- Global Times' Editor-In-Chief Answers If "There Will Be A War Between China And The US"
Global Times’ Editor-In-Chief Answers If “There Will Be A War Between China And The US”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 23:30In addition to occasionally provocative but mostly dreadfully unimaginative propaganda tweets, the editor in chief of China’s Global Times Hu Xijing represents a useful barometer of sentiment among Beijing’s top power echelons, which in a time when a new cold war has broken out between the US and China, can prove rather valuable.
Which is why the following episode is rather informative in terms of how China views the current tit-for-tat in diplomatic and tech warfare between the two superpowers. In an op-ed in his Global Times, Hu Xijin writes that toward the end of his dialogue with Qiu Zhenhai, a Phoenix TV commentator on Friday night, in a video chat about the current US crackdown on China, a netizen asked: Will there be a war between China and the US?
Here’s what Hu responded:
First, as the strategic mutual trust between China and the US has almost evaporated and the US has strengthened its military presence in China’s close neighborhood, the risk of accidental military frictions between China and the US has increased compared with the past. Moreover, when and if such friction occurs, it will be more politically difficult to keep it under control through peaceful means or to stop it from simmering beyond peaceful intentions.
Second, neither China nor the US wants a military conflict with the other side. Although both militaries are preparing for the worst-case scenario, neither wants a military showdown. There is therefore room for both sides to manage risks and avoid a military crisis.
Third, China is peace-loving in nature. We have no ambition to establish hegemony and replace the US. We will not go further in the Pacific or the Indian Ocean to challenge US interests. China has a profound historical conclusion that a belligerent state will eventually perish. China is a cautious major country.
Fourth, China has a very restrained definition of its core interests, all of which are as close as just on its doorstep. But if China, as a great power, is still subjected to serious military provocation, we have nothing to think about except for taking the challenge. China will take the call and will surely defeat the US on our doorstep. When it comes to our ability to mobilize people and resources to safeguard China’s core interests, when it comes to the will to fight to the end, Washington can hardly compare with Beijing, and Washington knows this better than we do.
Even though I don’t know what the lowest ebb in US-China relations might be, I know China has a clear principle that makes hegemons like the US cautious when making moves around China. Of course, I hope that China and the US can manage all accidents well.
Taking this naive interpretation one step further, on Saturday Hu tweeted that “China won’t engage in a cold war. China will insist on opening-up to outside world, including to the US. Trump govt is the most active in starting a new cold war & decoupling, but it’s not in line with interests of American society, nor the interests of Europe. It can’t last long.”
China won’t engage in a cold war. China will insist on opening-up to outside world, including to the US. Trump govt is the most active in starting a new cold war& decoupling, but it’s not in line with interests of American society, nor the interests of Europe. It can’t last long.
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) July 18, 2020
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Well, that’s one perspective. For a different, and far more realistic and pragmatic one,read the latest thoughts from historian Niall Ferguson, in which he explains that “China has already declared cold war on US.”
- The Global Reset Unplugged & "The Deep State"
The Global Reset Unplugged & “The Deep State”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 23:30Authored by Peter Koenig via GlobalResearch.ca,
Imagine, you are living in a world that you are told is a democracy – and you may even believe it – but in fact your life and fate is in the hands of a few ultra-rich, ultra-powerful and ultra-inhuman oligarchs. They may be called Deep State, or simply the Beast, or anything else obscure or untraceable – it doesn’t matter. They are less than the 0.0001%.
For lack of a better expression, let’s call them for now “obscure individuals”.
These obscure individuals who pretend running our world have never been elected. We don’t need to name them. You will figure out who they are, and why they are famous, and some of them totally invisible. They have created structures, or organisms without any legal format. They are fully out of international legality. They are a forefront for the Beast. Maybe there are several competing Beasts. But they have the same objective: A New or One World Order (NWO, or OWO).
These obscure individuals are running, for example, The World Economic Forum (WEF – representing Big Industry, Big Finance and Big Fame), the Group of 7 – G7, the Group of 20 – G20 (the leaders of the economically” strongest” nations). There are also some lesser entities, called the Bilderberg Society, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Chatham House and more.
The members of all of them are overlapping. Even this expanded forefront combined represents less than 0.001%. They all have superimposed themselves over sovereign national elected and constitutional governments, and over THE multinational world body, the United Nations, the UN.
In fact, they have coopted the UN to do their bidding. UN Director Generals, as well as the DGs of the multiple UN-suborganizations, are chosen mostly by the US, with the consenting nod of their European vassals – according to the candidate’s political and psychological profile. If his or her ‘performance’ as head of the UN or head of one of the UN suborganizations fails, his or her days are counted. Coopted or created by the Beast(s) are also, the European Union, the Bretton Woods Organizations, World Bank and IMF, as well as the World Trade Organization (WTO) – and – make no mistake – the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It has no teeth. Just to make sure the law is always on the side of the lawless.
In addition to the key international financial institutions, WB and IMF, there are the so-called regional development banks and similar financial institutions, keeping the countries of their respective regions in check.
In the end its financial or debt-economy that controls everything. Western neoliberal banditry has created a system, where political disobedience can be punished by economic oppression or outright theft of national assets in international territories. The system’s common denominator is the (still) omnipresent US-dollar.
“Unelected Individuals”
The supremacy of these obscure unelected individuals becomes ever more exposed. We, the People consider it “normal” that they call the shots, not what we call – or once were proud of calling, our sovereign nations and sovereignly elected governments. They have become a herd of obedient sheep. The Beast has gradually and quietly taken over. We haven’t noticed. It’s the salami tactic: You cut off slice by tiny slice and when the salami is gone, you realize that you have nothing left, that your freedom, your civil and human rights are gone. By then it’s too late. Case in point is the US Patriot Act. It was prepared way before 9/11. Once 9/11 “happened”, the Patriot Legislation was whizzed through Congress in no time – for the people’s future protection – people called for it for fear – and – bingo, the Patriot Act took about 90% of the American population’s freedom and civil rights away. For good.
We have become enslaved to the Beast. The Beast calls the shots on boom or bust of our economies, on who should be shackled by debt, when and where a pandemic should break out, and on the conditions of surviving the pandemic, for example, social confinement. And to top it all off – the instruments the Beast uses, very cleverly, are a tiny-tiny invisible enemy, called a virus, and a huge but also invisible monster, called FEAR. That keeps us off the street, off reunions with our friends, and off our social entertainment, theatre, sports, or a picnic in the park.
Soon the Beast will decide who will live and who will die, literally – if we let it. This may be not far away. Another wave of pandemic and people may beg, yell and scream for a vaccine, for their death knell, and for the super bonanza of Big Pharma – and towards the objectives of the eugenicists blatantly roaming the world – see this. There is still time to collectively say NO. Collectively and solidarily.
Take the latest case of blatant imposture. Conveniently, after the first wave of Covid-19 had passed, at least in the Global North, where the major world decisions are made, in early June 2020, the unelected WEF Chairman, Klaus Schwab, announced “The Great Reset”. Taking advantage of the economic collapse – the crisis shock, as in “The Shock Doctrine” – Mr. Schwab, one of the Beast’s frontrunners, announces openly what the WEF will discuss and decide for the world-to-come in their next Davos Forum in January 2021. For more details see this.
Will, We, The People, accept the agenda of the unelected WEF?
It will opportunely focus on the protection of what’s left of Mother Earth; obviously at the center will be man-made CO2-based “Global Warming”. The instrument for that protection of nature and humankind will be the UN Agenda 2030 – which equals the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). It will focus on how to rebuild the willfully destroyed global economy, while respecting the (“green”) principles of the 17 SDGs.
Mind you, it’s all connected. There are no coincidences. The infamous Agenda 2021 which coincides with and complements the so-called (UN) Agenda 2030, will be duly inaugurated by the WEF’s official declaration of The Great Reset, in January 2021. Similarly, the implementation of the agenda of The Great Reset began in January 2020, by the launch of the corona pandemic – planned for decades with the latest visible events being the 2010 Rockefeller Report with its “Lockstep Scenario”, and Event 201, of 18 October in NYC which computer-simulated a corona pandemic, leaving within 18 months 65 million deaths and an economy in ruin, programmed just a few weeks before the launch of the actual corona pandemic. See COVID-19, We Are Now Living the “Lock Step Scenario” and this and this.
The Race Riots
The racial riots, initiated by the movement Black Lives Matter (funded by the Ford Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Foundation), following the brutal assassination of the Afro-American George Floyd by a gang of Minneapolis police, and spreading like brush-fire in no time to more than 160 cities, first in the US, then in Europe – are not only connected to the Beast’s agenda, but they were a convenient deviation from the human catastrophe left behind by Covid-19. See also this.
The Beast’s nefarious plan to implement what’s really behind the UN Agenda 2030 is the little heard-of Agenda ID2020. See The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020”. It has been created and funded by the vaccination guru Bill Gates, and so has GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations), the association of Big Pharma – involved in creating the corona vaccines, and which funds along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) a major proportion of WHO’s budget.
The Great Reset, as announced by WEF’s Klaus Schwab, is supposedly implemented by Agenda ID2020. It is more than meets the eye. Agenda ID2020 is even anchored in the SDGs, as SDG 16.9 “by 2030 provide legal [digital] identity for all, including free birth registration”. This fits perfectly into the overall goal of SDG 16: ”Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.”
Following the official path of the UN Agenda 2030 of achieving the SDGs, the ‘implementing’ Agenda ID2020 – which is currently being tested on school children in Bangladesh – will provide digitized IDs possibly in the form of nano-chips implanted along with compulsory vaccination programs, will promote digitization of money and the rolling out of 5G – which would be needed to upload and monitor personal data on the nano chips and to control the populace. Agenda ID2020 will most likely also include ‘programs’ – through vaccination? – of significantly reducing world population. Eugenics is an important component in the control of future world population under a NOW / OWO – see also Georgia Guidestones, mysteriously built in 1980.
The ruling elite used the lockdown as an instrument to carry out this agenda. Its implementation would naturally face massive protests, organized and funded along the same lines as were the BLM protests and demonstrations. They may not be peaceful – and may not be planned as being peaceful. Because to control the population in the US and in Europe, where most of the civil unrest would be expected, a total militarization of the people is required. This is well under preparation.
In his essay “The Big Plantation”, John Steppling reports from a NYT article that a
“minimum of 93,763 machine guns, 180,718 magazine cartridges, hundreds of silencers and an unknown number of grenade launchers have been provided to state and local police departments in the US since 2006. This is in addition to at least 533 planes and helicopters, and 432 MRAPs — 9-foot high, 30-ton Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles with gun turrets and more than 44,900 pieces of night vision equipment, regularly used in nighttime raids in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
He adds that this militarization is part of a broader trend. Since the late 1990s, about 89 percent of police departments in the United States serving populations of 50,000 people or more had a PPU (Police Paramilitary Unit), almost double of what existed in the mid-1980s. He refers to these militarized police as the new Gestapo.
Even before Covid, about 15% to 20% of the population was on or below the poverty line in the United States. The post-covid lockdown economic annihilation will at least double that percentage – and commensurately increase the risk for civil turbulence and clashes with authorities – further enhancing the reasoning for a militarized police force.
China’s Crypto RMB
None of these scenarios will, of course, be presented to the public by the WEF in January 2021. These are decisions taken behind closed doors by the key actors for the Beast. However, this grandiose plan of the Great Reset does not have to happen. There is at least half the world population and some of the most powerful countries, economically and militarily – like China and Russia – opposed to it. “Reset” maybe yes, but not in these western terms. In fact, a reset of kinds is already happening with China about to roll out a new People’s Bank of China backed blockchain-based cryptocurrency, the crypto RMB, or yuan. This is not only a hard currency based on a solid economy, it is also supported by gold.
While President Trump keeps trashing China for unfair trade, for improperly managing the covid pandemic, for stealing property rights – China bashing no end – that China depends on the US and that the US will cut trading ties with China – or cut ties altogether, China is calling Trump’s bluff. China is quietly reorienting herself towards the ASEAN countries plus Japan (yes, Japan!) and South Korea, where trade already today accounts for about 15% of all China’s trade and is expected to double in the next five years.
Despite the lockdown and the disruption of trade, China’s overall exports recovered with a 3.2% increase in April (in relation to April 2019). This overall performance in China exports was nonetheless accompanied by a dramatic decline in US-China trade. China exports to the US decreased by 7.9% in April (in relation to April 2019).
It is clear that the vast majority of US industries could not survive without Chinese supply chains. The western dependence on Chinese medical supplies is particularly strong. Let alone Chinese dependence by US consumers. In 2019, US total consumption, about 70% of GDP, amounted to $13.3 trillion, of which a fair amount is directly imported from China or dependent on ingredients from China.
The WEF-masters are confronted with a real dilemma. Their plan depends very much on the dollar supremacy which would continue to allow dishing out sanctions and confiscating assets from those countries opposing US rule; a dollar-hegemony which would allow imposing the components of The Great Reset scheme, as described above.
At present, the dollar is fiat money, debt-money created from thin air. It has no backing whatsoever. Therefore, its worth as a reserve currency is increasingly decaying, especially vis-à-vis the new crypto-yuan from China. In order to compete with the Chinese yuan, the US Government would have to move away from its monetary Ponzi-scheme, by separating itself from the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and print her own US-economy- and possibly gold-backed (crypto) money – not fiat FED-money, as is the case today. That would mean cutting the more than 100-year old ties to the Rothschild and Co. clan-owned FED, and creating a real peoples-owned central bank. Not impossible, but highly improbable. Here, two Beasts might clash, as world power is at stake.
Meanwhile, China, with her philosophy of endless creation would continue forging ahead unstoppably with her mammoth socioeconomic development plan of the 21st Century, the Belt and Road Initiative, connecting and bridging the world with infrastructure for land and maritime transport, with joint research and industrial projects, cultural exchanges – and not least, multinational trade with “win-win” characteristics, equality for all partners – towards a multi-polar world, towards a world with a common future for mankind.
Today already more than 120 countries are associated with BRI – and the field is wide open for others to join – and to defy, unmask and unplug The Great Reset of the West.
- Jeffrey Epstein's Gulfstream Jet Listed For $16.9 Million In Florida
Jeffrey Epstein’s Gulfstream Jet Listed For $16.9 Million In Florida
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 23:00The late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 Gulfstream G550 is now for sale in Florida, reported Daily Mail.
The private jet has been listed for $16.9 million. Epstein owned three private jets, including a Boeing 727, known as the ‘Lolita Express‘, a Gulfstream IV, and the G550 now for sale.
The G550 was manufactured in 2008 and refitted with a new interior and repainted dark blue several years ago.
The tail number on the plane reads N212JE. The aircraft flew mostly between Epstein’s homes in Palm Beach, Manhattan, Paris, and into the US Virgin Islands.
Daily Mail had published pictures from within the G550, courtesy of aircraft sales firm Equus, showing what it was like in the life of Epstein before he mysteriously died in jail, though ruled suicide by New York City Medical Examiner’s Office.
Equus said the jet had flown 5,747 hours and made 1,348 landings, powered with twin Rolls-Royce turbofan engines, with the capability of carrying 16 passengers.
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records show Epstein’s company, JEGE LLC, acquired the plane in August 2013, then transferred to another of his company’s in January 2018, called Plan D LLC.
Flight data via ADSBExchange show the plane flew 107 flights between January 2018 and June 2019.
- Technocrats Should Observe The Hippocratic Oath
Technocrats Should Observe The Hippocratic Oath
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 22:30Submitted by Peter C. Earle, an economist and writer who joined the American Institute for Economic Research in 2018 and prior to that spent over 20 years as a trader and analyst in global financial markets on Wall Street
In some states, the lockdown reopenings are being reversed. We are seeing a new round of state versus state blame-mongering and recriminations. The new benchmark for normalcy to return is January 2021. Why that date? As with many benchmarks over these months, it’s completely made up.
We are supposed to believe that they know better than the rest of us, that government and not people and not medical professionals possess the essential knowledge we need.
As writer Bari Weiss commented in her July 14th New York Times resignation letter (albeit referring to the influence of hyper-woke Twitter intellectuals): “Truth isn’t a process of collective discovery [anymore], but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”
Local knowledge, individual risk appetites, and personal responsibility are again being supplanted by the calculations and stratagems of technocrats.
All of which reminds me of Charles McKay’s Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. This book focuses on financial bubbles, and a particularly interesting portion of it discusses disease panics as exacerbated by the forecasting experts of the early modern period. They, like their modern day descendants, thrived in an era of top-down, deferred-to expertism; not armed with massive reams of data and analytical methods at their disposal, but the similarly arcane methods of scrying and divination.
McKay sets the stage: The Great Plague of Milan, 1629 to 1631. In the role that today would be occupied by the media, Hollywood, or another source of perceived wisdom, a prophecy passed down for generations held that
in the year 1630 the devil would poison all Milan. Early one morning in April, and before the pestilence had reached its height, the passengers were surprised to see that all the doors in the principal streets of the city were marked with a curious daub, or spot, as if a sponge, filled with the purulent matter of the plague-sores, had been pressed against them. The whole population were speedily in movement to remark the strange appearance, and the greatest alarm spread rapidly. Every means was taken to discover the perpetrators, but in vain. At last the ancient prophecy was remembered, and prayers were offered up in all the churches that the machinations of the Evil One might be defeated.
Added to the fear of the disease were worries that a foreign government was at work, actively spreading the sickness.
Many persons were of opinion that the emissaries of foreign powers were employed to spread infectious poison over the city; but by far the greater number were convinced that the powers of hell had conspired against them, and that the infection was spread by supernatural agencies. In the meantime the plague increased fearfully.
In a passage that reminds of early COVID-19 fears, long since dispelled:
Distrust and alarm took possession of every mind. Everything was believed to have been poisoned by the devil; the waters of the wells, the standing corn in the fields, and the fruit upon the trees. It was believed that all objects of touch were poisoned; the walls of the houses, the pavement of the streets, and the very handles of the doors. The populace were raised to a pitch of ungovernable fury.
“Snitch” policies directly reminiscent of present-day measures followed.
A strict watch was kept for the devil’s emissaries, and any man who wanted to be rid of an enemy, had only to say that he had seen him besmearing a door with ointment; his fate was certain death at the hands of the mob.
An old man, upwards of eighty years of age, a daily frequenter of the church of St. Antonio, was seen, on rising from his knees, to wipe with the skirt of his cloak the stool on which he was about to sit down. A cry was raised immediately that he was besmearing the seat with poison. A mob of women, by whom the church was crowded, seized hold of the feeble old man, and dragged him out by the hair of his head, with horrid oaths and imprecations. He was trailed in this manner through the mire to the house of the municipal judge, that he might be put to the rack, and forced to discover his accomplices; but he expired on the way. Many other victims were sacrificed to the popular fury.
Pity, in particular, poor Mora a “half a chemist and half a barber,” accused
…of being in league with the devil to poison Milan. His house was surrounded, and a number of chemical preparations were found. The poor man asserted, that they were intended as preservatives against infection; but some physicians, to whom they were submitted, declared they were poison. Mora was put to the rack, where he for a long time asserted his innocence. He confessed at last, when his courage was worn down by torture, that he was in league with the devil and foreign powers to poison the whole city; that he had anointed the doors, and infected the fountains of water. He named several persons as his accomplices, who were apprehended and put to a similar torture. They were all found guilty, and executed.
(And in an era in which statues and monuments are being pulled down or defaced, “Mora’s house was [razed] to the ground, and a column erected on the spot, with an inscription to commemorate his guilt.”)
While the public mind was filled with these marvellous occurrences, the plague continued to increase. The crowds that were brought together to witness the executions, spread the infection among one another. But the fury of their passions, and the extent of their credulity, kept pace with the violence of the plague; every wonderful and preposterous story was believed.
One Milanese resident described by McKay “had brooded over such tales till he became firmly convinced that the wild flights of his own fancy were realities.” Telling a story about an invisible phantom chariot and demonic laboratories, a story which at any other time would have been met with derision, was suddenly (as certainly occurs today) infused with credibility:
[T]he minds of the people were so impressed with the idea that scores of witnesses, half crazed by disease, came forward to swear that they also had seen the diabolical stranger, and had heard his chariot, drawn by the milk-white steeds, rumbling over the streets at midnight with a sound louder than thunder. The number of persons who confessed that they were employed by the Devil to distribute poison is almost incredible.
In summary, although there was indeed a disease spreading in Milan,
[a]n epidemic frenzy was abroad, which seemed to be as contagious as the plague. Imagination was as disordered as the body, and day after day persons came voluntarily forward to accuse themselves. They generally had the marks of disease upon them, and some died in the act of confession.
The conclusion, according to McKay? The soothsayer prophecies, “by taking away the hope of recovery – that greatest balm in any malady – increased threefold the ravages of the disease.”
Looking at the lockdowns and the consequent leveling of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of small businesses – and the myriad other costs that such a policy brings – one wonders: is there no probity? It’s clear that the architects of schemes will never apologize; well, not really. But will they be held accountable?
Perennially, proposals are made that economists, data scientists, and other individuals with influential knowledge sets should, like medical doctors, have to take a Hippocratic Oath: an oath upholding fundamental ethics.
While the original Hippocratic Oath did not, as it does now, require physicians to “First, do no harm,” the modern reach of technically-skilled elites via the media and policy should unquestionably bring that dictum.
A Technocrat’s Oath would not be restrictive of the mere practice of model building, running simulations, or other present day vaticinations. Rather, it would come into force where and when the forecasts of those methods are passed to policymakers. For one thing, at least three requirements should be met; and all preferably publicly:
- At least three major sources of inaccuracy – whether found in deficient sources of data, questionable assumptions, or estimates of sensitivity – must be expressed clearly – must be expressed clearly before and after a prediction is made;
- A discussion of statistical inference must be accompanied by a discussion of causal inference (preferably an interdisciplinary one); and,
- Any prognostication which does not prominently feature uncertainty as a growing factor over time must be summarily discarded.
If professionals whose judgment can directly impact one person are bound to a strict moral code (in addition to bearing legal and reputational risk), shouldn’t technocrats informing the highest levels of government face considerably more stringent standards of practice?
Perhaps another of the many effects of telling two or three generations of young people that a university degree is of unquestionable value is an undue veneration of the expert class. Many of our grandparents and great-grandparents, who had a formidable assemblage of wisdom but only a fraction of our formal schooling, were naturally doubtful in the face of boundless pessimism or optimism – especially when offered free of charge by bureaucrats from lofty heights of the Federal edifice. It was the people who lived through the Great Depression who offered such succinct quips as “You get what you pay for (and less),” and “It’s always darkest before the dawn.”
Whether by today’s standards or a medieval one, at a certain level of influence, unqualified prognostication is either ignorant, irresponsible, or deceptive. Pithy epigrams alongside basic skepticism, knowledge of personal hygiene, and a propensity to self-isolate in the face of illness have superintended the human relationship with microorganisms more than massive agent-based models ever will.
- "They Just Take And Take" – AOC Aims To "Soak The Rich" With Proposed New York Wealth Tax
“They Just Take And Take” – AOC Aims To “Soak The Rich” With Proposed New York Wealth Tax
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 22:00Despite the critical role she played in dissuading Amazon from bringing its “HQ2” to Queens (it was one of two sites chosen by the company after more than a year of searching), AOC triumphed over all of her Democratic primary opponents, including former CNBC reporter Michele Caruso-Cabrera.
And earlier this week, a progressive Democrat successfully primary-ed longtime Democratic incumbent in a district that encompasses parts of the Bronx and Westchester.
Although not every AOC-approved candidate in NYC has achieved this much, the city’s outsize community of mostly white college-educated “socialist organizers” has emerged as a political force capable of outmatching NYC’s ossified Democratic machine (shriveled after nearly 8 years of de Blasio’s ineptitude) Mayor De Blasio might be a committed progressive, but he’s not down for the revolution, man. The rose-emoji crew want to ensure that city offices are occupied by candidates that they approve. Which is why mayor-in-waiting Scott Stringer shouldn’t count his chickens before they hatch.
Though her career in Congress has been marked by staggering displays of ineptitude, she has succeeded in her main objective: normalizing crypto-marxist policies like a jobs guarantee, UBI and the sprawling ‘Green New Deal’. And although her progressive bloc only counts four members (“the Squad”, as they’ve come to be known), a fifth might be joining them in the next Congress if Bowman triumphs in November.
But after months of hard work in Washington, AOC is turning her attention back to NYC, with her latest campaign: A “wealth tax” to finance an emergency worker bailout fund for poor and undocumented New Yorkers.
According to Bloomberg, AOC’s proposed wealth tax would tax the wealthy on unrealized gains in their stock portfolios. Currently, investments typically aren’t taxed until they are sold and a profit (or loss) is realized.
New York would be the first state in the country to enact a wealth tax that targets wealth, instead of solely income (whether individual or corporate) and consumer spending. The state bill will be considered when the NY legislature returns from vacation on Monday.
“It’s time to stop protecting billionaires, and it’s time to start working for working families,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a video directed at Cuomo. The message spread on Twitter with the hashtag #MakeBillionairesPay.
Of course, there’s a small problem with AOC’s plan: the rich often hold large slugs of stock because of the power it bequeaths them to influence the board. For Jeff Bezos, his double-digit stake in Amazon is part of how he retains control over Amazon. If shareholders had tossed Bezos out during the aftermath of the dot-com bust, would Amazon shares be worth $3,000 a share today?
A wealth tax would be a massive disincentive for every wealthy individual or family who falls under its purview. Many would probably follow Carl Icahn to Miami, or another Sun Belt state where taxes are much, much lower.
As Lloyd Blankfein explains in a tweet. These types of extreme tax regimes often decrease tax revenue.
For states with already high rates, increasing tax rate doesn’t necessarily increase tax revenue. https://t.co/jwDl7uoJyr
— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) September 13, 2019
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But as the public debate over the wealth tax advances, we suspect we won’t be hearing AOC delve into the finer points of tax policy. It’s much more effective to simply organize a protest and get all your media buddies to come out and photograph crowds with their “soak the rich” signs.
The protest began at Madison Square Park, where Jeff Bezos spent $96 million creating his Manhattan dream home.
From there, the small group marched to the Midtown offices of Governor Andrew Cuomo with a demand that has begun to grow louder as the pandemic grinds on: soak the super-rich.
Friday’s demonstration in New York, and others like it, haven’t reached anything near the level of the Occupy Wall Street movement a decade ago. But this time, protesters have a hometown advocate in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive lawmaker who this week joined a campaign demanding Cuomo pass a billionaires’ tax for New York State.
“They take and take and take from our city and do not contribute, proportionally,” said Molly Glenn, 34, who works in construction and joined Friday’s protest. “You want to have an apartment here. You want to say that you are a member of the greatest city in the country. You should have to support the city.”
To be sure, the 100 billionaires living in NY state contribute more than half of the state’s annual tax haul.
And there’s a reason for that: She has no incentive to educate her voters on the drawbacks of driving away Amazon and the billionaires. Her political rhetoric plays on mass resentment of the wealthy. AOC’s willingness to pander to the “Occupy Wall Street” set by demonizing the wealthy is what made her stand out.
And what does it matter if the state’s coffers take a hit from all the wealthy leaving the state? AOC will forever be known as the socialist who drove out the billionaires like snakes. While the middle-class, college educated voters who comprise many of her most vocal supporters (think the hosts of the podcast Chapo Trap House) would never feel the sting of falling state revenues, the half of AOC’s district that’s Latino, and those who fall below the poverty line, might not be so forgiving.
After all, it wasn’t long ago that AOC rallied support for opposing Amazon by focusing on the billions of dollars in on-paper tax incentives. However, she never delved into the full story: That those incentives aren’t coming out of the state coffers, rather they’re a discount on a hypothetical tax rate that the company would be paying only if it met certain obligations relating to economic development. Whether the deal was too generous was up for debate, but AOC argued that tax reforms are wrong on principle.
With the state in desperate need of new revenue, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Gov. Cuomo, who has previously resisted more taxes on the rich, assent and agree to sign some version of AOC’s wealth tax proposal to help restore the state’s desperately low coffers.
The sad irony is that such a move might exacerbate the situation in the long term.
- Goldman: States Containing 80% Of The US Population Have Paused Or Taken Steps To Reverse Reopening
Goldman: States Containing 80% Of The US Population Have Paused Or Taken Steps To Reverse Reopening
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 21:56Goldman writes:
Reopening is on hold in most of the US, as states containing about 80% of the population have explicitly paused or taken targeted steps to reverse reopening. Over the past several days, Washington has placed its reopening on hold, and Pennsylvania has now ordered bars and nightclubs closed and imposed occupancy limits on restaurants events.
The number of new virus cases per day is either increasing or at very high levels in almost every state. While the acceleration of virus spread (Rt) has been less sharp than in the spring, it is still occurring at a rate that appears to be preventing state governments from pushing forward with economic reopening plans.
While recommended federal criteria for reopening include a declining trend in case growth, governments may also pay attention to the level of new cases, which is also still high in many states, in deciding when it may be appropriate to return to an easing in restrictions.
And here is Goldman’s latest state tracker:
- Kick The Culture War Off Campus
Kick The Culture War Off Campus
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 21:30Authored by Jim DeMint via RealClearPolitics.com,
America’s college campuses are the intellectual headwaters of the “woke” mob now poisoning the great rivers of freedom in our country. This mob has taken over the political left, devastated our cities and now threatens every American with traditional values and common-sense conservative views.
Colleges and universities have been a bastion of liberalism and progressivism for so long it’s a cliché. But that cliché has led to complacency. Conservatives don’t like that college campuses have always been hotbeds of bad ideas – from communism to anti-Semitism to the so-called “critical theory” behind woke-ism. But the campus left has rarely been more than an irritant. Conservatives on the whole haven’t taken radical professors, brainwashed students and cowardly university administrators seriously because they were unserious people spouting unserious ideas.
Indeed, serious people on the left usually treated the academic left with the same kind of head-patting indulgence as everyone else. Since the 1960s, campus progressives had stopped bombing buildings, and instead spent their time making up words to show off their virtue, like “womyn,” “Latinx,” and “cis-gender.” The scholarship produced by woke academics in nonsense fields like anti-racism, critical gender theory, and ecofeminism never spilled out into broader political or cultural debates. Colleges were dismissed as sandboxes where children played and occasionally fought, but never did any real damage. The expectation was that, however outrageous college woke-ness was getting, no one would ever take it seriously in the real world, so there was no need to pay much attention.
That turned out to be a mistake.
Now we know that at least some of the children and adults steeped in the anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-truth narrative behind the “Awokening” do indeed take it seriously. Some have taken it so seriously they have launched a nationwide crime wave. After all, if everything they’ve been taught is true – that America is racist and evil, that the Constitution is a weapon of oppression, that conservative speech is violent while progressive violence is just speech – then it was only a matter of time before some Chads and Emilys broke out the Molotov cocktails.
The wanna-be woke media covers up both their thuggish violence and their historical illiteracy (because mainstream media elites are among the most privileged people on planet Earth and would never survive if the mob ever turned on them). Democratic Party leaders look the other way – while rising left-wing stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praise the mob – for the same reason. If Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer stood up to the mob, they’d lose.
And so it’s up to Republican politicians to fight back. Luckily, for the first time in a long time, the Republican leader is a fighter. And the fight Donald Trump should pick is defunding colleges that promote this insanity.
President Trump could drive a stake through the heart of the woke mob in a single stroke, by disqualifying colleges and universities who stand with the mob from access to federal funding, which amounts to nearly $150 billion from taxpayers annually from federal loan programs and research grants. Schools around the country have been cracking down on religious and politically conservative, patriotic students and professors – policing speech and punishing “thought crime” as if in an Orwellian dystopia. They are joining campaigns against Israel. Male students accused of crimes are prosecuted without due process. Students and faculty are disciplined for, among other things, re-tweeting scientific facts inconvenient to the left. Radical trans activists are trying to force colleges to treat trans women as women, full stop – even in eligibility for women’s sports and access to women-only safe spaces.
Additionally, it’s time for patriotic alumni to stop giving to universities out of nostalgia and demand a return to classical academic focus instead of woke brainwashing of our children. Each year, colleges and universities receive over $40 billion in private donations. And parents should seek out schools that reject the forced leftist agenda. A recent survey of Harvard faculty revealed that 99% of professors self-identify as very liberal to moderate, and only 1% admitted to having conservative-leaning views.
These aren’t just toddlers squabbling in a sandbox. The campus-led assault on free speech and equal justice – to say nothing of objective truth – are a clear and present danger to freedom, justice, and our constitutional order. And they are inspiring a rising generation of pseudo-fascists whose tantrums, however ignorant, are quickly amassing a frightening criminal rap sheet.
Washington should cut these frauds and thugs off the federal gravy train, and make their access to taxpayer money contingent on them actually serving the taxpayers and the republic. Let’s force holier-than-thou woke professors and deans to decide which they care more about, their culture war or their cash.
I think I know how they’d answer.
- Face Mask Usage By Demographic
Face Mask Usage By Demographic
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 21:00COVID-19 case rates are increasing rapidly in most states in the US, however, as Statista’s Willem Roper notes, people are reacting to it much differently than when it first appeared in the country at the end of February.
For instance, while some states are closing down and requiring people to wear face masks, others are banning local officials from implementing mandatory face mask procedures. A new survey shows a few demographic facts on who’s wearing face masks who isn’t.
A new survey from Gallup shows 72 percent of U.S. adults say they either always wear a face mask or wear one often when going to public places.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Women, college graduates and Democrats responded the most that they often or always wear a face mask, while men, non-college graduates and Republicans had the highest percentages of those saying they either rarely or never wear a face mask.
Establishment health experts have overwhelmingly claimed that wearing face masks can help stop the spread of COVID-19. However, after admitting they lied about NOT wearing masks early in the pandemic, and questions over the virus’ transmission routes has led to growing mistrust of media and government officials has built a substantial coalition of people around the country who refuse to wear one.
- Trump Considers Afghan War Critic For Ambassador To Afghanistan: Wants "Full & Speedy Withdrawal"
Trump Considers Afghan War Critic For Ambassador To Afghanistan: Wants “Full & Speedy Withdrawal”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 20:30Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,
Amid a substantial US pullout from Afghanistan, the administration still doesn’t have a proper US Ambassador for that country. Reports, however, are that the short list includes a long-time war critic, Will Ruger.
Though not nominated yet, Ruger is undergoing vetting, and has been meeting with officials. The Vice President for Research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute, Ruger has frequently advocated ending the Afghanistan War.
Troops in Afghanistan, US Army file image Though the US is heading toward ending that war anyhow, with so many officials taking a wait and see approach, having a proper ambassador who is known to want a pullout would be a clear signal the administration intends to complete the process.
According to Politico:
Ruger, a Naval Reserve officer who served a year in Afghanistan a decade ago, is aligned with the president’s thinking about the U.S. footprint in the Middle East and the wars in Afghanistan and Syria, and has been especially vocal about getting out of Afghanistan.
“President Trump has correctly concluded that a full and speedy withdrawal of our troops is imperative,” he wrote in the American Interest in late May. “Our national interest isn’t served by continuing to wage a futile battle but by exiting it.”
The US is well ahead of its pullout schedule, down to about 8,500 troops in Afghanistan. Officials sayt hey want 4,000 by the election, and some are saying a complete pullout is possible by then.
- Cisco Fires Employees That Question Black Lives Matter During Company-Wide Racism Discussion
Cisco Fires Employees That Question Black Lives Matter During Company-Wide Racism Discussion
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 20:00In early June, dutifully doing its part to virtue signal along with the rest of the world, Cisco Systems hosted an “all hands on deck” meeting on race, hosted via videoconference. In the comments of the online forum, visible to everyone, some workers questioned the Black Lives Matter movement and were subsequently fired from their jobs, proving once again that you can have an opinion, as long as it’s the right opinion.
Chief Executive Officer Chuck Robbins talked with Ford Foundation President Darren Walker, who is Black, and Bryan Stevenson, a Black lawyer and author who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, during the company’s June 1 meeting in front of 30,000 employees, according to Bloomberg.
Several people spoke out online against Black Lives Matter during these online forums. For example, one employee wrote: “Black lives don’t matter. All lives matter,” while another wrote that BLM “reinforces racism”. A third employee commented: “People who complain about racism probably have been a racist somewhere else to people from another race or part of systematic oppression in their own community!”
Cisco says it fired a “handful” of workers for “inappropriate conduct” because it won’t tolerate racism. It also, apparently, won’t tolerate its employees opinions.
The “incident” at Cisco (read: people expressing well reasoned opinions) has been a microcosm of similar situations at other silicon valley companies, who are left to try and figure out how to posture to the public they are concerned about racism, while at the same time not laying off their entire staff. Some believe that protests at companies could be next if employees aren’t “trained” to think the right way.
Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said: “Employers should be striving for zero tolerance when it comes to racism and discrimination, period. The protests we’ve seen in the streets have become part of our new normal and will eventually make their way inside workplaces if employers fail to meet the moment.”
Cisco said that ultimately 237 comments of the 10,400 made during the videoconference “objected to what was being presented”, while the majority of comments praised management. On the video call, Cisco’s CEO was announcing a $5 million donation to “groups combating racism”.
Francine Katsoudas, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief people officer, said: “I just felt sad to see it. I felt a ton of empathy. I knew that for the African-American and Black employees that were in the meeting, that it was heartbreaking to see that.”
She then tried to backtrack and justify the firings because they weren’t considered “legitimate debate”. Katsoudas said: “You have a framework where red absolutely is crossing the line. But if someone has a question or they don’t understand something, there’s a way for them to ask that question. We went through and just placed things on that spectrum.”
The remarks were apparently so offensive they were “seared in the minds of some Black employees,” according to Bloomberg. One employee commented: “Wow…and these people work at Cisco?” If they are bold enough to say those things at work for all to see, imagine what is said behind closed doors.”
Yeah, it could be differing opinions!
“We still have work to do as a nation. I pray my daughters have a better world to live in soon,” another employee said.
Meanwhile, we pray our children have a world where their first amendment right hasn’t completely disintegrated over the next few years. But with the direction things are moving, it doesn’t look promising…
- "Putin Hacked Our Coronavirus Vaccine" Is The Dumbest Story Yet
“Putin Hacked Our Coronavirus Vaccine” Is The Dumbest Story Yet
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 19:30Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via CaitlinJohnstone.com,
OMG you guys Putin hacked our coronavirus vaccine secrets!
This week, mainstream media is reporting what is arguably the single dumbest Russiavape story of all time, against some very stiff competition.
“Russian hackers are targeting health care organizations in the West in an attempt to steal coronavirus vaccine research, the U.S. and Britain said,” reports The New York Times.
“Hackers backed by the Russian state are trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine and treatment research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions around the world, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said on Thursday,” Reuters reports.
“Russian news agency RIA cited spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying the Kremlin rejected London’s allegations, which he said were not backed by proper evidence,” adds Reuters.
To make news gathering easier, we should just always assume that Russia has tried to hack everything stored on every computer ever — emails, recipes, Atari consoles — and only report it when anonymous US & UK intel officials determine that Russia has NOT hacked something https://t.co/XfOAbNr7pJ
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 16, 2020
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I mean, there are just so many layers of stupid.
First of all, how many more completely unsubstantiated government agency allegations about Russian nefariousness are we the public going to accept from the corporate mass media? Since 2016 it’s been wall-to-wall narrative about evil things Russia is doing to the empire-like cluster of allies loosely centralized around the United States, and they all just happen to be things nobody can actually provide the public with hard verifiable evidence of.
Ever since the shady cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike admitted that it never actually saw hard proof of Russia hacking the DNC servers, the already shaky and always unsubstantiated narrative that Russian hackers interfered in the US presidential election in 2016 has been on thinner ice than ever. Yet because the mass media converged on this narrative and repeated it as fact over and over again they’ve been able to get the mainstream headline-skimming public to accept it as an established truth, priming them for an increasingly idiotic litany of completely unsubstantiated Russia scandals, culminating most recently in the entirely debunked claim that Russia paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Secondly, the news story doesn’t even claim that these supposed Russian hackers even succeeded in doing whatever they were supposed to have been doing in this supposed cyberattack.
“Officials have not commented on whether the attacks were successful but also have not ruled out that this is the case,” Wired reports.
Thirdly, this is a “vaccine” which does not even exist at this point in time, and the research which was supposedly hacked may never lead to one. Meanwhile, Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University reports that it has “successfully completed tests on volunteers of the world’s first vaccine against coronavirus,” in Russia.
Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, how obnoxious and idiotic is it that coronavirus vaccine “secrets” are a even a thing??? This is a global pandemic which is hurting all of us; scientists should be free to collaborate with other scientists anywhere in the world to find a solution to this problem. Nobody has any business keeping “secrets” from the world about this virus or any possible vaccine or treatment. If they do, anyone in the world is well within their rights to pry those secrets away from them.
Watch this. They’re literally just saying Russians talked about already leaked documents on the internet. That’s the whole entire news story. https://t.co/pZdqWC75IW
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) July 16, 2020
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This intensely stupid story comes out at the same time British media are blaring stories about Russian interference in the 2019 election, which if you actually listen carefully to the claims being advanced amounts to literally nothing more than the assertion that Russians talked about already leaked documents pertaining to the UK’s healthcare system on the internet.
“Russian actors ‘sought to interfere’ in last winter’s general election by amplifying an illicitly acquired NHS dossier that was seized upon by Labour during the campaign, the foreign secretary has said,” reports The Guardian.
“Amplifying”. That’s literally all there is to this story. As we learned with the ridiculous US Russiagate narrative, Russia “amplifying” something in such allegations can mean anything from RT reporting on a major news story to a Twitter account from St Petersburg sharing an article from The Washington Post. Even the foreign secretary’s claim itself explicitly admits that “there is no evidence of a broad spectrum Russian campaign against the General Election”.
“The statement is so foggy and contradictory that it is almost impossible to understand it,” responded Russia’s foreign ministry to the allegations. “If it’s inappropriate to say something then don’t say it. If you say it, produce the facts.”
Jeremy Corbyn refuses to answer questions about Russian involvement in last year’s general election.
Leaked government documents highlighted by Mr Corbyn during the campaign were almost certainly “amplified” online by Russia, the UK Government has said https://t.co/aZBxub1VzE pic.twitter.com/2cOuLC3JbU
— ITV News Politics (@ITVNewsPolitics) July 16, 2020
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Instead of producing facts you’ve got the Murdoch press pestering Jeremy Corbyn on his doorstep over this ridiculous non-story, and popular right-wing outlets like Guido Fawkes running the blatantly false headline “Government Confirms Corbyn Used Russian-Hacked Documents in 2019 Election”. The completely bogus allegation that the NHS documents came to Jeremy Corbyn by way of Russian hackers is not made anywhere in the article itself, but for the headline-skimming majority this makes no difference. And headline skimmers get as many votes as people who read and think critically.
All this new cold war Russia hysteria is turning people’s brains into guacamole. We’ve got to find a way to snap out of the propaganda trance so we can start creating a world that is based on truth and a desire for peace.
* * *
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- Mexican Cartel Displays Show Of Force In 'Shocking' New Video
Mexican Cartel Displays Show Of Force In ‘Shocking’ New Video
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 19:00A shocking video surfaced onto social media Friday, showing a convoy of armored vehicles with dozens of combat-uniformed gunmen who expressed their support for Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes (“El Menccho”), the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), reported Mexican newspaper El Universal.
All of the trucks appear American made and many seem to be outfitted with different levels of armor, along with stationary turrets on top. These types of vehicles are common to warzones in the Middle East.
Abrazos, no balazos.
👇 pic.twitter.com/UgvQwzAcj3— Héctor de Mauleón (@hdemauleon) July 18, 2020
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Commenting on the video, Alfonso Durazo, Secretary of Public and Citizen Security, said the government is investigating the video:
“The propaganda video attributed to a criminal gang is being analyzed in order to confirm its eventual authenticity and temporality,” Durazo said.
“Regardless of this, we state that there is no criminal group with the capacity to successfully challenge the federal security forces, much less from that evident assembly,” he added.
El Universal journalist Gabriel Guerra tweeted, “This video is truly troubling. Although its authenticity must be established, it speaks of an armed capacity comparable to or greater than that of many guerrilla groups. Each one will read different things, what I see is an enemy of the Mexican State and of all of us.”
What the video suggests is that CJNG is well-armed and appears to employ combat-uniformed gunmen with high-caliber weapons and militarized vehicles.
Bloomberg noted, “The cartel [CJNG] based in the central state of Jalisco has spread across Mexico and increasingly has posed direct challenges to the government. Mexico City’s police chief blamed it for an elaborately planned attempt on his life last month — an ambush on the capital’s most famous boulevard.”
- Mueller And Weissmann Op-Eds Greatly At Odds With Their Report And Evidence
Mueller And Weissmann Op-Eds Greatly At Odds With Their Report And Evidence
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 18:30Submitted by Aaron Mate of Real Clear Investigations
In response to President Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s prison sentence last week, the Russia investigation’s two lead prosecutors published op-eds in the nation’s top newspapers that fueled the collusion narrative their own investigation failed to validate. As they chided Stone and others for alleged deceptions, both Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller and one of his top deputies, Andrew Weissmann, made claims greatly at odds with their official report, discrepancies that they did not acknowledge.
Neither responded to emailed requests Thursday for comment.
The Mueller op-ed, published in the Washington Post, does not just take aim at Stone – who was convicted for lying about his failed efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks regarding emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Mueller focuses, instead, on what he calls “broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper.”
Andrew Weissmann: Now the prosecutor argues Roger Stone should be brought “before a grand jury,” something his probe could have done earlier but didn’t. In a bid to refute that criticism, Mueller begins by defending the FBI’s justification for launching the probe. “By late 2016,” he writes, “the FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled to a Trump campaign adviser that they could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to the Democratic candidate,” Hillary Clinton. The campaign adviser is George Papadopoulos, whose barroom conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer served as the basis for the Trump-Russia probe. (Downer passed this tip to the U.S. government in late July – though Mueller writes “late 2016.”)
Contrary to Mueller’s assertion, the record shows the FBI was not acting on any evidence that “the Russians had signaled” anything to Papadopoulos, but instead on the Australian diplomat’s recounting of vague hearsay — which Papadopoulos never relayed to anyone else in the Trump campaign. The bureau’s own documents make this clear. The recently declassified FBI electronic communication (EC) that officially opened its Russia investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, states that Downer had told the U.S. government that Papadopoulos had “suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist” the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing damaging, yet “unclear,” information about Clinton and President Obama. Not only was this tip vague, there was no evidence that the “some kind of suggestion” actually came from the Russian government or even a Russian national.
George Papadopoulos: Mueller had no evidence that “the Russians had signaled” anything to the junior Trump adviser. But the Special Counsel wrote otherwise in the Washington Post on Saturday. Instead, Downer was relaying what he claims Papadopoulos told him about an unspecified suggestion he had received of Russian assistance. Papadopoulos later told the FBI that the suggestion came from a conversation with Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic. But Downer did not hear about Mifsud at the time, and his tip to the FBI accordingly made no mention of him. Regardless of the exact date it learned of Mifsud, the U.S. government has never formally claimed or presented evidence that he was a Russian government representative or was relaying information that he had received from Russia. (After leaving office, former FBI Director James B. Comey claimed without evidence that Mifsud was “a Russian agent” in a Washington Post op-ed.)
The Mueller Report conspicuously avoided such a label. It instead stated that Mifsud had suspected “connections to Russia.” Its inventory of such connections is this: Mifsud was apparently in touch with “a one-time employee” of the Internet Research Agency (the private Russian social media company that Mueller indicted before dropping the case) about “possibly meeting in Russia,” but the investigation “did not identify evidence of them meeting.” Mifsud was also apparently in contact with a social media account “linked to an employee of the Russian Ministry of Defense.” At his congressional hearing one year ago, Mueller declined to discuss Mifsud’s identity or explain why the FBI had not arrested him after interviewing him in Washington, D.C., in February 2017. Mueller also did not explain why his office did not charge Mifsud for perjury despite claiming in its final report that he had made false statements.
Joseph Mifsud: The Mueller Report conspicuously avoided labeling him a “Russian agent,” but that hasn’t stopped Mueller from implying otherwise. Recently declassified December 2017 testimony from Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director who helped launch and oversee the Russia probe, support these details.
Speaking to the House Intelligence Committee, McCabe said the Papadopoulos-Mifsud tip was not considered evidence of a Russia connection. Asked to explain why the FBI never sought a FISA surveillance warrant on Papadopoulos, McCabe responded: “Papadopoulos’ comment didn’t particularly indicate that he was the person that had had — that was interacting with the Russians.” That admission not only contradicts Mueller’s claim that the “FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled” something, it raises an important question for his team to answer: Why did the FBI open – and continue – the Trump-Russia investigation based on a hearsay comment from a Trump adviser whom they did not believe was actually interacting with Russia?
After claiming that the collusion investigation was predicated on evidence of Russian outreach to the Trump campaign, Mueller’s op-ed turns to Roger Stone. The veteran Republican operative, Mueller writes, “lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks,” as well as about “the existence of written communications with his intermediary.”
Roger Stone (center): A new Mueller claim is at odds with his investigation’s failure to establish that Stone had an intermediary to WikiLeaks. But that claim from Mueller is at odds with his investigation’s failure to establish that Stone had an intermediary to WikiLeaks. In both public and private, Stone claimed to have intermediaries, but as the Mueller team found out, they were two individuals, Randy Credico and Jerome Corsi, who never made contact with WikiLeaks. The only interaction that either Credico or Corsi had with WikiLeaks during the campaign came when Credico interviewed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on his radio show in August 2016. And the only known contact between Stone and WikiLeaks before the election came when WikiLeaks wrote Stone, in a Twitter message, to cease making “false claims of association.” This exchange was excluded from Stone’s indictment and the Mueller Report, and Mueller’s op-ed is no different.
Mueller also makes a striking claim about Stone’s supposed Russian contacts and foreknowledge of WikiLeaks releases. “Stone became a central figure in our investigation,” Mueller writes, “for two key reasons: He communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those Russian intelligence officers.”
Jerome Corsi: Evidence showed he had no contact with WikiLeaks and no inside information of its plans, despite Weissmann’s suggestion to the contrary now. While Stone claimed advance knowledge, Mueller omits that he never asserted that Stone actually had such knowledge.
Mueller’s reference to communication with Russian agents is likely the Twitter messages exchanged with Guccifer 2.0, the online persona that Mueller alleges was a front for Russian intelligence. Yet the only known communication between the two is in fact exculpatory for Stone. Stone sent Guccifer 2.0 just three short messages. None mentioned the stolen DNC emails. The closest they came to coordination was when Stone asked Guccifer 2.0 to retweet an article in The Hill. Mueller implies that all of this was grounds to investigate Stone, when it was evidence that Stone’s contact with Guccifer 2.0 was minimal and inconsequential.
Three days after Mueller’s piece was published, the top prosecutor on his team, Andrew Weissmann, published an op-ed in the New York Times that went even further. While Mueller’s article tried to defend his investigation, Weissmann effectively called for it to continue: Stone, Weissmann argued, should be brought “before a grand jury.”
Weissmann – now a legal analyst for MSNBC and preparing for the September publication of his memoir on the Mueller probe — bases his argument on the possibility that Stone hid incriminating information in order to protect Trump. Stone, Weissmann claimed (approvingly quoting the sentencing federal judge), “had been prosecuted for ‘covering up for the president.'” Stone, Weissmann added, was found guilty of “lying to Congress about the coordination between the Trump 2016 campaign, Mr. Stone, WikiLeaks and Russia,” and putting him before a grand jury would “get at the truth of why he lied.”
The Mueller Report: It doesn’t agree with what its lead author and his deputy write now. Yet Stone’s own case – and, of course the Mueller Report, which found no conspiracy — underscored that there was no such “coordination,” which is presumably why Stone was never accused, let alone convicted, of lying about it. The word “coordination” only appears once in his indictment: in describing the FBI investigation of potential Trump-Russia collusion, not in describing anything to do with Stone.
Stone was instead convicted of making false statements to Congress about his failed efforts to obtain information about WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. Stone’s case and trial underscored that these efforts went nowhere: Both individuals whom he tapped as his intermediaries, Corsi and Credico, had no contact with WikiLeaks and no inside information of its plans. The suggestion to the contrary by Weissmann in the New York Times’ op-ed section is contradicted by the paper’s own reporting on Stone’s trial last year, when it noted that Stone “had no real ties to WikiLeaks.”
Despite this, Weissmann goes on to suggest, without evidence, that Stone still has something to hide. “If there was nothing nefarious about his coordination efforts, why did he lie about them to Congress?” the investigator writes. “This question remains unanswered, as the Mueller report notes.” Yet the Mueller team has already answered Weissmann’s question. In revealing that the Trump campaign tried to learn about WikiLeaks’ plans through Stone – who had no inside information – Weissmann and his colleagues showed that the campaign had no “coordination” with WikiLeaks and no advance knowledge of its publications.
Weissmann fails to mention that his own team of prosecutors consciously avoided the very action that he is now advocating. The Mueller team never interviewed Stone or tried to bring him before a grand jury after an exhaustive investigation of Stone and his associates. By November 2018, CNN reported, “[r]oughly a dozen of Stone’s current and former associates have been contacted by Mueller’s team for interviews or to testify before the grand jury.”
The Mueller team’s pursuit of Stone included an engagement with Corsi that descended into farce. The Mueller investigators, the Washington Post later reported, spent more than two months “chasing tantalizing leads offered by Corsi,” even “dispatch[ing] FBI agents around the country to interview potential witnesses,” but, after “expending valuable government money and precious time,” found “themselves unable to untangle Corsi’s assertions.” This included multiple sessions with Corsi where Mueller prosecutors “spent weeks coaxing, cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist, as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories.” They even delved into philosophical territory: “At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself.”
If, after all of this effort, Weissmann and the Mueller team thought that Stone was coordinating with WikiLeaks or had something to hide, they could have questioned him or brought him before a grand jury. But by the end of 2018, Stone was no longer claiming that he had a back channel to WikiLeaks and had corrected his prior statements to the contrary. Presumably, the Mueller team had reached the same conclusion after questioning scores of Stone’s associates and chasing down leads from coast to coast. And presumably, they would have expected Stone to tell them the same story under oath.
That would have negated their ability to prosecute him, and it would have denied them an opportunity to advance the collusion theory with one final indictment. In January 2019, the Mueller team chose an off-ramp: Stone was indicted for making false statements to a House inquiry all the way back in September 2017. The Mueller team released a lengthy indictment that suggested a collusion angle, and conducted an early morning SWAT raid on Stone’s Florida home with television cameras present.
Stone’s January 2019 indictment appeared to be the Mueller probe’s final act, the last in a series of cases that publicly implied collusion without ever alleging that such collusion occurred. These two op-eds suggests that effort continues.
Weissmann and Mueller’s new public statements about Stone and the Russia investigation are only the latest in a series of contributions to the collusion narrative. In response, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham has said that he will seek Mueller’s testimony. If Weissmann is summoned as well, this would be a critical opportunity, through sworn testimony under penalty of perjury, to get to the bottom of claims about the Russia investigation – although perhaps not the ones that the prosecutors behind it want the public to focus on.
- World Suffers 2nd Straight Record Jump In New COVID-19 Cases As US Deaths Surpass 140k: Live Updates
World Suffers 2nd Straight Record Jump In New COVID-19 Cases As US Deaths Surpass 140k: Live Updates
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 18:08Summary:
- Texas reports 10k+ new cases for fifth straight day
- Miami-Dade ICUs at 122% capacity
- Global COVID cases reach second straight daily record
- US reports record jump for second straight day
- NJ cases continue to creep higher
- Trump says he’ll hold “tele-rallies” instead of in-person campaign events
- Xinjiang capital closed due to outbreak
- US sees another daily record in COVID-19 cases
- Florida reports latest numbers
* * *
Update (1536ET): Looks like the number of newly reported COVID-19 cases remained at record highs on Saturday, after states reported another record jump the prior day. The record-breaking numbers out of the US have contributed to the second straight day where the number of global COVID-19 cases smashed the existing record.
There were 259,848 new cases reported across the world over the last 24 hours, according to a report from the World Health Organization.
Total cases worldwide is now around 13.8 million, per the WHO’s count. As we noted above, the previous record was set on Friday, with 237,743 new cases.
Additionally, the number of deaths reported Saturday was 7,360, bringing the total number of deaths worldwide to 593,087.
Here are some highlights from the US:
Texas reported more than 10k new cases for the fifth day in a row. Saturday’s 10,158 new cases bring the state’s total to 317,730 cases.
Meanwhile, the state reported an additional 130 deaths, just a day after reporting highest daily total of 174 new deaths. The state has reported 3,865 cases statewide.
Intensive care units in Miami-Dade County are at 122% capacity, according to the latest data released on the county’s coronavirus dashboard on Saturday.
President Trump says he will hold “telephone rallies” instead of in-person events during his first “tele-rally” in Wisconsin.
“I wanted to be with you, and this is really replacing our rallies that we all love so much, we had great rallies in Wisconsin and all over the country, and unfortunately until this gets solved, and we’re doing really well with the therapeutics and vaccines, but until that gets solved it’s going to be tough to have those big massive rallies, so I’m doing telephonic rallies, and we’ll call them the Trump Rallies, but we’ll do it by telephone and we have a lot of people on the line and I appreciate it.”
Indianapolis pushed back the start date for public schools another two weeks to August 17 via a vote of the state school board on Saturday. The decision comes after the state reported 800 new cases, its second-highest total.
According to JHU, there are at least 3,670,005 cases of the virus confirmed in the US, along with 139,480 who have died. Worldometer has counted 3,822,604 cases and 142,755 deaths. And according to Worldometer, the US reported a second-consecutive record jump in new cases.
And deaths…
Meanwhile, New Jersey reported 309 new cases 16 additional deaths as the number of new cases reported each day in the Garden state continues to creep higher.
* * *
Another Chinese city has assumed a “wartime footing” and reimposed strict lockdowns along with aggressive testing and tracking after a cluster of cases was discovered yesterday.
Except this time, the city being locked down also happens to be the capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang Province, where CCP officials were recently targeted by US sanctions over their involvement in an extensive prison-camp system where 1 million or more of the state’s Muslim Uighur population have been imprisoned.
Though the virus hit the city during the first round of the outbreak, Party officials tasked with overseeing public-health in Xinjiang said that officials had tracked the latest cluster to Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, according to the official Weibo account of the regional government.
In Urumqi, local officials asked people not to make unnecessary trips outside the city, and asked that anybody who absolutely needs to travel take a test first. The government also carried out city-wide free infection tests, officials told the press conference as part of what the officials termed a “wartime” response.
Director of the Disease Control and Prevention Center in Urumqi, Rui Baoling, told a news conference on Saturday that recent cases in the city were associated with a cluster of activities. All the confirmed cases and asymptomatic infections were reported in the Tianshan District, CCTV said. She didn’t say what activities were involved.
“The epidemic has developed rapidly,” Rui was quoted saying.
Xinjiang has so far mostly avoided the worst of the pandemic, which burst out of the central Chinese city of Wuhan (capital of the centrally located Hubei Province) in December and January (though there’s some evidence to suggest that the virus might have been spreading internationally and domestically prior to then). The province is rural and among the poorest in China. On Saturday morning, the region reported a total of 17 coronavirus cases, plus 11 asymptomatic cases (remember these data are reported with a 24 hour delay). Another 269 people were under medical observation.
Urumqi on Friday launched an emergency response plan that placed the city on a “wartime footing” and called for the study of new cases, both symptomatic and asymptomatic.
“The epidemic situation is generally controllable,” Rui was quoted as saying to state media.
And while that may be true, the CCP isn’t taking any chances. The crackdown to suppress the cluster led the city to cancel more than 600 scheduled flights at Urumqi Diwopu International Airport, more than 4/5ths of total flights. The city also suspended subway services. Including the 16 cases in Urumqi, China reported 22 new cases over the last 24 hours, up from 10 a day earlier.
Six of those were imported.
China reported 14 new asymptomatic patients, up from five a day earlier.
The outbreak in Xinjiang comes after the PRC’s capital Beijing suffered a flare-up of coronavirus infections last month.
As of Friday, mainland China had 83,644 confirmed coronavirus cases, the health authority said. The COVID-19 death toll remained at 4,634.
Meanwhile, the US set another record on Friday by reporting more than 77,000 coronavirus cases (77,233 to be exact) and 951 deaths. The US is now averaging just under 1,000 deaths per day. While the numbers are still nowhere near the 3,000/month that the CDC had once worried about, it still represents movement in the wrong direction.
The US set another one-day record with reported on Friday, prompting some hard-hit states to impose new lockdown measures, including the shuttering of most California schools. The 77,233 infections recorded by the Covid Tracking Project were accompanied by another grim tally of 951 fatalities.
On Saturday, Florida showed some signs of stabilization, with 10,328 new Florida COVID-19 cases overnight, bringing the total to 337,569. Hospital admissions climbed to 20,632 while the state reported another 90 deaths, bringing the total to 4,895 deaths.
- Facebook Deplatforms Former Employee Who Questioned BLM/Diversity Narrative
Facebook Deplatforms Former Employee Who Questioned BLM/Diversity Narrative
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 18:00Earlier in the week, we posted an interesting video from ex-Google and Facebook employee, Patrick Shyu, who explained why he thought “diversity” policies were creating more problems than solutions.
It appears the video, which went viral, did not sit well with the social media overlords of the ministry of truth, as Shyu has just been banned from Facebook, and shadowbanned from YouTube, after 10 years on the platform. As Shyu begins,
“…just because you didn’t like something I said… for 10 years I said all great things and then one time I say something that you may not necessarily like, you disable my entire account and I lose access to all the past 10 years information… and there’s no explanation, no customer service, and not much an appeals process.”
The former tech-lead exclaims that “this sounds more like high school drama than a company trying to be a platform,” adding that “it seems like they are maybe trying to swing the election again.”
He also suspects, based on the sudden drop in traffic to his other site, that he has been shadowbanned by YouTube.
“I think it is quite disturbing the age of censorship in which we are entering with most communication dominated by these top-tier tech companies… and almost all of these companies have certain political biases, promoting only certain viewpoints and blocking others.”
They simply “don’t want to promote a open, free discussion,” he ominously concludes, “and there is no such thing as a neutral platform or means of discussion these days.”
Of course, Shyu is not alone in being banned or shadowbanned for expressing a non-arbiter-of-truth-acceptable perspective… or even merely discussing such matters… and we suspect, before the election is over, he will not be the last.
Watch the full clip below:
- Krugman's Keynesianism Has Made Him Wrong about Much More Than Economic Theory
Krugman’s Keynesianism Has Made Him Wrong about Much More Than Economic Theory
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 17:30Submitted by William L. Anderson, professor of economics at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland, via Mises.org
“Let me tell you about Keynesian economists. They are different from you and me. They learn their mathematical models and aggregate terminology early and easily, and it does something to them, makes them proud and self-omniscient where the rest of us are circumspect, in a way that, unless you were born a Keynesian economist, is very difficult to understand.” (With apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Paul Krugman, who apparently knows even the very hearts and inner thoughts of people who disagree with his pronouncements, from Keynesian economic analysis to the current state of American politics, does not like being reminded that he once predicted on the pages of Time Magazine in 1998: “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” His full statement included:
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.
When asked about the quote, he declared:
Well, two things.
First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine’s one hundredth anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought provoker.
But the main point is that I don’t claim any special expertise in technology—I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the ’98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing.
Lest one confuse Krugman’s mea culpa with Jake Blues’s plea for his jilted fiancée not to shoot him in the sewer tunnel (Jake had the better excuses), I believe that what Krugman wrote is much more significant than what he and his supporters would claim. Krugman claims he was just engaging in thought provocation when, in reality, he was demonstrating that in spite of his Nobel Prize, his MIT degree, and his long record in being on the faculties of elite universities, his actual knowledge of real economics is deficient. Very deficient.
There are so many nuances in his statement on technology that it would take most of the existing bytes in cyberspace to provide a complete commentary. Given that readers of this page do not possess that kind of long-suffering patience (and have better things to do with their lives), I will stick to a few items.
If one were to ask a relatively educated person why the US economy has grown so much, the typical answer most likely would be “technology.” (That word seems to serve the same purpose as “plastics” in The Graduate—single word that is supposed to call up all sorts of symbolism.) Thus, as technology advances, the economy improves and so on.
There isn’t much nuance with such a view, which often incorporates what Austrian economists call “homogeneous capital,” that is, capital that is perfectly interchangeable with labor, raw materials, and other capital. (This accounts for the smooth, convex, and continuous nature of the production function when economists present models of isoquants and isocosts.) But while such assumptions make modeling easier, they do not explain capital very well.
However, the homogeneous capital (and homogeneous every other factor of production) assumption then permits Keynesians to assume that if government takes actions to “shift” the fictitious aggregate demand curve, the economy will produce more goods and employ more people. Just add money (the source is irrelevant) and the economy shifts. Just like that.
If You Increase Spending, the Economy Will Grow
To a Keynesian, this is economics. Like Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams, who hears the voice saying, “If you build it, they will come,” a Keynesian hears a voice saying, “If you increase spending, the economy will grow.” There is no need to break down things any further, since the prevailing assumption is that more spending means more growth, especially since every good Keynesian knows that if we leave markets to operate on their own, people will save money, spending will fall, and the economy will implode into a morass of unemployment and idle resources.
Given Krugman’s Keynesian mindset, it is not difficult to understand why he would absolutely fumble any prediction regarding the economic effects of the internet. While information is important (and Krugman gets that part wrong, too, as he underestimates the role of information in production and exchange), the internet has revolutionized retail, and by revolutionizing retail, it has changed the scope of production possibilities.
Let us begin with retail itself. Envision a spring with potential growth, but the water from the spring is moved through a pipe with a one-inch diameter, which means the flow is limited by the capacity of the pipe. However, if we were to replace that narrow pipe with a pipe with a six-inch diameter, then the owner of the spring could increase production and enjoy more economies of scale. Taking it a step further, the spring owner can invest in capital that will expand the capacities of the spring, all of which means more accessible water for consumers.
Applying that concept to the economy at large, distribution—and that includes retail—plays an important role in production, because the more efficient and economical the distribution of goods, the more can be made available to consumers. The larger the supply of available goods, the more prices of those goods will fall and they will be available to more people.
Enter the internet. While Krugman might be one of the most influential economists in the country (at least via his perch at the New York Times), it is clear that he really understands very little about how the internet affects economic growth, and that should not be surprising given his Keynesian perspectives. For most Keynesians, there is a disconnect between flooding an economy with new spending and how that process actually brings about an increase in output and decrease in unemployment. J.M. Keynes himself argued in The General Theory that government monetary and direct spending activities would force up consumer prices, thus undercutting wages through inflation or, to be more precise, cutting wages en masse. Under Keynesian thinking, employment opportunities do not arise because of expansion of capital, but rather because of a trick played by monetary authorities. However, Keynesians do not explain how such schemes actually contribute to economic growth; we are to take it on faith.
Furthermore, Keynesians also disconnect the relationship between production and consumption, with consumption having little more purpose than to clear the shelves of previously produced goods, thus allowing producers to make more goods to put on the shelves. And so on. Not surprisingly, Keynesians also misunderstand the role of capital, which in their “theology” is useful only insofar as money is spent to create it.
With economists like Krugman unable to present a coherent causal theory as to why their schemes result in economic growth, one should not be surprised that Krugman is unable to explain the internet’s role in the economy. Part of the problem is that Krugman does not understand the relationship between lower costs and economic growth, instead believing that higher costs (and especially higher labor costs) are the engine of expansion. Like Keynes before him, Krugman insisted that inflation—the more the better—was another key to expanding the economy.
In Krugman’s eyes, apparently the internet is mostly a mechanism for advancing social media in which he and his friends can label people they don’t like as “racist” or worse. Yet what is the commercial strength of the internet, and how has it promoted real economic growth?
Austrian economists are best equipped to understand the internet’s impact, because they understand the role of entrepreneurs and capital. While Krugman has said in the past that productivity is key to economic growth, he then seems to believe that the way to achieve that growth is through high income tax rates, expansion of labor unions, and a return to the regulated New Deal cartels in banking and finance. Austrians, on the other hand, realize that the regulated cartels that characterized much of the US economy from the New Deal well into the 1970s were responsible for much of the economic stagnation that plagued the country before the Jimmy Carter administration moved to deregulate transportation, telecommunications, and banking and the Ronald Reagan administration worked with Congress to reduce federal income tax rates. (Before he came to endorse 70-plus percent tax rates, Krugman told a group of economists, including Joseph Salerno and I, that the pre-Reagan rates were “insane.”)
So, if Krugman believes that raising business costs, increasing taxes, expanding the regulatory state, and covering all of it by printing money is the key to economic growth, he hardly is going give the internet any credit for contributing to a growing and productive economy. After all, the internet permits more workplace flexibility, enables retailers to better target their markets, reduces costs for both consumers and producers, and better enables economic exchanges. Economists such as Ludwig von Mises would have understood, and certainly Carl Menger would have realized that the internet better enables the development of the higher-order goods that Menger emphasized as the key to rising standards of living.
In other words, Krugman’s wrong prediction was not just a silly error that resulted from an off-the-cuff remark. No, it perfectly reflected his inability to understand even the basics of economics.
- "I Was Terrified" – 'Protesters' Fume About Feds Brutally Suppressing Portland Riots
“I Was Terrified” – ‘Protesters’ Fume About Feds Brutally Suppressing Portland Riots
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 17:00On Thursday and Friday, #resistance and far-left twitter was abuzz with talk of a terrifying new force on the streets of Portland: federal agents wearing plain clothes and using unmarked vans to snatch up protesters and shuffle them to the nearest police precinct. Before the agents showed up, some brave locals complained that Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and other city officials had simply let a bunch of “anarchists” set up their own version of Seattle’s “CHOP”.
Unwilling to countenance another “CHOP”, President Trump issued an executive order calling for all federal statues and monuments to be protected against vandals and rioters. This resulted in the deployment of what some called “Barr’s Army” – a “violent gang” of federal agents who snatched up peaceful protesters left and right (nevermind the vandalism and destruction these demonstrations have caused since the death of George Floyd, including another bout of violence that emerged this week.
WaPo has unsurprisingly lionized the demonstrations in stories with titles like “50 Nights Of Protest” and others. Last night, a video surfaced of ICE agents who had been deployed to the city
A Reuters reported managed to speak with two protesters who were allegedly chased down by the cops in an unmarked van.
Portland protester Conner O’Shea said agents chased him in an unmarked vehicle Wednesday while walking with his friend Mark Pettibone back to their cars. “I know they’re looking for people that are doing graffiti and laser pointing,” he said. “We haven’t done any of that, which makes it all the more scary.”
“It’s horrifying and I think as Americans we’ve read about things like this happening in other countries, you know, in textbooks about the 70s, 80s,” he said.
Interestingly, the name ‘Mark Pettibone’ popped up in a handful of other media reports about the ‘crackdown’ in Portland. The Washington Post shared Pettibone’s story, apparently taking his word for it: Pettibone told his sob story about being attacked and arrested by plainclothes officers in an unmarked van.
“I was terrified,” Pettibone said. “It seemed like it was out of a horror/sci-fi, like a Philip K. Dick novel. It was like being preyed upon.”
Newspapers like WaPo and other “legacy” media organizations have been using language like this to describe the police more frequently lately, as they quote protesters and leaders who repeat their hysterical remarks as if they were fact.
As Pettibone tells it, he couldn’t tell whether the men confronting him were police or far-right extremists. After officers demanded that he stop, he said he ran for half a block before sinking to his knees with his hands in the air. Police searched him, then drove him to a holding cell, then released him shortly after. Now he’s demanding to know why he was detained and generally making a big deal about the injustice of it all.
Oregon Gov Kate Brown and Portland Mayor Wheeler have denounced this federal intrusion. But when Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf landed in Portland on Thursday to assess the situation and report back, both officials publicly declined to meet with him.
It’s just another sign that pandering politicians have internalized the far-left’s hatred of anybody who disagrees with their world view. Because a discussion might lead to a resolution, and then what would all these protesters do? As the protesters claim they were being snatched up by unidentified ‘agents’, DHS issued a statement directly contradicting this.
Agents were in uniform, but they didn’t wear badges due to fears of personal safety. It’s the same line or reasoning that justifies using an unmarked van, a spokesperson for DHS said.
After visiting the city, Wolf released a statement that included a list of incidents DHS officers have faced in Portland since late May, and praised them in a series of tweets on Friday.
Our men and women in uniform are patriots. We will never surrender to violent extremists on my watch. pic.twitter.com/kG8w8kyw9E
— Acting Secretary Chad Wolf (@DHS_Wolf) July 17, 2020
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Here is what I saw in Portland yesterday. pic.twitter.com/B0xvTTYvIj
— Acting Secretary Chad Wolf (@DHS_Wolf) July 17, 2020
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These valiant men and women have defended our institutions of justice against violent anarchists for 48 straight days. We will prevail. pic.twitter.com/Qo9XoCyH2N
— Acting Secretary Chad Wolf (@DHS_Wolf) July 17, 2020
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“I offered @DHSgov support to help locally address the situation that’s going on in Portland, and their only response was: please pack up and go home. That’s just not going to happen on my watch.” pic.twitter.com/BW8UdbNZ9c
— Acting Secretary Chad Wolf (@DHS_Wolf) July 17, 2020
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When asked by Reuters about Wolf’s visit, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said that while he was aware of the visit, he wished Wolf had sjust stayed in Washington.
“We’re aware that they’re here. We wish they weren’t. We haven’t been invited to meet with them, and if we were we would decline.”
Give it another month or so and we’ll see if Wheeler doesn’t change his tune. Because local officials are deluding themselves if they think appeasing these anarchists – anarchists who want to destroy America despite the fact that most of them are white and from relatively wealthy backgrounds – will work.
- Declassified: Christopher Steele's "Primary Sub-Source" Was His Own Employee; NYT Russiagate Propaganda Shredded By Strzok Comments
Declassified: Christopher Steele’s “Primary Sub-Source” Was His Own Employee; NYT Russiagate Propaganda Shredded By Strzok Comments
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 16:30FBI documents declassified by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reveal that Christopher Steele’s “primary sub-source” for his infamous Clinton/DNC-funded dossier was a ‘non-Russian employee of Christopher Steele’s firm.’
Per Graham’s office:
- The document reveals that the primary “source” of Steele’s election reporting was not some well-connected current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian based contract employee of Christopher Steele’s firm. Moreover, it demonstrates that the information that Steele’s primary source provided him was second and third-hand information and rumor at best.
- Critically, the document shows that Steele’s “Primary Sub-source” disagreed with and was surprised by how information he gave Steele was then conveyed by Steele in the Steele dossier.
Meanwhile, a second document released by Graham absolutely shreds a New York Times article authored by Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo. Journalist Sharyl Attkisson details how comments made by former FBI agent Peter Strzok revealed the article, entitled “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contact With Russian Intelligence,” was absolute propaganda.
Claim in NYT article: “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.”
Note by Strzok: “This statement is misleading and inaccurate as written. We have not seen evidence of any individuals in contact with Russians (both Governmental and non-Governmental” and “There is no known intel affiliation, and little if any [Government of Russia] affiliation[.] FBI investigation has shown past contact between [Trump campaign volunteer Carter] Page and the SVR [Service of the Russian Federation], but not during his association with the Trump campaign.”
Claim in NYT article: “…one of the advisers picked up on the [intercepted] calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months…”
Note by Strzok: “We are unaware of any calls with any Russian government official in which Manafort was a party.”
Claim in NYT article: “The FBI has obtained banking and travel records…”
Note by Strzok: “We do not yet have detailed banking records.”
Claim in NYT article: “Officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, and how many of Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians.”
Note by Strzok: “Again, we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intel officials” and “Our coverage has not revealed contact between Russian intelligence officers and the Trump team.”
Claim in NYT article: “The F.B.I. asked the N.S.A. to collect as much information as possible about the Russian operatives on the phone calls…”
Note by Strzok: “If they did we are not aware of those communications.”
Claim in NYT article: “The FBI has closely examined at least four other people close to Mr. Trump… Carter Page… Roger Stone… and Mr. Flynn.”
Note by Strzok: “We have not investigated Roger Stone.”
Claim by NYT: “Senior F.B.I. officials believe… Christopher Steele… has a credible track record.”
Note by Strzok: “Recent interviews and investigation, however, reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of subsource network.”
Claim by NYT: “The F.B.I.’s investigation into Mr. Manafort began last spring [2016].”
Note by Strzok: “This is inaccurate… our investigation of Manafort was opened in August 2016.”
Claim by NYT: “The bureau did not have enough evidence to obtain a warrant for a wiretap of Mr. Manafort’s communications, but it had the N.S.A. closely scrutinize the communications of Ukrainian officials he had met.”
Note by Strzok: “This is inaccurate…”
* * *
Will the New York Times correct their inaccurate reporrting?
* * *
Statement and documents from Sen. Lindsey Graham’s office:
WASHINGTON – Today, as part of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and related FISA abuses, Chairman Lindsey Graham (R- South Carolina) released two recently declassified documents that significantly undercut the reliability of the Steele dossier and the accuracy and reliability of many of the factual assertions in the Carter Page FISA applications.
“I’m very pleased the investigation in the Senate Judiciary Committee has been able to secure the declassification of these important documents,” said Chairman Graham. “I want to thank Attorney General Barr for releasing these documents and allowing the American People to judge for themselves.
“What have we learned from the release of these two documents by the Department of Justice? Number one, it is clear to me that the memo regarding the FBI interview of the primary sub-source in January 2017 should have required the system to stop and reevaluate the case against Mr. Page.
“Most importantly after this interview of the sub-source and the subsequent memo detailing the contents of the interview, it was a miscarriage of justice for the FBI and the Department of Justice to continue to seek a FISA warrant against Carter Page in April and June of 2017.
“The dossier was a critical document to justify a FISA warrant against Mr. Page and this DOJ memo clearly indicates that the reliability of the dossier was completely destroyed after the interview with the primary sub-source in January 2017. Those who knew or should have known of this development and continued to pursue a FISA warrant against Mr. Page anyway are in deep legal jeopardy in my view.
“Secondly, the comments of Peter Strzok regarding the February 14 New York Times article are devastating in that they are an admission that there was no reliable evidence that anyone from the Trump Campaign was working with Russian Intelligence Agencies in any form.
“The statements by Mr. Strzok question the entire premise of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump Campaign and make it even more outrageous that the Mueller team continued this investigation for almost two and a half years. Moreover, the statements by Strzok raise troubling questions as to whether the FBI was impermissibly unmasking and analyzing intelligence gathered on U.S. persons.
“These documents, which I have long sought, tell a damning story for anyone who’s interested in trying to find the truth behind the corrupt nature of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016 and beyond.”
The first document is a 57-page summary of a three-day interview the FBI conducted with Christopher Steele’s so-called “Primary Sub-source” in January of 2017. [Document 1]
- This document not only demonstrates how unsubstantiated and unreliable the Steele dossier was, it shows that the FBI was on notice of the dossier’s credibility problems and sought two more FISA application renewals after gaining this awareness.
- The document reveals that the primary “source” of Steele’s election reporting was not some well-connected current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian based contract employee of Christopher Steele’s firm. Moreover, it demonstrates that the information that Steele’s primary source provided him was second and third-hand information and rumor at best.
- Critically, the document shows that Steele’s “Primary Sub-source” disagreed with and was surprised by how information he gave Steele was then conveyed by Steele in the Steele dossier. For instance, the “Primary Sub-source”: did not recall or did not know where some of the information attributed to him or his sources came from; was never told about or never mentioned to Steele certain information attributed to him or his sources; he said that Steele re-characterized some of the information to make it more substantiated and less attenuated than it really was; that he would have described his sources differently; and, that Steele implied direct access to information where the access to information was indirect.
- In total, this document demonstrates that information from the Steele dossier, which “played a central and essential role” in the FISA warrants on Carter Page, should never have been presented to the FISA court.
The second document contains Peter Strzok’s type-written comments disagreeing with assertions made in aNew York Times article about alleged Russian intelligence ties to the Trump campaign. [Document 2]
- The document demonstrates that Peter Strzok and others in FBI leadership positions must have been aware of the issues with the Steele dossier that the FBI’s interview with Steele’s “Primary Sub-source” revealed, because Strzok commented that “[r]ecent interviews and investigation, however, reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of his sub-source network.”
- The document further shows that the FBI’s assertion to the FISA court that “the FBI believes that Russia’s efforts to influence U.S. policy were likely being coordinated between the RIS [Russian Intelligence Services] and Page, and possibly others” appears to be a misrepresentation. This is because, in his comments on the Times article, Strzok asserts that “[w]e have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with IOs [Intelligence Officials]. . . . We are unaware of ANY Trump advisors engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.”
- The document also indicates that the FBI may have been using foreign intelligence gathering techniques to impermissibly unmask and analyze existing and future intelligence collection regarding U.S. persons associated with the Trump campaign: “Both the CIA and NSA are aware of our subjects and throughout the summer we provided them names and selectors for queries of their holdings as well as prospective collection.” The quote does not provide enough information to fully understand exactly what the FBI was doing but impermissible unmasking and analysis of existing and future incidental intelligence collection of U.S. persons would be troubling.
- The document also raises questions as to whether the FBI was properly using intelligence techniques and databases “throughout the summer” considering that the earliest formal investigation of a U.S. person associated with the Trump campaign was not officially opened until July 31, 2016.
- Iran Puts Air Defenses On 'High Alert' Following Unexplained Blasts
Iran Puts Air Defenses On ‘High Alert’ Following Unexplained Blasts
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 16:00CNN is reporting late this week that US intelligence has observed that Iran has put parts of its anti-air missile defense system on “high alert” following multiple unexplained blasts and fires and sensitive military, industrial, and nuclear sites.
The report cites “several” intelligence indications according to the unnamed intel official. It also comes at a moment of wide speculation that either Israel or the US is behind some of the recent spate of explosions. Lately Israeli officials have strongly suggested that this is indeed the case.
Anti-air defense system, file image. “The change in alert status means Iranian surface-to-air missile batteries would be ready to fire at targets perceived to be a threat,” CNN writes.
“The official would not say how the US picked up on these indicators, but American satellites, spy planes, and ships routinely operate in nearby international airspace and waters where they continuously monitor Iranian activity,” it continues.
The report speculated that it’s possible the change in anti-air alert status is due to military training exercises; however, it’s more likely the Islamic Republic now sees itself as under attack.
The US has “several” intelligence indications Iran has put portions of air defense system on ‘high alert’ in recent days. This comes in wake of unexplained explosions at key facilities tied to its military and nuclear programs: US Official. Worries abt Iran retaliation. #natanz
— Barbara Starr (@barbarastarrcnn) July 16, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Over the past month there’s been well over a half-dozen major blasts, with one at a ballistic missile site, and another at Natanz nuclear facility.
The CNN report points toward the new alert status as specifically a likely response to the Natanz destruction, the explanation of which is still deeply uncertain.
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