- England's "Freedom Day" Dulled By Looming Food Shortages As "Ping-Demic" Worsens
England’s “Freedom Day” Dulled By Looming Food Shortages As “Ping-Demic” Worsens
In keeping with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s promise, England lifted its last remaining COVID-linked restrictions on movement and business at midnight on Monday, finally allowing people to move about more or less freely, even as new COVID cases are climbing in the UK and much of the EU.
Despite the surge in new cases across the UK (which has been overwhelmingly driven by the Delta variant), instances of deaths and hospitalizations have climbed only slightly.
Over the weekend, the number of new daily cases climbed above 50K for the first time since January… but deaths remain de minimus (and that is with a 2 month lag from cases picking up)…
Across England, work from home guidance has been removed, along with the legal obligation to wear face masks in public places. Some “key protections” will remain, however. People who test positive for Covid-19 or are contacted by NHS Test and Trace will have to self-isolate, as will those arriving from amber and red-list countries.
BoJo’s decision has also infuriated some public health “experts”, who have in turn condemned Boris Johnson’s lifting of most COVID legal restrictions as “a threat to the world.” The UK now has the third-highest number of active COVID cases outside Brazil and Indonesia.
Others have complained – with good reason – that “Freedom Day” isn’t quite living up to its name, with one critic calling it “all mouth, no trousers”.
And not without reason. As the economy is supposedly reopening, a deluge of mandatory quarantine orders have been handed down to coworkers and family members of the infected have created serious problems for the British economy. The British press is calling it the “ping-demic” – a reference to being “pinged” by the NHS test-and-trace system. Some are worried that it could soon lead to food shortages, the Evening Standard said.
Tim Morris, chief executive of the UK Major Ports Group, called what has been dubbed the “ping-demic” as the most “significant threat to ports’ resilience we have seen yet…
“If the current trajectory of absences continues without the Government taking any action, there has to be a risk of disruption to important supply chains, including food.”
The NHS T&T app sent a record 520,194 alerts last week. Each of those represents a person (often a worker) who must quarantine for up to ten days after reportedly coming into “close contact” with someone who has tested positive.
Meat processors are saying 1 in 10 of their workforce were being told to self-isolate by the app, a development that could require firms “to start shutting down production lines altogether”.
Even BoJo has been impacted: Only hours “Freedom Day” began, the PM was himself forced to go into self-isolation after his government’s health secretary tested positive.
As Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid pointed out in a note to clients published Monday morning, it’s becoming “increasingly difficult” in the UK to have a conversation with anybody who disagrees with your views on ending the COVID lockdown.
Those for suggest that with all the vulnerable groups fully vaccinated and every adult having been offered at least one jab then we have to start learning to live with the virus and the summer is the best place to start. To delay would only postpone cases and risks the peak occurring in winter when the health service is usually more stretched. Mental health considerations also come into the equation as does the still relatively low death rate. Those against will suggest that fully reopening now after the recent surge in cases could soon lead to high hospitalisations and genuinely risk pressurising the health service. They would also argue that new variants could emerge with such a wide prevalence of cases and could also create huge numbers of long covid cases and more deaths than should occur. Anyway, the world will be watching the U.K. experiment with huge interest. It could show a pathway back towards normality or it could be a warning to even heavily vaccinated countries that covid will be a problem for a decent length of time still.
Breaking down the numbers the big growth area over this period has been males aged 15-40. It’s the first time in the pandemic that there’s been a notable gender split.
The day has been nicknamed “Freedom Day”, and for many it didn’t disappoint. As nightclubs opened their doors and dancefloors for the first time in 16 months, young people packed into establishments to celebrate. In a message recorded at the PM’s country house, Chequers, where he is spending is quarantine, Johnson urged caution even as he said it was time to move away from government rules to a new era of personal responsibility: “If we don’t do it now we’ve got to ask ourselves, when will we ever do it?”
Indeed!!
Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/20/2021 – 02:45 - Floods Close Rail Lines In Europe For Months Or Longer
Floods Close Rail Lines In Europe For Months Or Longer
By Keith Fender of Trains.com,
Portions of the rail network in Western Europe could be out of service for months or years after massive flooding that has left hundreds dead across a swath of western Germany and Belgium. Rail service has been suspended after the floods that saw rivers running 3 yards higher than previous records in some cases and destroyed homes and businesses.
Stranded trains are partially submerged at Gerolstein in Germany’s Eifel region, on the route from Cologne to Trier. (Courtesy Deutsche Bahn) Flooding was caused by a slow-moving, low-pressure weather system that sat over the region from 15 July, releasing two months’ worth of rain in two days. Over 10 inches of rain fell continuously in some places in the hilly Ardennes, Eifel, and Ruhr regions; in many cases, this was then channeled down steep-sided river valleys, unleashing massive destructive power in towns and villages in the water’s path.
In Belgium, most rail lines south of Brussels saw disruption, with many in the hilly Ardennes region seriously damaged. The high-speed rail line connecting Brussels with Cologne in Germany was briefly closed, but as this goes through hills and over valleys, it was not seriously damaged. Services restarted over the weekend. The older rail lines that follow river valleys, often no more than a few yards above the river, fared much less well. Several routes are so badly damaged that reconstruction is expected to take until late August; less damaged routes reopened July 19.
Situation worse in Germany
In neighboring Germany, where the scale of destruction and loss of life has been greater, some rail lines, again built following river valleys, have been completely washed out. In total, German national railroad Deutsche Bahn has reported 600 kilometers (more than 370 miles) of tracks and 80 stations are impassable.
The worst affected route along the valley of the river Ahr from Remagen to Ahrbrück has seen around 12.5 miles of its 18-mile length destroyed by flood water, with all seven bridges destroyed where the line crossed from one side of the river to the other. The town of Schuld, which has been seen on TV screens across the world, lies a few miles upstream of Ahrbrück in the same river valley (the rail line in this area closed in 1973); over 110 people were killed by the floods in this region alone. The German government has promised emergency funding for flood damaged areas but has already said it is likely to take years to rebuild the worst damaged areas and their road and rail infrastructure.
A damaged rail bridge in the Ahr River valley, as seen from a drone (Courtesy Deutsche Bahn, Alexander Menk) Whilst the Ahr Valley damage has been widely reported, other towns in the wider Eifel region have suffered serious damage, and the rail network and equipment parked in flood areas is now out of action, probably for months. Further north, flood water hit towns around Aachen and Cologne, destroying buildings and disrupting some rail lines. Much of the flood water ended up in the river Rhine; this led to flooding in cities along the river.
In the Ruhr region, the main station in the city of Hagen was flooded and closed, along with rail lines through the city, as were those in the nearby city of Wuppertal. The flood waters knocked out power and telecoms services in many areas. In the city of Bonn, the electronic signaling center controlling the main rail lines along the Rhine valley was unable to function due to flood damage.
Countries neighboring Germany have also seen flooding, with the south of the Netherlands hit with largescale disruption to rail and road travel. As the weather system moved, on flood waters have affected Switzerland and by this weekend the rain had moved east to Bavaria in Germany and the neighbouring Czech Republic, with the rail line between Dresden and Prague shut down July 18 as the river Elbe burst its banks. The Elbe Valley was the scene of massive flooding in August 2002 which closed the rail line for three months.
European rail companies face up to changing weather
The intensity of the flooding and sheer amount of water — with the consequent damage and loss of life — has been characterized as exceptional, with the consensus view in Germany that this is due to changes in climate and weather patterns. While many of Germany’s big rivers, such as the Rhine or the Danube routinely flood, this has historically been in spring, when snow melting on higher ground swells the rivers. Most big cities on these rivers are built to either contain the flooding or to manage it, with some districts routinely flooded. What is so different this time is that the flooding was so fast and further upstream, where rivers normally no more than small streams in summer became raging torrents overnight.
Rail companies across Europe have been aware of the danger to their networks caused by changing weather patterns in the last two decades with torrential rain becoming more common, overwhelming tracks or structures such as bridges. In another recent example. a passenger train in Scotland derailed in August 2020, with loss of life following heavy rain that covered the track in debris after drainage failed
Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/20/2021 – 02:00 - The Propaganda War (And How To Fight It)
The Propaganda War (And How To Fight It)
Authored by Cj Hokpins via The Consent Factory,
Every totalitarian system in history has used the power of visual propaganda to generate a new “reality,” one that reifies its official ideology, remaking the world in its own paranoid image. New Normal totalitarianism is no exception. For example, take a look at this panel copied from the landing page of The Guardian — one of the global-capitalist ruling classes’ primary propaganda organs — on July 17, 2021…
This isn’t just “biased” or “sensationalist” journalism. It is systematic official propaganda, no different than that disseminated by every other totalitarian system throughout history. Here’s the one from the following day…
Forget about the content of the articles for a moment and just take in the cumulative visual effect. Official propaganda isn’t just information, misinformation, and disinformation. It is actually less about getting us to believe things than it is about creating an official reality, and imposing it on society by force. When you’re setting out to conjure up a new “reality,” images are extremely powerful tools, just as powerful, if not more powerful, than words.
Here are a few more that you might recall…
Again, the goal of this type of propaganda is not simply to deceive or terrorize the public.
That is part of it, of course, but the more important part is forcing people to look at these images, over and over, hour after hour, day after day, at home, at work, on the streets, on television, on the Internet, everywhere.
This is how we create “reality.” We represent our beliefs and values to ourselves, and to each other, with images, words, rituals, and other symbols and social behaviors. Essentially, we conjure our “reality” into being like actors rehearsing and performing a play … the more we all believe it, the more convincing it is.
This is also why mandatory masks have been essential to the roll-out of the New Normal ideology. Forcing the masses to wear medical-looking masks in public was a propaganda masterstoke. Simply put, if you can force people to dress up like they’re going to work in the infectious disease ward of a hopsital every day for 17 months … presto! You’ve got yourself a new “reality” … a new, pathologized-totalitarian “reality,” a paranoid-psychotic, cult-like “reality” in which formerly semi-rational people have been reduced to nonsense-babbling lackeys who are afraid to go outside without permission from “the authorities,” and are injecting their children with experimental “vaccines.”
The sheer power of the visual image of those masks, and being forced to repeat the ritual behavior of putting them on, has been nearly irresistible. Yes, I know that you have been resisting. So have I. But we are the minority. Denying the power of what we are up against might make you feel better, but it will get us nowhere, or, in any event, nowhere good. The fact is, the vast majority of the public — except for people in Sweden, Florida, and assorted other officially non-existent places — have been robotically performing this theatrical ritual, and harassing those who refuse to do so, and thus collectively simulating an “apocalyptic plague.”
The New Normals — i.e., those still wearing masks outdoors, shrieking over meaningless “cases,” bullying everyone to get “vaccinated,” and collaborating with the segregation of the “Unvaccinated” — are not behaving the way they’re behaving because they are stupid. They are behaving that way because they’re living in a new “reality” that has been created for them over the course of the last 17 months by a massive official propaganda campaign, the most extensive and effective in the history of propaganda.
In other words, to put it bluntly, we are in a propaganda war, and we’re losing. We can’t match the propaganda power of the corporate media and New Normal governments, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back. We can, and must, at every opportunity. Recently, readers have been asking me how to do that. So, OK, here are a few simple suggestions.
The vast majority of obedient New Normals are not fanatical totalitarians. They’re scared, and weak, so they are following orders, adjusting their minds to the new official “reality.” Most of them do not perceive themselves as adherents of a totalitarian system or as segregationists, although that is what they are. They perceive themselves as “responsible” people following sensible “health directives” to “protect” themselves and others from the virus, and its ever-multiplying mutant “variants.” They perceive the “Unvaccinated” as a minority of dangerous, irrational “conspiracy theorist” extremists, who want to kill them and their families. When we tell them that we simply want our constitutional rights back, and to not be forced into being “vaccinated,” and censored and persecuted for expressing our views, they do not believe us. They think we’re lying. They perceive us as threats, as aggressors, as monsters, as strangers among them, who need to be dealt with … which is exactly how the authorities want them to perceive us.
We need to try to change this perception, not by complying or being “polite” to them. On the contrary, we need to become more confrontational. No, not violent. Confrontational. There is actually a difference, though the “woke” will deny it.
To begin with, we need to call things what they are. The “vaccination pass” system is a segregation system. It is segregationism. Call it what it is. Those cooperating with it are segregationists. They’re not “helping” or “protecting” anybody from anything. They are segregationists, pure and simple. Refer to them as “segregationists.” Don’t let them hide behind their terminology. Confront them with the fact of what they are.
Same goes for the rest of CovidSpeak. Covid “cases,” “deaths,” and “vaccines” get scare quotes. Healthy people are not medical cases. If Covid didn’t kill someone, they are not a Covid death, period. “Vaccines” that do not behave like vaccines, and that are killing and crippling tens of thousands of people, and that have not been adequately tested for safety, and that are being indiscriminatetly forced on everyone, do not get to be called vaccines.
OK, here comes the big idea, which will only work if enough people do it. You probably won’t like it, but what the hell, here goes …
This is the red inverted triangle the Nazis used in the concentration camps to designate political opponents and members of the anti-Nazi resistance. Make one. Make it out of fabric, paper, or whatever material you have at hand. Put a big, black “U” in the center of it to signify “Unvaccinated.” Wear it in public, conspicuously. When people ask you what it means and why you are wearing it in public, tell them. Encourage them to do the same, assuming they’re not New Normal segregationists, in which case … well, that will be a different conversation, but go ahead and tell them too.
That’s it. That’s the whole big idea. That, and whatever else you are already doing. The triangle is not meant to replace that. It’s just one simple way for people to express their opposition to the totalitarian, pseudo-medical segregation system that is currently being implemented … despite all that other stuff you’ve been doing, and that I have been doing, for 17 months.
All right, I can already feel your disappointment. You thought I was going to propose a frontal assault on Klaus Schwab’s secret castle, or a guerilla naval attack on Bill Gates’ yacht. Cathartic as either of those endeavors might be, they would be (a) futile, and (b) suicidal. Frustrating as it has been for all of us, this is still a battle for hearts and minds. Essentially, it is a War on Reality (or between two “realities” if you prefer). It is being fought in people’s heads, not in the streets.
So, let me try to sell you on this red triangle thing.
The point of a visual protest like this is to force the New Normals to confront a different representation of what they, and we, are. A representation that accurately reflects reality. No, of course we are not in concentration camps — so, please, spare me the irate literalist emails — but we are being segregated, scapegoated, censored, humiliated, and otherwise abused, not for any legitimate public health reasons, but because of our political dissent, because we refuse to mindlessly follow orders and conform to their new official ideology. The New Normals need to be forced to perceive their beliefs and actions in that context, even if only for a few fleeting moments at the mall, or in the grocery store, or wherever.
Think of it this way … as I explained above, they are basically performing a theatrical event, conjuring up a “pandemic reality” with words, actions, and pseudo-medical stage props. What we need to become is that asshole in the audience who destroys the suspension of disbelief and reminds everyone that they’re sitting in a theater, and not in 15th Century Denmark, by loudly taking a call on his phone right in the middle of Hamlet’s soliloquy.
Seriously, we need to become that asshole as conspicuously as possible, as often as possible, to disrupt the show the New Normals are performing … and to remind them what they are actually doing, and who they are actually doing it to.
Look at the white people in the tweet above tormenting that girl who is just trying to go to school like any other student.
The New Normals do not want to perceive themselves that way, as a pack of fanatical, hate-drunk segregationists, but that is what they are, because it is what they are doing … but it is not what most of them are by nature. Yes, some people are congenitally sociopathic, but no one is inherently totalitarian. We are not born fascists or segregationists. We have to be programmed to be that way. That’s what the propaganda is for, not to mention all the other authoritarian conditioning we are subjected to from the time we are children.
Or that’s the gamble, or the leap of faith, behind the inverted red triangle thing. It is a basic non-violent civil-disobedience tactic, which works on people who still have a conscience and haven’t gone full totalitarian yet.
Granted, it might not work this time — we are already at the stage where they are going to imprison restaurant owners for serving the “Unvaccinated” — but it might, and what have we got to lose?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/20/2021 – 00:00 - Democrats Introduce Bill To Rename "Racist" Place Names
Democrats Introduce Bill To Rename “Racist” Place Names
Congressional Democrats introduced the Reconciliation in Place Names Act last Friday to address land areas with racist and bigoted names. More than 1,000 land units and geographic features with racist names, such as “Negro Mountain” along the Allegheny Mountains, stretching 30-mile from Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, to Casselman River in Pennsylvania, are still labeled on US maps.
Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Edward Markey, and Rep. Al Green, along with 25 cosponsors, all Democrats, introduced the bill.
“We need to immediately stop honoring the ugly legacy of racism and bigotry, and that’s why I’m introducing the Reconciliation in Place Names Act with my colleagues,” Warren said in a statement.
“This is about ending egregious expressions of systemic racism and bigotry, and taking a step toward dismantling white supremacy in our economy and society. It’s about building an America that lives up to its highest ideals,” she stated.
In 2015, 1,441 federally recognized places, such as mountains, forests, rivers, streams, and parks, had questionable names.
The Reconciliation in Place Names Act would specifically:
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Create an advisory board composed of individuals with backgrounds in civil rights and race relations, tribal citizens, and organizations to bring a depth of knowledge and experience to the process.
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Solicit proposals from tribal nations, state and local governments, and members of the public, and would provide an opportunity for the public to comment on name change proposals.
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Require the advisory board to make recommendations to the Board on Geographic Names on geographic features to be renamed and to Congress on renaming Federal land units with offensive names.
More than 600 places are using “negro”, including Negro Mountain, Big Negro Creek in Warren, Illinois; Negro Foot, Virginia, and Dead Negro Spring in Oklahoma.
There’s also “Wetback Tank,” a reservoir in Sierra County, New Mexico, which has been criticized for containing the ethnic slur used to describe Mexican Americans.
The bill would create an advisory board of civil rights experts with help from the public to rename the questionable land areas.
The name changes follow a couple of years of “racist” statues of and memorials to Confederate soldiers and generals were ripped down.
The history of yesterday is considered dishonorable today under the new era of “wokeness.” Should these land areas be renamed and statues removed or preserved as mementos of history?
An Irish statesman by the name of Edmund Burke once said: “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 23:40 -
- The Strategic Bomber Race Is On: U.S. B-21 Raider VS Russian PAK DA
The Strategic Bomber Race Is On: U.S. B-21 Raider VS Russian PAK DA
By Southfront,
Strategic bombers are powerful and exclusive weapons that not every air force can get. Nowadays, only Russia and the United States have this type of combat aircraft in their arsenal.
For all intents and purposes, it is a race – who will get the new-and-improved strategic bomber first. For the United States this is the B-21 Raider, under development by Northrop Grumman on top of the B-2 bomber. The B-21 should be a flying-wing- type aircraft with a wingspan of about 42 m.
The main goal for the developers is to minimize the visibility of the aircraft in the radad and thermal ranges. According to the preliminary reports, the B-21 should cost much less than its predecessor, only $ 550 million. However, the U.S. promising weapons are known to easily rise in prize during their development.
Much less is known about the strategic bomber being developed in Russia. Only project name is known: PAK DA, and it is an aircraft also made according to the “flying wing” scheme, taking into account the technologies of reducing its signature during flight. At the moment, the appearance of the aircraft has already been approved and tested for radar signature.
PAK DA will be portable of modern cruise missiles with nuclear and conventional warheads, including high-precision hypersonic long-range missiles. It is hard to compare the two warplanes, currently, as they are both veiled in secrecy. It is likely that in terms of stealth, the B-21 will significantly surpass the PAK DA, since the Americans have a lot of experience in this area.
Another potential advantage of the B-21 is their ability to detect air and ground targets, as the United States has been developing radars with AFAR for much longer.
Additionally, the B-21 power plant, based on the latest technical solutions of the F135 or PW9000 engines, will also be better – the PAK DA power plant is made on the basis of the NK-32 engine developed in the late 1970s. A potential advantage of the Russian vehicle may be the presence of decimeter L-band antennas, which provide detection of low-signature aircraft, which partly compensates for the greater radar signature of the PAK DA compared to the B-21.
A serious drawback of Russian combat aircraft is the lack of small-sized interceptor missiles capable of hitting enemy air-to-air missiles with a direct hit.
Both B-21 and PAK DA should also include the unmanned flight mode and will be able to carry long-range subsonic cruise missiles with nuclear and conventional warheads, as well as promising hypersonic weapons.
Meanwhile, Moscow could have the upper hand in terms of hypersonic weapons.
Thus, the U.S. B-21 has better stealth, and more efficient engines, and the best AFAR radars. This comes in addition to compact anti-missiles, and laser self-defense weapons. In conclusion, it should be considered that the advantage of a particular platform can only be proved by its long-term operation, since technologically sophisticated models risk reducing overall efficiency as they are less convenient to operate.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 23:20 - "Your Safety Is In Jeopardy!" – Baltimore City Hit With Cop And Firefighter Shortage
“Your Safety Is In Jeopardy!” – Baltimore City Hit With Cop And Firefighter Shortage
Baltimore City continues to descend into chaos this summer as labor shortages plague the police department and firehouses.
Residents could be at risk of police not responding to 911 calls or firefighters not arriving to a fire or other emergency. Under new management, newly elected Mayor Brandon Scott fails to keep public emergency services stocked with first responders.
According to Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police’s (FOP) Twitter, the city is experiencing a cop shortage as patrols plunge. The police department is more than 500 cops short (something we outlined not too long ago).
“CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE: Last night, the @baltimorepolice Northern District had 7 officers on the street and the other Districts averaged 12 officers. Ten years ago the average was 20 officers/shift. YOUR SAFETY IS IN JEOPARDY!” Baltimore City FOP tweeted.
Declining patrols and a liberal City Hall have transformed the city into a chaotic mess this summer. Violent crime is surging, and homicides are expected to break above the 300-level for the six consecutive year.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has blamed the surge in violent crimes on Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s halt on prosecuting minor traffic violations, prostitution, drug possession, and other minor offenses during the virus pandemic.
Meanwhile, the official Twitter handle for the Baltimore Firefighters Union IAFF Local 734, reports one of the busiest fire departments in the city, Engine 13, closed on Saturday because of “staffing issues.” The video below shows the firehouse unable to respond to fire down the street.
The busiest engine last year, Engine 13, is closed today due to staffing issues. This is the fire on Division St, where they should have been the first engine to respond. pic.twitter.com/20ECOpomzL
— Baltimore Firefighters IAFF Local 734 (@BCFDL734) July 17, 2021
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Police and fire shortages can’t be good.
Baltimore City citizens and visitors are in danger. @BaltimoreFire and @BaltimorePolice are dangerously short of personnel. Your safety is at risk! #cityincrisis #500copsshort @MayorBMScott https://t.co/9jMH1bN43Y
— Baltimore City FOP (@FOP3) July 18, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The question remains if America’s labor shortage is driving police and firefighter shortages in the city, or people just don’t want to risk their lives for an imploding town. Soon, basic public services could be in jeopardy.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 23:00 - Beijing Vet Dies Of Monkey B Virus, Which Has 70-80% Fatality Rate
Beijing Vet Dies Of Monkey B Virus, Which Has 70-80% Fatality Rate
Authored by Nicole Hao via The Epoch Times,
On July 16, China reported the first Monkey B Virus death in its history. The individual, identified as a veterinarian in Beijing, was infected by monkeys in March and passed away on May 27.
Monkey B virus (BV), also known as Herpes B virus, has a fatality rate of 70 to 80 percent, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s English journal the “China CDC Weekly” cited in its July 17 report. The report said that the deceased’s close contacts were tested in April and were free of the virus.
According to the U.S. CDC, humans typically get infected with BV when bitten or scratched by an infected macaque monkey, or have contact with a macaque’s eyes, nose, or mouth. The CDC highlighted that there has only been one case of BV human-to-human transmission documented in history.
It’s unclear which type of monkey the victim was in contact with when he contracted the virus.
First Death in China
The deceased veterinary was 53 years old. He worked for a non-human primate breeding and experimental institution in Beijing.
On March 4 and 6, the veterinarian dissected two dead monkeys. One month after the dissections, the veterinarian “experienced nausea and vomiting followed by fever with neurological symptoms,” according to the report.
Because doctors in Beijing didn’t have any experience with BV infections, the veterinarian was asked to visit several hospitals for treatment, but was not diagnosed until April 17 when doctors collected his cerebrospinal fluid and that of his two co-workers to test for monkey-related viruses.
The results showed that the veterinarian was infected with BV.
A group of scientists from China CDC and Capital Medical University concluded in their report: “This implied that BV in monkeys might pose a potential zoonotic threat to the occupational workers.”
Medical workers deliver a patient to the fever clinic at a hospital in Beijing, China, on Jan. 13, 2021. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)
According to the U.S. CDC, BV infections start with flu-like symptoms, which include fever and chills, muscle aches, fatigue, and headaches. The symptoms typically start within one month after exposure to a BV infected monkey.
The first human infection was identified in 1932, and since then, only 50 cases of transmission to humans have been reported. Of those, most had come into contact with a monkey, and 21 died.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 22:40 - Tokyo Olympics Face Widespread Opposition
Tokyo Olympics Face Widespread Opposition
With the Tokyo Olympics just four days away, now would normally be the time for anticipation to build, for the Olympic spark to spread from the host country all over the world and for athletes to wrap up years of preparation.
This year though, as Statista’s Felix Richer notes, with COVID-19 still lurking, things are sadly different.
The 2020 Summer Olympics, postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic, are widely met with a strange mix of indifference and dismissal. Amid fears of rising case numbers and aggressive virus variants, the Japanese people are firmly against the Tokyo Games, while the global public has trouble getting excited for yet another crowdless event, seemingly prioritizing commercial interests over public health concerns.
According to a recent Ipsos survey, an average of 57 percent of respondents across the 28 countries in which the poll was conducted are opposed to holding the games this year, with Japanese opposition particularly strong at 78 percent.
You will find more infographics at Statista
With athletes pulling out of the Olympics due to COVID infections and others reportedly testing positive after arriving at the Olympic Village, doubts over the safety of the megaevent continue to mount.
According to a Asahi Shimbun poll, 68 percent of Japanese respondents doubt that the Games can be held “safe and secure”, a promise repeatedly made by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and the IOC.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 22:20 - Evergrande Stock Sinks Below Liquidation Level
Evergrande Stock Sinks Below Liquidation Level
By Sofia Horta e Costa, Bloomberg reporter and macro commentator
The steepening rout in China Evergrande’s shares have sent them far below the value of its assets, showing how pessimistic investors are about the developer’s ability to generate cash.
Evergrande shares trade at just 62% of book value following Monday’s plunge, the lowest-ever valuation in data compiled by Bloomberg going back to its IPO in 2009. The wide deviation from its market value suggests shareholders are pricing in a significant decline in the assets’ earnings power. In terms of dollar amounts, its shares have lost $15 billion in value since this year’s January high.
The collapse in the valuation of the shares is a problem for a heavily indebted company with narrowing options for raising funds. It’s not just its own shares: subsidiary Evergrande Property Services has lost about $17 billion in value since its February high, while Evergrande New Energy Vehicle is down more than $60 billion in the period. Evergrande controls more than 60% of both firms. The value of Hengten Networks — a Hong Kong-listed internet services provider in which Evergrande has a 38% stake — has dropped about $15 billion.
The company’s access to freely available cash is also shrinking. After the shares plunged 16% on Monday following the freezing of a bank deposit, a city in Hunan province halted sales at two of the company’s residential projects, alleging the developer didn’t properly handle funds. The suspension will last until Oct. 13 and Evergrande can’t use funds currently deposited in supervised bank accounts, according to a statement.
Evergrande will discuss plans for a special dividend to its shareholders at a board meeting on July 27. The developer is unlikely to fund such a plan with cash, according to CCB International analysts. They predict the most likely outcome would involve a share distribution in one of its units, namely Evergrande New Energy Vehicle, but the value of those shares is fast evaporating.
The company’s bonds are also pricing in a bleak outcome for the developer. Evergrande’s 8.75% dollar bond due 2025 trades at 58.5 cents, Bloomberg-compiled prices show. That’s down from 82.9 cents at the beginning of the year. The company hasn’t sold a single dollar bond in more than 17 months.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 22:00 - Half Million Chinese Sign Letter Demanding WHO Probe US Fort Detrick Lab
Half Million Chinese Sign Letter Demanding WHO Probe US Fort Detrick Lab
Chinese state-run media Global Times attempts to flip the narrative that maybe COVID-19 originated from a US Lab.
Chinese Communist Party’s top mouthpiece, Global Times, says more than half a million Chinese citizens have endorsed a letter to request the World Health Organization (WHO) to investigate a top-secret biosafety level 4 lab in Maryland.
The move to divert attention from the Wuhan Institute of Virology comes as the Chinese media outlet points out that a group of Chinese netizens drafted a letter to the WHO to investigate the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The letter went on to say Fort Detrick lab is known to store some of the most deadly and infectious viruses, including Ebola, novel coronavirus, SARS, MERS, smallpox, among others. It added if any of these dangerous diseases were leaked or accidentally escaped, they could pose a severe risk to the international community.
“But this lab has a notorious record on lab security. There have been scandals of anthrax bacterium from the lab being stolen, causing poisoning to many and even death. There has been a leakage incident in the lab in the autumn of 2019 right before the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, however, detailed information had been withheld by the US under excuses of national security,” the letter said.
Global Times continues to twist the narrative that perhaps the novel coronavirus could be linked to the Maryland lab.
The letter noted that China has allowed Western virologists and US media to visit the Wuhan lab, while the US has not followed suit with Fort Detrick nor released data with “countries including China that are independent from US geopolitical influence.”
“What is more perplexing is that, when China allowed virologists from Western countries and even US mainstream media to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the US has not opened the Fort Detrick lab, let alone shared the original data with countries including China that are independent from US geopolitical influence,” it added.
We’ve noted before the US funded research at the Wuhan lab for “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.”
The game at play between superpowers is to control the narrative of COVID’s origins. Notice how there’s no mention of Wuhan South China Seafood Wholesale Market anymore as top Biden administration officials push the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan lab.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 21:40 - The Panic Pandemic
The Panic Pandemic
Authored by John Tierney via City-Journal.com,
Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus…
The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans—typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions.
Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.
If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.
One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.
The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so—unless we begin to understand what went wrong.
The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse.
The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that—unless drastic measures were taken—intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.
This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science.” What had originally been a limited lockdown—“15 days to slow the spread”—became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?
The most prominent early critic was John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, who published an essay for STAT headlined “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.” While a short-term lockdown made sense, he argued, an extended lockdown could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk. The article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.
The fury intensified in April 2020, when Ioannidis followed his own advice by joining with Jay Bhattacharya and other colleagues from Stanford to gauge the spread of Covid in the surrounding area, Santa Clara County. After testing for Covid antibodies in the blood of several thousand volunteers, they estimated that the fatality rate among the infected in the county was about 0.2 percent, twice as high as for the flu but considerably lower than the assumptions of public-health officials and computer modelers. The researchers acknowledged that the fatality rate could be substantially higher in other places where the virus spread extensively in nursing homes (which hadn’t yet occurred in the Santa Clara area). But merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets.
Other scientists lambasted the researchers and claimed that methodological weaknesses in the study made the results meaningless. A statistician at Columbia wrote that the researchers “owe us all an apology.” A biologist at the University of North Carolina said that the study was “horrible science.” A Rutgers chemist called Ioannidis a “mediocrity” who “cannot even formulate a simulacrum of a coherent, rational argument.” A year later, Ioannidis still marvels at the attacks on the study (which was eventually published in a leading epidemiology journal). “Scientists whom I respect started acting like warriors who had to subvert the enemy,” he says. “Every paper I’ve written has errors—I’m a scientist, not the pope—but the main conclusions of this one were correct and have withstood the criticism.”
Mainstream journalists piled on with hit pieces quoting critics and accusing the researchers of endangering lives by questioning lockdowns. The Nation called the research a “black mark” for Stanford. The cheapest shots came from BuzzFeed, which devoted thousands of words to a series of trivial objections and baseless accusations. The article that got the most attention was BuzzFeed’s breathless revelation that an airline executive opposed to lockdowns had contributed $5,000—yes, five thousand dollars!—to an anonymized fund at Stanford that had helped finance the Santa Clara fieldwork.
The notion that a team of prominent academics, who were not paid for their work in the study, would risk their reputations by skewing results for the sake of a $5,000 donation was absurd on its face—and even more ludicrous, given that Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, and the lead investigator, Eran Bendavid, said that they weren’t even aware of the donation while conducting the study. But Stanford University was so cowed by the online uproar that it subjected the researchers to a two-month fact-finding inquiry by an outside legal firm. The inquiry found no evidence of conflict of interest, but the smear campaign succeeded in sending a clear message to scientists everywhere: Don’t question the lockdown narrative.
In a brief interlude of journalistic competence, two veteran science writers, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, published an article in Scientific American decrying the politicization of Covid research. They defended the integrity and methodology of the Stanford researchers, noting that some subsequent studies had found similar rates of fatality among the infected. (In his latest review of the literature, Ioannidis now estimates that the average fatality rate in Europe and the Americas is 0.3 to 0.4 percent and about 0.2 percent among people not living in institutions.) Lenzer and Brownlee lamented that the unjust criticism and ad hominem vitriol had suppressed a legitimate debate by intimidating the scientific community. Their editors then proceeded to prove their point. Responding to more online fury, Scientific American repented by publishing an editor’s note that essentially repudiated its own article. The editors printed BuzzFeed’s accusations as the final word on the matter, refusing to publish a rebuttal from the article’s authors or a supporting letter from Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School. Scientific American, long the most venerable publication in its field, now bowed to the scientific authority of BuzzFeed.
Editors of research journals fell into line, too. When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against Covid, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as “as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.” After being rejected by The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.
Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than ten journals and finally gave up—the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he said. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly. “Just as in war,” Kulldorff wrote, “we must exploit the characteristics of the enemy in order to defeat it with the minimum number of casualties. Since Covid-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.” It was a tragically accurate prophecy from one of the leading experts on infectious disease, but Kulldorff couldn’t find a scientific journal or media outlet to accept the article, so he ended up posting it on his own LinkedIn page. “There’s always a certain amount of herd thinking in science,” Kulldorff says, “but I’ve never seen it reach this level. Most of the epidemiologists and other scientists I’ve spoken to in private are against lockdowns, but they’re afraid to speak up.”
To break the silence, Kulldorff joined with Stanford’s Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to issue a plea for “focused protection,” called the Great Barrington Declaration. They urged officials to divert more resources to shield the elderly, such as doing more tests of the staff at nursing homes and hospitals, while reopening business and schools for younger people, which would ultimately protect the vulnerable as herd immunity grew among the low-risk population.
They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare” from “Covid deniers” and “agents of misinformation.” Google initially shadow-banned it so that the first page of search results for “Great Barrington Declaration” showed only criticism of it (like an article calling it “the work of a climate denial network”) but not the declaration itself. Facebook shut down the scientists’ page for a week for violating unspecified “community standards.”
The most reviled heretic was Scott Atlas, a medical doctor and health-policy analyst at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He, too, urged focused protection on nursing homes and calculated that the medical, social, and economic disruptions of the lockdowns would cost more years of life than the coronavirus. When he joined the White House coronavirus task force, Bill Gates derided him as “this Stanford guy with no background” promoting “crackpot theories.” Nearly 100 members of Stanford’s faculty signed a letter denouncing his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,” and an editorial in the Stanford Daily urged the university to sever its ties to Hoover.
The Stanford faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn Atlas’s actions as “anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.” Several professors from Stanford’s medical school demanded further punishment in a JAMA article, “When Physicians Engage in Practices That Threaten the Nation’s Health.” The article, which misrepresented Atlas’s views as well as the evidence on the efficacy of lockdowns, urged professional medical societies and medical-licensing boards to take action against Atlas on the grounds that it was “ethically inappropriate for physicians to publicly recommend behaviors or interventions that are not scientifically well grounded.”
But if it was unethical to recommend “interventions that are not scientifically well grounded,” how could anyone condone the lockdowns? “It was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it,” Bhattacharya says. “The immediate results have been disastrous, especially for the poor, and the long-term effect will be to fundamentally undermine trust in public health and science.” The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu. Yet Fauci dismissed the focused-protection strategy as “total nonsense” to “anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases,” and his verdict became “the science” to leaders in America and elsewhere.
Fortunately, a few leaders followed the science in a different way. Instead of blindly trusting Fauci, they listened to his critics and adopted the focused-protection strategy—most notably, in Florida. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, began to doubt the public-health establishment early in the pandemic, when computer models projected that Covid patients would greatly outnumber hospital beds in many states. Governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were so alarmed and so determined to free up hospital beds that they directed nursing homes and other facilities to admit or readmit Covid patients—with deadly results.
But DeSantis was skeptical of the hospital projections—for good reason, as no state actually ran out of beds—and more worried about the risk of Covid spreading in nursing homes. He forbade long-term-care centers to admit anyone infected with Covid and ordered frequent testing of the staff at senior-care centers. After locking down last spring, he reopened businesses, schools, and restaurants early, rejected mask mandates, and ignored protests from the press and the state’s Democratic leaders. Fauci warned that Florida was “asking for trouble,” but DeSantis went on seeking and heeding advice from Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists, who were astonished to speak with a politician already familiar with just about every study they mentioned to him.
“DeSantis was an incredible outlier,” Atlas says. “He dug up the data and read the scientific papers and analyzed it all himself. In our discussions, he’d bounce ideas off me, but he was already on top of the details of everything. He always had the perspective to see the larger harms of lockdowns and the need to concentrate testing and other resources on the elderly. And he has been proven correct.”
If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy. The state effectively served as the control group in a natural experiment, and no medical treatment with dangerous side effects would be approved if the control group fared no differently from the treatment group. But the outcome of this experiment was even more damning.
Florida’s mortality rate from Covid is lower than the national average among those over 65 and also among younger people, so that the state’s age-adjusted Covid mortality rate is lower than that of all but ten other states. And by the most important measure, the overall rate of “excess mortality” (the number of deaths above normal), Florida has also done better than the national average. Its rate of excess mortality is significantly lower than that of the most restrictive state, California, particularly among younger adults, many of whom died not from Covid but from causes related to the lockdowns: cancer screenings and treatments were delayed, and there were sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses and from heart attacks not treated promptly.
Chart by Jamie Meggas
If the treatment group in a clinical trial were dying off faster than the control group, an ethical researcher would halt the experiment. But the lockdown proponents were undeterred by the numbers in Florida, or by similar results elsewhere, including a comparable natural experiment involving European countries with the least restrictive policies. Sweden, Finland, and Norway rejected mask mandates and extended lockdowns, and they have each suffered significantly less excess mortality than most other European countries during the pandemic.
A nationwide analysis in Sweden showed that keeping schools open throughout the pandemic, without masks or social distancing, had little effect on the spread of Covid, but school closures and mask mandates for students continued elsewhere. Another Swedish researcher, Jonas Ludvigsson, reported that not a single schoolchild in the country died from Covid in Sweden and that their teachers’ risk of serious illness was lower than for the rest of the workforce—but these findings provoked so many online attacks and threats that Ludvigsson decided to stop researching or discussing Covid.
Social-media platforms continued censoring scientists and journalists who questioned lockdowns and mask mandates. YouTube removed a video discussion between DeSantis and the Great Barrington scientists, on the grounds that it “contradicts the consensus” on the efficacy of masks, and also took down the Hoover Institution’s interview with Atlas. Twitter locked out Atlas and Kulldorff for scientifically accurate challenges to mask orthodoxy. A peer-reviewed German study reporting harms to children from mask-wearing was suppressed on Facebook (which labeled my City Journal article “Partly False” because it cited the study) and also at ResearchGate, one of the most widely used websites for scientists to post their papers. ResearchGate refused to explain the censorship to the German scientists, telling them only that the paper was removed from the website in response to “reports from the community about the subject-matter.”
The social-media censors and scientific establishment, aided by the Chinese government, succeeded for a year in suppressing the lab-leak theory, depriving vaccine developers of potentially valuable insights into the virus’s evolution. It’s understandable, if deplorable, that the researchers and officials involved in supporting the Wuhan lab research would cover up the possibility that they’d unleashed a Frankenstein on the world. What’s harder to explain is why journalists and the rest of the scientific community so eagerly bought that story, along with the rest of the Covid narrative.
Why the elite panic? Why did so many go so wrong for so long? When journalists and scientists finally faced up to their mistake in ruling out the lab-leak theory, they blamed their favorite villain: Donald Trump. He had espoused the theory, so they assumed it must be wrong. And since he disagreed at times with Fauci about the danger of the virus and the need for lockdowns, then Fauci must be right, and this was such a deadly plague that the norms of journalism and science must be suspended. Millions would die unless Fauci was obeyed and dissenters were silenced.
But neither the plague nor Trump explains the panic. Yes, the virus was deadly, and Trump’s erratic pronouncements contributed to the confusion and partisanship, but the panic was due to two preexisting pathologies that afflicted other countries, too. The first is what I have called the Crisis Crisis, the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians. It’s a longstanding problem—humanity was supposedly doomed in the last century by the “population crisis” and the “energy crisis”—that has dramatically worsened with the cable and digital competition for ratings, clicks, and retweets. To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics, and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding, and power during a crisis.
Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized. Early in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, the New York Times reported the terrifying possibility that the virus could spread to children through “routine close contact”—quoting from a study by Anthony Fauci. Life magazine wildly exaggerated the number of infections in a cover story, headlined “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS.” It cited a study by Robert Redfield, the future leader of the CDC during the Covid pandemic, predicting that AIDS would soon spread as rapidly among heterosexuals as among homosexuals. Both scientists were absolutely wrong, of course, but the false alarms didn’t harm their careers or their credibility.
Journalists and politicians extend professional courtesy to fellow crisis-mongers by ignoring their mistakes, such as the previous predictions by Neil Ferguson. His team at Imperial College projected up to 65,000 deaths in the United Kingdom from swine flu and 200 million deaths worldwide from bird flu. The death toll each time was in the hundreds, but never mind: when Ferguson’s team projected millions of American deaths from Covid, that was considered reason enough to follow its recommendation for extended lockdowns. And when the modelers’ assumption about the fatality rate proved too high, that mistake was ignored, too.
Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded. For Americans under 70, the probability of surviving a Covid infection was about 99.9 percent, but fear of the virus was higher among the young than among the elderly, and polls showed that people of all ages vastly overestimated the risk of being hospitalized or dying.
The second pathology underlying the elite’s Covid panic is the politicization of research—what I have termed the Left’s war on science, another long-standing problem that has gotten much worse. Just as the progressives a century ago yearned for a nation directed by “expert social engineers”—scientific high priests unconstrained by voters and public opinion—today’s progressives want sweeping new powers for politicians and bureaucrats who “believe in science,” meaning that they use the Left’s version of science to justify their edicts. Now that so many elite institutions are political monocultures, progressives have more power than ever to enforce groupthink and suppress debate. Well before the pandemic, they had mastered the tactics for demonizing and silencing scientists whose findings challenged progressive orthodoxy on issues such as IQ, sex differences, race, family structure, transgenderism, and climate change.
And then along came Covid—“God’s gift to the Left,” in Jane Fonda’s words. Exaggerating the danger and deflecting blame from China to Trump offered not only short-term political benefits, damaging his reelection prospects, but also an extraordinary opportunity to empower social engineers in Washington and state capitals. Early in the pandemic, Fauci expressed doubt that it was politically possible to lock down American cities, but he underestimated the effectiveness of the crisis industry’s scaremongering. Americans were so frightened that they surrendered their freedoms to work, study, worship, dine, play, socialize, or even leave their homes. Progressives celebrated this “paradigm shift,” calling it a “blueprint” for dealing with climate change.
This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about. Science is a process of discovery and debate, not a faith to profess or a dogma to live by. It provides a description of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline do not have the knowledge or perspective to guide society. They’re biased by their own narrow focus and self-interest. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the physician who allied with him against Atlas on the White House task force, had to answer for the daily Covid death toll—that ever-present chyron at the bottom of the television screen—so they focused on one disease instead of the collateral damage of their panic-driven policies.
“The Fauci-Birx lockdowns were a sinful, unconscionable, heinous mistake, and they will never admit they were wrong,” Atlas says. Neither will the journalists and politicians who panicked along with them. They’re still portraying lockdowns as not just a success but also a precedent—proof that Americans can sacrifice for the common good when directed by wise scientists and benevolent autocrats. But the sacrifice did far more harm than good, and the burden was not shared equally. The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable in America and the poorest countries of the world. Students from disadvantaged families suffered the most from school closures, and children everywhere spent a year wearing masks solely to assuage the neurotic fears of adults. The less educated lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer as they kept working at home on their laptops. Silicon Valley (and its censors) prospered from lockdowns that bankrupted local businesses.
Luminaries united on Zoom and YouTube to assure the public that “we’re all in this together.” But we weren’t. When the panic infected the nation’s elite—the modern gentry who profess such concern for the downtrodden—it turned out that they weren’t so different from aristocrats of the past. They were in it for themselves.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 21:20 - Iraq's PM To Tell Biden In White House Visit: 'US Combat Troops Have Got To Go'
Iraq’s PM To Tell Biden In White House Visit: ‘US Combat Troops Have Got To Go’
Next week on July 26 President Joe Biden is expected to host Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi at the White House in order to “highlight the strategic partnership between the United States in Iraq,” according to a US statement.
But the Iraqi side is now saying that American combat troops have got to go. Al-Kadhemi emphasized in a new statement at the start of this week: “The visit will be to set out this relationship, and to put an end to the presence of combat forces, because the Iraqi army can now fight for itself on behalf of Iraqis and the world against terrorist groups in Iraq. There is no need for combat troops.”
Then Senator Joe Biden in Iraq in 2007, Getty Images He did say that US training and intelligence assistance, along with air power when requested would continue to aid the anti-ISIS and counterterror mission in the country.
Since Trump’s final year in office, the presence of US combat forces in Iraq has been scaled down little by little, with some bases even being handed over to Iraq’s army; however, Iraq’s parliament all the way back in January 2020 passed a resolution demanding a full and final exit of all US troops. This was prompted by the assassination that month of IRGC Quds chief Qassem Soleimani and founder of Iraq’s powerful Kataib Hezbollah militia, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
This was followed by large-scale protests across major Iraqi cities demanding that foreign troops leave. Since then there’s also been tit-for-tat attacks between pro-Iranian Iraq groups and American forces. Recently Biden has struck ‘Iran-backed’ targets inside eastern Syria near the Iraq border.
Days ago US Mideast envoy Brett McGurk reportedly discussed a full US withdrawal with Kadhemi in Baghdad, in order to lay some of the groundwork for the later July meeting at the White House. According to AFP:
Some 3,500 foreign troops are still on Iraqi territory, including 2,500 Americans, who have been posted to help fight the Islamic State group since 2014.
In Washington, Kadhemi is expected to push for a concrete timetable of American troop withdrawal. The implementation of their departure could take years.
Tit-for-tat strikes against local militias in Syria and Iraq are a waste of U.S. resources, and they risk wider conflict for no core U.S. interest.
ISIS’s territorial caliphate has been destroyed, and U.S. troops should exit both Syria and Iraq. https://t.co/isa4nDDIrj
— Defense Priorities (@defpriorities) July 19, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
But given such a relatively small presence of about 2,500 troops, one wonders why a draw down would “take years”.
No doubt a stalled US exit has much more to do with ensuring the ‘security vacuum’ isn’t immediately filled by Iran. However, it’s too little, too late given Iranian Shia ascendancy in Baghdad happened the moment the Bush administration toppled Saddam Hussein.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 21:00 - How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse
How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.
The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.
Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.
The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy’s connections run. Put another way, the economy’s as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.
One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels. It’s such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.
The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.
Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources. We see this everywhere in the global economy: a handful of plants and companies (sometimes a single source of essential components) process or manufacture essential components in much larger systems.
This is how you end up with thousands of newly manufactured vehicles parked in lots awaiting one critical part that is in short supply.
Another key weakness is the entire system’s reliance on debt, leverage and speculation. Few seem to understand that physical production and delivery systems can grind to a halt for financial reasons–for example, lines of credit being pulled, a counterparty to some arcane commodity swap goes under, taking the presumably solvent corporation down with it, and so on.
The more debt that’s been piled up, the greater the instability of the entire system. Risk always appears low until the system destabilizes, and then all the hedges fail and risk breaks out, flooding through the entire financial system.
Leverage is great fun on the way up, as it magnifies gains. Since the Federal Reserve implicitly guarantees that “buy the dip” will generate massive gains, why not ramp up leverage ten-fold to maximize those Fed-guaranteed gains?
Leverage is less fun on the way down. When the underlying collateral has shrunk to 20% of the leveraged bets being made, a 21% decline in the asset wipes out all the collateral holding up the palace of leveraged debt.
The Fed can print money but it can’t create collateral, nor can it make insolvent entities solvent. All the Fed can do is increase the debt and leverage, which is not the solution, it’s the problem.
Speculation is also inherently unstable, as the euphoric herd, once startled, turns in panic and stampeded in fear. Markets which appeared liquid–i.e., sellers could count on someone buying as many millions of shares as they desired to sell–become illiquid, as buyers vanish like mist in Death Valley. With buyers gone, prices plummet to levels the herd reckoned “impossible” just days before.
The Fed’s entire strategy in the 21st century has been to inflate asset bubbles that generate the illusion of wealth–the so-called wealth effect which is presumed to inspire voracious borrowing and spending.
Unfortunately for the Fed, most of the gains flowed to the top 0.1%, and an economy based on a handful of billionaires buying super-yachts and spaceships is a line of dominoes awaiting the inevitable “accident.” So there are two systemic problems with relying on asset bubbles to generate “wealth”: 1) since 90% of the assets are owned by a thin slice of the populace, bubbles increase destabilizing inequality, and 2) bubbles are intrinsically unstable. So the U.S. economy, dependent on the Fed for the “juice” of monetary stimulus, is now dependent on incredibly unstable bubbles in assets, debt and leverage, bubbles which have generated extremes of wealth/income inequality that are destabilizing the social and political orders.
As the three charts below illustrate, the fragility and instability are well hidden until it’s too late: bubbles, debt, leverage, budgets and revenues can only click higher because the system breaks down if there is any sustained decline (the rising wedge model of breakdown). Once the subsystems fail, there’s no putting the eggshell back together.
The second chart depicts how buffers thin beneath the surface, masking the systemic fragility. The loss of redundancy, the decay of maintenance, the loss of experienced workers–all of these are hidden from public view until the system breaks down.
The third chart tracks the S-curve of expansion, confidence, complacency, delusion and collapse followed by human systems, from nations to empires to corporations: as the buffers thin and the rising wedge reaches an apex of vulnerability, the leadership evinces a delusional confidence in the permanence and stability of increasingly fragile, unstable systems.
Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.
This is how breakdowns in apparently stable subsystems triggers the fall of dominoes throughout the larger system, leading to a collapse that was widely viewed as “impossible.” Such is the power of complacency and delusion.
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Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 20:40 - White House Transfers Its First Gitmo Detainee To Morocco In Effort To Shut Down Facility
White House Transfers Its First Gitmo Detainee To Morocco In Effort To Shut Down Facility
On Monday the Biden White House announced its first transfer of a detainee from Guantanamo Bay as part of previously reported plans to “quietly” pursue a permanent closure of the high secure military prison which since 9/11 has controversially housed ‘terror masterminds’ as well as suspects rounded up in the wake of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
The Hill identified 56-year old Abdul Latif Nasir as the detainee who has been repatriated to Morocco after in 2016 the Periodic Review Board (PRB) deemed that his detention “no longer remained necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States.”
Abdul Latif Nasir Despite this 2016 judgement, no action was taken to move Nasir out of Gitmo either during Obama’s final year in office, or Trump’s four years. The number of detainees at Gitmo is now at 39. Military documents alleged that Nasir had “traveled to Afghanistan for jihad” and engaged in combat actions against US troops. Trump had previously accused the Obama administration of “returning terrorists to the battlefield” for efforts to send inmates back to their countries of origin.
“The United States is also extremely grateful for the Kingdom’s willingness to support ongoing U.S. efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility,” the Pentagon said in reference to Morocco. Presumably other repatriations to foreign countries are currently being negotiated.
Of those 39, a whopping 28 have yet to be charged with war crimes or specific criminal or terroristic acts despite being there for two decades. The Bush administration had argued that ‘War on Terror’ captives were not subject to the Geneva conventions and so could be held indefinitely without trial.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price issued the following statement confirming prior reporting that Biden has reprioritized shutting down Gitmo for good: The president is “dedicated to following a deliberate and thorough process focused on responsibly reducing the detainee population of the Guantanamo facility while also safeguarding the security of the United States and its allies,” Price said.
Inside Gitmo, Getty Images Biden’s approach will reportedly be centered on a plan to transfer most of the remaining 39 detainees to foreign countries for these host countries to deal with them legally. This would not, however, include the most infamous prisoner at Gitmo Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the group dubbed the “9/11 five” – believed to be directly behind the 9/11 terror attacks which killed about 3,000 Americans.
The “five” were supposed to stand trial in January 2021 but controversy over transferring them to the continental United States has seen any such request blocked by Congress. This also after Trump previously signed an executive order to keep Gitmo open.
A top former Biden administration official privy to the ongoing discussions said in June of the Biden White House and its “quiet” approach to closing Gitmo: “They don’t want it to become a dominant issue that blows up,” and further “They don’t want it to become a lightning rod. They want it to be methodical, orderly.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 20:20 - "It's Not A Conspiracy"
“It’s Not A Conspiracy”
Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,
Philosophers and analysts use a principle called Occam’s Razor (sometimes Ockham’s Razor) to solve difficult problems. It says that when you are confronted with two possible solutions to a problem, one complicated and one simple, it’s usually better to select the simple solution.
There’s always some attraction to the complicated solution because humans like intrigue and plot twists. But statistically, the simple solution is more likely to be correct and therefore the one that analysts should prefer unless contrary evidence presents. This approach is useful in dealing with conspiracy theories.
Yes, real conspiracies exist (such as the plot to assassinate JFK), and analysts must be alert to the possibility. But most so-called conspiracies have much simpler explanations that are more likely to be correct.
One of the most potent drivers of coordinated political action is not a deep, dark conspiracy. It’s usually just the result of like-minded individuals cooperating to achieve the same goal.
It’s Groupthink, Not Conspiracy
If the political players all think alike and agree on goals, you don’t need a conspiracy. Just let them go to work every day and communicate with each other, and you’ll get the coordinated result without the inevitable twists and turns of a conspiracy.
That’s a good thing to bear in mind when considering the current administration. 23, top Biden administration officials all worked at the same consulting firm called WestExec Advisors. These officials include Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
For those who may be unfamiliar, “WestExec” is a reference to West Executive Avenue, a non-public road that runs between the West Wing of the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
The West Wing is not that large and only has a few choice offices plus the Situation Room, the Roosevelt Room (for larger meetings) and the Cabinet Room, which is smaller. Most officials who say they “work in the White House” actually work in the Eisenhower Building, which means they walk across West Executive Avenue when they have meetings with top Biden officials.
The WestExec Advisors name is a play on that kind of insider status of the long list of former WestExec principals who are now running the country. (Don’t look to Biden as the source of power; he’s not mentally competent and does what the WestExec crowd or the rest of the Biden family tell him to do).
A Threat to National Security
So, with all of this power emerging from one firm, does that mean there’s a conspiracy among the alums to control the world?
Not really. But, it points to a bigger problem, which is the lack of cognitive diversity. The WestExec crowd all went to top schools, had top jobs in previous administrations, exhibit high IQs, and boast lots of credentials.
If you look at their resumes, you’ll see they all went to the same schools, had the same professors and pursued the same career paths. With few exceptions, it’s all Harvard, Yale and Columbia with a small dose of Stanford or Chicago for good measure.
They all went to law school or got PhDs and worked for the same small set of law firms or consulting firms. Then they all worked in a small set of government agencies, including the State Department, National Security Council or the Intelligence Community.
They all think alike. That’s an acute weakness because if they all look at things the same way, they will all miss the real dangers coming that don’t fit into their mental molds. Lack of cognitive diversity is a fatal weakness.
As a leader, you should always be willing to lower the average IQ if it means you can increase the range of viewpoints. At least someone might point out it’s raining to a group that’s too buried in briefing books to look out the window. This uniform mindset is itself a danger to national security. Sooner than later, a threat will arise that none of them will see coming.
On the Verge of the Most Destructive War Since WWII?
And there’s no shortage of threats in the world. Perhaps the most pressing right now is China’s aggressive posturing in East Asia. It’s not just China and the U.S.
The world’s three largest economies — the U.S., China and Japan — may be squaring off for the most destructive and costly war since the end of World War II.
The main protagonists will be China and the U.S. The cause of war will be a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which may be coming much sooner than the world expects.
China would start the war with an invasion across the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. would be obliged to come to the defense of Taiwan and take measures to disable the Chinese fleet and its air support. But, Japan is no bystander.
A glimpse at a map shows that if Taiwan were in Communist China’s hands, Japan’s own sea lanes would be threatened, including its access to imported oil. Japan has its own island disputes with China. If China were to capture Taiwan, Japan’s islands in the East China Sea would likely be the next to fall.
The U.S. could fall back to a line of islands, including Guam, Hawaii and the Aleutians, but no fallback is possible for Japan. If China seizes Taiwan and the U.S. falls back, Japan would be under the thumb of China, and they know it.
Of course, a fallback by the U.S. would be an enormous blow to U.S. credibility, as well as its economic power. That’s why an alliance of the U.S. and Japan against China to defend Taiwan (along with Taiwan’s own formidable defense capability) is the most likely response to a Chinese amphibious assault.
“Wolf Warrior” Diplomacy
The question for the world is whether China will get the message and refrain from attacking Taiwan. Unfortunately, signs point in the opposite direction. China has left its non-threatening style of diplomacy in the past.
Today, China pursues “Wolf Warrior diplomacy,” named after a popular Chinese movie that features aggressive Navy SEAL-style tactics as practiced by Peoples’ Liberation Army commandos.
China has come out of its shell and seeks regional hegemony to be followed by global hegemony. It is aggressively pushing on its neighbors in India, Myanmar, and the six nations that surround the South China Sea. Taiwan is the prize, and China is preparing to seize it.
This attack will be Xi Jinping’s legacy and his attempt to rival the reputation of Mao Zedong. Will Team Biden be able to see it coming?
U.S. investors should not take Chinese restraint for granted. Allocations to cash, gold and U.S. Treasury notes will preserve wealth when the worst happens.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 20:00 - Watch: Two Dams In China's Inner Mongolia Collapse After Heavy Rain
Watch: Two Dams In China’s Inner Mongolia Collapse After Heavy Rain
Two dams collapsed in China’s northwestern region of Inner Mongolia after heavy rains, Reuters reports, citing a statement from the water ministry on Monday.
Both dams were located in the Inner Mongolian city of Hulunbuir and collapsed on Sunday. There were more than 1.6 trillion cubic feet of water capacity between both dams.
On July 18, the dams on the open spillway of Yong’an Reservoir and Xinfa Reservoir in the Daur Autonomous Banner of Morin Dawa, were breached and collapsed as the water level of the Nuomin River continued to rise because of heavy rain, according to People’s Daily.
The dam collapse reportedly affected 16,660 people, flooded 325,622 mu (21708.1 hectares) of farmland, and destroyed 22 bridges, 124 culverts, and 15.6 kilometers of highways.
At 8 pm on Sunday, the national flood control administration issued a third-level emergency response and sent a working group to the scene to guide and assist local emergency management.
Local citizens were evacuated to safe places before the collapse, and no casualties have been reported as of press time. –Global Times
Footage posted on social media shows the collapse and subsequent flooding downstream.
Two dams in northern China collapsed. The waters of the corresponding reservoirs are flooding nearby towns.
Video shows water overtopping one of the dams and minutes later the entire dam is washed away. The damage is catastrophic.
July 18, 2021
Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia pic.twitter.com/ST5hnLZ5zy— Things China Doesn’t Want You To Know (@TruthAbtChina) July 19, 2021
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Two dams in Hulun Buir City in North China’s Inner Mongolia were reported to have collapsed on Sunday because of heavy rain since Saturday. No injuries have been reported.https://t.co/jI6pUO5k6F pic.twitter.com/CLEQ6fN0L5
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) July 19, 2021
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The collapse of the dams highlights the safety risks posed by aging infrastructure during the summer flood season.
During this time last year, the Three Gorges Dam was suspected to be on the edge of failure after water levels at the world’s largest dam were at extreme levels.
Severe weather has been seen worldwide, with floods in Europe and Asia and heatwaves in North America.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 19:40 - Critical Race Enthusiasts Should Learn The Lesson Of "Defund The Police"
Critical Race Enthusiasts Should Learn The Lesson Of “Defund The Police”
By Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, via Real Clear Policy,
A year ago, “defund the police” activists were having quite a time. Outlets like CNN and Vox were publishing fawning profiles. Social media sensations like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar were leading the parade. Cities like Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Austin even approved partial defundings. It was a juggernaut.
Now? A tough-on-crime former cop just won the Democratic mayoral nomination in Bill de Blasio’s New York. Former President Barack Obama is warning fellow Democrats, “You lost a big audience the minute you say [‘defund the police’].” Sen. Bernie Sanders has rejected calls for “no more policing.” And White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, a few weeks ago, bizarrely claimed that it was not Democrats but Republicans who wanted to defund the police (because they opposed President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill).
What happened? Intoxicated by a few policy wins in deep blue cities, enthusiasm in the left-leaning Twitter echo chamber, and their viselike grip on the national media, “defund” activists overlooked one important detail: Their agenda was deeply unpopular with most Americans. A summer 2020 YouGov poll found that just 16 percent of adults wanted to cut police funding — much less “defund” the police. Indeed, 81 percent of black Americans wanted police to spend as much or more time in their communities. During a year when major American cities saw an unnerving increase in homicides, after years of declines, that reaction was not just understandable, it was wholly predictable.
As a result, Democrats squandered an opportunity to build consensus around meaningful police reform. After all, in the wake of the George Floyd murder, there was broad national agreement supporting a range of reforms. Prominent Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott were eager to negotiate. Sen. Ted Cruz, sitting on a panel alongside Houston’s Democratic mayor, insisted it was time for “all of us together to look at ways to make sure that our justice system is more fair.” Rather than pressing an advantage where most Americans were with them, though, Democrats got suckered by a woke fringe into embracing a deeply unpopular agenda.
Those who embrace the stew of “anti-racist” policies and practices loosely referred to as “Critical Race Theory” should take note. As with policing, there’s broad-based support for practical efforts to address persistent inequalities. For instance, while residential attendance zones lock many black and brown children into schools that fail to provide crucial supports, set high expectations, or deliver first-rate instruction, the nation’s parents support school choice policies by hefty margins.
Moreover, there’s widespread agreement that schools can do better talking about race. There’s broad sympathy for the notion that schools have, at times, taught a white-washed version of history that minimizes our failings and overlooks the contributions of minority communities to American commerce and culture. If Democrats want to tackle such concerns in a practical manner, they have the wind at their back.+
As with the self-destructive push to “defund the police,” though, those intent on tackling such problems have stood by as their efforts have been overtaken by ideologues in thrall to a vision of “anti-racist” education that is noxious to the vast majority of Americans.
Take, for instance, the “anti-racist” insistence that universal values are actually hallmarks of “white supremacy” culture. The famed KIPP charter schools announced last summer that the chain was abandoning its slogan “Work Hard, Be Nice” as an “anti-racist” blow against “white supremacy” culture. The Smithsonian published a guide asserting that “hard work,” “self-reliance,” and “be[ing] polite” are all a product of the “white dominant culture.” Bellevue School District in Washington state paid for “aspiring white antiracist leaders” to attend a class called “Humble & Brave,” where educators learn that these traits “go against the white norm.”
It should come as no great surprise that all of this is out of step with what the lion’s share of Americans believe. If one asks parents — of any race — what values they want their kids to learn, more than 4 out of 5 will endorse concepts like “hard work,” “being well-mannered,” and “being responsible.” In fact, Black parents are slightly more likely than white parents to say that these traits are important. It’s not that hard to understand why Black, Latino, or Asian parents might resent the notion that “hard work” or “responsibility” are somehow alien to their culture. As one parent put it, “We did not immigrate to this country for our children to be taught in taxpayer-funded schools that punctuality and hard work are white values.”
The woke fringe cheered earlier this spring when the Biden Department of Education held up as a model of civic education the 1619 Project, which teaches that America was founded as a “slavocracy” and is a nation where “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” Most Americans reject this cartoonish narrative of their country, with more than two-thirds of adults opposed to having schools tell students that America was founded on racism.
And yet, Democratic officials have blithely gone along as progressive pundits, union leaders, and advocates have raced to defend even the most noxious goings-on against the critics of Critical Race Theory.
Look, there’s much of value in today’s efforts to make education more effective, responsive, and just. Indeed, there are plenty of places where people of goodwill can find common ground on school improvement. But, if Democrats intent on school improvement follow the woke fringe down the same Twitter-inspired, navel-gazing rabbit hole that swallowed police reform, they oughtn’t be unduly surprised when they look up in the heat of the 2022 midterm elections to see Jen Psaki insisting that Critical Race Theory was really a Trumpian scheme all along
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 19:20 - Scramble Into Treasurys Could Spark Month-End Reverse Repo Chaos
Scramble Into Treasurys Could Spark Month-End Reverse Repo Chaos
In the days following the quarter-end burst to almost $1 trillion, usage of the Fed’s infamous overnight reverse repo facility had shrunk by roughly $200BN, gravitating in the $750BN – $800BN range, until today when 71 counterparties parked $860.5BN worth of reserves at the Fed, the second highest amount on record.
But despite renewed expectations that this latest push will finally send total RRP activity above $1 trillion as banks seek to park excess reserves/deposits anywhere but in the economy and/or markets, Curvature’s Scott Skyrm disagrees, pointing to one notable change: the surge in yields.
As Skyrm writes in his latest Repo Market Commentary “with the stock market sell-off and the bond market rally, it only means one thing! A flight-to-quality.” This matters because traditionally “a flight-to-quality will affect the Repo market by removing securities from the market.”
And as “end buyers” purchase Treasurys and pack them away in their portfolios, “it means less collateral in the market” (reserves, i.e., cash, is what banks use to buy TSYs with, or – in the case of JPMorgan – not buy TSYs with as discussed earlier). Skyrm then writes that historically a large percentage of the securities purchased are the on-the-run issues, so “given the slow summer weeks and large issue sizes, I don’t expect Repo market activity to increase substantially.”
However, after a sleepy August, if volatility continues into the refunding and if yields reverse course and collateral is once again dumped, Skyrm warns that “we could have a pretty active August.”
Not everyone agrees with this take: according to interbroker dealer Wrightson ICAP, RRP volumes could return to the $900 billion level by Wednesday or Thursday.
But the biggest reason why many expect the RRP balance to explode in the next 10 days is because in May, the Treasury forecast that its cash balance on July 31 will drop to $450 billion; it was $698 billion on July 16, meaning that the Treasury will have to drain $250 billion in cash from the Treasury General Account, with the resultant reserves likely getting parked immediately at the Fed’s repo facility…
… unless of course the Fed makes equities eligible for CET1 coverage, encouraging banks to use Fed reserves to buy stocks outright instead of through market intermediaries.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 19:00 - Victor Davis Hanson: The American Descent Into Madness
Victor Davis Hanson: The American Descent Into Madness
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,
America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?
Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months. The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.
Citizenship as Mere Residency
Two million people are anticipated to cross the southern border, en masse and illegally, over a 12-month period. If that absurdity were to continue, we would be adding the equivalent of a major U.S. city every year. The new arrivals have three things in common: Their first act was to break U.S. law by entering the country. Their second was to break the law by residing here illegally. And their third will be to find false identification or other illegal means to continue breaking the law. One does not arrive as a guest in a foreign country and immediately violate the laws of his host—unless one holds those laws in contempt.
Arrivals now cross a border that had been virtually closed to illegal immigration by January 2021. In the cynical and immoral logic of illegal immigration (that cares little for the concerns either of would-be legal immigrants or U.S. citizens), arrivals will be dependent upon the state and thus become constituents of progressives who engineered their arrival.
Yet the issue is not illegal immigration per se. If protests were to continue in Cuba, and 1 million Cubans boated to Miami, the Biden Administration would stop the influx, in terror that so many anti-Communists might tip Florida red forever.
How strange that the U.S. government is considering going door-to-door to bully the unvaccinated, even as it ignores the daily influx of thousands from Mexico and Latin America, without worrying whether they are carrying or vaccinated for COVID-19. Meanwhile, the progressive media shrilly warns that the new Delta Variant of the virus is exploding south of the border. Note how the administration applies standards to its own citizens that it does not apply to foreign nationals illegally entering the country.
Crime as Construct
Crime is another current absurdity. There exists a mini-industry of internet videos depicting young people, disproportionately African American males, stealing luxury goods from Nieman-Marcus in San Francisco, clearing a shelf from a Walgreens with impunity, or assaulting Asian Americans. These iconic moments may be unrepresentative of reality, but given the mass transfers and retirements of police, and the frightening statistics of large increases in violent crime in certain cities, the popular conception is now entrenched that it is dangerous to walk in our major metropolises, either by day or at night. Chicago has turned into Tombstone or Dodge City in the popular imagination.
Scarier still is the realization that if one is robbed, assaulted, or finds one’s car vandalized, it is near certain the miscreant will never be held to account. Either the police have pulled back and find arrests of criminals a lose-lose situation, or radical big-city district attorneys see the law as a critical legal theory construct, and thus will not enforce it. Or the criminal will be arrested and released within hours.
So a subculture has developed among Americans, of passing information about where in the country it is safe, where it is not, and where one can go, where one cannot. This is clearly not America, but something bizarre out of Sao Paulo, Durban, or Caracas.
The Campus Con
The universities over the past 40 years were intolerant, hard Left, and increasingly anti-constitutional. But they also fostered a golden-goose confidence scheme that administrators dared not injure, given the precious eggs of federally guaranteed student loans that ensured zero academic accountability and sent tuition costs into the stratosphere. There was an unquestioned supposition that a degree of any sort, of any major, was the ticket to American success. In cynical fashion, we shrugged that most prestigious institutions were little more than cattle branders that stamped graduates with imprints that gave them unearned privilege for life.
Yet universities now have both hands around their golden goose’s neck and are determined to strangle it. The public is becoming repulsed at the woke McCarthyite culture on campus, and will be more turned off when campuses open in the fall in 2019-style. At the Ivy League or major state university campuses, admissions are no longer based on proportional representation in the context of affirmative action, but are defined increasingly by a reparatory character.
Grades, test scores, and “activities” of the white and Asian male college applicants are growing less relevant. Only “privileged” white males with sports skills, connections, or families who give lots of money are exempt from the new racial reparation quotas. The new woke admission policy ironically is targeting the liberal suburban professional family, the Left’s constituency, whose lives are so fixated on whether children graduate from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, or like campuses.
Given the radical change in incoming student profiles, the faculty increasingly will have to choose between accusations of racism, or grading regardless of actual performance, given thousands of new enrollees do not meet the entrance standards of just two or three years ago. Remember that since wokeism was always a top-down elite industry, minority progressives still will fight it out with white leftists in intramural scraps over titles, salaries, and managerial posts.
The public has had enough. For the first time, people will ask why are we subsidizing student loans, why are multibillion-dollar endowments not taxed, and why do we think a B.A. in sociology or psychology or gender studies is an “investment” that prepares anyone for anything?
Commissars and Jacobins
The critical race theory craze is reaching peak woke, or is already on the downslope. No complex and sophisticated society is sustainable with a Maoist creed of cannibalizing citizens for thought crimes. Commissars do not produce anything or serve anybody, but only monitor thoughts and speech to ascertain the purity of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are not just a drain on the productive sector but will insidiously destroy it, since their currency is to ensure a timid, obsequiousness and banal orthodoxy.
We know from the failed Soviet system and from the French Revolution that the most mediocre in society became its most eager auditors of correct behavior. The arbiters of proper thought—the self-righteous paid toady, the perpetual victim employed in service to government payback, the freelancing snitch—were always the villains of freedom, productivity, and humanity, whether we read of the killing off of Alexander the Great’s inner circle, the forced suicides of the Neronian circle, the Jacobin murder spree, or the nightmarish world described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
That the Biden Administration has now joined with Silicon Valley to hunt down on social media any dissenters from this month’s official policy on vaccinations and mask-wearing was not so shocking as to be expected from a media that banned coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In Cuban-fashion, millions of judge-jury-executioner online snitches, with government encouragement, will help root out incorrect thoughts at light speed.
Inflation Is a Mere Construct
We used to know what inflation was, its pernicious role in past civilizations, and how to combat it. The danger of worthless currency is a staple of classical literature from Aristophanes to Procopius. The scary fact is not just that we are destroying the value of our money—the exploding price of gas, food, appliances, lumber, power, and housing are overwhelming even Joe Biden’s entitlement machine—but that we are constructing pseudoeconomics to justify the nihilism.
Right now, we witness a multitrillion-dollar fight over borrowing beyond our $30 trillion debt to build “infrastructure,” a word that has been expanded to include mostly anything but roads and bridges. What exactly is so liberal about the farmworker paying $5 a gallon for gas to commute to the fields, the small contractor doing a remodeling job with plywood at $80 a sheet, or the young couple whose loan qualification is always a month behind the soaring price of a new home?
Our People’s Military
Americans during this entire descent in madness sighed, “Well, at least there is the military left.” By that, I think they meant John Brennan had all but wrecked the CIA, while James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Kevin Clinesmith, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, et al. had weaponized the FBI. But the military was still a bastion of traditional, nonpartisan service, whose prime directive was to defend the country, win any war it was ordered to fight, and to maintain deterrence against opportunistic enemies. It was not envisioned as a “people’s army.” It was not a revolutionary Napoleonic “nation in arms.” And it was not a “liberation army.” The Constitution, 233 years of tradition, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice all reassured America of its wonderful defense forces.
And now? We are in the process of a massive reeducation and indoctrination campaign. The revamping not only draws scarce resources away from military readiness, but targets, without evidence, the white working class, and defames it as insurrectionary—the very same cohort that disproportionately died in Afghanistan and Iraq.
If only General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, had been as animated, as combative, and as fired up in congressional testimony about winning in Afghanistan or deterring the Chinese in the waters off Taiwan as they were in defense of their recommended lists of Marxist-inspired critical race theory texts!
One purpose of the Uniform Code of Military Justice was not to prevent retired top brass from attacking beloved presidents, or even blasé ones. Its aim was to remind the country that it is the business of civilians, not pensioned retired military subject to recall in times of crisis, to galvanize opinion against loudmouth unpopular presidents like Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, or Donald Trump.
The reason why the “revolving door” became a bipartisan worry was that four-star officers had mastered the navigation of Pentagon procurement. They possessed a rare skill easily—and hugely—monetized upon retirement, and thus its use was to be discouraged wholeheartedly.
And now?
The code is a mere construct. The revolving door is an advertisement for advancing to high rank. Policing the thoughts of American soldiers is apparently more important than fathoming the minds of our enemies on the battlefield.
Keep Cuba Castroite?
What was so hard about understanding that Cuba since 1959 has been a Communist gulag, antithetical to human freedom and consensual government? What was so difficult about conceding that Cuba had been an ally of the nuclear Soviet Union, always egging it on to war against the United States?
Yet here we are with protestors against a failed, evil state in the streets of Havana, and our own government, media, and professional classes are worried that ossified Communism in Cuba may fall.
After opening the U.S. southern border to pseudo-political refugees, the Biden Administration is terrified that thousands of real ones might come to Miami in the fashion it invited millions to storm into Texas. The Biden Administration, and the Left in general, finally revealed what many of us have known: it had no real ideological view on illegal immigration. Its immigration policy was entirely utilitarian and hinged only on whether illegal immigration altered the demography of the electorate in the correct way.
The United Nations Über Alles
Finally, almost all Americans used to agree that the U.S. Constitution was unique and guaranteed personal freedom in a way the United Nations charter could not. Dozens of fascist, Communist, totalitarian, and authoritarian regimes, usually the majority of governments on earth, ensured that any General Assembly or U.N. committee ruling would parrot the views of its illiberal and corrupt members.
Not anymore. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has invited in the U.N. to assess whether the United States meets global standards of justice or, in fact, is racist and in need of global censure: “I urge all U.N. member states to join the United States in this effort, and confront the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia,” he said last week.
That is like asking Libya in 2001 to assess whether our airline pilot training met proper standards or having China adjudicate the conditions in U.S. prisons.
America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive, and frightening place by July 2021. It went not so much hard-Left, as stark-raving mad.
That abrupt descent, too, is not workable and millions will collectively decide they have no choice but to push back and conclude, “In the 233rd year of our republic, we tens of millions are not going to cede freedom of thought and expression to thousands of Maoists. Sorry, no can do.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/19/2021 – 18:40
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