- Kadish: Is It Puppeteers Or Puppets In Control In Washington?
Kadish: Is It Puppeteers Or Puppets In Control In Washington?
Authored by Lawrence Kadish via The Gatestone Institute,
It must be the best of times and the worst of times for our nation’s enemies.
On one hand they have a President in the White House whose actions are reducing America into some befuddled and diminished world power.
On the other hand our foes are trying to figure out, as are all Americans, who is actually in charge in Washington?
Is it a shadow government of consultants, lobbyists, and Obama retreads?
Or is it really a president who counts success as getting to the presidential helicopter unassisted?
One can envision the intelligence chiefs of our sworn enemies being sternly lectured by their supreme leaders to get to the bottom of it because they can’t believe their good fortune that American leadership has fallen so far so fast. It must be a devious trap.
If only that were true.
It is understandable our foes sense a unique moment in history. Under Biden, America now has a national debt that rivals a Black Hole. Our unemployment numbers refuse to go down, suggesting deep fissures in our economy. Our southern border remains more a suggestion than a checkpoint. And our allies see a nation that has casually condemned to death untold numbers of Afghans who fervently believed in America until they saw our last C-17 depart Kabul.
What all of this might suggest is that there are individuals in Washington who are wielding enormous power without worrying about what Joe Biden might think or do because whatever they decide, it is Biden who will take the fall. If true, it has the makings of a nightmare situation.
And yet there is another scenario that is equally chilling.
What if Biden is not the tool of those behind the throne? What if he has cut the cord of puppet strings and is “dancing” freely? What if he is pursuing policies and initiatives far removed from those who thought they could direct the actions of a President whose cognitive behavior has been seriously questioned?
So pity our poor enemies. They do not know who to bribe, intimidate, or co-opt.
And then pity America — for whether we tell Joe “it’s time to go” or “straighten up and fly right,” we appear to be trapped by a Washington power elite intent on consigning our future to oblivion.
In the end, it will be up to the American electorate to halt this slide as they consider who to send to Congress in the next election cycle.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 23:30 - Forget 5G, China Leads The 6G Charge
Forget 5G, China Leads The 6G Charge
While the world is still very much in the transition phase with 5G, research is already well underway for the next iteration of the technology standard for mobile broadband networks – 6G.
Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes that, according to a whitepaper by Samsung it takes an average of ten years for a new standard to become ready for commercialization, with 5G taking eight years. The tech giant suggested a potential rollout date of 2028-2030 for 6G, highlighting the urgent need for progress to be made.
As this infographic shows, the country at the front of this new charge is China.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Data from the Cyber Creative Institute as covered by Nikkei Asia shows that of around 20,000 6G-related patent applications as of August 2021, 40.3 percent originated from the Asian superpower. The United States isn’t far behind, however, claiming 35.2 percent of the applications. The home of Samsung, South Korea, is in fifth place (when combining applications for European countries) with 4.2 percent.
The source assessed patent applications for nine core 6G technologies including communications, quantum technology, base stations and artificial intelligence. 6G is expected to be about ten times faster than 5G.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 23:00 - Wokeness: An Evil Of Our Age
Wokeness: An Evil Of Our Age
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,
History is replete with examples of nations, successful and not-so-successful alike, that abruptly committed suicide.
The ancient polis of Corcyra devoured itself in a bloody conflict as a collective madness took hold of the island city-state during the Peloponnesian War.
The Jacobins in 1793 hijacked the French Revolution and turned a movement toward a constitutional republic into a totalitarian, year-zero effort to destroy the past and ensure equity for all—or else. The Reign of Terror—and eventually Napoleon—followed.
The effort to force war-weary Czarist Russia to reform into a constitutional monarchy ended up being kidnapped by a small but lethal clique of Leninist Bolsheviks. What ensued was the destruction of Russian life—and millions of corpses—over the next 70 years. Ditto Mao Zedong’s various murderous resets culminating in the cannibalistic “Cultural Revolution.” Mao’s final tab was 60-70 million deaths of his fellow Chinese.
French, Russian, and Chinese wokists all toppled statues, canceled out the nonbelievers, wiped away history, tore down monuments, and declared themselves the purest of all generations in their year zero—before getting down to the business of dividing up the spoils and settling scores.
Most of these bloodbaths started out with the supposedly noble idea of delivering social justice, equity, and fairness before they inevitably went deadly and feral. We should be just as worried about our own woke pandemic.
Mythological
Start with the idea that “wokeness” is an ideology divorced from reality. Nearly all of its premises are complete distortions.
Between 2017 and 2020, minorities had made the greatest gains in employment in U.S. history. Women currently represent about 60 percent of all college students.
Recent wage gains for minority middle-class Americans outpaced those of the white working- and middle class. The latter were underrepresented in college enrollments and as graduates—but vastly overrepresented (at twice their percentage of the general population) in the toll of combat dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. Asian-Americans and a dozen other ethnic groups outpace so-called whites in per capita and household income. “White privilege” is usually a sloppy term that applies mostly to the white elites who use it to smear others.
America was in our sixth decade of “affirmative action,” the euphemism of ensuring equity of result by calibrating race and gender—but not class—in hiring and admissions. Proportional representation and disparate impact continued or were even enhanced. But they became increasingly selective as entire fields from the Postal Service to professional sports were somehow exempt from racial set-asides applied to others. Quotas disappeared when the marginalized were “overrepresented” in a field.
The historical reparatory effort of the massive programs born out of the Great Society continued to address the baleful legacy of slavery that had ended over 150 years ago, as well as Southern Jim Crow laws that had largely disappeared 40-50 years ago, and the fumes of such racial toxicity. So, Martin Luther King’s “content of our character” rather than the “color of our skin” was still embraced as the melting-pot ideal of the Civil Rights movement that had fought for integration and full assimilation into American society. Meanwhile, intermarriage has never been more common.
The desperate Left had therefore been forced to invent adjectives and phraseology like “systemic racism” and “microaggression” and “whiteness” given the vast majority of Americans did not feel or express or act out on “racism.”
In other words, wokeness created the mythology that the nonwhite were worse off than ever before—a typical revolutionary fabrication to evoke the sort of hysteria necessary for an otherwise unpopular agenda. But then again, we live in an age where we were assured Hunter Biden’s lost laptop was “Russian disinformation”, the Steele dossier was iron-clad proof of something, and a pangolin or a bat birthed COVID-19.
The wrongful death of George Floyd in police custody—despite his later angelic deification, Floyd was in fact a felon with a history of violence toward women, arrested in the act of passing counterfeit U.S. currency—was the work of a cruel rogue cop and his incompetent enablers. Otherwise, data and statistics did not show that African American males were dying while in police custody in numbers greater than their proportions of those yearly arrested. Nor were they the victims of some pandemic of interracial hate crimes. Indeed, blacks statistically were more likely to commit rare violent interracial crimes than were others, including targeted hate crimes against other ethnic and racial groups.
Elite-Driven
Another great lie was the propaganda that the woke movement was a grass-roots movement. Yet statue-toppling, vandalism, Trotskyism, and cancel culture remain largely the work of college students, upper-middle class white coastal elites, celebrities, and privileged minorities in the media, academia, law, the corporate world, entertainment, and professional sports.
In a reductionist sense, much of the woke movement became a battle among elites to leverage diversity czars in universities, reparational quotas in administrative hiring and college admissions, and a sort of racialized intramural reseating among first-class passengers on the corporate and government Lido deck.
While wokeists harangued New York and Hollywood for more nonwhites in TV commercials, thousands of young African American males continued to be slaughtered in the inner-cities, as schools in those places resisted reform and remained indifferent to the poor quality of education offered residents. Because the culpable municipal officials—hard-Left diversity mayors, neo-Marxist district attorneys, and “reformist” police chiefs—were themselves woke, no one cared about derelict governance. And so, the killing continues unabated, surrealistically unremarked upon by the wokest.
Class considerations were suppressed, given that the beneficiaries of wokeness were not necessarily previously poor and oppressed. In our racialized madness, billionaires like LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, and Beyonce, multimillionaires like the Obamas and Colin Kaepernick, and moneyed political, corporate, entertainment, military, and sports grandees—play-acted oppression and victimization from their villas and privileged perches, in perfect Marie Antoinette fashion. All they lacked was fake peasant garb and a village at Versailles.
The architects themselves of wokeness mostly cashed in on the supposedly toxic capitalist system that they had so harangued as the ground zero of “systemic racism.” So, BLM cofounder and self-described “cultural Marxist” Patrisse Cullors is now “retired”—and the savvy owner of four new homes, residing in nearly all-white tony Topanga Canyon, with a new $35,000 security gate. How else could she best use her black privilege to direct her multimillion-dollar war against “white privilege”?
Professor Ibram X. Kendi (neé Henry Rogers), whose “antiracist” new industry calls for racism to stop racism and discrimination to end discrimination, now charges his corporate and university clients a reportedly $20,000 penance fee for a phoned-in Zoom chat. (He apparently has no discount rate for the poorer of his clients). Kendi no doubt took Lenin to heart (“Capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them with.”) when he hawks his video indulgences at $333 a minute.
The cultural revolutionary Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates was customarily already one step ahead and has moved on from the woke movement to a multimillion-dollar career writing black-themed comic books or adapting them to the big screen. Barack and Michelle Obama, long ago known for their cinematic creativity, leveraged a $50 million “consulting” movie deal with Netflix, whose founder is best known in California for his efforts to fund the campaign against Larry Elder, including commercials starring . . . Barack Obama.
Racist
Wokeness took the Obama-era mantra of diversity and simply shed any pretense that it was not racist. Remember, after 2009 our elites institutionalized the new-old idea that anyone claiming not to be white was suddenly part of a new inclusive oppressed class, one at war with the racial oppressors.
“Diversity” was a clever update of the previously failed Jesse Jackson idea of a victimized rainbow coalition that would aggregate, and force-multiply collective grievances against white male victimizers.
Suddenly, ethnic groups with higher per capita incomes than so-called whites were victims. There were no requisites to being “diverse” other than claiming nonwhite status. Wealthy Punjabi immigrants, Chilean aristocrats, illegal aliens fleeing racist Mexico, Nigerian doctors—anyone rich or poor, resident or citizen, victimized or not—was presto! “diverse” and thereby eligible for reparatory claims in hiring and admissions.
Many liberal whites wished to get in on it and got caught at it—whether Ward Churchill with this entire Native American tribal garb, or, on the cheaper side, Elizabeth Warren with her “high” cheek bones or racial fabulists Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King. After all, if gender is “constructed,” then naturally race, too, could become a construct.
All this is dangerous because we are now logically headed to DNA-categorized ID badges reminiscent of yellow Star of David patches. Here once again Elizabeth Warren had been in the lead—claiming that her boomeranged DNA results showing a tiny drop of Native American lineage were thus proof that she was an indigenous victim after all—and so in her troubled mind truly had been deserving as the first Native American law professor at Harvard. Given this nonsense, one would think a distracted America has no real debt and is in possession of a secure border, a thriving economy, a brilliantly educated youth, and only friends abroad.
Why is Wokeism Deadly?
Wokeism is a lethal distraction. As General Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday lectured the nation on the various nefarious strains of white rage, whiteness, and white supremacy, the Taliban was systematically gobbling up Afghanistan. Meanwhile their boss in the White House quoted his woke military experts in order to lie there was no danger of a general collapse. No general objected. Apparently, Biden even phoned the Afghan president in a sordid attempt to leverage him likewise to lie that all was well. The ubiquitous Alexander Vindman was not listening in this time around.
In a traditional Islamic society, what were woke Americans doing bragging about gender studies programs at an Afghan university, flying pride flags at the U.S. embassy, and encouraging honorific George Floyd street murals? All that is usually the haughty cultural imperialism of would-be winners, not the virtue signaling of a defeated and humiliated diplomatic and military cohort fleeing toward the exits.
Think of this for a second: as the U.S. bureaucracy invested trillions in Afghanistan to virtue-signal against supposed George-Floyd type racism, its media appendages said nothing back home as the black candidate for the California governorship was the target of an egg-throwing woman wearing a gorilla mask. What a grotesque reminder that empires flounder abroad as they rot at home.
So these distractions never sleep, even amid the greatest defeat and loss of global deterrence in U.S. military history since Vietnam. True ideologues that they are, even our defeated on the battlefield are unfazed in their wokeist creed.
As Kabul suffered its end of days, our bemedaled wokists were still lecturing the country about the gender ratios of the Afghan refugees on U.S. flights out, the culturally sensitive food awaiting them, and a new idea of a soft Taliban—or the notion that the medieval gangsters who had defeated the Pentagon were not really all that bad, but more likely “partners” in a shared agenda of seeing us skedaddle by August 31. Will they say that in six months?
Woke indemnity blinds us to racism and classism. Gavin Newsom, of French Laundry repute, is the epitome of a white-male mediocrity leveraging his rich family friends to elevate himself by quid pro quo favoritism. Joe Biden has voiced the most racist rants of any presidential candidate or president in the last 50 years (just recently he referred to his own senior black official as “boy”). Both bought woke insurance that inoculates them against their hypocrisy—or perhaps further fuels their own class and racial biases with an efficacy rate much more impressive than COVID vaccinations.
The creation of the blanket term “whiteness” is racist to the core. It imputes to anyone considered not sufficiently pigmented some sort of conspiratorial evil, regardless of individual character, beliefs, family history, or ideological outlook. It is incoherent since it blames the United States, and everything in it, for whiteness, and then demands that the nonwhite south of the equator from Africa to Asia be given instant access to this supposedly failed white contaminated miasma. Scarier still for the wokist, whiteness is just the new face of the old racist “blackness,” in which racists imputed to individual blacks supposedly collective pathologies in order to justify discrimination against a single individual.
Once the neo-Confederate idea of color triumphs, then there is no logical reason why “blackness,” “brownness,” “yellowness,” “redness” and every sort of pigmentary category should not be used to condemn individuals for their supposed membership in a taboo racial tribe, massaged and negatively stereotyped for contemporary advantage. We are headed back to 1840 not ahead to 2040.
If Something Can’t Go On Forever, It Will Stop
Finally, wokeism is unsustainable. We are already seeing large numbers of the supposedly “nonwhite” pushback against the wokeist trajectory, knowing that such a racialist monster may soon devour them, too. Drawing artificial racial Mason-Dixon lines inside millions of multiracial families, after the initial grifting subsides, will only incur anger at those who drew them. When Confederates embraced the one-drop, one-sixteenth rule, there was unanimous later agreement that it was not just abjectly racist, but lunatic; when the woke borrow such racial distillery it too will eventually be rejected as the crackpot hatred that it is.
There are probably some 100 million white males of the lower- and middle classes. Most feel little if any identity with the woke upper-middle class and wealthy bicoastal white male elite of some 20-30 million. If anything, a trucker from Boise has more in common with a Mexican-American sheriff in Modesto than he does with a woke techie in Menlo Park.
So, what is truly evil is the current woke trademark of loud privileged whites who scapegoat the losers in the globalist game as racist (or in the Obama-Hillary Clinton-Biden patois of “clingers,” “deplorables,” “irredeemables,” “dregs,” “chumps”), mostly out of elite condescension, virtue-signaling guilt, and pathetic contextualizing their own privilege by projecting their unearned status onto supposedly distant cultural losers.
There will be a substantial political correction to the madness, mostly because without one there is no longer a confident America abroad that advances and protects the interest of a free world challenged by nightmarish Chinese Communism.
Such racist selectivity would destroy a meritocratic and productive free market economy at home that fuels the Left’s massive government redistribution.
The victory of woke would guarantee that as Americans went full pre-modern and pre-civilizational, we would look in the mirror, straining to redefine and recategorize ourselves, and then search out which particular tribal band offers us the best protection from the roving mobs—and each other.
Even the Chinese apparat could not invent a more evil, more macabre way to destroy the United States.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 22:30 - France Still Seething, Warns Australia Over "Huge Mistake" In Defense Deal With US
France Still Seething, Warns Australia Over “Huge Mistake” In Defense Deal With US
Still seething, French diplomats continue to harangue Washington and Australia over the new landmark defense pact which will center on the US sharing nuclear submarine technology with Australia, which led to the immediate cancelation by Canberra of a major contract for submarines worth over $60 billion (with some estimates putting the total deal struck in 2016 at $90BN).
As we detailed earlier, on Friday France recalled its ambassadors to both countries in protest, in a move widely being described as the first time in history Paris pulled its ambassador to Washington in anger. Meanwhile on Saturday France’s ambassador to Australia rebuked the country for its “huge mistake”.
Launch of French nuclear submarine Suffren in Cherbourg in 2019, AFP/Getty Images Ambassador Jean-Pierre Thebault said trust and integrity have been broken. “This has been a huge mistake, a very, very bad handling of the partnership,” The Associated Press reports.
“I would like to be able to run into a time machine and be in a situation where we don’t end up in such an incredible, clumsy, inadequate, un-Australian situation,” Thebault added.
The initial French sub contract with Australia, which had been first agreed to in 2016, was for France to build 12 conventionally powered submarines modelled on Barracuda nuclear-powered subs. Negotiations had long been tense, particularly after rising costs and significant production delays on the French side.
The new ‘AUKUS’ deal with the United States officially announced Thursday will see Australia acquire at least eight nuclear submarines, allowing it to join a tiny number of countries globally who deploy nuclear-powered subs, in a moved being seen as aimed at countering China’s growing power in the Indo-Pacific.
If this happened under Trump, the liberal media would have been up in arms. Imagine. https://t.co/e4j2Oj3ept
— asad abukhalil أسعد أبو خليل (@asadabukhalil) September 18, 2021
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Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said at the end of this week of which has seen France continue to lash out: “Australia understands France’s deep disappointment with our decision, which was taken in accordance with our clear and communicated national security interests.”
French FM Le Drian earlier described Australia’s scrapping deal “a stab in the back” and warned that trust has been broken between the two trading partners.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 22:00 - The Rise And Fall Of 9MM Ammo Prices During COVID; What's Next?
The Rise And Fall Of 9MM Ammo Prices During COVID; What’s Next?
Op-Ed via The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN).
The Machine Gun Nest has been open since 2015, but we’ve been in the firearms industry since 2013. Earlier than that, Rob (one of the owners) has been collecting guns since the early 2000s. We’ve seen panic buys, ammo prices fluctuate, and firearms banned and unbanned.
March of 2020. The COVID19 pandemic hits the United States. Many people (like myself) were aware of the situation in China and had time to prepare for the worst adequately. Many people were caught completely off guard.
Many things led to the recent panic buy, but most of it is related to COVID. Many people thought that the world was going to end. So many people “woke up” to the idea that they may have to fend for themselves and that no one was coming to save them. This change of mentality led to an explosion in firearms and ammo sales.
Weirdly enough, the price of ammo didn’t have an immediate rise at the beginning of the pandemic. It was summertime before we started to see a real spike in price. Prices averaged $0.20 a round for 9mm until July. Then we began to see prices rise to an average of about $0.30/per round.
The price rise could be attributed to the BLM protests, counter and subsequent riots that followed, which were viewed widely across the internet and traditional media. There were depictions of innocent people getting hurt or worse, swarmed by protestors, with no police anywhere to help.
This led to a panic buy on top of a panic buy. Whereas previously, shelves had been scarce, they became empty. People started to hoard ammunition like they had been hoarding toilet paper. Since manufacturing companies were set up to meet the average demand of the “Trump Slump” of the previous years, where gun and ammo sales had been low, there started to be bottlenecks in ammunition production. Ammo manufacturers were not prepared for the sharp increase in buying.
In August 2020, we started to see prices increase even more as ammo became harder to come by. 9mm saw an average of $0.50/ per round. Major manufacturing companies started to report that they had accumulated millions of dollars in backorders. We tried to place a substantial order for ammo and were straight up told that there was no way that we’d get it within the year or next.
Speaking to some of our friends, we gathered that there was a shortage of primers. Primers are the component within ammunition that ignites the gunpowder to expel the projectile from the bullet & firearm when struck by the firing pin. For those that don’t know, primers are incredibly dangerous to produce. The manufacturing process sometimes results in death. Primers are typically the bottleneck in the production process for ammunition. A shortage of primers caused by high demand and supply chain disruption continued to help drive up the cost of ammo.
We luckily found an importer who had bought 1M rounds of Turkish 9mm. We were able to work with him to import the ammo, and that saw us through the worst of the shortages. Unfortunately, we were victims of circumstance (like everyone else) and had to pay a high cost per round to acquire the ammo.
After the 2020 election, we saw prices rise again to an average of $0.60 per round. To give you an idea of what that means- a box of ammo is 50 rounds typically. That’s about 3-5 magazines, depending on how many bullets you load. 9mm is meant to be an inexpensive round. It’s relatively cheap to produce, and its popularity has a lot to do with that fact. When you have people paying $30 ($0.60 per round) for a box of 9mm, as opposed to $12 (0.24 per round) eight months prior, shooting starts to get expensive, especially since the average range trip equates to about 2-300 rounds per caliber.
Consider this as well; statistics show that in 2020 alone, 23 million firearms were sold, with 6 million of those guns being bought by first-time gun owners. Suppose each of those new gun owners wants to buy enough ammo for an average range trip, 200 rounds. In that case, those people would need 1,200,000,000 rounds of ammo to satisfy the demand, and that’s not even including the 32% of Americans that own guns (According to Gallup polling.) That would be about 104,960,000 people if you were wondering.
So, to satisfy that market, if each of those 104.9 Million people wanted only 200 rounds of ammo for one firearm, the amount of ammo needed would be serious. (and we know that people, in reality, want thousands of rounds per firearm). That’s not including law enforcement contracts and military contracts, which usually take precedence over the civilian market.
Finally, in Jan. of 2021, we seem to reach the peak. With the Jan. 6th protests and Biden’s inauguration, gun and ammo buying hit new highs. 9mm prices on average hit $0.71 per round. During this time, we regularly heard from customers that other spots were selling 9mm at $1/round.
At the time of writing this (September 2021), we’re just now starting to see a drop in ammo prices and gun sales slowing down. 9mm is sitting at $0.31 per round for steel case and $0.34 per round for brass on the low end. Any well-known brand names are sitting at around $0.39 per round. Even with Biden’s new “Russian Ammo Ban,” prices seem to have steadily fallen, at least on 9mm.
The real question is, will the prices keep dropping? It’s anyone’s guess.
There’s a ton of factors affecting the market right now, from unrest around the world. For example, earlier this month, a coup in Guinea sent Aluminum prices to a ten-year high. If you’re unfamiliar, Guinea holds a quarter of the world’s bauxite supply, a raw material that can be refined into alumina, which can then be smelted into aluminum.
This price change can affect the cost of firearms, as manufacturers will have to pay a higher price to acquire raw materials.
Shipping and transporting are another problem now, with sea containers fetching record-high prices because of a shortage and supply chains still seeing significant disruptions.
Since the panic buy for firearms has at least subsided a little bit, people have stopped hoarding ammo and are choosier. We’re seeing this in gun sales right now where customers aren’t coming in and just buying anything on the wall. People are starting to do their research and are becoming pickier about their buying. I think this is the same for ammo as well. The demand has subsided a bit. If supply continues to meet demand, I think we’ll continue to see a drop in prices. Barring some mutation in covid that gives the virus a 50% CFR, more supply chain disruptions, or the Biden administration passing some severe gun control legislation, I think we will continue to see the price of ammo dropping slowly.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 21:30 - California Policymakers Suddenly Agree With Trump That Controlled Burns Make Forests More Resilient
California Policymakers Suddenly Agree With Trump That Controlled Burns Make Forests More Resilient
California lawmakers are apparently just now discovering that controlled burns to prevent future wildfires might be the new prescription as decades-old policies of progressive-driven ‘conservation’ and reactive fire suppression have failed.
Democratic state lawmakers are suddenly in agreement with former President Trump who said in August 2020 that the state needs “to clean its forest floors more than anything else.”
At a rally in Pennsylvania last August, Trump told supporters:
“I see again the forest fires are starting. They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.“
And now, Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, praised a new $20 million controlled burn pilot program that won legislative approval and could soon be signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, according to local Napa County news East County Today.
“If we want to reduce the frequency and destructiveness of wildfires, we must remove combustible fuels from our tinder-dry forests and woodlands,” Sen. Dodd said.
“Prescribed burning is a time-tested solution to this worsening problem. I am thrilled to see this come to fruition and thank my legislative colleagues for supporting this worthwhile investment.”
By starting controlled fires, forest managers can eliminate fuels, such as thickets, brush, branches, and young trees that supercharge fast-moving blazes. This allows older trees to survive and keeps forest floors free and clear of fuels for the next season of wildfires.
Decades of progressive (and reactive) policies (not global warming) have made California’s woodlands overgrown, and when hot temperatures and drought arrive, the forests are tinder boxes ready to ignite.
Today’s reactive wildfire response to deploy thousands of firefighters, helicopters, planes, drones, bulldozers, and firetrucks to suppress fires is a failed policy, and lawmakers are quickly learning the hard way with more than three million acres burned in the state this fire season, displacing thousands of households and pushing first responders onto the brink of exhaustion.
*CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR NEWSOM SAYS OVER 3M ACRES HAVE BURNED
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 14, 2021
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President Biden visited California on Monday and said: “These fires are blinking code red for our nation.” He promoted two spending bills in Congress that would fund forest management and more resilient infrastructure.
So Trump was right when he criticized California for mismanaging its wildfire management program that has been the culprit of these mega-fires. Meanwhile, liberal media continues to toe the establishment line that climate change is at fault, not just bad policymaking.
As H.Sterling Burnett recently noted,in late July, President Joe Biden held a virtual joint planning meeting and press conference with the governors of various Western states to discuss how to handle 2021’s wildfire season.
Every leader blamed catastrophic human climate change for the severity of recent wildfire seasons.
The New York Times allowed Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Kate Brown to follow up that event with an editorial titled “The West Is on Fire, It’s Past Time to Act on Climate Change.”
Biden and the governors are wrong.
Wildfires have been common throughout the West historically, often burning more acres than they’ve burned in recent years. To the extent that wildfires have increased in intensity recently, it isn’t due to modest warming, but rather to decades of federal and state mismanagement of publicly owned forests throughout the Western United States, leaving those forests in tinderbox conditions.
…
So, for political reasons, Biden and the governors want to blame modest recent warming for the scope and intensity of wildfires in Western states in 2020 and 2021. The true culprit is more than 30 years of forest mismanagement.
Contrary to Biden and the governors’ assertions, state and federal efforts to address racial disparities, increase electric vehicle usage, and stop using fossil fuels to generate electricity will do nothing to prevent wildfires.
Wildfires are natural. They can’t be stopped. They can be managed. The damage they cause to the forests and the people living near them can be dramatically reduced.
Wise management of forests is required, either through regular, widespread, low-intensity burning, as the Native Americans did, or through active forest management, including intensive logging and brush clearing and firefighting efforts, as governments did prior to 1990. These tools, not massive, misdirected spending on climate change, are the best hope of preventing Westerners’ lives and livelihoods from being consumed by flames.
It appears California Democrats are maybe finally willing to accept that truth… of course with the knowledge that no mainstream media outlet will point out their hypocrisy.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 21:00 - Debunking Biden's Claim We Must "Protect The Vaccinated From The Unvaccinated"
Debunking Biden’s Claim We Must “Protect The Vaccinated From The Unvaccinated”
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
The official line on vaccines is that they are extremely effective at protecting against serious illness. And yet, these same people are also claiming that the unvaccinated are a major threat to the vaccinated.
More specifically, President Biden claimed on September 10 that vaccine mandates were to “protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers.”
In other words, it is claimed that vaccines are remarkably effective, and that the vaccinated must also be protected from the unvaccinated. How can both claims be true at the same time? They can’t. The idea that vaccinated people are being frequently harmed by the unvaccinated is a complete fabrication, based on the pro-mandate crowd’s own mainstream data.
As Robert Fellner points out, according to the official data,
The odds of a vaccinated person dying from COVID are 1 in 137,000.
The fatality rate for seasonal flu, meanwhile, is at least 100 times greater than that. The chance of dying in an automobile accident is over 1,000 times greater. Dog attacks, bee stings, sunstroke, cataclysmic storms, and a variety of other background risks we accept as a normal part of life are all more deadly than the risk COVID poses to the vaccinated.
Moreover, the risk of death to vaccinated people is similar to the risk of having an adverse side effect to the vaccine. And as the spokesmen for Big Pharma and the regime never tire of telling us, you shouldn’t care about having an adverse reaction, because it is so very rare and inconsequential.
So by that reasoning, vaccinated people shouldn’t worry about getting very ill from covid. Those cases are just as rare as the so, so rare cases of adverse reaction.
And yet, even after all of this, the backers of vaccine mandates are trying to whip up hysteria about how we must “protect the vaccinated” who are in grave danger thanks to the unvaccinated.
The level of mental and logical incoherence necessary to come to this conclusion is quite a feat.
It Doesn’t Stop the Spread
It must also be remembered that vaccination does not stop the spread of covid.
Fellner continues:
But as [the CDC’s] Dr. Walensky explained last month, while the COVID vaccines remain incredibly effective at preventing serious illness and death, “what they cannot do anymore is prevent transmission.” This reflects the official position of the agency as well, which is why the CDC now requires vaccinated people to mask indoors and follow the same type of social distancing practices as unvaccinated people.
The official confirmation that COVID is endemic, and vaccination cannot stop transmission and thereby eliminate it in the way it could for things like polio and smallpox, makes mandates intolerable to a free society. The entire argument for mandatory vaccination originally rested on the claim that the vaccines could reliably stop transmission.
Moreover, those who are vaccinated often experience a mild form of covid when they are re-infected, which means they often spread the disease without even knowing they have it. The vaccinated also carry the same viral load as the unvaccinated, as noted last month by the UK’s Evening Standard:
While evidence demonstrates that vaccines significantly reduce hospitalisations and deaths, scientists now believe those infected by the Delta variant can still harbour similar levels of virus to those who are unvaccinated.
Previous thinking was that vaccinations would stop the spread, but now,
[T]his has been thrown into doubt and raises questions about vaccine passports … which work on the assumption that double-jabbed people are less likely to spread the virus.
Yet again, we see the notion that the vaccinated are being endangered by the unvaccinated is a fantasy of the mandate activists.
At least the CDC is being logical when it says the vaccinated should keep wearing masks. Indeed, every time we hear this from the CDC we should remind ourselves: vaccination does not stop the spread.
They’re Filling Up the Hospitals!
There is a secondary fallback position the mandate pushers also use: that the unvaccinated are taking up all the intensive care beds and therefore denying people with other conditions the hospital beds that are allegedly more deserved by others.
As I pointed out here, this is also an inconsistent argument since this arguments rests on the idea that people who make unhealthy choices (like not taking a vaccine) ought to be treated as pariahs.
This only applies to one single “unhealthy choice.” These mandate pushers are apparently perfectly fine with drug abusers, smokers, and morbidly obese victims of Type-2 diabetes—the numbers of whom have been multiplying— filling up all the ICU beds. No, those people deserve their hospital beds even though they made the choice to destroy their own health. In fact if one suggests people lay off the meth pipe, the Big Gulps, or the Marlboros—in an effort to improve health—one is an intolerable “fat shamer” or someone who blames the victims.
In any case, recent data has also emerged questioning whether or not the data on hospitalizations is very useful in identifying the load imposed on ICUs by covid patients.
A recent study showed that nearly half (i.e., 48 percent) of covid hospitalizations in 2020 were mild cases. According to The Atlantic (not exactly a hotbed of anti-vaccine rhetoric):
The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
And why are there fewer severe cases now? It may be because “unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.”
Get Vaccinated Even If You Already Had Covid!
But no matter! All that matters is getting people vaccinated, and it’s all for your own good, and governments ought to be able to force medications on you. The cynical refrain of the pro-abortion Left, “get your laws off my body” only applies to one single case. In every other case, the state owns you.
This drive for vaccination no matter what can also be seen in the effort to vaccinate even those who have already recovered from covid. The claim here is that those who natural immunity should get jabbed because they have a higher incidence of reinfection—although it is admitted cases of reinfection tend to be far milder than the initial case.
Specifically, those pushing vaccination in this case may point to a study suggesting the unvaccinated are 2.34 times more likely to be reinfected than the vaccinated.
Yet, according to the pro-mandate crowd, this is 2.34 times larger than an extremely small number. After all, we’re frequently told that cases of reinfection for the vaccinated are “extremely rare” and inconsequential. So, that means for the unvaccinated, the odds of reinfection are a little more than double an inconsequential number. Now, I don’t have a degree in mathematics, but I have taken enough calculus and statistics classes to know that 2.3 times “basically zero” is also “basically zero.”
But that is the math being used by those who insist that the risk of reinfection for the vaccinated is negligible, while the risk of reinfection for the already-recovered is an enormous public health crisis.
According to the mandate pushers’ own data, the drive to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated makes no sense at all. But I suspect they’ll stick with the slogan, or even double down on it.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 20:30 - Taibbi: Does America Hate The "Poorly Educated"?
Taibbi: Does America Hate The “Poorly Educated”?
Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,
It was impossible to mistake the tone of Joe Biden’s announcement of a vaccine mandate last week. It was an angry speech, which started by explaining that “many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are still not vaccinated,” and went on to announce that “our patience is wearing thin,” and “your refusal has cost all of us.” Biden, not normally one for oratorial effects, even conveyed a sense of barely contained rage by muttering, “Get vaccinated!” as he walked off the stage.
“Enjoying the angry Dad vibes from this Biden speech,” came the cheerful comment of former Justice Department spokesman and MSNBC analyst Matthew Miller:
Enjoying the angry dad vibes from this Biden speech. He is turning the damn car around.
— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) September 9, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Who’d attracted Biden’s anger — the unvaccinated — was clear. The why was more confusing. The president decried how “the unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals… leaving no room for someone with a heart attack or pancreatitis or cancer,” a legitimate enough point. But after reassuring those who’d “done their part” that just “one out of every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized” this summer, Biden nonetheless explained that “a distinct minority of Americans” is “causing unvaccinated people to die.” He added: “We’re going to protect the vaccinated from unvaccinated co-workers.”
As many noted, the statements were contradictory. If the vaccine really is that effective, the overwhelming consequences of of any failure to get vaccinated will be borne by the unvaccinated themselves. But Biden’s speech was as much about directing anger as policy. The mandate was an extraordinary step, but Biden’s unique — and uniquely strange — rhetorical setup, which framed the decision as a way to stop “them” from doing “damage” and killing “us,” was just as big a story.
The arrival of Covid-19 has exacerbated a troubling divide that’s been growing in America for decades, and is elucidated at length in Michael Sandel’s recent The Tyranny of Merit. The book tells a politically unsettling story about meritocracy in America, one that runs counter to prevailing narratives on both the left and the right. Though mention of Covid-19 is limited to a few paragraphs in a new prologue, the pandemic in many ways has become the ultimate test case of Sandel’s thesis: that we Americans have been so conditioned to believe that winners deserve to win that we’ve found ways to hate losers of any kind as moral failures, even when life is at stake, and especially when lack of education is seen as a factor.
It’s not remotely the same kind of book, but The Tyranny of Merit does follow up on themes in Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch’s late seventies premise described American society devolved into a ceaseless all-against-all competition on all fronts, from the professional to the physical to the social and sexual and beyond. Moreover, Lasch wrote, if the original “American dream” was imbued with at least some vague ideas that success should be tied to virtues like thrift, discipline, and wisdom, by the disco age “the pursuit of wealth lost the few shreds of moral meaning.”
In the time since Lasch’s iconic treatise, though, relentless messaging campaigns emanating from both sides of the political aisle re-emphasized the idea that material success was tied to moral character. Ronald Reagan evangelized the idea that poverty was mostly a deserved state, and government at most owed those who weren’t to blame for their own problems. When Bill Clinton came along, he took Reagan’s finger-wagging moralizing and re-cast it in the cheery new technocratic language of global capitalism. “We must do what America does best,” Clinton said at his inauguration. “Offer more opportunity to all and demand more responsibility from all.”
Clinton’s formula was really Yin to Reagan’s Yang: in a world that offered more “opportunity,” there was now even less excuse for failure. We forget, because the pre-9/11 world seems so long ago, but Clinton-era editorialists spent much of the late nineties hyping the opportunity gospel. We were told a combination of the Internet and an increasingly integrated international economy created vast new worlds of material possibility, for those willing to “fill the unforgiving minute” and run the race. “If globalization were a sport,” wrote an exultant Thomas Friedman in 1999, “it would be the 100-yard dash, over and over and over. And no matter how many times you win, you have to race again the next day.”
Onetime labor parties paradoxically were the biggest boosters of the new hyper-competitive global economy, whose central feature was forcing Western workers to face off against masses of laborers in China, South Asia, Mexico, and other places where political rights were, shall we say, less of a priority. As the stress on former blue-collar workers intensified, politicians often sold the public on the idea that higher learning was their Golden Ticket out of the miseries of debt, higher medical costs, and especially social immobility.
By the time Barack Obama came along, it was axiomatic among the cosmopolitan set that anyone with enough ingenuity and entrepreneurial energy should be able to get ahead. Sandel amusingly points out that Obama often culled from a Sly and the Family Stone song in describing his vision of modern American capitalism, using the phrase “You can make it if you try” 140 times during his presidency:
The explosive and uncomfortable message at the heart of The Tyranny of Meritocracy is the idea that the resulting political divide is now less about ideology than education. Sandel deserves credit for taking on a subject that almost no one in high society wants to hear about, let alone those in the academic world. Forget red versus blue: he shows the real gulf is between those who have diplomas, and those who don’t. The subtext is that people with the right degrees deserve to be rich, and have health insurance, and good schooling for their kids, and dignified work, while those who threw away their books after high school deserve failure, in the same way smokers deserve lung disease — especially if they make unsanctioned political choices.
This is an excerpt from today’s subscriber-only post. To read the entire article and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 19:30 - Hospital Staff That Decline COVID Vaccine For Religious Reasons Must Attest To Also Swearing Off Tylenol, Tums, & Other Common Meds
Hospital Staff That Decline COVID Vaccine For Religious Reasons Must Attest To Also Swearing Off Tylenol, Tums, & Other Common Meds
In order to obtain a religious exemption from the Covid-19 vaccine at a hospital system in Arkansas, staff are also required to “swear off” common medicines like Tylenol, Tums and Preparation H.
Conway Regional Health System said it noticed an uptick in vaccine exemption requests that “cited the use of fetal cell lines in the development and testing of the vaccines,” according to ARS Technica.
Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, said: “This was significantly disproportionate to what we’ve seen with the influenza vaccine.”
He continued: “Thus, we provided a religious attestation form for those individuals requesting a religious exemption.” This attestation includes a list of about 30 common medicines that “fall into the same category as the COVID-19 vaccine in their use of fetal cell lines.”
ARS Technica reported that some of the common medicines on the list include Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, aspirin, Tums, Lipitor, Senokot, Motrin, ibuprofen, Maalox, Ex-Lax, Benadryl, Sudafed, albuterol, Preparation H, MMR vaccine, Claritin, Zoloft, Prilosec OTC, and azithromycin.
Employees then must attest they “truthfully acknowledge and affirm that my sincerely held religious belief is consistent and true”.
Troup said that the hospital wants to make sure that staff are “sincere” in their beliefs and that the hospital wants to “educate staff who might have requested an exemption without understanding the full scope of how fetal cells are used in testing and development in common medicines.”
Employees that don’t sign the form are only granted provisional exemptions. Troup said 5% of the hospital’s staff has filed for such an exemption.
“A lot of this, I believe, is a hesitancy about the vaccine, and so that’s a separate issue than a religious exemption,” he concluded.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 19:00 - US Will Push More Arab States To Normalize With Israel
US Will Push More Arab States To Normalize With Israel
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the US would continue to push Arab states to normalize relations with Israel. This month marked the one-year anniversary of the signing of Trump administration-brokered agreements that normalized relations with Israel and the UAE, and Bahrain, known as the Abraham Accords.
Following the UAE, Morocco also normalized with Israel. Sudan agreed with Israel to open relations, but Khartoum has been slow to establish diplomatic ties. “We will encourage more countries to follow the lead of the Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco,” Blinken said during a virtual meeting with the countries’ ministers.
Signing of the Abraham Accords under the Trump administration. Image source: State Dept. While touted as peace deals, the Abraham Accords will lead to an influx of more US arms in the region and have failed to slow Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank through settlements and Israel’s brutality against the people of Gaza.
For agreeing to normalize with Israel, the UAE was awarded a $23 billion weapons deal that includes F-35 fighter jets that the Biden administration briefly paused but then decided to proceed with. For Morrocco, the US recognized Muskat’s sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region, another move President Biden will not reverse.
The Trump administration pressured Khartoum into normalizing with Israel by adding it as a condition to get Sudan removed from the US terror list. To be removed from the list, the US made Sudan pay $335 million in compensation to victims of the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that were carried out by al-Qaeda, even though Osama bin Laden was kicked out of Sudan in 1996.
The Clinton administration bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in response to the embassy attacks, something the US never even apologized for.
A major aspect of the Abraham Accords is to isolate Iran. According to Israeli media, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett floated the idea to President Biden of an anti-Iran NATO-style alliance in the Middle East that includes Israel and Arab states opposed to Iran. Earlier this year, there were reports that Israel was in talks with Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia about the idea of an anti-Iran alliance.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 18:30 - JPMorgan: DeFi Adoption By Institutional Investors Surges
JPMorgan: DeFi Adoption By Institutional Investors Surges
It was a busy week for crypto, with many updates in JPMorgan’s weekly Crypto Weekly note. Here are the highlights:
- Bitcoin and ether prices rise in the week. The price of bitcoin and ether rose by about 4% w/w and 6% w/w to $48.1K and $3.6K, respectively. This recovery follows the price decline across major cryptocurrencies after a selloff in the last week. The price of ether gained following the news of its co-founder Vitalik Buterin making it to the TIME’s ‘Most Influential’ List.
- Trading volume of major cryptocurrencies decline w/w. The average daily volume (ADV) of Bitcoin and Ether declined by 18% and 21% w/w, respectively, as did volatility. The ADV of Litecoin, Dogecoin and Uniswap also declined during the week.
- At the Senate hearing, SEC Chair Gary Gensler reiterated that most cryptocurrencies, including stablecoins, qualify as securities, which should not be sold without proper risk disclosures. He also said that crypto lending and staking services are likely to fall under SEC’s jurisdiction as lending products come under the securities laws.
The size of the global market increased in the past week, with the global crypto sector’s market cap increasing 2.2% w/w from $2.1 trillion to $2.2 trillion as of 9/16.
A snapshot of the key regulatory updates this week:
It continues to be a busy time for crypto adoption by financial institutions. Among the notable developments:
- Interactive Brokers will start offering cryptocurrency trading and custody services for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.
- Fidelity Digital Assets plans to increase its headcount by up to 70% between April and year-end. It also plans to offer yield funds and other products related to stablecoins or decentralized finance (DeFi) coins.
- The Fairfax County pension funds will invest a total of $50 million in a fund which invests in digital tokens and cryptocurrency derivatives. Earlier this year, the pension funds also invested in a crypto venture capital fund.
- Franklin Templeton is raising $20 million for the firm’s first blockchain VC fund. The fund was already raised $10 million from a single sale. The firm is also recruiting engineers in “tokenized asset development department.”
There was also a flurry of news on the adoption by non-financial services companies, including AMC Theaters accepting most cryptos, Googles announcing the development of an NBA-linked blockchain, Square joining the open invention network, and Paris Saint Germain announcing crypto.com as its official cryptocurrency partner.
Which brings us to the main story: according to JPMorgan, the second quarter of 2021 saw an increase in DeFi adoption by institutional investors as more than 60% of all DeFi transactions were over $10 million versus less than half in the broader crypto market. Institutions in major economies are driving the DeFi activity as emerging markets are still adopting traditional crypto assets.
Huobi Ventures announces a $10mm GameFi fund (9/14) to invest in projects developing blockchain based games with “play-to-earn” features such as those in Axie Infinity. Huobi also set up a $100mm DeFi fund and a $10mm NFT fund in May.
Total Value Locked (TVL) Across DeFi Projects is rising. Total value locked (TVL) refers to the total dollar amount of assets that is staked or “locked” up across all DeFi protocols. Put differently, TVL does not refer to transaction volumes or market cap of cryptocurrencies but rather the value of reserves that are “locked” into smart contracts. TVL can help assess the health of the entire DeFi ecosystem or a specific DeFi project or app. This value does not represent any leverage created by the underlying crypto assets. In traditional finance, this could be thought of as deposits in the banking system. Examples of assets included in total value locked include crypto assets staked in yield protocols (ex. depositors earn yield on staked crypto), lending protocols (ex. borrowers post collateral for loans), staked in automated market maker exchanges (ex. liquidity pools for decentralized exchanges), and underlying synthetic assets. As of 9/16/2021, total value locked in DeFi protocols stands at $90.6B.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 18:00 - Antibody Treatments For COVID Work. Why Aren't They Being Promoted?
Antibody Treatments For COVID Work. Why Aren’t They Being Promoted?
Authored by Mark Glennon via Wirepoints.org,
It’s perhaps the most effective way to save your life if you are infected with COVID-19, but probably the least known. It reduces the risk of even being hospitalized by 70% to 85%, though it must be administered early to be effective – within four days of infection. Lives probably are being lost unnecessarily because people don’t know about it.
It’s monoclonal antibody treatment, abbreviated as mAb. To the extent the public has any familiarity with it they, may know it as Regeneron, though that’s actually the name of the company that makes the leading treatment, REGEN-COV2, and there are several other mAbs from other makers.
Health authorities for months back should have been issuing this message constantly: “Immediately after being exposed or you have COVID symptoms, get tested and ask if an antibody treatment is right for you.”
But they didn’t. They still aren’t. At least not in Illinois and most of the nation.
Why not?
No reasonable explanation is evident and a significant number of lives may have been lost because of the failure to inform the public properly. And now, with antibody treatments getting more attention, the treatments must be rationed, adding to the tragedy. At least in part, the explanation is a sad one – politics, and politicized media.
The effectiveness of REGEN and other antibody treatments has been known since at least November when the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for REGEN and another mAb. Earlier tests had found REGEN to be over 70% effective in heading off serious illness and multiple subsequent tests have confirmed it.
“Many of us were talking about this as early as March [2020]” wrote Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner.
“Regeneron did extraordinary work to secure their own manufacturing, but we needed a concerted industrial effort to get the supply we needed.”
Only over the last month have antibody treatments started to gain more attention. That’s probably because Dr. Anthony Fauci finally – belatedly – spoke up, saying that the treatments can reduce the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization or death by 70% to 85%. That seems to have been a signal to the establishment herd that it was permissible to talk about the treatments positively. The Biden Administration thereafter announced it would be stepping up purchases of the treatments.
But the increased attention has now caused a shortage of the treatments. What was in oversupply only a couple months ago is now being rationed. The Biden Administration just announced restrictions on how much of the treatments may be shipped to each state. From the Washington Post: “Soaring demand for the therapy represents a sharp turn from just two months ago, when monoclonal antibodies were widely available and awareness of them was low. With little promotion by the government, consumers, doctors and states were using just a tiny fraction of the available supply.”
Here in Illinois, health authorities and the media are completely behind the curve. It’s difficult to find even a word that has been said on the subject. The message isn’t being given that you should get tested fast if you think you are infected and see if antibody treatment is available to you.
Intensive care units in some parts of downstate Illinois are now full of COVID patients. How many of those hospitalizations would have been avoided if the victims had been aware of the treatment and acted quickly to get it?
That goes for most of the nation as well. Florida is one of six states among the exceptions. Those six states have been using the treatments aggressively, consuming 70% of the supply in recent weeks. That’s partly due to high, recent infection rates in most of those states, but also because they have seen the value of antibody treatment that other states have ignored, and they’ve told their people about it. That’s especially true of Florida, which I’ll get to.
Why haven’t health authorities and supposed experts been making a life-saving treatment better known?
One benign but irrational answer is that they don’t want to distract from the importance of vaccinations because they view prevention as better than treatment. For example, CNN’s expert, Dr. Leana Wen, said, “It’s totally backwards to say that we should be focused on treatment instead of emphasizing prevention, and the steps that we know work to stop Covid-19 in the first place.” And Dr. Christian Ramers, an infectious-disease specialist, told the Daily Beast. “It’s so much better to prevent a disease than to use an expensive, cumbersome and difficult-to-use therapy,” Ramers submitted. “It does not make any medical sense to lean into monoclonals to the detriment of vaccines. It’s like playing defense with no offense.”
That seems irrational on its face. Preventative vaccines and therapeutics like antibody treatment are not alternatives. Promote vaccines all you want, but when somebody is facing possible death, treat them.
But another explanation at least partially accounts for why mAbs have been shunned: The establishment doesn’t like the politics of who championed antibody therapy, particularly Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a leading, likely, Republican candidate for president.
Since at least November, DeSantis has been encouraging Floridians to seek the treatment if they get infected.
“And the good thing about this is millions of doses are ready to ship as we speak,” he said then.
“Soon as the FDA approves they will then go out within the next 24 hours and we expect our hospitals hopefully to receive these within the next three to six weeks. He later set up clinics specifically for providing the treatment.
Well, we certainly can’t be agreeing with anything he says, as MSM sees things, so the Associated Press led the charge. They did it by trying to implicate two others the left doesn’t like, Ken Griffin and his hedge fund, Citadel. Griffin is a Chicago billionaire who frequently supports Republicans and conservative causes.
So, in a column reprinted almost universally in the national and Illinois media, the AP linked DeSantis’ support for antibody treatments to a Citadel investment in Regeneron and Griffin’s campaign contributions to DeSantis.
It was a smear job, creating the impression that Regeneron’s product is snake oil peddled by DeSantis as a return favor. DeSantis responded appropriately, saying the column was a blatant political attack.
The AP wasn’t alone. A Bloomberg columnist on Twitter mocked DeSantis and the Regeneron product because of what he claimed it costs – $1,250 per dose – though vaccines are free. That’s false. DeSantis made the treatment free.
As you would expect, the press had another reason for dismissing the value of antibody treatments – Trump. He credited Regeneron’s product for helping with his recovery when he was infected. But that was because Regeneron’s CEO was a member of Trump’s golf club, said the Daily Mail. And Trump owned shares of Regeneron and Gilead, another mAb maker, so that must explain his claim, as USA Today would have you believe. “No, Regeneron did not cure Donald Trump of COVID,” The New Republic flatly told us in a headline, as if they had any idea.
The facts on antibody treatment have now overrun that political hype. Still today, however, the public remains mostly unaware of the efficacy and availability of the treatment, except in a few states like Florida. Although treatments are now being rationed, they are available to people in high risk groups everywhere.
Too bad the federal government didn’t ramp up its purchases of the product earlier.
Too bad every state didn’t promote it as heavily as Florida did.
Too bad states like Illinois still aren’t talking about it.
Too bad governors in states like Illinois aren’t saying what DeSantis is now saying, which is that he will “fight like hell” to get what he can of the available treatments now being rationed.
Too bad because we will never know how many lives might have been saved.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 17:30 - Actually, It All Makes Sense
Actually, It All Makes Sense
Back in June, we explained that the reason behind the market’s shocking response to the Fed’s hawkish policy announcement when yields plunged instead of spiking higher, had little to do with what the Fed would actually do (as every Fed action is now in direct response to the market, which the FOMC is compelled to prop up no matter the cost) and everything to do with the market’s read of r-star, and we quoted DB’s head of FX strategy George Saravelos who said that everything that is going on “boils down to a very pessimistic market view on r*” or in other words, the same argument we made 6 years ago when we predicted – correctly – that the Fed’s hiking cycle would end in tears (as it did first in November 2018 when the Fed capitulated on its hiking strategy after stocks plunged, and then again in Sept 2019 when the Repo crisis forced the Fed to resume QE).
The bottom line, for those who missed our lengthy take on this complex topic is that the equilibrium growth rate in the US, or r* (or r-star), was far far lower than where most economists thought it was. In fact, as the sensitivity table below which we first constructed in 2015 showed, the equilibrium US growth rate was right around 0%. This means that each and every attempt by the Fed to tighten financial condition will end in disaster, the only question is how long it would take before this happens.
Today, we won’t recap the profound implications from Powell’s huge policy error which we laid out previously (we suggest readers familiarize themselves with our recent work on the topic published in “Powell Just Made A Huge Error: What The Market’s Shocking Response Means For The Fed’s Endgame“), but we will touch on a recent blog by Deutsche Bank’s Saravelos – who unlike most of his peers on Wal Street, has a clear and correct read on what is currently going on in the market – and to help clients comprehend what’s actually going on, he has penned a simple framework to understand current market behavior. As Saravelos puts it, “there is no “puzzle” in the way global bond markets are behaving and it is entirely possible for yields to fall as inflation pressures rise.”
As Saravelos explains, the starting point is that over the last six months the global economy has been experiencing a negative supply shock due to COVID. This can be most clearly seen in the incredibly sharp run-up in inflation surprises against the equally incredible sharp run-down in growth surprises.
In simple Econ 101 terms, we are experiencing a leftward shift in the global economy’s supply curve. A negative supply shock (permanent or not) does two things: it lowers growth and increases inflation.
This is exactly what markets have been doing: inflation expectations are close to the year’s highs, but real rates (the closest market equivalent to a measure of real growth) are at the year’s lows.
The moves in the two variables are therefore entirely consistent with the incoming data.
Now what is most notable is that real yields have dropped more than inflation expectations have risen. The combined effect has been to lower nominal yields.
As Saravelos puts it, “there is nothing surprising about this, because there is nothing automatic about which effect dominates” and it ultimately depends on consumer sensitivity to rising prices, or in wonkish terms the slope of the demand curve: the greater the demand destruction from price rises, the bigger the negative effect on growth relative to inflation pushing yields down and vice versa. So, what the market is effectively doing, is pricing in substantial demand destruction from the supply shock.
Is this the correct thing to be pricing? Perhaps it is, we have been highlighting this unfolding demand destruction since May, and consumer confidence in the US is collapsing.
What about central bank reaction functions? There is an automatic belief in the market that higher inflation should mean more hawkish central banks. But as the DB strategist notes, “this belief rests on 30 years of demand shock management, where inflation has always and everywhere been positively correlated to growth.” And as an interesting aside, according to Saravelos, Larry Summers was right about inflation risks this year but wrong about the cause: lower supply has dominated over stronger demand. A supply shock similar to the one we are currently experiencing means the central bank response is not obvious, and as a result “raising rates will only make the growth shock worse.” By implication, tapering – which is tightening no matter what you read to the contrary – will similarly be a policy mistake and compound the economic slowdown, leading to an even more powerful easing reaction in the coming quarters.
Which brings us to central banks’ characterization of the current inflation shock as transitory; as DB explains, it is another way of saying that they currently prefer to accommodate rather than respond to the supply shock. In terms of capital markets, ss long as the Fed looks through the shock, risk appetite will likely stay resilient, the dollar weak and volatility low. However, the moment the Fed does respond, all bets are off.
Bottom line, current market pricing is fully in line with a supply side shock with very strong demand destruction effects. A low r*, as we have been arguing since 2015 and again since June, is likely to prevail post-COVID only flattens consumer demand curves further. Saravelos concludes that “he continues to believe that it is the behavior of the consumer, including the desired level of precautionary savings as well as the response to the unfolding supply shock that is the most important macro variable for the market this year and beyond.” As such, the latest UMich survey which showed that Americans are panicking over soaring inflation, and whose buying intentions have plunged to the lowest levels on record…
… is extremely alarming.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 17:00 - General Milley Downplayed BLM Riots To Prevent Trump From Invoking Insurrection Act
General Milley Downplayed BLM Riots To Prevent Trump From Invoking Insurrection Act
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, tried to downplay the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots in an effort to prevent Donald Trump from invoking the Insurrection Act, arguing that they were mainly centered around the use of “spray paint.”
That’s according to the new book, ‘Peril’, written by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
Despite the violent demonstrations quickly spreading across the country, Milley continued to insist that they had only impacted two cities and were relatively sedate, echoing CNN’s ludicrous “fiery, but most peaceful” description of the riots.
“They used spray paint, Mr President, that’s not an insurrection. […] We’re a country of 330 million people. You’ve got these penny packet protests,” Milley allegedly told Trump.
Milley apparently told Trump that most of the riots only involved around 300 people and that they paled in significance to the 1968 Washington riots caused by the assassination of MLK and the Battle of Fort Sumter in 1861, which started the Civil War.
The riots took mere days to spread to virtually every major city in the country, with looting, arson and violent attacks becoming commonplace, eventually causing around $2 billion dollars in property damage as well as at least 19 deaths and over 17,000 arrests.
At one point, demonstrators took over an entire area of downtown Seattle, completely obliterating official law and order for a number of weeks.
Trump’s failure to act strongly and decisively led to him looking weak, derailing a lot of momentum he would have had going into the election.
According to other reports, Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and put Milley in charge of National Guard troops to end the unrest, leading the two to have a shouting match where Milley refused to take charge.
Back in June, Milley appeared to side with the kind of ‘woke’ rhetoric spewed by far-left groups like BLM when he told the House Armed Services Committee that he was concerned about “white rage” in the United States.
As we highlighted earlier this week, Milley was also accused of treason by Trump after it emerged that he had promised to warn China ahead of any military operations.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson labeled the revelation, “One of the scariest things that has ever happened in this country.”
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Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 16:30 - Taliban Changes Ministry Of Women's Affairs To Islamic 'Morality Police'
Taliban Changes Ministry Of Women’s Affairs To Islamic ‘Morality Police’
So much for prior declarations heard among Western officials of a more “moderate” Taliban… On Friday Reuters has confirmed that what was formerly the “Ministry of Women’s Affairs” in Kabul has now been changed to “Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” – according to a new sign that’s gone up over the ministry.
The full lengthy name of what formerly under the US-backed national government served to protect women’s rights is now the “Ministries of Prayer and Guidance and the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” Reuters reports.
Via Al Arabiya It appears to be the reestablishment of the ‘morality police’ that the Taliban had in place prior to the 2001 invasion, which was tasked with ensuring strict enforcement of sharia law in all aspects of public life, including that women wear the burka, no alcohol is possessed or consumed, and that there’s a strict segregation of the sexes with the exception of family.
The virtue and vice arm of the ministry was also responsible for carrying out punishments ranging from public flogging to executions.
Reuters further notes that women had been for weeks attempting to enter the Women’s Affairs ministry building but that they were consistently turned away. According to further details:
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The Taliban has said that women will not be allowed to work in government ministries alongside men.
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Though the group said women in Afghanistan can continue with their university studies, classes must now be segregated and head coverings are mandatory. The Taliban has ordered secondary school classes for boys to resume on Saturday, but made no mention of the future of girls’ education in the notice, according to The Guardian.
Ironically this reestablishment of what’s essentially the Islamic moral police comes days after on Monday a United Nations donor conference in Geneva resulted in $1.2 billion in aid being pledged to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Absent so far has been aid from Washington, with the White House earlier saying this would be dependent on the Taliban’s behavior and actions. This hasn’t stopped Europe, however, form letting the aid flow – which the Taliban has promised to deliver to the people.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 16:00 -
- DeSantis Office: Over Half Of Those Seeking Lifesaving COVID-19 Treatment In South Florida Fully Vaccinated
DeSantis Office: Over Half Of Those Seeking Lifesaving COVID-19 Treatment In South Florida Fully Vaccinated
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,
A spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office said that more than half of those who are seeking monoclonal antibody treatment in the south of Florida are “fully vaccinated” individuals amid supply issues.
“More than half the patients getting the monoclonal antibody treatment in south Florida are fully vaccinated,” DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw wrote in response to a comment on Twitter that suggested that only unvaccinated people are the reason why there is a significant demand for monoclonal antibodies.
Florida, she wrote hours earlier, “is above average in vaccination rate” and that “more than half of the patients in south Florida getting monoclonal antibody treatment are vaccinated and have breakthrough infections. Vaccinated or unvaccinated – Denying treatment to Covid patients is wrong.”
Monoclonal antibodies are engineered immune system proteins that boost an immune response against an infection.
Earlier this week, the White House and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced plans to control the U.S. monoclonal antibody supply due to distribution issues. According to HHS’s website in a Sept. 13 update, the agency “will determine the weekly amount of mAb products each state and territory receives based on COVID-19 case burden and [monoclonal antibody treatment] utilization.”
A spokesperson for HHS told CNN that Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana are using 70 percent of the supply of the drug.
“Given this reality, we must work to ensure our supply of these life-saving therapies remains available for all states and territories, not just some,” the HHS spokesperson said, adding that a new system “will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country … providing states and territories with consistent, fairly-distributed supply over the coming weeks.”
Before the change, states and hospitals could purchase the antibodies on their own without going through the federal government.
“More than 50 percent of the monoclonal antibodies that had been used in Florida were going to be reduced,” DeSantis said on Thursday, adding that “there’s going to be a huge disruption, and patients are going to suffer as a result of this.”
On Thursday, DeSantis’s office said the state would deal directly with GlaxoSmithKline, a maker of monoclonal antibody infusion treatments.
“The Biden administration and their allies in media have claimed that Florida is using too much monoclonal treatment because of a low vaccination rate,” Pushaw told The Epoch Times on Thursday, “and Biden has lashed out at Governor DeSantis for opposing the tyrannical federal vaccine mandate.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 15:30 - How "Boring" Erin O'Toole Has Come Within A Hair's Breadth Of Unseating "Entitled" Justin Trudeau
How “Boring” Erin O’Toole Has Come Within A Hair’s Breadth Of Unseating “Entitled” Justin Trudeau
Over the summer when he first called Monday’s snap election, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expected to trample the Conservative opposition, and possibly even cement the Liberals’ first majority government since the beginning of his reign.
Erin O’Toole
Trudeau had hoped that his handling of the pandemic might help him gain a political leg up. But one month later, the picture is looking very different. The polls are extremely close, and it’s possible that thea Conservatives might upset the Liberals. At the very least, it’s looking virtually certain that the Liberals will only manage to securie another minority government in coalition with the NDP and the greens, leaving them effectively right where they started, with the public frustrated over what would then prove to have been a monumental waste of time and resources, according to Bloomberg.
Source: the New Republic
As the campaign enters its last frantic weekend, there are many seats considered a “toss-up” by various pollsters, suggesting the election could go down to the wire.
Source: Bloomberg
Source: The New Republic
With Trudeau terrified of the election slipping away, he came out swinging on Thursday and Friday, attacking his main rival, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole. Trudeau has tried to pitch himself as the better leader on COVID issues, but O’Toole has generated unexpected levels of popularity by insisting that rapid testing is a preferable policy course to vaccine mandates, which Trudeau has implicitly backed.
O’Toole has also successfully slammed Trudeau as a hypocrite for calling an election in the middle of a pandemic.
“Mr. Trudeau called an election that’s costing us $600 million rather than keeping the Delta variant from spreading, rather than actually working together.”
Despite his recent success in the polls, O’Toole is still a political obscurity in the US. So, in an attempt to familiarize its readers with the potential next leader of Canada, Bloomberg has published a piece on O’Toole trying to explain his appeal to voters.
According to sources quoted in the report, one of O’Toole’s most formidable attributes is that he’s boring – unlike the flashy political scion whose boyish (and some might say, Fidel Castro-esque) looks have made him a darling of the international press (while enduring constant criticisms of being all surface and little substance), O’Toole is basically the anti-Trudeau. A stolid public servant who achieved his position via hard work, not via birthright.
O’Toole has used this rhetoric as an effective cudgel.
“Every Canadian has met a Justin Trudeau in their lives – privileged, entitled and always looking out for number one,” O’Toole said this week near Ottawa, summing up his campaign message. “He was looking out for number one when he called this expensive and unnecessary election in the middle of a pandemic. That’s not leadership, that’s self-interest. And it’s Justin Trudeau through and through.”
[…]
“The one big positive thing about Erin O’Toole is what you see is what you get, privately and publicly,” said Ashton Arsenault, vice president at Crestview Strategy in Ottawa. “There’s no difference between the two and I don’t think you can say that about everybody in the political universe.”
In six weeks, Trudeau’s lead has eroded from a 6 point lead to a statistical dead heat.
One of the most bizarre contrasts between O’Toole and Trudeau is their appearance. O’Toole is actually a year younger than the PM. But his thinning white hair give him the air of a dad, not a man-boy.
The suburbs around Canada’s biggest city, known by their area code, 905, are the main electoral battleground. It’s also O’Toole home turf. Although he was born in Montreal, O’Toole grew up near Toronto and has served as the member of parliament for Durham since 2012.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 15:00 - North Carolina Judges Strike Down Voter ID Law, Claiming It's Racist
North Carolina Judges Strike Down Voter ID Law, Claiming It’s Racist
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
Two North Carolina judges on Friday struck down a law that required identification to vote, alleging it “was enacted with the unconstitutional intent to discriminate against African American voters.”
North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore gavels in a session in Raleigh, N.C., on April 30, 2020. (Gerry Broome/AP Photo)
The law was enacted in violation of the Equal Protection Clause in North Carolina’s Constitution, the majority of the panel said. The clause says that nobody shall be denied equal protection of the laws nor shall anybody be subjected to discrimination by the state due to race.
Defendants, including North Carolina House Speaker Timothy Moore, failed to show that racial discrimination was not a substantial or motivating factor behind enactment of the law, Superior Court Judges Michael O’Foghludha and Vince Rozier Jr., both Democrats, wrote in a 102-page ruling permanently blocking the measure.
“Other, less restrictive voter ID laws would have sufficed to achieve the legitimate nonracial purposes of implementing the constitutional amendment requiring voter ID, deterring fraud, or enhancing voter confidence,” they said.
The law in question, Senate Bill 824, was enacted after a majority of voters in North Carolina approved it as a constitutional amendment in 2018. Before that, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed the bill and overrode a veto from North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
According to previous court rulings, plaintiffs challenging a law in the state must show that discrimination was a “motivating factor” in passing a law, the pair of judges said in their majority decision. That puts the burden on defendants to prove that the law “would have been enacted without this factor,” they added, quoting from a North Carolina Court of Appeals ruling from last year, Holmes v. Moore.
Jabari Holmes and five other voters in the state sued over the law on the same day the legislature overrode Cooper’s veto, noting that a previous voter identification requirement was invalidated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit because it was alleged to be intentionally racially discriminatory, in a decision upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The bill “unconstitutionally and unjustifiably burdens the right to vote of Plaintiffs and similarly situated registered, qualified North Carolina voters who lack acceptable photo ID when they go to the polls and are subject to a complex process to vote,” the group of voters said in their complaint.
Moore and other defendants charged that the suit should be dismissed because, they said, the law did not violate the state Constitution.
Judge Nathaniel Poovey, third judge on the panel, offered a dissenting opinion in which he highlighted how the law was approved by the voters of the state.
“Presenting some form of identification is a task we must perform quite frequently in everyday life. Adding more familiarity to the process of casting a vote increases the level of certainty in the electoral process. And doing so by requiring the presentation of photographic identification ensures each person offering to vote is who they proclaim to be, thereby increasing confidence in the outcome of each election,” Poovey, a Republican, said.
Voters are seen during the North Carolina primary elections at the Pullen Community Center in Raleigh, N.C., on March 15, 2016. (Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)
The evidence showed that “no registered voter in this State will be precluded from voting by the identification requirements in this law,” he added.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which represents the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement that the ruling “Is a testament to the overwhelming evidence, including compelling stories of disenfranchisement from voters themselves, which highlighted how the state’s Republican-controlled legislature undeniably implemented this legislation to maintain its power by targeting voters of color.”
Sam Hayes, general counsel for Moore, the North Carolina House speaker, said in a statement that “Once again, liberal judges have defied the will of North Carolinians on election integrity.”
“This fight is far from over. We look forward to appealing this partisan ruling on behalf of the people of North Carolina,” he added.
Two other lawsuits against the bill are also being considered by courts. A federal suit brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is set to go on trial in January 2022; a separate suit brought on the state level by the association is awaiting a decision on appeal to the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 14:30 - Biden Admin Starts Deporting Haitians From Under Texas Bridge, Fox Foils FAA Drone Ban
Biden Admin Starts Deporting Haitians From Under Texas Bridge, Fox Foils FAA Drone Ban
For a month and a half, we’ve been keeping an eye on the developments of thousands of migrants gathering under the Anzalduas Bridge in Mission, Texas. On Aug. 2, we first reported stunning drone footage from Fox News’ Bill Melugin, who captured 1,000 migrants under the bridge surrounded by US Border Patrol agents. Now the number of migrants has increased to more than 11,000, and the federal government imposed a no-fly zone for unmanned aircraft systems.
The Biden administration’s attempt to cover up the border disaster by blocking drones didn’t stop Melugin and his team who hitched a ride on a Texas Department of Public Safety’s helicopter to capture an aerial view of the migrant crisis, mostly Haitians, crossing the Mexico–US border with ease and gathering under the bridge as they wait to be processed by Border Patrol agents.
BREAKING: I am absolutely stunned by what I’m witnessing right now. We are on a boat in the Rio Grande near the Del Rio international bridge and we are watching as masses of hundreds of migrants walk across the river from Mexico and stream into the US illegally. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/xXE4pDkpIe
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) September 18, 2021
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BREAKING: Our @FoxNews drone is back over the international bridge in Del Rio, where it appears the mass of migrants has expanded once again.
Stunning visuals. More than 11,000 under the bridge as of yesterday w/ more streaming in. Expect that number to be bigger today. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/phnep2MWz8— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) September 18, 2021
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Melugin took shocking videos of thousands of migrants not just crossing the border but gathered underneath the bridge, a testament to the Biden administration’s mishandling of the migration crisis.
AMAZING — Since the Biden administration has kicked @BillFoxLA and his team out from flying Fox News’s drones along the U.S./Mexico border in Del Rio, TX, *local* law enforcement decided to get him a helicopter to hop in and go check things out to continue reporting. pic.twitter.com/pZ54my6E7o
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 17, 2021
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Melugin thanked the Texas Department of Public Safety for allowing his team to fly with them while the FAA grounded his drone. He said, “the true scope of the situation in Del Rio is seen best from the air,” adding the FAA has now “cleared us to fly our drone again after FOX submitted a waiver.”
Thank you to @TxDPS for taking us up in the chopper today while our drone was grounded by the Feds. The true scope of the situation in Del Rio is seen best from the air.
Also happy to report the FAA has cleared us to fly our drone again after FOX submitted a waiver. pic.twitter.com/ACG6IGxryL— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) September 17, 2021
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On Saturday morning, the Texas Department of Public Safety released more footage from the bridge.
At the direction of Governor @GregAbbott_TX, DPS continues to maintain an increased presence at the bridge where a growing number of migrants are gathering in the Del Rio Sector. pic.twitter.com/yFxlvmfOrW
— Texas DPS (@TxDPS) September 18, 2021
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Aerial footage from DPS Aircraft Operations Division 🚁 pic.twitter.com/AdWwrdUSSr
— Texas DPS (@TxDPS) September 18, 2021
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DPS stands ready to protect the people and property of this great state. pic.twitter.com/0d816Z57D1
— Texas DPS (@TxDPS) September 18, 2021
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Meanwhile, the Biden Administration fails to see the border crisis as they completely ignore the growing problem.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) requested the president to deploy National Guard along the southern border. He stated Friday that thousands of illegal immigrants, mainly from Haiti, are assembling under the bridge.
“The Biden Administration must recognize this for what it is: A National Security Crisis. As such he must fully deploy the National Guard to the southern border to help our Border Patrol agents with more resources to control the situation.
“Recently, over 10,000 migrants have surged to the border in Del Rio. It is no coincidence this is happening as Democrats in Congress are moving to pass legislation that would grant immediate citizenship for up to 10 million illegal immigrants. This is a wakeup call to Democrats that their policies are putting American lives in danger and must be abandoned,” McCarthy said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who traveled to the bridge on Thursday, called it “the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.”
“There are right now, as we’re speaking, there are 10,503 people under that bridge. It is packed in as a mass of humanity,” Cruz said. “They take your breath away because it just goes on and on and on—infants, little children, people struggling enormously.”
Cruz criticized the Biden administration for the situation and called for deportation flights of the migrants.
“It’s a political decision that Joe Biden could end tonight by simply following the law and saying we’re going to send people back to Haiti, which is what federal immigration law requires,” Cruz said.
The Biden administration paused deportation flights to Haiti after a powerful earthquake devastated the country last month. There’s talk the administration may restart “widescale expulsion of Haitian migrants from a small Texas border city by putting them on flights to Haiti starting Sunday,” according to AP News.
Biden’s rollback of Trump-era border policies has created an utter mess that mainstream leftist media chooses to ignore.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 09/18/2021 – 14:00
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