- "War" Top Trend On Greek Twitter As Military On 'High Alert' Over Turkish Drilling Incursion
“War” Top Trend On Greek Twitter As Military On ‘High Alert’ Over Turkish Drilling Incursion
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/23/2020 – 02:45Greek news sources are reporting that Greece’s military is on “high alert” after on Tuesday Turkish survey ships entered East Mediterranean waters between Cyprus and Greece.
And Reuters reports that “Greece accused Turkey on Tuesday of attempting to encroach on its continental shelf in a serious escalation of tensions between the two NATO allies at odds over a range of issues.”
For much of the past year European Union leaders have condemned Turkey’s expansive claims to broad swathes of Mediterranean waters around Cyprus and reaching into Greece’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The US State Department is also backing Greece’s condemnation of Turkish encroachment. Meanwhile, the number one trending hashtag in Greek Twitter right now happens to be war.
No.1 trend in Greek twitter right now: #πολεμος = war pic.twitter.com/wJu8qQE21B
— The Greek Analyst (@GreekAnalyst) July 22, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
On Tuesday a US State Department statement demanded that Turkey back down from its drilling plans which are sure to immediately escalation already soaring tensions.
“We urge Turkish authorities to halt any plans for operations and to avoid steps that raise tensions in the region,” the statement said. And Greece’s foreign ministry said it clearly violates the country’s sovereignty and that it stands ready to defend its territory.
This as not for the first time a pair of Turkish F-16s reportedly flew over Greece’s easternmost territory, including the islands of Strongyli and Megisti. Greece’s prime minister also said this week that EU sanctions await Turkey if it moves forward with illegal drilling.
Reuters: “An advisory known as a Navtex was issued by Turkey’s navy on Tuesday for seismic surveys in an area of sea between Cyprus and Crete. The advisory is in effect until Aug. 20.“
A number of very recent issues have already significantly built-up tensions. To review:
- Turkey’s provocative move to turn the historic Byzantine Hagia Sophia church into a mosque.
- Continued historic animosity over ethnically-partitioned Cyprus.
- Turkish claims to all waters surrounding Cyprus.
- Recent border tensions involving Erdogan sending thousands of Syrians refugees to Greece’s border.
- Greece’s militarized response along migrant crossing points at the Turkish border.
- Turkey’s involvement in Libya, which has seen its navy patrols expand into the Mediterranean off the north African coast.
Erdogan just made a hugely provocative visit to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which a top Turkish court has declared to be a mosque. Via AFP All of this means the region stands of the brink, perhaps more than every before, while the Greek navy prepares to prevent Turkish drilling ships to encroach on its territorial waters.
To underscore where things stand, see this message being widely shared in Greek on social media and via Greek news sources: Greek social media users are urging people to not post photos, videos or information about Greek military movements.
Meanwhile Greek stocks saw their biggest daily drop in a month on Tuesday amid the renewed Turkey tensions, while the Turkish lira also felt the pressure, falling further against the dollar, for a total 13% decline so far this year.
- Pandemic And Hair Trigger Flash Points: An Explosive Situation
Pandemic And Hair Trigger Flash Points: An Explosive Situation
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/23/2020 – 02:00Authored by Wayne Madsen via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
As the Covid-19 pandemic continues its deadly march around the world, a number of relatively dormant conflicts, as well as several well-known flash points, stand ready to place the world on the edge of a major armed conflict. History shows us that during times of stress – economic depression, religious strife, vacuums of political leadership, and public health crises like that which is now plaguing the world – the chances for war increase commensurately.
India and China, which fought a border war in 1962, are against faced off at several key border locations stretching from Ladakh in the western Himalayas to Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern sector of the mountain range. The resurgent border conflict between the world’s most populous and second-most populous nations is exacerbated by the Covid-19 virus that has taken a toll on what had been the burgeoning economies of both nuclear-armed countries. Deaths and injuries among Indian and Chinese border troops have resulted from fights, with sticks and rocks being used as weapons. A wider and deadlier conflict may result if the weapons used are India’s T-90S tanks and Apache helicopters – now engaged in exercises along the border – and armed Chinese troops that have penetrated some 8 kilometers beyond the 1962 truce line, which is officially called the Line of Actual Control (LAC), in eastern Ladakh. Meanwhile, the number of Covid cases in India has climbed about one million.
The Korean peninsula went on a war footing as South Korea successfully managed its Covid cases while North Korea, according to many reports, suffered several deaths as the virus spread throughout its population. In June of this year, North Korea ordered the demolition of the joint North Korea-South Korea liaison office building in Kaesong, a North Korean border town. On January 30 of this year, the office was closed due to the pandemic. The massive explosion that felled the four-story building capped off the deterioration of ties between Pyongyang and Seoul that saw their crescendo in 2017, when Donald Trump held his first of three summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The destruction of the Kaesong building also put an end to the policy of South Korean President Moon Jae-in in forging new ties to the North. Trump did not help keeping the peace in Korea when he told a group of governors in February of this year that the South Koreans were “terrible people.” Trump has angered Asian governments from Beijing to Seoul and Tokyo to Singapore with his openly racist comments, which have also included Asians. The pandemic has placed the Sino-Indian border and the 38th Parallel of Korea at the top of the list for flash points that could very well ignite into open warfare.
In Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reversing the secularization policies enacted by Kemal Ataturk, ordered the Hagia Sophia museum – a mosque under the Ottoman Empire and the main cathedral of Eastern Christianity under the Byzantine Empire – transformed back into a mosque. In 1934, Ataturk decreed that Hagia Sophia was no longer a mosque but a museum open to all. Ataturk also invited Christian experts not restore the ornate Byzantine tiles in the building, which had been plastered over under Ottoman rule. Erdogan rejected calls from Greece to respect the Hagia Sophia and its Christian iconography, setting the stage for further deterioration in relations between Turkey and Greece, both members of NATO. Many Greek nationalists long for the restoration of Constantinople, now Istanbul, and the Hagia Sophia under Greek Orthodox control. Erdogan, who fancies himself as a neo-Ottoman sultan, has done little to placate countries from Greece and Russia to Serbia and Bulgaria that see Islamist control of the Hagia Sophia as an extreme provocation. A number of Turkey’s neighbors have grown irritated over Erdogan and his Muslim Brotherhood-linked policies. A modern “Entente Cordiale” between Greece, Cyprus, Armenia, Iran, Lebanon, the Kurdistan Regional Government, Georgia, the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria and even Egypt and Iraq against Erdogan cannot be ruled out. It is said that a leader can be judged by the opinion that his neighbors have of him. Erdogan remains generally despised by every one of his neighbors.
Another flash point that could result in a regional war is the initial operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and Ethiopia’s obstruction of the natural flow of the Nile River, which serves as the lifeblood for the downriver countries of Egypt and Sudan. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has made no secret of this threat to bomb the GERD if Ethiopia’s water flow activities affected Egypt. Egypt is relying on the 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, which granted Egypt an annual allocation of Nile water resources plus a veto over any dam construction on the Nile headwaters. The rift between Cairo and Addis Ababa have rekindled old animosities stemming from Egypt’s failed invasion of Ethiopia in 1874. Not helping in calming frayed diplomatic nerves, the pandemic has helped to stoke further tensions in the Horn of Africa, just as it has along the Sino-Indian border, the Korean Peninsula, and Istanbul.
The global instability brought about by the pandemic also threatens to turn other flashpoints into hot war zones.
Chief among these is the ongoing civil war in Libya, where the Tripoli government is backed by over 3500 Islamist guerrillas transferred by Turkey from the Syrian front to take on the forces of the rival Libyan government based in the east. Essentially, the Libyan civil war has turned into one between the old Ottoman fiefdom of Tripolitania and the one-time heavily British influenced province of Cyrenaica. The Libyan civil war involves several outside players other than Turkey. These include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
There are showdowns between the United States and Venezuela, Russia and Ukraine, China and several other countries in the South China Sea, maritime brinkmanship in the Persian Gulf between the United States and Iran, and cross-strait tension between China and Taiwan. One or more of these flashpoints could result in a major regional or global war, especially as nations fear the repercussions of the pandemic affecting their very survival as nation-states.
In Barbara Tuchman’s widely-acclaimed book on the factors that resulted in the First World War, “The Guns of August,” she wrote, “Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.” All the plans of nations large and small to prevent a repeat of the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which ravaged the battlefield trenches of France, have largely proven ineffective. The world is now being subjected to Tuchman’s danger and death – the danger of the uncontrolled pandemic and the mounting death toll arising from it. The current missing ingredient of live ammunition may, if cooler heads do not prevail, result in a modern-day “guns of August.” Continued economic dislocation and a deepening global recession is all that is needed as a catalyst for military standoffs from the Himalayas and South China Sea to the Caribbean waters off Venezuela and the 38th parallel of Korea to turn into hot war zones purposely or by accident.
- Election 2020: The Worst Case Scenario Is The Most Likely One
Election 2020: The Worst Case Scenario Is The Most Likely One
Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/23/2020 – 00:00Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
The most frequently asked question I get these days is what is going to happen in November, 2020. The election seems to be on the majority of people’s minds even more so that the coronavirus pandemic. In the summer of 2016 I accurately predicted that Donald Trump would enter the White House and met endless opposition to the idea. At the time, an overwhelming number of analysts in the liberty movement assumed Trump would lose, and that Clinton, by hook or by crook, would become president. Obviously this was not the case.
I made the call on a Trump presidency for a number of reasons. Set aside the fact that the majority of major elections are rigged from within because the elites choose candidates on BOTH sides to run, and lets just look at the simple campaign dynamic at the time.
For one, Clinton was the worst possible candidate that could have been chosen to run against Trump if they had actually intended on “winning”. The DNC had rigged the primary process against Bernie Sanders in order to push Clinton through, yet she was universally hated not just by conservatives but also by moderate liberals. Democrats tend to draw a larger voter base by running “vibrant” candidates that appeal to younger Americans, yet they ran one of the most twisted and decrepit creatures they had on their roster. Though all the polling said Clinton would win in a landslide, the crowds at her campaign events were tiny and devoid of energy. It was clear that she had zero momentum.
It was almost as if she was being set up to lose. But why? Trump’s rhetoric was anti-globalist and his calls to “drain the swamp” were resonating with voters. Would this not greatly damage or expose the establishment agenda?
Here’s what people need to understand…
Sometimes giving an enemy a false sense of security by allowing them a minor victory is the best strategy. The globalists strategize for the long term; not just for the next 4 years, but for the next 40 years. As Richard N. Gardner, former deputy assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations under Kennedy and Johnson, and a member of the Trilateral Commission, wrote in the April, 1974 issue of the Council on Foreign Relation’s (CFR) journal Foreign Affairs (pg. 558) in an article titled ‘The Hard Road To World Order’:
“In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.”
My prediction on Trump becoming president was not only based on Clinton’s inadequacy as a candidate, but also on Trump’s usefulness as a scapegoat for collapse. Keep in mind that the US economy had been struggling to maintain support since the crash of 2008. With all major fundamentals either stagnant or in decline, and with corporate debt, consumer debt and national debt skyrocketing, an enormous bubble was being created in the US economy. This bubble was being inflated by the Federal Reserve through endless stimulus policies to the point that the economy had become addicted to easy money. The system was dependent on it.
Eventually, this bubble was going to pop regardless of how much money was printed by the Fed. The banking elites needed a cover event and a scapegoat for the inevitable collapse they had engineered. With Clinton in office, the globalists would get the blame for the crash. With Trump in office, conservatives and all of our ideals and principles get the blame for the crash.
Trump’s entry into the White House brought hope for many conservatives, but I never put much faith in the eventual outcome once I realized the same elites that had infested previous administrations were now packed into Trump’s cabinet. The fact of the matter is, Trump is surrounded by them.
Dozens of members of the Council on Foreign Relations (a globalist think tank) reside in Trump’s cabinet, along with elites like Pompeo, Mnuchin, Ross, Kudlow, Lighthizer, Fauci, etc. Mike Pompeo is a hardcore neo-con with longtime support for numerous unconstitutional policies including mass surveillance of Americans. Steve Mnuchin is former Goldman Sachs. Wilber Ross is an agent for the Rothschild banking syndicate. Larry Kudlow is former New York Federal Reserve. Robert Lighthizer is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And, Fauci is the guy that gave MILLIONS of dollars to the Level 4 lab in Wuhan, China to research none other than coronavirus transmission from bats to other mammals; the same lab that is probably responsible for the initial pandemic outbreak.
One could debate whether or not Trump is aware that he is being swarmed by globalist parasites, but it is a FACT that these people still have considerable influence over White House policy either way.
This brings us to 2020. We are now in the middle of a viral pandemic; government officials and establishment elites are calling for extensive economic lockdowns in order to “flatten the curve” and slow the infection rate. These lockdowns are accelerating the decline of the already weakened US economy and setting the country up for collapse in the near term. Civil unrest is constantly on the verge of breaking out on both sides of the political divide.
The social justice cultists want chaos in the name of bringing down the system and replacing it with some kind of Marxist Utopia. Conservatives are ready to protest and perhaps even go to war in order to stop the lockdowns and prevent medical tyranny (and I agree with them). This is the background for election 2020, and it’s an epic mess.
For the past few month my suspicion is that there might not be an election at all. But let’s look at the factors that are in place:
1) Joe Biden, the Dem candidate, appears to have stage four dementia. Either that, or he is a very good actor. This is another situation where I am questioning WHY? Why would the establishment run Biden (like they ran Clinton), perhaps the worst possible choice if they hope to rally people against Trump and conservatives?
Maybe Trump is meant to stay in office for another four years, because Biden appears to have no capacity to hold the attention of an audience (again, unless his Alzheimer’s is an act). That said, if the economic decline is severe enough into November, the election numbers could still be very close because of the backlash against Trump. Close elections are the easiest for the establishment to manipulate one way or the other.
2) Leftists hate Trump so thoroughly that they would vote for anyone at this point just to get rid of him; but will this fervor be enough to sway moderate Dems to participate if Biden continues his displays of mental frailty?
3) The pandemic lockdowns and viral spread are likely to hit hard by November. Meaning, there is a chance that people will find it difficult to vote at all, unless the votes are handled by mail-in or by electronic means.
4) Electronic or mail-in voting will not be trusted by the public on either side. Whoever wins will be accused of cheating.
5) Civil unrest and violence is almost guaranteed in the lead up to the elections, which could frighten people away from voting booths if they are even in operation.
These factors and more lead me to predict that Election 2020 will be a contested election which ends with Trump staying in office but accused of usurping the democratic process. This outcome is the worst possible outcome and also the most advantageous for the globalist establishment.
The elites are even hinting publicly that this is about to happen. For those of you that have been reading my work for many years, the name “Max Boot” might sound familiar. In my article ‘How Globalists Will Attempt To Control Populations Post Collapse’, published in 2016, I outlined writings by Council on Foreign Relations member Max Boot on the Malaysian Model, a method he describes as the perfect strategy for taking control of a population and destroying an insurgency.
The model calls for the institution of city-sized concentration camps which are used to isolate a rebellion away from the general population. The population in these cities is then subjected to extreme tracking and control measures, while the military is sent out to rural areas to eliminate potential insurgent threats.
Well, Boot is back again, this time writing about how he thinks Donald Trump will try to “hijack” the presidency in 2020.
In an article for the Washington post titled ‘What If Trump Loses But Insists He Won’, Boot outlines a scenario that was “war gamed” by a group called the Transition Integrity Project. The group played out a scenario in which there is a razor thin victory for Joe Biden, followed by actions by Trump to keep control of the presidency through lies and legal wrangling. The group also predicted civil unrest leading to potential “civil war” as the fight over the White House expands.
This article is, I believe, an attempt at predictive programming by the establishment. They are TELLING US exactly what is about to happen. A contested election, civil war, martial law, economic collapse and the US will be destroyed from within. If conservatives actively support unconstitutional levels of federal power or martial law, then the scenario becomes even worse. By forsaking our foundational principles in order to “defeat the left”, we would be handing victory to the globalists. We would be destroying our own movement’s reason for existing while the elites barely have to lift a finger.
The CFR and its long time goal of erasing US sovereignty would then be nearly complete. All that would be left is to ensure they they are the people that get to rebuild America from the ashes of all out domestic conflict and collapse. This cannot be allowed to happen.
I continue to predict that the plan is to destroy the US as we know it and blame conservatives in the process. With so many elites inhabiting Trump’s cabinet, this outcome would be easy for them to engineer. That said, the end game is not in the hands of the elites. It’s in the hands of conservatives.
The temptation for conservatives will be to fully embrace government power in order to stop the leftists, but if we refuse to support martial law measures, if we demand or assert alternative solutions (such as community based security), if we stand by our principles of limited government and if we fight back against the globalists specifically instead of only focusing on the political left, then there is a chance we can stop them from taking control. That said, if we bow to government power and hand over our freedom just to defeat the leftists, then we will lose the greater battle against globalism in the long run.
* * *
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- Strip Clubs Being Left Bare By Paycheck Protection Program
Strip Clubs Being Left Bare By Paycheck Protection Program
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 23:40Among everybody’s favorite “small businesses” that shut down due to the pandemic earlier this year were our fine country’s strip clubs. And like every other business in the “hospitality” industry, these clubs hoped the government’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) would help them stay afloat during the shutdown.
But a little known provision in the Trump administration’s program that bans companies that “present live performances of a prurient sexual nature” from participating has stopped some clubs in their tracks. Several have sued and Federal judges have rebuked the SBA for excluding them, according to Reuters.
It’s the latest in a growing list of criticisms of the program, which has been rife with waste, fraud and abuse since its inception. Meanwhile, some legitimate businesses in the hospitality industry, like gentleman’s clubs, can’t get access to funds. It’s still unclear if the SBA will even work with the clubs that have won court orders.
Brad Shafer, an attorney who convinced a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan to issue a ruling in May ordering the SBA to work with more than 50 strip clubs, said: “The ball is in the SBA’s court right now. We still don’t know the end of this story.”
Reuters was able to find 36 organizations that represented “dozens” of strip clubs across the country that were approved for between $11.15 million and $27.95 million from the program. Some businesses had to wait until after the court’s decision to get their funding.
John Meehan, who owns Cheerleaders strip clubs in New Jersey and Philadelphia, was denied by PNC for loans. He said: “I wasn’t complaining, but I was scratching my head.”
A spokeswoman for PNC said she didn’t know why the loans were denied: “Under those guidelines, applicants were responsible for certifying that they met applicable SBA eligibility requirements, and lenders were not required to independently verify such eligibility.”
RCI Hospitality Holdings Inc., which operates more than 35 strip clubs, had better luck and was approved for between $4.45 million and $11.7 million in funding. Representatives for the company declined to comment.
One dancer, Jordan Lawrence, concluded: “These people need to come out here and interact with people like me because they are interfering with our livelihood. We have bills to pay too.”
- "How We Got Here": The Transformation Of America
“How We Got Here”: The Transformation Of America
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 23:20Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,
Earlier this month, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said on Twitter that he would “transform” America if he were elected. “We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation — we’ll transform it.”
That’s good news if you don’t like America. According to the dictionary, to “transform” is to “make a thorough or dramatic change in the form, appearance or character” of something. It is to reshape, or as the current phrase goes on the left, “to reinvent” — as the Democrats have promised to “reinvent public safety” by defunding police forces, by encouraging looters, by eliminating cash bail that ensures criminal defendants show up for trial, and by prosecuting people who use their Second Amendment right to bear arms to protect their lives, their families and their livelihood.
When you hear that Biden wants to “transform” America, and then you hear that he is leading President Trump by 10 or 15 percentage points in the polls, you have to fear that perhaps America is already transformed, that it is no longer the sweet land of liberty, that it is no longer the same land where our fathers died, that the dear freedom we once took for granted has been replaced by the cheap freedom of “nothing left to lose.”
But if we as a nation no longer respect the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, in the articles of the Constitution, in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who put honor and country first, then we must ask — those of us who still have a moral compass and are looking for the direction home — “How did we get here?”
It’s no accident that Biden’s promise to transform America echoed the words of the man he served as vice president. The week before Barack Obama was elected president, he told a crowd in Missouri, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” After his election, he endeavored to fulfill that promise, most overtly by co-opting the nation’s health care system, one-fifth of the U.S. economy, and putting it under the auspices of the federal government with the Affordable Care Act.
But let’s not blame Obama and absolve ourselves of all responsibility. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault is not in our star politicians, but in ourselves. Ben Franklin said that the Founding Fathers had given the nation a republic “if you can keep it.” Well, we’ve done a rather poor job of keeping it. The descent into the madness on our streets and in our courthouses and in our legislatures today did not just start with Barack Obama, and as we now see clearly it will not just stop with Donald Trump.
For well over 100 years, the nation has toyed with socialism like a fifth-grader experimenting with cigarettes. What harm could it do, right? But before you know it, your fifth-grader is all grown up and struggling to breathe or is starting another round of chemotherapy. Actions have consequences, and so does looking the other way.
In my new book, “How We Got Here,” I look at some of the roots of the radical ideology that is now threatening to destroy our country. It is no accident that the subtitle is “The Left’s Assault on the Constitution,” because it is that document which restrained the socialist impulse for many years and yet is now proving dangerously susceptible to court-ordered subversion.
In retrospect, I submit that our faith in the Constitution was perhaps ill-placed. We forgot the warning of John Adams that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
That quote is well-known to conservatives, if not sufficiently honored, but the rest of President Adams’ letter to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798 is little remembered. That’s unfortunate, because it sounds the alarm on our current crisis quite presciently:
“[S]hould the People of America, once become capable of that deep … simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Sound familiar? It should. Black Lives Matter and its allies on the left have adopted the “language of justice” while indeed “practicing iniquity” in the form of arson and shootings and “rioting in rapine and insolence.” Though the word is out of fashion, rapine seems an apt description of the state of our city streets since the end of May. It is defined as the “violent seizure of someone’s property.” How else do you describe what happened in Minneapolis and Atlanta and Seattle and is still happening in Portland, Ore.?
Adams warned that “this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World” should these conditions come to pass, and we do not have to guess if he was right. We are living it. We know full well that the instincts of “avarice, ambition and revenge” can indeed “break the strongest cords of the Constitution.” Witness what happened to the St. Louis attorney who defended his home with a weapon when he was threatened by an unlawful assembly. No one protected him, no one answered his call for police, and within a week his gun was seized and he was threatened with prosecution for a “hate crime.” So much for the Second Amendment.
“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” said Adams. “We the People” have no way to contend with a government that is unbridled by morality and religion. That, ladies and gentleman, is the point we have reached, so discovering “how we got here” may be only an academic exercise. Nonetheless, if we are going to have any chance to restore morality to government — and power to the Constitution — we must do the hard work of finding out what went wrong. After that, we shall see if there is any hope.
Let’s start with the loss of morality. This is the north star of behavior, the bellwether of decency, the certainty of right and wrong. Morality is what C.S. Lewis in “The Abolition of Man” called the Tao — “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” In other words, it was that force which existed independent of man but embedded in him that impelled our Founders to describe certain inalienable rights as “self-evident.” The Tao was not created by religion, but rather was the reason why religions existed. It is what our Founders called Natural Law.
So what went wrong? In a word, education. In two words, “progressive education.” For the first hundred years or so of our nation’s history, education served its usual purpose of reinforcing social norms, teaching values and passing on the heritage and traditions that bind us together. All of that began to change in the 1880s, thanks in large part to one man — John Dewey, the godfather of progressive education, who insisted on teaching children what they want to learn instead of what they should learn. Essentially, what the progressive education movement wanted to accomplish — and did accomplish by the 1960s — was to jettison traditional values and replace them with transient values (those which each generation or even each student adopted individually). This meant that society was no longer tethered to the Tao. Morality had become relative. Education had switched from being a method of reinforcing social conventions and standards to uprooting them.
Time magazine in 1958 put it this way:
“In a kind of country-club existentialism, Dewey and his boys genially contended that the traditional ends of education, like God, virtue and the idea of ‘culture,’ were all highly debatable and hence not worth debating. In their place: enter life adjustment. The Deweyites thus transformed conditioning techniques into ends in themselves. … Within the schools, discipline gave way to increasingly dubious group persuasion. ‘With teen-agers,’ one high school principal said proudly, ‘there is nothing more powerful than the approval or disapproval of the group. When the majority conforms, the others will go along.’ It would not easily occur to the modern educationists that such blind fostering of group pressure is a travesty of free democracy.”
Dewey’s system of education emphasized students doing what feels good rather than learning what is good for them. Progressive education does not believe in moral, religious or cultural absolutes, but rather teaches students that they have the right to reject any system of belief, any principles, and values that they find to be “restrictive” or that make them “uncomfortable.” In essence, Dewey said to question everything and respect nothing. That model did permanent damage to the family, to the church, and to the country. Progressive education does not believe in moral, religious or cultural absolutes and makes every individual the master of his own moral universe. It also means that nothing can be taken for granted, nothing is certain, and the concept of right and wrong is malleable.
Which brings us — in this truncated history — to the 1960s. The social revolution of that decade was the illegitimate child of progressive education and the affluent society. Thanks to the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation, my own generation was able to smoke weed, skip class, and raise Cain — all while on the family allowance. Somehow along the way, these products of indulgence decided that America didn’t live up to their high standards of social justice. They rejected the principles of rugged individualism and free enterprise and substituted their socialist fantasies. The Vietnam War gave them the perfect foil to foment civil unrest and to enlist most of their generation into a war on “the establishment,” which meant a war on law and order, a war on religion, a war on the nuclear family, and a war on authority in general. These were the godchildren of John Dewey: Question everything, respect nothing.
One mastermind of the ’60s revolution was Bill Ayers, who was first a progressive educator, then a bomb-throwing revolutionary in the Weather Underground, and then a fugitive from justice. It was while he was hiding from the FBI for the entire decade of the 1970s that Ayers realized that violent revolution could not topple the government unless it was first rotted from within. In “Prairie Fire” and other radical writings, Ayers described how young people, minorities and women could be turned against the system, and most importantly how revolutionaries who wore suits and ties could infiltrate boardrooms, political parties, the military, the courts and other institutions of society in order to bring about change from within.
When you see how many millions of dollars that corporate America has voluntarily given to the communist front organization known as Black Lives Matter, you can gauge just how successful Ayers was in his strategy. When you see that the Democratic Party is led by communists and socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you can thank Bill Ayers. When you see military generals publicly condemning the commander-in-chief for his efforts to ensure public safety, you know that Bill Ayers has come close to victory. When you watch our courts chip away at our freedoms, you can bet that Bill Ayers thinks he has won. And maybe he has.
A recurring theme in “How We Got Here” is that the Constitution no longer means what it says it means, but rather what any five Supreme Court justices say it means. These justices have a remarkable knack for discovering new powers for the government hidden in nooks and crannies of the document that somehow were missed previously. Under such a scenario, the Constitution becomes a tool for social engineering rather than a protection against government excess, as was originally intended.
It too is all part of the plan. After all, judges are lawyers, and lawyers are graduated from law schools, and the top law-school students come from the top Ivy League and radical-left colleges, and most radical college students come from public schools, and public schools are to progressivism what politics is to the swamp. You can thank John Dewey, and you can thank Bill Ayers, who after he returned to public view, became an influential educator of educators at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In “Prairie Fire,” Ayers outlined how the revolution would transform America. Yes, violence would play a role. Yes, bankrupting the system by increasing dependence on government would play a role. Yes, spurring foreign wars to spread America’s military too thin would play a role. Yes, encouraging division among the races would be part of it, as would weakening the influence of religion on the masses, but if you wanted to win the revolution, Ayers made it perfectly clear how to begin: “The real question is: Who will control the schools?”
How did we get here? The answer by now should be obvious.
* * *
Frank Miele’s new book “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com to read his daily commentary .
- Newsroom Job Cuts Up 170% Through June, Worst On Record
Newsroom Job Cuts Up 170% Through June, Worst On Record
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 23:00Newsroom employment continues to slump. From 2018 through June, more than 28,000 employees at US newspapers have been laid off.
Since the start of 2018, newsrooms have had a challenging time, resulting in industry-wide consolidation. The push to digital has been a significant contributor to this trend. As of recent, the coronavirus pandemic has triggered a nasty recession, collapsing ad revenue for media firms.
Newsroom job cuts this year is shaping up to be the worst on record, could even surpass the dark of 2008/09, wrote outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
The new report, titled “Newsrooms Suffer Worst Layoffs Through June on Record,” reveals newsroom job cuts totaled 11,027 through June, up 169.8% from the 4,087 cuts announced in 1H19.
“Newsrooms have had a rough few years, as revenues declined and consolidation in the industry decimated news teams. Coupled with a hostile environment for many journalists, news has become an increasingly difficult career path,” said Andrew Challenger, Senior Vice President of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
A Challenger survey during the pandemic of newsrooms shows 23.3% of media firms furloughed workers. About a third of respondents said they slashed pay, and over half were able to avoid layoffs.
A couple of years of consolidation, coupled with the virus-induced recession, newsrooms are set to record the largest ever round of job cuts on record.
Not too long ago, Quartz fired half of its journalist, blamed job cuts on the virus that dramatically crushed its finances.
Global advertisement spending is set to collapse this year, further pressuring newsrooms that will create a perfect storm of layoffs.
- Partisanship Has Untethered Americans' Minds From Objective Reality
Partisanship Has Untethered Americans’ Minds From Objective Reality
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 22:40Authored by ‘Zman‘ via The Burning Platform blog,
Simulacra and Simulation
Logic dictates that it is impossible for someone to lie to themselves. A lie is the deliberate, and therefore conscious, telling of a falsehood. The person lying is deliberately trying to deceive someone. The only way lying can be successful is if the person hearing the lie believes it. Lying to yourself is an obvious paradox. This is true of self-delusion or self-deception. The real paradox here is that we have these expressions because the phenomenon seems to exist.
For example, the odds of knowing someone who has died from the corona virus is very low, unless you work in a nursing home. For the typical person, you are more likely to know someone who was murdered. In fact, in most of the country, you are four times more likely to know a murder victim than a corona victim. Yet, many people on the Left will tell you they know many people who have died from corona. They really believe this is true and display the appropriate emotions to prove it.
Adding to the intrigue is the fact that these people have had the math explained to them many times by the more skeptical. The same is true about the stories of overwhelmed hospitals everyone hears about, but no one has seen. The nurses and doctors posting TikTok videos of themselves dancing in empty hospitals had no effect on the believers in these claims. Even now, they are sure the “first responders” are nearing exhaustion as they heroically fight the virus.
It is not a coincidence that these people are sure Donald Trump is Adolph Hitler slowly imposing the Third Reich. People who otherwise seem calm and rational, despite their politics, become hysterical when talking about Trump. “He’s a dangerous dictator who is destroying the country” they bellow. It’s not just hyperbole. They really seem to believe that Trump is not only a man who wants to be a dictator, but that he is actually assuming dictatorial power. The lie is very real to them.
It’s not so much that they believe complete nonsense regarding Trump. It’s that their own reaction to the nonsense underscores the irrationality of it. After all, if Trump is anything like they believe, voting him out of office is unlikely. After all, he would use his magic dictator power to rig the vote or just ignore the result. Rather than reevaluate their beliefs, they are now creating another fantasy around with Trump secretly plotting to ignore the results of the election.
For these people, perception is reality to the point where reality is warped in order to make it comply with their pseudo-reality. Like fanaticism, partisanship untethers the mind from objective reality. Unlike fanaticism, which is temporary and disconnected from rational thinking, partisanship enslaves the rational mind, forcing it to create an alternative reality. This partisan reality is so powerful it blocks out anything that contradicts or disconfirms the alternative reality.
The most extreme version of this are the radicals that go on a murderous rampage in the belief they are defending their cause against dangerous enemies. They quickly move from disagreement to murder, because they quickly create a reality in which anyone showing the least bit of doubt is secretly plotting to kill them. Those who commit political murder do so in the firm conviction they are acting in self-defense. In fact, they have to kill their opponents for the good of society.
The thing about political murder is it is not irrational. If you truly think the only way your people can survive is to abide by a certain set of rules, then anyone trying to undermine those rules is a direct threat to your survival. Bargaining with such a person or offering them leniency would be no different than bargaining with a killer. The fact that political opposition is not the same as violent assault is the deception. The partisan has become convinced of something that is at odds with reality.
Compounding this strange conflict of realities is the fact the people in each are highly similar to one another, but seemingly incapable of seeing the reality of the other as the other perceives it. The people sure the hospitals are war zones, for example, look at images of empty hospitals or the statistics on hospital layoffs and it has no impact on their mental processes. It’s as if that information is invisible to them. In fact, it just confirms to them that the other people are dangerously insane.
In fairness, something similar happens when dealing with the MAGA people. Their blind loyalty to Trump and the old America is more endearing, but just as disconnected from reality as the “Trump is Hitler” stuff. In this regard, those looking hard at the world find themselves surround by people from at least two simulations that are derivative of reality, but at odds with it in fundamental ways. It’s as if there is a leak in these simulations and their simulacrum are leaking into the real world.
The question we face in this age is whether it is possible to maintain a civil society with an abundance of people embracing an alternative reality. Fanatics, eccentrics, lunatics and so on have been a part of human society since the beginning. The issue today is one of scale. Those leaky simulations have burst open and our reality is now flooded with berserk imitations of normal people, acting on a sense of reality that is at odds with objective reality. We’re being overrun by simulacrum.
- First Pandemic, Now Rainstorms, Headaches For Restaurants Soar
First Pandemic, Now Rainstorms, Headaches For Restaurants Soar
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 22:20Until a proven vaccine, one that has to be mass-produced and handed out to the population, but then again, recent polling data show only half of Americans are willing to take the vaccine once commercially available, the restaurant industry will remain absolutely crushed in a depression.
The exact figure on restaurant failures is dependent on the source, OpenTable recently said 25% of all US restaurants are set to go out of businesses due to shifts in consumer habits linked to the public health crisis, resulting in collapsing foot traffic with weakest eateries closing first. Imagine, if foot traffic stays low through late summer into fall, it would eventually lead to restaurants with high cash buffers depleting funds and trigger another round of closures through winter.
So far, restaurants with carryout and outdoor seating have been the winners through the midpoint of summer. Early in the pandemic, consumers stayed home and ordered takeout, via popular delivery apps, such as DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats.
Consumers who gather up the courage to hop in their automobiles and drive to their favorite eatery are now demanding outdoor seating more than ever. This has posed a significant challenge for restaurant, first not every eatery has the space to expand or even have outdoor dining; and second, operators serving food must contend with rainstorms.
Dale Talde, owner of Goosefeather restaurant in Tarrytown, New York, told Bloomberg his top concern today is the weather, with about 90% of seating now located outside, his staff must be conscious of storms.
“We have to move thousands of pounds a day based on these crazy weather patterns,” Talde said, referring to staff shifting tables inside and out, depending on the weather. He said a Phase 3 region had limited his indoor dining operations, which is the reason why he has a majority of tables outside.
Goosefeathers in Tarrytown, New York. H/T Bloomberg Talde’s restaurant isn’t the only one in New York battling evolving weather trends. Public health orders countrywide have limited indoor capacity at restaurants that has pushed operators outside. Besides the pandemic, the weather has become a significant factor for operators in 2020.
Talde said the pandemic has led to a decline in average checks, falling from $100 in pre-corona times to $70, or about a 30% reduction in several months. He said total sales on a typical Saturday would fetch upwards of $20,000, and now the number is halved.
At Le Crocodile in Brooklyn’s Wythe Hotel, owner Jon Neidich said most of his sales are from his newly created outdoor dining area. He said profitability is not on his mind, instead just trying to “break-even” and survive the virus pandemic.
Le Crocodile in Brooklyn’s Wythe Hotel. H/T Bloomberg Neidich was another operator who said the weather had become a major challenge since many tables are now outside. “With rain, you can go from 80 seats to 40 seats. If you have a storm with wind, business is gone.”
At Philadelphia’s Sunset Social restaurant, a massive rooftop space outfitted with restaurant seats is prone to rainy afternoons.
“We have to send our entire team home,” owner Branden McRill said. “If it seems like a passing shower, we’ll keep a few team members on and try to ride it out, but it’s usually a wash.”
Bloomberg notes insurers could get into the weather game and start offering policies to restaurants for weather-related losses.
“Weather is definitely the X-factor for us,” Sean Fowler, the owner of Mandolin, in Raleigh, North Carolina. He said heat lamps for the fall would be considered shortly if indoor dining capacity continues to be limited.
Bob Giaimo, CEO of the Silver Diner chain, said his company quadrupled outdoor dining at 18 retro diners across the mid-Atlantic. He said outdoor dining contributes to about half of the restaurant’s dine-in business, and the weather has become a challenging problem.
Outdoor dinning at a Silver Diner location in Rockville, Maryland. H/T Bloomberg “Heat has been challenging, but now we’re getting fans and misters,” Giaimo said. “We recognize these outdoor cafes are going to be a fixture.”
With many states pausing or reversing reopenings, current figures from Goldman Sachs has about 80% of the US population are in areas where the recovery has reversed. On top of that, seasonal shifts from summer into fall/winter will force restaurants who have outdoor seating to purchase tents and heating devices.
What a mess it must be for restaurant operators, who’ve been crushed by the pandemic, now easily susceptible to Mother Nature’s wrath.
- Oklahoma Teens Charged With Terrorism For Breaking Windows During Protests
Oklahoma Teens Charged With Terrorism For Breaking Windows During Protests
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 22:00We have previously discussed my reservations about the use of federal charges of arson and other crimes to prosecute individuals accused of rioting offenses in the recent protests. The concern was the federalization of local offenses. Now, however, I have concerns about state charges out of Oklahoma.
Teenagers are facing terrorism charges after allegedly helping to break in the windows of an Oklahoma City bail bonds business in late May. I have long raised concerns about the broadening of terrorism laws and this is an example of why I still hold such concerns. As the Justice Department explores possible terrorism charges, the Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater appears to be adopting an exceptionally broad interpretation of that crime. Among those charged was Malachai Davis, 18, who was shown breaking the window of the CJ Bail Bond building using what appeared to be brass knuckles.
That charge has a tragic irony because, according to his attorney, Davis’ father died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.
Haley Lin Crawford and Sydney Lunch, who both just turned 18, were charged with acting with a large crowd to unlawfully break the windows of CJ’s Bail Bonds in Oklahoma City on May 30, according to the Oklahoman. They were identified using Facebook Live video streamed by other demonstrators as well as the Crimestoppers bulletin below.
At least three others had been charged with terrorism after the May 30 incident.
Prater declared last month that those who incite violence in the streets are “criminals” and “[w]hen you employ these tactics for a political purpose, you are a terrorist.” He denounced Black Lives Matter protestors of later trying to intimidate him and law enforcement to drop the charges. Protesters held a sit in at his office.
I tend to agree with the Black Lives Matter position, contained in a petition on Change.org, that it is overreach “[t]o conflate acts of vandalism against property with acts of terrorist violence against human beings.” The Oklahoma Democratic Party has also spoken out against the charges.
By charging such property damage as terrorism, the prosecutor radically increased the potential sentence as well as the required bond.
What is curious is that others were charged with rioting (and at least one with assault on an officer) but Prater charged these individuals with terrorism. I do not see the dividing line between the cases.
Two other cases come closer to the cases we discussed earlier as possible federal terrorism cases linked to the burning of police vehicles.
Isael Antonio Ortiz, 21, is accused of burning an Oklahoma County sheriff’s van and attempting to burn a bail bonds business with others. Eric Christopher Ruffin, 26, was accused of encouraging the “wanton destruction” on Facebook Live. He is quoted from the Facebook video as saying every single one of those that kill Black people need to die and “that’s what happens when you got numbers outside.”
This is Ruffin’s second charge. He was accused on May 30th of terrorism in relation to the burning of the van. He was then charged in the bail bonds fire. He went on Facebook Live before turning himself in to declare
“I’m innocent. You dig what I’m saying? We’ve got mounds and mounds of evidence. I didn’t burn nothing. I didn’t set nothing on fire. I didn’t tell nobody to do none of that s—. You dig what I’m saying? And … they’re doing this because, I feel as if … they want a fall person right now. … And it’s wrong. It’s wrong what they’re trying to do to me.”
He was also featured in this interview:
Ruffin’s threat (if tied to criminal acts) comes closest to conventional terrorism charge. I still have some reservations, particularly with the Ortiz case, in treating wanton destruction as terrorism. We have seen thousands of such cases during protests and they have not been treated as terroristic acts. I believe that such charges would be reserved for the narrow category of criminals who use violent to terrorize communities or countries. Ruffin admittedly raises a viable issue, but we need to know more about the context and intent behind that statement. I am still concerned about the use of the charge even with Ruffin even with his reckless and threatening words.
There are very serious charges that can be brought against all of these defendants, including the rioting charges levied against at least six other individuals. I do not see why it is necessary to treat this as terrorism. Terrorism is an offense that is quickly loosening its meaning and cohesion as a criminal charge as prosecutors reframe vandalism, property damage, and rioting as terrorism. It seems as misplaced as calling the 9/11 attacks as a property damage offense. The damage in Oklahoma was done in the rage of a protests following the death of George Floyd. That is no defense but the intent was not to terrorize. If it could be construed as terroristic, then any wanton property damage would become terrorism.
As I have said before, I tend to view these cases through the eyes of criminal defense attorney. However, I cannot see the logic and necessity of framing these crimes as terroristic acts.
- Sierra Club Disowns John Muir Over Friendship With Eugenicists, 'Perpetuating White Supremacy'
Sierra Club Disowns John Muir Over Friendship With Eugenicists, ‘Perpetuating White Supremacy’
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 21:40He may have devoted most of his life to the preservation of America’s wilderness and had a direct hand in the establishment of Yosemite National Park, but legendary environmentalist John Muir was friends with eugenicists – and so, he must be canceled.
The Sierra Club – which Muir founded and served as its first president – has condemned the iconic naturalist for his associations, along with racist comments in what Executive Director Michael Brune described as part of the organization’s “substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”
In a Wednesday post on their website, Brune pointed to Muir’s close friendship with paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn and other eugenicists – whose movement sought to improve the genetic quality of the human race through selective breeding and sterilization of those deemed ‘unfit to reproduce.’ The list of ‘undesirables’ included those with mental or physical disabilities, low IQs, criminals, deviants, and various minority groups.
The Sierra Club’s distancing from Muir comes just one day after Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced that they would remove the name of Margaret Sanger, the organization’s founder, from their Manhattan clinic in order to disavow her ties to the eugenics movement. However, it may come as a surprise that as recently as 2009 eugenics was OK – that’s when Hillary Clinton said she was “really in awe” of Sanger, whose work “in the United States and certainly across our globe is not done.”
Muir was further denigrated in Wednesday’s Washington Post, which called him racist for having described native Americans ‘dirty’ – which Johnmuir.org points out was taken out of context.
The critics ignore that Muir decried dirt and squalor anywhere he found it, disapproving of domestic animals or people alike who were unkempt and dirty compared to the “clean” forest animals he observed in his wanderings. Reading elsewhere in his journals, we find that Muir’s aversion to dirt on the human body just as often included people of European descent as anyone else. –John Muir Global Network
He also referred to African Americans as lazy “Sambos,” according to the Post, writing in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf “One energetic white man, working with a will, would easily pick as much cotton as half a dozen Sambos and Sallies.”
That said, later in life Muir lived among the Tlingit natives in Alaska, of which he wrote “Uncle Sam has no better subjects, white, black, or brown, or any more deserving his considerate care.”
The Sierra Club and the Post also ignore Muir’s ‘evolved attitude’ towards Native Americans of the course of his life – as apparently only southern Democrats such as Robert Byrd – a former Grand Cyclops of the KKK who filibustered the original GOP civil rights act, are allowed to ‘evolve’, while Muir is apparently beyond redemption.
In their Wednesday letter, the Sierra Club said that because of Muir’s legendary status, his “words and actions carry an especially heavy weight” which “continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club.”
“Such willful ignorance is what allows some people to shut their eyes to the reality that the wild places we love are also the ancestral homelands of Native peoples, forced off their lands in the decades or centuries before they became national parks,” the group added.
Reparations
In order to atone for the racial sins of their founder, the Sierra Club announced that the 128-year-old organization – the nation’s oldest environmental group which boasts over 800 employees and four million members – that it would overhaul its executive leadership so “that leaders of color at the Sierra Club make up of the majority of the team making top-level organizational decisions.”
The club will also invest $5 million “in our staff of color and our environmental and racial justice work.”
Will California now rename the 211-mile John Muir trail? Or will UC San Diego rename Muir College to something less offensive?
- Johnstone: The Only Obstacle To A Healthy World Is Government Secrecy And Propaganda
Johnstone: The Only Obstacle To A Healthy World Is Government Secrecy And Propaganda
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 21:20Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
If people in power were no longer able to hide secrets and spin lies about what’s going on in the world, all of our major problems would come to an end. Because secretive and manipulative power structures are the source of all of our major problems.
If the public could see what’s actually happening in their world, they would immediately begin using the power of their numbers to overhaul our current system. This is why our current system pours so much energy into preventing the public from seeing what’s actually happening in their world.
If it weren’t for the constant campaign of obfuscation and manipulation of public perception via veils of government secrecy and propaganda, humanity would naturally find its way out of the power-driven tribulations it now faces, as surely as you’ll avoid obstacles and hazards in your path when you are walking with your eyes open. The only problem in this case is that our eyes have not been permitted to open.
May All Be Revealed
“The fight for humanity’s future begins at your own eyelids.”https://t.co/j1JQcolxIh
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) June 24, 2020
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It isn’t actually necessary to hold a bunch of hard, rigid ideas about exactly what kind of society we should have, what kind of political system we should have, what kind of economic system we should have. There’s nothing wrong with promoting ideas and having preferences of course, but really if you just gave humanity the ability to navigate through its own troubles by removing the blindfolds of propaganda and power opacity, it would organically create a healthy society, and realistically such a society probably won’t look a whole lot like our mental models.
You do have the option, then, of simply promoting the end of government/political/corporate/financial opacity and the end of establishment perception management. Wanting humanity to see with clear eyes so that it can make its own informed decisions about where to take itself is a complete political position, in and of itself. You don’t have to hold any other political preferences of any kind if you don’t want to.
The desire for an end to the obfuscations and manipulations of the powerful so that humanity can find its own way is the most anti-authoritarian position you can possibly take, because it also protects the world from your own authoritarian impulses.
I personally am very leftwardly inclined and believe that if humanity had its perception management blindfolds removed it would naturally create a world where we’re all truly equal and everyone is taken care of by the collective each according to their need, but what the hell do I know? Maybe if the blindfold is removed I’d be proven wrong. I respect human sovereignty enough to want to find out, free from my own political preferences. I should not be the one making such societal decisions, society as a whole should. I just want human perception to be freed up enough to make that call.
How To Defeat The Empire
“What I do advocate, in as many different ways as I can come up with, is a decentralized guerrilla psywar against the institutions which enable the powerful to manipulate the way ordinary people think, act and vote.”https://t.co/4F5dWaURdq
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) September 10, 2019
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If you choose to make the end of perception management your foremost priority, that means you push for government transparency at every opportunity and support any movement to take away secret hiding places from the powerful.
It means opposing the way the powerful bolt shut all the doors on public scrutiny of their behavior, smear anyone who speculates about what they might be up to as a crazy conspiracy theorist, and imprisons anyone who leaks information about what they’re really doing to the people.
It means you support whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden who help shine light on the things power tries to keep hidden in the dark.
It means you support WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and any journalist who helps expose the secrets of the powerful.
It means you fight the empire’s propaganda machine at every opportunity to break public trust in its manipulations.
It means you support breaking up the monolithic mass media and giving everyone the equal ability to influence the dominant narratives.
It means opposing internet censorship, since Silicon Valley plutocrats propping up the establishment their kingdoms are built upon by censoring anti-establishment voices is another way of keeping people from being shown the truth about their world.
I personally would add that it means supporting the decriminalization of psychedelics, because seeing within ourselves is just as important as seeing what’s happening in our world and entheogens can facilitate this seeing, but maybe that’s just me.
Cancel Government Secrecy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
“Government says it needs secrecy to make war on its enemies effectively, and, curiously, the more secrecy we allow it the more wars and enemies it seems to have.”https://t.co/fLWa478cva
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) July 20, 2020
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Again, there’s no harm in engaging in politics and pushing for the changes you’d like to see in your world, and there can be many benefits to doing so. But as long as people are successfully prevented from seeing and understanding what’s really happening in their world by the obfuscation of information and by the manipulation of people’s perception of that information, the status quo will always remain in place.
So in my opinion this is the most sensible point upon which to converge our energy. I personally have no interest in controlling what humanity does, and desire only that people come to see freely enough to make their own decisions.
It’s absolutely insane that information which affects us all is kept hidden away from our clear vision by secrecy and propaganda. It’s even crazier that they shame us when we wonder what’s really going on and throw us in prison when we try to find out. We must liberate ourselves from this madness so we can create a healthy world together.
* * *
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
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- Vandals Deface Oakland Mayor's House With Messages To Defund Police And "Cancel Rent"
Vandals Deface Oakland Mayor’s House With Messages To Defund Police And “Cancel Rent”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 21:00The Mayor of Oakland’s house was vandalized overnight on Monday night this week. The culprit(s) wrote messages across her garage door and other parts of her home at around 2.A.M. Tuesday morning, according to Fox.
A spokesperson for the Mayor’s office also said that “projectiles” were shot at her house and that fireworks were set off.
Some of the messages written on her house included: “Blood on your hands,” “Wake up Libby,” “Defund OPD,” and “Cancel Rent”.
The Mayor’s spokesperson, Justin Berton, said: “This attack, designed to intimidate the Mayor and strike fear into her family, will not stop her from advocating for the policies she believes are in the best long-term interests of her beloved hometown. Like all Oaklanders, she supports passionate protest but does not support tactics meant to harm and terrorize others.”
The police were seen outside of the mayor’s house on Tuesday morning. An anonymous group has claimed responsibility for the vandalism, posting online the reasons why they targeted the mayor and stating: “This is just the beginning”.
Perhaps the Mayor will start to get the message that the solution to these lingering issues is taking back your city by using force.
Recall, it wasn’t until protesters visited the home of Seattle’s Mayor that the city’s “autonomous zone” was finally disbanded. Putting aside the obvious hypocrisy, perhaps this will come as a much needed wake-up call for clueless liberal politicians who continue to drag their feet in enforcing the law because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
But we won’t hold out hope.
You can watch Fox’s report on the incident here:
- Martenson: Mainstream Media Lied And People Died
Martenson: Mainstream Media Lied And People Died
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 20:40Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,
Chris Martenson is a futurist, economic researcher and holds a PhD in toxicology from Duke University. He is telling people to “brace for impact” because we are well beyond the point of no return economically and financially speaking.
Martenson explains, “We are not doing anything except steering towards a cliff edge at this point in time...”
” We had the 2008 financial crisis, and we should have learned a couple of lessons. We didn’t learn any lessons, and I think we have just enshrined these lessons into something that is really going to bite us. The Federal Reserve, Plunge Protection Team and all the organs of state are all geared towards one thing and one thing only, and that is giving more money to rich people.
I believe we are in the Fourth Turning . . . and one of the hallmarks of this is loss of faith in institutions. The Federal Reserve is still held up as a benevolent organization. They care about inflation and unemployment, and none of that is true. What they care about is shoveling and funneling big profits to big banks. So, the Federal Reserve deserves to lose every bit of respect anybody has ever held for it.”
Martenson goes on to say, “I think this is ruining our society...”
” This is the kind of thing that I believe led Plutarch way back a couple of thousand years ago to say, ‘The oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics is a gap between the rich and the poor.’ The Federal Reserve is busy enshrining and ensuring that we have the largest and steepest wealth pyramid we have ever seen. . . . The Federal Reserve is creating the conditions that lead to a future that I don’t want to go toward. I don’t want to live in a place where mobs rule, people are unhappy and riots are happening. . . .
The Federal Reserve is the entity that is most responsible for most of the pain we see going on around us. I wrote an article called ‘Brace for Impact’ recently because this is a trend I am seeing, and it is accelerating and not slowing down. There are no signs that team elite is going to say we have taken enough . . . let’s start reversing some of that. No, they are going to keep doing what they do, and they won’t stop until something breaks.”
Nowhere are the problems more in focus than in the large Democrat controlled cities. Martenson says:
…this is why you are seeing a “back to land movement . . . a flight from the cities . . . and this trend is just starting.”
Martenson also weighs in on the Covid 19 crisis and says, “The mainstream media (MSM) press has blood on their hands for failing to take a neutral position on this stuff,” such as the very positive results for treatments like Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). Instead, the MSM ignored HCQ or said it was dangerous to use, which was a total lie. Martenson contends the MSM misinformed people, and ‘people died.’”
Martenson also says, “People should tune your body up so your body can fight off Covid 19. . . . You want your body to be as healthy as it can be from an immunological standpoint.”
Martenson says the good news is Covid 19 is definitely going to “trend down by the end of the year.”
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Dr. Chris Martenson, co-founder of PeakProsperity.com.
- John Cleese: Society Is Now Controlled By The Most Touchy, Emotionally Unstable, & Fragile People
John Cleese: Society Is Now Controlled By The Most Touchy, Emotionally Unstable, & Fragile People
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 20:20Former Monty Python and Fawlty Towers star John Cleese has had enough of political correctness and the cancel culture, and as for the state of the “dysfunctional world we live in,” warning that “it’s completely hopeless…”
As for the sense of hopelessness he feels, Cleese blames the “power seekers.”
“I believe there’s something wrong with these people. The reason they want to be powerful is that they want to control people, so that they don’t get lathered into situations that they can’t control emotionally. The one thing they fear is losing power, so they’ll do almost anything to hold on to it.
If they don’t know what they’re doing or what they’re talking about, there’s no way (the world) will ever get well.”
The 80 year old comedian is as politically savvy as he is humorous as he brings his one-man-show “Why There Is No Hope” to live-stream after blasting the BBC last month as “cowardly and gutless” for temporarily taking down an episode of Fawlty Towers that made fun of Germans and World War II and also featured a character using a racial slur.
Cancel culture “misunderstands the main purposes of life which is to have fun”, Cleese told Reuters, referring to the trend in which people are ostracised because of behaviour or remarks seen as objectionable.
“Everything humorous is critical. If you have someone who is perfectly kind and intelligent and flexible and who always behaves appropriately, they’re not funny. Funniness is about people who don’t do that, like Trump.”
Summing the current state of the world up perfectly, Cleese says, the problem with political correctness, he added, is that comedians “have to set the bar according to what we are told by the most touchy, most emotionally unstable and fragile and least stoic people in the country”.
- Cryptos Join The Precious Metals Party: Ethereum Surges To 5-Month Highs
Cryptos Join The Precious Metals Party: Ethereum Surges To 5-Month Highs
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 20:15Mimicking their non-fiat currency peers in precious metals land, cryptos are surging higher tonight as Asian markets open.
Source: Bloomberg
Bitcoin jumped back above $9600, its highest in a month…
Source: Bloomberg
But it is Ethereum that is stealing the show for now, ripping higher to $170 – its highest since February…
Source: Bloomberg
With yields crashing to near record lows around the world, negative-yielding debt is once again on the rise making the zero-yielding precious metals and crypto even more attractive as a lower cost place to store wealth…
Source: Bloomberg
And it seems crypto has some catching up to do as gold and negative-yielding debt values trade tick for tick higher.
As Tyler Winklevoss recently noted, “The Fed continues to set the stage for bitcoin’s next bull run,” in a July 22 tweet, which included an article link on the government agency’s discussions of further stimulus spending.
As a decentralized borderless digital asset away from government control, Bitcoin holds as a potential hedge to mainstream markets and national dollars — a point often stressed by a number of crypto industry participants.
Bitcoin holds a 21 million coin maximum supply, protecting the asset against value dilution. “When money printer go brrrr and inflate the stonks market, it’s time to Bitcoin,” Winkelvoss said in a July 18 tweet, referring to U.S. money printing resulting in a rising stock market, while giving the nod to Bitcoin as an alternative.
- Campus Reform Reporters, Professor Targeted With Death Threats, Online Harassment
Campus Reform Reporters, Professor Targeted With Death Threats, Online Harassment
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 20:00Authored by Addison Smith via CampusReform.org,
Campus Reform correspondents and Syracuse University students Justine Murray and Adrianna San Marco were recently harassed and threatened on social media for their conservative values, receiving a string of death threats and social media harassment.
Murray is no stranger to harassment. Campus Reformreported in February on Murray’s allegations that professors targeted her on social media. Now, Murray has begun receiving criticism on social media for allegedly “antagonizing” people of color.
On June 21, SU alumna Tayla Myree posted a screenshot of a now-deleted Thanksgiving post of Murray sarcastically captioning her photo “CuLtUrAl GeNoCiDe #HappyThanksgiving,” joking of a leftist talking point referring to Thanksgiving as a celebration of cultural genocide.
Myree called Murray an “open racist,” accusing her of “constantly antagonizing” minority students on campus.
“I’m tired of us staying silent about the open racists that attend @syracuseu. Justine Brooke Murray has consistently antagonized BIPOC students at Syracuse for years and has yet to be reprimanded for harassing students,” Myree’s post read.
Myree then criticized Murray for being pro-free speech, calling her the “free speech police.”
“Justine is a part of what I recognize as the ‘free speech police’ which are students who openly advocate for students to have the right to say whatever they want without consequence, free speech does not extend to hate speech ma’am, and hate speech has ZERO place on any campus.”
The post quickly spread on social media, gaining thousands of likes and hundreds of comments.
Murray’s social media quickly became flooded with death threats and other smears. One individual dedicated an account threatening to kill her titled, @basilkillsjustinebrookemurray. The culprit publicly called for her home address to be leaked, threatening to “cut u 2 pieces” and “ima kill u.”
Murray told Campus Reform that this has been a common occurrence during her time at Syracuse:
“[I have been harassed] Since my first semester in my freshman year. It was instantaneous. A couple of the highlights included students banning me from what they called the ‘multi-cultural floor’ of my freshman dormitory because I dressed up as the First Lady for Halloween,” Murray said.
She then expressed concern for her safety and said the administration has not taken action.
“I feel unsafe going back to campus. And I decided that I will not be going back to campus…in the fall. Or, I don’t think I will be going back to campus in the fall,” Murray said. She also alleges that the administration has stayed silent throughout this situation.
“The administration at SU has done nothing. The campus police keep taking reports from me and I’ve been in touch with them repeatedly. They did get between me and the mob a couple of times. But they know the students involved and, to date, I know of no action taken against the ones who pushed me, intimidated me, or chased me,” Murray said in an email to Campus Reform.
Murray also obtained several screenshots of harassing messages aimed at Miriam Elman, a Jewish political-science professor at the school.
One individual took to Twitter accusing Elman of having “discriminated against many Arab students” and “islamophobia.” One Instagram account, @Bipoc.syracuse, posted a story aimed at “openly zionist professors,” sparking a barrage of online attacks toward Elman, and accusations of her supposedly discriminatory behavior.
Soon after, Elman allegedly received an email, obtained by Campus Reform, in which she was called a “fat, white Judeo-Christian Zionist supremacist Jew.” The email also allegedly slandered her Jewish religion as a “racist cult.”
“Fuck you, fuck Israel, fuck judaism, fuck your Torah and talmud,” the email read.
Elman did not comment on personal allegations but told Campus Reform of her disappointment to see such posts.
“What could have been an invitation to thoughtful discussion and a valuable online platform for students to express their experiences with racism on campus and to brainstorm practical solutions, so quickly morphed into antisemitic attacks on faculty and students. To see Jewish professors and students targeted for their identity and faith is intolerable. To see this on a self-described anti-racist platform is truly disheartening,” Elman said in an email to Campus Reform.
Elman insisted that antisemitism is on the rise on campuses across America.
“On far too many campuses, Jewish students are being told that they have to check a huge chunk of their identity–Zionism–as the price that they have to pay to be admitted into progressive causes, coalitions, and campaigns. The trend we are seeing is an often intense intimidation, with Jewish students essentially being presented with an ultimatum from their peers: either shed an integral component of your faith, or face social ostracism.”
San Marco also faced harassment after writing an opinion article calling institutional racism a “myth.” San Marco was fired from the Syracuse campus newspaper for the piece.
She alleged that people online threatened her with physical harm. One individual commented on her Instagram, “You better hope I don’t see your ass cuz I swear I’ll fuck your shit up” and another privately messaged her, saying, “Hope you fucking die soon bitch”
People repeatedly threatened San Marco with physical violence.
“I wanna beat her ass sooooooo badddddd like I don’t even give a fuck,” someone commented on an Instagram post.
When San Marco tweeted a picture of a transgendered woman who was killed at a protest, saying “she should be remembered as her biological sex not her delusion,” an individual promptly replied, “Disgusting. Hope the same is said to you when you get a bullet in the head for being racist.”
In a Twitter thread, another individual referred to San Marco as “that Wicked White Syracuse Bitch.”
“Please don’t let me see that Wicked White Syracuse Bitch in person that’s all imma say. I would love 5 minutes with the ugly racist bitch. Like you’re using my friends tweets for what? She said what she said. White people like this say absurd things just so other dumb and evil whites can co-sign them. I’ll beat the shit out this hoe though,” she wrote, encouraging people to “Beat Tf Out Of Racist White Bitches 2020.”
When San Marco tweeted about the threat, another Twitter user replied, “conservatives students deserve to get beat up… y’all ugly”
When confronted about this threat, the user directly advocated for San Marco to be physically assaulted.
“Yes i want her attacked,” she replied.
More people took to Twitter calling for Syracuse to expel her for her conservative column.
“@SyracuseU this girl should, at the very least, be considered for suspension for incredible academic negligence. Is this how you teach your students? To create such a false conclusion based on one study debunked by its own writers? This is pathetic. Expel her,” the tweet read.
Another person threatened to report her, tweeting, “You should not be allowed to step foot on the campus because you are dangerous.”
San Marco said the SU administration has not taken any action against these threats. On June 24, she sent an email to the school Chancellor Kent Syverud and three other leaders at the university, expressing her concern for her safety.
“I have received countless physical threats by other students at SU and alumni alike. (read the attachments below). During this time I have made reports with The Department of Public Safety and spoken to officers multiple times. These reports don’t make me feel safer. They don’t assure me that the students targeting me will face consequences nor do they provide promise that these threats will not be carried out,” San Marco said in a letter to the school.
San Marco then took aim at the school for its alleged negligence.
“I am fearful for my life on our campus and you are silent. As a student I am unsure whether I will return to campus this Fall. My family is terrified for me. My mother is afraid to read comments under my social media posts and my sisters have begged me not to return. This is what your silence has done. You have emboldened our community and led them to believe that they have full impunity to say and do whatever they please without consequence,” she added.
In an interview with Campus Reform, San Marco said she was initially not public about her conservative views for fear of the threats she has now received. “I have avoided being open about my views because I didn’t want to experience the harassment that I’m getting now. The blatant hatred and harassment I have been receiving the past couple of weeks stem from the opinions piece I wrote in early June. I have received so many threats that returning to campus has become a real safety concern. I am fearful that someone will attack me while I’m walking home at night,” she said in an email to Campus Reform.
“The administration has been silent. I filed multiple reports with the Department of Public Safety at Syracuse University over the vile comments and messages I received, yet none of my administrators have reached out to me. In fact, last week I emailed multiple high-level administrators pleading with them to take action and protect their conservative students and they never responded.”
San Marco has now told Campus Reform she will be transferring out of Syracuse due to concern for her safety.
“I will not be returning,” San Marco said. “It’s just not safe on campus right now, unfortunately.”
San Marco posted a letter to Twitter explaining her decision:
“My time on Syracuse University’s campus has come to a close. After continued silence from administrators and further degration [sic] to my safety I can no longer justify returning to campus this fall,” she wrote.
Syracuse did not respond to request for comment in time for publication.
- How Shady 'Shadow Lenders' Are Helping Fuel The $1.6 Trillion Student-Loan Crisis
How Shady ‘Shadow Lenders’ Are Helping Fuel The $1.6 Trillion Student-Loan Crisis
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 19:40Discerning between which colleges are outright scams, and which are venerable American institutions isn’t always easy. After all, if we’re going solely by the advantage that a degree confers in the labor market, one could argue that a degree in art history from Wesleyan probably isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, let alone the $250,000+ sticker price.
But in a world where ‘non-profit’ institutions have accrued endowments worth hundreds of millions (and in some cases, billions) solely from ‘alumni fundraising’, yet still charge teenagers unimaginable sums for degrees that they don’t necessarily want or need (but have been brainwashed by society to believe they most possess), the standard for what constitutes abusive and predatory behavior is probably unjustifiably high.
In a recent study by the Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group that purports to protect students from predatory lenders, researchers described a $5 billion “shadow lending” network that they said charged exorbitant interest rates – sometimes as high as 35% annually – to lend to students at for-profit colleges which often have poor track records of guiding students to the jobs market.
Of course, Americans have $1.6 trillion in student loans outstanding. Compared to this, $5 billion over a decade is a drop in the bucket. But like most lenders who specialize in extending credit to the desperately poor, the lenders who partner with these schools engage in all kinds of deceptive and shady practices, often with the explicit aid of the schools they work with.
Over the past decade, students have borrowed more than $5 billion through an opaque web of companies to pay for training at for-profit schools, the Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group, found. These products, which aren’t traditional federal or private student loans, often carry high interest rates and other risks for borrowers, according to the SBPC.
In addition, by providing financing to students, this shadow credit system, as the SBPC dubs it, helps to keep programs training students for careers in fields like trucking and cosmetology in business — even when they’re prohibitively expensive for many and don’t provide graduates with a credential that’s valuable in the labor market.
“This whole cottage industry is allowed to prey on and rip off the most vulnerable borrowers in our country,” said Seth Frotman, the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center. “These players are key cogs in the larger student-debt crisis, but also critical components of what allows predatory schools to thrive.”
What’s more, as private lenders have largely abandoned the student lending business since the financial crisis, leaving it mostly to government-sponsored enterprises, these shady enterprises have flourished.
Though typically out of the public and regulatory eye, these products have taken on a more prominent role in the student finance landscape since the Great Recession, according to the SBPC’s report. In the past, for-profit colleges relied on traditional, private lenders to provide loans to students, which were bundled together and sold to investors. Often these loans were made to students with little regard for whether they would be able to repay them.
In the years since the financial crisis, traditional, private lenders have dramatically reduced their involvement in the student-loan market broadly. These so-called shadow lenders stepped in to fill the void for students financing career training at for-profit colleges, according to the report.
These companies work with schools in three key ways, the report found. The first is as an exclusive partner for students needing financing. In some cases that can mean developing a product for a specific program or helping a school lend to its students. The second is by offering an independent credit product that in some cases schools will promote through their website or financial aid materials.
The third is servicing or collecting on debt students owe to schools for tuition. In these cases, students will enroll in a course without paying anything up front, but wind up owing this money with interest. Some of the companies highlighted in the SBPC report work with schools to service and collect this debt, they found.
But even ‘legitimate’ colleges can use these lenders to fulfill a provision of federal law that requires schools to derive at least some of their money from independent sources.
In addition, some products require that borrowers be rejected by another lender before being approved; others advertise that they can provide financing without a credit check or underwriting.
Meanwhile for the colleges, the products allow a means to sidestep regulation, the report found. For schools that rely on federal financial aid, these products can help them comply with the 90/10 regulation, a rule that requires colleges receiving federal financial aid to get at least 10% of their funds from a source other than the government’s student loan program. By working with these opaque lenders, schools can create their own lending programs that students can use to finance tuition, which don’t count toward the 90% limit on federal financial aid financing.
The progressive left’s discussion of endemic economic inequality in America always seems to focus on tech companies, whom they blame for not hiring enough black and latino and LGBTQ workers, despite the fact that these firms already hire many non-white workers (but for the purposes of diversity, women and people of Asian background don’t apparently count). Why is it that these companies seem to fall perennially short, giving their activist critics the illusion of credibility? CEOs frequently explain that the talent pool (ie qualified graduates) simply doesn’t allow it.
And why is that? Because people whose parents didn’t attend college don’t see the sense in taking on an unfathomable amount of debt, all for an excuse to spend four years partying and acting like an overgrown child. And honestly, we can’t blame them.
- What Capitalism Can Do When Allowed, And Communism Never Will
What Capitalism Can Do When Allowed, And Communism Never Will
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 19:20Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investments,
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 “for his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community.” Maybe, but it sure didn’t start out that way.
By that, I don’t mean to suggest Gorbachev was some warmonger cloaking himself in the language of peace. On the contrary, the man was sincere. He was also sincere in his commitment to Communism and the Soviet way. What ultimately led him to such international acclaim was first his honesty in looking inward at that system itself. The rest was mere expedience.
History has made the words perestroika (restructure) and glasnost (literally: listen) synonymous with the man. And while these were crucial in how the old Soviet way would end up being dismantled, it was very far from their original purpose.
On December 15, 1984, at the Soviet embassy in London, Gorbachev met with KGB agents and representatives from officers in its Line X. The latter were there to bring him up to speed on its tactical successes. Line X had been established for the purposes of stealing particularly American technology. Not military secrets, mind you, corporate knowledge, new products, and know-how.
Gorbachev himself wasn’t yet in full control of the massive Soviet empire. Though Yuri Andropov had died that February, and had made it widely known he wished Gorbachev to succeed him as General Secretary of the Communist Party, some top government politicians were concerned he was too young (53 at the time) standing up Konstantin Chernenko (a holdover Brezhnev guy) instead.
Chernenko was Gorbachev’s opposite in many ways, including age. Too old and too frail, it was left to the younger man to essentially take control regardless of who had officially followed Andropov.
Most importantly, though, where Chernenko and his support base had been concerned, the Soviet state should hold fast to the course they were on. Gorbachev, like Andropov, realized this was suicide. But, they had judged Soviet Russia’s faults lay with the application of Marxist-Leninist thought, not in the doctrines themselves.
Very early on in the Russian Revolution, as far back as 1918, before the Red government was really fully operational, there was already a coalescing secret police apparatus being put in place. Directorate K, for example, was charged with counter-intelligence which, back then, meant spying as much on Russians as anyone else. Service A was dedicated to developing active measures to assist each directorate and its various departments.
Directorate T was the scientific and technical intelligence division. As Lenin himself allegedly said, the Communists would need to pursue Western technology “with both hands.”
Communism, you see, isn’t meant to compete with capitalism, rather it is meant to replace it. The capitalists create all this marvelous technology which the Communists then expropriate as the basis from which to create their perfect human society.
As I wrote last week, that’s why Karl Marx had envisioned (demanded, in some parts of his work) that the socialist revolutions would take place only where industrial capitalism had already contributed such grand innovations and knowledge. To attempt to impose communism on a pre-industrialized society was, even to Marx and his partner Friedrich Engels, madness. Doomed to failure.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) wouldn’t wait, however, even though Russia was nowhere near this prerequisite state. Instead, he’d try it his own way; the revolutionaries would take over before the country was ready economically, and then, often using capitalist practices, they would bring the country up to snuff (central planning) beginning with the first National Economic Plan in 1921.
And, as much as possible, pilfer, filch, and steal every single bit of technology and innovation they could from the capitalist pigs to speed up the process and narrow the gap.
It was Leon Trotsky who had taken this idea to its furthest conclusion, in the process angering Josef Stalin. Writing later to try to save himself from Uncle Joe’s angry gaze, unsuccessfully, Trotsky clarified how his thoughts were consistent with Lenin’s; including how he, like Lenin, had spoken often of the possibility Marx was wrong. Perhaps not all national systems needed to pass through the democratic, capitalist stage in order to set the proper stage for pure socialism.
So long as some in the world industrialized and took the capitalism road as far as it would take them, pre-industrialized societies had the right to expropriate those gains, catch up to them, and then even lead the entire world, capitalist, too, in a global socialist revolution overthrowing the entire old order.
In his Pre-Requisites of Socialism, written back in 1919, Trotsky argued how the technological gap had become so large it wasn’t realistic to expect the socialist system (of co-operatives) to have to catch up. Instead:
“It is evident that if this took place, the co-operative societies would then simply have automatically to expropriate all capitalist undertakings, after which it would remain for them to reduce the working day sufficiently to provide work for all citizens and to regulate the amount of production in the various branches in order to avoid crises. In this manner, the main features of socialism would be established. Again, it is clear that no revolution and no dictatorship of the working class would be at all necessary.”
That would mean to literally “expropriate all capitalist undertakings” everywhere; not just what little had been induced in Russia.
Stalin, on the other hand, wanted to focus his iron grip on Russia alone, perfecting this sort of heterodox socialist experiment in that place before exporting the revolution elsewhere (Socialism In A Single Country), putting him at odds with this Trotsky-ite Permanent Revolution viewing everything globally.
Gorbachev, like Andropov, fell somewhere in the middle. He wanted to get Soviet Communism right, to focus just on the Russian version, and was absolutely dedicated to doing so. But in order to have any chance, they’d have to catch up using any means they could. Still committed to the Revolution, in 1985 he said:
“We must not change our policy. It is right, correct, authentically Leninist. We have to accelerate our rhythm, go ahead, be frank and overcome our faults and see clearly our luminous future.”
Directorate T and Line X had implanted agents all over the West in the seventies, taking full advantage of the pre-Reagan policy of “détente” in going after the soft corporate targets of especially technology companies. In July 1981, French President Francois Mitterrand demanded a private conversation with Ronald Reagan to inform the new US President of a Line X spy’s defection to French Intelligence.
Colonel Vladimir I. Vetrov, a KGB Directorate T official, had handed over purportedly thousands of documents showing the mountains of secrets Line X had robbed from Corporate America, particularly the potential from its nascent computer industry just then becoming unlocked.
Vetrov, given the French codename Farewell, showed how infiltrators would insert themselves into otherwise benign foreign delegations touring private corporate facilities. In one instance, at a visit to a sensitive Boeing factory, Line X personnel applied adhesive to the bottoms of their shoes to covertly pick up samples of any stray material uncollected on the facility floor for scientists back in Russia to examine and extrapolate.
According to US intelligence sources, the Americans used Farewell’s information to implant all kinds of false data, unworkable technology, and ridiculous plans in a counterintelligence sting that ran for years. By the time Gorbachev was in London being amazed at all these tactical successes, they had been widely compromised and stopped being very useful (in one story, the CIA allegedly convinced a chipmaker to stamp a taunting message on one false mold so that when the mold was inevitably stolen and a Russian factory began producing the chips from it the note was reproduced right on the product for the predictably Russian audience to choke on; then there were the fake Space Shuttle plans and the real, flawed shuttle the Russians built from them).
Perestroika wasn’t any kind of attempt at peaceful co-existence. As Gorbachev said to those KGB guys in London, Line X was supposed to be a key part of it! Reform was going to mean Trotsky plus Stalin equals Communism Wins.
To put it quite simply, the Russian version of the Marxist revolution hadn’t gone very well. It was already two generations old, and the third had become sincerely apathetic about the whole enterprise. Under Brezhnev, instead of catching up to the West as had been planned the Russian economy kept falling further and further behind.
Much of that was due to its attempts to export this brand of socialism to the rest of the world. The military spending this required, to keep the US at bay while they did this, the feeble economy just couldn’t support it. With production in domestic industries falling off, productivity in terminal decline, by the late seventies the Russians were in deep trouble.
As one old Soviet joke said, whenever the Party boss showed up at the mine (or factory) to give the workers their daily admonishments to work harder, the workers would laugh to themselves about how they’d continue pretending to work so long as the Party continued pretending to pay them.
This was no joke, not so far as the system was concerned. As Marx said, it is the workers who have to lead the revolution; if they don’t buy in, forget the whole thing. And in order for the workers to buy in, they have to have something to buy in to. A realistic future where the socialist paradise made sense, a much better alternative to the rising living standards and technological prowess on display practically everywhere else.
It just never happened in Russia, after a few generations they figured how unrealistic it was, and here was Gorbachev to attempt dealing with the fallout. He only began by paring back Soviet military commitments. Right from the start, there was no hope of reforming the system with the economy having to carry such a massive burden (some estimates put military spending at 20 to 25% of meager contemporary Soviet GNP).
With so much diverted to guns, there was no means by which to invest especially in developing new technologies and productive capacities in the true Marxist tradition. As Nikolai Leonov, a KGB general, wrote:
“First there was a visible decline in the rate of growth, then its complete stagnation. There was a drawn-out, deepening, and almost insurmountable crisis in agriculture. It was a frightening and truly terrifying sign of crisis. It was these factors that were crucial in the transition to perestroika.”
That was his “peace” initiative. Gorbachev had no alternative but to try to work with the Americans as his first step to getting the socialist dream back on track.
The rest of perestroika was, get this, simple capitalism. Just as Lenin realized he had to take this step in 1921 (“one step backward in order to take two steps forward”), Gorbachev was acceding to doctrinaire Marxism; to try to restart the two-step approach all over again, to salvage the Revolution from Lenin’s original sin of jumping the gun before Russia was sufficiently advanced.
By the eighties, it still wasn’t sufficiently progressed because capitalism across the rest of the world had redefined, yet again, the standard for “advanced.”
Glasnost was political reform intended to soften the blow of Soviet hardliners who would resist any such sliding back defying the ideals of the Russian Revolution – just as Victor Serge had complained bitterly of Lenin in the early twenties and instead, clearing the path for Stalin. By softening up the uncompromising authoritarian stance which was Stalin’s legacy, and allowing at least some limited freedom of expression, Gorbachev counted on this openness clearing his path toward restructuring.
Those reforms led ultimately to total dissolution. Why? Because as the central hand of the state was loosened, what there was of Russia’s economy simply collapsed further. Forget microchips and robotic assembly, mass starvation would come to be a very real prospect. Again.
By 1990, it grew to full-blown crisis. Perestroika was significantly revised (for the fourth or fifth time, depending on who was keeping track) into a plan whose end would have meant full-blown, no holds barred, free-market capitalism. In Soviet Russia.
In a top-secret document, now in the hands of the US Library of Congress, the minutes of Meeting No. 2 of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU held on September 20, 1990, show that Gorbachev signed the following pledge on its behalf:
“We adopt the position that was elaborated during the discussions of the Politburo of the Central Committee on the further activity to be taken by party organizations in connection with the conversion to a market economy, with the proviso that this matter is to be reviewed at the next Plenum of the Central Committee.”
What followed was one radical proposal after another to do just that. The one which came closest to being acted upon was called the Five Hundred Day Program, or Shatalin Five Hundred Days Plan. Stanislav Shatalin along with Grigory Yavlinsky, an economist (Communist, but still) and close confidant of Gorbachev’s who had worked on perestroika with him throughout, had proposed selling off all state properties, rethinking much of the top-down economic structure, and sanctioning a return to private property.
Even a true stock market.
It never happened. The hardline opposition Gorbachev had skillfully kept at bay with glasnost on his hip would no longer be held back by such a radical move. Forcing him to first denounce the Shatalin plan after so publicly supporting it, and Yavlinsky, Gorbachev tried to find compromises that just weren’t available. In August 1991, the old guard Communists attempted their coup.
Though he survived it, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was out not long after and the Soviet Union gone with him.
In January 1992, not coincidentally, Deng Xiaoping embarked upon his famous Southern Tour; his political campaign to convince Chinese Communist hardliners that they had better remember their Marx, their Trotsky, and to see the Soviet example for what it represented. The risks were more than real, and right next door.
Like Russia, China had been forced into its socialist revolution too soon. The Chinese economy was even less industrialized in 1949 than Russia’s had been three decades earlier. Not much had changed by 1989 when the massacre at Tiananmen Square turned world opinion solidly against them. Cooperation wasn’t much of an option.
If China’s Communist Revolution hoped to survive, it would have to go all the way – on the economy. Embrace the wealth and technology that only a capitalist system could invent and then multiply. And, of course, stealing, pilfering, and thieving as much as possible where possible; that’s the part of Trotsky they all seem to agree on.
Unlike the Russians, though, the Chinese would keep a tighter political grip while this happened. That’s the lesson they ultimately learned; more wealth first, and even more authoritarian to achieve it. So long as the rest of the world’s workers refused Trotsky’s old invitation, China would have to do it Stalin-style: Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in One Country.
They keep waiting for “enough” wealth to be created, or just show up at their doorstep delivered clandestinely by whatever they might call their own version of Line X in Chinese, since communism doesn’t create its own wealth. They’ve been indoctrinated into believing that the capitalist West will, eventually, exhaust itself, the Communist countries industrialized as well as pre-industrialized will catch up, and then the workers of the world will unite!
It just never happens. Those countries unfortunate enough to fall victim to this misanthropic, ill-conceived, and, really, stupid ideology end up with authoritarians trying to transition their economy from wherever it was before to where it cannot and never will go. Instead, they’re just stuck with the authoritarians and their quixotic quest to impose their utopia which justifies the authoritarianism – and all its evils – in the minds of the authoritarians.
And over the years, especially recent years, proponents have made all kinds of excuses for why Soviet Russia didn’t fail, or if it did why it wasn’t their fault. Blah. Blah. Don’t listen to them; watch what they all did in the early nineties, especially the Chinese. China’s miracle growth and breathtaking transformation since that very time isn’t actually a miracle at all, nor was its timing coincidence.
As much as they might want to, they just can’t steal their way to paradise. And if there’s always more left to steal, where does it truly end?
It’s what capitalism can do, when allowed, and what communism never will. There’s no such thing as terminal wealth and technology. After almost four centuries of progress, we should expect and even prepare for how it all just stops? As I wrote above, socialism really is a stupid, deeply misanthropic ideology.
Capitalism sure is messy, unpredictable, and, most of all, lumpy. It doesn’t go in a straight line, can cause tremendous stress and pain, and there are times when it gets caught up, for prolonged periods, in the bureaucratic messes of interfering morons. But once it is eventually set free, stable money, the world’s workers end up united if only in having no interest in the deplorable Marxist revolution – Trotsky, Lenin, or Mao – and its authoritarian Hotel California.
For as bad as it might get at times, including these, it sure can get worse. If we let it. The trick is, not to fall for the trick in the first place. If you never check in, you’ll never have to worry about how you can never check out.
- Lumber Futures Fade From Two Year High As Recovery Stalls
Lumber Futures Fade From Two Year High As Recovery Stalls
Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/22/2020 – 19:00Lumber futures have more than doubled since the lows in April as consumers ramped up renovations on homes during the pandemic, and others exited cities for suburbs while timber shortages developed.
In 15 weeks, or from the start of April 1, CME lumber futures climbed from $255 to $583, a 128% increase, hitting a two-year high.
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Demand for lumber surged in April as consumers during the pandemic renovated their homes. Others took advantage of low-interest rates and escaped the socio-economic implosion in cities and quickly moved to rural communities. The surge in demand appears to be temporary and seasonal.
Bloomberg quoted RBC Capital Markets analyst Paul Quinn as saying the virus-induced recession was initially supposed to damage housing but instead sparked a boom.
Massive production cuts at sawmills in April (due to virus lockdowns) with low inventory were several factors leading to the rise in lumber futures.
“Inventories are still very low,” Quinn said. “Significant permanent capacity closures have led to widespread shortages.”
Optimism in housing and the economy have been a byproduct of the Federal Reserve and US government pumping trillions of dollars into the economy. The rise in lumber futures should not be confused with a V-shaped recovery in the economy.
“The perfect storm of stimulus, liquidity, supply chain constraints, and seasonality have benefited lumber. Looking forward, all of the above go away,” said Teddy Vallee, CIO of Pervalle Global.
3-Month Treasury bill rate didn’t follow lumber futures higher as in past recoveries, suggesting timber prices will come back down to Earth as the economy is far from a robust recovery.
There are significant headwinds in the housing market, including 4.1 million loans in forbearance, high unemployment, a quarter of personal income is derived from the government, and housing prices are expected to slump in major cities.
With the recovery stalling, lumber futures might be introduced to our friend named gravity.
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