Today’s News 23rd August 2023

• Europe Is Heading Towards A Triple Crisis
  Europe Is Heading Towards A Triple Crisis

  Via Remix News,

  Europe is unavoidably heading towards a triple crisis, German publicist Thomas Fasbender told Preussische Allgemeine in an interview on the occasion of the publication of his new book, “The eerie century” (Das unheimliche Jahrhundert).

  The subtitle of the book, “Before the turning point,” is a direct quote of an expression taken from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s special address to the Bundestag on Feb. 27, 2022, in reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In it, he used the word “Zeitenwende.”

  While the official translation for the word used by the German government is “turning point” or “watershed moment”, the original German term refers to both a changing of times and a geopolitical shift.

  “I chose the term ‘turning point’ because it was brought into play by Olaf Scholz. Although the book was essentially written before then, we are indeed experiencing a change of epoch. However, it is much more extensive than Scholz described,” the author said in the interview.

  He says that the current triple crisis Europe is facing will have a defining impact on the continent for the rest of the century.

  “Europe is heading for a triple crisis, the effects of which will affect us massively throughout the century.”

  First, there is the rapid loss of power by Western Europe after some 500 years of global dominance.

  “The times when the British, French, Germans, and others left their mark on the world politically, culturally, scientifically, technically and economically is history,” he said.

  Fasbender says the second crisis, the climate change crisis, cannot be tackled by simply stopping it:

  “The second major crisis is climate change. The fact is that it is happening. In recent years, the discussion has focused on who is responsible for it and how it can be stopped. “

  “But we will not succeed in stopping it. So we have to ask ourselves: What does it mean in concrete terms to live in a world that is two or more degrees warmer? What effects will this have, how do we deal with it?”

  “What we do in Germany has virtually no impact. I find it all the more astonishing that we are only now beginning to address the issue of adaptation. This is all the more important because we can only spend each euro once. Either for climate protection (which will not be possible) or for climate adaptation.”

  The third, but by no means least important crisis, is the population explosion in the Sub-Saharan region, which essentially also encompasses the previous two:

  “The third issue is population growth in Africa, especially in the Sub-Saharan region. There, we are seeing a doubling of the population by 2050 and even a quadrupling by 2100.”

  “Sometime in the 22nd century, more than half of the world’s population will come from sub-Saharan Africa. This is where the real turning points lie dormant.”

  “We are entering a world in which Europe may still be perceived as a living museum. Certainly no longer as a beacon or role model,” he said.

  

  People work together to pull, according to the locals, a capsized boat ashore at the beach where several people were found dead in Dakar, Senegal, Monday, July 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

  Fasbender concludes that “We Europeans are also hampered by the fact that many either do not grasp the new realities or do not want to accept them. On the contrary, we continue to overestimate ourselves.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 08/23/2023 – 02:00

• We're All Suspects In A DNA Lineup, Waiting To Be Matched With A Crime
  We’re All Suspects In A DNA Lineup, Waiting To Be Matched With A Crime

  Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

  “Make no mistake about it…your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason… I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”

  – Justice Antonin Scalia dissenting in Maryland v. King

  Be warned: the DNA detectives are on the prowl.

  

  Whatever skeletons may be lurking on your family tree or in your closet, whatever crimes you may have committed, whatever associations you may have with those on the government’s most wanted lists: the police state is determined to ferret them out.

  In an age of overcriminalization, round-the-clock surveillance, and a police state eager to flex its muscles in a show of power, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.

  No longer can we consider ourselves innocent until proven guilty.

  Now we are all suspects in a DNA lineup waiting to be matched up with a crime.

  Suspect State, meet the Genetic Panopticon.

  DNA technology in the hands of government officials will complete our transition to a Surveillance State in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

  By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc.

  It’s getting harder to hide, even if you think you’ve got nothing to hide.

  Armed with unprecedented access to DNA databases amassed by the FBI and ancestry website, as well as hospital newborn screening programs, police are using forensic genealogy, which allows police to match up an unknown suspect’s crime scene DNA with that of any family members in a genealogy database, to solve cold cases that have remained unsolved for decades.

  As reported by The Intercept, forensic genetic genealogists are “combing through the genetic information of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in search of a perpetrator.”

  By submitting your DNA to a genealogical database such as Ancestry and 23andMe, you’re giving the police access to the genetic makeup, relationships and health profiles of every relative—past, present and future—in your family, whether or not you or they ever agreed to be part of such a database.

  Indeed, relying on a loophole in a commercial database called GEDmatch, genetic genealogists are able to sidestep privacy rules that allow people to opt out of sharing their genetic information with police. The end result? Police are now able to identify and target those very individuals who explicitly asked to keep their DNA results private.

  In this way, merely choosing to exercise your right to privacy makes you a suspect and puts you in the police state’s crosshairs.

  It no longer even matters if you’re among the tens of millions of people who have added their DNA to ancestry databases. As Brian Resnick reports, public DNA databases have grown so massive that they can be used to find you even if you’ve never shared your own DNA.

  That simple transaction—a spit sample or a cheek swab in exchange for getting to learn everything about one’s ancestral makeup, where one came from, and who is part of one’s extended family—is the price of entry into the Suspect State for all of us.

  After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects.

  It’s what police like to refer to a “modern fingerprint.”

  Whereas fingerprint technology created a watershed moment for police in their ability to “crack” a case, DNA technology is now being hailed by law enforcement agencies as the magic bullet in crime solving, especially when it helps them crack cold cases of serial murders and rapists.

  After all, who wouldn’t want to get psychopaths and serial rapists off the streets and safely behind bars, right?

  At least, that’s the argument being used by law enforcement to support their unrestricted access to these genealogy databases, and they’ve got the success stories to prove it.

  For instance, a 68-year-old Pennsylvania man was arrested and charged with the brutal rape and murder of a young woman almost 50 years earlier. Relying on genealogical research suggesting that the killer had ancestors who hailed from a small town in Italy, investigators narrowed their findings down to one man whose DNA, obtained from a discarded coffee cup, matched the killer’s.

  In another cold case investigation, a 76-year-old man was arrested for two decades-old murders after his DNA was collected from a breathalyzer during an unrelated traffic stop.

  Yet it’s not just psychopaths and serial rapists who are getting caught up in the investigative dragnet. In the police state’s pursuit of criminals, anyone who comes up as a possible DNA match—including distant family members—suddenly becomes part of a circle of suspects that must be tracked, investigated and ruled out.

  In this way, “guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in a technological age in which one is just a DNA sample away from being considered a person of interest in a police investigation. As Jessica Cussins warns in Psychology Today, “The fundamental fight—that data from potentially innocent people should not be used to connect them to unrelated crimes—has been lost.”

  Until recently, the government was required to at least observe some basic restrictions on when, where and how it could access someone’s DNA. That was turned on its head by various U.S. Supreme Court rulings that heralded the loss of privacy on a cellular level.

  For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Maryland v. King that taking DNA samples from a suspect doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment. The Court’s subsequent decision to let stand the Maryland Court of Appeals’ ruling in Raynor v. Maryland, which essentially determined that individuals do not have a right to privacy when it comes to their DNA, made Americans even more vulnerable to the government accessing, analyzing and storing their DNA without their knowledge or permission.

  It’s all been downhill since then.

  Indeed, the government has been relentless in its efforts to get hold of our DNA, either through mandatory programs carried out in connection with law enforcement and corporate America, by warrantlessly accessing our familial DNA shared with genealogical services such as Ancestry and 23andMe, or through the collection of our “shed” or “touch” DNA.

  Get ready, folks, because the government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

  This has been helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget).

  For example, Rapid DNA machines—portable, about the size of a desktop printer, highly unregulated, far from fool-proof, and so fast that they can produce DNA profiles in less than two hours—allow police to go on fishing expeditions for any hint of possible misconduct using DNA samples.

  Journalist Heather Murphy explains: “As police agencies build out their local DNA databases, they are collecting DNA not only from people who have been charged with major crimes but also, increasingly, from people who are merely deemed suspicious, permanently linking their genetic identities to criminal databases.”

  All 50 states now maintain their own DNA government databases, although the protocols for collection differ from state to state. Increasingly, many of the data from local databanks are being uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s massive DNA database, which has become a de facto way to identify and track the American people from birth to death.

  Even hospitals have gotten in on the game by taking and storing newborn babies’ DNA, often without their parents’ knowledge or consent. It’s part of the government’s mandatory genetic screening of newborns. In many states, the DNA is stored indefinitely. There’s already a move underway to carry out whole genome sequencing on newborns, ostensibly to help diagnose rare diseases earlier and improve health later in life, which constitutes an ethical minefield all by itself.

  What this means for those being born today is inclusion in a government database that contains intimate information about who they are, their ancestry, and what awaits them in the future, including their inclinations to be followers, leaders or troublemakers.

  For example, police in New Jersey accessed the DNA from a nine-year-old blood sample of a newborn baby in order to identify the child’s father as a suspect in a decades-old sexual assault.

  The ramifications of this kind of DNA profiling are far-reaching.

  At a minimum, these DNA databases do away with any semblance of privacy or anonymity.

  These genetic databases and genomic technology also make us that much more vulnerable to creeps and cyberstalkers, genetic profiling, and those who would weaponize the technology against us.

  Unfortunately, the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—continues to lag far behind the government and Corporate America’s encroachments on our rights.

  Moreover, while much of the public debate, legislative efforts and legal challenges in recent years have focused on the protocols surrounding when police can legally collect a suspect’s DNA (with or without a search warrant and whether upon arrest or conviction), the question of how to handle “shed” or “touch” DNA has largely slipped through without much debate or opposition.

  As scientist Leslie A. Pray notes:

  We all shed DNA, leaving traces of our identity practically everywhere we go… In fact, the garbage you leave for curbside pickup is a potential gold mine of this sort of material. All of this shed or so-called abandoned DNA is free for the taking by local police investigators hoping to crack unsolvable cases… shed DNA is also free for inclusion in a secret universal DNA databank.

  What this means is that if you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name.

  As the dissenting opinion to the Maryland Court of Appeals’ shed DNA ruling in Raynor rightly warned, “A person can no longer vote, participate in a jury, or obtain a driver’s license, without opening up his genetic material for state collection and codification.”

  It’s just a matter of time before government agents will know everywhere we’ve been and how long we were at each place by following our shed DNA. After all, scientists can already track salmon across hundreds of square miles of streams and rivers using DNA.

  Today, helped along by robotics and automation, DNA processing, analysis and reporting takes far less time and can bring forth all manner of information, right down to a person’s eye color and relatives. Incredibly, one company specializes in creating “mug shots” for police based on DNA samples from unknown “suspects” which are then compared to individuals with similar genetic profiles.

  Of course, none of these technologies are infallible.

  DNA evidence can be wrong, either through human error, tampering, or even outright fabrication, and it happens more often than we are told.

  What this amounts to is a scenario in which we have little to no defense against charges of wrongdoing, especially when “convicted” by technology, and even less protection against the government sweeping up our DNA in much the same way it sweeps up our phone calls, emails and text messages.

  As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals from the past expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 08/23/2023 – 00:05

• Ex-Head Of JPMorgan's Precious Metals Desk Sentenced To Prison For Manipulation
  Ex-Head Of JPMorgan’s Precious Metals Desk Sentenced To Prison For Manipulation

  It was not that long ago that a veritable army of trolls would emerge upon our merest mention that precious metal markets (like all other markets) are manipulated, whether by commercial or central banks, or by random assorted hangers on.

  Today, we can table that particular debate in perpetuity, after US District Judge Edmond Chang sentenced the former head of JPMorgan’s precious-metals desk and his top trader to prison for spoofing, fraud and market manipulation.

  Michael Nowak, whom we first highlighted back in 2019…

  JPM’s gold spoofing strategy was adopted by Michael Nowak, who was JPMorgan’s global head of precious metals trading when he was put on leave last month: DOJ.

  And that’s why Jamie Dimon is richer than you

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 16, 2019

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

  … and most recently profiled last year, and who once upon a time was not only an LBMA board member but also ran gold and silver trading at JPMorgan, as well as his top trader Gregg Smith were sentenced Tuesday in Chicago with Nowak receiving a term of one year and one day while Smith was given two years, the stiffest sentence yet in a recent government crackdown on questionable trading practices.

  

  As we reported at the time, both men were convicted at a trial last year. Smith, 59, was described as “the most prolific spoofer that the government has prosecuted to date” while Nowak, 49, has been called “the boss” behind the scheme.
  In imposing sentence, the judge said Smith and Nowak clearly knew what they were doing was wrong.

  “This is a serious offense that you committed,” Chang said to Nowak. “What happened here was the equivalent of putting out lies — and many lies — into the market. Market integrity is a crucial component to the financial markets. These lies moved the market. It’s not like they had zero impact.”

  Smith and Nowak “used their positions as some of the most powerful traders in the worldwide precious metals markets to engage in an egregious effort to manipulate prices for their benefit,” Acting US Assistant Attorney General Nicole M.

  Argentieri said in a statement, adding the Justice Department was committed to holding “accountable those who engage in fraud and manipulation that undermines the investing public’s trust in the integrity of our commodities markets.”

  As Bloomberg reports, the stiff (for a banker) prison sentences were intended to “send a message” that market manipulation will be punished, the judge said. “I’m trying to deter all forms of financial fraud in the market,” he said, clearly unaware of this thing called the Federal Reserve.

  Chang ordered Nowak to start his sentence on Oct. 23 and Smith on Jan. 15. Lawyers for both men said they planned to appeal their convictions.

  Prosecutors had initially sought sentences of six years for Smith and five years for Nowak, but on Tuesday said they were revising those down to around two years. Both men’s lawyers argued that they should be spared jail because neither gained personally from the spoofing. Of course, both main made millions in bonuses which would never have been paid had they not generated huge gains for Jamie Dimon’s criminal enterprise.

  The JPMorgan case was part of a crackdown by federal prosecutors on illegal spoofing, where traders place bogus orders to move prices up or down and then quickly cancel them before they can be executed. Smith and Nowak used the technique to manipulate gold and silver prices from 2008 to 2016, or the entire duration of the period in which we said – and showed – that gold manipulation was rampant, for which were frequently mocked and ridiculed.

  Convictions for Smith, Nowak and a third trader who was found guilty in November, Christopher Jordan, capped a string of wins by prosecutors in spoofing cases targeting some of Wall Street’s biggest banks, including Bank of America, Deutsche Bank AG and Morgan Stanley. Two former Deutsche Bank and two former Bank of America traders previously each received one-year sentences.

  JPMorgan, the largest US bank and the biggest US financial criminal enterprise by far, agreed in 2020 to pay $920 million to settle the Justice Department’s allegations against it — the biggest fine by any financial institution accused of market manipulation since the 2008 global financial crisis.

  Prosecutors also charged several members of the team Nowak led at JPMorgan. Three of them pleaded guilty and testified against Nowak and Smith. The witnesses described how Nowak and Smith routinely placed huge buy and sell orders they never intended to execute — part of their strategy to push prices in the direction that would profit the bank.

  Christiaan Trunz, a former Smith protege and one of the traders who pleaded guilty and cooperated, told jurors that he learned to spoof by watching Nowak and Smith for years. When Trunz came under scrutiny for his own spoof trades, he said Nowak coached him to lie to compliance officials and later counseled him against pleading guilty as prosecutors were preparing criminal charges against top executives on the trading desk.

  Trunz testified that Smith was so fast at placing and canceling bogus orders that his colleagues would joke that he needed to put ice on his fingers to cool them down.

  “This was an open strategy on the desk,” said Trunz, who sat next to Smith and watched him click his computer mouse rapidly to place and cancel trades. “It wasn’t hidden.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 23:45

• Wake Up!
  Wake Up!

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

  The last three and a half years have been times of enormous upheaval.

  

  It has affected politics, economics, culture, media and technology. It’s not just about the spreading of economic, cultural and demographic decay. Millions and billions of lives have been wrecked, to be sure, but there is also a big impact on the way we see the world around us.

  What we once trusted, we now doubt and even disbelieve as a matter of new habit. The simple categories of understanding that we once deployed to make sense of the world have been tested, challenged and even overthrown. Old forms of ideological commitments have opened their way to new.

  This particularly pertains to intellectuals. Or should in any case.

  If you have not shifted your thinking in some respect over these years, you are either a prophet, asleep or in denial.

  The way social media works today, influencers are reluctant to admit it lest risk their followings built out of a prior cultural landscape. This is really too bad.

  There is nothing wrong with changing, adapting, migrating and calling out truth even if that contradicts what you once said or how you used to believe.

  There is no need to change your principles or ideals. What should change in light of evidence is your evaluation of the problems and threats, your outlook on the relative priorities of focus, your perceptions of the functionality of institutional structures, your awareness of issues and concerns about which you had limited prior knowledge, your political and cultural allegiances and so on.

  These days, this intellectual migration seems mainly to have affected the left. Nearly daily I find myself having the same conversations with people in person, on the phone or online. It is from an Obama voter and someone with traditionally “liberal” allegiances.

  The COVID era utterly shocked them in what they discovered about their own tribe. They aren’t liberal at all.

  They supported universal quarantine, forced face coverings and then mandatory jabs pushed by a tax-funded corporate monopoly. Concerns about human rights, civil liberties and the common good suddenly evaporated. Then of course they turned to the most blunt instrument of all: censorship.

  The trauma felt by principled people who imagined themselves to be “on the left” is palpable.

  But the same is true of people “on the right” who were aghast to observe that it was Trump and his administration that greenlighted lockdowns, spent many trillions forcing COVID compliance and then threw public monies at Big Pharma to rush a shot by bypassing all standards of necessity, safety and effectiveness.

  The promise to “make America great again” ended in wreckage coast-to-coast. For Trump partisans, this realization that it all happened under their hero is hard to take, a triangulating rope-a-dope.

  Even more strangely, it was the “never Trumpers” on the right who most strongly supported lockdowns, masking and shot mandates.

  The libertarians are another story entirely, one that nearly surpasses understanding. Among the higher echelons of this faction in academia and think tanks, the silence from the start and even years later was truly deafening.

  Instead of standing up to totalitarianism, as the whole of the intellectual tradition had prepared them to do, they deployed their clever heuristics to justify outrages against core freedoms, even the freedom to associate.

  So yes, observing one’s own tribe collapse into craven careerism and coercion is disorienting. But the problem goes even deeper. The most striking alliance of our time has been to observe the lockstep of the elites in government, media, tech and academia.

  The reality blows apart the traditional binary of public vs. private that has dominated ideological discussion for centuries.

  This binary is nicely represented by the sculpture in front of the Federal Trade Commission.

  

  It shows a man holding back a horse. It’s man vs. beast, completely different species and totally different interests, one demanding to move forward and the other holding it back.

  The point of the sculpture is to celebrate the role of government (man) in controlling trade (industry). The contrary position would condemn government for controlling industry.

  But what if the sculpture is pure fantasy even at its very structure?

  In reality, the horse is either carrying the man or pulling a cart that carries the man. Are they cooperating together in a partnership that is allied against consumers, stockholders, small businesses, the working classes and people more generally?

  That realization — the very essence of what was revealed to us in the course of the COVID response — utterly shatters core presumptions behind the dominant ideologies of our times and going far back in time.

  That realization requires a recalibration from honest thinkers.

  I had to reevaluate my own cherished beliefs about markets and politics, which was painful in many ways. But it was necessary.

  Below, I take you on that journey — and show you why we must adjust our thinking to adapt to new realities. Read on.

  The Scales Fell From My Eyes

  I was going through an archive of writings from the 2010s in search of some insight or possibly something to reprint. I found many hundreds of articles. None of them jumped out at me as necessarily wrong but I found myself rather bored with their superficiality. Yes, they are entertaining and fascinating in their way but what precisely did they reveal?

  There was no consumer product unworthy of rhapsodic celebration, no pop tune or movie that didn’t reinforce my biases, no new technology or company undeserving of my highest praise, no trend in the land that was contrary to my conception of progress all around us.

  It’s exceedingly difficult to recreate an older state of mind but let me try. I saw myself as a composer of hymns to material progress all around us, a cheerleader of the glories of all market forces. I lived with this public-private binary.

  All that was good in the world came from the private sector and all that was evil came from the public sector. That easily became for me a simplistic, good vs. evil conception of the great struggle, and also blinded me to the ways that these two ideal types play together in real life.

  Armed with this ideological weaponry, I was ready to take on the world.

  And so Big Tech came in for massive celebration from me, even to the point that I completely ignored warnings of capture and surveillance. I had a model in mind — migration to the digital realm was emancipatory while attachment to the physical world was mired in stagnation — and nothing could shake me from it.

  I had also implicitly adopted an “end-of-history” style of triumphalist thinking that befits the generation that saw freedom win the great Cold War struggle.

  And so the final victory of liberty was always at hand, at least in my fevered imagination.

  This is why the lockdowns came as such a shock to me. It flew in the face of the linear structure of historical narrative that I had constructed for myself in order to make sense of the world.

  This is why the best comparison of the COVID years might be to the Great War, the global calamity that was simply not supposed to happen based on the wild optimism cultivated during the Gilded and Victorian epochs of decades earlier.

  The very foundations of peace and progress had gradually eroded, and prepared the way for terrible war, but that generation of observers did not see it happening simply because they were not looking for it.

  To be sure, and uniquely so far as I can tell, I had been writing about the prospect of pandemic lockdowns for the previous 15 years. I read their research, knew of their plans and followed their germ games. I drummed up awareness and called for hard limits on what the state could do during a pandemic.

  At the same time, I had become accustomed to treating the academic and intellectual worlds as something external to the social order. In other words, I never once believed that these cockamamie ideas would ever leak into our own lived realities.

  Like so many others, I had come to regard intellectual discussion and debate as a challenging and most enjoyable parlor game that had little impact on the world. I knew for sure that there were crazy people extant who dreamed of universal human separation and the conquering of the microbial planet by force.

  But I had presumed that the structures of society and the trajectory of history embedded too much intelligence to actually implement such delusions. The foundations of civilization were too strong to be eroded by gibberish, or so I had believed.

  What I had overlooked were several factors.

  • First, I didn’t understand the extent of the rise, independence and power of the administrative state and the impossibility of controlling its authority through elective representatives. I simply did not anticipate the fullness of its reach.

  • Second, I had not understood the extent to which private industry had developed a full working relationship with the structures of power in its own industrial interests.

  • Third, I had overlooked the way consolidation and cooperation had developed between pharmaceutical companies, public health, digital enterprises and media organs.

  • Fourth, I had failed to appreciate the tendency of the public mind to drop knowledge accumulated from past wisdom. For example, who would have believed that people would forget what they once knew, even from thousands of years of experience, about exposure and natural immunity?

  • Fifth, I did not anticipate the extent to which high-end professionals would give up all principles and curry favor with the new policy priorities of the government/media/tech/industry hegemon. Who knew that nothing about the main themes of patriotic songs and movies would have stuck when it most mattered?

  • Sixth, and this is perhaps my greatest intellectual failing, I had not seen how rigid class structures would feed conflicting interests between the professional class of laptop workers and the working classes who still need the physical world to accomplish their goals.

  On March 16, 2020, the laptop class conspired in a forced digitalization of the world in the name of pathogenic control, and this came at the expense of some two-thirds of the population who depended on physical interactions for their livelihood and psychological well-being.

  This aspect of class conflict — which I had always chalked up to be a Marxian delusion — became the defining feature of the whole of our political lives. Instead, the lack of empathy from the professional class was evident everywhere, from academic opinion to media reporting. It was a society of serfs and lords.

  For those who are researchers, writers, academics or just curious people who want to understand the world better — even improve it — to have one’s intellectual operating system so profoundly disturbed is an occasion of profound disorientation. It is also a time to embrace the adventure, recalibrate and set about correcting and finding a new path.

  When your ideological system and political allegiances fail to provide the explanatory power we are seeking, it is time to improve them or give them up entirely.

  Not everyone is up to the task. Indeed, this is a major reason why so many want to forget about the past three and a half years. They would rather close their eyes to the new realities and default back to their intellectual comfort zones.

  For any writer or thinker of integrity, this should not be an option. As painful as it might be, it is best just to admit where we went wrong and set out to discover a better path. This is why so many of us have adopted a paradigm called the “COVID test.” Few pass. Most fail. They failed in shockingly public and inexcusable ways: left, right and libertarian.

  The influencers who flopped so badly in these years and have yet to own up to it deserve neither attention nor respect. Their attempt to pretend they were never wrong and then move on as if nothing much has happened is embarrassing and disreputable.

  But those who come to terms with the wreckage all around us and seek to understand its causes and the way forward deserve a listen and appreciation. For it is these people who are doing their best to save the world from another round of disaster.

  As for the rest, they are taking up air space and should, in a just world, be tutoring the children with learning losses and delivering meals to the vaccine-injured.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 23:25

• Middle-Age Crisis: 35-50 Year-Olds Turn To Booze, Bud, And 'Shrooms'
  Middle-Age Crisis: 35-50 Year-Olds Turn To Booze, Bud, And ‘Shrooms’

  In the land of the ‘free’ and the home of the distraught: New research reveals an alarming number of middle-aged Americans are drowning their troubles away in binge drinking and getting higher than a kite to pass the time. 

  The University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future (MTF) found binge drinking, marijuana use, and hallucinogen consumption among middle-aged adults 35 to 50 (prime-age workers) hit record highs in 2022. 

  “While binge drinking has generally declined for the past ten years among younger adults, adults aged 35 to 50 in 2022 reported the highest prevalence of binge drinking ever recorded for this age group, which also represents a significant past-year, five-year and 10-year increase,” MTF wrote in the report. 

  “The value of surveys such as MTF is to show us how drug use trends evolve over decades and across development, from adolescence through adulthood,” said Megan Patrick, research professor and principal investigator of the MTF panel study. 

  Adults aged 35 to 50 aren’t turning to sports cars and wild adventures in what might be a midlife crisis. Instead, a staggering 28% have resorted to marijuana in the past year, while 4% have used hallucinogens. 

  Patrick said, “Behaviors and public perception of drug use can shift rapidly, based on drug availability and other factors. It’s important to track this so that public health professionals and communities can be prepared to respond.”

  Major findings of MTF’s report: 

  • A whopping 44% of young adults smoked marijuana this past year, a drastic climb from the 28% a decade prior.

  • Daily cannabis use? Skyrocketing. Over 1 in 10 young adults smoke marijuana on a daily basis, nearly double from a decade ago. 

  • Middle-aged (35-50) aren’t far behind; their pot smoking has more than doubled in 10 years, with 28% now getting high.

  • Trippy times: Both young and middle-aged adults are experimenting with hallucinogens like LSD and shrooms at higher rates. Specifically, 8% of those 19-30 and 4% of the 35-50 brackets. 

  • The e-cigarette craze is alive and well; young adults vaping nicotine surged from 14% in 2017 to 24% in 2022.

  • Binge drinking: Nearly 30% of middle-aged folks are on a binge-drinking spree, reaching all-time highs in 2022. That’s up from 25% in 2017 and 23% in 2012. 

  The findings aren’t surprising. We reported earlier this year that a ‘shroom boom‘ was blasting off as middle-class soccer moms and average working-class folks were increasing their consumption of psilocybin, the main active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. Even Janet Yellen joined in on the craze while in China… 

  

  Numerous studies have shown those who used psilocybin were able to curb drinking and other drug addictions easier. These studies add to increasing research showing that psychedelics paired with therapy could treat mental health issues.  

  MTF’s latest report shows Americans are binging on whatever they can get their hands on, indicating a looming mental health crisis. But, of course, the corporate media are blind to this crisis. They would rather focus on ‘climate change’ using fuzzy math. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 23:05

• How Inflation Destroys Civilization… And What You Can Do About It
  How Inflation Destroys Civilization… And What You Can Do About It

  Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,.

  Thanks to rampant inflation, socialism – and the poverty it inevitably brings – could soon become irreversibly entrenched in the US, just like in numerous Third World countries.

  Rapidly rising food, housing, medical, and tuition prices are squeezing Americans – many do not understand the actual cause of their falling living standards.

  The explosion in the cost of living is a predictable consequence of the Federal Reserve’s ongoing currency debasement.

  

  Since the Covid mass hysteria, the Federal Reserve has printed more money than it has for the entire existence of the US.

  From the founding of the US, it took over 227 years to print its first $6 trillion. But during Covid, the US government printed over $6 trillion in a matter of months.

  It’s important to put such large numbers into context.

  A trillion is a massive, almost unfathomable number.

  The human brain has trouble understanding something so huge. So let me try to put it into perspective.

  If you earned $1 a second 24/7/365—about $31 million per year—it would take you over 31,688 YEARS to make $1 trillion.

  So that’s how enormous a trillion is.

  When politicians carelessly spend and print money measured in the trillions, you are in dangerous territory.

  In short, the Fed’s actions during the Covid scam amounted to the biggest monetary explosion that has ever occurred in the US.

  Initially, the Fed and its apologists in the media assured the American people its actions wouldn’t cause severe price increases. But unfortunately, it didn’t take long to prove that absurd assertion false.

  As soon as rising prices became apparent, the mainstream media and Fed claimed that the inflation was only “transitory” and that there was nothing to be worried about. When the inflation was obviously not “transitory,” they told us “inflation was actually a good thing.”

  Of course, they were dead wrong and knew it—they were gaslighting.

  The truth is that inflation is out of control, and nothing can stop it.

  Even after the most intense rate hiking cycle in US history, price increases remain persistent.

  That’s not to mention that prices are never going back to the levels they were. We’re at a new baseline that only gets adjusted higher.

  It’s like trying to run on a treadmill where the speed only ratchets up.

  That’s why many people struggle to keep their heads above water. They simply cannot keep up with the rising prices.

  Michael Saylor was correct when he said, “The road to serfdom consists of working exponentially harder to earn a currency that is growing exponentially weaker.”

  Even though the media won’t tell you, the Fed’s currency debasement is the primary reason why most people are feeling the economic pain of inflation today. They know it’s becoming harder and harder to maintain their lifestyle—but many don’t understand why.

  They’ll blame supply chain problems, Vladimir Putin, and greedy corporations… anything but the Fed as the source of inflation.

  The media’s search for the real cause of inflation is like OJ Simpson’s search for “the real killers,” only more absurd.

  The deliberate confusion created around inflation opens the door for opportunistic politicians who promise supposed freebies to ease the pain of inflation. Many, unfortunately, succumb to this siren’s call.

  Perverse as it is, the policies offered to people suffering from inflation create even more inflation. In other words, inflation has a way of perpetuating itself, much like a heroin addiction, because people will keep wanting more and more of the very thing that is poisoning them.

  For example, a Newsweek poll shows 63% of Americans “strongly support” government stimulus checks to combat inflation.

  In other words, let’s fight the effects of currency debasement by engaging in even more currency debasement.

  The more inflation reduces living standards, the more people push for misguided government policies like universal basic income, price controls, inflation relief stimulus checks, and a higher minimum wage… which creates a cycle of rising prices.

  It’s only a matter of time before “fight for $15″—the rallying cry for a $15 minimum wage—becomes “fight for $20.” Then it’s “fight for $50,” “fight for $100,” and so forth.

  People should really fight to end the Federal Reserve and the fake money they create out of thin air and force everyone else to use. It’s the only way to end this insidious cycle that impoverishes everyone except the politically-connected insiders closest to the money printing.

  But, of course, that’s not going to happen.

  Instead, the more likely outcome is that the US is headed straight into an inescapable downward spiral of a political-inflation cycle that follows a clear pattern and creates a self-perpetuating doom loop.

  1. In a fiat currency system, the government will inevitably print an ever-increasing amount of currency to finance itself.

  2. This makes prices and living costs rise faster than wages.

  3. The average person feels the pain but doesn’t understand what’s happening.

  4. More people support politicians who promise freebies to supposedly relieve the pain inflation causes.

  5. In order to pay for the “freebies,” the government prints more currency.

  6. This creates even more inflation, and the cycle repeats.

  Most of America Depends on the Government

  At this point, we have to ask ourselves whether the political situation in the US will improve. Unfortunately, the data points to a troubling but inevitable answer… “no.”

  The reason is simple: a growing majority of US voters are receiving money from the government.

  An estimated 47% or so of Americans already receive some form of government benefit. But I don’t think that accurately reflects the situation. At least, not when considering all the government employees and those in the nominally private sector who feed off the warfare state. This includes defense and other government contractors who win huge, no-bid contracts.

  People involved in the military-industrial complex live off government slops as much or more than those who collect food stamps and other traditional forms of welfare. Yet they aren’t counted in the statistics. Any honest account of who depends on the government needs to include them.

  When you count everyone who lives off political dollars instead of free-market dollars, we’re already well north of 50% of the US population.

  In other words, the US has already crossed the Rubicon. There’s no going back.

  The growing majority of voters who collect net benefits from the government is a built-in constituency to perpetuate policies financed by ever-increasing inflation.

  That’s a big reason why I think currency debasement is inevitable.

  What You Can Do

  Unfortunately, most people have no idea how bad things can get when the political-inflation cycle spirals out of control, let alone how to prepare.

  The price of groceries, medical care, tuition, rent, and everything else will only rise. The only question is, how fast will prices rise?

  It’s an established trend in motion that is accelerating and approaching a breaking point.

  We will likely see incredible volatility in the financial markets that could decimate many ordinary people’s life savings and retirement assets.

  But I’m not just talking about a stock market crash or a currency collapse…

  It’s something much bigger… with the potential to alter the fabric of society forever.

  It’s created an economic situation unlike we’ve ever seen before, and it’s all building up to a severe crisis on multiple fronts.

  It could all go down soon… and it won’t be pretty.

  It will result in an enormous wealth transfer from savers to the parasitical class—politicians, central bankers, and those connected to them.

  Countless millions throughout history were wiped out financially—or worse—during periods of profound change because they failed to see the correct Big Picture and take appropriate action.

  Don’t be one of them.

  That’s exactly why I just released an urgent new report with all the details, including what you must do to prepare. It’s called, The Most Dangerous Economic Crisis in 100 Years… the Top 3 Strategies You Need Right Now. Click here to download the PDF now.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 22:45

• Trump Confirms Thursday Surrender In Georgia Case Over 2020 Election
  Trump Confirms Thursday Surrender In Georgia Case Over 2020 Election

  Authored by Catherine Yang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Former President Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that he will be surrendering to authorities at Fulton County Jail in Georgia on Thursday, Aug. 24, over the charges he faces for contesting the state’s 2020 election result.

  “Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED by a Radical Left District Attorney, Fani Willis, who is overseeing one of the greatest Murder and Violent Crime DISASTERS in American History,” he wrote on Truth Social.

  “In my case, the trip to Atlanta is not for ‘Murder,’ but for making a PERFECT PHONE CALL! She campaigned, and is continuing to campaign, and raise money, on this WITCH HUNT. This is in strict coordination with Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ. It is all about ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”

  

  Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had brought charges against President Trump and 18 co-defendants, all of whom were charged under Georgia’s Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. In all, the 98-page indictment included 161 acts of racketeering and 41 total charges. President Trump was charged on 13 counts.

  Bond Set at $200,000

  Also on Monday, Judge Scott McAfee began setting bond and release conditions for the defendants.

  According to newly posted court records (pdf), President Trump has agreed to have his bond set at $200,000.

  Following negotiations with the prosecution, Attorney John Eastman’s bond was set at $100,000; Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, had bond set at $10,000; Attorney Kenneth Chesebro’s bond was set at $100,000; and attorney Ray Smith III’s bond was set at $50,000.

  All of the defendants have bond conditions that prohibit what they can say, but President Trump is the only one whose restrictions include specific details, including prohibiting him from making any “direct or indirect threat of any nature” against codefendants, victims, the community, including in his “posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media.

  Rising Poll Numbers

  President Trump’s polling has only trended upwards since his first indictment in April.

  Amid a flurry of recent legal action—motions have been filed in both criminal and civil cases that President Trump is named in—the GOP frontrunner’s polling has only improved.

  On Aug. 21, new poll numbers released put President Trump well ahead his challengers, especially as runner-up Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s numbers have been slipping.

  The difference was 62-16 percent according to a CBS poll, 57-18 percent according to a Quinnipiac University poll, and 53-16 percent according to a Fox News poll.

  In Iowa, a poll carried out by Des Moines Register, NBC News, and Mediacom put him at 42 percent of the vote that surveyed likely Republican caucus-goers. Mr. DeSantis came in at 19 percent, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) placed third with 9 percent. When the former president was indicted for the first time earlier this year, he likewise saw a surge in the polls—and in fundraising.

  Observers have noted that the increased legal action against him may only make his supporters dig their heels in, as the legal challenges might be viewed as political action on the behalf of his rival, the incumbent president.

  President Joe Biden has stayed quiet on the matter, ignoring questions from the media about President Trump’s indictments. President Trump and his legal team have repeatedly denounced the cases brought against him as “election interference” and a “witch hunt” given the timing of the cases.

  Besides the Georgia case, President Trump is facing charges brought against him by the Department of Justice in both Washington, D.C., and Florida. Like the Georgia case, the Washington case concerns his challenge of the 2020 election results, but in federal instead of state court. The Florida case, also in federal court, regards his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Both cases are being overseen by special counsel Jack Smith.

  The Republican favourite is also facing both criminal and civil suits in New York.

  Janice Hisle contributed to this report.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 22:05

• BRICS Nations Still Trail G7 In Per-Capita GDP
  BRICS Nations Still Trail G7 In Per-Capita GDP

  While the five BRICS nations have caught up with the G7 in terms of collective PPP-adjusted GDP, they still trail the G7’s mature economies by a significant margin in terms of GDP per capita – an often-used measure of economic development and prosperity.

  As Statista’s Felix Richter reports, according to the IMF, none of the five BRICS members even comes close to matching Japan’s GDP per capita, which in turn is the lowest among the G7 countries.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Using PPP-adjusted international dollars, the United States’ per-capita GDP amounts to $80,035, more than three times that of China, which amounts to $23,382.

  India, the world’s most populous country and third largest economy in terms of PPP-adjusted GDP, has by far the lowest GDP per capita among the twelve G7 and BRICS nations.

  The pace of progress has been rapid, nonetheless.

  Since the turn of the century, India’s GDP per capita increased nearly fivefold, trailing only China in that respect.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 21:45

• Australia's Misinfo Bill Paves Way For Soviet-Style Censorship
  Australia’s Misinfo Bill Paves Way For Soviet-Style Censorship

  Authored by Rebekah Barnett via The Brownstone Institute,

  The Australian Government’s proposed new laws to crack down on misinformation and disinformation have drawn intense criticism for their potential to restrict free expression and political dissent, paving the way for a digital censorship regime reminiscent of Soviet Lysenkoism…

  

  Under the draft legislation, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will gain considerable expanded regulatory powers to “combat misinformation and disinformation,” which ACMA says poses a “threat to the safety and wellbeing of Australians, as well as to our democracy, society and economy.”

  Digital platforms will be required to share information with ACMA on demand, and to implement stronger systems and processes for handling of misinformation and disinformation.

  ACMA will be empowered to devise and enforce digital codes with a “graduated set of tools” including infringement notices, remedial directions, injunctions and civil penalties, with fines of up to $550,000 (individuals) and $2.75 million (corporations). Criminal penalties, including imprisonment, may apply in extreme cases.

  Controversially, the government will be exempt from the proposed laws, as will professional news outlets, meaning that ACMA will not compel platforms to police misinformation and disinformation disseminated by official government or news sources. 

  As the government and professional news outlets have been, and continue to be, a primary source of online misinformation and disinformation, it is unclear that the proposed laws will meaningfully reduce online misinformation and disinformation. Rather, the legislation will enable the proliferation of official narratives, whether true, false or misleading, while quashing the opportunity for dissenting narratives to compete. 

  Faced with the threat of penalty, digital platforms will play it safe. This means that for the purposes of content moderation, platforms will treat the official position as the ‘true’ position, and contradictory information as ‘misinformation.’

  Some platforms already do this. For example, YouTube recently removed a video of MP John Ruddick’s maiden speech to the New South Wales Parliament on the grounds that it contained ‘medical misinformation,’ which YouTube defines as any information that, “contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19.”

  YouTube has since expanded this policy to encompass a wider range of “specific health conditions and substances,” though no complete list is given as to what these specific conditions and substances are. Under ACMA’s proposed laws, digital platforms will be compelled to take a similar line.

  This flawed logic underpins much of the current academic misinformation research, including the University of Canberra study which informed the development of ACMA’s draft legislation. Researchers asked respondents to agree or disagree with a range of statements ranging from the utility of masks in preventing Covid infection and transmission, to whether Covid vaccines are safe. Where respondents disagreed with the official advice, they were categorised as ‘believing misinformation,’ regardless of the contestability of the statements.

  The potential for such circular definitions of misinformation and disinformation to escalate the censorship of true information and valid expression on digital platforms is obvious. 

  Free expression has traditionally been considered essential to the functioning of liberal democratic societies, in which claims to truth are argued out in the public square. Under ACMA’s bill, the adjudication of what is (and is not) misinformation and disinformation will fall to ‘fact-checkers,’ AI, and other moderation tools employed by digital platforms, all working to the better-safe-than-sorry-default of bolstering the official position against contradictory ‘misinformation.’ 

  But the assumption that such tools are capable of correctly adjudicating claims to truth is misguided. ‘Fact-checkers’ routinely make false claims and fall back on logical fallacies in lieu of parsing evidence. In US court proceedings, ‘fact-checker’ claims are protected under the First Amendment, confirming that the edicts of ‘fact-checkers’ are just opinion.

  Recent reporting on the gaming of social media moderation tools, most notably from the Twitter Files and the Facebook Files, shows that they comprise a powerful apparatus for promoting false narratives and suppressing true information, with significant real-world impacts. Take the Russia collusion hoax, which was seeded by think tanks and propagated by social media platforms and news media. The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal is thought to have swung the 2020 US election outcome. 

  ACMA seeks to curtail expression under the proposition that misinformation and disinformation can cause ‘harm,’ but the scope is extraordinarily broad. A shopping list of potential harms includes: identity-based hatred; disruption of public order or society; harm to democratic processes; harm to government institutions; harm to the health of Australians; harm to the environment; economic or financial harm to Australians or to the economy.

  The overly broad and vague definitions offered in the bill for ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘serious harm’ makes enforcement of the proposed laws inherently subjective and likely to result in a litany of court cases – to the benefit of lawyers and the institutionally powerful, but to the detriment of everyone else. 

  Moreover, the definition of ‘disrupting public order’ as a serious and chronic harm could be used to prevent legitimate protest, a necessary steam valve in a functioning democracy. 

  ACMA says that the proposed laws aren’t intended to infringe on the right to protest, yet the erosion of protest rights during Covid lockdowns proves that politicians and bureaucrats are prone to take great latitude where the law allows it. The right to protest was effectively suspended in some states, with Victorian police using unprecedented violence and issuing charges of incitement to deter protestors. 

  In the US, the involvement of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in censoring online speech and, in particular, its framing of public opinion as ‘cognitive infrastructure’ demonstrates how even policies designed to combat ‘threats to infrastructure’ can be subverted as a means clamp down on ‘wrong-think.’

  In the past, extreme censorship has led to mass casualty events, such as the Soviet famine of the 1930s brought on by Lysenkoism. Biologist Trofim Lysenko’s unscientific agrarian policies were treated as gospel by Stalin’s censorious Communist regime. It was reported that thousands of dissenting scientists were dismissed, imprisoned, or executed for their efforts to challenge Lysenko’s policies. Up to 10 million lives were lost in the resultant famine – lives that could have been saved had the regime allowed the expression of viewpoints counter to the official position.

  History tells us that censorship regimes never end well, though it may take a generation for the deadliest consequences to play out. The draft legislation is now under review following a period of public consultation. Hopefully, the Australian Government will take the historical lesson and steer Australia off this treacherous path. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 21:25

• Top US Food Imports By Origin Country
  Top US Food Imports By Origin Country

  The U.S. is a major producer and exporter of food products, but did you know that it’s also one of the world’s largest food importers?

  As Visual Capitalist’s Govind Bhutada details below, due to seasonality and climate, some foods can’t be grown on home soil, at least enough to fulfill consumption demands. Indeed, many familiar grocery items come from other countries.

  This infographic from Julie Peasley uses data from the Chatham House Resource Trade Database (CHRTD) to show where the U.S. gets its food from, highlighting the top exporting countries of various imported food items.

  
  

   

  The Types of Imported Foods

  The U.S. imported around $148 billion worth of agricultural products in 2020, and according to the USDA, this has since risen to $194 billion in 2022.

  Around 50% of all U.S. agricultural imports are horticultural products like fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, and more. Other large import categories include sugar and tropical products, meat, grains, and oilseeds.

  With that context in mind, we break down each category and highlight the five foods with the largest single-origin import value.

  Farm Fresh: Fruit and Vegetable Imports

  U.S. fruit and vegetable imports have been on a steady rise since 2000. In fact, between 2011 and 2021, fruits and nuts imports made up 44% of domestic consumption, while 35% of vegetables consumed in the U.S. came from outside the country.

  Mexico is by far the largest exporter of fruits and vegetables to the United States.

  

  The U.S. imported $2.5 billion worth of tomatoes from Mexico in 2020, representing 31% of international tomato trade. Avocados, native to central Mexico, were nearly as popular with $2.1 billion worth of imports.

  Generally, the largest exporters of fruits and vegetables to the U.S. are North and South American countries, with products often coming from Guatemala, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, and Brazil.

  Beefed Up: Meat Imports

  The U.S. is the world’s largest overall consumer of beef (or bovine meat), and the third-largest per capita consumer at nearly 37.9 kg (84 lbs) per person per year.

  Therefore, despite being one of the top producers of beef, the country still imports a lot of it.

  

  Precisely, The U.S. imported $8.7 billion worth of meat in 2020. Canada was the largest source of imported beef, with the U.S. accounting for more than 70% of all Canadian beef exports.

  The sources of meat imports are more geographically diverse than fruits and vegetables, with billions of dollars of imports coming from New Zealand and Australia.

  Making Waves: Seafood Imports

  Despite plenty of coastlines, the U.S. imports 70–85% of all its seafood and accounted for 15% of global seafood imports in 2020 at $21.8 billion.

  Frozen shrimp and prawns were the top seafood import, with $1.9 billion worth from India.

  

  The largest source of U.S. seafood imports overall with $3.1 billion total was Canada, which leads in lobster, crab, and whole fish imports. It was followed by Chile at $2.1 billion, primarily for parts of fish (fillet or meat, fresh or chilled).

  Other Foods: Oils, Grains, Coffee, and More

  There are plenty of other types of foods and agricultural products that the U.S. relies on other countries for. Here are the largest single-origin U.S. food imports for the remaining categories:

  

  Some of the highest and potentially surprising exports? Imports of refined Canadian canola oil totaled $1.4 billion in 2020, while Vietnam exported a whopping $960 million worth of cashews to America.

  A Global Plate: The Diversity of U.S. Food Imports

  The amount and value of food imported to the U.S. highlights the diversity of consumer preferences and the importance of global food stocks, considering America is one of the world’s leading food producers.

  With countries having to rely on others to satisfy demand for limited production supply or exotic foods, the interconnectedness of the global food system is both vital and delicate.

  What’s clear is that the U.S. food plate is indeed a global one, with many foods taking remarkable journeys from farm to fork.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 21:05

• 204 Chicago Homicides In Mayor Johnson's First 100 Days, Including Four Teenagers Killed Last Weekend
  204 Chicago Homicides In Mayor Johnson’s First 100 Days, Including Four Teenagers Killed Last Weekend

  By Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner of Wirepoints

  It would be naïve to think that a progressive Chicago mayor could actually reduce the city’s crime numbers during his first 100 days in office, but Brandon Johnson did have a real opportunity to flip the trajectory. Chicago’s crime had already hit its post-George Floyd, post-covid highs in 2022 (see appendix) and Mayor Lori Lightfoot had made a major mess of policing and criminal justice. Johnson had a perfect chance to lead, and maybe even bring the crime numbers down.

  

  Unfortunately, Johnson has refused to even try to tamp down on crime during his first 100 days. If anything, he’s doubled down on the city’s long-running soft-on-crime approach. He continues to reject calling out the city’s violence for what it is, downplaying mob actions and resorting to semantics. And he keeps talking and talking about ‘root causes,’ but refuses to stop what’s happening nightly on the city’s streets. 

  His failure to act means the bloodshed continues. New Chicago Police CompStat numbers show during Johnson’s first 100 days a total of 204 murders – far more than the mayor’s two immediate predecessors. And in all, major crimes during Johnson’s first 100 days are up 25 percent compared to the same time period last year.

  The events of last weekend capture the essence of the city’s terrible violence, with 40 shot and seven murdered, including four teens (credit to ABC7 for the details):

  • A 14-year-old boy was fatally shot in his head and chest on Chicago’s South Side, police said. The shooting happened in the 8700-block of South Cregier Avenue at about 6:51 p.m. 

  • A 16-year-old boy has died after he was shot Friday at around 7:49 p.m. in the 4400-block of S. Lavergne on the city’s Southwest Side. CPD said the teen was struck multiple times to the body by gunfire.

  • A 17-year-old girl was shot to death at a West Side Park on Saturday afternoon. Chicago police said she, along with a 16-year-old boy, were shot while a block party was going on nearby. The shooting happened in the North Austin neighborhood’s 5700-block of West Bloomingdale Avenue at about 4:10 p.m.

  • An 18-year-old passenger of a car was shot and killed Friday night in the West Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side. The youth was inside a car just before 10 p.m. in the 4300-block of West Maypole Avenue when someone fired shots, striking him in the head, cheek and abdomen, Chicago police said.

  In all, the total number of teens aged 18 and under killed since Johnson took office has grown to 33.

  

  The 204 homicide total during Johnson’s first 100 days is 25 percent higher than it was under Lori Lightfoot’s first 100 days and 33 percent higher compared to Rahm Emanuel’s back in 2011.

  

  And while it’s true that Chicago has experienced a decline in homicides – murders in 2023 are down 7 percent compared to the same period last year – the other big cities with the nation’s most homicides are seeing far bigger declines in murders YTD. Los Angeles homicides are down 24 percent this year, while Philly’s and Houston’s are down 21 and 23 percent respectively. New York is down 11 percent.

  And major crimes overall this year are still up 34 percent – on top of last year’s own 33 percent increase.

  Slower growth in crime?

  One claim Johnson might make is that he’s presiding over a decline in the growth of the crime rate since he took over. Major crimes are up 25 percent since May 15th (versus the same period in 2022), slower than the 42 percent increase that occurred during the nearly five months of 2023 when Lightfoot was still in charge. 

  But the “reduction” in crime growth can be attributed largely to the relatively stable number of motor vehicle thefts Chicago is experiencing in 2023 as compared to 2022, when an explosion in motor vehicle thefts began in June and peaked four months later. 

  The city’s crime rate has grown more slowly the last two months simply because Chicago isn’t experiencing the same massive growth in car thefts it had last year. 

  Note, though, that the actual number of car thefts in 2023 are running much, much higher than 2022 so far. Already, Chicago has experienced 17,000 car thefts in 2023 compared to “just” 8,000 in the same period last year. We just covered those numbers in detail in: Spree of robberies, car thefts drive Chicago crime to new highs.

  

  Root causes, real solutions

  A key point we have to make when discussing crime: Yes, root causes matter. Tremendously. 

  The lack of two-parent households matters. So does a lack of reading, writing and math skills. As does the city’s neighborhoods struggling with few jobs and fewer opportunities. All that has to be fixed.

  But reaching agreement on the causes and solutions of crime – even among allies – can take years or decades. 

  In the meantime, Chicagoans are suffering the consequences of a post-pandemic-high crime wave: more violence, more stolen and destroyed property, and more deaths.

  The short-term solution remains the same for Chicago: deterrence. As we’ve written time and again, that means a dramatic increase in policing, arrests, prosecutions and sentencing.

  Without such changes, Brandon Johnson’s next 100 days will continue to be bloody.

  A final point. The mayor has a unique position to speak directly to offenders and their parents and get them to listen. But so far he has squandered that, making no attempt to say that criminal conduct is deeply wrong. 

  Appendix.

  

  Read more from Wirepoints:

  • Spree of robberies, car thefts drive Chicago crime to new highs
  • Red states, blue cities: Who’s to blame for America’s homicide crisis
  • What Chicago requires immediately is deterrence. Stop the bleed. Fast.
  • Chicago, New Orleans were the nation’s murder capitals in 2022 – A Wirepoints survey of America’s 75 largest cities
  • Not ‘mob action…they are not baby Al Capones’ says Chicago Mayor Johnson about latest youth violence

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 20:45

• Watch: 'Good Guy' With Gun (& Six-Pack Of Beer) Takes Down 'Bad Guy' With Knife
  Watch: ‘Good Guy’ With Gun (& Six-Pack Of Beer) Takes Down ‘Bad Guy’ With Knife

  Authored by Athena Thorne via PJ Media,

  Today’s feel-good story comes to us from Cass County, Mich. A law-abiding gentleman with a concealed carry permit was picking up a six-pack of Miller Lite in his local gas station convenience store. Suddenly, 35-year-old Cordelius Anthony Martin burst into the establishment. “You know why I’m here,” declared Martin. He pulled a mask over his face and rushed the terrified clerk, brandishing a boxcutter.

  

  From the next aisle, our hero alertly watched the interaction. He would later explain to the police that he “could not see what was in the robber’s hand, but he could see the look of fear on the clerk’s face,” reported WOOD TV8 (video below). Cool as a cucumber, the carrying customer reacted as one expects a hero would: by calmly drawing his firearm and neutralizing the threat to the innocent store worker.

  Of the seven rounds our hero let off, at least three struck the armed robber: in the arm, the back, and the face. The bad guy went down. As he crawled toward the shooter, the alpha citizen realized he had time to run out to the car to fetch another loaded magazine, which he did. He then held the robber at gunpoint until the police arrived.

  Martin spent a couple of days in the hospital before being released — only to be arraigned on three charges, including armed robbery, and held on a $100,000 bond. A three-time felon, Martin faces life in prison for his latest escapade.

  It remains unclear whether the unnamed hero will face charges of his own. “In Michigan, obviously, we do have defense of others as part of the law, in Michigan, that you can defend others if they’re in a situation that there’s dangerous force being used against them,” Cass County Prosecutor Victor Fitz told WOOD TV8. “And certainly in this case, we’ll be looking at the facts in regard to that.”

  The store clerk says, simply, of the Good Samaritan, “He saved my life.” Plus, the hero has plentiful melanin levels in his skin, so he is presumably immune to hate crime charges. His prospects for remaining unmolested by excessive law enforcement look promising in this case.

  The incident occurred at the Stone Lake Marathon mini-mart on July 27, but police only recently released the footage. It can be seen in this report from WOOD TV8. Enjoy!

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 20:25

• A Letter To Our Betters
  A Letter To Our Betters

  Authored by Eric Lundrum via American Greatness,

  To those who rule over us, though not by our own choice;

  To those who could not care less about this nation we call our home, but instead only care for their own power, glory, and enrichment;

  To those who consider themselves better than us, and view us with nothing but the utmost contempt:

  

  We know exactly who you are. Now, more than ever before, We The People have had the wool pulled from our eyes, due in large part to your own arrogance. You have ended up as our ruling class, through manipulation rather than merit, through deception rather than democracy, and through favoritism rather than free elections.

  And we know all this through the efforts of one man: The man that you are now attempting to sentence to hundreds of years in one of your gulags, all for the crime of exposing your treachery at the highest levels. Most simply, Donald J. Trump committed a sin that, in your eyes, is far more egregious than such trivial crimes as bribery, sexual impropriety, abuse of power, or even outright treason. President Trump’s only crime was to humiliate the lot of you, at every level and in both parties. The damage to your ego is a far greater offense than any actual criminal wrongdoing committed by many career politicians of days gone by.

  That is why you now hunt the man with all the relentlessness of Ahab pursuing his White Whale. And that is why we are now more resolved than ever before to stop you. Quite simply, the fight to save Donald Trump is the fight to save America: His struggle now is unlike any smear, intimidation, and character assassination campaign faced by any other political figure in American history. And it is only so because you have made it so. The more viscerally you react to him, and the more deranged your attacks against him, the more determined his supporters become to stand by him through it all.

  But this all goes far beyond President Trump.

  You dictate to us from your halls of marble, built ages ago by far greater men than you will ever be, and in so doing desecrate the memory of those who came before us. If our Founding Fathers could see the state of their nation today, they would either believe that the Revolution had failed; or, perhaps, they would even regret the Revolution altogether if this was the ultimate end result.

  You have actively led a widespread and systematic effort to erase our nation’s history, from the legacy of those very Founders to the statues and other monuments meant to stand through all of time as a tribute to their greatness. Whether by mobs of roaming thugs or by official decree, you have sought to tear down the very memory of those who built the nation that you now run.

  You speak down to us from your houses of glass, eternally – and perhaps deliberately – oblivious to the two-tiered society you have created for your own benefit and at our expense.

  You claim to fight for “democracy,” and yet actively obstruct the will of we, the 63 million, from the moment our chosen leader laid his hand on the Bible. Your bureaucrats determined that an archaic “interagency consensus” should override the desires of the American people and their elected commander-in-chief.

  When he called out the corruption of one of your leading political puppets, and suggested that such corruption should be investigated, you responded by putting him through a nakedly political impeachment trial. You made a crime out of noticing a crime, even after the former Vice President quite literally confessed to committing the corrupt act to which President Trump was referring.

  You used an over-exaggerated Chinese virus to take away our rights, our way of life, and our sense of self for several years, even while you continued to live your lives freely with your high-class restaurants and extremely essential hair appointments. As the masses starved, financially and otherwise, your very own Marie Antoinette declared “let them eat ice cream.” You even used the then-impending pandemic to enrich yourselves, with no consequences still to this day.

  When the second great disease of 2020 – vicious and violent race riots – tore through the country and devastated thousands of us little people, you actively cheered on the terrorists and agitators. Your PR teams in the mainstream media declared the riots to be “fiery but mostly peaceful.” Your future Vice President openly promoted an effort to release violent anarchists who had just destroyed the property of defenseless American citizens. And your friends in the corporate world, with their black squares and black fists, crowed their support for the violence which cleared out many small businesses that competed with their massive companies.

  And you let savages burn down our country over what? A career criminal, a man who threatened pregnant women at gunpoint, and who, in the end, met his demise not at the knee of his arresting officer, but at the hands of the drugs to which he was addicted. In response, your corrupt judicial system locked up the police officers who simply did their job by restraining a monster. When brave citizens took it upon themselves to fight off other criminals during that fiery summer, you similarly thrust upon them the whole weight of your so-called “justice system,” sometimes with deadly consequences. In a complete inversion that would stun even Orwell, you legalized crime, and then made it a crime to fight crime.

  Your so-called “intelligence” agencies spent years crafting the biggest lie in modern politics, and then doubled down when your narrative of “Russian collusion” was debunked. You then outdid yourselves with an even greater lie, declaring that the stolen election of 2020 was the “most secure” election in our history…and yet, in your arrogance, your propagandists in the rags of the media couldn’t help but admit, in their own smug way, that the election was indeed stolen from the man who was re-elected by we, the 74 million.

  For all your pearl-clutching over the events on January 6th, you have spent years ignoring previous or subsequent acts of violence carried out against government figures: You let protestors storm the Capitol in 2018 in protest of a Supreme Court justice’s confirmation, and you have cheered on as waves of radical, pro-transgender protesters storm state capitols all across the country. When lawmakers of your preferred party embrace such actions that are, by your own definition, “insurrectionist,” you instead make celebrities out of them.

  And yet you continue to shamelessly suppress the rights of hundreds of American citizens over that single short, peaceful protest at the U.S. Capitol. You have sentenced Americans who were not even present that day to decades in prison, with others sentenced to re-education routines more reminiscent of the U.S.S.R. than the U.S.A, determined to purge any “wrongthink” from the minds of rubes who, according to you, just don’t know any better. You even sent your agents to infiltrate the defense teams of unsuspecting defendants, proving that our judicial system and the very notion of the rule of law itself are nothing more than hastily-discarded suggestions for you.

  And once more, your mad power trip has even led to several good American men taking their own lives due to the endless misery to which you subjected them. But no statues are built of them, nor murals painted in their honor, nor streets renamed for them. That luxury is reserved for actual criminals.

  Since the fateful day your senile puppet seized power, your absolute disregard for the wellbeing of the American people has only made itself even more apparent. You have forced all of us to accept some of the most sickening beliefs and behaviors that this world has ever seen, as perfectly encapsulated by the perverse delusions of those who call themselves “transgender.” You have promoted the most vile of degenerate freaks ever to serve in the federal government, only relieving them of their positions after incontrovertible evidence of them committing multiple crimes.

  At the altar of transgenderism, you expressed more sympathy for a mass shooter than for the shooter’s underaged and Christian victims, declaring that the true victims were actually the shooter’s fellow “trans” people. To this day, your mobsters in law enforcement have forbidden the release of the shooter’s manifesto, knowing full well that her demented scribblings would confirm the true beliefs of all who suffer from this anti-biological affliction.

  When transgenders are not massacring children, they are indoctrinating them. You have demanded that America’s impressionable young children obediently accept these teachings, even if it means protecting rapists. If the father of a violated girl speaks out, you have your police beat and arrest him in a demonstration of your power. If more parents join his cause and speak out just as he did, your ersatz Department of Justice and faux Attorney General will label them as “domestic terrorists.”

  The same nonexistent attorney general has rather conveniently turned a blind eye to far-left agitators terrorizing Supreme Court justices in the name of their “right” to murder babies, despite such acts being clear violations of federal law. But he did find the time to revive dismissed charges against a pro-life pastor, even going so far as to have the man arrested at gunpoint by a swarm of agents, all in front of his screaming children.

  And in perhaps the single greatest crime against the American people, you have actively assisted a mass invasion of this fine land by foreign hordes, with the promise of a life in America paid for by We the People. You have even gone so far as to directly import these third-world defilers into our homeland, with your pseudo president openly cheering for the replacement of our people.

  You attempt to distract from such domestic crimes with grand overseas affairs; but these matters too have exposed your corruption and contempt for the American people. You single-handedly delivered the greatest military defeat in our nation’s esteemed history, producing nightmarish images that led to the entire world viewing us as a weak nation. You have continued to demand that We the People silently comply with an endless supply of our money going towards an equally endless conflict in Europe.

  Meanwhile, your installed president cannot even be bothered to comment on the devastating destruction of one of the most beautiful locations on Earth, which just so happens to be located in an American state. But this should come as no surprise: After all, this same Resident of the United States demonstrated his clear preference for the fake nation of Palestine over the American town of East Palestine.

  And all the while, the man now occupying our great White House is actively covering up his entire corrupt family’s past of enriching themselves at the expense of our national sovereignty. His son is free to commit crimes for which others have spent years in prison, knowing that his father’s government will give him the most generous of plea deals.

  So here we arrive, at our current state of affairs. This long train of abuses and usurpations which you have carried out for decades has culminated in the greatest offense yet against the American people, which just so happens to be the one thing that unites every faction of your shadow government: Your unholy hatred of the one man who is fighting for We the People, and the one man who could stop you.

  And that is why we will continue to support Donald J. Trump. That is why he remains the people’s president. Every time you attack him, he only grows stronger, as does our support for him. You continue dragging all of us towards the point of no return, the danger of the looming precipice only surpassed by the extreme thinness of the ice upon which you currently stand. Either you will take us over the edge, or the thin ice will break beneath you first.

  With your increasingly authoritarian displays of brute power and disregard for We the People, you have truly forced our great nation off the edge of the map. But, just as in physics, one law always applies in politics: No matter how far, nor how fast, the pendulum may swing in one direction, it will always, inevitably, swing back in the opposite direction.

  The position in which the pendulum of our nation currently resides has resulted in the Tree of Liberty becoming quite dry. It thus stands to reason that whenever the pendulum swings at last to the other side, it will end up in a position that will ultimately see a long-overdue flood of nourishment for the Tree.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 20:05

• A Sober Look At Four Indictments
  A Sober Look At Four Indictments

  Authored by Josh Kantrow via AmericanThinker.com,

  I’ve read the indictments and it seems that three of the four cases against Trump are pretty weak.

  

  Georgia (election interference)

  Using tweets to support a RICO case?  

  Come on.  

  Plus taking two and a half years to investigate and now pressing for a trial in six months, to interfere with the primaries, seems to be the very definition of election interference.

  D.C. (election interference)

  If lying politicians can be prosecuted for fraud, as Special Counsel Jack Smith proposes, we’ll need many new prisons.  

  The case impinges on Trump’s free speech rights.  Plus, how does Mr. Smith intend to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, Trump’s subjective belief that he knew that the fraud claims he was advancing were baseless?

  As to these two cases, as I’ve said since January 6, I’m not about to defend Trump’s post-election conduct.  But judgment should be left to voters, not jurors.

  New York (Stormy Daniels hush money payment)

  This indictment is based on falsifying business records to pay a mistress.  

  That’s normally chargeable as a misdemeanor payable by a fine.  

  That Alvin Bragg, who campaigned on getting Trump, has brought felony charges, while he fails to prosecute some cases involving violent crime, is ridiculous.  This case should be settled and go away.

  Florida (refusing to return documents)

  The strongest case.  Trump stepped right into it here.  His lawyers negotiated with the National Archives, DOJ, and others for over a year.  All he had to do was give the documents back.  But it appears as though he did not, then lied about it, then obstructed. 

  Here’s the overarching problem with the cases.  Prosecutors use their discretion all the time not to prosecute, as we see in cities across the U.S. where “progressive” district attorneys choose not to prosecute violent crime, or offer sweetheart deals.  The DOJ does this as well (Hillary and Hunter). 

  Yet in the case of Trump, state and federal prosecutors seem to be going out of their way to bring charges against Trump in venues highly favorable to the prosecutors.  Indeed, many of the counts involve novel, creative, and “unprecedented” legal theories.  This further sows mistrust that we have a two-tier justice system and increases the partisan divide.  Plus there are concerns as to whether Trump can get a fair trial in New York City; Washington, D.C.; and Fulton County, Georgia.

  As noted, the one exception to this is the Florida documents case.  While the DOJ could have used its discretion not to prosecute, as they did with Hillary and Hunter, for example, Trump owns this one due to his behavior.  This case, however, also was brought in the one venue that probably favors Trump.

  In my view, there is a grand bargain that would resolve this legal pile-up.  Trump agrees not to run for public office again, and in return pleads guilty to a few misdemeanors or low-level felonies, pays some hefty fines, and goes away.  The country can then move on to the serious problems it faces, most notably tackling the national debt, entitlement reform, securing our border, reforming our immigration system to allow for more skilled workers and less unskilled ones, figuring out how to deal with artificial intelligence (which may be an even greater disruption to our lives than the internet), and how to confront China. 

  All this is probably just wishful thinking on my part.  The hatred of Trump by the left may prevent prosecutors from dismissing some or all the cases in exchange for Trump not running.  Plus Trump hates to look like a loser, which is how dropping his candidacy may be perceived.

  Instead, these indictments may result in Trump gaining more support.

  If the goal of the prosecutors is to interfere in the Republican primaries to advance Trump to the general election, they may come to see they played with fire, and instead of burning Trump instead caught fire themselves.  

  All Trump has to do is flip 44,000 votes in three states in 2024 to regain the presidency.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 19:25

• Bud Light Backlash "Shows Little Signs Of Abating", Citi Warns
  Bud Light Backlash “Shows Little Signs Of Abating”, Citi Warns

  The Bud Light backlash shows no signs of stopping: AB InBev’s US volumes tanked 15.2% this past month, according to Citi, citing new data from Nielsen. The brewer has not apologized to its base drinkers for its tone-deaf transgender TikTok campaign in April. 

  Here are the main points of Citi analyst Simon Hales’ note to clients about “the ongoing backlash to Bud Light’s social media campaign”: 

  • ABInBev beer volumes dropped by 15.2% in 4 weeks.

  • Market average decrease: 2.8%.

  • Beer price/mix increased by 4.1%.

  • Total dollar sales for beer fell by 11.7%.

  • ABInBev’s total value share decreased by 484bps.

  • Beer value share dropped by 555bps.

  • Bud Light backlash persists.

  • Bud Light contributes to ~30% of the group’s US revenues (about 8% of the group).

  • Bud Light volumes: -29.7%; previously -29.9%.

  • Budweiser volumes: -25.3%; previously -26.2%.

  In the US beer, flavored malt beverage, cider, and seltzer markets, AB InBev is the only major brewer experiencing widespread declines in total value share and volumes in the last four weeks. 

  

  AB InBev’s brand portfolio is suffering at a time when US beer, flavored malt beverage, cider, and seltzer markets are marginally growing. 

  

  Citi’s Hales shows AB InBev’s sales are at a critical low — where either the brewer can revive demand through proper marketing — maybe an apology might work — or face a second exodus wave as drinkers switch to other beers. 

  

  An in-depth view of AB InBev’s declines by brand. 

  

  Hales shows Molson Coors has been one of the biggest winners following Bud Light Marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid’s move to ‘nuke’ the brand with ‘woke’ transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. She was eventually fired. 

  

  In a separate report, Deutsche Bank analyst Mitch Collett warned Bud Light faced a 25% permanent loss of its business. 

  Billy Busch, the heir to the Anheuser-Busch dynasty, made a few recent television appearances, telling AB InBev that he would like to buy back the ailing brand to “make the brand great again” (free from woke). 

  Bud Light’s PR nightmare, combined with its summertime marketing flop, has failed to revive the brand (for now). Could consumers have finally seen through the façade and realized Bud Light has been handing them ‘piss water masquerading as beer’ for years? 

  Meanwhile, the new top-selling beer in the US is Modelo Especial. Epoch Times explained more:

  Modelo Especial is now the top-selling beer in the United States, surpassing Bud Light, whose popularity has plummeted in the midst of a lengthy boycott.

  Data from Nielsen IQ shows Modelo Especial’s sales at beer and grocery stores surpassed Bud Light’s for the entire year, according to CNN. Modelo got 8.34 percent share of dollars spent on beer, as compared to 8.28 percent for Bud Light from the start of 2023 to Aug. 12.

  “The fact that we became the number-one beer in America due to a competitor’s moves is not accurate,” Jim Sabia, executive vice president and managing director of Constellation Brands, said in a recent statement.

  Several brewers in the Mid-Atlantic region told us they’ve increased light beer production and expanded portfolios to take market share away from AB InBev. For those seeking a real American-owned beer, ditch the Belgian brewer in favor of local brewers. 

  More in the full note available to pro subs.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 19:05

• How Much Of Today's 'Racism' Is Manufactured?
  How Much Of Today’s ‘Racism’ Is Manufactured?

  Authored by Roger Kimball via RealClearPolitics.com,

  The real problem with racism in America today is that demand far outstrips supply. Where does the demand come from? Chiefly from our woke elites. It is they who understand that the charge of “racism” is a potent meal ticket and guarantor of institutionalized political power. Accordingly, they have a large stake in perpetuating the reign of racism. In this realm, too, incentives matter.

  

  It is also worth noting that many of these elite race cadets are white. Blacks are invited to participate in this theatrical production, but only so long as they play their assigned roles. They must mouth the pieties about “systemic,” i.e., perpetual, incurable racism. 

  The main narrative of this drama is racial conflict, enforced and perpetuated partly by a woke media machine, partly by governmental fiat. The real goal is the destruction of America as a meritocratic republic that cherishes individual liberty and the rule of law.

  These are points that Thomas D. Klingenstein makes in “Racism in America Today: A Real or Manufactured Problem?”, a powerful speech he delivered at the Women’s National Republican Club earlier this summer and just posted on his website at tomklingenstein.com.

  “To a very significant degree,” he argues, racism is a weapon “crafted by woke Leftists in order to overthrow the American way of life.”

  Klingenstein, chairman of the Claremont Institute, is refreshingly forthright. “To the woke Left I say, ‘if you want to destroy America, then we will fight you and defeat you. America is not yours to destroy.’” Hear, hear.

  This speech is full of hard truths.

  “Blacks commit more than 50% of the violent crime in America,” Klingenstein notes, “yet are only about 13% of population. The woke tell us this is due to racism, but Americans know better. We know that racism does not cause more crime, or out-of-wedlock births, or lower academic achievement.” 

  And here’s the kicker:

  “It is not racism but culture that causes outcome differences. But the woke make it very difficult for the rest of us to say it, because if it’s culture that explains outcome differences then the blame rests not on whites but on blacks.”

  That grinding sound you hear is The Narrative coming unglued. 

  Klingenstein is also clearsighted about the ultimate aim of the woke weaponization of race: “group outcome equality.” Most Americans, he points out, believe in color-blind advancement according to merit. Hence “these two goals are utterly irreconcilable. You can’t offer admission to college, medical school, law school, flight training, or anything else according to race and other quotas and, at the same time, offer admission according to merit. It’s one or the other: merit or group quotas.”

  Klingenstein is right: “These irreconcilable goals make this struggle a war,” a war in which “the woke Left seeks total victory.” We do not often acknowledge the uncompromising nature of this ideology. What it wants is not compromise, and certainly not conciliation. What it wants is the utter destruction of its enemy, which is us. 

  This generally unacknowledged home truth helps to explain why the word “racism” silences conversation and sends an anticipatory shudder of delight down the spines of politically correct vigilantes of virtue. Like the word “heretic” in an earlier age, “racism” is more weapon than word. Its primary effect is not to describe but to intimidate, ostracize, and silence. 

  What semantic significance it may command is overshadowed by its use as an epithet. Once  it is successfully applied to a person or practice, a sort of secular damnation, or at least excommunication, ensues. Seldom is there any appeal, let alone absolution. Those who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, said St. Mark, cannot be forgiven. Racism is the eternal, the unforgivable, sin of our age. Those successfully accused of racism are beyond the pale, cast out into utter darkness. 

  It would be a tall order to explain why this should be so, but it seems clear, as Klingenstein notes, that charges of racism and the pursuit of power go hand in hand. 

  The deployment of power always attracts acolytes and entrepreneurs. So it is no surprise that a thriving cottage industry has grown up around accusations of racism. Elsewhere I have called the resulting enterprise “Racism, Inc.” There is no shortage of workers on that assembly line. On college campuses (but not only on college campuses, as such names as Al Sharpton and Ibram X. Kendi remind us), the bludgeon of “racism” is a popular and effective instrument of moral one-upmanship and social control, not to mention intellectual conformity and economic blackmail.

  Given the prominence of “racism” in today’s lexicon of moral opprobrium, it is curious that the word itself is of very recent vintage. Indeed, it is a neologism so recent that it does not appear in the 1971 Oxford English Dictionary. The Supplement to my edition of the OED (printed in 1961) introduces “racialism” – the “tendency to racial feeling; antagonism between different races of men” – but fails to provide an equivalent of our multipurpose imprecation “racism.” 

  Perhaps that fact is itself evidence of a particularly insidious form of racism – all the more insidious because it is unacknowledged. Or perhaps that fact, along with the recentness of the word in any currency, suggests that there is something artificial, manufactured, or even cynically manipulative about the tort it describes.

  Klingenstein’s speech reminded me of a profound observation made some years ago by the philosopher Sidney Hook.

  “As morally offensive as is the expression of racism wherever it is found,” Hook wrote, “a false charge of racism is equally offensive, perhaps even more so, because the consequences of a false charge of racism enable an authentic racist to conceal his racism by exploiting the loose way the term is used to cover up his actions.”

  Hook wrote that several decades ago. Tom Klingenstein reminds us that we have yet to catch up with it.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 18:45

• China Retaliates Over Fukushima Water Dump: Blocks Seafood Imports As Nobody "Wants To Eat Radioactive Salmon"
  China Retaliates Over Fukushima Water Dump: Blocks Seafood Imports As Nobody “Wants To Eat Radioactive Salmon”

  In July, the UN’s nuclear watchdog gave Japan the “greenlight” to dump ‘treated’ radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima plant into the Pacific Ocean. And now, the world braces for the first release of radioactive water on Thursday. What could possibly go wrong?

  Tokyo Electric Power Company (better known as TEPCO) will begin discharging 1.34 million tons of radioactive water that has accumulated since the 2011 tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant. It’s part of a $150 billion clean-up effort after the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. 

  On Tuesday, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida cleared TEPCO for the Thursday release at a meeting of Cabinet ministers. 

  Kishida said at the meeting that the release of the water is essential for the progress of the plant decommissioning and Fukushima prefecture’s recovery from the March 11, 2011, disaster.

  He said the government has done everything for now to ensure the safety, combat the reputational damage for the fisheries and to provide transparent and scientific explanation to gain understanding in and outside the country. He pledged that the government will continue the effort until the end of the release and decommissioning, which will take decades. –Bloomberg

  The discharge of radioactive water will be released over three decades and has been filtered and diluted. But that hasn’t stopped China and Hong Kong, some of the largest buyers of Japan’s seafood exports, from issuing warnings about bans on seafood imports from 10 prefectures if the dump begins. 

  Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee stated this week that he had “immediately instructed” trade officials to impose import control measures to “protect Hong Kong’s food safety and public health.”

  “The Japanese government insists on discharging nuclear wastewater into the sea.

  “This unprecedented decision and practice of discharging a large amount of nuclear waste over 30 years — regardless of the inextricable risks to food safety and the irreversible pollution and damage to the marine environment — is an irresponsible imposition on others,” Lee wrote in a Facebook post. 

  In July, Hong Kong banned seafood imports from the Japanese regions of Tokyo, Fukushima, Chiba, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Gunma, Miyagi, Niigata, Nagano, and Saitama. Hong Kong is Japan’s second-largest market, after mainland China, for seafood exports. 

  Reuters spoke with Halry Yu, 42, owner of the Japanese restaurant Hassun in Hong Kong, who said more than 90% of seafood sent to the city is from Tokyo. He warned:

  “If they ban imports that come via Tokyo, I think all sushi restaurants in Hong Kong will be in trouble. There are some seafood supplies from Osaka, but variety is limited.”

  Meanwhile, Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the Chinese state-run Global Times, posted a model of the radioactive water being released that could “Pollute China and the US in 3 years” and “Pollute the whole world in 10 years.” He asked: “Anyone wants to eat radioactive salmon?” 

  According to a model made by Tsinghua University, the nuclear-contaminated wastewater discharged by Japan will:

  -Pollute China and US in 3 years
  -Pollute the whole world in 10 years

  Anyone wants to eat radioactive salmon? pic.twitter.com/m9JcAvuilc

  — Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) August 22, 2023

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

  Oddly enough, there has not been a peep about this clear and present ocean disaster from either the original Greta, or her new and improved version for mass-consumption replacement, Sophia Kianni. 

  Both social media teams of Kianni and Greta are either bashing oil companies this week or promoting the world is burning — still nothing on Japan. 

  Amidst the climate alarmists, Greta and her upgraded version, Kianni (touted as Greta 2.0), seem strangely silent on Japan’s attempt to destroy the oceans with radioactive water. The conspicuous absence of outrage and coverage makes some realize these kids are just puppets, something we’ve known all along, in which they promote nonsense climate ‘news’ to distract from the real disasters. 

  We still remember Greta. 

  

  Where’s the coverage on Japan Greta and Greta 2.0?

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 18:25

• 14 US Cities Initiate New Globalist Climate Plan In Partnership With Soros & The Clintons
  14 US Cities Initiate New Globalist Climate Plan In Partnership With Soros & The Clintons

  Authored by Jack Hellner via AmericanThinker.com,

  The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group is a globalist enterprise with at least 14 partners right here in the U.S., and, they have set an “ambitious target” to convince the masses to give up meat, dairy, and private car ownership, as well as almost all flights, to supposedly save the planet and control temperatures forever around the current level.

  

  From RedState yesterday:

  Fourteen major American cities are part of a globalist climate organization known as the ‘C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,’ which has an ‘ambitious target‘ by the year 2030 of ‘0 kg [of] meat consumption,’ ‘0 kg [of] dairy consumption,’ ‘3 new clothing items per person per year,’ ‘0 private vehicles’ owned, and ‘1 short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every 3 years per person.’ …

  The organization is headed and largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Nearly 100 cities across the world make up the organization, and its American members include Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

  So 14 leftist cities in the U.S. have signed on to this commitment to take away freedom of choice from their citizens, while people suffer under rampant crime and children perform poorly in schools, but their priority is to take away milk, meat, and gas-powered cars. 

  Got it.

  Major funders and partners of the organization include George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Clinton Foundation, and The World Bank.

  Michael Bloomberg, the president of the group, is himself transported via gas-guzzling private jets and limousines, to his many mansions around the world.  From Fox News:

  Flight records show that Bloomberg’s private jets took more than 1,700 trips and emitted at least 10,000 metric tons of CO2 from August 2016 to August 2020, a Business Insider analysis found. A typical car emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide in one year.

  Bloomberg has access to multiple private jets, but he wants to limit us to one short-haul flight every three years.

  He probably pretends he cares about his carbon footprint by buying worthless pieces of paper called carbon credits.  His real estate portfolio consists of “at least 11 homes,” and he owns a fleet of luxury personal vehicles:

  To suit his luxurious fortune, he owns a Mercedes-Benz Maybach sedan. His Audi R8 is the one that shows athletic personification. Like a mandated SUV in the home of every celeb, Cadillac Escalade is tuned in black color. After not getting satisfied with one, he owns another fullsize SUV from Chevrolet.

  Bloomberg and other green pushers tell people their gas-powered cars are destroying the planet, yet he has a massive car collection of gas-guzzlers.

  They want to outlaw milk; does that include breastfeeding?  Pretty sure that’s a dairy product, and women and babies breathe out that vicious CO2, a non-pollutant, clear gas that makes plants thrive.

  These billionaires generate massive pollution and pollute people’s minds with talking points to indoctrinate the people to fall for pure propaganda.

  What you will never see in these articles or in these policies is scientific data that show a direct correlation between milk and temperature, cars and temperature, meat and temperature, the population and temperature, crude oil consumption and temperature, or CO2 and temperature.  The temperature fluctuates no matter what the other variables do.

  You will also not see any correlation between any of these variables and storm activity or sea levels.

  When there is no correlation, you can’t assume causation.  It is all a scam.

  The sole purpose of these big government policies by leftists is to control our lives.

  These billionaires and other leftists pretend they care about the poor and middle classes and small business, but every day, they show that is a blatant lie.  They are extremely dangerous to our survival as a great and prosperous country, as are all the journalists who regurgitate the talking points without asking questions or doing any research.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 18:05

• 'Bread And Water': Bankman-Fried Denied Vegan Meals, Adderall — And Is Running Out Of Anti-Depressant
  ‘Bread And Water’: Bankman-Fried Denied Vegan Meals, Adderall — And Is Running Out Of Anti-Depressant

  FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was tossed in pre-trial detention until his Oct. 2 trial after he showed a journalist from the NY Times private writings from his ex-girlfriend and business partner, Caroline Ellison, and used a VPN in violation of a previous order not to, has been denied vegan meals and adderall, and has been subsisting on ‘bread and water,’ like many crypto bros who trusted their life savings to FTX before SBF and pals allegedly used those funds to try and stave off oblivion.

  

  Appearing before a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday to plead for a narrower indictment on securities fraud, wire fraud and other charges, attorneys for the embattled 31-year-old, who was never going to do well in prison, says he’s “literally subsisting on bread and water” and a scant amount of peanut butter.

  The hearing was the first since a judge revoked SBF’s $250 million bail, tossing him into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York.

  SBF lawyer Mark Cohen says that the FTX founder hasn’t been given any Adderall since he was jailed, and has only a few doses left of antidepressant, Emsam. Cohen also argued that the legal team was struggling to cobble together SBF’s defense without access to their client.

  At Tuesday’s hearing, his lawyers said the jail’s failure to provide him with the medication Adderall to treat attention deficit hyperactive disorder – despite a court order for the facility to do so – and serve him vegan food would hinder his ability to participate in preparing his defense case. -Reuters

  SBF was led into court wearing leg restraints and a beige-colored uniform to appear in front of US Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn, where he pleaded “Not guilty” to seven new criminal charges related to making some $100 million in political campaign contributions using stolen customer funds, federal prosecutors allege, after dropping similar charges related to violating US campaign finance laws because the Bahamas threw a fit and ‘did not intend to extradite the defendant on the campaign contributions count.’

  According to Christian Everdell, another lawyer for the former billionaire, SBF hasn’t been allowed to review any of the millions of pages of evidence against him, a violation of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

  His lawyers also rejected a plan to allow SBF to use a laptop in the cell block of the courthouse to review the evidence with his lawyers two days a week from 9am to 3pm, which Everdell said was inadequate.

  “It means he cannot help prepare his defense,” he said.

  Bankman entered his ‘Not guilty’ plea in response to seven counts of fraud and money laundering contained in a revised US indictment. According to prosecutors, SBF’s alleged fraud scheme cost customers and investors billions of dollars.

  The case is US v. Bankman-Fried, 22-cr-673, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/22/2023 – 17:45

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