- Total Tyranny: We'll All Be Targeted Under The Government's New Pre-Crime Program
Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under The Government’s New Pre-Crime Program
Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”
– James Bamford
It never fails.
Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again.
In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a “precrime” crime prevention agency.
Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.
Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.
The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism.
Where we run into trouble is when the government gets overzealous and over-ambitious and overreaches.
This is how you turn a nation of citizens into snitches and suspects.
In the blink of an eye, ordinary Americans will find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors.
Of course, it’s an elaborate setup: we’ll all be targets.
In such a suspect society, the burden of proof is reversed so that guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven.
It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate.
Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.
It works the same in any regime.
As Professor Robert Gellately notes in his book Backing Hitler about the police state tactics used in Nazi Germany: “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.”
Here’s the thing as the Germans themselves quickly discovered: you won’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.
In fact, all you will need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious to a neighbor, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.
The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.
Use harmless trigger words like cloud, pork and pirates: The Department of Homeland Security has an expansive list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats. While you’ll definitely send up an alert for using phrases such as dirty bomb, Jihad and Agro terror, you’re just as likely to get flagged for surveillance if you reference the terms SWAT, lockdown, police, cloud, food poisoning, pork, flu, Subway, smart, delays, cancelled, la familia, pirates, hurricane, forest fire, storm, flood, help, ice, snow, worm, warning or social media.
Use a cell phone: Simply by using a cell phone, you make yourself an easy target for government agents—working closely with corporations—who can listen in on your phone calls, read your text messages and emails, and track your movements based on the data transferred from, received by, and stored in your cell phone. Mention any of the so-called “trigger” words in a conversation or text message, and you’ll get flagged for sure.
Drive a car: Unless you’ve got an old junkyard heap without any of the gadgets and gizmos that are so attractive to today’s car buyers (GPS, satellite radio, electrical everything, smart systems, etc.), driving a car today is like wearing a homing device: you’ll be tracked from the moment you open that car door thanks to black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems that can monitor your speed, direction, location, the number of miles traveled, and even your seatbelt use. Once you add satellites, GPS devices, license plate readers, and real-time traffic cameras to the mix, there’s nowhere you can go on our nation’s highways and byways that you can’t be followed. By the time you add self-driving cars into the futuristic mix, equipped with computers that know where you want to go before you do, privacy and autonomy will be little more than distant mirages in your rearview mirror.
Attend a political rally: Enacted in the wake of 9/11, the Patriot Act redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience were considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.
Express yourself on social media: The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. A decorated Marine, 26-year-old Brandon Raub was targeted by the Secret Service because of his Facebook posts, interrogated by government agents about his views on government corruption, arrested with no warning, labeled mentally ill for subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views about the government, detained against his will in a psych ward for having “dangerous” opinions, and isolated from his family, friends and attorneys.
Serve in the military: Operation Vigilant Eagle, the brainchild of the Dept. of Homeland Security, calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.” Police agencies are also using Beware, an “early warning” computer system that tips them off to a potential suspect’s inclination to be a troublemaker and assigns individuals a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—based on a variety of factors including one’s criminal records, military background, medical history and social media surveillance.
Disagree with a law enforcement official: A growing number of government programs are aimed at identifying, monitoring and locking up anyone considered potentially “dangerous” or mentally ill (according to government standards, of course). For instance, a homeless man in New York City who reportedly had a history of violence but no signs of mental illness was forcibly detained in a psych ward for a week after arguing with shelter police. Despite the fact that doctors cited no medical reason to commit him, the man was locked up in accordance with a $22 million program that monitors mentally ill people considered “potentially” violent. According to the Associated Press, “A judge finally ordered his release, ruling that the man’s commitment violated his civil rights and that bureaucrats had meddled in his medical treatment.”
Call in sick to work: In Virginia, a so-called police “welfare check” instigated by a 58-year-old man’s employer after he called in sick resulted in a two-hour, SWAT team-style raid on the man’s truck and a 72-hour mental health hold. During the standoff, a heavily armed police tactical team confronted Benjamin Burruss as he was leaving an area motel, surrounded his truck, deployed a “stinger” device behind the rear tires, launched a flash grenade, smashed the side window in order to drag him from the truck, handcuffed and searched him, and transported him to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and mental health hold. All of this was done despite the fact that police acknowledged they had no legal basis nor probable cause for detaining Burruss, given that he had not threatened to harm anyone and was not mentally ill.
Limp or stutter: As a result of a nationwide push to certify a broad spectrum of government officials in mental health first-aid training (a 12-hour course comprised of PowerPoint presentations, videos, discussions, role playing and other interactive activities), more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported for having mental health issues by non-medical personnel. Mind you, once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, or a dissident watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there. For instance, one 37-year-old disabled man was arrested, diagnosed by police and an unlicensed mental health screener as having “mental health issues,” apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait, and subsequently locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will and with no access to family and friends. A subsequent hearing found that Gordon Goines, who suffers from a neurological condition similar to multiple sclerosis, has no mental illness and should not have been confined.
Appear confused or nervous, fidget, whistle or smell bad: According to the Transportation Security Administration’s 92-point secret behavior watch list for spotting terrorists, these are among some of the telling signs of suspicious behavior: fidgeting, whistling, bad body odor, yawning, clearing your throat, having a pale face from recently shaving your beard, covering your mouth with your hand when speaking and blinking your eyes fast. You can also be pulled aside for interrogation if you “have ‘unusual items,’ like almanacs and ‘numerous prepaid calling cards or cell phones.’” One critic of the program accurately referred to the program as a “license to harass.”
Allow yourself to be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun, such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane, for instance: No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. John Crawford was shot by police in an Ohio Wal-Mart for holding an air rifle sold in the store that he may have intended to buy. Thirteen-year-old Andy Lopez Cruz was shot 7 times in 10 seconds by a California police officer who mistook the boy’s toy gun for an assault rifle. Christopher Roupe, 17, was shot and killed after opening the door to a police officer. The officer, mistaking the Wii remote control in Roupe’s hand for a gun, shot him in the chest. Another police officer repeatedly shot 70-year-old Bobby Canipe during a traffic stop. The cop saw the man reaching for his cane and, believing the cane to be a rifle, opened fire.
Stare at a police officer: Miami-Dade police slammed the 14-year-old Tremaine McMillian to the ground, putting him in a chokehold and handcuffing him after he allegedly gave them “dehumanizing stares” and walked away from them, which the officers found unacceptable.
Appear to be pro-gun, pro-freedom or anti-government: You might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you: express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers); exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership); read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books; show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies); fear an economic collapse; buy gold and barter items; subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation; voice fears about Big Brother or big government; expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties; or believe in a New World Order conspiracy. This is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced or declared unfit for society.
Attend a public school: Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.” From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, 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. Additionally, as part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the FBI—the nation’s de facto secret police force—has been recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist” as part of its “Don’t Be a Puppet” campaign.
Speak truth to power: Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon who were being singled out for daring to speak truth to power. These men and others like them had their phone calls monitored and data files collected on their activities and associations. For a little while, at least, they became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.
All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/22/2021 – 00:00 - Watch Postmates Robot In The Wild Of Downtown Los Angeles
Watch Postmates Robot In The Wild Of Downtown Los Angeles
A new video that surfaced on TikTok showed what appeared to be a Postmates Serve delivery robot cruising down the sidewalk of Los Angeles, dodging a homeless man laying on the pathway, and continued on its route to deliver food to a customer.
If you had to ask us, this video is a glimpse of the dystopic future in liberal-run cities where automation displaces low-skilled workers and the homeless population continues to increase.
@supersnacksupreme ##postmates ##postmatesrobot ##delivery ##melrose ##losangeles ##la ##fyp ##foryoupage ##foodiemobbb
https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js
TikTok was awash with comments about the dystopic world ahead:
“This is the future, and it’s looking pretty bleak,” said glassfox.
“This is so dystopian,” Kendall Tichner said.
Another person said, “when are people going to realize they are replacing people’s jobs with robots this is the start.”
Someone else added: “There definitely something wrong with this” video.
This is a taste of the dystopic world ahead where automation displaces millions of humans. Some of them will wind up homeless or perhaps be given generous UBI checks as technological unemployment is set to soar by the end of this decade.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 23:40 - Caught Red-Handed: CDC Changes Test Thresholds To Virtually Eliminate New COVID Cases Among Vaxx'd
Caught Red-Handed: CDC Changes Test Thresholds To Virtually Eliminate New COVID Cases Among Vaxx’d
Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,
New policies will artificially deflate “breakthrough infections” in the vaccinated, while the old rules continue to inflate case numbers in the unvaccinated.
The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) is altering its practices of data logging and testing for “Covid19” in order to make it seem the experimental gene-therapy “vaccines” are effective at preventing the alleged disease.
They made no secret of this, announcing the policy changes on their website in late April/early May, (though naturally without admitting the fairly obvious motivation behind the change).
The trick is in their reporting of what they call “breakthrough infections” – that is people who are fully “vaccinated” against Sars-Cov-2 infection, but get infected anyway.
Essentially, Covid19 has long been shown – to those willing to pay attention – to be an entirely created pandemic narrative built on two key factors:
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False-positive tests. The unreliable PCR test can be manipulated into reporting a high number of false-positives by altering the cycle threshold (CT value)
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Inflated Case-count. The incredibly broad definition of “Covid case”, used all over the world, lists anyone who receives a positive test as a “Covid19 case”, even if they never experienced any symptoms.
Without these two policies, there would never have been an appreciable pandemic at all, and now the CDC has enacted two policy changes which means they no longer apply to vaccinated people.
Firstly, they are lowering their CT value when testing samples from suspected “breakthrough infections”.
From the CDC’s instructions for state health authorities on handling “possible breakthrough infections” (uploaded to their website in late April):
For cases with a known RT-PCR cycle threshold (Ct) value, submit only specimens with Ct value ≤28 to CDC for sequencing. (Sequencing is not feasible with higher Ct values.)
Throughout the pandemic, CT values in excess of 35 have been the norm, with labs around the world going into the 40s.
Essentially labs were running as many cycles as necessary to achieve a positive result, despite experts warning that this was pointless (even Fauci himself said anything over 35 cycles is meaningless).
But NOW, and only for fully vaccinated people, the CDC will only accept samples achieved from 28 cycles or fewer. That can only be a deliberate decision in order to decrease the number of “breakthrough infections” being officially recorded.
Secondly, asymptomatic or mild infections will no longer be recorded as “covid cases”.
That’s right. Even if a sample collected at the low CT value of 28 can be sequenced into the virus alleged to cause Covid19, the CDC will no longer be keeping records of breakthrough infections that don’t result in hospitalisation or death.
From their website:
As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause. This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance. Previous case counts, which were last updated on April 26, 2021, are available for reference only and will not be updated moving forward.
Just like that, being asymptomatic – or having only minor symptoms – will no longer count as a “Covid case” but only if you’ve been vaccinated.
The CDC has put new policies in place which effectively created a tiered system of diagnosis. Meaning, from now on, unvaccinated people will find it much easier to be diagnosed with Covid19 than vaccinated people.
Consider…
Person A has not been vaccinated. They test positive for Covid using a PCR test at 40 cycles and, despite having no symptoms, they are officially a “covid case”.
Person B has been vaccinated. They test positive at 28 cycles, and spend six weeks bedridden with a high fever. Because they never went into a hospital and didn’t die they are NOT a Covid case.
Person C, who was also vaccinated, did die. After weeks in hospital with a high fever and respiratory problems. Only their positive PCR test was 29 cycles, so they’re not officially a Covid case either.
The CDC is demonstrating the beauty of having a “disease” that can appear or disappear depending on how you measure it.
To be clear: If these new policies had been the global approach to “Covid” since December 2019, there would never have been a pandemic at all.
If you apply them only to the vaccinated, but keep the old rules for the unvaccinated, the only possible result can be that the official records show “Covid” is much more prevalent among the latter than the former.
This is a policy designed to continuously inflate one number, and systematically minimise the other.
What is that if not an obvious and deliberate act of deception?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 23:20 -
- "Mask Up To Keep It Up" – Study Finds Links COVID To Erectile Dysfunction
“Mask Up To Keep It Up” – Study Finds Links COVID To Erectile Dysfunction
A new study published in The World Journal of Men’s Health says aftereffects of contracting COVID-19 could cause erectile dysfunction in men.
“Our research shows that COVID-19 can cause widespread endothelial dysfunction in organ systems beyond the lungs and kidneys. The underlying endothelial dysfunction that happens because of COVID-19 can enter the endothelial cells and affect many organs, including the penis,” said Ranjith Ramasamy, M.D., associate professor and director of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Reproductive Urology Program.
“In our pilot study, we found that men who previously did not complain of erectile dysfunction developed pretty severe erectile dysfunction after the onset of COVID-19 infection,” Ramasamy continued.
Ramasamy and researchers from UMiami discovered long after recovery, the virus may stay in mens’ penises for months on end. And if that wasn’t scary, researchers further hypothesize that the “widespread blood vessel dysfunction” caused by COVID could contribute to erectile dysfunction.
“The blood vessels themselves malfunction and are not able to provide enough blood to enter the penis for an erection,” Ramasamy said. “We found that the virus affects the blood vessels that supply the penis, causing erectile dysfunction.”
The virus has been associated with damaging other organs, such as the lungs, kidneys, and brain. But now, after collecting penile tissue samples from two men with a history of COVID infections, UMiami researchers believe erectile dysfunction “could be permanent.”
This isn’t the first study that has claimed COVID can cause erectile dysfunction.
In March, researchers from the University of Rome published a study in the medical journal Andrology titled “”Mask up to keep it up”: Preliminary evidence of the association between erectile dysfunction and COVID‐19,” which said those who contracted the virus were 5.6x more likely to have erectile dysfunction.
Ramasamy said more data is needed to understand better how widespread erectile dysfunction is post-COVID infection.
Both studies come as one of the biggest deflationary threats looms over the global economy: US birth rates have fallen to their lowest level in a generation.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 23:00 - Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, And Why It Matters
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters
Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearEnergy.com,
On January 8, 2014, at New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming: nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on manmade global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS) led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science – in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
At one point, Koonin read an extract from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report released the previous year. Computer model-simulated responses to forcings – the term used by climate scientists for changes of energy flows into and out of the climate system, such as changes in solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, and changes in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – “can be scaled up or down.” This scaling included greenhouse gas forcings.
Some forcings in some computer models had to be scaled down to match computer simulations to actual climate observations. But when it came to making centennial projections on which governments rely and drive climate policy, the scaling factors were removed, probably resulting in a 25 to 30 percent over-prediction of the 2100 warming.
The ensuing dialogue between Koonin and Dr. William Collins of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – a lead author of the climate model evaluation chapter in the Fifth Assessment Report – revealed something more troubling and deliberate than holes in scientific knowledge:
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Dr. Koonin: But if the model tells you that you got the response to the forcing wrong by 30 percent, you should use that same 30 percent factor when you project out a century.
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Dr. Collins: Yes. And one of the reasons we are not doing that is we are not using the models as [a] statistical projection tool.
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Dr. Koonin: What are you using them as?
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Dr. Collins: Well, we took exactly the same models that got the forcing wrong and which got sort of the projections wrong up to 2100.
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Dr. Koonin: So, why do we even show centennial-scale projections?
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Dr. Collins: Well, I mean, it is part of the [IPCC] assessment process.
Koonin was uncommonly well-suited to lead the APS climate workshop. He has a deep understanding of computer models, which have become the workhorses of climate science. As a young man, Koonin wrote a paper on computer modeling of nuclear reaction in stars and taught a course on computational physics at Caltech. In the early 1990s, he was involved in a program using satellites to measure the Earth’s albedo – that is, the reflection of incoming solar radiation back into space. As a student at Caltech in the late 1960s, he was taught by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman and absorbed what Koonin calls Feynman’s “absolute intellectual honesty.”
On becoming BP’s chief scientist in 2004, Koonin became part of the wider climate change milieu. Assignments included explaining the physics of man-made global warming to Prince Philip at a dinner in Buckingham Palace. In 2009, Koonin was appointed an under-secretary at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration.
The APS climate debate was the turning point in Koonin’s thinking about climate change and consensus climate science (“The Science”).
“I began by believing that we were in a race to save the planet from climate catastrophe,” Koonin writes in his new book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters.”
“I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed.”
“Unsettled” is an authoritative primer on the science of climate change that lifts the lid on The Science and finds plenty that isn’t as it should be.
“As a scientist,” writes Koonin, “I felt the scientific community was letting the public down by not telling the whole truth plainly.”
Koonin’s aim is to right that wrong.
Koonin’s indictment of The Science starts with its reliance on unreliable computer models. Usefully describing the earth’s climate, writes Koonin, is “one of the most challenging scientific simulation problems.” Models divide the atmosphere into pancake-shaped boxes of around 100km wide and one kilometer deep. But the upward flow of energy from tropical thunder clouds, which is more than thirty times larger than that from human influences, occurs over smaller scales than the programmed boxes. This forces climate modellers to make assumptions about what happens inside those boxes. As one modeller confesses, “it’s a real challenge to model what we don’t understand.”
Inevitably, this leaves considerable scope for modelers’ subjective views and preferences. A key question climate models are meant to solve is estimating the equilibrium climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide (ECS), which aims to tell us by how much temperatures rise from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet in 2020, climate modelers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute admitted to tuning their model by targeting an ECS of about 3° Centigrade. “Talk about cooking the books,” Koonin comments.
The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Self-evidently, computer projections can’t be tested against a future that’s yet to happen, but they can be tested against climates present and past. Climate models can’t even agree on what the current global average temperature is. “One particularly jarring feature is that the simulated average global surface temperature,” Koonin notes, “varies among models by about 3°C, three times greater than the observed value of the twentieth century warming they’re purporting to describe and explain.”
Another embarrassing feature of climate models concerns the earlier of the two twentieth-century warmings from 1910 to 1940, when human influences were much smaller. On average, models give a warming rate of about half of what was actually observed. The failure of the latest models to warm fast enough in those decades suggest that it’s possible, even likely, that internal climate variability is a significant contributor to the warming of recent decades, Koonin suggests. “That the models can’t reproduce the past is a big red flag – it erodes confidence in their projections of future climates.” Neither is it reassuring that for the years after 1960, the latest generation of climate models show a larger spread and greater uncertainty than earlier ones – implying that, far from advancing, The Science has been going backwards. That is not how science is meant to work.
The second part of Koonin’s indictment concerns the distortion, misrepresentation, and mischaracterization of climate data to support a narrative of climate catastrophism based on increasing frequency of extreme weather events. As an example, Koonin takes a “shockingly misleading” claim and associated graph in the United States government’s 2017 Climate Science Special Report that the number of high-temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low-temperature records across the 48 contiguous states. Koonin demonstrates that the sharp uptick in highs over the last two decades is an artifact of a methodology chosen to mislead. After re-running the data, record highs show a clear peak in the 1930s, but there is no significant trend over the 120 years of observations starting in 1895, or even since 1980, when human influences on the climate grew strongly. In contrast, the number of record cold temperatures has declined over more than a century, with the trend accelerating after 1985.
Notes Koonin, “temperature extremes in the contiguous U.S. have become less common and somewhat milder since the late nineteenth century.” Similarly, a key message in the 2014 National Climate Assessment of an upward trend in hurricane frequency and intensity, repeated in the 2017 assessment, is contradicted 728 pages later by a statement buried in an appendix stating that there has been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones “nor has any trend been identified in the number of U.S. land-falling hurricanes.”
That might surprise many politicians.
“Over the past thirty years, the incidence of natural disasters has dramatically increased,” Treasury secretary Janet Yellen falsely asserted last month in a pitch supporting the Biden administration’s infrastructure package. “We are now in a situation where climate change is an existential risk to our future economy and way of life,” she claimed.
The sacrifice of scientific truth in the form of objective empirical data for the sake of a catastrophist climate narrative is plain to see. As Koonin summarizes the case:
“Even as human influences have increased fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.”
Koonin also has sharp words for the policy side of the climate change consensus, which asserts that although climate change is an existential threat, solving it by totally decarbonizing society is straightforward and relatively painless.
“Two decades ago, when I was in the private sector,” Koonin writes, “I learned to say that the goal of stabilizing human influences on the climate was ‘a challenge,’ while in government it was talked about as ‘an opportunity.’ Now back in academia, I can forthrightly call it ‘a practical impossibility.’”
Unlike many scientists and most politicians, Koonin displays a sure grasp of the split between developed and developing nations, for whom decarbonization is a luxury good that they can’t afford. The fissure dates back to the earliest days of the U.N. climate process at the end of the 1980s. Indeed, it’s why developing nations insisted on the U.N. route as opposed to an intergovernmental one that produced the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances.
“The economic betterment of most of humanity in the coming decades will drive energy demand even more strongly than population growth,” Koonin says.
“Who will pay the developing world not to emit? I have been posing that simple question to many people for more than fifteen years and have yet to hear a convincing answer.”
The most unsettling part of “Unsettled” concerns science and the role of scientists.
“Science is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected,” Karl Popper wrote nearly six decades ago.
That condition does not pertain in climate science, where errors are embedded in a political narrative and criticism is suppressed. In a recent essay, the philosopher Matthew B. Crawford observes that the pride of science as a way of generating knowledge – unlike religion – is to be falsifiable. That changes when science is pressed into duty as authority in order to absolve politicians of responsibility for justifying their policy choices (“the science says,” we’re repeatedly told). “Yet what sort of authority would it be that insists its own grasp of reality is merely provisional?” asks Crawford. “For authority to be really authoritative, it must claim an epistemic monopoly of some kind, whether of priestly or scientific knowledge.”
At the outset of “Unsettled,” Feynman’s axiom of absolute intellectual honesty is contrasted with climate scientist Stephen Schneider’s “double ethical bind.” On the one hand, scientists are ethically bound by the scientific method to tell the truth. On the other, they are human beings who want to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change.
“Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest,” Schneider said.
“Being effective” helps explain the pressure on climate scientists to conform to The Science and the emergence of a climate science knowledge monopoly. Its function is, as Crawford puts it, the manufacture of a product – political legitimacy – which, in turn, requires that competing views be delegitimized and driven out of public discourse through enforcement of a “moratorium on the asking of questions.” This sees climate scientist gatekeepers deciding who can and cannot opine on climate science. “Please, save us from retired physicists who think they’re smarter and wiser than everyone in climate science,” tweeted Gavin Schmidt, NASA acting senior climate advisor, about Koonin and his book. “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote,” a chair of a university earth sciences department tells Koonin, “but I don’t dare say that in public.” Another scientist criticizes Koonin for giving ammunition to “the deniers,” and a third writes an op-ed urging New York University to reconsider Koonin’s position there. It goes wider than scientists. Facebook has suppressed a “Wall Street Journal” review of “Unsettled.” Likewise, “Unsettled” remains unreviewed by the “New York Times,” the “Washington Post” (though it carried an op-ed by Marc Thiessen based on an interview with Koonin) and other dailies, which would prefer to treat Koonin’s reasoned climate dissent as though it doesn’t exist.
The moratorium on the asking of questions represents the death of science as understood and described by Popper, a victim of the conflicting requirements of political utility and scientific integrity. Many scientists take this lying down. Koonin won’t. For his forensic skill and making his findings accessible to non-specialists, Koonin has written the most important book on climate science in decades.
* * *
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Green Tyranny and Capitalism, Socialism and ESG.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 22:40 -
- US Hits Russian Entities With More Nord Stream 2 Sanctions After Removing Them For German Side
US Hits Russian Entities With More Nord Stream 2 Sanctions After Removing Them For German Side
In the continuing saga of contradictory US efforts to thwart the Russia to Germany natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, the US Treasury on Friday hit Russia with more sanctions – specifically announcing that three more Russian entities and 13 vessels will come under sanction for their work on the project.
“Among the sanctioned vessels are the Akademik Cherskiy, the Vladislav Strizhov, the Yury Topchev and the Baltiyskiy Issledovatel, along with others,” Treasury announced. “The sanctioned companies are Russia’s Marine Rescue Service, Mortransservice, and the Samara Heat and Energy Property Fund.”
Via Moscow Times/TASS Of course, the bizarre thing about this is that it was only on Tuesday of this week that the Biden administration revealed it would actually remove Trump-era sanctions on Nord Stream 2 AG and CEO Matthias Warnig (considered a personal friend of Putin) – which is the German company overseeing the project.
The removal of the punitive actions took place Wednesday and Axios’ Jonathan Swan wrote of the decision that it “indicates the Biden administration is not willing to compromise its relationship with Germany over this pipeline, and underscores the difficulties President Biden faces in matching actions to rhetoric on a tougher approach to Russia.”
Germany had long rejected Washington’s punitive measures over the project as interference in its domestic affairs, but Wednesday’s removal for the overseer of the project served to drastically east tensions with Berlin over the matter, with German foreign minister Heiko Maas thanking the Biden administration for doing so:
“We understand the decisions that have been taken in Washington as taking into account the really extraordinarily good relationship that have been built with the Biden administration,” Maas said.
Biden was immediately slammed for the act of “capitulation” after long vowing to get “tough” on Russia by Republicans but also Democrat hawks, including in conservative and independent media outlets which pointed out that Trump would have no doubt been accused of being under “Russian influence” had he been the one to relax sanctions.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 22:20 - 14 Cities In LA County Issue No-Confidence Resolutions Against Soros-Backed DA
14 Cities In LA County Issue No-Confidence Resolutions Against Soros-Backed DA
Authored by Vanessa Serna via The Epoch Times,
Fourteen cities in Los Angeles county have issued no-confidence resolutions against District Attorney George Gascon, claiming his reforms went too far.
Diamond Bar’s city council passed a no-confidence motion during its May 18 meeting, with some councilmembers wishing to address Gascon’s perceived leniency to horrific crimes throughout the county.
“Gascon is making it less safe for our residents and businesses,” Diamond Bar Mayor Nancy Lyon told The Epoch Times.
“He’s more concerned about the criminals than the victims. You can’t do special enhancements on things like hate crime, elder abuse, child physical abuse, trauma, [or] human trafficking.”
Lyon added, “Even if they’re 17-and-a-half-year-old and they committed a double murder and tortured people, they can’t be tried as an adult… and he’s no longer going to seek the death penalty in any case.”
The residents’ response to the agenda item was “overwhelming,” Lyson said, adding she has never seen the community more involved. While most residents were in favor of the no confidence vote, a few voiced opposition to it.
One Diamond Bar resident said council should vote against the notion, as Gascon’s sweeping reforms were justifiable.
“The common practice of conditioning freedom solely on whether an arrestee can afford bail is unconstitutional,” the speaker said.
“DA Gascon’s policy encourages the use of diversion programs, which provide treatment rather than prosecution in jailing for many minor offenses.”
The resident continued, “Public expense jails, prisons, and courts are not the best way to manage the root causes of many misdemeanors, we must step up the availability of community support services…We must stop thinking that imprisoning people longer reduces crime or addresses issues that our society fails to address…Depriving people of life and liberty after serving a sentence only keeps them from becoming productive members of society.”
Conversely, some Diamond Bar residents who said they originally voted for Gacon expressed disappointment in the district attorney.
“While I voted for him initially his truth was really a lie and he proved it on his first day in office,” a speaker said.
“[We] did not elect him to destroy our system of justice.”
The City of Manhattan Beach also voted in favor of no confidence for the district attorney on May 18.
“We share the DA’s desire for criminal-justice reform,” Mayor Suzanne Hadley told The Epoch Times.
“Our Concern is that the DA is choosing not to enforce the law—rather than tackle the necessary, difficult, and legislative work of true reform.”
The no confidence votes from 14 cities came less than a year after the district attorney took office last December. Other cities to pass symbolic no confidence resolutions include Covina, Azusa, Beverly Hills, Lancaster, La Mirada, and Whittier, Santa Clarita, Pico Rivera, Redondo Beach, Arcadia, Rosemead, and Santa Fe Springs.
On his first day in office, Gascon signed a special directive that announced policy changes including potential sentence reductions for inmates, a ban on sentence enhancements, and elimination of the death penalty.
Gascon received $2 million in funding for his district attorney campaign from Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, who is known for financing leftist causes.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 22:00 - "Xi Who Must Not Be Named": Ordinary Chinese Are Increasingly Afraid To Talk About Their Leader
“Xi Who Must Not Be Named”: Ordinary Chinese Are Increasingly Afraid To Talk About Their Leader
It’s a dynamic familiar to fans of the Harry Potter franchise: a villain so powerful that ordinary people fear to even mutter his name aloud. In Harry Potter world, characters use phrases like “You Know Who” to reference the series arch-villain, Voldemort. But in China (where Harry Potter is, unsurprisingly, banned), ordinary citizens (even those who genuinely support the CCP) are afraid to utter the name of President Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader since Chairman Mao.
An interesting piece published in the latest issue of the Economist pointed to the dynamic:
Open criticism of the most important man in China is taboo. Last year Ren Zhiqiang, a retired property tycoon and vocal critic of the government, published an essay about a speech by Mr Xi in which Mr Ren said he was not an “emperor” showing off his new clothes but a naked “clown”. Shortly afterwards, Mr Ren was sentenced to 18 years in prison for corruption.
Chinese citizens’ euphemisms for President Xi – which include, most notoriously, comparing the leader to “Winnie the Pooh” – are evolving so fast by necessity that China’s online censors are having trouble keeping up.
Earlier this month, Meituan CEO Wang Xing posted a classic ninth-century poem mocking an ancient Chinese emperor. While Wang insisted the poem was an oblique jab at the company’s competitors, too many people interpreted it as a jab at China’s leadership. Meituan’s stock subsequently slumped, wiping $2.5 billion off Wang’s net worth. The company, China’s largest food-delivery app, has since been caught up in the CCP’s anti-trust crackdown.
Even at pro-Beijing media outlets and private gatherings of pro-government diplomats and executives, people take excessive precautions as soon as discussions veer toward the politically sensitive. In conversation, Chinese citizens use phrases like “you know who,” “big number one” and our “eldest brother” or “big uncle” to reference Xi.
Others insist on turning off their mobile phones when the subject of Chinese politics arises.
Such is the current climate that even those who broadly support the government are sometimes nervous about mentioning Mr Xi’s name. Some employees at a state-run media group have taken to substituting the word “Trump” for Mr Xi in chat groups. At small social gatherings, people frequently stop short of uttering the name, even in the most benign contexts. They use instead phrases such as “you-know-who”, “big number one”, “the eldest brother” or “our big uncle”.
When, at a recent private gathering that included diplomats, executives and bankers, the talk turned to Chinese politics, it was suggested that all switch off their mobile phones. No one thought it likely that government snoops were really listening in and no one had anything particularly controversial to say. But all agreed it was better to be safe.
Electronic eavesdropping isn’t the only tactic employed by China’s censors and secret police. Beijing is once again popularizing a tactic used during theCultural Revolution and Stalin’s Red Terror: encouraging people to snitch on their friends and neighbors.
Electronic eavesdropping is not the only concern. The old-fashioned sort is also encouraged. Last month, the government launched a new system, with a website and hotline, for citizens to snitch on one another for making “harmful” political commentary. This can include “denying the excellent traditional Chinese culture, revolution culture and advanced socialist culture” as well as attacks on political leaders or their policies.
If this trend continues, pretty soon, ordinary Chinese citizens will risk jail time just for mentioning Harry Potter, or Winnie the Pooh, or Xinjiang.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 21:40 - Rochester Mayor Vowed To Take "Illegal Guns Off The Street"; Police Just Found One In Her Home
Rochester Mayor Vowed To Take “Illegal Guns Off The Street”; Police Just Found One In Her Home
By Cam Edwards of BearingArms,
Rochester, New York Mayor Lovely Warren is a typical Democrat politician when it comes to gun control. She’s complained about the number of “illegal guns on the streets” of the city, supported the state’s draconian gun control laws, and even announced a gun “buyback” earlier this week, claiming once again that “getting guns off our streets must be a priority.”
“That’s why I’m glad our police department is partnering with the Attorney General’s Office and our churches to host a gun buy-back event next week. I know Chief Herriott-Sullivan and her team are working with their partners in law enforcement to stop the flow of illegal guns into our city. We must continue working together with our citizens to take these guns off our streets so our residents can feel safe in their neighborhoods and live the lives they deserve.”
Turns out Warren should have been more concerned about illegally possessed guns in her home. On Wednesday, the New York State Police raided the home that Warren shares with her husband Timothy Granison and allegedly discovered him to be in possession of 31 grams of cocaine as well as a firearm, which is a no-no since Granison was convicted of armed robbery 24 years ago.
Lovely Warren, AP Photo/Adrian Kraus, File According to the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, Granison was one of seven people arrested as part of an ongoing drug investigation that’s been going on for months.
New York State Police stopped Granison’s vehicle Wednesday afternoon on Birch Crescent in Rochester and cocaine was found inside his car, said New York State Police Major Barry Chase.
On Wednesday evening, New York State Police conducted a search at the home that Warren and Granison share at 93 Woodman Park.
New York State Police on Wednesday and Thursday executed search warrants at seven locations within city limits, including Mayor Warren’s home. More than two kilos of powder and crack cocaine were recovered, as were three firearms and a semi-automatic rifle and more than $100,000 cash said Doorley.
One unregistered hand gun, a loaded magazine and the semi-automatic rifle were recovered from the mayor’s house, New York State Police Major Barry Chase said. It was not yet clear if the rifle is illegal.
For the moment, the only gun charge that Granison faces is possession of an unregistered firearm, though his felony conviction back in the 1990s makes him ineligible to legally own a firearm, regardless of whether or not it’s registered with the state of New York, as required under the terms of the state’s draconian SAFE Act. During a court hearing on Thursday, Granison pleaded not guilty to the drug and gun charges, and so far his wife has been silent about his arrest and the guns found in the couple’s home.
In the past, however, Warren’s been a vocal supporter of the SAFE Act and other restrictions on legal gun owners in the state, even as she’s sought to cut the Rochester Police Department’s budget amidst a sharp increase in violent crime in the city. Last August, she even lauded the Rochester PD for confiscating hundreds of guns, and vowed to keep up the pressure against those possessing them illegally.
“But we can’t legislate morality,” Warren said. “We can’t… We legislate consequences. So. The thing is. We are focusing on bringing these people do justice that are picking up these weapons but also getting the weapons off the street.
Well, I suppose the good news for Warren is that there are two fewer guns in Rochester today. Too bad for her that they were seized from her own home. I wonder if Warren is still big on ensuring that there are consequences for possessing a gun illegally in the city she oversees, or if she’s suddenly had a change of heart over the past 24 hours.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 21:20 - US Special Forces Seek Amphibious Transport Plane For Pacific Combat
US Special Forces Seek Amphibious Transport Plane For Pacific Combat
The US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) explores options for transforming Lockheed Martin’s C-130 Hercules four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft into an amphibious plane that would support operations in the Indo-Pacific area as great power competition between China continues to gain steam, according to military intelligence website Janes.
USSOCOM revealed the interest in Lockheed’s MC-130J Commando II fitted with floats during a presentation at the virtual Special Operations Forces Industry Conference on Wednesday.
USSOCOM wants the MC-130J Amphibious Capability, or MAC, to operate from water and traditional land-based runways. An artist rendering of the concept plane is shown below.
MAC’s Program Executive Officer, Colonel Ken Kuebler, suggested during the virtual conference that the new plane could “land and take off” from land and sea during the same mission.
USSOCOM’s Fixed Wing Technology Insertion Roadmap, which was illustrated at the event, said a timeline of the plane’s development and when it could operate would be between 2022–25.
Kuebler suggested there was “enough command interest” at USSOCOM to pursue building the MAC.
“There is enough of a focus on peer and near-peer as we look at emerging threats. Is it going to be cost effective? That’s why we have several lines of effort early on and there will be plenty of off-ramp [opportunities] along the way to determine if we move forward,” he said.
USSOCOM is focusing on the great power competition in the Indo-Pacific region against China. The importance of an amphibious transport plane for special forces is imperative if conflict breaks out.
According to the foreign policy and national security website “War On Th Rocks,” the US currently operates zero military seaplanes. Japan and Russia operate a small number of seaplanes, but China has unveiled the largest and most modern operational seaplane, the AG-600.
In a great power competition, one that is underway in the Pacific, the US is in desperate need of seaplanes if conflict breaks out because it currently has none.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 21:00 - Georgia Gov. Urges Educators Not To Teach Critical Race Theory’s ‘Dangerous Ideology’
Georgia Gov. Urges Educators Not To Teach Critical Race Theory’s ‘Dangerous Ideology’
Authored by Isabel Van Brugen via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Thursday wrote a letter to the state Board of Education opposing the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its “dangerous ideology” in public schools.
“This divisive, anti-American agenda has no place in Georgia classrooms,” the Republican governor said in a statement on Twitter.
He urged educators in his letter “to take immediate steps to ensure that Critical Race Theory and its dangerous ideology do not take root in our state standards or curriculum.”
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp holds a news conference in Atlanta, Ga., on Nov. 24, 2020. (Ben Gray/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP) Kemp said that parents, students, administrators, and educators in Georgia have come to him in recent weeks with concerns about the teaching of CRT in state schools.
“Like me, they are alarmed this divisive and anti-American curriculum is gaining favor in Washington D.C. and in some states across the country.”
CRT has gradually proliferated in recent decades through academia, government structures, school systems, and the corporate world. It redefines human history as a struggle between the “oppressors”—white people—and the “oppressed”—everybody else—similar to Marxism’s reduction of history to a struggle between the “bourgeois” and the “proletariat.” It labels institutions that emerged in majority-white societies as racist and “white supremacist.”
Like Marxism, CRT advocates for the destruction of institutions, such as the Western justice system, free-market economy, and orthodox religions, while demanding that they be replaced with institutions compliant with the theory’s ideology.
Proponents of CRT have argued that the theory is merely “demonstrating how pervasive systemic racism truly is.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in March denounced critical race theory as hateful, while Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire, and West Virginia have said that they aim to ban the teaching of critical race theory in schools, workplaces, and government agencies.
Earlier this month, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law a bill mandating the teaching of CRT in schools, while Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill banning its teaching in the state’s public and charter schools.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education has proposed a grant priority that seeks to promote controversial racial concepts in the classroom. The proposal, known as the “Proposed Priorities: American History and Civics Education,” would incentivize schools to teach the quasi-Marxist critical race theory to its students.
One of the priorities encourages schools to “incorporate culturally and linguistically responsive” teaching approaches that would contribute toward what the department calls an “identity-safe” learning environment.
Referring to the proposal, Kemp said in his letter that it is “ridiculous” that the Biden administration is considering using taxpayer funds to push a “blatantly partisan agenda” in Georgia classrooms.
The state must instead focus on its goal of providing the highest quality education to every child in Georgia “without partisan bias or political influence.”
“Education in Georgia should reflect our fundamental values as a state and nation—freedom, equality, and the God-given potential of each individual,” the governor wrote.
The State Board of Education didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.
Richard Woods, Georgia’s elected Republican state superintendent, said in a May 11 Facebook post for his campaign that the Georgia Department of Education has no current or proposed standards that include “CRT concepts.”
“We will not be adopting any CRT standards nor applying for or accept any funding that requires the adoption of these concepts by our state, schools, or classrooms. We will not provide trainings that seek to promote these teachings to educators and support staff,” he said.
Petr Svab contributed to this report.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 20:40 - Police Recruiting Plummets Ahead Of Violent Summer
Police Recruiting Plummets Ahead Of Violent Summer
Police departments across the country fail to attract new recruits after a year of social justice warriors and liberal-run city councils defunding police and the leftist media throwing the men and women in blue under the bus.
Recruiting deficits come ahead of what is expected to be another violent summer. Reduced funding and a hard time recruiting potential officers could cause overtime or burnout among law enforcement agencies, Axios reported Wednesday.
Demonstrations demand police reform last year crushed departments’ recruitment efforts leading to widespread pressure. The recruitment deficit could send some law enforcement agencies into crisis this summer:
“The warmer months always usually give us more problems when it comes to violence,” NYPD Chief of Department Rodney Harrison said, the WSJ reported.
Axios noted officer applicants at several law enforcement agencies across the country had seen drastic drops compared to last year.
For instance, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department told Axios that applications plunged 26% during the first four months of 2021 compared to the same period last year.
In Des Moines, Iowa, the metro’s police department received 300 applicants last month for its newest round of recruits, approximately 50% fewer than a year ago.
The Fayetteville Police Department in Northwest Arkansas hardly received any applicants this year.
There’s also the issue of officer exodus. In Minneapolis, the metro area where the police-killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide social unrest in spring 2020, has seen more than 105 officers leave, more than twice as normal.
Over the past year and a half, about 20% of Seattle cops have quit. The revelation comes after police in the metro area have been battling anti-police protesters from BLM and Antifa, and a city council that has neutered cops’ ability to use crowd control devices.
In Denver, where police funds are running short, the city could not meet its goal in hiring the required quota of yearly officers it needed.
A tweet by the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police recently disclosed the city is 500 cops short of what is needed to keep the city safe.
The bottom line is the systematic dismantling and shaming of police across the country ahead of what is expected to be a summer of violence continues to transform the county into a violent mess.
So it comes as no surprise that gun and ammo sales are through the roof and urban flight is at a record.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 20:20 - Two Ways To Push Back Against The Cultural Revolution
Two Ways To Push Back Against The Cultural Revolution
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Fourteen year old Gao Yuan was attending a boarding school in China when the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966. And that’s when his life changed forever.
Even though the communists had won the Chinese Civil War and been in total power since 1945, Chairman Mao still believed that there was too much capitalist influence in China.
So he decided to completely rewrite literature, history, and the entire education system.
School instruction switched from teaching math and science, to activism.
Students like Gao Yuan were encouraged to find and punish “revisionists” who sought to undermine the revolution’s progress, including their own parents and teachers.
One teacher fell under suspicion because, even though he routinely spoke of China’s natural beauty, he didn’t ever praise Chairman Mao.
Other teachers were denounced for wearing western clothes or engaging in borgeois activities— like drinking wine or buying an expensive radio.
Gao Yuan liked his teachers and hesitated to participate. But he was even more afraid of being labeled an evil revisionist himself. So he joined the mob and began accusing teachers and parents.
The assistant headmaster committed suicide when accused of revisionism. Gao Yuan found his body, and even though he had liked him, Gao assumed the suicide proved the man must have been guilty of thought crime.
Another teacher died under mysterious circumstances. Soon the rest of the faculty fled, and the school fell under the control of the students.
That’s when the situation really turned bizarre.
Factions quickly formed like rival gangs, and the students turned against one other. Each group accused the other of failure to live up to the full revolutionary spirit, finding micro-transgressions everywhere.
Students were killed— one suffocated after have had a sock stuffed in his mouth. Another was tortured to death. One girl committed suicide rather than be captured by a rival student group. Several children died in an accidental explosion while attempting to make bombs.
This was NOT an isolated incident; as the Cultural Revolution spread, similar incidents occurred across China in government offices, factories, schools, and the military.
Gao Yuan eventually fled the school, only to find that his father had been “canceled” by local students for caring too much about farming and economics, and not enough about party politics. He lost a prominent position in county government.
When Gao Yuan finally returned to his school months later, he found the campus destroyed— shattered windows, unmarked graves, bombed out buildings, and utter chaos.
Years later he recounted his experience in a book called Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution.
Now the US is entering its own Cultural Revolution. While any rational person can see many forms of discrimination that still exist, we are being force-fed a narrative that White Supremancy is at the core of everything.
It has become so ridiculous that, according to one California state math education group, saying 2+2=4 perpetuates white supremacy.
The only way to fix it is for “anti-racists” to identify and punish the oppressors, i.e. people who believe that 2+2=4.
This is among the many lessons that now dominate school curiccula in many districts in the Land of the Free.
Kids are being taught Critical Race Theory, and a brand new history based on the New York Times’s 1619 Project.
Books that have been at the cornerstone of literature classes for more than a century are now being cancelled. Math and science are blasted as racist and transphobic.
Students at an elite private school in Manhattan called Grace Church High School now dedicate hours each week to “anti-racism” instruction.
Segregated sessions force white students to attend classes which teach them that objectivity and individualism are features of white supremacy.
They are taught to find and report racial “micro-aggressions” of their teachers and peers— for instance, if someone insists they don’t care about someone’s skin color.
Challenging, questioning, or engaging in discussion about systemic racism is taken as proof that the transgressor is racist.
A former teacher at the school, Paul Rossi, attempted to introduce debate about the topic in a segregated, ‘whites only’ learning session.
He was accused of harassment, and told his failure to accept as gospel the critical race narrative created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.”
This is what educators honestly believe— that differing opinions and constructive discussion are literally harmful to students’ brains.
Rossi was forced to resign. But it’s not just teachers who are cancelled.
Students are also punished for questioning Critical Race Theory, and they are reprimanded if they don’t speak up in support of it.
Teachers suggested that the school “officially flag” students who remain silent, believe in meritocracy, or suggest that everyone be treated with respect regardless of skin color.
Incredibly, a new government regulation proposed by the US Department of Education last month will prioritize special federal funding to schools which focus on this sort of thought control .
The national media reinforces this dogma. When parents speak out against Critical Race Theory being taught in their children’s schools, the media blasts them as white supremacists.
Recently, 70% of a Texas town voted for school board members vehemently opposed to Critical Race Theory, in a local election where about three times as many voters as usual turned out.
Yet NBC reported it was a “bitterly divided election”.
Really?
Does a 70% to 30% victory with massive voter turnout sound bitterly divided?
It’s clear based on these (and other) election results that the majority of the population opposes this cultural revolution.
The people who are trying to cancel Western Civilization are just a small, extremely vocal minority. The problem is, they control the media, the big tech companies, the universities, and most of the federal government, so their message seems much more popular than it really is.
This revolution has even spread to the military and intelligence agencies, with everyone from the CIA to US Special Operations Command prioritizing wokeness over national defense.
And of course, dozes of major corporations from Disney to Coca Cola have jumped on the bandwagon too.
History has much to teach us. And the key lesson from China’s cultural revolution is that these movements don’t suddenly disappear.
Now, you might be surprised to hear me say that the strongest way to fight back against this movement is to VOTE.
But I’m not talking about the broken political process.
I’m talking about the vote you make with your money.
If you disagree with a company’s woke politics, stop buying their products. Honestly. If you hate the fact that Disney is ultra-woke, but you’re not willing to give up your Disney+ membership, then you may need to rethink your priorities.
Same goes for Woka Cola, or any other major brand.
There’s also the vote you can make with your feet.
If your state or local government has totally lost its mind, consider moving. You can’t fix your neighbors’ way of thinking, but you can might be able to find greener pastures elsewhere.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 20:00 - Handful Of Black COVID Survivors Experience Massively Enlarged Tongues
Handful Of Black COVID Survivors Experience Massively Enlarged Tongues
Doctors in Houston, Texas are scratching their heads after a handful of COVID-19 survivors developed massively enlarged tongues.
The condition, called macroglossia, makes it impossible for patients to eat, drink or talk. Last fall, KHOU reported that there were two documented cases in the United States, which has swelled to nine patients – eight of whom are black, according to Dr. James Melville of the UTHealth School of Dentistry, who has become an expert in the condition.
Two of the patients had suffered strokes, while the other seven were hospitalized with COVID-19 before developing the rare condition.
More via KHOU:
Melville says the patients who had survived COVID-19 had inflammatory cells in their tongue tissue, which means there’s something about the virus that is making certain people more prone to the rare condition.
“I think it has a lot to do with where the virus is attaching itself and the body’s immune response to it,” said Dr. Melville.
He is now doing a study to figure out if there’s a common link in those patients’ genes. If doctors can answer that question, they hope they can also figure out how to prevent it.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 19:40 - The Government's Emergency Powers Myth
The Government’s Emergency Powers Myth
Authored by Andrew Napolitono, originally published at Creators.com,
“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.”
– Ex Parte Milligan, Supreme Court of the United States, 1866.
Last week, the media in New Jersey began to ask Gov. Phil Murphy when he would surrender his emergency powers. He claimed emergency powers in March 2020, and he also claimed that those powers are not limited by the Constitution when he said on Fox that the Bill of Rights is above his pay grade. His reply to the media inquiries was that he will surrender them when he surrenders them!
I am using the example of Murphy in order to address the concept of emergency powers, but there is no hyperbole here. Murphy quite literally issued executive orders barring folks from doing what the Constitution guarantees them the right to do, and he imposed criminal penalties for violating his orders, and he had folks who defied him arrested and prosecuted. Stated differently, he assumed the powers of the state legislature — which is to write the laws — and he violated his oath to uphold the Constitution.
He claimed that somehow he can interfere with the exercise of basic human freedoms — like going to church, going to work, shopping for food, operating a business, assembling and traveling — because he declared a state of emergency.
If the government declares an emergency, can it thereby acquire the lawful power to interfere with constitutionally guaranteed freedoms? In a word: No.
Here is the backstory.
When the states formed the federal government in 1789, they did so pursuant to the Constitution. The Constitution was written to establish and to limit the federal government. In 1791, just two years later, the Constitution was amended to add the Bill of Rights. The original understanding of the Bill of Rights was that it restrained only the federal government by articulating negative rights.
A negative right restrains the government from interfering with the exercise of a preexisting right. Thus, the First Amendment does not grant the freedom of speech — because it comes from our humanity — but it does prohibit Congress from infringing upon it.
After the War Between the States, Congress sent the 14th Amendment to the states for ratification. Its history is tortuous, and in part repellant, but it was ratified, and it is the law of the land. It has been interpreted and applied by the courts as imposing the Bill of Rights upon the states. Thus, any right expressly or arguably protected from federal interference by the Bill of Rights is protected from state interference as well.
The Ninth Amendment — which today restrains the feds and the states — is the work of James Madison’s genius. Madison, who chaired the House of Representatives committee that wrote the Bill of Rights, wrestled along with his colleagues about the best way to protect unenumerated rights.
The big-government crowd in Congress did not want any enumerated rights to be expressed. They argued that by listing a few, the unlisted rights would be subject to government assault.
The small-government crowd argued that by listing no rights as immune from government interference, the Constitution would invite the government to assault whatever rights it wished.
Madison’s solution to all this was to add a Bill of Rights and include the Ninth Amendment. That amendment recognizes that we all have pre-political, fundamental, natural rights — too numerous to enumerate — and prohibits all government from disparaging them.
During the War Between the States, Abraham Lincoln did more than disparage them. He ordered the military to arrest newspaper editors and even public officials in the North and confine them without trial because he disapproved of their criticism of him. One of them, Lambdin P. Milligan, sued for his freedom, and he won.
In a unanimous decision, cited hundreds of times, the Supreme Court rejected the concept that “emergency” somehow creates or increases government power. The court condemned “emergency” as a doctrine the fruits of which none is “more pernicious.” This condemnation is still the law of the land today, and it applies to the states as well as to the feds.
Thus, no matter the exigency — war, floods, pandemic, fear, myth — individual natural rights, protected from government interference by the Ninth Amendment, trump the unconstitutional words of government officials and invalidate their efforts to enforce compliance. Murphy’s orders contain empty words because they do not have the force of law since they were not legislatively created and they directly contradict the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s most definitive interpretations of it.
When Murphy became the governor of New Jersey, he took an oath to enforce the Constitution. Whatever personal ignorance or mental reservations he may have had, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and every public official, federal and state, is bound by it.
If government officials could declare an emergency whenever they wished and thereby be relieved of the obligation to defend the Constitution — and the rights it guarantees — then no liberty is safe.
Because our rights are natural and individual and because we did not all consent to their suspension, no government may morally or constitutionally suspend them, and we must resist all efforts to do so. Of course, there is a dark side to this. The government that has destroyed liberty and property has also immunized itself from financial liability for the consequences of those destructions.
Yet, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, whenever any government destroys liberty and property, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 19:20 - Afternoons Running Errands In The Suburbs Are The New "Rush Hour"
Afternoons Running Errands In The Suburbs Are The New “Rush Hour”
With everybody moving out of cities and into the suburbs to work from home during the pandemic, there’s officially a “new rush hour”.
Gone are the days of waiting on the interstate to get in and out of your local metro area around the edges of the nine to five workday. Here now are the days of a different kind of rush hour: one where running errands in the afternoon, while working from home, has suburban streets filling up.
Afternoon traffic has “come roaring back” while traditional rush hour times across the U.S. still show traffic below pre-pandemic levels.
Marjorie Crosbie, profiled in a new Wall Street Journal article, experienced this change firsthand. The 10 mile trip to pick up her daughter at an after-school program recently took her 45 minutes instead of the usual 22-23 minutes. Crosbie works as a senior finance manager for PwC and has been working from home full time since the pandemic.
In her area, Tampa, afternoon vehicle trips are at 105% of levels they were at pre-pandemic. “In more than 40 of the 100 biggest U.S. metros, roads are more congested on weekday afternoons than they were pre-pandemic,” the report notes.
Tim Rivers, Florida market director for commercial real-estate firm JLL, told the Journal: “People are working from home, so the suburbs have tremendous traffic. They’re going out for a morning coffee at Starbucks to take their Teams or Zoom call, or going for a workout midday.”
Traffic in the afternoon has come back quicker in metro areas that have reopened earlier, the report notes. 7 of the top 10 trafficked areas have been in Florida, with notable upticks in areas like Fort Myers and Sarasota. In places like San Francisco, New York and Detroit, afternoon weekday trips are still below 80% of pre-pandemic levels, the report notes.
Whit Blanton, executive director of Forward Pinellas, a land-use and transportation planning agency in Pinellas County, said: “As other states did more of a lockdown and more long-term restrictions on restaurants and indoor events, people flocked to Florida.”
Jeff Gabriel, 39, vice president of strategy at 23 Restaurant Services, said: “I have been stuck in traffic within 2 or 3 miles of my house.” He claims his commute takes longer in his neighborhood than on highways, which are still less congested than before the pandemic.
And of course, traffic is starting to pile up as people make their way to the beach in an effort to have a somewhat normal summer. Amanda Payne, president and CEO of Amplify Clearwater, a chamber of commerce, said: “It seems like it’s busier in the evening trying to get to the beach. You kind of time your trip across that bridge in the not-so-busy times. It is very crowded. Parking is a challenge. There are vehicles everywhere.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 19:00 - Watch: Rep. Jordan Exposes Democrats' Efforts To Stifle COVID Origin Investigation
Watch: Rep. Jordan Exposes Democrats’ Efforts To Stifle COVID Origin Investigation
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
During a hearing Wednesday in the House, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan succinctly highlighted how everyone EXCEPT House Democrats wants answers to legitimate questions regarding the possibility of the coronavirus leaking from a Chinese lab.
Republican lawmakers, intelligence officials, Journalists, and even members of the Biden administration have all said that there is credible evidence behind the theory.
However, as Jordan outlines, House Democrats have stymied investigations and dismissed the notion as a ‘distraction’.
“Where did this thing start? Did it jump from animal to humans or was it a leak from a lab, a lab in Wuhan china?” Jordan asked.
“The American people would probably like to know, after all, they’ve had their liberties assaulted for the past year” Jordan asserted.
Jordan quoted former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wafe who wrote :
“It’s a stretch to get the pandemic to break out naturally outside of Wuhan and then without leaving a trace to make its first appearance in Wuhan. But he says this for the lab escape scenario, a Wuhan origin for the virus is a no-brainer.”
Jordan continued:
“Wuhan is home to China’s leading center for coronavirus research. Researchers were genetically engineering bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. They were doing so under minimal safety conditions. If the virus with an uninspected infectiousness had been generated there, its escape would be no surprise.”
Jordan notes that it is unfathomable why Democrats are blocking efforts to find answers, unless they are seeking to protect Anthony Fauci from having to answer difficult questions about his involvement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the Obama/Biden years.
Watch:
This week, GOP representatives on the House Intelligence Committee demanded an update from the White House and the Director of National Intelligence on the possibility that the coronavirus leaked from the lab in Wuhan.
The Republicans, led by Ranking Member Devin Nunes also want access to any intelligence on the “gain of function” research that was undertaken at the Wuhan lab in conjunction with US agencies.
Even Biden’s own CDC Director said this week that there is a “possibility” that the COVID-19 virus was leaked from the Wuhan lab.
Leftist media and ‘fact checking’ outlets have repeatedly dismissed the notion as a ‘conspiracy theory’, but are now doing an about face on the matter.
As Infowars reported in April 2020, the NIH awarded a $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct coronavirus gain of function research.
Additionally, the results of the US-backed gain of function research at Wuhan was published in 2017 under the heading, “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.”
White House Medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci has come under increased scrutiny as the NIH’s involvement with the Wuhan lab is being called into question.
As we reported earlier in the year, top US National Security officials have indicated that they believe the most credible theory on the origin of COVID-19 is that it escaped from the Chinese laboratory.
The development also comes in the wake of a group of the world’s leading scientists penning an open letter urging more investigation into the possibility that the coronavirus pandemic was caused by a leak from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology, saying that the World Health Organisation has dismissed the notion without proper consideration.
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 18:40 - 63% Of Millennial Buyers Regret Purchasing New Home During Pandemic
63% Of Millennial Buyers Regret Purchasing New Home During Pandemic
As it turns out, buying at the market top can quickly lead to feelings of remorse.
With prices of single-family homes soaring the most on record…
…one recent survey found that millennials who decided to take advantage of low mortgage rates and buy a home during the COVID pandemic have mostly come to regret their decision.
As the survey from BankRate pointed out, buyer’s regrets are even more of a factor in the pandemic, as agents compete even more ruthlessly for deals. Leave it to the millennial generation to normalize buying a home sight-unseen, and waiving contingencies that might allow them an escape hatch once problems emerge.
Unsurprisingly, the rush to buy is leading some to settle for properties that aren’t quite right for them. Homebuyer regrets fell into two broad categories: financial and physical.
Also of interest: the survey found that, generally speaking, older buyers had fewer complaints about their purchases. Perhaps that’s a reflect of the fact that older people have a better idea of what they want.
In total, 64% of millennial homebuyers, aged 25 to 40, have some regrets about their purchase compared with just 33%of baby boomers, aged 57 to 75.
By far the biggest regret among recent homebuyers was being unprepared for the cost of maintenance. More than 20% of millennial homeowners said they felt the costs of homeownership were too high, and that number jumped to 26% among those ages 25-31.
Millennials, well known for being fickle trend-followers, also reported finding that their home wasn’t a good fit for them.
That those who buy during a market boom end up disappointing isn’t surprising, since they have less time to make decisions, and are competing against a much larger pool of potential buyers.
“Because the market is so competitive, you have less time to make a decision on a homebuying purchase than you do on a laptop at Best Buy,” said Olmsted. “You’ve already had, possibly, a couple of offers not accepted, you feel that pressure to make a decision and put an offer in.”
For those looking to avoid being similarly dissatisfied, BankRate offered a list of helpful tips:
- Work with an agent who understands the market.
- Be ready to make some concessions, but stick to your guns on must-haves.
- Focus on whether a home is somewhere you’d be comfortable living, even if it’s not your dream property.
- Make a budget and keep it.
- Don’t rush into a deal just because you’re frustrated.
Another suggestion: remember, those who own their own homes are in the minority in the millennial generation. They should be grateful they aren’t being forced to move back into their childhood bedrooms with their partner – because that’s what some millennials are being forced to do to save for a down payment.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 18:20 - University Research Finds AOC, Bernie Sanders Highly Ineffective
University Research Finds AOC, Bernie Sanders Highly Ineffective
Authored by Alex Munguia via Campus Reform,
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are some of the least effective members of Congress, according to a new study by researchers from Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.
The researchers, who generated their data using computers and basing their scores on 15 criteria, say the proof is in the math.
Their equations factored how many of a congressman’s bills pass committee, make it to the other house, and eventually become law. They established a benchmark score of 1.5 and above as “Exceptional” and scores of .50 and below as “Below Expectations.”
Among the lowest scoring House Democrats were Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (0.209) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (0.058).
They also identified several senators who were ineffective, with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont scoring 0.136, and Vice President Kamala Harris scoring just 0.512.
The average score was 1.0.
The highest scoring senators were Gary Peters (D-Mi.), Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) and Roger Wicker (R-Ms.), who scored 5.015, 3.589, and 3.558.
Congressmen who practice bipartisanship are the most effect legislators, the study also said.
“Collectively, these results imply that engaging in bipartisan behaviors contributes to a virtuous cycle: those who cosponsor across party lines attract cross-party cosponsors to their own bills, which translates into greater legislative success for their agendas.”
And it found that regardless of political affiliations “those who acquired degrees from elite educational institutions tend to be more liberal than others in their respective parties.”
Rep. Rashida Talib had the highest score of the “squad” at 1.411, beating both Representatives Ilhan Omar (0.328) and Ayanna Pressley (0.670).
Speaking to Campus Reform Vanderbilt University Professor Alan Wiseman, who helped to organize the study, said bipartisanship is still a path to becoming a successful lawmaker in Congress.
Wiseman said that there is a “very strong relationship between bipartisanship and lawmaking effectiveness for our top 10 Democratic House and Senate members holds.”
“Even in these politically challenging times,” he continued. “Bipartisanship appears to pay off for those who seek to advance their legislative initiatives.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/21/2021 – 18:00
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