- Escobar: Flying Dragon, Crashing Eagle
Escobar: Flying Dragon, Crashing Eagle
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/25/2020 – 00:05Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
Four geoeconomic summits compressed in one week tell the story of where we stand in these supremely dystopian times…
The (virtual) signing of RCEP in Vietnam was followed by the equally virtual BRICS meeting hosted by Moscow, the APEC meeting hosted by Malaysia, and the G20 this past weekend hosted by Saudi Arabia.
Cynics have not failed to note the spectacular theater of the absurd of having the Top 20 – at least in theory – economies discussing what is arguably the turning point in the world-system linked to a beheading-friendly desert oil hacienda with a 7th century mentality.
The Riyadh declaration did its best to lift the somber planetary mood, vowing to deploy “all available policy tools” (no precise details) to contain Covid-19 and heroically “save” the global economy by “advancing” global pandemic preparedness, vaccine development and distribution – in tandem with debt relief – for the Global South.
Not a peep about The Great Reset – the Brave New World scheme concocted by Herr Schwab of Davos and fully supported by the IMF, Big Tech, transnational Big Capital interests and the oh so benign Prince Charles. Meanwhile, off the record, G20 sherpas moaned about the lack of real global governance and multiple attacks on multilateralism.
And not a peep as well about the real life vaccine war between the expensive Western candidates – Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca – and the much cheaper Russia-China versions – Sputnik V and Sinovac.
What seems to be the case is that any agenda – sinister or otherwise – fits the one-size-fits-all vow by the G20 to provide “opportunities of the 21st century for all by empowering people, safeguarding the planet, and shaping new frontiers.”
The House of Xi
At the G20, President Xi Jinping did not waste the chance – after RCEP, BRICS and APEC – to once again emphasize China’s priorities: multilateralism, support for WTO reform, ample international cooperation on vaccine research and production.
But then, in tandem with reducing tariffs and facilitating the trade of crucial medical supplies, Xi proposed a global health QR code – a sound way to restore global travel and trade: “While containing the virus, we need to restore the secure and smooth operation of global industrial and supply chains.”
Predictably, there were howls about neo-Orwellian intrusion, comparing the QR code with the exceptionally misunderstood Chinese credit system. Herr Schwab’s Great Reset in fact proposes something similar, with even more neo-Orwellian overtones, disguised under an innocent “Covid Pass” app, or highly secure “health passport”.
What Xi has proposed amounts to just a mutual recognition of health certificates, issued by different nations, based on nucleic acid tests. No gene altering vaccines coupled with nanochips. These QR codes, incorporated to health apps, are already used for domestic travel in China.
Chinese officials have made it very clear that Beijing has been working as the representative of the Global South inside the G20. That’s multilateralism in action. And the multilateralist drive extends from RCEP – signed between 15 nations – to the brilliant Sun Tzu maneuver of China now accepting even the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the successor of the Obama-promoted and Trump-detonated TPP.
This revival – a case of Make TPP Chinese Again – can be envisaged because Beijing not only has mastered how to contain Covid-19 but is also recovering in lightning speed. China will be the only major economy growing in 2020 – de facto leading the world to a tentative post-Covid paradigm.
What the APEC meeting made crystal clear is that with East Asia graphically hitting the economic limelight, as seen with RCEP, much vaunted US “leadership” inevitably diminishes.
APEC promoted a so-called Putrajaya Vision 2040, condensing an “open, dynamic, resilient and peaceful” Asia-Pacific all the way to 2040. That neatly ties in with the three accumulated five-year Chinese plans all the way to 2035, approved last month at the CCP plenum in Beijing.
The emphasis, once again, is on multilateralism and an open global economy.
Few are more capable to capture the moment than Professor Wang Yiwei at the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University, who wrote the best Chinese book on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Wang stresses how China is in a period of “strategic opportunity” and is now “the most powerful leader of globalization”. China’s emphasis on multilateralism will “activate the connectivity and vitality of a trade platform like RCEP”.
Stranger than fiction
Now compare all of the above with Trump at the G20 tweeting about the election dystopia and privileging golfing instead of discussing Covid-19 containment.
And then there’s The Elements of the China Challenge, the new 74-page delusional epic concocted by the office of secretary Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo.
Diplomatic howls comparing it with the notorious George Kennan “long telegram” that codified the containment of the USSR in the Cold War are nonsense. Chinese Foreign Ministry reaction was more to the point: this was concocted by some “living fossils of the Cold War” and is doomed to end up “being consigned to the dustbin of history”.
President Xi Jinping, at RCEP, BRICS, APEC and the G20, concisely laid out the Chinese case: multilateralism, international cooperation on multiple fields, an open global economy, due representation of Global South’s interests.
As we wait for a set of imponderables all the way to January 20, 2021, perhaps an angular approach to what may lie ahead for the world economy is best offered by fiction.
Enter Billions, season 5, episode 2, dialogue written by Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Axe: “You know they call us traders ‘gamblers’. The world’s economy is one big casino, fueled by a giant debt bubble and computer driven derivatives. And there’s only one thing better than being a gambler at a casino.”
Wags: “That’s being the house.”
Axe: “That’s right. There’s a systemized machine out there, sucking capital from localities and injecting it into the global markets, where it can be used to speculate and manipulate. And if something goes wrong there are bailouts and bail-ins, federal aid and easing. Where the government doesn’t hunt you down, but instead gives you a nice soft net to land in.”
Wags: “That’s your answer to the fireside chat: You want to become a bank.”
Axe: “I want to become a bank.”
Wags: “In order to rob it?”
Axe: “In order that I don’t have to.”
- Mississippi Cops Can Now Use Your Ring Doorbell Camera To Live Stream Your Neighborhood
Mississippi Cops Can Now Use Your Ring Doorbell Camera To Live Stream Your Neighborhood
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 23:45Today in “those who surrender their liberty for security” news…
The Jackson, Mississippi police department is piloting a 45 day program that allows them to live stream private security cameras, including Amazon Ring cameras, at the residences of its citizens.
It’s no surprise that Amazon’s Ring cameras were the only brand named for the pilot program, as EFF pointed out, since they have over 1,000 partnerships with local police departments.
The program allows Ring owners to patch their camera streams to a “Real Time Crime Center” – i.e. a dispatcher on desk duty whose new favorite way of passing the time is to watch you bring out your garbage twice a week in a bathrobe.
While the pilot program is supposedly “opt-in” only, meaning residents have to volunteer to be a part of it, it is an obvious step in the wrong direction of mass privacy invasion without a warrant.
The worst part is that even if you don’t participate and a neighbor’s cameras are pointed off center, perhaps towards a portion of your property, that footage can now be reviewed and combed through by law enforcement officials.
Police have used Ring cameras to “build comprehensive CCTV camera networks blanketing whole neighborhoods”, EFF notes, reducing the hardware burden on the department and slipping their presence into a neighborhood where it may otherwise not be welcomed.
Amazon published a statement distancing themselves from the program: “[Amazon and Ring] are not involved in any way with any of the companies or the city in connection with the pilot program. The companies, the police and the city that were discussed in the article do not have access to Ring’s systems or the Neighbors App. Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos ,and can choose to allow access as they wish.”
- Saudi Arabia Receives Dangerous Gifts From Houthi-Iranian Alliance
Saudi Arabia Receives Dangerous Gifts From Houthi-Iranian Alliance
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 23:25Submitted by South Front,
The Yemeni Houthis have fired their new cruise missile, the Quds-2, at a Saudi Aramco oil company distribution station in the kingdom’s city of Jeddah, the group’s media news wing announced early on November 23. A spokesperson for the Armed Forces of the Houthi-led government, Yahya Sarea, said foreign companies and residents in Saudi Arabia should stay away from the military and oil infrastructure of Saudi Arabia as “operations will continue”. He emphasized that the missile precisely hit its target causing notable damage.
The Houthis claim that the Quds-2 is a new generation “winged missile” produced by their Missile Forces. As always, the missile was likely assembled thanks to technical assistance from Iran or Iranian-supplied components. That facility is located southeast of Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport. Over the past years, the Houthis have repeatedly pounded the military section of the airport with missiles and drones. Therefore, it was just the question of time, when the nearby oil infrastructure would be hit.
At the same time, the Saudi side remains silent regarding the impact of the Houthi missile strike. This is an ordinary posture of Saudi Arabia towards Houthi missile and drone strikes. The Kingdom censors social media, denies any damage and claims that all targets were intercepted, if it appears possible and that no visual evidence of destruction are leaked immediately. Also, the main oil production and export facilities of Aramco are mostly in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, more than 1000km across the country from Jeddah. Therefore, Riyadh likely believes that it can silence another setback in the ongoing war with the Yemeni movement.
In September 2019, when the Houthis, with probable help from Iran, put out of service almost a half of Saudi oil infrastructure by hitting targets in Abqaiq and Khurais, the Kingdom was vowing a powerful response and the full destruction of Houthi missile and drone capabilities. However, a year later, the situation on the ground in Yemen for Saudi-backed forces became even worse and the widely-promoted ‘great Saudi victory’ over the Houthis turned into ashes.
In recent month, Saudi-led forces lost the battle for the Yemeni province of Bayda, and now they seem to be losing the battle for Marib. Recently they retreated from the key Maas Base and the route for the potential Houthi advance on the provincial capital is almost open. The denial of the facts on the ground and the air dominance of the Kingdom did not help it to achieve a victory in the war. In turn, it’s the Houthis who have put themselves in the position that allowed them to turn the tide of the conflict. With the current trend in the Yemeni conflict, Saudi Arabia will apparently have to pay an even bigger price for its intervention in the Arab country.
- Rich Americans Scrambling To Buy 'Golden Passports' To Second Country
Rich Americans Scrambling To Buy ‘Golden Passports’ To Second Country
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 23:05Wealthy Americans are rushing to secure second passports, as a growing club of individuals have begun participating in government programs abroad which allow foreigners to acquire them, according to Bloomberg.
A person holds up an image of a Cypriot passport during a protest against corruption last month after the latest scandal to surround the investment scheme. Eric Schmidt acquired all the typical trappings of a mega-rich U.S. citizen: a superyacht, a Gulfstream jet, a Manhattan penthouse.
One of his newest assets is far less conventional: a second passport.
Alphabet Inc.’s former chief executive officer applied to become a citizen of Cyprus, according to an announcement last month in a Cypriot newspaper that was first reported by the website Recode. –Bloomberg
According to the report, Americans rarely sought to buy so-called ‘golden passports’ in prior years, with such programs historically appealing to people from countries with far fewer travel freedoms than the United States – such as China, Pakistan and Nigeria.
“We haven’t seen the likes of this before,” said Paddy Blewer, a London-based citizenship and residency advisory director at Henley & Partners. “The dam actually burst — and we didn’t realize it — at the end of last year, and it’s just continued getting stronger.“
A second passport can be had for as ‘little’ as $100,000 – and include potential benefits such as lower taxes, greater investment freedom, and hassle-free travel.
The so-called citizenship-by-investment programs haven’t historically been as popular with Americans since one of their main draws — the favorable tax regimes of adopted countries — has been of little benefit to citizens of the U.S., one of the few nations to tax its people regardless of where they live.
The current heightened interest among U.S. citizens predates the coronavirus pandemic, but the crisis has helped turbo-charge demand as they plan for how to maintain some freedom of movement with lockdown measures increasing amid a swelling second wave of Covid-19 cases. –Bloomberg
“Americans are thinking: ‘I want to have that ability to move as quickly as possible and not be stuck,” said Nestor Alfred, CEO of St. Lucia’s citizenship-by-investment unit.
Another factor stoking interest is the prospect of a President Biden and a flipped Senate in January resulting in massive tax hikes on the wealthy. Others are securing the passports out of fear of social unrest according to Apex Capital Partners, which says its clients have increased 650% since the November 3 election.
“We’re seeing this interest from Americans who are all saying the same things that Chinese, or Middle Eastern or Russian clients are saying,” said Apex founder Nuri Katz. “They’re saying, ‘We’re not leaving the U.S. right now, but we’re concerned and we want to have something else, just in case.’”
Over half-a-dozen countries are now offering a citizenship-by-investment program, after St. Kitts and Nevis was the first country to do so in the early 1980s. Malta, for example, has raised $1 billion through June 2019 following the launch of their program last decade. The Carribean territory of Dominica has raised over $350 million in five years.
That said, the programs have also invited their share of scandal.
Fugitive Malaysian financier Jho Low was among 26 individuals to lose their Cyprus citizenship last year. The speaker of the Cypriot House of Parliament, Demetris Syllouris, resigned last month after offering to help a Chinese businessman with a criminal record get citizenship.
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Following the scandal, Cyprus said it would end its current passport-for-investment program on Nov. 1. The European Union, meanwhile, issued legal ultimatums to Malta and Cyprus about their citizenship-by-investment programs, claiming they may have violated the EU law. Representatives for Malta’s government, which announced plans to revise its program before the EU’s action, didn’t respond to requests for comment. –Bloomberg
What’s next, golden immunity passports?
- US, UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War On Independent Media
US, UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War On Independent Media
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 22:45Authored by Whitney Webb via UnlimitedHangout.com,
British and American state intelligence agencies are “weaponizing truth” to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced “cyber war” to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives.
In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.
A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.
Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.
Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end.
Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing and for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children (among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company’s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for product safety who covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects.
Pedestrians walk past Pfizer world headquarters in New York on Monday Nov. 9, 2020. Pfizer says an early peek at its vaccine data suggests the shots may be 90% effective at preventing COVID-19, but it doesn’t mean a vaccine is imminent. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.
UK Intelligence’s New Cyberwar Targeting “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda”
On Monday, the UK newspaper The Times reported that the UK’s GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so. In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in “information warfare,” to launch an online campaign to counter “deceptive narratives” about Covid-19 vaccine candidates.
The newly announced GCHQ “cyber war” will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda” but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.” The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance (US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such “propaganda” sites hosted within their borders.
The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.
It seems that, from the perspective of the UK national-security state, those who question corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and its possible impact on the leading experimental Covid-19 vaccine candidates (all of which use experimental vaccine technologies that have never before been approved for human use) should be targeted with tools originally designed to combat terrorist propaganda.
While The Times asserted that the effort would target content “that originated only from state adversaries” and would not target the sites of “ordinary citizens,” the newspaper suggested that the effort would rely on the US government for determining whether or not a site is part of a “foreign disinformation” operation.
This is highly troubling given that the US recently seized the domains of many sites, including the American Herald Tribune, which it erroneously labeled as “Iranian propaganda,” despite its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The US government made this claim about the American Herald Tribune after the cybersecurity firm FireEye, a US government contractor, stated that it had “moderate confidence” that the site had been “founded in Iran.”
In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it plans to target are “linked to Moscow” gives further cause for concern given that the UK government was caught funding the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled critics of the UK government’s actions as well as its narratives with respect to the Syria conflict as being related to “Russian disinformation” campaigns.
Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor, or perhaps even an allied media organization such as Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab that a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the main government sources for The Times article bluntly stated that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyber war will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.
This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.
Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that “anti-vaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization as promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.
Similarly, a think tank tied to US intelligence—whose GCHQ equivalent, the National Security Agency, will take part in the newly announced “cyber war”—argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the US ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”
InfraGard, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector,” warned in the paper published last June that “the US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with ‘social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns’ orchestrated by the Russian government,” as cited by The Guardian. The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent “anti-vaxxers” are aligned “with other conspiracy movements including the far right . . . and social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns by many foreign and domestic actors. Included among these actors is the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government–aligned organization.”
An article published just last month by the Washington Post argued that “vaccine hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,” which the FBI named a potential domestic terror threat last year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying “The US anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it’s going toward more-extremist tendencies.”
Simone Warstat of Louisville, Colo., waves a placard during a rally against a legislative bill to make it more difficult for parents to opt out for non-medical reasons to immunize their children Sunday, June 7, 2020, in Denver.
It is worth pointing out that many so-called “anti-vaxxers” are actually critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-vaccine” misleading. Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making Covid-19 vaccines donate heavily to politiciansin both countries and have been involved in numerous safety scandals, using state intelligence agencies to wage cyber war against sites that investigate such concerns is not only troubling for the future of journalism but it suggests that the UK is taking a dangerous leap toward becoming a country that uses its state powers to treat the enemies of corporations as enemies of the state.
The CIA-Backed Firm “Weaponizing Truth” with AI
In early October, the US Air Force and US Special Operations Command announced that they had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the US-based “machine intelligence” company Primer. Per the press release, “Primer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation [emphasis added]. Primer will also enhance its natural language processing platform to automatically analyze tactical events to provide commanders with unprecedented insight as events unfold in near real-time.”
According to Primer, the company “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data,” and their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” In other words, Primer is developing an algorithm that would allow the national-security state to outsource many military and intelligence analyst positions to AI. In fact, the company openly admits this, stating that their current effort “will automate the work typically done by dozens of analysts in a security operations center to ingest all of the data relevant to an event as it happens and funnel it into a unified user interface.”
Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of “truth,” as defined by the state. Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track “insurgency” in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.”
In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley then wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not” as established by intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.”
Notably, on November 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to target “anti-vaccine propaganda,” the US website NextGov reported that Primer’s Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to “Covid-19 related disinformation.” According to Primer’s director of science, John Bohannon, “Primer will be integrating bot detection, synthetic text detection and unstructured textual claims analysis capabilities into our existing artificial intelligence platform currently in use with DOD. . . . This will create the first unified mission-ready platform to effectively counter Covid-19-related disinformation in near-real time.”
Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told NextGov that Primer’s new Covid-19–focused effort “automatically classifies documents into one of 10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID” on areas such as “business, science and technology, employment, the global economy, and elections.” The final product is expected to be delivered to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.
Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the national-security state it is designed to protect by “weaponizing truth.” Primer proudly promotes itself as having more than 15 percent of its staff hailing from the US intelligence community or military. The director of the company’s National Security Group is Brian Raymond, a former CIA intelligence officer who served as the Director for Iraq on the US National Security Council after leaving the agency.
The company also recently added several prominent national-security officials to its board including:
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Gen. Raymond Thomas (ret.), who led the command of all US and NATO Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and is the former commander of both US Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
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Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson (ret.), the former deputy chief of staff for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance who led the Air Force’s intelligence and cyber forces. She also personally developed “strategic partnerships” between the Air Force and Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM in order “to accelerate the Air Force’s digital transformation.”
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Brett McGurk, one of the “chief architects” of the Iraq War “surge,” alongside the notorious Kagan family, as NSC Director for Iraq, and then as special assistant to the president and senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration. Under Obama and during part of the Trump administration, McGurk was the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the State Department, helping to manage the “dirty war” waged by the US, the UK, and other allies against Syria.
In addition to those recent board hires, Primer brought on Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as a strategic adviser. Gordon previously “drove partnerships within the US Intelligence Community and provided advice to the National Security Council in her role as deputy director of national intelligence” and had a twenty-seven-year career at the CIA. The deep links are unsurprising, given that Primer is financially backed by the CIA’s venture-capital arm In-Q-Tel and the venture-capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Bloomberg Beta.
Operation Warp Speed’s Disinformation Blitzkrieg
The rapid increase in interest by the US and UK national-security states toward Covid-19 “disinformation,” particularly as it relates to upcoming Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, is intimately related to the media-engagement strategy of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed.
Officially a “public-private partnership,” Operation Warp Speed, which has the goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by next January, is dominated by the US military and also involves several US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as intelligence-linked tech giants Google, Oracle, and Palantir. Several reports published in The Last American Vagabondby this author and journalist Derrick Broze have revealed the extreme secrecy of the operation, its numerous conflicts of interest, and its deep ties to Silicon Valley and Orwellian technocratic initiatives.
Warp Speed’s official guidance discusses at length its phased plan for engaging the public and addressing issues of “vaccine hesitancy.” According to the Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners—especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”
The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework for its communications effort. The third pillar of that strategy is entitled “Stop Myths” and has as a main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”
Though that particular Warp Speed document is short on specifics, the CDC’s Covid-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook contains additional information. It states that Operation Warp Speed will “engage and use a wide range of partners, collaborations, and communication and news media channels to achieve communication goals, understanding that channel preferences and credible sources vary among audiences and people at higher risk for severe illness and critical populations, and channels vary in their capacity to achieve different communication objectives.” It states that it will focus its efforts in this regard on “traditional media channels” (print, radio, and TV) as well as “digital media” (internet, social media, and text messaging).
The CDC document further reveals that the “public messaging” campaign to “promote vaccine uptake” and address “vaccine hesitancy” is divided into four phases and adds that the overall communication strategy of Warp Speed “should be timely and applicable for the current phase of the Covid-19 Vaccination program.”
Those phases are:
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Before a vaccine is available
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The vaccine is available in limited supply for certain populations of early focus
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The vaccine is increasingly available for other critical populations and the general public
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The vaccine is widely available
Given that the Covid-19 vaccine candidate produced by Pfizer is expected to be approved by the end of November, it appears that the US national-security state, which is essentially running Operation Warp Speed, along with “trusted messengers” in mass media, is preparing to enter the second phase of its communications strategy, one in which news organizations and journalists who raise legitimate concerns about Warp Speed will be de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.
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- Internet Searches For "Bidet" Begin To Soar As Toilet Paper Shortage Intensifies
Internet Searches For “Bidet” Begin To Soar As Toilet Paper Shortage Intensifies
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 22:25Consumers are panic-hoarding toilet paper, food, and ammo as coronavirus surges across the country. Kroger, Giant, Target, and other supermarket chains have recently placed limits on toilet paper and other high demand goods to prevent shortages.
Last week, we reminded readers that the next round of “panic hoarding” was about to begin – and as of this week – that is certainly the case with reports across Twitter of empty store shelves.
Toilet paper shortage 2.0 #HereWeGoAgain #2020strikesagain pic.twitter.com/icG3Z1b0O7
— Julie Dolan (@WLKYJulie) November 18, 2020
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Many people are saying that everything is going very strongly and only great energy exists in the American supply chain for paper products pic.twitter.com/kab6Y2myzJ
— Attorney@Law (@TheGlare_TM) November 16, 2020
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yeah. The second toilet paper shortage of 2020 pic.twitter.com/xjrEiOHDaf
— Peter Jausovec 💻 (@pjausovec) November 19, 2020
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While everyone scrambles to find toilet paper in stores and or online, there’s a more hygienic way to wipe than using a roll of Charmin ultra-soft, that is, a bidet.
Americans are quickly catching on about bidets, commonly found in European and Asian countries. The neat thing about a bidet, it requires no toilet paper and seamlessly cleans the undercarriage after nature calls.
Internet search trends for “best bidet” are surging again, the second time this year. The first eruption occurred in March after lockdowns resulted in a shortage of essential items. Now, as states and cities reimpose strict social distancing measures, with threats of lockdowns if a Biden presidency is seen early next year, bidet searches are back to April levels.
Is the panic-hoarding of bidets next?
- Trump Plans To Pardon Michael Flynn: Report
Trump Plans To Pardon Michael Flynn: Report
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 22:15President Trump plans to pardon his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about contacts with the former Russian ambassador during the 2016 presidential transition – only to have the Justice Department drop the case after Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, fought for the release of information suggesting that the FBI laid a ‘perjury trap‘ to try and get him to lie.
The ‘deep state’ judge in the case, Emmet G. Sullivan, refused to drop the case, and has instead asked a federal appeals court – twice – whether he can ignore the DOJ, after asking a government-paid private lawyer to argue against Flynn.
The rumored pardon, reported by Axios, will be “part of a series of pardons that Trump issues between now and when he leaves office,” as is typical of outgoing presidents.
That said, according to Fox News’ Greg Jarrett, Flynn doesn’t want a pardon. “He wanted full exoneration and the case dismissed,” adding that “it’s clear” that presiding judge Emmett Sullivan is trying to ‘run out the clock’ until Biden takes office, and recommends Trump go through with a pardon.
Fox News’s Gregg Jarrett says just now Michael Flynn “doesn’t want a pardon. He wanted full exoneration and the case dismissed.” He goes on to say “it’s clear” the presiding judge, Emmet Sullivan, is trying to run out the clock till Biden takes office and says Trump should pardon
— Daniel Chaitin (@danielchaitin7) November 25, 2020
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As Axios notes, a Flynn pardon would come on the heels of Trump commuting the sentence of longtime associate Roger Stone, who Trump said was unfairly targeted as part of a political ‘witch hunt.’
According to FBI documents released in Flynn’s case, senior FBI officials discussed strategies for targeting and setting up Flynn, prior to interviewing him at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017. It was that interview at the White House with former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Special Agent Joe Pientka that led Flynn, now 61, to plead guilty after months of pressure by prosecutors, financial strain and threats to prosecute his son.
- On Fumes Of Stimulus & Frustration: California Legal Cannabis Sales Explode
On Fumes Of Stimulus & Frustration: California Legal Cannabis Sales Explode
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 22:05Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,
You just knew this would be coming. It was bound to show up in the data. And California is cashing in…
Cannabis tax revenues in Q3 collected by the State of California soared by a record 80% year-over-year, and by a record of $136 million year-over-year, to a $307 million, the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration reported Monday afternoon. This does not include tax revenues collected by cities and counties. All three categories surged: Excise Tax (+89%), Cultivation Tax (+80%), and Sales Tax (+67%).
This brought California’s cannabis taxes during the first nine months of 2020 to $775 million, and on track to exceed $1 billion for the whole year, a sorely needed injection of moolah during these trying times:
Cannabis has always been a popular product and business in California in a huge black market that persists today, but what we’re looking at is the shift of black-market weed to regulated and taxed legal weed, much of it locally grown, and sold at retailers that are paying rent, unlike other retailers that have shut down or stopped paying rent.
California cannabis tax revenues had been surging by around $60 million every quarter compared to the same quarter a year earlier, since the beginning of legalization in January 2018. This rate of growth was fairly stable through the fourth quarter 2019.
Then in February 2020, Covid was beginning to run around in California, and people began to react. On February 26, San Francisco declared a state of emergency. By that time, traffic had already died down. On March 17, the five most populous counties of the Bay Area began the lockdown. And people, to soothe their pains and anxieties…
In Q1, cannabis tax revenues surged by $76 million year-over-year to $206 million. In Q2, the stimulus money and extra unemployment benefits of $600-a-week kicked in, and cannabis tax revenues surged by $103 million to $260 million. And in Q3, the stock market gains were ladled on top of it, and the state started sending out the additional $300-a-week in unemployment benefits in $900-lumpsum payments, and cannabis tax revenues exploded by $135 million to $307 million.
This chart shows the year-over-year increases in millions of dollars for each quarter. Note how through 2019, the year-over-year increases were roughly stable at around $60 million, and then they surged:
With the cannabis sales tax rate of 7.25% (state 6% and mandatory local 1.25%), and $106 million in sales taxes reported, we can figure that $1.46 billion in weed was retailed by regulated retailers in the quarter. For the year 2020, legal weed retail sales will likely exceed $5 billion, and at this rate, exceed $6 billion in 2021. This is starting to add up.
The regulations that followed California Proposition 64, approved by voters in November 2016, legalized the production, distribution, sale, and use of recreational cannabis by adults as of January 2018. The regulations are complex. Three regulatory offices are in charge: The California Bureau of Cannabis Control; the California Department of Food and Agriculture; and the California Department of Public Health. And things are not always clear-cut and have led to legal entanglements, one of which a judge just ruled on: Advertising cannabis products and businesses on highway billboards.
Proposition 64 included a ban on highway billboards that advertise cannabis products and businesses. The California Bureau of Cannabis Control had interpreted the language to mean that there could be no cannabis billboard within 15 miles of the California border, but were OK elsewhere. Soon, cannabis billboards started popping up everywhere, including on along 101 Freeway, near San Louis Obispo, where a construction contractor with two kids that frequently used the freeway decided enough was enough and sued.
On Friday, a San Luis Obispo County Superior Court Judge said in a ruling that the Bureau of Cannabis Control had improperly allowed these cannabis billboards along California highways and that the bureau and its director “exceeded their authority in promulgating the advertisement placement regulation.”
The ruling prohibits billboards along 4,315 miles of interstate highways and along state highways that cross state borders, according to one of the attorneys for the plaintiff, cited by the Los Angeles Times (state law allows cannabis ads on city streets, subject to local ordinances, but not within 1,000 feet of daycare centers, K-12 schools, or playgrounds). The bureau said it was “still reviewing the ruling” and hadn’t decided if would appeal. No one said it would be smooth sailing to bring the huge weed business out of the black market and integrated it into legal commerce. But it seems to have been worth the effort.
* * *
- China Slams NatSec Advisor O'Brien As Sowing "Chaos" & Cold War Tensions In Asia
China Slams NatSec Advisor O’Brien As Sowing “Chaos” & Cold War Tensions In Asia
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 21:45Top Chinese diplomatic officials have hit back against US national security advisor Robert O’Brien over his “unreasonable remarks” in the Philippines while on an official visit there this week.
The Chinese embassy in Manila on Tuesday slammed what diplomatic officials called his deliberate efforts at “stirring up trouble in the South China Sea” and “provoking a rift between China and the Philippines.”
Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien, Getty Images The Manila embassy further harangued Washington for not promoteing regional peace and stability, instead creating “chaos in the region” for US self-interest.
“In recent years, to safeguard its regional and global hegemony, the US has regarded itself as ‘patron’ and ‘judge’ of regional countries and directly intervened in the South China Sea and other issues,” the statement said.
His statements were said to have “fanned the flames everywhere” and “seriously” undermined regional security by seeking to create tensions between China and its regional allies.
The statement said further, “The US is the biggest driver of the militarization of the South China Sea and the most dangerous external factor endangering the peace and stability of the South China Sea” – something which has been emphasized by Beijing many times in the recent past.
O’Brien has been on a surprise tour of Vietnam and the Philippine’s this week in a mission seen as attempting to counter the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries’ (and key allies) recent signing of a historic trade pact, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), hailed as the biggest free trade deal ever among fifteen Asia Pacific Nations and widely reported as a huge win for China.
“We got the Philippines’ back when it comes to the South China Sea,” says US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien as he visits the Philippines. https://t.co/mxhoWZnRWu
— Rappler (@rapplerdotcom) November 23, 2020
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O’Brien weighed in heavily on soaring tensions in the South China Sea and US efforts to maintain ‘freedom of navigation’ by its beefed up naval presence there:
During his speech at the building of the Department of Foreign Affairs on Monday, O’Brien reiterated Washington’s support for Manila’s fight for control over the West Philippine Sea.
“I just want to say that those resources belong to the children and grandchildren of the people here. They belong to the [Filipino] people,” O’Brien said.
“They don’t belong to some other country that just because they may be bigger than the Philippines, they can come take away and convert the resources of the Philippine people. That’s just wrong,” he added.
The Chinese embassy called the whole speech “full of Cold War mentality” and which was intended to “wantonly incite confrontation.”
O’Brien had vowed that “Any armed attack on Philippine forces aircraft or public vessels in the South China Sea will trigger our mutual defense obligations.”
He also provocatively confirmed that $18 million in missiles the Trump administration pledged to the Philippines last April would soon be delivered on, and that the deal is currently progressing.
- Majority Of Republicans Would Support Trump As A 2024 Candidate, New Poll Finds
Majority Of Republicans Would Support Trump As A 2024 Candidate, New Poll Finds
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 21:25Authored by Annaliese Levy via SaraACarter.com,
According to a new national tracking poll by Morning Consult and Politico, Donald Trump will continue to have a powerful platform with the GOP base even after he leaves office.
The Nov. 21-23 survey collected data among 669 Republicans and 1,990 registered voters overall and found that he will most likely continue to have immense influence over the Republican Party from outside the government.
Trump is also the favored Republican candidate for a 2024 run according to a hypothetical test of 14 potential candidates. Trump received 53% of support among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Vice President Mike Pence came in second at 12% support. Donald Trump Jr. got the third-highest support at 8%, while other Republican figures, including Sen. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney and Rick Scott, and Nikki Haley each received less than 5% support.
With Trump losing the 2020 presidential election, he is still eligible to run for a second term. Trump has given permission to begin the transition process to the next administration, while he has still not conceded. Trump has delayed conceding the election to President-elect Joe Biden as his legal team is continuing its fight against alleged election fraud in key swing states.
If Trump were to run in 2024, he would be a dominant force in the Republican party.
Nearly 68% said they consider Trump to be more in touch with the party’s rank and file, compared with 20% who said the same of Republicans in Congress. Trump was also more likely to be considered effective and committed to the country’s best interests. 56% of Republican voters say Trump is predominantly looking out for the party’s best interests.
Trump has told White House officials he could announce his 2024 candidacy as soon as he leaves the White House in January.
Some Republicans think Trump should step away and allow other candidates to emerge.
But others say that’s unlikely. As he leaves the White House, Trump will continue to have a resilient and powerful hold on the GOP, with loyal followers who will support him throughout another candidacy.
Trump received at least 68 million votes in 2020, five million more than he did in 2016, and about 48% of the popular vote, meaning he retained the support of nearly half of the public. If he decides to run for a second term, he will be a difficult candidate to beat.
- Bill Gross' Neighbor "Forced To Flee" Mansion During Coordinated Harassment Campaign
Bill Gross’ Neighbor “Forced To Flee” Mansion During Coordinated Harassment Campaign
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 21:05The civil court battle between Bill Gross (joined by his girlfriend, former tennis pro Amy Schwartz) and his neighbors, tech entrepreneur Mark Towfiq (and his wife), continues, with more juicy details coming to light this week, portraying Gross’s heavy-handed approach toward dealing with an annoying neighbor who chafed at the sight of one of Gross’s lawn statues.
In previous testimony, we’ve heard that Gross retaliated against his neighbor by turning the house’s sound-system up full-blast playing the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island” on repeat at volumes that one Laguna Beach compliance officer described as being even louder than the Pacific Coast Highway and the Ocean.
But in the latest testimony, Towfiq shared how Gross threatened him, claiming he would take drastic measures to punish the Towfiq’s if they proceeded to lodge a complaint with the town about Gross’s lawn sculpture. Towfiq told the court that Gross’s threat “filled me with dread”, yet he persisted, according to Bloomberg.
So Gross made him face the music, so to speak.
When Towfiq texted Gross’s girlfriend – whom Gross and his legal team have claimed is the object of a “prurient obsession” on the part of Mr. Towfiq – Gross apparently took his girlfriend’s phone and texted back the following: “peace on all fronts or well just have nightly concerts big boy.”
To dispel any confusion, Gross even signed one of his tweets.
Source: Bloomberg
Towfiq explained that he initially complained to Gross because the netting surrounding his lawn sculpture, which is adjacent to Towfiq’s property, was “unsightly” and detracted from his “enjoyment” of the $25 million palace he constructed for himself and his wife. But after he filed a complaint about the sculpture, Gross dropped all pretense of neighborly respect and resorted to threats, Towfiq said.
“I had a sinking feeling in my stomach,” Towfiq testified when asked by his lawyer what his reaction to the text was. “That is, a total dread that I’m going to be the target of his rage or something.”
But once Gross turned up the music, Towfiq said he and his wife were “forced to flee” the property and call the police. At one point, Towfiq said he recorded Gross and Schwartz dancing on their balcony, while giving him the finger and “taunting” him. Towfiq said the music was so loud it penetrated the extra-thick double pane windows that Towfiq said he’d installed in his home.
Gross’s antics didn’t stop there: he repeatedly interrupted proceedings to complain that he “couldn’t hear” Towfiq. At one point, Gross’s attorney asked the judge if Gross could be seated right next to Towfiq so he could more adequately hear his testimony.
Towfiq complained that Gross wouldn’t stop “staring” at him during the testimony, but Gross complained he was simply trying to understand Towfiq because “he mumbles.”
Gross is suing Towfiq for installing cameras on his property to harass Gross and his girlfriend, while Towfiq is suing for psychological distress, arguing that Gross subjected him to a form of “torture” for refusing to simply drop his complaint to the town about Gross’s lawn sculpture.
Gross has a history of high-profile feuds, including with his ex-wife, whom he terrorized with fart spray and old fish. And that was before he retired from his day job as a portfolio manager at Janus Henderson.
- The Blizzard Of Bogus Journalism On COVID
The Blizzard Of Bogus Journalism On COVID
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 20:45Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,
This game of hunt-and-kill Covid cases has reached peak absurdity, especially in media culture…
Take a look at Supermarkets are the most common place to catch Covid, new data reveals. It’s a story on a “study” assembled by Public Health England (PHE) from the NHS Test and Trace App. Here is the conclusion. In the six days of November studied, “of those who tested positive, it was found that 18.3 per cent had visited a supermarket.”
Now, if the alarm bells don’t go off with that one, you didn’t pay attention to 7th grade science. If the app had also included showering, eating, and breathing, it might have found a 100% correlation. Yes, the people who tested positive probably did shop, as do most people. That doesn’t mean that shopping gives you Covid and it certainly doesn’t mean that shopping kills you.
Even if shopping is a way to get Covid, this is a very widespread and mostly mild virus for 99.8% percent of the population with an infection fatality rate as low as 0.05% for those under 70. Competent infectious disease experts have said multiple times that test, track, and isolate strategies are nearly useless for controlling viruses such as this.
This story/study was so poor and so absurd that it was too much even for Isabel Oliver, Director of the National Infection Service at Public Health England. She sent out the following note:
Thank you. One down, a thousand to go.
The New York Times pulled a mighty fast one with this piece: “States That Imposed Few Restrictions Now Have the Worst Outbreaks.” This would be huge news if true because it would imply not only that lockdowns save lives (which no serious study has thus far been able to document) but also that granting people basic freedoms are the reason for bad health outcomes, an astonishing claim on its own.
The piece, put together by two graphic artists and seemingly very science-like, speaks of “outbreaks,” which vaguely sounds terrible: packed with mortality. It’s odd because anyone can look at the data and see that New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut lead the way with deaths per million, mostly owing to the fatalities in long-term care facilities. These were the states that locked down the hardest and longest. Indeed they are locking down again! Deaths per million in states like South Dakota are still low on the list.
How in the world can the NYT claim that states that did not lock down have the worst outbreaks? The claim hinges entirely on a trivial discovery. Some clever someone discovered that if you reflow data by cases per million instead of deaths per million, you get an opposite result. The reasons: 1) when the Northeast experienced the height of the pandemic, there was very little testing going on, so the “outbreak” was not documented even as deaths grew and grew, 2) by the time the virus reached the Midwest, tests were widely available, 3) the testing mania grew and grew to the point that the non-vulnerable are being tested like crazy, generating high positives in small-population areas.
By focusing on the word “outbreak,” the Times can cleverly obscure the difference between a positive PCR result (including many false positive and perhaps half or more asymptomatic cases) and a severe outcome from catching the virus. In other words, the Times has documented an “outbreak” of mostly non-sick people in low-population areas.
There are hundreds of ways to look at Covid-19 data. The Times picked the one metric – the least valuable one for actually discerning whether and to what extent people are sick – in order to generate the result that they wanted, namely that open states look as bad as possible. The result is a chart that massively misrepresents any existing reality. It makes the worst states look great and the best ones look terrible. The visual alone is constructed to make it looks as if open states are bleeding uncontrollably.
How many readers will even know this? Very few, I suspect. What’s more amazing is that the Times itself already debunked the entire “casedemic” back in September:
Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.
Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time….
In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.
All of which makes one wonder what precisely is going on in this relationship between cases and severe outcomes. The Covid Tracking Project generates the following chart. Cases are in blue while deaths are in red.
Despite this story and these data, the graphic artists at the Times got to work generating a highly misleading presentation that leads to one conclusion: more lockdowns.
(My colleague Phil Magness has noted further methodological problems even within the framework that the Times uses but I will let him write about that later.)
Let’s finally deal with Salon’s attack on Great Barrington Declaration co-creator Jayanta Bhattacharya. Here is a piece that made the following claim of the infection fatality rate: “the accepted figure of 2-3 percent or higher.” That’s an astonishing number, and basically nuts: 10 million people will die in the US alone.
Here is what the CDC says concerning the wildly disparate risk factors based on age:
These data are not inconsistent with the World Health Organization’s suggestion that the infection fatality rate for people under 70 years of age is closer to 0.05%.
The article further claims that “herd immunity may not even be possible for COVID-19 given that infection appears to only confer transient immunity.” And yet, the New York Times just wrote that:
How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination.
Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.
How is it possible for people to make rational decisions with this kind of journalism going on? Truly, sometimes it seems like the world has been driven insane by an astonishing blizzard of false information. Just last week, an entire state in Australia shut down completely – putting all its citizens under house arrest – due to a false report of a case in a pizza restaurant. One person lied and the whole world fell apart.
Meanwhile, serious science is appearing daily showing that there is no relationship at all, and never has been, between lockdowns and lives saved. This study looks at all factors related to Covid death and finds plenty of relationship between age and health but absolutely none with lockdown stringency. “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate,” says the study, echoing a conclusion of dozens of other studies since as early as March.
It’s all become too much. The world is being seriously misled by major media organs. The politicians are continuing to panic and impose draconian controls, fully nine months into this, despite mountains of evidence of the real harm the lockdowns are causing everyone. If you haven’t lost faith in politicians and major media at this point, you have paid no attention to what they have been doing for the better part of this catastrophic year.
- Cops Swarm Toronto BBQ For Defying COVID Lockdown, Shut It Down
Cops Swarm Toronto BBQ For Defying COVID Lockdown, Shut It Down
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 20:25A popular Toronto restaurant, Adamson Barbecue, had a swarm of cops show up after owner Adam Skelly fought back against COVID lockdown restrictions and reopened both indoor and outdoor dining in defiance of Ontario’s new ‘Gray zone‘ restrictions.
Police are now approaching Adamson BBQ in Etobicoke which is serving customers inside against provincial regulations today. @CityNews pic.twitter.com/jinvlxVbQS
— Adrian Ghobrial (@CityAdrian) November 24, 2020
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— Joe Warmington (@joe_warmington) November 24, 2020
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People could be seen dining as Skelly showed cops and inspectors around.
— Joe Warmington (@joe_warmington) November 24, 2020
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Skelly lashed out against the restrictions in a Monday night video, where he announced that he would reopen.
“The data from Toronto Public Health that came out two weeks ago shows that two of the over 10,000 Ontario COVID deaths were linked to bars, restaurants and retail. So why are we getting we getting singled out? And the big multinational corporations are all essential while they’re packed?” Skelly said.
And to nobody’s surprise, Adamson BBQ was shut down by the authorities.
— Joe Warmington (@joe_warmington) November 24, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsRestaurant owner Jason Lake drove three hours to support Skully.
Jason Lake from the Minden 50s Diner came 3 hours to support Adamson BBQ ans Adam Skully pic.twitter.com/20qwbndYoO
— Joe Warmington (@joe_warmington) November 24, 2020
Skully came under fire in April after questioning the severity of COVID-19 and calling social media naysayers retards.
- Gingrich: The Thieves Who Stole Our Election Got Sloppy
Gingrich: The Thieves Who Stole Our Election Got Sloppy
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 20:05Authored by Newt Gingrich, op-ed via The Epoch Times,
Laziness leads to sloppiness, and sloppiness is how the most brazen heist in American history is being exposed…
Stealing the 2020 election was a mammoth undertaking, involving widespread lawlessness and illicit partnerships between private actors and public officials. They’ve been working to cover their tracks since Election Day, but they didn’t work fast enough. Now, the courts need to stop them from destroying any more evidence so that the people of Pennsylvania—and the rest of the country—can accurately assess the ramifications of their wrongdoing.
Explosive new litigation filed in federal district court on Nov. 21 details and documents a wide variety of illegal practices that were used to inflate the number of votes received by Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, including disparate treatment of voters based on where they live and outright manipulation of Pennsylvania’s voter registration system by partisan activists.
An unprecedented number of mail-in and absentee ballots were cast this year, and practically everyone expected that this would result in a higher-than-usual rate of ballots being rejected for various flaws, such as lacking a secrecy envelope or missing information. In Pennsylvania, tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots were likely to be rejected, based on historical patterns. Instead, a mere 0.03 percent of mail-in ballots were ultimately rejected—somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1,000 votes.
Considering that a significant majority of mail-in votes were cast for Biden, the Democrat candidate benefited handsomely from this discrepancy. But how did this anomaly happen?
It turns out that election officials in Democrat strongholds such as Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Philadelphia County, and Philadelphia’s collar counties—particularly Delaware County—exceeded their authority in order to give voters preferential treatment that wasn’t afforded to voters in Republican-leaning areas of the state.
Specifically, election workers illegally “pre-canvassed” mail-in ballots to determine whether they were missing a secrecy envelope or failed to include necessary information. When ballots were found to be flawed, voters were given an opportunity to correct, or “cure,” their ballots to make sure they counted. In at least some cases, Democrat Party officials were even given lists of voters to contact about curing their ballots.
Election officials in Republican-leaning counties rightly interpreted this as a violation of Pennsylvania’s election code, but Democrat Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar issued guidance authorizing the illegal practices despite lacking the statutory authority to do so.
That’s not the only way Democrats broke the law to give their candidate an unfair advantage, though. Extensive on-the-ground investigations conducted over the past year and a half by attorneys and investigators with the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society have uncovered another element of the plot that involved even more egregious behavior.
Boockvar also exceeded her authority by granting private, partisan organizations—including the notoriously pro-Democrat group “Rock the Vote”—access to the Commonwealth’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE).
“Rock the Vote’s web tool was connected to our system, making the process of registering voters through their online programs, and those of their partners, seamless for voters across Pennsylvania,” the lawsuit quotes Boockvar as saying.
That’s not supposed to happen. It’s one thing for outside groups to submit registration applications to the state on behalf of would-be voters, but election clerks are the only ones who are supposed to enter this sort of information directly into the records.
It’s easy to see why by inspecting post-election voter lists, which contain names such as “Mary April Smith,” followed by “Mary May Smith,” “Mary June Smith,” “Mary July Smith,” and so forth through the rest of the calendar. When the same voter lists were purchased just a week later, however, those suspicious names had mysteriously disappeared from the rolls.
Under the circumstances, that’s direct evidence of a systematic effort to conceal wrongdoing. All further alterations to the SURE system should be immediately halted to allow a thorough investigation of the records before any more evidence can be destroyed.
The thieves who attempted to hijack the 2020 presidential election were bound to slip up somewhere, and now they’re trying to clean up the glaring evidence of their wrongdoing before the full extent of their crimes can be exposed to the American public. We can’t allow that to happen, or we may never be able to trust the integrity of our elections again.
- $500 Million In Coal Stranded Off China's Coast As Australian Trade Spat Intensifies
$500 Million In Coal Stranded Off China’s Coast As Australian Trade Spat Intensifies
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 19:45At least 50 giant bulk carriers loaded with Australian coal, worth $500 million, are anchored off several Chinese ports, as the latest diplomatic spat between Canberra and Beijing intensifies.
Bloomberg, citing shipping data from Kpler, said 66 vessels are loaded with Australian coal had been moored off China’s coast for more than a month. The ships collectively have 5.7 million tons of coal and about 1,000 seafarers onboard. Vessel sizes range from Capesize to Panamax.
The ban on Australian coal is occurring as both countries are locked in a one-sided trade war, with Beijing slapping tariffs and blacklisting commodities from the country this year.
According to Braemar ACM Shipbroking, Beijing has halted Australian coal imports, with vessels unable to clear customs.
“Some ships have been waiting for months,” said Nick Ristic, a dry bulk analyst with Braemar.
A recent report from the shipbroker said some of the vessels were being diverted from China’s coast to other countries, such as India or Vietnam.
Bulk Carriers Hauling Coal Around China
The ban comes as Beijing rushes to support domestic coal prices and prop up ailing coal mining companies.
Research firm Wood Mackenzie said China’s monthly coal imports had fallen to a decade low. Readers may recall Beijing has already told local firms to ditch Australian iron ore and cotton.
For more color on the diplomatic spat that has morphed into a trade war between both countries, China Daily, a China-run state publication and mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, accused Australian politicians and media of “constantly concocting lies about China and stoking Sinophobia.”
Australia was “shirking” its responsibility for “worsening bilateral relations” between the two countries and “misleading the public.”
“Some ill-intentioned Australians have pinned the blame on the Chinese side by claiming that China’s control measures on some Australian exports are “economic coercion” and even accusing China of weaponizing economic ties.”
“It is both ridiculous and in vain for those in Australia to dress up their country as a victim. Facts speak louder than words.”
“Any objective observer can see that it is Canberra that has single-handedly undermined the political and economic premises for cooperation with Beijing.” – China Daily
Meanwhile, in a wake-up call to the US, despite the trade spat, 15 Asia-Pacific countries, including China and Australia, recently signed a huge trade deal. Also, with a Biden presidency, global trade disputes may soften.
- World's Largest Model Agency Attempt To Go Public Via SPAC Collapses
World’s Largest Model Agency Attempt To Go Public Via SPAC Collapses
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 19:25Just how ridiculous is the blank check IPO fever that has gripped markets in 2020? Consider this: SPACs, or blank-check companies which go public for the express purpose of buying an existing firm and which also exploded in 2007 just before the housing/credit bubble burst, now make up a record share of U.S. initial public offerings this year. According to Bloomberg, SPACs have collectively raised $66.4 billion year-to-date, accounting for nearly half of all the $138.9 billion raised in U.S. IPOs (SPACs only accounted for 19% of the $71.4 billion IPO pie last year).
And while there is no stopping the blank check juggernaut absent a full-blown market crash – so far in November, the SPAC pipeline has continued to grow with 18 more filings on deck to list on U.S. exchanges – one company that won’t be going public via a SPAC merger is the world’s largest model agency, Elite Model World, whose merger discussions with blank-check firm Galileo Acquisition have fallen apart without a deal being reached according to Bloomberg, which reported that Elite informed investors this month that the talks had collapsed.
Maybe the models demanded that the SPAC be denominated in Euros?
In any case, with the deal dead, Galileo is searching for a new merger target. The $138 million SPAC is focused on “the consumer, retail, food & beverage, specialty industrial, technology or medtech sectors which are headquartered in Western Europe, with an emphasis on Italian family-owned businesses, portfolio companies of private equity funds, or corporate spin-offs, and that have significant North American exports and a clearly defined North American high growth strategy.” That’s a real kitchen sink, so for simplicity’s sake, let’s just say “Western Europe/Italy”.
Elite Model has in recent years diversified into representing social media influencers, as well as its traditional fashion model clientele. Unfortunately, judging by the sudden collapse of the SPAC, it does not appear to have diversified into actually being profitable.
Galileo and Elite Model held talks last month with potential investors about raising new equity for a merger that would have taken the agency public, Bloomberg reported at the time.
- "We Feel Like We Are Drowning" – Rural Hospitals Overwhelmed By Shortages Of Bed, Staff
“We Feel Like We Are Drowning” – Rural Hospitals Overwhelmed By Shortages Of Bed, Staff
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 19:05As the coronavirus ravages rural parts of the US, areas it largely ignored during the spring and summer, hospitals are being overwhelmed.
We pointed out earlier that only four US states have hospitalization rates below 100 per million, with the Midwest being the worst hit region, though down in Texas, El Paso has stood out for the severity of its outbreak, and the degree to which deaths have overwhelmed the city’s morgues, forcing Gov. Greg Abbott to send in the national guard.
On Tuesday, Reuters published a story recounting stories from some of the most overburdened hospitals in the country right now. They can be found in places like rural Lakin, Kansas, or other “critical access” hospitals spread out across a dozen states in the midwest and the mountain west. Sparsely populated states like North and South Dakota are being hit particularly hard.
Since mid-June, daily new COVID-19 cases reported in the midwest have increased by 20x. For the week ending Nov. 19, North Dakota reported an average of 1,769 daily new cases per 1 million residents, while South Dakota recorded nearly 1,500 per million residents, Wisconsin and Nebraska around 1,200, and Kansas nearly 1,000. Even during New York’s worst week from April, the state never averaged more than 500 new cases per million people. California hasn’t topped 253.
Across the Midwest, hospital directors told Reuters that they’re at capacity, or dangerously close. Most have tried to increase availability by repurposing wings or cramming multiple patients in a single room, and by asking staffers to work longer hours and more frequent shifts.
Kearny County Hospital in rural Lakin, Kansas is one such example. The hospital is classified as a “critical access hospital” by federal authorities since it’s the only hospital servicing a patch of southwestern Kansas, not far from the border with economically desolate Oklahoma.
Some medical workers complained to Reuters that they see a “disconnect” between the grim scene inside the ICU, and families who are out planning Thanksgiving dinner parties, while some young people continue frequenting bars.
“There’s a disconnect in the community, where we’re seeing people at bars and restaurants, or planning Thanksgiving dinners,” said Dr. Kelly Cawcutt, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. As health workers, she said, “we feel kind of dejected.”
Dr. Drew Miller, the chief medical officer at Kearny, told Reuters about how he almost lost a 30-year-old patient who needed to be moved to the ICU, but there were no beds. The man survived after he briefly stopped breathing. Dr. Miller said he was astonished when the patient’s pulse returned.
Still, while some forecasters see even more dire numbers ahead, Dr. Miller warned “I don’t think the worst is here yet.”
But for remote hospitals, an even bigger than space is staff. COVID-19 patients must be monitored more closely than others, requiring more nurses to be on duty per shift. When infection rates rise, rural hospitals typically hire from a pool of traveling nurses. However, thanks to the pandemic, that pool is now empty.
Melisa Hazell, a critical care nurse at Hutchinson Regional Medical Center in Hutchinson, Kansas, told Reuters she recently recovered from COVID-19 herself, but she returned to work as soon as she was certain she wouldn’t spread the virus. After being off for 12 days, she said she wasn’t “mentally and physically ready” to go back to work. However “my teammates needed me,” she said.
Thousands of miles away, Mary Helland, a chief nursing officer with CommonSpirit Health in North Dakota, said she has put in requests for traveling nurses for all 11 “critical access hospitals” she oversees, spread across a region covering North Dakota and Minnesota.
But “bigger hospitals are using them all up,” she said. At 190-bed Hutchinson Regional, Chief Nursing Officer Amanda Hullet said she has started taking floor shifts for the first time in years after moving to a managerial position that requires much more desk work. Another nurse said that the refusal of some governors to mandate mask-wearing in public is frustrating. But even people who wear masks are still frequently infected with the virus.
Doctors say trying to change such behavior can feel like a hopeless task. One infectious disease doctor in Wisconsin told Reuters that “Everyone [is] continuing to go about their lives”…but “we sort of feel like we’re drowning.”
- There Were Two Americas Today As Dow Struck 30,000
There Were Two Americas Today As Dow Struck 30,000
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 18:50The K-shaped economic recovery, one where the rich grow richer and the working-poor are crushed with job loss and insurmountable debts, was on full display Tuesday afternoon as the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed 30,000 for the first time.
By mid-afternoon, hours after the DJIA soared to new highs, Bloomberg tweeted a disturbing video of yet, another massive food bank line, something we’ve been highlighting this fall as an increasing occurrence as covid winter continues to crush the working-poor.
Today’s food bank lines were situated in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where hundreds of vehicles were lined up “at a local stadium parking lot,” Bloomberg said. The lines snaked around a parking lot, with an overflow of vehicles pouring out onto the city street.
LOOK: Albuquerque residents lined up in their cars and trucks for a food bank distribution program at a local stadium parking lot ahead of Thanksgiving pic.twitter.com/i5kF4Hva2w
— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) November 24, 2020
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On Monday, we noted that on Dec. 31, many of the key provisions in the CARES Act are set to expire if there is no action from Congress. This could be catastrophic for 12 million America who will lose access to their Emergency unemployment benefits activated in the aftermath of the covid pandemic, which alone could be a drag of up to 1.5% to growth in 1Q, according to a recent Bank of America report.
Additionally, the expiration of eviction moratorium, mortgage forbearance programs, and suspension of student loan payments could compound the working poor’s financial stresses, many of whom, about 21 million of them, are unemployed and receiving benefits from the government.
In today’s America, massive food bank lines are becoming a common occurrence once more – similar to what was seen in the early days of the pandemic.
Earlier this month, the North Texas Food Bank (NTFB) handed out more than 600,000 pounds of food to 25,000 hungry people – one of the largest-ever food giveaways, explained NTFB officials.
Thousands of cars lined up to collect food in Dallas, Texas, over the weekend, stretching as far as the eye can see. pic.twitter.com/xLFGOcBkPK
— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 16, 2020
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While other stimulus packages could be introduced under the Biden administration, America’s working poor has been permanently scarred for years and financially set back a decade.
The K-shaped recovery is getting worse – dropping helicopter money has yet to fix the economy as promised earlier in the year as millions of families are set to go without food this holiday season.
Just a reminder, a rising stock market tide doesn’t lift all boats.
- AOC & 'The Squad' Confront Biden About Lack Of 'Progressive' Cabinet Picks
AOC & ‘The Squad’ Confront Biden About Lack Of ‘Progressive’ Cabinet Picks
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/24/2020 – 18:30Now that Joe Biden has announced all of his nominations for key positions shaping the administration’s foreign policy and domestic economic policy, it’s pretty clear that “the Squad” (which some have quietly blamed for the Democrats’ surprisingly poor performance in House races across the country) and their progressive allies got shafted. Biden took none of their recommendations for top positions (neither Elizabeth Warren nor Bernie Sanders will play prominent roles).
AOC and her allies are badly in need of a win to try and show their backers that they didn’t completely fold on their principles by backing Biden. And with a few more progressive members joining their ranks in the upcoming Congress, AOC needs to step up and be a leader if she has any hope of running for president in 2028 (she won’t quite meet the minimum age in 2024).
‘The Squad’ is looking for a scalp, and they’re going after a key player in the incipient Biden Administration: Bruce Reed, Biden’s former chief of staff during his years as VP. Biden and his team have picked Reed to lead the OMB, a relatively sleepy office that makes recommendations about the federal budget.
According to a report in Axios, AOC and Ilhan Omar are circulating a petition calling on Biden to drop Reed, criticizing him as a deficit hawk.
It’s an interesting choice considering that Biden’s National Security team is filled with deep state stalwarts who have never said no to a foreign entanglement.
But, apparently, AOC & Co. are okay with that. But the fact that Reed once recommended cuts to Social Security and Medicare makes him unpalatable to leftists. Reed led the Bowles-Simpson Commission under Barack Obama, which progressives opposed because of the cuts. “Biden must not repeat Obama’s mistake,” the petition warns.
The petition which has been signed by AOC, Omar and fellow Squad member Rashida Tlaib, objects to Reed, characterizing him as a “major test for the soul of the Biden presidency,” and demanding that OMB “be staffed with people who will prioritize working people, not Wall Street deficit scaremongers.”
Two other new progressive lawmakers – Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush — are also backing the petition. They recently joined a protest movement urging Biden to keep his promise to pass a $2 trillion version of the “Green New Deal”./p>
In a separate incident, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee hired the actor Mark Ruffalo to record and then blast out an e-mail to their nearly 1 million members urging Biden to pick Rep. Deb Haaland for secretary of the Interior, one of the few remaining cabinet-level positions that’s still up for grabs.
The climate justice democrats are urging Biden to consider creating a climate mobilization office within the White House, to ensure that climate hysteria will continue to inform policy even after Biden’s time in office is up.
Right now, leftists are terrified that a Biden presidency will simply morph into ‘Obama Part 3’ and everyone will forget about them and all the protest movements they helped organize as the fever of ‘Democratic socialism’ finally breaks.
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