- Fear Porn Inc.
Fear Porn Inc.
Authored by Terry Paulding via AmericanThinker.com,
I took a step back from writing about the Wu Flu for a few weeks because there were so many people already writing what I was thinking. But now the country and the world around us are spiraling downward into panic, and officials are feeding us fear porn recklessly. It’s time to sift the information, to try to find some clarity. My all-time favorite word is “perspective,” and that is what seems to be missing right now. That, and honesty from the “top” levels of our government and our media.
I’m not a medical professional. Just an observant senior citizen who cares about my own health and that of those around me. I read and watch multiple sources of information daily because as a grandparent, I’m concerned for my kids and my little grandkids, as well as my own well-being.
The following are my observations.
Let’s start with this mostly unacknowledged problem: the vaccinated have had the rug pulled right out from under their feet. They were secure in the knowledge that they did the right thing. They dutifully rolled up their sleeves, problem solved, COVID could no longer touch them. Oops!
Cue the needle screeching across the record, painfully. (Sorry, youngsters, if that’s not an image that makes you cringe as it does us old-timers.)
Now the vaccinated are aware that there is no truth to the bogus “fact” that they would no longer be in any danger from COVID. The booster shot is being pushed, and pushed hard — but will it be any better than the first two ineffective shots?
The fact that the “vaccine” is not a vaccine is becoming obvious.
The fear is palpable. No matter how high they hastily build their wall against information contrary to the narrative, that wall is crumbling. Reports from other countries, and from our own hospital nurses, are that wards are filled with sick, vaccinated people.
There are ample reports that the vaccinated are in fact themselves spreading delta and therefore responsible for the variant’s mayhem. This may be because their infections are often symptom-free, due to the effects of the vaccine. Then there are the terrifying reports that the vaccinated have compromised their immune systems. Nobody wants to mention any of these possibilities, because they would interfere with the program to get everyone vaccinated. With good reason!
Why, then, is government coming down on the unvaccinated so hard? What’s to be gained by the heavy-handed approach?
New Yorkers, for instance, no longer have the freedom to live if they aren’t vaccinated. I can’t imagine (and I’m an ex–New Yorker, so I imagine the city quite well) what that would be like. I guess grocery and restaurant delivery would be the only options. You can’t live like that, not in a city that is a rabbit-warren of small apartments stacked on top of one another, next to one another. It’s a recipe for despair. Not only for the unvaccinated who have never had COVID, but also for those who have had it and have natural immunity to the virus, immunity that’s far better than the spike protein in the “vaccine” shots.
San Francisco is going in the same direction. Want to go to a restaurant or bar? Show your vaccination certificate. In the Bay Area, people are clearly terrified. They’ve started wearing their masks alone, in the car, once again.
That’s a pretty strong indicator.
Those of us who decided not to get the shot are the lucky ones. If we get COVID, we’ll know, and if we’re smart, we will have arranged in advance to get treatment immediately. In Florida, Ron DeSantis is setting up clinics for monoclonal antibody infusions. They’re desperate to shut him down. Treating people for the infection in a forthright, obvious manner means it will no longer have the power to terrify us all into getting the lucrative jabs.
We won’t all end up in the hospital; we won’t be dying. Between the antibody treatments, and ivermectin and its cohort of zinc, Vitamin D, etc., the death toll from the virus should be demonstrably minuscule among the otherwise healthy.
I have to add my own honest feelings about this. I am not scared of getting the delta variant.
From all accounts, it will confer great antibody protection from future infections. It’s not that bad in the healthy, and I’m healthy. I’ve arranged treatment if I get it. And I would be making my contribution to herd immunity. I also think if the kids get delta, it would be far better than subjecting them to the experimental, and likely harmful in the long term, “vaccine.” Especially since the vaccine has killed 9,000+ Americans and injured countless others with myocarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and potentially (we just don’t really know yet!) more.
My opinion: Take off the masks, mingle freely, celebrate life. End the fear porn’s power over all of us. It’s time.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 23:40 - US Customs In Alaska Seizes 3,000 Fake CDC Vaxx Cards From China
US Customs In Alaska Seizes 3,000 Fake CDC Vaxx Cards From China
It what may be the largest “fake vaccine document” seizure to date – following on the heels of one in Memphis – US Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) announced this week that it intercepted a shipment of over 3,000 counterfeit vaccine cards in Anchorage, Alaska at the airport.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect to the seizure is that the fake document shipment arrived from China. But according to the US Customs statement, the fakes – which appeared to copy CDC vaccination cards – were easy to spot:
The vaccine cards sought to mirror those distributed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after a person receives their full regimen the coronavirus vaccine. However, CPB stated that the cards were of “low quality printing.”
Image via U.S. Customs and Border Protection The seizure is similar to a bust of China-shipped fakes in Memphis Tennessee just days prior. Area Port Director Lance Robinson was cited in a press release as saying, “Getting these fraudulent cards off the streets and out of the hands of those who would then sell them is important for the safety of the American public.”
“Looking out for the welfare of our fellow Alaskans is one of the many and varied responsibilities CBP is proud to take on,” he added.
Black market demand for such fake vaxx cards is on the rise in correlation to the number of public venues and events across the country now demanding “proof” of COVID vaccination, whether they be restaurants or concerts and festival venues.
A handful of Americans have been caught with fake vaccine cards, however, it doesn’t appear anyone has as yet spent time in jail for the violation. But both local and federal authorities are increasingly making threats of steep fines and up to a year or even five years in jail for fraudulent activity related to vaccines and medical documentation.
For example in Chicago…
A licensed pharmacist in Chicago was arrested for allegedly selling vaccine cards on eBay, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
According to court documents, prosecutors said Tang-Tang Zhao sold 125 authentic CDC vaccination cards to 11 different buyers for approximately $10 apiece.
“If you do not wish to receive a vaccine, that is your decision,” one US Customs official said additionally last week. “But don’t order a counterfeit, waste my officer’s time, break the law, and misrepresent yourself.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 23:20 - It's Time To Purge The "Experts"
It’s Time To Purge The “Experts”
Authored by Wesley Smith via The Epoch Times,
The United States’ military mission in Afghanistan has collapsed in chaos and ignominy. The catastrophe has many parents. But surely “the experts” upon which our leader relied bear much blame.
They were the ones who often failed to comprehend the power of religious belief and the role pride in Islam played in the Taliban’s unyielding commitment to victory. They were the ones who thought we could remake Afghanistan into a western liberal image. They were the ones who failed to comprehend the intractable tribal nature of Afghan society.
To say the least, Afghanistan has vividly exposed the utter stupidity of our vaunted foreign policy and national security experts. Our hapless Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for example, assured us that Kabul would not fall from “Friday to Monday.” He was right. It fell from Friday to Sunday.
And what are we to make of the vaunted internationalists at the United Nations? After President Biden’s godawful speech signifying nothing, the State Department held a press briefing, during which spokesman Ted Price reiterated an unintentionally hilarious United Nations Security Council statement urging the Taliban government to be “inclusive and representative—including with the full, equal and meaningful participation of women.” I’m sure the barbarians will get right to including women as soon as they are finished raping them.
The hubris of these whizzes might be tolerable if they were adept at technocracy. But they stink at it. Indeed, every American debacle in my lifetime has “the experts’” fingerprints all over it. There was the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Vietnam. The farce of the missing Iraq WMDs. The list goes on and on.
What’s that you say? The Cuban Missile Crisis worked out very well? Indeed, it did. But that was because JFK ignored the advice of military experts to bomb Cuba.
What about the collapse of the Soviet Union? Once again, that salutary event was hastened because President Reagan ignored experts’ widespread disdain of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) program and forged ahead anyway, which helped break the communists’ treasury.
Look at China. Our China-hand experts were sure that if we boosted the country’s economy the Chinese people would demand increased freedom to go along with their improved standard of living. Not only did that demand not materialize—except in the now crushed Hong Kong citizens’ reaction to the loss of their once existing freedoms—but we are looking increasingly like China instead of it looking more like us.
Worse, we are now dependent on that tyranny for much of our manufacturing and mining of crucial natural resources like rare earth metals.
Great job, experts!
Foreign policy is far from the only field afflicted with debilitating expertitis.
The public health failures during COVID could—and no doubt will—fill several books. But the botched investigations and repeated mendacity surrounding the question of whether the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, are particularly enraging—not to mention the U.S. funding of “gain of function” research conducted there championed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Speaking of the hubris of the expert class, Fauci wrote last year that WHO and the UN should be empowered to “rebuild the infrastructure of human existence” in order to avoid future pandemics. Considering their repeated record of abject failure, putting the international experts in charge of such an all-encompassing project would probably return us to the caves
And look what has happened in the medical sector where our experts are helping drive the transgender moral panic. Major medical journals and associations even promote puberty blocking for children despite its being, at best, entirely experimental and potentially physically harmful to the patients. Good grief, the American Medical Association even urges that we stop listing the sex of children on birth certificates!
And we haven’t even yet mentioned the misbegotten California public policies recommended by climate change experts that have reduced the once Golden State to a third world environment of rolling blackouts, out-of-control wildfires, and inadequate water storage because no new reservoirs have been built for decades—this, even though the state’s population grew exponentially. Good grief, farmers in the Central Valley have begun plowing under their precious almond trees!
Failure after dismal failure has caused mass distrust in the expert class and a concomitant collapse of confidence in our institutions.
This is a profound crisis. We need expertise. People who know what they are talking about and who can explain complicated issues to policy makers and the people are essential to the proper operation of sophisticated democratic societies.
But to do that job right, experts need to be apolitical. They need to provide as objective advice as they can when wearing their “expert” hats. Most of all, they need to put personal ideology aside in the performance of their duties and welcome heterodox opinions. For example, it wasn’t ideology that created the triumph of the moon landing. It was dispassionate excellence in rocket science and engineering.
The problem is that too many of our current “experts”—in foreign policy, law enforcement, science, education, the medical intelligentsia, the list goes on and on—have become highly politicized. Some even now think they should be deciders rather than advisers. That attitude doesn’t make policy more expertly based, it makes expertise more politically motivated, which is to say, it ceases being expert at all.
Creating a paradigm in which we can again safely rely on experts will require a great culling of the faux specialists now perched in powerful government and think tank sinecures. Frankly, mass resignations or firings may be the only efficacious remedy for what ails us. The time has come for that great sorting out to begin.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 23:00 - ATF Now Labels FRT-15 A Machine Gun, Turning Law Abiding Citizens Into Criminals
ATF Now Labels FRT-15 A Machine Gun, Turning Law Abiding Citizens Into Criminals
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) decided that Florida company Rare Breed Trigger, LLC’s special trigger is converting semi-automatic rifles into machine guns.
FRT-15 is a drop-in trigger for an AR-15 rifle and forces the trigger to be reset. The force reset dramatically speeds up the rate of fire of the rifle.
On July 26, the ATF sent a letter to Rare Breed stating the FRT-15 trigger has been classified as a machine gun under the National Firearms Act and that Rare Breed needs to cease all sales.
The ATF declared the Rare Breed trigger a mixture of parts designed and intended to convert a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun. The ATF’s investigation found that the trigger allows a firearm to “shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, with a single continuous pull of the trigger.”
According to Baltimore-based The Machine Gun Nest, Rare Breed had to contact the ATF within five days of receiving the letter to develop a plan to address those so-called “machine guns” already distributed.
Rare Breed has challenged the ATF’s decision and is set to explain how their trigger mechanism still fits the definition of a semi-automatic weapon.
The Machine Gun Nest said the ATF is going rogue again due to former President Trump setting dangerous precedence with the bump stock ban because the Biden administration could, at any moment, say an AR-15 is a machine gun.
“While I’ve handled one [FRT-15], I understand that they still require one pull of the trigger to function. The user pulls the trigger, the weapon fires, and the FRT-15 forces a reset of the trigger. If the user keeps continuous force on the trigger, it will fire again,” The Truth About Guns’ Travis Pike said.
Pike added, “This is not an automatic function by any means, and the weapon fires one shot per trigger pull.”
In a video released by Rare Breeds, the company explains how the FRT-15 mechanism doesn’t classify a rifle as a machine gun.
The Machine Gun Nest ends by saying, “When we have a law enforcement agency acting through executive fiat by just changing these rules and criminalizing people – it sets terrifying precedence – what if the CDC changed a rule that would criminalize you overnight? If you think this okay, then they haven’t come for something important to you yet – and this is the precedent that is giving the government too much power.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 22:40 - McMaken: Did The Pentagon & The Generals Want This Disastrous War?
McMaken: Did The Pentagon & The Generals Want This Disastrous War?
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
In early July, Ron Paul penned a column titled “It’s Saigon In Afghanistan,” invoking the imagery of the fall of Saigon in 1975, when US military helicopters scrambled to evacuate personnel from the roof of the US embassy. But Paul suggested that maybe the situation in Afghanistan was “perhaps not as dramatic” as the situation in Saigon forty-six years ago.
But that was six weeks ago.
Now, it looks like the end of the US’s war in Afghanistan may be in many ways every bit as chaotic as the US regime’s final defeat in Vietnam.
When Paul was writing his article in early July, we were already getting hints of the direction things were going. US forces abandoned Bagram Airfield in the middle of the night, and the US didn’t even tell its allies what was going on. Afghan officials discovered the US was gone hours later. Shortly thereafter, looters ransacked the base.
But that, it seems, was just the beginning. Over a period of a mere ten days, provincial capitals in Afghanistan have fallen one after the other. On Sunday, the Taliban entered the strategically key capital Kabul. The Taliban’s reconquest of the country was so fast that even the US regime’s spokesman admitted “the militants’ progress came much more quickly than the U.S. had anticipated.”
Now, after spending twenty years implementing “regime change” in Afghanistan, and after spending more than $800 billion—an official figure that’s likely far smaller than the real monetary cost—the US’s strategy in Afghanistan has completely collapsed.
Indeed, for the US’s local allies, the situation is far worse now than what it was in 2001. Those who were unwise enough to ally themselves with the Americans over the past twenty years now face reprisals from the Taliban. Death will likely be the result for many.
Not surprisingly, then, Afghanis in recent days have flocked to Kabul International Airport, desperate to find some way out of the country as the Taliban closes in.
Crowds of people desperate to escape Afghanistan stormed Kabul’s international airport, rushing onto the tarmac.
People clung to the sides of military planes, even as one taxied down the runway, in a bid to flee as the Taliban takes control.https://t.co/BMfaEkDykr pic.twitter.com/WkX0JQx3io
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 16, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
It’s doesn’t take an immense amount of imagination to recall the images of those who were desperate to escape from the US embassy in Saigon.
Blame the Generals and the Pentagon
So now we reach the stage of figuring out who is to blame for this total strategic failure in Afghanistan.
Some politicians will try and use the US regime’s failure in Afghanistan to score points against the Biden administration. We already see it with some Republicans who still haven’t figured out that the American public long ago stopped caring about the war.
It’s easy to see the partisan reasons for this, but if we want to honestly focus on who’s to blame for the utter waste of time and resources that was the war in Afghanistan, we have to look far beyond just a handful of civilian politicians.
Yes, much of the blame should go to the civilian bureaucrats, because they share an immense amount of the blame in bringing about this strategic blunder. George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Madeleine Albright are just a few of the politicos who encouraged the continuation of this lost war.
But the fact is the civilian war architects were encouraged and enabled every step of the way by Pentagon bureaucrats (i.e., the generals), who were only more than happy to have an excuse to pad their budgets and increase their relevance on Capitol Hill. As Ron Paul put it this week:
The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.
And of course, the Pentagon allied itself with the “private” sector industries that supplied the materiel.
Paul continues:
The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.
Or, as Timothy Kudo describes it,
Across two decades, our military leaders presented rosy pictures of the Afghanistan War and its prospects to the president, Congress, and the American people, despite clear internal debate about the validity of those assessments and real-time contradictory information from those fighting and losing the daily battle against the Taliban. Or, to put it in the words of John Sopko, the inspector general who issued a series of reports known as the Afghanistan Papers: “The American people have constantly been lied to.”
Nor did the military officers counsel caution or peace. Douglas MacGregor at the American Conservative correctly recalls:
All that can be said with certainty is that between 2001 and 2021, none of the senior officers expressed opposition to the policies of intervention and occupation strongly enough to warrant their removal. None felt compelled to leave the service and take their opposing views to the public forum.
When it became clear that the collective strategies and tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq were failing, not only General David Petraeus, but most of America’s senior military leaders chose to prevaricate and distort facts in public to show progress when there was none. How many American lives might have been saved had someone only told the truth will never be known.
Moreover, Petraeus and countless military technocrats continued to call for more military action while trying to place the blame on others. Doug Bandow sums it up:
Many of those once responsible for U.S. forces in Afghanistan while in authority have taken the lead in trying to perpetuate the mission. For instance, David Petraeus is busy trying to shield his reputation and shift blame to Biden as the Afghan project collapses. Joseph Dunford, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, recently co-chaired the congressionally mandated Afghanistan Study Group, which predictably insisted that the United States should stay in the country. What other conclusion was imaginable? As the entire geopolitical enterprise collapses, its promoters insist that American forces should stick around with no good purpose and no realistic plan of action.
Indeed, the incompetence of the US’s military leadership has been on clear display in recent weeks as the US-trained and US-armed military personnel have been impotent in the face of Taliban advances. The US’s military hierarchy was specifically tasked with training these Afghan forces, yet it’s now clear how well that directive was carried out.
Unwarranted Trust in Military Brass
The complicity of the military brass’s role has always been especially damaging, because the generals have long banked on the unwarranted amount of credibility they enjoy with the public. As Kudo notes:
The promise that victory was just around the corner proved intoxicating to presidents and politicians, not to mention everyday Americans, who blindly trusted anyone with four stars on his epaulettes. Despite the partisanship and institutional mistrust of the past two decades, the military consistently has been the most trusted institution in the country, rated highly by roughly 70 percent of Americans. Cloaked in near-universal trust, these officers repeatedly argued that an unwinnable war could be won.
Unfortunately, because of this, military personnel are likely to continue to be shielded from the criticism they deserve.
After all, there is a persistent habit among many Americans to repeat the narrative that all wars will be won if only the politicians listen to the generals, and “let the generals do their job.” One still hears this today from those who still engage in wishful thinking about the Vietnam War and who still cling to the idea that the war could have been won if only the military “experts” had been in charge. In actual experience, however, the lost war in Afghanistan is what we get when we listen to the generals.
But don’t expect any meaningful reform. In the United States, when bureaucrats fail, they usually get rewarded with larger budgets, such as when the US’s “intelligence community” allowed 9/11 to occur right under its collective nose. The same is likely—at least in the short term—for the Pentagon. The generals will simply “pivot” to argue for ever-larger military budgets in the name of fighting China, Iran, Russia, and other perceived enemies.
In other words, the generals and the civilian politicians are hard at work planning the next Afghanistan. Let’s just hope the taxpayers who pay for it all may be a little less naïve next time.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 22:20 - Semi Shortage Continues To Sting Auto Production, With VW And Toyota Cutting Output
Semi Shortage Continues To Sting Auto Production, With VW And Toyota Cutting Output
Both VW and Toyota have announced they are temporarily cutting output due to the ongoing global chip shortage, with Volkswagen being the latest to disclose the production pause.
VW’s main plant in Wolfsburg is only going to be running on its early shift after summer break due to the lack of supply, Bloomberg reported this morning.
Its plant in Wolfsburg is the “world’s biggest car plant” and employs about 60,000 people. Audi is also pausing production temporarily, extending its summer break by one week, the report notes.
Global shortages of semiconductors could wind up cutting worldwide production of autos this year by about 7.1 million vehicles, Bloomberg predicted this morning.
IHS predicts that 2.1 million units could wind up being lost in the third quarter of 2021 alone.
There is still little in the way of normalization to be optimistic about until the second quarter of 2022, IHS estimates.
An IHS report stated: “The situation is still fraught with challenges. We are also seeing additional volatility due to Covid-19 lockdown measures in Malaysia where many back-end chip packaging and testing operations are performed.”
Toyota also said it was planning to temporarily stop 14 plants next month while lowering its production by 40%.
Toyota Purchasing Group Chief Officer Kazunari Kumakura said this week: “Especially in Southeast Asia, the spread of Covid and lockdowns are impacting our local suppliers.”
The rise of the Delta variant in Southeast Asia has once again slowed production, just as most countries were getting ready to “officially” re-open, on the heels of numerous vaccines becoming available.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 22:00 - Democrats' "Defund-The-Police" Debacle
Democrats’ “Defund-The-Police” Debacle
Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics.com,
It’s easy to find politicians saying dumb things. Television news gives them plenty of coverage. Viewers like colorful voices, which are often the most extreme.
The resulting Kardashianization of politics doesn’t matter much unless these caricatures tarnish an entire political party, define its public perception, and compromise its chances of passing legislation and winning elections.
That’s the Democrats’ problem with “the Squad,” led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
This problem arose again last week when squad member Cori Bush told a national TV audience how eager she is to defund the police. She said nothing to convince anyone who rejects her views. She probably made matters worse with her transparent hypocrisy, defending her right to hire expensive private security guards while advocating less police protection for everyone else.
Rep. Bush hasn’t learned the single most important lesson about being stuck in a hole: Stop digging. The St. Louis Democrat doesn’t dig with shovels, either. She bought an industrial-size excavator and went to work. The hole she’s digging is “defund the police,” and polls show she’s mining for fool’s gold. The defund movement may be popular with some wealthy (white) elites, activists on the extreme left and, at least temporarily, some African Americans in congressional districts like Bush’s, though its popularity even in those precincts will fade as violence continues to rise. Everyone else is already staunchly opposed. They fear, quite reasonably, that defunding will lead to more crime, not only because there will be fewer cops on the beat but because those who remain will limit their active policing because they lack political support.
A new poll, just completed by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and Harris Poll, shows that 75% of respondents want more police and only 25% want less. About the same number, 72%, oppose defunding the police. A slight majority even favors restoring “stop and frisk” policies to “deter gun crime,” something New York did under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg before ending the practice because so many young minority men were being searched.
Pollster Mark Penn, co-leader of the Harvard/Harris survey, now says rising violence is the single most important issue for the 2022 midterms. “Crime is becoming the next crisis in America,” he concluded, “with overwhelming numbers seeing an increase in crime and Americans want stricter, not looser, enforcement of laws.” There’s no question which party has the advantage on that issue. The question for Democrats is: What can they do to recover?
Of course, many voters also want to see police reforms and greater transparency. Both are being put in place across the country. Most of all, Americans want police, prosecutors, and judges to do their respective jobs and protect them from predators. That means the left’s push to slash police funding has become a major electoral liability for mainstream Democrats, both nationally and locally. One sign that the political winds have changed is that two progressive cities, Seattle and Minneapolis, which gutted their police budgets last year, now want to increase them. They are not alone.
Cori Bush spit directly into that wind last week during her CBS interview. Correspondent Vladimir Duthiers asked Bush her response to critics who say it is hypocritical for you to support defunding police departments while she is spending lavishly on her own personal security.
“They would rather I die? You would rather me die? Is that what you want to see? You want to see me die? You know, because that could be the alternative. So either I spent $70,000 on private security over the last few months, and I’m here standing now and able to speak, able to help save 11 million people from being evicted.”
As if that answer wasn’t bad enough, she added,
“I have private security because my body is worth being on this planet right now. … I have too much work to do. There are too many people that need help right now for me to allow that. So if I end up spending $200,000, if I spend 10, 10, 10 more dollars on it, you know what, I get to be here to do the work. So suck it up and defunding the police has to happen.”
The only way to summarize her response is:
“I’m far more important than ordinary people, which means protecting me is far more important than protecting them.”
That’s not an appealing message.
There’s nothing wrong with Bush wanting to stay alive. She might want to acknowledge that other people do, too. Since they can’t afford private security, they count on the police to help. She wants to deny them that help.
It is political malpractice for Cori Bush to embrace this kind of narcissism, hypocrisy, and cringing victimization on national TV. It’s even worse when your own party is scrambling to limit the self-inflicted damage done by the movement she advocates. Republicans will be happy to re-air that interview again and again. It’s that bad.
Voters now connect defunding the police with rising crime, and they connect both with the Democrats. Even though party leaders, including Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer, have repeatedly tried to distance themselves from progressive demands to cut police budgets, they haven’t succeeded in the public eye, at least not yet.
Why do Democrats have such trouble with the crime issue, despite unwavering support from the mainstream media? The problem is all that darn evidence. All the cities that actually did defund police are governed by Democratic mayors and city councils. All the lax prosecutors, so reluctant to charge violent offenders and brazen shoplifters, are self-proclaimed “Justice Democrats.” Almost all the local judges who release prisoners are Democrats. Almost all the support for “no cash bail” comes from Democrats and has been implemented in blue cities and states. Those policies, supported by leaders like Vice President Kamala Harris, put perps back on the streets only hours after they’ve been charged with violent crimes. It was the Democrats who held a national convention last year and didn’t mention the rioting and looting going on for months. To their credit, party leaders now have to routinely say they oppose defunding police. But no top Democrat — not Biden, not Schumer, not Pelosi — has been brave enough to flatly condemn the progressives who support it and take them on. The public has noticed. Voters realize that strident demands to cut police budgets, eliminate cash bail, and reduce serious crime to misdemeanors are elements of a larger progressive wish list that would limit all facets of law enforcement and criminal punishment.
Many of those wishes are being granted. In city after city, police know they no longer have the support of top elected officials. They know many of their arrests won’t be prosecuted. The predictable result is that more police are retiring and those who remain are spending more time sitting in squad cars and less time chasing criminals. They know hoodlums can walk into a store, scoop up $950 worth of merchandise, and stroll out to their car with implicit permission from city officials. District attorneys in several major cities, all of them Democrats, consider these thefts only misdemeanors and won’t bother prosecuting. So, police figure, “Why bother trying to catch the robbers?”
The inevitable public revulsion poses a political challenge that goes well beyond one or two Squad members with bad ideas and bully pulpits. True, some have pushed the defunding agenda more aggressively than others, but voters believe the whole party is implicated. Now that moderate members want to change course, those on the left, like Cori Bush, want to keep digging and proudly shouting their message to the world. Their colleagues on the center-left haven’t figured a way to climb out of the hole.
Next November, voters will bury them even deeper if their main concerns are rising crime and lawlessness on the southern border. If that reckoning comes, Democrats will have only themselves to blame.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 21:40 - A "Summer Chill" Looms For Consumers As Child Tax Credits Fail To Boost Spending
A “Summer Chill” Looms For Consumers As Child Tax Credits Fail To Boost Spending
Last week we warned that the US economy was facing a “sudden negative change” as consumer spending was set to collapse, and we even warned that the retail sales data this week would be atrocious. Well it was, and whether due to the end of stimmy checks, the evaporation of savings, or a fresh round of Delta covid restrictions, suddenly the worst kept secret – that the US consumer is once again on the verge of tapping out – is fully in the public, leading to many prominent banks slashing their GDP forecasts for the current and future quarters, most notably Goldman which took a machete to its 8.5% Q3 GDP forecast and now sees just 5.5% even as it warns of a stagflationary burst of even higher inflation.
And with Goldman also pointing out – well after the fact, and well after its chief equity strategist hiked his S&P price target to 4,700 from 4,300 as if the two are now completely unlinked (spoiler alert: in today’s centrally planned markets they are) – that consumer spending declined 3% in just the past few weeks…
… other banks are joining in the fray, with Bank of America’s Michelle Meyer pointing out on Thursday that total card spending, based on BAC aggregated credit and debit cards, has hit a “summer chill” slowing to just 11% 2-year growth rate for the 7-days ending August 14th, while the 1-year growth rate is similarly at 11% as the 1 and 2-year rates have now converged for total spending although remain wide apart for a number of categories.
The charts below shows just how sharp the slowdown and normalization in spending has been in recent weeks as US consumers are reverting to their pre-covid spending patterns, albeit in a time when prices are exploding, and it is only a matter of time before we enter the “trapdoor” plunge phase once all accumulated purchasing power disappears.
According to Meyer, the main reason behind the moderation over the last several weeks has been due to a pullback in spending on leisure services, which are defined as travel (airlines + lodging), entertainment and restaurants/bars. The 2-year growth rate of this composite is running at 0.6% for the latest week, down from the recent high of 2.5% in late June.
A more detailed look shows a slowdown across virtually all leisure sectors, from airlines to lodging and entertainment, although one can see that spending on durable goods is also starting to take on water.
When netting out leisure service spending, BofA still sees a drop in the growth rate of spending from early July but some stability over the last few weeks. According to Meyer, the weakening in leisure services spending is responsible for just more than a quarter of the slowdown in total card spending over the last four weeks. Which also means that non-leisure spending is taking a big hit too as the next series of charts shows. Tangentially, as exhibit 28 shows, the pool bubble has also burst.
Finally, what about the stimmies? Well, with the bulk of Biden’s trillions now spent, there was a modest bounce in household spending when the welfare president started sending out child tax credit. However, while CTC recipients did spend in excess of others for 2 weeks after they got the check, they then fell below for the following two weeks as they spent the entire stimulus and then hunkered down more than non-recipient households until the next child tax credit.
One can’t help but dread what happens to the US economy – and society – when one day the stimmies, the universal basic income, the emergency benefits and so on, finally come to an end.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 21:20 - The Fall Of An American Empire
The Fall Of An American Empire
By Philip Cunliffe, senior lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent. His most recent books include Cosmopolitan Dystopia: International Intervention and the Failure of the West, as published originally in Spiked.
The fall of Kabul to Taliban forces on 15 August marks the end of a long cycle of international politics.
The original justification for the Western military intervention in Afghanistan back in 2001 was state failure. It was said that the absence of centralised public authority and power in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan provided shelter for the al-Qaeda terror network, allowing it to take root and launch terrorist attacks against the US.
According to the US national security adviser of the time, Condoleeza Rice, the security problem of the 21st century was not strong, expansionist states aggressing against their neighbours. Rather, it was weak, failing ones, whose disorder and disarray spread across borders, and through regions. These failing states therefore necessitated external intervention.
The disintegration of the Afghan government and army over the past few weeks exposes the folly of such an approach. After two decades of a nation-building effort that has cost many thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars, the US has succeeded only in substituting one failed state for another. And so it is now the Taliban that very clearly commands more authority around Afghanistan rather than the Kabul government. The US wasn’t building an Afghan nation state – it was building a failed state.
It is too easy to blame the Afghans themselves for the Taliban’s victory, as President Biden sought to do in his address to the nation. Doubtless the corruption of the new Afghan elite played a significant part in weakening the institutions of the US-backed Kabul regime. But given it was the US that was driving this state-building project with so much treasure and blood, an explanation of the Afghan state’s collapse cannot stop at the borders of Afghanistan. If Afghanistan was indeed a de facto province of an American empire, then the explanation for the fall of that province must be rooted in the core of the empire, not in its periphery. As Condoleeza Rice herself suggested throughout the early 2000s, the political project of state-building was always larger than Afghanistan itself – and, in truth, it always coincided with a staggered cycle of imperial decline.
The origin of state-building
The state-building policies and structures that emerged at the end of the 1990s were prompted less by the emergence of al-Qaeda-style terrorism than a much earlier political failure.
This failure centred on Western powers’ use of economic ‘shock therapy’, sanctions regimes and cruise-missile diplomacy to flatten the political and social order of the old Eastern bloc and Third World during the 1980s and especially the early 1990s. As these already battered states and societies, from the former Yugolslavia to vast swathes of Africa, were shredded by the rapid introduction of market economies, or pulverised by UN coalitions and humanitarian interventions, it became clear that Western powers had destroyed one order, but had failed to replace it. They realised that new institutions of centralised control had to be re-established to replace the old political order. They realised that, to function effectively, the operation of the market and globalised capitalism required a whole infrastructure of civil society, public institutions, regulatory agencies, laws and security apparatuses. State-building thus emerged as a corrective to the destructive excesses of the 1980s and early 1990s.
However, destroying old orders proved easier than building new ones – as Afghanistan has shown.
Although the al-Qaeda terror network had its base in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, its alliance with the Taliban was not a natural one. The Taliban of the 1990s might have been as doctrinaire as al-Qaeda, but it was comprised of poor and rural Afghans, who were largely ignorant of the outside world – theirs was a revolt of the village against urban modernity and technology as much as anything else. Hence the Taliban banned mobile phones, cameras and televisions when it swept into Kabul in 1996. Contrast that with the leader of the al-Qaeda network, Osama bin Laden. He was very much a modern Islamist in that he saw Islam as a source of ideological renewal for a godless modern world. He courted journalistic interviews and fired off his videotaped pronouncements and recordings to Al Jazeera.
Once the US decided, in 2001, that conquest rather than police and intelligence operations was to be its chosen modus operandi against terrorist cells like those of al-Qaeda, state-building was inevitable. The US invasion swiftly overthrew the ragtag militias of the Taliban, necessitating the creation of a substitute political order to replace the tribal coalition and rural theocracy that underpinned Taliban rule. This inaugurated the process of state-building in Afghanistan, built up in cooperation with the UN and an occupying NATO force.
State-building was not restricted to Afghanistan, however. It became a new imperial project to help cohere the West’s Cold War victory after the failures of the 1990s. State-building spawned a whole cadre of globalised technocrats, governance experts, aid workers, constitutional experts, peacekeepers, administrators, counter-insurgency theorists, spooks and lawyers. In some cases, it even produced outright viceroys, with protectorates imposed on places such as Kosovo and East Timor.
Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president who has fled Kabul for the United Arab Emirates, is a case in point. He himself was a technocrat, whose academic training was in the anthropology of early modernisation. Indeed, the US military even drew anthropologists into its war effort in Afghanistan under the ‘Human Terrain’ programme.
Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani at a joint meeting of the US Congress with vice president Joe Biden, 25 March 2015, in Washington, DC. State-building was nothing if not frenzied. Court houses were built, women’s NGOs funded, parliamentary buildings thrown up, and new police forces and armies assembled, sometimes from the militias of former warlords. War-torn capital cities throughout the Balkans and Africa became overnight boom towns with vast infusions of aid, while the rural hinterlands remained largely untouched, and often wracked by permanent insurgency and constantly collapsing ceasefires, as in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But, like the shock therapy of the 1990s, state-building quickly ran up against its own limits. While it was easy to throw up new buildings, and subsidise local elites and middle classes with NGO funds, it was harder to legitimise this new order. After all, these fragile new institutions were dependent on foreign armies, whether NATO forces or United Nations peacekeepers, to keep warlords and insurgents at bay. The state-builders were caught up in numerous binds: they wished to create long-lasting institutions of independent statehood, yet at the same time they expected these new institutions to enact Western rather than indigenous policymaking. Rather than representing their own citizens, these jerry-rigged new states were intended to act as transmission belts for policies concocted by Western policymakers and international agencies.
Humanitarian compassion and altruism were sufficient to justify state-building from the outside as a new civilising mission. Yet at the same time, devolving political responsibility to local institutions proved impossible. After all, painting a country’s inhabitants as victims of human-rights abuses may justify the external interventions in the first place. But victimhood, by its very definition, is no basis on which to build independent, politically self-sufficient nations.
The state-builders had long been aware of the problem of the lack of legitimacy of these new states. This generated a list of technocratic euphemisms such as ‘capacity-building’, ‘local ownership’, ‘partnership’, ‘bottom-up’ and ‘grassroots’. These tried to fill in for the very thing these states really lacked – namely, political legitimacy. Moreover, there was nothing behind these terms, not least because the problem ran deeper than how to make local populations connect to Western-led institutions.
Many analysts and eventually historians will pore over the fall of Kabul and the many contributing factors that led to the implosion of the US’s client state. Some will look to parse the inter-ethnic relations among Tajiks, Uzbeks and Pashtun Afghans. And others will try to trace the bank accounts through which the cronies of ex-president Ashraf Ghani siphoned off billions. But there is no avoiding the ultimate issue – the lack of political legitimacy that led to the collapse of the Afghan state has to be rooted at the core of the global political system, and not in a remote imperial outpost.
For all the death and hardship visited upon Afghanistan during this 20-year-long occupation, as long as state-building could be justified in humanitarian terms – defending the rights of Afghan women and children against rapacious fundamentalists, for instance – it could continue interminably. The war in Afghanistan has already lasted two decades, ran the thinking, so what’s a few more?
What ultimately undercut the war effort was not any battlefield loss to the Taliban, but Donald Trump. In his sloganeering for an ‘America First’ foreign policy, and in his efforts to delegitimise state security agencies and bureaucracies, he kept raising a single question to which no one had an answer – what was the US self-interest in these never-ending and supposedly altruistic interventions? Given the grandiloquent proportions to which US foreign-policy ambition had swollen, it was easily punctured by this simple but sharp question. Twenty years after the original invasion of Afghanistan, and nearly a decade after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, no one had any meaningful answer to Trump’s question.
The very election of Trump himself and the turbulence that shadowed his administration indicated a deeper problem for US foreign policy – the collapse of political legitimacy at the core of this new empire. How could the US expect to build legitimate states in the periphery of the international system, when its own domestic legitimacy was evaporating?
The decay of the political order
This problem was illustrated last summer, when the US government sent in Humvees – still painted in desert tan from decades of Forever Wars in the Middle East – to repress the looting and rioting that had broken out in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and lockdowns. This display of militarised policing in the midst of a pandemic that threatened to overwhelm ramshackle public-health systems revealed the source of the problem: the US itself is becoming a failing state. After all, it was now deploying its military force against its own citizens, an exercise of power without right. This hints at a domestic political order that is so hollowed out that only its instruments of global empire remain standing – an outsized central bank and an outsized war machine seeking to prop up the global order.
Indeed, successive US governments have spent a total of $2 trillion on the war effort in Afghanistan. And they have done so while infrastructure has crumbled and de-industrialisation accelerated at home. This demonstrates that, prior to Covid at least, war has become the only legitimate reason for large-scale public spending. Needless to say, much of this spending was recycled to private contractors and arms manufacturers as a de facto public subsidy for US capitalists.
The fact that the US state was unable to justify public spending, except in terms of maintaining global order through force, in turn exposed something else – the emptiness at the core of the global market system that had emerged after the Cold War.
As stated above, state-building was developed as a counterpart to the neoliberalism of the 1990s. It was intended to undergird the extension of the market into the developing world. Neoliberalism was expressly counterposed to the state and intended to curb, delegitimise and repress public power over the market. But, at the same time, neoliberalism was always dependent on state power to achieve these aims. As a result, neoliberalism succeeded in delegitimising public power and authority, while also relying on the state to expand the rule of the market. The justification for the exercise of state power and public authority shrivelled away, as the market itself could not generate its own legitimacy or justification in the face of stagnant wages, growing inequality and recurrent financial bubbles. Without an effective justification for the exercise of public power, political order itself inevitably decays: thus state failure is built into the logic of neoliberalism.
We can see the results today at the core of the global order in the US. There, political life is decaying into oligarchic rule from above and fragmented identity politics from below. And we can see it on the periphery, in places like Afghanistan, where this decay has resulted in warlordism and ethnic strife. This is the globalisation of what the critical theorist Max Horkheimer termed ‘racket society’, in which a social order, underpinned by law and universal principles, disintegrates into various large hierarchies offering protection in return for domination, and devoid of any sense of common interest or general will. In the US this is apparent in an emerging oligarchic state and the various identity groups it sponsors; in the periphery, it is apparent in the predominance of warlords, drug dealers, NGOs, kleptocrats, smugglers, terror networks, UN agencies, peacekeepers and occupying armies. State failure is the result of globalised neoliberalism.
Perhaps religious fervour and Islamic ideology will be sufficient to enable the new Taliban to offer an alternative to the warlordism and graft of the US-sponsored Ghani regime. Perhaps the Taliban racket will win out over the warlord-NGO-NATO racket, and a new proto-nation might even emerge.
In the US itself, however, there is no clear answer to the problem of the failing state. For example, the BLM movement not only exposed the declining legitimacy of the US state. It also amplified it in its call to ‘defund the police’ and abolish the forces of public order. BLM, for example, merely wants to turn over burned-down and increasingly violent inner cities to state-funded NGOs and social workers, which constitute the social base of the BLM movement. And so one racket substitutes for another.
Until we establish a cohesive political vision based on universal principles and a concept of general will that rises above the parochialism of identity groups and their associated rackets, little will change – our states will continue to fail.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 21:00 - San Francisco Prepares To Suspend Cops And Firefighters Who Refuse To Disclose Vaccination Status
San Francisco Prepares To Suspend Cops And Firefighters Who Refuse To Disclose Vaccination Status
San Francisco is preparing to suspend nearly two-dozen employees with the police, fire, and sheriff’s departments who have refused to disclose their vaccination status, while hundreds of employees from other departments are about to be similarly put on notice, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Two police officers walk on Stockton Street near Union Square in San Francisco, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2018. The city sent notifications to 20 employees in the police, fire and sheriff’s departments for failing to meet an Aug. 12 disclosure deadline, while employees from other departments – including Public Health and the Municipal Transportation Agency, could receive similar letters next week.
The city is recommending a 10-day unpaid suspension for 11 Police Department employees, seven Fire Department employees and two employees in the Sheriff’s Department.
“The health and well being of city employees and the public we serve are top priorities during our emergency response to COVID-19,” reads the letter which was obtained by the Chronicle. “Your failure to comply with the vaccination status reporting requirement endangers the health and safety of the city’s workforce and the public we serve.”
The letters will arrive as San Francisco grapples with a surge in coronavirus cases fueled by the delta variant, with the unvaccinated making up the overwhelming majority of those who are hospitalized or killed by the virus. The data shows that the vaccines are extremely safe and very effective at preventing severe COVID-19.
San Francisco was the first large city in the country to require all municipal employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, unless they have a valid religious or medical exemption. All employees had to report their vaccination status to the city by Aug. 12, and those without valid exemptions must be inoculated 10 weeks after the Food and Drug Administration fully approves the vaccines. The Department of Human Resources already gave employees a two-week extension to report their status. -SF Chronicle
According to the report, the city says that failure to get the jab could eventually lead to firings.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 20:40 - Beijing Will Use Afghan Angst To Pressure US, Distract From Domestic Chaos
Beijing Will Use Afghan Angst To Pressure US, Distract From Domestic Chaos
Authored by Bill Blain via MorningPorridge.com,
Even as China’s markets wobble, they will view The Afghan Skedaddle as an opportunity to pressure the US.
“When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery, when I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery, and when I’ve a smattering of elemental strategy, I am the very model of a modern Major-General.”
China’s markets are under pressure from the widening Chinese Communist Party’s regulatory crackdown – which is likely as much about imposing party discipline and control as much as it was ever about consumer protection. But as investors fret about crashing China stocks, rising global uncertainty and the destabilisation caused by the Afghan debacle, the Chinese are likely to up the pressure and further test a distracted US administration. “Interesting times” lie ahead for global markets as the tension threatens to escalate.
China has not been good for me this year.
This morning, yet again, the front page of the FT is about China Tech stocks being thumped – this time it’s a new data privacy law that’s caused the big names to spiral down another 5%. My personal portfolio has taken a spanking after I switched a modest portion of my personal assets into China late last year. Alibaba is down 48% while Tencent is 44% lower. The basket of China focused funds I also bought into are doing equally not well. None of this has been very helpful – China stock shenanigans are not accelerating my retirement planning.
It was only 10 months ago – soon after the Ant Financial IPO cancellation bombshell and regulatory defenestration of Jack Ma – that I decided to make a modest pivot into China, eventually raising my allocation to nearly 5%. Soon after I wrote an article for Master Investor comparing East vs West investment possibilities: China vs USA: Which Economy Would You Bet On? I referenced how China is still only 3% of global investment portfolios, but 14% of global market cap, and why investors like Ray Dalio of Bridgewater favoured China.
I made the bet back then the Chinese – well, let’s be honest, President Xi – had made their point by hammering down the sticky-out-nail Jack Ma, and expected China would resume its seduction of western investors, encouraging them to invest into China as having better long-term valuation and demographic metrics than the overpriced US market and stagnant European stocks.
Er.. that wasn’t quite the script they’ve followed.
After a succession of clampdowns on “regulatory grounds” the whole China market has become increasingly tortuous. There is a lot of noise about imposing market discipline, regulatory oversight, customer protection, but it’s equally apparent the Party is taking a far more active role in managing the economy directly by managing entrepreneurs and reminding them whose interests they would do well to serve. The spooks analysing China politics believe Xi is using the clampdown to relieve billionaires of their cash burdens and ability to fund internal political opposition within the party. He’s redirecting control to reward his own supporters.
Rather than being a capitalist state with communist characteristics, China is looking increasing Stalinist.
It’s difficult to remain enthusiastic when China is clearly an economy focused on serving the state first, and shareholders a very distant second.
This week, we’ve seen big-tech data collectors thumped, health-care apps knocked down 15% due to “social concerns”, drinks companies drenched as part of a regulatory attempt to stem heavy drinking at work, and the wealthy have been put on notice that “common prosperity” should outweigh their propensity for western luxury goods. Hermes bags are out. Mao suits are in.
The bottom line is we just don’t know what China will decide to attack next. Just a few weeks ago one of my chums, Will Nutting, was warning how European luxury good makers were all at long-term highs, but that no one on Wall Street was even pondering the sustainability of China luxury demand in the face of a likely government pogrom. Go figure what it means for Tesla.
It’s all terribly confusing for global investors….. China and South-East Asia are driving global growth, have expanding middle classes looking to consume, and are showing themselves to be more resilient economies than the tired old occidental economies of the West… In a simple world, the choice between tired, bureaucratic, red-tape bound Europe or thriving Asia would be a no-brainer. Instead, we are struggling to reconcile Xi’s apparent wholesale destruction of China market value.
The question is why is China apparently running such risks with its economy? There are multiple possible answers to with the party demonstrating its control, encouraging domestic consumption, and because low foreign investment is not a problem. China can afford to do without and is relatively indifferent to investor opinion. They don’t particularly care – knowing western legal institutions will protect their overseas investments, while making their own rules domestically. They know the global economy will recover, and they want to ensure they grab and hold the largest possible slice of it. They will do that by replacing the USA.
And if they secure borders in the South China Seas and can grab back Taiwan while the West is distracted – then even better.
An all-out war with the USA is not in China’s interest. They know that and the Americans know that… But…. this is definitely the time for China to challenge a befuddled America.
America remains, on paper, the most powerful nation on the planet. The conventional wisdom is its 10 Nuclear Powered Aircraft Carriers could each take out a mid-sized nation’s entire airforce. Its 157 B-52, B-1 and B-2 strategic bombers are effectively unstoppable. Over 3500 tactical aircraft ensure its armies are likely to hold air-superiority over any theatre, allowing the well equipped army to puts boots on any ground they care to. The US spends as much on defence as the next 7 nations combined (China, Saudi, Russia, UK, France, India and Japan, in that order).
America’s service men and women are undoubtedly well-motivated, extremely well-trained and superbly equipped. But, are they as well led?
Perfect preparation counts for little when the political leadership and state agencies that manage the US look dysfunctional. There is much written about how America’s Generals and Admirals spend more time on Woke agendas than war-planning.. (which I don’t believe for a millisecond.)
China will be weighing up the opportunity presented in the wake of the Afghan debacle. America carries a mighty big stick, but can it actually hit anything with it…? Political gridlock between the Reds and Blues guarantees nothing happens, the parties themselves are riven by factionalism and can barely present coherent strategy, while the agencies of state covering security, defence and intelligence services have been politicised, and become bureaucratic and sclerotic.
On the advice of a friend and mentor I watched President Eisenhower’s end-of-office televised speech from Jan 1961 as he stepped down to make way for JFK to usher in the new Camelot. The speech is famous due to Ike’s warning about the growth and rising influence of the “Military Industrial Complex” – and how more and more defence spending may ultimately deliver less and less defence for an ever higher cost, but he also makes prophetic comments about his role working with Congress as a facilitator to deliver a Better America to the nation.
Ike’s farewell message is only 15 minutes long – but the intervening 61 years demonstrates we did not listen, how the world has changed, and changed utterly. You can watch it on YouTube.
The US spends twice as much on its forces than China, but China only needs one of multiple ballistic missiles to take out a carrier. US aircraft are mission capable – but the Chinese know their purloined engine tech means their aircraft break sooner. Not a problem. Build ‘em cheap and stack ‘em high.
Following the Afghan Skedaddle the Kommentariat has variously blamed Biden, said it’s all Trump’s fault, and that Obama should have stopped it after Bush Jr never should have started it. It’s been easy to pour scorn on the successive administrations for a cataclysm of cascading policy mistakes and errors in Afghanistan.
But give Joe credit. He made a decision.
Often the most courageous thing to do is not the hopeless last stand and death before dishonour nonsense, but knowing when to give up. Biden has received zero credit for his spot-on comment that Afghanistan was bound to end chaotically – but he is right, chaos was inevitable. There was no easy way to step out. Its nasty, it’s tough and it hurts – but what was the alternative? 20 more years juicing Afghan corruption?
Now America faces the backlash from the optics of defeat in Afghanistan; the impression of a people abandoned by American troops slinking away at midnight, which sits uneasy alongside the earlier betrayal of the Kurds in Syria by Trump. Who will now trust America? Ukraine? The Baltic republics? Europe? Taiwan?
The Chinese will be placing its bets now – testing how far they can they push, and how much more can they do to destabilise America? How can they maximise the political impasse and when should they make their plays..? They will push, push and push some more, and probably step back as often. Meanwhile the Gangster Tsar in Moscow will be looking for opportunities to not only increase the value of his own considerable portfolio of assets, but to snipe and take advantage of the weakened global credibility of the USA.
All of which begs the question: What’s the right investment strategy in a world of deepening cold war between the USA and China?
Perversely… I will go with the buy America argument… In a fracturing and uncertain world, then the assets with the greatest safety will remain the liquid US stock market and US Treasuries as the flight to quality argument.
And at the back of my mind I’ll remember the old adage: “The Americans will always do the right thing, after first exhausting every other possibility.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 20:20 - Arizona Dems Panic Over Upcoming Election Audit Results, Issue Preemptive Rebuttal
Arizona Dems Panic Over Upcoming Election Audit Results, Issue Preemptive Rebuttal
Democratic officials in Arizona are sweating over the upcoming results of the 2020 election audit, and have launched a pair of preemptive strikes against a report that could come as soon as next week according to Politico.
In a Thursday rebuttal, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) tried to poke as many holes as possible in the audit – while also trying to reassure people that ballot equipment was tested before and after the election.
Hobbs called the GOP Senate-led effort “secretive and disorganized,” and claimed that they routinely failed to follow best practices for an audit.
“All credible audits are characterized by controls, access, and transparency that allow for the processes and procedures to be replicated, if necessary,” reads the rebuttal. “As this report has described, the review conducted by the Senate’s contractors has consistently lacked all three of these factors.”
One Republican, Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer, joined Hobbs with a lengthy rebuttal of his own – an open letter to state Republicans casting doubt on the credentials of the auditors, while also defending his own reputation.
“I will keep fighting for conservatism, and there are many things I would do for the Republican candidate for President, but I won’t lie about the election, and I will not unjustifiably turn my back on the employees of the Board of Supervisors, Recorder’s Office, and Elections Department — my colleagues and friends,” he wrote.
Since late April, contractors hired by the Republican-controlled state Senate have been reviewing all the ballots cast in Maricopa County, which President Joe Biden won en route to flipping the state, along with examining election equipment.
The process was initially supposed to take 60 days, but has stretched on well past that. Julie Fischer, a “deputy Senate liaison” for the effort, told POLITICO that the contractors’ report — the firm leading the effort is called Cyber Ninjas — is expected to be submitted to the state Senate on Monday, and a hearing will be scheduled after that.
Election officials in the state have opposed it nearly every step of the way, including Richer, Hobbs and the GOP-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. -Politico
“The only thing that has been consistent about this endeavor has been missed deadlines and having to walk back statements,” said Richer at a Thursday presser, adding “Please look into it before taking whatever the Cyber Ninjas produce as gospel.”
Read the rest of the report here.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 20:00 - Melvin Capital Was Secretly Short Many More Stocks
Melvin Capital Was Secretly Short Many More Stocks
The infamous collapse of Melvin Capital will forever live in the annals of short squeezes gone terribly wrong, but we now learn that it could have been even worse.
The hedge fund’s various publicly disclosed bearish bets (many of them via puts) including such names as the original meme stock gone wild, Gamestop, was one of the precipitating catalysts for a historic January surge in countless heavily shorted small and mid-cap names. Indeed, Melvin’s short was one of reasons cited in various reports published on WallStreetBets in mid and late 2020 as the clarion call to aggressively start bidding up the names in hopes of sparking a squeeze at the hedge fund. A few months later, that’s exactly what happened and within days Mevlin suffered catastrophic losses, forcing founder Gabe Plotkin to seek a bailout from Citadel and Point 72.
But while all that has been widely publicized, what was unknown until now is that Melvin capital was secretly ramping up its bearish bets in various other heretofore unknown names, and had the daytrading army been aware of these positions the outcome for Melvin could have been even more dire.
On Monday of this week, the New York-based firm released previously confidential documents that showed it held put options on several previously unknown stocks at the end of December, including on $324 million worth of shares in Beyond Meat. As Bloomberg, which first noted the amended filings observes, it was the second report Melvin released on a delayed basis that identified stocks it had bet against late last year through puts, positions which had been confidential until now; the first one was in April.
According to the latest disclosures filed in an amended 13F statement, Melvin’s combined SEC filings for the fourth quarter listed put options on stocks that it hadn’t previously disclosed betting against, including Beyond Meat, Helen of Troy, First Majestic Silver and CryoPort Inc.
Here are the holdings disclosed in the amended 13F for the Dec 31, reporting period, and which were only made public on Aug 16.
The other amended filing can be found here.
Plotkin obtained permission from the SEC to delay required disclosures starting in February, after Reddit traders used the fund’s earlier filings to target stocks he had likely sold short.
THIS FILING LISTS SECURITIES HOLDINGS REPORTED ON THE FORM 13F FILED ON FEBRUARY 16, 2021 PURSUANT TO A REQUEST FOR CONFIDENTIAL TREATMENT AND FOR WHICH THE MANAGER IS NO LONGER REQUESTING CONFIDENTIAL TREATMENT.
However, by then the proverbial cat was out of the bag as the army of retail daytraders (whether with or without the implicit guidance and backing of one or more hedge funds such as Senvest) started trading in unison in late January in the opposite direction of Melvin’s puts, an unprecedented move by retail investors that saddled one of Wall Street’s most successful traders with a stunning monthly loss of 55%.
Meanwhile, as a result of the rushed liquidation at Melvin, even the shares that the fund was secretly short also started surging around late January during the peak of the retail-trader mania, without any public link to Plotkin’s hedge fund. As Bloomberg notes, “the moves confounded Wall Street and even the companies themselves”, although now we know the reason.
Other short bets, such as ADT, Macerich and United Natural Foods also hadn’t shown up in Melvin’s filings for at least a year. Those shares also moved sharply higher in late January – Macerich jumped 75% in the three days through Jan. 27 as Melvin was scrambling to unwind its combined short exposure, creating a gamma meltup that sent the underlying prices of its shorts soaring, only to tumble within a week.
According to Bloomberg calculations, Plotkin added aggressively to his bets that stocks would decline in the final quarter of 2020 around the time the broader market was melting up, the delayed filings show. The face value of shares covered by Melvin’s put options more than doubled during the fourth quarter to almost $1.6 billion, from $703 million at the end of September.
But while Melvin was prudent in hiding some of its shorts, it kept many of its prodigious shorts In the public domain and in January, Reddit traders began using Melvin’s previously reported put options as a proxy for the firm’s short positions. Within weeks, they drove prices of heavily shorted stocks to astronomical levels, most famously GameStop which soared to a peak of $483 on Jan. 28 from less than $20 at the start of the year. That forced Melvin to close out its short positions, both those publicly disclosed as well as the secret ones.
Melvin’s January loss was almost 55%, Bloomberg News reported last month. It was still down about 43% through July.
How did Plotkin manage to keep much of its bearish exposure secret?
As Bloomberg details, in February, Melvin faced a deadline to file the Form 13F that would disclose his holdings at the end of 2020. In that disclosure, the firm took advantage of an SEC loophole that permits fund managers to conceal certain holdings. Melvin released its first confidential amendment to its fourth-quarter report on April 28 and the second one this week. In addition to the first-time positions, they show a jump in the number of put options that Melvin held on earlier targets, including six-fold increases in its bets against ViacomCBS Inc. and Tanger Factory Outlet Centers Inc. By late January, rising stock prices had pushed the face value of Melvin’s year-end put positions to $4.4 billion.
And while Bloomberg’s conclusion is that “it could have been worse if the fund made the same bets entirely through short sales”, we are not so sure: after all this is a market where gamma squeezes – which are the result of heavy option trades where dealers have to take the other side of the trade, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop – are now the norm as Tesla first showed in 2020. As such, one can make the argument that Melvin’s panicked unwind of its entire put book may have had an even greater impact on the value of the underlying stock than had the fund been merely short the stock. Considering Melvin’s billions in losses in just a few days from being forced to liquidate a handful of Put positions, we think it would agree.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 19:27 - 61% Of Taxpayers, Or More Than 100 Million US Households, Paid No Federal Income Taxes Last Year
61% Of Taxpayers, Or More Than 100 Million US Households, Paid No Federal Income Taxes Last Year
The majority of US taxpayers – 61% – paid no federal income taxes last year due to the pandemic and ensuing policy response, according to CNBC, citing a new report by the Tax Policy Center.
The pandemic and federal stimulus led to a huge spike in the number of Americans who either owed no federal income tax or received tax credits from the government. According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, 107 million households owed no income taxes in 2020, up from 76 million — or 44% of all taxpayers — in 2019. -CNBC
“It’s a really big number,” said Tax Policy Center fellow, Howard Gleckman, adding “It’s also really transitory.”
According to Gleckman, high unemployment combined with large stimulus checks and generous tax credit programs (set to expire after 2022) account for the majority of the spike. He expects the share of nontaxpayers to fall starting next year.
The share of Americans who pay zero income taxes is expected to stay high, at around 57% this year, according to the Tax Policy Center. It’s expected to fall back down to 42% in 2022 and remain at around 41% or 42% through 2025, “assuming the economy continues to rebound and several temporary tax benefits expire as scheduled,” Gleckman said. -CNBC
Helping to ease the tax burden were pandemic-related increases in the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit, and the child and the dependent care tax credit – which together erased federal taxes owed for millions of American families.
This year, no household making under $28,000 will pay any federal taxes due to the credits and tax changes, according to the report – whereas around 43% of middle-income households are expected to pay federal income tax. According to Gleckman, the offsets in dollar terms were small for many families.
“Imagine somebody who would have owed $1,500 in 2020 income tax until they got two stimulus payments — $1,200 in April and $600 in December,” he told CNBC. “That threw them into the category of nonpayers. While the payments resulted in a large percentage increase in their after-tax income, the dollar amount of their tax cut was only a tiny fraction of a high-income filer who received a tax cut of, say, $30,000 from the 2017 [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act], yet still owed some tax.”
In 2020, the top 20% of taxpayers paid 78% of federal income taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, which was up from 68% in 2019. The top 1% of taxpayers paid 28% of taxes in 2020, up from 25% in 2019.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 19:20 - Biden Falsely Claims The US Doesn't Have A Military Presence In Syria
Biden Falsely Claims The US Doesn’t Have A Military Presence In Syria
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
President Biden falsely claimed that the US does not have a military presence in Syria when defending his decision to pull out of Afghanistan. In an interview with ABC on Wednesday night, Biden pointed to the so-called “threats in Syria and Africa.
“There’s a significantly greater threat to the United States from Syria. There’s a significantly greater threat from East Africa. There’s significant greater threat to other places in the world than it is from the mountains of Afghanistan.” he said. “We don’t have military in Syria to make sure that we’re gonna be protected.”
Via AFP/Getty Images There has been a presence of US troops in Syria since the Obama administration. There are currently about 900 US soldiers in the country’s northeast. On paper, the US presence is about supporting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) against ISIS. But the occupation is also a part of Washington’s economic war against Damascus.
The region of Syria where US troops are deployed is where most of the country’s oil fields are located. By occupying the area, the US is keeping the vital resource out of the Syrian government’s hands. The US also maintains crippling sanctions on Syria that specifically target the energy and construction sectors, making it difficult for the country to rebuild after 10 years of war.
The Biden administration has no plans to pull out of Syria, and Biden’s comments suggest the US might be preparing to send more troops. The US recently announced it is ending its “combat” mission in Iraq, but troops will remain in an advisory role indefinitely. Part of the reason the US doesn’t want to give up its bases in Iraq is that they support the occupation of Syria.
👀 Biden incorrectly says the U.S. has no troops in Syria. We have 900 in Syria, more than a third of what we had in #Afghanistan.
The Commander-in-Chief should know this. pic.twitter.com/lDwhjWPsfU
— John Cooper (@thejcoop) August 19, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Biden recently escalated airstrikes against al-Shabaab in Somalia, another region he claims there are threats facing the US. At the end of July and early August, the US bombed Somalia three times after a long pause in drone strikes in the country.
Biden tells ABC: “We don’t have military in Syria”
Pentagon: We have 900 U.S. troops in Syria
— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) August 19, 2021
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US officials claim al-Shabaab is a threat to the US homeland due to their al-Qaeda affiliation. But the reality is, al-Shabaab is a local group that only pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda after years of fighting the US and its proxies, including a US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. The first attack al-Shabaab took credit for was in 2007 against Ethiopian soldiers in Mogadishu. It wasn’t until 2012 that the group pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda.
The US is also expanding special forces operations across the African continent. Earlier this week, the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo said he authorized the deployment of US special operations forces to his country.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 19:00 - NYC To Require Vax Card And Proof Of ID For Indoor Activities
NYC To Require Vax Card And Proof Of ID For Indoor Activities
Those hoping to enter restaurants, gyms, entertainment venues and other business in New York City will need to show proof of vaccination and ID, according to a Friday morning tweet by City Councilmember Mark D. Levine.
Patrons wait to show proof of vaccination before entering a performance at City Winery in New York City in May.Credit…Victor J. Blue for The New York Times “NYC’s new vaccination screening program for indoor dining etc requires that you show proof of vax *and* ID,” he tweeted, adding “The ID requirement is to help reduce fraud.”
He then directs people without an ID to New York’s ‘IDNYC‘ service to obtain one.
The ID requirement is to help reduce fraud. Venues covered by the vax screening program are required to check ID for those 18+. Checking ID for 12+ is optional.
The NYC Covid Safe app allows you to upload a picture of your ID if you don’t want to carry it.
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) August 20, 2021
Keep in mind that the crux of Democrats’ argument against voter ID is that it’s racist to force minorities to obtain identification due to various socioeconomic factors.
Can I then use that ID to vote?
— red light (@RedsLight) August 20, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAcceptable forms of vaccination proof include a CDC-issued vaccine card, the New York State Excelsior Pass, or the NYC COVID Safe app. A photograph of a vaccination card is not acceptable.
As the NYT reported on Thursday, rolling out the Excelsior Pass will cost taxpayers roughly $27 million. So far over 3.5 million people have already obtained one, which includes a QR code that can be stored on a smartphone or printed out.
The app verifies applications against city and state vaccination records, and the code is generated the day after someone is considered fully vaccinated, which is 15 days after the final shot.
Through a Freedom of Information Request, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, an advocacy group that has expressed concern about the privacy and security implications of vaccine passports, received the latest contract between the state and I.B.M., which is developing the app. –NYT
“Just buy into this because it’s going to work for all of us, is going to make us all safer,” NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said on Monday.
Businesses have just over three more weeks before the rules go into effect on September 13, and apply to everyone in the city in settings ranging from coffee shops, to yoga studios, to strip clubs according to ABC7NY.
Exceptions include children under 12, athletes, contractors and some performers who don’t live in the city, as well as ‘church potlucks, community centers, office buildings, house parties – even if they’re catered – and people ducking in somewhere to pick up food or use the bathroom.’
Businesses not enforcing the rule face a $1,000 fine for the first offense, $2,000 for the second, and $5,000 for the third.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 18:40 - Watch: Oliver North Warns Taliban Have Names, Addresses, Phone Numbers Of Everyone Who Worked With US In Afghanistan
Watch: Oliver North Warns Taliban Have Names, Addresses, Phone Numbers Of Everyone Who Worked With US In Afghanistan
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
Appearing on Hannity Thursday, Lt. Col. Oliver North warned that the Taliban has managed to obtain the personal details of everyone who worked with the US in Afghanistan, and are using the information to hunt down and execute people.
“They’ve got the bank records. They got it all thanks to the embassy… It is being reported that the Taliban has captured the payroll data from the American embassy and the Kabul banks showing the names, addresses and phone numbers for locals now being hunted down,” North stated.
North also warned that the Taliban have captured US weapons, including drones that can be sold off to and reverse engineered by Russian, Chinese and Pakistani intelligence, causing a major national security threat.
Watch:
North also revealed that Anti-Taliban resistance groups in the Panjshir Valley have called him appealing for help, prompting the Colonel to ask “is anyone in the US government answering the phone?”
Amrullah Saleh, Vice President of Afghanistan and Ahmad Massoud, son of Ahmad Shah Massoud spotted in Panjshir.They are bringing all Anti-Taliban commanders together in Panjshir. This province is still free from Taliban. pic.twitter.com/bgb8hUdfwi
— Sudhir Chaudhary (@sudhirchaudhary) August 16, 2021
North also warned that Communist Chinese agents are reported to be on hand in Afghanistan working with the Taliban against US interests.
North stated that “If Biden can’t figure out how to deal with these problems, he ought to step down.”
He continued, “The scary part of that is that in every case of a president not finishing his term, you know who becomes the president. That’s a scary prospect too.”
North slammed the administration, noting “the incompetence is at every level of this administration, it goes to the top of the Pentagon, the top of the State Department, the top of the CIA. The incompetence is extraordinary, I hate to say that.”
North’s comments come as it was revealed that, despite Biden’s claims that ‘chaos was always factored in’ to the withdrawal, officials at the Kabul embassy directly warned him about the imminent danger of the Taliban taking control in JULY.
The Wall Street Journal reports that embassy officials in Kabul sent a memo to Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as other State Department officials on July 13th warning of the exact scenario that has unfolded.
An internal State Department cable in July warned of the Taliban’s quick advance and Kabul’s collapse https://t.co/ShrTh86phg
— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) August 20, 2021
“About two dozen State Dept officials serving at Kabul embassy sent an internal memo to Secretary of State Blinken & another top State Dept official last month warning of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline.”https://t.co/y9c5rN554o pic.twitter.com/vYI5NqCJxx
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) August 19, 2021
The warning came five days after Biden told America that “The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army, they’re not. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance for you to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”
“The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army, they’re not. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance for you to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.” – Joe Biden, July 8, 2021
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) August 15, 2021
The Taliban is now in control of more of Afghanistan than it was in 2001:
This map shows Taliban control of Afghanistan in 2001 vs. 2021 pic.twitter.com/vubGLoft8c
— Samuel Ramani (@SamRamani2) August 16, 2021
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 18:20 - FBI Shoots Down Dem 'Conspiracy Theory' That Jan. 6 Capitol Riot Was Pre-Planned
FBI Shoots Down Dem ‘Conspiracy Theory’ That Jan. 6 Capitol Riot Was Pre-Planned
Many Democratic leaders, including – most notably – Nancy Pelosi refuse to let go of the notion that the Jan. 6 “attack” on the Capitol was a terror attack on par with 9/11 or the Pulse nightclub shootings. Why? Because, they claim, the whole seige was planned and perpetrated by shadowy militia groups like the Oath Keepers, working in concert with Republican lawmakers.
Dems also blame President Trump for instigating the incident (the supposed reason behind Twitter and Facebook banning his accounts).
But according to a scoop from Reuters published Friday, prosecutors who once planned to try and lay charges of sedition, conspiracy or other serious offenses against members of the Oath Keepers and other militia groups have been stymied by the reality of what actually happened. And now that the first (surprisingly stiff) jail sentences have been handed down, the FBI has apparently determined that there’s “scant evidence” to suggest that the events of Jan. 6 resulted from an “organized plot”, according to a scoop published by Reuters.
In other words, it’s a repudiation of prosecutors’ claims that “trespassing plus thought crime = terrorism”.
The FBI tells Reuters that “95%” of these cases are “one offs”. And even among the “5%” who were more organized, there is still no evidence of a “grand scheme” to overthrow Congress and install President Trump for a second term.
Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.
“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”
But that’s not even the most disappointing bit for Pelosi, who is trying to use her Jan. 6 Committee to punish GOP colleagues. Because the FBI also told Reuters that there’s no evidence that Trump, or people around him, were involved in organizing the unrest.
But the FBI has so far found no evidence that [Trump] or people directly around him were involved in organizing the violence, according to the four current and former law enforcement officials.
The report specifically cited “dirty trickster” Roger Stone (who was famously taken into custody by a SWAT team for a perp walk in front of CNN cameras) and InfoWars founder Alex Jones.
Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described “dirty trickster”, and Jones, founder of a conspiracy-driven radio show and webcast, are both allies of Trump and had been involved in pro-Trump events in Washington on Jan. 5, the day before the riot.
FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said.
The findings could also help the 40 or so defendants who belong to militia groups, and are facing more serious conspiracy charges. As we first learned a few weeks ago, prosecutors feel they don’t have enough evidence to lay charges of “seditious conspiracy”, or use the RICO act to target militia groups as if they were an organized criminal gang.
But one source said there has been little, if any, recent discussion by senior Justice Department officials of filing charges such as “seditious conspiracy” to accuse defendants of trying to overthrow the government. They have also opted not to bring racketeering charges, often used against organized criminal gangs.
Senior lawmakers have been briefed on the FBI’s findings and find them “credible”, according to Reuters. The ultimate takeaway is this: while some groups may have discussed the rally and attendant protest in advance, and while they ultimately may have “worked together” on the day in question, there’s simply no evidence of a grand conspiracy headed by a single nefarious ringleader (not Stone, not Jones, not even Trump).
Prosecutors have filed conspiracy charges against 40 of those defendants, alleging that they engaged in some degree of planning before the attack. They alleged that one Proud Boy leader recruited members and urged them to stockpile bulletproof vests and other military-style equipment in the weeks before the attack and on Jan. 6 sent members forward with a plan to split into groups and make multiple entries to the Capitol.
But so far prosecutors have steered clear of more serious, politically-loaded charges that the sources said had been initially discussed by prosecutors, such as seditious conspiracy or racketeering.
The FBI’s assessment could prove relevant for a congressional investigation that also aims to determine how that day’s events were organized and by whom.
With seditious conspiracy now off the table, the most serious charges are likely to be the assault on an office charges, which carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 18:12 - Liberal Utah Teacher Canned For Going On Pro-Vax, "Trump Sucks" Rant, Calling Parents 'Dumb'
Liberal Utah Teacher Canned For Going On Pro-Vax, “Trump Sucks” Rant, Calling Parents ‘Dumb’
A schoolteacher in Lehi, Utah is out of a job after she was caught on camera by a student going off the rails against former President Donald Trump, pushing vaccines, and calling most parents (including her own) ‘dumb.’
“I hate Donald Trump. I’m going to say it. I don’t care what y’all think — Trump sucks,” said Chemistry teacher Leah Kinyon, adding “Don’t tattle on me to the freakin’ admin; they don’t give a crap” (they did).
Kinyon also told students she would be “super proud” of them for getting vaccinated, adding “I don’t have to be happy about the fact that there’s kids coming in here with their variants that could possibly get me or my family sick.”
“I would be super proud of you if you chose to get the vaccine,” Kinyon says in the video. “We’ll just keep getting variants over and over until people get vaccinated… It could end in five seconds if people would get vaccinated.”
The teacher was not wearing a mask while making the comments.
“This is my classroom, and if you guys are going to put me at risk, you’re going to hear about it,” she added. “Because I have to be here. I don’t have to be happy about the fact that there’s kids coming in here with their variants that could possibly get me or my family sick. That’s rude, and I’m not going to pretend like it’s not.” –Fox13
She then ranted against the students’ parents, saying “most of” them “are dumber than you.”
At least one student pushed back, to which Kinyon can be heard saying “You can believe what you want to believe, but keep it quiet in here because I’m probably going to make fun of you.”
“That’s pathetic that you think that,” she said later, telling a student “You’re the problem with the world.”
Kinyon was immediately placed on leave after the video went viral. After a brief investigation, district officials announced she was fired.
“Alpine School District has concluded our investigation of the incident that occured (sic) on August 17, 2021 at Lehi High School. Although the details of a personnel investigation are confidential, the teacher involved is no longer an employee of Alpine School District,” reads a statement.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 18:00
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