- Google Mistakenly Uses Photo Of Swiss Engineer On Wikipedia Entry For Notorious Bulgarian Rapist
Google Mistakenly Uses Photo Of Swiss Engineer On Wikipedia Entry For Notorious Bulgarian Rapist
Today in “Skynet rewrites history” news, a Google algorithm has been responsible for mixing up an engineer based in Switzerland with a notorious serial killer online.
The mix up happened when algorithms mistakenly took a photograph of engineer Hristo Georgiev and placed it into a Wikipedia entry for Hristo Georgiev, who is described by the same entry as “a Bulgarian rapist and serial killer who murdered five people, mainly women, between 1974 and 1980”.
The software engineer seemed to take the news in stride.
Seems like Google falsely associated a photo of mine with a Wikipedia article of a serial killer. I don’t know if this is hilarious or terrifying. pic.twitter.com/rmAL7uQYy4
— Hristo Georgiev (@hggeorgievcom) June 24, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
He even wrote a blog post called “Google turned me into a serial killer”.
“As I was scrolling through my inbox today, I stumbled upon an e-mail from a former colleague of mine who wanted to inform me that a Google search of my name yields a picture of me linked to a Wikipedia article about a serial killer who happens to have the same name as mine,” he wrote.
“I quickly popped out my browser, opened Google and typed in my name. And indeed, my photo appeared over a description of a Bulgarian serial killer,” his blog says. “My first reaction was that somebody was trying to pull off some sort of an elaborate prank on me, but after opening the Wikipedia article itself, it turned out that there’s no photo of me there whatsoever.”
Georgiev concluded:
“It turns out that Google’s knowledge graph algorithm somehow falsely associated my photo with the Wikipedia article about the serial killer. Which is also surprisingly strange because my name isn’t special or unique at all; there are literally hundreds of other people with my name, and despite of all that, my personal photo ended up being associated with a serial killer. I can’t really explain to myself how this happened, but it’s weird.”
Several days later, the engineer reported the that problem had been fixed.
Google fixed the problem. No harm done (or none that I‘m aware of). Blog post updated – https://t.co/rOeQoQnZK7
— Hristo Georgiev (@hggeorgievcom) June 26, 2021
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/01/2021 – 02:45 - German Mayor Responds To Islamist Terror Attack By Expressing Concern About Refugees
German Mayor Responds To Islamist Terror Attack By Expressing Concern About Refugees
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
After a Somali refugee went on a stabbing rampage that left three women dead, the Mayor of Würzburg reacted by writing an open letter expressing concern about the stigmatization of refugees and migrants.
Yes, really.
Videos from the scene of the attack showed members of the public confronting the 24-year-old killer, who was later found to have radical Islamist propaganda on the premises of his home.
The suspect, who arrived in Germany in 2015 as a refugee, also reportedly told staff at a local hospital that his attack had been a ‘contribution to jihad’.
On Monday, Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria’s Interior Minister, said the incident had all the hallmarks of an Islamist terror attack.
⭕️One more video from the incident in #Gerrmany #Wuerzburg
👉There are 3 dead, 6 injured. The suspect was taken into custody. pic.twitter.com/Vx6VXryAT9— 🅻-🆃🅴🅰🅼 (@L_Team10) June 25, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
While Mayor Christian Schuchardt expressed grief over the deaths of the victims, the main focus of his open letter was to complain that the attack could be used to stereotype other migrants and refugees.
“But I also cried for our city last night. Because of this short circuit, this equating is so obvious. Refugees, immigrants, violent criminals, religious warriors and terrorists – massacres,” he said in his letter.
“However, the crimes of individuals can never be traced back to population groups, religions or nationalities. We Germans were not condemned in general after the Second World War either. Nor does this now apply to Somalis or refugees in general. This pigeonholing must come to an end,” Schuchardt added.
“And at the same time, there will be no end to it. This is my moral demand, my wish for the society that I know cannot be fulfilled. Because how would you feel as a foreigner in our city today?” the letter asked.
In reality, refugees have been responsible for numerous terror attacks throughout Europe over the past six years since Angela Merkel’s disastrous decision to open the borders to them.
The terrorist who beheaded a woman and killed two others near a church in Nice, France last October was revealed to be a Tunisian boat migrant.
The Chechen teen who beheaded school teacher Samuel Paty in the same month had been granted a 10-year residency in France as a refugee the previous March.
The majority of the Paris massacre terrorists also exploited the refugee wave to enter Europe.
The three terrorists who went on a knife rampage in Lyon back in April last year were also Sudanese refugees.
The Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salmen Abedi was also rescued from Libya as a refugee by the British Royal Navy after the fall of Colonel Gadaffi.
These are just a few of the many examples.
* * *
Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/
In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/01/2021 – 02:00 - Decisions That Would Cause U.S. To Lose World War III
Decisions That Would Cause U.S. To Lose World War III
Authored by David Pyne via RealClear History,
This month marked the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union which took place on June 22, 1941. Hitler’s witting or unwitting pre-emptive attack against the Red Army, which were massed on the borders of eastern Germany, western Poland, Hungary, and Romania poised for their own invasion, enabled the Germans to capture or destroy tens of thousands of Soviet tanks and aircraft. Some authors who have examined Soviet archives have suggested the offensive was scheduled to take place a mere two and a half weeks after Hitler’s attack.
Despite the fact that the Soviet Union had joined with Nazi Germany in invading Poland and starting World War II as co-aggressors, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill responded to the German invasion of its former Soviet ally by pledging their unqualified support for the Soviet war effort no matter what the consequences of their unqualified political and military support might be. U.S. and U.K government war propagandists went to work to deceive their citizens into believing that the world’s greatest mass murderer, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was, in fact, a gallant ally of democracy and freedom in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In the four years that followed, the U.S. and Britain sent 15,000 combat aircraft and nearly 23,000 tanks and armored fighting vehicles to the Soviet Union along with even more massive quantities of strategic materials. Without these, Stalin stated he could not have produced the tanks, aircraft, and other heavy weapons needed to defeat Nazi Germany. This Allied military-industrial aid put the wartime needs of U.S. and U.K. forces as well as their own citizens behind Stalin’s needs and requisitions while also providing the Soviets with atomic bomb making plans and materials according to the new book “Stalin’s War-A New History of World War II”. This critical U.S. assistance to the Soviet atomic bomb program likely enabled the Soviets to explode their first atomic and hydrogen bombs several years earlier than they otherwise would have.
Lend-Lease allowed Soviets to triumph
This massive U.S.-U.K. military aid provided the Red Army with the ability to engage in mobile counteroffensives, which succeeded many times in encircling German forces, that it otherwise would have largely lacked. The 430,000 US trucks and jeeps provided under Lend-Lease constituted the bulk of Soviet motorized capabilities of the Red Army and enabled the Red Army to overrun half of Europe and much of Asia while annexing parts or all of nine countries and conquering half a dozen more during and after the war.
While a reasonable argument could have been made for providing the Soviets with some military aid to help them halt the German advance in the east, by 1943, the rationale for this enormous U.S.-U.K. military-industrial assistance had largely evaporated. This is due to the fact that, after the Battle of Kursk, the German Army was never again able to mount an offensive in the east and began a rapid retreat culminating in the Soviet capture of the German capital of Berlin less than two years later along with the eastern half of Europe.
After the fall of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Blitzkrieg continued in the Far East in what later came to be known as Operation “August Storm” as the USSR entered the war against Imperial Japan exactly one week before it surrendered, claiming Manchuria, northern Japan and North Korea in a rapid armored advance that lasted scarcely more than two weeks. Inexplicably, the U.S. continued its Lend-Lease military-industrial assistance program to the Soviets including about sixty U.S. warships and dozens of amphibious landing ships until September 1945 — a month after Imperial Japan had surrendered.
U.S., U.K., helped create Iron Curtain
Shortly after the war, Winston Churchill feigned surprise when he announced in his famous speech at Fulton, Mo. in March 1946 that an “Iron Curtain” now divided Europe and claimed that he alone had foreseen this unfortunate event. His claim was questionable given that he and FDR had authored the Yalta Agreement and previous agreements which had ceded virtually all of eastern Europe and much of Central Europe to the Soviets, thereby creating the Iron Curtain, leading to the Cold War between the Western and Soviet blocs that lasted half a century. Of course, for any educated observer of international affairs and world history at the time, the end result of the U.S.-U.K. decision to provide massive military-industrial aid to the Soviet Union was clear from the onset.
When the war began, the Soviet Union was the largest and most heavily armed nation in the world by far — more than 33 times larger than Nazi Germany at its greatest extent — and it spanned two continents. The decision of the U.S. and U.K. to ally themselves with the Soviet Union along with the enormous amount of direct military and military industrial aid they provided the Soviets ensured that the Soviet Union, not the Western Powers, would be the dominant power in postwar Europe.
Rather than merely liberating it from Nazi control and rebuilding postwar Germany as an ally of freedom against totalitarian aggression, at the Yalta Conference, the Big Three — FDR, Churchill, and Stalin decided to destroy and dismember Germany into six pieces and starve millions of its citizens as part of their implementation of the Soviet-inspired Morgenthau Plan. This decision proved to have devastating consequences for U.S. national security, let alone the hundreds of millions of captive peoples enslaved in the newly expanded Communist bloc.
Following Germany’s defeat, General George S. Patton was very upset with the Truman-Eisenhower continuation of FDR’s appeasement policy of the Soviet Union and their decision to unjustly hold 70 million Germans collectively responsible for the crimes of Hitler and top Nazi leaders. He resolved to resign his commission and go on a speaking tour of the United States to urge a patriotic call to support a policy designed to confront, contain and, possibly even roll back, Soviet tyrannical control of Central and Eastern Europe. Tragically, Patton was assassinated in a joint OSS-NKVD conspiracy mere days before he was able to do so, depriving the free world of one of its most visionary leaders.
European balance of power tilted
One of the main results of the war was that the balance of power in Europe was destroyed and the Soviet Union became the new hegemon of continental Europe and, for a time following the Communist takeover of mainland China, Asia as well. Visionary anti-Communist statesmen such as former President Herbert Hoover, predicted this tragic and apocalyptic outcome if the Western Powers chose to ally with the Soviet Union. The U.S. and U.K. could have won the war against Nazi Germany and liberated Europe without their Unholy Alliance with what President Ronald Reagan later rightly termed “an evil empire”, let alone without providing massive military aid to it. It would have been far better for the U.S. to have simply signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and raced them to see which of the two countries could liberate the Nazi-occupied countries first. That way, the U.S. and U.K. would not have been complicit in the many horrific Soviet war crimes including the mass murderers of millions of people who dared resist the Soviet Communist onslaught helping to extinguish the flames of freedom from nearly a dozen nations in Eastern Europe, which yearned to be liberated from their enslavement by tyrannical dictators.
During the Pacific war, the Chinese National Revolutionary Army, led by Chiang Kai Shek, fought gallantly against the Japanese. By tying down nearly 80 percent of Japan’s Army divisions in China enabled the U.S. to engage in a Pacific island-hopping campaign that defeated Japan in three and a half years. They were able to accomplish this great feat despite being provided with only about 1 percent of the military assistance that the U.S. had given to the Soviet Union.
In 1946, the year after World War II ended, America’s Chinese Nationalist allies seemed on the verge of defeating Mao’s Soviet-backed Red Army and winning the Chinese Civil War. Then, General George C. Marshall, who had been sent by President Truman to lead U.S. foreign policy with regards to China, decided to cut off all military and logistical support to Chinese Nationalist forces, depriving them of the fuel and ammunition they needed to prevent China from being taken over by murderous Communist forces.
In the end communism prevailed
In response to this unprecedented gift by the Truman Administration to Stalin and CCP leader Mao Zedong, the U.S. Congress voted to approve $1 billion in military aid to help the Nationalists avert total defeat. Sadly, President Truman and Secretary Marshall ordered the U.S. Pacific Fleet to dump all of the tanks, aircraft and other U.S. weapons that Congress had been earmarked for the Nationalist freedom fighters into the Pacific Ocean rather than allow them to fall into Chinese Nationalist hands. In the meantime, Stalin had, since August 1945, been arming and equipping Mao’s Red Army forces with the latest tanks and other weapons in the Manchurian sanctuary we granted to him to help Mao Communize all of mainland China. When Mao proclaimed victory in the Chinese Civil War on Oct. 1, 1949, the only surprising thing about it is that it took them so long to finalize their victory.
While claiming to be fighting a war for democracy against totalitarian tyranny, U.S. leaders enabled the Soviet and Chinese Communists to double the amount of territory under their control from 16 percent to 30 percent of the world’s landmass. Thanks to FDR and Truman, the number of people enslaved by godless Communism increased by nearly 430 percent from 170 million in 1939 to 730 million a mere decade later — 30 percent of the world’s people. Communist tyrants have since mass murdered nearly a billion people including forced abortions and infanticide — lives that otherwise might have been spared.
Did U.S. really “win” cold war?
While the U.S. supposedly “won” the Cold War when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, World War II’s tragic aftermath has continued as Russia signed a military alliance agreement with Communist China two decades ago in July 2001, forming the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which Russian President Putin has rightly called “a reborn version of the Warsaw Pact”. If Roosevelt and Truman had not chosen to prolong the Second World War unnecessarily for seven months after the issuance of the MacArthur Memorandum in January 1945 which documented five separate Japanese surrender attempts, Stalin would not have been able to conquer Manchuria, enabling him to provide a safe haven to Communist Chinese forces.
Had Truman not cut off all U.S. military support to Chinese Nationalist forces from 1946-49, Communist China and North Korea (with whom we remain technically in a state of war due to the fact no peace treaty ending the Korean War was ever signed) would not exist today. China and Korea would be united and free, having fought as allies in our Cold (and sometimes ‘hot’) War against the Soviet Union and its Communist vassal state allies. Meanwhile, had the U.S. not provided such vast amounts of military industrial assistance to the Soviet Union helping them conquer or annex vast territories during and after the war, Russia might be considerably weaker today and might pose a significantly lower nuclear threat.
Certainly, the decision of U.S. leaders from President George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama to unilaterally disarm America of over 94 percent of its Cold War-era nuclear arsenal, while leaving its citizens largely defenseless against the existential threats of nuclear missile and Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack in the face of a massive nuclear buildup by our Sino-Russian alliance enemies, bodes ill for America’s future prospects. However, if the U.S. ends up fighting another major war against Russia and its Communist Chinese and North Korean allies in the near future, and goes down to defeat, an outcome which is more likely than not, future generations of Americans may recall that it was the decisions of two U.S. presidents — Roosevelt and Truman — over 75 years ago, that sowed the seeds of America’s demise and helped ensure we would lose the war for our very national existence.
* * *
David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and H.Q. staff officer with a M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the EMP Caucus on National and Homeland Security and as a Vice President of the Association of the United States Army’s Utah Chapter.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 23:40 - New Video Shows Boston Dynamics' Robo-Dog Dancing To A Whole New Beat
New Video Shows Boston Dynamics’ Robo-Dog Dancing To A Whole New Beat
It comes as no surprise that after South Korean firm Hyundai finalized its acquisition of Boston Dynamics earlier this month, the internet’s favorite dancing four-legged robot, Spot, danced to a song by South Korean boy band BTS.
The South Korean automotive giant now owns a controlling interest in the Massachusetts-based robotics company, previously belonging to SoftBank.
Last year, Hyundai and BTS partnered in a music video called “I’m On It” that featured an IONIQ, a new EV lineup brand of Hyundai. So it comes as no surprise that Hyundai would use BTS to pump up their new Spot robot in a video released Tuesday.
Seven Spot robo-dogs can be seen dancing to the BTS song.
Another video shows a couple of members of BTS dancing alongside Spot.
Eric Whitman, a Boston Dynamics roboticist who had a role in the music video, said, “There were a lot of challenges around getting the vision of our choreographer, who’s used to dealing with human dancers, into our software.”
Whitman said, “Everything had to be worked out in advance and scripted precisely. Robots have the advantage over humans in that they’re very repeatable: Once you get it right, it stays right. But they have the disadvantage that you have to tell them every little detail. They don’t improvise at all.”
Whitman said it had taken years to evolve Spot’s behavior and movements, such as reliable walking and climbing.
“When we do these projects we always have two goals,” he said. “One is to use the video as motivation to improve the product. The secondary goal is to have fun making the video.”
Under South Korean ownership, we wonder what new tasks Hyundai will program Spot to do in the future.
Meanwhile, China has released a robo-dog of their own.
So the question remains: Will these robots end up in a war?
To answer that, a top French military academy has already trained with Spot.
So the answer could likely be yes.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 23:20 - CJ Hopkins Exposes "The War On Reality"
CJ Hopkins Exposes “The War On Reality”
Authored (somewhat satirically) by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,
So, the War on Reality is going splendidly. Societies all across the world have been split into opposing, irreconcilable realities. Neighbors, friends, and even family members are bitterly divided into two hostile camps, each regarding the other as paranoid psychotics, delusional fanatics, dangerous idiots, and, in any event, as mortal enemies.
In the UK, Germany, and many other countries, and in numerous states throughout the US, a “state of emergency” remains in effect. An apocalyptic virus is on the loose.
Mutant variants are spreading like wildfire. Most of society is still shut down or subject to emergency health restrictions. People are still walking around in public with plastic face shields and medical-looking masks. The police are showing up at people’s homes to arrest them for “illegally gathering outdoors.” Any deviation from official reality is being censored by the Internet corporations. Constitutional rights are still suspended. Entire populations are being coerced into being injected with experimental “vaccines.” Pseudo-medical segregation systems are being brought online. And so on … you’re familiar with the details.
Meanwhile, in Sweden, and a few other countries, and in various other states throughout the US, there is no apocalyptic pandemic.
People are just going about their lives as normal. OK, sure, there is a nasty virus going around, so people are taking common sense precautions, as people typically do for any nasty virus, but there is no “state of emergency” in effect, and no reason to radically transform society into a paranoid, pathologized-totalitarian dystopia.
This state of affairs, in which two contradictory, mutually-exclusive realities exist, is … well, it’s impossible, and so it cannot continue. Either there exists a devastating global pandemic that justifies a global “state of emergency,” the suspension of constitutional rights, and the other totalitarian “emergency measures” we have been subjected to since March of 2020 or there isn’t. It really is as simple as that.
Except that it isn’t as simple as that. It is easy to forget, given the last 16 months, that people have been bitterly divided, and inhabiting mutually-exclusive realities, and regarding people who don’t conform to their realities as enemies for the last five years. I’m not talking about political disagreements, or even socio-cultural differences. I’m talking about contradictory realities. Things that actually happened, or didn’t happen. Things that exist, or do not exist.
I’m not going rehash the whole War on Populism — I covered it extensively at the time — but that’s when the current global-capitalist War on Reality was officially launched. It wasn’t just the usual lies and propaganda. It was a full-scale ideological assault. By the end of it, people actually believed that (a) Donald Trump was a Russian agent, (b) that he was literally Hitler, and so was going to stage some sort of “coup,” declare himself American Führer, and launch the “Trumpian-White-Supremacist Fourth Reich,” and (c) that he had actually attempted this by sending a few hundred unarmed protesters — violent domestic extremist grandmothers, father-and-son kill squads, and bison hat loonies — to “storm the Capitol” and overthrow the government during the so-called “January 6 Insurrection.”
So, when GloboCap rolled out the “New Normal” reality, they weren’t exactly starting from scratch.
Millions of people — not just Americans, because the War on Populism was a global campaign — were already living in a new reality in which facts no longer mattered at all, where things that never happened officially happened, and other things that obviously happened never happened, not officially, or were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.
But the goal of GloboCap’s War on Reality isn’t simply to deceive the masses and divide them into opposing camps. Rulers have been deceiving the masses and dividing them into opposing camps since the dawn of human civilization. This time, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
OK, bear with me now, because this gets kind of heady.
The War on Reality is not an attempt to replace reality with a fake reality. Or it is that, but that is only one part of it. Its real goal is to render reality arbitrary, to strip it of its epistemological authority, to turn it into a “floating signifier,” a word that has no objective referent, which, of course, technically, it already is. You cannot take a picture of reality. It is a concept. It is not a physical object that exists somewhere in time and space.
But let’s leave that last point for a later discussion. This is not the time to get lost in semiotics. For most people, for most practical purposes, reality is … well, reality. It’s objective. Material. It actually exists. It exists independent of our beliefs. It isn’t just an arbitrary, empty signifier that doesn’t actually refer to anything, but which we use, strategically, to assert authority, or to impose ideology on society. If that were the case, there would be no reality. Nothing would be true, everything would be permitted … which is a bunch of postmodern Marxist nonsense.
But just imagine, for a moment, if that were the case … if what determined reality was actually just a question of power rather than facts. Imagine that reality was just a concept that we used to mark the current limits of our knowledge and ideological beliefs. Our doctors — oncologists and virologists, for example, but they could be any kind of doctors or scientists — would be not all that different from medieval alchemists, who totally believed in their reality at the time, as did the patients they were treating, but which we know now was not reality at all, because our reality is the real reality. I mean, it’s not as if people, five hundred years from now, are going to look back at our medical practices and scientific knowledge, and laugh, like we do at those medieval alchemists, right?
Sorry, I got a little off track there. I was trying to explain the ultimate purpose of this global-capitalist War on Reality, and I wandered off into an ontological swamp, which isn’t going to get us anywhere. So, let’s get back to imagining reality, not as what we all know it is (i.e., an actual, material thing that exists), but as a construct people use to validate certain officially-sanctioned beliefs and perceptions and invalidate other beliefs and perceptions, more or less like a system of morals, except instead of dividing things into to “good” and “evil,” it divides things into “real” and “fake.”
Now imagine that you were an immensely powerful, globally hegemonic ideological system, and you wanted to impose your ideology on as much of the entire world as possible, but you didn’t have an ideology per se, or any actual values at all, because exchange value was your only real value, and so your mission was to erase all ideologies, and values, and truths, and belief systems, and so on, and transform everything and everyone in existence into de facto commodities that you could manipulate any way you wanted, because they had no inherent value whatsoever, because their only real value was assigned by the market.
How would you go about doing that, erasing all existing values, religious, cultural, and social values, and rendering everything a valueless commodity?
Well, you wouldn’t want to destroy reality completely, because people wouldn’t stand for that. They would freak right out. Things would get ugly. So, instead, you might want to go the other way, and generate a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive realities, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … which would still freak people out pretty badly.
Naturally, there would be one official reality that you would force everyone to rigidly conform to at any given moment in time, but you would change the official reality frequently, and force everyone to conform to the new one (and pretend that they’d never conformed to the old one), and then, once they had settled into that one, you would change the official reality again, until people’s brains just shut down completely, and they gave up trying to make sense of anything, and just tried to figure out what you wanted them to believe on any given day.
If you repeated that process long enough, eventually, nothing would mean anything anymore, because everything could potentially mean anything … at which point, you could basically tell people anything you wanted and they would go along with it, because what the hell difference would it make? A narcissistic billionaire ass-clown could be a Russian agent and literally Hitler. A half-assed riot could be an “insurrection.” Children could be born “systemically racist.” Men could menstruate. But wait … it’s gets better.
You could stage an apocalyptic global pandemic that only happened in certain countries, or in certain parts of certain countries, and that more or less mirrored natural mortality, and that didn’t drastically increase historical death rates, but was nonetheless totally apocalyptic.
Perfectly healthy people could become “medical cases.” You could count anyone who died of anything as having died of your apocalyptic virus. You could tell people in no uncertain terms that medical-looking masks will not protect them from viruses, and then turn around and tell them that they will, and then, later, publicly admit you were lying in order to manipulate them, and then deny you ever said that, and tell them to wear masks.
You could experimentally “vaccinate” millions of people whose risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from your apocalyptic virus was minuscule or non-existent, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands in the process, and the people whose brains you had methodically broken would thank you for murdering their friends and neighbors, and then rush out to their local discount drugstore to experimentally “vaccinate” their own kids and post pictures of it on the Internet.
At that point, you wouldn’t really have to worry about “populist uprisings,” or “terrorism,” or any other type of insurgent activity, because the vast majority of the global population would be scramble-headed automatons who were totally incapable of independent thought, and who had no idea what was real and what wasn’t, so just repeated whatever new script you fed them like customer-service representatives on Haldol.
It doesn’t get much better than that for globally hegemonic ideological systems!
OK, sorry, I think I got lost there again. I’m not sure what I was trying to say. I’ve been a little foggy lately. I’m not sleeping so well. It’s probably Long Covid. Or maybe it’s just that time of month. Whatever. It’s not like it matters anyway. Still, I think I’ll go down to my former local bookshop and get myself tested.
Have a nice day in … you know, reality!
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 23:00 - 5,000 Burgers Per Day: World's First Mega Lab-Grown Meat Factory Opens
5,000 Burgers Per Day: World’s First Mega Lab-Grown Meat Factory Opens
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) The Great Reset plan includes a complete transformation of the global food and agricultural industries and the dieting of humans. The architects behind this plan are preparing for a meatless society with the introduction of cell-based, slaughter-free meat.
Before this decade is over, we’re all going to be eating some form of slaughter-free meat, including chicken, pork and lamb, and beef. The point of all this is to generate fewer greenhouse emissions at cattle farms, use less land for farming, and reduce the use of freshwater and grains for the traditional process of growing livestock.
The aim is for a sustainable future, and already we’ve noted a few companies producing cell-based, slaughter-free meat. However, these facilities are operating at limited output as it is costly to produce fake meat.
That’s where Future Meat Technologies of Israel comes into play with their brand new facility able to pump out 500 kilograms (1,102 pounds) of cultured meat products per day, or the equivalence about 5,000 hamburgers per day.
“This facility opening marks a huge step in Future Meat Technologies’ path to market, serving as a critical enabler to bring our products to shelves by 2022,” said Rom Kshuk, CEO of Future Meat Technologies. “Having a running industrial line accelerates key processes such as regulation and product development.”
Kshuk said the facility produces cultured chicken, pork, and lamb products, and beef production will be coming online soon.
Here’s the company’s production facility located in Rehovot, Israel.
The company’s platform enables fast production cycles—about 20 times shorter than traditional farming.
Yaakov Nahmias, the company’s founder and chief scientific officer, said, “our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone, while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations.”
It seems as Nahmias’ roadmap for commercializing lab-grown meat plays into the “great reset” plan orchestrated by WEF.
So we don’t confuse readers, cultured meat products are different from plant-based imitation meat companies, such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
Future Meat Technologies could end up on US store shelves in 2022, pending regulatory approval. The company is also examining several locations for future plants in the States.
So there you have it, one part of the great reset by global elites is to transform the food industry and ensure that everyone eats fake meat by the end of this decade to save the planet from cow burps.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 22:40 - Conrad Black: A Tsunami Of Crises About To Swamp Biden Administration
Conrad Black: A Tsunami Of Crises About To Swamp Biden Administration
Opinion authored by Conrad Black via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The Biden-Harris administration is now in an extended levitation of credibility. Except for Donald Trump, who entered office in the midst of a public relations terror campaign against him and had no trace of a political honeymoon, all incoming presidents arrive with a favoring wind of bipartisan goodwill behind them.
A group of Venezuelans wait to be picked up by Border Patrol after illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into Del Rio, Texas, on June 3, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times) Especially as President Biden came into office promising a quieter and more genteel atmosphere and has largely done that, it is not surprising that his general popularity has been sustained at somewhat above 50 percent these first five months. But for a long time the Democrats have not had any war-cry except “We’re not Trump” and “That is racism.”
In service to that credo, from Inauguration Day they have taken the position that they would do the reverse of anything Trump did: outright reaction unsupported by any analysis. Nothing else is conceivable as an explanation for their southern border policy.
As Vice President Harris checked the box by going to El Paso, 800 miles away from the more agitated areas of illegal southern entry last week, she repeated the mantra that this administration inherited a mess. The polls are unanimous in indicating that the public realizes they did not inherit a mess; they inherited the almost complete end of illegal immigration and they squandered it instantly and jubilantly by effectively inviting the world to enter while having the hapless Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas repeat like a Disney World self-propelled puppet “The border is closed.”
Television viewers can switch channels from that almost daily pronunciamento to see illegal immigrants swarming across by land and through water. Illegal immigration is now running at the rate of two million a year, which is an unsustainable level of entry of almost entirely unskilled people who will severely strain the social and educational and public security services of the southern border states.
It is a crisis closing in upon a disaster, and the public can already see it approaching. All that can be said for the vice president’s visit to El Paso, where she was welcomed by the gushy local Democratic congresswoman to the “21st Century Ellis Island,” (where people arrived legally and some were rejected), is that it was nothing like as great a fiasco as her visit to Mexico and Guatemala three weeks ago.
There she conspicuously failed to excite the enthusiasm of the American public to deluge more billions of dollars into those improvident areas in order to tackle “the sources of the problem”—the ancient liberal death wish of turning America’s pockets inside out to fight poverty in poor foreign countries by enriching their avaricious politicians.
Inflation
The tsunami of crises that are about to break over this administration do not stop at the southern border. It is no longer possible to disguise that inflation is stoking up. Awareness of this has been clouded and deferred because the composition of the index does not necessarily reflect the needs of average families.
If the figures are broken out and averaged in traditional ways, the current rate of inflation appears to be something like eight or 9 percent and it will continue to remain high while the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, which was solely responsible for the so-called Biden-Sanders Unity Program, is sticking to its guns.
It demands and may force trillions more dollars to be thrown out of the windows of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve in an instant and artificial expansion of the money supply. The president’s latest wheeze for trying to satisfy Sanders while making a gesture to advocates of sane fiscal policy was his professed agreement on a bipartisan infrastructure bill, which almost everyone agrees is needed and is a good thing, followed a couple of hours later by the assertion that it would not be approved if not accompanied by a much larger “virtual infrastructure” measure.
The Republicans who had agreed the bipartisan measure rose in revolt and the president, as is his custom, (and as is made plausible by his frequently turgid inarticulation), announced that he had been misunderstood. For the first time he is under some pressure to work himself out of one of the jams that he has blundered into, instead of just shrugging it off and relying on the docile media to ignore it.
If he retains any of his old Senate bargaining skill, he may be able to come through it with his credibility intact. But he is trying to govern from a high wire, a very hazardous procedure for so unsteady a leader.
Crime
Even more urgent than the surging immigration and imminent inflation crises is the entirely predictable and much predicted crime wave. Violent crime is up everywhere and especially in Democratic-governed cities that cravenly bowed to the outrageous demands in the “peaceful protests” of last summer that injured 2000 police personnel, killed approximately 50 people, and caused over $2 billion of property damage.
The rioters, almost none of whom would have been Republican voters, demanded that the police be defunded and “reimagined” and this was done in many cities, generating violent crime increases of from 25 to 150 percent.
All Biden’s nonsense about shooting to hit people in the leg and enlisting social workers and psychologists to go out on 911 calls is vanishing in the vast cauldron of skyrocketing violent crime. Many formerly feasible neighborhoods are terrorized by gangs and conditions are undoubtedly aggravated by sluggish work from police forces that are tired of being the scapegoats for racist urban terrorists. The ranks of American urban police are thinning rapidly as the people in blue can easily find less hazardous and more highly appreciated work.
The president’s address on crime on June 23 took refuge in the usual Democratic arguments about gun control. No doubt the gun laws can be better enforced, but the counter-argument that in such lawless conditions, the existence of firearms in most American homes is a factor of deterrence of crime and not an incitement to it.
Chicago has tough gun laws but its worst areas are shooting galleries where the arrest rates are so low that it is obvious that the police are either compromised by their association with violent gangs or confining themselves to the perimeters of the most crime-ridden areas and have abandoned the core of those areas to the Darwinian masters of them, (and these desperate conditions are certainly not confined to Chicago).
The president was correct in his plan to give greater assistance to criminals returning to civilian life and to prison reform in general, but that will work better with nonviolent people who are generally chronically over-sentenced, and who are much less likely to be repeat offenders than their violence-prone fellow inmates.
Possible Fixes
This is a problem that disconcerts and frightens scores of millions of Americans. When the administration comes to its collective senses, it can go back to the Trump methods of protecting the southern border while giving their policy a name that connotes reform.
Biden can also stop being intimidated by Sanders and (Congresswoman) Ocasio Cortez and be assured of a large number of the reasonable majority with any serious gesture of fiscal restraint, at least up until the midterm elections. It might not be too late to damp down the psychology of inflation.
But there is no quick fix to violent crime. It will soon be impossible to hide from the necessity to intervene directly to finance the recruitment and proper training of at least 100,000 more police personnel.
The methods for reducing violent urban crime in the United States are now well known and were demonstrated by the mayoral regime of Rudolph Giuliani in New York (1993–2001), and there is no alternative but to return to them and the federal government can incentivize that.
The embarrassment to the Democrats in such a course will be as nothing to the embarrassment they will receive at the polls next year if they do not take serious anti-crime measures.
Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world. He’s the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and, most recently, “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other,” which has been republished in updated form. You can hear more of Conrad’s thoughts on his podcast “Scholars & Sense” alongside his co-hosts Bill Bennett and Victor Davis Hanson at ScholarsAndSense.buzzsprout.com.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 22:20 - Billionaire Funds South Dakota National Guard Deployment To U.S-Mexico Border
Billionaire Funds South Dakota National Guard Deployment To U.S-Mexico Border
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem tweeted Monday that she’s sending 50 of her state’s National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas and will be paid for by a private donation, according to Axios.
Noem said, “I’m officially announcing up to 50 National Guard troops to Texas to help secure our border.” She said President Biden has forgotten that a secured border is critical to maintaining a sovereign nation. “We shouldn’t be making our own communities vulnerable by sending police to fix Biden’s border crisis.”
The funding for the troop deployment is coming from a “Tennessee billionaire and high-dollar Republicans,” Axios said.
Noem spokesperson Ian Fury told Axios the funds are coming from a foundation run by billionaire Willis Johnson. There was no word on the size of the donation or the exact mission the troops would be conducting.
Johnson has spent millions of dollars to bankroll several political campaigns, including former President Trump’s reelection campaign.
The eventual deployment of the troops, funded by republicans, could optically tarnish Biden’s image when it comes to border security because his administration has been chipping away at law and order on the border.
Other Republicans, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, announced they would send state law enforcement units to Texas to secure the border to clean up Biden’s disastrous border policies that have resulted in absolute chaos.
Texas Gov. Abbott has frequently fought with the Biden administration on border issues.
America is a melting pot of cultures. The most sustainable way to blend the world’s people is through a fair and orderly immigration system—something the Biden administration has failed to do.
The chaos on the southern border is terrible optics for Biden as Republicans swarm in with law enforcement and privately funded troops to fix the mess. Certainly, the border will be a huge debate issue in the next presidential election cycle.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 22:00 - Biden Sends Federal Motor Fuels Tax Packing, Washington Insider Says
Biden Sends Federal Motor Fuels Tax Packing, Washington Insider Says
By Mark Solomon of FreightWaves,
President Joe Biden has thrust a dagger into the heart of the federal motor fuels tax and, with it, the trust fund that’s long been dedicated to paying for highway projects.
So says Randy Mullett, a multi-decade veteran of the inside-the-beltway transportation wars and head of a Virginia-based consultancy. Biden’s staunch opposition to an increase in the federal fuels tax — which hasn’t been raised since 1993 — sends a clear message to Congress that the Highway Trust Fund, which for decades has used fuel tax proceeds to funnel money to states for road infrastructure projects, has reached the end of its useful life, Mullett said. The Trust Fund was created in 1956 to fund the interstate highway system and other road projects.
“The days of a dedicated highway trust fund are finished,” Mullett said Tuesday afternoon during a virtual session at the SMC3 annual summer meeting.
House Democrats had been tinkering with the idea of raising the fuel tax by indexing it to inflation, Mullett said. Biden’s pronouncement quashed those efforts, he said. From now on, every infrastructure project will compete with other federal spending initiatives for the same pot of money, a prospect no one in the transport ecosystem relishes, Mullett said.
Bereft of federal money, states will be pressured to continue hiking their fuel taxes, Mullett said. Over the past three decades, states have repeatedly raised fuel taxes and related fees to pay for necessary infrastructure improvements.
Perhaps the oldest unresolved issue in official Washington has been how to pay for infrastructure improvements absent any increases in the federal fuels tax. The tax has sat at 22.4 cents per gallon on diesel and 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline since President Bill Clinton’s first year in office. Groups including shippers, carriers and the 3 million-strong U.S. Chamber of Commerce have repeatedly endorsed measures to raise fuel taxes. However, the Obama administration consistently rejected it as a regressive tax, a position that Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president, has adopted. The Trump administration talked early on about supporting a fuel tax hike, but nothing ever materialized.
Adding to the cost squeeze is the administration’s refusal to support taxes or user fees on the use of electric-powered vehicles (EV), which currently escape levies because they don’t require fossil fuels. Though still a distinct minority of the nation’s truck and auto fleets, EVs will become much more commonplace on American roads over the next 20 years. Hardly anyone disputes the need to capture EV activity and tax their use. The question is how it will be done.
The urgency behind the “how-do-we-pay-for-this” question has reached a crescendo, with the administration and a bipartisan group of senators agreeing to an eight-year, $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, and with the House and Senate dueling over how to reauthorize the 2015 FAST Act, the last federal transport-spending bill. It is expected that the legislation, if a version gets enacted, will cost an additional $500 billion to $600 billion depending on its duration.
With costs running far ahead of revenues due to years of inaction at the federal level, the trust fund regularly runs out of money and requires periodic capital transfers from the general treasury to meet its commitments. The House’s reauthorization bill, which is set to be voted on by the full chamber later this week, contains $148 billion in transfers over the next five years. The Senate is still putting together its version.
It is unclear whether the administration-backed initiative and the reauthorization legislation will be consolidated or will move forward on different tracks. Either way, there is more infrastructure funding on the table than at any time in recent history.
Panelists at the session said transport and business interests need to be on guard for any form of revenue-raising coming out of both branches. The Biden administration has proposed hiking the corporate income tax rate to 28% from 21% to pay for infrastructure programs, a move that would be a “huge hit” on retailers, said Jonathan Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation (NRF), the world’s largest retail industry trade group.
There has also been bipartisan talk of a bill-of-lading tax, which would have a direct and enormous impact on all of logistics. Mullett said the broad strokes of the measure are “ill-defined” and that it’s unlikely to go anywhere. However, anything is possible when the executive and legislative branches are “scrambling for dollars,” he said.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 21:40 - Welcome To The "Post-COVID Luxury Spending Boom"
Welcome To The “Post-COVID Luxury Spending Boom”
Now that the Covid panic is starting to subside, the “boom” is beginning. Especially in the luxury goods market.
The surge in spending is indicative of the tailwind that loosening lockdowns, combined with trillions of dollars in stimulus, has created.
One person experiencing the spending binge firsthand is travel agent Dottie Williford, who told The Washington Post that the company’s luxury offerings are being sold out first: “People don’t usually spend $20,000 to go to the Bahamas, but my clients are. The first things to sell out were the top category on the ship.”
As a result, businesses are going to start catering further to the wealthy, the report notes. This is due to the fact that the wealthiest Americans will be the driving force behind a lot of the recovery in retail spending.
As of now, “nearly 40 percent of overall consumer spending comes from the top fifth of earners — households that earn at least $120,000 a year,” WaPo notes. The bottom 20% of households account for just 9% of spending – and that gap is set to widen. The wealthiest 10% of Americans added more than $8 trillion to their net worth in 2020, despite the entire economy essentially shutting down and most of the country being in lockdown.
Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Harvard University, said: “Higher-income folks are accumulating a lot of savings. They will spend more going forward and that will further create an incentive for companies to cater to higher-income folks even more.”
High income consumer spending is now 11% higher than pre-covid levels and consumer spending could grow at the fastest pace since 1946, the report notes. As a result, names like J.Crew and Uniqlo are specifically raising their price points heading into the new season, the report notes. Names like Gucci and Louis Vuitton are also raising prices.
Kayla Marci, a market analyst at retail-data firm EDITED, said: “Prices are rising. We’re also seeing these mass markets aligning their prices with luxury or expanding the offering of high-end products.”
The hospitality and travel indsutry is also feeling robust demand. Lindblad Expeditions, a cruise line that normally offers 35 day Antarctic cruises for $50,000 each, said it may expand into a “diverse high end travel aggregate” heading into 2021.
Its CEO, Sven Lindblad, said in April: “We are well-prepared to start up again. We have excellent financial reserves, a couple of new companies under our umbrella and a marketing machine that is vastly strengthened for growth.”
Similarly, Oceania Cruises’ 2023 world cruise, which is called “Around the World in 180 Days,” and costs between $46,000 and $160,000 per guest, sold out in a single day.
CEO Frank Del Rio said: “We believe this achievement, along with multiple booking records we have announced in recent months, demonstrates the pent-up demand that exists from our mature and affluent cruisers even for long and exotic voyages once the severe impact of the pandemic subsides.”
Robertico Croes, director of the Dick Pope Sr. Institute for Tourism Studies at the University of Central Florida, echoed the bullish sentiments for the industy: “The post pandemic will see a very strong movement toward the most affluent in terms of product development and services, and so on, compared to those who don’t have the affluence needed to engage in travel. Travel is inherently a luxury item.”
Additionally, live entertainment spending is up 60% this year, amusement park trips and recreation are up 54% this year and membership clubs are up 45% this year. Those three fastest growing categories are usually dominated by high income Americans.
Demand for second homes has also “more than doubled” during the pandemic and was up a scorching 178% in April and 48% in May.
If the post-Great Recession spending data is any indicator, the economic recovery could only be getting started:
In the five years after spending by the top 20 percent hit bottom during that recession, their share of all spending on care services such as day care, preschool and eldercare jumped 9 percentage points to 56 percent of overall spending in that area. The story was similar in education spending, such as college and private schools, as their share jumped 5 percentage points to 54 percent overall.
Discretionary spending by the top 20 percent on fun purchases like pets, toys and hobbies rose 3.4 percentage points to 38.5 percent of that overall category. In another category that includes hotels and vacation homes, where the top 20 percent were already dominant, they gained even more ground, reaching 59 percent of spending overall.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 21:20 - Incremental Outrageousness Is Killing America
Incremental Outrageousness Is Killing America
Authored by Bruce Abramson via RealClearPolitics.com,
Critical race theory has exploded into public consciousness. Millions of American parents are just coming to realize that our schools have become woke indoctrination centers preaching divisiveness, bigotry, discrimination, and disdain for American history. Most of them are wondering how we got here.
The answer is simple: Slowly. Incrementally. One step after another, over the course of decades. It’s hardly just K-12 education. An incentive system of “incremental outrageousness” has taken every aspect of American culture dangerously far from reality into the orgy of radical leftist hatred known as progressivism.
How did it happen without anyone noticing?
Turns out, we’ve reached the endgame of a strategy the radical left put in play in the 1960s: the long march through the institutions. The onslaught began in higher education—an institution particularly well suited for a takeover because it functions without external market signals. Success in academia hinges entirely on peer approval. Faculty members make all decisions concerning the hiring, firing, and promotion of junior colleagues, curriculum design, publication in prestigious journals, the appropriate paths for research, and the availability of public and private research funding.
The surest way to succeed as an academic is thus to flatter the senior folks charged with making decisions about your career. The best way to do that (within the bounds of legality and propriety) is to “build upon” their work—that is, by taking it one step further in the recommended direction. Senior academics select the direction. Junior academics bolster the prestige of their seniors whenever they make a new “scientific discovery” along the designated path. In one fell swoop these junior academics show how important past work has been and tie their own egos, prestige, and careers to those of their seniors.
This process calcifies conventional wisdom while divorcing each new “discovery” from everything other than the step that immediately preceded it. Each small step in the approved direction represents a small step away from the reality that originally grounded it.
Incremental outrageousness. Consider, for example, the well-grounded observation that it might be worthwhile to study history from the perspective of the peasants and/or the conquered rather than of royalty and/or the victorious. Fast-forward a few decades and many incremental steps. Now, perspective implies sympathy; those who study the oppressed are compassionate, while those who study the oppressors are cruel. Fast-forward a few more decades. Critical theory reduces all human interactions into conflicts between oppressors and oppressed.
Finally, fast-forward to present. Today, “science has proved” that the nuclear family is a tool of oppression—hence the opposition of Black Lives Matter and its ideological allies—and that the biggest problem facing America is a white supremacism so pervasive that it can boast exactly zero organizations of any size or influence.
How did science prove such things? One day at a time, building incrementally upon the scientific frontier of the day before.
Outrageous? Absolutely. But the path from a grounded, reasonable observation to a hateful fantasy capable of undermining the republic was so methodical, so incremental, and so organic that few noticed it happening. Millions of individuals, over the course of decades, responded rationally to the incentives they faced. Prestigious “experts” told them what they had to do, say and join to succeed. Most young people arriving on campus or beginning work in the prestige professions complied; those who did not had short, unhappy experiences and limited career success.
Meanwhile, decent, colorblind, patriotic Americans trusted our nation’s institutions to police themselves. That trust was badly misplaced. The radical left hollowed out our institutions and took them over—first academia, then the media, then the civil service, K-12 education, the professional organizations, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. In 2021, even corporate America is more interested in being woke than in maximizing profits.
Social media was the final blow. Social media made incremental outrageousness the dominant incentive system driving American society. Viral posts invariably move one step beyond yesterday’s outrage—familiar enough to seem plausible, but still pushing forward in the approved direction. The conventional wisdom dominating American culture is dangerously divorced from reality.
The organic nature of incremental outrageousness is responsible for today’s “social progressives”: The folks committed to progressivism despite having no understanding of progressive ideology. The folks who provide cover and support for anti-American radicals despite believing quite deeply that they’re supporting traditional American concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality. The folks we need to wake up if we’re to secure the support necessary to sustain the American republic.
Those of us committed to that republic must undertake a program of strategic education and commitment. Tools and techniques for waking them and changing their incentives are available and teachable. By all appearances, however, very few of our leaders or our fighters have mastered them. That’s going to have to change—soon—if we have any hope of restoring America.
No one said it was going to be easy.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 21:00 - Baltimore City Police Set To Seize Twice As Many "Ghost Guns"
Baltimore City Police Set To Seize Twice As Many “Ghost Guns”
Months ago, we told readers “ghost guns,” which are untraceable to the federal government and can either be made from 80% percent lower kits or 3D printers were popping up all across Baltimore City. Now the number of ghost guns the Baltimore City Police Department (BCPD) expects to seize this year is set to be more than double what it was last year.
Baltimore police are on track to seize at least twice as many privately manufactured firearms — often called “ghost guns” — as they did in 2020, Sheree Briscoe, the city’s deputy police commissioner, said Tuesday.
At a virtual conversation moderated by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, Briscoe said the department has seen an increase in its recovery of privately manufactured firearms in the last few years.
The department recovered 29 ghost guns in 2019; 126 in 2020; and 83 from January to mid-May this year.
“We’re on pace to surpass last year’s numbers and potentially come in between 250 to 300 privately made firearms that will make their way to the streets of Baltimore in the hands of various age groups [and] communities,” she said.
According to Briscoe, 15 ghost gun seizures were “directly linked” to homicide or shooting investigations in 2020.
“…To some that may not be a large percentage, but any percentage that’s attributed to a gun that is not legally registered, legally manufactured with serial numbers, is a challenge because then you run the difficulty of trying to find out where did that come from, who may ever possess that gun,” said Briscoe. – Maryland Matters
With more than 300 homicides for six consecutive years, 2021 murders are estimated to be over 300.
BCPD Commissioner Michael Harrison has blamed the rise in violent crime on several issues, including an officer shortage.
Last year, liberal city officials defunded BCPD, but as violent crime soared, newly elected Mayor Brandon Scott reversed their measure to increase funding.
The situation in the metro area is so severe that Governor Larry Hogan had a recent meeting with Mayor Scott and Police Commissioner Michael Harrison. The governor said the meeting was “productive” but attributed the lack of consequences for petty crime to the surge in violence.
“When crime’s being committed right in front of police officers, when the state’s attorney refuses to prosecute half the crimes, we’re not going to fix the problem, regardless of how many meetings we’re going to have,” Hogan said, referring to Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby halting the prosecution of minor traffic violations, prostitution, drug possession, and other minor offenses during the virus pandemic. In March, Mosby held a press conference to declare that rough policing doesn’t prevent more violent crimes. Months later, her policing strategies have failed.
Last Wednesday, Mayor Scott sat down with President Biden at a roundtable discussion on gun violence. The mayor and Biden discussed new efforts to address violent crime.
“Today’s conversation with Mayor Scott of Baltimore, for example, echoed what we know to be the case and hear from mayors all across the country. Mayors have the power to help shape and enforce the laws in their cities, but they can’t control the laws in neighboring cities and states even though the gun legally bought there often ends up in their streets. Mayor Scott says that 80% of the guns in Baltimore were acquired outside the city. There’s nothing he can do about that, so we have to act,” Biden said.
The president has been an advocate for banning ghost guns and crushing the NRA.
When someone can create an entire 3D-printed ghost gun at their home for under $350, including the cost of the printer, it seems Biden’s ambitions for more gun control could be a losing battle.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 20:40 - George Orwell's 1984 Has Become A Blueprint For Our Dystopian Reality
George Orwell’s 1984 Has Become A Blueprint For Our Dystopian Reality
Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”
– George Orwell, 1984
Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21, 1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.
It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.
Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.
“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell
Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.
Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell
The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.
Orwell understood what many Americans are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs.
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell
Even our ability to speak and think freely is being regulated.
In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.
In my debut novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the dystopian future that George Orwell predicted for 1984 has finally arrived, 100 years late and ten times as brutal. In this post-apocalyptic world where everyone marches to the beat of the same drummer and words like “freedom” are taboo, Erik Blair—Orwell’s descendant and unwitting heir to his legacy—isn’t volunteering to be anyone’s hero. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always go according to plan. To save all that he loves, Orwell will have to travel between his future self and the past.
And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.
“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell
Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
Say hello to the new Thought Police.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has been working on an artificial intelligence system designed to anticipate your every move. Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence) has been designed to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS.
What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange.
So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?
We’re running out of options.
Whether you’re dealing with fact or fiction, as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 20:20 - Charges Filed Against Trump Org And CFO Alan Weisselberg
Charges Filed Against Trump Org And CFO Alan Weisselberg
Update (1900ET): A Manhattan grand jury has filed the anticipated indictments against Trump Org and longtime CFO, Alan Weisselberg, who will reportedly turn himself in tomorrow, according to the Washington Post. The indictments containing the specific charges will be unsealed on Thursday afternoon, however people familiar with the case say the charges are related to allegations of unpaid taxes on benefits enjoyed by Trump Organization executives.
Not exactly money laundering for Russian mobsters, as the Rachel Maddows of the world have been hinting at for over four years.
NEW: A Manhattan grand jury has filed indictments against President Trump’s company and its longtime CFO, Allen Weisselberg.
Weisselberg will turn himself in tomorrow. Trump Org will also be arraigned in court, represented by a lawyer.https://t.co/CRl0kkHvqv— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) June 30, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
According to the Post, dual investigations appear to have been set in motion by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who turned on the former President in 2018 after pleading guilty to making hush-money payments to two women who claimed to have had sex with Trump over a decade before the 2016 US election.
Vance’s office opened an investigation in 2018, responding to Cohen’s charges that Trump had directed the illegal payoffs. But Vance’s probe broadened beyond those allegations to encompass years of business transactions. Vance examined tax breaks Trump got on an estate in suburban New York, loans Trump took out on his Chicago tower, and statements Trump made to New York tax authorities about the value of his Manhattan towers, according to previous court filings.
The investigation became bogged down for much of Trump’s term, however, because of a long legal fight over his tax returns. Vance had sought them from Trump’s accountants in 2019, but Trump sued to stop him, saying that — as president — he was immune from investigation by any state-level prosecutor. -WaPo
And of course, timing is everything – as the lawsuit, which we suspect could have been filed months, or even years ago, will now play out right as Trump gears up to support Republicans through the 2022 midterms.
* * *
The Trump Organization and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, is expected to be charged on Thursday with tax-related crimes, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. Trump himself is not expected to be charged, as we noted earlier this week.
Allen Weisselberg, behind former President Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. in 2017, is chief financial officer of the Trump Organization.
Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated PressThe action by the Manhattan district attorney’s office would mark the first criminal charges against the former US president’s company since prosecutors began investigating three years ago. Weisselberg reportedly refused prosecutors’ attempts to get him to cooperate against Trump, according to the report.
The defendants are expected to appear in court Thursday afternoon.
The Trump Organization and Mr. Weisselberg are expected to face charges related to allegedly evading taxes on fringe benefits, the people said. For months, the Manhattan district attorney’s office and New York state attorney general’s office have been investigating whether Mr. Weisselberg and other employees illegally avoided paying taxes on perks—such as cars, apartments and private-school tuition—that they received from the Trump Organization. -WSJ
According to the report, if prosecutors can show the Trump Organization and its executives systematically avoided paying taxes, more serious charges could follow.
Trump has denied wrongdoing and insists that the case – led by Democrats – is politically motivated, and that the case covers “things that are standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 20:05 - Restaurants Have No Choice But To Raise Menu Prices Amid Inflationary Pressures
Restaurants Have No Choice But To Raise Menu Prices Amid Inflationary Pressures
All vaxxed up (or maybe some have the COVID antibodies), many Americans are ditching their on-demand food delivery apps this summer and are supporting local restaurants with an in-dining experience but have been sticker shocked by the rise of menu prices.
Restaurants, big and small, are passing along the increasing costs of basic commodities and labor. For instance, the cost of vegetable oils, cereals, dairy, meat, and sugar has been erupting since the beginning of the pandemic. Compound this with labor costs, along with the cost of everything soaring, and restaurants already suffering from a lost year in 2020, are raising menu prices at a much faster pace than historical rates, according to Bloomberg.
Increasing menu costs are displayed in government data showing inflation rising at its fastest clip since 2009.
Source: Bloomberg The Labor Department said this month that consumer prices in May rose .6%, pushing the annual inflation rate to 5% over the last 12 months. Other government data reveals wholesale costs for various meats jumped 20% since the start of the year. Also, producer prices for processed poultry in May soared to a record high.
According to more government data, restaurant food prices rose 4% in May than a year ago, with limited-service meals up 6.1%. Full-service 4.1% over the last 12 months, the biggest jump since late 2008.
Bloomberg spoke with Tampa, Florida, restaurateur Andrew Koumi, who increased menu items by 2% to 4%. He operates a six-location chain called Green Market Cafe and attempts to keep food and paper costs below 35% of his menu prices. His computer keeps warning him that certain items, like chicken, have doubled in the last six months.
Koumi isn’t worried about passing along costs to consumers because “everyone” in the industry is “doing it.” He said some restaurants are “drastically” raising menu prices.”
“Could it go up more? It’s scary. I’m hoping that it levels,” he added
Restaraunt chain Chipotle raised its menu price by 4% due to increasing labor costs and food prices. Another chain, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc., raised its menu prices by 3% amid persistent increases in wage and commodity expenses.
So far, consumer confidence remained steady in June amid warnings that inflation could sour their mood.
The great debate today is if inflation is “transitory,” and the latest report via BofA’s Michael Hartnett concludes US inflation to remain elevated for two to four years. So much for the “transitory” narrative stuffed down our throats by the monetary wonks at the Federal Reserve.
Get used to paying higher prices… Or just eat at home.
… or perhaps some restraunts will keep prices steady but decrease the size of the meal, something known as “shrinkflation.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 20:00 - Half A Million Illegals Crossed Since Harris Named Border "Czar"
Half A Million Illegals Crossed Since Harris Named Border “Czar”
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures, around 500,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border since Kamala Harris was named border ‘czar’.
The Washington Free Beacon reported the findings, noting that only three months has passed since Harris took on the responsibility, and that the half a million figure is just those that have been apprehended.
The CBP says around 180,000 immigrants are being caught per month. In April agents arrested 178,854 illegal immigrants, the highest monthly figure for 21 years. That figure was then surpassed in May as agents apprehended 180,034 illegals.
By the time June’s figures are reported in the coming days, the combined number is expected to be over half a million, more than the entire population of Miami, Florida or Cleveland, Ohio.
Harris only bothered to visit the border when President Trump announced he was making a trip. Even then Harris visited El Paso, some 1000 miles away from where the crisis is taking place.
Previous to this, Harris lied and claimed she had been to the border, telling NBC’s Lester Holt “This whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.”
When Holt pushed back and said she had not, Harris snapped “I—and I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t—I don’t understand the point that you’re making,” then again laughed maniacally:
On Tuesday, Republican Senator Ron Johnson argued that Harris’ trip to El Paso was designed to distract the media and keep them away from the real crisis hit areas of the border.
“They took her to a point in the border where she wouldn’t see the crisis and so the press wouldn’t report on the crisis,” Johnson said.
The Senator added, “You just simply can’t understand what this administration is doing. We literally are apprehending now about 6,000 people per day. That’s I mean, that’s a large caravan every day being processed, some of them being returned, others are being dispersed. But this crisis is not going away. It’s just under everybody’s radar because the press isn’t covering it.”
Watch:
https://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=6261537044001&w=466&h=263Watch the latest video at foxnews.com
* * *
Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/
In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here. Support our sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, we urgently need your financial support here.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 19:40 - Kamala Harris Staffers Are Leaking — And Her Office Is A 'Dysfunctional' Mess
Kamala Harris Staffers Are Leaking — And Her Office Is A ‘Dysfunctional’ Mess
Vice President Kamala Harris’ office is a toxic, ‘abusive’ environment where “people are thrown under the bus from the very top,’ according to 22 current and former staffers, administration officials and associates of Harris and President Biden.
In a Politico exposé reminiscent of a Feb. 2019 New York Times in which over fifty current and former staffers decried her dysfunctional campaign (h/t @mattdizwhitlock), Harris and her Chief of Staff, Tina Flournoy, are slammed for running an office with “low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, Chief of Staff Tina Flournoy “It all starts at the top,” said one administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity (as they all did).
“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” said another person with direct knowledge of Harris’ office. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like shit.”
As Politico notes, “The dysfunction in the VP’s ranks threatens to complicate the White House’s carefully crafted image as a place staffed by a close-knit group of professionals working in concert to advance the president’s agenda. It’s pronounced enough that members of the president’s own team have taken notice and are concerned about the way Harris’ staffers are treated.”
Harris spokeswoman Symone Sanders – a racist who mocked a white Trump supporter after he was beaten by a group of black men – and was passed over for Biden’s press secretary, pushed back against the nearly two-dozen accounts of dysfunction, saying Flournoy has an “open door policy,” and that “Black women like me would not have the opportunity to work in politics without Tina.”
Symone Sanders Sanders called the anonymous sources “cowards.”
“We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day. What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I’m like ‘welcome to the club,'” Sanders continued. “We have created a culture where people, if there is anything anyone would like to raise, there are avenues for them to do so. Whoever has something they would like to raise, they should raise it directly.”
Harris and Flournoy’s defenders are pulling the race card – saying that “Black women in particular—are subjected to standards that men often don’t have to clear. A tough and demanding office environment may be seen as a virtue for one and a sign of disorder and lack of leadership acumen for another.”
Staffers looking for an exit.
According to the report, some of Harris’ aides are looking for other employment opportunities, while others have left already. In recent days, two top advance staffers, Karly Satkowiak and Gabrielle DeFranceschi, left the ‘dysfunctional’ office. And while Harris’ team said the departures were ‘long-planned’, two people familiar with the departures call bullshit.
For DeFranceschi, the deputy director of advance, the departure came down to a “difference in opinion on how things should run,” according to another person familiar with the matter, who said that Harris’ office is run “very different” from the Obama operation, where DeFranceschi previously worked. “If you have an opinion about how things should run and it’s not listened to, that can be frustrating.”
DeFranceschi did not respond to a request for comment.
A third Harris aide who worked on her digital team, Rajan Kaur, left the staff after opting not to relocate to Washington from Brooklyn.
Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to the president, defended Flournoy as well as the decision to keep news of the border trip contained among a small group of people, saying Harris’ office didn’t want it to leak or “turn it into a spectacle.”
“It was closely held and there may be people whose feelings were a little hurt on her staff that they weren’t brought into the discussion,” Dunn said. “But any suggestion that it was mishandled or kept a secret from people who needed to know about the arrangements or needed to know about it is absolutely not true.”
Asked if she was aware of the complaints about the VP’s office, Dunn replied that it was “not anywhere near what you are describing.” -Politico
Flournoy, a veteran of the Clinton White House and Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, is part of an ‘informal group of Black women who’ve worked together for decades in Democratic politics, which includes Donna Brazile, Minyon Moore, Leah Daughtry and Yolanda Caraway,’ according to the report.
“Look, [Tina’s] strong, she’s intelligent, she’s driven, and she expects strong, intelligent, driven people around her,” said Daughtry, adding “But some people may find strong, driven, smart people intimidating, but I think that’s more projection than reality because that’s just not Tina’s intent or style. And nothing in her experience would lead you to think that she’s an intimidating person.”
So the staffers are the problem? Hilarious.
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) June 30, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Politico paints a different picture – having developed a reputation for being Kamala’s gatekeeper, often refusing to delegate while second-guessing others in Harris’ office.
Apparently, she did the same thing as Bill Clinton’s post-presidential chief of staff.
“People who Clinton knew for decades all of a sudden couldn’t get through to him because Tina choked off contact,” one of the people said. “Because Clinton didn’t use email,” just his blackberry, “she was able to keep many FOBs [friends of Bill] out.”
Morale is “rough,” and in many ways ‘similar to the failed presidential campaign and her Senate office,’ according to a former Senate aide who speaks with Harris’ staffers.
Read the rest of the report here.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 19:20 - Majority Of Voters Reject Teaching Children That America Is "Structurally Racist": Harvard Poll
Majority Of Voters Reject Teaching Children That America Is “Structurally Racist”: Harvard Poll
Authored by GQ Pan via The Epoch Times,
About two-thirds of Americans believe that children should not be taught in school the claim that the United States is a “structurally racist” nation dominated by white supremacy, a new poll revealed.
The findings were published last week as part of an online survey (pdf) conducted by the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and The Harris Poll between June 15 and 17, among 2,006 registered voters. The survey asked participants whether they “believe that kids in elementary school should be taught that America is structurally racist and is dominated by white supremacy.”
In response, 61 percent of participants answered children “should not be taught this,” while the remaining 39 percent said children “should be taught that America is structurally racist.”
When it came to another question regarding the teaching of the First Amendment in schools, an overwhelming 81 percent of participants said elementary school students should learn about the First Amendment and the importance of free speech, compared to 19 percent who said they should not.
The results of the survey echoed those of an online poll conducted by Economist and YouGov poll between June 13 and 15, among 1,500 adult U.S. citizens. Participants were asked if they had “a good idea of what critical race theory (CRT) is,” to which 54 percent responded “yes,” 23 percent said “no,” and 23 percent said they are “not sure.”
Those who said they knew about CRT were then asked whether they have a “favorable or unfavorable” opinion of it. Of these participants, 58 percent said they at least have a “somewhat unfavorable” view of CRT, while 38 percent say they are in favor of the Marxism-rooted ideology, which deems the foundations of the American system to be inherently and irredeemably racist.
The idea that racism remains deeply embedded in America has been popularized over the past years by left-wing activists, politicians, media publications, and the New York Times’s 1619 Project.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning project consists of a collection of essays that argue, among many other controversial claims, that the primary reason for the American Revolution was to preserve slavery and that slavery was the source of American economic growth in the 19th century.
A K-12 curriculum based on the 1619 Project, developed by Pulitzer Center, has made its way into many public school districts across the nation, including Chicago, Illinois; Buffalo, New York; and Newark, New Jersey.
A new rule proposed in April by the Education Department also prioritizes funding U.S. history and civics programs that incorporate the 1619 Project and the works of prominent CRT advocate Ibram X. Kendi.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 19:00 - Four Cali Residents Convicted Of Using $1.8 Million In PPP Funds For Luxury Homes, Gold Coins And Jewelry
Four Cali Residents Convicted Of Using $1.8 Million In PPP Funds For Luxury Homes, Gold Coins And Jewelry
While hundreds of billions of dollars in PPP money has (and will continue to go) unchecked as a result of arguably the government’s most wasteful and poorly planned cash grab for citizens, the dragnet has managed to pull in a couple of offenders.
The latest of which were four California residents that were convicted by a Federal Jury on June 25 for “scheming to submit fraudulent loan applications seeking millions of dollars in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) COVID-19 relief funds,” according to a DOJ press release.
Richard Ayvazyan, his wife Marietta Terabelian and brother Artur Ayvazyan, all based out of Encino, were each found guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, 11 counts of wire fraud, eight counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, the release says. Additionally, Vahe Dadyan of Glendale was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, six counts of wire fraud, three counts of bank fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and one count of money laundering.
As a result they must forfeit “bank accounts, jewelry, watches, gold coins, three residential properties, and approximately $450,000 in cash”.
The evidence at the trial showed that the defendants used fake, stolen or synthetic identities to submit fraudulent applications. After obtaining more than $1.8 million in relief funds, the group used the cash as “down payments on luxury homes in Tarzana, Glendale, and Palm Desert” and for “gold coins, diamonds, jewelry, luxury watches, fine imported furnishings, designer handbags, clothing, and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle”.
As part of changing their identities, the group “submitted false and fictitious documents to lenders and the Small Business Administration (SBA), including fake identity documents, tax documents, and payroll records.”
The charges were being brought by the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force, whose job is to “marshal the resources of the Department of Justice in partnership with agencies across government to enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud.”
If this example is any indication, the Fraud Enforcement Task Force should have enough work ahead of them to be busy for the next several decades. The full DOJ release can be found here.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 18:40
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...
