- Compliance 101: Gun-Toting Cops Endanger Students And Turn Schools Into Prisons
Compliance 101: Gun-Toting Cops Endanger Students And Turn Schools Into Prisons
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”
– Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes
Just when you thought the government couldn’t get any more tone-deaf about civil liberties and the growing need to protect “we the people” against an overreaching, overbearing police state, the Trump Administration ushers in even more strident zero tolerance policies that treat children like suspects and criminals, greater numbers of school cops, and all the trappings of a prison complex (unsurmountable fences, entrapment areas, no windows or trees, etc.).
The fallout has been what you’d expect, with the nation’s young people treated like hardened criminals: handcuffed, arrested, tasered, tackled and taught the painful lesson that the Constitution (especially the Fourth Amendment) doesn’t mean much in the American police state.
For example, in Florida, a cop assigned to River Ridge High School as a school resource officer, threatened to shoot a student attempting to leave school for a morning orthodontist appointment.
In Pennsylvania, school officials called in the cops after a 6-year-old with Down syndrome pointed a finger gun at her teacher.
In Kentucky, a school resource officer with the sheriff’s office handcuffed two elementary school children with disabilities, ages 8 and 9. A federal judge made the sheriff’s office pay more than $300,000 (of taxpayer money) to the families, ruling that the handcuffing of the students “was an unconstitutional seizure and excessive force.”
Welcome to Compliance 101: the police state’s primer in how to churn out compliant citizens and transform the nation’s school’s into quasi-prisons through the use of surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, strip searches and active shooter drills.
If you were wondering, these police state tactics have not made the schools any safer.
Rather, they’ve turned the schools into authoritarian microcosms of the police state, containing almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.”
Two years after President Trump announced his intention to “harden” the schools, our nation’s children are reaping the ill effects of gun-toting, taser-wielding cops in government-run schools that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to prisons.
America’s schools are about as authoritarian as they come.
From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a steady diet of:
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draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior,
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overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech,
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school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students,
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standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking,
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politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them,
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and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.
Young people in America are now first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated like criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered and in some cases shot.
In my day, if you talked back to a teacher, or played a prank on a classmate, or just failed to do your homework, you might find yourself in detention or doing an extra writing assignment after school.
That is no longer the case.
Nowadays, students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far more severe, shifting from detention and visits to the principal’s office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.
Students have been suspended under school zero tolerance policies for bringing to school “look alike substances” such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.
Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in hot water.
Even good deeds do not go unpunished.
One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.
In South Carolina, where it’s against the law to disturb a school, more than a thousand students a year—some as young as 7 years old—“face criminal charges for not following directions, loitering, cursing, or the vague allegation of acting ‘obnoxiously.’ If charged as adults, they can be held in jail for up to 90 days.”
These outrageous incidents are exactly what you’ll see more of if the Trump Administration gets its way.
Increasing the number of cops in the schools only adds to the problem.
Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers (a.k.a. school resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting.
Indeed, the growing presence of police in the nation’s schools is resulting in greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”
Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers (SRO) have become de facto wardens in elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepper spray, batons and brute force.
In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”
The horror stories are legion.
One SRO was accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting the cafeteria line.
That same cop put another student in a chokehold a week later, allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury.
In Pennsylvania, a student was tasered after ignoring an order to put his cell phone away.
When 13-year-old Kevens Jean Baptiste failed to follow a school bus driver’s direction to keep the bus windows closed (Kevens, who suffers from asthma, opened the window after a fellow student sprayed perfume, causing him to cough and wheeze), he was handcuffed by police, removed from the bus, and while still handcuffed, had his legs swept out from under him by an officer, causing him to crash to the ground.
Young Alex Stone didn’t even make it past the first week of school before he became a victim of the police state. Directed by his teacher to do a creative writing assignment involving a series of fictional Facebook statuses, Stone wrote, “I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business.” Despite the fact that dinosaurs are extinct, the status fabricated, and the South Carolina student was merely following orders, his teacher reported him to school administrators, who in turn called the police.
What followed is par for the course in schools today: students were locked down in their classrooms while armed police searched the 16-year-old’s locker and bookbag, handcuffed him, charged him with disorderly conduct disturbing the school, arrested him, detained him, and then he was suspended from school.
Not even the younger, elementary school-aged kids are being spared these “hardening” tactics.
On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”
In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids—some as young as 4 and 5 years old—for simply failing to follow directions or throwing tantrums.
Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.
Unbelievably, these tactics are all legal, at least when employed by school officials or school resource officers in the nation’s public schools.
This is what happens when you introduce police and police tactics into the schools.
Paradoxically, by the time you add in the lockdowns and active shooter drills, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair and delusion.
For example, a middle school in Washington State went on lockdown after a student brought a toy gun to class. A Boston high school went into lockdown for four hours after a bullet was discovered in a classroom. A North Carolina elementary school locked down and called in police after a fifth grader reported seeing an unfamiliar man in the school (it turned out to be a parent).
Police officers at a Florida middle school carried out an active shooter drill in an effort to educate students about how to respond in the event of an actual shooting crisis. Two armed officers, guns loaded and drawn, burst into classrooms, terrorizing the students and placing the school into lockdown mode.
If these exercises are intended to instill fear and compliance into young people, they’re working.
As journalist Dahlia Lithwick points out: “I don’t recall any serious national public dialogue about lockdown protocols or how they became the norm. It seems simply to have begun, modeling itself on the lockdowns that occur during prison riots, and then spread until school lockdowns and lockdown drills are as common for our children as fire drills, and as routine as duck-and-cover drills were in the 1950s.”
The toll such incidents take on adults can be life-altering, but when such police brutality is perpetrated on young people, the end result is nothing less than complete indoctrination into becoming compliant citizens of a totalitarian state.
Schools acting like prisons.
School officials acting like wardens.
Students treated like inmates and punished like hardened criminals.
This is the end product of all those so-called school “safety” policies, which run the gamut from zero tolerance policies that punish all infractions harshly to surveillance cameras, metal detectors, random searches, drug-sniffing dogs, school-wide lockdowns, active-shooter drills and militarized police officers.
Unfortunately, advocates for such harsh police tactics and weaponry like to trot out the line that school safety should be our first priority lest we find ourselves with another Sandy Hook.
What they will not tell you is that such shootings are rare.
As one congressional report found, the schools are, generally speaking, safe places for children.
In their zeal to crack down on guns and lock down the schools, these cheerleaders for police state tactics in the schools might also fail to mention the lucrative, multi-million dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as Taser International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles and $100,000 shooting detection systems.
Indeed, the transformation of hometown police departments into extensions of the military has been mirrored in the public schools, where school police have been gifted with high-powered M16 rifles, MRAP armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and other military gear. One Texas school district even boasts its own 12-member SWAT team.
According to one law review article on the school-to-prison pipeline, “Many school districts have formed their own police departments, some so large they rival the forces of major United States cities in size. For example, the safety division in New York City’s public schools is so large that if it were a local police department, it would be the fifth-largest police force in the country.”
The ramifications are far-reaching.
There can be no avoiding the hands-on lessons being taught in the schools about the role of police in our lives, ranging from active shooter drills and school-wide lockdowns to incidents in which children engaging in typically childlike behavior are suspended (for shooting an imaginary “arrow” at a fellow classmate), handcuffed (for being disruptive at school), arrested (for throwing water balloons as part of a school prank), and even tasered (for not obeying instructions).
Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters—which one would hope would be the objective of the schools—government officials seem determined to churn out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
So what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now—the children growing up in these quasi-prisons—but for the future of this country?
How do you convince a child who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?
Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when, for most of his young life, he has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?
Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College, believes that school is a prison that is damaging our kids, and it’s hard to disagree, especially with the numbers of police officers being assigned to schools on the rise.
Students, in turn, are not only finding themselves subjected to police tactics such as handcuffs, leg shackles, tasers and excessive force for “acting up” but are also being ticketed, fined and sent to court for behavior perceived as defiant, disruptive or disorderly such as spraying perfume and writing on a desk.
Clearly, the pathology that characterizes the American police state has passed down to the schools.
Now in addition to the government and its agents viewing the citizenry as suspects to be probed, poked, pinched, tasered, searched, seized, stripped and generally manhandled, all with the general blessing of the courts, our children in the public schools are also fair game for school resource officers who taser teenagers and handcuff kindergartners, school officials who have criminalized childhood behavior, school lockdowns and terror drills that teach your children to fear and comply, and a police state mindset that has transformed the schools into quasi-prisons.
Don’t even get me started on the “school-to-prison pipeline,” the phenomenon in which children who are suspended or expelled from school have a greater likelihood of ending up in jail. One study found that “being suspended or expelled made a student nearly three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system within the next year.”
By the time the average young person in America finishes their public school education, nearly one out of every three of them will have been arrested. Nearly 40 percent of those young people who are arrested will serve time in a private prison, where the emphasis is on making profits for large megacorporations above all else.
Indeed, this profit-driven system of incarceration has also given rise to a growth in juvenile prisons and financial incentives for jailing young people. In this way, young people have become easy targets for the private prison industry, which profits from criminalizing childish behavior and jailing young people.
None of these tactics are making our communities or schools any safer, and they’re certainly not contributing to environments in which learning flourishes. Incredibly, despite the fact that the U.S. invests more money in public education (roughly $13,000 per child per year) than many other developed countries, we rank around the middle of the pack in science, math and reading, and behind many other advanced industrial nations.
Without a doubt, change is needed, but that will mean taking on the teachers’ unions, the school unions, the educators’ associations, and the police unions, not to mention the politicians dependent on their votes and all of the corporations that profit mightily from an industrial school complex.
As we’ve seen with other issues, any significant reforms will have to start locally and trickle upwards.
For starters, parents need to be vocal, visible and organized and demand that school officials 1) adopt a policy of positive reinforcement in dealing with behavior issues; 2) minimize the presence in the schools of police officers and cease involving them in student discipline; and 3) insist that all behavioral issues be addressed first and foremost with a child’s parents, before any other disciplinary tactics are attempted.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if you want a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry like criminals.
If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners, run the schools like prisons.
If, on the other hand, you want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, then run the schools like freedom forums.
Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like citizens of a republic and not inmates in a police state penitentiary.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/22/2020 – 00:05 -
- Trump Not Giving Up On "Military Options" For Maduro's Ouster, Considers Naval Blockade
Trump Not Giving Up On “Military Options” For Maduro’s Ouster, Considers Naval Blockade
Despite Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro emerging victorious after last year’s tumultuous events, which included a US assisted coup attempt by a faction of the military last Spring, out of which Washington also maintained a diplomatic fiction that opposition leader Juan Guaidó is actually the president, it appears the White House is still considering military options against Maduro.
Bloomberg reports “President Donald Trump is frustrated that pressure is building too slowly on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and is still considering military options in the country, including a naval blockade, a senior administration official said.”
Image via CNN Apparently the current sanctions regimen and attempt to block all oil exports, which has seen the US go after major oil companies still doing business with state-run PDVSA (most recently sanctioning a subsidiary of Russian state oil major Rosneft), is not putting swift or severe enough pressure on the Maduro government.
The goal remains, the unnamed top official told Bloomberg, “securing free and fair elections in Venezuela” — which in Washington-speak really means ensuring US-backed Guaidó secures loyalty of the military and thereby leadership over the country. “The U.S. doesn’t believe that free elections are possible with Maduro in power,” the official said further.
The report names Spain as a key European barrier to the US and EU campaign to ouster Maduro. Several new initiatives are being undertaken keep keep up and increase the pressure, however, as Bloomberg notes:
The U.S. has put several companies that continue to do business in Venezuela on notice, the official said, including India’s Reliance Industries, Spain’s Repsol, Chevron and Greek shippers. Trump is likely to raise the issue of India’s oil imports from Venezuela with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a two-day visit next week, the official said Friday in a briefing for reporters.
Trump’s perhaps most aggressive plan of action remains a “naval blockade” of all goods going in and out of the country, which gained a lot of media coverage last August.
The president had frequently vocalized the idea of a naval embargo which would involve multiple warships stationed up and down the South American country’s coastline.
But top US military officers were said to have consistently opposed the plan, saying it was impractical and would take away already stretched naval resources busy engaging Iran and China.
The White House has further been deeply frustrated that the Venezuelan opposition, which failed to deliver results after a months-long standoff last year and with full Washington support that even likely included covert aid via the CIA.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 23:45 - Lady Justice Spurns Her Blinders For Trump Associates
Lady Justice Spurns Her Blinders For Trump Associates
Authored by Julie Kelly via AmGreatness.com,
People like Justice Amy Berman Jackson, who claim to hold the greatest devotion to our institutions, who purport to cherish the rule of law above all else, are the ones responsible for systematically demolishing it all.
She claim sounded like something from Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) or Rachel Maddow or any number of Russian collusion propagandists:
“He was not prosecuted for standing up for the president. He was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”
Those words, however, were not uttered on MSNBC but rather in a federal courtroom by Amy Berman Jackson, a U.S. district court judge seated in the nation’s capital, whose job is to ensure the fair administration of justice based on the rule of law.
The “he” Jackson was referring to is Roger Stone, a Trump confidant; the “president,” of course, is Donald Trump.
Now, Stone wasn’t charged with covering up for the president nor did the indictment against him suggest as much. There was nothing to “cover up” as election collusion is a fantasy concocted by the Democrats and the news media. But the Obama-appointee was on a roll; facts, at that point, didn’t matter to Jackson. (In a tweet Thursday morning, Schiff echoed Jackson’s evidence-free remark, claiming Stone “did it to cover up for Trump.”)
Her absurd and blatantly political accusation from the bench was just part of Jackson’s 40-minute monologue Thursday morning prior to sentencing Stone to 40 months in prison for lying to Congress, obstructing justice, and witness tampering. (The loquacious judge doesn’t like competition; she put a gag order on Stone last year that is still in effect.)
The seven charges against Stone stemmed from Robert Mueller’s investigation into nonexistent collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The Justice Department accused Stone of thwarting a similar investigation conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, then headed by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).
The case against Stone is rooted in the claim that the Russians hacked the email system of the Democratic National Committee—an intrusion, it’s important to note, that is backed up solely by an analysis conducted by CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm. The politically connected company was hired to investigate the breach in the spring of 2016 by Perkins Coie, the same law firm that hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Trump. The DNC refused to surrender any devices or data to the FBI, despite several requests by then-director James Comey.
Stone allegedly, in no small measure due to his own boasting, was in touch with WikiLeaks, the website that eventually leaked the DNC’s hacked emails. His concealment of communications related to WikiLeaks earned Stone and his wife an early-morning FBI raid at their home in January 2019 as the CNN news cameras rolled.
Former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote this of the government’s case against the eccentric political gadfly prior to his sentencing Thursday:
The Stone prosecution is more politics than law enforcement. It was the Mueller probe’s last gasp at pretending there might be something to the Russia-collusion narrative. Notwithstanding that, when the “gee, it sure feels like there could be some collusion here” indictment was filed, over a year and a half after special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, it had long been manifest that there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy.
It appears that Jackson, like so many Trump-haters in the Beltway, still clings to the fantasy that the collusion hoax is legitimate.
Evidently, in the judge’s mind, bad actors like Stone are the only reason why Team Mueller and congressional investigators failed to find what Schiff repeatedly assured the public was convincing evidence of collusion. Jackson told the courtroom prior to her ruling that Stone’s deception “led to an inaccurate, incomplete and incorrect report,” by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee.
But there is no evidence to support Judge Jackson’s accusation, nor did she offer any explanation. The lengthy report issued in March 2018—one month after Nunes released his memo revealing for the first time how the FBI deceived the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—details the committee’s yearlong investigation into the matter. The report concluded that while the Russians attempted to interfere in the election, there was no coordination to do so with members of the Trump campaign.
Jackson’s purpose was clear:
To assist the Democrats’ nonstop crusade to undermine the credibility of Nunes and his report, and to suggest that if only Trump’s lackeys hadn’t hampered the work of dozens of super-smart investigators working with unlimited resources, proof of the secret conspiracy would have been uncovered and Trump would have been ousted from the White House.
In a statement by email, Jack Langer, a spokesman for Nunes, told me:
“Our 240-page report has precisely one sentence that may be inaccurate information provided by Stone. That line had no impact on any of the report’s findings whatsoever. For the judge to use that to characterize our report as inaccurate and incomplete is absurd. Then again, a lot of the judge’s sentencing speech seemed to be regurgitating the Democrats’ debunked talking points about Russian collusion.”
That was not Jackson’s only impersonation of Adam Schiff; she went full drama queen mode warning that Stone poses an insidious danger to the very foundation of our nation.
“The truth still exists, the truth still matters,” Jackson lectured. (This is exactly why we need cameras in federal courtrooms so the public is privy to these sort of self-indulgent performances.)
“Roger Stone’s insistence that it doesn’t, his belligerence, his pride in his own lies are a threat to our most fundamental institutions. If it goes unpunished it will not be a victory for one party or another. Everyone loses.”
And it isn’t just enough for the judge to express her outrage about how Roger Stone almost single-handedly destroyed the work of our founding fathers by misleading lawmakers pursuing a concocted crime. No, we all need to rise up to signal our collective “dismay and disgust” at the American menace with a Nixon tattoo—and it must, the judge ordered, “transcend party.”
Jackson rattled off all the parties who “cared” about making sure Stone paid for his crimes against humanity, including Congress and the American people. (It’s a safe bet most Americans were paying no attention to this trial or could even identify Stone in a lineup.) She took more potshots at Stone; perhaps without being ironic, Jackson called Stone an “insecure” person who craves attention.
Jackson’s grandstanding might have been met with shrugs (or ignored altogether) in any other political climate but her dire warnings about the necessary consequences for committing perjury and obstructing justice and covering up for political pals demonstrate an astonishing level of hypocrisy if not flat-out complicity in the selective application of the law.
The president and his supporters can hardly tolerate lectures about fairness when Trump foes such as Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, and others continue to escape justice for far worse crimes.
Further, unlike Stone, those offenders held positions of power and influence—and abused both in service of achieving their mutual goal that Jackson so dramatically endorsed today: The sabotage of Donald Trump and anyone associated with him.
The people, like Jackson, who claim to hold the greatest devotion to our institutions, who purport to cherish the rule of law above all else, are the ones responsible for systematically demolishing it all.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 23:25 - 77-Year-Old Man Pummels Thief After Parking Lot Sneak Attack
77-Year-Old Man Pummels Thief After Parking Lot Sneak Attack
Who doesn’t enjoy a fun video where a seemingly elderly looking man beats the shit out of some young punk who tried to steal his cash?
A behatted old man was minding his own business standing in front of a surveillance camera near a parking lot when a young masked punk in a bright-colored vest suddenly rushes him and tries to rob him.
The man pushes back the young lad, then throws up his fists and clocks him right in the jaw. They dance for a bit, eventually moving out of frame. As the video ends, its clear the would-be thief has run away.
Surveillance footage shows 77-year-old fight off masked man who tried to steal his cash as he walked away from an ATM.
Police in Wales say the suspect fled the scene empty-handed. https://t.co/QddZfGQa4L pic.twitter.com/v1CNJR0nQG
— ABC News (@ABC) February 18, 2020
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But why stop there? You know how liberals refuse to believe that armed citizens actually foil crimes? We suspect it’s because they couldn’t imagine showing that kind of courage, but for one southern couple, a pair of off-duty police officers, the ‘good guy with a gun myth’ became a reality.
The pair foiled a robbery when they chased off a masked suspect who tried to hold up the restaurant.
Off-duty husband-and-wife police officers from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, had their meal interrupted when a masked man walked into a Louisville chicken restaurant and demanded money.
They drew their weapons and helped chase down the robbery suspect. https://t.co/8jZeJPc85n pic.twitter.com/Rwn4kecbGv
— ABC News (@ABC) February 19, 2020
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According to ABC, the couple were the only ones eating at the restaurant when the thief approached. The would-be thief was identified and, later, arrested.
That incident could have played out much differently if it weren’t for Kentucky’s generous 2nd amendment protections.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 23:05 - Subcomandante Bloomberg It Is, "Another 'Obama' Won't Cut It… Folks Ain't Buying That Con Anymore"
Subcomandante Bloomberg It Is, “Another ‘Obama’ Won’t Cut It… Folks Ain’t Buying That Con Anymore”
Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins, via The Unz Review,
Break out the pussyhats and vuvuzelas, folks, because the neoliberal Resistance is back, and this time they’re not playing around. No more impeachments and investigations. It’s time to go mano-a-mano with Trump, and they’ve finally got just the bad hombre to do it. No, not Bernie Sanders, you commies. A battle-hardened Resistance fighter. El Caballo Pequeño! El Jefe Mínimo! Subcomandante Michael Bloomberg!
Yes, that’s right, Michael Bloomberg, multi-billionaire Republicrat oligarch, has mobilized a guerilla army of overpaid PR professionals, Wall Street sociopaths, liberal racists, and anti-outdoor-smoking fanatics, and is steamrolling toward the Democratic convention to buy a brokered nomination and save America from “Putinism.” He’s had it with you sugary-soft-drink-drinking, chain-smoking, gun-toting, Oxy-gobbling, Hitler-loving, Putinist peasants and your infatuation with Donald Trump. So he’s decided to transform the entire country into a sterile, upscale, fascist themepark where you can rent a studio for $3,000 a month and the cops keep “the darkies” in their place, like he successfully did to New York City.
Although his campaign seemed to come out of nowhere (and sort of resembles a desperate attempt to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination), the Resistance have been planning this corporatist Tet Offensive for quite some time. Apparently, Subcomandante Bloomberg and his inner circle of sub-subcomandantes have been hiding out deep in the mountainous jungles of Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side (or in the Hamptons, or London, or in one of El Jefe’s other multi-million-dollar homes) since Trump and the Russians invaded the country, waiting for the perfect moment to start inundating the American people with television commercials and social media posts informing them of his “electability.”
Clearly, that moment has now arrived.
Bloomberg has spent over $400 million on TV, radio, and digital ads, and it isn’t even Super Tuesday yet. He bought the Democratic National Committee and had them change the rules so he could join the debates (which, based on his poor performance in Las Vegas, might not have been the most brilliant strategy). He has been buying politicians, community organizers, journalists, pundits, his opponents’ campaign staff, Instagram and Facebook influencers, and everyone else he can possibly buy to support his campaign to buy the presidency … which is totally legal, and the American way, and is our only hope of overthrowing the Putin-Nazi Occupation Government and regaining our God-given capitalist freedom!
Sure, to some folks, it looks … well, unseemly (not to mention decidedly undemocratic), this Wall Street oligarch attempting to bribe and bully his way into the White House, but, given the stakes, what choice do we have? As the corporate media and intelligence agencies have been telling us for the last three years, the country is under occupation by an evil conspiracy of Russian-backed Nazis personally controlled by Vladimir Putin! More or less any moment now, Putin is going to order Trump to nullify the U.S. Constitution, declare martial law, appoint himself Führer, and start rounding up and murdering the Jews … or investigating Hunter Biden, or the spooks who have been trying to force him out of office.
This Putin-Nazism cannot continue! Trump must be deposed, no matter the cost. As Robert Reich put it in this piece in The Guardian:
“If the only way we can get rid of the sociopathic tyrant named Trump is with an oligarch named Bloomberg, we will have to choose the oligarch.”
There you have it, folks. We’ll have to choose Bloomberg, or else his golf buddy, Literal Hitler, will destroy the fabric of democracy, or whatever.
Another op-ed in The Washington Post, It Might Be Time to Take Bloomberg Seriously, wondered, if it comes down to Bloomberg versus Bernie:
“Do you choose socialism or capitalism? An ideologue or an executive? Are you really going to ask Americans to trade one extreme for the other, or do you want to offer them a certified, electable moderate?”
Vox, in its “Case for Michael Bloomberg — Mike Bloomberg and His Billions Are What Democrats Need to Beat Trump,” observes that, sure, Bloomberg has drawbacks, like his history of racist remarks and policies, abusing women, oppressing the poor, and just generally being an arrogant little authoritarian corporatist creep, but hey, he’s apologized for all that stuff, and he’ll probably never do it again.
Plus, according to this piece in …uh, Bloomberg Opinion (which “does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Bloomberg LP and its owners”), The 2020 Election Is a Choice Between Democracy and Putinism! At the end of the day, once the dust has settled:
“It will come down to rule of law. In November, Americans will decide whether they will fight for the foundation of liberal democracy and democratic capitalism or whether they will accede to Putinism.”
You’ll be hearing variations of this message over and over, and over again, as we approach election day in November … that is, assuming Bloomberg and the rest of the Resistance can buy, bribe, badger, and bamboozle enough Democratic voters into nominating him. First, they need to deal with Bernie Sanders and his swarm of kill-crazy commie terrorists (who rumor has it are also being remotely controlled by Vladimir Putin). To do this, all they will need to do is deny Sanders a first ballot win in Milwaukee, which shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish. Sure, a brokered convention will be ugly, but, as Robert Reich said, they’ll have to do it, or else … well, you know, end of democracy.
Yes, I’m aware that Subcomandante Bloomberg blew his first debate (prompting Twitter pundits to pronounce him DOA) and that millions of “progressive” Democrats hate him, and that the corporate media are running a lot of “Bloomberg’s Nasty Past” pieces now (in order to maintain the appearance of journalism), but, make no mistake, if he secures the nomination, they’ll be lining up to “reluctantly” endorse him, because the alternative will be Russian Hitler!
Look, it’s easy to get distracted by the day-to-day ups and downs of the horse race (which is the primary purpose of the horse race, after all) and forget that we are in the middle of a global capitalist War on Populism … a war that GloboCap intends to win. Sure, they will survive another four years of Trump (or even four years of Sanders if they have to), but, at some point, in order to restore “normality,” or “democratic capitalism,” or whatever, they are probably going to need to stop dicking around and install a bona fide global capitalist oligarch in the Oval Office. They are going to need to do this in order to crush the hopes of the populist insurgency that erupted in the Spring of 2016, and led to the rise of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, the Brexit, the ongoing protests in France, the downfall of Angela Merkel, etc.
Another Obama is not going to cut it … people aren’t buying that con anymore. No, if the empire is going to reestablish control, it is going to need to take its liberal mask off, and shove a blatant corporatist oligarch like Bloomberg down the public’s throat in order to remind everyone who’s boss. It may not be Michael Bloomberg this time, but it is going to be someone like Bloomberg eventually. Someone powerful, and extremely unpleasant, who will be sold to us as the only one who can save the world from the “Nazis” and the “Russians” … which will necessitate taking some very extreme measures, like the ones we took during the War on Terror. You remember the measures we took back then, don’t you?
Or what, you think that GloboCap has been manufacturing all this mass hysteria over “Russian election interference” and “Nazi terrorism” for their own amusement? Yeah, that’s probably all it is. It’s probably not a prelude to anything.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 22:45 - Watch Mexican Army Raid Cartel Bunker Found Near US Border City
Watch Mexican Army Raid Cartel Bunker Found Near US Border City
The number of murders continues to rise under the Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) government. More than 36,000 people lost their lives in 2019 amid a deepening of Mexico’s drug war.
We have routinely shared deteriorating conditions of Mexico in the last half-decade, and the warzones that have developed on many border towns.
Last month, the US consulate in Mexico’s border city of Nuevo Laredo issued a warning as intense gunfire broke out across the city. Here’s the audio from the epic gun battle that unfolded (audio is from US side):
This is horrible #NuevoLaredo pic.twitter.com/fd4REo9wmT
— Kαяø⁷ IS SEEING BTS (@cypherlarry_) January 2, 2020
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Now it appears the Mexican Army has stumbled across a large bunker used by cartels.
Breitbart said the “bunker was previously discovered in 2018 and was only used to store damaged vehicles.”
Here’s a video of Mexico’s Army entering the structure only to find a charred SUV and bullet casings.
Elementos de la @SEDENAmx durante reconocimientos realizados el 12/02/2020 localizaron un búnker con aprox 70 Mts. Longitud por 6 Mts. De ancho y 2.5 Mts. De altura a inmediaciones de la col. Vista Hermosa del mpio de Reynosa, Tamps.
Vídeo 1 pic.twitter.com/j2B9qcFrfc
— La Voz Del Pueblo (Oficial) (@LPueblo2) February 16, 2020
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The bunker is located in Vista Hermosa neighborhood of Reynosa, was previously discovered by the Mexican Army in 2018 during a raid that was littered with Claymore mines and had a treasure trove of weapons.
Breitbart notes that the bunker was used to store weapons, armored vehicles, and other combat materials for cartels.
En el citado Búnker se localizaron evidencias de disparos de arma de fuego, diversos cartuchos y cascos regados en el piso así como un vehículo incendiado mismo que se encontraba en el interior de referido Búnker.
Imágenes pic.twitter.com/jWxE5ukMxl
— La Voz Del Pueblo (Oficial) (@LPueblo2) February 16, 2020
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Why is this concerning? Well, the bunker is just miles away from Texas. The border region is a hotspot for cartel violence that is at risk of spilling over onto US soil and could engender Americans.
Some of the most recent gun battles on the border have seen cartel members using machine guns, armored vehicles, explosives, .50 caliber rifles, and other devices that would generally be found in a warzone.
All of the above suggests AMLO has lost control of his own country, as his policies are failing to curb violence and arrest cartel gun battles that are routinely occurring on the border.
AMLO’s recent deployment of an elite marine force to fight drug cartels on the border was most likely due to pressure by the Trump administration, who cited the total Mexican murder count in 2019 exceeded the 2018 record of 36,685.
Trump began increasing pressure on Mexico in November following the murders of three mothers and six of their children in a fundamentalist Mormon compound in the northern state of Sonora. Cartel gunman reportedly ambushed the families while fighting for control of the area where the victims lived.
It’s only a matter of time before Trump sends in the military to clear out cartels on the border.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 22:25 - Pope Francis The Taxman
Pope Francis The Taxman
Authored by Antonius Aquinas via AnotoniusAquinas.com,
On the heels of calling for a Marxist economic conference this coming March (“Economy of Francesco”), Jorge Bergoglio (a.k.a. “Pope Francis”) has once again opined on financial matters. The purported head of the Catholic Church has now designated “tax cuts” as sinful behavior on a par, apparently, with stealing, lying, and adultery:
Today’s structures of sin include repeated tax cuts for the richest people, often justified in the name of investment and development.
Bergoglio did not mention what category of sin advocacy for tax cuts falls under – venial or mortal.
Maybe the details of how such a policy ranks in offending Divine Justice will be hammered out at the upcoming Economy of Francesco Commie confab!
In Bergoglio’s collectivist mind, those who try and keep their wealth from the ravenous demands of the State are somehow denying the poor their just due:
Every year hundreds of billions of dollars, which should be paid in taxes to fund health care and education, accumulate in tax haven accounts, thus impeding the possibility of the dignified and sustained development of all social agents.
What Bergoglio and his fellow socialists do not understand is that tax cuts lead to economic growth, whether they are for higher or lower income groups. The less wealth that the State confiscates, the more is available to be used for saving and investment – two keys to economic growth. The rich do not horde their money but expand and create businesses which leads to more and better paying jobs for lower income groups who supposedly Bergoglio wants to help.
The poor will only be uplifted by greater production where more goods and services are available at lower prices. Redistribution of income via taxation does not create new wealth, but simply transfers existing wealth from the productive class. Moreover, taxation has the deleterious effect of making individuals produce less since their efforts are siphoned off at the point of a gun. More taxation means less production and, thus, less and more expensive goods for the poor.
Of course, this is basic economic theory that any sane person can understand unless one has matriculated to a Western university or college or pays attention to economic ignoramuses like Jorge Bergoglio!
Bergoglio’s constant attention to the plight of the poor along with other social issues (“climate change,” the environment, immigration) does not align with the vision that the Entity, which created the office that Bergoglio currently holds, had in mind. On at least two occasions, He counseled His followers to focus their attention on spreading the “good news” instead of earthly concerns:
For the poor you have always with you: but me you have not always. [Mt. 26:11]
Let the dead bury their dead, but go thou, and preach the kingdom of God. [Lk. 9: 60]
While the Church has always sought to protect and help the poor, widows, orphans, and the downtrodden, its primary mission is to preach the Gospel. Since the time of the Second Vatican Anti-Council, 1962-65, and especially during the “reign” of Pope Francis, evangelization has been condemned and, like tax cuts, is now considered sinful activity.
Bergoglio’s criticism of tax reduction is, no doubt, aimed at the Trump Administration’s plan for an additional round of tax cuts. Tax reduction, however, without cuts in government spending will further explode budget deficits which are now even beyond sustainable.
Without corresponding spending reduction, tax cuts will mean that the Federal Reserve will have to make up for the short fall with further money printing. One cannot have Big Government and tax cuts simultaneously. The inevitable monetary crisis will, unfortunately, be blamed on tax cuts and will play into the hands of Bergoglio and his fellow travelers.
That Bergoglio spends most of his time as a social justice warrior instead of the supposed “vicar of Christ” on earth shows the state of the modern Church. Worse, when he does speak on matters of faith, his words and actions are riddled with heresy.
For all those concerned, it is best that “Pope Francis” should be ignored not only for the falsehoods he spreads about Christianity, but also as a social theorist. His pronouncements on the latter will only lead to further impoverishment of the poor and the rest of society while inciting class conflict between those who seek to keep their wealth and those who want to confiscate more of it.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 22:05 - "The Human Race Could Go Extinct": JPMorgan Fearmongers Climate Change Impact In Leaked Report
“The Human Race Could Go Extinct”: JPMorgan Fearmongers Climate Change Impact In Leaked Report
A new explosive report from JP Morgan was leaked out this week titled “Risky business: the climate and the macroeconomy” warns climate change poses a significant macroeconomic risk to the world economy and could result in a “catastrophic” event.
“The response to climate change should be motivated not only by central estimates of outcomes but also by the likelihood of extreme events (from the tails of the probability distribution). We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened,” the report advised its top clients.
JPM’s David Mackie and Jessica Murray, the authors of the report, said: “climate change would not only impact GDP and welfare directly but would also have indirect effects via morbidity, mortality, famine, water stress, conflict, and migration.”
They said the impact of climate had been underestimated by governments, adding:
“Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive.”
A “global carbon tax should be introduced immediately” to curb climate change and prevent an epic meltdown of the global economy, the economists warned.
JPM has so far been reserved in their language about climate change. Still, the new report offers some insight into fearmongering by the investment bank of how global warming could crash the economy, and how a carte blanch approach is needed to solve the crisis.
The so-called climate crisis is a guise for the introduction of green bonds, unlimited fiscal deficits, and MMT, a move that would be orchestrated by central banks, governments, and financial elites to fire up the printing presses once more.
Financial elites have already crafted a narrative for the average bloke, that governments need to fight climate change immediately through spending vast amounts of money for a green transformation of the economy, or risk economic implosion and loss of life.
So the illusionary emergency of climate change is nothing more than fearmongering by financial elites who understand that after decades of money printing via central banks risks a global reset in financial assets, and the only way to solve this upcoming crisis is to create another crisis, called the climate change crisis, to trick everyone into believing more money printing is needed to save the world from rising temperatures (but really more money printing shore up financial assets in hopes the everything bubble doesn’t implode in the next recession).
The reason for this elaborate scheme is that after the 2008 financial crisis, where financial elites were bailed out and the middle class was left to rot, convincing the average person that money printing is needed once more would be a difficult task.
So again, financial elites created a fake climate change crisis to offer a policy prescription of money printing to protect their asset bubbles, but simultaneously, make everyone believe that it’s to transform the global economy into a much greener trajectory to save the planet.
And if you care to read JPM’s leaked report, here it is:
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 21:45 - Escobar: No Weapon Left Behind – The American Hybrid War On China
Escobar: No Weapon Left Behind – The American Hybrid War On China
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The New Silk Roads – or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – were launched by President Xi Jinping in 2013, first in Central Asia (Nur-Sultan) and then Southeast Asia (Jakarta).
One year later, the Chinese economy overtook the U.S. on a PPP basis. Inexorably, year after year since the start of the millennium, the U.S. share of the global economy shrinks while China’s increases.
China is already the key hub of the global economy and the leading trade partner of nearly 130 nations.
While the U.S. economy is hollowed out, and the casino financing of the U.S. government – repo markets and all – reads as a dystopian nightmare, the civilization-state steps ahead in myriad areas of technological research, not least because of Made in China 2025.
China largely beats the U.S. on patent filings and produces at least 8 times as many STEM graduates a year than the U.S., earning the status of top contributor to global science.
A vast array of nations across the Global South signed on to be part of BRI, which is planned for completion in 2049. Last year alone, Chinese companies signed contracts worth up to $128 billion in large-scale infrastructure projects in dozen of nations.
The only economic competitor to the U.S. is busy reconnecting most of the world to a 21st century, fully networked version of a trade system that was at its peak for over a millennia: the Eurasian Silk Roads.
Inevitably this state of things is something interlocking sectors of the U.S. ruling class simply would not accept.
Branding BRI as a “pandemic”
As the usual suspects fret over the “stability” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Xi Jinping administration, the fact is the Beijing leadership has had to deal with an accumulation of extremely severe issues: a swine-flu epidemic killing half the stock; the Trump-concocted trade war; Huawei accused of racketeering and about to be prevented from buying U.S. made chips; bird flu; coronavirus virtually shutting down half of China.
Add to it the incessant United States government Hybrid War propaganda barrage, trespassed by acute Sinophobia; everyone from sociopathic “officials” to self-titled councilors are either advising corporate businesses to divert global supply chains out of China or concocting outright calls for regime change – with every possible demonization in between.
There are no holds barred in the all-out offensive to kick the Chinese government while it’s down.
A Pentagon cipher at the Munich Security Conference once again declares China as the greatest threat, economically and militarily, to the U.S. – and by extension the West, forcing a wobbly EU already subordinated to NATO to be subservient to Washington on this remixed Cold War 2.0.
The whole U.S. corporate media complex repeats to exhaustion that Beijing is “lying” and losing control. Descending to sub-gutter, racist levels, hacks even accuse BRI itself of being a pandemic, with China “impossible to quarantine”.
All that is quite rich, to say the least, oozing from lavishly rewarded slaves of an unscrupulous, monopolistic, extractive, destructive, depraved, lawless oligarchy which uses debt offensively to boost their unlimited wealth and power while the lowly U.S. and global masses use debt defensively to barely survive. As Thomas Piketty has conclusively shown, inequality always relies on ideology.
We’re deep into a vicious intel war. From the point of view of Chinese intelligence, the current toxic cocktail simply cannot be attributed to just a random series of coincidences. Beijing has serial motives to piece this extraordinary chain of events as part of a coordinated Hybrid War, Full Spectrum Dominance attack on China.
Enter the Dragon Killer working hypothesis: a bio-weapon attack capable of causing immense economic damage but protected by plausible deniability. The only possible move by the “indispensable nation” on the New Great Game chessboard, considering that the U.S. cannot win a conventional war on China, and cannot win a nuclear war on China.
A biological warfare weapon?
On the surface, coronavirus is a dream bio-weapon for those fixated on wreaking havoc across China and praying for regime change.
Yet it’s complicated. This report is a decent effort trying to track the origins of coronavirus. Now compare it with the insights by Dr. Francis Boyle, international law professor at the University of Illinois and author, among others, of Biowarfare and Terrorism. He’s the man who drafted the U.S. Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 signed into law by George H. W. Bush.
Dr. Boyle is convinced coronavirus is an “offensive biological warfare weapon” that leaped out of the Wuhan BSL-4 laboratory, although he’s “not saying it was done deliberately.”
Dr. Boyle adds, “all these BSL-4 labs by United States, Europe, Russia, China, Israel are all there to research, develop, test biological warfare agents. There’s really no legitimate scientific reason to have BSL-4 labs.” His own research led to a whopping $100 billion, by 2015, spent by the United States government on bio-warfare research: “We have well over 13,000 alleged life science scientists… testing biological weapons here in the United States. Actually this goes back and it even precedes 9/11.”
Dr. Boyle directly accuses “the Chinese government under Xi and his comrades” of a cover up “from the get-go. The first reported case was December 1, so they’d been sitting on this until they couldn’t anymore. And everything they’re telling you is a lie. It’s propaganda.”
The World Health Organization (WHO), for Dr. Boyle, is also on it: “They’ve approved many of these BSL-4 labs (…) Can’t trust anything the WHO says because they’re all bought and paid for by Big Pharma and they work in cahoots with the CDC, which is the United States government, they work in cahoots with Fort Detrick.” Fort Detrick, now a cutting-edge bio-warfare lab, previously was a notorious CIA den of mind control “experiments”.
Relying on decades of research in bio-warfare, the U.S. Deep State is totally familiar with all bio-weapon overtones. From Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Korea, Vietnam and Fallujah, the historical record shows the United States government does not blink when it comes to unleashing weapons of mass destruction on innocent civilians.
For its part, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has spent a fortune researching bats, coronaviruses and gene-editing bio-weapons. Now, conveniently – as if this was a form of divine intervention – DARPA’s “strategic allies” have been chosen to develop a genetic vaccine.
The 1996 neocon Bible, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), unambiguously stated, “advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
There’s no question coronavirus, so far, has been a Heaven-sent politically useful tool, reaching, with minimum investment, the desired targets of maximized U.S. global power – even if fleetingly, enhanced by a non-stop propaganda offensive – and China relatively isolated with its economy semi paralyzed.
Yet perspective is in order. The CDC estimated that up to 42.9 million people got sick during the 2018-2019 flu season in the U.S. No less than 647,000 people were hospitalized. And 61,200 died.
This report details the Chinese “people’s war” against coronavirus.
It’s up to Chinese virologists to decode its arguably synthetic origin. How China reacts, depending on the findings, will have earth-shattering consequences – literally.
Setting the stage for the Raging Twenties
After managing to reroute trade supply chains across Eurasia to its own advantage and hollow out the Heartland, American – and subordinated Western – elites are now staring into a void. And the void is staring back. A “West” ruled by the U.S. is now faced with irrelevance. BRI is in the process of reversing at least two centuries of Western dominance.
There’s no way the West and especially the “system leader” U.S. will allow it. It all started with dirty ops stirring trouble across the periphery of Eurasia – from Ukraine to Syria to Myanmar.
Now it’s when the going really gets tough. The targeted assassination of Maj. Gen. Soleimani plus coronavirus – the Wuhan flu – have really set up the stage for the Raging Twenties. The designation of choice should actually be WARS – Wuhan Acute Respiratory Syndrome. That would instantly give the game away as a War against Humanity – irrespective of where it came from.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 21:25 - "Ilhan Omar Did Marry Her Brother", Explosive New Report Confirms
“Ilhan Omar Did Marry Her Brother”, Explosive New Report Confirms
The question of whether or not congresswoman Ilhan Omar (yes, the same Ilhan Omar who is constantly bickering about President Trump breaking the law) married her own brother to skirt immigration laws appears to now finally have an answer: yes.
In fact, Omar told friends “years ago” that the man who went on to become her second husband was, in fact, her brother, according to the Daily Mail. One of those friends has now come forward to reveal how Omar and Ahmed Elmi “scandalized the Somali community in Minneapolis.”
That friend, Abdihakim Osman, has claimed that Omar said she wanted to get her brother papers so he could stay in the U.S. at the same time she was married to her first husband, Ahmed Hirsi.
Omar and Hirsi “No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later,” Osman told the Daily Mail.
Omar had first been married to Hirsi in 2002 in a private ceremony that was not registered with the state. They had two children. In the late 2000s, however, Elmi began turning up in Minneapolis.
Osman said: “People began noticing that Ilhan and Hirsi were often with a very effeminate young guy.”
He continued: “He was very feminine in the way he dressed — he would wear light lipstick and pink clothes and very, very, short shorts in the summer. People started whispering about him. ‘[Hirsi] and Ilhan both told me it was Ilhan’s brother and he had been living in London but he was mixing with what were seen as bad influences that the family did not like. So they sent him to Minneapolis as ‘rehab’.”
Elmi, on the right Osman also said: “When [Hirsi] and Ilhan got married, a lot of people were invited. It was a big Islamic wedding uniting two large clans in the Minneapolis community. I would say there were 100-150 people there. When she married Elmi, no one even knew about it.”
Elmi and Omar married on February 12, 2009 at a Hennepin County office in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Omar claims she separated with Hirsi in 2008, but because the marriage was “under the table”, so was the alleged separation. Osman claims that while Omar and Elmi moved to Fargo after their marriage, that Omar and Hirsi were still together as husband and wife.
Osman continued: “She said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school. We all thought she was just getting papers together to allow him to stay in this country. Once she had the papers they could apply for student loans. They both moved to North Dakota to go to school but she was still married to [Hirsi]. In the Somali way, the only marriage that mattered was the one in the mosque.”
The lack of paperwork in Somalia has made it difficult to confirm the link as to whether or not Elmi and Omar are truly related.
Omar and Elmi divorced in 2017 before Omar re-married Hirsi, before having her third child with him. Osman “scoffed” at the idea of Omar’s marriage to Elmi being real. Omar then went on to have an affair with her chief fundraiser, Tim Mynett, a married father of one whose company receive more than half a million dollars from Omar’s campaign last year.
Omar’s spokeswoman refused comment to the Daily Mail. Instead, he said: “The Congresswoman is focused on the work her constituents sent her to Washington to accomplish.”
The New York Post said last month that the FBI was investigating the marriage and had met with a source in Minneapolis who handed over a trove of documents related to the marriage. The penalty for marriage fraud is up to five years in jail and a fine of up to $250,000.
Hopefully, the new revelations make it clear enough for a formal investigation into Omar to be opened, as she has repeatedly refused to answer questions relating to her marriage. She originally called the allegations “baseless, absurd rumors” and accused journalists of Islamophobia.
Because, when in doubt, play the victim, right?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 21:05 - China's Debts Are Coming Due At The Worst Possible Time
China’s Debts Are Coming Due At The Worst Possible Time
Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,
The economic consequences of coronavirus are quickly piling up like garbage along the streets of Los Angeles. Breaking supply chains, closed Chinese factories, iPhone disruptions, and massive shortages of Chinese made products. These developments will most definitely get worse before they get better.
The economic impacts will be devastating. As China flatlines, and first quarter GDP growth approaches zero, the global economy, including the U.S., will also be greatly disrupted. Perhaps many low-cost, Made in China products will go on indefinite hiatus. What then?
Quite frankly, the global economy’s overdue for a synchronized downturn. Coronavirus may mark the turning point. But it would have arrived sooner or later, with or without the threat of a burgeoning pandemic.
Still, the prospect of a great plague makes people all the more excitable. A run-of-the-mill recession and bear market is one thing. But add the rapid spread of a hyper contagious virus to the mix, and the human animal is inclined to go mad in unison.
In the meantime, and despite yesterday’s moderate selloff, the major U.S. stock market indexes are near record highs. The expectation of ever more Fed intervention has pacified investors. But that’s not all…
The yield on the 10-Year Treasury note has slid down to 1.50 percent; near the lower limit of the federal funds rate, which is currently between 1.5 and 1.75 percent. In other words, the Fed’s next policy move has already been decided by Treasury investors. Similarly, gold investors, which have pushed the price of gold above $1,620 per ounce, have also preempted the Fed.
But what’s really going on? Moreover, should you panic, yet?
Should You Panic, Yet?
The answer, no doubt, depends on whether you’re a borrower or a lender. By this, some context is in order…
Assuming a financial agreement is made in good faith, both parties stand to benefit. The lender, having loaned money to a creditworthy borrower, can count on steady coupon payments. At the same time, the borrower can put the money to a resourceful undertaking; ideally, something that produces a return that’s greater than the loan.
However, when the borrower doesn’t live up to their terms of the agreement things quickly get ugly. The borrower may seek relief through bankruptcy court. The lender may take possession of collateral. Each case is different.
Still, when an economy is growing and loans are generally performing, the occasional bad loan can easily be absorbed. But the longer an economy’s growth run extends, the more complacent lenders become. Debts pile up higher and higher. At the same time, the perception of risk diminishes.
By the top end of the credit cycle, capacity has far outpaced demand. Businesses and individuals have overextended themselves with the expectation that continued growth will mask their mistakes. The boom then always ends at the worst possible time.
At the peak, the financial system has become highly unstable. Any triggering event will serve to topple it.
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” counseled Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. If we had to choose, most of the time it’s preferable to be a lender. But not always. For example, after a massive and broad reaching credit binge, borrowers and lenders are both equally screwed…
China’s Debts are Coming Due at the Worst Possible Time
Booms and busts fueled by cheap credit are incredibly destructive. What’s more, they’re exacerbated by central bank efforts to smooth out the business cycle. Rather than rounding the peaks and tapering the bottoms, stimulative fiscal and monetary policy has the unfavorable effect of magnifying them.
Coincidence. Fate. Serendipity. Providence. Destiny. Karma. Fortuity. Kismet. Or just plain chance. There is something both eerie and poetic about the genesis of the coronavirus outbreak being China…and at this precise moment in time.
One of the more reckless examples of destructive stimulus over the last decade is China’s mass concrete binge. Pumping credit to stimulate construction in China has had the ill-effect of compelling the country to do something extraordinarily incredible. In short, they’ve mixed up massive amounts of concrete and splattered it across the landscape.
Specifically, China’s economy used 6.6 gigatons of cement between 2011 and 2014. What a gigaton is we don’t really know. But we assume it is something unfathomable heavy. To put this in perspective, the U.S. used 4.5 gigatons of cement over the last 100 years.
What in the world compelled an entire nation to behave like utter blockheads? Unsurprisingly, misguided stimulus policies pushed everyone beyond the absurd. This mass malinvestment and overbuilt capacity may never realign with the real economy.
Over the last decade, China has borrowed massive amounts of money to finance one of the biggest infrastructure binges in history. Roads, bridges, airports, and entire ghost cities were constructed. The boom was spectacular. It was also an epic disaster in the making. Because the debt’s coming due at the worst possible time:
“More than 2 trillion yuan ($283 billion) of local-government notes will mature in 2020, according to Bloomberg-compiled data — a record and 58 percent more than [2019] level.”
How will local governments pay their debts when their economy’s on coronavirus lockdown? Alas, for borrowers and lenders alike, they won’t.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 20:45 - Twitter Tool Could See 'Verified' Users Given Power To Label "Lies" & "Harmful" Tweets
Twitter Tool Could See ‘Verified’ Users Given Power To Label “Lies” & “Harmful” Tweets
Twitter is preparing to roll out more ways it intends to censor and “label” speech. The company is also experimenting with giving only blue checkmark “verified” fact-checkers and journalists the power to identify “lies” and label and edit accordingly. What could possibly go wrong?
“Twitter is experimenting with adding brightly colored labels directly beneath lies and misinformation posted by politicians and other public figures, according to a leaked demo of new features” obtained by NBC, which first broke the story Thursday.
Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey. Image via AFP “We’re exploring a number of ways to address misinformation and provide more context for tweets on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “Misinformation is a critical issue and we will be testing many different ways to address it.”
Get ready for a potential new Twitter where essentially all utterances and perspectives on controversial events and data will have to pass through blue checkmark gatekeepers.
This is an astounding and Orwellian section from the NBC report:
In this version, disinformation or misleading information posted by public figures would be corrected directly beneath a tweet by fact-checkers and journalists who are verified on the platform and possibly by other users who would participate in a new “community reports” feature, which the demo claims is “like Wikipedia.”
Here’s what it might look like when a politician tweets “harmfully misleading” content after March 5th. Big red/orange flag underneath the offending tweet.
These are screenshots from that were left on a public testing site. Twitter confirmed they’re possible iterations. pic.twitter.com/EH61YDGjOg
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) February 20, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Tweets marked as ‘disinformation’ could then be reduced in visibility on the platform.
The company said it is only in the early stages of research and work with the demo, and there’s as yet no confirmation of exactly what will be included in the new roll out, expected on March 5th.
An image capture of the leaked demo which illustrates how it works, via NBC. Verified community members can flag tweets by public figures or other accounts as “Harmfully Misleading”.
Perhaps even more disturbing is that one experimental version of the feature sets up moderating and labeling false information as if it’s a competition among accepted “community members”.
The “harmfully misleading” tag wouldn’t just be for politicians. It’d be for climate change denial and health misinformation, too, at least according to this test.https://t.co/Yhyv45WFjG pic.twitter.com/GwbgIojK27
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) February 20, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The NBC report explains:
In one iteration of the demo, Twitter users could earn “points” and a “community badge” if they “contribute in good faith and act like a good neighbor” and “provide critical context to help people understand information they see.”
Supposedly this is to prevent trolls or “ideologues” from inundating the platform as moderators.
Twitter, Facebook and other social media giants have been under increased pressure to curtail misleading political information, but no doubt as the above demonstrates the “solution” will only result in severe censorship and a purge of ‘unacceptable opinions’ by establishment gatekeepers — something Twitter has certainly already long been engaged in, as we’ve recently experienced.
Groupthink will now be programmed permanently into the platform’s architecture.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 20:25 - When US Hospitals And Military Publicly Brace For A Pandemic, You Should Pay Attention
When US Hospitals And Military Publicly Brace For A Pandemic, You Should Pay Attention
Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
If you trust the numbers coming out of China (I don’t) it appears that they’re getting their coronavirus epidemic contained. Yesterday they reported the lowest number of new cases in ages, with 349 newly confirmed patients, in a dramatic drop of more than 1300 fewer cases than Tuesday.
Xinhuanet, the official Chinese government propaganda news outlet reported:
NHC spokesperson Mi Feng made the remarks at a press conference in Beijing Wednesday, citing the epidemic data in the province over the past week.
The daily count of newly cured and discharged cases in Hubei, excluding the capital city of Wuhan, has exceeded the number of newly confirmed cases for four consecutive days as of Wednesday, said Mi.
He also noted that the number of newly confirmed cases has decreased significantly since Feb. 13 in areas besides Wuhan, and the increase in the cumulative number of confirmed cases has remained flat. (source)
Of course, there’s plenty of evidence that China has toyed with the numbers all along, so it’s difficult not to take this “good news” with a grain of salt.
Particularly when hundreds of potentially infected people disembarked the Diamond Princess yesterday to make their ways home to 50 different countries via a wide variety of public transportation options.
And particularly when our own government is busily (and visibly) preparing for the potential of a massive outbreak in the United States.
We didn’t even see these kinds of preparations when we were being warned by the CDC to get ready for an Ebola outbreak back in 2014. Mercifully, we dodged the bullet on that one but it certainly wasn’t because of well-thought-out protocols and procedures. The entire thing was handled so poorly that it could have resulted in disaster. Perhaps we learned from that?
CDC warned American hospitals are warned to prepare
Anyone who is a prepper knows that medical items like gloves, N-95 masks, and other PPE are in short supply right now, and hospitals are also concerned about shortages. The CDC issued a warning last week:
“This is the time to open up your pandemic plans and see that things are in order,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, a top official of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, urged hospitals last week.
“For instance,” she continued, health-care providers need to plan for a “surge at a hospital, the ability to provide personal protective equipment for your workforce, the administrative controls and so forth that you might put place in a health care setting.” (source)
In a separate interview, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters, “At some point, we are likely to see community spread in the U.S. or in other countries.”
How are hospitals bracing for impact?
Across the country, hospitals are taking steps to prepare for an onslaught of patients who may or may not have the infectious disease. Considering that it’s influenza season and many of the symptoms are similar to those of Covid-19, surge capacity could be reached very quickly.
Here’s how some hospitals are preparing, according to a CNBC article:
- San Diego-based Scripps Health is consolidating medical supplies such as masks, gloves, and gowns and backups have been ordered. (Expect that orders to healthcare facilities will be shipped long before ours.) Health-care workers are being taught how to safely reuse N95 respirator masks, in the event of shortages
- Northside Hospital in Atlanta is watching patients for clinical symptoms and potential exposure to the virus. If they suspect a patent could have been exposed, they will be given a mask and be immediately moved to an airborne isolation room, where they will remain while in the hospital. “Infection control and prevention measures are always a priority,” spokeswoman Katherine Watson said.
- NYU Langone Health in New York City has classified Covid-19 as a “Level 1 Priority.” A level 2 or 3 scenario would be when “there is transmission in the city and it begins to impact hospital operations. The health-care system has implemented a conservation plan and medical supplies, especially respirator masks, are only given to staff as needed.”
Cat Ellis, the author of The Wuhan Coronavirus Survival Manual, warns that hospitals could reach surge capacity very quickly and that it will impact more than people with potential cases of Coronavirus.
The latest data I could find for how many hospital beds are available in the United States is for 2018 from the American Hospital Association. They put the total number of hospital beds in 2018 at 924,107. This is similar to the data from Stastisca.com, and it confirms that there was still a downward trend in the number of available hospital beds in 2018.
Assuming the downward trend has continued since 2018, we have less than 924 thousand available beds for every sick person from all causes in the United States. We are facing the potential worst-case scenario of 2,697,300 hospitalizations for Wuhan coronavirus alone.
This would raise the death toll from all causes as hospitals reach surge capacity. Surge capacity occurs when there is a sudden influx of patients that a hospital becomes overwhelmed and cannot treat any additional sick people.
In this situation, there are no more beds, and there is not enough hospital staff to treat any more patients.
Often, during a pandemic, it is not the pandemic illness itself that will kill a person. During the 2014 Ebola pandemic, it was common for people to die of some other health problem, and not Ebola, simply because doctors and nurses were too afraid to come to work. In other places, health care workers also became sick and unable to care for patients, as they were now patients themselves.
Imagine going into labor in the middle of a pandemic crisis. While homebirth attended by a skilled midwife has consistently proven to be safe and have better outcomes than hospital births, things can and still do go wrong. What if that were to happen during a pandemic with no beds available? What if you or a loved one experienced a heart attack or stroke? What if you were in a car accident or injured in a mob trying to get the last supplies off a grocery store shelf and needed emergency room care? (source)
Being prepared to treat minor issues at home is very important when hospitals are overflowing with people who may or may not have a potentially deadly illness.
The US Military is preparing as well.
An executive order was issued by the Joint Staff and approved by Defense Secretary Mark Esper to officially initiate pandemic plans, the Military Times reports. On Feb. 1, U.S. Northern Command was directed the Joint Staff “to commence prudent planning in their assigned role synchronizing the department’s plans for pandemic flu and disease.”
However, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Mike Hatfield says that in no way “does the planning indicate a greater likelihood of an event developing. As military professionals, planning for a range of contingencies is something we owe the American people.”
But in other military news, the Department of Defense has announced that eleven military bases near major airports across the country have set up quarantine camps for possible coronavirus patients. Before you panic and scream “FEMA CAMPS – THEY’RE ROUNDING US UP!” relax. These quarantine areas, at this point, are meant to house only 20 patients.
The DOD installations and the airports they could support as tertiary backups are:
- JB Pearl Harbor-Hickam, HI (HNL)
- Great Lakes Training Center Navy Base, IL (ORD)
- Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base, TX (DFW)
- March ARB, CA (LAX)
- Travis AFB, CA (SFO)
- Dobbins ARB, GA (ATL)
- Fort Hamilton, NY (JFK)
- Naval Base Kitsap, WA (SEA)
- Joint Base Anacostia, DC (IAD)
- Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, NJ (EWR)
- Fort Custer Training Center (DTW)
Under the request, DOD support at each location will be limited to providing housing support for up to 20 people as they undergo a period of quarantined observation. The department will also provide office space for several HHS personnel and their equipment through February 22, 2020. (source)
Of course, as the situation evolves, these facilities could always be expanded. There are already DoD quarantine facilities for up to a thousand patients.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Saturday approved a request from the Department of Health and Human Services for the possible use of military facilities to accommodate 1,000 people who may have to be quarantined upon arrival from overseas due to a new virus.
A Defense Department statement said HHS officials requested the use of several facilities capable of housing at least 250 people in individual rooms through Feb. 29. HHS would be responsible for all care, transportation and security of the evacuees, according to the statement. (source)
The locations for these quarantine facilities are the 168th Regiment, Regional Training Institute, Fort Carson, Colorado; Travis Air Force Base, California; Lackland Air Force Base, Texas; Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California. These bases are where recently evacuated from Wuhan and from the ill-fated Diamond Princess cruise ship are waiting out their quarantines.
What does it all mean?
First of all, it doesn’t mean that you should panic. Let’s get that out of the way first. Panic, as Selco writes, does not lead to good decision-making. You can be aware of what is going on and add it to your arsenal of information to help you make the best choices in the future.
What it does mean is that the US government is taking this outbreak extremely seriously. Since generally, the party line is “everything will be just fine,” recent actions taken publicly should definitely spark some awareness that this could become serious.
Preparing for the potential of a Covid-19 pandemic is strongly advisable. (Learn more here.) You have to keep in mind all the other things that could go wrong during a long-term siege of illness. The panic of other people; the fall of systems like utilities, police, fire, and hospitals; and shortages of supplies are all things you should take into account.
Personally, I’m glad they’re taking it seriously because the handling of the Ebola threat was a near-disaster.
It’s impossible to say whether this virus will be contained before it becomes widespread in the United States and elsewhere, and it’s also very difficult to predict the ramifications if it does. Viruses mutate, different health systems may handle it better than others, and containment efforts in different areas may be more successful than others – or less.
But I’d say that the preparations being undertaken by hospitals across the nation and by our own military are a blinking neon sign that we’d be foolish to ignore.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 20:05 - Wall Street Sets Up Scapegoat For Next Market Crash: 'Free Trades' Enticing Retail To Panic-Buy Stocks
Wall Street Sets Up Scapegoat For Next Market Crash: ‘Free Trades’ Enticing Retail To Panic-Buy Stocks
Bloomberg’s narrative this morning of why stocks have been racing higher isn’t because central banks are pushing global yields into negative territory thus providing lift for growth stocks, or the dozens of rate cuts in the last year, or the Federal Reserve’s ‘Not QE’ leading to an abundance of liquidity, or record stock buybacks, but as the mainstream financial press states: “Small investors are back. In a big way.”
So apparently broke American consumers with insurmountable debts, including auto loans, credit card debt, and student loans, along with virtually no savings, are responsible for the recent rip roar in Tesla, Virgin Galactic, and Apple.
Sure… But let’s hear out what Bloomberg has to say. They mention since Ameritrade Holding Corp. offered free trading in October, trading volume from mom and pop brokerage accounts soared.
Ameritrade wasn’t the only one canceling trading fees, and this was seen industry-wide, an attempt by Wall Street to sucker in retail into a spectacular blow-off top that, as we explained above, has been produced by the Federal Reserve.
“When you take a bull market and juice it with zero commission trading, we can expect it to generate interest among retail accounts. That, it did,” said Jason Goepfert, president of Sundial. “Retail traders have become manic.”
Since the start of October, when E*Trade, TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab slashed trading fees to zero, the S&P500 has soared 13%, and the Nasdaq 100 jumped 24%.
Bloomberg fails to mention, and why would they, that rapid growth in the Fed’s balance sheet exploded during the same time. So the perfect narrative to cover up the Fed’s massive money printing to lift stocks, we mentioned here: “One Bank Finally Explains How The Fed’s Balance Sheet Expansion Pushes Stocks Higher” – is to blame retail speculation for the next blow-off top in the stock market.
Enticed by President Trump’s stock market pumping tweets and soaring stock prices, Matt Hermansen, 23, who is a blue-collar worker employed at a concrete company in Oakland, California, said zero trading fees had made him an avid trader.
“I’ll invest smaller amounts. Before I never really invested anything less than $1,000, $500 minimum,” he told Bloomberg in a phone interview. “Now, if I have enough to buy an extra share, I’ll do it. I’ll do like $300.”
TD Ameritrade’s interim president and CEO Steve Boyle said there were 38 days where the number of trades topped 1 million in 4Q, up from 23 days in all of 2019.
It’s “a new world in discount brokerage where price no longer clouds the comparison for trades,” Boyle said last month. TD’s monthly volume had already risen 40% from a year ago, averaging 1.4 million trades per day.
Randy Frederick, a vice president of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab, said increased trading by retail accounts represents confidence in the bull market.
“It’s partially driven by free commissions, but I don’t think it’s just that, because not everyone is offering free commissions,” Frederick said. “The fact that we have been in a bull market for a long time, people are just optimistic. Things are going up and they continue to go up.”
But again, there are no mentions of the Fed-induced rally – just more white-collar Wall Street execs indicating that it’s retail driving the bull market – not balance sheet expansion and stock buybacks.
And hiding at the bottom of the Bloomberg article, a quote via Peter Cecchini, chief global market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald LP, who says retail investors flooding the market is “creating flashbacks to the internet frenzy in the late 1990s.”
“There’s sometimes no fundamental reason for it. It just is based on perception — a perception based on narratives that run only an inch deep,” he said in note. “Let’s see how much longer it persists. This kind of activity often unwinds much faster than the wind up.”
The chart below illustrates the irrational exubernace in retail traders, betting on a one way market. Though this trend never ends well.
And it’s the aggressive money printing via the Fed, which is the missing link and why many on Wall Street can’t comprehend the latest melt-up in stocks. Nevertheless, the narrative of retail fueling the stock market has already begun, so when the bubble does pop, the Fed and Wall Street can scapegoat retail traders. Funny how things work.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 19:45 - Woke Irrationality Is Undermining Civilization
Woke Irrationality Is Undermining Civilization
Authored by Andrew Fillat and Henry Miller via HumanEvents.com,
The Seattle School Board recently deemed inequality – too few minorities – in their gifted children program to be more important than nurturing the abilities of these intellectually talented kids. They propose to consign these high achievers to classes that will fail to challenge or engross them, and potentially show them the futility of achievement.
“What are they thinking?” we wonder. Presumably, this school board is not comprised of stupid, corrupt, or ill-intentioned people. But what could motivate this kind of policy change?
Of course, people have a right to be ignorant and to make bad decisions. Just as we can choose to damage our health by overeating, smoking cigarettes, and neglecting to take prescribed medications, we can also choose to remain uninformed on policy issues. Sometimes, it might even make sense to do so.
According to economists, “rational ignorance” comes into play when the “cost” (usually meaning the effort) of gaining enough understanding of an issue to be able to make an informed decision relating to it outweighs the benefit that one could reasonably expect from doing so. For example, many who are preoccupied with family, school, work, and mortgages may not consider it worthwhile to sift through a mass of arcane data to understand, say, the risks and benefits of nuclear power, plasticizers in children’s toys, or genetically engineered crops.
A quarter century ago, the cosmologist Carl Sagan expressed concern about the trend toward a society in which, “clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline … we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.”
More recently, British polymath Dick Taverne warned that, “in the practice of medicine, popular approaches to farming and food, policies to reduce hunger and disease, and many other practical issues, there is an undercurrent of irrationality that threatens science-dependent progress, and even the civilized basis of our democracy.”
In everyday life, public policy, and even in the decisions made by elite universities, we are seeing such dire predictions validated.
Climate change protesters.
MISSING THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
A variation on these ponderous themes is the kind of thing we recently encountered in an article published by Stanford University’s news service that seems a perfect example of largely symbolic idealism: “simple, but meaningful steps [people on campus] can take to reduce their environmental footprint.” Those steps consist of actions like converting lights to LEDs, updating aerators to save water, and reducing the use of disposable packaging and utensils.
Those actions are aimed at addressing climate change at the micro level, and there’s nothing wrong with them, to be sure. Certainly, small contributions can make a difference if they’re aggregated across a large population. But at Stanford, they seem to be missing the forest for the trees. At the same time the university encourages those baby steps, it embraces and encourages organic farming, which is wasteful of water and arable land. The university’s organic gardens prohibit the cultivation of plants crafted with modern genetic engineering technologies (including a groundbreaking one that was co-invented by a Stanford professor), and, incredibly, invited Vandana Shiva, an aggressively anti-science and anti-technology activist, to lecture to its students. Her rejection of modern agricultural technologies and encouragement of primitive farming methods in poor countries leads to low yields, vulnerability to pests and diseases, under-nutrition, and diminished longevity.
The dissonance between Stanford’s ostensible priorities – preeminence in science and technological innovation, and environmental stewardship – and its actions is a prime example of the schizophrenia of much of America’s liberal intelligentsia.
Too often, even when small actions make sense, the attempts to generalize and expand the good intentions to a larger scale go wildly awry. We could go on and on about the wrong-headed, proposed remedies for climate change, but consider the following examples:
-
The U.S. has only around 2-3% (and dropping) of the world’s coal generating capacity. Disrupting the coal industry by governmental fiat makes little sense because it is already shrinking from free market forces like the availability of cheap natural gas. Even if every plant were to close tomorrow, there would be no discernible impact on climate change (Note: Japan, on the other hand, is planning to build 22 new, coal-fired power plants).
-
Speaking of natural gas, why would we want to block pipelines, exploration, and the use of a resource that makes our country energy independent and reduces carbon emissions? Emissions began to decline significantly in 2005, coincident with the shale gas revolution, which ended our dependence on foreign suppliers of energy.
-
Wind power is no salvation. The cost and pollution involved in building the monster wind turbines offset any real benefit (in terms of dollars and environmental effects) many years into the future—if ever. And that doesn’t include the negative effects of building the massive batteries needed to make this form of power compatible with the realities of demand and distribution.
-
Nuclear power continues to be largely ignored, although it is the only purely manmade form of zero-emissions energy.
The broader point is that, echoing Professor Sagan and Lord Taverne, we are increasingly sacrificing common sense and rationality to a kind of mindless idealism.
Climate change protesters.
THE LIMITS OF QUIXOTIC THINKING
The most likely explanation for the policy shift the Seattle School Board is considering is that they, too, have capitulated to idealism and have been blinded by identity politics into believing that all people are, literally, created equal—not just in the eyes of the law, but in innate characteristics including intelligence. According to this view, differentiating people by accomplishments is hurtful if the outcome does not precisely mirror the racial, gender, ethnic, and cultural dimensions through which everyone can be categorized. Any underrepresented cohort in these political categorization schemes is, by default, considered to be victimized, and the system must, ipso facto, be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.
But if this is a valid viewpoint, we would ask, “Why isn’t everybody athletically talented enough to play professional sports if they choose?” and, “Why can’t everybody become a coloratura soprano or a published poet?”
Those questions are fundamentally no different than, “Why can’t everybody solve complex math and engineering problems like the smartest kids at M.I.T.?”
The ideal of perfect equality fails in the real world, so why distort policy to try to achieve the impossible?
This situation has been a long time coming. It began when parents somehow acquired the notion that disappointment or hurt feelings was something their kids should, and could, be entirely spared. But that fails to distinguish between learning opportunities, where disappointment is constructive – every child must at some point learn that he can’t always win the spelling bee or get all A’s – and the kind of damage to self-esteem that might justify protection.
This trend has led to “participation trophies,” safe spaces, crying booths, protection from micro-aggressions and “trigger words,” and, more recently, the “right” not to be made to feel uncomfortable. British writer and TV personality Piers Morgan has called it the “snowflake and victimhood culture.”
This new entitlement is a major contributor to the adoption of feelings-based policies that reject the need to seek rational validation. Fact-based debate no longer seems necessary, if passion and good intentions suffice. Unwelcome facts can be ignored, repudiated, or “cancelled,” if social media condemns them.
Entitlement is everywhere. Identity is everything. Measures of merit are no longer a crucial factor for judging people’s status. Virtuous ideas and virtue-signaling are sacrosanct, regardless of their grounding in reality.
Although individuals are entitled to believe in horoscopes, trust in crystals to bring good luck, or buy into quack medical cures, such irrationality becomes a serious threat to society when it is allowed to influence public policy. For that reason, we need to choose political leaders who understand the limits of quixotic thinking, or we will continue to confront financial albatrosses like the Green New Deal and California High Speed Rail Consortium (aka the Train to Nowhere). If we tolerate the dominance of ideological purity and good intentions over reason, perils lie ahead.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 19:25 -
- "They're Traumatized": Governments Ignore Plight Of Foreign Students Trapped In Wuhan
“They’re Traumatized”: Governments Ignore Plight Of Foreign Students Trapped In Wuhan
Beijing wasn’t thrilled last month when the US, UK, Japan, South Korea and a bevy of other developed nations demanded they be allowed to evacuate their citizens from virus-stricken Wuhan, instead of leaving them to survive or die of the plague or starvation as essentials run low in a city of 11 million on lockdown.
It accused foreign governments of being alarmist and acting hysterical. Interestingly, many countries, mostly in Africa, that had large numbers of students and others either studying or working in the city, opted not to pursue to evacuation route, pledging to find some other way to meet their peoples’ needs.
That was a month ago.
Now, many young African students are exasperated by their governments, which they claim have basically abandoned them either to avoid straining ties with Beijing, or simply because they can’t risk introducing the virus to their impoverished and deeply unprepared health-care systems.
According to Reuters, one Ugandan student in Wuhan is living in a crowded dorm. With no money, she survives on one meal a day. The student’s mother, who wakes up at 3 am Uganda time every day to talk with her daughter on WeChat, told Reuters that the young students have been “traumatized” by the experience.
“They are traumatised,” said Namusisi, who wakes up at 3 a.m. every day to talk to her daughters over the Chinese messaging service WeChat. “They ask, has Uganda given up on us?”
Not a single sub-Saharan country has flown their citizens home from Wuhan. And neither has Pakistan, which relies on China’s support in its eternal struggle against India, especially as tensions between the two have run especially high in recent years.
According to DW, there are around 1,300 Pakistani students currently in Hubei province, 800 of them in Wuhan, the province’s capital, and epicenter of the virus, which has been under lockdown for weeks. Their families gathered in Islamabad on Thursday to demand the government do something to rescue their children.
A group of Pakistani students studying in Beijing were allowed to leave the country earlier this month. But for the students in Wuhan, the government is only in intermittent contact with them and their families. The consensus is that the students will be left to wait out the outbreak.
Not only are the students living in “constant fear” of catching the virus, they are also struggling against food shortages.
Some of the students told DW that they are living under the constant fear of catching the virus. Asif Sajjad, a student at Wuhan University, said that many of them are suffering from psychological stress.
“We have been confined to our rooms for weeks. If anyone coughs or sneezes, it sends a shiver down our spines to think the person may have caught the virus,” he said.
“There are food shortages, and even if we go out on the balcony, we have to cover our face. We want to know why the government does not bring us back.”
The Chinese government says it has taken adequate measures to protect foreign students in Wuhan and elsewhere in Hubei.
But one student complained that he didn’t even have the “recommended” facemasks mandated by health officials in China amid a widespread shortage in China. He claimed the government could have at least helped him and students like him obtain supplies.
“In addition to that we have not been provided with the recommended masks, but only the simple masks,” he said, adding that the proximity of hospitals to the campus was also a concern.
“It seems the Pakistani government is not concerned about us at all. Even poor countries like the Maldives have taken out their students but we are still stuck here living in constant fear.”
After telling Reuters that she had gone to the Ugandan parliament seeking help, but come up empty handed, the Ugandan mother we mentioned above recounted the story about how she told her daughters to run and go shopping as soon as they told her about the quarantine.
When Margaret Ntale Namusisi’s three daughters called her in Uganda to say they were being quarantined at their university in Wuhan, China, because of the coronavirus outbreak, she sent money and told them: “Run very fast and do shopping.”
At this point, there appears to be little their families can do. Their governments have kowtowed to Beijing, which has refused to publicly acknowledge that it isn’t winning the fight against the virus, and that the outbreak should be cleared up by springtime, as President Trump once said.
But pretty soon, the biggest concern for these students won’t just be evading the virus. It’ll be about survival as food stocks run out and millions begin to starve.
At least, that would be the worst-case scenario…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 19:05 - UK Suspects All Kids Using Chat App Are Hackers, Should Be Reported By Parents
UK Suspects All Kids Using Chat App Are Hackers, Should Be Reported By Parents
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity.
UK urges parents to report their kids to police for using normal technology
Police in the UK are distributing a flyer to teachers in public schools, to be passed on to parents.
The poster warns parents to check their children’s computers for certain technology, as it could be a sign that their child is a hacker.
The flyer names anonymous browser TOR, voice chat service Discord, computer operating system Kali Linux, and Virtual Machines used to run different operating systems on the same computer.
These are all, by the way, perfectly legal. And they are useful for plenty of activities besides hacking.
The poster says Discord is “often used to share hacking tips.” But you’re more likely to find a teen using Discord to chat while playing Fortnite.
Kali Linux is useful for penetration testing used to boost cyber security and protect against hacking threats. It should be encouraged among teens if parents want them to train for the modern economy, and protect themselves against hackers.
And worst of all, the flyer encourages parents to CALL THE POLICE on their own children, for using these perfectly legal computer programs.
Click here for the full story.
* * *
IRS warns Fortnite users to pay tax on their virtual currency
Until last week, the IRS website advised players of the video game Fortnite that their pretend money could face a real tax.
The IRS used the in-game virtual currency V-bucks as an example of a potentially taxable convertible currency.
V-bucks are purchased with real dollars but used only in the game to buy upgrades. They aren’t actually convertible back to dollars.
Now the IRS has clarified that if the money stays in the game, it is not taxable.
But if a video game currency were to leave the game, it triggers a potentially taxable event.
Just like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, the IRS treats all virtual currencies–including video game money– like property.
That means if you make money on the sale of the currency– or if you spend the currency after it has increased in value– that is a capital gain.
Click here for the full story.
* * *
New York Judge orders removal of 20 stories from NYC skyscraper
New York City has a lot of zoning rules, but plenty of exceptions.
For instance, builders can buy the unused zoning rights of adjacent properties.
Say the zoning laws limit a property to 20 floors, but a building is only 15 stories tall. A next-door property could buy the rights to the remaining five floors, and make their own building 25 stories.
One particular project used this loophole aggressively to gain permission to build a 51 story building. They got all the necessary permits from the city for the build.
But activists weren’t happy. They sued the builders over what they called a “gerrymandered” zoning lot. But the builders had permission, so they kept building.
Now the structure of the building is already completed, but a New York Judge just ruled for the activists.
He ordered the city to revoke the building permit, and ordered the builders to REMOVE at least 20 floors from the building.
Click here for the full story.
* * *
5 years and $2 million later, city still hasn’t finished building a bike rack
Falls Church, Virginia planned to spend $600,000 each for covered bike racks at two of the city’s Metro stations.
The 92-bike racks were supposed to be completed in 2015.
Now, five year later, the cost of the bike racks has reached $1.9 million EACH… but they still aren’t finished.
This city spent over $20,000 per bike parking spot, and has nothing to show for it.
But we should totally trust the government with more responsibility and control over our lives.
Click here for the full story.
* * *
NYC’s ‘serial subway robber’ praises the elimination of bail
A new bail reform law in New York prevents judges from requiring bail for most misdemeanors, and some non-violent felonies.
After a suspect is processed, they are released without having to pay anything.
And it’s great to see fewer people being locked in cages for victimless crimes like smoking a plant.
But there is always someone waiting to abuse the system.
Case in point, Charles Barry has been arrested six times since the law went into effect on January 1st. He likes to hang out in the subway and snatch money from a hand, pickpocket, or pose as a subway worker.
Now every time he is arrested, Barry is quickly back on the streets to steal again.
Leaving the courthouse the last time, he praised the new law, yelling to reporters, “Bail reform, it’s lit! You can’t touch me, I can’t be stopped…I take $200, $300 a day of your money… It’s a great thing. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Barry also has a habit of missing court dates, which requiring bail is supposed to prevent.
We’re no strangers to writing about people being arrested for the most trivial reasons. So I’d rather see a few guys like Barry walk free in exchange for countless innocent people spared from sitting in a cell.
But it’s just frustrating that legislators couldn’t be bothered to insert a couple of lines of text into the bill to prevent actual criminals like Charles Barry from taking advantage of much needed reform.
Click here for the full story.
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 18:45 - US Will No Longer Tolerate Russia's "Non-Compliance" Of Open Skies Treaty: Esper
US Will No Longer Tolerate Russia’s “Non-Compliance” Of Open Skies Treaty: Esper
US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has slammed Russia’s longtime “non-compliance” to the Open Skies treaty, months after the Trump administration expressed a desire to nix it along with the recently defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).
Esper told reporters at US Strategic Command on Thursday that the US has yet to finally determine whether it will stay the course with the treaty, but underscored that Washington “can’t continue” to tolerate Russian “noncompliance” with the treaty.
“So far, no formal final decision has been made. In due course we will be getting together to do that, to decide the best path forward for our nation,” Esper said.
‘Open Skies’ flight file image, via the European Council on Foreign Relations. “I take no view one way or the other with regard to arms control in general. They should be in our national interests if we’re going to enter an agreement or continue an agreement. The place where we begin is compliance with what’s happening on those agreements.” Esper continued.
The Trump administration notified NATO in late November that the US is mulling pulling out of the treaty unless Russian non-compliance issues are rectified.
The Americans and Russians have for years quarrelled over specifics, including what reconnaissance cameras and equipment should be allowed, but more importantly Russia’s restriction of US overflights near Kaliningrad and Georgia, as detailed in the following:
U.S. critics of the treaty have raised concerns about Russian compliance with the treaty, citing, in particular, Russia’s refusal to allow observation flights within 500 kilometers of Kaliningrad or within a 10-kilometer corridor along Russia’s border with the Georgian border-conflict regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The United States has reciprocated by restricting flights over the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii and the missile defense interceptor fields in Fort Greely, Alaska.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, via the AP. The post Cold War treaty, ratified in 2002, allows its 34 member states to conduct short-notice, unarmed observation flights to monitor other countries’ military operations in mutual verification of arms-control agreements.
The treaty even allows Russian recon flights over tightly restricted Washington D.C. airspace — in past years Russian Tupolev Tu-154s have even flown at low altitude over such sensitive sites as Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, the US Capitol, the Pentagon, and CIA headquarters in Langley.
A senior administration official previously said of Open Skies, “This is a U.S. position—that we think this treaty is a danger to our national security. We get nothing out of it. Our allies get nothing out of it, and it is our intention to withdraw.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 18:25 - Trump Slams Oscars For Giving Best Picture Award To A Foreign Movie
Trump Slams Oscars For Giving Best Picture Award To A Foreign Movie
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
President Trump went off last night on the Oscars for giving its top prize to a foreign movie.
During a speech to a crowd in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Trump asked why an American film wasn’t given the award.
“By the way, how bad were the Academy Awards this year — did you see?” he asked.
“‘And the winner is a movie from South Korea’ — what the hell was that all about? We got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of it, they give them the best movie of the year? Was it good? I don’t know.”
Trump goes off on the Oscars for giving Best Picture to Parasite because it’s a South Korean movie pic.twitter.com/GUGKdExTbw
— Claudia Koerner (@ClaudiaKoerner) February 21, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The president was referring to Parasite, a South Korean black comedy thriller.
“Let’s get Gone With the Wind — can we get, like, Gone With the Wind back, please?” asked Trump.
The president also said he was never a fan of Brad Pitt, who used his speech at the Oscars to attack Trump over the impeachment process.
Neon, the film company that distributed Parasite, responded to Trump by tweeting, “Understandable, he can’t read,” yet another “Orange man stupid, orange man bad” sick burn that earned nearly 150,000 likes.
Understandable, he can’t read.#Parasite #BestPicture #Bong2020 https://t.co/lNqGJkUrDP
— NEON (@neonrated) February 21, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
As we highlighted yesterday, if you thought Hollywood wasn’t ‘woke’ enough, it’s about to get a whole lot more politically correct.
Major Hollywood studios are set to use a new tool that scans movie & TV scripts and flags up any examples where “diversity” is not portrayed positively or “gender roles” are not adequately represented.
The tool bears some hallmarks to Soviet realism, where every piece of art had to mimic the criteria of a prescribed style in order to “educate citizens on how to be the perfect Soviets” and “limit popular culture to a specific, highly regulated faction of emotional expression that promoted Soviet ideals.”
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 18:05
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