic recession, recent developments suggest the funds will be seen as a key tools in building resilience against future economic shocks.
- "Alone In The World": US Vows "Full" Iran Sanctions Snapback Begins Saturday Morning
“Alone In The World”: US Vows “Full” Iran Sanctions Snapback Begins Saturday Morning
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 19:40Another Iran showdown is coming at the United Nations at the end of this week after the United States finds itself isolated in claiming authority to impose ‘snapback’ sanctions on Iran:
Virtually alone in the world, the Trump administration will announce on Saturday that U.N. sanctions on Iran eased under the 2015 nuclear deal are back in force. But the other members of the U.N. Security Council, including U.S. allies, disagree and have vowed to ignore the step. That sets the stage for ugly confrontations as the world body prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary at a coronavirus-restricted General Assembly session next week.
On Wednesday the Trump administration pledged it will move to impose “full” US sanctions on any international entity or arms company doing deals with Iran.
Per the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal brokered under Obama, a 13-year old arms embargo on Iran is set to expire October 18 of this year.
The US failed in a recent bid weeks ago to get the UN Security Council to back its efforts to extend the embargo. On Aug. 20 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced at UN headquarters that the US will activate snap back sanctions, which even US allies say it has no authority to do, given Trump withdrew from the deal in May 2018.
“These will be valid U.N. Security Council (actions) and the United States will do what it always does, it will do its share as part of its responsibilities to enable peace,” Pompeo said Wednesday. “We’ll do all the things we need to do to ensure that those sanctions are enforced.”
The White House is ready to go it alone, promising that all prior UN sanctions will “snap back” at 8 p.m. EDT on Saturday, according to remarks this week by newly appointed special envoy for Iran Elliott Abrams.
“We expect all U.N. member states to implement their member state responsibilities and respect their obligations to uphold these sanctions,” Abrams said at a Wednesday press briefing.
“If other nations do not follow it… I think they should be asked … whether they do not think they are weakening the structure of U.N. sanctions,” he added.
- President Trump's Ban On Critical Race Theory, Explained
President Trump’s Ban On Critical Race Theory, Explained
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 19:20Authored by Dan Sanchez, Tyler Brandt, and Brad Polumbo via The Foundation for Economic Education,
Does Critical Race Theory promote racial harmony or does it “sow division” as the Trump administration claims? And what is its relation, if any, to Marxism?
With the November election just around the corner, it’s only to be expected that President Trump would seek to rally conservative voters and drive his supporters to the polls. So, when his administration, on September 4, instructed the federal government to eliminate all training in “Critical Race Theory,” some thought it was just a red-meat stunt to excite the Republican base. Others saw it as an act of right-wing censorship and an obstruction of racial progress.
In truth, there’s much more to this development than mere politicization and censorship.
Here’s a breakdown of what the administration is doing and why it’s a welcome move.
The Executive Memo
“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought wrote in the executive memorandum.
“Employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism,’” Vought explained.
“According to press reports, in some cases these training [sic] have further claimed that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.”
The order instructed federal agencies to identify and eliminate any contracts or spending that train employees in “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” “or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”
The days of taxpayer funded indoctrination trainings that sow division and racism are over. Under the direction of @POTUS we are directing agencies to halt critical race theory trainings immediately.https://t.co/dyMeJka9rt
— Russ Vought (@RussVought45) September 4, 2020
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The Exposé
How did it “come to the President’s attention,” and what press reports is Vought referring to?
Well, President Trump is known to watch Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. And days before the memo was issued, Carlson had on journalist Christopher Rufo to discuss his multiple reports uncovering the extent to which Critical Race Theory (CRT) was being used in federal training programs.
“For example, Rufo claimed, the Treasury Department recently hired a diversity trainer who said the U.S. was a fundamentally White supremacist country,” wrote Sam Dorman for the Fox News web site, “and that White people upheld the system of racism in the nation. In another case, which Rufo discussed with Carlson last month, Sandia National Laboratories, which designs nuclear weapons, sent its white male executives to a mandatory training in which they, according to Rufo, wrote letters apologizing to women and people of color.”
Rufo challenged President Trump to use his executive authority to extirpate CRT from the federal government.
As I told @TuckerCarlson tonight: I call on President @realDonaldTrump to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory from the federal government.
There is no place for this toxic, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology in our public institutions. pic.twitter.com/78J0CwNjfh
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) September 2, 2020
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The Debate
CNN’s Brian Stelter (as well as Rufo himself) traced Trump’s decision directly to the independent investigative journalist’s self-proclaimed “one-man war” on CRT, of which the recent Carlson appearance was only the latest salvo.
“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda.”
Came to Trump’s attention, how?
Oh you know how…https://t.co/7sD6ifL2zP pic.twitter.com/UnlOH33MQ1
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 7, 2020
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Selter characterized Trump’s move as a reactionary attack on the current national “reckoning” on race. He cited the Washington Post’s claim that, “racial and diversity awareness trainings are essential steps in helping rectify the pervasive racial inequities in American society, including those perpetuated by the federal government.”
So which is it? Is CRT “divisive” and “toxic” or is it “rectifying” and “anti-racist”?
Intellectual Ancestry
To answer that, it would help to trace CRT to its roots. Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began as an academic movement in the 1930s. Critical Theory emphasizes the “critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures,” as Wikipedia states. Critical Race Theory does the same, with a focus on racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color.
The “power structure” prism stems largely from Critical Theory’s own roots in Marxism—Critical Theory was developed by members of the Marxist “Frankfurt School.” Traditional Marxism emphasized economic power structures, especially the supremacy of capital over labor under capitalism. Marxism interpreted most of human history as a zero-sum class war for economic power.
“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.”
Mises called this view a “conflict doctrine,” which opposed the “harmony doctrine” of classical liberalism. According to the classical liberals, in a free market economy, capitalists and workers were natural allies, not enemies. Indeed, in a free society all rights-respecting individuals were natural allies.
A Bitter Inheritance
Critical Race Theory arose as a distinct movement in law schools in the late 1980s. CRT inherited many of its premises and perspectives from its Marxist ancestry.
The pre-CRT Civil Rights Movement had emphasized equal rights and treating people as individuals, as opposed to as members of a racial collective. “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King famously said.
In contrast, CRT dwells on inequalities of outcome, which it generally attributes to racial power structures. And, as we’ve seen from the government training curricula, modern CRT forthrightly judges white people by the color of their skin, prejudging them as racist by virtue of their race. This race-based “pre-trial guilty verdict” of racism is itself, by definition, racist.
The classical liberal “harmony doctrine” was deeply influential in the movements to abolish all forms of inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to race-based slavery, to Jim Crow.
But, with the rise of Critical Race Theory, the cause of racial justice became more influenced by the fixations on conflict, discord, and domination that CRT inherited from Marxism.
Social life was predominantly cast as a zero-sum struggle between collectives: capital vs. labor for Marxism, whites vs. people of color for CRT.
A huge portion of society’s ills were attributed to one particular collective’s diabolical domination: capitalist hegemony for Marxism, white supremacy for CRT.
Just as Marxism demonized capitalists, CRT vilifies white people. Both try to foment resentment, envy, and a victimhood complex among the oppressed class it claims to champion.
Traditional Marxists claimed that all capitalists benefit from the zero-sum exploitation of workers. Similarly, CRT “diversity trainers” require white trainees to admit that they “benefit from racism.”
Traditional Marxists insisted that bourgeois thoughts were inescapably conditioned by “class interest.” In the same way, CRT trainers push the notion that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” as a result of their whiteness.
Given the above, it should be no wonder that CRT has been criticized as “racist” and “divisive.”
Reckoning or Retrogression?
Supporters of CRT cast it as a force for good in today’s “rectifying reckoning” over race.
But CRT’s neo-Marxist orientation only damages race relations and harms the interests of those it claims to serve.
In practice, the class war rhetoric of Marxism was divisive and toxic for economic relations. And, far from advancing the interests of the working classes, it led to mass poverty and devastating famines, not to mention staggering inequality between the elites and the masses.
Today, the CRT-informed philosophy, rhetoric, and strategy of the Black Lives Matter organization (whose leadership professed to be “trained Marxists”) is leading to mass riots, looting, vandalism, and assault. The divisive violence has arrested progress for the cause of police reform, destroyed countless black-owned small businesses, and economically devastated many black communities.
Those who truly wish to see racial harmony should dump the neo-Marxists and learn more about classical liberalism. FEE.org is the perfect place to start.
Is Trump’s Ban a Form of Censorship?
So much for CRT being a force for good. Of course, even horrible ideas are protected by the First Amendment. The government should never use force to suppress people from expressing ideas, speech, or theories it dislikes.
Critics insist that President Trump is engaged in this kind of censorship by targeting CRT.
Not so.
No one is banning White Fragility, the blockbuster CRT manifesto. No one is locking up those who preach CRT or ordering mentions of it stripped from the internet.
The memo simply says that taxpayer dollars will no longer be spent promulgating this theory to federal government employees. As heads of the executive branch, presidents have wide latitude to make the rules for federal agencies under their control. Deciding how money is spent certainly falls under their proper discretion—and it is always done with political preferences in mind, one way or the other.
It is not censorship for Trump to eliminate funding for CRT, anymore than it was “censorship” for the Obama administration to choose to tie federal contracts to a business’s embrace of LGBT rights.
Elections have consequences, one of the most obvious being that the president gets to run the executive branch. If we don’t want the president’s political preferences to be so significant in training programs, then we should simply reduce the size of government and the number of bureaucrats.
In the meantime, stripping the federal government of the divisive, toxic, and neo-Marxist ideology of Critical Race Theory is a positive development for the sake of racial justice and harmony.
* * *
https://fee.org/Scripts/fee-repub.js
- "Not Ideal" – Fox Offers Non-Apology To Newt Gingrich After Awkward George Soros Rebuke
“Not Ideal” – Fox Offers Non-Apology To Newt Gingrich After Awkward George Soros Rebuke
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/17/2020 – 19:00Fox News host Harris Faulkner addressed an awkward moment on Wednesday, when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich correctly pointed out that billionaire George Soros has influenced local races for district attorney around the country, who have in turn been soft on leftist criminals causing violence and mayhem throughout the country.
“Look, the number one problem in almost all these cities is George Soros-elected, left-wing, anti-police, pro-criminal district attorneys who refuse to keep people locked up,” said Gingrich, adding “Just yesterday they put somebody back on the streets who’s wanted for two different murders in New York City.”
“You cannot solve this problem — and both [Kamala] Harris and [Joe] Biden have talked very proudly out what they call ‘progressive district attorneys’. Progressive district attorneys are anti-police, pro-criminal, and overwhelmingly elected with George Soros’s money,” he added. “And they’re a major cause of the violence we’re seeing because they keep putting the violent criminals back on the street.”
Gingrich was then shut down, after commentator Melissa Francis interjected “I’m not sure we need to bring George Soros into this.“
“He paid for it!” shot back Gingrich, adding “I mean, why can’t we discuss that fact that millions of dollars….”
“No he didn’t,” insisted Marie Harf, another panelist – adding “I agree with Melissa. George Soros doesn’t need to be a part of this conversation.”
“Okay, so it’s verboten,” Gingrich replied. Awkward silence ensued…
Watch:
Fox News panel melts down when Gingrich calls out Soros pic.twitter.com/fntofzyMh4
— Jewish Deplorable 🇺🇸 (@TrumpJew) September 16, 2020
On Thursday, host Harris Faulkner addressed the incident – saying “So, we had a little incident on the show yesterday that was not smooth.”
“And while I was leading that segment we had interruptions and I sat silently while all of that played out, also not ideal.“
“Our guest, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is beloved and needed to be allowed to speak with the openness and respect that this show is all about, was interrupted,” Faulkner continued. “Do we debate with fire here? Yes! But we must also give each other the space to express ourselves. As the only original member of this six-year-old amazing daytime ride known as Outnumbered — I especially want to rock and roll with every voice and perspective at the table.”
Faulkner ended with “We don’t censor on this show.”
OMG
Fox anchor Harris Faulkner APOLOGIZES for the hosts interrupting Newt Gingrich’s Soros rant yesterday.
“We had interruptions, and I sat silently while all of that played out. Not ideal! Gingrich is beloved and needed to be allowed to speak… we don’t censor on this show.” pic.twitter.com/HyU7898RyB
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 17, 2020
Meanwhile, Gingrich was right. As we reported in 2016, Soros openly expressed his intention to ‘reshape the American justice system’ by pouring funds into ‘powerful’ District Attorney races.
As we noted at the time: “So far, Soros has funneled $3 million into seven local DA races over the past year but his support is “expected to intensify in the next few years, thanks to longer-term planning and candidate recruitment.” In general, Soros looks to fund progressive DAs running on platforms to “reduce racial disparity in sentencing” and support prison “diversion programs” for drug offenders instead of trials that could result in jail time.“
So why is it “verboten” to discuss?
Disgraceful that Harris Faulkner allowed the tart Marie Harf to shut down Newt’s comments. Soros is seeking to overthrow our form of government and bring socialism to the US. Is Harris hushed because the bulk of Soros’ “buys” are black radicals ?
— Jim Fincher (@norm101020) September 17, 2020
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