- Shellenberger: Why Anti-Police Activism Kills
Shellenberger: Why Anti-Police Activism Kills
Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Substack,
In response to anti-police protests, many officers quit, resulting in shortages and a spike in avoidable deaths, from homicides to heart attacks, of innocents…
Will Yurek with three of his four children including Drew (far right) who called 911 when his father suffered a heart attack. First responders say the city of Seattle failed to save Will’s life because of a police shortage.
At 1:24pm on Nov. 2, 13-year-old Drew Yurek called 911 to report an emergency: his father Will didn’t feel well and needed help. Medics arrived six minutes later, but were told by dispatch to wait for the police before entering; there was a cautionary note that flagged the occupant of the address as being hostile to first responders. But the note was outdated, and referred to a previous tenant.
Because of a shortage of police officers first reported by Seattle journalist Jason Rantz, the medics were left to wait outside the house until cops could arrive.
At 1:37pm, Drew called 911 again, desperate. He needed help. Medics waited two more minutes before deciding to ignore the order and enter the building. They found Will and started to perform CPR and apply a defibrillator. But by then it was too late. Despite their best efforts, Will, 45 and a father of four, died of a heart attack as Drew looked on.
The police did not arrive until 1:45pm.
Now Drew’s mother, Meagan Petersen, is planning to sue the city of Seattle. “People need to know how the city let this happen,” said Meagan, who is divorced from Will and lives in Utah. “They could have saved Will if the system was working like it should.”
Firefighters and police officers I spoke to said they believe they could have saved the man’s life had there not been a shortage of cops. By the end of 2020, 200 police officers had left the Seattle police force.
What happened to Will Yurek and what his son had to suffer is a tragic but cautionary tale of what happens when activism and moral cowardice at the top of government destroys public safety and common sense in society. It has happened in Seattle, but many other parts of the country have also fallen victim — with many more in peril, too.
Before a vaccine mandate took 100 police officers off the street in mid-October, the Seattle police department was short at least 400 police officers to be at the minimum considered necessary to protect public safety. Why is that?
The overwhelming and unavoidable reason is anti-police protests by Black Lives Matter activists. This happened nationwide, but was worse in Seattle, where Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and progressive members of the Seattle City Council allowed anarchists to briefly take over the downtown Capitol Hill neighborhood in the summer of 2020. Durkan did so to show solidarity with anti-police protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.
The anti-police protests in Seattle were surprising because in 2018 the City Council had hired a black woman, Carmen Best, for the first time to serve as the city’s police chief. Best opened up for the first time about what happened last summer in an interview with me for my book, “San Fransicko,” earlier this year. Best is also one of the candidates NYC’s Mayor-Elect Eric Adams is considering for NYPD Commissioner.
Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, left, talks with activist Raz Simone, right front, and others near a plywood-covered and closed police precinct behind them on June 9, 2020.
“I refuse to work for this socialist City Council and their political agenda,” said one officer. “It ultimately will destroy the fabric of this once fine city.” Another said the city’s progressive City Council “will be the downfall of the city of Seattle.”
Anti-police protests took a toll around the country. At least two dozen other police chiefs or senior officers resigned, retired, or took disability leave in America’s 50 biggest cities in 2020, while 3,700 beat officers left. Today there are fewer police officers per capita in America than at any time since 1992.
In 2020, the homicide rate increased on average by more than one-third in America’s 57 largest cities. Homicides rose in 51 cities and declined in just six of them. Homicides rose 35 percent in Los Angeles, 31 percent in Oakland, 74 percent in Seattle, 63 percent in Portland, 60 percent in Chicago, and 47 percent in New York City.
Some blamed the coronavirus pandemic, and higher gun sales, which rose in March. But homicides in 2020 only started to rise in June, after Black Lives Matter protests, not March. And there had been a similar spike in homicides in 2015 when there was no coronavirus pandemic.
The lack of sufficient police may have made communities more vulnerable to the spikes in homicides seen in 2015 and 2020, as police were redirected to deal with anti-police protests. “When you have your officers and detectives every night on the front line dealing with demonstration after demonstration after demonstration,” said former police chief Best, “they are not engaging with community members. They are not talking to young people. All of that is not happening because the focus now is on the nightly demonstrations.”
“When people believe the procedures of formal social control are unjust,” notes University of Missouri criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, whose research is relied upon by the Department of Justice, “they are less likely to obey the law.”
Counter to the claims of those who advocate defunding the police as a way to reduce violence, the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Research has found that fatigue predicts a rise in public complaints against cops: a 13-hour rather than 10-hour shift significantly boosts their prevalence, while back-to-back shifts quadruple their odds.
The people who suffer most from anti-police activism are black. Nationally, 30 times more African Americans were killed by civilians than by police in 2019. Today, black Americans are seven to eight times more likely to die from homicide than white Americans.
If anti-police protests increase homicides, why do groups like Black Lives Matter do it? Because they are after radical system change, not less violence. Radical thinkers, from anarchists to socialists, have for 200 years blamed our capitalist system for crime, and justified crime as a revolutionary act. Crime is a rational response to the high levels of inequality created by capitalism, they argue.
For the most part, societies, including in Seattle, have dismissed these radical arguments. “The anarchists had always been a cosplay clown joke,” Seattle Police officer Christopher Young told me earlier this year. “On May Day they would come and fight the police and break some windows. We’d be like, ‘Okay guys, go back to your mother’s basement.’”
But after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, the anarchists rebranded themselves as “anti-fascists,” said Young, and that increased their legitimacy in the eyes of Seattle’s progressive voters. “They said, ‘We’re here to fight the racists and fascists.’”
“The community really wanted more cops,” she told me.
“At least three City Council members campaigned on more cops. They wanted better response times.”
They also wanted more racial and gender diversity and so, said Best, she created a plan “to have a lot more diversity with our hiring, for women and people of color both. We got to almost 40 percent of either minority or women representation as new hires.”
But after the Floyd killing, Seattle anarchists started attacking the police.
“Within that large group of people who were there peacefully protesting,” said Best, “there were groups there to create mayhem, throw rocks, bottles, and incendiary stuff, and point lasers at the officers.”
In June, somebody removed a police barricade that had prevented demonstrators from protesting in front of the East Precinct downtown. “It was decided,” said Best, “to remove the barricade and to allow the demonstrators to fill in the street in front of the precinct. We didn’t want to give up the precinct. I have to tell you it was not my decision.”
Progressive members of the Seattle City Council had pressured Mayor Durkan to order the police to abandon their precinct building.
“The next morning,” said Best, “there were these folks out there armed with long rifles, telling the officers who responded that it was their ‘sovereign land.’ ‘What sovereign property are they talking about?’” Best asked her colleagues. “Well, they’re talking about Twelfth Avenue.” She laughed. “We had never experienced anything like that.”
And therein began CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and Chief Carmen Best
Later, the organizers would rename the area CHOP, for Capitol Hill Occupied Protest. The anarchist leaders invited hundreds of Seattle’s homeless residents to move into the occupied zone, and many did. When asked, Seattle’s mayor insisted that everything would work out fine.
“How long do you think Seattle and those few blocks [will] look like this?” CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Seattle’s mayor.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “We could have a summer of love!”
But soon after, said Best, “We were getting reports of rape, robbery, assault… I don’t know what the Wild West was like, but it couldn’t have been any worse than that.”
Armed residents at CHOP shot two teenage boys just before it was shut down. At least one of them could have been saved. But CHOP’s unelected leaders didn’t allow first responders in until hours later.
The homicides led Chief Best to demand permission from the City Attorney to retake the neighborhood, which she did a few days later.
But then, in August 2020, a few weeks later, the Seattle City Council voted to cut the budget of the Seattle Police Department. “That means that all these new people that we hired who are black, people of color, and women will be the first ones to go,” Best told the City Council. “Because it’s first in, first out.”
The council said they wanted Best to go through and pick the people to fire.
“Let me get this straight,” she said she told the council. “You want me to pick the white people to go? Are you crazy?’ They were highly dismissive. It was the most bizarre thing that I had ever dealt with.”
Best criticized the City Council.
“I said that they were being reckless and dangerous and that people are going to suffer for it,” she said. “The next day, one of the city councilors said, ‘We need to cut her salary by 40 percent.’ It wasn’t even on the agenda for them to talk about. It was highly punitive and retaliatory.”
And so Best resigned.
By the end of 2020, 200 police officers had left the Seattle police force.
In truth, much of what people believe about the police is wrong. Police killings of African Americans in our 58 largest cities declined from 217 per year in the 1970s to 157 per year in the 2010s. And there are no racial differences in police killings when accounting for whether or not the suspect was armed or a threat (“justified” vs “unjustified” shooting).
Reducing homicides and other crimes will require more police, and that will require community and political leaders to educate voters, and publicly apologize for their role in unfairly demonizing police officers.
Most of all, we should seek to make amends to the victims of anti-police activism, including the Yurek family, who are mourning the loss of a young father at Thanksgiving time. “Mr. Yurek’s young son acted quickly and competently. Unfortunately, the city of Seattle was neither quick nor competent,” said the family’s attorney, Mark Lindquist of the Herrmann Law Group.
But Will Yurek’s death could gain new meaning if it helps us, as Americans, to view police officers as vital, if imperfect, public servants, and take the measures necessary to affirm their role, and recruit them back into our city police forces.
* * *
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,”Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress. He is author of just launched book San Fransicko (Harper Collins) and the best-selling book, Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins June 30, 2020). Subscribe To Michael’s substack here
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 23:30 - Beijing Furious After Biden Invites Taiwan To Global Democracy Summit, While China Left Off List
Beijing Furious After Biden Invites Taiwan To Global Democracy Summit, While China Left Off List
It was previously reported that the US intentionally kept China and Russia off the list of invitees for the Biden administration-sponsored “Summit for Democracy” set to be held next month in virtual format. The first ever US-sponsored event of its kind has a goal of restoring democracy and promoting human rights across the globe, based on Biden’s foreign policy agenda, and the US has invited at total of 110 countries to participate.
China on Wednesday is seething, issuing a scathing statement, after it’s been revealed the White House has invited Taiwan instead of China to the world gathering which runs from Dec.9 through Dec.10.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson told a press conference in Beijing that it’s “firmly opposed” to the “mistake” of the US inviting Taiwan, given Taiwan remains “inalienable part of Chinese territory,” according to the statement.
AFP via Getty Images “U.S. actions only go to show democracy is just a cover and a tool for it to advance its geopolitical objectives, oppress other countries, divide the world and serve its own interests,” the statement added.
At the same time officials in Taipei are seeing it as a major diplomatic win – considering it advances Taiwan independence and self-rule on the world stage:
The island state would be represented by Digital Minister Audrey Tang and Hsiao Bi-khim, Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the US, said Taiwan’s foreign ministry.
“Our country’s invitation to participate in the ‘Summit for Democracy’ is an affirmation of Taiwan’s efforts to promote the values of democracy and human rights over the years,” the ministry said.
Starting especially under the Trump administration, Washington began more frequently denouncing Beijing for egregious human rights violations, especially in Hong Kong and in Xinjiang, the latter which reportedly has a system of Communist ‘reeducation camps’ for Muslim Uyghurs.
US-China tensions have only continued despite last week’s virtual meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and President Biden wherein Biden reaffirmed his commitment to the ‘one China’ policy as Xi reportedly laid out that Beijing sees Washington support to Taiwan – including weapons transfers – as “playing with fire”. State media reported Xi during the Nov.15 virtual meeting: “Such moves are extremely dangerous, just like playing with fire. Whoever plays with fire will get burnt.” Biden had said according to the White House summery of the virtual summit that his administration “strongly opposes unilateral efforts to change the status quo or undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait”.
Meanwhile, the Chinese and Russian militaries just this week pledged to expand their cooperation on the basis of “threats” emanating from the West, led by the United States.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 23:00 - With Inflation So High, The Elites Have Some Suggestions For How You Can Save Money This Thanksgiving…
With Inflation So High, The Elites Have Some Suggestions For How You Can Save Money This Thanksgiving…
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Normally, inflation is not a major theme on Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, these are not normal times. Thanks to Joe Biden and our other crooked politicians in Washington, we are facing an inflation crisis that is unlike anything that we have experienced since the 1970s. Earlier this week, I discussed a new poll which showed that 88 percent of Americans are deeply concerned about inflation, and a different poll found that 67 percent of Americans disapprove of the way that Biden is handling rising prices. Now Thanksgiving is nearly upon us, and most Americans are finding that their grocery dollars are not stretching as far as they once did.
This is being hailed as “the most expensive Thanksgiving ever”, but don’t worry, because the elite are offering some suggestions for how you can save some money.
For example, NBC News is telling us to “consider not buying a turkey” in order to save some cash.
If that wasn’t offensive enough, they are also saying that “some people think turkey is overrated” and that an “Italian feast” might be a better alternative…
“I know that is the staple of the Thanksgiving meal. However, some people think turkey is overrated, and so it tends to be the most expensive thing on the table. Maybe you do an Italian feast instead.”
I love Italian food, but Americans have eaten turkey on Thanksgiving for generations.
Sadly, many Americans won’t be having turkey this year because it has just gotten too expensive.
Of course NBC has an answer for that too. They are suggesting that if you tell those you have invited that there won’t be any turkey on the table “some guests may drop off the list, and that’s a way to cut costs too.”
Seriously?
That is what they actually think ordinary Americans should do?
It just makes me sick how the elite talk down to us like this.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is being even more offensive. A few days ago, they encouraged Americans to consider a “soybean-based dinner” because turkey is so much more expensive…
“A Thanksgiving dinner serving of poultry costs $1.42. A soybean-based dinner serving with the same amount of calories costs 66 cents and provides almost twice as much protein”
Yuck.
Just yuck.
Over the years, I have tried “alternative” soybean-based products from time to time, and to be frank all of them were disgusting.
And I find it to be highly offensive for the people that actually created this inflation crisis to be pushing Americans toward less expensive and more “eco-friendly” alternatives.
We wouldn’t be in this mess if the Federal Reserve had not created trillions upon trillions of dollars out of thin air over the past couple of years.
And we wouldn’t be in this mess if NBC News and other media outlets had not endlessly promoted the corrupt politicians in Washington that just keep borrowing and spending money as if the future will never come.
We didn’t get here by accident.
What we are now experiencing is a perfect example of cause and effect. Our insane leaders flooded the system with new money, and now a typical Thanksgiving dinner is 14 percent more expensive than it was last year…
The cost of providing a traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner to 10 people in 2021 is 14% higher than a year ago, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual survey.
Thankfully, your income has gone up 14 percent over the past year as well, right?
Sadly, most of you will not be able to answer that question affirmatively.
The cost of turkey is rising at a particularly blazing pace. At this point, the average price of a 16 pound turkey is $4.60 higher than it was at this time in 2020…
Ranking the data this way lets us see that the increase in the cost of turkey is responsible for most of the year-over-year increase. Rising by $4.60 from 2020’s $19.39 to 2021’s $23.99 for a 16-pound bird, turkey alone accounts for nearly 72% of the year-over-year increase in the total cost for the meal.
But at least soybean-based dinners are still affordable.
Of maybe you could even eat bugs this year.
The global elite would really love that.
In addition to changing the menu, the elite are also giving us pointers for how to minimize the spread of COVID during our Thanksgiving celebrations.
According to the New York Times, children should wear masks, eat as quickly as they can, and stay as far away from the adults as possible…
I’m glad to hear that the children and all guests are vaccinated. As the kids will not be fully vaccinated until two weeks after their second shot, I think some care is warranted, especially because some attendees are 65 and older and thus at greater risk of more serious breakthrough infections. You could have the kids wear masks, eat quickly and stay away from the older adults when eating.
So I guess that hugging grandma and grandpa is out of the question.
These control freaks really do want to micromanage all of our lives, and those that obediently do whatever they say without thinking are part of the problem.
The truth is that the vast majority of the “experts” that they put on television to tell us how to live our lives really aren’t “experts” at all.
It is all a big con game, and it amazes me that there are still so many people out there that fall for it.
Once you get a look behind the curtain and you realize what a giant fraud their entire system is, there is no going back.
Unfortunately, much of the population is still under their spell, and so we need to work really hard to wake people up while there is still time to do so.
Look, I really do hope that all of you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Eat lots of turkey, enjoy your family and friends, and try to smile.
We should find joy in these moments while we still can, because soon everything will change.
* * *
It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 22:30 - Lovers Of Canned Cranberries Beware: Expect Thanksgiving Shortages
Lovers Of Canned Cranberries Beware: Expect Thanksgiving Shortages
A Thanksgiving meal usually consists of roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, corn, and pumpkin pie. But we left out one crucial side that some Americans might not get to eat this year due to a can shortage, that is, jellied cranberry sauce from Ocean Spray.
Ocean Spray CEO Tom Hayes told Bloomberg Radio that consumers might have to make their own fresh cranberry sauce due to a can shortage and snarled supply chains that will leave some supermarket shelves that usually stock Ocean Spray items bare.
He said consumers who prefer “iconic cranberry jellied sauce in a can” may not get what they want. People may have to “make cranberry sauce from fresh berries,” Hayes said.
Hayes suggested that consumers should “plan early and make sure you get to the grocery store. It will be a happy Thanksgiving, but you have to demonstrate more flexibility than you have in the past.”
Labor shortages, rising freight costs, upward pressure on wages, and port congestion add to the overall Thanksgiving dinner costs, up some 14% from a year ago amid soaring food inflation that shows no signs of abating.
It’s not just cranberries: turkey supplies in cold storage are at their lowest point in years ahead of Thursday’s holiday. This means Thanksgiving will be the most expensive ever.
And, of course, the monetary wonks at the St.Louis Fed have chimed in on this topic and advised everyone to switch from traditional poultry to plants to avoid soaring food costs.
From the FRED Blog: A Thanksgiving dinner serving of poultry costs $1.42. A soybean-based dinner serving with the same amount of calories costs 66 cents and provides almost twice as much protein https://t.co/qmyjwZd7aU pic.twitter.com/pHv3ZR9o6u
— St. Louis Fed (@stlouisfed) November 20, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The CEO of Ocean Spray is right, “be flexible” this holiday season because everything that consumers once thought was readily available is not so much anymore due to supply chain woes.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 22:00 - Bitcoin Is The Single Best Shot At Achieving Liberty In Our Lifetime
Bitcoin Is The Single Best Shot At Achieving Liberty In Our Lifetime
Authored by Dr. Wolf Von Laer via BictoinMagazine.com,
How do Bitcoin’s properties present the best opportunity to seize liberty humanity has ever seen?
What do you see when you switch on the TV or scroll through your news feed on your preferred social media platform?
You see a failed war ended after 20 years, hundreds of thousands of people dead, billions of dollars squandered, and the same illiberal regime in charge as before.
You also see inequality, rising prices and protests.
And you see pushbacks for mandates.
Bitcoiners regularly reply to all the troubles in the world by saying that “Bitcoin fixes this.” Hyperbole? No, Bitcoin is the only realistic pathway to the libertarian “bon mot,” our witty remark of “fix the money, fix the world.” Indeed, Bitcoin is the best shot libertarians have to shrink the size of government, fight inflation, curtail the debt from inflation, starve the military-industrial complex, and to avoid an ever-increasing scope for government.
How does Bitcoin achieve this?
Bitcoin is a savings technology that is nascent money. Money historically has three functions: it must serve as a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account. Bitcoin, despite its volatility, is certainly a store of value but is thus far less prevalent as a medium of exchange or unit of account.
However, Bitcoin has only been around for 12 years, and its rate of adoption is already growing faster than the internet’s did. Money is the ultimate “network good,” which means that its value and usability increases with every user joining, and every user has the incentive to encourage others to take up bitcoin since it benefits them directly. As a result, within a short amount of time, Bitcoin has emerged from being a somewhat esoteric toy for cypherpunks, to being adopted by financial institutions and the country of El Salvador, as well as becoming the savings technology for tens of millions of people around the world (Bitcoin’s current user base is estimated to be around 120 million). This is absolutely remarkable.
It does not matter why people use bitcoin. It might be because it is cheaper and faster than traditional cross-border payments. It might be because it is collapsing upward and growing in value by around 200% annually. It might be because some people speculate on it. Or, it might be because it saves lives and allows people to escape some of the worst environments possible. An example of this can be seen in some great articles written by Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at Human Rights Foundation, on bitcoin usage in Afghanistan, Cuba, or Palestine.
Bitcoin already empowers millions, and not just the rich elites with existing access to banks, stock markets, and other financial technologies. Bitcoin empowers the billions of people who are unbanked and promises a future that takes control of money away from the government. Bitcoin appeals to millions of people and every person joining the Bitcoin network will have the incentive to attract more users.
Bitcoin presents hope for millions and presents a viable plan B to holding fiat money, which melts in your hands due to the irresponsibility of monetary central planners. Right now, the most important reason why the government can grow beyond its mandate — beyond its income through taxation — is through the power of the government to print and force everyone to use their ever-value losing money.
In just the last 24 months, the U.S. Federal Reserve has printed 40 percent of all dollars in existence. Naturally, this has translated into huge levels of inequality, since the people close to the government’s trough (such as banks) benefit from the higher purchasing power compared to the people at the bottom of the food chain (like fixed income recipients, students, etc.) who only see prices rise with diminishing real purchasing power. This is known as the Cantillon effect.
The Federal Reserve Board is directly monetizing the debt that the government takes on, and the Fed provides infinite demand for government debt, which would not be able to grow at the astonishing pace it does without the power of the printing press to buy all of it up.
The Bitcoin network itself and the personal owning of bitcoin is an act of peaceful rebellion against the fiat money system. Every day, when someone buys bitcoin, it moves money away from the fiat system and puts it into a store of value. It is put into a system that cannot be inflated. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin issued. Bitcoin has been tested, Bitcoin has been attacked, and the protocol has remained robust against 12 years of adversaries trying to undermine it.
Many of Bitcoin’s detractors fundamentally don’t understand Bitcoin’s value proposition. And it makes sense that they don’t. We have not seen a new type of money emerge in over five millennia. Moreover, Bitcoin’s roots lie in more atypical fields such as Austrian economics, game theory, cryptography, and economic history. Thus, the frameworks through which most economists and pundits analyze Bitcoin are highly inadequate.
Another new aspect is that Bitcoin gives its users absolute control over their money. They can decide when to send money, how much, and how much they pay for a transaction. Nobody needs to be asked if you can send money to a nonprofit organization six thousand miles away, and nobody needs to confirm if you can send remittances to your family in other countries. No agency or bank can prevent this. Bitcoin allows you to become your own bank. This is incredibly empowering and such technology has not existed before.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 21:30 - Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Emerges As White Knight For NYC's Broke Princeton Club
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Emerges As White Knight For NYC’s Broke Princeton Club
One month after the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan shut its door down indefinitely after defaulting on nearly $40 million in mortgage debt, the venue frequented by so many grads of the Ivy safety school may have found a savior in ex-Google CEO, billionaire Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt (obviously a Princeton graduate) who has donated tens of millions to the Ivy League school in the past and who most recently played a crucial role in Hillary Clinton’s failed attempt to defeat Donald Trump for the 2016 election, has bid on the club’s loan through his family’s investment office, Bloomberg reports citing people familiar with the situation.
If his bid wins, Schmidt would provide the funds to make improvements so the 10-story private club on West 43rd Street is more suitable as a co-working space, Bloomberg sources said. It’s not known how many other bidders Schmidt is competing with or if his current bid is the highest. The auction is scheduled to conclude Nov. 29.
The storied club which was founded in 1866 and includes two restaurants, banquet space, squash courts and 58 guest rooms, ran out of cash after being closed for 15 months during the pandemic and losing about one-third of its 6,000 dues-paying members. After efforts to raise capital failed, lender Sterling National Bank put the club’s $39.3 million debt in default and enlisted Newmark Group to sell the note by the end of November.
Unlike other Manhattan-based Ivy League clubs, some of which are supported financially by their associated schools, the Princeton club has no affiliation with Princeton University; that meant it was also the only one to default.
Schmidt, 66, ranks 56th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a net worth of $27.9 billion. The former Google chief executive officer’s family investment office is based in the same Menlo Park, California, building that also houses his philanthropic foundation, established in 2006 with his wife Wendy Schmidt, Bloomberg notes.
A former trustee of Princeton University, Schmidt is also on the club’s member roster. His donations over the years to Princeton include $25 million in 2009 to support technology research, money to rebuild the school’s computer science department and $5 million last year to endow a professorship of indigenous studies.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 21:00 - We Don't Get A Vote On The Woke Revolution
We Don’t Get A Vote On The Woke Revolution
Authored by J.Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,
You don’t get to vote on the revolution. That’s kind of the point. From the happy example of Colonial America to the terrors that mutilated and murdered innocents in France, Russia, and China, revolutionaries work outside the established system to impose a new order.
So it is with today’s woke revolution. The potent cultural forces that have mainstreamed radical concepts such as “white privilege,” “microaggressions,” and “gender fluidity” are beyond the reach of American democracy.
No one voted for any of it; it cannot be stopped at the ballot box. Electing anti-woke politicians in 2022 and 2024 will not turn the tide.
The embrace of woke ideology by many prestigious news outlets – as symbolized by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which recasts American society through the cramped lens of racism and oppression – is not subject to popular approval. Neither is the American Medical Association’s move to view health disparities between blacks and other Americans as the result of “systemic racism” (rather than biology, personal behavior, or cultural influences).
We don’t get to vote on the decision by the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research, to commit $90 million in funding along with “every tool at our disposal to remediate the chronic problem of structural racism.” The same goes for the diktat in corporate America to mandate race and gender into their hiring decisions, or the woke-saturated culture that predominates at most American colleges and universities, where faculty applicants are asked to sign loyalty oaths to diversity and equity.
Parental opposition to the influence of critical race theory in public schools shows that pushback is possible. School board meetings are one of the few public venues where ordinary Americans can voice their discontent to this ideology, which casts white kindergarteners as oppressors and non-white tots as victims. But these critics are labeled “domestic terrorists” for their efforts — and it’s still not clear what, if any, impact the parents will have on what and how children are taught.
In fairness, broad swaths of the culture always operate and evolve outside of politics. The world of ideas and entertainment – the books we read, movies we watch, groups we join – must never be subject to electoral will. But the woke revolution feels different. First, it is an explicitly political ideology that is, at bottom, about power. Second, it is remarkably ambitious: It seeks a wholesale transformation of America’s past, present and future. Third, while some of its ideas resonate with plenty of people, it is a top-down movement that seeks to impose alien ways of thinking and being on everyone – hence the rise of cancel culture and other illiberal mechanisms to silence and punish those who fail to conform.
One of the great paradoxes of the social justice movement is that even as it claims to fight inequality, it is itself a reflection of the growing inequality in America: both of wealth and culture. Like most revolutions, it is not led by the downtrodden but by the elites. It is not the person of color on the streets but the swells at the top (most of them white) who are imposing the new order.
Although it might seem that the woke revolution erupted in 2020 with George Floyd’s murder, or with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement following Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, its intellectual framework – which includes critical race theory, postmodernism, anti-colonialism, black power and queer/gender studies – emerged at America’s universities in the 1960s and 1970s. Heavily influenced by Marxism, leftist scholars suffered a crisis of confidence after communism was discredited 30 years ago as the Soviet Union collapsed. In response, activist academics essentially repackaged their old ideas. They still saw politics as a zero-sum battle between oppressors and the oppressed, with themselves in the moral vanguard, but they replaced the concept of class with new identity markers: racial and sexual identity. The struggle was no longer between capitalists and the proletariat, but privileged “cisgendered heteronormative” whites versus the rest of humanity.
There was always a kernel of truth to this narrative – America, like every other nation, has unequal distributions of wealth and power (hierarchy is inevitable; even the communists, who pledged to create true equality, simply replaced the tsar’s hierarchy with their own, one dominated by party leaders and apparatchiks). But the expansion of rights and opportunities we’ve achieved over the last half-century – the fact that legions of people defined as “oppressed” enjoy status, respect, wealth and power only dreamed of in most corners of the globe – exposes the absurdity of the claim that race and gender determine one’s fate.
Nevertheless, this narrative increasingly informs the education delivered at Western colleges and universities, especially at elite schools. The graduates of these institutions, in turn, become the professors, journalists, managers, administrators and other moral enforcers using their positions to advance the woke revolution from within.
The key question – why would seemingly intelligent people commit to an ideology so at odds with reality? – requires a complex set of answers. The collapse of traditional social norms, the offshoring of the blue-collar sector, the baneful influence of social media, the realignment of legacy media into tribal factions, the creation of overeducated citizens saddled with crippling debt, rapidly rising living standards that create rising expectations — all this and more play a part. Radicalism is opportunistic, lying dormant for decades until the right combination of conditions presents itself.
But a pivotal, if underappreciated, force is the rise of the information-based global economy, which has doubled the number of millionaires in the United States in just a decade, opening a chasm of envy between the haves and the super-haves. Statista reports that there were close to 6 million U.S. households with financial assets worth more than $1 million in 2019; more than double the number in 2008. At the same time, Pew reports that “as of 2016, the latest year for which data are available, the typical American family had a net worth of $101,800.”
This growing inequality is not based on the false claim that the wealthy are benefiting at the expense of non-rich – they are, more accurately, getting a bigger slice of a growing pie in a world where living standards continue to rise. But this increase does make it easier for radicals to exploit the false argument, insistently advanced by prestigious news and information outlets, that the current system is unjust and that, given America’s history, today’s disparities stem from race.
To buy peace, and peace of mind, many well-off Americans – especially the well-educated ones who now call the Democrat Party home – are happy to acquiesce to ideas that, as a practical matter, will have little immediate impact on their own comfortable lives: agreeing that the American Revolution was fought over slavery, that social justice requires reparations, that gender identities are malleable, that reality is socially constructed, that “silence is violence.” It costs them nothing to spout these slogans, which allow them to feel morally superior.
In the long run, I hope, truth will out. But those who oppose the revolution should know they are battling powerful and entrenched forces that are, in significant ways, beyond their reach.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 20:30 - Putin Says He Feels "Fine" After Taking Dose Of Experimental Russian Nasal Vaccine
Putin Says He Feels “Fine” After Taking Dose Of Experimental Russian Nasal Vaccine
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he’s feeling “fine” after taking an experimental nasal COVID jab earlier this week while also receiving a booster dose of the experimental “Sputnik V” jab as well.
According to Bloomberg, Putin said late last week that the nasal version of the jab is still in trials and hasn’t been approved by regulators in Russia. But in a televised appearance announcing he’d taken the injected booster, Putin said he would also volunteer to participate in the testing of the nasal vaccine as well.
Denis Logunov, deputy director of the Gamaleya National Research Center, which was responsible for developing Sputnik, said that taking the two vaccines together would help better protect Putin against infection in the upper respiratory tract.
The long-serving Russian president, 69, said Logunov gave him the nasal version Monday. Putin told a government meeting that he was “feeling fine” after the boosters, and that he had exercised that day.
Russia memorably claimed to be the first country to approve a COVID jab in the summer of 2020, but officials and scientists began getting the shots even before Sputnik V was registered. Putin, however, got his first two-dose inoculation only in March of this year.
Gamaleya’s Logunov reportedly told Putin that workers at the center had also tried the nasal version of the jab, leaving it up to the president whether he would also like to try it. “That’s off-label and we’re testing it on staff as usual,” he explained to the press in a statement.
Meanwhile, in a meeting with Putin on Wednesday, Russian PM Mikhail Mishustin said pre-clinical testing of the nasal inoculation “showed it was safe and effective” and that Phase 1 clinical trials in adult volunteers had been authorized, with initial results due back in 42 days.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 20:00 - Fake It Till You Make It? Biden Energy Secretary Fumbles Two Simple Questions In One Day
Fake It Till You Make It? Biden Energy Secretary Fumbles Two Simple Questions In One Day
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Tuesday biffed two simple questions that anyone in her position should have been able to answer.
Granholm – the former Democratic Governor of Michigan who has zero experience in the energy sector – was asked how many barrels of oil the US consumes in a day, to which she replied “I don’t have that number in front of me. Sorry.”
REPORTER: “How many barrels of oil does the U.S. consume per day?”
Energy Sec. Granholm: “I don’t have that number in front of me. I’m sorry.” pic.twitter.com/lToOjsLNLu
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 23, 2021
Next, Granholm couldn’t provide an answer as to when Americans can expect gas prices to drop, and how long she might expect a drop to last, to which she replied: “Yeah, I’m not going to make a prediction about how much and how long.”
Reporter: “Bottom line, how soon will Americans see prices at the pump drop, and how long do you expect that to last?”
Energy @SecGranholm: “Yeah, I’m not going to make a prediction about how much and how long.” pic.twitter.com/KYrqwmmOyF
— The Hill (@thehill) November 24, 2021
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hey, remember when you all pretended Rick Perry, the longest-serving chief executive of a gas- and oil-rich state, was in over his head at the department of energy? that was fun. https://t.co/RSlff4MZfw
— tsar becket adams (@BecketAdams) November 24, 2021
Nothing like faking it till you make it (or don’t)…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 19:45 - COVID-19 Made Democracies More Authoritarian And Authoritarian Regimes Even Worse
COVID-19 Made Democracies More Authoritarian And Authoritarian Regimes Even Worse
By Eric Boehm, published originally in Reason,
The COVID-19 pandemic is contributing to a significant decline in democratic values across the globe as many countries have taken aggressive and authoritarian steps to attempt to curb the virus.
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past two years, that’s probably not much of a surprise. Still, a new report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a global nonprofit based in Sweden, offers a comprehensive look at the worrying trend of democratic erosion—a trend that has been helped along by the pandemic even though its roots go deeper.
“The world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a ‘new normal’ of Covid-19 restrictions,” the IIDEA warns. The number of countries that are becoming “more authoritarian” by the group’s calculus is three times the number of countries that are moving toward democracy. This year is the fifth consecutive year in which the trend has been moving in that direction, the longest uninterrupted stretch of pro-authoritarian developments since the IIDEA started tracking these metrics in 1975.
That trend predates the COVID-19 pandemic, of course, but governmental responses to the virus have made things worse.
A number of democratic countries—the report specifically mentions the United States in this section—have implemented COVID measures “that were disproportionate, illegal, indefinite or unconnected to the nature of the emergency,” according to the IIDEA report. Those include travel restrictions and the use of “emergency powers that sometimes sidelined parliaments.”
The last two years have indeed been littered with examples of previously unheard-of government powers on display in the U.S. That includes everything from statewide lockdowns in which governors decreed which businesses were “essential” to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with the backing of both the Trump and Biden administrations, making it nearly impossible for property owners to evict deadbeat tenants. It took until this month for the U.S. to reopen its border with Canada for supposedly “nonessential” travel, even though there was probably no good justification for closing the border in the first place.
Outside the U.S., places like Austria and Australia continue to rachet up authoritarian restrictions on public interactions and economic behavior—even for people who have been vaccinated. According to the report, 69 countries have made violating COVID restrictions an imprisonable offense, with two-thirds of those countries being ones the group considers to be democracies. Albania and Mexico have the most punitive laws on the books, allowing prison sentences of 15 years and 12 years, respectively, for violating pandemic-related protocols.
More than 20 percent of countries have used their militaries to enforce COVID controls, which the report warns could contribute to “the normalization of increasingly militarized civil life after the pandemic.” Meanwhile, 42 percent of countries have rolled out voluntary or compulsory apps used for contact tracing, which may be effective in curbing the spread of the virus but create concerning new opportunities for government surveillance in a post-pandemic world. Of particular concern to IIDEA are the eight non-democratic regimes (Azerbaijan, Bahrain, China, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Singapore, Thailand, and Turkey) where those apps have been made mandatory for all smartphone-using residents.
Meanwhile, some public health officials in America are wishcasting for even more aggressive restrictions. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, recently praised the “really strict lockdowns” deployed by China—a country that no healthy democracy should be using as a model for good policy making.
But while COVID-19 has been the acute cause of much democratic backsliding in the past two years, the IIDEA report indicates a more insidious threat that lurks behind the pandemic: “The rise of illiberal and populist parties in the last decade is a key explanatory factor in democratic backsliding and decline,” the report states. Those parties seek to obtain power so they can dismantle checks on government authority, including freedom of expression and policies meant to protect minority rights.
Indeed, as Reason‘s Stephanie Slade has pointed out, some of the leading advocates of America’s turn towards illiberalism are now quite open about their embrace of authoritarianism. This tendency to embrace “will-to-power” politics amounts to declaring that “what matters above all else is ensuring that our tribe is dominant.” That’s not a good signal for democracy, or for the preservation of human freedom.
The will-to-power also serves to paper over the nonsensical aspects of their ideas. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), for example, wants to give the Commerce Department more power to decide what products can be lawfully bought and sold in the United States—despite the fact that he voted against confirming Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. He literally wants to give more power to someone he believes is not qualified for the job. Similarly, left-wing efforts to abolish the filibuster in the Senate are easily exposed as nothing more than a power grab by asking advocates how a filibuster-less Senate would have worked during Donald Trump’s presidency—a tactic that Axios’ Jonathan Swan recently used to great effect in an interview with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.).
In various forms and despite internal inconsistencies, these illiberal and populist sentiments seem to be growing stronger. Expanded governmental powers during the pandemic offer an even more tantalizing prize to politicians who would use the power of the state to direct society in the future.
“As in many other aspects of life, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated and magnified pre-existing political trends while adding a whole new plethora of unprecedented challenges to democracies that were already under pressure,” writes Kevin Casas-Zamore, IIDEA’s secretary-general, in the preface to the report. “The monumental human victory achieved when democracy became the predominant form of governance now hangs in the balance like never before.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 19:40 - China Regulators Halt New Tencent Apps, Updates For Data Privacy Review
China Regulators Halt New Tencent Apps, Updates For Data Privacy Review
Tencent Holdings Ltd. shares in Hong Kong slid on Wednesday after Chinese regulators ordered the internet services giant based in Shenzhen to halt updating and publishing new apps. The regulator wanted to review existing apps to make sure they complied with new privacy laws.
Tencent shares slid 2% to 472.20 HKD. Shares are down 38% from the January high of 766.50 HKD. Shares have been dropping all year as Beijing ramped up regulatory crackdowns on big-tech.
According to Bloomberg, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) ordered Tencent to suspend updates of existing apps, but they can still be downloaded in app stores.
The MIIT has ordered that all new apps and updates from Nov. 24 until the end of the year will need to undergo a review by the regulator before they are made available, state broadcaster CCTV reported without saying where it obtained the information. The reviews are expected to take about seven days. – Bloomberg
Tencent, which owns WeChat and QQ messaging services, released a statement that said it was working to improve user protection features within its apps. The company is expected to stay in regular contact with MIIT to ensure compliance.
On Nov. 1, Bejing rolled out the Personal Information Protection Law to oversee how big tech handles user data. The passage of the new law resulted from months of Beijing cracking down over big tech’s power. Bloomberg noted, “Tencent has been targeted by the MIIT because nine of its products were found on four previous occasions to violate data protection rules, triggering the freeze.”
Earlier this year, Tencent halted new user registrations for WeChat, citing technical upgrades. That suspension lasted one week.
Institutional investors have been asking: Is it time to trim Indian equities and become more optimistic about China’s attractive valuations despite continued threats of regulatory crackdowns?
Yes. And No.
“Valuations are key right now,” Belinda Boa, head of active investments for the Asia Pacific at BlackRock Inc., said. “Because of the outperformance we’ve seen in India this year, on a relative basis, we are starting to take profits” and becoming more positive on Chinese growth stocks, she said. Blackrock is also getting ready to launch a new China tech ETF.
But then there’s Ark Investment Management LLC’s founder Cathie Wood who is still waiting for the dust to settle after a year of regulator crackdowns.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 19:20 - Support For More Gun Control Falls, But Partisan Divide Grows
Support For More Gun Control Falls, But Partisan Divide Grows
Authored by John Lott Jr., via RealClearPolitics.com,
According to a new Gallup poll, support for stricter gun control has fallen by 15 percentage points in just the last five years.
But, despite the drop being driven by independents’ changing views, Democrats aren’t likely to rethink their support for more gun control.
The partisan divide on this issue has never been so large — 91% of Democrats and only 24% of Republicans support stricter laws.
While Democrats claim they want “reasonable” or “common sense” laws, you get an idea of how stark the partisan differences are by considering the response to Gallup’s question about whether people support a complete ban on civilian ownership of handguns: 40% of Democrats like the idea compared to only 6% of Republicans.
The recent election results in Virginia and New Jersey show Democrats are in real trouble with rural, working-class voters. Some pundits put part of the blame on the party’s constant push for gun control.
You can see the opposing views in the reactions to the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul tweeted the lesson she took from it: “If there was any question about why we need strong gun safety laws, this is your answer. This should never have been allowed to happen in the first place.”
Other Democrats see gun ownership in apocalyptic terms. “This entire tragedy [with Rittenhouse] makes the case that we should not allow our fellow Americans to own and use weapons that were originally designed for battlefield use,” said Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke. “That AR-15, that AK-47, has one single, solitary purpose and that is killing people as effectively, as efficiently, in as great a number, in as little time as possible. We saw that in Kenosha.”
O’Rourke calls AR-15s “weapons of war,” but he appears unaware that these guns fire the same bullets, with the same rapidity, and do the same damage as a small caliber hunting rifle. They just look like military weapons.
The New York Times ties the AR-15 that Rittenhouse used to the assault weapon ban lapsing in 2004 because Republicans “blocked its renewal.”
Meanwhile Republicans generally viewed the case as showing the benefit of guns for self-defense. They point out the person Kyle Rittenhouse wounded admitted on the witness stand that he was shot him only after he pointed a handgun directly at Rittenhouse. Another had struck Rittenhouse in the head with a skateboard and was going to do so again before Rittenhouse shot him.
You can also see the partisan gap in a new Rasmussen survey. While Democrats support a national registration system by a 64% to 25% margin, Republican opposition is the mirror image (27% to 63%). Sixty-four percent of Republicans fear that registration would mean the government will “eventually confiscate all guns.” They need not be conspiracy theorists to believe that, as 40% of Democrats agree.
The Washington Free Beacon obtained a leaked document this month showing that the Biden administration has already compiled the records of more than 54 million U.S. gun owners. They are also drastically changing Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) regulations to ensure the federal government collects all licensed dealer information on their customers.
It isn’t hard to see why so many Americans fear that eventual confiscation is the end game. Under the label of “reasonable” gun control laws, Democrats keep pushing rules to end private firearm ownership.
Do you think that is hyperbole?
Look no further than Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova. She calls for “debanking” of what she claims are “socially sub-optimal industries.” It is a revival of the Obama administration’s “Operation Chokepoint,” where the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) pressured banks into closing businesses’ accounts. Try running a company without someone to handle credit cards, lines of credit, check cashing, and other things that financial institutions do.
Or take President Biden’s “zero tolerance” policy toward what he calls “rogue” gun dealers. No policymaker wants dealers to secretly sell guns to criminals out of the back of their store. But that is not what Biden is going after. Even one mistake in paperwork, no matter how trivial and inconsequential, now means the loss of one’s license and the end of one’s business. When Biden talks about 5% of the gun dealers selling 90% of the guns found at crime scenes, he ignores the fact that 95% don’t.
The one common feature of these and many other proposals is to make owning a gun more costly and less common — thus driving gun makers and sellers out of business.
The Biden administration and other Democrats, even those in conservative states like Texas or Montana, show no intention of changing course. Republicans see Democrats releasing violent criminals on little or no bail, refusing to prosecute violent criminals, and defunding the police. The Democrats’ sole focus on gun control ignores that 92% of violent crime has nothing to do with guns.
Republicans believe that Democrats either don’t understand what works or don’t really care about reducing crime.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 19:00 - Over 600 Google Employees Sign Manifesto Against COVID Vaccine Mandate
Over 600 Google Employees Sign Manifesto Against COVID Vaccine Mandate
At least 600 Google employees have signed an internal manifesto calling for the Silicon Valley tech giant to rescind its Covid-19 vaccine mandate, according to CNBC, citing internal documents.
The manifesto within Google, which has been signed by at least 600 Google employees, asks company leaders to retract the vaccine mandate and create a new one that is “inclusive of all Googlers,” arguing leadership’s decision will have outsize influence in corporate America. It also calls on employees to “oppose the mandate as a matter of principle” and tells employees to not let the policy alter their decision if they’ve already chosen not to get the Covid vaccine.
Although only a tiny portion of Google’s overall workforce has signed the document, momentum could grow as the return-to-work deadline nears. Most of the company’s employees are expected to return to physical offices three days a week starting Jan. 10.
The company has given its more than 150,000 US employees until Dec. 3 to report their vaccination status, and whether they prefer to work from home or not.
Google’s mandate followed a ‘vax-or-test’ order by the Biden administration for companies with more than 100 employees. Moreover, the company says that all employees who work directly or indirectly with government contracts must get the jab, even if working from home.
“Vaccines are key to our ability to enable a safe return to office for everyone and minimize the spread of Covid-19 in our communities,” wrote Google VP of security in an email sent near the end of last month, who added that the changes from Biden’s executive order were “minimal.” His email also gave employees until Nov. 12 to request exemptions based on religious beliefs or medical conditions, which would be granted on a case-by-case basis.
A Google spokesperson said the company stands behind its policy.
“As we’ve stated to all our employees and the author of this document, our vaccination requirements are one of the most important ways we can keep our workforce safe and keep our services running. We firmly stand behind our vaccination policy.”
Maybe some of these employees saw the “died suddenly” spike in google trends.
— Zr1Trader (@ZR1Trader) November 23, 2021
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Read the rest of the report here.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 18:40 - Tourists Are Flocking To Florida In Greater Numbers Than Before Pandemic
Tourists Are Flocking To Florida In Greater Numbers Than Before Pandemic
Authored by Nanette Holt via The Epoch Times,
More than 32 million travelers poured into Florida in July, August, and September, exceeding the number of visitors during the same period in 2019 before the CCP virus pandemic.
It was the second consecutive quarter of growth in domestic visitors, with 31.2 million Americans flocking to the Sunshine State in the third quarter of the year, according to Visit Florida, the state’s official tourism marketing corporation.
That number was up from pre-pandemic numbers by almost 7 percent.
Meanwhile across the country, the total number of domestic travel trips was expected to reach 85 percent of the 2019 level, according to the fall forecast of the United States Travel Association.
And international arrivals to the U.S. overall were expected to reach only 27 percent of pre-pandemic levels.
In 2019, U.S. domestic travel had increased 1.7 percent, with the number of trips taken reaching 2.3 billion, the report showed.
Leisure travel accounted for 80 percent of all travel. International visits experienced a 0.7 percent downturn in 2019 but still accounted for 79 million trips.
That year, domestic and international travelers spent $1.1 trillion in the U.S.
The industry was supporting nine million jobs in 2019, and generated $277 billion in payroll and $180 billion in tax revenues for federal, state and local governments.
Then COVID-19 struck, and tourism ground to a halt.
Domestic trips across the nation are predicted to finally climb out of the slump caused by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus in 2023, and finish with growth three percent above pre-pandemic levels.
International arrivals are not expected to recover to 2019 levels until 2025.
But tourism is charging forward again in Florida. About 1.2 million visitors traveled to Florida from overseas, and 85,000 came from Canada during this year’s third quarter.
That number of visitors represents a 597 percent increase from the same time in 2020, and a 16.1 percent increase from the second quarter of this year.
While tourism in other states was practically paused, Florida aggressively marketed outside its borders for seven months and saw steady growth in visitor volume each quarter.
“In 2020, the experts thought Florida’s economy would be among the most impacted in the nation, because of how important tourism is to our state,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis. “Instead, we are setting the pace for job creation and visitation in the U.S.
“We have been able to set these records because, in Florida, we kept businesses open and made sure Floridians could keep working. In just 15 months, Florida’s visitation numbers have surpassed past pre-pandemic levels, helping drive revenue, job growth, and economic activity to all 67 counties in our state.”
The influx of visitors “is a huge win for our state and has pushed the recovery of Florida’s tourism industry to new heights,” said Danny Gaekwad, owner of MGM Hotels and chair of the Visit Florida board of directors.
“Florida regularly outperforms the nation in hotel occupancy, demand, and revenue, and is an undisputed leader in the U.S. travel sector,” Gaekwad said.
“We are incredibly grateful for Gov. DeSantis for paving the way to this success and allowing our tourism community to thrive.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 18:20 - China Says US "Playing With Fire" After Warship Conducts 11th Taiwan Strait Transit This Year
China Says US “Playing With Fire” After Warship Conducts 11th Taiwan Strait Transit This Year
China has blasted the latest US warship sail-through of the contested Taiwan Strait, which happened Tuesday, calling it an intentional “provocation” after a US Navy statement asserted “The United States military flies, sails, and operates anywhere international law allows.”
The Navy’s Seventh Fleet had identified that the guided-missile destroyer USS Milius conducted the “routine” transit as part of the US “commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific”. This year the White House appears to have ordered such pass throughs of the strait on a monthly basis, given Tuesday’s event marked the 11th US warship transit of the Taiwan Strait this year, which is just under the record – in 2020 there were a total of 13.
USS Milius, UN Navy image Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian subsequently said, “The Chinese side was closely following and fully aware of the US military vessel’s passage through the Taiwan Strait.” He disputed the standard Pentagon description of maintaining freedom and openness of international navigation.
“The US warships have repeatedly flexed muscles, made provocations, and stirred up trouble in the Taiwan Strait in the name of ‘freedom of navigation.’ This is by no means commitment to freedom and openness, but rather a deliberate disruption and sabotage of regional peace and stability,” Zhao said.
“China is firmly resolved in upholding national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Zhao continued. “The US side should immediately correct its mistakes, stop making provocations, challenging the bottom line and playing with fire, and play a more constructive role in regional peace and stability.”
Additionally the Chinese military’s Eastern Theater Command had revealed later on Tuesday that it had sent PLA naval and air forces to “conduct close-in tracking and monitoring” of the warship.
During the past decade, the US Naval presence in the strait has steadily grown…
US-China tensions have only continued despite last week’s virtual meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and President Biden wherein Biden reaffirmed his commitment to the ‘one China’ policy as Xi reportedly laid out that Beijing sees Washington support to Taiwan – including weapons transfers – as “playing with fire”. State media reported Xi during the Nov.15 virtual meeting: “Such moves are extremely dangerous, just like playing with fire. Whoever plays with fire will get burnt.”
Biden had said according to the White House summery of the virtual summit that his administration “strongly opposes unilateral efforts to change the status quo or undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait”.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 18:00 - Five Trump-Russia 'Collusion' Corrections We Need From The Media Now
Five Trump-Russia ‘Collusion’ Corrections We Need From The Media Now
Authored by Aaron Maté via RealClearInvestigations.com,
Five years after the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded collection of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories known as the Steele dossier was published by BuzzFeed, news outlets that amplified its false allegations have suffered major losses of credibility.
The recent indictment of the dossier’s main source, Igor Danchenko, for allegedly lying to the FBI, has catalyzed a new reckoning.
In response to what the news site Axios has called “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” the Washington Post has re-edited at least a dozen stories related to Steele. For two of those, the Post removed entire sections, changed headlines, and added lengthy editor’s notes.
Rosalind Helderman: Bylined reporter on two of the Post’s most corrected stories.
Twitter/@PostRoz
Tom Hamburger: Other bylined reporter on two of the Post’s most corrected stories.
Twitter/@thamburger
But the Post’s response also exhibits the limits of the media’s Steele-induced self-examination. First, the reporters bylined on those two articles, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, and their editors have declined to explain how and why they were so egregiously misled. Nor have they revealed the names of the anonymous sources responsible for deceiving them and the public over months and years.
Perhaps more important, the Post, like other publications, has so far limited its Russiagate reckoning to work directly involving Steele – and only after a federal indictment forced its hand. But the Steele dossier has been widely discredited since at least April 2019, when Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents were unable to find evidence in support of any of its claims.
The dossier was also only one aspect of the Trump-Russia misinformation fed to the public. Even when not advancing Steele’s most lurid allegations, the nation’s most prominent news outlets nonetheless furthered his underlying narrative of a Trump-Russia conspiracy and a Kremlin-compromised White House.
Along the way, some journalists won their profession’s highest distinction for this flawed coverage. While co-bylining stories that the Post has all but retracted, Helderman and Hamburger also share a now increasingly awkward honor along with more than a dozen other colleagues at the Post and New York Times: a Pulitzer Prize. In 2018, the Pulitzer awards committee honored the two papers for 20 articles it described as “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
Above, Washingon Post and New York Times reporters whose 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on the Trump-Russia affair is tainted by evidence in the public record that significant reporting was erroneous or misleading — reporting that still has not been corrected by their publications, even though the Post recently made numerous corrections regarding the long-discredited Steele dossier. Journalist identifications are here. (Credit: YouTube/The Pulitzer Prizes)
Although neither newspaper has given any indication that it is returning the Pulitzer, the public record has long made clear that many of those stories – most of which had nothing to do with Steele – include falsehoods and distortions requiring significant corrections. Far from showing “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage,” the Post’s and the Times’ reporting has the same problem as the Steele document that these same outlets are now distancing themselves from: a reliance on anonymous, deceptive, and almost certainly partisan sources for claims that proved to be false.
Many other prestigious outlets published a barrage of similarly flawed articles. These include the report by Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy that the Mueller team obtained evidence that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had visited Prague in 2016; Jane Mayer’s fawning March 2018 profile of Steele in the New Yorker; the report by Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier of BuzzFeed that President Trump instructed Cohen to lie to Congress — explicitly denied by Mueller at the time; and Luke Harding of The Guardian’s bizarre and evidence-free allegation that Julian Assange and Paul Manafort met in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.
McClatchy and BuzzFeed have added editors’ notes to their stories but have not retracted them.
In this article, RealClearInvestigations has collected five instances of stories containing false or misleading claims, and thereby due for retraction or correction, that were either among the Post and Times’ Pulitzer-winning entries, or other work of reporters who shared that prize. Significantly, this analysis is not based on newly discovered information, but documents and other material long in the public domain. Remarkably, some of the material that should spark corrections has instead been held up by the Post and Times as vindication of their work.
RCI sent detailed queries about these stories to the Post, the Times, and the journalists involved. The Post’s response has been incorporated into the relevant portion of this article. The Times did not respond to RCI’s queries by the time of publication.
Falsehood No. 1: Michael Flynn Discussed Sanctions With Russia and Lied About It
Flynn faces the press in his only White House Briefing Room remarks as national security adviser.
YouTube/C-SPAN
Officials say Flynn discussed sanctions
By Greg Miller, Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post, February 9, 2017Less than a month after BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, the Washington Post significantly advanced the then-growing narrative that the Trump White House was beholden to Russia.
A Feb. 9, 2017, Post article claimed that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn “privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia” with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak “during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The Post sourced its reporting to nine “current and former officials” who occupied “senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls” between Flynn and Kislyak following the Nov. 8, 2016 election.
The Post’s sources – who were revealing classified information, presumably from taps on Kislyak’s phone – left no room for doubt: “All of those officials said Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit.” They also added their own spin to the meaning of the conversations: Flynn’s calls with Kislyak “were interpreted by some senior U.S. officials as an inappropriate and potentially illegal signal to the Kremlin that it could expect a reprieve from sanctions that were being imposed by the Obama administration in late December to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 election.”
Adding some mind-reading to the narrative, a former official told the Post that Kislyak “was left with the impression that the sanctions would be revisited at a later time.”
The Post and its sources fueled innuendo that Flynn had floated a payback for Russia’s alleged 2016 election help and lied to cover it up.
Facing a barrage of anonymous officials contradicting him, Flynn walked back an initial denial and told the Post that “while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.” Four days later, he was forced to resign. The following December, Special Counsel Mueller seemingly vindicated the Post’s narrative when Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, including about his discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador.
Flynn would later backtrack and reverse that guilty plea, sparking a multi-year legal saga. When the transcripts of his calls with Kislyak were finally released in May 2020, they showed that Flynn had grounds to fight: It wasn’t Flynn who made a false statement about discussing sanctions with Kislyak; it was all nine of the Post’s sources — and, later, the Mueller team — who had misled the public.
Sergei Kislyak: Transcripts of Flynn’s calls with the Russian Ambassador do not square with the Washington Post’s reporting.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File
In all of Flynn’s multiple conversations with Kislyak in December 2016 and January 2017, the issue of sanctions only gets one fleeting mention – by Kislyak. The Russian ambassador tells Flynn that he is concerned that sanctions will hurt U.S.-Russia cooperation on fighting jihadist insurgents in Syria. The sum total of Flynn’s response on the matter: “Yeah, yeah.”
The pair did have a longer discussion about a separate action Obama had ordered at the time: the expulsion of 35 Russian officials living in the United States. The expulsions, which were carried out by the State Department, were a distinct action from the sanctions, which targeted nine Russian entities and individuals under a presidential executive order.
In discussing the expulsions, Flynn never addressed what Trump might do; his only request was that the Kremlin’s response be “reciprocal” and “even-keeled” so that “cool heads” can “prevail.”
“[D]on’t go any further than you have to,” Flynn told Kislyak. “Because I don’t want us to get into something that has to escalate, on a, you know, on a tit for tat.”
In its rendering of the call, the Mueller team cited these comments from Flynn – but inaccurately claimed that he had made them about sanctions. The Special Counsel’s Office appeared to be following the lead of the Post’s sources, who had claimed, falsely, that Flynn’s references to sanctions were “explicit.” Both the Post and the special counsel used Flynn’s explicit comments about expulsions to erroneously assert that he had discussed sanctions.
Yet the release of the transcripts did not prompt the Post to come clean. Instead, both the Post and the New York Times doubled down on the deception. The Post’s May 29, 2020, story about the transcripts’ release was headlined “Transcripts of calls between Flynn, Russian diplomat show they discussed sanctions.” The Times claimed that same day that “Flynn Discussed Sanctions at Length With Russian Diplomat, Transcripts Show.”
In reality, the transcripts showed the exact opposite.
In response to RCI, the Post acknowledged that the Feb. 9, 2017 story had conflated “sanctions” with “expulsions.”
“We appropriately used the word ‘sanctions’ in reference to the punitive measures announced by President Obama, including Treasury penalties on Russian individuals, expulsions of Russian diplomats/spies and the seizure of two Russia-owned properties,” Shani George, the Post’s Vice President for Communications, wrote.
In other articles, however — including a Dec. 29, 2016 article linked in the Feb. 9 story’s second paragraph – the Post made a clear distinction between the two. Asked about dropping the distinction between sanctions and expulsions for the article discussed here, the Post did not respond by the time of publication.
Falsehood No. 2: Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence
Left to right, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone: Repeated contacts with Russian spies? Doubtful.
FNC/AP
Trump Campaign Aides Had
Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence
By Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo
New York Times, February 14, 2017On Feb. 14, 2017 – just one day after Flynn resigned – the New York Times fanned the flames of the growing Trump-Russia inferno.
“Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials,” the Times reported.
The story, written by three members of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team, Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, also suggested that these suspicious “repeated contacts” were the basis for the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s potential conspiracy with Russia: “American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.”
The article even threw in a plug for Christopher Steele, who, the Times said, is believed by senior FBI officials to have “a credible track record.”
The story helped build momentum for the appointment of Special Counsel Mueller, and then quickly unraveled.
Four months after the Times’ report – and just weeks after Mueller’s hiring – FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress about the story, saying that “in the main, it was not true.” When the Mueller report was released in April 2019, it contained no evidence of any contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence officials, senior or otherwise. And in July 2020, declassified documents showed that Peter Strzok, the top FBI counterintelligence agent who opened the Trump-Russia probe, had privately dismissed the article. The Times reporting, Strzok wrote upon its publication, was “misleading and inaccurate … we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.”
Comey on Times story: “In the main, it was not true.” It’s still uncorrected.
To date, the Times has appended two minor corrections. The most recent one reads: “An earlier version of a photo caption with this article gave an incorrect middle initial for Paul Manafort. It is J., not D.”
Rather than address its glaring errors, the Times left the story otherwise intact. When the Strzok notes disputing its claims emerged, the Times responded: “We stand by our reporting.”
Earlier this year, the Times even claimed vindication. The occasion was an April 15, 2021, press release from the Treasury Department. The Treasury statement alleged that Konstantin Kilimnik, a former aide to Trump’s one-time campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent” who “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” during the 2016 election.
Writing that same day, Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt declared that Treasury’s evidence-free press release — coupled with an evidence-free Senate Intelligence claim in August 2020 that Kilimnik is a “Russian intelligence officer” — now “confirm” the Times’ report from February 2017.
The Treasury announcement did not explain how the department, which conducted no official Russiagate investigation, was prompted to lodge an explosive allegation that a multi-year FBI/Mueller investigation found no evidence for. It also does not name the position Kilimnik allegedly held in Russian intelligence – much less say whether he was a senior official. It also failed to address ample countervailing evidence:
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that Kilimnik had shared this same, publicly available polling data with Americans;
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that the FBI still does not deem him a Russian intelligence officer, instead claiming that he has unspecified “ties”;
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that he had long been a valued State Department source;
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that he traveled to the U.S. on a civilian Russian passport, not the suspicious diplomatic one Mueller alleged without producing it;
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and that even the Senate Intelligence Committee was “unable to obtain direct evidence of what Kilimnik did with the polling data and whether that data was shared further.”
Wanted in the U.S., Kilimnik shared his civilian (not diplomatic) passport with RCI.
Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigations
In addition, no U.S. government or congressional investigator ever contacted him for questioning, Kilimnik told RCI in an April 2021 interview when he produced images of the civilian passport.
To declare victory, Mazzetti and Schmidt not only relied on one sentence of a press release but distorted the claims of their original story. Even if Kilimnik somehow proved to be a Russian intelligence officer, the Times’ 2017 story had reported that the Trump campaign had engaged in “intercepted calls” with multiple “senior Russian intelligence officials” – not just one person, and at a “senior” level.
To elide that, Mazzetti and Schmidt abandoned the plural Russian “intelligence officials” to spin the Treasury press release as proof that “there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the election.” It then returned to the use of the plural to further claim that Treasury’s statement is “the strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign.”
RCI sent Mazzetti and Schmidt detailed questions about their February 2017 article and their claim, four years later, that a Senate report and a Treasury press release confirm it. They did not respond.
Falsehood No. 3: George Papadopoulos’s ‘Night of Heavy Drinking’ With the Australian Envoy
The Times mischaracterized George Papadopoulos’s supposed Russiagate-launching barroom chat.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Unlikely Source Propelled Russian Meddling Inquiry
By Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo
New York Times, December 30, 2017By late 2017, the Russiagate saga was engulfing the Trump presidency. The indictments of several figures connected to Trump fueled a media-driven narrative that Mueller was closing in on a Trump-Russia conspiracy.
But a roadblock emerged in late October. After a year of evasions, the Hillary Clinton campaign and its law firm Perkins Coie admitted that they had funded the Steele dossier and that a lawyer for the firm, Marc Elias, had commissioned it. The disclosure was forced by House Republicans, led by Rep. Devin Nunes, who had subpoenaed the bank records of Fusion GPS in a bid to identify its secret funder. (Fusion GPS was the opposition-research firm hired by Perkins Coie that in turn hired Steele.)
For those wedded to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the admission was problematic: After months of anonymous media claims that Steele’s dossier was “credible” and even “bearing out,” the heralded document was exposed as a paid partisan hit job from Trump’s political opponents. If the FBI was found to have relied on the dossier, the Clinton campaign’s key role could discredit the entire investigation.
Just before the 2017 year-end deadline for 2018 Pulitzer eligibility, the New York Times produced a new origin story for the probe that would temper these concerns and help the newspaper win the prize. The FBI’s decision to open the Trump-Russia probe had nothing to do with Steele, the Times claimed. Instead, the instigator was George Papadopoulos, a low-level campaign volunteer indicted by Mueller two months prior.
“During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016,” the Times’ piece began, Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer that Russia had “political dirt on Hillary Clinton,” including “thousands of emails.” Papadopoulos, the Times said, had learned of the Russian scheme the previous month from Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic who claimed to be in touch with “high-level Russian officials.” Mifsud’s claim signaled inside knowledge of Russia’s alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee, the Times said, because at that point the “information was not yet public.”
Alexander Downer: The Australian diplomat’s account of his conversation with George Papadopoulos conflicts with the Times’ reporting.
Twitter/@AlexanderDowner
When Downer, via the Australian government, relayed this information to the U.S. in July, the FBI decided to open its Trump-Russia probe, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, the Times reported.
“The [DNC] hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the Times claimed. The article pointedly asserted that the Steele dossier “was not part of the justification to start a counterintelligence inquiry, American officials said.” (In a possible contradiction, it also claims, without specifics, “that the investigation was also propelled by intelligence from other friendly governments, including the British.”)
Several key aspects of the article have been challenged by the principals involved — leaving aside a key question the Times appears never to have asked: Why would the FBI launch a counterintelligence probe of a presidential campaign based on a barroom conversation involving a volunteer?
Moreover, the Times or its sources mischaracterized the barroom conversation, according to both of its participants. Speaking to a Sydney-based newspaper a few months later about the fateful London exchange, Downer said Papadopoulos had never mentioned “dirt” or “thousands of emails” — which the FBI would have linked to the DNC hack. Instead, Downer told The Australian, Papadopoulos “mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging.” Contrary to the specificity of the Times’ rendering, Downer recalled that Papadopoulos “didn’t say what it was.” He also said Papadopoulos made no mention of Mifsud, a mysterious figure with rumored ties to Western intelligence who vanished after a cursory FBI interview.
A declassified FBI document would later confirm Downer’s account of a vague conversation. In May 2020, the Justice Department released the July 31, 2016, FBI electronic communication (EC) that officially opened its Russia investigation. The EC states that Downer had told the U.S. government that Papadopoulos had “suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist” the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing damaging information about Clinton and President Obama. The EC made no mention of any “dirt,” “thousands of emails,” or Mifsud. It also acknowledged that the nature of the “suggestion” was “unclear” and that the possible Russian help could entail “material acquired publicly,” as opposed to hacked emails by the thousands.
Another declassified document, the December 2017 testimony from Andrew McCabe — the former FBI deputy director who helped launch and oversee the Russia probe — also undermined the Times’ premise. Asked why the FBI never sought a surveillance warrant on the Trump volunteer who supposedly sparked the investigation, McCabe replied that “Papadopoulos’ comment didn’t particularly indicate that he was the person … that was interacting with the Russians.”
Despite the countervailing claims of Downer, McCabe, and the FBI document that opened the investigation (not to mention the recollections of both Papadopoulos and Downer that they only had one drink, belying the Times claim of “a night of heavy drinking”), the Times has never run a single update or correction.
Falsehood No. 4: Russia Launched a Sweeping Interference Campaign That Posed a ‘National Security Threat’
Social media posts from Russia’s effort to “assault American democracy,” as the Times put it.
HPSCI Minority
Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin
and leaves a Russian threat unchecked
By Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe and Philip Rucker
Washington Post, December 14, 2017To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans
By Scott Shane
New York Times, September 8, 2017As the Pulitzer-winning media outlets relied on anonymous intelligence officials to fuel innuendo about Trump-Russia collusion, they turned to these same sources to imply that a compromised president was unwilling to confront the existential threat of “Russian interference.”
“Nearly a year into his presidency,” a Pulitzer-winning December 2017 Washington Post story declared, “Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House.” As a result, Trump has “impaired the government’s response to a national security threat.”
The Post’s article was sourced to “more than 50 current and former U.S. officials” including former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who “described the Russian interference as the political equivalent of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”
Another Pulitzer-winning story, written by Scott Shane of the New York Times two months earlier, offered a revealing window into the merits of the Russian interference allegations, and the appropriateness of equating them to attacks like 9/11.
“To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans,” the Times’ headline blared. Aside from the Pulitzer board, Shane’s article also impressed the New York Times’ editors, who proclaimed in a follow-up editorial that their colleague’s “startling investigation” had revealed “further evidence of what amounted to unprecedented foreign invasion of American democracy.”
But from the details in Shane’s article, it is difficult to see why anonymous U.S. intelligence officials, Pulitzer judges, and Times editors saw the alleged Russian “cyberarmy” as such a seismic danger.
Melvin Redick, suspected Russian operator. The proof? Articles “reflecting a pro-Russian worldview,” the Times reported.
New York Times
Shane’s piece opened by describing a June 2016 Facebook post by an account user named Melvin Redick, who promoted the website DC Leaks, alleged by the U.S. to be a Russian intelligence cutout. Redick’s posts, Shane writes, were “among the first public signs” of Russia’s “cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts” that turned the platforms into “engines of deception and propaganda.” To Clint Watts, a former FBI agent turned MSNBC commentator, Russia’s infiltration of Facebook and Twitter was so dangerous that social media, he said, is now afflicted by a “bot cancer.”
But these explosive conclusions, Shane’s own piece later acknowledged, were undermined by a lack of evidence. The online users who manipulated social media, Shane quietly notes near the bottom, were in fact only “suspected Russian operators” [emphasis added]. Shane’s uncertainty extends to Melvin Redick, the alleged Russian bot who begins the story. Redick is one of several identified accounts that “appeared to be Russian creations,” Shane concedes. The only proof tying Redick to Russia? “His posts were never personal, just news articles reflecting a pro-Russian worldview.”
Robert Mueller’s final report two years later also tried to raise alarm about what he called a “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference campaign. But as with the Pulitzer-winning outlets before him, the contents of his report failed to support the headline assertion. The Russian troll farm blamed for a sweeping social media campaign to install Trump spent about $46,000 on pre-election posts that were juvenile, barely about the election, and mostly appeared during the primaries. After suggesting that the troll farm was tied to the Kremlin, the Mueller team was forced to walk back that innuendo in court, and later dropped the case altogether. The other main claim regarding Russian interference – that the GRU (Russia’s foreign intelligence agency) hacked the DNC’s email servers and gave the material to Wikileaks – was quietly undermined by Mueller’s qualified language and key evidentiary gaps, as RCI reported in 2019.
The Russian hacking claim suffered an additional setback in May 2020, when testimony from the CEO of CrowdStrike — the Clinton-contracted firm that was the first to publicly accuse Russia of infiltrating the DNC — was declassified. Speaking to the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017, CrowdStrike’s Shawn Henry disclosed that his company “did not have concrete evidence” that alleged Russian hackers had stolen any data from the servers.
Despite its once exhaustive and alarmist interest in the operations of Russia’s cyber army, neither the Times nor the Post has ever reported Henry’s explosive admission. This includes Pulitzer-winning Post national security reporter Ellen Nakashima, who effectively kicked off the Russiagate saga by breaking the news on CrowdStrike’s Russian hacking allegation in June 2016. Other than Henry, Nakashima’s main source was Michael Sussmann – the Clinton campaign attorney recently indicted for lying to the FBI.
Falsehood No. 5: The Justice Department Pulled Its Punches on Trump
Ex-Justice official Rod Rosenstein was blamed for handcuffing Mueller — a charge much doubted.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Justice Dept. Never Fully Examined
Trump’s Ties to Russia, Ex-Officials Say
By Michael S. Schmidt
New York Times, Aug. 30, 2020 (Updated June 9, 2021)When Mueller ended his investigation in 2019 without charging Trump or any other associate for conspiring with Russia, a collusion-obsessed media formulated more conspiracy theories to explain away this unwelcome ending.
First came the belief that Attorney General William Barr had forced Mueller to shut down, misrepresented his final report, and hid the smoking-gun evidence behind redactions. When Mueller failed to support any of these allegations in his July 2019 congressional testimony, a new culprit was needed.
One year later, the New York Times found its fall guy: Mueller’s overseer, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, had handcuffed the special counsel.
“The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia,” Michael Schmidt reported on Aug. 30, 2020. Rosenstein, Schmidt said, “curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere” and preventing the FBI from “completing an inquiry into whether the president’s personal and financial links to Russia posed a national security threat.”
To buttress his case, Schmidt cited the Democrats’ leading collusion advocate, Rep. Adam Schiff, who feared that “that the F.B.I. Counterintelligence Division has not investigated counterintelligence risks arising from President Trump’s foreign financial ties.”
But as Schmidt’s article tacitly acknowledged, that outcome did not come from Rosenstein but the Mueller team itself. After Rosenstein appointed Mueller, Schmidt reported, members of the special counsel’s team “held early discussions led by the agent Peter Strzok about a counterintelligence investigation of the president.” But these “efforts fizzled,” Schmidt added, when Strzok “was removed from the inquiry three months later for sending text messages disparaging Mr. Trump.” If Rosenstein had indeed “curtailed” a counterintelligence investigation by Mueller’s team, why did the special counsel staffers discuss it, and why did it only “fizzle” upon Strzok’s exit three months later?
Strzok himself disputed the premise of Schmidt’s article.
“I didn’t feel such a limitation,” Strzok told the Atlantic. “When I discussed this with Mueller and others, it was agreed that FBI personnel attached to the Special Counsel’s Office would do the counterintelligence work, which necessarily included the president.” The only problem, Strzok added, was that by “the time I left the team, we hadn’t solved this problem of who and how to conduct all of the counterintelligence work.” Strzok’s “worry,” he added, was that the counterintelligence angle “wasn’t ever effectively done” – not that it was ever curtailed. Another key Mueller team member, lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, also rejected Schmidt’s claim.
NYT story today is wrong re alleged secret DOJ order prohibiting a counterintelligence investigation by Mueller, “without telling the bureau.” Dozens of FBI agents/analysts were embedded in Special Counsel’s Office and we were never told to keep anything from them. 1 of 2
— Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_) August 31, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Also erroneous is NYT claim “Rosenstein concluded the F.B.I. lacked sufficient reason to conduct an investigation into the president’s links to a foreign adversary.” See DOJ Special Counsel Appointment Order, para. (b)(i). 2 of 2
— Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_) August 31, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Rosenstein’s May 2017 scope memo, which established the parameters of Mueller’s investigation, indeed contained no such limitations. It broadly tasked Mueller to examine “any links and/or co-ordination” between the Russian government and anyone associated with the Trump campaign, as well as – even more expansively – “any matters that arose or may arise directly from that investigation.”
In his July 2019 congressional appearance, Mueller had multiple opportunities to reveal that his probe had been impeded or narrowed. Asked by Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) whether “at any time in the investigation, your investigation was curtailed or stopped or hindered,” Mueller replied “No.” When Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) tried to lead Mueller into agreeing that he “of course … did not obtain the president’s tax returns, which could otherwise show foreign financial sources,” Mueller did not oblige. “I’m not going to speak to that,” Mueller replied.
With no curtailing or interference in the probe, perhaps Mueller never turned up any Russia-tied counterintelligence or financial concerns about Trump because there was simply none to find.
For a media establishment that had spent years promoting a Trump-Russia collusion narrative and sidelining countervailing facts, that was indeed a tough outcome to fathom.
But it’s no time for excuses or false claims of vindication: The tepid accounting spurred by the Steele dossier’s collapse should be just the start of a far more exhaustive reckoning. Broadly misleading journalism that plunged an American presidency into turmoil demands much more than piecemeal corrections.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 17:40 -
- Apple Sues Israeli Spyware Firm, Begins Notifying Victims Of State-Sponsored iPhone Hacks
Apple Sues Israeli Spyware Firm, Begins Notifying Victims Of State-Sponsored iPhone Hacks
Hours after Apple filed a lawsuit against Israeli spyware maker NSO Group, it sent threat notification alerts to notify victims of state-sponsored hackers that they had been targets, including activists and researchers in Thailand, El Salvador and Uganda.
In El Salvador, for example, at least a dozen staff members of a newspaper known to be deeply critical of the government were alerted. The message sent from Apple warns: “Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID. These attackers are likely targeting you individually because of who you are or what you do.”
Further it said, “If your device is compromised by a state-sponsored attacker, they may be able to remotely access your sensitive data, communications, or even the camera and microphone. While it’s possible this is a false alarm, please take this warning seriously.”
Via AFP On Tuesday Apple filed suit in a US federal court against NSO Group over its notorious Pegasus malware, seeking to collect what appear to be largely symbolic damages of over $75,000. But ultimately the legal action is toward gaining a permanent injunction which would bar the Israeli firm from ever using Apple software or devices.
Further the US company is using the lawsuit as a “warning” to other international makers of spyware. The following is the statement released by Apple and in the lawsuit:
“The steps Apple is taking today will send a clear message: in a free society, it is unacceptable to weaponize powerful state-sponsored spyware against innocent users and those who seek to make the world a better place,” Ivan Krstic, Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture, said in a tweet.
NSO Group software permits “attacks, including from sovereign governments that pay hundreds of millions of dollars to target and attack a tiny fraction of users with information of particular interest to NSO’s customers,” Apple said in the lawsuit filed in federal court in the Northern District of California, saying that it is not “ordinary consumer malware.”
NSO Group is well-known to work closely with the Israeli government as a key defense contractor, and government authorities oversee and regulate the export of Pegasus as a unique defense technology which must be prevented from being used by Israel’s enemies. The spyware is actually controlled for export in the same way that weapons would be.
It’s believed the Saudis, for example, used such technology to hack and track journalists and dissidents, such as the murdered Jamal Khashoggi, killed at the Istanbul consulate in 2018 at the hands of Saudi operatives on orders from the kingdom.
Apple rolling out notifications to victims of NSO Group’s Pegasus spywarehttps://t.co/otgljsmDZn pic.twitter.com/U82TqmlMFT
— profdeibert (@RonDeibert) November 23, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Revelations starting in 2018 detailed that the cutting edge spyware was used by foreign governments to hack Western allies, including accessing the mobile numbers of French President Emmanuel Macron and much of his cabinet. But it appears many more victims on the list were activists, journalists, and political oppositionists in various countries, often whose governments are seen as friendly to Israel.
The Israeli government itself has come under fresh pressure, including from the Biden administration, over the whole scandal. At the start of this month NSO Group and another Israeli spyware company were placed on a US blacklist by the Biden administration, in an almost unprecedented US move targeting of an Israeli entity. US firms or entities now have to seek a special US waiver if they want to do business with the company. The White House said it moved against NSO for having acted “contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the US”. It appears Apple is now trying to tighten the noose.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 17:20 - Biden To Restart Trump's "Remain In Mexico" Policy
Biden To Restart Trump’s “Remain In Mexico” Policy
The Biden administration will begin booting asylum seekers back to Mexico as soon as next week following a court order to resume the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” program, according to Axios, which adds that the illegal immigrants will be offered the COVID-19 vaccine on the way out.
The ruling means that Biden will officially backtrack on a key election promise which forces asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until their US immigration court hearings.
More via Axios:
- One difference from the program under former President Trump’s administration: All migrant adults enrolled in “Remain in Mexico” will be offered the vaccine, although it can’t be required, according to two government immigration officials.
- It’s unclear at what point in the process the migrants would be able to get their shots, whether before being turned back, when they return to the U.S. for their court hearing or at some other time.
- The policy, formally called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), will first be reinstated in El Paso and Brownsville, Texas, as well as San Diego, California, one DHS official said.
* * *
“In compliance with the court order, we are working to reimplement MPP as promptly as possible,” DHS spokesperson Marsha Espinosa told the outlet, which notes that the timing of the move ultimately depends on Mexico’s cooperation.
“We cannot do so until we have the independent agreement from the Government of Mexico to accept those we seek to enroll in MPP. We will communicate to the court, and to the public, the timing of reimplementation when we are prepared to do so.”
According to two sources familiar with internal discussions, there are concerns about migrants who would be forced to travel through Mexico in the ‘middle of the night’ so they can be on time for early morning court hearings.
Read the rest of the report here.
Unauthorized migrant crossings dropped for a third straight month in October, with ‘only’ 164,303 people intercepted along the US-Mexico border – a 14% decrease from September as the number of Haitians plummeted by more than 90%.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 17:00 - If The Chaos In Our Streets Is This Bad Now, How Bad Will It Get In 2022 And Beyond?
If The Chaos In Our Streets Is This Bad Now, How Bad Will It Get In 2022 And Beyond?
Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,
If crime and violence are wildly out of control when things are still relatively good, how nightmarish will things become when conditions get really bad in this country?
Just think about it.
Right now, anyone that wants a job can get one. Millions of Americans have either died of have become seriously incapacitated over the last two years, and so now we are in the midst of the most epic worker shortage in the history of the United States. Companies all over the nation are absolutely desperate to hire anyone with a pulse, and so there is no excuse for being unemployed. In addition, we have invented literally millions of different ways to entertain ourselves. There are hundreds of channels on television, new movies are constantly being released, we live in a golden era of video games, and there are millions of sites to visit and things to do on the Internet.
So we should all be able to make a living, and we should all have more than enough things to do in our free time.
In other words, crime should theoretically be extremely low right now.
But instead, crime rates are absolutely skyrocketing and we are seeing chaos in our streets on a nightly basis.
In fact, I just wrote about the chaos in our streets yesterday, and now I am writing about it again today.
When I was growing up, you weren’t taking your life into your hands by attending a parade. Sadly, quite a few of those that attended the Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin on Sunday won’t be attending any parades ever again.
A career criminal/rapper/political activist/registered sex offender named Darrell Brooks ripped right through the center of the parade in his vehicle, and many of the victims that he hit were women and children…
Father Corey Montiho recalled running between crumpled bodies in the streets of Waukesha, 20 miles from Milwaukee, in an attempt to find his wife and two daughters after the girls’ dance team was hit by a speeding red SUV which tore through the parade route around 4.40pm – leaving the streets littered with bodies, broken bones, and ‘fragments of brain’.
‘They were pom-poms and shoes and spilled hot chocolate everywhere. I had to go from one crumpled body to the other to find my daughter,’ he said. ‘My wife and two daughters were almost hit.
‘I saw bodies flying. I ran down the parade route to find my girls. Addison, my daughter, heard someone yell “car” and ran away. The girls right next to her were hit.
If the man behind the wheel had been a conservative, the mainstream media would undoubtedly be calling this an act of “domestic terrorism”.
But since Darrell Brooks absolutely hates conservatives and absolutely hates the police, the mainstream media are not using that particular label.
Meanwhile, stores in the San Francisco area were hit by highly organized looters for a third night in a row…
San Francisco Bay has been hit by a third day of brazen looting, with a gang of thieves filmed smashing glass cases at a jewelry store and emptying them as staff screamed in terror.
The latest incident happened at a Sam’s Jewelers store at the Southland Mall in Hayward around 5:30pm PST Sunday evening, and was caught on camera.
Robbers – said to have been part of a gang of around 40 to 50 teens who entered the mall – wielded hammers to smash display cases at Sam’s, before making off with goods. Dramatic footage shot from a nearby store showed shop workers screaming with fear as the disturbing scene unfolded.
Other stores in that same mall were hit as well.
The thieves have learned that as long as they keep the value of what they steal under $950 they will never be charged with a felony.
So it is open season on retailers in northern California, and store owners desperately want the politicians to do something to protect them…
Retailers who already suffered looting in the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 have had enough, and are speaking out against the left-wing Mayor and other public officials who have failed to protect them. The San Francisco Chronicle reported:
“The mayor and her entire team should resign,” said John Chachas, whose family owns luxury retailer Gump’s on Post Street in Union Square. “You can’t really run a retail enterprise if you have to board up the windows five weeks before the critical Christmas selling season.”
Sadly, we are seeing similar scenes in the middle of the country.
For example, one gang of organized looters just got away with approximately $120,000 worth of merchandise from a Louis Vuitton store near Chicago…
A group of over a dozen people stormed a Louis Vuitton store in a Chicago suburb and stole about $120,000 worth of merchandise, police said.
The suspects were caught on video wearing masks and sweatshirts as they grabbed bags and cleared out shelves in the store. The robbery resulted in about $120,000 in merchandise being stolen.
Of course these are not just isolated incidents.
As the National Fraternal Order of Police has pointed out, crime rates are absolutely skyrocketing all over the nation.
As Violent Crime SURGES across America, some politicians and some in the media are gaslighting the public into thinking the Police are the Problem…
Homicides:
Atlanta ⬆️ 58%
Portland ⬆️ 533%
Philadelphia ⬆️ 37%Shootings:
New York City ⬆️ 64%
Los Angeles ⬆️ 51%
Chicago ⬆️ 18% pic.twitter.com/5RbhbKY312— National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) (@GLFOP) June 22, 2021
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This is the end result of decades of moral collapse in America.
These young criminals are not stealing because they can’t find jobs and desperately need money.
At this point, all of them could go out and get jobs by the end of the week.
And they aren’t causing havoc because they are bored because there is nothing to do.
Rather, they are committing these crimes because our system never taught them right and wrong and now they have fully embraced evil.
As the chaos in our streets gets worse and worse, it is becoming increasingly difficult to be a police officer. Many of our largest cities have greatly restricted what police departments can do to crack down on crime, law enforcement officers are being endlessly demonized by the corporate media, and violent attacks against police officers are on the rise.
In such an environment, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that so many officers regret ever becoming cops. For instance, just check out these numbers from a recent survey that was conducted in New York…
Not only did 56 percent of cops say they wouldn’t put on the badge if they had to do it all over again, but a majority feel the public disrespects (46 percent agree, 42 percent disagree) and distrusts (44 to 41 percent) them.
“There is no other profession that is scrutinized as much as we are,” said one NYPD sergeant, a 16-year-veteran. “The far-left leaning politics are absolutely destroying the city of New York.”
Countless officers have left their law enforcement careers behind over the past couple of years, and many more will leave in 2022.
And because we are in the midst of such a horrible labor shortage, it will not be easy to replace them.
This is yet another example of how core institutions are crumbling all over America, and it is only going to get worse in the years ahead.
As the violence in our streets continues to escalate, what will the streets of our major cities look like in 2022 and beyond?
If you live in or near one of our major cities, you may want to ask yourself that question, because the storm clouds on the horizon are becoming exceedingly clear at this point.
* * *
It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/24/2021 – 16:20
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