- Patriotic Dissent: How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against "Forever Wars"
Patriotic Dissent: How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against “Forever Wars”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/25/2020 – 00:05Authored by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon via Counterpunch.org,
When it comes to debate about US military policy, the 2020 presidential election campaign is so far looking very similar to that of 2016. Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that “we have the strongest military in the world,” promising to “make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one.”
In the White House, President Trump is repeating the kind of anti-interventionist head feints that won him votes four years ago against a hawkish Hillary Clinton. In his recent graduation address at West Point, Trump re-cycled applause lines from 2016 about “ending an era of endless wars” as well as America’s role as “policeman of the world.”
In reality, since Trump took office, there’s been no reduction in the US military presence abroad, which last year required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion. As military historian and retired career officer Andrew Bacevich notes, “endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified); the nation’s various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; US troops are still present in something like 140 countries; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically.”
When the National Defense Authorization Act for the next fiscal year came before Congress this summer, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a modest 10 percent reduction in military spending so $70 billion could be re-directed to domestic programs. Representative Barbara Lee introduced a House resolution calling for $350 billion worth of DOD cuts. Neither proposal has gained much traction, even among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Instead, the House Armed Services Committee just voted 56 to 0 to spend $740. 5 billion on the Pentagon in the coming year, prefiguring the outcome of upcoming votes by the full House and Senate.
An Appeal to Conscience
Even if Biden beats Trump in November, efforts to curb US military spending will face continuing bi-partisan resistance. In the never-ending work of building a stronger anti-war movement, Pentagon critics, with military credentials, are invaluable allies. Daniel Sjursen, a 37-year old veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is one such a critic. Inspired in part by the much-published Bacevich, Sjursen has just written a new book called Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War (Heyday Books)
Patriotic Dissent is a short volume, just 141 pages, but it packs the same kind of punch as Howard Zinn’s classic 1967 polemic, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. Like Zinn, who became a popular historian after his service in World War II, Sjursen skillfully debunks the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, and the military’s own current generation of “yes men for another war power hungry president.” His appeal to the conscience of fellow soldiers, veterans, and civilians is rooted in the unusual arc of an eighteen-year military career. His powerful voice, political insights, and painful personal reflections offer a timely reminder of how costly, wasteful, and disastrous our post 9/11 wars have been.
Sjursen has the distinction of being a graduate of West Point, an institution that produces few political dissenters. He grew up in a fire-fighter family on working class Staten Island. Even before enrolling at the Academy at age 17, he was no stranger to what he calls “deep-seated toxically masculine patriotism.” As a newly commissioned officer in 2005, he was still a “burgeoning neo-conservative and George W. Bush admirer” and definitely not, he reports, any kind of “defeatist liberal, pacifist, or dissenter.”
Sjursen’s initial experience in combat—vividly described in his first book, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of The Surge (University Press of New England)—“occurred at the statistical height of sectarian strife” in Iraq.
“The horror, the futility, the farce of that war was the turning point in my life,” Sjursen writes in Patriotic Dissent.
When he returned, at age 24, from his “brutal, ghastly deployment” as a platoon leader, he “knew that the war was built on lies, ill-advised, illegal, and immoral.” This “unexpected, undesired realization generated profound doubts about the course and nature of the entire American enterprise in the Greater Middle East—what was then unapologetically labeled the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).”
A Professional Soldier
By the time Sjursen landed in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, in early 2011, he had been promoted to captain but “no longer believed in anything we were doing.”
He was, he confesses, “simply a professional soldier—a mercenary, really—on a mandatory mission I couldn’t avoid. Three more of my soldiers died, thirty-plus were wounded, including a triple amputee, and another over-dosed on pain meds after our return.”
Despite his disillusionment, Sjursen had long dreamed of returning to West Point to teach history. He applied for and won that highly competitive assignment, which meant the Army had to send him to grad school first. He ended up getting credentialed, while living out of uniform, in the “People’s Republic of Lawrence, Kansas, a progressive oasis in an intolerant, militarist sea of Republican red.” During his studies at the state university, Sjursen found an intellectual framework for his “own doubts about and opposition to US foreign policy.” He completed his first book, Ghost Riders, which combines personal memoir with counter-insurgency critique. Amazingly enough, it was published in 2015, while he was still on active duty, but with “almost no blowback” from superior officers.
Before retiring as a major four years later, Sjursen pushed the envelope further, by writing more than 100 critical articles for TomDispatch and other civilian publications. He was no longer at West Point so that body of work triggered “a grueling, stressful, and scary four-month investigation”by the brass at Fort Leavenworth, during which the author was subjected to “a non-publication order.” At risk were his career, military pension, and benefits. He ended up receiving only a verbal admonishment for violating a Pentagon rule against publishing words “contemptuous of the President of the United States.” His “PTSD and co-occurring diagnoses” helped him qualify for a medical retirement last year.
Sjursen has now traded his “identity as a soldier—the only identity I’ve known in my adult life—for that of an anti-war, anti-imperialist, social justice crusader,” albeit one who did not attend his first protest rally until he was thirty-two years old. With several left-leaning comrades, he started Fortress on A Hill, a lively podcast about military affairs and veterans’ issues. He’s a frequent, funny, and always well-informed guest on progressive radio and cable-TV shows, as well as a contributing editor at Antiwar.com, and a contributor to a host of mainstream liberal publications. This year, the Lannan Foundation made him a cultural freedom fellow.
In Patriotic Dissent, Sjursen not only recounts his own personal trajectory from military service to peace activism. He shows how that intellectual journey has been informed by reading and thinking about US history, the relationship between civil society and military culture, the meaning of patriotism, and the price of dissent.
One historical figure he admires is Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor for service between 1898 and 1931. Following his retirement, Butler sided with the poor and working-class veterans who marched on Washington to demand World War I bonus payments. And he wrote a best-selling Depression-era memoir, which famously declared that “war is just a racket” and lamented his own past role as “a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”
Reframing Dissent
Sjursen contrasts Butler’s anti-interventionist whistle-blowing, nearly a century ago, with the silence of high-ranking veterans today after “nineteen years of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars.” Among friends and former West Point classmates, he knows many still serving who “obediently resign themselves to continued combat deployments” because they long ago “stopped asking questions about their own role in perpetuating and enabling a counter-productive, inertia-driven warfare state.”
Sjursen looks instead to small left-leaning groups like Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War), and Bring Our Troops Home. US, a network of veterans influenced by the libertarian right. Each in, its own way, seeks to “reframe dissent, against empire and endless war, as the truest form of patriotism.” But actually taming the military-industrial complex will require “big-tent, intersectional action from civilian and soldier alike,” on a much larger scale. One obstacle to that, he believes, is the societal divide between the “vast majority of citizens who have chosen not to serve” in the military and the “one percent of their fellow citizens on active duty,” who then become part of “an increasingly insular, disconnected, and sometimes sententious post-9/11 veteran community.”
Not many on the left favor a return to conscription.
But Sjursen makes it clear there’s been a downside to the U.S. replacing “citizen soldiering” with “a tiny professional warrior caste,” created in response to draft-driven dissent against the Vietnam War, inside and outside the military. As he observes:
“Nothing so motivates a young adult to follow foreign policy, to weigh the advisability or morality of an ongoing war as the possibility of having to put ‘skin in the game.’ Without at least the potential requirement to serve in the military and in one of America’s now countless wars, an entire generation—or really two, since President Nixon ended the draft in 1973–has had the luxury of ignoring the ills of U.S. foreign policy, to distance themselves from its reality.”
At a time when the U.S. “desperately needs a massive, public, empowered anti-war and anti-imperial wave” sweeping over the country, we have instead a “civil-military” gap that, Sjursen believes, has “stifled antiwar and anti-imperial dissent and seemingly will continue to do so.” That’s why his own mission is to find more “socially conscious veterans of these endless, fruitless wars” who are willing to “step up and form a vanguard of sorts for revitalized patriotic dissent.” Readers of Sjursen’s book, whether new recruits to that vanguard or longtime peace activists, will find Patriotic Dissent to be an invaluable educational tool. It should be required reading in progressive study groups, high school and college history classes, and book clubs across the country. Let’s hope that the author’s willingness to take personal risks, re-think his view of the world, and then work to change it will inspire many others, in uniform and out.
- Canada Approves "Glory Holes" For Safe Sex During Pandemic
Canada Approves “Glory Holes” For Safe Sex During Pandemic
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 23:45The British Columbia Centre for Disease Control’s website has an entire section dedicated to sex education during the virus pandemic. Deep within, government leading health experts suggest “glory holes” could be the safest technique to minimize virus spreading during sex.
“Use barriers, like walls (e.g., glory holes), that allow for sexual contact but prevent close face-to-face contact,” the Canadian CDC wrote.
As defined by Urban Dictionary, a “Gloryhole is a hole made in a thin wall or other type of partition where a man can insert their penis for sexual stimulation by an anonymous person on the other side.”
The crowdsourced online dictionary for slang words also said these holes “can be found in bathrooms in the stall wall, in private rooms found in adult bookstores, and in dark rooms and labyrinths in bathhouses. Open rooms in bathhouses with many gloryholes are called a sucktorium and often have a raised level on one side of the holes to allow everyone to stand.”
Canadian CDC also suggests “masturbation” and “virtual sex” are the best methods for getting turned on during the pandemic. Still, at the same time, it allows one to practice safe sex social distancing. If one is to “masturbate with a partner(s), physical distancing will lower your chance of getting COVID-19,” health officials added.
Of course, the internet went crazy, here’s what people had to say about top Canadian officials advising the public to use “glory holes.”
Fabulous job Canadian Liberals!
You put 🇨🇦 on the world stage, front and center, with your “nut-ball” agenda! (no pun intended)
Maybe tomorrow your “tea-bagging” advice will be even more nationally embarrassing!#gloryholes #LiberalismIsAMentalDisorder #cdnpoli #Canada
— 5 Gallon Ferguson 🚽 (@Ferguso80948031) July 22, 2020
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Dammit Kyle that’s not how you make a #gloryhole pic.twitter.com/4eoAiUdkeC
— A Guillotine Enthusiast (@AGuillotineEnt1) July 22, 2020
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You know the world is changing when the government of Canada 🇨🇦 promotes glory holes 😂 Hey Siri, wheres the nearest glory hole. pic.twitter.com/hS1kqkEKgx
— #OG_Vesyll | 💕 (@Vesyll) July 22, 2020
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The world is a whack place…
- The Biden Campaign: Disease, Depression, & Racial Discord
The Biden Campaign: Disease, Depression, & Racial Discord
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 23:25Authored by Jonathan Cohen via AmericanThinker.com,
As the presidential election draws closer, the Biden campaign’s strategy has increasingly focused on blaming Trump for disease, depression, and racial unrest. Presidents, like coaches of sports teams, get too much credit during good times and too much blame when troubles occur. The last six months have brought a motherlode of bad luck on Trump’s campaign; the worst pandemic in a century; a massive lockdown of the economy; public health measures resulting in 40 million people out of work and living in extreme social isolation; weeks of rioting with widespread looting, unopposed attacks on police and the burning down of many businesses. While Trump is responsible for none of it, the Biden campaign strategy has become the party of disease, depression, and racial violence in order to aggravate all three crises.
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On the pandemic they have transformed the Chinese Communist Party’s role in the origin and internationalizing of the disease into the claim that Trump is a racist. They have transformed the FDA and CDC’s initial testing screwup into a Trump failure that caused the disease to take hold in the U.S. They attacked one possible treatment, hydroxychloroquine, as a dangerous drug simply because Trump suggested it might be helpful. They claimed that the few hundred people demonstrating against the lockdown were going to kill thousands while ignoring the fifteen million people violating social distancing norms to attack police. And worst of all, they offered little support for the administrations’ guidelines on slowing the spread.
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On the economy, they have encouraged overly restrictive lockdown policies that deepen and prolong the economic deterioration. They insisted on putting financial incentives into the supplemental appropriations to incentivize people to remain on unemployment rather than return to work.
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Worst of all, in response to the death of George Floyd, they have played down the demonstrators demands to abolish the police, refused to condemn rampant vandalism, opposed attempts to control rioting, and above all celebrated the massive turnouts at Black Lives Matter rallies even though they clearly created a serious contagion risk.
With disease, depression, and chaos in the streets on Trump’s watch, it simply makes no sense for the Democrats to have Biden out at press conferences forced to take positions on lockdown measures, reopening the economy, and violence in the streets.
What does the Biden campaign have to gain by having to answer questions about what he thinks about tearing down statues of Washington and Jefferson?
While I agree that Biden was never too smart to begin with and does show signs of reduced mental capacity, his debate with Sanders showed that he is still capable of managing a debate. Given the current predicaments that the Trump administration is facing, if Biden makes it out of the debates without drooling, it may be enough to push him over the finish line.
The real danger for the Democrats is that this could backfire. If the violence continues abetted by the Democratic officials demonizing police, imposing selective shutdowns of businesses, churches, and gatherings of more than ten people while enthusiastically promoting anti-police rioting that violates social distancing guidelines, prosecuting people for defending their homes and businesses against rioters while letting tens of thousands of violent criminals out of jail, then the public may grow weary of the chaos and shift the blame from Trump to the Democrats.
Law and order is not a Trump electoral strategy. Basic safety is something that people desperately want and the radical Democratic mayors, governors, and city councilors are actively promoting crime and violence by their anti-police policies. CNN and MSNBC do their best to hide the deterioration of social order in our cities but people know what is happening and as they realize that it is their local official’s fecklessness that is making them unsafe, they may turn against the Democrats.
The election is still three months away and the Democrats playbook comes with a lot of risk. While the current polling shows that promoting disease depression and racial discord may in the short run help Biden, in the long run it may well backfire as the public wises up to the Democrat’s destructive policies.
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- Young Americans Have Used 33% Of Their Total Savings During COVID-19
Young Americans Have Used 33% Of Their Total Savings During COVID-19
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 23:05The coronavirus shutdowns have had a dramatic impact on the broader economy (if not the stock market, which is almost back to all time highs) and few have been hit as hard as young Americans such as Millennials and Gen Zers. A recent survey from Travis Credit Union seeking to learn more about the money-saving habits of young Americans and how Covid-19 and the looming recession has impacted their savings, polled nearly 2,000 Millennials and Gen-Zers and here’s what they found:
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99% said that saving money is important to them.
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39% of young Americans have had to dip into their savings during Covid-19 and have used an average of one-third of their total savings
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The top reasons for using savings during Covid-19: Food, utilities, mortgage or rent, credit card debt, and student loans.
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73% of respondents said Covid-19 will shape their financial habits moving forward.
Some more details: on average, respondents began saving at the age of 19 and 90% have taken the first step and opened a dedicated savings account. While men have more saved than women on average ($16,631 and $11,649, respectively), over half of all respondents add to their savings on a monthly basis.
Looking into the future, 1 in 4 young Americans say that the most important thing they’re planning for is retirement, with just over half saying they have a savings account dedicated to their retirement goals. The most popular type of retirement account: 401(k) (34%), followed by a Roth IRA (20%) and separate personal savings account (20%).
Even with good saving habits in place, 8 out of 10 respondents said that they’ve felt stress or anxiety when it comes to saving money. That’s no surprise, given the current economic climate – but they’ve learned to plan for times like these. In addition to a nest egg, 2 in 5 have and work to maintain an emergency fund. When asked what they are preparing for, many said potential job loss (33%), while others cited family emergencies (32%), medical emergencies (27%), and major home or car repair (8%).
As the survey concludes, in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and an economic recession, Millennials and Gen Zers are learning the importance of having these funds tucked away for a rainy day. Three out of four say that the impact of coronavirus has changed their saving habits and that it will continue to shape their financial habits going forward.
This is not the first time a crisis has changed young adults’ relationship with money. Many point to the 2008 economic recession as a financial influence, and one in three say it changed how they approach their saving habits. When asked, 42% said they began saving sooner, 21% became more aware of their spending, 19% began saving for retirement earlier than planned, and 18% pursued a career with job security.
Of course, no matter how optimistic of a spin the poll creators want to put on it, if a third of young America’s savings has indeed already been wiped out, that means that a tremendous amount of future purchasing has been pulled into the future. And in an economy that has been notoriously hostile to young workers, it is unclear just how or where all these Millennials and GenZers will find the funds to replenish their savings funds. Worse, it also means that if four months of living under the pandemic is all it took for a third of their savings to be gone forever, we dread to think what will happen in 8 months if there is still no vaccine or cure, and the economy is still barely functioning as it is today.
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- Escobar: Brazil's "Money Laundering Scandal From Hell" That No One Wants To Talk About
Escobar: Brazil’s “Money Laundering Scandal From Hell” That No One Wants To Talk About
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 22:45Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Two decades after the fact, a political earthquake that should be rocking Brazil apart is being met with thunderous silence…
What is now described as the Banestado leaks and the CC5gate is straight out of vintage WikiLeaks: a list, published for the first time in full, naming names and detailing what is one of the biggest corruption and money laundering cases in the world for the past three decades.
This scandal allows for the healthy practice of what Michel Foucault characterized as the archeology of knowledge. Without understanding these leaks, it’s impossible to place in the proper context the sophisticated Hybrid War unleashed by Washington on Brazil initially via NSA spying on President Dilma Roussef’s first term (2010-2014), all the way to the subsequent Car Wash corruption investigation that jailed Lula and opened the way for the election of neofascist patsy Jair Bolsonaro as President.
The scoop on this George Orwell does Hybrid War plotline is due, once again, to independent media: the small website Duplo Expresso, led by young, daring Bern-based international lawyer Romulus Maya, which first published the list.
An epic 5-hour podcast assembled the three key protagonists who denounced the scandal in the first place, back in the late 1990s, and now are able to re-analyze it: then Governor of Parana state Roberto Requiao; federal prosecutor Celso Tres; and police superintendent, now retired, Jose Castilho Neto.
Previously, in another podcast, Maya and anthropologist Piero Leirner, Brazil’s foremost analyst of Hybrid War, briefed me on the myriad political intricacies of the leaks while we discussed geopolitics in the Global South.
The CC5 lists are here, here, and here. Let’s see what makes them so special.
The mechanism
Way back in 1969, the Brazilian Central Bank created what was described as a “CC5 account” to facilitate foreign companies and executives to legally wire assets overseas. For many years the cash flow in these accounts was not significant. Then everything changed in the 1990s – with the emergence of a massive, complex criminal racket centered on money laundering.
The original Banestado investigation started in 1997. Federal prosecutor Celso Tres was stunned to find that from 1991 to 1996 no less than $124 billion in Brazilian currency was wired overseas. Between 1991 and 2002 that ballooned to a whopping $219 billion – placing Banestado as one of the largest money laundering schemes in history.
Tres’s report led to a federal investigation focused in Foz do Iguacu in southern Brazil, strategically located right at the Tri-Border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, where local banks were laundering vast amounts of funds through their CC5 accounts.
This is how it worked. U.S. dollar dealers in the black market, linked to bank and government employees, used a vast network of bank accounts under the name of unsuspecting ”smurfs” and phantom companies to launder illegal funds from public corruption, tax fraud and organized crime, mainly through the Banco do Estado do Parana branch in Foz do Iguacu. Thus the Banestado case.
The federal investigation was going nowhere until 2001, when police superintendent Castilho ascertained that most of the funds were actually landing in accounts at the Banestado branch in New York. Castilho arrived in New York in January 2002 to turbo-charge the necessary international money tracking.
Through a court order, Castilho and his team reviewed 137 accounts at Banestado New York, tracking $14.9 billion. In quite a few cases, the beneficiaries had the same name of Brazilian politicians then serving in Congress, cabinet ministers and even former Presidents.
After a month in New York, Castilho was back in Brazil carrying a hefty 400-page report. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, he was dropped out of the investigation, which was then put on hold for at least a year. When the new Lula government took power in early 2003, Castilho was back in business.
In April 2003, Castilho identified a particularly interesting Chase Manhattan account named “Tucano” – the nickname of the PSDB party led by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was in power before Lula and always kept very close ties to the Clinton and Blair political machines.
Castilho was instrumental in the set up of a Parliamentary Inquiry Commission over the Banestado case. But once again, this commission led to nowhere – not even voting a final report. Most companies involved negotiated a deal with the Brazilian Internal Revenue Service and thus ended any possibility of legal action in regard to tax evasion.
Banestado meets Car Wash
In a nutshell, the two largest political parties – Cardoso’s neoliberal PSDB and Lula’s Workers’ Party – which never really faced down imperial machinations and the Brazilian rentier class, actively buried an in-depth investigation. Moreover Lula, coming right after Cardoso, and mindful or preserving a minimum of governability, made a strategic decision of not investigating “tucano” corruption, including a slew of dodgy privatizations.
New York prosecutors duly prepared a special Banestado list for Castilho with what really mattered for criminal prosecution to go though: the full circle of the money laundering scheme, with (i) funds first illegally remitted out of Brazil using the CC5 accounts, (ii) passing through the New York branches of the Brazilian banks involved, (iii) reaching offshore bank accounts and trusts in tax havens (e.g., Cayman, Jersey, Switzerland) and then finally (iv) going back to Brazil as – fully laundered – “foreign investment”, for the actual use and enjoyment of the final beneficiaries who first got the not accounted for money out of the country using the CC5 accounts.
But then Brazilian Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos, appointed by Lula, nixed it. As superintendent Castilho metaphorically puts it, “this, deliberately, prevented (him) from going back to Brazil with the murdered body”.
Well, whereas Castilho never got hold of this critical document, at least two Brazilian Congressmen, two Senators and two Federal Prosecutors – who would later on rise to fame as Car Wash investigation “stars”, Vladimir Aras and Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima – did get it. Why and how the document – call it the “body bag” – never found its way into the criminal proceedings back in Brazil is an extra mystery wrapped up inside the whole enigma.
Meanwhile, there are “unconfirmed” reports (several sources would not go on record on this) that the document might have been used for outright extortion of the individuals, mostly billionaires, featured on the list.
Extra sauce in the judicial sphere comes from the fact that the provincial judge in charge of burying the Banestado case was none other than Sergio Moro, the self-serving Elliot Ness figure who in the next decade would rise to superstar status as the capo di tutti I capi of the massive Car Wash investigation and subsequent Justice Minister under Bolsonaro. Moro ended up resigning and is now de facto already campaigning for President in 2022.
And here we hit the toxic Banestado-Car Wash connection. Considering what is already public domain about Moro’s modus operandi on Car Wash, as he altered names in documents with the single-minded objective of sending Lula to jail, the challenge now would be to prove how Moro “sold” non-convictions related to Banestado. With a very convenient legal excuse: with no “body” found (or formally brought back to criminal proceedings in Brazil), no one could be found guilty of murder.
As we plunge into excruciating details, Banestado increasingly looks and feels like the Ariadne’s thread that may reveal the beginning of the destruction of Brazil’s sovereignty. A tale full of lessons to the learned by the whole Global South.
The Black Market Dollar King
Castilho, in that epic podcast, did ring alarm bells when he referred to $17 million that had transited in the Banestado branch in New York and then was sent, of all places, to Pakistan. Castilho and his team found that out only a few months after 9/11. I sent him some questions about it, and he answered, through Maya, that his investigators would dig it all up again, mentioning that a report did indicate the origin of these funds.
This is the first time such information has surfaced – and the ramifications may be explosive. We’re talking about dodgy funds, arguably from drugs and weapons operations, leaving the Triple Border – Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay – which happens historically to be a top site for CIA and Mossad black ops.
Financing may have been provided by the so-called King of The Black Market Dollars, Dario Messer, via CC5 accounts. It’s no secret that black market operators at the Tri-Border are all connected to cocaine trafficking via Paraguay – and also to evangelicals. That is the basis of what Maya, Leirner and myself have already described as Cocaine Evangelistan.
Messer is an indispensable cog in the recycling mechanism inbuilt in drug trafficking. Money travels to fiscal paradises under imperial protection, is duly laundered, and gloriously resurrects on Wall Street and the City of London, with the extra bonus of the U.S. easing some of its current account deficit. Cue to Wall Street’s “irrational exuberance”.
What really matters is free circulation of cocaine – why not hidden in the odd soya cargo, something that comes with the extra benefit of securing the well being of agro-business. That’s a mirror image of the CIA heroin ratline in Afghanistan I detailed here.
Most of all, politically, Messer is the notorious missing link to judge Moro. Even mainstream O Globo newspaper was forced to admit, last November, that Messer’s shadowy businesses were “monitored” nonstop for two decades by different U.S. agencies out of Asuncion and Ciudad del Este in Paraguay. Moro for his part is an asset for two different U.S. agencies – FBI and CIA – plus the Dept. of Justice.
Messer may be the joker in this convoluted plot. But then there’s the Maltese Falcon: There’s only one Maltese Falcon, as the John Huston classic immortalized it. And it’s currently lying in a safe in Switzerland.
These happen to be the original, official documents submitted by construction giant Odebrecht to the Car Wash investigation which have been undisputedly “manipulated”, “allegedly” by the company itself. And “maybe”, in collusion with (then) judge Moro and the prosecution team led by Deltan Dallagnol. Not only, possibly, for the purpose of incriminating Lula and persons close to him, but also – crucially – deleting any mentions of individuals who should never be brought to light. Or Justice. And, yes, you guessed it right if you thought about the (U.S.-backed) Black Market Dollar King.
The first serious political impact after the release of the Banestado leaks is that Lula’s lawyers Cristiano and Valeska Zanin have finally, officially requested for Swiss authorities to hand over the originals.
Governor Requiao, by the way, was the only Brazilian politician to publicly ask Lula, back in February, to go for the documents in Switzerland. It is no surprise that Requiao was the first public figure in Brazil to now ask Lula to make all this content public once the former President gets hold of it.
The real, not adulterated Odebrecht list of people involved in corruption is crammed with big names – including the Judiciary elite. Confronting the two versions, Lula’s lawyers may finally be able to demonstrate the falsification of “evidence” that led to the jailing of Lula but also, among other developments, the exile of Ecuador’s former President Rafael Correa, the imprisonment of his VP, Jorge Glas, the imprisonment of Peru’s former President Ollanta Humala and wife and, most dramatically, the suicide of Peru’s former two time President Alan Garcia.
The Brazilian Patriot Act
The big political question now is not to uncover the master manipulator who buried the Banestado scandal two decades ago.
As anthropologist Leirner detailed it, what matters is that the leaking of the CC5 accounts focuses on the mechanism of the corrupted Brazilian bourgeoisie, with the help of their political and judicial partners – national and foreign – to solidify itself as a rentier class, but still always submissive to and kept in check by “secret”, imperial files.
Banestado leaks and the CC5 accounts should be seen as a political opening for Lula to go for broke. This is all-out (Hybrid) War – and blinking is not an option. The geopolitical and geoeconomic project of destroying Brazilian sovereignty and turning it into an imperial sub-colony is winning – hands down.
A measure of the explosiveness of Banestado leaks and CC5 gate has been the reaction by assorted limited hangouts: thundering silence, and that encompasses Leftist parties and alternative, supposedly progressive media. Mainstream media, for whom judge Moro is a sacred cow, at best spins it as “old story”, “fake news” and even a “hoax”.
Lula is facing a fateful decision. With access to names so far shadowed by Car Wash, he may be able to unleash a neutron bomb and pull off a reset of the whole game – exposing a rash of Car Wash-linked Supreme Court judges, prosecutors, district attorneys, journalists and even Generals who received funds from Odebrecht overseas. Not to mention bring back Black Market Dollar King Messer – who controls the fate of Moro – to the frontline. This means directly pointing a finger at the U.S. Deep State. Not an easy decision to make.
It’s now clear that creditors of the Brazilian state were, originally, debtors. Confronting different accounts it’s possible to square the circle on Brazil’s legendary “fiscal imbalance” – exactly as this plague is brought up, once again, with the intent of decimating the assets of the ailing Brazilian state. Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, a neo-Pinochetist and Milton Friedman cheerleader, has already warned he’ll keep selling state companies like there’s no tomorrow.
Lula’s plan B would be to clinch some sort of deal that would bury the whole dossier – just like the original Banestado investigation was buried two decades ago – to preserve the leadership of the Workers’ Party as domesticated opposition, and without touching on the absolutely essential issue: how Guedes is selling out Brazil.
That would be the line favored by Fernando Haddad, who lost the presidential election to Bolsonaro in 2018: a sort of Brazilian Bachelet (Chile’s former President), an ashamed neoliberal sacrificing everything to have yet another shot at power possibly in 2026.
Were Plan B to happen it would galvanize the wrath of trade unions and social movements – the flesh and blood Brazilian working classes which are on the verge of being totally decimated by neoliberalism on steroids and the toxic collusion of the U.S.-inspired Brazilian version of the Patriot Act with the military schemes to profit from “Cocaine Evangelistan”.
And all that after Washington – successfully – nearly destroyed national champion Petrobras, an initial objective of NSA spying. Zanin, Lula’s lawyer, also adds – maybe too late – that the “informal cooperation” between Washington and the Car Wash op was in fact illegal, according to decree number 3.810/02.
What will Lula do?
As it stands, as a development of the Banestado leaks, a first Banestado “VIP list” was gathered. It includes the current President of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, who also serves as a Supreme Court Justice, Luis Roberto Barroso, bankers, media tycoons and industrialists. Car Wash prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol happens to be very close to the neoliberal Supreme Court Justice in question.
The VIP list should be read as the road map for the money laundering practices of the Brazilian 0,01% – roughly estimated to be 20,000 families who own the close to one trillion dollar Brazilian internal debt. A great deal of those funds had been recycled back to Brazil as “foreign investment” through the CC5 scheme back in the 1990s. And that’s exactly how Brazil’s internal debt exploded.
Still no one knows where the Banestado-enabled torrent of dodgy money actually landed, in detail. The “body bag” was never formally acknowledged to have been brought back from New York and never made its way into the criminal proceedings. Yet money laundering is still in progress – and thus the limitation period does not apply – so somebody, anybody would have to be thrown in the slammer. It doesn’t seem that will be the case anytime soon, tough.
Meanwhile, enabled by the U.S. Deep State, transnational finance and local comprador elites, some in uniform, some in robes, the slow motion Hybrid War coup against Brazil keeps rambling on.
And day by day inching closer to full spectrum dominance.
Which bring us to the key, final question: what will Lula do about it?
- Wealthy Elites Buy Private Islands To Isolate From "Coronavirus Storm"
Wealthy Elites Buy Private Islands To Isolate From “Coronavirus Storm”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 22:25As the virus pandemic continues to spread around the world, demand is surging for private islands as wealthy elites escape virus-infected metros.
The evolution of elites abandoning cities started during lockdowns. Folks with economic mobility packed up their bags and headed to rural communities and towns as major cities were engulfed with the virus and resulting lockdowns. Shortly after lockdowns eased, social-unrest exploded across the country, which was another major factor in the exodus. Let’s not forget, the rapid advances in technology have made it possible for white-collar folks to work remotely.
While fleeing to the suburbs isn’t enough for some folks, there appears to be increasing demand for private islands in recent months.
Financial Times spoke with real estate agents who say demand for “private hideaways” in the South Pacific, Caribbean, and remote parts of the US and Europe are becoming in high demand in the age of virus pandemic.
Trayor Lesnock, founder of Platinum Luxury Auctions, and the agent who is selling a small island in Fiji, called Mai Island, said the pandemic has allowed people to “reassess their lives” and pursue new living environments to isolate themselves.
“Owning an island has long been considered cool and desirable, but it’s often been a whimsical dream,” Lesnock said. “But with Covid-19, it’s starting to look a lot more practical, as people rush to find private spaces for themselves and keep a distance from others.”
Here’s the 32-acre island he is selling in Fiji:
Financial Times points out wealthy buyers aren’t just purchasing tropical islands, a 157-acre island, called Horse Island, off the south-west coast of Ireland recently sold for €5.5m ($6.6 million).
“There’s obviously a thought process in people’s minds — particularly those that can afford these multimillion-euro properties — that they can just get away and self-isolate,” said Callum Bain, a surveyor at Colliers International, the real estate agent that helped sell the island.
Farhad Vladi, a German businessman who has sold 3,000 islands in five decades, said the pandemic had caused a “spike” in wealthy folks buying islands. He said, “less expensive islands in Scandinavia and Canada” are being purchased at the moment with buyers not even visiting the properties.
Agents said private islands off the coasts of countries that have strict social distancing, and low cases and deaths are in high demand. Many of these islands are based around Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific islands.
Pumpkin Island, a private island off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, was recently listed for $25 million, is described by owners as a “safe haven” from the pandemic.
“We’ve weathered the [coronavirus] storm well and people are looking for places where they will have space and where they don’t feel like they’re on top of someone else . . . I definitely think that’s an attraction,” said Laureth Rumble, whose family owns Pumpkin Island.
The trend is clear: wealthy elites are fleeing cities for rural communities, have now decided to buy private islands as the virus pandemic shows no signs of abating.
- Doug Casey On Why This Election Could Be The Most Important Since The US Civil War
Doug Casey On Why This Election Could Be The Most Important Since The US Civil War
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 22:05International Man: The hysteria surrounding COVID-19 and the government lockdown has completely changed in-person interactions.
How do you think this will impact the way that Americans cast their vote in the presidential election?
Doug Casey: It’s a very bad thing from Trump’s point of view. For one thing, it’s severely limiting the number and size of his rallies, which he relies on to keep enthusiasm up.
More people are staying at home and watching television than ever before. And unless they glue their dial to Fox, they’ll gravitate towards the mainstream media, which is stridently anti-Trump. People who are on the fence hear authoritative-sounding talking heads on television, and it naturally influences them away from Trump.
Furthermore, this virus hysteria is discouraging people from going out—especially older people who are roughly 80% of the casualties of this virus. They’re less likely to go to vote. But older people are most likely to be Trumpers because they’re culturally conservative. I’m assuming that the COVID hysteria will still be with us in November.
Keeping his voters at home is one thing. But the effects that the hysteria is having on the economy are even more important. Presidents always take credit when the economy is good and are berated when it’s bad on their watch, regardless of whether they had anything to do with it. If the economy is still bad in November—and I’ll wager it’s going to be much worse—people will reflexively vote against Trump.
With free money being passed out—the $600 per week in supplementary unemployment—between the state and federal payments, something like 30 million people are making more now than they were before the virus. In February, before the lockdown, there were about 3.2 million people collecting unemployment. Now, there are about 35 million. So, it seems we have over 30 million working-age people who are . . . displaced. That doesn’t count part-time workers, who aren’t eligible for unemployment but are no longer working.
When the supplementary benefits end, so will the artificial good times.
Worse, the public has come to the conclusion that a guaranteed annual income works. This virus hysteria has provided a kind of test for both Universal Basic Income and Modern Monetary Theory—helicopter money. So far, anyway, it seems you really can get something for nothing.
Even Trump supports helicopter money because he knows it’s all over if today’s financial house of cards collapses.
Most people will still be out of work when the free money ends. The recognition that the country is in a depression will sink in. They’ll look for somebody to blame. When things get seriously bad, people want to change the system itself.
There’s now a lot of antagonism toward both free minds and free markets. Polls indicate that a majority of Americans actually support BLM, an openly Marxist movement. Forget about free minds—someone might be offended, and you’ll be pilloried by the mob. Forget about free markets—they’re blamed for all the economic problems, even though it’s the lack of them that caused the problem. The idea of capitalism is now considered undefendable.
Widespread dissatisfaction with the system is obviously bad for the Republicans and good for the Democrats, who promote themselves as the party of change.
The bottom line is that this whole episode with COVID is uniformly bad for whatever Trump or the Republicans represent. It’s bad for the old status quo.
International Man: If people are afraid to go out, will it impact voter turnout?
Doug Casey: Absolutely. As I just said, especially among older people who tend to be conservative Republican voters.
But let’s be candid. This election is going to hinge on who cheats the best. And the Democrats have, over the years, developed far greater expertise in cheating than the Republicans. Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” wasn’t written for the kind of people who vote Republican.
For one thing, there’s going to be more emphasis on mail-in votes, which make it easier to cheat. You can register dead people as voters. You can register your dog as a voter. If the fraud is ever even discovered, it won’t be until long after the election.
That’s only part of it, though. A high percentage of voting machines are computerized. Fraud by hacking voting machines is apparently easy to do—and it’s pretty untraceable. It’s just a matter of planning and boldness.
One of the consequences of this widely acknowledged dysfunction is to delegitimize the whole idea of voting. As you know, I don’t believe in mass democracy, because it inevitably degrades into a system where the poorer citizens vote themselves benefits at the expense of the middle class. Basically, mob rule dressed in a coat and tie. But if the populace loses faith in “democracy” during a serious economic crisis—like this one—they’re going to look for a strong man to straighten things out. The US will look more and more like Argentina.
International Man: In previous US elections, there were issues with voter fraud and delays tallying votes in a handful of US states.
If this happens again, do you think that the election results could be contested? What would the implications of that be?
Doug Casey: The election will be contested no matter which side wins because the country has become totally polarized. No matter who wins, the other side is going to be terminally unhappy with the result.
This election is undoubtedly the most important one since 1860. The outcome of that was the War Between the States.
The Democrats really want to change the very nature of the US. If they win, they’ll be able to do so, for several reasons. First, it seems almost certain that they’ll make Washington, DC, a state; there will then be 102 senators voting—and those two from Washington, DC, will without question be left-leaning Democrats. Second, the 20 million undocumented people—illegal aliens—now in the US will undoubtedly be made citizens; they lean heavily toward the Democrats. Third, they’ll expand the size of the Supreme Court and pack it with leftists.
There could be more, of course. Perhaps they’ll reduce the voting age to 16; it’s already the case in Argentina and a growing number of other countries. Maybe they’ll even engineer a Constitutional Convention to change everything. The 2nd Amendment will go, of course, and the rest of the Bill of Rights would be heavily modified. Most of it’s already a dead letter—but that would formalize the change once and for all.
These things would cement the Democrats in office. But please don’t think I support the Republicans. That would be like supporting tuberculosis just because it’s better than terminal cancer.
It used to be pretty simple—the Republicans and the Democrats were just two sides of the same coin. Like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Traditionally, one promoted the warfare state more, the other the welfare state. But it was mostly rhetoric; they were pretty collegial. Now, both the welfare and the warfare states have been accepted as part of the cosmic firmament by both parties. Now, it’s about cultural issues. Polite disagreement has turned into visceral hatred.
The Dems at least stand for some ideas—although they’re all bad ideas. The Reps have never stood for any principles; they just said the Dems wanted too much socialism, too fast. Which is why they were always perceived—correctly—as hypocrites. Things have changed, however. Antagonism between the right and the left is no longer political or economic—it’s cultural. That’s much more serious.
Look at the 20 Democratic candidates that were in the primary debates last summer. They were all radical collectivists, dedicated statists. The Republicans were all—with one exception—mealy-mouthed nonentities.
I suspect the Dems will win in November because they actually have a core of philosophical beliefs—and that counts during chaos. It doesn’t matter that they’re irrational or evil. Then, whenever a really radical group takes over—and these people are serious radicals—they cement themselves in power. And it only takes a small number of people working as a cadre to do it.
With the Russian Revolution, the hardcore Bolsheviks only numbered in the hundreds. That was enough to take control of a hundred million Russians—and stay in power for 70 years until they totally ran the wheels off the economy.
The same thing happened with Fidel Castro in Cuba. He landed with only 50 or 60 guys, but once he took over the country, his apparatus was able to keep control of it.
Serious, radical populists and socialists can pull that off. They can say they’re working for the people and can promise lots of free stuff. The hoi polloi want to hear that during a crisis—like the one we’re entering. Once they’re in, it’s almost impossible to get them out.
International Man: Millennials will soon overtake the baby boomers as the largest adult population. They’ll have a growing impact on elections.
How do you think this will affect the future direction of the country?
Doug Casey: First of all, I’ve got to say that I don’t believe in democracy as a method of government. I understand how shocking that is to hear. Let me explain.
There’s something to be said for a few people, who share traditions and culture and generally agree on how the world works, to vote on who will speak for them. That’s one thing—and it makes sense. But it’s very different from a gigantic agglomeration of very different, even antagonistic, people fighting for control and power.
Winston Churchill said two things about democracy that are apposite.
One is that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” I would argue that’s simply not true. Perhaps we can discuss the alternatives someday.
The other thing that he said was, “The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” He’s absolutely right in that quip.
I’d have less of a beef with democracy if the government was totally precluded from any intervention in the economy. The problem is that the institution of government itself is innately, intrinsically, and necessarily coercive.
In a civilized society, however, coercion should be limited. What does that mean?
It means that a government should be strictly limited to preventing force and fraud. That implies a police force to prevent domestic force and fraud, a military to protect the country from invasion, and a court system to allow people to adjudicate disputes without resorting to force.
If the government did nothing but those things, sure you can vote. But votes would be largely irrelevant.
Actually, an argument can be made that those three things are so important to the conduct of a civilized society that they shouldn’t be left to the kind of people that want to be elected.
The market can and will do anything that’s needed or wanted, better and cheaper than a political instrument like the government. And at this point, the government doesn’t do any of those three things well. Instead, it tries to do absolutely everything else.
But, getting back to millennials, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and people like her, are both the current reality and the future of the Democratic Party — and of the US itself.
Why? It’s irrational to make a 30-year-old barmaid into an icon. But she’s cute, vivacious, outspoken, and has a plan to remake the country. And she’s shrewd. She knows how to capitalize on envy and resentment. She realized she could win by ringing doorbells in her district, where voter turnout was very low, and about 70% are non-white. There was zero motivation for residents to turn out for the tired, corrupt, old hack of a white man she ran against.
Nobody, except for a few libertarians and conservatives, are countering the purposefully destructive ideas AOC represents. And they have a very limited audience and not much of a platform. Arguing for sound money and limited government makes them seem like Old Testament prophets. Collectivism and statism are overwhelming the values of individualism and liberty.
It’s exactly the type of thing the Founders tried to guard against by restricting the vote to property owners over 21, going through the Electoral College. Now, welfare recipients who are only 18 can vote, and the Electoral College is toothless.
Of course, I don’t believe in either politics or voting. But, if you must have voting, it should only be for people 25 or over, who own a certain amount of property, so they have something to lose in the system. Most important, the government should have zero involvement in the economy. But, forget about it. Just the opposite is happening at an accelerating rate.
For the last couple of generations, everybody who’s gone to college has been indoctrinated with leftist ideas. Almost all of the professors hold these ideas. They place an intellectual patina on top of emotion and fantasy-driven ideas.
When the economy collapses in earnest, everybody will blame capitalism. Because Trump is rich, he’s incorrectly associated with capitalism. The country—especially the young, the poor, and the non-white—will look to the government to “do something.” They see the government as a cornucopia, and socialism as a kind and gentle way to expropriate the middle class.
A majority of millennials are in favor of socialism. By 2050, whites will be a minority in the US. A straw in the wind is that a large majority of the people who commit suicide each year are middle-class white males—essentially, Trump supporters. The demographic handwriting is on the wall. Trump’s election in 2016 was an anomaly. A Last Hurrah.
There’s no political salvation coming from the Republican party. Like Trump himself, it doesn’t have any core principles. It just reacts to the Dems and proposes less radical alternatives to their ideas. It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s only capable of putting forward empty suits, pure establishment figures like Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, or a Bush. Or a non-entity like Pence. That’s a formula for disaster in today’s demographic and cultural environment.
* * *
Misguided political and economic ideas have taken hold in the US and around the world. In all likelihood, the public will vote itself more and more “free stuff” until it causes an economic crisis. New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free guide that will show you exactly how to survive and thrive in the coming crisis. Click here to download the PDF now.
- Two Of Jeffrey Epstein's Properties, Including His NYC Mansion, Just Hit The Market For $110 Million
Two Of Jeffrey Epstein’s Properties, Including His NYC Mansion, Just Hit The Market For $110 Million
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 21:45For the low low price of just $110 million, you could have the honor of owning both the Manhattan and Palm Beach residents of the now-deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Think about all the fodder that will provide for those boring dinner parties, when nobody has anything to talk about.
The NYC property was listed by brokerage Modlin Group for $88 million and is located at 9 E. 71st St. If sold at that price, it could be a price record for a Manhattan townhouse, according to Bloomberg.
The lengthy description of the NYC property on Modlin’s website describes it as the “last and largest of just a handful of goliath mansions built during its era in the 1930’s” and the “capstone property of the wealthiest and most prominent block of all of New York City.” The Mansion stands with provenance and commanding authority in a neighborhood steeped in New York’s richest history.
“The property is uniquely positioned,” the listing continues “as the perpetual and unobtrusive perspective overlooking the Frick Museum to Central Park can never be blocked by new construction, a rarity in the ever-growing New York City landscape.”
Epstein’s former NYC mansion It does not, however, mention Jeffrey Epstein. Bloomberg’s description of the property seems a bit more apt: “The Upper East Side home was one of the locations where Epstein was accused of luring underage girls to perform paid sex acts, according to an indictment last year, before the financier was found dead in his jail cell.”
And of course, it also doesn’t note that before Epstein, the mansion was owned by his Les Wexner, a name that has repeatedly and mysteriously continued to pop up during various stages the Epstein investigations. “In 2011, the deed to the home was transferred from the company Wexner used to buy it to an Epstein company in the U.S. Virgin Islands,” Bloomberg writes.
But that doesn’t sound as great in an $88 million real estate listing, we guess.
Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion has been listed separately for $21.95 million. More of Epstein’s property is expected to hit the market in the coming weeks, with the proceeds going to Epstein’s estate. The estate has been established as a compensation fund for victims, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The agent who listed the Florida home “declined to comment”, which usually isn’t a great first step to selling a home.
- Americans Are Buying Guns In Record Numbers & The Washington Post Isn't Pleased
Americans Are Buying Guns In Record Numbers & The Washington Post Isn’t Pleased
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 21:25Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Social scientists have been trying for many years to blame homicides on the presence of guns. A favorite tool in this quest is the use of studies that show a correlation between gun ownership and crime. These studies are then reported as “evidence” that the presence of guns causes crime.
But there’s always been a problem with this attempt at showing causality between guns and homicides: causality can just as plausibly go the other way. That is, in times and places where the local population feels they are in danger of being crime victims, people are more likely to purchase guns for protection. So, rather than saying “guns cause crime,” we should be saying “crime causes guns.”
New Gun Purchases Soar as Uncertainty and Violence Increase
We’re likely seeing this phenomenon at work now.
In recent months, according to the firearm industry’s trade group National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), Americans have purchased millions of guns:
The early part of 2020 has been unlike any other year for firearm purchases—particularly by first-time buyers—as new NSSF® research reveals millions of people chose to purchase their first gun during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fox News reports:
Gun sales have skyrocketed during the past three months, and a record-breaking 80.2 percent increase in sales was reported in May compared to last year, according to the shooting foundation. April’s data showed a 71.3 percent increase from 2019, and there was an 85.3 percent increase in March, according to information previously released by Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting.
Many new gun owners during this period feared general unrest as a result of the government-mandated lockdowns. Potential first-time buyers still on the fence about buying a firearm in May were perhaps confirmed in their fears by the riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Then, in the wake of the riots, serious violent crime appeared to spike. It was widely reported, for instance, that homicides in New York City spiked “21 percent in first six months of 2020.” Crime in other cities increased as well, ranging from a jump of over 200 percent in Nashville to 23 percent in Kansas City, Missouri.
Naturally, seeing these news stories, many potential gun owners are more likely to conclude that they need a gun for personal protection. This is especially true when combined with a perception that police organizations cannot be relied upon to engage in crime prevention and enforcement. And this has indeed been the perception in many places where police have appeared unwilling to intervene in June’s riots.
Many normal people would see these events as an illustration of how gun purchases result from fears over crime and uncertainty.
But now, perhaps predictably, left-wing media organizations like the Washington Post are trying to turn this narrative around: people aren’t buying guns as a reaction to violence and social disarray, the Post insists. All those new gun purchases are what’s causing the violence in the first place.
Americans purchased millions more guns than usual this spring, spurred in large part by racial animosity stoked by widespread protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as well as anxiety over the effects of the covid-19 pandemic.
That gun-buying binge is associated with a significant increase in gun violence across the United States.
The Post cites two new reports, one from the Brookings Institution and another from the University of California, both of which conclude that the rise in gun purchases has likely caused more “gun violence.”
Note the careful use of language here, though: the gun purchases are “associated” with an increase in gun violence, since causality cannot be established. Indeed, near the bottom of the Post article, the author admits:
The authors [of the Brookings and UC reports] caution that a study of this nature cannot prove causality, particularly at a time of massive social upheaval in a country dealing with an unprecedented public health crisis as well as a nationwide protest movement.
Of course, if one is already committed to the idea that guns cause crime, it makes perfect sense that millions of Americans in early 2020—after passing a criminal background check—will buy guns, and then almost immediately use those guns to commit crimes.
Moreover, it’s unclear that the two studies referenced by the Post article even imply that homicides result from more gun purchases.
The Brookings study, for instance, is more of an op-ed than a study. It’s simply a review of some past events which were followed by surges in gun purchases, including the Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings. This appears to be true indeed, and is a helpful reminder that people do often purchase firearms in light of concerns over personal safety, or at least in light of concerns about future access to firearms.
The UC study is a bit more specific, but even this is far too general to be of any use in concluding that gun purchases lead to violence. Because of data limitations, the UC report, of course, doesn’t establish that the people who bought firearms this year are responsible for any increase in crime that may be occurring. But it’s not even established that surges in gun purchases correlate with surges in crime at the city or neighborhood levels. This is critical, since trends in homicides are not really on a statewide or even metro-wide level. Homicide trends in the US tend to be dominated by homicides in a relatively small number of cities and neighborhoods. For example, the homicide rate in Baltimore is ten times that of the US overall. But this doesn’t mean homicides in Maryland are remarkably high.
So, have firearms purchases surged near the neighborhoods in Chicago, New York, and Kansas City where surges in crime have also occurred? It’s possible, since people bordering the most violent neighborhoods may feel the most at risk. On the other hand, it’s also entirely possible that firearms sales are occurring in places relatively distant from the places with surging homicides. The UC study only appears to give a state-level reading on this. In other words, the study really tells us very little.
- Pentagon Found "Vehicles Not Made On This Earth"; Rubio Hopes It's Alien, Not Chinese
Pentagon Found “Vehicles Not Made On This Earth”; Rubio Hopes It’s Alien, Not Chinese
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 21:25Authored by Elias Marat via TheMindUnleashed.com,
As secretive unit operating within the U.S. Department of Defense that is charged with investigating unidentified flying objects (UFOs) will make some of its findings public after it was revealed that the Pentagon has been recently briefed about “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
The once-covert UFO unit, which operates within the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence, will soon begin giving regular biannual updates on its research to the U.S. Senate’s Intelligence Committee, reports The New York Times.
The Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force was formed in 2019 for the purpose of studying strange and inexplicable encounters between U.S. military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles or UFOs in a bid “to standardize collection and reporting” of the various sightings.
The program is the successor to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which also investigated UFOs but was dissolved in 2017 due to a lapse of funding. However, the team working on that program continued its work alongside the intelligence community even after it was officially disbanded.
Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who headed the Pentagon program, resigned in October 2017 after a decade with the program. Elizondo, along with a group of former government scientists and officials, remain convinced that objects of unkown origin have crashed on Earth and that these apparently extraterrestrial materials have been the focus of research.
“It no longer has to hide in the shadows,” Elizondo told the Times. “It will have a new transparency.”
Former Senate majority leader and retired Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), who led the push to fund the earlier UFO program, also believes that the studies should see the light of day.
“After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” Reid said.
So far, none of the alleged crash artifacts have been subject to public scrutiny or verification by independent researchers. However, some of the retrieved objects such as strange metallic debris were identified as being manmade – raising the possibility that they could be related to the military of U.S. rivals such as China or Russia.
However, astrophysicist Eric Davis – who served as an advisor for the Pentagon program since 2007 – said that he had briefed the Pentagon in March about material retrieved from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
The Department of Defense subcontractor also said that he had concluded that the objects found were of the type “we couldn’t make … ourselves.”
In an interview last month, President Donald Trump told his son Donald Trump Jr. that he had heard some “interesting” things about supposed aliens as well as the secretive Area 51 base near Roswell, New Mexico, that some theorists claim is a UFO crash site.
The U.S. government has been increasingly open in its discussions of UFOs since last September, when U.S. Navy admitted that widely-circulated video footage captured by Navy pilots that purportedly showed UFOs flying through the skies did depict actual “unknown” objects that flew into U.S. airspace.
While officials admitted that they have been baffled by the unknown flying objects, they also admit that past encounters with them have been frequent. They also said that rather than calling them “UFOs,” they prefer the term unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs.
While it remains yet to be seen what information the once-secret UFO unit plans to lay out for lawmakers, acting intelligence committee chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is intent on finding out who or what precisely is behind the apparent UFO activity over U.S. military bases.
“We have things flying over our military bases and places where we are conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is — and it isn’t ours,” Rubio told CBS Miami in an interview last Friday.
“Frankly, that if it’s something from outside this planet — that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity,” the hawkish senator added.
For Reid, further transparency is needed.
“It is extremely important that information about the discovery of physical materials or retrieved craft come out,” he said.
Finally, all of this oddness sparked an interesting question from Mike Krieger
They seem to be priming the public for something with this alien and UFO rollout. Why now?
The whole thing stinks. pic.twitter.com/Ms6oxSoyl0
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) July 24, 2020
- "Shut The Eff Up Forever" – Morning Show Host Slams Biden For Calling Trump "The First Racist President"
“Shut The Eff Up Forever” – Morning Show Host Slams Biden For Calling Trump “The First Racist President”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 21:15Political affiliations and preferences are a funny thing, especially in the US, where black and latino Democratic voters repeatedly chose former Vice President Joe Biden over his more progressive rivals (Bernie, Warren), as well as DNC insider favorite Kamala Harris (whom the Bernie Bros successfully tarred as “Cop-mala”).
Biden’s unwavering popularity with minority voters is one of the few legitimate strengths in the Biden column. Of course, the most jarring thing about Biden and his campaign right now is the fact that he’s reportedly been hiding out in his basement and only doing a limited number of speeches and media appearances. The few campaign-related interviews Biden does do are inexplicably buried by mainstream (ie Democratic Party-aligned) media orgs, if they’re covered at all.
One example of this occurred earlier this week, when one of the most popular radio hosts in the country – “The Breakfast Club” radio host Charlamagne Tha God – derided Biden and his penchant to mistakenly violate progressive orthodoxies, saying he “wished [Biden] would shut the eff up forever” and go back to hiding in the basement.
Biden’s mistake? Saying that Trump was the “first” racist American president. Even though the founding fathers and their immediate successors have been dead for centuries, Charlamagne insisted that at least 12 former presidents owned slaves. That’s not actually true. According to at least one source, eight former presidents owned slaves. Admittedly, this distinction doesn’t exactly dilute Charlamagne’s point.
Here’s the full quote, courtesy of Fox News:
“I really wish Joe Biden would shut the eff up forever and continue to act like he’s starring in the movie ‘A Quiet Place’ because as soon as he opens his mouth and makes noise, he gets us all killed, OK?” the radio host said. “There’s already so many people who are reluctantly only voting for Joe Biden because he’s the only option and because Donald J. Trump is that trash.”
Here’s the context. Charlamagne was referencing a comment Biden made Wednesday in one of his few public statements. The comment earned Biden a place as “Donkey of the Day” on “The Breakfast Club.”
On Wednesday, Biden took aim at the president’s alleged racism, suggesting it’s historic compared to his predecessors.
“No sitting president has ever done this… No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists and they’ve existed and they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has,” Biden said.
However, Charlamagne declared the presumptive Democratic candidate Thursday’s “Donkey of the Day” for his comments.
Then, Charlamagne did something unexpected (for a morning show host on a show that mostly focuses on entertainment and pop culture): He wipped out the polling data.
Charlamagne then cited polling that showed a wide enthusiasm gap between Biden and Trump, noting that it’s “not good” for the Democrat to be lacking excitement among his voters, and suggested Biden’s latest remarks will further contribute to the “lack of enthusiasm.”
“Old white male leadership has failed America and there is nothing worse than an old white male [who] can’t recognize the faults and flaws of other old white males,” Charlamagne told listeners. “Racism is the American way. Donald Trump is not the first. And sadly, he won’t be the last, right? He’s just more overt with his racism than most presidents in recent times.”
Biden better announce his VP pick – the candidate has promised to pick a black woman for the position – quick, Charlamagne said. Because the VP isn’t going to be able to ride the BLM wave into the Oval Office if he doesn’t make some commitments.
- One Bank Warns Buying Gold Is The Only Hedge Left For The "Great Debasement"
One Bank Warns Buying Gold Is The Only Hedge Left For The “Great Debasement”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 21:05As far as Bank of America is concerned, there are just two themes one needs to know to explain the current “market” (which as the same Bank of America explained last week, is now manipulated to a never before seen extent): the Great Repression and Great Debasement.
First the Great Repression – also known as “Don’t fight the Fed” – which according to BofA CIO Michael Hartnett is the outcome of $8 trillion in central bank asset purchases in just three months in 2020, has crushed interest rates, corporate bond spreads, volatility & bears. The most perfect example of this repression: the US fiscal deficit soared from 7% to 40% of GDP in Q2’20…
… and less than one month later the volatility of US Treasury market fell close to all-time low.
Besides volatility, central bank repression works its magic on yields: case in point Italian & Greek 10-year government bonds which are down to 1%, while US Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities (CMBS) & IG corporate bonds down to 2%, meanwhile the 30-year US mortgage rate just dropped to a record all time low of 3%.
As a result of this unprecedented repression (of reality), the Fed has made everyone a winner:
Fed has made bulls in every asset class a winner…gold, bonds, credit, stocks, real estate all up big since March lows; levered cross-asset risk parity strategy at all-time high.
It also means that BofA’s recently preferred “All-weather” portfolio consisting of equal parts of all assets, i.e., 25/25/25/25 stocks, bonds, cash, gold, is up a record 18% in the past 90 days (Chart 7), which is “astounding & abnormal” given 7% historic annual average.
This “can’t lose” market has also led to fundamental shift in the zeitgeist, as the traditionally bearish narratives of Q2 such as a Democratic sweep, end of globalization, Japanification, narrow “lockdown” leadership of growth stocks is paradoxically morphing into bullish narratives. Here, Hartnett reminds is that “when the only reason to be bearish is there is no reason to be bearish” that’s when you sell. And sure enough, recent market moves justify getting defensive: the global equity market cap has round-tripped from $89tn to $62tn back to $87tn, with BofA warning that it is “hard to see financial conditions getting incrementally easier in July/Aug period of “peak policy” stimulus; summer dip in risk assets (e.g. SPX to 3050) likely.“
And yet, all good times come to an end – otherwise the Fed would have printed its way to utopia decades ago – and the with Great Repression in full force, it also means that the Fed is currently pursuing a just as Great Debasement.
Echoing something we have also said, namely that with the bond market now nationalized by the Fed and no longer providing any useful inflationary (or deflationary) signals, the only remaining asset class with any sort of discounting qualities is gold…
Why did the Fed need to nationalize bonds first? Because the 10Y no longer reflects future inflation which is the only catalyst for an equity selloff.
Only leaves gold as indicator of inflation. A spike in gold is death to Fed’s plans
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 24, 2020
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… Hartnett writes that interest rate repression means “investors can’t hedge the inflationary risk of $11tn of fiscal stimulus via “short bonds”…so investors crowding into “short US dollar”, “long gold” hedges.
Indeed, US dollar debasement is well underway as the default narrative for US economy with excess debt, insufficient growth, and maxed-out monetary & fiscal stimulus. However, local currency debasement is also underway everywhere else, and so the next market crisis will lead to an even bigger spike in the dollar as global monetary authorities are faced with an even bigger global synthetic short squeeze than the one which sent the USD soaring to all time highs in March.
Which is why shorting the dollar to hedge debasement may be profitable for a while but eventually lead to catastrophic consequences.
That leaves long gold as the only natural hedge to the central bank “all in” bet of kicking the can until something breaks. That something will likely be gold exploding higher first above $2,000… then $2,500… then $3,000 at which point the Fed’s control over fiat currencies, as well asthe illusion that there is no inflation, and the financial regime will finally collapse.
As Hartnett condludes, “the correct historical analog is the late-1960s when themes of “smaller world”, “bigger government”, “monetary & fiscal excess” led to positive nominal returns but also inflection up in inflation.
Secular market trend has been deflation (credit & tech) dominating inflation…$100 of EPS in 1995 now $1,500 in tech sector, but just $425 in everything else (Chart 9 and 10);
yet in 2021 GDP in dollar terms forecast to rise $1.3tn in China, $767bn in EU+UK, versus $612bn in US; global fiscal stimulus the other big 2020 trend…supports rotation from deflation to inflation…and traders note semiconductor stocks are already discounting ISM levels of >60 (Chart 11).
Finally, one look at the price of gold – which just closed at an all time high…
… and it becomes clear that it is now just a matter of time before the financial world as we know it, will end.
- San Francisco Mayor Blasts 'Woke' White BLM Supporters For Hijacking Movement
San Francisco Mayor Blasts ‘Woke’ White BLM Supporters For Hijacking Movement
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 20:45Authored by Stacey Lennox via PJMedia.com,
In an interview with Vogue Magazine, San Francisco Mayor London Breed discussed a range of issues. When asked about the current cultural moment, she said that she was overwhelmed by the response from people who are not black to the Black Lives Matter movement. However, she also expressed frustration with so-called “white allies.”
When she was asked if she had any critiques of the current demonstrations, she responded:
I have a real problem with the takeover of the movement by white people.
I want people to respect the opinions and feelings of Black people and allow us to decide what is in our best interest. I talk about the plan to reduce the police budget and reallocate those resources to the African American community, and a large number of non-Blacks reached out to tell me what I should do for the Black community. Then, they say what their community deserves because of their challenges as well. That really bothered me. The Black community [of San Francisco] is capable of speaking for ourselves and deciding what’s in our best interest.
Then she answered a question as to whether for not she felt that the concerns of San Francisco’s black residents were being heard. Breed’s response was sharp criticism of the progressive movement:
What’s happening in San Francisco now, and has for so many years, is you have a progressive movement made up of people who are mostly white and feel that they know what’s in the best interest of Black people.
I’m over that.
I think it’s important that we support and respect the Black people here enough to know that we have a mind of our own. Because half the policies pushed in San Francisco are “progressive policies” that don’t work for Black people. Because, if they did, why are things far worse for Black people here? In San Francisco, a city where less than 5 to 6% of the population is African American and yet we are disproportionately overrepresented in everything that’s bad: high school dropouts, arrests, homelessness. You name it.
Thank you, Mayor Breed! Though it could be just as easily argued that progressive policies are bad for everyone. She presides over a city that had more drug addicts than high school students in January of 2019. It also spawned the Snapcrap app that tracked public defecation.
The city also has one of the most progressive district attorneys in the country. Raised by domestic terrorists Bill Ayes and Bernadette Dorn, Chesa Boudin refuses to prosecute nearly all non-violent crimes. It is so bad Fox News Host Tucker Carlson did a series on San Francisco called American Dystopia:
With Breed’s criticism of progressive policies, it becomes necessary to wonder why she is embracing one of the worst ideas the woke left has come up with. She is actively diverting money away from the police department to invest in black communities.
A majority of black Americans do not support this idea. Overall support has been dropping as violence in many cities has escalated.
Breed’s rhetoric is pretty astonishing, given she leads a city where the black population has been declining for decades. According to the New York Times, black residents used to make up one in seven residents in San Francisco in 1970. Today it has fallen to one in 20 with the majority living in public housing.
Another consequence of progressive policies is skyrocketing rent and lack of affordable housing. While Breed has tried to remedy some of that by adding low-income units and shelter beds, it is like putting a band-aid on an injury that requires a tourniquet.
According to the website RENTCafe, the average rent in San Francisco is $3,629, with an average apartment size of 747 square feet. This amount is more than twice the national average of $1,468. This is an astounding price to live among piles of poop, strewn dirty needles, and unaddressed non-violent crime.
To the activists that have been critical of her leadership, Breed had a few words when she was asked if she was misunderstood:
Yes, but I don’t care that I am by people who have privilege. Let me be clear: In most cases, they’ve never had to live like I’ve had to live. I had to live in a public housing development that they wouldn’t have even dared set foot in. This is over 20 years, not just two years, of my life. I’ve been working in the trenches for my community my entire life.
And none of these people have been in the trenches when we were dealing with issues of police brutality on a regular basis. Almost every day you’re hearing that someone that you loved was killed. I think part of it is, my experience is what determines how I make decisions. The good news is the people who know me and love me from the neighborhood I grew up in, they understand why I do what I do. They’re not “activists,” but they love and they trust me.
Here’s hoping her neighborhood encompassed half the city. Her comments are not likely to be popular with the woke white progressives who follow the Robin Di Angelo school of thinking.
Only they know what is best, and Mayor Breed isn’t listening.
- Space Command Accuses Russia Of Testing Anti-Satellite Weapon
Space Command Accuses Russia Of Testing Anti-Satellite Weapon
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 20:25President Trump’s newly created Space Command announced Thursday (July 23) that Russia has tested a space-based anti-satellite weapon.
“On July 15, Russia injected a new object into orbit from Cosmos 2543, currently Satellite Catalog Number 45915 in Space-Track.org,” Space Command wrote. “Russia released this object in proximity to another Russian satellite, which is similar to on-orbit activity conducted by Russia in 2017, and inconsistent with the system’s stated mission as an inspector satellite.”
According to Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, Commander of U.S. Space Command and U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations, the U.S. government “raised concerns” earlier this year about the same Russian satellite system, when it “maneuvered near a U.S. government satellite.”
“This is further evidence of Russia’s continuing efforts to develop and test space-based systems, and consistent with the Kremlin’s published military doctrine to employ weapons that hold U.S. and allied space assets at risk,” Raymond said.
We noted in April, Russia has been testing anti-satellite weapons, with aims to destroy U.S. spy satellites. This has been an ongoing issue for years. Back in 2018, the State Department raised concerns that a Russian satellite could be weaponized to take out the U.S. GPS network.
Russia’s space weapon test is the latest example of new threats emerging in Low Earth orbit (LEO). President Trump’s initiative for a new military branch appears to have been an excellent decision to protect U.S. assets in LEO, despite sparking a new race for the weaponization of space.
War hawks have claimed that if the Trump administration didn’t act, China or Russia would’ve weaponized outer space first, leaving the U.S., and its network of spy satellites in immediate danger.
Space Command already appears to be safeguarding America’s assets in outer space, as it seems Russia could be making moves to take out critical U.S. spy satellites.
- Grocery Giant Bows To 17-Year-Old Twitter-Mobster… & Other Absurdities
Grocery Giant Bows To 17-Year-Old Twitter-Mobster… & Other Absurdities
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 20:05Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.
Art museum curator cancelled for not abandoning “white male artists”
Gary Garrels was the Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
After giving a presentation on the importance of diversity in art, he ended by saying, “don’t worry, we will continue to collect white male artists.”
His word choice may be curious, but his entire point was that diversity should include everyone… and that means white, male artists too.
He had mentioned at another point that specifically excluding white artists would be reverse discrimination.
But this egregious sin was enough to elicit a Change.org petition from his co-workers calling for his ouster.
The petition claimed that Gary may be “deliberately racist.” It also claimed his use of the term “reverse discrimination” is “white supremacist and racist language.”
Gary bowed to the mob, and resigned.
Somehow, this petition did not violate Change.org’s policy against using petitions to bully.
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
Florida motorcycle crash victim “died of Covid”
Sadly, a man from Florida who crashed his motorcycle succumbed to Covid-19.
At least, that was according to the Florida Health Department.
Florida initially counted the motorcycle death as one of those rare cases where a 20-something year old died of Covid.
This came to light during a press conference with a local health official.
When reporters asked if any of the young victims had any underlying conditions, the health official said, “The first one didn’t have any. He died in a motorcycle accident.”
He added, “But you could actually argue that it could have been the Covid-19 that caused him to crash.”
After the media picked up the story, the state corrected the data.
But it makes you wonder– how much can you trust the official statistics?
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
22 peer-reviewed scholarly articles on Covid-19 have been retracted
Speaking of official statistics being wrong, a lot of the official information has turned out to be wrong too.
Wear a mask, shut down your business, swear off social contact, and remain in your home cowering in fear. That is the most scientific way to beat Covid-19, according to many news outlets and rabid peers.
But scientific journals aren’t so sure about the facts on Covid-19.
A website called Retraction Watch keeps track of papers and studies withdrawn from scholarly and scientific journals.
So far, it has counted 22 peer-reviewed scientific papers and experiments on Covid-19 that were originally published, but later had to be retracted for various reasons.
For instance, one study found that coronavirus infects t-cells, but later realized the methodology was wrong, and the virus does not invade t-cells, like HIV.
Another retracted study said coronavirus could spread 15 feet through the air via water droplets.
Several of the retracted studies were from China. And that only adds to the confusion. Were they retracted for faulty science? Or were the results accurate, but the Chinese government forced a retraction in order to placate their narrative?
The point is, science is doing the best it can. They’re breaking new ground every day. But there’s still a tremendous amount of uncertainty about Covid. Even when they reach conclusions, they sometimes later find out that their conclusions were wrong.
Yet despite this uncertainty, politicians have no trouble shutting down the global economy and trampling over individual freedoms.
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
Grocery giant bows to 17-year old Twitter mobster
Oh what a glorious cultural revolution comrades! When any teenage girl with internet access can do her part to strike the root of prejudice in our society.
This time the victim of the Twitter mob is Trader Joe’s, a grocery chain known for its quirkiness.
Trader Joe’s liked to have a little fun with branding its culinary offerings from around the world.
For instance, the store sells Mexican food under “Trader José,” Chinese food under “Trader Ming,” Italian food under “Trader Giotto” and so on.
But one teenage tyrant, a 17 year old girl, found this offensive. So she started a petition– once again Change.org helped facilitate this important social reform.
The petition claims that using variations of Joe in branding foreign foods “belies a narrative of exoticism that perpetuates harmful stereotypes…”
“The Trader Joe’s branding is racist because it exoticizes other cultures – it presents “Joe” as the default “normal” and the other characters falling outside of it.”
The petition, now signed by a mob of almost 5,000 random internet users, also took issue with the inspiration for the original Trader Joe’s store.
The founder read an apparently racist book, and rode an apparently racist Disney ride, which together gave him the idea for his clearly racist business of selling food products from around the world.
Trader Joe’s quickly yielded to the Twitter mobsters, saying although the names were “rooted in a lighthearted attempt at inclusiveness, we recognize that it may now have the opposite effect.”
Click here to see the petition.
* * *
On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years.
That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.
- "Schools Steal This Joy From Children": Homeschool & Outdoor Programs See Huge Surge Amid COVID-19
“Schools Steal This Joy From Children”: Homeschool & Outdoor Programs See Huge Surge Amid COVID-19
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 19:45School districts and counties across the US, including counties in COVID-resurgent Texas this week, have mandated that all public and private schools not start their school year until after Labor Day (Sept. 7). Even after that Fall start date, some areas witnessing the current resurgence of cases, such as in California, may not return in person at all or at least go to a half-capacity scenario while offering online options for those families in a position to allow their children to stay home. But concerning online contingency plans, the trend appears to be: Remote learning? No thanks.
Bottom line is that school-wise it’s a time of extreme uncertainty and anxiety for families across the US. And then there are the difficult questions of assuming the moment a ‘normal’ school year actually kicks off – will masks be required through the day? will younger students really be able to practice social distancing? will a school shut down completely again the moment a student or staff member gets coronavirus? will on-campus schooling be safe?
Due to these and other lingering questions, homeschooling is set to explode across the US, despite elites at places like Harvard doing their best to push stereotypes of “insular conservative homeschoolers” and the supposed “dark side” of homeschooling as somehow “detrimental” to societal progress. Regardless, all kinds of ‘alternative’ and hybrid stay at home schooling programs are now popping up organically amid continued pandemic and ‘shutdown’ fears. The Wall Street Journal presents hard numbers illustrating the trend in a lengthy report aptly titled: Amid Coronavirus, Parents ‘Pod Up’ to Form At-Home Schools.
Via ThoughtCo/Getty Images Recent polls show up to a third of Americans are “not at all” comfortable sending their children back to in-person schooling given the COVID-19 risks and ‘unknowns’. And likely this figure is higher.
The Wall Street Journal describes of the recent polling:
A recent poll of 1,341 families by Pittsburgh-based consumer-research firm CivicScience found that more than one-third of parents with children ages 3 to 17 said they are “not at all” comfortable with a return to school in the fall. In a recent Axios-Ipsos poll of 219 parents of children 18 and under, 71% said they felt sending them to school in the fall presented a moderate or large risk to their household’s health and well-being. Not all families can afford to design their own education program. Some households will see their income decline if one parent works fewer hours to manage academics.
And further, the report details, “In the past three weeks, the National Home School Association has referred about 3,000 parents to local home-schooling groups—compared with a handful, if any, in a typical three-week period says Executive Director J. Allen Weston.”
One observable trend taking place across the United States includes families and students gathering in ‘pods’ to conduct their own small-scale schooling. Neighbors or families who already have connections and trusted friendships with children similar in age plan to gather in small groups of 5 to 10 students at people’s homes or even local churches.
The NYT reported this week that interest in homeschooling is surging this fall due to Covid-19 concerns. Here are some helpful resources.https://t.co/inE88EsCAh
— Kerry McDonald (@kerry_edu) July 18, 2020
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Within the homeschool sub-culture these are akin to what’s often referred to as “co-ops”. This involves a homeschool group teaching children at home for most of the week based on a common curriculum, but coming together as a ‘campus’ at an outside location (such as a church or rented building, or in a residence) for one or two days of the week. This also takes the form of community field trips or nature outings. It essentially allows for highly independent schooling, yet while maintaining a broader “structure” and interactive social life.
Interestingly, as the WSJ underscores, parents are actually seeing in the set-back of coronavirus shutdowns and delays of traditional campuses…“an opportunity”. Consider this damning quote of the current established “system” and the state of public school districts from a commentator cited in the WSJ report:
“Schools steal this joy from children.”
Now parents, at least those with the time and resources to make it happen, can model their child’s educational experience very differently from the mundane 8 or 9-hour campus life (which for many students feels more like a prison) regulated by periodic bells and a restrictive atmosphere of procedures set up to move thousands of students from point A to point B throughout the day, or what some authors like John Taylor Ghatto have called “factory model schooling” which is not based on truth-seeking, as all learning should be, but instead on “schooling an industrial proletariat”.
Via Louisville Family Fun/Thrive Forest School In a revealing section on the state of mass public education today, WSJ writes:
Home-schooling experts say the approach isn’t just logging in to school virtually. Instead, parents and students seek educational opportunities in everyday life, from reading food labels to learning about nature as they walk through a park, Mr. Weston says. “Schools steal this joy from children,” he adds, and escalating pressure to meet benchmarks on standardized tests hasn’t helped. Not all states require home-schoolers to take those tests, he says. Across the U.S., about 4 million K-12 students are home-schooled, Mr. Weston estimates. He believes that figure will rise to at least 10 million by the end of the 2020-21 school year.
The report gives an example of how pods of new homeschooling communities are popping up organically in response to the crisis:
Myra Margolin, a full-time mother of a newborn and preschooler in Washington, created a Facebook group for families interested in forming home-schooling pods. She expected about 30 families would join and exchange ideas. The group, which launched July 6, has more than 850 members. “People are freaking out,” Ms. Margolin says, with interests that range from convening free-form play groups to hiring teachers for more structured learning environments.
And other alternative programs like ‘homeschool nature programs’ and outdoor focused learning programs, and small scale Montessori environments, as well as Charlotte Mason style and classical learning are also soaring in terms of interest.
Why attack homeschool now, unless you’re afraid people are waking up to reality? “Hilariously, “arithmetic” was also misspelled in the original. It has since been corrected”
Harvard’s Lazy Attack On Homeschooling via @forbes https://t.co/TTYFoKVnrA— Isaac Crockett (@isaaccrockett1) April 23, 2020
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All of this begs the question: given that even before the rise of the pandemic, public school districts in many cities were already in a state of crisis – academically, financially, culturally, and otherwise…
Could the 2020-2021 school year (or lack thereof) be the death knell for mass public education?
- More Fallout From Iran/China Deal: India Loses Farzad-B
More Fallout From Iran/China Deal: India Loses Farzad-B
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 19:25Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
The carnage for following President Trump’s lead on ending the JCPOA continues for India.
From SputnikNews last week comes this note about the Farzad-B oil and gas field and Iran.
Close on the heels of breaking the Chabahar-Zahedan rail project agreement, Iran appears set to deny India’s state-run ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL), exploration and production rights for the key Farzad B gas field.
The granting of rights to OVL was already delayed with New Delhi moving slowly on the issue, but came to a complete standstill after the 2018 imposition of US sanctions on Tehran.
Now that threat looks to be a reality.
Turkish news agency Anadolu Agency quoted India’s External Affairs Ministry (EAM) as saying on Thursday Tehran would develop the Farzad-B gas field in the Persian Gulf region “on its own” and might engage India “appropriately at a later stage”.
Translation: “Stop stalling for Trump’s sake and make good on your promises or the project goes to China.”
Because that’s where this leads in light of the announced mega-deal between Iran and China worth a reported $400 billion.
I wrote last week I thought India has lost its way on the New Silk Road. Losing the contract to build the railway it pushed for to bypass Pakistan and assert independence from China’s OBOR plans should have been a clear enough signal.
But apparently it wasn’t.
India’s involvement in the Farzad-B gas field is now more than a decade delayed because of U.S. interference through sanctions nominally over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Work was supposed to begin in 2012 but President Obama sanctioned Iran, forcing OVL, ONGC’s international arm, to stop. Work was set to begin again after ratification of the JCPOA in 2015 and Trump nixed that in 2018 when he pulled the U.S. out of the deal.
Not only did this stop India’s work on the field but it also put the kibosh on any new pipeline into India.
I reported in November of 2017 that Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak announced preliminary development work on a new version of the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline. That talk abruptly ended with Trump’s pulling out of the JCPOA.
Some version of IPI has been opposed by the U.S. for two decades now, preferring instead to thread the TAPI pipeline through the needle of failed geopolitics.
Gazprom already operates in three major Iranian oil fields, including Farzaz-B, and IPI was supposed to be a venture tying Iran and India together with Gazprom supplying the expertise and money to get it done.
Remember, pipelines are the stitching that bind nations together. This is why the U.S. is so adamant about stopping ones that don’t serve its or its allies’ interests, in this case the Saudis.
So, while we are regaled incessantly about the dangers of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, the real reason for the pulling out of the JCPOA was always about Energy Dominance, Trump’s plans to further solidify the U.S.’s hold over global energy flows.
Because once Trump did that, multiple projects under development with European and Indian oil majors ended abruptly. Companies like Italy’s ENI, France’s Total and others were all forced to sell their interests in these major oil and gas development projects.
And China came in to scoop some of them up, presaging where we are today.
The same thing happened in the fallout from the coup in Ukraine in 2014 which led to Crimea’s reunification with Russia.
That prompted onerous sanctions which forced U.S. oil majors out of major deals to develop Russian oil and gas blocs in the Arctic as well as the development of Nordstream 2 and Turkstream.
Speaking recently about the U.S.’s opposition to Nordstream 2, Alexander Mercouris of The Duran connected these dots back to Exxon-Mobil having to pull out of its projects with Russia because of Crimea sanctions (starts at 4:52 in).
Germany, for its part, is fully hacked off about what Trump and Pompeo are threatening over Nordstream 2 and this will be the wedge issue which forces a split in policy direction between them, including counter-sanctions from Germany.
Threats eventually become actions especially when we are dealing with something as fundamental to the future of Germany and the European Union as Nordstream 2. So we should finally see some teeth from Germany if Pompeo goes through with these sanctions.
Remember also, that CAATSA, the updated version of the Magnitsky Act, took sanctions policy out of the hands of the President by a spiteful Congress (spearheaded by John McCain) and placed it in the hands of the Secretary of State and the Treasury Secretary.
In this sense Trump is a tourist in his own foreign policy.
The bottom line here is that Iran and China are countering to up the pressure on India to finally decide where their energy future lies, because the last ten years have been terrible for them in securing their energy future constantly bowing to external pressure.
One of India’s persistent issues is the vulnerability of its currency due to its intense energy import needs. The rupee is the antithesis of stable in part because of its energy imports.
Even with drastically lower energy import prices the rupee has been in free fall versus the U.S. dollar for two years now, and nothing the Modi government has done has alleviated India’s reliance having to buy oil only sold for U.S. dollars.
During the Obama sanction years (2012-15) India and Iran famously traded goods for oil. Under the current environment thanks to CAATSA that option is off the table. Keeping Iran and India at arm’s length is meant to protect the petrodollar system rather than the two countries trading in local currencies.
What I find most ironic is that every attempt to stop Iran and India from coming closer together on energy projects has forced India to develop closer ties to Russia’s Rosatom for nuclear power.
Rosatom is the main equipment supplier and technical consultant in the construction of Kudankulam nuclear power station in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
The first and second reactors at the plant are already in service with the third and fourth due to come online in 2023 and 2024, according to Kremlin mouthpiece Tass.
Russia and India are also planning the construction of a second nuclear power station. There are plans for up to six Russian-designed nuclear power plants in India.
Each and every time the U.S. pressures one of its ‘allies’ back into the narrow box of acceptable energy sources, the net result is a win for either China or Russia.
The story of the development of Farzad-B is yet another instance of this.
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- It's Happening Again… Investors Dump Everything 'China'
It’s Happening Again… Investors Dump Everything ‘China’
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 19:05Global stock markets plunged Friday as tensions between the US and China spiral out of control.
Stocks in Hong Kong and mainland China tumbled after Beijing ordered Washington to cease all operations at its consulate in the city of Chengdu. This came days after Washington ordered the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas, to close.
Investors are becoming fearful the tit-for-tat spat between the US and China will escalate into August. Today’s equity selling in Asia, Europe, and the US is evident in derisking.
We must note, derisking has been stealthily occurring under the surface for two months. While President Trump and Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy pump stocks, the smart money has been quickly dumping US-listed firms that do business in China because of increasing tensions.
Fathom’s proprietary China Exposure Index (CEI) tracks US-listed firms that have 15% and 85% of their revenues from China. The CEI shows investors have been dumping these companies since the start of June.
Readers may recall, a plunging CEI in early February preceded the stock market crash that started later in the month.
Read: In Latest Sign Of Imminent Market Collapse, Investors Dump Everything’ China’
So the question we ask today: Is today’s CEI plunge hinting the stock market is set to tank again?
- 7 Facts That Parents & Teachers Should Know About The Risks Of Reopening Chicago Public Schools
7 Facts That Parents & Teachers Should Know About The Risks Of Reopening Chicago Public Schools
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/24/2020 – 18:45Authored by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner via Wirepoints.org,
School reopenings have become the next major political football in America, and the opening of Chicago Public Schools is no exception. The Chicago Teachers Union says they don’t want in-school teaching and prefer to maintain online learning, while the school district officials are planning for a hybrid opening.
But how risky is it really for CPS children to return to school? What are the chances of students catching and spreading the virus? What are the chances of them bringing it home? And how risky is a reopening for teachers?
Here are seven facts Chicago parents and teachers should know:
1. Only two Chicago children aged 17 and younger have died from COVID-19 since the virus first appeared, according to the city of Chicago’s latest coronavirus data. While every death is a tragedy, fortunately Chicago’s children haven’t fallen victim to COVID-19.
2. CPS children face more risk from suicide, accidents and gun deaths. Since March 1, the approximate “start” of the coronavirus, nearly 100 Chicago children under the age of 19 have died from causes other than COVID. Four from suicide. Twelve from car- or drug-related accidents. And an outrageous 46 have died from gun violence.
3. One nationwide estimate of the infection fatality rate for children is just 0.004 percent. The Women’s Institute for Independent Social Enquiry says nationwide there have been 317,711 reported cases of children with COVID-19, with 805 intensive care hospitalizations and 77 deaths. However, they estimate there are 1.9 million children infected when taking into account undetected cases. That results in a fatality rate of 0.004 percent.
The actual fatality rate could be even lower once antibody testing can capture just how many children have actually been infected by the virus.
4. More than three-quarters of teachers in CPS are under the age of 50. And 60 percent are under the age of 40. That means as a group they’re at far less risk of suffering death from COVID-19. That’s particularly true when comorbidities are taken into account (next section).
In total, 231 Chicago adults under the age of 50 have died from COVID since March. There are over 34,000 known cases in that age group, but the real number of people infected is certainly far larger. The CDC’s best estimates assume there are 10 times more undetected cases of COVID-19 than detected. Based on their estimate, the group fatality rate for those adults younger than 50 is at 0.064 percent.
5. The risk for teachers is even lower: More than 92 percent of Chicago COVID-19 victims had pre-existing conditions. Age alone should not be the concern for teachers since pre-existing conditions are the determining factor in COVID-19 deaths. Chicago city data shows that over 92 percent of COVID-19 victims in Chicago suffered from one or more comorbidities, i.e., hypertension, obesity, heart disease and diabetes. We’ve provided a full list of Chicago’s COVID-19 deaths and their comorbidities here. The source is the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Taking comorbidities into account means even fewer teachers are targets of the virus.
For sure teachers with pre-existing conditions will need to consider the risk to themselves and others, but what we know of the virus so far can help mitigate those risks. Limiting activities that require close student/teacher contact, keeping students together in teaching groups, making use of schools’ most-open spaces like gyms – all are sensible ideas. Older students can practice better hygiene and social distancing while younger students, as shown below, catch and transmit the virus at very low rates.
For older teachers and/or those with pre-existing conditions, there is still the option of teaching online for those who need it or even early retirement, if necessary.
6. Students, particularly young children, are low vectors for the virus
Though much more needs to be learned about the interaction of COVID-19 with children, and there is some conflicting evidence, most studies are demonstrating the virus has a limited impact.
For example, Science magazine recently reported “several studies have found that overall, people under age 18 are between one-third and one-half as likely as adults to contract the virus, and the risk appears lowest for the youngest children.”
More surprisingly, it appears parents should be more concerned about giving COVID to their children instead of worrying that children will bring the virus home with them.
The Netherland’s health ministry advises that “Data from the Netherlands also confirms the current understanding: that children play a minor role in the spread of the novel coronavirus. The virus is mainly spread between adults and from adult family members to children. The spread of COVID-19 among children or from children to adults is less common.”
And a recent rapid literature review of pediatric COVID studies concluded:
“Low case numbers in children suggest a more limited role than was initially feared. Contact tracing data from Asia, the USA, Europe and Israel have all demonstrated a significantly lower attack rate in children than adults, including testing of asymptomatic household contacts on both PCR and serology. Coupled with low case numbers would suggest that children are less likely to acquire the disease…Limited data on positive cases in schools have not demonstrated significant transmission, except within adolescent populations. Studies of younger children in schools have found low rates of transmission, but with very low case numbers.”
– Boast A, Munro A, Goldstein H. An evidence summary of Paediatric COVID-19 literature, Don’t Forget the Bubbles, 2020.
7. Chicago COVID-19 deaths have collapsed to an average of just 2 a day over the last week.
Once a hotspot nationally, Chicago deaths have collapsed from nearly 50 a day in early May to about 2 a day in the last week. The city is at a level consistent with many European countries when they began to successfully reopen schools.
In fact, Chicago and New York City are now the only two major cities in the country that have an average daily infection rate of less than 5 percent – epidemiologists’ generally-accepted public health threshold for keeping COVID-10 under control.
* * *
COVID-19 is scary, but until and only if the virus changes targets, kids are more at risk from violence, accidents and from not being in school.
Keeping schools shut has had an increasingly negative impact on children’s lives. More and more evidence shows that children missing school is leading to isolation, anxiety, the loss of critical development time, and not to mention, lost instructional time – remote learning didn’t work. There’s also the increased risk of unreported child abuse and teen suicide.
Younger children in particular are ill-served by remote learning, according to a new report issued by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine that recommends students return to the classroom. That report echoes the opinion of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends that “all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.”
The science and data of COVID-19 in Chicago agree.
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