Jul 21

Today’s News 21st July 2021

  • "Hellish" Noise Complaints Lodged About £30,000 Per Week Luxury London Flat…Owned By The Vatican
    “Hellish” Noise Complaints Lodged About £30,000 Per Week Luxury London Flat…Owned By The Vatican

    A flat in London that is owned by none other than the Vatican has come under controversy for the amount of “hellish noise” coming from the unit late at night.

    The £30,000 per week luxury flat in question is at Hans Place in Chelsea, FT reported this week. Complaints about “loud events” with some involving DJs, have been lodged with the local council, the report notes. The unit is 9,000 square feet and houses a large garden and indoor swimming pool. 

    The property was bought among other luxury London properties in 2014 in a purchase that was “overseen by cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu”. Becciu was the first cardinal in modern times to be charged with financial crimes by the Vatican this year.

    Other investments overseen by Becciu have been “under mounting international scrutiny as a result of the allegations brought against him”, the FT reports. The London flat, and other properties, are held through Jersey shell companies through a Vatican unit in charge of “charitable donations that are intended for the poor and needy”.

    A local resident told the Financial Times that “people at the property held noisy parties and social gatherings there”, including parties that went into the early hours of the morning. As a result, neighbors lodged various complaints. 

    One such resident complaint cited “hellish noise” coming from the property. Another tried to go right to the source: “I have written to Apostolic Nuncio (the Vatican ambassador) but they have done nothing about this”.

    “With restrictions lifting hopefully people can party in night clubs not in flats,” the local council told FT. They are still investigating the complaints, the report notes. And despite the Vatican ownership, no complaints openly suggested that any Vatican employees were present at any of the late night gatherings. 

    Becciu denies wrongdoing and had “no role in overseeing the rental or management of any London property owned by the Vatican”.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 07/21/2021 – 02:45

  • Today Hungary, Tomorrow Poland — Will German Pressure Cave Eastern Europe?
    Today Hungary, Tomorrow Poland — Will German Pressure Cave Eastern Europe?

    Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

    Since it became clear that Joe Biden was going to be certified as the President-elect it’s been clear that Poland would become a major story. Poland is one of the bad boys of the European Union and with the return of The Davos Crowd’s favorite American, Barack Obama, to the White House all of Poland’s problems within the EU would intensify.

    With Nordstream 2 nearly complete, time is rapidly running out for Andrej Duda and his Law and Justice (PiS) party.

    Last week I discussed Hungary and whether Prime Minister Viktor Orban had the cards to play in resisting the EU’s pressure there. Orban’s a skilled player who has performed admirably in the face of EU intransigence on his sovereigntist agenda there. Orban always knew he had to balance the great powers around him while still maneuvering Hungary where he knew it needed to go.

    Poland hasn’t faired as well. Andrew Korybko hits the nail on the head in a recent post stating:

    It also puts the Central European leader in a disadvantageous position after having irresponsibly formulated its foreign policy on the expectation that former US President Trump would win re-election and continue reshaping European geopolitics in a manner that’s in close alignment with Polish interests.

    While Trump was in power Poland became increasingly strident in its opposition to both Germany and Russia thinking that U.S. policy would continue long into the future. It was a bad bet. If anyone in Poland’s leadership actually spoke with Vladimir Putin occasionally, even if just for tea, they would have remembered that the U.S. is “Not Agreement Capable.”

    This isn’t just hindsight talking. This was all said during Trump’s presidency. Poland’s leadership tried to have their cake and eat it too. Thinking Trump had their backs they could indulge their Russophobia while concurrently opposing Nordstream 2 and flex its sovereignty against Germany, even, like Hungary, inviting an Article 7 censuring by the EU.

    The more prudent approach, which myself and others said at the time, would have been to emulate Orban, finding ways to antagonize the EU but only so far while opening up relations with Putin and Trump. Orban showed far more strategic vision than Duda in this respect. He understood his position well by shoring up Hungary’s energy and trade positions.

    Unfortunately, without an aligned Poland, Hungary can only do so much.

    Poland, on the other hand, is now at the mercy of the Germans because of Nordstream 2 who will now control gas flows from it throughout the European pipeline network. I talked about this back as far back as 2017:

    Germany gets what it wants. And it wants to be able to use gas delivered by Nordstream 2 to put political pressure on Poland and the rest of the Visegrad Nations.

    This is the real crux of the issue for Poland. And they are free to entertain Trump’s offers to buy LNG from U.S. sources for three times the price of Russian piped gas. Poland can help themselves by siding with Russia over the separatists in the Donbass, but they won’t because the Law and Justice Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of U.S. neoliberal and neoconservative interests.

    Sure, the Poles got a small win recently when the European Kangaroo Court of Justice ruled in their favor over Gazprom’s usage of the Opal pipeline, but that’s, at best, cold comfort.

    The play for Poland has always been to reach out to Russia rather than continue to think they can stand up to Germany from within the very political structure set up to enhance German power and influence in every way, the EU. They welcomed Trump’s promises of expensive U.S. LNG and resisted Visegrad solidarity. Because of their opposition to Nordstream 2 they were easily manipulated into helping NATO destabilize Ukraine and Belarus while setting themselves up to be slaughtered the moment Davos got rid of Trump and re-established the link between D.C. and Brussels.

    And now, as Korybko astutely points out, PiS is facing increasingly stiff competition from none other than former President Donald Tusk who was a miserable failure while President of the European Council. Davos is making its move to reassert its dominance over Poland.

    This leaves PiS in the unenviable position politically of having no good options. Korybko’s solution is a non-aggression pact with Russia to assuage the fears of Russian military advances because at this point Poland is quickly running out of options.

    It’s unclear exactly what the terms of an informal Polish-Russian “non-aggression pact” in Belarus and Ukraine would look like, but it could be modeled off of the much larger one that the US and Russia are also informally attempting to negotiate after last month’s Biden-Putin Summit. What’s most important is that their threat assessments of one another, influenced as they are by their suspicions of each other’s strategic motives, gradually decline to the point where a so-called “new normal” can set in for more responsibly regulating their regional competition.

    The biggest issue for Poland at this point is the loss of gas transit through Ukraine. Their fears over this and the regular pronouncements recently from Russia about Ukraine’s historical relationship to Russia make that threat more and more likely over the coming years. The government in Kiev is becoming desperate. President Zelensky’s meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel is focused on Germany paying Ukraine reparations for Nordstream 2.

    I’m inclined to agree with some of that, since Merkel was part of the group that began Ukraine’s troubles with the accession agreement to the EU which was blocked by Putin and set all of this nonsense in motion over the past eight years. And after breaking Ukraine Merkel has shown zero interest in trying to help it back to its feet.

    So, Ukraine will likely get nothing from Merkel of substance now that she has, for all intents and purposes, washed her hands of the country and she’s as lame-duck as lame-duck gets. All of this is really just theatre at this point. Ukraine will be a staging area in Eastern Europe to launch color revolutions across the region, including Poland and continued aggression against Belarus. This was always the fallback position of Davos and U.S. neoconservatives.

    To me, the real solution is to sit down with both Zelensky and Putin and work out a future which ensures gas transit and delivery between all three. From everything he’s said and intimated, Putin is more than happy to make that deal. A strong and vibrant eastern Europe is the perfect buffer between the EU and Russia.

    So, like Viktor Orban in Hungary, Poland’s leadership has a real choice, will they finally see their board position for how very weak it is and finally reach out to potential allies (Hungary, Czech Republic) and non-combatants (Russia) and start shoring up its position?

    Or will they continue to screech into a whirlwind of their own making, choosing to wallow in their (admittedly justified) past grievances with their neighbors rather than figure out which of them is the one most likely targeting them for destruction. Hint for Duda…. it ain’t Putin.

    The irony is that Poland is still worried about the communists from the East when the real commies are rising in the West.

    Like Hungary and the Czechs, Poland still has its own currency. They’ve been recent buyers of gold to shore up the Zloty. There is a real opportunity for all of these countries, along with Serbia, to form a strong economic bloc making them a destination for capital rather than seen as cannon fodder in the EU’s forever war with Russia, which isn’t over, it’s just on hold for now.

    Because if they don’t see this point soon, the window of opportunity for all of Eastern Europe to break the EU wide open closes.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 07/21/2021 – 02:00

  • Is Secretary Of State Blinken Setting Us Up For Paying Reparations?
    Is Secretary Of State Blinken Setting Us Up For Paying Reparations?

    Authored by Carol Greenwald via AmericanThinker.com,

    Secretary of state Antony Blinken is neither naïve nor stupid.  So why did he invite United Nations officials to investigate systemic racism in the United States?  It cannot be for the sophomoric reason he stated:

    Responsible nations must not shrink from scrutiny of their human rights record; rather, they should acknowledge it with the intent to improve.

    Antony Blinken (U.S. government public domain image).

    It is the responsibility of the American people and their elected representatives, not the U.N., to examine and improve, if needed, the human rights record of the U.S.  An April 2021 poll shows that nearly two thirds of Americans and 90% of Republicans oppose the idea of providing reparations to the descendants of slaves, according to the results of a nationwide University of Massachusetts Amherst/WCVB poll.  So the administration is seeking ways to affect the public’s views: bring in the U.N. and supposedly world opinion.

    The State Department invitation for an official visit, issued on July 13, was to the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and the U.N. special rapporteur on minority issues.  The State Department plans to issue invitations to other U.N. experts who “report and advise on thematic human rights issues.”

    These other “experts” are the members of the U.N. Human Rights Council.  Secretary Blinken welcomed the U.N. Human Rights Council’s adoption of a resolution on July 13 that calls for action to combat systemic racism against Africans and people of African descent in the context of law enforcement.

    Both of the special rapporteurs who have been invited to the U.S. signed a U.N. Human Rights Council statement last year that called for “reparative (emphasis added) intervention for historical and contemporary racial justice” around the world.

    Take a look at the nations on the Human Rights Council that, on June 5, 2020, issued this report that said: “The uprising nationally is a protest against systemic racism that produces state-sponsored racial violence, and licenses with impunity this violence. … The protests the world is witnessing, are a rejection of the fundamental racial inequality and discrimination that characterizes life in the United States for black people, and other people of color.”

    The current fifteen members of the U.N. Human Rights Commission are in addition to China, Russia, and Cuba, such leading lights as Bolivia, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Senegal, and Uzbekistan.  France and the U.K. are the only liberal Western democracies included.

    We could write the report right now, without even knowing that the U.N. Human Rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, has already endorsed reparations on July 12 after issuing a U.N. report on systemic racism in late June, which called for wide range of reparation measures.

    The U.N. report will be used by the leftists and the Democrat party — but I repeat myself — as proof that a massive transfer of wealth is needed from white Americans to Americans “of color.”  The ideological framework for this has been made by Critical Race Theory, which alleges that all whites are by definition racist and that the American system of government is systematic racism.  Since only whites can be racist, the Chinese government, a non-white government, cannot be following a racist policy against the Uighurs.  The slavery of Africans today by other Africans and Arabs in Africa is a taboo subject, even though the U.N.’s International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that there are more than three times as many people in forced servitude today as were captured and sold during the 350-year span of the transatlantic slave trade.  But do not expect the U.S. Human Rights Commission to address the modern slave trade of Africans by Africans and Arabs.

    The U.S. is the target.  The leading members on the council — China, Russia, and Cuba — will make sure that it is the U.S. that owes the rest of humanity reparations.

    So no, Blinken is neither naïve nor stupid.  This is a carefully orchestrated political power play against the American people.

    We are being set up.  The U.N. Human Rights Council, with its august sounding name, will issue its report decrying systemic racism in the U.S. and calling for financial reparations, among other remedies, and the Democrats will use the authority of this world forum to bludgeon Americans into accepting a vast transfer of wealth from one group of Americans to another.  It turns out that Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax and Biden’s higher income tax rates are not the only things you have to fear as this administration tries to destroy the American middle class.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 07/21/2021 – 00:05

  • Russian Warship Reportedly Test-Fires New Hypersonic Weapon
    Russian Warship Reportedly Test-Fires New Hypersonic Weapon

    Russia’s defense ministry (MoD) released a video showing the successful test-fire of a new hypersonic missile on Monday, ahead of what could be a massive rollout to naval ships and submarines. 

    “The Zircon missile successfully struck the target in the White Sea with a direct hit at a distance of over 350 kilometers. The test confirmed the tactical and technical performance of the missile, and its flight speed was around Mach 7,” Russia’s MoD said in a statement. 

    The launch was conducted from an Admiral Gorshkov-class frigate located in the White Sea on the northwest coast of Russia. The missile reportedly struck a land-based target 350 kilometers (217 miles) on the coast of the Barents Sea. 

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the Zircon missile could travel upwards of Mach 9, or about 6,900 mph and a distance of 1,000 kilometers (621 miles). 

    The missile has conducted recent tests where Putin described the launches as a “great event not just in the life of our armed forces but for all of Russia.”

    Against a backdrop of soaring tensions between NATO and Russia, Moscow is in the process of deploying numerous hypersonic weapons that Putin deems “invincible.” 

    Only Russia and China have fielded hypersonic weapons while the US continues to lose military supremacy as the gap of when US hypersonic missiles are deployed continues to widen. 

    Russia’s MoD released a video of the launch. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 23:45

  • Many Big-City Democrat Mayors Defunded Police While Spending Heavily On Their Security Details, Watchdog Finds
    Many Big-City Democrat Mayors Defunded Police While Spending Heavily On Their Security Details, Watchdog Finds

    Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times,

    Democratic mayors in 20 of the nation’s 25 biggest cities slashed police department budgets and positions even as they spent millions of tax dollars on their own security details, according to data obtained by a government watchdog.

    “In 25 major U.S. cities, officials have proposed cutting—or in 20 cases already cut—police budgets. However, what OpentheBooks.com auditors found was that mayors and city officials still enjoy personal protection of a dedicated police detail costing taxpayers millions of dollars,” Adam Andrzejewski, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Open The Books (OTB), said in a statement announcing the new data.

    “This is ‘police protection for me (the political elites), but not for thee (the citizens),’” Andrzejewski said.

    The Chicago-based group is a non-profit that uses public-right-to-know and freedom of information laws to maintains hundreds of publicly available databases of federal, state, and local spending with the goal of providing “every dime online in real time.”

    In San Francisco, for example, the costs of the security detail protecting Mayor London Breed and other city officials spiraled from $1.7 million in 2015 to $2.6 million in 2020.

    Breed has proposed shifting $120 million from the city’s police department to mental health and workforce training programs. City officials declined to say how many officers are assigned to the security details, according to OTB.

    In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot claimed to be opposed to defunding the police, but OTB found officials quietly abolished 400 police department positions last year.

    Those positions were eliminated even as the city’s “security detail costs peaked in 2020 – up $700,000 over five years: $2.7 million spent on 16 officers (2015); $2.9 million for 16 officers (2016); $2.7 million for 20 officers (2017); $2.8 million for 16 officers (2018); $2.8 million for 17 officers (2019); and $3.4 million for 22 officers (2020)—an all-time high,” OTB said.

    In New York City, Mayor Bill DeBlasio slashed $1 billion from the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) $6 billion annual budget, including $354 million transferred to mental health, homelessness, and education services.

    But the mayor, who briefly sought the Democratic presidential nomination last year, continues to enjoy tax-paid police protection for himself, his wife, and his son.

    City officials have not yet agreed to disclose the costs or number of officers assigned to the multiple DeBlasio security details, according to OTB.

    In Baltimore, Mayor Brendon Scott’s administration spent $3.6 million on a security detail that included 14 officers to protect the chief executive as well as States Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, according to the data compiled by OTB. The Baltimore Police Department budget has been reduced by $22 million.

    “Protection for the mayor included six officers and one sergeant, costing almost $2 million,” OTB said in the statement. “The state’s attorney has three officers and one sergeant, costing $1.3 million. The police commissioner’s security detail included two officers and one sergeant, costing $464,948.”

    Baltimore has been plagued for a decade with steadily rising rates of serious crime, including murder, robbery, and assault. The city has also seen two of the present mayor’s immediate predecessors, Catherine Pugh and Sheila Dixon, resign and be convicted on various corruption charges.

    In San Diego, Mayor Todd Gloria’s administration budgeted $2.6 million for 12 full-time officers to protect him and members of the city council during meetings and city hall.

    “However, the mayor’s budget calls for cutting $4.3 million from the police overtime budget and spending more than $1 million to set up the new police oversight body, the Commission on Police Practices,” OTB said.

    Notable among the other cities examined by OTB were these:

    • Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, cut $8 million from the police budget to launch a mental health team to respond to certain 911 calls.

    • Oakland officials cut the police budget by $14.6 million. Even bigger cuts are expected in the near future.

    • Despite two years of near-continuous rioting led by Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists, Portland officials slashed $15 million from the police budget and disbanded a gun violence reduction unit and transit team that had been accused of over-policing Black communities, among other cuts.

    • Milwaukee officials are cutting 120 police officer positions, beginning with the current year’s budget. The reductions are to come mainly by not replacing retiring officers. Sixty positions were eliminated last year.

    • In Seattle, city council members at one point last year declared their intent to slash the police budget by half, but ultimately settled on a 20 percent reduction.

    • Los Angeles officials have approved a $150 million budget cut from its $1.86 billion proposed budget.

    • In the nation’s capital, officials reduced the Metropolitan Police Department’s budget by $15 million.

    • Philadelphia residents have seen local officials transfer $33 million from the police to other programs.

    • Austin officials cut about $20 million from the police department and shifted $80 million in services previously provided by law enforcement to other departments.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 23:25

  • Victoria's Secret Capitulates, Will Bring Back Its Fashion Show In A Way That's "Culturally Relevant"
    Victoria’s Secret Capitulates, Will Bring Back Its Fashion Show In A Way That’s “Culturally Relevant”

    Two years after Victoria’s Secret caved to social justice warriors by eliminating its fashion shows, the company has said it is ready to hold them again.

    Apparently, the company is finding out the hard way that giving in to social justice warriors, many of whom live at home and don’t even have the discretionary income to buy their products anyway, isn’t a good business decision.

    During an investor event held this week the company says it is going to bring back its runway show in a way that’s “culturally relevant”, which is likely code for plus sized women, transgender models, and androgynous fashion. Also known as the “Cosmopolitan” model.

    The company becomes “an independent company next month when L Brands completes a separation of the bath-products chain Bath & Body Works from Victoria’s Secret,” Bloomberg reported this week.

    Also as part of its shift to be “culturally relevant”, the company also said it is examining moving into maternity and bridal categories. Meanwhile, we still don’t see the problem with how the show used to be.

    Recall, back in 2019, we noted that the company had cancelled its fashion show as its brand struggles with its longtime CEO’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile who allegedly killed himself (or was murdered) in his prison cell in a Manhattan jail.

    After years of waning viewership and criticism that the company wasn’t an “all-inclusive” brand, L Brands, Victoria Secret’s parent company, decided that the fashion show was a relic from a bygone era, and that it was time for Victoria’s Secret’s marketing to evolve.

    “We think its important to evolve the marketing of Victorias Secret,” Stuart Burgdoerfer, the chief financial officer of L Brands, said on an earnings call back in 2019. “We’ll be communicating to customers, but nothing that I would say is similar in magnitude to the fashion show,” he added later.

    The announcement in 2019 came after Victoria’s Secret sales cratered. SJWs pointed to it as proof that the company had an image problem that was alienating customers – but we concluded it was more likely that the twin trends of e-commerce and fast fashion chipped away at the company’s profits.

    In 2018, Edward Razek, then CMO of L Brands, provoked a controversy for saying transgender women should not star in the show. Razek apologized for the remarks and ended up retiring soon after the company hired its first openly transgender model.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 23:05

  • Top Health Officer Orders Australians: "Don't Have A Conversation" With Each Other
    Top Health Officer Orders Australians: “Don’t Have A Conversation” With Each Other

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    The chief health officer of New South Wales gave a press conference telling Australians that they shouldn’t “engage in conversation with each other,” even if they’re wearing masks, in order to reduce the transmission of COVID.

    Yes, really.

    Dr. Kerry Chant made the remarks in response to people in NSW being ordered to comply with yet another lockdown triggered by just a handful of new cases, which included a man in Cootamundra who visited a Woolworths supermarket, Pizza Hut restaurant, petrol station and Officeworks store.

    “Whilst it’s human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately this is not the time to do that,” said Chant.

    “So even if you run into your next door neighbor in the shopping center…don’t start up a conversation, now is the time for minimizing your interactions with others, even if you’ve got a mask, do not think that affords total protection, we wanna be absolutely sure that as we go about our daily lives we do not come into contact with anyone else that would pose a risk,” she added.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    In addition to officials telling people they shouldn’t talk to their friends and neighbors, those living in or those who visited the affected areas are now under a minimum 7 day stay-at-home order, while masks will again become mandatory masks for teachers and high school students.

    Twitter users reacted to the statement by pointing out that this represents a new level in the complete inhumanity of lockdown.

    “Their desperation is front and centre. They’re either running out of time or they’re going insane right in front of our eyes,” commented British pop due Right Said Fred.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    As we have previously highlighted, Australia has imposed innumerable brutal lockdowns, some of the most draconian in the western world, in the disastrous pursuit of a ‘zero COVID’ policy.

    Alice Springs, a town in Australia 800 miles away from the nearest city went into full lockdown last month after just a single new case of COVID-19 was detected.

    As we reported earlier this month, COVID-19 lockdowns were found to have been a major contributing factor to a doubling in attempted suicides of those aged between 5-25 in Australia.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 22:45

  • Here's What Americans Think Of Famous Billionaires
    Here’s What Americans Think Of Famous Billionaires

    Hot on the heels of fellow billionaire Richard Branson, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos blasted into space this morning. He traveled onboard New Shepard, a rocket ship developed by his company Blue Origin. The capsule had the largest windows ever launched into space, affording Bezos and his crew spectacular views of planet Earth. In an interview before the launch, with CBS News, Bezos said “I’m excited. People keep asking me if I’m nervous. I’m not really nervous, I’m curious. I want to know what we’re going to learn.”

    Excitement is in short supply in some quarters, however, with a petition not allowing Bezos to return to planet Earth garnering more than 160,000 signatures by launch day.

    According to a recent YouGov poll, the U.S. public does not have a particularly positive opinion of the Amazon founder with 49 percent saying they find him very or somewhat unfavorable. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is even more widely disliked with YouGov finding that 6 out of every 10 Americans find him very or somewhat unfavorable.

    Infographic: What Do Americans Think Of Famous Billionaires? | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    With states everywhere ‘defunding the police’, we suspect these billionaires will be increasing their private security crews because…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 22:25

  • "We've Got To Fight Disinformation", Says Empire Made Entirely Of Disinformation
    “We’ve Got To Fight Disinformation”, Says Empire Made Entirely Of Disinformation

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone,

    The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by disinformation.

    If the propaganda engine of the US-centralized empire ceased actively deceiving the public about the world, it would collapse immediately. There would be mass unrest at home and abroad, status quo politics would be abandoned, alliances and coalitions would crumble, leaders official and unofficial would be ousted, and US unipolar hegemony would end.

    The only thing keeping this from happening is the vast amounts of wealth and energy which are poured into continuously deceiving the people of America and its allies about what’s really going on in their nations and political systems, and in the world as a whole.

    Getting people believing they live in separate, sovereign nations which function independently from one another, instead of member states within a single undeclared empire which moves as one unit on the international stage.

    Getting people believing they control the fate of their nation via the democratic process, when in reality all large-scale politics are scripted puppet shows controlled by a plutocratic class who owns both the politicians and the media outlets which report on them.

    Getting people believing they are part of a virtuous rules-based international order which opposes totalitarian regimes to spread freedom and democracy, instead of a tyrannical empire that works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates.

    And above all, manufacturing the illusion that the oppressive, exploitative imperialist status quo is normal.

    It’s not the big, famous lies like those which preceded the invasion of Iraq that make up the bulk of the adhesive holding the empire together, it’s the small, mundane lies we’re fed every single day by the plutocratic media. The ones which distort our worldview by half-truths, spins and omissions designed to normalize a status quo of murder, theft and ecocide.

    This normalization happens in the way pundits and politicians treat any attempt to end wars or redress income inequality as freakish extremism and unrealistic fantasy, when in reality it’s the most sane and normal thing in the world and the only thing unrealistic about it is the fact that attempts to advance those agendas are always sabotaged by those same pundits and politicians.

    The normalization also happens in the way endless wars, starvation deaths by US sanctions, the looming threat of total extinction via climate collapse or nuclear war, rapidly exacerbating income inequality and increasing tyranny at home and abroad are not treated as newsworthy stories, while celebrity gossip and partisan bickering between AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene makes headline news. Every day the news media fail to report on the greatest horrors that the empire has unleashed on our world while focusing on vapid trivialities, they help normalize the horrors.

    If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the US-backed genocide in Yemen would be front-page news every day instead of something which gets a marginal mention once every few weeks. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.

    If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the fact that Americans are getting poorer and poorer while billionaires multiply their wealth during the pandemic would be brought front and center to everyone’s attention. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.

    If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the fact that the US military just spent trillions of dollars on a decades-long occupation of Afghanistan that accomplished nothing besides making horrible people rich would have been a national scandal. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.

    But the mass media do not exist to share important information about the world. They exist to share important disinformation about the world. If they did not do this, the same US empire which is decrying the spread of disinformation today would collapse into its own footprint.

    The US empire is without exception the single most corrupt and destructive force on this planet, and it’s not even close. It is the very last institution on earth that should be in charge of deciding what online content is true and what is “disinformation”. Absolute dead last, without exaggeration.

    Depraved institutions which lie constantly and have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century should not be the Ministry of Truth for the world’s online communication systems. This should be extremely obvious to everyone.

    *  *  *

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 22:05

  • Dam Near China's Flooded Zhenghou City Collapses, Third In Last 48 Hours
    Dam Near China’s Flooded Zhenghou City Collapses, Third In Last 48 Hours

    A dam near the city of Zhengzhou in central China’s Henan province has been destroyed by heavy flooding, after being seriously damaged in heavy storms that killed several people and brought the region to a halt, local media reported.

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    The dam is the third to fail in recent days: over the weekend, due to severe rain, two dams in Hulun Buir City in North China’s Inner Mongolia collapsed. Fortunately, however, no injuries have been reported.

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    According to Xinhua News Agency, the meteorological bureaus of Henan and Zhengzhou have raised the level of emergency response to meteorological disasters to the first level. The Chinese media report that the subway in Zhengzhou was flooded, and rescuers evacuated blocked passengers.

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    The Chinese army warned that a stricken dam in the centre of the country “could collapse at any time” after being severely damaged in torrential storms that killed at least three people and brought the region to a standstill. Weather authorities also issued the highest warning level for central Henan province as downpours caused widespread disruption and the evacuation of residents of flooded streets.

    On Tuesday evening the regional unit of the People’s Liberation Army warned that the relentless downpour had caused a 20-meter breach in the Yihetan dam in Luoyang — a city of around seven million people — with the risk that it “may collapse at any time.”

    This aerial photo taken on July 19, 2020 shows water released from the Xiaolangdi Reservoir Dam in Luoyang in central China’s Henan Province.

    The PLA’s Central Theater Command said it had sent soldiers to carry out an emergency response including blasting and flood diversion.

    “On July 20, a 20-meter breach occurred at the Yihetan dam ….the riverbank was severely damaged and the dam may collapse at any time,” it said in the statement according France 24.

    Earlier in the day, state media also reported that the army sent about 20,000 personnel to carry out emergency work to preserve the integrity of the dams.

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    During China’s rainy season, floods are a frequent occurrence, causing annual destruction and washing away highways, crops, and homes. However, the threat has grown over time, partially due to the extensive construction of dams and levees that have cut connections between rivers and lakes and altered floodplains that had helped absorb the surge.

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    Local media also reported earlier in the day that at least 12 people died in the province due to floods caused by torrential rains. Around 100,000 residents have been evacuated in the province so far. More than 6,000 military and fire service personnel are involved in rescue operations.

    In the nearby city of Zhengzhou, at least one person died and two more were missing since heavy rain began battering the city, according to the state-run People’s Daily, which reported that houses have collapsed. Zhengzhou Airport also canceled flights until Wednesday.

    Since July 16, more than 144,660 people have been affected by torrential rains in Henan Province, with 10,152 being moved to safer areas, according to the provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters cited by Xinhua.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 21:45

  • Virginia PTA Leader Ousted After Being Caught Wishing Death On Anti-Critical Race Theory Parents
    Virginia PTA Leader Ousted After Being Caught Wishing Death On Anti-Critical Race Theory Parents

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A Virginia Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) official has resigned after she was seen on video at a protest making incendiary remarks about parents who oppose critical race theory.

    Demonstrators gather in front of Los Alamitos Unified School District Headquarters in protest of critical race theory teachings in Los Alamitos, Calif., on May 11, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

    In a statement released over the weekend, the PTA said that its “executive committee requested and received the resignation of Michelle Leete, who served as Vice President of Training.”

    “The actions & rhetoric of Ms. Leete & all of the like-minded partisan supporters of the SB are deeply disappointing. It evinces a deep lack of concern for children & parents, particularly where the wellbeing of children & families clash with political considerations,” a Twitter post from the organization reads.

    Leete was recorded at a counter-protest criticizing those who oppose critical race theory (CRT), an offshoot of the European Marxist school of critical theory, being taught inside classrooms.

    “Let them die,” Leete said, apparently referring to CRT’s opponents during the demonstration.

    The Virginia PTA’s statement also sought to distance the organization from Leete, stating that it doesn’t condone her words and noted that she wasn’t speaking in her capacity as a high-ranking member of the state’s PTA. Leete is also an executive within the Virginia NAACP.

    In recent months, parents around the United States—particularly in Virginia’s Fairfax and Loudon counties—have taken up arms against teachers who use curriculum that borrows from CRT, the closely associated “antiracist” movement, and the similarly aligned “1619 Project.”

    Opponents of the ideology say it foments communist class struggle along racial lines and will lead to catastrophic consequences, while proponents have attempted to separate CRT from Marxism by saying it provides a more accurate interpretation of U.S. and colonial history.

    “An outgrowth of the European Marxist school of critical theory, critical race theory is an academic movement which seeks to link racism, race, and power,” Legal Insurrection’s Criticalrace.org website states, noting that it radically departs from the earlier Civil Rights movement.

    Notably, CRT attempts to “challenge the very foundations of the liberal order, such as rationalism, constitutional law, and legal reasoning,” and its proponents argue that nearly all aspects of American politics, social life, and economic systems are founded on race, the website states.

    However, universities and public schools have gone a step further, according to Legal Insurrection’s site, which has compiled the actions that school officials have recently taken to promote CRT or closely aligned movements.

    According to the website, a number of schools have started essentially forcing students to undergo diversity, antiracism, and bias training; have changed admissions policies and standardized testing; changed curriculum requirements; implemented disciplinary measures that prevent academic freedom; and have renamed buildings, among other policy shifts.

    Some Republican-led states have passed legislation in recent weeks that essentially bars the teaching of CRT-derived curriculum at public schools or the use of CRT-based training materials in government offices.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 21:25

  • Goldman Flow Desk: No Institutions Bought Today's Dip
    Goldman Flow Desk: No Institutions Bought Today’s Dip

    Overnight, Goldman trader John Flood had some advice for its institutional clients: “don’t buy this dip.”

    I am a consistent buyer of dips but this wobble feels different and I am bracing for a weaker tape this week. Negative Covid headlines are picking up in velocity. Issuance spigots are fully turned on and this paper is getting harder to place from my seat (after some choppy px action related to issuance last week).

    Well, judging by today’s furious bounce in the market which was the biggest one-day gain in the S&P following three days of losses, few followed his advice. Or maybe not – according to Goldman’s flow desk, despite all the sound and fury of today’s gain, virtually no institutions took part. Here is Flood again after the close:

    I was surprised by the velocity of today’s rebound but dont think we can scream all clear just yet (i am still bracing for choppiness over the next week or so due to various positioning dynamics I flagged pre mkt yesterday).

    Our desk during the drawdown yesterday was active but today eerily quiet and not seeing institutions add to risk on our desk…feels like short hedge band aids being ripped off at the moment…ETFs represent 32% of total tape (down from 35% yesterday but up from 24% ytd avg) Consumer Discretionary shorts a focal point of pain today….(GSCBMSDS INDEX) +437bps.

    Earlier today we showed that the biggest highlight of today’s move was the face-ripping short squeeze that started yesterday and ended almost where it started one week ago.

    If Goldman is right, and if today’s move was just one giant squeeze, brace for more fireworks tomorrow as the selling resumes from a freshly squeezed and higher price point…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 21:05

  • Over 200 People In 27 States Being Monitored For Monkeypox: CDC
    Over 200 People In 27 States Being Monitored For Monkeypox: CDC

    The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is monitoring over 200 people in 27 states for potential exposure to monkeypox after their contacts were traced with a Texan who contracted the rare disease while traveling in Nigeria weeks ago.

    CDC file photo

    According to Stat, state and local health officials are working with federal authorities to monitor those who were in contact with the monkeypox patient, who flew into Atlanta international airport on July 8, and then on to Dallas Love airport the next day. One week later, he was diagnosed with the rare disease, which can be transmitted through bodily fluids and respiratory droplets, according to the CDC.

    Monkeypox has an incubation period of three to 17 days.

    The individuals who came in contact with the man include passengers who sat within six feet of the patient, or used the mid-cabin bathroom during the overseas flight. They will be monitored until July 30, according to the report. Also included are airline workers and family members.

    “It is a lot of people,” said Andrea McCollum, epidemiologist for the National Center for Emerging Zoonotic and Infectious Diseases. “We’re in the timeframe where we certainly want to closely monitor people.”

    “We define indirect contact as being within 6 feet of the patient in the absence of an N-95 or any filtering respirator for greater than or equal to three hours,” McCollujm continued.

    Monkeypox is caused by a virus that is related to smallpox, the only human virus to have been eradicated. It causes less severe illness than smallpox, but is still quite dangerous. The CDC said that the fatality rate for the strain of monkeypox seen in the Dallas case is about 10%.

    Monkeypox is rarely seen in people. There was a large outbreak in the U.S. in 2003, when a shipment of animals from Ghana contained several rodents and other small mammals that were infected with the virus; 47 confirmed and probable cases were reported in five states. The outbreak was the first time human cases of monkeypox were reported outside of Africa. -Stat

    Nigeria has seen a sharp uptick of monkeypox cases over the past few years, while seven cases have been reported outside its borders; four in the UK, and one in Singapore, Israel and the United States. One of the UK patients was a local healthcare worker who had unprotected contact with a monkeypox patient.

    First identified in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the original source of the monkeypox virus has yet to be identified – however cases have been linked to the handling of bushmeat as well as the trade of exotic small mammals, according to McCollum.

    Those who contract the disease experience fever, chills, swollen glands, and its namesake rash that spreads across the body. It can spread via inhalation of respiratory droplets from infected individuals, or contact with their lesions or bodily fluids. It can also be transmitted via bed linens or other items used by an infected person.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 20:45

  • Street Justice: Man Found Dead On Staten Island With "I Touch Little Girls" Scrawled Across His Chest
    Street Justice: Man Found Dead On Staten Island With “I Touch Little Girls” Scrawled Across His Chest

    Is this what happens when the NYPD is discouraged from enforcing the law? Rising rates of violent crime offer a sense of impunity to both criminals and, eventually, the vigilantes. And the Big Apple has a long history with vigilantism.

    As murders mount, the New York Post and NBC New York reported on a grisly murder that was discovered by police Monday night on Staten Island.

    Source: Staten Island Advance

    An 80-year-old man was found dead in an apartment building with a message scrawled on his dead flesh: “I touch little girls”. Police were called to the scene Monday morning at around 0930ET. It’s not clear what lead police to the site, but the victim was found lying in a hallway, in an obviously public place where his body – and the messages written  on it – could be viewed.

    Both in prison, and on the outside, people who abuse children are often targeted with retributive justice, even if the allegations aren’t always accurate.

    Police said the suspect was lying shirtless, face up, with cuts to his forehead and two black eyes. He also had the messages “I take dolls in my room for girls age 1-5” on his stomach and “I touch” on his foot, per the NYP.

    The NYPD’s homicide squad is investigating the incident.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 20:25

  • California Appeals Court Overturns Anti-Misgendering Law On First Amendment Grounds
    California Appeals Court Overturns Anti-Misgendering Law On First Amendment Grounds

    Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A California appeals court struck down as unconstitutional a state law that penalized elder-care workers for using pronouns inconsistent with elderly long-term care patients’ claimed gender identity.

    L.G.B.T. activists from the National Center for Transgender Equality rally in front of the White House in Washington on Oct. 22, 2018. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

    Gender identity is a disputed concept. A lack of linguistic clarity has clouded the issue in recent years as the concepts of sex and sexual identity, or gender, a politically and scientifically contentious concept whose definition isn’t universally agreed upon, have become difficult to separate. Despite the distinct meanings of the two words, many institutions and individuals use “gender” to mean biological sex, especially on fillable forms and documents.

    Failing to use gender in its new meaning can be costly nowadays.

    A New York human rights law banning gender identity discrimination imposes fines of up to $250,000 for failing to use a person’s preferred personal pronouns.

    Social media giant Twitter bans users for “misgendering” or “deadnaming” transgender people, categorizing it as harassment and abuse. Deadnaming is referring to people by names they used before they changed their gender identity—for example, calling Caitlyn Jenner by that person’s birth name, Bruce Jenner.

    Facebook reportedly recognizes at least 58 genders, allowing users to select which gender to use in their profile self-descriptions. Among them are Androgynous, Bigender, Cisgender, Gender Fluid, Genderqueer, Non-binary, Pangender, Trans, and Two-Spirit.

    But in a rare legal defeat for the transgenderism movement, a ruling by the Court of Appeal of the State of California, 3rd Appellate District, sided with First Amendment speech protections over activists. The ruling by the three-judge panel was unanimous.

    The court decision in Taking Offense v. State of California, came on July 16. Taking Offense is an informal group of state taxpayers.

    The court decision affects the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights, which the California Legislature added to the state’s Health and Safety Code in 2017.

    State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat, said in 2017 that he wrote the bill because LGBT seniors face special challenges that weren’t covered by existing nursing home laws, local media reported.

    Wiener said he had received reports of LGBT seniors being mistreated.

    “We have a number of advocacy organizations that are very excited about the bill, that helped us get it passed, and they are definitely putting the word out that people living in long-term care facilities have these protections and should be aware of them,” he said.

    Health and Safety Code section 1439.51, subdivision (a)(5), “prohibits staff members of long-term care facilities from willfully and repeatedly referring to a facility resident by other than the resident’s preferred name or pronoun when clearly informed of the name and pronoun,” according to court documents.

    Taking Offense challenged that provision, arguing that it violates care facility staff members’ rights to free speech, free exercise of religion, and freedoms of thought and belief, and is vague and overbroad.

    The court said it “recognized the Legislature’s legitimate and laudable goal of rooting out discrimination against LGBT residents of long-term care facilities,” but stated that “we agree with Taking Offense that … the pronoun provision, is a content-based restriction of speech that does not survive strict scrutiny.”

    “The pronoun provision—whether enforced through criminal or civil penalties—is overinclusive in that it restricts more speech than is necessary to achieve the government’s compelling interest in eliminating discrimination, including harassment, on the basis of sex. Rather than prohibiting conduct and speech amounting to actionable harassment or discrimination as those terms are legally defined, the law criminalizes even occasional, isolated, off-hand instances of willful misgendering—provided there has been at least one prior instance—without requiring that such occasional instances of misgendering amount to harassing or discriminatory conduct.

    “Using the workplace context as an analogy, the statute prohibits the kind of isolated remarks not sufficiently severe or pervasive to create an objectively hostile work environment.

    “There is no requirement in the statute that the misgendering at issue here negatively affect any resident’s access to care or course of treatment. Indeed, there is no requirement that the resident even be aware of the misgendering.”

    In this case, the attorney general “has not shown that criminalizing occasional, off-hand, or isolated instances of misgendering, that need not occur in the resident’s presence and need not have a harassing or discriminatory effect on the resident’s treatment or access to care, is necessary to advance that goal.”

    The Epoch Times requested comment from California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, a Democrat, over the weekend, but didn’t receive a reply by press time.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 20:05

  • Watch: Chinese Subway Passengers Trapped In Chest-High Floodwaters As Heavy Rains Pound Henan Province
    Watch: Chinese Subway Passengers Trapped In Chest-High Floodwaters As Heavy Rains Pound Henan Province

    Torrential rains hit central China on Tuesday, overflowing the banks of major rivers, flooding streets of metro areas, and trapping subway passengers in chest-high floodwaters, according to RT News. 

    There has been no official word on deaths, but dramatic videos posted on social media show the devastation in Zhengzhou in China’s Henan province. 

    One video shows passengers stuck in a subway car in chest-high floodwaters

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    In other videos, passengers experienced head-high water as, for whatever reason, many still wore their masks. Subway stations were also flooded. 

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    China experiences frequent flooding during the summer months. Henan is a central regional transport hub – roads and tunnels have been logistical nightmares for companies moving freight. 

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    Elsewhere in the region, the water levels of the Yi River have risen to dangerously high levels. 

    There are at least 31 large and medium-sized reservoirs in the province that have surpassed their warning levels.

    Reuters notes 19 inches of rain fell in the city of Lushan over the last several days. 

    “This is the heaviest rain since I was born, with so many familiar places flooded,” said a resident of Gongyi on Chinese social media.

    We shared on Monday that two dams collapsed in China’s northwestern region of Inner Mongolia after heavy rains. 

    Heavy rains in China and Europe, megadroughts in the US, what the heck is happening worldwide? 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 19:45

  • Taibbi: NPR's Brilliant Self-Own
    Taibbi: NPR’s Brilliant Self-Own

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    Yesterday’s NPR article, “Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire,” is among the more unintentionally funny efforts at media criticism in recent times.

    The piece is about Ben Shapiro, but one doesn’t have to have ever followed Shapiro, or even once read the Daily Wire, to get the joke. The essence of NPR’s complaint is that a conservative media figure not only “has more followers than The Washington Post” but outperforms mainstream outlets in the digital arena, a fact that, “experts worry,” may be “furthering polarization” in America. NPR refers to polarizing media as if they’re making an anthropological discovery of a new and alien phenomenon.

    The piece goes on to note that “other conservative outlets such as The Blaze, Breitbart News and The Western Journal” that “publish aggregated and opinion content” have also “generally been more successful… than legacy news outlets over the past year, according to NPR’s analysis.” In other words, they’re doing better than us.

    Is the complaint that Shapiro peddles misinformation? No: “The articles The Daily Wire publishes don’t normally include falsehoods.” Are they worried about the stoking of Trumpism, or belief that the 2020 election was stolen? No, because Shapiro “publicly denounced the alt-right and other people in Trump’s orbit,” as well as “the conspiracy theory that Trump is the rightful winner of the 2020 election.”

    Are they mad that the site is opinion disguised as news? No, because, “publicly the site does not purport to be a traditional news source.”

    The main complaint, instead, is that:

    By only covering specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda (such as… polarizing ones about race and sexuality issues)… readers still come away from The Daily Wire’s content with the impression that Republican politicians can do little wrong and cancel culture is among the nation’s greatest threats.

    NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop.

    Conservatives have always hated NPR, but in the last year I hear more and more politically progressive people, in the media, talking about the station as a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish. A brief list of just a few recent NPR reports:

    “Billie Eilish Says She Is Sorry After TikTok Video Shows Her Mouthing A Racist Slur.” Pop star caught on tape using the word “chink” when she was “13 or 14 years old” triggers international outrage and expenditure of U.S. national media funding.

    “Black TikTok Creators Are On Strike To Protest A Lack Of Credit For Their Work.” White TikTok users dance to Nicky Minaj lyrics like, “I’m a f****** Black Barbie. Pretty face, perfect body,” kicking off “a debate about cultural appropriation on the app.”

    “Geocaching While Black: Outdoor Pastime Reveals Racism And Bias.” Area man who plays GPS-based treasure hunt game requiring forays into remote places and private property describes “horrifying” experience of people asking what he’s doing.

    “Broadway Is Reopening This Fall, And Every New Play Is By A Black Writer.” All seven new plays being written by black writers is “a step toward progress,” but critics “will be watching Broadway’s next moves” to make sure “momentum” continues.

    “She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier.” It took Cold Lake First Nations member Danita Bilozaze nine whole months to change her name to reflect her Indigenous identity.

    “Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It’s Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” Tom Hanks pushing for more widespread teaching of the Tulsa massacre doesn’t change the fact that he’s built a career playing “white men ‘doing the right thing,’” NPR complains.

    Mixed in with Ibram Kendi recommendations for children’s books, instructions on how to “decolonize your bookshelf” and “talk to your parents about racism” (even if your parents are an interracial couple), and important dispatches from the war on complacency like “Monuments And Teams Have Changed Names As America Reckons With Racism, Birds Are Next,” “National” Public Radio in the last year has committed itself to a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the most moralizing, tendentious, humor-deprived, jargon-obsessed segment of American society. Yet without any irony, yesterday’s piece still made deadpan complaint about Shapiro’s habit of “telling [people] what their opinions should be” and speaking in “buzzwords.”

    This was functionally the same piece as the recent New York Times article, “Is the Rise of the Substack Economy Bad for Democracy?” which similarly blamed Substack for hurting “traditional news” — and, as the headline suggests, democracy itself — by being a) popular and b) financially successful, which in media terms means not losing money hand over fist. There, too, the reasons for the rise of an alternative media outlet were presented by critics as a frightening, unsolvable Scooby-Doo mystery.

    It’s not. NPR sucks and is unlistenable, so people are going elsewhere. People like Shapiro are running their strategy in reverse and making fortunes doing it. One of these professional analysts has to figure this one out eventually, right?

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 19:25

  • Lawmakers Sound Alarm Over China Purchases Of US Farmland
    Lawmakers Sound Alarm Over China Purchases Of US Farmland

    A group of bipartisan lawmakers are sounding the alarm over foreign purchases of prime US agricultural real estate, in an effort to lessen China’s influence on the US economy.

    Recent legislation advanced by House lawmakers warns that China’s presence in the American food supply poses a national security risk, while key Senators have expressed interest in keeping American farms in American hands, according to Politico.

    The debate over farm ownership comes amid broader efforts by Congress and the Biden administration to curb the nation’s economic reliance on China, especially in key industries like food, semiconductors and minerals deemed crucial to the supply chain. The call for tighter limits on who owns America’s farms has come from a wide range of political leaders, from former Vice President Mike Pence to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), after gaining momentum seeded in farm states.

    “America cannot allow China to control our food supply,” said Pence during a Wednesday speech at the Heritage Foundation in which he urged President Biden and Congress to “end all farm subsidies for land owned by foreign nationals.”

    Former Vice President Mike Pence speaks during an event. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images

    By the beginning of 2020, Chinese owners controlled approximately 192,000 agricultural acres in the US, worth around $1.9 billion – including land used for farming, ranching and forestry, according to the Department of Agriculture. It’s a small but growing percentage of the nearly 900 million acres of total US farmland – with the USDA reporting in 2018 that China’s agricultural investments have grown more than tenfold since 2009.

    The Communist Party has actively supported investments in foreign agriculture as part of its “One Belt One Road” economic development plans, aiming to control a greater piece of China’s food supply chain.

    “The current trend in the U.S. is leading us toward the creation of a Chinese-owned agricultural land monopoly,” Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) warned during a recent House Appropriations hearing.

    The committee unexpectedly adopted Newhouse’s amendment to the Agriculture-FDA spending bill (H.R. 4356 (117)) that would block any new agricultural purchases by companies that are wholly or partly controlled by the Chinese government and bar Chinese-owned farms from tapping federal support programs. -Politico

    Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) warned that the new law would “perpetuate already rising anti-Asian hate,” however she and committee leaders have indicated a willingness to find a solution as the legislation works its way through Congress, according to the report. It’s expected to reach the House floor before the end of this month as part of a broader appropriations package, however the Senate has yet to draft their own version of the spending bill.

    Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y. speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill, on May 27, 2020, in Washington. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo

    Of note, Saudi Arabia has also been buying up US farmland in the Southwest.

    “We are new in this process,” said Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-GA.), chair of the agriculture appropriations subcommittee. “I would suggest that we sit down and we work through it so we can accomplish our objective, but do it in a way that is sensitive to all those who might be somewhat offended by the approach.”

    Read the rest of the report here.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 19:05

  • What's It Like Hauling Nuclear Weapons Across The Country?
    What’s It Like Hauling Nuclear Weapons Across The Country?

    By Noi Mahoney of FreightWaves,

    Nuclear materials couriers (NMCs) might have one of the toughest and most secretive jobs in the transportation industry: hauling nuclear bombs and other dangerous material.

    The National Nuclear Security Administration oversees the transportation of nuclear bombs and other material across the U.S. Pictured is one of the tractor-trailers used by the agency. (Photo: National Nuclear Security Administration)

    The drivers who make up the covert fleet transporting nuclear weapons to locations across the United States are operated by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an organization established in 2000.

    The Office of Secure Transportation is part of the NNSA, which is a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Curtis Johnson, the lead federal agent recruiter for NNSA, said in some ways the job is like other trucking jobs.

    “Similar to other truck driving jobs, the NMC position does have its share of routine and monotonous long hours over the road,” Johnson told FreightWaves. “However, unlike most other trucking careers, these long-haul trips are part of a larger operation and every vehicle in the convoy is manned by multiple federal agents who share the driving, communications and security.”

    The DOE continuously recruits and hires nuclear couriers year-round, Johnson said.

    “We typically advertise the NMC position on www.usajobs.gov three or four times per year, with each job announcement being open to new applicants for one or two weeks at a time,” Johnson said.

    After completing the hiring process, NMC candidates will spend approximately 18 weeks of training at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. The 18-week-long course is referred to as nuclear materials courier basic (NMCB) training and is a requirement for all new NMC candidates.  

    “I don’t believe that comparing NMCB to a military boot camp would be the best comparison,” Johnson said. “Our agency’s NMCB training would better compare to the specialized schooling that military service members attend after graduating from boot camp, such as infantry school or security forces training.” 

    The NMCB training runs two to three classes per year and applicants must have either military or law enforcement experience.

    The NMCB has three primary phases of training in which candidates develop the requisite knowledge, skills and abilities to become an NMC, including:

    • Driver training provides candidates with the fundamental skills to operate OST transport vehicles. Candidates must secure a CDL and pass all driving performance tests. 
    • Firearms training is provided for OST’s primary weapons and candidates must qualify with them on DOE-approved courses under both day and night conditions.
    • The final phase of training is individual and small-unit tactics tailored to OST mission operations. Candidates must pass all tactics performance evaluations. Additionally, they receive instruction on the Advanced Radio Enterprise System, federal agent legal authorities and law enforcement control tactics.

    Throughout the NMCB program, candidates must pass a physical fitness test, numerous written examinations and multiple performance tests.

    After graduation, candidates who have successfully obtained a DOE security clearance participate in over-the-road mission operations with an active federal agent unit and undergo intense performance testing in convoy operations force-on-force exercises.

    The DOE tries to hold three NMC training classes per year, with each class containing 20 NMC candidates.

    “The numbers fluctuate, but quite often only 45 to 50 of the 60 trainees will graduate each year,” Johnson said. “The top three reasons for candidates not graduating are voluntary resignations, injuries and failing to satisfactorily complete a portion of the training.”

    The salary range for an NV-01 (basic) federal agent NMC is $48,682 to $76,981.

    Candidates must undergo an 18-week nuclear materials courier basic training program. Pictured are 24 new nuclear materials couriers who graduated from the training in 2018. (Photo: National Nuclear Security Administration)

    Once a candidate becomes an NMC, he or she is authorized to make warrantless arrests and use lethal force if necessary during missions, Johnson said.  Mission travel is generally performed year-round and is almost always preplanned. The position does not require nuclear couriers to be on call at all times. 

    Missions are always transporting either nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon components or special nuclear materials, such as uranium, to secure military sites across the U.S.

    Listening to the radio or music is allowable so long as it does not interfere with convoy communications, Johnson said. 

    “Though the travel element of the job can be less than exciting, NMCs train year-round when they are not on the road doing missions,” Johnson said. “The mission pace changes from month to month, but most trips occur every other week with the other weeks being dedicated to training (shooting range, physical fitness, computer-based training, tactics).” 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/20/2021 – 18:45

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