- Bovard Blasts Biden's Buffoonish War On Extremism
Bovard Blasts Biden’s Buffoonish War On Extremism
Authored by James Bovard via JimBovard.com,
The Biden administration revealed on Tuesday that guys who can’t get laid may be terrorist threats due to “involuntary celibate–violent extremism.” That revelation is part of a new crackdown that identifies legions of potential “domestic terrorists” that the feds can castigate and investigate. But there is no reason to expect Biden administration anti-terrorism and anti-extremism efforts to be less of a farce and menace than similar post-9/11 campaigns.
Since the French Revolution, politicians have defined terrorism to stigmatize their opponents, a precedent followed by the Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. The report labels the January 6 clash at the Capitol as a “domestic terrorism” incident but fails to mention it spurred a mushroom cloud of increasingly far-fetched official accusations. Capitol Police acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told Congress that January 6 was “a terrorist attack by tens of thousands of insurrectionists.” Less than a thousand protestors entered the Capitol that day but apparently any Trump supporter who hustled down the Mall towards the Capitol became the legal equivalent of Osama Bin Laden. Unfortunately, this “seen walking in the same zip code” standard for guilt could be the prototype for Biden era domestic terrorist prosecutions.
The Biden report did not bestow the same “terrorist” label on the mobs who burned U.S. post offices in Minneapolis or assailed a federal courthouse in Portland last year. In its litany of terrorist incidents, the report cites “the vehicular killing of a peaceful protestor in Charlottesville” at the 2017 Unite the Right ruckus but omits the 49 people killed in 2016 by a Muslim enraged by U.S. foreign policy at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Maybe that case was excluded because the murderer was the protected son of a long-term FBI informant and FBI falsehoods derailed the subsequent trial of his widow. Nor did the report mention the worst terrorist incident since 9/11—the Las Vegas bloodbath where a single shooter killed 58 people and injured 900 others. The FBI claimed it could never find a motive for that slaughter and its “final report” on the incident was only three pages long. Never mind.
The White House claims its new war on terrorism and extremism is “carefully tailored to address violence and reduce the factors that… infringe on the free expression of ideas.” But the prerogative to define extremism includes the power to attempt to banish certain ideas from acceptable discourse. The report warns that “narratives of fraud in the recent general election… will almost certainly spur some [Domestic Violent Extremists] to try to engage in violence this year.” If accusations of 2020 electoral shenanigans are formally labeled as extremist threats, that could result in far more repression (aided by Facebook and Twitter) of dissenting voices. How will this work out any better than the concerted campaign by the media and Big Tech last fall to suppress all information about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election?
The Biden administration is revving up for a war against an enemy which the feds have chosen to never explicitly define. According to a March report by Biden’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “domestic violent extremists” include individuals who “take overt steps to violently resist or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. government in support of their belief that the U.S. government is purposely exceeding its Constitutional authority.” But that was the same belief that many Biden voters had regarding the Trump administration. Does the definition of extremism depend solely on which party captured the White House?
The report notes that the “Department of Defense is reviewing and updating its definition of prohibited extremist activities among uniformed military personnel.” Bishop Garrison, the chief of the Pentagon’s new Countering Extremism Working Group, is Exhibit A for the follies of extremist crackdowns on extremism. In a series of 2019 tweets, Garrison, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, denounced all Trump supporters as “racists.” Garrison’s working group will “specifically define what constitutes extremist behavior” for American soldiers. If Garrison purges Trump supporters from the military, the Pentagon would be unable to conquer the island of Grenada. Biden policymakers also intend to create an “anti-radicalization” program for individuals departing the military service. This initiative will likely produce plenty of leaks and embarrassing disclosures in the coming months and years.
The Biden report is spooked by the existence of militia groups and flirts with the fantasy of outlawing them across the land. The report promises to explore “how to make better use of laws that already exist in all fifty states prohibiting certain private ‘militia’ activity, including…state statutes prohibiting groups of people from organizing as private military units without the authorization of the state government, and state statutes that criminalize certain paramilitary activity.” Most of the private militia groups are guilty of nothing more than bluster and braggadocio. Besides, many of them are already overstocked with government informants who are counting on Uncle Sam for regular paychecks.
As part of its anti-extremism arsenal, DHS is financing programs for “enhancing media literacy and critical thinking skills” and helping internet users avoid “vulnerability to…harmful content deliberately disseminated by malicious actors online.” Do the feds have inside information about another Hunter Biden laptop turning up, or what? The Biden administration intends to bolster Americans’ defenses against extremism by developing “interactive online resources such as skills-enhancing online games.” If the games are as stupefying as this report, nobody will play them.
The Biden report stresses that federal law enforcement agencies “play a critical role in responding to reports of criminal and otherwise concerning activity.” “Otherwise concerning activity”? This is the same standard that turned prior anti-terrorist efforts into laughingstocks.
Fusion Centers are not mentioned in the Biden report but they are a federal-state-local law enforcement partnership launched after 9/11 to vacuum up reports of suspicious activity. Seventy Fusion Centers rely on the same standard—“If you see something, say something”—that a senior administration official invoked in a background call on Monday for the new Biden initiative. The Los Angeles Police Department encouraged citizens to snitch on “individuals who stay at bus or train stops for extended periods while buses and trains come and go,” “individuals who carry on long conversations on pay or cellular telephones,” and “joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of time.” The Kentucky Office of Homeland Security recommended the reporting of “people avoiding eye contact,” “people in places they don’t belong,” or homes or apartments that have numerous visitors “arriving and leaving at unusual hours,” PBS’s Frontline reported. Colorado’s Fusion Center “produced a fear-mongering public service announcement asking the public to report innocuous behaviors such as photography, note-taking, drawing and collecting money for charity as ‘warning signs’ of terrorism,” the ACLU complained.
Various other Fusion Centers have attached warning labels to gun-rights activists, anti-immigration zealots, and individuals and groups “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority.” A 2012 Homeland Security report stated that being “reverent of individual liberty” is one of the traits of potential right-wing terrorists. The Constitution Project concluded in a 2012 report that DHS Fusion Centers “pose serious risks to civil liberties, including rights of free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, racial and religious equality, privacy, and the right to be free from unnecessary government intrusion.” Fusion Centers continue to be bankrolled by DHS despite their dismal record.
The Biden report promises that the FBI and DHS will soon be releasing “a new edition of the Federal Government’s Mobilization Indicators booklet that will include for the first time potential indicators of domestic terrorism–related mobilization.” Will this latest publication be as boneheaded as the similar 2014 report by the National Counterterrorism Center entitled “Countering Violent Extremism: A Guide for Practitioners and Analysts”?
As the Intercept summarized, that report “suggests that police, social workers and educators rate individuals on a scale of one to five in categories such as ‘Expressions of Hopelessness, Futility,’ … and ‘Connection to Group Identity (Race, Nationality, Religion, Ethnicity)’ … to alert government officials to individuals at risk of turning to radical violence, and to families or communities at risk of incubating extremist ideologies.” The report recommended judging families by their level of “Parent-Child Bonding” and rating localities on the basis in part of the “presence of ideologues or recruiters.” Former FBI agent Mike German commented, “The idea that the federal government would encourage local police, teachers, medical, and social-service employees to rate the communities, individuals, and families they serve for their potential to become terrorists is abhorrent on its face.”
The Biden administration presumes that bloating the definition of extremists is the surest way to achieve domestic tranquility. In this area, as in so many others, Biden’s team learned nothing from the follies of the Obama administration. No one in D.C. apparently recalls that President Obama perennially denounced extremism and summoned the United Nations in 2014 to join his “campaign against extremism.” Under Obama, the National Security Agency presumed that “someone searching the Web for suspicious stuff” was a suspected extremist who forfeited all constitutional rights to privacy. Obama’s Transportation Security Administration relied on ludicrous terrorist profiles that targeted American travelers who were yawning, hand wringing, gazing down, swallowing suspiciously, sweating, or making “excessive complaints about the [TSA] screening process.”
Will the Biden crackdown on extremists end as ignominiously as Nixon’s crackdown almost 50 years earlier? Nixon White House aide Tom Charles Huston explained that the FBI’s COINTELPRO program continually stretched its target list “from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.” At some point, surveillance became more intent on spurring fear than on gathering information. FBI agents were encouraged to conduct interviews with anti-war protesters to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox,” as a 1970 FBI memo noted. Is the Biden castigation campaign an attempt to make its opponents fear that the feds are tracking their every email and website click?
Biden’s new terrorism policy has evoked plenty of cheers from his Fourth Estate lapdogs. But a Washington Post article fretted that the administration’s report did not endorse enacting “new legal authority to successfully hunt down, prosecute, and imprison homegrown extremists.” Does the D.C. media elite want to see every anti-Biden scoffer in the land put behind bars? This is typical of the switcheroo that politicians and the media play with the terms “terrorists” and “extremists.” Regardless of paranoia inside the Beltway, MAGA hats are not as dangerous as pipe bombs.
The Biden report concludes that “enhancing faith in American democracy” requires “finding ways to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories.” But permitting politicians to blacklist any ideas they disapprove won’t “restore faith in democracy.” Extremism has always been a flag of political convenience, and the Biden team, the FBI, and their media allies will fan fears to sanctify any and every government crackdown. But what if government is the most dangerous extremist of them all?
* * *
James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Public Policy Hooligan. He is also a USA Today columnist. Follow him on Twitter @JimBovard.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 23:30 - Next Generation Of Motorsports May Involve "Flying Racing Car"
Next Generation Of Motorsports May Involve “Flying Racing Car”
Imagine if F1 racing ever dabbled in air racing – it would likely involve some sleek, high-performance flying car, zooming over a fixed course in the sky as the crowd, dazzled not by the roar of a petrol high-performance motor but rather the buzzing of propellers.
There appears to be new extreme motorsport on the horizon, and it involves the world’s first flying electric cars series.
According to Airspeeder, a proposed motorsport series for electric flying vehicles, founded by Matt Pearson and powered by performance eVTOL manufacturer Alauda, their prototype electric racing vehicle called EXA has successfully completed its first flight.
Airspeeder EXA is the flying car’s name and will be remotely piloted in three global races this year. Races will be brought to the public from professional minds at Brabham, McLaren, Jaguar, F1, Boeing, and Rolls-Royce.
The racing vehicles aren’t designed to carry a pilot inside, which means pilots from aviation, motorsport, and eSports backgrounds will be able to operate the world’s only racing electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft.
Augmented reality sky-tracks will be displayed for pilots as their flying race cars will show the audience, via live steams, the potential of these full potential of these powerful flying machines that have a greater thrust-to-weight ratio than a McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle fighter jet.
The company says this is a “sport for the digital era. It needs no physical infrastructure for spectators or tracks. We race and with minimal ecological impact.”
Give this sport a high ESG rating while you’re at it!
What would be cooler if this sport paves the way for crewed electric flying car racing series.
It seems like F1, IndyCar Series, and NASCAR might have a new competitor, one that is ESG friendly.
Without further ado, flying racing cars are here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 23:00 - University Of Florida Lab Finds Dangerous Pathogens On Children's Face Masks
University Of Florida Lab Finds Dangerous Pathogens On Children’s Face Masks
Authored by Meiling Lee via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A laboratory at the University of Florida that recently analyzed a small sample of face masks, detected the presence of 11 dangerous pathogens that included bacterias that cause diphtheria, pneumonia, and meningitis.
A student wears a mask as he does his work at Freedom Preparatory Academy in Provo, Utah, on Feb. 10, 2021. (George Frey/Getty Images) Gainesville parents in Florida concerned about the harm caused to their children wearing face masks all day at school in 90 °F weather sent out six masks—five that were worn by children ages 6 to 11 for five to eight hours at school, and one worn by an adult—to be analyzed for contaminants at the University of Florida’s Mass Spectrometry Research and Education Center.
Of the six masks, three were surgical, two cotton, and a poly gaiter. Masks that have not been worn and a t-shirt worn at school acted as the control samples.
Five of the masks were found to be contaminated with parasites, fungi, and bacteria, according to Rational Ground. Only one mask was found to contain a virus that can cause a fatal systemic disease in cattle and deer. Other less harmful pathogens that can cause ulcers, acne, and strep throat were also detected.
None of the controls were contaminated with pathogens, while “samples from the front top and bottom of the t-shirt found proteins that are commonly found in skin and hair, along with some commonly found in soil.”
Amanda Donoho, a mother of three elementary school children, teamed up with other parents to send the masks to the lab because her sons broke out in rashes from prolonged mask-wearing.
“Our kids have been in masks all day, seven hours a day in school,” Donoho told Fox & Friends on June 17. “The only break that they get is to eat or drink.”
Donoho said that while students do not have to wear a mask outside at school since April 2021, masks were still required when they were within six to eight feet of each other. Masks must also be worn on school buses.
Further research is needed to better understand what is being put on children’s faces, says Donoho.
Superintendent Carlee Simon at the Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) in Gainesville, Fla. did not respond to a request for comment.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that kids should continue to wear masks and social distance until they are able to get vaccinated, despite data showing that children are minimally affected by COVID-19 and are not super-spreaders of the virus.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed an executive order on May 3, suspending all COVID-19 emergency restrictions, including mask-wearing. However, certain school districts like ACPS kept their mask policy in place for the remainder of the school year, while masks were optional within the community.
ACPS says masks will be optional for the 2021–22 school year but would continue to be required on school buses until mid-September unless the federal transportation regulation changes.
The CDC says masks are still required on planes, trains, buses, and at airports.
In an updated June 17 guidance, masks are no longer required in “outdoor areas of a conveyance (like a ferry or the top deck of a bus)” and fully vaccinated individuals may resume everyday activities that were done prior to the pandemic without mask-wearing or physically distancing unless required by federal or state law.
People are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after their second shot of a messenger RNA vaccine or after a single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
The CDC did not give guidance for people who’ve recovered from COVID-19 and have natural immunity.
The Epoch Times has contacted the CDC for comment.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 22:30 - "Coming To Stores Near You Soon" – PepsiCo Files Trademark For 'Rockstar' Hard Seltzers
“Coming To Stores Near You Soon” – PepsiCo Files Trademark For ‘Rockstar’ Hard Seltzers
A new patent filed last week appears to show PepsiCo Inc. wants to dive headfirst into the hard seltzers market via its “Rockstar” brand.
PepsiCo filed a trademark application on Monday (June 14) for the “Rockstar” trademark registration that indicates the beverage company plans to sell it as a beer, alcoholic fruit cocktail drinks, alcoholic malt beverages, and hard seltzer.
The filing was first tweeted by Josh Gerben, founder of Gerben Intellectual Property, said:
“Pepsico has filed a new trademark application for its ROCKSTAR brand (the energy drink). In the USPTO filing (made on June 14) Pepsico says it now plans to sell ROCKSTAR-branded beer and hard seltzer. Coming to stores near you soon…”
We noted Wednesday that hard seltzers are singlehandedly transforming the alcohol industry.
According to IWSR Drinks Market Analysis, alcohol sales soared during the pandemic, and hard seltzers led most of the growth. They found seltzers and canned cocktails jumped 43%, and overall alcohol sales rose about 2% in 2020.
NielsenIQ data provided Business Insider with data on the hard seltzer industry, only to reveal that it has become a multi-billion dollar industry over a short period, with $4.5 billion in sales in just 52 weeks ending on May 22. For the month, sales jumped 80% over the same month in 2020. In 2017, hard seltzers had sales of only $39 million. Already, sales this year are around $3 billion, more than doubling 2019’s.
If Pepsi wants to stay relevant and one step ahead of Coca-Cola, the latest “Rockstar” hard seltzer trademark filing will do that just for them. Only a matter of time before Coca-Cola files a trademark registration of its own hard seltzer.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 22:00 - Meet The Censored: Bret Weinstein
Meet The Censored: Bret Weinstein
Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,
On May 23, 2017, not so long ago in real time but seemingly an eternity given the extraordinary history we’ve lived through since, a group of 50-odd students at Evergreen State College arrived at the classroom of a biology professor named Bret Weinstein, demanding his resignation. He stepped into the hall to talk, believing he could work things out.
He was wrong. Weinstein’s offense had been to come to work during an event called the “Days of Absence,” in which white students, staff, and faculty were asked to stay home. This was an inverted version of a longstanding Evergreen event of the same name that, based on a Douglas Turner Ward play, invited students of color to stay home voluntarily, to underscore their value to the community. As he would later explain in the Wall Street Journal, Weinstein thought this was a different and more negative message, and refused to comply. When that group of 50 students he’d never met arrived at his door and accused him of being a racist, he assumed he could find common ground, especially when his own students (including students of color) spoke on his behalf.
“I was one of Evergreen’s most popular professors,” he later testified to the House of Representatives. “I had Evergreen’s version of tenure. Did they really think they could force my resignation based on a meritless accusation? They did think that, and they were right.”
Weinstein was a Bernie Sanders supporter who described his politics as unabashedly liberal, even leftist. Like many, he’d grown up steeped in the imagery of sixties protest culture, probably imagined himself on its side, and therefore thought he could find solidarity with protesters. He didn’t realize was that he was the canary in a coal mine for a new movement that understood free speech as a stalking horse for the exercise of institutional power. When Weinstein opened his mouth to defend himself, what the crowd heard was him attempting to exercise authority, and they exercised theirs back.
They’d won over Evergreen’s new president, George Bridges, who refused to intercede in Weinstein’s behalf and later even asked college police to stand down, when protesters began stopping traffic and searching cars for someone, presumably Weinstein. The police told Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety, and ultimately he was, in fact, forced to resign.
Frequently portrayed as the involuntary protagonist of the first of a series of campus free speech crises, in fact Weinstein was one of the first to understand that a rollback of “free speech” in cases like his was incidental to the larger aims of the movement.
“What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control. Speech is impeded as a last resort,” he told the House Oversight Committee.
He described the new movement as like a cult, in which members sincerely believed they were acting to stop oppression, but leaders understood they were simply “turning the tables” on oppression. They were exercising authority to achieve what may be presented as social justice goals, while the actual end is the authority itself, with the teardown of due process and other protections a critical part of the picture. “This committee,” he said, “should take my tale as cautionary.”
Fast forward three years. Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying have become prominent figures in independent media, co-hosting a popular podcast called DarkHorse. Identified in the New York Times as one of the main dramatis personae of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web,” a group of heterodox intellectuals not aligned with the traditional right or left, he appeared for a time to find a home on YouTube. Maybe he would never go back to academia, but this seemed a more secure replacement. After all it’s one thing to be dependent on the whims of a college president or even a faculty board, but surely there’s safety in subscriber numbers?
Not so fast. As detailed in “Why Has ‘Ivermectin’ Become a Dirty Word?”, Weinstein is on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent casualties to a censorship movement that it’s hard not to see as part of a wider Evergreening of America. He and Heying’s two YouTube channels have been hit with multiple warnings for two brands of speech offenses, and are on the verge of having their business shut down entirely as a result (YouTube has a “three strikes and you’re out” policy). One offense involves interviews with the likes of Dr. Pierre Kory about the potential benefits of the repurposed drug ivermectin, and the other involves interviews with guests like Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology used in the Covid-19 vaccines. One video with Malone this week had 587,331 views before it was shut down.
In the years since Weinstein left Evergreen, the American cultural and political establishment has undergone a change in thinking, tracking with the warning Weinstein delivered to congress. The Trump election inspired a loss of faith in democracy, Charlottesville defamed speech rights, and Russiagate was an ongoing argument against due process, with many of the same people who opposed Dick Cheney’s spy state suddenly seeing themselves as aligned with the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA in the war on Trump.
Weinstein in his testimony talked about a movement that targeted the liberal concepts that traditionally bound us together, one being the “marketplace of ideas.” By 2021, the “marketplace of ideas” was regularly being portrayed as a trick, a tool for repression designed to conceal the fact that, as the New York Times put it last year, “good ideas do not always triumph in a marketplace of ideas.”
Thus instead of argument and debate, many now believe we should use force and influence to achieve objectives. This is just what Weinstein described at Evergreen: eschewing argument, accumulating power for its own sake instead. It’s in light of this cultural shift that we’ve seen a movement in favor of censorship, with erstwhile opponents of corporations posturing as libertarians, filling social media with arguments about how private companies should be free to do what they want.
When Facebook, Apple, YouTube and Spotify teamed up to kick Alex Jones off the Internet in the summer of 2018, most of the left cheered. The obvious fear, however, was that moderators would develop mission creep. The DarkHorse incidents show we’re there. Whether or not one agrees with Weinstein about the efficacy of ivermectin, or the idea that the Covid-19 vaccines carry unreported dangers, anyone who follows his show recognizes that his is nearly the opposite of an Alex Jones act. He and Heying’s shows are neither frivolous nor abusive, and they clearly make an effort to be evidence-based, interviewing credentialed authorities, typically about subjects ignored by the corporate press.
This is exactly what independent/alternative media is for: tackling third rail subjects that, for one reason or another, can’t find a home in traditional media. Often, it takes scoops initially dismissed as silly conspiracies by what ABC reporter Jon Karl recently described as “serious people,” a classic example being Gary Webb’s famous CIA cocaine trafficking story.
A Time magazine editor in rejecting that one told reporters on that “if this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine,” while Newsweek years later called a U.S. Senator, John Kerry, a “randy conspiracy buff” for saying the Contras in Nicaragua were engaged in drug trafficking. Only years later, in the small San Jose Mercury-News, did the story come out, and even then it took years before the coke-for-guns tale truly broke through in popular media.
With the Covid-19 story, Weinstein and Heying were among the first to openly consider the so-called “lab leak hypothesis” of how the pandemic began. In fact, in the days before people like Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to change their minds about the theory’s feasibility, and before beloved mainstream figures like Jon Stewart declared that if there was “an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania” you’d know “it’s the fucking chocolate factory,” Weinstein and Heyer were roundly denounced as Covid-19 misinformation peddlers.
In January, after they went on Real Time With Bill Maher, they were blasted for pushing a “Steve Bannon Wuhan Lab Covid Conspiracy” by a Daily Beast writer who mostly seemed upset that Weinstein and Heying had soiled Maher with the ick of unconventional thinking. However, since conventional wisdom on the lab leak theory changed, criticism on that front has died down, especially now that platforms like Facebook have announced they “will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.” Still, the shift in consensus thinking about lab origin has only seemed to accelerate the vigilance about ivermectin and other issues.
This is a significant moment in the history of American media. If a show with the audience that Weinstein and Heying have can be put out of business this easily, it means that independent media going forward will either have to operate outside the major Internet platforms, or give up its traditional role as a challenger of mainstream narratives. There are plenty of people out there who take a sarcastic view of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” just as they roll their eyes at lots of YouTubers or Instagram stars or even the “Substackerati,” but even those critics should realize the seriousness of this moment, not just for this show, but for all media.
I reached out to Weinstein about his fight with YouTube:
TK: Can you sketch out the structure of your media business?
Weinstein: Heather and I have been doing livestreams since March, 2020. They began as bi-weekly and were originally focused on COVID. The topic quickly broadened, and streams were reduced to once a week in September, 2020. We have done 83 livestreams as of June 5th. Livestreams consist of 1-2 hours of presentation and discussion between Heather and Bret, followed by 1-2 hours of audience Q and A.
The remainder of the podcasts are discussions between me, Bret, and one or more guests. Some have been done in studio, others over zoom. The maximum number of guests was The Black Intellectual Round Table with seven guests. All guest discussions have been taped, with two recent exceptions (with Pierre Kory, and Steve Kirsch/Robert Malone), and generally the content is not edited with respect to substance. The main channel has 329,000 subscribers. Revenue on the main channel is generated by YouTube ads at the beginning of the podcast, by Superchat questions, and recently we have done spoken ads for carefully chosen sponsors. Podcasts also drive subscribership on each of our Patreon pages, and channel/podcast merchandise is also available from Teespring linked through YouTube.
The clips channel was created in July 2020, and consists of clips made by a video editor/producer who watches our podcasts and selects highlights. Subscribership on the clips channel is rapidly growing and stands at 182,000. All revenue on the clips channel is from YouTube ads.
The main livestreams (but not the Q&As), and the podcasts that I have with other guests, are also uploaded to audio-only podcast platforms. Combining YouTube and podcast downloads, episodes tend to get above 200,000 views/listens each. The audio-only podcast has reliably been in the top 10 in Apple’s “Science podcasts” category, and goes in and out of top 100 in “overall” podcasts. Currently it is #77.
TK: Tech company executives have consistently said they intervene on this subject only for safety reasons, to prevent misleading information that might cause someone to avoid a lifesaving treatment. What is your answer to that? Are you an anti-vaxxer? Could a reasonable person infer from your broadcasts that you’re recommending that adults not get vaccinated?
Weinstein: We are biologists engaging material that is inherently evolutionary. Our upcoming book is on the problem caused by the interface of people with novel technology for which we are not evolutionarily prepared. No one is trained in even a majority of the disciplines relevant to the COVID Pandemic. Virologists aren’t clinicians, aren’t epidemiologists, aren’t evolutionary biologists, aren’t pharmacologists, aren’t data scientists. We state repeatedly that we are not medical doctors and are not making recommendations, but we are sharing our view of scientific material that we are qualified to analyze.
It is true that some may become hesitant about the Covid vaccines from our discussions. That may cost lives, as we have taken pains to point out repeatedly. We also surely save lives. For example, it is especially likely that DarkHorse viewers who have had COVID would skip being vaccinated, greatly reducing their risk of adverse reactions without increasing their risk of future COVID.
The question is one of net effect. We have been way ahead of official guidance throughout the pandemic, and we have been very sharp in our criticism of those who have treated SARS-CoV2 casually. We have clearly sobered many up about the issue. Our refrain has been that although the case fatality rate from COVID is moderate, the damage to the body from a case of COVID—even if mild—is often substantial and likely implies reduced longevity. And we have given prescient advice on prevention. We were extremely early in recognizing that conducting business outside, opening windows (especially in cars), keeping conversation with strangers brief, wearing masks, removing masks outside, spending time in the sun, supplementing with vitamin-D, all have protective effects.
The best defense of what we have done on DarkHorse is simply to compare our prevention model with the official guidance. It is the low quality and slow improvement in the official model that constitutes the greatest danger. It takes far too long for official guidance to catch up to the evidence.
As to the questions of whether we are vaccinated and/or would get vaccinated again: we (and our children) are more fully vaccinated than most people, in part due to the exposures that our (former) jobs as tropical biologists gave us. We are, for instance, vaccinated against yellow fever, typhoid, and rabies. We are not vaccinated against Covid, and do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid (unless, perhaps, a traditional vaccine were to be produced).
TK: Jon Stewart made the lab-leak hypothesis mainstream last week. You were one of the first media figures to try to bring attention in that direction. What was the response when you raised your own concerns, and what’s your reaction now, given the way that discussion has suddenly become permissible?
Weinstein: The lessons of the lab leak are many. Of course, those of us who could see that the official narrative was wildly inconsistent with the evidence were aggressively stigmatized. Many were driven to self silence. And the official narrative could easily have held, causing dissenters to be recorded in history as cranks. This is standard for such a situation. Unfortunately, there is no appetite for extrapolating from the lab leak to other COVID questions. Today Tony Fauci announced a multi-billion dollar initiative to search for new drugs to treat COVID, and Carl Zimmer dutifully reported the story with excitement in the NYT, even as the revelations about Fauci’s apparent corruption and responsibility continue to surface. There was no mention of the danger implied in new drugs and EUAs. The idea of repurposed drugs doing the job safely and cheaply is elided with the baseless assertion that a search for useful existing drugs was essentially fruitless. There is simply no update to the public’s trust in authority based on the lessons of the lab leak, no recognition that officials are often mistaken, or lying or both.
And that’s the core of the problem with YouTube’s policy. Official consensus has been frequently laughable in the context of Covid, often with deadly consequences. If ever there was a moment for scientific generalists to help their audience understand the evidence, this is it.
Consider this bizarre fact. In Sept. 2020, Politifact “fact checked” the lab leak hypothesis and declared it a “pants on fire lie.” Politifact was forced to walk that conclusion back in May 2021. My flow chart had a lab leak at almost 90% as of April 2020. In June of 2021 Politifact “fact checked” the assertion (made on the DarkHorse Podcast by Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA vaccine technology) that “spike protein is cytotoxic.” They declared it false. How did they end up the arbiter of factual authority in this case? Shouldn’t the presumption be with Dr. Malone, and with DarkHorse?
TK: Don’t tech companies and health officials have a responsibility to try to prevent dangerous speech during an emergency like a pandemic? Do you feel that any discussion on a topic like this should be allowed, or do you believe there should be a minimal factual standard? What’s the proper way to regulate this dilemma in your opinion?
Weinstein: I don’t think it works this way. Once you create the right to shut down speech for the good of the public, that tool becomes a target of capture and true speech is silenced. Furthermore, humans are stuck with the fact that heterodoxy exists at the fringe with the cranks. No one has a way to sort one from the other, except in retrospect. So if you regulate the cranks out of existence, you also shut down meaningful progress. The price of that is incalculable. Heather had a great piece on this published recently (What If We’re Wrong? In the on-line magazine Areo).
TK: Even if there are serious risks to your business, do you intend to stop talking about the subject?
Of course not. Lives are on the line. Too many have been lost already. This is an absolute moral obligation. That doesn’t mean we won’t pick battles strategically, but even loss of our channels is acceptable if the madness surrounding COVID treatment and prevention can be stopped.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 21:30 - World's Third Largest Diamond Unearthed In Botswana
World’s Third Largest Diamond Unearthed In Botswana
An enormous diamond has been unearthed in Botswana, according to a series of tweets by the Botswana government.
On Wednesday, the government of Botswana tweeted that 1,098-carat stone, believed to be the third-largest diamond ever found, was presented to President Mokgweetsi Masisi by Debswana Diamond Company’s acting managing director Lynette Armstrong.
Debswana is a mining company located in Botswana and is the world’s top producer of diamonds by value. The company is a joint venture between the government of Botswana and the South African diamond company De Beers; each party owns an equal share of the company.
“The diamond which is the third-largest in the world after the first and second that were discovered in South Africa and Lucara Botswana respectively, was discovered on June 1st from Jwaneng mine’s South Kimberlite pipe, making it the largest diamond in the company’s history since diamonds were discovered in Botswana in 1967,” the government said.
Masisi said the diamond would be sold, and “proceeds will be used to advance national development in the country.”
He added, “Debswana should use this latest discovery as an inflection point, for the mine to use its technology to realize more of these large discoveries.”
The announcement of the diamond’s discovery comes as IDEX Diamond Index, real-time global diamond asking prices, has risen to a five-year high.
For years, we’ve noted diamonds have become unpopular as millennials were saturated with debt, unable to realize the American dream of marriage and a house. But thanks to global central banks and governments worldwide pumping trillions of dollars into the global economy, diamond demand has surged, and prices are way up.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 21:00 - Reining In the Fed
Reining In the Fed
Authored by Alexander William Salter via The American Institute for Economic Research,
A specter is haunting the Federal Reserve: the specter of political activism.
It’s no secret that something strange is happening at the Fed.
Visitors to the New York Fed’s homepage are greeted, not with a description of the Fed’s important monetary and regulatory mandates, but an affirmation of the Fed’s commitment to economic justice.
“We are firm in the belief that economic equality is a critical component for social justice,” the banner reads.
Social equity is important.
It’s certainly a valid area for policy action. But why it’s any concern of the Fed’s is a mystery.
In addition, the Fed recently waded into environmental policy. It’s started putting soft pressure on the banks it oversees to disclose what they’re doing about climate risk and is gearing up for a significant climate-related regulatory extension. There’s no serious economic model or regulatory paradigm linking climate change to financial crises, of course. And the Fed’s poor track record at forecasting big economic shocks means we have scant reason to give it the benefit of the doubt.
This is bureaucratic overreach, plain and simple. The Fed has no mandate to pursue these goals.
In late May, I wrote a public letter of concern about how the Fed’s vital monetary and regulatory missions are in danger of morphing into something sinister. The letter was warmly received by experts in monetary and financial policy. It has more than three dozen co-signatories, including distinguished academics, former high Fed and Treasury officials, members of the Shadow Open Market Committee, and prominent CEOs.
The letter expresses my worry that “the Fed’s behavior renders it increasingly sensitive to political interference.” Recent public statements by Fed Governor Lael Brainard and Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari give us strong reasons to suspect the Fed is pursuing partisan agendas. This lessens the Fed’s credibility, weakens its independence, and makes it less capable of serving the public.
It’s time to put the Fed back on track. I believe Congress can and should act to rein in the Fed.
We know all too well that when it comes to bureaucratic mission creep, it’s incredibly difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. That’s why we must work to right the Fed’s course starting now. Its roles in fighting recessions and preventing financial panics are too important to be hijacked by partisanship.
The Fed can’t function as an effective macroeconomic steward unless it stays in its lane. Americans have a right to demand the central bank focus on its core duties.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 20:30 - Colorado Home Dubbed "Slice Of Hell" Is Selling For $590k
Colorado Home Dubbed “Slice Of Hell” Is Selling For $590k
A Colorado listing on Redfin has gone viral with more than half a million views since it was recently listed. The description in the listing calls the house a “slice of hell” after a departing tenant went ape shit during an eviction.
“Now it’s every landlord’s nightmare and needs someone with firm resolve to appreciate its potential. If you dream of owning your own little slice of hell and turning it into a piece of heaven, then look no further!” the listing said.
Photos uploaded to Redfin for the property located at 4525 Churchill Ct, Colorado Springs, show widespread vandalism with spray-painted floors, walls, doors, and cabinets, along with hammer holes in the drywall.
“There is not one surface of the home that has not been enhanced with black spray paint or a swinging hammer – damage done by an angry departing tenant who didn’t want to pay rent. But don’t let that slow you down. It’s not nearly as daunting as the freezer in the basement that’s full of meat and hasn’t had electricity to it for over a year,” the listing continued.
The listing even warns prospective buyers to “wear your mask” before entering the home.
At $590,000, the list price is about a 16% discount of what it could sell for if the house was in tip-top shape.
According to The Denver Post, the price tag to fix the damages ranges between $150,000 to $230,000. This is the perfect fixer-upper for someone trying to buy a suburban house during one of the worst housing shortages.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans face an eviction crisis in the coming months as pandemic safety nets expire.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 20:00 - Buchanan: Who Is Really Killing American Democracy?
Buchanan: Who Is Really Killing American Democracy?
By a vote of 30-1 in the House, with unanimous support in the Senate, Juneteenth, June 19, which commemorates the day in 1865 when news of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reached Texas, has been declared a federal holiday
It is to be called Juneteenth Independence Day.
Prediction: This will become yet another source of societal division as many Black folks celebrate their special Independence Day, and the rest of America continues to celebrate July 4 as Independence Day two weeks later.
Why the pessimism? Consider.
Days before Congress acted, the Randolph, New Jersey, board of education voted to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.
A backlash ensued, and the board quickly voted to rescind its decision.
Still under fire, the board voted to drop all designated holidays from the school calendar and replace them with the simple notation “Day Off.”
The school board had surrendered, punted, given up on trying to find holidays that the citizens of Randolph might celebrate together.
But the “day off” mandate created another firestorm, and the board is now restoring all the previous holidays, including that of Columbus.
The point: If we Americans cannot even agree on which heroes and holidays are to be celebrated together, does that not tell us something about whether we are really, any longer, one country and one people?
Do we still meet in any way the designation and description of us as the “one united people” that John Jay rendered in The Federalist Papers:
“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”
Does that depiction remotely resemble America in 2021?
Today, we don’t even agree on whether Providence exists.
We hear constant worries these days about a clear and present danger to “our democracy” itself. And if democracy requires, as a precondition, a community, a commonality, of religious, cultural, social and moral beliefs, we have to ask whether these necessary ingredients of a democracy still exist in 21st-century America.
Consider what has happened to the holidays that united Americans of the Greatest and Silent Generations.
Christmas and Easter, the great Christian Holy Days and holidays of that era, were expunged a half-century ago from the public schools and the public square – replaced by winter break and spring break.
The Bible, the cross and the Ten Commandments were all expelled as contradicting the secularist commands of our Constitution.
Traditional Christian teachings about homosexuality and abortion, reflected in public law, are now regarded as hallmarks of homophobia, bigotry, sexism and misogyny — i.e., of moral and mental sickness.
Not only do Americans’ views on religion and morality collide, but we also seem ever more rancorously divided now on matters of history and race.
Was Christopher Columbus a heroic navigator and explorer who “discovered” America — or a genocidal racist? Was the colonization of America a great leap forward for civilization and mankind, or the monstrous crime of technically superior European peoples who came to brutally impose their religion, race and rule upon indigenous peoples?
Three of the six Founding Fathers and most of the presidents of the first 60 years of our republic were slave owners: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Polk and Zachary Taylor, as well as the legendary senators Henry Clay and John Calhoun.
A number of Americans now believe that Washington and Jefferson should be dynamited off Mount Rushmore at the same time the visages of the three great Confederates — Gen. Robert E. Lee, Gen. Stonewall Jackson and Confederate President Jefferson Davis — are dynamited off Stone Mountain, Georgia.
From all this comes a fundamental question.
Is the left itself — as its cultural and racial revolution dethrones the icons of America’s past, who are still cherished by a majority — irreparably fracturing that national community upon which depends the survival of the democracy they profess to cherish?
Are they themselves imperiling the political system at whose altar they worship?
The country is not the polity. The nation is not the state. Force Americans to choose between the claims of God, faith, family, tribe and country — and the demands of democracy — and you may not like the outcome.
A question needs to be put to the left in America.
If your adversaries in politics are indeed fascists, racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes and bigots, as you describe them, why would, or should, such people accept and embrace your rule over them — simply because you managed to rack up a plurality of ballots in an election?
Free elections to decide who governs are, it is said, the central sacrament of democracy. But why should people who are described with every synonym for “deplorable” not reject the politics of compromise and instead work constantly to overthrow the rule of people who so detest them?
Winston Churchill called democracy “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried”
Are both sides sticking with democracy — for lack of an alternative?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 19:30 - 'Big Brother'? San Jose Requires Gun Purchases To Be Videotaped
‘Big Brother’? San Jose Requires Gun Purchases To Be Videotaped
Less than a month after a gunman opened fire and killed nine co-workers at a Bay Area rail hub, city leaders have implemented Big Brother’-style omniveillance to monitor firearm purchases at gun stores.
According to Mercury News, the San Jose City Council voted unanimously to approve a new law that requires all gun stores to record firearm purchases on video. What’s odd is that most gun stores already have surveillance cameras. However, the new law begins in September and will require shopowners to also record audio of all firearm and ammunition sales.
Mayor Sam Liccardo said the new law makes it more difficult for “straw sales,” in which a person buys a firearm or ammo for someone unable or unwilling to purchase and then transfers the goods to that person.
“We know a significant number of crooks and gangs get firearms through straw purchasing,” Liccardo said. “This set of ordinances is really focused on narrowing the flow of guns to those which are clearly legal and hopefully doing something to deter the flow of guns that are unlawful to own, that is to persons who are not entitled to own guns because of prior convictions or other reasons.”
The San Jose legislation is the first of its kind in the state and will likely be challenged in court.
Gun-rights advocates, such as the Sacramento-based Firearms Policy Coalition, said the new rule is “outrageous,” and the mayor wants “Big Brother’-style omniveillance to record gun owners’ every move, violating the privacy of millions, especially at-risk firearm purchasers.”
The council’s actions are part of a 10-point gun control plan that Liccardo unveiled after the mass shooting on May 26 at a rail yard in downtown San Jose.
The mayor also requires gun owners to purchase liability insurance and pay a tax to cover taxpayer costs connected to gun violence. The council is expected to consider that proposal later in the year.
None of this should be surprising to readers considering the Biden administration and liberals have waged war on guns and the NRA.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 19:00 - "To The Moon": Rise In Trans-Pacific Spot Rates Is Relentless – And Accelerating
“To The Moon”: Rise In Trans-Pacific Spot Rates Is Relentless – And Accelerating
By Greg Miller, of FreightWaves,
The trajectory of trans-Pacific spot rates brings to mind the catchphrase “to the moon.|
Carriers implemented general rate increases (GRIs) on June 1. Spot rates rose. They enacted more GRIs on Tuesday. Rates jumped again. Another wave of GRIs is set for July 1. Add fallout from China port congestion to the mix, and it’s a recipe for rates to keep climbing.
“Despite record highs, rate levels continue to sharply increase,” said Lars Jensen, CEO of consultancy Vespucci Maritime. Past predictions on spot rates have been repeatedly proved wrong — and far too conservative.
Last September, carriers met with Chinese regulators, who reportedly told them: You’re making a lot of money on the trans-Pacific, so don’t push it too high. For the following three months, rates did seem to plateau at around $3,800 per FEU on the Asia-West Coast route and around $4,700 per FEU on Asia-East Coast.
Current rates to the West and East coasts are 75% and 110% above those levels, respectively. If Chinese regulators did apply pressure to temper rate growth in Q4 2020, they definitely took their foot off the brake in 2021.
Then came the full-year guidance from ocean carriers, released in early 2021. Analysts noted that carriers’ initial guidance implied that H2 2021 spot rates would fall materially versus rates in H2 2020.
The beginning of the second half is now less than two weeks away. Given current rate trends and the imminent onset of peak-season demand, those earlier carrier spot-rate assumptions look increasingly implausible, barring an unforeseen event that causes a precipitous drop in U.S. demand.
New high for Asia-East Coast
On Tuesday, the day carrier GRIs were implemented, the Freightos Baltic Index daily assessment for Asia-East Coast rose 7% compared to Monday, to $9,889 per FEU, a fresh all-time high. Its Wednesday assessment was unchanged and was up 224% year on year (y/y).
S&P Global Platts provides daily assessments of Freight All Kinds (FAK) rates. Its North Asia-East Coast FAK assessment was $7,100 per FEU on Wednesday. Drewry released its weekly rate assessment for the Shanghai-New York route on Thursday: $8,017 per FEU, up 195% y/y.
Index moves offer guidance on the trend in the supply-demand balance, but amid current market conditions, they’re much less reflective of actual costs. Not only are different indexes reporting widely varying numbers, but these assessments do not include premium charges that are often required to get cargo loaded. Those charges can reportedly reach as high as 10,000 per FEU.
American Shipper was told that a carrier just quoted an all-in Asia-East Coast rate of $19,990 per FEU (which seems to include a $10 “discount” to avert the $20,000 threshold).
New high for Asia-West Coast
The Freightos Baltic Index daily assessment for Asia-West Coast jumped 9% on Tuesday compared to Monday, to $6,829 per FEU, another record high. On Wednesday, Freightos’ rate estimate pulled back slightly, to $6,614 per FEU, up 175% y/y.
Drewry’s weekly rate for Shanghai-Los Angeles was $6,358 per FEU, up 197% y/y. S&P Global Platts’ daily North Asia-West Coast FAK assessment for Wednesday was $5,800 per FEU.
Escalating Yantian fallout
It’s not just GRIs and U.S. import demand driving rates higher, it’s COVID-induced logjams in the Chinese ports of Yantian, Shekou and Nansha. While productivity in Yantian began gradually recovering this week, knock-on effects will continue. Cargo delayed by the outbreak should start arriving at U.S. ports en masse in July.
According to Marine Strategies International, “Yantian handles a quarter of China’s shipments to the U.S. The impact of the congestion is clearly reflected in the freight markets and is expected to be worse than what was seen post-Suez accident.”
S&P Global Platts provides daily assessments of Freight All Kinds (FAK) rates. Its North Asia-East Coast FAK assessment was $7,100 per FEU on Wednesday.
Jensen commented, “Yantian is on a slow path towards a beginning recovery. But that does not mean normal shipping service levels are resuming anytime soon. Both HMM and Maersk show extensive vessel omissions for the rest of June on their mainline services.”
Project44 released data on Thursday showing the extent of the disruption. In the first half of June, 298 container vessels with a total capacity of over 3 million twenty-foot equivalent units skipped calls in Yantian, according to project44. Even in a best-case scenario, “it could take weeks to process backlogged containers and shippers should expect serious delays,” it said.
“Dwell times at YICT [Yantian International Container Terminals] also paint a grim picture,” added project44. Over the past two weeks, the seven-day average of median dwell times for export containers doubled, to 23.06 days as of Tuesday.
Retail sales still exceptionally strong
Ultimately, spot rates won’t fall until demand pulls back. It has been widely hypothesized that Americans will spend less on goods as more are vaccinated and they spend more money on services (restaurants, travel, etc.).
Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal partly attributed May’s seasonally adjusted 1.3% drop in retail sales versus April to a shift in consumer spending to services from goods.
However, a far better gauge for container shipping is non-seasonally adjusted retail sales excluding vehicles and parts, given that vehicles are not shipped in boxes and that the automotive industry is being impacted by a chip shortage.
According to this dataset — provided to American Shipper by Jason Miller, associate professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University’s Eli Broad College of Business — May spending related to containerized imports increased.
May’s number, $429.1 billion, was up 3.6% from April’s and up 17.5% from May 2019, prior to COVID. It was the highest monthly total of 2021 and second only to December 2020 overall.
Autumn import decline?
The National Retail Federation (NRF) foresees a moderation of containerized imports during the fall season. Consultancy Hackett Associates and the NRF produce the monthly Global Port Tracker report. The latest edition forecasts that U.S. containerized imports in October will fall 10% versus a peak hit in May.
An import decline caused by congestion would not decrease spot rates. But rates would theoretically decline if there were a decrease in demand caused by a shift in consumer spending away from goods toward services, and/or if future demand fell because it had been pulled forward.
Asked by American Shipper for the rationale behind the lower October forecast compared to the May estimate, NRF Vice President for Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold replied, “The numbers we’re seeing now are high because there has been so much pent-up demand and more vaccines mean people are finally getting out of the house to shop again. Retailers have had to import record amounts of merchandise to keep up.
“We expect consumer demand to remain strong, but with the ongoing supply chain disruptions and port congestion we’ve seen for months now, many retailers are moving up their holiday imports to be sure that holiday merchandise arrives in time,” said Gold. “That means the peak season that would traditionally come in October will likely come sooner this year, and much of the holiday merchandise will already be here by October.”
But in general, forecasting future import flows has proved extremely challenging in the pandemic era, given the lack of precedent. Case in point: At this time last year, Global Port Tracker forecast total volume for the five months from June-October 2020 of 8.28 million TEUs. The final number for those months came in at 9.95 million TEUs — 20% higher.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 18:30 - Australia Takes China To WTO Over Wine Tariffs As Biggest Export Market Gutted
Australia Takes China To WTO Over Wine Tariffs As Biggest Export Market Gutted
Australia continues reeling from its ongoing trade war with China, lately seeing retaliatory tariffs cause the price of wine to double or triple in China, essentially wiping out Australia’s biggest export market.
And now the Aussie government is lodging a formal complaint with the World Trade Organization – specifically over its imposition of anti-dumping duties on Australian wines.
Saturday’s announcement marks yet another major escalation, with minister for trade, tourism and investment Dan Tehan stating alongside Agriculture Minister David Littleproud: “The government will continue to vigorously defend the interests of Australian wine makers using the established system in the WTO to resolve our differences.”
Getty Images Canberra further said the decision comes after “extensive consultation with Australia’s winemakers” and added that “Australia remains open to engaging directly with China to resolve this issue.”
Tehan further told a public broadcaster: “We’ve always said that we would take a very principled approach when dealing with these trade disputes, and if we think our industry has been harmed or injured we will take all necessary steps and measures to try to address that.”
The ongoing tensions were triggered last year after Canberra started seeking a probe into the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, now no doubt exacerbated by calls for investigating Wuhan’s labs lately going mainstream among Western allies. The demand led the Chinese diplomats in Australia hinting at “economic coercion” of Australian goods by Chinese companies.
Saturday’s complaint to the WTO follows last year’s formal appeal to the global trade dispute body over China’s imposition of steep tariffs on imports of Australian barley.
Breaking- the Federal Government confirms it WILL take China to the WTO over crippling tariffs placed on Australian wine. This has been expected for several weeks now pic.twitter.com/uuLLv70HX6
— Stephen Dziedzic (@stephendziedzic) June 19, 2021
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Australia has since the whole spat started endured severe collateral damage on everything from seafood to coal to barley to wine to beef, and tourism sectors – along with hitting some other commodities, even timber.
Canberra has frequently voiced its “readiness” to resume dialogue with Beijing yet there’s been no substantial breakthrough, particularly as the US has pushed its allies – most recently at the G7 summit in the UK – to take a tougher line on rolling back China’s influence.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 18:00 - Taibbi: Why Has "Ivermectin" Become A Dirty Word?
Taibbi: Why Has “Ivermectin” Become A Dirty Word?
Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,
On December 8, 2020, when most of America was consumed with what The Guardian called Donald Trump’s “desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical” attempt to remain president, the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the “Medical Response to Covid-19.” One of the witnesses, a pulmonologist named Dr. Pierre Kory, insisted he had great news.
“We have a solution to this crisis,” he said unequivocally.
“There is a drug that is proving to have a miraculous impact.”
Kory was referring to an FDA-approved medicine called ivermectin. A genuine wonder drug in other realms, ivermectin has all but eliminated parasitic diseases like river blindness and elephantiasis, helping discoverer Satoshi Ōmura win the Nobel Prize in 2015. As far as its uses in the pandemic went, however, research was still scant. Could it really be a magic Covid-19 bullet?
Kory had been trying to make such a case, but complained to the Senate that public efforts had been stifled, because “every time we mention ivermectin, we get put in Facebook jail.” A Catch-22 seemed to be ensnaring science. With the world desperate for news about an unprecedented disaster, Silicon Valley had essentially decided to disallow discussion of a potential solution — disallow calls for more research and more study — because not enough research and study had been done. Once, people weren’t allowed to take drugs before they got FDA approval. Now, they can’t talk about them.
Subscribe and read the rest of the post here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 17:30 - Here Are All The "Technical Obstacles" Standing In The Way Of Biden's Global Corporate Tax Deal
Here Are All The “Technical Obstacles” Standing In The Way Of Biden’s Global Corporate Tax Deal
As we have been saying for a while now, the Biden Administration’s push to create a new minimum corporate tax likely will never succeed despite all the optimistic reporting in the western press – a reality that will ultimately limit the degree by which the US corporate tax rate can be raised to finance Biden’s ‘Great Society’ ambitions.
Even after the G-7 struck a tentative deal during its recent meeting, a comprehensive reworking of the OECD’s international tax framework – what would constitute the biggest shakeup on the international tax front in a century – will require the consent of dozens of nations, including countries like Ireland, Indonesia and Singapore which have successfully used their low tax rates to drive economic development. Any one of these can sabotage the deal by refusing to lower tax rates.
To try and compensate for this, the Biden Administration is promising foreign governments that they will be entitled to a bigger piece of the profits generated by American multinationals. The G-7 deal would have applied this “carrot” on “profit exceeding a 10% margin for the largest and most profitable multinational enterprises.” There have even been talks to specifically exclude Amazon’s low-margin e-commerce business, allowing the tax to be based on profits from its more lucrative divisions, like AWS.
Over the coming weeks, diplomats will hold talks involving more than 100 governments about the new corporate tax framework ahead of a G-20 meeting in July where Washington hopes the outlines of a deal can come together. For the plan to succeed, more than 100 nations would ultimately need to agree on it.
Source: Bloomberg
Given the staggering scope of competing interests involved, as corporations jockey to be excluded from the tax while countries jockey for all sorts of special interest carve-outs, Bloomberg reports that the process could ultimately take years – even as the administration pushes for a significant breakthrough by the end of the summer – and involve a complex web of legislation to compensate for myriad “technical” complications. These include:
- Agreeing which companies will be covered, and deciding how governments can still use tax incentives to encourage virtuous economic activity despite a minimum rate, are among several other challenges that have overshadowed years of talks hosted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
- The Intergovernmental Group of 24 developing countries, which includes Brazil, India, and South Africa, wants the scope to gradually broaden to include more than 100 companies, according to a policy note it sent to other governments last month.
- &Nations must also decide how much tax revenue to share after the G-7 agreed to reallocate “at least 20%” of profits above a 10% margin. Developing economies want the biggest possible wedge of tax income from multinationals operating in their territories.
- If financial services are excluded from a deal as expected, that poses another challenge since drawing a clear line between them and tech companies is getting harder.
- Ireland remains a “hard sell”:
- In addition, some countries including China want exclusions in the rules that allow them to attract high-tech investment with tax incentives. “Minimum tax is devolving part of tax sovereignty and how you maintain incentives over a particular kind of foreign investment,” said David Linke, Global Head of Tax & Legal at KPMG. “That’s a difficult issue.”
- To be sure, Biden has a big carrot to offer: The OECD estimates an extra $150 billion a year could be generated from tougher US rules on foreign income and a 15% global minimum rate.
- A deal could involve dropping a host of levies on mainly American tech firms that countries enacted unilaterally in recent years and which prompted US threats of retaliation. Negotiators must agree on which measures will be rolled back and when, so to restore trust.
- Implementing new rules agreed at G-20 meetings in July or October will require many changes to treaties and domestic laws. This is particularly problematic for the EU, where directives on tax changes throughout the bloc require unanimity, and several countries may object to such legislation enforcing a OECD deal. Aside from Ireland’s reservations on a 15% minimum tax, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called that plan “absurd”.
- The US could see a challenge from Republicans, since a deal may need legislation in Congress, and treaty changes in the Senate that require a two-thirds’ majority vote.
While Democrats largely support Yellen’s effort, with so many obstacles, it’s impossible for Biden to bank on this as he prepares to raise taxes. But since he has already committed to the spending, it’s likely that the Administration will proceed anyway, abandoning its promises to offset new spending with taxes, and ultimately allowing the Fed to monetize the bulk of the spending, which could create problems since the central bank might finally be forced to start raising interest rates before then.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 17:00 - U Of Ottawa Prof: "Sex Work" Is "The Best Thing Young People Can Do Early In Their Careers"
U Of Ottawa Prof: “Sex Work” Is “The Best Thing Young People Can Do Early In Their Careers”
Authored by Addison Smith via Campus Reform,
University of Ottawa adjunct professor and Canadian Lawyer Naomi Sayers took to Twitter recently to endorse sex work for “young people,” calling it “the best thing” they can do early in their careers.
unpopular opinion: the best thing young people can do early in their careers is do #SexWork on the side because your early career prospects will be unstable, unpredictable, low pay, likely contract work and very much exploitative. https://t.co/HRAmZFPDNX
— Naomi Sayers, Lawyer (@kwetoday) June 13, 2021
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“unpopular opinion: the best thing young people can do early in their careers is do #SexWork on the side because your early career prospects will be unstable, unpredictable, low pay, likely contract work and very much exploitative,” Sayers wrote on Twitter Sunday.
She then addressed the idea of sex work being exploitative by comparing it to capitalism.
“That’s how capitalism works… People out here saying young people can be exploited in sex work. Literally, that’s capitalism. Lol. And quite literally, that’s any kind of work.”
Sayers then said capitalism, along with prisons, needed to be abolished, advocating for free education, and a living wage.
“Also, if you really want young people to not be exploited, provide them with livable wages, access to safe housing, clean water, free education. Literally. Abolish capitalism… Actually abolish prison but whatever.”
Alex Krause, Sayers’ publicist, responded to Campus Reform’s inquiry on Sayers’ behalf, insisting that she is “IN NO WAY” promoting sex work, but rather, was attempting to draw a correlation between it and the supposedly exploitative “capitalist society”.
“Naomi is IN NO WAY promoting or suggesting that anyone should pursue sex work, her point was to facetiously criticize capitalist society, to quote her initial tweet ‘…early career prospects will be unstable, unpredictable, low pay, likely contract work and very much exploitative,’” Krause told Campus Reform.
When asked what Sayers meant by her tweet, Krause told Campus Reform that her “intent” was to called out “systemic racism” and “stigmatization.”
“What Naomi meant is stated plainly. Yes, it is nuanced; but NO, she is not directly advocating for sex work. Her intent remains to call out systemic racism / stigmatization wherever it exists, and it is rampant within for-profit Canadian higher education institutions AND the prison system.”
“Capitalism, for-profit education, and prison are inherently stigmatizing towards certain marginalized groups. As we noted in the previous email, Naomi’s lived experience of stigmatization in the legal realm is telling, considering the massive investment that she made personally and financially to pursue a legal education.”
Krause then told Campus Reform that the interpretation of Sayers’ tweet was “indicative” of the problem Sayers is trying to address.
“Your interpretation of her coy, and nuanced take on exploitation of capitalism vs exploitation of sex work may be indicative of the exact issue she is trying to highlight – the quickness to stigmatize and/or “slut shame” sex work.”
Krause also explained Sayers’ critique of capitalism, insisting that it produces “exploitative career paths.”
“Capitalism has created an economy that many people leave university indebted for decades, and in turn feel pressured to work in exploitative career paths… Sex work can be exploitative, just like any other kind of work, and in fact it predates capitalist societies. Capitalism only further incentives “have nots”/marginalized communities to pursue whatever means they must to survive.”
Campus Reform reached out to Exodus Cry, a non-profit organization committed to fighting back against sex work and human trafficking. Director of Intervention Helen Taylor replied calling Sayers’ comments “deeply irresponsible.”
“For Professor Sayers to flippantly encourage young vulnerable students to engage in such a harmful industry is deeply irresponsible and extremely offensive to survivors who are working hard to heal and recover from the damage prostitution inflicted on their lives,” Taylor wrote
“The sex industry is a system of violence and gender inequality. It is not a ‘job like any other.’ It puts girls at higher risk daily of rape, theft and murder. It causes long-term PTSD comparable to torture victims… We believe education leaders ought to be protecting young women, and empowering them to aim high, not echoing pimp’s advertisements for the sex trade.”
* * *
UPDATE: Sayers’ publicist contacted Campus Reform after publication and insisted Sayers has no relation with the University of Ottawa as a professor.
When Campus Reform reached out to Sayers for an interview, she replied, “my policy is not to answer questions from media in which the answer can be found on google [sic], which tweets are searchable on google now (aka do their research)”.
Research conducted by Campus Reform found that in Sayers LinkedIn profile, she currently touts herself as “adjunct professor” at the university.
“I teach the Colonialism, Territory & Treaties at UOttawa’s Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies”, states her profile.
Sayers is also designated as an adjunct professor on the Ontario Paralegal Association website and the website theorg.com, which lists its mission as “to make organizations more transparent.”
Campus Reform contacted the University of Ottawa for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 16:30 - Another Small Step For Autonomy: Shenzhen Proposes Special License Plates For Self-Driving Vehicles
Another Small Step For Autonomy: Shenzhen Proposes Special License Plates For Self-Driving Vehicles
We’re moving one step closer to autonomy in China…
Southern China city Shenzhen is on the verge of granting special license plates for self driving vehicles, which would mark the first such instance in China, according to Caixin.
It is a step that will help “promote commercialization of self-driving vehicles, such as their use as taxis, instead of being limited to tests,” experts said. It’s one small step toward widespread adoption, as autonomous vehicles aren’t currently legal in the province.
The proposed regulation will be sent for approval by the Standing Committee of Shenzhen People’s Congress at the end of June.
Xiao Jianxiong, founder of Shenzhen-based self-driving company Autox Technologies Inc., says the highlight of the regulation is the issuance of special license plates.
If the regulation passes, the “Shenzhen government will issue a list of ICVs that can be sold, driven on roads and used for transportation business,” the report says.
There’s currently no national standards on self driving vehicles in China. Since Shenzhen is a special economic zone, it has more leeway to legislate than most other provinces in China. This would make it an obvious starting point for regulations that may wind up eventually spreading across the country – not unlike how California can often lead nationwide regulation in the U.S.
Xiao says that the number of self driving cabs could reach 50,000 by 2023 in China. So far, in Shenzhen, there are only a “few hundred” self-driving cabs.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 16:00 - NSA Agrees To Release Records On FBI's Improper Spying On 16,000 Americans
NSA Agrees To Release Records On FBI’s Improper Spying On 16,000 Americans
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
The National Security Agency (NSA) has agreed to release records on the FBI’s improper spying on thousands of Americans, the secretive agency disclosed in a recent letter.
The agreement may signal a rift between the NSA and the FBI, according to attorney Ty Clevenger.
Clevenger last year filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on behalf of The Transparency Project, a Texas nonprofit, seeking information on the FBI’s improper searches of intelligence databases for information on 16,000 Americans.
The searches violated rules governing how to use the U.S. government’s foreign intelligence information trove, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, an Obama nominee who currently presides over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, wrote in a 2019 memorandum and order that was declassified last year.
The FBI insisted that the queries for all 16,000 people “were reasonably likely to return foreign-intelligence information or evidence of a crime because [redacted],” Boasberg wrote. But the judge found that position “unsupportable,” apart from searches on just seven of the people.
Still, Boasberg allowed the data collection to continue, prompting Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, to lament that court’s decision on the data collection program, authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), “is even more inexplicable given that the opinion was issued shortly after the government reported submitting FISA applications riddled with errors and omissions in the Carter Page investigation.”
Page was a campaign associate of then-candidate Donald Trump who was illegally surveilled by the FBI.
After the judge’s order was made public, Clevenger filed FOIA requests for information on the improper searches with both the FBI and the NSA.
The FBI rejected the request.
In a February letter (pdf), an official told Clevenger that the letter he wrote “does not contain enough descriptive information to permit a search of our records.”
The NSA initially declined the request as well, but later granted an appeal of the decision, Linda Kiyosaki, an NSA official, said in a letter (pdf) this month.
“You had requested all documents, records, and other tangible evidence reflecting the improper surveillance of 16,000 individuals described in a 6 December, 2019, FISC Opinion,” Kiyosaki wrote.
Clevenger believes the NSA’s new position signals a rift between the two agencies, potentially because the FBI has repeatedly abused rules governing searches of the intelligence databases while the NSA has largely not.
“There’s been a battle between them, for example, Mike Rogers tried to shut off FBI access to the NSA database back in 2016,” Clevenger told The Epoch Times, referring to how Adm. Mike Rogers, the former NSA director, cut out FBI agents from using the databases in 2016.
“And so there’s been some history of the NSA trying to limit the FBI’s access because they know that the FBI is misusing the data intercepts,” he added.
The NSA and FBI did not respond to requests for comment.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 15:30 - US Navy "Shock Trials" Sparked M3.9 Quake Off Florida Coast
US Navy “Shock Trials” Sparked M3.9 Quake Off Florida Coast
A reported 3.9 magnitude earthquake off the Florida’s east coast Friday was actually an “experimental explosion,” the U.S. Navy confirmed.
ActionNewsJax.com reports that a spokesperson with the Navy said that what was measured were a result of military “shock trials” and they are not unusual, nor is it unusual for them to register as earthquakes.
The United States Geological Survey measured the seismic event roughly 100 miles off the coast of Ponce Inlet.
Shock trials test the strength of a ship’s hull to see how it holds up in an undersea explosion (ensuring it can perform in battle).
This is not the first time such “trials” have been undertaken off the Florida.
In July 2016, a reported 3.7-magnitutde earthquake was actually an ‘experimental explosion’ caused by the U.S. Navy, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 15:00 - Bill Maher: Woke Liberals Have A Bad Case Of 'Progressophobia'
Bill Maher: Woke Liberals Have A Bad Case Of ‘Progressophobia’
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,
In a must see video, comedian Bill Maher blast wokes who have no sense of massive progress on many liberal and Libertarian fronts.
Bill Maher Maher discusses “progressophobia”, a phase coined by psychologist Steven Pinker who calls it “a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress.”
“If you think that America is more racist now than ever, more sexist than before women could vote, and more homophobic than before blow jobs were a felony, you have progressophobia, and should adjust your mask because it is covering your eyes.”
“Before 2012, every time gay marriage was put before a state’s voters it lost, 35 times in a row. Now it’s the law of the land in every state. Even half of Republicans are for it.”
“Not that long ago, I knew people who went to prison for growing pot. Today, you can legally smoke it for fun in 43% of the country and I will.”
“Even something like bullying, it still happens, but being outwardly cruel to people who are different is no longer acceptable.”
“That’s progress. and acknowledging progress isn’t saying we’re done, or we don’t need more. And being gloomier doesn’t make you a better person.”
“In 1958, only 4% of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Now, Gallup does not even bother asking. The last time they did in 2013, 87% approved. An overwhelming number of Americans say they want to live in a multiracial neighborhood.”
“That is a sea change from when I was a kid.”
“In a country that is 14% black, 18% of the incoming Harvard class is black. And since 2017, white students are not even a majority in our public colleges.”
“Yet, there is a recurrent theme on the far left that things have never been worse.”
“This is one of the big problems with wokeness. That what you say doesn’t have to make sense or jibe with the facts, and a challenge itself is equated with racism.”
“Saying white power and privilege is at all all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago with the Tulsa race massacre? Higher than the years when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow went unchallenged? Higher than the 1960s when the Supremes and Willie Mays could not stay in the same hotel as the white people they were working with?”
[In a message to Zoomers] “Here’s the thing kids. There actually was a world before you got here. We need a third marker [to go along with A.D .and B.C.]. B.Y. Before You.
“Having a warped view of reality leads to policies that are warped. Black only dorms and graduation ceremonies, a growing belief that whiteness is a malady.”
“It’s certainly not inaccurate to say, we’ve come a long way baby, not mission accomplished, just a long way.”
98% Spot On
It’s not the Zoomers or millennials who are the big problem, it’s the educators and academia pounding garbage into young kids heads.
To Promote Equality, California Proposes a Ban on Advanced Math Classes
Please note To Promote Equality, California Proposes a Ban on Advanced Math Classes
Adversity Scores
Adversity scores are the Latest in Dumbing Down of US Education.
Starting in 2021, the SAT will assign students an ‘Adversity Score’ to Capture Social and Economic Background.
Bill Maher noted a recent Harvard youth poll of those aged between 18 and 29, that 72% of blacks are hopeful about the future but only 46% of whites.
Given what’s happening with US education, we should not be surprised.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/19/2021 – 14:30
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