- Germany To Extend Border Controls To Combat Illegal Migration
Germany To Extend Border Controls To Combat Illegal Migration
Authored by Grzegorz Adamccyk via ReMix News,
External border controls will continue around Germany until the number of illegal migrants drops significantly, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser stated on Monday during a meeting with Federal Police Chief Dieter Romann in Rostock.
Although numbers have started to decline, they remain higher than in previous years.
“I am not willing to accept these figures,” Faeser emphasized.
The German interior ministry is reportedly frustrated by the uneven distribution of refugees across Europe, according to Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Faeser pointed out that only a few countries are shouldering the bulk of the migration burden.
She also confirmed that existing controls at the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Switzerland will remain in place until the implementation of the Common European Asylum System which was approved this spring.
However, this process will take several more months, with the earliest end to the checks expected in June 2025.
Despite a record influx of nearly 128,000 illegal migrants last year, this year’s numbers have dropped, with 53,000 illegal entries reported so far — a 16 percent decrease compared to the same period last year. German authorities attribute this decline in part to the reintroduced border controls.
The Federal Police report that most illegal entries occur via Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Switzerland.
The stationary checks on the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland were initially introduced on Oct. 16, following the earlier reinstatement of controls at the Austrian border.
The decision came as German authorities noticed a rising influx of refugees and increased human smuggling activities along these routes.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/21/2024 – 02:00 - From Agrarianism To Transhumanism: The Long March To Dystopia
From Agrarianism To Transhumanism: The Long March To Dystopia
Authored by Colin Todhunter via Off-Guardian.org,
“A total demolition of the previous forms of existence is underway: how one comes into the world, biological sex, education, relationships, the family, even the diet that is about to become synthetic.”
Silvia Guerini, radical ecologist, in ‘From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg: A Critique of Gender Ideology’ (2023)
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain.
The big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and big financial institutions, like BlackRock and Vanguard, are also involved, whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, pushing biosynthetic (fake) food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating and financing the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.[2]
The billionaire interests behind this try to portray their techno-solutionism as some kind of humanitarian endeavour: saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, ‘helping farmers’ or ‘feeding the world’. But what it really amounts to is repackaging and greenwashing the dispossessive strategies of imperialism.
It involves a shift towards a ‘one world agriculture’ under the control of agritech and the data giants, which is to be based on genetically engineered seeds, laboratory created products that resemble food, ‘precision’ and ‘data-driven’ agriculture and farming without farmers, with the entire agrifood chain, from field (or lab) to retail, being governed by monopolistic e-commerce platforms determined by artificial intelligence systems and algorithms.
Those who are pushing this agenda have a vision not only for farmers but also for humanity in general.
The elites through their military-digital-financial (Pentagon/Silicon Valley/Big Finance) complex want to use their technologies to reshape the world and redefine what it means to be human. They regard humans, their cultures and their practices, like nature itself, as a problem and deficient.
Farmers are to be displaced and replaced with drones, machines and cloud-based computing. Food is to be redefined and people are to be fed synthetic, genetically engineered products. Cultures are to be eradicated, and humanity is to be fully urbanised, subservient and disconnected from the natural world.
What it means to be human is to be radically transformed. But what has it meant to be human until now or at least prior to the (relatively recent) Industrial Revolution and associated mass urbanisation?
To answer this question, we need to discuss our connection to nature and what most of humanity was involved in prior to industrialisation — cultivating food.
Many of the ancient rituals and celebrations of our forebears were built around stories, myths and rituals that helped them come to terms with some of the most fundamental issues of existence, from death to rebirth and fertility. These culturally embedded beliefs and practices served to sanctify their practical relationship with nature and its role in sustaining human life.
As agriculture became key to human survival, the planting and harvesting of crops and other seasonal activities associated with food production were central to these customs.
Humans celebrated nature and the life it gave birth to. Ancient beliefs and rituals were imbued with hope and renewal and people had a necessary and immediate relationship with the sun, seeds, animals, wind, fire, soil and rain and the changing seasons that nourished and brought life. Our cultural and social relationships with agrarian production and associated deities had a sound practical base.
People’s lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.
Silvia Guerini, whose quote introduces this article, notes the importance of deep-rooted relationships and the rituals that re-affirm them. She says that through rituals a community recognises itself and its place in the world. They create the spirit of a rooted community by contributing to rooting and making a single existence endure in a time, in a territory, in a community.
Professor Robert W Nicholls explains that the cults of Woden and Thor were superimposed on far older and better-rooted beliefs related to the sun and the earth, the crops and the animals and the rotation of the seasons between the light and warmth of summer and the cold and dark of winter.
Humanity’s relationship with farming and food and our connections to land, nature and community has for millennia defined what it means to be human.
Take India, for example. Environmental scientist Viva Kermani says that Hinduism is the world’s largest nature-based religion that:
“…recognises and seeks the Divine in nature and acknowledges everything as sacred. It views the earth as our Mother and hence advocates that it should not be exploited. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse and the exploitation of the earth and its resources.”
Kermani notes that ancient scriptures instructed people that the animals and plants found in India are sacred and, therefore, all aspects of nature are to be revered. She adds that this understanding of and reverence towards the environment is common to all Indic religious and spiritual systems: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.
According to Kermani, the Vedic deities have deep symbolism and many layers of existence. One such association is with ecology. Surya is associated with the sun, the source of heat and light that nourishes everyone; Indra is associated with rain, crops, and abundance; and Agni is the deity of fire and transformation and controls all changes.
She notes that the Vrikshayurveda, an ancient Sanskrit text on the science of plants and trees, contains details about soil conservation, planting, sowing, treatment, propagating, how to deal with pests and diseases and a lot more.
Like Nicholls, Kermani provides insight into some of the profound cultural, philosophical and practical aspects of humanity’s connection to nature and food production.
This connection resonates with agrarianism, a philosophy based on cooperative labour and fellowship, which stands in stark contrast to the values and impacts of urban life, capitalism and technology that are seen as detrimental to independence and dignity. Agrarianism, too, emphasises a spiritual dimension as well as the value of rural society, small farms, widespread property ownership and political decentralisation.
The prominent proponent of agrarianism Wendell Berry says:
The revolution which began with machines and chemicals now continues with automation, computers and biotechnology.”
For Berry, agrarianism is not a sentimental longing for a time past. Colonial attitudes, domestic, foreign and now global, have resisted true agrarianism almost from the beginning — there has never been fully sustainable, stable, locally adapted, land-based economies.
However, Berry provides many examples of small (and larger) farms that have similar output as industrial agriculture with one third of the energy.
In his poem ‘A Spiritual Journey’, Berry writes the following:
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.”But in the cold, centralised, technocratic dystopia that is planned, humanity’s spiritual connection to the countryside, food and agrarian production are to be cast into the dustbin of history.
Silvia Guerini says:
The past becomes something to be erased in order to break the thread that binds us to a history, to a tradition, to a belonging, for the transition towards a new uprooted humanity, without past, without memory… a new humanity dehumanised in its essence, totally in the hands of the manipulators of reality and truth”.
This dehumanised humanity severed from the past is part of the wider agenda of transhumanism. For instance, we are not just seeing a push towards a world without farmers and everything that has connected us to the soil but, according to Guerini, also a world without mothers.
She argues that those behind test-tube babies and surrogate motherhood now have their sights on genetic engineering and artificial wombs, which would cut women out of the reproductive process. Guerini predicts that artificial wombs could eventually be demanded, or rather marketed, as a right for everyone, including transgender people. It is interesting that the language around pregnancy is already contested with the omission of ‘women’ from statements like ‘persons who can get pregnant’.
Of course, there has long been a blurring of lines between biotechnology, eugenics and genetic engineering. Genetically engineered crops, gene drives and gene editing are now a reality, but the ultimate goal is marrying artificial intelligence, bionanotechnology and genetic engineering to produce the one-world transhuman.
This is being pushed by powerful interests, who, according to Guerini, are using a rainbow, transgenic left and LGBTQ+ organisations to promote a new synthetic identity and claim to new rights. She says this is an attack on life, on nature, on “what is born, as opposed to artificial” and adds that all ties to the real, natural world must be severed.
It is interesting that in its report Future of Food, the UK supermarket giant Sainsburys celebrates a future where we are microchipped and tracked and neural laces have the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms that could work out exactly what food (delivered by drone) we need to support us at a particular time in our life. All sold as ‘personal optimisation’.
Moreover, it is likely, according to the report, that we will be getting key nutrients through implants. Part of these nutrients will come in the form of lab-grown food and insects.
A neural lace is an ultra-thin mesh that can be implanted in the skull, forming a collection of electrodes capable of monitoring brain function. It creates an interface between the brain and the machine.
Sainsburys does a pretty good job of trying to promote a dystopian future where AI has taken your job, but, according to the report, you have lots of time to celebrate the wonderful, warped world of ‘food culture’ created by the supermarket and your digital overlords.
Technofeudalism meets transhumanism — all for your convenience, of course.
But none of this will happen overnight. And whether the technology will deliver remains to be seen. Those who are promoting this brave new world might have overplayed their hand but will spend the following decades trying to drive their vision forward.
But arrogance is their Achilles heel.
There is still time to educate, to organise, to resist and to agitate against this hubris, not least by challenging the industrial food giants and the system that sustains them and by advocating for and creating grass-root food movements and local economies that strengthen food sovereignty.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 23:25 - They Truly See Their Corruption As Heroism
They Truly See Their Corruption As Heroism
Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics,
Most of us get the big things right: Don’t touch fire, wrestle alligators, or play in traffic. But beneath these necessary survival strategies, we are boundless reservoirs of delusion.
While many of our unmoored beliefs are specific to us – I seem to be the only person who thinks I have a beautiful singing voice – some are universal. Chief among these is the claim: I’m my own worst critic.
Instead, we cut ourselves slack at every turn. I have a million reasons why I fell down on the job and disappointed my pals. You see, it’s like this … But woe to the other guy who falls short. Come on, man, stop making excuses.
We instinctively make ourselves the hero of our own story, concocting tales to convert our vices into virtue. This dynamic is ever at work in each of us. On the plus side, if we don’t love ourselves, who will?
But delusion can also grip us on a mass scale – it is the great danger of ideology and fuels the madness of crowds.
We are seeing this unfold with terrible consequence as the dominant media betrays the very foundations of journalism – starting with demanding that only certain leaders answer questions – to transfigure Kamala Harris into a combination of Rosa Parks, Franklin Roosevelt, and Beyoncé.
Their partisanship is so manifold and manifest that it has created a cottage industry in conservative media, which creates terabytes of content each day exposing the false narratives and double standards advanced by Democrats and their laptop lackeys. Such debunking is necessary and important. But there’s a bit of delusion at work here, too: Despite all evidence to the contrary the critics somehow believe their fact-checking and truth-telling will pressure the propagandists into changing their ways.
It won’t. They are impervious to challenge. They are beyond shame.
How come? To figure out why they persist in this untoward conduct, daily compromising the values of skepticism, fairness, and bringing truth to power that they say they hold dear, we need to ask: What higher value do they believe they are serving? What do they tell themselves so they can see their corruption as heroic?
The answer is obvious: They sincerely believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, an American Hitler. If that’s the case, why would you give him a fair shake or hold his opponents’ feet to the fire?
I know this explanation is not revelatory; the Hitler analogy has been critiqued for years. But I’m not so sure that we have fully reckoned with how deeply a large percentage of the nation is in the grip of this delusion.
Displaying textbook symptoms of the addled, they insist that falsehoods are truths. Despite unimpeachable evidence to the contrary, they continue to maintain that Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election, that he called all Mexicans rapists, praised neo-Nazi marchers at Charlottesville, advised Americans to inject bleach to combat COVID, and promised a “bloodbath” if he loses in November.
They are not lying when they make these claims – they sincerely believe they are expressing truths the rest of us just can’t see. This makes them immune to reason.
Echoing multiple conversations I’ve had with educated and engaged Democrats, a respected plastic surgeon recently told me, “If Trump wins, we will not have any more elections.”
He saw Jan. 6, 2021, as a dress rehearsal for the coming coup – never mind that Trump left office peaceably two weeks later. When I asked him how Trump might pull this off, he said the former president would declare a national emergency and GOP leaders would rally to his call for martial law, rounding up and jailing those who oppose him.
I pushed him again, to explain how all this might work. “Let’s say Trump and his Republican allies truly want to cross that Rubicon,” I said. “They couldn’t do it alone, right? They would probably need the Supreme Court, many state leaders, and the military to come on board. Do you really think the armed forces would support the overthrow of the Constitution?”
He didn’t respond. “Most important,” I said, “he would need the backing of his voters. Do you really believe that half the American people think ending elections and jailing untold numbers of people is fine and dandy?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Okey, dokey,” I said, switching the conversation to my concerns about the New York Yankees’ starting pitching.
His last comment suggested the dangerous depth of the delusion so many Democrats take for reality. They don’t just see Trump, but the other half of America as an existential threat to our Republic. Maybe they will defeat Hitler this November, but what to do with his tens of millions of brown-shirts?
Extreme times will require more extreme measures – more coercion, more censorship, more abrogation of rights in the name of liberty. They will heroically destroy our country in order to save it.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 23:00 - Inflammation: The Body's 'Fire' Burns Threats, But Things Go Wrong When It Smolders
Inflammation: The Body’s ‘Fire’ Burns Threats, But Things Go Wrong When It Smolders
Authored by Flora Zhao via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Many people experience chronic inflammation without even knowing it, Arch G. Mainous III, a professor at the University of Florida (UF) College of Medicine, told The Epoch Times.
Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock A large-scale study published in Frontiers in Medicine in 2024 showed that among adults in the United States, almost 35 percent had systemic inflammation. Even among healthy individuals (with no evidence of disease), the proportion was about 15 percent.
Chronic inflammation is linked to a wide range of conditions and often “touches on some big diseases,” Dr. Frank A. Orlando, the medical director of UF Health Family Medicine–Springhill, told The Epoch Times. And its cause lies in what we eat and do every day.
When the Fire Is Allowed to Smolder
“We need inflammation,” Peter Osborne, a clinical nutritionist and chiropractic doctor, told The Epoch Times. The inflammatory response is an essential part of the immune system. When the body is infected or injured, inflammation—often likened to fire—is nature’s way of burning away pathogens and repairing damage. Once the threat is eliminated, inflammation should subside. But if the fire continues to smolder, it can become a chronic issue.
Inflammation that persists for more than three months is chronic inflammation, which triggers heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, sarcopenia, autoimmune disease, and neurodegenerative disorders, among others.
Inflammation is the body’s immune defense. However, when it persists for more than three months, it becomes a chronic condition. Illustration by The Epoch Times A review published in Nature Medicine indicated that over 50 percent of deaths can be attributed to inflammation-related diseases.
Chronic inflammation is a significant contributor to many heart diseases. For example, scientists’ understanding of atherosclerosis has evolved from viewing it as a passive accumulation of cholesterol to recognizing it as a condition driven by chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation triggers biochemical reactions that lead to the formation of atherosclerotic plaques and can cause these plaques to rupture.
A meta-analysis published in The Lancet found that levels of inflammation are linked to increased mortality risk for heart disease, stroke, and several types of cancer. Specifically, every threefold increase in the concentration of C-reactive protein—a standard marker of inflammation—was associated with a 37 percent higher risk of coronary heart disease and a 27 percent higher risk of ischemic stroke.
On the other hand, lower inflammation levels appear to be associated with increased longevity. A study involving hundreds of centenarians in Japan found that inflammation levels were more accurate predictors of longevity than telomere length and better predictors of daily living capabilities and cognitive function in older people than age. The study suggested that “suppression of chronic inflammation could be an essential step towards further improvements in human healthy lifespan.”
Short-Term Solution
Most inflammation can be controlled with medications, such as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) (e.g., ibuprofen, naproxen, and aspirin), steroids, and immunomodulatory drugs. In 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved colchicine as the first anti-inflammatory drug for heart disease.
But while using anti-inflammatory drugs is common in clinical practice, “there are no guidelines recommending NSAIDs for general use long-term to control chronic inflammation,” said Orlando. He added that even over-the-counter NSAIDs carry risks, such as heart attack, stroke, acute kidney injury, and upper gastrointestinal bleeding, and can interact with other medications.
“We do not want to put people on those [medications] for a long time,” especially when it comes to more potent anti-inflammatory drugs like corticosteroids and colchicine, said Mainous, who is also vice chair for research in the Department of Community Health and Family Medicine at UF.
Osborne, who practices functional nutrition, said that anti-inflammatory drugs can affect gut microbiome health and disrupt the production and absorption of certain nutrients. A deficiency in nutrients responsible for regulating inflammation can, in turn, exacerbate inflammation. For example, NSAIDs may lead to vitamin C deficiency, while corticosteroids can result in vitamin D, calcium, and magnesium deficiencies.
Relying solely on medication won’t lead to resolution, said Osborne.
He highlighted a phenomenon: Developed countries have some of the best health care systems in the world, but when it comes to chronic inflammation, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases, and other conditions, “we spend more money trying to treat these diseases, but we fail.”
David Furman, who holds a doctorate in immunology and is the director of the 1000 Immunomes Project at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said that modern lifestyle is a key problem.
While modern technology makes life more convenient and comfortable, this convenience is merely a façade, he said. “We sit for long periods, eat fast food and highly processed foods, and endure high levels of work stress, all of which can trigger and worsen inflammation,” he said.
Unhealthy lifestyles drive chronic inflammation, which leads to a variety of diseases. Illustration by The Epoch Times Diet Is a Main Driver
“The biggest driver of chronic inflammation is found in our food,” Osborne said.
Food’s role is to nourish the body, providing energy and nutrients to maintain proper function. However, various food additives, such as artificial flavors, colors, emulsifiers, and added sugars, can contribute to chronic inflammation. Studies have demonstrated that common emulsifiers in processed foods, such as carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) and polysorbate 80 (P80), can damage the gut and induce inflammation. Additionally, the high levels of sugar and refined carbohydrates in ultra-processed foods can lead to elevated blood sugar and oxidative stress, triggering inflammation.
A large study published in 2020 found that individuals who followed a pro-inflammatory diet had elevated levels of multiple inflammatory markers and a 38 percent increased risk of heart disease. Another study based on data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), published in 2022, found that those who consumed a high amount of pro-inflammatory foods had a 41 percent increased risk of cancer mortality.
“You do not eat the food today, and you have a heart attack because of it tomorrow,” said Osborne. The problem is “when you eat poorly day in and day out for decades of your life,” which gradually prevents the body from ceasing inflammation until its defenses break down and disease occurs.
However, Osborne said that doctors in most countries rarely emphasize nutrition. During their eight years of medical education, they receive minimal training in that area. He hopes that diet will become a fundamental component when doctors educate patients on combatting diseases.
Several experts highlighted that avoiding ultra-processed foods is more important than simply consuming foods with potential anti-inflammatory properties. Mainous pointed out that eating a single anti-inflammatory food, such as a specific fruit, may not yield the desired anti-inflammatory effects.
Another important factor contributing to diet-induced inflammation is food allergies.
“There’s an old saying: One man’s food is another man’s poison,” Osborne noted, sharing the story of a patient he helped. The 6-year-old girl, who had an inflammatory disease, was given only six months to live. Fortunately, Osborne discovered that the child was allergic to blueberries, which her mother had been giving her every morning in a blueberry smoothie. Eliminating blueberries from the girl’s diet saved her life.
Gluten and certain substances in soy and milk can also cause inflammation in some individuals, Osborne added. Through modern medical tests and examinations, people can identify their trigger foods and adjust their diets to mitigate and prevent inflammation.
Toxins Inside and Outside Our Homes
Various synthetic ingredients in everyday household items and cosmetics not only directly irritate the skin but can also enter the body, leading to inflammation.
Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), found in drinking water, cookware, and food packaging, can increase inflammatory responses.
Harmful chemicals also exist in the air we breathe, especially in a bustling metropolis. According to Furman, types of air pollutants such as PM2.5 and PM10 (particle matter with diameters of less than 2.5 micrometers or 10 micrometers, respectively) can cause inflammation in the brain and lungs. Moreover, formaldehyde in new furniture or newly constructed homes can lead to cardiovascular inflammation. Osborne recommends using an air purifier at home as a basic protective measure for people living in areas with poor air quality.
High Body Fat, Low Muscle Mass
A 2021 study found that prolonged sitting raises pro-inflammatory cytokines in older women and lowers anti-inflammatory cytokines in older men. Another study showed that individuals who sit for long periods have elevated levels of various inflammatory biomarkers in their blood.
A sedentary lifestyle leads to more fat accumulation. “Thirty percent of the interleukin-6 in our bloodstream is secreted by fat cells,” said Furman, noting that this substance contributes to inflammation.
Adults who do not exercise also experience a 3 percent to 8 percent reduction in muscle mass every decade. Several experts highlighted and emphasized the anti-inflammatory benefits of exercise and maintaining muscle during interviews.
Greater muscle mass leads to the production of more anti-inflammatory molecules, said Furman.
“You have to think about the muscle as a secretory organ,” he said. Muscles produce and release cytokines and various small proteins into the bloodstream, which systemically reduce inflammation. This secretion is even more pronounced during muscle contractions.
A study conducted in the United Kingdom that tracked over 4,000 adults with an average age of 49 over a 10-year follow-up period found that those who exercised regularly exhibited reduced levels of two inflammatory markers: high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and interleukin-6. Notably, those who engaged in at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise per week had the lowest levels of inflammation.
People who exercise regularly have lower levels of two inflammatory markers than people who don’t. Illustration by The Epoch Times Mainous recommends aiming for 150 minutes of exercise per week, with the type of exercise tailored to individual health conditions. For young adults, moderate-to-intense exercise can temporarily increase acute inflammatory markers but helps reduce inflammation over the long term. For older adults and those with chronic conditions, it is crucial to avoid overexertion.
A Silent Inflammatory Agent
Experts also highlighted that stress, while intangible and invisible, is a major contributor to chronic inflammation.
One theory behind stress-induced inflammation is that it reduces the sensitivity of immune cells to signals that usually resolve inflammation.
Additionally, “stress causes inflammation by activating the body’s fight-or-flight response, which then triggers the release of what we refer to as pro-inflammatory chemicals and hormones,” Stephen Sideroff, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and the Department of Rheumatology at the University of California–Los Angeles’ School of Medicine, told The Epoch Times.
Sideroff said that the first step in managing stress is to reframe adverse events as positive challenges. He explained that moderate and well-timed stress can be beneficial as it activates the sympathetic nervous system, preparing people to handle threats effectively.
Many people feel powerless against stress, but this mindset contributes to the problem, according to Sideroff. He recommends adopting a growth mindset toward stress: “I have to learn something new if I am going to handle the situation better.” Through this learning process, one can “figure out a better way of dealing with the stressors in one’s life,” he said.
Excessive stress introduces another problem: As we use our energy to manage stress, our metabolism ramps up to produce more energy and directs more blood to the muscles and brain. However, “we all have just a certain amount of personal energy,” Sideroff explained. As a result, the brain reallocates energy from other organs, such as the kidneys, to address immediate needs. This reduces the kidneys’ ability to filter harmful substances from the blood, which can then further trigger inflammation throughout the body. “This is at the heart of one of the ways that stress leads to aging and disease; a lot of the maintenance processes of the body get neglected,” he added.
Letting go of anger and doubt and facing situations with calmness can also reduce inflammation. Sideroff said that these emotions are similar to stress and consume a significant amount of the body’s energy.
“The less we interpret other people’s behavior, the less stress,” Sideroff said. We should be “learning and figuring out all of the ways that we stress ourselves unnecessarily.”
Additionally, it is essential to allow the body’s repair systems more time to heal.
“After a stress is over, we need to give the body the opportunity to recover, to go into the recovery and healing mode,” said Sideroff. One way to achieve this is finding “time in our day where we can say, ‘I am in a zone of safety, or on an island of safety.’” Even just 10 minutes of letting your guard down and relaxing can be beneficial—whether through meditation or relaxation exercises. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system, facilitating the body’s recovery.
A randomized controlled trial showed that even short periods of meditation can improve mental health, decrease pro-inflammatory cytokines, and increase anti-inflammatory cytokines. Experienced meditators exhibited greater resilience and tolerance to stress and stimuli, with lower levels of inflammation in their bodies.
Furman added that the detrimental effects of loneliness should not be underestimated. “People who are socially isolated, lack strong community support, or do not have the care of friends and family experience significantly higher levels of inflammation.”
He said people should choose an anti-inflammatory approach tailored to their individual needs. “It is not a one-size-fits-all,” he added. For instance, someone with a high-stress job—especially if it is their sole source of income—and an unbalanced diet might start by making dietary adjustments and incorporating regular exercise. Additionally, they should focus on strengthening relationships with family and friends to help reduce inflammation.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 22:35 - Democrats Are Desperate To Keep Red Flag Laws As Legal Opposition Grows
Democrats Are Desperate To Keep Red Flag Laws As Legal Opposition Grows
If one was to describe the nature of the anti-gun movement, they would probably use the analogy of the frog in the boiling pot. Another way to look at it, though, is unwittingly inviting a vampire into your home. Do it once and he’ll keep inviting himself back every night until you have no more blood left to drain. Red flag laws are like an open invitation for gun grabbing vampires to enter any firearm owner’s home for almost any reason, slowly but surely confiscating weapons from every American they don’t like.
It doesn’t have to happen all at once. It could happen over the span of years, but eventually they’ll get every gun that’s not hidden away without anyone ever committing a crime and without any due process pursued. Donald Trump gave credence to these policies during his first term and it was one of the dumbest things he did in office. Under Kamala Harris, however, we can be guaranteed a federal effort to enforce Red Flags.
Red Flag laws are a backdoor to gun confiscation that undercuts the 2nd Amendment by using standards similar to involuntary civil commitment. Sometimes all it takes is a couple of random accusations that a person is dangerous and they receive a visit from authorities with a warrant to seize their firearms. In some states authorities can hold those guns for up to five years if courts deem it necessary, all without the person ever being convicted of a crime.
Just like civil commitment, there are a host of constitutional conflicts dealing primarily with the 14th Amendment. The political left is usually opposed to involuntary commitment for this very reason, yet, they are highly enthusiastic about Red Flag laws. Apparently, due process applies to some groups and not others.
A steady avalanche of lawsuits is now underway in multiple states to counter Red Flag measures and Democrats aren’t too happy about the level of opposition. In an article co-produced by Rolling Stone and The Trace, anti-gunners argue that the lack of compromise on the part of conservatives is putting people’s lives at risk. They attempt to support their position with a singular anecdote – An ongoing conflict between a 25-year Marine veteran named Don Willey diagnosed with a hoarding disorder and city officials in Cambridge, Maryland demanding he clean up his property.
Rolling Stone writes:
“The right-wing echo chamber expanded, until there was consensus. Red-flag statutes violated due-process rights and protections against unreasonable search and seizure. They also lacked a historical analogue, and, according to a controversial 2022 Supreme Court decision, were therefore incompatible with the Second Amendment.
These arguments would form the basis of Willey’s lawsuit, serving up the fresh outrage the gun-rights movement requires to sustain itself…”
The story drones on, adding little justification as to why Red Flag laws should be tolerated by the greater constitution loving public. But, it does give insight into how such laws might be applied if they are left unopposed.
Rolling Stone describes the battle between the veteran and city bureaucrat Susan Webb as if Willey is a bully terrorizing Webb and other officials with his presence. He’s a Marine, a Christian, he’s bigger than them, he apparently defends the display of confederate flags, he says mean things, he refuses to let them on his property and he owns guns. He’s also a member of the Second Amendment Foundation and a legal campaign called Capture the Flag that is opposed to the trespasses of Red Flag laws.
In other words, Willey is a Democrat bureaucrat’s worst nightmare. Rolling Stone continues with dismay:
“The federal judge in the case recently asked Maryland’s Supreme Court to provide him with a definitive interpretation of the state’s red-flag statute, placing the lawsuit on hold. But he indicated that the plaintiff’s narrative carried weight. The court, the judge wrote, “is no doubt sympathetic to the experience Willey endured as he described it.” These were victories in their own right, a degree of validation that also preserves the status quo for Willey, whose property remains unchanged…”
Here we get a look into the mind of the common Democrat/progressive. Note that they cling to the idea of the property and Willey’s lack of compliance. They automatically attach his defiance of the city to the reason for gun confiscation, and this is a twisted mentality.
The debate over property rights and hoarding is beyond the scope of this discussion, but there’s nothing within the law that allows for law enforcement to disarm a person simply because they have too much trash and they’re not cooperative with the city government.
Red Flags allow such officials to find ways to punish people for non-compliance by removing their 2A rights based on subjective accusations of danger rather than proof of a crime. Maybe they find a relative, an ex girlfriend or a neighbor that doesn’t like the target individual and they coax those people to write up a testimony. In the case of Willey, the city tried to use Veteran’s Affairs documents citing a previous struggle with PTSD as a reason why he should be disarmed.
Once you have disarmament in play, now it’s no longer a legal impasse between the city and the individual. Now they have instigated a confrontation which could end in bloodshed. Rolling Stone claims this concern has been inflated by pro-gun groups, but this is exactly how it works in most states with Red Flag laws.
In California, San Diego has been beta testing Red Flag confiscation for the past few years and they are avidly promoting the use of “task forces” to ensure guns are surrendered. There are no provisions within San Diego’s Red Flag measures allowing for true due process.
In 2022, the California State Legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom approved an expansion of California’s red flag law allowing eligible petitioners to include additional family members, roommates, individuals with a dating or co-parental relationship with a person who may pose a risk to themselves or others.
City officials in San Diego touted a decrease in overall gun homicide rates, but those stats conveniently end in 2020 when violent crime in CA began to spike again.
Maybe Rolling Stone is right and Don Willey is not a nice guy (they do attempt to dig up every last piece of dirt on the man’s life while saying little about Susan Webb). Maybe his land is covered in junk. Maybe his yard is a fire hazard. All of this could be true and it would be irrelevant to his gun rights.
Democrats think very differently, though. The core of Rolling Stone’s argument and The Trace’s argument is that Willey could be perceived by them as dangerous, and that’s enough to trample his rights. The problem is, leftists are terrified of everything and see danger under every rock and behind every tree (or junk pile). They are not qualified to be the arbiters of what constitutes a “dangerous person” and this is why they’re being buried in lawsuits.
Once these arbitrary distinctions and accusations are allowed, anything goes. A combative post or politically incorrect comment on social media could one day become a justification for a Red Flag visit. “Guilty until proven innocent” is an unacceptable dynamic in America and should not be tolerated.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 22:10 - Lobster-Chasers Gather In Florida For The Thrill Of The Early Hunt
Lobster-Chasers Gather In Florida For The Thrill Of The Early Hunt
Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
“The Turk” was anchored off near the southern tip of Florida, and the small boat had divers in the water when a large fishing vessel cruised directly over the dive site.
A man holds one of the lobsters that he caught during the two-day mini-season in Miami on July 28, 2010. Joe Raedle/Getty Images The smaller boat’s owner, dentist Jeff Pacha, watched furiously, anxiously. He worried, knowing as little as 13 feet of water might separate his wife and daughter—the two divers searching for lobsters on the ocean floor—from the intruder’s two sharp propellers.
Despite Pacha’s diver-down flag, the incoming boater idled across the area, presumably looking for a spot to anchor within the 100-yard safety perimeter the flag commands in open water.
Pacha waved and shouted. And the other vessel eventually turned and slowly moved away.
Pacha’s wife and daughter were able to return to the surface unharmed. But the scene repeats far too often this time of year, sometimes with deadly consequences, Pacha told The Epoch Times.
The dangerous encroachment illustrates the risks of seeking what’s known as a tasty treasure during Florida’s annual lobster mini-season.
During this year’s mini-season, which ran from July 24 to 25, one diver was hospitalized after being struck by a boat. Two other boating accidents required rescues, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).
During the two days of early lobstering, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office alone issued at least 12 citations requiring boat operators to appear in court, and they stopped more than 500 vessels for inspections.
What caused excitement to boil over was the annual early chance to find Florida’s spiny lobster.
The state’s regular season for lobster runs from midnight on Aug. 6 until a minute before midnight on March 31. The first two weekends are the busiest, Pacha said.
But for two days every summer, enthusiasts from around the country dive into what could be their best chance to seize their share of the most expensive item on the menu.
Lobsters. Right there for the taking. Straight from the ocean.
Boats filled with lobster divers speed past each other in Florida on July 25, 2024. T.J. Muscaro/The Epoch Times How to Catch a Feast
Divers are required to purchase a lobstering permit, a $5 add-on to a $17 saltwater fishing license.
Then they legally can seek the quarry that hides in shallow, warm, tropical waters.
The red, 10-legged crustacean with a spiky exoskeleton is prized for the meat in its tail. The Florida variety doesn’t have large, meat-filled claws, like its New England cousin.
Wild lobsters hide during the day under outcroppings of rock, wood, and other large objects. To get them out, divers swim to the ocean floor, find a likely hiding place, and poke into it a long metal stick. They try to “tickle” the “bugs”—as the creatures are called by those who hunt them—out of their holes and catch them in a net as they flee.
Down on the sandy ocean floor, Nicki Pacha, 25, and her mother Dee Pacha, 67, circled a cluster of coral and rock. They could see lobsters huddled within.
They poked their ticklers under the rock, gently jerking them in a scooping motion. The goal was to coerce the lobsters to exit the hiding place and swim past them.
They’d have to act fast to position their nets right at the mouth of the lobster’s hide-out. If everything goes according to plan, the lobster will swim right into the trap.
If a lobster is caught, a gloved diver first must flip it over to check for eggs that may be clinging to the bottom side of its tail. If there are no eggs, the diver next must use a measuring stick to check its size.
If the protesting bug passes inspection, it gets zipped up in the bag bound for the surface.
For a lobster to be a “keeper,” the carapace—the firm shell covering the head and legs—must be at least three inches long. Any lobster that’s smaller or is carrying eggs must be released.
Captain Tony Young, owner-operator of Forever Young Charters in Islamorada, compared the two days of early lobstering to the opening day of any hunting season. The opening days offer lobsters aplenty, he told The Epoch Times.
“It’s the best time of the year to catch lobster in the state of Florida.”
Nicki Pacha looks for lobsters in the waters off Summerland Key, Fla., on July 24, 2024. T.J. Muscaro/The Epoch Times Boat or No Boat, the Hunt Is On
A boat isn’t even a requirement.
Along U.S. Highway 1, boatless lobster hunters park their cars along the side of the road and wade into shallow water.
They climb out of their vehicles, donning an array of wetsuits, rashguards, and bathing suits. They awkwardly carry nets, fins, and dive flags under their arms. They step out cautiously on the rocky coastline and plunge into the water.
Later, the waterlogged variants waddle back to their vehicles, many with bags brimming with lobsters.
Aaron and Jenny Prost stood on the shoreline at the southern end of Marathon, a city on a narrow stretch of land in the middle of the Florida Keys, watching their boys hunt in the shallow waters on the second day of mini-season.
The couple from Venice, Florida, has gone on diving adventures together for years. This was the first time their two sons joined in on the fun, hoping to bag a few keepers.
Suddenly, their oldest, Samuel,14, popped up next to his diver-down flag about 50 yards from the shoreline.
“I got one!” he shouted.
But he wasn’t sure his catch was big enough to keep.
His father shouted back instructions on how to take a proper measurement, telling him to keep the lobster in the water until they knew for sure, according to state regulations. Lobsters, like fish, have to remain underwater to breathe.
Making sure to gently hold his catch below the water’s surface, the teen shuffled toward the shore for help. After a few moments, his father announced bad news: the lobster was millimeters too short.
Samuel groaned and slumped, then trudged back out from the shore to put the lobster back where he’d found it.
He’d faced a harsh reality of lobstering: It’s not as easy as advertised.
Lobsters are fast and tricky, and divers require a certain set of skills to catch them.
All the energy spent swimming in open water, all the time spent holding one’s breath, and all the effort spent struggling to stay down, stay level, tickle, and grab a lobster can leave a diver empty-handed.
A man prepares the lobsters he caught on the first day of the mini-season in Miami on July 28, 2010. Joe Raedle/Getty Images Keeping It Legal
Jeremiah Wann and his family from Mercer, Pennsylvania, rounded up about 10 lobsters during mini-season by snorkeling right off the pier of their vacation home on the ocean side of Tavernier, Florida.
The Wann boys—Holden, 16, and Lennon, 14—already knew the struggle of finding lobsters large enough to keep.
After four years of working on their lobstering skills, they’ve steadily improved, they told The Epoch Times. But they know the disappointment of catching lobsters too small to keep.
Plenty of others were caught ignoring the rules this mini-season. And that can bring serious consequences.
“The possible penalty for possession of each undersized lobster is up to 60 days in jail, a $500 fine, or both,” according to the Monroe County State Attorney’s Office.
Of the dozen citations issued over the two days by the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, most were for possession of too-small lobsters.
Lobster hunters face the same maximum penalty for taking a lobster with eggs, using a spear to catch one, or taking more than the law allows. Each violation may be charged separately.
State regulations allow divers to harvest six lobsters per day and 12 for the entire mini-season. A larger limit can be earned by helping the FWC eliminate an unwanted species from Florida waters.
Pacha and his family have taken that bait.
They participate in the FWC’s annual lionfish challenge, which offers prizes for divers helping to remove the venomous, invasive fish from reefs.
One of the prizes is a coin worth the right to take two extra lobsters during the mini-season. It’s earned by catching at least 25 lionfish or a combined total weighing at least 50 pounds.
By the end of the day, the Pachas had filled their boat’s cooler with 16 angry, snapping lobsters. They toasted their success with cold beer and later reflected on their close call.
While underwater, Nicki Pacha, 25, heard the idling of a boat above her, engines revving and clicking in and out of gear. She and her mother exchanged glances.
The 25-year-old medical student has been exploring underwater for about 20 years, both as a free diver and later as a scuba diver. Her parents have been diving together for 35 years.
Was it their family’s emergency signal? Three revs of their boat’s engine would be a call to surface.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 21:45 - J.D. Vance's Promise: Economic Mobility And Wealth Creation
J.D. Vance’s Promise: Economic Mobility And Wealth Creation
Authored by Terrence Keeley & Jim Sorenson via RealClearPolitics,
The election of J.D. Vance to the vice presidency could usher in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for dramatic advancements in the lives of America’s most down-trodden, forgotten, and trapped: Such is his promise “to never forget where he came from.” With the right policies, programs, and commitments, his compelling personal story of triumph over a broken home, the ravages of drug addiction, poverty, and cultural isolation could be replicated among millions.
One of the opportunities for transformative progress in a Trump-Vance administration lies in the fields of economic mobility and wealth creation. Coupled with new approaches to substance abuse and education – topics covered in the first two essays in this three-part series – President Trump and Vice President Vance could help reverse decades of growing wealth inequality between America’s most privileged and least fortunate. Market-oriented changes in three specific areas – homeownership, retirement savings, and employee stock ownership plans – would help end decades of growing inequality not by redistributing existing wealth but by giving historically excluded Americans proven tools for improving their financial well-being all on their own.
Wealth disparity in the United States is now roughly equivalent to Russia’s – a damning comparison – and much higher than averages in most industrialized nations. Extreme wealth disparity strains social cohesion and undermines public faith in institutions by breeding perceptions of unfairness.
Americans are also growing more unequal in wealth. In 1963, the wealthiest American families had 36 times the wealth of families in the middle distribution; by 2022, this disparity had doubled to 71 times as much.
U.S. wealth inequality has overwhelming racial correlations. According to research by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, African American families today have 23 cents for every dollar of white family wealth, and Hispanic families have only 19 cents. These gaps have also grown larger over time.
In our country, homeownership is the primary way citizens build wealth. In 2018, the black-white homeownership gap reached its highest level in 50 years. Today, black Americans remain the only racial group with a homeownership rate below 50%. If we want to narrow the wealth inequality gap between races, black and Hispanic homeownership must increase.
Improving home affordability, access to credit, helping people remain in their homes, and changing cultural mindsets are all needed for growing disparities in American homeownership to change. Reforming local land-use and zoning policies, deploying more public-private partnership resources to expand the supply of affordable for-sale housing, increasing down-payment assistance, and educating the broader public on ownership-vs-renting benefits are all part of the solution.
Homeownership could also be dramatically increased by unlocking appreciating home equity for first-time home buyers, enabling them to come up with a down payment and lower mortgage debt. Capital for these shared appreciation loans could come from institutional investors on a pro-rata basis. Home equity is America’s second-largest asset class at $31 trillion, but it largely sits untapped. As an asset class, home equity generates attractive, diversified, low-risk, positive inflation-adjusted returns. Policy initiatives and regulatory changes designed to unlock this appreciating asset class to the direct benefit of first-time and existing homeowners present a scalable solution for millions of people who have been left out of the housing market.
Expanding home ownership in lower-income, racially segregated communities would have significant ancillary benefits beyond wealth generation. Children of home-owning parents have greater educational attainment and income mobility than children of renters. This difference is especially stark among low-income families. Homeownership feeds directly into improved health, educational, and career outcomes, all vital components of family well-being.
Americans have consistently built wealth in two other ways beyond homeownership: First, by staying invested in the stock market over long periods of time; and second, by sharing in the wealth creation process of individual businesses. Basic market-friendly changes in retirement savings programs and more support for employee stock ownership plans would present two additional policy priorities for a Trump-Vance administration.
Today, 70 million hard-working Americans aren’t offered any retirement benefits through their place of employment. Among the bottom 50% of America’s wealth holders, the median retirement savings account balance is $0. For the most part, tax policies regarding retirement savings hinge on granting tax benefits through deductions, as opposed to credits or direct matches. This deduction approach is regressive because those with the highest incomes and the highest marginal tax rate gain the most.
The simplest and most tax-efficient way to help lower-income Americans save for their retirement is to give them the exact same benefit provided to every U.S. federal employee: access to the wealth-building vehicle known as the Thrift Savings Plan. The federal Thrift Savings Plan has a multi-decade history with 6.5 million federal employees who voluntarily set aside portions of their pay to invest in a range of target date and multi-asset funds.
Such funds ensure that beneficiaries have high equity exposures when they are young and higher bond exposures as they age, ensuring greater predictability in retirement income. The plan’s common stock index fund has returned 10.83% per year since its inception 35 years ago, meaning its holders have, on average, doubled their retirement savings every 6½ years. The Retirement Savings for Americans Act – bipartisan legislation that uses the same model as the Thrift Savings Plan – would similarly provide a path to more secure retirement for tens of millions of hardworking Americans. A supplemental retirement market reform sponsored by a Trump-Vance administration could augment retirement savings among lower-income groups by partially funding such accounts at birth, something the state of Connecticut has started to do with its CT Baby Bonds program.
Some 32 million American workers are employed by 2.9 million privately held firms owned by individuals at or near retirement age. A final, market-friendly policy the Trump-Vance administration could embrace involves creating employee stock ownership plans (ESOP). Here, bipartisan legislation has already been proposed in the Senate. The Employee Equity Investment Act would create a public-private partnership vehicle that facilitates the sale of privately-held companies to their employees – allowing them to maintain their jobs and build more wealth for themselves in the future. According to Jack Moriarty of the Lafayette Square Institute, such a program would build “a more competitive, resilient and broadly prosperous American economy.” ESOP participants have more than twice the average retirement balances of other Americans, proof of their effectiveness in building and retaining personal wealth over decades.
Transformational policy changes require vision, strong White House leadership, and a proven willingness to work across political lines. In areas as diverse as homeownership, retirement savings, and employee stock ownership, the time is ripe for generational reform. By providing heightened focus to proven methods for enhancing economic mobility and wealth creation – along with substance abuse and education – J.D. Vance, working side-by-side with Donald Trump, could improve the lives of millions of Americans. Such would be the promise of “remembering where he came from.” And such would be the promise of reinvigorating and restoring the American Dream.
Part one: Addressing Substance Abuse
Part two: Bolstering Education
Terrence R. Keeley is author of “Sustainable” and “Ending ESG.”
Jim Sorenson is the chairman of the Sorenson Impact Foundation.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 21:20 - Russia Summons US Envoy Over Presence Of American Mercenaries, CNN Crew In Kursk Region
Russia Summons US Envoy Over Presence Of American Mercenaries, CNN Crew In Kursk Region
Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday summoned a senior US Embassy official in Moscow in order to protest several issues related to US interference in the Kursk region, which has been scene of heavy fighting since Ukraine’s cross-border incursion kicked off on Aug.6.
Russia condemned “provocative actions” of both American journalists and US mercenaries spotted on Russian territory in the context of the Kursk invasion.
Via Fox News The foreign ministry in the meeting with US Embassy Chief of Mission Stephanie Holmes issued “strong protest” in “connection to the provocative actions of American reporters who illegally entered the Kursk region to produce propaganda for covering up the crimes of the Kyiv regime.”
The statement further said that national law enforcement authorities plan to “carry out the necessary investigative measures” examining the American journalists’ work.
Last week a CNN crew filed a report from the heart of the Russian town Sudzha just after the Ukrainian army took it over. It was clear that the CNN journalists were there under the protection of the Ukrainian military, as their words describing a segment indicated:
Chief International Security Correspondent Nick Paton Walsh gained some of the first access to a Ukrainian-held Russian town Friday, to witness their control over the town of Sudzha and the intensity of the fight. CNN was accompanied by the Ukrainian military who reviewed the video without sound prior to release for operational security reasons, yet had no editorial control.
Watch: Some of CNN’s footage inside the southern Russian town…
Chief International Security Correspondent Nick Paton Walsh gained some of the first access to a Ukrainian-held Russian town Friday, to witness their control over the town of Sudzha and the intensity of the fight. CNN was accompanied by the Ukrainian military who reviewed the… pic.twitter.com/Q9ueTEH5tR
— Beautiful Flower 🌺 (@LexieBeautiful_) August 18, 2024
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Moscow views his as unauthorized American journalists illegally entering Russia’s sovereign territory without permission, ultimately to assist with Ukrainian propaganda under Kiev’s military protection.
But among the more interesting charges aimed at Holmes from the Russian Foreign Ministry centers on the alleged presence of US military contractors assisting the Kursk invasion.
The ministry pointed to “evidence that has emerged of the participation of American private military companies on the side of the Ukrainian armed forces during” the offensive into Russia.
While not naming specific companies or firms, Russian state sources have flagged a posting by the American military lifestyle brand Forward Observations Group.
EXPOSED: US mercs spotted in Kursk region
US mercenary firm Forward Observations Group (FOG), previously known for its presence in Ukraine and Israel, claims its members are taking part in the Ukrainian attack of the Kursk region, Sputnik has discovered.
FOG’s official… pic.twitter.com/kED85qUczh
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) August 20, 2024
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The organization recently posted photos of alleged US mercenaries on Instagram, apparently on the Kursk battlefield, with a caption that reads: “the boys in Kursk.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 20:55 - Distorting Biden's Foreign Policy Record To Promote Harris' Candidacy
Distorting Biden’s Foreign Policy Record To Promote Harris’ Candidacy
Authored by Francis P. Sempa via RealClearDefense,
The great James Burnham in The Machiavellians distinguished between the “formal” and “real” meaning of political rhetoric. The formal meaning of such rhetoric, Burnham wrote, helps to disguise the real meaning.
The American foreign policy establishment has begun to spin the foreign policy legacy of President Joe Biden. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Jessica Matthews, Distinguished Fellow and former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, claims that although “it is too soon to judge the historical significance of Joe Biden’s one-term presidency, it is clear that the past four years have witnessed remarkable achievements in foreign policy.” But this narrative is not just about Biden’s supposed foreign policy legacy. It is also an effort to boost the foreign policy credentials of Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to Matthews, Biden shifted U.S. foreign policy “from an unhealthy reliance on military intervention to the active pursuit of diplomacy backed by strength,” strengthened our alliances, deepened our presence in Asia, promoted multilateralism, and ended the war in Afghanistan. “Biden,” she writes, “has made profound changes in foreign policy–not to accommodate American decline but to reflect the country’s inherent strength.”
Matthews credits Biden with “boldness” in withdrawing from Afghanistan–others would describe it as amateurish and humiliating. She claims that Biden’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “has been both skillful and innovative” and “masterful,” forgetting perhaps that he was the president that failed to deter that invasion. Biden’s “strength” that supposedly backed his diplomacy consisted of diminished relative naval power, a military leadership that prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion and efforts to combat climate change, an emboldened Iran in the Middle East, and an even more aggressive China in the western Pacific. It was during Biden’s presidency that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea grew closer–his administration did nothing to attempt to widen potential cleavages among the so-called “axis of autocracy.”
What Matthews tries to obfuscate is that under Biden, the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, Iran-backed Hamas invaded Israel, Russia invaded Ukraine, and China became more aggressive in the western Pacific, threatening both Taiwan and the Philippines. This is not a record of “remarkable achievement.” It almost makes Jimmy Carter look good by comparison.
In Ukraine, instead of using American “diplomacy backed by strength,” Biden has rejected any suggestions for a negotiated ceasefire in favor of support for a Ukrainian “victory.” This is the exact opposite of the kind of “realism” that Matthews claims to support. There is no end in sight to the Ukraine war, and the longer it lasts, the greater the chances of escalation to a wider European, or even global, war.
Matthews is closer to the mark when she characterizes the Biden Middle East policy as a “mix of inattention and wishful thinking,” and that is being generous. Matthews writes that Biden should have been willing to use our leverage to “compel Israel” to wage war the way we–separated from our enemies by oceans–think they–surrounded by enemies–should wage it.
Matthews also criticizes Biden for his Taiwan policy, even though she mysteriously credits him for implementing the “pivot to Asia.” She worries that Biden’s policy has strayed from her preferred policy of “strategic ambiguity.” Matthews apparently still believes that the failed dual policy of engagement/competition can still work with China. Her criticism of Biden here is off the mark. Biden has mostly moved away from the more confrontational policy pursued by the Trump administration during its last two years. The fact that Matthews thinks Biden has been too tough on China with respect to Taiwan reveals more about her worldview than Biden’s. Overall, she writes, “relations with China are steadier than those he inherited.”
Biden gets poor marks for his failure to “advance nuclear arms control and nonproliferation.” Matthews criticizes Biden for providing weapons grade fuel to our ally Australia for its submarines. Meanwhile, China has engaged in what some strategists call a nuclear “strategic break out,” which will result in China’s ability to deploy more than 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, and 1,500 such warheads by 2035. And Iran is well on its way to obtaining (if it already hasn’t) nuclear weapons.
But in the end, it is the “remarkable achievements” of the Biden administration that Matthews touts because the real purpose of the article is not to praise Biden’s foreign policy legacy as much as it is to persuade voters to choose a candidate this fall who will “share [Biden’s] worldview.” The choice, she concludes, is between an unmentioned Kamala Harris, who presumably shares Biden’s worldview, and Donald Trump, who will return to a foreign policy of “populism, go-it-alone nationalism, or even isolationism.”
Back to Burnham: Matthews’ formal meaning of her article is to generally applaud the foreign policy record of President Joe Biden, but the real meaning is to persuade voters to vote for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump.
Francis P. Sempa is the author of “Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century” and “America’s Global Role.” His work has appeared in Strategic Review, the Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the Claremont Review of Books, the Asian Review of Books, the South China Morning Post, the National Interest, and other publications.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 20:30 - University Of California Bans Encampments, Face Masks
University Of California Bans Encampments, Face Masks
Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The president of the University of California (UC) said on Monday that the 10-campus university system would enforce policies banning encampments and the wearing of masks to conceal identity in response to pro-Palestinian protests across the country.
Student protesters set up at the intersection of Campus Drive and W. Peltason Drive near the University of California–Irvine in Irvine, Calif., on April 29, 2024. Rudy Blalock/The Epoch Times In a letter to the university community, UC President Michael V Drake said that his office and campus leaders have reflected on “the events of the past year” and sought ways to strengthen policies and procedures.
They found that while the “vast majority” of protests held on UC’s campuses were peaceful and nonviolent, some activities over the past year were not.
Drake said that “consistent application of policies and laws” is needed to balance protecting free speech rights with ensuring the safety of students and maintaining critical university operations.
He said the policies would prohibit encampments, unauthorized structures, and restrictions on free movement on university property. They will also ban the use of masks to conceal identity and prohibit people from refusing to identify themselves to university personnel.
Drake said the university will also develop a framework for consistent enforcement of its policies and responses to policy violations, as well as launch a campus climate initiative.
“Our ultimate goal is for all of our community members to feel supported in their ability to express themselves, and to pursue their studies, research, patient care, and other work on our campuses,” he stated.
In a separate letter to campus leaders, Drake said the university will implement a “consistent tiered response” for those who violate institutional policies.
Individuals who violate campus policy will first receive a warning. If the conduct persists, the UC police department or campus fire marshal will assess the situation and may issue an unlawful assembly notice.
In the final phase of the tiered response, those who continue to break the law “may be cited, detained and arrested for unlawful behavior, or subject to other police actions.” Stay-away orders may be issued for “higher severity violations” and repeat offenses.
This came a week after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed by three students, prohibiting the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) from providing programs and access to buildings if Jewish students were blocked.
The students sued UCLA in June for allowing protesters to barricade the center of the campus and establish an encampment that obstructed passage to campus facilities.
In his 16-page ruling on Aug. 13, U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi described the situation at UCLA as “unimaginable” and “so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.”
The university is among the many campuses in the United States where demonstrators have set up encampments to protest the war in Gaza, which was Israel’s response to the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 20:05 - Harris' Unrealized Gains Tax Would Obliterate The U.S. Economy
Harris’ Unrealized Gains Tax Would Obliterate The U.S. Economy
Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance
On Tuesday, it was announced that Presidential candidate Kamala Harris would be supporting President Joe Biden’s tax proposals for 2025, which include a 44.6% capital gains rate and a 25% tax on unrealized gains.
Having used up all of the rest of the batshit, insane, counterintuitive economic dirty tricks left in the “we’ll literally do anything but cut spending” bag, the Biden administration began pushing this tax idea in April 2024 when I first wrote about it. Unrealized gains taxation could be the most destructive idea for our country since prohibition, I joked at the time.
As part of its budget proposal for the 2025 fiscal year, the Biden administration was trying to raise an addition $4.3 trillion over 10 years in the worst way possible: imposing a minimum tax equal to 25 percent of a taxpayer’s taxable income and unrealized capital gains less the sum of their regular tax, for taxpayers with wealth over $100 million.
Putting aside the fact that this high-risk idea only amounts to a pittance, $430 billion per year, the introduction of taxing unrealized gains could be one of the worst slippery slopes we ever dare to roll our country’s economy down.
I mean, shit, we could save $1 trillion just by not sending $100 billion a year to other nations for starters. But I digress. For an outline of exactly what an unrealized gains tax is, here’s the American Institute on Economic Research:
A tax on unrealized capital gains means that individuals are penalized for owning appreciating assets, regardless of whether they have realized any actual income from selling them.
If you purchased a stock for $100 this year, for example, and it increased to $110 next year, you would pay the assigned tax rate on the $10 capital gain. You didn’t sell the asset, so you don’t realize the $10 appreciation, but must pay the tax regardless.
Taxing unrealized capital gains contradicts the basic principles of fairness and property rights essential for a free and prosperous society. Taxation, if we’re going to have it on income, should be based on actual income earned, not on paper gains that may never materialize.
AIER notes that implementing such a tax not only deeply infringes upon personal liberty and private property rights — but I can’t help but think about how it also sets a destructive wrecking ball rolling down a slippery slope for the first time in our nation’s history.
And, given the precarious state of our nation’s finances, it doesn’t seem like the best time to start spitballing about new risky ideas that may or may not catch on only because they sound like they are addressing the problem of a widening wealth gap that Federal Reserve policies created and continue to exacerbate to begin with.
If the administration really wanted to address the problem of wealth inequality, it would be setting its sights on the central bank that sacrificed price stability so it could spray trillions of dollars in “stimulus” toward financial assets, while cutting American families paltry checks of just $600, during COVID. When I did the math during COVID, the total amount spent to bail out the country when we decided to shut down the economy and have the Federal Reserve replace it with a fiat house of cards amounted to something like $17,500 per every citizen in the United States.
Except, again, only $600 of that went to each individual. The rest went to the financial sector, in turn widening the inequality gap further as billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos saw tens of billions of dollars added to their net worth in a matter of months.
And so now, rather than take tangible, decisive action to actually address the problem, the Harris administration is putting forth a plan that won’t just be negative for the country, it could very well be the hill that our country’s economy dies on. And to be honest, I’m not being hyperbolic.
Over the last few years, we have seen an extraordinary exodus from places like New York and California, to places like Florida and Texas, because the former states were essentially taxing far too much relative to the benefits of what they were providing for citizens.
Source: Daily Mail
Ergo, places like California have seen people like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk move to Texas, while states like New York have seen businesses like Ken Griffin’s Citadel move to Florida. There’s nothing to read between the lines about when it comes to this capital flight out of one state and into another. It is simple cause and effect: at some point, people simply don’t think it is worth living in these states due to the taxes being too high.
It’s a quintessential example of the Laffer Curve. Tax too much, people are disincentivized to generate productivity, or in this case, live in your state.
Harris’ proposal to raise regular capital gains taxes is one thing, albeit still egregious; it is far lesser noxious of the two proposals. Taxing unrealized gains is an exponentially worse type of taxation that introduces not just a higher tax rate and a 3rd type of income tax, but a completely new system for taxation – one that taxes people’s assets as they appreciate, not just when they realize the gains of said appreciation.
“But it will only be against people worth more than $100 million,” proponents of the idea will exclaim. Hell, I’m not worth 1% of that, so why should I even care?
First off, it can’t be understated how earth-shattering it is to put this terrible idea into motion, regardless of who it is going to affect. You can’t justify a stunning overreach on people’s constitutional rights and civil liberties just because they sit in a certain tax bracket. And it is a line that, once crossed, the government won’t backtrack on. Once taxing unrealized gains makes its way into the zeitgeist, it sticks around for good. And, if it sticks around, it’ll only be another meaningful step moving the U.S. economy closer to an anemic corpse of a state-planned economy.
A tax of this nature creates a vacuum that does nothing but suck the vibrancy out of an economy. In addition to setting a new moral hazard standard, the tax directly targets the people with the most capital at work in our country. By specifically targeting the people that have the means to create new enterprises and invest using this capital, and then driving them out of the country, the tax is a surefire way to suck the lifeblood out of what’s left of the United States economy.
Make no mistake: it will be a clarion call for billionaires to simply move out of the United States and into tax havens. And think about it — these are the people that have the means to up and simply leave the country and relocate anytime they want. For them, if it makes financial sense, they will do it. Implementing this unrealized gains tax will set the ball in motion, you can mark my words. The rich will be as good as gone.
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And when billionaires decide to up and leave the United States, all of the tax revenue they were generating otherwise — not just the unrealized gains tax — leaves with them. In other words, an unrealized gains tax will push them past their limit and result in catastrophic consequences for the country’s tax revenue as a whole. It’ll literally do far more harm than good. If I can understand why, a fifth grader can. That means the ultra-rich, who are much smarter than I am, definitely understand it. They’re not going to be interested in hanging around and forking over this much more cash “for the good of the cause”. They already likely have a plan in such case this tax is passed, and — as a hint — it isn’t to happily hand over a check to the Harris administration and say “thanks for being such great stewards of my capital, keep up the good work”.
In reality, it likely involves yachts, dual passports, “investments” in places like Bermuda and Mauritius, attending F1 races and tennis matches, expensive champagne and Eastern European escorts (hereinafter referred to as: “The Hunter Biden Experience”).
But seriously, setting aside the billionaires for a moment, the tax is going to dampen everybody’s incentive to try and earn and invest to begin with. Who wants to invest in the market if they’re going to be taxed on their gains the very next day?
Possibly the worst part of this idea is its timing. The country is running a massive deficit now that looks to continue to widen because of our government’s refusal to cut spending on both sides of the aisle. As a reminder, you can only push the tax base so far before they turn tail and run. I know I’ve made jokes in the past (read: yesterday) about our government going through all of the solutions mandatory before arriving at any solution that works in the slightest, but this would be the granddaddy of all examples if implemented.
The timing of this proposed solution couldn’t be worse. We are at a point in our country’s fiscal history where we need balance more than ever.
We have the largest deficit and the most debt relative to GDP we have had in recent history.
The BRICS nations, including Russia, China, and India, are actively pursuing ways to break off of the Western banking system and challenge the U.S. dollar.
Inflation is running rampant and high interest rates are more than likely to cause our economy to slow down in marked fashion.
We’re running deficits, but we need the tax revenue we are currently bringing in if we have any hope of cutting spending to balance our budget and right the country’s ship economically. The loss of tax revenue as a result of capital flight from the United States responding to this proposed unrealized gains tax would be catastrophic and would accelerate the country’s financial and monetary demise, not help it.
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Now read:
- RFK Jr. Can Save Liberalism…By Endorsing Trump
- 1,307 Days: Kamala Harris Promises To Fix…Her Own Destructive Policies
- Tip Tax Toe: Kamala Harris’ Own IRS Pushed More Tip Tax Reporting Last Year
- Matt Taibbi: Kamala, Trump & The Death Of Objective Truth
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 19:40 - Putin Opens Russia As Haven For Westerners Fleeing 'Destructive Neoliberal Ideas'
Putin Opens Russia As Haven For Westerners Fleeing ‘Destructive Neoliberal Ideas’
Under a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin, Russia is relaxing temporary residence requirements for foreign citizens wishing to escape “destructive neoliberal ideas...which run counter to traditional Russian spiritual and moral values,” state news agency TASS has reported.
Under the terms of the decree, foreigners will have the privilege of applying for temporary residence “outside the quota approved by the Russian government and without providing documents confirming their knowledge of the Russian language, Russian history and basic laws.”
The stated aim of President Putin’s decree is to provide “humanitarian support to persons sharing traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” The Russian foreign ministry has been directed to initiate the new, expedited process for obtaining three-month visas as early as September. In support of the initiative, the foreign ministry will, within 30 days, publish a list of countries that are imposing destructive ideals on their citizens in conflict with traditional values embraced in Russia.
Those determinations will be driven by Putin’s November 2022 executive order regarding “Fundamentals of State Policy to Preserve and Strengthen Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values.” In part, that document states:
Traditional values include life, dignity, human rights and freedoms, patriotism, civic consciousness, service to the Fatherland and responsibility for its destiny, high moral ideals, strong families, productive labour, the primacy of the spiritual over corporeal, humanism, charity, justice, collectivism, mutual assistance and mutual respect, historical memory and the continuity of generations, as well as the unity of Russia’s peoples.
TASS notes that, in February, Putin commented approvingly on Italian student Irene Cecchini’s proposal that Russia relax its residency rules for foreigners who embrace traditional values. In June, Cecchini was a panelist at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, at a session titled “Time to Live in Russia.” She studied at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
Putin’s new policy may have been inspired by a suggestion from Italian Irene Cecchini, a student at a Moscow university In May 2023, Russia announced it would build a village near Moscow to accommodate immigrating conservative Americans and Canadians. At the time, Russian immigration lawyer Timur Beslangurov told RIA Novosti that such people were eager to emigrate because of the “propaganda of radical values: Today they have 70 genders, and who knows what will come next. Many normal people emigrate and are considering Russia, but they’re faced with huge bureaucratic problems with Russia’s migration law.” Putin’s new decree is apparently a first step in cutting that red tape.
As for Putin’s suggestion that Western values are eroding, could he be referring to the routine appearance of creatures like this at school board meetings and at the front of classrooms?
The dividing line in America is no longer between right and left. It is between what is normal and what is crazy. pic.twitter.com/0wTgD6sGiG
— Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) August 19, 2024
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
…or maybe President Biden’s appointment of luggage-stealing, dress-wearing, puppy-play freak Sam Brinton (left) to a high post managing nuclear waste?
…or perhaps VP candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s mandate that schools stock boys’ bathrooms with tampons?
We could go on for days, but we’ll leave you with this depiction of a Russian family that chose the reverse path of relocation:
Russians propaganda mocking those leaving Russia for America – freaking hilariously awesome 🤦😂 pic.twitter.com/LnmGbsdGrG
— Mihir Jha (@MihirkJha) October 8, 2022
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 19:15 - Numbers Don't Lie: Women Thrived Under Trump, Suffered Under Harris
Numbers Don’t Lie: Women Thrived Under Trump, Suffered Under Harris
Authored by Elise Stafanik via RealClearPolitics,
Of the countless lies about Kamala Harris perpetuated by Democrats and their loyal stenographers in the mainstream media, one of the most egregious is that a Kamala Harris presidency will deliver historic economic opportunity for working women. Unfortunately for these desperate Democrats attempting to erase publicly available data, numbers tell the exact opposite story. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden saddled women with the largest pay cut, inflation crisis, tax hike, and economic crash so far this century, whereas President Trump delivered the greatest economic boost for American women of any modern day president.
The median income for women increased every year during the Trump administration, reaching the highest on record in 2020. Real average weekly earnings increased 8.2% under President Trump yet decreased 3.9% under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The unemployment rate for women overall and for black women in particular reached a record low during President Trump’s term. In 2019, the workforce participation gap between men and women shrank to the narrowest in history. President Trump’s economy made history with the most women in the workforce ever.
This wasn’t by accident. Understanding that working women are also balancing families, President Trump delivered a pro-family economic agenda that included doubling the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child and expanding eligibility. Nearly 40 million families received an average benefit of $2,200 under his leadership, totaling credits of approximately $88 billion.
He then created the first-ever paid family leave tax credit for employees earning $72,000 or less and signed into law 12 weeks of paid parental leave for federal workers. He also signed the largest-ever increase in child care and development block grants – expanding access to quality, affordable childcare for more than 800,000 low-income families. President Trump signed into law a provision that enabled new parents to withdraw up to $5,000 from their retirement accounts without penalty when they give birth to or adopt a child.
The oft-asked question about balancing work and family life is: Can women have it all? Under President Trump’s leadership, the answer was a resounding yes.
Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, not so much.
Biden and Harris’ failed economic policies hurt every American but hit women hardest of all. Women are bearing the brunt of Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote for Biden’s comically named “Inflation Reduction Act,” which turbocharged inflation with a glut of ridiculous climate spending. Women are working longer hours and delaying retirement as a result.
Talk to any woman in America and there is no question that inflation is a women’s issue. Since Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president, prices have risen by 19.4% – making it increasingly difficult for women to provide for their families. Women are the majority of grocery shoppers, and grocery bills have skyrocketed, forcing many Americans to cut back on essentials. A single mother of two in Nevada had to sell her car to afford groceries under Biden. A mother of two in Michigan had “to think about putting gasoline prices before buying my kids clothes” because of Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote for Biden’s radical green energy agenda.
Families now need an extra $12,590 annually just to maintain the same standard of living they enjoyed three years ago, according to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee—and 67% of parents say inflation has impacted their ability to pay for their children’s education, school supplies, and extracurricular activities this past school year. The cost of childcare has increased 32% for the average family since 2019, and nearly two-thirds are spending 20% or more of their annual income on childcare. The average price for a pack of disposable diapers has increased 32% since 2019, and 47% of families reported struggling to afford them. In 2022, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ incompetence created a baby formula shortage, causing the price to soar to an all-time high. Some 44 million people were living in food insecure households in 2022, a 31% annual increase and the largest one-year increase since 2008.
Women make up the majority of voters in America, so it’s no wonder the Harris propaganda machine is in overdrive attempting to gaslight them into thinking they’ve never had it better. But as much as Democrats may lie, numbers never do. They show that President Trump not only cares deeply about women and all Americans but also knows what it takes to stimulate the economy to create historic opportunities on our behalf. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, sees women as a convenient voting block to pander to, deceive, and then abandon in favor of an economically poisonous, radically liberal agenda.
To my fellow women voters: Don’t be fooled.
Rep. Elise M. Stefanik represents New York’s 21st congressional district. She is the House Republican Conference chair, and chair of Women for Trump.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 18:50 - US, Allies Condemn China's Actions Against Philippine Vessels In South China Sea
US, Allies Condemn China’s Actions Against Philippine Vessels In South China Sea
Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The United States and several of its allies condemned China over what they said were dangerous actions by Chinese coast guard vessels after they collided with Philippine coast guard vessels in the South China Sea.
Photos provided by the Philippine coast guard show damage in the auxiliary room on the port side near the port auxiliary engine of Philippine coast guard vessel BRP Bagacay/MRRV-4410 (L) and on the coast guard vessel BRP Cape Engano/MRRV-4411 (R), following collisions with Chinese coast guard vessels in the disputed South China Sea, on Aug. 19, 2024. Philippine Coast Guard via AP The incident happened in the early hours of Aug. 19 near the Sabina Shoal, with Beijing and Manila accusing each other of being responsible for the collisions.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel criticized China for its actions against “lawful Philippine maritime operations” in an Aug. 19 statement.
“PRC [People’s Republic of China] ships employed reckless maneuvers, deliberately colliding with two Philippine Coast Guard ships, causing structural damage and jeopardizing the safety of the crew onboard,” Patel said.
The collision occurred about 20 nautical miles southeast of the Escoda Shoal, which is a part of the South China Sea that the Philippines refers to as the West Philippine Sea. The Sabina Shaol is located near the Second Thomas Shoal.
The latest incident marks renewed geopolitical tension between China and the Philippines, following a short reprieve since the two sides inked a provisional agreement at the Second Thomas Shoal in July. Earlier this month, the Philippines announced it would lodge a diplomatic protest with China after two Chinese fighter jets deployed fares in the path of a Philippine patrol plane.
Jonathan Malaya, assistant director general at the National Security Council of the Philippines, said on Monday that the two Philippine coast guard patrol boats, BRP Bagacay (MRRV-4410) and BRP Cape Engaño (MRRV-441), were on a resupply mission for the Philippine outposts at Patag and Lawak islands in the Spratly Islands. The two boats were rammed by Chinese coast guard vessels and suffered structural damage, he said.
“These actions are the latest examples of the PRC using dangerous and escalatory measures to enforce its expansive and unlawful South China Sea maritime claims,” Patel said. He called on China to abide by international law and desist from “dangerous and destabilizing conduct.”
Malaya said the United States reaffirms that Article IV of the 1951 U.S.–Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty “extends to armed attacks on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft—including those of its Coast Guard—anywhere in the South China Sea.”
International Condemnation
Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and the UK condemned China’s latest maritime actions.
Australia’s ambassador to the Philippines, HK Yu, wrote in a post on social media platform X that China’s actions undermine efforts to de-escalate tensions.
David Hartman, Canada’s ambassador to the Philippines, condemned the “irresponsible and dangerous maneuvers of the China Coast Guard” in an X post.
“These actions are inconsistent with China’s obligations under international law and undermine efforts to de-escalate tensions in the South China Sea,” Hartman wrote.
Japan’s ambassador to the Philippines, Endo Kazuya, said in an X post that Tokyo does not tolerate harassment and actions that “increase tensions or disturb navigational rights.”
Kazuya added that Japan “stands with [the Philiphines] by upholding rules-based order and peaceful settlement of disputes based on [international] law.”
Earlier this month, Australia, Canada, the Philippines, and the United States held a two-day “multilateral maritime cooperative activity” within Manila’s exclusive economic zones. The drill was aimed at showing the four nations’ “collective commitment to strengthen regional and international cooperation in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific,” according to a statement from the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.
Manila continued its criticism of Beijing over the collision on Tuesday. Alexander Lopez, a spokesperson for the country’s maritime council, expressed “serious concern over the deliberate harassment and infringement by China” on the Philippines’ sovereignty and sovereign rights in the South China Sea.
In July, Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to President Joe Biden over their concerns regarding China’s use of force against the Philippines in the South China Sea.
The lawmakers asked Biden to provide a “full list of military, diplomatic, and economic options developed by the Departments of State and Defense to support the Philippines and deter further escalation by the PRC.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 18:25 - What's Really Happening With Monkeypox
What’s Really Happening With Monkeypox
Authored by David Bell via the Brownstone Institute,
The World Health Organization (WHO) acted as expected this week and declared Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). So, a problem in a small number of African countries that has killed about the same number of people this year as die every four hours from tuberculosis has come to dominate international headlines. This is raising a lot of angst from some circles against the WHO.
While angst is warranted, it is mostly misdirected. The WHO and the IHR emergency committee they convened had little real power – they are simply following a script written by their sponsors. The African CDC, which declared an emergency a day earlier, is in a similar position. Mpox is a real disease and needs local and proportionate solutions. But the problem it is highlighting is much bigger than Mpox or the WHO, and understanding this is essential if we are to fix it.
Mpox, previously called Monkeypox, is caused by a virus thought to normally infect African rodents such as rats and squirrels. It fairly frequently passes to, and between, humans. In humans, its effects range from very mild illness to fever and muscle pains to severe illness with its characteristic skin rash, and sometimes death. Different variants, called ‘clades,’ produce slightly different symptoms. It is passed by close body contact including sexual activity, and the WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was mostly passed by men having sex with men.
The current outbreaks involve sexual transmission but also other close contact such as within households, expanding its potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe outcomes, perhaps due to issues of lower prior immunity and the effects of malnutrition and other illnesses.
Reality in DRC
The current PHEIC was mainly precipitated by the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though there are known outbreaks in nearby countries covering a number of clades. About 500 people have died from Mpox in DRC this year, over 80% of them under 15 years of age. In that same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under 5 years, died from malaria. The malaria deaths were mainly due to lack of access to very basic commodities like diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs, and insecticidal bed nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded globally. Malaria is nearly always preventable or treatable if sufficiently resourced.
During this same period in which 500 people died from Mpox in DRC, hundreds of thousands also died in DRC and surrounding African countries from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and the impacts of malnutrition and unsafe water. Tuberculosis alone kills about 1.3 million people globally each year, which is a rate about 1,500 times higher than Mpox in 2024.
The population of DRC is also facing increasing instability characterized by mass rape and massacres, in part due to a scramble by warlords to service the appetite of richer countries for the components of batteries. These in turn are needed to support the Green Agenda of Europe and North America. This is the context in which the people of DRC and nearby populations, which obviously should be the primary decision-makers regarding the Mpox outbreak, currently live.
An Industry Produces What It Is Paid for
For the WHO and the international public health industry, Mpox presents a very different picture. They now work for a pandemic industrial complex, built by private and political interests on the ashes of international public health. Forty years ago, Mpox would have been viewed in context, proportional to the diseases that are shortening overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that allows them to continue. The media would barely have mentioned the disease, as they were basing much of their coverage on impact and attempting to offer independent analysis.
Now the public health industry is dependent on emergencies. They have spent the past 20 years building agencies such as CEPI, inaugurated at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting and solely focused on developing vaccines for pandemic, and on expanding capacity to detect and distinguish ever more viruses and variants. This is supported by the recently passed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).
While improving nutrition, sanitation, and living conditions provided the path to longer lifespans in Western countries, such measures sit poorly with a colonial approach to world affairs in which the wealth and dominance of some countries are seen as being dependent on the continued poverty of others. This requires a paradigm in which decision-making is in the hands of distant bureaucratic and corporate masters. Public health has an unfortunate history of supporting this, with restriction of local decision-making and the pushing of commodities as key interventions.
Thus, we now have thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes to non-government organizations, commercial companies, and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding targets for Pharma, purloining public funding, and then developing and selling the cure. The entire newly minted pandemic agenda, demonstrated successfully through the Covid-19 response, is based on this approach. Justification for the salaries involved requires detection of outbreaks, an exaggeration of their likely impact, and the institution of a commodity-heavy and usually vaccine-based response.
The sponsors of this entire process – countries with large Pharma industries, Pharma investors, and Pharma companies themselves – have established power through media and political sponsorship to ensure the approach works. Evidence of the intent of the model and the harms it is wreaking can be effectively hidden from public view by a subservient media and publishing industry. But in DRC, people who have long suffered the exploitation of war and the mineral extractors, who replaced a particularly brutal colonial regime, must now also deal with the wealth extractors of Pharma.
Dealing with the Cause
While Mpox is concentrated in Africa, the effects of corrupted public health are global. Bird flu will likely follow the same course as Mpox in the near future. The army of researchers paid to find more outbreaks will do so. While the risk from pandemics is not significantly different than decades ago, there is an industry dependent on making you think otherwise.
As the Covid-19 playbook showed, this is about money and power on a scale only matched by similar fascist regimes of the past. Current efforts across Western countries to denigrate the concept of free speech, to criminalize dissent, and to institute health passports to control movement are not new and are in no way disconnected from the inevitability of the WHO declaring the Mpox PHEIC. We are not in the world we knew twenty years ago.
Poverty and the external forces that benefit from war, and the diseases these enable, will continue to hammer the people of DRC. If a mass vaccination campaign is instituted, which is highly likely, financial and human resources will be diverted from far greater threats. This is why decision-making must now be centralized far from the communities affected. Local priorities will never match those that expansion of the pandemic industry depends on.
In the West, we must move on from blaming the WHO and address the reality unfolding around us. Censorship is being promoted by journalists, courts are serving political agendas, and the very concept of nationhood, on which democracy depends, is being demonized. A fascist agenda is openly promoted by corporate clubs such as the World Economic Forum and echoed by the international institutions set up after the Second World War specifically to oppose it. If we cannot see this and if we do not refuse to participate, then we will have only ourselves to blame. We are voting for these governments and accepting obvious fraud, and we can choose not to do so.
For the people of DRC, children will continue to tragically die from Mpox, from malaria, and from all the diseases that ensure return on investment for distant companies making pharmaceuticals and batteries. They can ignore the pleading of the servants of the White Men of Davos who will wish to inject them, but they cannot ignore their poverty or the disinterest in their opinions. As with Covid-19, they will now become poorer because Google, the Guardian, and the WHO were bought a long time back, and now serve others.
The one real hope is that we ignore lies and empty pronouncements, refusing to bow to unfounded fear. In public health and in society, censorship protects falsehoods and dictates reflect greed for power. Once we refuse to accept either, we can begin to address the problems at the WHO and the inequity it is promoting. Until that time, we will live in this increasingly vicious circus.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 17:40 - WTI Extends Losses After API Reports Small (Surprise) Crude Build
WTI Extends Losses After API Reports Small (Surprise) Crude Build
Oil prices limped lower once again today (5th decline in the last six days) as stocks stalled and a potential cease-fire in Gaza built on mounting concern about the global demand outlook.
On Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Israel accepted a cease-fire proposal and that the next step was for Hamas to agree. In response, the militant group pushed back against the US, denying claims that it was stalling negotiations and saying it was “keen” to reach an accord.
Meanwhile, China’s worsening economic malaise is keeping the market subdued. Recent data showed shrinking factory activity and a decline in oil demand, while the world’s largest importer is also considering a new rescue plan for its beleaguered property sector.
The question is, will last week’s unexpected crude inventory build be confirmed as a one-off or is the macro background fear starting to actually impact physical markets.
API
-
Crude +347k (-2.9mm exp)
-
Cushing -648k
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Gasoline -1.04mm
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Distillates -2.24mm
For the second week in a row, Crude stockpiles saw an increase, while the all-important hub at Cushing saw another draw and product stocks fell…
Source: Bloomberg
WTI modestly extended losses on the crude build…
“The geopolitical risk premium, which had been inflating prices, started deflating when the U.S. announced that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted a bridging proposal to cool tensions between Israel and Hamas,” said Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management, in market commentary.
“A de-escalation in the Middle East could make that risk premium evaporate faster than a puddle in the desert sun.”
Additionally, Powell could mess it all up:
“An economic downturn resulting from a ‘Fed mistake’ would lead to a bear market in the global energy markets,” Tyler Richey, co-editor at Sevens Report Research, told MarketWatch.
So “if we start to see economic data deteriorate in the coming weeks or months, demand estimates penciled in based on the optimistic hope of a soft landing will fall considerably amid an emerging recessionary reality.”
Now we just have to wait and see what tomorrow’s official inventory and supply data shows.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 17:20 -
- What Has The Fed Done To Our Lives?
What Has The Fed Done To Our Lives?
Authored by George F. Smith via LewRockwell.com,
The following is derived from a speech in my novel, The Flight of the Barbarous Relic
Wars must be funded, and for this governments functioning as states call upon the banking system for assistance.
Central Bank counterfeiting, which is another name for inflation, is the fuel that energizes the forces of war. Inflation, or counterfeiting, amounts to issuing receipts for something that doesn’t exist, which legally is the prerogative of the central bank. Calling such receipts money allows them to be created in massive amounts quickly. When the US Congress votes to send billions of fiat money to Ukraine, Israel or anywhere else, no one questions the nature of what is being sent because legal tender laws make it all copasetic.
Yet, we should know better.
As to the assumed authority of any assembly in making paper money, or paper of any kind, a legal tender, or in other language, a compulsive payment [Thomas Paine wrote in 1786], it is a most presumptuous attempt at arbitrary power. There can be no such power in a republican government: the people have no freedom, and property no security where this practice can be acted . . .
If anything had, or could have, a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law: and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law; and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust, and calculated to support fraud and oppression. [emphasis added]
Banks belonging to the Federal Reserve central banking cartel can issue credit based on the Federal Reserve Board’s Regulation D, which specifies “a set of uniform reserve requirements for all depository institutions with transaction accounts,” so that, for instance, if the reserve ratio is 1:10, a bank with $10 million in reserve can issue $100 million in credit. Could you loan $100 to a friend if you only had $10 to spare?
The Fed dropped the reserve ratio to near zero in March, 2020 during the Covid pandemic. I’m tempted to say the Fed would react in a similar manner to a Congressional declaration of war, as required by the Constitution, but the war power of Congress has been neglected since WW II.
We need to keep in mind that lending as such is crucial to our well-being. As one commentator astutely observed, without an international banking system most of us wouldn’t be alive today. Money and banking make possible the division of labor, which has drastically reduced child mortality and raised living standards wherever free markets flourished.
But it’s also true that throughout most of banking history, the banks’ practice of generating unbacked money substitutes prevailed. Invariably, some would go too far and depositors would start showing up at teller windows wanting their notes exchanged for gold. Without enough gold to redeem, many of the banks had to shut their doors. But only temporarily.
For reasons of its own, government took a strong interest in the bankers’ plight and usually issued moratoriums on note redemption. For a period sometimes lasting years, banks were permitted to default on their liabilities to note holders while being allowed to conduct all other banking activities.
Helpful as this privilege was, it wasn’t enough. Banks weren’t always allowed to renege on their promises, their easy credit policies created bankruptcies and recessions, and besides, bank runs were embarrassing. No banker liked seeing crowds swarming at his door demanding what was theirs, even if the law was on his side.
Enter the central bank
Fortunately for American bankers and their political allies, Germany provided an example of an ingenious solution to the dilemma of bank counterfeiting. During the early years of the twentieth century U. S. bankers imported some of their ideas and, meeting at Jekyll Island, Georgia with a few powerful politicians, devised a plan for a banking cartel.
Americans didn’t like cartels or centralized power, the planners realized, so they called their creature a ‘reserve system’ and dressed it up with regional branches to avoid the appearance of a concentration of power. Since no cartel will work without government guns it was decided to attach the name ‘federal’ to it, as well. Thus, the American central bank became known as the Federal Reserve System, or the Fed, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913.
The Fed became an indispensable instrument of profit and power. Beginning in 1914, it cut reserve requirements approximately in half, dropping the ratio from 21 percent to 11 percent, roughly doubling the money supply and permitting both financial aid to the Allies and eventual American entry into the European war in April 1917.
Government, meanwhile, used the war as an excuse to create what one economic historian has aptly called a ‘garrison economy.’ Among other things government took over railroads and communications industries, seized hundreds of manufacturing plants, fixed prices, intervened in hundreds of labor disputes, raised taxes, and conscripted over a million men for military service so they could join the bloodbath over there, in
the European trenches. The Supreme Court, the alleged guardian of the Constitution – which itself is our alleged guardian against an aggressive government – ruled most of the war interventions constitutional, including the draft. Merely questioning the constitutionality of the draft could get you thrown in jail.Thus, the federal reserve – a government- protected, government-serving, elaborately-cloaked counterfeiting cartel – played a crucial role in converting a peaceful America into a bellicose, interventionist state.
We hear voices calling for patriotism during war. But who exactly were the patriots during ‘the war to end all wars’?
Was it J. P. Morgan, who repeatedly said, ‘Nobody could hate war more than I do’ as he was amassing commissions totaling $30 million as a purchasing agent of war supplies for England and France?
Was it Morgan’s steel, shipbuilding, and powder enterprises that bought controlling interest in, and editorial control over, the country’s 25 most influential newspapers?
Was it President Woodrow Wilson who had won reelection with the slogan ‘he kept us out of war’ then five months later asked Congress to join a war that had already killed five million people?
Was it Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, who rose in the Senate to dissect Wilson’s call for war point by point, arguing that Wilson and his advisors had been colluding with Britain for two years trying to find a pretext for American entry into the fray against England’s enemies?
Was it the senators who spoke after La Follette and for five hours hotly denounced him as ‘pro-German’ and ‘anti-American’?
Was it the majority of Americans who in spite of a well-orchestrated media campaign against Germany still opposed joining the war?
Was it the men who were conscripted and sent overseas, over 100,000 of whom lost their lives?
Was it the industrial firms back home, thousands of miles from the slaughter on the Western Front, whose income tax records showed huge profits during the war years?
Was it the millions here who kept their mouths shut about the war because the Espionage Act of 1917 and its successor, the Sedition Act of 1918, hung a 20-year prison sentence over the heads of Wilson’s critics?
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and John Quincy Adams are generally considered patriotic, yet they counseled strongly against American entanglement in foreign affairs.
The Fed, and its partner in theft, the income tax, enabled politicians and their financial backers to ignore their warnings.
Have you noticed we’ve been at war almost constantly since the Fed was forced upon us? We had World War I, the Great Depression — which was likened to war by the rulers — World War II, then the umbrella of the Cold War under which two hot wars and various skirmishes were fought.
For a president eager to go to war, the Fed has been a godsend.
The Federal Reserve makes war seem affordable. The media makes war seem patriotic. And in the background, waiting to be fattened, are the politicians’ corporate supporters who profit hugely from foreign invasions.
Have you noticed the economic trends since the Fed took over the money supply? The “elastic currency” today is approaching collapse, and economic calamities live on — the very opposite of the Fed’s alleged raison d’être. Should we be surprised at these outcomes? Of course not. The Fed is fulfilling its mission.
If we truly desire peace and prosperity, we will wipe every trace of central banking and fiat money from the face of the earth. Fiat currencies always bring out the worst in government as it inflates us into war, economic ruin, and autocratic rule.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 17:00 - China On The Verge: Welfare State Crumbles, Explosion In Social Unrest As Youth Unemployment Soars, Strikes Surge
China On The Verge: Welfare State Crumbles, Explosion In Social Unrest As Youth Unemployment Soars, Strikes Surge
In retrospect, it was clear that the bottom was falling out of China’s economy (the real economy, not the fake “as reported” one) last August when shortly after we learned that youth unemployment in the country hit a record 21.3%, Beijing unexpectedly stopped reporting this data entirely, because as Stalin would probably say today if he were still alive, “No data – no problem”!
Since then, largely as a result of Xi Jinping’s insistence not to stimulate the economy no matter the severity of the deterioration, China’s economy has accelerated down its perilous slowdown. And while Wall Street has gladly assumed that Beijing will be able to get away without a forceful stimulus for the foreseeable future even as GDP ticks down from 5% to 4% to 3% to… you get the picture, a far more credible – and unpleasant – argument for a bazooka stimulus is rearing its ugly head: social cohesion is about to crack.
We start where we left off last August, with China’s surging youth unemployment rate. Here, as the South China Morning Post reports, China’s revised youth unemployment surged to 17.2% in July (this would be the equivalent of about 23% according to the old series), the highest level since the National Bureau of Statistics adopted a new method of counting.
The jobless rate for 16- to 24-year-olds (excluding students) was up from 13.2% a month earlier and ended three months of declines, according to the latest NBS data. The rate for December was 14.9%.
As we reported last year, Beijing introduced the revised method for December after suspending the release of youth unemployment data from July. Under the previous approach, the jobless rate for the 16-24 age group, including students, peaked at 21.3 per cent in June.
Student numbers were then stripped out of the calculation, a change that the NBS said was to “more accurately” reflect that job-hunting was not a priority for students in China. That, however, is a major problem, as it does not account for the relentless firehose of new entrants that enter the labor market every year when millions of Chinese students graduate and start looking for a job.
Indeed, as SCMP reports, the rise in unemployment among young jobseekers comes as a record 11.79 million tertiary graduates enter the labor market of the world’s second-largest economy!
As a result, many fresh graduates have had to scale back salary expectations by about a third as the economy has struggled to gather momentum, according to analysts. One day before the youth jobless reading, the NBS reported that the country’s overall unemployment rate was 5.2%, up for the first time since February.
“The employment situation has remained generally stable so far this year,” NBS spokeswoman Liu Aihua said, “but we should also see at the same time that pressure … still exists. The structural contradiction of difficulties in both job seeking and recruitment is still prominent.”
Realizing that tens of millions of unemployed yutes is recipe for revolution, China’s ruling elites have put far more emphasis on dealing with youth joblessness this year – starting with adjusting how it is misreported of course to prevent all out chaos – in part because of the risks it poses to social stability as well as the pressure lower incomes would put on plans for consumer spending to lead the way to a sustainable recovery.
At a meeting of the State Council, the country’s cabinet, last Friday, Premier Li Qiang called for more efforts to “stabilize employment for key groups”. The Communist Party’s Politburo, the main decision-making body in China, had a similar message two weeks earlier, saying priority should be given to university graduates looking for jobs.
And last month the party’s Central Committee said it would “improve the system of employment support for key groups such as college graduates, rural migrant workers and ex-service members”.
Which brings us to even more data fudging: since the release of the December data, the Chinese authorities have split the 25-59 age group into two parts – 25-29 and 30-59 – and applied the new statistical method to both.
The jobless rate for the 25-29 age group, also excluding students, was 6.5% in July, up by 0.1% from June, inching back up after three consecutive months of decline. The rate for the 30-59 age group was 3.9%, just down from 4% reported in June.
Unfortunately for Beijing, literally nobody believes these numbers, because instead of a picture of economic stability, China now exudes an unprecedented slowdown, one where labor disputes in China’s property and manufacturing sectors have surged as economic growth decelerates, underlining blue-collar workers’ concerns over the country’s social safety net.
As Nikkei reported last week, while “unrest is rarely reported by the country’s media due to strict government control, signs of public discontent and hardship emerge nonetheless.”
Recent incidents include a protest by an ex-soldier who sat atop a building in Beijing’s famed Wangfujing shopping street on the evening of Aug. 1. In a video uploaded on the social media platform X, the man in full army uniform unveils a white banner accusing a government office in the city of Kunming, Yunnan province, of “strangling a retired serviceman who had served for 12 years.”
Two days earlier, another protester displayed a banner on an overpass in the county of Xinhua, Hunan province, demanding freedom and elections. In an accompanying video that spread on X, the protester identified himself as Fang Yirong and claimed to have been targeted by authorities since last summer for supporting democracy. He said he took part in the “white paper” protests in 2022 against China’s harsh COVID-19 restrictions.
Meanwhile, labor strikes in China increased 3% on the year to 719 incidents in the first half of 2024, according to the China Labor Bulletin (CLB), a Hong Kong-based workers advocacy group.
Incidents involving the all-important property and manufacturing sectors were up 12%, accounting for 80% of the total.
“The uptick in strikes is a reflection of the increasing social pressure as the economy struggles to improve,” said Max J. Zenglein, chief economist at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Germany.
China’s economic growth slowed to 4.7% in the second quarter, from 5.3% in the first, stifled by a persistent downturn in the property sector, which is going from bad to worse seemingly every single month as we will discuss in a subsequent post, and subdued household demand. Sluggish domestic growth has pushed some industries, including solar panels and automobiles, to step up exports and price dumping, sparking howls of outrage from domestic producers in export markets, while those hit by trade tensions with the U.S. have sought to shift production abroad.
Worker unrest appears to reflect the growing pressures. Among the incidents highlighted in the CLB report was a dispute at solar panel maker Akcome Technology over pay cuts and withdrawal of social security contributions. The Shenzhen-listed Akcome filed for bankruptcy at one of its subsidiaries on July 29, citing an inability to repay debts.
While there was no indication of the number of protesters at Akcome, CLB in a separate report profiled a strike involving over 1,000 workers at a shoe factory in Jiangsu province that counts Nike, Adidas, Asics, New Balance, Timberland and Salomon among its clients. The dispute at Yangzhou Baoyi Shoe Manufacturing in November took place over compensation issues affecting laid-off workers after the company moved its production to Indonesia.
“So far in 2024 there has been no notable improvement of the economy, with a weak labor market being a key source of household insecurity that is weighing down on consumption,” said Zenglein.
The largest proportion of protests — 344 incidents — were carried out by construction workers demanding wages, according to CLB. This is no surprise, said Zenglein, given the growing number of property developers that have run into financial trouble who are unable to pay their employees, resulting in chaos and ripple effects through the economy.
China’s strikes are usually by workers who face long working hours and low wages, CLB said. This also casts a light on the disparity in social security coverage between urban and migrant workers. Unlike people with a registered household in a city, many laborers from rural areas work without formal contracts despite forming the economic backbone of their adopted cities.
“It is difficult for migrant workers to find jobs that pay for social security for 15 years, the prerequisite for getting pension when retired,” the report said.
This scene from a video posted on X shows a banner criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping in Xinhua, Hunan province. As migrant workers are largely excluded from such welfare coverage altogether, “work becomes the hedge against an extremely porous social safety net,” said Yun Zhou, a social demographer and family sociologist at the University of Michigan. These workers “are confronting a harsh, discriminatory labor landscape where work availability is highly susceptible to China’s economic downturn and restructuring, working conditions are often at the will of capricious management, and workers’ productivity and worth are tightly managed by technology and algorithms.”
In a key socioeconomic planning meeting concluded last month, the government vowed to improve the social security system by addressing the restrictions faced by migration workers. In response to the country’s aging population, it added that the statutory retirement age — currently 60 years for men and between 50 and 55 for women — would be raised gradually and voluntarily. Of course, there has been no centrally-planned civilization in history that managed to raise the retirement age either “voluntarily” and without clashes, violence, and collapse in social cohesion, precisely the three things that Beijing fears the most.
“For China’s urban workers, the talk of raising retirement ages is felt as a delayed, if not broken, promise of social welfare coverage,” said Zhou.
Which is precisely why Beijing will have no choice but to blink in the end, and that will mean unleashing a much delayed stimulus bazooka that likes of which have not been seen yet.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 16:40 - Have You Seen Kamala's Proposed Radical Cabinet? Eric Holder, Rahm Emanuel, And More…
Have You Seen Kamala’s Proposed Radical Cabinet? Eric Holder, Rahm Emanuel, And More…
It seems Obama is angling for a fourth term, which is why he’s sidelined Biden in favor of Kamala Harris—the unpopular, inexperienced DEI diva who reportedly used her “womanly ways” to get ahead.
Why do we know this? We got a sneak peek at Kamala’s proposed cabinet, and it’s a who’s who of Obama-era radicals, starting with head Marxist Eric Holder and the progressive disaster who torched Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. If this scary group of radicals doesn’t light a fire in you to ensure President Trump gets reelected, nothing will.
If Harris and Walz weren’t radical enough, check out her proposed cabinet: Eric Holder as Chief of Staff, Jake Sullivan as Secretary of State, Rahm Emanuel as National Security Advisor. Notice a pattern? The Obama/Biden “Fundamental Transformation” continues… pic.twitter.com/7LAHN6wiq3
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) August 15, 2024
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What’s truly frightening is that these names represent a return to some of the most broken aspects of America.
Many people believe the Harris/Walz campaign is the biggest astroturf psyop in US political history, which says a lot considering what they pulled off with Basement Biden. At least Biden was well-known and liked by some clueless voters. Harris doesn’t even have that going for her, and as for Tim Walz, no one knows who he is unless you call him “Tampon Tim.”
The Kamala Psyop pic.twitter.com/Mg4hp6woG5
— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) August 16, 2024
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We also know that the Harris/Walz duo is the most radical duo to ever grace the campaign trail, and Kamala’s cabinet list tells you that this crazy train isn’t slowing down.
Kamala Harris was the architect of the DEFUND THE POLICE movement.
Tim Walz was an arbiter of the SUMMER OF LOVE.
This ticket is more than radical, it’s tyrannical. pic.twitter.com/Ty0zA7y2ex
— Wesley Hunt (@WesleyHuntTX) August 15, 2024
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The radical connections—from the trans agenda to backing Hitler-supporting terrorists—are flooding the internet, and the campaign is reeling, even if they won’t admit it.
Kamala Harris KNOWS Tim Walz’s connections to a radical Muslim imam is a liability, otherwise her campaign wouldn’t have denied it so forcefully. GOP needs to keep the pressure on pic.twitter.com/P1CKRti87J
— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) August 14, 2024
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A Harris/Walz presidency would be the final nail in America’s coffin. Not to be too hyperbolic, but with the level of extremism and liberal insanity that this administration would bring, especially with the likes of Eric Holder, Jake Sullivan, and Rahm Emanuel, there’s no way America could withstand another four years under such extremism.
You can watch the entire Glenn Beck video here:
A Harris/Walz presidency would be the final nail in America’s coffin. Without being too hyperbolic, the level of extremism and liberal insanity this administration would bring—especially with figures like Eric Holder, Jake Sullivan, and Rahm Emanuel—would be more than America could withstand. We can’t afford another four years of such extremism.
It’s time to take a stand and ensure this doesn’t happen. Get out there, make your voice heard, and fight for the future of this country before it’s too late. This is our last stand.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 16:20
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