- America's Future Is Liberal Fascism Sporting A Smiley Shirt And Armed With A Syringe
America’s Future Is Liberal Fascism Sporting A Smiley Shirt And Armed With A Syringe
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 23:50Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The globalists responsible for engineering a medical tyranny across much of the Western world have something valuable to teach right-wing nationalists and would-be fascists, and that is you don’t sell your damaged product out of the barrel of a machine gun, but rather dripping from the end of a syringe that promises to end all pain and misery.
Patrick Henry, one of America’s more outspoken Founding Fathers, famously remarked “give me liberty or give me death” when the life of his nation was on the line.
Today, America’s famous battle cry has been replaced by a masked and muffled gasp that advises, without hope of a second opinion, “give me lockdowns and keep me safe.”
So terrified is the American public of catching a virus that comes with a 99 percent survival rate that they are willing to forego Thanksgiving, the great national holiday commemorating – with no loss of irony – their Pilgrim ancestors’ collective courage to overcome the wild, hostile conditions of their new land.
It must be said that no fascist party has ever been so adept when it came to sealing the collective fate of their people to a common enemy. That’s because the threat facing mankind today, or so we are told, is not some nefarious ideology, like communism, or even a terrorist organization that the masses can be rallied to fight. Rather, the threat is a microscopic contagion that is capable of invading every nook and cranny of our lives. Already the age of manly handshakes is over, replaced by an emasculated majority, while an entire generation of youth now looks at their fellow human beings as infernal germ factories.
And unlike a traditional enemy that can be seen, attacked and eventually defeated, the coronavirus – we have been oddly forewarned – will make landfall again and again, while regularly morphing with comic book abilities into an increasingly deadlier villain. In this landless battle, only the medical authorities are decorated as heroes, while the people, lacking the professional credentials, are forced to be passive and helpless onlookers, their freedom of movement severely constrained. More importantly, the forces of nationalism have become irrelevant; only a globalist, one-world-order response can defeat this pandemic.
There is very good reason to suspect, however, that either the science on all of this is half-baked, or we the people are being intentionally duped on a grand scale. In fact, it’s probably a little bit of both. First, relying on nothing more than empirical evidence, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that there is no existential emergency confronting mankind. If there were, we would expect to see decomposing bodies piling up in the streets, like in the medieval times during the Black Plague. This would be especially the case among the homeless population, which is certainly not practicing social distancing etiquette as they pass around open containers on street corners.
Nor does there seem to be any massive queuing up at hospitals for emergency treatment. In fact, as early as April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told President Trump that the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort deployed to New York City by the federal government to help fight the coronavirus outbreak was “no longer needed”. Cuomo said the need for the support vessel “didn’t reach the levels that had been projected.” And I am certainly not the only one who has noticed that Covid cases seem to fluctuate curiously with the political climate.
Plenty of hospital rooms. You’ve got that right! https://t.co/lg0Bb2Ai9j
— Richard Hillbilly Chad (@DPotcner) October 28, 2020
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Let’s not forget that the overwhelming majority of Covid ‘victims’ recover nicely at home, according to no less of an authority than Anthony Fauci. At the same time, many people who acquire the disease are asymptomatic and never even knew they were infected. Children, meanwhile, seem amazingly impervious to the virus. That is not to say that there has been no sign of a virus this winter season. Of course there has been, just like every year. But while Covid cases may be on the rise in some places, and invisible in others, the death rate from this illness remains low and tumbling, predominantly hitting elderly people already suffering from comorbidities.
There are other reasons to be suspicious that what we are dealing with is not a first-class medical emergency, but rather something much more sinister. Like maybe an excuse for rolling out a Western-made vaccine that carries a microchip implant with tracking technology? Such a claim will sound less fantastic when it is realized that it has already been developed.
It is no secret that just one month before Covid-19 made its dramatic landfall in the United States, purportedly from Wuhan, China, MIT researchers announced a new method for recording a patient’s vaccination history: storing the smartphone-readable data under the skin at the same time a vaccine is administered.
“By selectively loading microparticles into microneedles, the patches deliver a pattern in the skin that is invisible to the naked eye but can be scanned with a smartphone that has the infrared filter removed,” MIT News reported.
“The patch can be customized to imprint different patterns that correspond to the type of vaccine delivered.”
Would it surprise anyone to know that the research was funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same family venture that now provides the bulk of funding to the World Health Organization?
In a new interview, Bill Gates authoritatively states that mass public gatherings will not come back “at all” until we have mass vaccination. Who made him king of the world? https://t.co/siW7bZ9yGc … https://t.co/ivaCI8eAEl
— Alternative News (@NewsAlternative) April 4, 2020
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Then, in September 2019, ID2020, a San Francisco-based biometric company that counts Microsoft as one of its founding members, announced a new project that involves the “exploration of multiple biometric identification technologies for infants” that is based on “infant immunization.”
We could continue here with a long list of other disturbing technologies that would effectively turn people into walking antennae for the rest of their lives, but the point is hopefully clear: although many people might be willing to accept a vaccine against Covid-19, they probably do not want the extra technological add-ons that people like Bill Gates, a man with zero medical qualifications, seem extremely anxious to include.
“The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson Foods warns in a full page ad in NYT today pic.twitter.com/5cyusH6L9V
— Ana Swanson (@AnaSwanson) April 26, 2020
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So what can Americans expect next? How about ‘Freedom Passes’ that Britons may need before they are able to return to some semblance of normalcy?
According to the Daily Mail, “Britons are set to be given Covid ‘freedom passes’ as long as they test negative for the virus twice in a week, it has been suggested…To earn the freedom pass, people will need to be tested regularly and, provided the results come back negative, they will then be given a letter, card or document they can show to people as they move around.”
And this is what they call a “return to normalcy.”
Personally, I call those plans the approach of fascism. And for those who doubt that it could not happen in America should heed the words of the late sagacious comedian George Carlin, who once quipped that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.” Had Carlin been alive today to see the tremendous mess we’ve inherited, he would most likely have included a syringe in the neo-fascist’s toolkit.
- South Korean Duck Farm Suffers Outbreak Of "Highly Pathogenic" H5N8 Bird Flu
South Korean Duck Farm Suffers Outbreak Of “Highly Pathogenic” H5N8 Bird Flu
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 23:30As COVID-19 cases slow after reaching a worldwide peak, eliciting a warning from WHO chief Dr. Tedros that people living in hard-hit areas shouldn’t get too complacent, a strain of “highly contagious” Avian bird flu has apparently traveled from Europe to South Korea.
A few days after an outbreak of bird flu led to a culling of more than 10,000 birds in northern England – though authorities were quick to reassure the public that there was no risk to the food supply – South Korean authorities have discovered an outbreak of a “highly contagious” H5N8 bird flu on a duck farm in the southwestern part of the country.
The outbreak, which occurred in the town of Girin-ri, roughly 300 kilometers from Seoul, killed 19,000 ducks.
There are six other poultry farms within a radius of three kilometers (1.9 miles) from the farm where the infected ducks were found, and all are being inspected.
Nearly 20k ducks died, and some 392k chickens and ducks at a total of six farms were killed, to prevent the spread of the disease, the ministry also said.
Authorities have already issued an order to stop any activities at poultry and livestock facilities, while freezing the movement of poultry products across the country for 48 hours. The blockage will last seven days for poultry farms in Jeongeup, as well as for farms within a radius of 10 kilometers from the site of the outbreak 30 days. The national alert level over the spread of bird flu has been raised to a “serious hazard.”.
The same strain of bird flu emerged in populations in Germany early this year. It hit several of Europe’s largest poultry producers located in Germany and elsewhere. While scientists believe the pathogen – while highly contagious – isn’t contagious to humans, at one point scientists in China said the same thing about COVID-19.
- Iranian Nuclear Program Gains Steam Following Assassination Of "Nuclear Soleimani" Near Tehran
Iranian Nuclear Program Gains Steam Following Assassination Of “Nuclear Soleimani” Near Tehran
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 23:10Submitted by SouthFront,
US President Donald Trump is apparently set to slam the door and go to great lengths to show love to his friends in Tel Aviv before withdrawing from the White House.
On November 27, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a prominent Iranian professor of physics and quantum field theorist, was assassinated near the Iranian capital of Tehran. Formally, Fakhrizadeh was the head of its Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, while Israel and the U.S. insist that he headed the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Israeli media even called Fakhrizadeh “the Nuclear Soleimani” referring to the commander of the Iranian Qods Force, who was assassinated by a US drone strike in Iraq on January 3, 2020. That assassination almost led to a US-Iranian war and the White House even swallowed a ballistic missile strike on its bases in Iraq, while Iranian air defense forces accidentally shot down an airliner near Tehran. Fortunately, a larger war was avoided, but the region entered into a new spiral of tensions between the Israeli-US bloc and Iranian-led forces. The November assassination did not trigger an immediate military response from Tehran, but there are little doubts that it will also have negative consequences for regional stability.
According to US and Israeli media, the development of the Iranian nuclear program requires the following factors: time, money and specialists.
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Iran has already had a lot of time.
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Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” was intended to target the ‘money’ factor, but Iran’s so-called resistance economy survived despite the pressure.
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Now, the US and Israel once again turned to the ‘specialists’ factor of this formula and they have capabilities to conduct politically-motivated assassinations as a part of what they call the ‘deterrence campaign’ against Iran.
Initial reports say that the car of Fakhrizadeh was targeted by a car bomb explosion and then was subjected to gunmen fire at Absard city. According to the Iranian Defense Ministry, Fakhrizadeh “was severely wounded in the course of the clashes between his security team and terrorists and was transferred to a hospital,” where he later succumbed to his wounds. Later it appeared in the unofficial version of events, claims that the attackers used a remotely-controlled machine gun that was installed in the trunk of a Nisan pickup. Then, the pickup and the gun were detonated. The Iranian Fars News report insists that the entire attack lasted for only 3 minutes and that no gunmen were involved.
The assassination demonstrates the particular gaps in the security of such prominent and high-ranking persons. It is no secret that the life of Fakhrizadeh was under threat for years, but he still moved around the country with a small security team with only two cars, and his car was not even armored. This posture may be partly explained by the cult of martyrdom on the all levels of Iranian society and the fact that Iranian officials are pretty close to ordinary people, especially in comparison with other Middle Eastern states. These factors allow the current political regime in Iran to resist unprecedented sanctions, political and even military pressure from its opponents, but at the same time creates additional security difficulties.
Immediately after the assassination, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Army were put on high alert and top Iranian officials vowed to take revenge for the attack. Also, on November 29, the Iranian Parliament decided to speed up the consideration of the bill that supposes to increase the level of uranium enrichment. As a “double urgency”, it was ratified with 232 votes from a total of 246 MPs attending the session. The final vote on the adoption of the law may take place on December 2. The bill states that Iran would now produce at least 120kg of uranium enriched to 20% per year. In comparison, the Iranian nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew, allowed Iran to enrich uranium to a maximum of 3.67%. In addition, under the bill in consideration, the government will have to put in operation one thousand additional centrifuges at the Natanz and Fordo nuclear facilities within a year. The bill also supposes an immediate return to the project for the reconstruction of the Arak nuclear reactor, which existed before the signing of the nuclear deal. Therefore, instead of slowing down the Iranian nuclear program, the assassination of Fakhrizadeh led to a public increase of the Iranian activity in the field. The United States and Israel will likely call these actions a great threat to global security and state that they are obliged to respond to the growing Iranian threat.
The only question is what do the Israeli and US leadership expect? Did they really believe that after the years of resistance and regional standoffs, that the Iranians would surrender after an assassination of one of their scientists?
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- Sun Ejects Biggest Solar Flare In Years Ahead Of Active Cycle
Sun Ejects Biggest Solar Flare In Years Ahead Of Active Cycle
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 22:50On Sunday, SpaceWeather said the sun’s solar explosion was measured as an M4.4-category eruption, which produced a shortwave radio blackout over some parts of Earth and a bright coronal mass ejection (CME).
“Remarkably, the flare was even bigger than it seemed. The blast site is located just behind the sun’s southeastern limb, so the explosion was partially eclipsed by the body of the sun.
“X-rays and UV radiation from the flare ionized the top of Earth’s atmosphere, producing a shortwave radio blackout over the South Atlantic… Ham radio operators and mariners may have noticed strange propagation effects at frequencies below 20 MHz, with some transmissions below 10 MHz completely extinguished,” SpaceWeather said on its website.
A coronagraph video via the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) shows the massive burst of electromagnetic radiation ejecting from the sun.
SpaceWeather said the flare and an associated CME were not Earth-facing but erupted behind the sun’s southeastern limb. This is good news because the explosion was partially eclipsed by the body of the sun. If the flare were Earth-facing, it would’ve likely been an X-class event, meaning it could’ve resulted in widespread radio blackouts, downed power grids, and disrupted communication networks.
The last decade of solar activity has been on the decline, though the latest flare-up in activity could suggest a new busy cycle is about to start.
In 2017, we noted that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Administration) planned for a massive solar event that would be strong enough to take down the power grids.
There has also been a couple of notable solar flare events in the last three years:
- Huge Solar Flare Sparks Widespread Blackouts, May Deter Korean Missile Launch This Weekend
- NASA: “Sun Erupts With Significant Flare”
With the Earth entering what appears to be an active solar period that could last through 2025 – this would present many challenges for the new digital economy as remote working has been kicked into hyperdrive because of the virus pandemic. Solar flares can disrupt satellite-based communications networks, as show below:
SpaceWeather warns that from Dec. 1-2, Sunday’s M4.4-class solar flare might sideswipe Earth’s magnetic field.
“The hidden sunspot that produced this major event will rotate onto the Earthside of the sun during the next day or two,” according to SpaceWeather. “Then its ability to spark geomagnetic storms will be greatly increased.”
An active solar cycle could be bad news for the digital economy as disruptions sparked by solar flares could create massive economic damage.
- After AZN Hack Accusation, Kim Jong Un Given COVID Vaccine By China
After AZN Hack Accusation, Kim Jong Un Given COVID Vaccine By China
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 22:30Authored by Harry Kazianis via 19fortyfive.com
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and “multiple other high-ranking officials within the Kim family and leadership network” have been vaccinated for Coronavirus “within the last two to three weeks” thanks to a vaccine candidate supplied by the Chinese government, according to two Japanese intelligence sources. Both officials spoke to 19FortyFive under the condition that their names not be identified.
The news comes on the heels of reports in Reuters that North Korea is suspected to have tried to hack into the computer networks of drugmaker AstraZeneca, part of what appears to be a wide-ranging campaign to secure any and all COVID-19 vaccine data it can through illegal cyberattacks.
North Korea’s COVID-19 Crisis Intensifies
While the leadership of North Korea may have found a way to try and protect themselves from the dangers of Coronavirus, many parts of the country are being impacted dramatically, compounding ongoing economic challenges brought on through international sanctions, decades-long food insecurity issues, and the landing of three typhoons several months ago.
With an antiquated and poorly resourced healthcare system that is in no shape to tackle a pandemic, North Korea has resorted to cutting itself off from the outside world since January when the so-called “hermit kingdom” sealed its borders in an attempt to keep out the virus. To this day, Pyongyang claims to not have any “confirmed” cases of COVID-19 in the country, although, has admitted to “suspected” cases.
Kim Jong Un Meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In recent days, multiple outlets have reported that various cities in North Korea—including Pyongyang, the capital—have been placed on lockdown due to COVID-19 concerns. The Kim regime has also instituted a ban on fishing and salt production in North Korean waters, executed an official for breaking anti-virus regulations, and instituted a shoot to kill order if anyone attempts to enter the country illegally.
Is the Vaccine Safe?
While neither source would confirm which company in China was the manufacturer of the Coronavirus vaccine given to the North Korean leadership, there are “at least 3-4 different Chinese vaccines in play including a whole inactivated virus vaccine from Sinovac and an adenovirus 5 vectored vaccine from CanSinoBio,” explained Dr. Peter J. Hotez, M.D., Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine.
Of special note is a vaccine being crafted by Sinophram Group, which according to the chair of the company, has been used by nearly one million people within China.
While clearly the number of vaccine candidates and vaccinations point to tremendous progress in what is surely a record-setting pace, questions remain over the effectiveness and safety of these vaccines, as no phase three trial data has been published on any Chinese vaccines as of now.
“So far, it’s looking as though the COVID-19 virus spike protein is a pretty soft target so it’s quite possible some of those vaccines may work,” noted Dr. Hotez. “The problem is we don’t have much if any insight on their quality control and assurance and fidelity of clinical testing, which is the truly hard part of vaccines. Given that China is probably the world’s largest producer of vaccines—some estimates say 5 billion doses annually of different vaccines—and likely the supplier of North Korea historically, the fact that they are providing COVID vaccines for DPRK is not a surprise.”
Kim’s Dilemma: What if the Vaccine Isn’t Effective?
With the speed at which China and many drug manufacturers around the world are developing, testing, and deploying COVID-19 vaccines, there is a chance a vaccine candidate may not have the intended effectiveness vaccines vetted for much longer time frames have. What happens if Kim, eager to protect himself, his family, and top aides, are vaccinated with a Chinese version that ultimately is not effective? Can they be revaccinated with something provided by another vendor? At least for now, according to various experts I spoke to, there is no clear answer.
“There is no data I’m aware of looking at boosting with different vaccines. That needs to be studied,” explained Dr. Hotez. “My guess is that it will likely be ok depending on which vaccine was the prime and which one was the boost, but it needs to be studied.”
Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2: This scanning electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2 (yellow)—also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19—isolated from a patient in the U.S., emerging from the surface of cells (blue/pink) cultured in the lab.
“The short answer is that we do not know whether revaccination with a more effective vaccine would be protective,” explained William John Moss, a Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology, International Health and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “However, I think it is likely that individuals could be revaccinated and derive protection from a more effective vaccine. The worst-case scenario would be that an initial vaccine could result in a less than ideal immune response that does not confer protection against Covid-19 but interferes with the response to a second vaccine. This will depend on the nature and magnitude of the immune responses elicited by the partially effective vaccine.”
One More Way North Korea Is Dependent on China
With North Korea’s existence as a country owed in large part due to massive subsidies in food and fuel thanks to China, it would seem Pyongyang is now indebted to Beijing even more, especially if China were to provide Coronavirus vaccine to the entire population, a situation that seems very possible. Such a move would be in Beijing’s interest, as it would want to avoid any large Coronavirus outbreaks that could lead to massive refugee flows coming into China or any internal instability in North Korea. And while the Kim regime may not feel comfortable relying even more heavily on China, they simply may have no choice—and be forced to follow Beijing’s lead more closely—at least for now.
“North Korea’s total population is a tiny drop in the Chinese bucket. Xi’s government could take care of the entire country if it desires. A decision to do so also would affirm a new closeness to the bilateral relationship,” explained Doug Bandow, a Senior Fellow at the CATO Institute, based in Washington, D.C.
“Looking after Kim’s health should gain Beijing extra attention in Pyongyang for its views, though Kim still isn’t going to surrender anything unnecessarily.”
“Even though Kim’s government has sought to reduce the DPRK’s economic and political dependence on China, that dependence and acquiescence still applies in high-priority situations. In other words, on crucial matters Pyongyang will do what Beijing wants,” noted Ted Galen Carpenter, a Senior Fellow also at the CATO Institute and longtime North Korea watcher.
- 'The Wuhan Files': CNN Publishes Leaked Report Showing China Downplayed COVID-19 Outbreak
‘The Wuhan Files’: CNN Publishes Leaked Report Showing China Downplayed COVID-19 Outbreak
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 22:10CNN has just published the first of what might be a series of reports on a cache of new documents purporting to prove that the information disseminated by Chinese government officials was markedly different from the numbers, assessments and projections being shared with top-level officials. While that doesn’t prove China lied to the public, it’s definitely not a good look (not that any rational person takes China’s COVID numbers at face value).
Reports dating from early February show that the number of cases reported in the province was at times 3x larger than what the public was being told.
A whistleblower who worked in the Chinese health care system provided 117 pages of internal documents from Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention to CNN. The report analyzes data collected between Oct. 2019 and April 2020.
For example, on Feb. 10, Chinese officials reported 2,478 new confirmed cases, making the total worldwide number reach beyond 40,000. But in a file labeled “internal document, please keep confidential,” the Hubei Provincial CDC recorded 5,918 new cases on that date, with 2,345 “confirmed cases,” 1,772 “clinically diagnosed cases” and 1,796 “suspected cases.”
The documents also “reveal what appears to be an inflexible health care system constrained by top-down bureaucracy and rigid procedures that were ill-equipped to deal with the emerging crisis,” according to CNN.
According to data from early March, the average time between symptom onset and confirmed diagnosis was 23.3 days. Three months later, China’s State Council released a White Paper saying the Chinese government had always published information related to the epidemic in a “timely, open and transparent fashion.”
The leak comes Monday evening, just hours before clocks pass midnight on Dec. 1: “It was clear they did make mistakes – and not just mistakes that happen when you’re dealing with a novel virus – also bureaucratic and politically-motivated errors in how they handled it.”
But perhaps the most intriguing finding from the report is the fact that influenza cases mysteriously spiked in Hubei Province right around this time last year. The outbreak wasn’t centered around Wuhan, but it emerged in the neighboring cities of Yichang and Xianning. The outbreak wasn’t widely reported before now, even though the instance of cases was 20x higher than the prior year, according to the documents.
At the same time that the virus is believed to have first emerged, the documents show another health crisis was unfolding: Hubei was dealing with a significant influenza outbreak. It caused cases to rise to 20 times the level recorded the previous year, the documents show, placing enormous levels of additional stress on an already stretched health care system.
The influenza “epidemic,” as officials noted in the document, was not only present in Wuhan in December, but was greatest in the neighboring cities of Yichang and Xianning. It remains unclear what impact or connection the influenza spike had on the Covid-19 outbreak. And while there is no suggestion in the documents the two parallel crises are linked, information regarding the magnitude of Hubei’s influenza spike has still yet to be made public.
As an important caveat, we most note: While this information wasn’t noted in the mainstream press, outlets like the Epoch Times – which has been widely derided as a purveyor of COVID ‘conspiracies’ – reported on a surge in “COVID-like” infections happening around the same time months ago.
CNN also noted that the revelations are coming as the US and EU are pushing China to cooperate fully with a WHO investigation, and indeed the agency just announced the other day that it’s sending another team comprising scientists of various nationalities on a more detailed fact-finding mission to investigate the “origins” of the pandemic.
Still, we can’t help but wonder how a low-level bureaucrat would not only manage to abscond with such a highly classified report, but then manage to leak it to CNN, a news organization staffed primarily by English-speaking reporters (though to be sure there are undoubtedly Chinese language experts in its employ) – all without China’s all-seeing surveillance state catching wind of what’s happening. The origins of the leak, and the lack of detail devoted to explaining how CNN got this information, suggest that there’s something more at work here. Could this be another Intel leak to favored reporters trying to turn the public’s ire back on China – they lied to us! – as the long, dark winter Biden has promised finally begins?
Or perhaps something more sinister?
- The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 21:50Authored by Graeme Wood via The Atlantic,
A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news…
Peter Turchin, one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I needed to know.
But he had to leave his office sometime. (“One way you know I am Russian is that I cannot think sitting down,” he told me. “I have to go for a walk.”) Neither of us had seen much of anyone since the pandemic had closed the country several months before. The campus was quiet. “A week ago, it was even more like a neutron bomb hit,” Turchin said. Animals were timidly reclaiming the campus, he said: squirrels, woodchucks, deer, even an occasional red-tailed hawk. During our walk, groundskeepers and a few kids on skateboards were the only other representatives of the human population in sight.
The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working.
(“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced.
In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical modeling unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”
Diamond and Harari aimed to describe the history of humanity. Turchin looks into a distant, science-fiction future for peers. In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.
The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,” he told me as we passed Mirror Lake, which UConn’s website describes as a favorite place for students to “read, relax, or ride on the wooden swing.” The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of democratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem. Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.”
The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.
“We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more. The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. “You are ruling class,” he said, with no more rancor than if he had informed me that I had brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his. Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.
In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn’t view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. “You reach hundreds of thousands.”) Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.
Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies. Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge,” Turchin said.
Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising insecurity becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.
Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if the disintegration were not happening now, roughly as the Seer of Storrs foretold 10 years ago. If the next 10 years are as seismic as he says they will be, his insights will have to be accounted for by historians and social scientists—assuming, of course, that there are still universities left to employ such people.
Peter Turchin, photographed in Connecticut’s Natchaug State Forest in October. The former ecologist seeks to apply mathematical rigor to the study of human history. (Malike Sidibe)
Turchin was born in 1957 in Obninsk, Russia, a city built by the Soviet state as a kind of nerd heaven, where scientists could collaborate and live together. His father, Valentin, was a physicist and political dissident, and his mother, Tatiana, had trained as a geologist. They moved to Moscow when he was 7 and in 1978 fled to New York as political refugees. There they quickly found a community that spoke the household language, which was science. Valentin taught at the City University of New York, and Peter studied biology at NYU and earned a zoology doctorate from Duke.
Turchin wrote a dissertation on the Mexican bean beetle, a cute, ladybuglike pest that feasts on legumes in areas between the United States and Guatemala. When Turchin began his research, in the early 1980s, ecology was evolving in a way that some fields already had. The old way to study bugs was to collect them and describe them: count their legs, measure their bellies, and pin them to pieces of particleboard for future reference. (Go to the Natural History Museum in London, and in the old storerooms you can still see the shelves of bell jars and cases of specimens.) In the ’70s, the Australian physicist Robert May had turned his attention to ecology and helped transform it into a mathematical science whose tools included supercomputers along with butterfly nets and bottle traps. Yet in the early days of his career, Turchin told me, “the majority of ecologists were still quite math-phobic.”
Turchin did, in fact, do fieldwork, but he contributed to ecology primarily by collecting and using data to model the dynamics of populations—for example, determining why a pine-beetle population might take over a forest, or why that same population might decline. (He also worked on moths, voles, and lemmings.)
In the late ’90s, disaster struck: Turchin realized that he knew everything he ever wanted to know about beetles. He compares himself to Thomasina Coverly, the girl genius in the Tom Stoppard play Arcadia, who obsessed about the life cycles of grouse and other creatures around her Derbyshire country house. Stoppard’s character had the disadvantage of living a century and a half before the development of chaos theory. “She gave up because it was just too complicated,” Turchin said. “I gave up because I solved the problem.”
Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical / Empirical Synthesis (2003), then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a permanent sayonara to the field, although he would continue to draw a salary as a tenured professor in their department. (He no longer gets raises, but he told me he was already “at a comfortable level, and, you know, you don’t need so much money.”) “Usually a midlife crisis means you divorce your old wife and marry a graduate student,” Turchin said. “I divorced an old science and married a new one.”
Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if they weren’t playing out now, roughly as he foretold 10 years ago.
One of his last papers appeared in the journal Oikos. “Does population ecology have general laws?” Turchin asked. Most ecologists said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is different. Pine beetles reproduce, run amok, and ravage a forest for pine-beetle reasons, but that does not mean mosquito or tick populations will rise and fall according to the same rhythms. Turchin suggested that “there are several very general law-like propositions” that could be applied to ecology. After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. “Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said. Turchin proposed, for example, that populations of organisms grow or decline exponentially, not linearly. This is why if you buy two guinea pigs, you will soon have not just a few more guinea pigs but a home—and then a neighborhood—full of the damn things (as long as you keep feeding them). This law is simple enough to be understood by a high-school math student, and it describes the fortunes of everything from ticks to starlings to camels. The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.
Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings. He’d long had a hobbyist’s interest in history. But he also had a predator’s instinct to survey the savanna of human knowledge and pounce on the weakest prey. “All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”
Historians read books, letters, and other texts. Occasionally, if they are archaeologically inclined, they dig up potsherds and coins. But to Turchin, relying solely on these methods was the equivalent of studying bugs by pinning them to particleboard and counting their antennae. If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.
“There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). “A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.” Turchin founded a journal, Cliodynamics, dedicated to “the search for general principles explaining the functioning and dynamics of historical societies.” (The term is his coinage; Clio is the muse of history.) He had already announced the discipline’s arrival in an article in Nature, where he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology “who care most for the private life of warblers.” “Let history continue to focus on the particular,” he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science. While historians dusted bell jars in the basement of the university, Turchin and his followers would be upstairs, answering the big questions.
To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data. The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.) But once the data are entered, after vetting by Turchin and specialists in the historical period under review, they offer quick and powerful suggestions about historical phenomena.
Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before. As the database expands, it will attempt to remove more questions from the realm of humanistic speculation and sock them away in a drawer marked answered.
One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. “No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do”—rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art—“because of an ugly thing like war,” he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex societies because they kill off simpler ones. The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present, Turchin said. “There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”
Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle. Turchin excludes the ultimate violent incident, the Civil War, as a “sui generis event.” The exclusion may seem suspicious, but to a statistician, “trimming outliers” is standard practice. Historians and journalists, by contrast, tend to focus on outliers—because they are interesting—and sometimes miss grander trends.
Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites. The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians. (The most famous of these was the assassination of James A. Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, by a lawyer who had demanded but not received a political appointment.) It wasn’t until the Progressive reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction actually slowed, at least for a time.
This oscillation between violence and peace, with elite overproduction as the first horseman of the recurring American apocalypse, inspired Turchin’s 2020 prediction. In 2010, when Nature surveyed scientists about their predictions for the coming decade, most took the survey as an invitation to self-promote and rhapsodize, dreamily, about coming advances in their fields. Turchin retorted with his prophecy of doom and said that nothing short of fundamental change would stop another violent turn.
Turchin’s prescriptions are, as a whole, vague and unclassifiable. Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them—while others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism. Other policies are simply heretical. He opposes credential-oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.
How to do that? Turchin says he doesn’t really know, and it isn’t his job to know. “I don’t really think in terms of specific policy,” he told me. “We need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don’t know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?” He conceded that each of these possibilities would have unpredictable effects. He recalled a story he’d heard back when he was still an ecologist: The Forest Service had once implemented a plan to reduce the population of bark beetles with pesticide—only to find that the pesticide killed off the beetles’ predators even more effectively than it killed the beetles. The intervention resulted in more beetles than before. The lesson, he said, was to practice “adaptive management,” changing and modulating your approach as you go.
Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically preordained disaster. He says he could imagine an Asimovian agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total civilizational collapse.
Historians have not, as a whole, accepted Turchin’s terms of surrender graciously. Since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones. (As Jo Guldi, a historian at Southern Methodist University, put it to me, “Some historians regard Turchin the way astronomers regard Nostradamus.”) Instead, each historical event must be lovingly described, and its idiosyncrasies understood to be limited in relevance to other events. The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.
One might even say that what defines history as a humanistic enterprise is the belief that it is not governed by scientific laws—that the working parts of human societies are not like billiard balls, which, if arranged at certain angles and struck with a certain amount of force, will invariably crack just so and roll toward a corner pocket of war, or a side pocket of peace. Turchin counters that he has heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that complexity. Consider, he says, the concept of temperature—something so obviously quantifiable now that we laugh at the idea that it’s too vague to measure. “Back before people knew what temperature was, the best thing you could do is to say you’re hot or cold,” Turchin told me. The concept depended on many factors: wind, humidity, ordinary human differences in perception. Now we have thermometers. Turchin wants to invent a thermometer for human societies that will measure when they are likely to boil over into war.
Eventually, Turchin hopes, no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically preordained disaster.
One social scientist who can speak to Turchin in his own mathematical argot is Dingxin Zhao, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago who is—incredibly—also a former mathematical ecologist. (He earned a doctorate modeling carrot-weevil population dynamics before earning a second doctorate in Chinese political sociology.) “I came from a natural-science background,” Zhao told me, “and in a way I am sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may also make big mistakes.”
Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs. “Biological species don’t strategize in a very flexible way,” he told me. After millennia of evolutionary R&D, a woodpecker will come up with ingenious ways to stick its beak into a tree in search of food. It might even have social characteristics—an alpha woodpecker might strong-wing beta woodpeckers into giving it first dibs on the tastiest termites. But humans are much wilier social creatures, Zhao said. A woodpecker will eat a termite, but it “will not explain that he is doing so because it is his divine right.” Humans pull ideological power moves like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand “the decisions of a Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,” a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. “I made that change,” Zhao told me, “and Peter Turchin has not.”
Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past. He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians. Few would dare to write a history of the United States, let alone one of human civilization. Turchin’s approach is also Russian, or post-Soviet, in its rejection of the Marxist theory of historical progress that had been the official ideology of the Soviet state. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, so too did the requirement that historical writing acknowledge international communism as the condition toward which the arc of history was bending. Turchin dropped ideology altogether, he says: Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.
Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. “If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,” Walter Scheidel, an actual historian at Stanford, told me. (Scheidel, whose books span millennia, takes Turchin’s work seriously and has even co-written a paper with him.) Instead they come from scientific fields where these taboos do not dominate. The genre’s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author, Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world’s foremost experts on the physiology of the gallbladder. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment. Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.
Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention “disciplinary carpetbaggers” like himself have received for applying scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that had eluded the old methods. He is skeptical of Turchin’s claims about historical cycles, but he believes in data-driven historical inquiry. “Given the noisiness of human behavior and the prevalence of cognitive biases, it’s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by picking whichever event suits one’s narrative,” he says. The only answer is to use large data sets. Pinker thanks traditional historians for their work collating these data sets; he told me in an email that they “deserve extraordinary admiration for their original research (‘brushing the mouse shit off moldy court records in the basement of town halls,’ as one historian put it to me).” He calls not for surrender but for a truce. “There’s no reason that traditional history and data science can’t merge into a cooperative enterprise,” Pinker wrote. “Knowing stuff is hard; we need to use every available tool.”
Guldi, the Southern Methodist University professor, is one scholar who has embraced tools previously scorned by historians. She is a pioneer of data-driven history that considers timescales beyond a human lifetime. Her primary technique is the mining of texts—for example, sifting through the millions and millions of words captured in parliamentary debate in order to understand the history of land use in the final century of the British empire. Guldi may seem a potential recruit to cliodynamics, but her approach to data sets is grounded in the traditional methods of the humanities. She counts the frequency of words, rather than trying to find ways to compare big, fuzzy categories among civilizations. Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with skepticism from traditional historians, who deny that the subject to which they have devoted their lives can be expressed in Excel format. Turchin’s data are also limited to big-picture characteristics observed over 10,000 years, or about 200 lifetimes. By scientific standards, a sample size of 200 is small, even if it is all humanity has.
Yet 200 lifetimes is at least more ambitious than the average historical purview of only one. And the reward for that ambition—in addition to the bragging rights for having potentially explained everything that has ever happened to human beings—includes something every writer wants: an audience. Thinking small rarely gets you quoted in The New York Times. Turchin has not yet attracted the mass audiences of a Diamond, Pinker, or Harari. But he has lured connoisseurs of political catastrophe, journalists and pundits looking for big answers to pressing questions, and true believers in the power of science to conquer uncertainty and improve the world. He has certainly outsold most beetle experts.
If he is right, it is hard to see how history will avoid assimilating his insights—if it can avoid being abolished by them. Privately, some historians have told me they consider the tools he uses powerful, if a little crude. Cliodynamics is now on a long list of methods that arrived on the scene promising to revolutionize history. Many were fads, but some survived that stage to take their rightful place in an expanding historiographical tool kit. Turchin’s methods have already shown their power. Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus. For my own sake, there are few thinkers whom I am more eager to see proved wrong.
- Islamists On Motorcycles Mount 'Most Violent Attack On Civilians This Year' In Nigeria
Islamists On Motorcycles Mount ‘Most Violent Attack On Civilians This Year’ In Nigeria
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 21:30The United Nations has called the horrific terrorist attack in Nigeria over the weekend the “most violent direct” assault on civilians this year.
Farmers that were working their fields in remote villages near Maiduguri, which is the capital of Nigeria’s Borno state – where Islamist militant faction Boko Haram has long been at war with the Nigerian government – when a large group of armed men on motorcycles swept through the area and killed everyone in sight.
A moto-taxi used by a Nigerian regular soldier on the lookout for Boko Haram insurgents. Image source: The Vintagent It happened Saturday afternoon and began hitting international press on Sunday, when the death toll steadily climbed throughout the day as investigators went through the appalling crime scene. The death toll now stands at over 110 civilians killed.
Though there weren’t immediate claims of responsibility, Boko Haram and a related splinter group the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), are being widely blamed by authorities.
France24 and the AP described summary executions of rice farmers:
The attack was staged Saturday in a rice field in Garin Kwashebe, a Borno community known for rice farming, on the day residents of the state were casting votes for the first time in 13 years to elect local government councils, though many didn’t go to cast their ballots.
The farmers were reportedly rounded up and summarily killed by armed insurgents.
Malam Zabarmari, a leader of a rice farmers association in Borno state, confirmed the massacre to The Associated Press.
“Armed men on motorcycles led a brutal attack on civilian men and women who were harvesting their fields,” a statement from the local UN humanitarian office said.
Funerals for the slain, via AFP “At least 110 civilians were ruthlessly killed and many others were wounded in this attack,” it added. There are also reports that woman were kidnapped from the village during the raid.
“The incident is the most violent direct attack against innocent civilians this year. I call for the perpetrators of this heinous and senseless act to be brought to justice,” UN representative Edward Kallon said.
Boko Haram has in recent years been known to use motorcycles to gain quick entry to cities and villages to carry out terror attacks. The Nigerian Army has responded with their own motorcycle units to more swiftly and effectively hunt down the terrorists, especially in remote country roads.
- "A Good Start" – Ron Paul Praises Flynn Pardon, Urges Trump To "Right Obama's Terrible Wrongs"
“A Good Start” – Ron Paul Praises Flynn Pardon, Urges Trump To “Right Obama’s Terrible Wrongs”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 21:10Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
Last week President Trump granted a “full pardon” to Gen. Michael Flynn, his first National Security Advisor. In a White House statement announcing the pardon, the Administration pointed out that the relentless pursuit of Flynn was a partisan effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election.
The pursuit of Flynn was spearheaded by people who refused to accept the results of the 2016 election and worked to undermine the peaceful transfer of power, said the White House. These same people are the ones accusing Trump of undermining the election by challenging what appears to be serious voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.
That is called “projection.”
The White House statement also cites partisans in politics, the media, and the Deep State which sought to prevent Trump from being elected, to prevent him from taking office once elected, and to remove him on false pretenses once in office.
In order to push the false narrative that Trump was somehow elected due to the intervention of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the coup-masters had to make it appear that a high-ranking official was involved in monkey business with the Russians. Flynn was the unlucky victim of their smear machine, accused of “Russia collusion” over an innocent telephone call with the then-Russian Ambassador in Washington during the transition to a Trump Administration.
Yet when Joe Biden’s transition people bragged recently that Biden was connecting with foreign officials before inaugurated, the media praised it as a welcome return of the “experts” to foreign policy.
While it is very good news that President Trump is in the mood to pardon those victims of the warmongering Deep State, I very much hope that he is only warming up. It would be a great tragedy if other Deep State victims are left to suffer for their non-crimes.
Tweeting about her legislation that calls for charges against Edward Snowden and Julian Assange to be dropped and the Espionage Act reformed, US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard told President Trump, “since you’re giving pardons to people, please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state.”
My good friend Rep. Thomas Massie, a Ron Paul Institute Board Member, is a co-sponsor of Rep. Gabbard’s legislation, making it a real bipartisan effort to restore the rule of law in the United States and to rein in the Beltway warmongers.
Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are not criminals. They are heroes for telling us the truth about what criminals in government were doing in our name and with our money.
The fact is we were lied into war over and over again. While those wars were profitable for the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex, they snuffed out the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people overseas and robbed our own children and grandchildren of trillions of dollars wasted on neocon lies. And meanwhile, as Ed Snowden showed us, the intelligence community declared us the enemy and set up an elaborate internal spy network that would make the East German Stasi green with envy.
President Trump: you have the incredible opportunity to right the terrible wrongs perpetrated by the Obama/Biden Administration. History will smile kindly upon you if you also grant full pardon to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden – and any other truth-teller who faces persecution for exposing the Deep State warmongers.
- "It's Really Bad" – Almost One-Third Of Small Businesses In NY, NJ Have Closed
“It’s Really Bad” – Almost One-Third Of Small Businesses In NY, NJ Have Closed
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 20:50Here comes the next recession as nearly one-third of small businesses in New York and New Jersey remain closed since the virus pandemic began earlier this year.
The NYPost outlines small business data from Opportunity Insights and New Jersey Business & Industry Association paint a troubling outlook for the rest of 2020 into 2021.
Opportunity Insights’ TrackingTheRecovery.Org, a Harvard database that monitors economic activity for the US, currently says 27.8% of small businesses in New York remain closed. The same goes for New Jersey, where 31.2% of small businesses had not reopened.
The New Jersey Business & Industry Association reports similar figures with 28% of New Jersey’s small businesses have closed up shop this year.
With top federal health officials on Sunday warning about a post-Thanksgiving spike in COVID-19, the reemergence of the virus in New York and New Jersey, along with stricter social distancing measures, means that more small businesses may be decimated in the months ahead.
“It’s really bad,” Eileen Kean, New Jersey state director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, told the Star-Ledger.
“And without federal dollars coming into New Jersey, the Main Street stores and other establishments are not gonna make it through the winter,” Kean said.
“It’s devastating how many restaurants have shuttered and jobs have been lost,” said Andrew Rigie, executive director of NYC Hospitality Alliances.
“And with the infection rate rising and the looming threat of indoor dining closing again, many more will close unless the government provides adequate support to these small businesses,” Rigie said.
On top of the small business closures in both states, 300,000 New Yorkers have filed a formal change of address notices with the U.S. Postal Service from March 1 to October 31. The rapid population decline suggests consumption at small businesses will continue to suffer well into 2021.
This all means that New York City’s economic recovery will lag the rest of the country. As explained by Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, the city’s recovery might not be seen until 2025:
“This is an event that struck right at the heart of New York’s comparative advantages,” Zandi said. “Being globally oriented, being stacked up in skyscrapers and packed together in stadiums: the very thing that made New York the pandemic undermined New York, was upended by it.”
- Killing The Future: COVID Madness Will Lead To Half A Million Fewer US Births In 2021
Killing The Future: COVID Madness Will Lead To Half A Million Fewer US Births In 2021
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 20:30Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
Research has concluded that the US will experience 500,000 fewer births in 2021, as couples choose not to have children because of the coronavirus fallout.
The findings by the Brookings Institute were published last week in the Wall Street Journal, which noted that there will be “between 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births in the U.S. next year, compared with a drop of 44,172 last year.”
The numbers equate to a 13% drop from the 3.8 million babies born in 2019.
The “analysis, partly based on what happened following the 2007-2009 recession, is that weaker job prospects equate to fewer births,” the report further notes.
“Women will have many fewer babies in the short term, and for some of them, a lower total number of children over their lifetimes,” the research, previously previewed in the Summer, noted.
The US birthrate is already at its lowest level on record, and according to clinics, there has been a 50% jump in requests for birth control since the beginning of the pandemic, and a 40% increase in requests for Plan B.
CDC research notes that the birth rate in the US has been below replacement level since 1971. It is now a problem across all major racial groups including Hispanics, non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and non-Hispanic Asians. All have below replacement birth levels.
A recent survey from the Guttmacher Institute discovered that 34% of women able to have babies in the US have made a decision to either delay having a child, or to just have fewer children because of COVID.
Analysts say this will have a long and profound impact on the economy for many years to come, as the US could be falling into a so called ‘Fertility trap’ where there are fewer women around to have babies, resulting in smaller families, and low population growth reducing economic growth.
All of this results in increased pessimism and a downward spiral that is difficult to break.
It will also mean that in the near future there will be a huge mismatch between the amounts of younger and older people in the country.
Indeed, by 2034 Americans over age 65 are expected to outnumber those under 18 for the first time in the history of the nation.
Unless it is stopped now, the COVID madness, the lockdowns, the panic, the social engineering will not only causing irrevocable damage to our collective psyche, societal morale, and cultural richness, it will also destroy future prosperity and literally deny life to millions along the way.
But perhaps that was the endgame all along?
- US Billionaires Have Gained $1 Trillion Since The Pandemic Started
US Billionaires Have Gained $1 Trillion Since The Pandemic Started
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 20:10American billionaires haven’t been just immune to the pandemic, they have been thriving in it, drastically increasing their collective wealth. An analysis by Chuck Collins at the Institute for Policy Studies found that American billionaires have been their wealth grow by $1 trillion since March of this year – more than 34 percent. That was not the case during the 2008 financial crisis when it took Forbes’ 400 richest people three years to recoup their losses from the Great Recession. Collins’ findings highlight a wealth gain by a mere 650 individuals that, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, seems obscene at a time when nearly 7 million Americans are at risk of eviction when moratoriums expire at the end of the year.
You will find more infographics at Statista
There are 650 billionaires on the list, out of which 47 are new arrivals with 11 dropping out due to death or financial decline. There were numerous impressive financial gains among notable billionaires on the lit with Jeff Bezos growing his fortune by $69.4 billion between March 17 and November 24. The Amazon boss and richest man on the planet is now with $182.4 billion. The most impressive gain on the list was recorded by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk who has seen his fortune experience a meteoric rise. In the above period, his weath surged a whopping 414 percent, climbing from “just” $24.6 billion to $126.2 billion, making him the world’s second richest man after Bezos.
Illustrating the gulf in financial inequality in the U.S. today, the analysis states that U.S. billionaires own $4 trillion, 3.5 percent of all privately held wealth in the country. Billionaire wealth is now twice the amount of wealth held by the bottom 50 percent of all American households combined, approximately 160 million people.
- Pennsylvania Lawmakers Formally Introduce Resolution To Dispute 2020 Elections Results
Pennsylvania Lawmakers Formally Introduce Resolution To Dispute 2020 Elections Results
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 19:50Just as we previewed over the weekend, Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania on Monday introduced a resolution to dispute the results of the 2020 election.
As The Epoch Times’ Ivan Pentchoukov reports, the text of the resolution, first previewed in a memo on Nov. 27, states that the executive and judicial branches of the Keystone State’s government usurped the legislature’s constitutional power to set the rules of the election.
“Officials in the Executive and Judicial Branches of the Commonwealth infringed upon the General Assembly’s authority under the Constitution of the United States by unlawfully changing the rules governing the November 3, 2020, election in the Commonwealth,” the resolution (pdf) states.
The resolution calls on the secretary of the Commonwealth to withdraw the “premature certification” of the presidential election and delay certifying other races, declares the 2020 election to be in dispute, and urges the U.S. Congress “to declare the selection of presidential electors in this Commonwealth to be in dispute.”
Members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly said in a statement, “A number of compromises of Pennsylvania’s election laws took place during the 2020 General Election. The documented irregularities and improprieties associated with mail-in balloting, pre-canvassing, and canvassing have undermined our elector process and, as a result, we cannot accept certification of the results in statewide races.”
They added, “We believe this moment is pivotal and important enough that the General Assembly needs to take extraordinary measures to answer these extraordinary questions. We also believe our representative oversight duty as Pennsylvania’s legislative branch of government demands us to re-assume our constitutional authority and take immediate action.”
The proposed text lists three steps taken by the judicial and executive branches to change the rules of the election.
First, on Sept. 17, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court “unlawfully and unilaterally” extended the deadline by which mail ballots could be received, mandated that ballots without a postmark would be treated as timely, and allowed for ballots without a verified voter signature to be accepted, the resolution says.
Second, on Oct. 23, upon a petition from the secretary of the commonwealth, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that signatures on mail-in ballots need not be authenticated.
And third, on Nov. 2, the secretary of the commonwealth “encouraged certain counties to notify party and candidate representatives of mail-in voters whose ballots contained defects,” the resolution says.
All of the changes are contrary to the Pennsylvania Election Code, which requires mail-in ballots to be received at 8 p.m. on Election Day, mandates that signatures on the mail-in ballots be authenticated, and forbids the counting of defective mail-in ballots.
The resolution also lists a variety of election irregularities and potential fraud, including the issues brought up by witnesses during the hearing before the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee on Nov. 25.
“On November 24, 2020, the Secretary of the Commonwealth unilaterally and prematurely certified results of the November 3, 2020 election regarding presidential electors despite ongoing litigation,” the resolution states.
“The Pennsylvania House of Representatives has the duty to ensure that no citizen of this Commonwealth is disenfranchised, to insist that all elections are conducted according to the law, and to satisfy the general public that every legal vote is counted accurately.”
Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican, said Friday that the GOP-controlled state legislature will make a bid to reclaim its power to appoint the state’s electors to the Electoral College, saying they could start the process on Nov. 30.
“So, we’re gonna do a resolution between the House and Senate, hopefully today,” he told Steve Bannon’s War Room on Friday.
- Beijing "Unexpectedly" Injects $30 Billion Into Financial System, Sparking Doubts About True State Of China's Economy
Beijing “Unexpectedly” Injects $30 Billion Into Financial System, Sparking Doubts About True State Of China’s Economy
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 19:30Back in late 2019, we were frequently greeted by headlines such as this, indicating that PBOC was periodically making “unexpected” liquidity injections, which made sense in light of China’s ongoing economic slowdown:
… and:
Fast forward one year, when China’s economy is supposedly growing at a blistering pace thanks the massive credit injections following the covid pandemic – or so Beijing and various PMI surveys would would indicate, with the November NBS manufacturing PMI overnight rising to 52.1 from 51.4 in October (all sub-indexes in the NBS manufacturing PMI survey implied stronger growth momentum in November) while the NBS non-manufacturing PMI rising further to 56.4 from 56.2 in October on the back of stronger services and construction PMIs….
… and yet the same telltale signs that not all is well with China’s economy are back, with Bloomberg posting a deja vu report this morning that China “unexpectedly” – there’s that word again – added yet another injection in the form of medium-term funding to the financial system on Monday “as the central bank sought to ease liquidity tightness in the final weeks of the year.” Perhaps China’s economy is not nearly as strong as the “pristine” indicators would make us believe?
Specifically, the People’s Bank of China offered 200 billion yuan ($30 billion) of the medium-term lending facility at an unchanged rate of 2.95%, according to a statement Monday at the same time that Beijing reported the latest blistering PMI numbers.
The latest injection came just two weeks after the central bank offered 800 billion yuan of the funds, which were already more than enough to offset the 600 billion yuan that were due this month.
“The MLF injection is a surprise,” said Zhaopeng Xing, a markets economist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group. “It shows the central bank aims to ensure liquidity without using broader easing measures like a reserve-ratio cut, when the demand for medium-term cash surged.”
Curiously, even as Chinese post-pandemic economic recovery is blowing away expectations, widespread concerns over tighter cash supply have sent China’s benchmark sovereign yield to its highest level since May 2019 earlier in November… <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>
… resulting in record wide spreads between US and Chinese 10Y yields.
The latest MLF injection came as the PBOC also added 150 billion yuan of 7-day reverse repurchase agreements on Monday.
Even more curious is the consensus explanation for the sharp rise in Chinese yields: according to Bloomberg, “the central bank’s drip-feed approach to offering funding has compounded” the lack of liquidity “indicating Beijing wouldn’t want to loosen monetary policy much more amid a growth rebound.”
But if the economy is so strong, which does China even need more liquidity: after all, the 10Y yield is – in theory – rising because of higher inflation expectations over the horizon, and yet the PBOC feels compelled to enter the market “unexpectedly” every other week to prevent sentiment from turning sour.
Maybe what’s going on is that the liquidity squeeze is the real story, and the so-called economic recovery is the latest goalseeked lie out of Beijing.
Recall that China is already facing a major funding squeeze, with the nation’s banks grappling with a $900 billion funding gap this month and next because of a need to repay at least 3.7 trillion yuan of short-term interbank debt and purchase 1 trillion yuan of newly issued government bonds. Also, 600 billion yuan of previously offered MLF loans will mature in December. The recent “unexpected” default of several SOE companies has added to the stress, with non-bank financial institutions finding it hard to fund themselves in the interbank market.
Rabobank’s Michael Every put it best when discussing the quantum states of the global newslow (China’s economy surging in one collapse of the wave function; China’s economy desperate for liquidity in the other), writing the following:
China’s economy continues to power ahead, with bumper net exports and capital inflows and industrial profits all being recorded: and yet the PBOC just had to inject CNY200bn (USD30bn) in MLF a month ahead of the end of the year to ease liquidity tightness, and that on the back of CNY800bn two weeks ago. Yes, this is gross not net: but why the need for so much PBOC help when everything is going so well? Perhaps because Chinese banks are still trying to repay CNY3.7 trillion of short-term interbank debt and purchase CNY1 trillion of government bonds and repay maturing MLF injections,…and are worrying about SOE bond defaults.
As Every rhetorically summarizes “everything is going so well though: there just isn’t any cash as a result” and concludes with a bad quantum physics pun: “Isn’t the most dangerous part of the Heisenberg below the water?“
How much longer can Beijing pretend that the economy is remarkably strong… if only there was a few hundred billion more in liquidity sloshing around. Probably at least until the January inauguration event. After that, non-quantum reality may finally have to reassert itself.
- Trump COVID Advisor Dr. Scott Atlas Resigns From White House
Trump COVID Advisor Dr. Scott Atlas Resigns From White House
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 19:23With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris having already assembled their own parallel White House coronavirus task force staffed almost entirely with Obama Administration vets, Dr. Scott Atlas, the so-called “anti-Fauci” who has reportedly become President Trump’s go-to advisor on all coronavirus-related topics, has decided to resign.
According to Fox News, Dr. Atlas has resigned from his post Monday evening. The move comes as Gov Gavin Newsom warns of “dramatic, arguably drastic” new lockdown-like restrictions coming to the Golden State (which represents one-fifth of the American economy, and roughly 1/8th of the US population).
Fox News exclusively obtained a copy of Dr. Atlas’s resignation letter, which was dated Dec. 1. In the letter, Dr. Atlas touted the Trump administration’s work on the coronavirus pandemic, while wishing “all the best” to Biden and his team.
“I am writing to resign from my position as Special Advisor to the President of the United States,” Atlas said, thanking him for “the honor and privilege to serve on behalf of the American people.” “I worked hard with a singular focus—to save lives and help Americans through this pandemic,” Atlas wrote, adding that he “always relied on the latest science and evidence, without any political consideration or influence.”
“As time went on, like all scientists and health policy scholars, I learned new information and synthesized the latest data from around the world, all in an effort to provide you with the best information to serve the greater public good,” Atlas wrote. “But, perhaps more than anything, my advice was always focused on minimizing all the harms from both the pandemic and the structural policies themselves, especially to the working class and the poor.”
Atlas, who had been criticized for opposing lockdowns in defiance of “science” (Dr. Robert Redfield once warned that “everything he says is false”), warned in his letter that “although some may disagree with those recommendations, it is the free exchange of ideas that lead to scientific truths, which are the very foundation of a civilized society.” “Indeed, I cannot think of a time where safeguarding science and the scientific debate is more urgent,” he said.
Before his arrival, “that expertise had not been present”, Dr. Atlas added.
Atlas, who spoke with the president on Monday, joined the administration in August, and was considered a Special Government Employee serving on a 130-day detail. That detail is set to expire this week, and it’s probably safe to say that Biden hasn’t invited Dr. Atlas back to serve in his administration.
- America's New Normal – Silent, Obedient Consent
America’s New Normal – Silent, Obedient Consent
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 19:10Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
Yesterday we took advantage of another beautiful Fall day in Cape May. We decided to check out the Cape May Lighthouse State Park. It is at the very end of Cape May. It is an example of what the government can do right – Preserve a natural habitat without glitz or commercialization. It is just miles of wetlands and walking trails. The lighthouse, built in 1859 by the U.S. Army is still functioning today. Two previous lighthouses succumbed to the sea. It is a majestic structure, reaching 157 feet into the sky
On the beach, not far from the lighthouse, is Battery 223. It is a crumbling concrete structure from World War II which was designed to protect against invasion by German forces. The structure was built with six-foot thick reinforced concrete walls and a thick blast proof roof; the entire building was covered with earth. The 6-inch guns had a nine-mile range. It is an interesting relic from our past. The dilapidated condition struck me as symbolic of our crumbling empire.
Once you walked into the nature preserve, a feeling of calm and peacefulness overwhelms you. Swans and ducks glide across the salt water ponds enjoying a feast of minnows. It’s nature at its most pristine. Just quiet and beauty.
The walking trails wind throughout the nature preserve. They are well maintained and pristine. No trash. No beer bottles strewn about. Visitors are respectful of this place. A feeling of calm engulfs you as you venture along the trails.
But, alas, I couldn’t write a post without acknowledging the human reality I witnessed walking along these trails on a stunningly beautiful sunny 58 degree day in late November. The four of us were unmasked, because masks don’t work and certainly aren’t necessary outside while walking.
As we were driving to the park, I noticed a few bike riders on the side of the road wearing masks while biking. I thought to myself – WTF. That is completely idiotic. Then we began walking along the miles of trails. The park was moderately busy, but you passed someone every few minutes.
Sadly, I would estimate that 80% of the people we passed on the trails were masked and fearful of us unmasked hooligans. I can only imagine their thoughts as they wondered why we were risking their lives by being so careless.
I was disgusted by the lack of critical thought exhibited by these people. I might have understood if it was only people over 70 years old wearing the masks, but most of these people were young. They have virtually a zero risk of dying from this flu. They have virtually a zero risk of catching it on a walking trail at a State park. But, they obediently and silently do as they are told by their overlords.
I am saddened by how easily the totalitarians have been able to use fear, propaganda, lies and misinformation to turn the vast majority of Americans into compliant sheep. It is so clear to me that this engineered flu panic is nothing more than another chapter in the scheme to enslave global populations under the thumb of global elitist billionaires who want to control us and enrich themselves.
V’s speech to the citizens of London captures the essence of what is happening and will happen unless the masses come to their senses.
“Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told…if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.
I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War. Terror. Disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor Adam Sutler. He promised you order. He promised you peace. And all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.”
– V speech to London, V for Vendetta
These thoughts did not ruin my day, but they are constantly bubbling below the surface as I observe the downward spiral of this country. Hopefully, the Cape May Lighthouse beacon will represent the shining light of truth that will help us avert a historical shipwreck of epic proportions.
- UAE Condemns "Heinous" Killing Of Iran Scientist In Rare Break From Israel-Gulf Axis
UAE Condemns “Heinous” Killing Of Iran Scientist In Rare Break From Israel-Gulf Axis
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 18:50Last Friday’s assassination of top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is putting immense strain on the newly ‘normalized’ ties between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.
The UAE late on Sunday issued a statement strongly denouncing the attack that it called a “crime” that could destabilize the region. This after Tehran has vowed to retaliate, yet without giving details of what form this might take.
The UAE “condemns the heinous assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, which could further fuel conflict in the region,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation said, as cited in Bloomberg.
Cleric holding an image of slain nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, via PBS. “The state of instability our region is currently going through, and the security challenges it faces, drive us all to work towards averting acts that could lead to escalation and eventually threaten the stability of the entire region,” it added.
Signed on September 15, the ‘Abraham Accords’ opened up formal diplomatic relations and economic dealings between Israel and the tiny oil-rich Gulf country for the first time in history.
Bahrain was also involved, and Sudan is said to be the next Arab League member to normalize ties, with the State Department now urging Saudi Arabia to follow.
1 \ Amazing new details of the Fakhrizadeh assassination emerge in the Iranian press: IRGC affiliated Fars news reports the assassination was done using an automatic machine gun operated with a remote control and not with gunmen who were on the groundhttps://t.co/CLSaCuHp2J
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) November 29, 2020
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As Bloomberg notes of the significance of the UAE condemning this latest attack:
“The denunciation late Sunday was significant both because of the historically strained relations between Sunni Gulf Arab states and Shiite Iran, and the fact that Tehran has blamed the attack on Israel, which recently signed a normalization deal with the UAE.”
Jordan is also the latest regional voice to condemn the brazen assassination which occurred east of Tehran last week.
Some current and former diplomats in the West have also condemned the killing, widely suspected to have Israeli or even US intelligence involvement, as it sets a precedented that could open tit-for-tat illegal assassinations as a modus operandi for score settling among rival powers in the region.
- Georgia's Raffensperger Suddenly Concerned About "Illegal" Out Of State Votes
Georgia’s Raffensperger Suddenly Concerned About “Illegal” Out Of State Votes
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 18:30Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) – who President Trump last Thursday called an “enemy of the people” for allegedly making some type of “deal” with Democratic operative Stacey Abrams over ballot harvesting – said on Monday that he’s suddenly concerned with progressive groups trying to sign up new voters in advance of a Jan. 5 Senate runoff which could flip the GOP-controlled chamber blue.
“These third-party groups have a responsibility to not encourage illegal voting. If they do so, they will be held responsible,” said Raffensperger, who added that his office is allegedly investigating efforts by America Votes, Vote Forward and the New Georgia Project to encourage people living outside Georgia to register to vote in the state.
Raffensperger also said his office has launched several investigations into accusations of fraud committed during the November election.
On Thursday, President Trump slammed Raffensperger – telling reporters: “You’re not allowed to harvest, but I understand the secretary of state, who is really an enemy of the people, the secretary of state, and whether he’s Republican or not, this man, what he’s done, supposedly he made a deal and you’ll have to check this, where she is allowed to harvest but in other areas they’re not allowed.”
JUST IN: President Trump calls GOP Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger the “enemy of the people” as he makes repeated false claims about the 2020 election. pic.twitter.com/1gjvZ4lMq3
— The Hill (@thehill) November 26, 2020
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Stacey Abrams – the failed GA gubernatorial candidate who failed to concede – has been credited with helping to register 800,000 people to vote in Georgia for the 2020 election, though she claims it wasn’t done through ballot harvesting, a process by which an individual will collect ballots from voters and turn them in.
Biden ‘won’ Georgia by 12,670 votes.
Meanwhile, the odds of Democrats gaining control of the Senate are currently at 29% according to PredictIt.
- Liquidity Reversal: The Rotation Trade Speed Bump
Liquidity Reversal: The Rotation Trade Speed Bump
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/30/2020 – 18:25Real Vision managing editor Ed Harrison is joined by editor Jack Farley to evaluate the value rotation trade and the challenges it will face in the coming months. As November comes to a close – a month that saw record-breaking appreciation in value stocks, cyclicals, and small-caps – Ed and Jack analyzes how rising COVID-19 hospitalizations will impact economic behavior. They then look at liquidity going forward, and how monetary conditions will affect markets over the next few months, incorporating Ed’s interview with Michael Howell and Jack’s upcoming interview with Teddy Vallee. Ed and Jack close by discussing the Government Accountability Office’s report on incorrect jobless claims data, as well as GM’s partial back-pedaling out of its deal with controversial electric vehicle manufacturer Nikola.
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